Adrift in the Noösphere (22 page)

“Forget it!”

But a kind of sexual pulse passed through him, a perverse pleasure at this insanely obscene spectacle. What, they abduct you into a fucking flying saucer and stick needles up your nose and drill your brain, and then they expect you to bang some hybrid alien? Jesus! His erection could not make up its mind. Klar-2 struck him more firmly in the small of his back, and the lights on the control patches around the walls began to fizz and flicker. He had not noticed any lights earlier, or any control surfaces.

The slab was now twice its previous width, a narrow double bed for a celestial wedding. Christ! He approached the woman hesitantly, and let his hand fall on her ribcage. His erection was sagging. Her flesh had never seen sunlight and seemed slightly moist. With a sigh, he clambered on to the slab and lay next to her. There was no response. He played for a moment with her stringy hair, touched one small nipple briefly, sent his fingers down between her legs. She failed to react to his caresses. He licked his fingers and tried again. A sour, faintly rank odor rose from her body as her cunt moistened. He hoisted himself dutifully over her supine body and tried to enter her, but his erection had subsided.

To his amazement, he found himself muttering, “I'm sorry.”

The woman looked at him, looked away.

“Just a moment.”

He tried to kiss her, and her mouth remained closed and unresponsive. Humiliated, he lay like a log on her.

“It might help if I knew your name,” he said.

Cinder, she told him. Had he heard her correctly? A cold demon from hell? The Cinderella of the flying saucers? Was he the prince, then, trying to fit his foot into her glass slipper? Foot: ha! Inch was more like it. But her name fired something in him. His hard-on half returned. He touched her, touched himself, forced himself somehow into her. The gray doctor was watching them with his awful black owl's eyes, and nudged him at the base of the spine with a device. Whimpering, he came in a thin trickle.

He lay exhausted and sick at heart on the slab as she got carefully to her feet and dressed again in the silver garment. “Why won't you tell me anything about yourselves?” he asked bitterly. “Who the hell are you people? How dare you use us like this?”

We have transferred our souls, bodies and minds into computer implementation and moved millions of light-years back into your time dimension, the Cinder creature told him coldly. Our command center is in another dimension beyond the supposed god you call the sun. We are millions of light-years backwards. The voice you are hearing has been sent billions of light-years ahead.

“I don't understand,” he said, sitting up and hugging himself. He felt sticky and abused. “What is this bullshit? “Light-years” isn't time, it's a distance. A schoolchild could tell you that.”

In the singularity metric, the gray doctor informed him, time and space are unitary.

“You mean a black hole?”

One little point collapses all dimensions, the woman told him. Powers gather through that point. It is the main channel for tuning into worlds with greater probability.

“Dimensions? Like, time and space? You mean time and space vanish when you go through a black hole? Is that how you get here?”

The accumulation of time does not vanish. You must understand that space with an infinite rotational energy tensor excludes time. We gather it in and put it to work. Our devices are using up time.

He did not understand. He sat there on the slab, downcast and tired and sad, and waited for them to send him back in their beams of light.

vi.

FILM MAKER SNATCHED BY LITTLE GRAY MEN

by
Judith Fripp
(Melbourne, Tuesday)

In 1952, Californian guru and café handy man George Adamski snapped a flying saucer and met the ski instructor from Venus who drove it. In 1975, timber worker Travis Walton was “abducted” by aliens for five days. Two years ago, Australian pilot Frederick Valentich vanished at sea after his plane was buzzed by a UFO, and hasn't been seen since. Now it's the turn of slick ad man and director Damon Keith, 35 (photo at right), to vacation on Venus.

Anyway, that's the explanation from his step-son, Ben Thompson, who watched them take Damon in a blue beam of light. Ben's real father is the famous cinematographer Vic Thompson, now working in Europe and the US with Peter Weir and Fred Schepisi among other ex-pat luminaries of local cinema. His worried mother Zelda, the former Mrs. Thompson, is now married to Damon. Confused?

The vanished Mr. Keith is known in Melbourne's bohemian arts circles for some entertaining pranks played when he was a comic turn and anti-Vietnam activist at Carlton's La Mama and Pram Factory theatres.

St. Kilda police were not commenting on the bizarre abduction claim, although they stated that Mr. Keith had been listed routinely as a missing person. By a strange coincidence, Mr. Keith recently returned from California, after an unsuccessful search for his daughter. Five-year-old Rosa was allegedly taken to the USA without his permission by her unmarried mother, Ramona M. Roach.

An officer warned that anybody making a false statement to police could be charged and prosecuted. No UFOs were booked in the bayside suburb for exceeding the speed of light on the rainy Saturday night.

Some late night disco revelers made independent reports of a “bright disc” hovering below the clouds near Luna Park. A local astronomer said this was “almost certainly” a shooting star, or meteor.

Ben Thompson, 18, admits he has been a “flying saucer nut” since childhood, when he believes he himself was contacted by creatures from outer space. He can even tell you where they come from—a planet called Zeeta Reticule!

Asked when he expects his step-father to return from his Spielberg adventure (remember
Close Encounters of the Third Kind
?), the second-year psychology student said he feared for Mr. Keith's life. “They killed Captain Mandell,” he said, referring to a famous jet pilot who crashed while chasing what US authorities say was a weather balloon.

And who are these little gray men? Aren't they meant to be green? A common error, says Ben. The UFO guys (and sexy gals!) come in plenty of shapes and colors, but strangely enough hardly any of them are green.

Anyone sighting Mr. Keith on the ground is asked to contact St Kilda police, who will notify his concerned family.

vii.

4 January 2000, Langley interrogation unit 8

Despite the clamor and frenzy caused by my father's second disappearance, he had not been abducted yet again by the Zetans. On the contrary, he seethed in a massively secure apartment (call it a cell and you would not be far wrong) in Maryland, USA. Every night he was fed well, given access to a superior choice of cable first release movies, permitted to swim or exercise in a compact but comprehensive gymnasium, all in the company of one pert young woman or another, each of whom made it clear that as part of her duties she was happy to stay the night in his king-size bed. Every morning he was fed an ample breakfast and then taken to a stark white room and attached to myographs and other stress-indicator devices, and asked by a fresh team his opinions about UFOs, world politics, and the meaning of life.

“I'm writing a new book,” he told his fourth pair of interrogators peevishly. “Look in my notebook, there's a directory called
The Zygote Paradigm
.”

A red-headed CIA scientist with a kindly expression flicked through his notebook menu and accessed a file. “I have it here, Mr. Keith. Do you actually expect us to believe this?”

“I couldn't give a flying fuck. Believe what you like.”

Nobody slapped him heavily about the chops. The monitoring equipment did not fry his nerves with an overdose of amps. Spiegle, a fat psychiatrist who hardly spoke during the first couple of hours of their interview, sat back in his easy chair, scratched his well-tailored belly, sighed. Tanner, the red-haired man, said, “Mr. Keith, if what you claim is true, this is the most momentous news since the discovery of the wheel.”

My father stared at him, and then away, drolly, to an imaginary or perhaps a hidden camera. He knew that much already.

“Tell us about their propulsion system.”

“Do you know how a bicycle derailleur gear system works?”

“What?”

“Have you ever ridden a bike?”

“Is this one of your cracker-barrel parables, Mr. Keith?”

“I'm an Australian, Dr. Tanner,” my father told him. “If you're going to insult me, you might at least use an Australian epithet. Ask me if I'm pissing in your pocket, for example. Ask me if I'm bullshitting you. Don't bother, I'm not. It's true, every word, and if you don't believe me you can check with Sir Lindsay Taggard.”

Incredibly, they had it on file. “The public servant you hoaxed back in April, 1972? I don't think he'd give you a sterling reference, Mr. Keith.”

“Call me Daimon, for Christ's sake. Call me Deems. We're old pals by now, aren't we?” He had never seen them before this morning, nor had the previous pairs of interrogators shown their faces once they'd left the room.

“What
about
bike gears?”

“Have you ridden one lately? A trail bike, say, with a lovely little set of ten or twelve gears to get you up the side of the mountain.”

“Not lately, but yes. So?”

“How do the derailleurs work?”

“Why, they— There's a sprocket, and the chain— I don't know. Is that what you're saying? That we leave that kind of detail to the mechanic in the store?”

“That's what I'm saying. It's metric defects, and beyond that they send it back under warranty.”

The psychiatrist eased forward, lit a cigarette, blew its smoke carefully away from Daimon. “Sorry, I know you hate this, but I get stressed, okay? And we're paying for this place, Daimon. Why do you called them ‘Zetans' when you know they couldn't possibly be from Zeta Reticuli?”

Deems smiled at him with admiration. “I thought you were the strong silent type. Are you telling me that Betty Hill invented her star map?”

This was an old, old story in UFO lore. When Barney Hill and his wife were kidnapped by the gray gynecologists, Betty was shown a holographic map of linked stars. Several years later a school teacher named Marjory Fish painstakingly built a scale model of the sun-like stars within 65 light years of Earth, and peered at it until she found a configuration closely matching Betty's hypnotic reproduction of the alien map.

The red-haired physicist snapped down the screen of his notebook. “You dealt with this Zeta crap yourself in that dumb Jesus book of yours, Deems. Fish would have done just as well if she'd turned Hill's dots upside down and hooked the lines together that way. Besides, the Zeta Reticuli binaries are too young and gravitationally destabilizing to have habitable planets.”

My father said happily, “I love it when I see you buggers bite. ‘Zetan' is a coinage of my own. It has nothing to do with the Fish map. See, the stuff the UFO aliens are built out of is cosmological dark matter, ‘Zed-nought' weakly interacting particles. I suppose you illiterate Americans would say ‘Zee-zero.' That's why they live near the core of the Earth where the gravity is nice and cozy. So they're Zed-Terrans—Zetans, okay?”

While the physicist had no ready reply to this, the psychiatrist was clearly disappointed; he had expected better of a man of my father's evident intelligence. “I
see
. So you subscribe to the Hollow Earth theory?”

Daimon was disappointed in return.

“Jesus, Spiegle, use your fucking ears. If the Earth was hollow, why would gravity-eaters choose to live there?”

The physicist winked at his colleague. “He's right, Leo. If his aliens are made of WIMPs or even WILPs, they'd sink straight down to the middle of the earth. Or the sun, for that matter. Do they live on the sun, Daimon?”

“
In
the sun, Tanner. Why else do you think every culture in history has worshipped the sun and the stars?”

“Well, light and warmth might have something to do with it, don't you think?”

“Uh huh, sure.” My father got up and went to the nice little kitchen, where an espresso machine burbled quietly. He pulled the handle and steamy coffee spurted. “Anyone else while I'm up?”

Tanner raised his arm. “And some cookies.”

“What are WILPs?” murmured the psychiatrist.

“WIMPS are weakly interacting massive particles,” the physicist muttered back, “and WILPs are weakly interacting light particles. Not to be confused with photons, which are just light particles.” He smirked, obscurely pleased with himself.

“The Zetans are the closest thing we can conceive to spirits,” Deems told them, carrying his coffee back into the bleak room, a tall pile of biscuits balanced precariously. “So you see, Heaven turns out to be there in both directions—down below, where the priests told us Hell was, and up above, in the stars.”

“You think these aliens are sort of like ghosts?” Spiegle asked grudgingly, “discarnate human souls?”

Daimon laughed out loud, a trifle hysterically.

“No, you don't have a soul, Spiegle,” he said, sputtering his coffee. “Neither do you, Tanner. Sorry.”

“Oh, I see, only you gifted UFO abductees have souls, right?”

“No, you fuck-wit. Did they lock your brains up when they gave you this damned jailers' job? Of course I don't have a soul, I'm an adult. Do I look like a first trimester fetus to you?”

The psychiatrist seemed taken aback. He opened his mouth, thought better of it, mused in silence. My father ate his chocolate cookie. Spiegle said slowly, “And that's why the occupants look like pre-term humans? They're neotenized, is that it? They remain somehow in the human fetal stage, but develop into a different kind of adulthood. Maybe sexless, even.”

“Exactly. They are our children. Without us, there wouldn't be any of them.”