The Web of the Magi

by Richard Cowper

Genres: Science Fiction; Sci-fi Action & Adventure; Space Opera

Synopsis

Both "Drink Me, Francesca" and "Out There Where the Big Ships Go" examine - in differing but related ways - humanity's first encounter with other intelligent life, and its inevitable profound consequences. In the former, one member of an interstellar expeditionary force is drawn into communion with an intangible, superior being; in the latter an astronaut, believed long dead, returns to Earth bringing with him an alien game whose subtleties the human race must master in order to show itself worthy of membership in the galactic community. "The Attleborough Poltergeist" is an eerie account of an apparently paranormal phenomenon which proves to have an even stranger scientific explanation, while the long title story is a surprising - and successful - departure: a full-blooded, adventurous fantasy reminiscent of Rider Haggard. A Victorian Army officer, doing surveying work in Asia Minor, stumbles upon a hidden valley in a remote mountain range. There he discovers a cult whose members literally tend and spin the loom of human destiny, and who await his long-predicted arrival to fulfil a strange and unexpected role in their society.

Release date: August 29, 2013

Publisher: Gateway

Print pages: 154

Sample

‘THERE WAS A time,’ observed Doctor Sukano, ‘when the one thing which no astronaut was supposed to carry with him above the ionosphere was the very thing which gave him the right to be there. How many of you know what that was?’

The 4th Year History seminar assumed a collectively pensive expression and it was left to Amanda Oxley to offer tentatively: ‘His humanity, sir?’

‘Very well, Amanda. And just how would you define that for us?’

‘I don’t think it’s possible, sir. I mean—well, other than as an amalgam of the qualities which go to make us human.’

‘Such as courage? fortitude? intelligence? cruelty? lust for power?’ Sukano suggested mildly.

The class laughed dutifully.

Amanda flushed but was not deflected. ‘Well, benevolence, for one,’ she countered. ‘And kindness of heart, and … and tenderness of character.’

‘Well done,’ said Doctor Sukano, underlining his approval with a nod. ‘In a word “sensibility”. Now I want you all to turn to page 24 of Lucas & Trench.’

The leaves riffled over and the class gazed at the double page spread of illustrations taken from the covers of various internationally popular science-fiction magazines circa A.D. 1930-1950.

‘Have you all found it?’

They nodded.

‘Now, as you will probably have realized, these curious productions of 20th Century Volkskultur have a good deal in common with those Medieval woodcuts from Trossach’s Demonologie which we were looking at last term. Technically they are more sophisticated but not necessarily more forceful. Fundamentally they are symbolic representations of infantile power fantasy—hence predominantly sexual in origin. Note the blatantly phallic space ships in figures 4 and 6; the grossly distorted anatomy wherever a female is portrayed; the equally exaggerated muscularity of the males; the invariably grotesque aliens.’

He allowed them to contemplate the illustrations curiously for a minute or two.

‘Now keep a marker in there and turn on to page 32—the two illustrations captioned “Cygnus Missions”. I want you to take a close look at the one on the left hand side, “Cygnus I. 1993.” The quality of the reproduction is rather poor but you will be able to see the point I wish to make. How many of them are there? Fifteen? Of those, six were finally selected. All excellent physical specimens. All male. All white. All mated heterosexuals. Most with two-plus off-spring. But every one indisputably cast from the same matrix that supplied the male fantasy archetypes for those magazine covers. I’m sure you can all see what I mean.’

The class turned from one page to the other and nodded.

‘Fundamentally,’ Sukano continued, ‘it is a late Victorian military stereotype brought up to date to accommodate the explosive advance of technology. Every age has had its ideal man and woman: the irony is that by the end of the 20th Century that ideal had become so far divorced from common reality as to be virtually unrecognizable. As a species we were suffering from a corporate loss of identity of a kind which we in the west had not experienced since the sack of Rome in 410 A.D. Is it not extraordinary that it was in this lamentable condition—this psychological and spiritual vacuum—that mankind elected to light out for the stars?’

A hand lifted. ‘Sir. Why were no women included in the Cygnus crews?’

‘Principally because, at that time, the Civil Space Programme was an extension of the Military Space Programme, and war, as you well know, was an essentially male preoccupation. Furthermore the enormous sums necessary for the financing of the star projects were obtainable only through the National Defence Budgets. The administration of those funds rested as it had always done, firmly in the hands of the military. The last strongholds of male hegemony in the western world were to be found in the Pentagon and its European equivalents. The only word that can possibly be said in favour of the authorities is that they sincerely believed they were doing the right thing. In their choice of crews for the two Cygnus Missions they endeavoured to select men who approached that ideal which they perceived to be enshrined within themselves. The first Mission was composed of six officers of impeccable pigmentation, patriotism, proven courage, technical expertise, physical superiority, and psychological stability. Imagination was conspicuous only by reason of its absence. In short our first ambassadors in space were a handful of white male mesomorphs as corporately unrepresentative of the human race as a whole as it would be possible to conceive, though at that time, of course, the exact opposite would have been held to be true.

‘The fifteen man crew of the second Mission—Cygnus II, launched in 1998 as the consolidating counterpart to Cygnus I—conformed to the same basic pattern. However, the crushing financial burden of mounting these massive expeditions had led to a more international crew being chosen. In place of the All-White, North American, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant corps d’élite which had manned Cygnus I, Cygnus II carried a discreet leavening in the form of five members of other races and other nations. Roughly speaking, their numbers and nationalities were in direct ratio to the financial contributions of their respective governments. Needless to say the fundamental human pattern remained much as before. A cursory glance at the illustration on the right hand page will make that abundantly clear.

‘On page 33 you will find the tabulated and summarized biographies of the Cygnus II crew. I wish to draw your attention briefly to the last column—that headed “Interests”. Have you got it?’

The class nodded.

‘It’s worth our taking a glance at this because it ought to tell us something about them. So let’s run a finger down the list and see what we’ve got. Golf and flying: football and skeet-shooting: chess and ham-radio: baseball and hunting: golf and hang-gliding: tennis and fishing: football and scuba diving: music and art: hunting and electronics: baseball and horse-riding: shooting and football: golf and Go: gliding and ice-hockey: judo and model engineering: and, finally, tennis and golf. Well now, given your knowledge of 20th Century social pastimes and the parameters of the Cygnus Mission, do any of those strike you as being in any sense “suspect” within your terms of reference?’

‘Music and art, sir?’ suggested several voices.

‘Yes, it stands out, doesn’t it? A distinct lack of competitive aggression there. But perhaps this is just the wisdom of hindsight. However, it is interesting to reflect that Peter Mahler joined the crew only at the eleventh hour. He was back-up to a Captain Hans Rabel who was found to have developed a heart murmur and was dropped at the last minute.

‘But it is not really the psychological strengths or weaknesses of Mahler which concerns us today—other than as a rather fascinating footnote to the work you will be examining during the coming week. I draw your attention to him, and to the membership of the crew of the Cygnus II, because I believe it is most important not to lose sight of our historical perspectives when we are studying works of this period. After all, the gulf which separates us from the early 21st Century can be bridged only by an intense effort of the historical imagination. What seems quaint—or even incomprehensible—to us today, was by no means either quaint or incomprehensible to our ancestors. Take a word like “Xenophobia” for instance. Does anyone know what it meant? Yes?’

‘Morbid fear of foreigners, sir?’

‘Very good, Roger. That is exactly what it did mean.’

There were muted murmurs of disbelief from some other members of the class.

‘Oh, it’s perfectly true,’ Sukano assured them with a smile. ‘Furthermore, not only was the word in common use in English but it could be found in some form in practically every language on the earth. Though naturally we were unaware of it at the time, we humans possessed the doubtful distinction of having evolved into the most terrified race in all our sector of the galaxy. We were frightened of almost everything. Indeed we even went to the lengths of devising sophisticated psychological theories which justified our fear as being to our own evolutionary advantage. Fear, we maintained, was vital to species survival.’

At this the whole class erupted into spontaneous laughter in which Doctor Sukano himself joined.

When their mirth had subsided he said: ‘You will understand why I doubt if today it is possible for even the most gifted historian to make more than a purely token identification with the protagonist of The Mahler Report. The point is that unless we make an attempt to do so we can never hope to comprehend fully its true significance as an historical document. So you must all make that effort.’

Sukano glanced up at the waterclock and then smiled around at his class. ‘Are there any further questions?’

The student who had known the word ‘Xenophobia’ raised his hand. ‘Sir,’ he said, ‘just how much of the Report is accepted as fact?’

Doctor Sukano looked as if he were about to frame a direct answer to the question then, obviously, changed his mind. ‘Well, let’s make that our starting point for next week’s discussion,’ he said. ‘I shall be fascinated to hear your opinions.’

The Mahler Report

So we’re on our own at last, Francesca. Corbin and Tollard rejoined the ship an hour ago. By now they’re probably processing their data and having bets with themselves as to how many colonists this area can be persuaded to support. A million? Two million? Hurrah for Lebensraum! Still, I might as well confess I felt something pretty close to a twinge of envy as I watched the little crab lift off. But by the time the dust had settled and the echoes had died away that extraordinary sense of absolute tranquillity had reasserted itself, flowing in upon me from the hills and forests like a cool, invisible tide. The sheer beauty of this place would take your breath away. To see it only in terms of just another potential colony fills me with a profound depression.

I knew that I ought to make an immediate start (all good Starmen work first and play later—or, better, never!) but after a token check that the radio was functioning correctly I turned my back on the camp, wandered over to the ruins, found myself a nice shady spot by the canal steps and sat down.

Have you ever tried thinking of nothing, Francesca? I mean really nothing. Just letting yourself be. It’s incredibly difficult. And it’s a hundred times more difficult when the whole of your life’s conditioning is screaming at you that this is just what you shouldn’t be doing, that you’re failing in your duty. (God! How I loathe that word!) After all, haven’t I spent the last two years learning how to compromise—strike bargains with my conscience—short-circuit my super-ego? Now all I wanted to do was simply to switch off everything that had the slightest bearing on the Mission. But everything. No more ratiocination: no more irritable reaching after fact and reason: just absorb with my basic animal senses: become a pure receptacle for impressions: be.

I couldn’t do it. And it struck me then that inside all our heads there’s a complete, self-motivated, microcosmic bureaucracy at work. The more we consciously relax, the more frantic the separate departments become, each one frantically coding, classifying, processing, reflecting and, above all, worrying. They’re in a perpetual state of near panic. But about what? Will you believe me, Francesca, when I tell you I even caught one little subsection busily calculating my mortgage repayments! There I was, God knows how many light years out beyond Eridanus, and some crumby little circuit in my cortex was still back there in Stuttgart dickering with Schnelling across his desk in the Global and Providential!

So I tried another way. I shifted down the stone steps into the sunlight, stretched out flat on my back and let the fingers of my right hand trail unseen in the cool, green water. As I did so I said out aloud: ‘O.K. you bastards, get to work on that.’

The words had scarcely left my lips before a screaming alert was being issued to all physical systems. ‘Alligators! Piranhas! Moray eels!—all translated, naturally, into some sort of Asylian equivalents which, as we well know, do not exist. Nevertheless, such was Starman Mahler’s superb mental conditioning that he jack-knifed up, whipped his hand out of the water and looked to see if his finger hadn’t been trimmed off at the knuckle by some ferocious predator.

Then—and this really was crazy, Francesca—our intrepid Starman lay down on his stomach, cupped up as much water as he could into his hands and drank it! He did that three or four times and then he propped his chin in his hands and stared down at his own dripping reflection. They grinned at each other and both said simultaneously: ‘You just don’t bloody well care any more, do you?’

Who names planets? Do you know, Francesca? Well, to be precise, who named Asylia? It’s a pretty good name—a hell of a lot better than ‘C.I. 22 (N.G. 2132/3)’ which is how it first appeared in the list as the twenty-second potentially habitable world discovered by Starship ‘Cygnus I’ while investigating the third planet out in the system associated with the fourth magnitude star labelled 2132 in the National Geographic Star Catalogue. But how did anyone get Asylia out of that lot? I bet it wasn’t their computer. Maybe the crew simply took it in turns to choose a name. If so, I wonder who hit upon Asylia.

Hi there! Sorry if I’ve neglected you. Just got my priorities back to front as usual. I’ve been spending the last two days slaving away dutifully on the inscriptions. I’m about half way round the second pedestal. And the lamentable truth is I’d have been off snapping away busily right now only there’s too much cloud about. Most of the exposed panels are so weather-worn that I need all the help I can get from the oblique light to bring the relief out to the point where the design registers. As far as I can make out there are at least three distinct scripts which I’m calling ‘High’, ‘Median’ and ‘Low’ just for my own convenience. So far all my attempts to reach even a vague approximation to their historical age have proved totally ludicrous. To date my radio-active decay readings taken from odd scraps of mortar have given me a span ranging from .9 million to 10,000! Every single reading I take seems to give me a different figure. What am I supposed to make of it when the same specimen of material has twice given me readings differing by approximately a quarter of a million years? It’s almost as if the stuff is saying: ‘Well, what shall we offer Dr Mahler this time? A thousand? Half a million?’ It’s so crazy that I’ve just about given up monitoring the print-outs. Yet the weird thing is I’m almost certain that the machine is functioning perfectly within its ordained parameters. It’s as if it’s trying to tell me something in a language I can’t even begin to comprehend. I’ve reported it to Dieterling and he’s simply written it off as ‘malfunction’. Typical.

When I haven’t been occupied on the reliefs I’ve been sculling around trying to match up the aerial survey prints of the site with some ground level observations. I’m pretty certain I’ve identified the main citadel and a couple of the ancillary settlements—if that’s what they are. The area between the temple and the foothills would engage a full archaeological team for a century. And that’s the very spot Tollard singled out for ‘prime urban development’! I suspect the occupation levels go down for millennia. There’s one place where the stream that feeds the canal has undercut a steep bank, and while. . .