The Flies of Memory

by Ian Watson

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

Synopsis

Charles Spark is an expert on body language, a bestselling author and a consultant (or walking lie detector) much in demand with industry and government. So when the aliens arrive, who better to join the team that will attempt to understand them? But even though these insectoid aliens - the "Flies" - in their pyramid-ship speak both English and Russian, they seem unreadable. "We have come to your planet to remember it," they say and at first they seem indeed to be a bizarre group of intergalactic tourists. When human beings start to interfere, things begin disappearing. The Dome of St Peter's in Rome is the first to go, followed by downtown Prague, old Mombasa, Münich, the heart of New Orleans. In an effort to understand what has happened, Spark, and a strange group of pilgrims, embark on a bizarre journey to Mars - where the city of Münich has reappeared in a canyon. And where time, and memory, have become manifest.

Release date: September 29, 2011

Publisher: Gateway

Print pages: 210

Sample

 

 

 

 

 

Maybe it was snobbish of Charles, but he had always hated cameras, especially those in the hands of tourists. A dog peeing against a palace wall was acting sensitively; it was leaving a memory of itself. But how often did camera-toting tourists really look at anything? So how could a photo truly remind them?

When Charles was a boy he began to choose memory places for himself. There was the local cemetery: chestnut trees, bluebells, and marble angels. There were the sand dunes at sunset: spiky marram grass pointing thousands of fading sundial fingers seaward as if the world was splintering with hair-cracks. He would vow, “I’ll fix this scene. In two years, ten years, I’ll remember this moment exactly! Myself, here, now.”

Of course he hardly succeeded; maybe that’s why he resented cameras. Yet a chain of such magic moments had linked his life. (And who is remembering him, right now?)

Here he was in Scotland keeping another thread of faith, with his widowed father. En route back to his academic seat at Columbia University from the Geneva arms talks he had hired a Volvo to tour the Highlands. He owed the old man a decent holiday so that Mr Spark senior could revisit his favourite sentimental sights and taste some good malt whiskies in their native glens. Charles also wanted a quiet time to think, about madness and Martine.

Scarcely had father and son started out than the alien Flies arrived on Earth. “We have come to your planet to remember it,” so they said. Broadcasting, in stilted English and Russian, their requests to tour all the world’s cities, the pyramid-ship settled gently into the Mediterranean offshore from Alexandria and floated, base submerged, not drifting an inch.

The unfolding news reached Charles via newspapers and TV in remote hotels. His father objected to their listening to the car radio.

“It’s worse than a bloody election campaign,” the old man groused as they were admiring Loch an Eilein. (Look: a solitary heron standing stock-still waiting to stab; jackdaws flapping over the castle ruin on the island.) “Blather blather. Most of it, sheer guesswork. Wait a few weeks and we’ll know what’s what.” Mr Spark was worried Charles would cut short their trip.

Mr Spark never used to swear until his wife died in a car crash—which wasn’t the old man’s fault, though he wouldn’t replace the car. “Where should I go to on my own?” he’d asked sadly after the funeral. Charles’s parents had driven all over the Borders and Highlands with a consuming passion. Now Mr Spark had taken to smoking a pipe, and swearing. You might have surmised that an anger rankled in him, and that a pipe was a substitute spouse. But Charles perceived that tobacco and rude words had been suppressed in his father many long years ago, although drams of whisky had been permitted. At the age of seventy-five Mr Spark’s behaviour was fraying round the edges, a genteel net curtain in decay.

As they were rounding the Pap of Glencoe, Mr Spark exclaimed, “Bloody ugly, that’s what!” For a distorted instant Charles thought that his Dad was talking about the looming peaks of the glen. Grim, those were, though sunlit. Then his father went on, “Wouldn’t want to meet one of your Flies on a dark night! Oh no. Nor would anybody in their right mind. Maybe your Martine might fancy doing their portraits. Just up her street, I’d imagine.”

Mr Spark had reason to be anxious. By now Charles had made several transatlantic phone calls from hotels to leave word of their itinerary. Already a week had passed and UNCO had been cobbled together, the United Nations Co-ordination Committee steered by America and Russia. Charles wanted to be in on this, and hoped he had sufficient clout and contacts. Already a thousand Flies had spread out from their floating Hive, and the Grand Tour had commenced in Cairo and Kyoto, San Francisco and Singapore, London and Leningrad and wherever else. Who would deny creatures which could fly a huge interstellar pyramid the way these aliens did? Who would not want to learn the secrets of their success?

“Look, son,” said Mr Spark after a while, “hordes of folk will all think they have special reasons for rubbing shoulders with these monstrosities. Why fuss on, when the buggers are going to be visiting everywhere? Bloody invasion, if you ask me. You’ll see a Fly soon enough. Will we ever see the back of them? That’s what I wonder.”

Charles nodded, unconvinced.

“Look!” His father pointed at the sky.

It wasn’t a Fly up there.

“Eagle?” Charles asked.

“Don’t be daft, that’s an osprey. Rare, those are. Almost extinct. It’s going fishing in Loch Leven. Look at it. You’ll likely never see another one.” (And I see it now, in shadow. Better than he did. Oh yes.)

A few minutes later Mr Spark was puffing contentedly, telling his son about the massacre of the MacDonalds. On his own terms the old man was good company, though really he and Charles had drifted worlds apart.

Charles’s reputation was founded on his first book about body language, The Truth of Signs. Soon he was being retained as a consultant by defence and aerospace as a kind of walking lie detector. This led to his kibbitzing on the arms talks on behalf of the US government. His next book, Signs of Passion, was his pop success.

Charles had a heightened sense of body language. If he couldn’t ever record a chunk of scenery to his full satisfaction, he could read body signals and facial cues with an animal instinct. Not that he didn’t need to work at this, scientifically; but let’s not weigh ourselves down with talk of proxemics and kinesics, all the jargon of non-verbal communication.

You might think this would have immersed Charles in other people’s lives as in a crowded jacuzzi, a hot tub of humanity. Not so. Old Eskimo saying: when you rub noses, you don’t see the face. When you’re watching the face, you don’t rub noses.

Another week passed. By Rannoch Moor, to the Braes of Balquhidder to the bristly Trossachs. During convivial evenings spent with his Dad over a glass or several of ten-year-old Glenduffie, Charles caught TV pictures of individual aliens in Rome, Edinburgh, and he strained to read significance into their gait, their stance, their gestures … and those blank, insect faces.

The topic of Martine cropped up again at the Trossachs Hotel. Martine had been a sort of alien, too.

“At least there was no grandchild,” remarked Mr Spark. “Just as well, in my opinion.”

A daughter-in-law who was part black, part brown, part blue for all he knew! Why should Charles have waited years then married such a person as Martine?

“Not that you ever met her,” Charles said mildly.

“Why should I put myself out, an old chap?”

True, Martine wouldn’t leave her one secure root in Greenwich Village. Charles had met her at a gallery opening just three months after Mrs Spark’s funeral. Within ten weeks he and Martine were married, and he had moved from his apartment off 116th Street into the Village for the next four years. When the break-up came, Charles returned to Upper Manhattan.

Loud tipsy Glaswegian talk babbled about them in the hotel bar. A stuffed golden eagle regarded visitors maliciously through glass eyes from inside its case.

“Maybe you ought to have had more children than me,” Charles suggested, “and had them earlier.”

“Costs money, son. You should know. Good schooling, Cambridge, all that. There’s the trouble with education, makes you want the world on a plate. Ach, it’s water under the bridge. Let’s enjoy another dram.”

Returning from the bar, Charles was aware of his father regarding him lovingly: his only son, big-boned and hardy-handsome, as the poet had written. Burly, though not tall. Shock of brown hair, already thinning at the crown. Broad, fresh, open face, with some crumpled laundry creases around the grey eyes. Generous lower lip, and thin mean upper lip which might have benefited by a moustache; but Charles hadn’t wanted to copy his Dad, who had always worn a tash. A loving look could betray a glint of bitterness which a glance which was merely affectionate never contained.

“A plague of bloody Flies from space,” sighed Mr Spark. “Who’d have believed it? Cheers, lad.”

Was there a weepy in the old man’s eye? In Charles’s heart salt tears stirred. The dead eagle’s eye also glinted. At least that was an earthly eye.

None so blind as those who rub noses! As Charles finally realised, Martine was mad. Crinkly chestnut hair, hazel eyes, milk chocolate skin, slim as a boy with breasts, melting and assertive, wiry-tough and sensuous-soft; hermaphroditic! On first encounter Charles read her signs of passion. Perhaps she thought he held a key to human behaviour, something which she illustrated only in faery or devilish parody. Perhaps Charles knew the secret of true expressions, a secret partly withheld from her.

In his lovely dark wife several persons cohabited, carrying out one psychic coup d’état after another. She was an artist in pen and ink, illustrating books and magazines. She drew inhabitants of a nether Earth, a population of goblins and nymphs which seemed to inhabit her, as subjects of her various ruling persons. These signalled out of her drawings with their fingers and their eyes, drawing Charles to her inexorably so as to understand those strange body signals.

Her art was always black and white; and flat without full perspective. Highly effective work—stunning—yet it seemed as if she lacked stereoscopic and colour vision, because—because her elements would not fuse and co-operate. She was several flat people stacked side by side, each of them vivid in its stance, seen frontally. Each person seemed full of so much, yet let them tilt sideways and there were only two dimensions to them, with edges which could cut cruelly. Meanwhile a different Martine came to the fore.

She could never draw ordinary human faces—her rage when she tried to sketch his! Yet when she invented the features of a troll or elf or imp, oh yes, that’s how those creatures would be; that’s how they would express their alien feelings. At the height of his passion Charles wrote a preface for a book of her drawings entitled Alien Expressions, though she never drew “aliens” as such. The body language of her imaginary beings was human body language distorted in a hall of mirrors as if it had followed an alternative path of evolution. Or else distorted in a personal madhouse.

Martine originally came from New Orleans, and was of wildly mixed ancestry. Perhaps this explained—to her!—her fractured self. Her brother Larry, a weatherman down in Louisiana, was a regular guy. His only turmoils were natural storms, your ordinary sort of hurricane.

Ah, Martine. If Charles did undertake a new book to be called Signs of Madness—researched in clinics, illustrated by eighteenth and nineteenth century engravings of the inhabitants of Bedlam—might this seem an impeachment of Martine, a revenge? In turn might this make Signs of Passion, written while they were living together, appear to have been an exploitation of her?

Charles had hoped to sort this out in his mind while in Scotland; till the Flies came to Earth.

They took a steamer cruise on Loch Katrine. Eyeing the rumpled, lovely woodlands, Mr Spark talked of Sir Walter Scott and Rob Roy. The Glaswegian trippers nursed sore heads so the outing was fairly peaceful. Father and son were only a stone’s throw from the fault line between Highlands and Lowlands but they stayed in the former, plunging that evening in the Volvo downhill to the toy town of Inversnaid by Loch Lomond, to another Victorian hotel, and more malt of the glen. As a final ferry departed the little harbour for Inverglas across the loch, Mr Spark stared at the summer sun setting.

“Just look at that golden whisky light falling on Ben Vorlich!” he exclaimed. “Remember it always—before it goes away!”

“When I was a boy,” Charles started to say. He had never told anyone about his magical memory moments. Did his Dad also know about memory-photography? Had Dad seen a certain look in his son’s eye?

A Scots voice interrupted, “Is there a Charles Spark in the bar? Telephone!”

By helicopter the next day from the hotel lawn to Glasgow, thence to Rome in a Lear-Fan executive jet. A chubby, genial American in his thirties, Lew Fisher, was Charles’s courier; he had even brought a driver to Inversnaid to return the Volvo and Charles’s father to the other side of Britain.

Why Rome? No less than eight of the aliens were flitting about Rome; no other city rated more than two Flies. UNCO was paying special attention to Rome.

Why the sudden VIP treatment for Charles?

Orders.

Whose? Lew talked instead during the flight about antigravity. Not only could the aliens steer something twice the volume of the Great Pyramid at Giza, but each was using a personal flying pack. Those whirry little wings couldn’t support their body weight, let alone zip them along at jet speed. After the first week or so the scouts flew back non-stop to the hive—even from the other side of the world—then returned to wherever to continue sightseeing.

“Repulsion machinery,” said Lew, “that’s the theory. They’re using the fifth force in nature, called, um, hypercharge. When we measure hypercharge it’s gentle. Tiny. But our eggheads guess there are actually two extra forces involved, um, Yukawa terms, that’s the name, both of ’em big. Only, one is attractive and the other’s repulsive.” (“Like the Flies themselves,” Charles could hear his Dad mutter.) “So those almost cancel out. Well, the Flies have figured how to nix the attractive force, letting them tune the repulsive one. That may give them a force-field too. Deflect interstellar debris.”

Lew was clearly no physicist. It was already plain to Charles how the CIA and KGB would be operating within UNCO, doing their best to be Cosmic Interstellar Agency and Kosmic Galaxy Bureau, both fishing for the secrets of the Flies.

Then there was the communication problem. Was the aliens’ use of English and Russian deliberately poor? Their own lingo of whistles and chirps was uncrackable.

The bottom line: what was their game?

“The sun’s going to blow up? They know, but we don’t?” mused Lew. “They’ve guessed that we might wipe ourselves out? Shame to lose such a neat civilisation totally. Let’s remember it, guys. Or is ‘remember Earth’ a euphemism for shoving us aside? Meaning that we’ll be no more than a memory?”

“Maybe they’re the first interstellar package tour?”

“Without anything you’d call a camera? Just staring at things?”

“That’s the way to see a world.”

Lew cocked an eyebrow, then shrugged. “Welcome aboard the puzzle wagon.”

He ran a videotape for Charles. Behold those sleek bodies, plated with a chitin so deeply blue it was almost black. Around the waist between thorax and abdomen the tool belt certainly included a powerful radio and location beacon. Consider those dome heads with the hairy ears and the twitchy moustache feelers and those big bulgy faceted amber eyes.

A Fly had six skinny hairy black limbs. Its arms ended in jointed claws. Its hind “balance” legs were short, its abdominal legs four times as long. When a Fly hurried, its body pivoted up on to those long legs till it was almost horizontal, little legs wagging like rudders. That was how a Fly sometimes launched itself into the air; but the wings were undoubtedly science, not biology. Perhaps the ancestors of the Flies once had wings, which withered as the species evolved; now Flies wore wings again, re-invented.

“They can’t be true insects,” said Lew. “Anything that size needs an internal skeleton. They breathe like us. Yeah, breathe our air, and eat our food—though they’re like flies in that regard! Prefer the trash cans of restaurants, not the haute cuisine inside. They could inhabit this planet quite happily, Charlie.”

Charles was to stay at the American Embassy in the Via Veneto; and on arrival Lew ushered him in to meet the regional security chief who was UNCO liaison man, name of Dino Tarini, an Italian-American.

Tarini, mid-forties and scrawny, wore an impeccable cream silk suit and did not blink like other people, irregularly, inconspicuously. He stared—then once a minute or so he shuttered his eyes briefly as if he were some human surveillance camera making a time-lapse record of what went on. His high-tech desk and leather chair were backed by framed photos of Michelangelo’s David and the Statue of Liberty looking strangely like brother and sister.

“Carlo, you eyeball some sights with Lew today. Try out Santa Maria sopra Minerva. A nun’s showing one of the Flies round this afternoon. Interesting church, Carlo. It’s Dominican. Dominicans ran the Inquisition. Grand Inquisitor’s statue’s there. They prosecuted Galileo in the convent next door. Showed him the thumbscrews.”

Tarini plainly resented the way a string had been pulled on Charles’s behalf and had a low opinion of the relevance of body language. (By whom had the string been pulled? Ah …)

The following morning an UNCO bull session was scheduled at the Farnese Palace, which housed the French embassy: neutral territory, thus to underline international co-operation.

“French don’t swap intelligence with us or the Soviets; whereas Italians allow our missiles on their soil, don’t they?” As venue Tarini would have preferred an Italian government building staffed by his cousins.

“Tomorrow evening: reception at the palace. Try to talk to a Fly, Carlo. Why do they go back to the Hive?” Find out. Prove your worth.

“Maybe they get homesick,” said Charles.

Tarini closed his eyes, recording the witticism.

“Yeah, and maybe there’s a queen-fly roosting in there, a great black squashy mass that was full of eggs. Maybe she hatched all the other little Flies while the ship approached; programmed all her sons.”

“You don’t sound as though you like them too much, Don Tarini.” Yes, give him the title of a Mafia godfather.

“Some things about our visitors we like very much.”

Questions hung in the air. Did the Hive have defences? How to find out non-disastrously, whilst also laying out the golden credit card from Kyoto to Copenhagen, the red carpet from Minsk to Vladivostok? The road to the stars lay open; but Flies crowded it.

“Will they share their knowledge with us if we’re nice to them?” Tarini was lying.

Rome was aromatic with the scent of flowers, coffee, olive oil, whiffs of unfamiliar tobacco, mixed with puffs of exhaust fumes and drain stench. The whole hot, humid city—streets, pavements, walls—droned a faint mantra. Hum-om-hum.

After catching beers and mortadella sandwiches at a bar beyond Trevi, Charles and Lew played chicken to cross the Via del Corso. Their destination was a piazza where a marble elephant supported an obelisk carved with hieroglyphs. The beast stood on a plinth, knitting its brows, its trunk slung rearwards as if to squirt dust. What big cabbage-leaf ears it had, pinned back in sculpture. The area between Jumbo and the scabbed cliff-face of the church of Santa Maria above Minerva was cordoned by police in dark blue, cradling machine pistols. Several hundred spectators, including newsmen and paparazzi slung with cameras, waited for a sight of the alien.

Showing their UNCO credentials, the two men were admitted into the chill of the church, where blue marble geometry inset a white marble floor, highly polished. Black marble pillars, flecked pink, lined the nave. Curving medallioned groin-vaulting supported a star-studded imitation sky. A multitude of side chapels … any description of this church was a cartoon! Ten thousand sentences couldn’t capture every detail in remembrance.

Down at the transept half a dozen UNCO people were scrutinising a chapel, from which a soft clear voice emerged. The chapel was graced by a statue of a pope and a fresco of an angel with blue swan’s wings half-furled. Watched by cloaked prelates a dove spat golden fire at a kneeling Madonna. In front of this painting a lanky young woman in a long blue frock, her flaxen hair peeping from under a blue headscarf, was patiently addressing … the ve. . .