God's World

by Ian Watson

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

Synopsis

The sudden appearance of angelic beings bearing a mystical space drive and a summons to ''God's World'' launches an international crew of scientists on a voyage to the far limits of space. There they become embroiled in an alien war that will decide the fate of all creation . . .

Release date: September 29, 2011

Publisher: Gateway

Print pages: 240

Sample

THIS TIME, WHEN Peter and I make love, we unmask the porthole. Dousing the cabin lights, we float in the pale gloaming. We touch, we kiss.

Outside is High Space: a grainy, mottled sea of trembling, incoherent half-light. Brighter kaleidoscopic whorls well up and die back in that twilight sea, as though they are the distorted, prismatic images of actual stars out there. But they are not that; the ship’s instruments cannot translate them into patterns corresponding to stars. At times they appear like ghostly images of our own ship, probability echoes trying to suck us back down again into normal space. Perhaps they’re simply the product of atoms sloughing off the hull, particles scattering away through the boundary of the High Space field, becoming mountains of virtual mass in our wake before they cascade back among the ordinary interstellar hydrogen.

“So far from Earth, and so close to ourselves,” murmurs Peter, with a royal purr. Freckles stipple his upper reaches (I chart their chiaroscuro with outspread finger tips) as though nature couldn’t make up her mind whether his top half was to be white or amber. In the vague glow of High Space all these freckles tend to merge, while his legs, bare of freckling, seem magnified, stockier and plumper than they really are. He’s quite short, and wiry. A curly red-head.

“Yet how far, Amy? We can measure our own closeness far more easily. This way—”

From our long, free-fall foreplay of tongues and toes and fingertips we are borne gently down upon the waiting bunk.

Or rather, here it is that we bear down by choice. For in High Space a strange, subjective sort of quasi-gravity comes into play. As we are drawn to each other by intense desire, so we gather a local force of gravity in ourselves. It pulls and holds us against each other as though we are about to be fused by natural law as well as inclination. Only extremes of feeling trigger the effect—and its opposite, if hate or rage is the feeling: an actual repulsion, a thrusting away.

So the tethers of the bunk rise towards us, Indian rope trick style, as we sink down. Peter catches hold and tugs impatiently. Will we never reach our goal? Time is stretching out now, teasing us. At last the tethers wrap round us softly. We squash the bunk, we squeeze each other.

So he slides inside me: slow dance of swelling tissues, hot muscle, nerves aglow, glissade douce. We are dense with this. Our joy winds us together slowly like twin rubber bands of nerve fibre which seem as if they can never reach a snapping point. Ours is snail-love: the slow mutual twining of molluscs. In this sliding world we move only by muscle waves, snails both of us, his love dart lodged beneath my mantle. The love-making of snails is very beautiful.

Outside in High Space the whorls bloom and dissolve back again into the formless modality of pre-Creation: fingerprints of our ship’s transit, perhaps. My fingertips press into Peter’s flesh meanwhile, his into mine.

Our twin orgasm, later, expends the quasi-gravity in a slow shockwave detectable throughout the ship, tugging vicariously for a while—we know well!—at the rest of the crew. There may be smiles of complicity later on, perhaps a grimace from cold Jacobik who deserves no first name. (Could he ever have been a product of love?) The others can sense that it was us, rather than René and Zoe, say; there is our signature, our flavour in the gravity pulse … Oh, we’re all very much together on this journey.

When we finally drift apart, in free-fall once more—in detumescent space—Peter remasks the porthole while I illumine the little cabin softly, rheostating the lights to half-strength.

Despite the size-constraints imposed by the ellipsoid of the High Space field, here is a private place. Private space guards us against the conflicting subjectivities of High Space, and makes me wonder again (as a good cultural proxemicist): what is the irreducible distance between people? What unconscious forces still resist the equalization of all humanity?

One wall of my cabin is decorated with a photocollage of those extraordinary events whose origins we now fly to discover: the God’s World broadcasts—those temporary appearances of angels and avatars who came into existence and departed from it again. Here are the photographs: actual snapshots of God’s messengers. I brood on them. Can one film an illusion? A durable, solid illusion? How solid and durable must an event be to be classed as real rather than imaginary? These angels and avatars hovered precariously between the two categories—though not so the chariot they brought for us; that remains, amidships.

Peter claps his hands. Here am I wool-gathering before my photographs! So easy to lose track of time, where time is ours to construct. How long have we been en route? Forever—and no time at all. Clocks tick on, yet they are only clockwork toys. True time depends upon our attention. Yet a shared consensus still exists by and large: the average of all our attitudes. In this same steel hull we contrive to coexist.

Peter bowls a ball of clothes for me to catch, my blue jumpsuit unravelling slowly in mid-air, arms and legs inflating, offering me part of my stencilled name, lest I forget: AMY. Briefs detach themselves and hover: a white butterfly.

Acrobatically we dress. Pulling on the magnetic boots, we click gently to the floor. Now AMY DOVE faces PETER MUIR, not loving snails but two crew members of Earth’s first starship—which is Earth’s only in superstructure. Myself, psychosociologist. And him? Call him parahistorian: chronicler not of profane but of sacred time, of events that occur outside history, in faith, legend, shamanic rites; cartographer of the ‘Other’. When we first met it was fairly obvious that he was the obverse of my coin, and I of his. For I charted the extent to which we can still remain ’other’ to one another in an increasingly homogenized world, and my basic yearning must always have been for that lost human terra incognita which he was pursuing, in fossil form, on the sacral plane: by way of the idea of some lost Golden Age of direct communication with the sky, with the beyond, to which we had all lost the key. Which is now so suddenly and alarmingly restored to us …

“If you really love someone,” I suggest, “any baby you make together isn’t ‘yours-and-mine’ or ‘yours-or-mine’. No, it’s a fusion. It’s the impossible fusion that you can’t actually reach on your own, by yourselves.” A third side of the coin of ‘otherness’: the unity of lovers?

He grins roguishly. “We don’t do so badly.”

“We aren’t one, though. Our baby would be that one. I think that’s why people have babies, really. To be fused forever, even though they can’t experience it directly. When we get back … ”

“When?” The word puzzles him; he has to recollect its meaning.

“That baby would be the sum of ourselves: the sum of our relationship, wouldn’t it? Yet he or she would be somebody else, quite separate from us—a mere relation!” He groans at the play on words, which is—I admit—pretty ludicrous, and even unintentional. Words! So clear-cut and definitive on the one hand, yet on the other hand so foggy, dissolving into other words, even into their very opposites. With such words we try to express all the connexions and disconnexions of the world. Perhaps words have to be that way or we should see no connexions at all, or alternatively we should be cast adrift in a sink of consciousness where everything melted together indistinguishably. As it is, we’re poised in between total connexion and total disconnexion. I click a few paces across the floor to kiss him. Connecting.

“What will he look like, Amy? Or she! A perfect fusion would have to be a hermaphrodite, wouldn’t it?” Chuckling, he licks his lips, tasting my love. “It’s better in High Time, isn’t it? Making love, I mean. We’re that much nearer the fusion of I and Thou … And then the fusion bomb goes off, tickling them all up and down the ship! And so, we fly apart again.”

“Please don’t joke about those.” I’m offended. We may not be carrying fusion bombs but we do have our quiver of thermonuclear missiles—ten arrows tipped with five kilotons apiece. To me that is abominable. Yet the avatars spoke of war in Heaven …

“I didn’t mean those, love. I wasn’t thinking.”

“No, but Jacobik does, at every moment.”

What will that baby of ours look like? The genetic roulette wheel should have a fine spin, matching Peter’s short befreckled redness to my own ampler, more exuberant limbs (for I overtop my love by almost a head; though my breasts are quite tiny, really, little cones); to my own tumbling jet-black curls (monkishly cropped for zero gee, alas), my brown eyes flecked with green, my copper-tan skin: I have Irish in me, and Bengali too … and am always predictably a little in love with myself, after love …

“I’m hungry. Let’s go and dial a meal. We’ll watch the others smile at us, if anyone’s about. Race you?”

A race in lightly magnetized boots is an exaggerated, ridiculous fast walk of pumping elbows and quickly planted flat feet; one must be careful not to leave the floor. We could float, we could fly; but this is funnier—our private game.

So: click, click, click, we sprint in stylized sloth along the corridor, past closed doors. Quasi-gravity tugs at us once, unbalancing us. René and Zoe? Yes! We know, we know. Their signature is in the pulse. Today (what does ‘today’ mean?) our couplings have coupled, almost. Maybe we inspired them. We wink, we chuckle. Conspirators.

A TAPE RECORDER stood on a long mahogany table, spools slowly turning. Behind the vast gilt-framed mirror on the wall perhaps a video camera was filming me; maybe a team of psychologists sat there unseen, observing every gesture, every tic. My chair wobbled slightly and was placed too far out in the enormous room, isolating me; however I sat composedly, concentrating instead on the minute interactions of collaborating nations, brought together by the mystery and threat of the God’s World visions. Through the tall, heavily draped windows, on the other side of the Rue de Rivoli the trees in the Tuileries gardens were still leafless. A cold scudding shower blew from the north; a forlorn electric camionette with striped red awning unfolded was attempting to sell hot crepes to passers-by. Piebald pigeons pecked and scuttled near it.

I shook my head, just once, to toss my curls aside, indicating the faintest impatience with the questions, outweighed by friendly tolerance of the questioners, aware that the ritual was necessary.

“Proxemics,” I told my multinational interrogators, “is the study of how close people come to one another—how close they can come, psychologically. Cultural proxemics is more; it’s the study of how closely human cultures can converge in a highly integrated and homogeneous world. Or whether there’s an irreducible core of cultural diversity. Society functions like the stars,” I smiled, offering them a bit of astrophysics that I had off pat. (After all, we were talking about going to the stars.)

“The pressure for diversity—for which you can read radiation pressure—balances the convergent pull of the huge solar mass. Where these two balance, you have a viable sun. Where diversity wins out, you get explosions, novae, a tearing apart. Where convergence wins out, you get that collapse inwards upon itself of a neutron sun. Every atom is stripped of its difference from every other. Every irregularity is erased. Worse, you can get the black hole from which nothing will ever emerge. Humanity might be heading that way culturally. Though, of course, the inward collapse—the sheer density—may provoke an explosion in its turn, an outburst on a different energy level: a new fusion explosion in the core. Maybe the God’s World broadcasts should be seen in this light—as a sort of resurgence of mythical thought, a resurgence of the ‘Other’.” (I was annoyed by that ‘sort of.) “I believe it’s a useful viewpoint … ”

“But there is an objective machine, Dr Dove,” insisted the Chinese interviewer. “An actual piece of alien equipment was transmitted here.”

“In which we must participate with our … souls, to make it carry us anywhere. Why now, at this point in time? That’s the question I put to you.” Yes, turn the tables on them!

In High Space, where time has ended, to be reborn only when we reach our destination, I remember that world where history had become too much for us. Every moment had become instant history, a matter of recorded data to be sorted and ordered as soon as they occurred. The foreseeable future would consist only of extrapolations from this mass of data—portending the death of our culture? Culture had ceased to recreate itself at every moment. Now it merely accumulated itself (just as the mass of humanity accumulated itself!), and no alternative cultures were in view. I’m remote from that world now, seeing it through the wrong end of a telescope, receding and diminished. In any case, that world had passed away already. The ‘Other’ had returned with a vengeance, erupting from elsewhere. It was an emergence which I greeted with as much joy as fearful surprise …

“Of course my background influenced this line of thought!” (A background which was all on record. But did I understand my own record? This was what I had to sell them—or, in the case of the Chinese interviewer, provide a self-criticism session about … )

“One of my grandads was a Bengali, a Hindu who’d emigrated to London. He married an Irish girl who’d lapsed from her faith. My other two grandparents were Finnish and Brazilian; he was an engineer and she was a Kardecist spiritualist. They were lovely people. We all lived—three generations—in this huge house. A family commune. The grandparents used to make up hybrid stories to amuse us kids: Krishna and the leprechauns, you know! After a time this began to worry me. It seemed as if they were throwing away something precious—the totems of the tribe—on anecdotes, so that we could all live together smoothly. It seemed so richly textured and, well, up to date on the surface, but I got to wondering how much of themselves they were all giving up for adjustment’s sake. They all gave so much to the common pool.

“Well, you pour water into a bathtub and let it stand for a few days, and it looks completely settled—but it isn’t settled at all. The original currents are still there days afterwards, even though you can’t see them.

“I began to think, if you pour people together so that they’ve got no choice but to mix—in a pool of nine billion, do you see? That’s why I started in on this line of work. And it also seemed to me that humanity must have had a primitive sense of identification with others and with nature once upon a time—a kind of collective soul rather than separate individualities. Civilization only began when you got differentiation: a sense of diversity, of the existence of the ‘Other’.

“Wars and hatreds came from this, but the chance of cross-fertilization too. That’s what powers civilization. But our history is growing stationary and locked. Our culture is all together again, and all alone because of this. Can it be that these avatars from God’s World are symptoms of a new upsurge of diversity: of a rebound, of the ‘Other’ welling up again psychologically? Where can that ‘Other’ be found nowadays? Only out there, among the stars! You don’t really need to send an alien anthropologist—not that any such person exists! You need someone who senses these currents—senses how they can be played on and manipulated.”

“Nice commercial.” A certain General Patrick Sutton pursed his lips. “These forces are extremely destructive. Destabilizing, hmm? All the religious groups claiming the avatars as their own personal revelation; that’s desirable, is it?”

“You speak as though this is simply a psychological event,” repeated Chen Yi-piao doggedly. “Do you think we have collectively imagined the High Space drive into existence? Why should you be thought fit to travel to a far star, if it is only to study the irrational in mankind?”

“Because the ‘Other’ is out there. It must be. It reaches out and touches the hollow where the ‘Other’ was, in us. It fills it. It gushes into the empty reservoir. This may be how we were able to perceive these messages at all: because of our need for them! God’s World—whatever it is—has reached into the subconscious context of man. It’s a lost context. And now it restores that context abruptly in a world which has no place for it, no social structures adapted to it. Suddenly it becomes objective: in the form of tangible apparitions. The transcendental has come back into our lives. Mystery, strangeness, the numinous, God. That’s the form this ‘Otherness’ takes when it flows in now. The unused symbols are still latent in us.”

A certain André Navarre scribbled a note and passed it down the line of faces …

Rain stung along the Rue de Rivoli. Electric Citroens and Peugeots passed silently, wipers performing interrupted harmonic motions, bearing citizens whose lives had all been interrupted, some of whom were terribly afraid, affronted in their bourgeois myth by avatars of Christ, Mohammed, Buddha. Solid men of civilization, managers, they were being manipulated by something out of their control which couldn’t be tamed in tidy convenient token rituals while the life of the real world went on without revelation; they had been touched by something from outside, manipulating the religious consciousness.

A van with red slogans painted on its side cut in. ‘Bouleversez le Monde!’ ‘La guerre des anges aura lieu.’ ‘Turn the world topsy-turvy.’ ‘The angel war is on’ Drivers hooted angrily; they wanted to ram that van.

Here in Paris one should feel safe! The God’s World broadcasts weren’t visible north of the 44th parallel. Maybe that was one reason why this panel was being held in Paris. One might thus prevent something from eavesdropping. God, in a word: deus absconditus, who had recontacted humanity from an alien star …

CAPTAIN K CALLS another meeting, summoning everyone personally by interphone. (In vain merely to post notice of a meeting amid this personal timelessness.)

K stands for Kamasarin, Grigory Arkadievitch. Half-Russian and half-Mongol, and a General in the USSR Kosmonaut Corps—though styling himself plain Captain here—with years in military and astronautical parapsychology research, he is a ‘sensitive’. Consequently he keeps a foot firmly planted in both camps aboard ship: the rationals and the psychics (wickedly abbreviated to rats and psychs).

Built like a champion wrestler, a lion of the steppes, is our Captain K: a man of severe merriment and a gracious though tough politeness (of courtesies to opponents on grassland wrestling fields). In his broad ruddy wind-chapped Asiatic face, under a bullet haircut which would render him bald were his stubble not so jet-black, are set mesmeric eyes.

As usual, the meeting (or encounter group, or metascientific rap session) occurs in the mess room. Most of us soon have our butts stuck fast to the adhesive chairs. One or two simply float, albeit not far off the deck. Lese-majesty it would be to float up above Captain K’s head; though, as mercury slides up the thermometer, this may happen if opinions hot up. Peter brings two tubes of tomato juice from the autochef as the last stragglers drift in. (They make a point of rubbing sleep from their eyes.) We pretend there is vodka in the tomato juice.

A crew list for starship Pilgrim Crusader:

Grigory Kamasarin (USSR; Captain)

rats

Col. Neil Kendrick (USA; computers & communications; 2nd in command)

Col. Gus Trimble (USA; astronaut-engineer)

Maj. Ritchie Blue (USA; astronaut-pilot/navigator)

Maj. Natalya Vasilenko (USSR; astronaut-doctor; life-support systems)

Dr Li Yu-ying (China; biochemistry)

Mme Wu Chen-shan (China; historiographer/commissar)

Jacobik (Czechoslovakia; weapons systems, deserving no first name)

psychs

Heinz Anders (W. Germany; astro physics)

Salman Baqli (Iranian IPR; planetology)

René Juillard (France; biology)

Zoe Denby (USA; comp. religion)

Sachiko Matsumura (Japan; linguistics)

Peter Muir (Scotland; parahistory)

Amy Dove (England; psychosociology)

So you see, the punch, the hard technology is entirely in the hands of the heavy rationals, American and Soviet, with Chinese support. (Except of course, for Kamasarin’s hybrid role; but he is loyal.) The political trigger fingers are orthodoxly Christian, or their orthodox Marxist antitype: bedfellows in defence of established history. We psychs, who hold the ship in High Space by our presence, are only supportive scientists, really. We may be the batteries that sustain the flight, but the switchgear is in other, harder hands; and if the ship travels the slower for that, so much the worse, so long as it travels.

We visualize High Space as a huge pyramid, apeing the pyramidal shape of the alien drive itself—the higher step you are on, the closer you are to the other side. So we psychs leaven the flight; we make it rise. We’re the horses in harness, pulling the royal chariot along (albeit horses much deferred to in our whims). No doubt we should arrive much sooner without the drag of the rat contingent, yet this is a political cru. . .