Year Zero (2000), page 12
Molly shook her head. She hadn't realised until she found herself miserably speechless how disappointed she would be if it turned out that Christine hadn't tried to find her in the fifty-some days she'd been away.
Mephistopheles—who was, as usual, occupying one of Lilith's spare armchairs—said: "How are the mad scientists doing with the things man was never supposed to know?"
"If I were the incurious type, I'd say that it had been an absolute doddle," Molly said, dully, when she had found her voice again. "As things are, though ... I'll get out of your way as soon as possible, so that you can have the entire floor to yourselves, just the way you want, but I'd really appreciate it if you'd do me a favour first."
"What favour?" Lilith asked.
"I want to know what I was really doing while I was blanked out. I've watched the videotapes, but Wingate's right: that was just activity for activity's sake. I want to know what was going on inside my head. Wingate claims that he was working on some kind of rejuvenation serum—which isn't implausible, given that Elvis was involved in something similar not a million miles away—but that's not why he got excited about the amnesia and plastered my head with sensors. He must have started wondering about military applications then, even if he hadn't before. Imagine what the army could do with something that could wipe out memories and turn people into domestic robots! I need to make some sense of this—which is why I need to know where my mind went while my body was getting deeply into trivial housework. I figure that you people are far more likely to be able to help than the hypnotherapists Wingate threw at me, and cheaper too."
"When I say that there are things that man was not meant to know," said Mephistopheles, ominously, "that includes woman, too. Has it occurred to you that your brain might have a very good reason for filtering your memories and rendering them inaccessible?"
"Of course it has," said Molly. "Why do you think I'm so desperate to dig them up? Can you do it?"
"No," said Mephistopheles.
"Of course we can, dear," said Lilith, "But Meph does have a point, you know. Sometimes, ignorance really is bliss."
"Ignorance is intolerable," Molly countered, stubbornly, "and I wouldn't know bliss if it bit my leg."
Lilith sighed. "Tonight, then," she said. "You'd better join us for dinner—I don't suppose you've had time to do any food shopping."
Molly accepted the invitation, and went back to her own flat to change. She'd brought back a plastic bag full of the clothes that she'd been given to wear at Peaslee but it was all casual attire, so she went through her meagre wardrobe in search of something a little more upmarket that wasn't too tarty or too threadbare. There wasn't a lot of choice; all the half way good stuff had disappeared while she'd been absent without leave from the B&B.
Dinner at Lilith's was a grander affair than she'd anticipated. She'd guessed that Belial and Beelzebub would probably be there, as well as Mephistopheles, but she'd hadn't expected Astarte and Belphegor. Apparently, the demons were more interested in the affairs of the human world than they were prepared to let on—unless, for some reason, they thought that what was going on at Peaslee might be of special relevance to them. Molly tried to pump them about that during the meal, but they weren't very forthcoming. The wine was only a Chilean red that had been on special offer in Asda —chock-full of flavinols, if you believed the newspapers, but no use at all for loosening the tongues of demons reared on far harder liquors.
Afterwards, Lilith sat Molly down in an armchair and asked Astarte to do the honours. Because she was one of the demons co-opted from an earlier mythological system, Astarte had a slightly wider repertoire of party tricks than the original products of the Christian imagination.
"First, I'm going to try to put you back into the trancestate," Astarte explained. "If that works, I should be able to give you access to the hidden memories. I'm not going to ask you any questions while you're under, so we won't know anything until you wake up—and then it will be entirely up to you to decide what to tell us. Once the cat's out of the bag, though, it won't be possible to put it back. Whatever it is, you'll have to live with it."
"Fine," said Molly. "And don't worry—I'll tell you everything."
"There are some things that even demons are not meant to know," Mephistopheles said, gloomily, but it was obvious that he was in a minority of one, and he didn't volunteer to leave when Astarte started wiggling her fingers.
For a couple of minutes, Molly thought that it wasn't going to work, and that even demonic magic wouldn't be powerful enough to help her figure out what had been going on—but then she abruptly lost contact with Arcadia House, and remembered everything.
28
Molly had expected that the recovered memories would take a relatively ordinary form, at least to begin with, allowing her to recall her body's return trip from Peaslee Pharmaceuticals to 1303 Arcadia House on that first Friday and all the housework that had occupied her hands thereafter. In fact, the deluge of memories cut right to the chase and revealed to her exactly what her mind had been doing.
Unfortunately, her mind seemed to have been having a direly difficult time, in a world far more alien than any she had seen on her recent galactic tour.
At first, the only impressions she had been able to glean were of her immediate surroundings, and even they had been vague and distorted. She retained the impression of immense edifices made of some kind of translucent substance, threaded with endless winding corridors and vast spiral stairs, but it had all been horribly confusing at the time, and it was just as confusing now that she had the opportunity to bring hindsight to bear on the task of making sense of it ...
By day, the walls had been alive with refracted light, coloured with all the hues of the spectrum; by night they had been filled with dim starlight. These edifices were usually stable, as if built on solid foundations, but she had sometimes had the impression of extremely swift movement, as if they were able to lift themselves from whatever surface they usually stood upon and hurl themselves into the void. When they did so, the alternation of colourful day and glittering night had been replaced with a more complex play of light, and Molly had felt her own body grow less burdensome.
Because she had toured a tiny fraction of the galaxy with the greys Molly was easily able to guess, now, that the edifices must have been spaceships, and that the alterations in her own self-awareness must have been the result of weight-loss in zero-g—but she had not made that deduction at the time. There was, in any case, something very strange about the remembered sensation, which was markedly different from what she had felt when the greys first took her to their mothership.
As time went by, she recalled, the distortion of her vision had begun to ease somewhat, and she had been able to make out certain shapes more clearly. It was as if she had been seeing through eyes that were not her own, and that she had had to learn to see all over again. She had once read about an experiment in which newborn kittens were reared in an environment in which everything was vertically striped, and had subsequently proved to be unable to distinguish horizontal strips from series of dots. Her own experience had not been exactly like that, because the alien environment in which she found herself had seemed to have no straight lines of any kind, vertical or horizontal, and no angles either, but she assumed that something similar must have been going on. At first, her habits of perception had been woefully ill-adapted to the edgeless and un-angular environment, but as time went by she had become a little better adapted to the analysis of its multitudinous curves, circles and spirals.
Molly had eventually been able to make a little more sense of her surroundings, although the first objects that she had been able to pick out clearly were far outside the walls which usually confined her. One was a bluish circle dappled with greens and browns and streaked with white, and this she had eventually recognised as the Earth seen from a distance. The other was a featureless orb whose surface was a uniform polished white. The little she knew about astronomy encouraged her to jump to the conclusion that this must be Venus, and she began to wonder whether she had somehow made telepathic contact with aliens who were engaged in shuttling back and forth between Earth and its inner neighbour on a regular basis.
Molly's improved perceptions had begun to deliver more disturbing news when she began to get a better sense of her own body, and realised that it was not merely her eyes that were not her own. She had gradually realised that certain snaky entities that moved in liquid curves before her were, in fact, parts of her own body. She had never mastered her new sense of touch, but she had eventually been able to manoeuvre her eyes in such a way as to see as much of herself as was readily perceptible by sight alone. So far as she had been able to tell she was still possessed of two eyes, both positioned frontward to produce binocular vision, but they had been set in a huge bulbous mass, more like a torso than a head. She had never managed to obtain a confident count of her tentacular limbs, but there had been at least eight of them arrayed about the lower rim of the fleshy mass.
In brief, she had been metamorphosed into something vaguely resembling a giant octopus.
She had realised fairly soon after coming to terms with that fact that she was not engaged in the kind of activities one might have expected of an octopus. For one thing, she had not been immersed in a liquid medium. For another, her tentacular arms had been continually occupied with various kinds of labour, some of them as thoughtlessly routine as those to which her human body had been consigned. Indeed, while she had been sharing the consciousness of the alien monster her own body had, in effect, been reduced to the status of a few additional appendages. Apparently, this was a species thoroughly accustomed to multi-tasking.
Although she had not been able to make out what foodstuffs her alien symbiote ate or what fluids it drank, she/ it had certainly been involved in the routine business of nourishment—but that had only required a couple of her/its limbs. Meanwhile, the others had never ceased to be busy. Some, she felt sure, had been manipulating machinery; others had been involved in some kind of inscription, producing complex designs compounded out of circles and shadowy splashes.
Molly had realised, eventually, that her mind had somehow been made captive. Her personality had been superimposed upon, or subsumed within, the brain of this monstrous creature, which had made use of it in some fashion that she could not fathom even in retrospect.
Molly realised that the memories which she had of her adventure were entirely passive, and that this was the main reason why they were so ill-formed. Normally, she and every other being with which she was familiar went about her everyday business attentively, picking out certain stimuli for response, noticing items of significance and neglecting others. The memories conventionally secreted into her brain were, in the main, a record of what had captured her attention and what had required response—especially considered responses. These newly-recovered memories, by contrast, seemed vague and surreal, partly because they had no such strengthening elements; they were more like the memories of dreams, and might have banished entirely even now had it not been for the fixative power of Astarte's magic.
Even that magic, however, could not put into the memories something that had not been there to begin with: an alert, actively-engaged consciousness.
For this reason, what Molly had recovered remained intensely frustrating even when she came out of her trance. She was alert and actively-engaged now, but every time she tried to grasp the fine detail of what had happened to her while she was under the influence of Wingate's drug, it evaded her grasp. It was if as the memories were clouds, which kept forming suggestive shapes but dissipated every time she reached out to try to feel their precise shapes. She discovered a little, but suspected far more, and found it deeply frustrating that she had no way to make her suspicions more concrete. She formed the strong conviction that she had been much more profoundly displaced in time than in space, but when she tried to find firm proof of that conviction she could not find any, at least for the moment.
As the memories continued to unfold, however, she found more and more sense emerging spontaneously within them.
The longer her mind had been captive, the more accustomed it had become to its alien habitat, and the more comfortable it had become within the activities directed by the alien consciousness with which it had been fused.
Molly found, in the end, that striving hard to make sense of what she had not been able to make sense of at the time was hopeless, and deduced that her best chance of enlightenment lay in accepting passivity and allowing the development of what she could only conceive as a flow of intuition.
Just as her alien powers of sight had become clearer by degrees, so her alien powers of understanding had been slowly augmented, little by little. She had begun to have a vague sense of the exotic mind that had kidnapped and imprisoned hers. She had begun to catch enigmatic glimpses of its stocks of knowledge, its conscious activities, even its intentions and purposes ...
The work of the handless but inordinately clever limbs had eventually come to the very edge of meaningfulness, and she had begun to see the sense in the patchwork of circles and shadows ...
But then the flow had been abruptly cut off, as the last of Nathanael Wingate's injections exhausted its effect. She had returned to her body for good. She had, she supposed, been set free, perhaps in the nick of time. Had she progressed just one step further, her mind might actually have fused with its host and been permanently secured within it—but Wingate, perhaps perceiving that she was at breaking-point, had terminated the experiment.
Molly wondered whether Wingate and his colleagues had had the slightest inkling of what had really been happening to her. It seemed more likely that they had only been concerned with observing her from the outside, studying the actions of her mind-deserted body, conceiving of the anomalous activity within her brain as something spontaneous. Wingate probably had not the slightest suspicion of what had really been happening. Even if he had, he certainly could not have been any better placed than Molly was to make sense of it all —and even Molly knew that there was a great deal of work still to be done in that respect.
29
"I think it must have been a very long time in the past," Molly told the interested demons, when they pressed their demands for the explanations that remained frustratingly just out of reach. "I think it was billions of years ago—maybe before the beginning of the fossil record."
"Long before our time, then," said Lilith. She had already admitted, although some of her companions had not, that Molly had been right about demons being a projection of the human yearning for moral order.
"Long before that," Molly confirmed, speaking rather distractedly because she was still trying hard to connect up the pieces of what she had recalled, hoping to make a little more sense of it. "I think they might have had something to do with the real Creation, much further back in time than any mythical Adam. The creation of the first replicator molecule, that is—the ancestor of DNA. Except that it wasn't creation, as such, because the organic sludge must already have been here, ensliming the planet. It must have been more like a kind of nudge: an evolutionary kick-start."
"You're just making it up," Mephistopheles put in, airily. "It's all confabulation—false memory syndrome, isn't that what the experts on TV call it? The world only began a few thousand years ago."
"You weren't there, Meph," Lilith told him. "I was on the scene, at least in spirit, a long time before you, but I'm not foolish enough to think that was the beginning. If you'd only taken the trouble to master the art and science of doubt, you'd know that the so-called Father of Lies was and is a mere apprentice."
"Do you suppose that your mad scientist might have done this deliberately, Molly?" Astarte wanted to know. "Could he have intended to put you in touch with these giant octopuses. " "Don't you mean octopi?" said Beelzebub.
"Actually," Mephistopheles put in, eager to regain the intellectual high ground, "octopus comes from the Greek, not the Latin, and ought to be rendered octopous. Technically, the plural is octopodes, but octopuses is acceptable as an Anglicization. Octopi, on the other hand, is an etymological atrocity."
"Oh, shut up," said Belphegor. "Molly?"
"I can't be absolutely sure," Molly admitted, "but I don't think Wingate has any idea what really happened to me. He could see I'd gone, of course, and that there was some kind of feedback from wherever I'd gone, but I suspect that what Peaslee are interested in is whether they can figure out how to get rid of people whenever they want to, and bring them back on demand. It's the motives of the aliens that are really puzzling. They seemed to know what they were doing. I think they even wanted me to know what they were doing—and maybe they'd have managed it if they'd had a little more time."
"Maybe your friends the greys can tell you who they are—or were," Astarte suggested.
"I don't think so," Molly said. "The greys evolved intelligence a few million years before we did, and fucked up their own biosphere while we were still busy inventing agriculture, but they belong to the same galactic era—maybe even the same interstellar family, if there is an interstellar family."
"You mean that the octopuses might have created them, too?" Lilith said.
"Maybe. Not created, exactly—but the primeval sludge on the greys' homeworld might have been nudged in the same sort of way."
"Well," said Beelzebub, "if they were trying to make the evolution of life on Earth copy evolution on their own world, they certainly made a big mistake. I never heard of a smart octopus."
"Perhaps they weren't," Molly said, still groping for some further insight, some crucial key that would allow her to make that last leap of comprehension. "Perhaps they were trying to make something different, something new. Perhaps that's why they tried to reach forward in time, to establish a link with us. Perhaps ..."
