The Book Of Ian Watson, page 12
I was pretty worried when I emerged, into the midst of the lynch mob. Even dear Rosamundi was baying.
Court martial me and shoot me? Tear me limb from limb?
Neither of these. Worse, far worse. They have all gone insane.
“Five years’ work ruined!” Wang screamed at me. “By a piece of void flotsam!” They don’t care about any umpire penalty now, for removing a team member. Not with the Earth gone.
I still wouldn’t have believed it possible.
They’re going to sacrifice me—to the Krakens. They’re going to feed me to them.
And they proceed to do it.
Two robos hustle me out naked, bar a loincloth and an air pressure mask, from the Station and frog-march me to the edge of the cliff. A third robo abseils down the face of the cliff, twenty, thirty metres. And I am lowered, to a tiny ledge. My ankle is chained to a ring, driven into the rock. If I try to bend over to test the strength of the chain I’ll tumble headlong. Either the chain will snap, dropping me into the harbor, or I’ll hang here upside-down.
The robo abseiler doesn’t make it back to the top. It falls past me, narrowly missing dislodging me, and splashes into the waters where the great shapes lurk, alerting them. I’m sure its fall wasn’t deliberately contrived. I’m sure my dear friends would prefer me to have to wait a long time at this dizzy height—time to brood upon my crime—sunburnt by Hoyle, staring madly at the blue horizon or else squinting down my nakedness towards the pack of living submarines with their long, long suckery flails wafting like anemone tentacles far below.
Presently one tentacle quests upwards, higher and higher. It fumbles at the outcrops and ledges, feeling along them. Another tentacle follows it up. A third. A fourth. All six. Oh God, oh cosmic meta-intelligences (if there are any of you), save me.
The Kraken’s head breaks surface. Its purple eyes squint upwards. Can it see me, up here in the air? Between its suckers is a maw, a black hole.
The tip of the first tentacle reaches my ankle. Wavering, it creeps up my leg.
I suppose I scream and scream and kick and try to tear free, heedless of falling. The tentacle loops around my chest. It holds me firm. A second tentacle probes my ankle, then the chain. It tears the ring piton out of the rock. My knees buckle.
And I am hoisted out from the cliff. I am borne down towards the water, towards the purple eyes, the maw. The Kraken’s mantle is phosphorescing wildly across the spectrum, underwater and above too. It sings a color song of appetite.
Coiling back, the tentacle holds me up before its eyes. The purple ovals stare at me. Oh let it bite my head off! Let this be a fast death. Anything but slowly stifling and dissolving in its stomach, in the darkness.
Suddenly it whisks me up and away from its maw. The tentacle bears me higher, higher, up through the air! Another tentacle snakes up alongside it, wavering beside me.
Extending incredibly, it hoists me over the lip of the cliff and sets me down on my bare feet. The crushing coil around my chest … slackens. It frees me. It whips away. The second tentacle hovers above me briefly. Very gently it pats me on the head—the way you pat a puppy.
I stumble back to the station—where else can I go?—highly unsure of my reception.
But Rosamundi meets me on the other side of the pressure doors and throws a towel around me, as though I am a racehorse back from a brisk canter.
The others are waiting for me. Perhaps shame-faced is too strong a word. A sense of chagrin shows, let’s say.
After glancing around to confirm that, for once, there is no vid-eye about, Captain Wang breaks the ice—as though he has not just recently allowed his crew to hang me up as bait.
“You’ll never guess what friend Kraken pulsed while he was hoisting you, Mr. Cortina.”
“I don’t suppose I will. I don’t think I’ll guess anything ever again, Captain. Do we have to play guessing games now?”
“He—or she, or it—said this. Quite poetic, but maybe that’s in the translation …
‘A ripple in the water;
‘A man upon the cliff—
‘Redemption.
The offer of his own self
To pass within my self
‘Erases the internalizing of the Game.
‘Now Earth is other than a stake.
‘Play resumes, at the earlier stage.
‘Thank you.’”
“I wonder how they can have the concept of honorable sacrifice?” asks Matsumoto.
“Ah, they don’t really,” says Wang. “They have a sense of symmetry. It thought that Cortina sacrificed himself symmetrically. Inside the Kraken’s belly, to balance the insides of worlds. Two insides cancel out. I suppose swimmers in deep seas need a deep sense of symmetry in three dimensions. Pressures within, pressures without, and so on. It’s what the whole Game’s really about—balancing off. Flush against Straight. I suppose we represent a three-body problem for the Game … Which corresponds to something very basic to the Krakens’ minds. The Krakens are our pieces? Hell, no, we’re their pieces. I’ve suspected for a while that Flush and Straight have both won the Game, maybe many times—and started playing all over again. Obsessively. Best of three. Best of five. Or the Krakens slid them into a new game without their being able to realize it, by right of umpire! The Krakens don’t want Earth or Luna or anywhere, for themselves or for their players. They want symmetry. We’re their poem, their song. Their art form. As are the Pangolins and Spidermen.”
“It must have been bloody boring for them before Flush and Straight achieved space travel!” say I.
“Isn’t it odd, though,” remarks Wang icily, “that the Spiders and the Pangolins are both six-limbed creatures? Who would dream up intelligent land dwellers with six limbs, except something that had six limbs itself? Six tentacles, for example. They’d expect there’d be a terrible fuss balancing on less than four legs—if they’d never seen it done.”
A chill descends on the room. “Wouldn’t it be a very singular situation,” he continues, “if the Krakens had designed the Spiders and Pangolins, with a genetic vector to come to Showdown to play the Game? And continue playing it?”
I can see the flaw in that. “The Krakens would have needed space travel. A marine species can’t have space travel. They can’t build things. Anything.”
“Then how can the Krakens conceive the heavens at all? Stars and moons and worlds ought to be meaningless to them. Maybe there’s some other way through space. Some other way of establishing connections between space-time loci … If you brood about it long enough. If you play games with networks, spatial patterns, dimensions.” Wang waves his hand in the direction of the Games Room. “Speaking of which, enough of this intermission. We’re getting seriously behind. Mr. Cortina, kindly resume your place. And the rest of you.”
“What! But just an hour ago—!”
“I hope it has been a salutary lesson. At least all is well again. You have undone the harm you caused. I think I shall reward you. After our tour of duty, I will recommend your secondment for a second tour.”
But today, only twenty-four E-hours later, a Highspace signal from WorldGov informs Wang and all of us that a fleet of giant squidlike creatures is cruising the Pacific Ocean of Earth east of Australia. These bear a startling resemblance to the Krakens of Showdown. Some of them seem to be sick from the salinity of the terrestrial water, but they forge ahead regardless. WorldGov is most uncertain what to do about them. If they are Krakens, how did they get to Earth except through some dimensional gateway of their own devising deep in their own ocean … a gateway devised by superintelligence? Does one argue with super-intelligence?
At least I know what the Krakens are doing.
Earth isn’t a stake any longer. Earth is a new gamesboard.
The Krakens are surveying their new board.
Author’s Note
The planetary system in this story was devised by Harry Stubbs (Hal Clement) for the Galileo’s Worlds project, and is used with grateful acknowledgement.
INEXPLICABLE
In 1979 Cutty Sark Scotch Whisky, in association with New Scientist magazine, offered a prize of £1,000 for the best “scientific paper” on any aspect of the UFO phenomenon—as well as a prize of £1,000,000 to anyone who could produce any artefact acceptable to the Science Museum in London as of demonstrable alien manufacture. The winning essay was a predictably sceptical assessment of Ufology. This was my attempt to win a million Pounds …
UFOs, Science, and the Inexplicable
The notion of a ‘scientific paper’ on the UFO phenomenon begs a couple of important questions. Firstly, we’re to suppose that this phenomenon will yield to scientific investigation as generally understood. We’re to suppose that the evidence can be collected, sifted and analysed to yield an irreducible core of data (or even no authentic data at all, in which case success comes early!) and a hypothesis developed which will succeed in ‘explaining’ the phenomenon and even perhaps provide grounds for experimental or observational verification.
One can imagine a number of excellent scientific papers, and one could even write these—though they would be rather like reviews of imaginary books. Here is the meteorological explanation, or the plasma cloud explanation. Here is the antimatter particle explanation. Here, even, is the explanation in terms of actual alien spacecraft powered by gravitational field inducers which produce ionisation effects. When even the BBC nature programme The Living World chips in with its own hypothesis (namely, clouds of bud-worm moths) it’s obvious that everybody can see the matter quite clearly from their own special angle—no less so the ‘alien spacecraft’ aficionados, though since their own particular obsession lies outside the bounds of current conceivable technology to explain the data they must extrapolate or invent a possible future technology and attendant scientific theories of gravity, space-time, lightspeed constraints. (Yet why not indeed, when one can talk blithely on the fringes of ‘real’ science—as does Adrian Berry in The Iron Sun—of diving our starships through the midst of toroidal black holes?)
Obviously, if we don’t provide an explanation of this order—whether it be bud-worm moths or gravity drives—can what we are suggesting be rightly labelled ‘scientific’? Science, as we all know, strives to explain things. Science unravels the DNA; it takes us back to the first microseconds of the Big Bang; it analyses the basis of matter as a dynamic interplay of quarks and gluons. Some day science will explain everything, and already we know the right sort of questions to pose. It’s our scientific duty to explain this phenomenon too.
But—and here the second question is begged—does science really operate this way? As physicist Geoffrey Chew has pointed out (“‘Bootstrap’: A Scientific Idea?” in Science, 23 August 1968), the whole history of scientific endeavour is one of an increasingly close approximation to the ‘truth’. The number of a priori concepts embedded in scientific theories may certainly lessen as time goes by, yet a priori concepts as such—something taken for granted; some unquestioned framework—are essential to science as we understand it. All natural phenomena are ultimately interconnected, yet science only works by a partial approach—provided, of course, that the part currently being ignored is sufficiently small for the partial approach to work. Thus we have today a cosmology that ignores quantum effects, a particle physics that ignores gravitation, a natural science that ignores the mechanism underlying consciousness; and so on. “Semantically,” as Chew says, “an attempt to explain all concepts can hardly be called ‘scientific’.” May we presume that one day the a priori, taken-for-granted elements will diminish to zero by scientific attrition? Not so. For a ‘total self-consistency’ approach would inevitably involve the concept of observation and thus the enigma of consciousness itself—and it would thus move outside physics into a domain “that will not even be describable as ‘scientific’.” Capra concludes thus, too, at the end of his book The Tao of Physics when he declares that we will one day move beyond a ‘theory’ to a ‘vision’ of Nature—and this isn’t something that is definable along the rational, analytical lines of science as we know it.
How about making a start on the groundwork for this ‘vision of Nature’ now? For it happens that the two questions which are begged may in fact answer one another. The necessary incompleteness of scientific method and the unidentifiability of the UFO phenomenon may perhaps be brought together fruitfully in a new approach which does not so much seek to ‘solve’ the UFO problem as to use it as a probe into the necessary incompleteness of our approach to physical reality—an approach, moreover, which draws into the equation a theory of that consciousness which, in the long run, must be ‘bootstrapped’ into our understanding of the nature of reality.
How to proceed? One sure feature of the UFO phenomenon is its unidentifiability. Another is its ubiquity. Here, we must side with the ‘revisionist’ Ufologists (such as Jacques Vallée, Aimé Michel, or a recent addition to their ranks, Bertrand Méheust). We aren’t simply talking about ‘flying saucers’—apparently alien craft—which have been buzzing around the Earth and even landing on it since 1947 or so. We’re also talking about the rash of phantom rockets seen over Scandinavia in the Thirties. We’re talking about the dirigibles observed over the Middle West of America in the 1890s—sightings all of craft that were conceivable within the ‘belief structure’ of their period, yet which were technologically somewhat outside of it. We’re also talking about flying ships that snagged their anchors in church steeples in the Middle Ages and aerial battles witnessed then—events outside of normal reality yet compatible with the belief structures of the time.
We’re also talking about the menagerie of Ufonauts reported by UFO contactees, people who prove under hypnosis to have sincerely experienced something. We’re also talking about the structurally similar encounters with fairy folk—who abduct, as do the Ufonauts; who promise great things then cheat and hoodwink, just as the Ufonauts offer evidence which evaporates into trash and nonsense. We’re talking about a phenomenon with many guises—sedulously adapting itself to the belief structure of the time, which today in our consensus world of CETI and space travel presents itself in terms of alien visitors from the stars.
We’re talking about a phenomenon which has been collectively experienced—mutating sociologically—for a very long time, and which is thus of the psyche, yet which is also of the objective physical world since it leaves actual traces such as radiation burns, marks in the soil, or blips on radar screens. We’re talking about a phenomenon which bridges ‘reality’ and the consciousness that structures reality for us. In so doing, it questions what existence is: what the relationship might be between consciousness and reality.
A fascinating analysis of the problem appears in Méheust’s (as yet untranslated) Science Fiction et Soucoupes Volantes—which I am happy to cite since I arrived at some of the same ideas and extrapolations beyond them independently in the course of writing a novel on the UFO theme entitled Miracle Visitors. Meheust’s unique contribution to the debate is his proof, from a dedicated dredging of pulp fiction of the past 100 years, that exact details of UFO phenomenology and exact experiences of contactees have been prefigured by obscure SF romancers years before they took place ‘in reality’, in Brazil or wherever, to people who could have had no access to the long-forgotten ‘originals’. These filter through into the phenomenon, as per text. But from what do they filter?
Méheust favours the idea of an “objective mythical web” which organises, in the domain of reality, UFO events and in the mythic, psychic domain organises the preferred imagery from which the fictional tales arose. He relates this back to the archaic substratum of human thought from which arises dream imagery and likewise the transmutational symbolism of alchemy so aptly analysed by Jung.
Jung insists in Psychology and Alchemy that a ‘symbolism as rich as that of alchemy invariably owes its existence to some adequate cause, never to mere whim or play of fancy.’ The alchemist ‘projects’ his inaccessible unconscious—with which he is striving for union—upon the objective world (upon his retorts and alembics and chemicals) which will simultaneously validate his projection for him, and deny it ultimate proof since it is only a projection. Rumours of success abound, of course. Like the UFO contactee, the alchemist is widely known to have succeeded, but no one can prove it.
Yet alchemy was ‘only’ a projection. What are we to make, then, of the objective evidence left over by UFO events? The answer to this takes us even further into the process of projection of unconscious forces onto the outside world—to a zone where the observer actually modifies reality, or more exactly where a symbiotic interplay occurs affecting both domains.
As Méheust shows, UFOs do obey rules. Hard evidence and duration of sightings vary inversely with the possibility that observers can get close enough to pin them down. ‘Holes of impunity’ would seem to be known to them in advance. Yet they continue to show themselves, and it has been demonstrated statistically (by the astrophysicist Poher) that the observing consciousness is ‘necessary’ to them.
Impossibility of proof, coupled with ostentatious intrusions, is therefore an essential characteristic. What scientific theory can tackle this inherent indefinability?
We may genuflect here to Kurt Gödel with his proof that the axioms of a particular system cannot all, by definition, be validated within the terms of that system. A metasystem is required; but it too will carry its own inbuilt logical restriction. We may nod at Geoffrey Chew with his statement about the necessarily partial nature of science.
Yet an avenue is open by which we can approach this particular psychophysical enigma—not from the mystical side, though there are techniques there, in Sufi thought particularly—but closer to our rational scientific paradigm: namely in a discipline that is in its own (highly fashionable) infancy—the study of altered states of consciousness, or transpersonal psychology.
