Alien Embassy

by Ian Watson

Genres: Science Fiction; Alien Contact; Dystopian; Genetic Engineering

Synopsis

Lila Makindi grows up in East Africa in a peaceful and harmonious 22nd century world, which has succeeded our own age of extravagance, environmental damage, and warfare. Its citizens know that the Space Communications Administration, better known as Bardo, is guiding the planet benevolently, thanks to contact with wise aliens by means, not of grandiose spaceships, but of psychic travel powered by the sexual techniques of tantric yoga. Wonderfully, Lila is chosen for psychic starflight. But she discovers that in reality mental starflight is spinning a web of protection around the world to safeguard the human race from a malign alien energy force, the Starbeast. Yet is this the true reality? Only when Lila travels to Tibet does she discover the actual, unexpected purpose behind Bardo.

Release date: September 29, 2011

Publisher: Gateway

Print pages: 239

Sample

‘Come in, Rajit,’ the Teacher called; and the boy in the turban followed the echo of his knuckles into the room.

(This must have been how it happened…)

On one of the white plaster walls an emerald lizard poised, the membrane of its throat trembling convulsively. The table bore crockery, school exercise books, a bronze statuette of a Tibetan god copulating with a highly gymnastic partner, and a large box. A louvre window intersected the rows of palms and the flowering tree outside, producing a chequerboard effect. One of the two cane chairs was occupied by the African Teacher, the other by a Chinese, whose olive green tunic and customary holster (which may or may not have contained a pistol) showed him to be a Dobdob, one of the police wing of the Space Communications Administration, Bardo, which also handled all the world’s internal affairs.

‘I hear you’d like to be a lama when you’re older, Rajit?’

The boy nodded firmly.

‘More than anything!’

‘Why’s that?’ A pucker of amusement creased the face of the Chinese.

‘To see India one day–’ the boy blurted out.

The Chinese cut him off angrily.

‘Do you feel confined, here in Africa? Here is the same as everywhere else – part of human society. If you’re a lama, what do you think you’ll be preaching about? Tourism? He made the last word sound obscene, which it was. ‘What sort of people travel the world nowadays?’

‘Some sailors do.’

‘Oh yes – carrying essential supplies! That’s just because everywhere isn’t self-sufficient. Even the biggest of the sail- barges only need a few husband and wife teams to crew them–’

‘A computer trims the sails, I know.’

‘The barge is their world, not the ports they call at.’

Rajit flushed.

‘But you travel, sir. There’s nothing wrong with travel if you’re really contributing something.’

‘You’re forthright, at least! Bardo officials travel, right enough – to co-ordinate the world and see that everyone is fed and cared for and correctly educated. Perhaps to find candidates for starflight, if we’re lucky…’

‘I only want to visit places… to contribute. Like you, sir. Only slowly, as a Lama.’

‘Quite! The trick of being a lama is just that. To move gently from place to place, to teach the people social ecology. To repeat the good news of how the human body-field can be used to contact our star friends, without squeezing the world dry to build rocket-ships and other paraphernalia. The lama proves by his own example that there’s no need for people to waste energy that way. He doesn’t wander from town to town because he’s been allotted some sort of magic carpet, but because he’s the perfect compass needle to point the true way. That way always points right here – wherever he is, in a little village like your Bagamoyo or a big far-off city like Bombay.’

‘I agree, sir.’

‘But you’d still like to see Bombay? Well, honesty’s a fine thing, Rajit. At the same time, the really honest man also knows when to tell a lie. He knows when it’s more true to tell a lie. Sometimes we have to tell little lies and play games, don’t we? He who doesn’t know how to do this is a fool. No one would want him for a Lama.’

The Chinese smiled.

‘You’ll be a lama if you study hard – and learn to tell a lie convincingly, for the sake of pointing the way. In fact, you can even start right now. I have a little service to ask of you confidentially.’

‘I won’t tell a soul, whatever it is,’ Rajit promised fervently.

A stray mosquito had blown into the room along with Rajit. It flew about now, trailing legs like loose threads, whining ever so faintly but persistently. The lizard made a rush across the plaster and froze above the Dobdob’s head, a green flame.

‘You see that box on the table? Inside there’s a coco-de-mer. Yes, a real one. It’s quite heavy. Take it down to the shore. Secretly. I want you to dump that coco as though it had been washed up by the tide – but nowhere too conspicuous. Then get rid of the box. Smash it up. Now, there’s a girl in this village called Lila.’

‘Yes, we’re good friends.’

‘So I’ve been told. I want you to make sure she finds that coco. By herself, though; on her own – that’s essential. I’ll leave it up to your own ingenuity to arrange. Point her the right way without her realizing it; and keep the other children out of the way. After she finds it–’

Rajit listened carefully to every word.

Outside, a dog barked in the hot dust, and the blue jacaranda bloomed.

When I was just eleven years old and my breasts were freshly budding I found a coco-de-mer washed ashore. It was tangled up in damp seaweed, though strangely it was quite dry itself.

Cocos are huge, double coconuts. Because they resemble a woman’s parted thighs and vulva, they’ve always been powerful ritual objects. The ocean had brought this one all the way from the Seychelles Islands, for me! Forgetting my sandals in the excitement of being singled out by fate (for I firmly believed I was destined for Bardo even then, though it was to be six years before the Dobdobs came to confirm it) I ran barefoot through the Bagamoyo streets, staggering under its weight, to show the prodigy to my friends. The Bardo Building – the former mosque – contained an ebony carving of a coco-de-mer, which we children had to dust and polish; but we’d never seen a real one. They’re only found in the Seychelles. The southern equatorial current generally bears them all the other way: to India and Sri Lanka, where they’ve been treasured for centuries.

Yussuf, Rajit, Cousin Rose and Timothy crowded round.

The black, polished double shell stood as high as my knee-cap on the dusty road. The central cleft where the shell divided was smooth and milky white. Symbol of human love and joy – and more than that, the gateway to the stars.

Our own thin, lanky, domestic coconut palms spiked the blue sky everywhere. Their clusters of nuts were only a fraction of the size of my coco; little skullfuls of milk. Tattered parasols of leaves drooped from the tops of their knobbly banded trunks, providing the only shade for our village, apart from a few corrugated awnings along the shops, and an arcade outside the dispensary where patients could squat and gossip.

Dun, humpbacked cattle with tight, ribbed hides grazed right down on to the beach under the shade of these palms, nibbling seaweed at the high tide line.

‘Mer means sea in French,’ Rajit said knowingly. (All those facts crammed into his turban along with reams of oily black hair.)

‘They never spoke French in India,’ Yussuf protested.

‘People always performed a ceremonial when they found a new coco!’ Rajit said. ‘We must do the same. Out at the tombs. That’s the proper place! ‘

‘She ought to take it straight home,’ mumbled Timothy the albino. He was scared of the old ruined Arab graveyard. Scared of spooks, since he looked like one himself. His skin was mottled pink and ivory, and his flesh had a poachy texture like thick sour milk. He was a sickly boy. We all know that he’d probably die in his early twenties, since albinos only live a little while. Rajit took an unkind advantage of his appearance in our games. Timothy was the perfect ghost. However, we were children, we didn’t care, and Timothy still followed us round sheepishly, grateful not to be excluded. Tears sprang to his eyes as he begged us not to go to the tombs, and we told ourselves that it was just the sunlight hurting them.

Cousin Rose and I were both black and glossy as polished ebony. We wore our hair plaited in tight corn rows. Our mothers spent hours unwinding and retying them every week-end – a whole morning of fidget and chatter, during which we heard (for example) how Bibi Mwezi had poured boiling water over the contra capsule in her arm in her anxiety to conceive a child, and how she put up with the worsening pain for weeks till Mboya, the Barefoot Doctor, was hard put to it to save her whole arm from amputation. Or we heard the tale of how the baobab tree gets its strange shape – for a baobab looks as though it’s growing upside down, with its crown buried in the soil and its roots poking in the air. That tree is somebody whose head got stuck in the ‘Divine Ground’ by experimenting with Tantra, the yoga of love, without proper knowledge or safeguards. This was a cautionary tale put about by the lamas, and I mention it mainly to illustrate how we behaved with Timothy – because a huge baobab loomed over the Arab tombs and one day the tale suggested a game to Rajit. He uprooted a large stone to make a hole in the ground, and forced Timothy to stand on his hands, with his head hidden down the hole, while we stood round laughing at this white baobab tree with legs wagging in the air. Other times, we collected the fallen baobab pods, smooth as the heads of babies, with the lightest down of hair, to crack them open for their sweet sherbet.

The graveyard sang with heat and insects. It was just after noon. For centuries now the old pillar tombs had been rotting back into their natural state of coral. Pockmarks gnawed the blocks and columns; their plaster mouldings had nearly all fallen off. Most of the lime and gypsum mortar had washed loose during the past four hundred and fifty years, although there were still a few geometric friezes and even an unbroken blue and white Chinese bowl inset high up at the top of one pillar just underneath the turban-like knob. It bore the Chinese character for ‘long life’ (according to Rajit). All other inset plates and bowls had long since fallen out or been stolen.

I carried my coco-de-mer up to the base of one tomb and propped it against the carved coral.

‘Whose tomb is it, Yussuf?’

Yussuf, who could read Arabic, squinted up at the remains of the squiggly dotted script.

‘It says, that this is the tomb of the Muslims… He is as-sultan Shonvi la-Haji… He died in the year something after the Flight of the Prophet. He must have been a salt trader, Sultan Shonvi. The salt boss. That’s what it means.’

I tried to visualize the bearded Arab in his flowing robes and jewels. The slaves, the sacks of salt on their backs. Whipcracks. Laden dhows in the now silted-up creek. Before the Europeans came to this part of Africa. Then went home again. Before Americans brought sacks of grey dust from the seas of the Moon, and bags of red sand from the Martian deserts, at incredible cost. And abandoned the whole enterprise. Before the human race discovered the true way to the stars through the sexual union of Man and Woman.

We were all so young then. Even Rajit, with the first soft bristles on his chin, was merely cruelly innocent when he made us carry out the masquerade that afternoon among the graves.

He insisted that Timothy and I should act out the copulation of

Black Kali and White Shiva. Kali the Destroyer stands for the ravages of time, Shiva for the eternal spirit of creativity. Thus, though Shiva is slain, a white corpse, he still has an erection, even in death. Kali rides upon his body, her four arms brandishing weapons, her red tongue sticking out in scorn. She’s supposed to do so in a graveyard, by night.

After dark the graveyard was always full of great scuttling crabs marching up from the sea, and the baobab tree glowed ghostly in the starlight. Sighs of wind through its branches sounded like lost souls coming to take possession of you.

However, the sun was shining down on us right then, from overhead. Ants were tunneling through the bones of the long- dead Salt Boss, turning them into flutes and trumpets; and the hum and buzz of insects round about us sounded like music played on them, filtering up above the ground.

‘You’ll have to take your clothes off, both of you,’ ordered Rajit. ‘Timothy must lie down with his eyes wide open. He’s dead. He’s the white corpse of Shiva. He has to be virile, of course.’

‘How can he be?’ wondered Cousin Rose. ‘There’s nothing to excite you when you’re dead.’

‘But Timothy isn’t really dead, he’s only pretend-dead! Anyway, it has to be this way because Kali on top of Shiva means that you’re leaving your physical body behind – by means of the sexuality of the body. Right, Lila? It’s just a symbol for Bardo flight. So Timothy has to be virile just by thinking about it. He isn’t to touch himself, because he’s dead. He can’t move, see?’

‘Tim will get awfully sunburnt. You know that his mother won’t let him take his clothes off to swim, in case his skin peels,’ said Yussuf.

‘That’s the salt water, not the sun!’

The only occasion when I’d seen Tim naked, he had looked like a great fat maggot, his flesh as spongy as white bread, with pink blotches as big as saucers. I loathed the prospect of touching his naked body with my own. No doubt Rajit was aware of this, and it added to his sadistic glee. Both Rajit and Yussuf had proved their newly-acquired virility recently, standing in the surf, squeezing their own white seed into the foam. But could Timothy produce anything? To be sure, he had a contra capsule implanted in his arm, just as they did, but the Barefoot Doctor might only have given him one as a kindness, to save him from the scorn of his peers. So, despite my repugnance, I was curious.

As we stood arguing, a giant green mantis sprang on to a knob of the Salt Boss’s tomb and glared at us – ten centimetres long with saw teeth on its open arms ready to snap shut like an animal trap; with globe eyes and very little brain behind them. A female; and she was pregnant. Her swollen egg-case slumped beneath her angel’s wings. A green Kali had come to watch over our little ceremony. Her arrival settled the matter.

Timothy stripped off awkwardly and laid his blotchy body down by the tomb. It was a beached gasping fish’s body. We all felt at once guilty, fascinated, excited.

‘Open your eyes,’ said Raijt. ‘Dead Shiva’s eyes must stare.’

‘But what at?’ Tears welled in Timothy’s eyes.

‘At Kali, obviously. Now take your things off, Lila. Don’t squat on him till he’s virile, though. He has to do it by thought power.’

‘I can’t!’ said Timothy.

I slipped off my java-print frock and handed it to Rose.

Rajit giggled. ‘Let’s use the coco to help him! Concentrate on the magic coco, Tim!’

Rajit picked up the heavy coco and deposited it on Timothy’s thighs, while I straddled them, pinning him down. Then Rajit pressed my hands down on the coco and began rocking it to and fro as though the coco shell was making love to the albino. He slapped and rubbed Timothy’s flesh against the groove in the coco. It was like a sea-slug smacking concrete.

Poor Tim stared blindly at me through a film of tears, while I rocked to and fro, clutching my coco, dreaming of space travel.

‘He’s wet himself!’ said Rose.

I scrambled clear and snatched my precious coco free. Tim swung over on his side to escape our gaze, and blubbered quietly.

Rose threw my dress back at me brusquely and knelt by the crying boy, stroking his wispy ginger curls, as slick with sweat as a bawling baby’s skull.

‘We didn’t mean to hurt you, Tim. It’s only a game,’ she crooned.

None of us were looking at each other any more. We were ashamed. I stumbled when I stepped into my frock and tore the cotton on a toenail.

Back home, my mother greeted the advent of the coco with such delight that I might already have been accepted by Bardo for the space programme. She called the neighbours in for bowls of coconut beer, and sent a message to Teacher Makindi, who soon arrived to take a drink. He seemed to see the coco as something of an omen too. Naturally we all believed it after that. Whereupon my aunt (Rose’s mother) grew jealous.

‘Hush, girl, it’s just a lucky find, it doesn’t mean anything. You’re only eleven years old.’ But I tapped the tiny bump of the capsule in my arm.

‘I’m a woman,’ I said, and drank my beer down. The fermented coconut juice buzzed in my throat.

‘I’m a womb-man,’ I sang. ‘My womb is Space!’

After a while my head swam. I was already swimming through the psychic space inside me, out to fabled Procyon and far Barnard’s Star.

Our little group fell apart after the cemetery masquerade. A wedge had been driven between us. Timothy avoided us utterly now, a solitary ghost of a boy who’d used up his whole life’s energy bearing the weight of my coco that day. He sat dully in school, dozing and lazy. He deliberately made his skin more repulsive by sitting out in the brightest sunshine till he was a kind of walking chrysalis, except that no butterfly would ever emerge from it, only the same white grub.

Rose and I no longer had our hair corn-rowed together. My aunt let Rose’s hair grow into a bush. My mother filled up the lonely gap of Saturday mornings more satisfyingly by entertaining Teacher Makindi, who continued calling round at our home to show me mandala prints during these hours of hair dressing, paying court to my mother on the side.

Before long, Teacher Makindi was coming round constantly. When I was present, he spoke about Astromancy, about psychic Spaceflight, and about Bardo, while Mother looked on proudly and hopefully. If I happened to be out of the house when he came visiting, Mother looked equally exhilarated on my return.

Our school lessons took up the five weekday mornings. Afternoons were for swimming, playing Go with pebbles on the beach, fishing or helping in the fields. Saturday – Restday – we could do what we liked, but every Sunday morning we had extra classes in the Bardo Building, the old mosque, on the significance of Bardo and Social Ecology – on outer space and the inner workings of the world which had now joined hands. On successive Sundays, week in, week out, we learnt from Makindi or from a visiting Barefoot lama precisely how the Social Ecology of Earth is sustained by our new knowledge of the stars and why the proper organisation to administer the Earth’s affairs is Bardo.

Rajit, his sights set on being a lama, did well in Social Ecology. As he grew into adolescence, he gave up pranks and masquerades. His eyes were firmly fixed on the dusty road downcast to Dar es Salaam, whence the computer-rigged sail-barges set out with their cargoes of sisal fibre, copper and salted eland carcasses, for the Persian Gulf and India. Dar es Salaam was the lama training centre for all East Africa.

Bardo – and Astromancy That was my best lesson. The word Bardo actually stands for Bureau of Astromancy Research and Development Organisation. Two hundred years ago, in the Bad Old Days, they had had rocketships and dreamt of colonizing the stars. The Earth was becoming a desert while they shipped dust back from dead worlds.

Then, in the far north of People’s India, where Tantra, the yoga of sexual ecstasy, had kept a toehold through all the revolutions of the time, the woman known to us as Comrade Tara Dakini found herself for the first time in human history in full true contact with a Rakshasa, one of the alien intelligences inhabiting the moon of the second planet of Barnard’s Star; and the human race passed suddenly from one mode of science to another. The foundation of our knowledge shifted; our present world was born. Society shifted abruptly too: towards loving mutuality and stability. So we learnt. So the Teacher and the lamas told us.

Teacher Makindi was thin, sleek and svelte in his blue tunic. Always encouraging and helpful, he kept remote from me at heart, however. I never quite ceased being in school, even at home when he visited (and later still, when he became my stepfather).

‘Astromancy,’ he taught me one Saturday morning at home, while my hair was being done, reiterating the previous Sunday’s lecture given by a lama passing through Bagamoyo on his preaching circuit, ‘means communication with the stars by psychic means, just as necromancy means communication with the dead, in graveyards, when people believed in such things.’

He smiled a private smile as though he knew all about our game among the graves. And Mother tugged my hair even tighter, exposing scalp as though preparing my skull for electrodes for my Bardo test, years in advance.

Bardo. It was once a Tibetan word, before the Bureau took it over. There was an ancient Tibetan religious book called the Bardo Thödol, the so-called Book of the Dead,. . .