Alien Abduction, page 9
For a moment, it seemed that Imhotep would refuse to answer the question, but then it thought better of it. “My offspring,” it said, shortly.
It was the first time I had cause to wonder whether I was really correct to think of it as “it”. “Are you its mother or its father?” I asked.
“Neither,” it said. “Sex is the prerogative of adults. Pedogenetic reproduction is a short cut in more ways than one. It’s my clone—or was. It still would be, if it weren’t for its capacity for mutation. Thus far, though, it doesn’t seem.…”
The reason Imhotep stopped was that the head of the adult had finally appeared. Imhotep’s own head, I remembered, was the result of pedogenetic pseudometamorphosis. There was no reason to expect the head of its clone-sibling’s adult incarnation to resemble it closely. It did resemble it very closely, though; it had similar big dark eyes, and a similar mouth with similar teeth and a tongue, shaped for pronouncing the syllables of human languages as well as well as those of its own species.
Except, of course, that it didn’t know any human languages. Imhotep’s clone-sibling had not had the same opportunity, or the same motive, to learn any language that Imhotep had learned while it was a larva. Imhotep’s larval clone-sibling had only known its own language—a language it ought to have forgotten, if the normal course of specific development had been followed.
Once the monster’s head was free, it was able to stand up slowly on its four hind legs, and to use its hand-like forefeet to free itself of the debris of its cocoon. While it did so, it looked down. Not until it had finished did it look up—not at Imhotep, but at me.
It looked at me with intelligence in its eyes, and with compassion. It looked at me with love. It didn’t say a word, because it couldn’t, but I understood. Imhotep understood too. Imhotep understood that I had worked the miracle, that I had catalyzed the production of the first self-consciously intelligent adult that its species had ever produced.
Imhotep spoke to its recently-metamorphosed clone-sibling, but the clone-sibling made no reply. It continued looking at me, and its silent gaze told me everything I needed to know.
I’m not claiming that we exchanged ideas telepathically, or even that there was any kind of quasi-magical empathy between us, but there was a bond, and there was understanding. I knew it, and so did Imhotep.
The monster took a single step towards me, which brought it close enough to be able to reach out with one of its vast and clumsy hands to caress my throat. All the while it was looking directly into my eyes—and now it came close enough to be able to do so without my having to strain my neck.
I was able to lie back, and make myself more comfortable, while the creature from the chrysalis moved its head to a position directly above mine, so that it could look down at me gratefully, fondly and admiringly. It didn’t matter, just then, that I was a long-extinct mammal, while it was a God-knows-what from the Third Arthropod Era. There was a bond between us more intimate than that between any Earthly mother and child, or between any Earthly pedogenetic clone-parent and clone-sibling.
I felt perfectly happy, for the first time in my adult life.
Then the others burst in, all armed with ugly ray guns, and shot the thing to pieces.
Imhotep tried to stop them, and was gunned down too.
That was when I started screaming.
I must have blacked out soon afterwards, presumably because whatever was in charge of my drip feed doctored the input with a powerful narcotic. When I woke up, I was back in my own bed.
The clock on my bedside table said that it was twenty past three, but it wasn’t—not so far as I was concerned.
It wasn’t the end of the world, either, but it certainly wasn’t twenty past three—not for me.
I remembered everything, probably because the confusion aboard the alien timeship had been too great to allow them to do the memory-wipe properly. My brain might have attempted its own kind of memory-wipe, but there was never any possibility of it taking effect. Nor was there any possibility of my confusing the experience with a dream or a nightmare. It was real. It took no time, according to the clock, but it was real. It was more real than Mike, more real than the divorce, more real than the ovarian cysts, more real than the hysterectomy, more real than any of the thousand diseases and hundred deaths I witnessed week by week and year by year at the hospital. It was the realest thing I ever experienced, or ever will.
It’s possible, I suppose, that the time-travelers got the wrong idea. It’s possible that they thought that the adult was attacking me, and that the hand it put to my throat was about to strangle me. It’s just about conceivable that they thought they were doing the right thing, the ethical thing. They were, after all, afraid of what Imhotep and I might have wrought…and, for that matter, of anything and everything else that their project might yet produce.
They didn’t understand. They couldn’t understand.
They were not, after all, adults themselves.
I am an adult. I do understand. I understand better than they did, and better than Imhotep did. Nothing can ever take that away from me, even though it’s no longer my secret, my private torment, my heaven and hell on Earth. Whatever anyone says, it wasn’t twenty past three to me.
CHAPTER FIVE
REVEALING THE TRUTH
Steve thought that Mary’s story was even more interesting than Jim’s, in terms of potential psychological insights. He couldn’t be certain whether the elements of coincidence between the stories were just that, or aspects of a pattern, but he was enthusiastic to find out. He was tempted to ask Walter Wainwright whether the coincidental aspects had cropped up before—and how frequently they recurred, if so—but he knew that the chairman wouldn’t appreciate a question like that being raised in a meeting, even in the casual chat phase that preceded the general retreat.
In any case, Steve thought, even if it were to be confirmed that the coincidental resemblances were more than merely coincidental, that would only open up a new set of questions. The overwhelming likelihood was that AlAbAn members borrowed from one another in reconstructing their own stories, perhaps unconsciously—a turn of phrase here, an interpretative guess there. It was entirely natural, he supposed, that some such process should occur; every AlAbAn group, and perhaps every other group remotely like it, must develop its own idiosyncratic culture as its particular membership formed a social microcosm, which newcomers learned and then passed on. The mild sensation of intoxication that the group was able to conjure up in its meetings probably had more to do with that petty kind of creationism than with the exotic content of the stories that were told, although the particular stories told by Jim and Mary certainly lent a distinctive flavor to the experience.
Janine had wept a few discreet tears at the spectacle of Mary’s distress, although she’d tried to wipe them away covertly with her sleeve, but Milly hadn’t. Steve wasn’t surprised by that—not because he had assumed that Milly’s relative physical fortitude was reflected emotionally, but simply because Milly was an old AlAbAn hand. From her viewpoint, Mary’s story must the thirtieth or fortieth in line rather than the second, and must have contained enough familiar details—even if they were purely coincidental ones—to make parts of it seem stale.
Amelia Rockham was the real heroine of the evening, though, in Steve’s view. She had been able to comfort Mary, and had even persuaded her to listen to a few spoken responses. Needless to say, no one asked any questions. The only people who spoke offered warmly sympathetic comments, as they were supposed to do. Neither Janine nor Milly was among them, but Steve saw Milly nodding and murmuring in the general chorus, as was apparently her wont. When they left the cottage, though, Milly seemed more subdued than she had been on the outward journey, and she made no further attempts to flirt with Steve.
“I suspect that AlAbAn meetings must proceed rather differently in the branches based in London, Birmingham and Manchester,” Steve said, pensively, as he waited for two other cars to pass before easing himself out into the unexpectedly busy traffic. “Urban stroppiness must surely override the genteel etiquette of the shires, and turn the meetings into slanging matches. Wiltshire isn’t even your common-or-garden shire, like Hampshire or Hertfordshire, or all the other places where hurricanes hardly ever happen and everybody knows the price of elderberry wine. It’s a shire squared, like dear old Dorset: quaintness run riot. It would be the perfect home for an organization like AlAbAn, even if it weren’t such an intense focal point of UFO activity.”
“That must help, though,” said Janine. “If Walter’s right, and everyone in the world has been abducted by aliens at least once, so that the victims in need of support are merely the unlucky few whose memory-wipes have failed, it’s hardly surprising that Wiltshire has more than its fair share of rememberers. There’s so much talk of UFOs hereabouts, even nowadays—so many props and prompts to struggling and faltering memories.”
“And it’s hardly surprising, either, that the Wiltshire rememberers should include veterans like Amelia Rockham and Walter Wainwright,” Steve added. “They must have been way ahead of the wave of fashionability if they remembered their own abductions way back in the fifties. That was long before everybody else began to get in on the act and forging crop-circles became a popular summer pastime. They’re entitled to get a little merry on the success of their enterprise.”
Milly listened to this exchange from the back seat, but didn’t join in. It wasn’t until Janine turned round and began chatting about the possibility of another night out with Alison that Milly broke her silence, and not until Janine asked her what kind of week she’d had that she found an occasion to deploy her infectious laugh, in an anecdote about road rage on the school run.
“You can come with us to the Chinese if you like, Mil,” Janine said, as they came back into the city. “I’m sure Steve wouldn’t mind driving you home, later.”
“No, that’s all right,” Milly said. “Drop me off first and have yourselves a ball.”
Steve stopped the car to let Milly out, and turned his head to let her kiss him on the cheek before she got out. She kissed Janine, too, saying: “Same time on the twenty-eighth?”
“Absolutely,” Steve said.
When Milly was safely inside, Steve turned to Janine and said: “You actually warned her off, didn’t you? Just because she made that remark about throwing her any time?”
“You think a lot of yourself, don’t you?” Janine retorted. “Do you really think that I’m so desperate to hang on to you that I’d read the riot act to anyone who invited you to call her darling?”
“I’d like to think so,” Steve said, as he steered the car in the direction of Janine’s flat and the nearby Chinese take-away.
“Well, I didn’t. I think it was Mary’s story that cooled her down. She’s always been that way—up one minute, down the next. It gave me a shiver or two, although it certainly made me grateful for modern hygiene. Thank God there’s no possibility of my entertaining the ancestors of countless potential sentient races in the Second and Third Arthropodan Eras. Imagine if you caught head-lice from one of your filthy kids, and had to use that disgusting medicated shampoo, wondering whether every vigorous scrub might be exterminating potential ancestors of sentient species to come. Every swipe of the nit-comb might be changing future history.”
“My kids aren’t any dirtier, on average, than your customers,” Steve said, although he wasn’t usually in the habit of defending his charges. “Schools only suffer from epidemic outbreaks because there are so many people gathered together in one place. Anyway, we needn’t think of it in terms of exterminating potential ancestors. We could take pride in being the instigators of such a rigorous selective regime, hastening the evolution of insect-kind. We might be making a small but crucial contribution to their eventual rise to sentient intelligence. One of those stinky scrubs or deft flicks of the nit-comb might be selecting out the Mitochondrial Eve of future Arthropodan culture and civilization.”
“And that would be something to take pride in?” she said.
“Why not?”
“As opposed, say, to scrubbing just a little bit harder, wiping out the ultimate ancestor of arthropodan civilization, and paving the way for a new evolution of something much more like us instead?”
“Or something even less like us, which not even a maternal Mary could learn to love?” Steve countered. “Changing history is a tricky business, especial when we can’t tell one louse from another, so we’ve no way of identifying the ones with potential. You have to remember, too, that head-lice aren’t the only kind we have. If I had to bet which kind would be most likely to give rise to intelligent offspring a couple of hundred million years in the future, I’d go for the crotch-crabs every time.”
“Now you’re being deliberately disgusting,” Janine said. “Unless, of course, you’re trying to be superior, because you know something I don’t. Will there be pubic lice in the story that you’re working your way up to telling?”
“If there are,” Steve assured her, “that’s a part of the dream I haven’t remembered yet. In the meantime, if ever I get an itch down there, I won’t hesitate for an instant before taking the cure, even if I might be exterminating the ancestors of a thousand potential sentient species. In matters of that sort, the principle of informed consent simply isn’t relevant.” He pulled on the handbrake by way of punctuation, and switched off the engine.
“What a busy life we’re beginning to lead,” Janine said, with a contrived sigh, once they had reached the Chinese and placed their order. “Survival studies on Wednesdays, victim support every second Thursday. When you throw in your Tuesday sessions with your psychotherapist, and all your staff meetings at school, you must be exhausted by Friday—and yet you still manage to lead me up the garden path every now and again.”
“Cricket keeps me fit,” Steve told her. “It’s a pity, in a way, that the school doesn’t have a team. If I could do a bit of coaching, Rhodri mightn’t be on at me so often to supervise computer club or run plagiarism checks on his wretched assessment projects. That’s the trouble with being young and computer literate—the old hands get you to do all their dirty work for them. Mercifully, it’s only the second week of term—that particular deluge doesn’t usually start until the end of October. On the other hand, it’s better than helping out with coaching rugby. Rhodri and Mrs. Jones the PE are welcome to that one.”
“She’s Welsh too, is she?”
“Her husband is. He was a rugby player in his time—built like an ox, although he’s running to fat now. She can hold her own in a scrum, mind. Do you know the old joke about nothing good ever coming out of Wales but rugby players and loose women?”
“My wife’s Welsh—what position does she play? Yes, heard it a million times. Is that still going the rounds in the playground?”
“I doubt it. I try not to listen to playground talk—way too filthy for my tender ears.”
“Especially the bits about you, no doubt. It’s really quite decorous in Tom Cook’s, considering the reputation reps have. I thought of becoming a rep, you know, if only to give Mum and Dad heart attacks, but I’m too good on the computer. I’m going to put in for management training, though, given that you think it’s a good idea. It involves the occasional weekend course, but they’ll be child’s play compared with the survival course we’re planning to do in December. Nice seaside hotels or jaunts to London—you know the sort of thing.”
“Not really,” Steve admitted. “It’s been a while since I went as far as Bournemouth, and I don’t go to London at all if I can possibly help it.”
“Is it crowds you’re phobic about, then?” Janine said, striking so unexpectedly that she caught Steve completely off-guard.
“No,” he said, shortly.
“You’ll have to tell me eventually,” she said. “You do realize that—unless you’re planning to dump me if I get too close.”
“No,” Steve said, again, then had to add: “That’s no to the second part. I don’t plan to dump you. I know I’m going to have to let you in on it eventually—but give me time, okay? If I can just make a start on breaking the phobias down, it’ll be so much easier to confess to having them. Bear with me, will you?”
“Sure,” she said. “As Walter Wainwright says, it sometimes takes a while. I’ll be here when you get around to it, just as I’ll be here in a fortnight’s time, when you need your next dose of victim support. In fact, I’m quite looking forward to it. I’m beginning to understand how Milly got hooked—but I hope the next story has a little more zip in it.”
“So do I,” Steve said.
The weekend went well—especially the Sunday, when Steve was able to enjoy a long and uncommonly productive bowling stint in the friendly, finishing up with four wickets, and then won forty-three pounds in a long poker session. He turned up at school the next morning in a state of absolute exhaustion, but the kids didn’t care and most of the staff still weren’t talking to him. Rhodri Jenkins made a muttered remark en passant about travel agents and marathons, but he was far too busy to stop and chat.
On the Wednesday, Steve and Janine went to the third seminar of the survival course, which mostly had to do with the necessities involved in procuring and using a supply of fresh water in the absence of any kind of tap-supply. Thirst, the course-leader alleged, might be the most urgent problem, but it wasn’t the only killer to be feared. His account of the possible and probable consequences of bad hygiene was suitably blood-curdling, although substantial compensation was offered in the practical part of the demonstration, which explained how to improvise a still.
Steve met Janine again on the Friday; they went to a comedy club in Swindon, where there was an open mike night. Steve preferred open mike nights to gigs featuring big names, partly because he was naturally antipathetic to TV-brokered celebrity and partly because it seemed so much more exciting when some youngster who was still only practicing turned out to be funny against all the odds.
