Adrift in the Noösphere (21 page)

“Tell us anyway,” cries a fervent voice.

“We're up for it, man,” cries another.

Deems gazes at them sardonically. “Really? You actually think you can handle this revelation?”

“Sure.”

A little voice pipes, “You'll help us understand it,” and everyone laughs, friendly and enthusiastic.

“I will indeed, Sandra,” Daimon says with a smile. He leans forward, putting his silver elbows on the desk. “Very well, let's take a chance here. What is the meaning of life? The philosophers and theologians and shamans and public relations flacks struggled with this one for thousands of years. I'm here to tell you, friends, that their answers aren't worth a pinch of shit. We can forget them. The speculations of Plato and Aquinas and Kant about the meaning of human life were exactly as informed and interesting as their speculations about nuclear physics. It's not just that they were wrong about everything that science has since revealed to us. It's not just that their guesses were childishly primitive. No, friends, they weren't even asking the right questions. Which is why the answer to that big question, that ultimate question, seems so hard for us to accept. Until we see through it, and through the question. Here's the answer, friends.”

He pauses. They crane forward. Surely they have heard this before, know it as their catechism, but the thrill never leaves them, the burst of creepy shock, that exultant shock of freedom and transgression and sheer good humor in Daimon's UFO revelation.

“What is the meaning of human life? It is the same answer the wise scientist gives if asked, What is the meaning of the sun? What is the meaning of a tidal wave that smashes a hundred thousand suffering people caught in its path? What is the meaning of the sky's darkness at night? What is the meaning of a joyful orgasm that begins a new life?”

He stands up abruptly, and the great screen at his back goes scarlet, a shocking explosion of blood or sunset, and then to utter black. In the center of the void, a tiny flower of piercing light opens. Its petals unfold. It is the universe in the first moments of creation, the Big Bang itself, the universe uttered into existence. Organ chords carry the numinous message. Daimon stands before them, his silvery suit catching light from the screen. He is exultant, and he stares at them with absolute conviction.

“What is the meaning of human life?

“There is no meaning.”

iv.

July, 2005, Los Angeles

After my mother was slaughtered, butchered and eaten by Valentine the guru and his followers, I spent the next ten years submitting at night to physical and sexual abuse by members of Harmonic Resonance and studying tensely at a cult school during the day. This is hardly the place to dilate upon that atrocious decade, which I blocked from conscious memory until my chance encounter with Benjamin Thompson, Daimon's adopted son.

By 2003, my step-brother was an established therapist in the USA specializing in deep recovery techniques, having broken some years earlier with the Church of Jesus Christ, Time Traveler (as it was known on the West Coast) after my father denounced his earlier claims and slid the movement's substantial holdings into a Malaysian account for the newly announced Scionetics organization.

My own powers of recall were in terrible shape, of course, for I had developed a barrage of dissociative personality disorders to permit me to cope, however inadequately, with my rough handling by the Harmonic Resonance cultists. It was my belief, until Ben opened up the hideous can of worms under my skull, that Margaret Rosch had died in an automobile accident six months after our arrival in the United States, and that I had been adopted by her ditzy friend Katie, whom I called “Mom” from that day hence.

The most curious aspect of this hidden life is that Benjamin had no slightest inkling of our familial relationship when the hypnotic probing began in his comfortable Los Angeles office, or of the type of banal horror he would unmask. From all the indicator instruments I filled out tediously, a barrage of Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventories, Hopkins Image Recognition Test cards, Barber Suggestibility Indices and so on, he had expected that I was a prime candidate for alien abductee of the year.

It was not true; to the best of my knowledge I have never been visited by the gray gynecologists, never gone into their high laboratories for probing and ovary pillage. I'm sure that's true. When I came out of trance, Benjamin sat looking at me with a very pale and bemused expression. His obese black nurse busied herself with the Mac voice-activated transcriber, a machine prone to lexical ambiguity unless watched closely, and her matronly presence protected both of us from any possible subsequent forensic disputes.

I could remember little of my hypnotic testimony. “Was I abducted by a UFO?” I asked my new therapist hopefully. Anything was better than this awful
not knowing
.

He coughed, and coughed again. Something seemed to be stuck in his throat, and I doubt that it was an alien implant.

“Your name is not Angel,” he told me, evading my question, “it's Rosa. Rosa Rosch.”

No, my lost life did not instantly flood back into my conscious awareness like a dam bursting. I looked at him as if he were the one with the mental problem.

“What?”

Benjamin sat where he was and extended his beautiful hand to within 20 centimeters of my own. “May I hold your hand?”

I gave my permission. His grip was warm and firm, if, I thought, a trifle damp. He was anxious. His eyes darted about my face.

“Rosa, you are my step-sister.”

I withdrew my hand and got smartly off the couch. “Send me your bill,” I said coldly, making for the door. The nurse somehow got in my way, and Benjamin reached past her and took my hand again, increasing his grip.

“They did terrible things to you, Angel,” he said. “They took away your mother, and your name, and your history, and your peace of mind. But at least they were not able to harm the rest of your family. We thought you were gone for good, Rosa.” There were genuine tears in his eyes. “If you wish to see your father, I can arrange a meeting.”

I was thunderstruck.

“My father? Don't be silly, Dr. Thompson, my father died many years ago.”

“No,” Benjamin told me, with a smile, “your father is alive and kicking.”

“Who is he?” I forced myself to ask, through lips anaesthetized with fear and hope. This man was clearly out of his tree. Dr. Ben placed credence, after all, in the routine abduction and pillage of a tenth of the population of these United States, so he was patently unhinged. But then I was slowly remembering, through a numb, shaking haze, the details of the regression: that my mother had been hacked up and stir-fried by sweet-natured people, my own extended mystical family, who claimed to be vegetarians.

“Your father is quite a famous fellow,” Benjamin told me, with a certain ambiguous satisfaction. It is hard to dislike Deems, after all. “The Reverend Daimon Keith, founder of Scionetics.”

We had not been permitted to read the
National Enquirer
at Harmony, nor indeed watch vulgar television programs, and after my escape I had never gotten into the habit. I didn't have a clue what he was talking about.

v.

August 1970, inside the UFO

He opened his eyes, and it was happening again. Were they under the bed, hiding beneath the fall of the blankets? Were they peeking at him from the crack of the closet's open door? Were they lurking behind the door? No. The door was closed, it was deep in the middle of the night. Everyone else in the house was asleep. He wanted to huddle into the comforting warmth of body-heated sheets and covers, but somehow they had been pulled away. It was cold. He felt so cold that he was sure he must be shivering, but his legs and arms were so heavy that he could not even shiver. They were standing there next to his bed, looking at him with their huge dark eyes.

“Go away,” he said, wanting to scream.

They were just out of view, at the edges of his vision. Were there four of them, or five? The gray doctor was one of them, he could tell that much. They would do things to him again. Within his chilled, heavy flesh, his heart thudded. One thin hand came up over the edge of the bed and touched his own bare hand with a metal rod. He yelped, once, and then his heart slowed, calmed.

“What?” he asked sluggishly. “What?”

He was to go with them once more. They meant to put him on their ship and invade his body again. Despite the effects of the rod, his blood seemed to cool even further. His stomach contracted in fear. Light poured suddenly from the wall between his bedroom and the backyard. The small gray people, dirty-white people, big-eyed bugs without mouths or noses passed into the light with jerky, spasmodic steps. Like frames of a badly-edited old film. Jump cuts. Merging into each other like some sort of overlap. He was in the air and moving into the blue light.

It was so cold. The light was gone. He lay tilted on his side somehow, the blood draining into the left side of his face and body. The slab was hard, unyielding. Yes, they had brought him into the round room again. He recognized the heavy stink of the place. What do they eat? he thought blurrily. What kind of awful crap do they suck up through those lipless little mouths? The gray doctor touched his forehead with a needle. It was sharp, long, glinting in the dimness. The doctor pushed it hard into his skull, like a drill, and it hurt. It was agonizing! He could not believe that they were doing this to him again. The sadistic bastards. Don't they know anything about pain? He told himself that he would teach them about pain if they let him loose, if they withdrew this sickening heaviness from his arms and legs. Tears flooded his closed eyes.

“Why are you resisting?” asked the one he called Klar-2.

“It hurts so much,” he whimpered. The needle came out of his cranium now and, without cleaning it, the gray doctor put it up into his left nostril. A blob of blood and gray goo clung to the needle as it went deep into his nose. He wished he could faint, or just die. The pain was excruciating, and they would not let him scream or turn away. The needle drilled and drilled, and a stench of burning entered the whole of his head like a ponderous cloud. Out came the needle, the drill, and one of the others handed Klar-2 a long flexible tube with a three-clawed grip at its snout. The gray doctor pushed the new thing up into his nostril. Light burst through his head, and for a moment he did lose consciousness. Despite the torpor they had induced in him, he convulsed in agony as the device came out of his nose. Blearily, he saw that its tiny claw now held a small burred sphere. Klar-2 held it up for general inspection. A drop of blood fell from the device. The gray doctor's eyes were huge and dark, a brown almost black. Throbbing, burning pain hung in his head.

Two of the small aliens took him by the hand, one on each side. The slab rotated until it stood vertical, and then, to his horror and disbelief, it swiveled forward another thirty or forty degrees. He dangled above them, unsupported. This was not free-fall, not a region of the ship without gravity. From time-lapsed moment to moment he felt dizzily that he might fall and smash his nose—his tender, brutalized nose!—on the segmented metal deck. Instead he somehow remained stuck to the hard surface while they inspected him with their gadgets, their stupid toys. He realized suddenly that he was so cold because they had stripped him naked. At the same moment, one of them touched his penis with its machine. To his horror, he instantly got an erection. His rage increased.

“You bastards! Leave me alone, you shits.”

They stepped aside into shadows, and the slab whirled back to the horizontal. He lay, heavy, immobile, with his ridiculous hard-on sticking straight up at the lens or light or whatever it was on the ceiling. Out of the corner of his eye he saw a seamless doorway open in the wall to his left, close again. A woman in a silvery cloak and long stringy pale hair came into the chamber, and the aliens did their jump-cut retreat as she approached the slab.

His humiliation was complete. The woman was not quite human, but there was no telling his fucking mindless dick that. It quivered, a randy jolt that was not quite an ejaculation. He remembered that they had done this before. They had brought some kind of tube over and connected it to his penis as if he were a prize bull, and he'd spurted his jism into it even as he had roared his furious rejection of them. Everything blurred. Cliché or not, this had to be a nightmare, a dream, the sort of fantasy you get when you've gone over the edge, cracked up; a stupid, unbelievable image dredged from horror movies.

Something light and cool touched his right eyelid, and he realized that he had been lying hunched with his eyes tightly clamped shut. The pale-haired woman regarded him without expression. She touched her own garment twice, at throat and groin, and it fell from her. Somehow, crumpled, it flew across the room and stuck to the side of the chamber.

She pushed him off the slab.

The metal floor struck his shoulder, and his left ankle clipped the hard edge of the slab as he fell. Emotions collided inside him: outrage and hilarity. He lay on the slick floor, rubbing his ankle, and started to laugh. He pushed himself to a standing position, conscious of his absurd hard-on, and looked over his stinging shoulder at the woman.

She had got herself on to the slab and lay there looking expressionlessly at the ceiling lens. Naked and unpleasant as a fish, she was stretched out like someone expecting a disagreeable medical examination. The gray doctor touched his arm, and he jumped. Where had that bastard come from?

You will give her a baby, Klar-2 instructed him in the weird way they had, without opening his slitty mouth.

“Fuck you!”

There was perhaps the faintest tinge of ironic amusement in the alien's gaze. Impossible. It was
alien
!

He looked back at the woman. At least she was human. Sort of. Her hair was long and unappealing, Alice in Wonderland grown up a bit. On the face of it she should have been attractive, but something about her rigid presence repelled him. Her breasts were small, but sagged a little. Her public hair was thick, untrimmed. She saw him looking at her and opened her legs, lifting her knees. The gray doctor gave him a push in the back.