The Book Of Ian Watson, page 14
Carla pouted.
“I didn’t hire you as a chatterbox, Luna. Will you please be quiet? We’re getting closer. I’m trying to concentrate on the influences.” And she stretched her belly forth, to gather these in. Like a neutrino detector, full of fluid.
The seventeenth observatory was the province of the Haupt-Seer (Unpronouncable) from Capella 1V: a social organism, or rather congregation of such organisms, resembling in toto a blue jellyfish the size of a small whale.
The Medusoid floated in several million gallons of saline solution, its physical needs attended to by a host of slave organisms tailored for each occasion. Some were free-floating tentacles resembling eels, others were nets and scoops. And several were androids of blue translucent flesh which clambered, dripping, out of the great pool in a caricature copy of whichever alien race the Medusoid found most handy at reading particular instruments in the adjoining laboratory—though these androids needed to return to their pool before too long, or they would begin to dry out and die. Humidity was high in the Capellan observatory, after the dry desert air; even so, once out of the parent amnion, these bodies would only last a matter of hours.
One of these lumps of slave-flesh slapped wetly across the tiled floor to greet the visitors from Earth. It wore the approximate shape of a human woman, who was no more attractive than the prehistoric Magdalenian Venus—no Mary Magdalen, she. Perhaps her shape was chosen out of courtesy. But equally this could have been intended as morphological satire.
Developing a mouth, the amorphous Magdalen addressed Jeff and Lady Carla in space pidgin.
“So, as I understand it,” said Jeff briskly, after hearing her out, “what you’re suggesting is to drug the Lady Carla and her bloodstream, placenta and foetus with tailored psychochemicals akin to the oxytocin hormone which induces labour. Thus she—but more importantly her child—will hallucinate coming into the world as a tiny, premature Kangaroid foetus rather than as a full-blown human baby. Then one of the Kentauran empaths will enter the baby’s fledgling mind to examine the psycho-template of two natal cosmological models superimposed?”
“Yas, boss,” said the sloppy Venus.
“Well, this isn’t quite what the Lady had in mind. It isn’t ambitious enough, you see? The Lady wishes to experience all known birth-cosmologies at once, so that her child is born under the influence of all the biological variations on the Cosmos known to the Institute. Can you fix it?”
In the pool, the Medusoid’s tentacles seemed to quiver with excitement.
“We been working on dis now coupla years. The machines can whomp us up a cocktail, chop-chop. Fills us with curiosity, dis birth business. Us not being born, jus coming together in de Amnion Ocean of Capella. So we know dis Cosmos jus comes together too. Jus happens for no reason.”
“But out of what does it happen?”
“Outa de fluid of eternity. Time is de sea. We’s all made outa bits of Time dat turn inta matter.”
“Can you include your own world-view in the, er, cocktail, noble Haupt-Sir?”
“Some of de psych-chemo-links dat attract us togeder? As our cells emerge, all over de sea? Couldn’t dat be teratogenic? Misshape de foetus?”
“No problem. This human foetus is already fully formed, about to be born. Just you give it your own spontaneous coming-together experience, too.”
“Okay, boss. So dat’s fifty-two biocosmic birth experiences, programming da view of de cosmos, divided into a dozen main types.”
“Fifty-two weeks, and twelve zodiacal signs!” exclaimed Carla.
“How perfectly horoscopic! I knew we were right to come here.” She went so far in her enthusiasm as to squeeze Jeffs hand.
The Venus observed them, meltingly, then slopped back towards the pool.
The Medusoid also ‘whomped up’ a team of jelly-blue nurses for the delivery. Wet nurses, thought Jeff as he presided, noticing how they tended to ooze and drip.
A large space had been cleared for the birth-bed in the laboratory. Even so, this was crowded with alien observers and mechanical extensions from other observatories, since the Medusoid had invited its colleagues as though to a vernissage.
There was considerable tension in the air, as though today something crucial to all intelligences in the travelled galaxy was about to be demonstrated or refuted. Certainly it might also represent something important to the fortunes and funding of the Institute on Traith; something, too, whereby the Medusoid Haupt-Seer gained much status, or else was shamed in the eyes of its peers—if not in its own eyes. The Medusoid always had sufficient blue slave jelly-eyes in attendance, ready to dote on it. When one pair of eyes grew bleary, it could always conjure up a new pair.
Amidst the Kangaroids, Avoids, Arachnoids, Batrachoids and others, one anthropoid observer was present in the person of the Haupt-Seer Marcus Desmond-Campbell. A firm proponent of the standard Big Bang Cosmos, his skull still bore the faintest grooves from the surgical forceps which had assisted his own cork-in-the-bottle delivery. Till now, he had refrained from comment.
The Kentauran empath, Chlippa, was an Avoid and thus inclined by nature towards one particular Cosmic Egg model of the universe. Yet Chlippa was broad-minded enough to digest other viewpoints, no matter how eccentric. Kentauran empaths were invaluable in the presentation of evidence uncovered at the Institute. They were the psychic translators of those deeply held, yet biologically biassed, preconceptions which in the past had generated whole towering structures of scientific theory that proved on later analysis to have their foundations firmly rooted in the birth canal. Or the egg-shell. Or the amnion. Or the pouch.
The Lady Carla writhed in confusion on the birth-bed, while a jelly-nurse ineffectually mopped her brow.
She was giving birth to a human baby, she was breaching a Delphoid into warm water, she was laying an egg, she was oozing the merest slip of a foetus as though in a miscarriage, she was venting strings of Batrachoid spawn, she was …
She cried out, she croaked, she gurgled, she whistled, she clucked …
Jeff inspected her actual dilation.
Now the head was presenting nicely.
Chlippa stood beside Jeff, her eyes shut by her nictitating membranes, her wings rustling faintly to ventilate herself.
Meanwhile the baby—which sported a thatch of wet black fuzz—was no doubt being born as a human child, and slipping out as a Kangaroid, and pecking its way out of the shell, and chewing its way through a membrane, and spontaneously combining with itself …
Easing out the spindly legs, Jeff held … him up.
“It’s a boy, Carla! It’s a boy!”
He payed out the birth-cord then wiped the baby and laid him on his mother’s belly, where the newborn clutched and swam and flapped for a nipple. The baby wailed, to clear his lungs.
Deep in the infant’s mind, Chlippa rocked from side to side.
She spoke in a dazed tone.
“The bright light … the darkness. Up, down … in, out … inside, outside … Ah, now I see the overlay! Now I know the truth!”
“Yes?” asked a jelly-nurse, on behalf of the Medusoid.
Chlippa flicked her nictitating membranes open, like gauze curtains whipped aside; but the windows of her eyes were empty.
“The one … cancels out the other,” she chirped. “One by one, they all cancel out each other … Because there’s no cosmogony at all. There isn’t any universe at all! The universe doesn’t exist. It’s all an illusion of ours! Birth is an illusion, life is an illusion, the Cosmos is an illusion!”
“Obviously you’re hallucinating in rapport,” said the Haupt-Seer Marcus Desmond-Campbell coldly. “That’s all the baby’s doing: hallucinating. It stands to sweet reason, if you try to superimpose fifty-two different—”
“No. The jigsaw fits together perfectly now, Haupt-Seer. This is the first time we’ve ever seen it whole and entire. But it contains no picture. It only possesses the shapes of the separate pieces. When you put them all together, there’s no shape left—there’s no picture. Just a perfect blank.”
The baby boy managed to turn his head, stickily, upon Carla’s chest.
“Mama,” he said, quite clearly—but to the Kentauran bird.
And that was all that he ever said, though for several months humans and aliens hoped that he would say something more.
And he shut his eyes, and refused to open them again.
But he sucked milk, lustily.
So, in the seventeenth observatory on Thraith, under all the biopsycho-zodiacal signs of the Cosmos, a wilfully blind, dumb Buddha had been born. But in his mind (as the Kentauran empaths knew all too well) he conceived a whole universe which, compassionately, he meant to care for, at least until he died—though he cared little about the specific details of it.
Except for the milk.
The milk was good. It squeezed from one or other of two nipples—just as (he began presently to decide) the cosmos of white light sprayed forth alternately from the twin paps of non-existence, forming the matter that was his flesh, the worlds that were his blood cells, the stars that were his neurons.
In baby Buddha’s sixth month, against all advice, the Lady Carla van der Voort decided that he really must be weaned. Since the Lady Carla was the only human female currently on Thraith, her decision was final.
Quite final.
With a title as long as the following, what more need one say …?
Some Sufist Insights into the Nature of Inexplicable Events
SF has a strange paradox implicit in it (if one may generalize the genre for a moment, lopping off a few toes and fingers which don’t fit, as on Procrustes’s famous bed). SF concerns itself with the unknown and unpredictable (the future; alien life forms) and even the unexplainable (the nature of the universe; the nature of reality), yet at the same time it has an obsession with explaining things ‘scientifically’.
Sometimes the answer to the problems posed by the chosen story and milieu is genuinely implicit in the story (as in, say, Stableford’s Daedalus series)—the veils are penetrated and the solution laid bare. At other times the answer is simply pulled out of a hat—a deus ex machina is trundled on from the wings to wrap things up. (An extreme case of this is when it becomes increasingly impossible to find a big enough deus to fit the bill, as in Farmer’s Riverworld series: who are the makers? By now, nobody’s going to be satisfied; yet the original conception remains a magnificent one.) The tension between scientific rationality and mystery is one that pulls at many writers, and is actually responsible, I believe, for some of the crudities of the genre—the writer goes for ‘mere’ adventure as a resolution of the dilemma that will hopefully coast the reader past the dilemma so that he doesn’t even notice it. (This dual strain is evident in Arthur Clarke’s novels: on the one hand technological supremacy solves all; on the other the Star-Child or the Overmind sweeps such toys aside, utterly transcending them. This contradiction is rather neatly resolved in Clarke’s culminating novel, The Fountains of Paradise.)
So, as SF writers we have to develop some tools for handling this paradox (as well as researching our backgrounds and the far frontiers of modern science), if we aren’t merely going to blat people over the head with a trumped-up deus or seduce them with runaway adventure.
Unfortunately these tools don’t appear to be available within science, which of course ‘explains’ things—explains increasingly more, but never everything, about the universe. Actually, by definition they aren’t available within consensus science, because science is really a process of ongoing convergence upon the truth, or a set of truths, by a method of partial approximations. The partial approach is essential to scientific method; some hypotheses must always be taken for granted. Also, any eventual total explanation is going to involve the nature of consciousness as well as the nature of matter and will necessarily move outside of rational science—from theory to vision, as Capra puts it in The Tao of Physics.
Where can one find the tools to think about this? We surely need them, since scientists can take basic things for granted in their theories (such as the gravitational constant G: valid for all epochs of the universe?), but if we story-mongers take too much for granted the reader might justifiably feel cheated. Of course, we do cheat all the time; and the modes of cheating—FTL drives, time travel etc.—are the very conventions of the genre. A genre based on cheating? Well, yes—and necessarily so—for here we are trundling our technology into unexplainable areas.
How about turning to some theologies for help? (Using the term in its broadest, least dogmatic sense.) Well, of course, theologies and mythologies have been pillaged along with the best of sources. But most theologies are absolutist ones. They tell The Truth. What we want is a ‘theology’ that doesn’t tell The Truth, that seeks instead to provide us with thinking tools for the area of indefinability.
Zen? No theology, Zen, of course. But in any case Zen hits you over the head with the begging bowl and in the moment of concussion you may perceive a flash of light; Zen is the very opposite of an analytical method; and we really need an analytical method for thinking about mystery. This is science fiction, after all.
One such analytical method for handling inexplicability exists in Sufism, of which I first became aware around about the time I was starting a novel on the UFO phenomenon (which emerged as Miracle Visitors). While I was penning the manuscript (in real live handwriting) I stopped and scribbled some notes to myself in the back of it (which I left out of the printed text, not wishing this to be a metanovel, a novel about writing a novel—things were complicated enough, anyway), for I was up against the Paradox. (Particularly in this book, since UFOs are precisely that: unidentified—and, I believe, unidentifiable in essence.) One of the notes ran as follows: “If one writes a novel on the (true) scientific premise that science cannot explain everything—and that it would be unscientific to believe that it could (against its own tenets as science), is this a science-fiction novel? This book is described as science fiction. Which it is. Yet if the events of the book cannot be explained scientifically, how can this be so?”
Sufism: the mystical tradition in Islam, home of some of the keenest thinkers of the last thousand years. (Or a mystical tradition that merely wears the robes of Islam for convenience?) Isn’t this rather unpleasantly trendy—jumping upon the newest bandwagon? If you want to know the colour of their oil money, you’d better know the colour of their thought If the Ayatollah Khomeini can overthrow the Shah, what’s he all about? Alternatively, Jim Blish as a good Spenglerian would have cried ‘Shame! Syncretism!’—which is the cobbling together of other cultures’ philosophies from every which where to prop up our autumnal declining Western world view.
I must confess to a tension here, since I strongly dislike what I can see of the public face of this emerging grassroots Islamic revival: the re-introduction of the veil, the stoning of adulterers, people scourging themselves with chains. Yet the Sufi tradition is a fluid one, that takes of the colouration of the bottle it is poured into, and historically that bottle happens to have been Islam.
The works of Idries Shah—variously hailed as an axis of the age, or decried as a kind of Castaneda of the Middle East, a suspect person (by some scholars; but there’s too much scholasticism in Sufi studies—the tracing of endless genealogies of sects)—are a useful start, in a discursive, allusive, ‘teaching parable’ way. Inexplicable chains of cause and effect are embedded in funny anecdotes—shockers, designed to knock us off our linear rails. Symptomatically, his major ‘history’, The Sufis, lacks an index—it isn’t a book designed to be used that way. (While his Book of the Book contains about 23 pages of text and another 200 blank pages—designed as a serious joke to make us think about what we are hoping to do when we quarry books for aid and instruction.) His works are also anthologies of major Sufi writings by such as Jalaluddin Rumi and Ibn ’Arabi.
Turning to the original sources, and some major commentaries upon them, one enters a world of thinkers whose ideas about the nature of the universe, and of causality, and the inexplicable, of timelines, of perception and cognition, of ontology and cosmology, of evolution (oh yes: in Rumi, A.D. 1207-73), of the intersection of matter and consciousness, are highly apposite to what SF is up to—and of course to the basic paradox, of explanation and inexplicability (which is perhaps why a fair amount of Sufist philosophy appears in the form of fictions, and poetry).
Fascinating texts are, for instance, the Discourses of Rumi (translated by A. J. Arberry—my U.K. edition was published by John Murray) and Ibn ‘Arabi’s Wisdom of the Prophets (Fusus al-Hikam), a partial translation from Beshara Publications; also the complex yet highly rewarding commentary on this and on another book of Ibn ‘Arabi’s by France’s premier orientalist Henry Corbin, Creative Imagination in the Sufism of Ibn ‘Arabi (Bollingen Series XC1, Princeton University Press).
For me, this material is more than just another eclectic grab from other cultures. Alexei and Cory Panshin are already well aware of this rich vein; and I have noticed in The Dark Design a Sufi, Nur (whose name means ‘light’ in Arabic), stepping on stage making knowing noises. …
But be careful. The Sufi sources are not merely material to be used. They will use you too—and that’s the only way in to them.
Here is some Sufism camouflaged as science fantasy. Istinbat, in Arabic, means “mystical interpretation”; Wakil is “custodian of a mosque, or Sufi order”; Tasamma is to “claim a spiritual relationship”; and so forth. Suf (as in Sufism) is “wool”, and wool is sometimes pulled over the eyes …
Dome of Whispers
“Welcome to the Dome of Whispers, star-stranger. I am Istinbat. Please let me assure myself that you carry no recording devices or other instruments. The visitor to the Dome of Whispers may bring only himself, or herself. …
