Alien Abduction, page 26
They had ovens, where they baked pots as well as cooking food, using wood for fuel. They did a certain amount of metal-working, but they were basically stone-and-ceramic technologists. Metal blades were very precious, and used with great care. The tools they used most frequently were pounding tools for breaking the shells of mollusks and crushing seaweed into pulp.
They seemed to be a happy and contented tribe. They led secure lives, even though the savannah had more than its fair share of dangerous predators—not just mammals, birds and reptiles, but monsters unknown in our world. They did suffer occasional losses to those predators, which occasionally raided their villages by night, but when they went foraging on the savannah they were guarded; they were also guarded in their homes by day and by night, although they rarely saw their guardians They were secure in their contentment because they were protected, watched over and defended by the most jealous of all the monsters that stalked the savannah. Sometimes, their guardians failed in their protective duty, but not often.
Lili was happy and contented too, and not just while she was innocent. When she learned about the thing that lived inside her, it changed her conception of herself and her species, but it didn’t terrify her. Why should it? Everyone had one—everyone, at least, who was under the age of forty. When a host reached forty or thereabouts, the parasite moved on to the next phase of its life-cycle. It wasn’t really a worm, you see; it was a larva. It was only a parasite for part of its life. After that…well, its adult phase is difficult to describe, but you need to get past the idea of caterpillars turning into butterflies, or even into dragonflies. These monsters were a whole other order of being.
They were beautiful, in their way—textured like marble—but they were also incredibly hideous. They had more than twenty senses, and organs to suit, and they had all the kinds of limbs you can imagine, with some to spare. They started off quite small, but there was a lot to eat on that savannah—the Earth will have a lot more biomass then than it does now—and they kept growing for centuries, if they survived that long. They were the top predators, but they weren’t short of rivals. They also had parasites of their own, and things could get pretty rough between themselves, especially in the mating season. One reason why they had so many limbs was that so many of them were modified as weapons. When they competed for mates, they didn’t hold back; Lili had seen several such contests, albeit from a safe distance.
By the time Lili was half way to adulthood she knew that every meal she ate was feeding a larva as well as herself, that when she grew fat it wasn’t really her growing fat, but the larva inside her. She knew, too, that when she was old enough to marry, she and her husband would both be feeding larvae, and that when she fell pregnant, she would be feeding the larva as well as her own infant, before and after the unborn infant acquired a parasite of its own. None of that seemed horrible to her. She was cheerful. She was contented. She was secure.
She learned to fish, and to cook, and to gather the produce of the savannah. She learned to sing, to play games, to flirt and be courted. She learned to love the monsters that protected her, always on her side because she was carrying one of their young. She learned all the knowledge of her tribe, and all its folklore. She learned what I’ll call its religion, for want of a better word, although it was really just a matter of biology. She learned the reason for her existence. Her tribe didn’t have the sort of god that our tribes and nations have always had to make do with, because they didn’t need that kind of god. They knew where they came from, and what the purpose of their existence was.
I’m telling you this more in the manner of a lecture than a story, because that’s the way I eventually organized the information, but you need to remember that it wasn’t told to me as a lecture, I remembered it all, haphazard bit by haphazard bit, and while I pieced it all together I pieced it together as a life that I’d lived. I remembered it as a happy life, a beautiful life, a life worth living. All the while, there was something else in me—another set of memories, another life, another intelligence—that couldn’t look at and live in Lili’s memories in quite the same way as Lili, but while I was there, giving Michelangelo’s David a helping brain, I was Lili, and her memories were as much mine as my own, and they were happy, serene, idyllic.
Hers was a childhood like none that was ever possible for any human of our kind, Hers was an adolescence that was never possible for any girl of our sort. Hers was a young adulthood that was…well, you get the picture. She wasn’t yet thirty when she was taken by the time-traveling aliens, and put to bed so that I could read her mind. She’d had two children of her own, and expected to have one or two more.
As I said, though, her mind wasn’t really her own—not entirely. The larva lived in her gut—which isn’t, technically speaking, inside the body’s flesh at all—but it put out feelers. By feelers I don’t mean the kind of antennae that insects wear on their heads. I mean real feelers: natural neuroworms. The larva didn’t just share her meals; it shared her thoughts, and it used her brain to think thoughts of its own.
While Lili learned, the Lili-larva learned, and some of what the larva had to learn was what any larva of its kind needed to know in order to comprehend and continue its own life-trajectory. It learned those things, in large measure, the same way Lili learned about matters beyond the immediately practical: from speech and story, exemplary dramatization and educational exposition. Its primary education came, for the most part, out of the mouths of human beings, who had to carry the heritage of their parasite species in their myths and memories as well as their own. Some of it, though, came from the mouths of monsters. The monsters had mouths as well as everything else—including mouths that could formulate human speech.
The Lili-larva was happy too, while it was a larva. It knew that it had sterner challenges ahead, when it became an adult, but while it was a larva its larvahood was comfortable, protected, idyllic. The Lili-larva took part in Lili’s games, Lili’s thoughts, Lili’s own happiness…just as I did.
The adults of Lili’s species worked hard while they were under forty, not just on their own behalf but on their larvae’s behalf. Sometimes, they even did work for the monsters. They loved work. They derived a great deal of pleasure from it—perhaps, though not necessarily, because they had neuroworms sticking into the pleasure-centers in their hind-brains, which rewarded them every time they did anything to further their purpose in life, to serve the monsters. After forty or thereabouts, they didn’t work any more. After forty, they were fattened up to be eaten. Sometimes the adult monsters that emerged from the pupae formed by the larvae they’d nurtured took part in the feast. Sometimes they didn’t. They didn’t have any particular sentimentality about that kind of relationship.
I can’t tell whether the adults who were eaten, when they reached the age of forty-two or forty-three, enjoyed being eaten. Maybe they did and maybe they didn’t. I know, though, that Lili was looking forward to being eaten—that she regarded it as a privilege to be treasured and devoutly desired, an entirely appropriate consummation of the purpose of her existence. She hadn’t the slightest desire to avoid being eaten. The pseudohumans of eight hundred million years hence will know that they must die, but they won’t experience any angst in consequence. They’ll love being alive, while they’re working for their larvae and their children, and for the monsters that made them, but they won’t mind the thought of dying in the least. Lili didn’t, at any rate…not, at least, while she was lying on that bed in that research establishment somewhen inexpressible, dreaming the dreams that I was translating for the aliens who had made Michelangelo’s David.
Afterwards, when they sent her home…I don’t know anything about that, do I? But I wonder, sometimes, if she’ll remember, just a little, or if she’ll dream, sometimes, about another set of memories, another life, another existence: an existence that’s only cheerful sometimes, only contented rarely, and not idyllic at all, in sum. She couldn’t see anything horrible in her parasite, or in the monsters that would eat her one day—if one of their rivals caught her first—but she might have been able to see something horrible in the fragments of me that slipped into her brain while her neuroworm-borne fragments slipped into me. She might have been able to find something horrible in the mere possibility of a creature that looked like her but had no awareness of the purpose of her life, no awareness of why she existed or where she was bound.
Maybe, I sometimes tell myself, that wouldn’t make Lili miserable at all, Maybe it would make her even happier, to know that she might be like that but wasn’t, Maybe it would just make her value her own happiness a little more. After all, I can’t say that it’s made me any happier to have shared her bliss, her joy, her contentedness. If anything, it’s only added to the burden of my own uncertainties, my own self-dissatisfaction. It would be too cruel, don’t you think, if every meeting of minds only served to make both the participants more miserable than they were before? I’d like to think that Lili went back home, eight hundred million years in the future, no worse off for her abduction, and perhaps a little better.
Not that I have any complaints myself, you understand. There’s more to life than happiness, isn’t there? Perhaps, if I’ve learned anything, I’ve learned that even happiness can be horrible, and that what people ought to be searching for isn’t happiness at all, or the purpose of life, but a different kind of reward. So I wonder, now, whether I ought to be searching for something else, if only for a different kind of happiness that’s earned, through understanding. I sometimes wonder, now, whether we might be the unluckiest intelligent species that will ever inherit or inhabit the Earth, simply because we’re the first, with no others to look back on and take inspiration from, and not the least vestige of an emergent pattern to contemplate.
I wonder other things, too—darker things. I can’t help myself. I’m almost sure that the aliens were wrong, and that Lili and I only looked alike on the outside, while being utterly different on the inside, but I can’t be sure, can I? Maybe, I sometimes can’t help thinking, it’s me that was mistaken, and the whole human race along with me. I know that we don’t have huge larvae in our guts that are destined to turn into monsters with far more senses and limbs and mouths than any sensible creature could ever need—but that doesn’t necessarily mean, does it, that our flesh and our brains and our minds are entirely our own; that there aren’t things living inside us that aren’t really us, even though anatomists think they are, and which use our brains for thinking their own thoughts, dreaming their own dreams. If they’re never apart from us, physically, I suppose there’s a sense in which they’d be part of us by definition…but still, if they had their own thoughts, their own dreams, their own happiness.…
We know, you see—all of you must know it as well as I do—that our brains are capable of entertaining other lives, other memories, other beings. Maybe they’re all put there by neuroworms, or some equivalent technology, but nature has its own technologies, doesn’t it? What human and alien artifice can produce by design, DNA can usually produce by natural selection, given time and the right challenge. We’re already full of nature’s neuroworms. How can we be sure that they’re all really us, and that none of them are conduits to alien experience? It’s unlikely, I know—but once you’ve been an instrument in an alien investigation, eight hundred million years downstream and somewhen unspecifiable, you can’t help wondering.
I can’t, anyway.
I loved Lili. I loved being with her, and I loved her. I loved her childhood, her adolescence, her children, her Lili-larva. I loved her happiness. I still treasure her happiness, whenever I can obtain a glimpse of it. I’m glad I haven’t forgotten her—although I did, for a while, and it wasn’t easy to piece her back together again, fragment by fragment, dredging her up from my dreams, sorting her out, and making her coherent—but I’d done it once and I did it again, and I take immense satisfaction in that. Michelangelo’s David would be proud of me, I think, and the aliens and monsters too. I’d like to think that it helps to prove that we humans aren’t quite as pathetic, incompetent and wretched as we might seem, within the great scheme of things, to creatures who can see that scheme, and are making headway in understanding it.
I’d like to think that some day, eight hundred million years from now, Lili will catch an occasional fugitive glimpse of me, in the deepest recesses of her dream-memory. I’d like to think, too, that she might contrive to be just a little bit happy that I was once alive. I know that she won’t have any particular reason to be happy about that, but why shouldn’t she? We’ll be together for a little while, after all, and togetherness is good, isn’t it?
Even we think that togetherness is good—and we don’t have any reason to think so that’s anywhere near as good as Lili’s, do we?
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
CLEARING UP MISCONCEPTIONS
“I thought you were going to put your hand up,” Milly said, when Steve put the car in gear and pulled away, with his eyes on the rear-view mirror, in which he could see Walter Wainwright politely opening the passenger door of his Renault Megane for Janine. Steve hadn’t done that for Milly, and had never done it for Janine in all the time they’d been going out—not even in the first flush of sheer infatuation.
“I think I would have put my hand up if you’d put yours up,” Steve said—honestly, so far as he could tell. “I only hesitated—but then, when you didn’t put your hand up, I got stuck in the hesitation. I suppose you got caught in the same sort of trap.”
“No, I just chickened out,” Milly said, appropriating the petty virtue of admitting her fault frankly.
“I’m sorry,” Steve said, defensively.
“It’s okay,” Milly replied, claiming the additional petty virtue of generosity. “I was supposed to go first—that was the deal. When I didn’t put my hand up, you must have thought I was pulling a fast one on you. And it wasn’t just me, was it? You were thinking about Janine, too. Even though you’re with me now, you’re always looking at her.”
“Given that we sit side-by-side while she always plonks herself down in the green armchair,” Steve said, his defensiveness edging towards paranoia “that’s a simple matter of geometry. Should I complain because you’re always looking in her direction instead of turning your head through ninety degrees to stare at me?”
“Women are allowed to look at one another,” Milly said. “It’s a completely different emotional experience. Anyway, I’ll have another go next time—at putting my hand up, I mean—whether you do or not, I mean. I am ready. I wish I had done it today, then I wouldn’t have to follow Megan. Her story was much better than mine. I know that the group’s the most supportive support group anyone could ever hope to find, but my story’s not nearly as good as most. I’ve tried to dress it up with philosophizing, the way Megan did, but I’m no good at that sort of thing, and I can’t alter the actual events, can I? That would be cheating. It’s just my luck to have an experience that wasn’t as neat, or pretty or delicate as other people’s. On the other hand, that’s me all over—bloody typical.”
She stopped then, quite abruptly. Out of the corner of his eye, Steve saw her blush. He’d never seen her blush before; three years’ experience as a traffic warden had rendered her pretty much embarrassment-proof. He realized that she thought she’d revealed too much of herself, not merely in what she’d just said but in her failure to volunteer to tell her story. It was, he thought, the failure of her resolve that she was condemning as “bloody typical”, as well as all the respects in which she thought that she couldn’t quite measure up to Janine.
“Mine lacks literary polish too,” he said, trying to help her out. “Megan obviously did a lot of work on hers before she ever showed her face at AlAbAn, and people like Arthur and Neville have honed theirs by continual repetition. There’s a sense, of course, in which they’re all simply made up, but there’s a more important sense in which they’re not, in which they really are given to us, as they are, on a take-it-or-leave-it basis. It would be cheating to switch things around or invent things in the interests of more dramatic tension or smoother development. No matter how mad we all are, there’s a profound method in our madness. The collective unconscious isn’t the kind of thing that has motives or makes purposive plans, but there’s still a sense in which we’re instrumental. We have parts to play.
For once, Milly was prepared to join in. “Megan’s right,” she said. “We’re not entirely ourselves. We might not have huge worms inside us, wearing us like smart cockleshells, but there are still things in us that aren’t really us—things we can’t command and can’t control. Emotional incontinence.”
“I think it might go further than that,” Steve said, reflectively. “The limited empire of reason is part of the human condition. The bits of our minds that we think of as us have always had to battle against impulses from elsewhere—animal spirits, the passions, the id, whatever you want to call them—but this is something different.”
“This?” Milly echoed, not quite getting his drift.
“Alien abduction,” he said. “AlAbAn. The way our stories intersect and overlap. Something else is going on.”
“Of course it is,” Milly said, with a wry smile. “We’re being abducted by inquisitive aliens—probed and analyzed and put to work on all kinds of weird tasks in other times, and maybe on other planets. No wonder we’re not quite ourselves. We’re probably infested with all kinds of escaped neuroworms from a multitude of future eras, whose cross-breeding will produce even more monstrous varieties. Maybe that’s why we’re about to become extinct. It probably has nothing to do with global warming and the release of all that trapped methane—we’re going to be eaten up by parasitic worms from the great swamps that sprawl all over the time-stream. Now that’s a better story by far than the one in my experience. If only I could work that into a tale to tell.…”
