Читать книгу Alien Abduction: The Wiltshire Revelations - Brian Stableford - Страница 4

CHAPTER TWO

CREATIONISM

I work in Southampton so my normal way home is the motorway and then the A31, but I’d had to visit a client that day whose offices were on the north side of Romsey. I’m in corporate insurance. We finished late—after seven—and instead of driving back to the motorway junction I let the SatNav guide me home by a more direct route. It took me through Awbridge, Sherfield English, and Plaitford, and then to a place that’s actually called Nomansland. It was south of there, aimed vaguely in the direction of Fritham, that it happened.

This was late November, so it was pretty dark and the road was empty. Because it was a B-road, I wasn’t doing much more than thirty—fifty at the most—and I was keeping my eyes peeled for headlights coming in the opposite direction. I didn’t see the deer until I was almost on top of it. It wasn’t a big deer—a roe deer, I guess, and not fully grown at that—but it was plenty big enough to put some hefty dents in the radiator and the bonnet if I hit it head on. I braked hard, but I didn’t think it would be hard enough, because the damn thing stood stock still until the last possible moment, when it suddenly leapt sideways.

I will gladly swear on every Holy Book there is that there was nothing else on the road before that moment—but when the deer bounded from my side of the road to the other, it was suddenly in front of another vehicle, which appeared out of nowhere, coming in the opposite direction without its headlights on. Even if he’d braked, the other guy would have been certain to hit the stupid creature, but it didn’t seem to me that he braked at all. Instead, he swerved—which, as you know, is entirely the wrong thing to do. If he’d swerved my way, he’d only have clipped my back end, because I was still moving forward even though I’d slammed the brakes on. In fact, he went the other way, straight into a tree.

I didn’t actually see him hit the tree, because he didn’t have his headlights on and mine were pointed in the wrong direction, but there was an almighty bang. I came to a halt shortly afterwards, and jumped out immediately—well, almost immediately—to see if there was anything I could do. I left the door open in the hope that the car’s internal lights would give me enough light to see what was what.

I took my mobile with me, and began thumbing 999 before I noticed that there was no signal—which was peculiar in itself, given that I wasn’t exactly a million miles from civilization, even if they have just made half of Dorset into a National Park.

I’d only got the vaguest impression of the other vehicle as it went past. It had seemed bulky, so I’d assumed it was some kind of four-by-four, but as I first set off towards the wreck it seemed even bigger than that—minibus-sized at least. The thought crossed my mind that it might have been carrying a whole bunch of kids—but as I ran towards it, it vanished as suddenly as it had appeared. One moment it was there, a mass of shadow suggestive of the kind of mangled metal mess you’d expect to find, given that it had just run into a tree doing fifty-five or sixty; the next, it was gone. The vehicle, that is; it had left its driver, or one of its passengers, behind.

The guy was lying on the roadside, apparently having been thrown clear on impact—or maybe having jumped just before the impact. For a moment, I thought he was dressed in something like a big plastic bag, but that must have been a trick of the poor light. When I knelt down and put out a hand I found that he was wearing a dark suit just like mine—made of identical cloth, it seemed. He started when I touched him, and tried to sit up.

“Don’t do that, mate,” I said. “You’re supposed to stay still until the ambulance gets here, so they can put one of those collars on your neck.”

He didn’t take any notice. First he tried to look at his wristwatch, and then he started fiddling with his belt.

“Honest, mate,” I said, “You really need to take it easy.” I was so caught up in the moment that I’d mentally shunted aside the fact that no ambulance was coming, because I hadn’t been able to call one, and the fact that the guy had jumped or been thrown out of a disappearing car.

There was a noise behind me then. I turned around, expecting to see some farmer or householder who’d heard the bang and come running. It was the deer. It had taken a few steps forward, as if to see what havoc it had wrought. Its eyes caught what little light there was, glowing in the eeriest way. I had the impression that it was staring at the chap on the ground, in fascination or in terror. Then it turned aside and bounded off the road, disappearing into a thicket.

The accident victim managed to sit up. His face was badly scratched, presumably where he’d hit the road. He wasn’t bleeding much, though. He was still trying to squint at his wristwatch, while his other hand was groping at his waist. He was staring at me in the much the same way the deer had stared at him, in what seemed to be fascination and terror.

“Well, okay,” I said. “If you can move you can move. I can’t get a signal on my mobile anyway—we must be in a freak blank spot. You’d better get into my car, so I can drive you to A-and-E in Ringwood. You’re going to need X-rays, probably some stitches.”

I put out a hand to help him up, but he wouldn’t take it. He got to his feet by himself and looked as if he was about to bolt, following the deer into the bushes. Then he changed his mind. He looked at me, and at the car behind me, and then he turned around to look at the place where his own car should have been but wasn’t. He cursed. I didn’t recognize the language, but it was definitely a curse.

“Odd, that,” I said, trying to inject a note of humor into the situation. “I didn’t know they’d started making four-by-fours that vanish into thin air when they hit trees.”

He cursed again, in that unknown language, and fiddled some more with his wristwatch and his belt. Now that he was standing up I could see that his suit really was identical to mine—not to mention his shirt and tie. I’d just begun to wonder exactly what his face had looked like before the road bashed it up so badly when he suddenly said: “What year is this?”

“2006, mate,” I said. “You got amnesia? Do you remember your name?”

If he did remember his name, he didn’t tell me what it was. His face was in no condition to go white, but I never saw a man look so scared. He looked at me in sheer panic, and then he looked at my car again. I never saw anyone look at a Volkswagen Polo like that.

“Okay,” I said, “it’s a couple of years old, and it doesn’t vanish on impact—but it goes, and the brakes still work. I’m not the one who came off worst in this little business. Get in, and I’ll take you to A-and-E.”

He started fiddling with his belt again. It looked like an ordinary belt, just like mine, but I’d begun to cotton on to the fact that appearances were deceptive, and that it might be something more like Batman’s utility belt. It didn’t have a holster attached to it, but all of a sudden there was something in his hand that looked uncomfortably like a gun, and he pointed it at me.

“Come on!” I said. “I could have just driven off. I stayed to help you. I’m trying to get you to hospital. Believe me, you’re not fit to drive. You don’t even know what year it is.”

He seemed to have second thoughts, and lowered the gun, which now looked like something you might see in a cowboy film. Then he brought it up again, and said: “You drive.”

It was my turn to curse, but I got back into the car, and didn’t even try to drive off while he was going round to the passenger side. He couldn’t get the door open. I had to do it for him. I got my first clear sight of him as he got in. He was my height and build, and his shoes were brown suede, just like mine. If his face hadn’t been so badly cut and bruised, he might well have looked exactly like me. The gun was, indeed, an antique Colt revolver.

“Well,” I said, all the more desperate to make light of things, “either you’re some alternative version of me displaced from a parallel world, or you’re some kind of alien chameleon who’s automatically taken on my appearance and is plundering my fondness for old movies in deciding what a gun ought to look like.”

He still looked terrified, but now he looked amazed too. “You know that?” he said. “You understand?”

“Sure,” I said, although I felt anything but sure. “I even know how to put a seat belt on—which apparently you don’t.”

If he really had been me he wouldn’t have been able to look any more frightened than he already did, but alien chameleons obviously have an advantage in that regard. He did put his seat-belt on, though.

“Drive,” he said.

“Where to?” I wanted to know.

“Turn around,” he said. “Go back the other way.”

I made a three-point turn, and headed back towards Nomansland.

“You really do need X-rays,” I told him. “It’s a miracle that you survived, and I’m really grateful that the cuts on your head aren’t bleeding nearly as much as I’d have expected, but you could have broken something. You really should have had your headlights on, you know, even if that thing you were driving was only pretending to be a car. It’s way too late for making crop circles, you know—the harvest came in three months ago.”

He didn’t say anything, but the hand that was pointing the gun at me was trembling. I should have been terrified myself, but I wasn’t. However absurd it might be, I thought that I was in control of the situation.

We should have reached Nomansland—the village called Nomansland, that is—within three minutes, or five at the most. We didn’t. The road just kept on, silent, dark and deserted. It didn’t take a genius to work out that we weren’t in Wiltshire or Dorset any more—and I don’t mean that we’d somehow skipped into Hampshire.

I was shaken up, I guess. At any rate, I wasn’t myself. In any normal frame of mind I’d never have done what I did, which was to slam on the brakes without warning and grab the gun out of his shaking hand when he lurched forward. I turned it on him. It felt strangely comfortable in my hand.

“Ordinarily,” I said, “I’d just tell you to get the hell out, and then drive off. Unfortunately, I realize that it might just be a bit too late for that, and that I might not be able to find my way back to any place my SatNav can recognize. So tell me—where are we?”

He cursed softly in his alien language. “Not 2006,” he said, eventually. “Too dangerous.”

“2006 is too dangerous for you?” I said. “What year do you come from, then?”

“Too dangerous for everyone,” the alien chameleon said, resentfully. “We no longer keep count with clocks and calendars. We know when it is, internally.” He was watching me very carefully as he said it. I’d already managed to give him the impression that I knew and understood far more than I did, and I wanted to hold on to the intellectual high ground

“Do time travelers often crash into trees while avoiding stray twenty-first-century deer,” I asked him, “or are you feeling like a bit of a chump just now?”

He muttered something that might have included the words “your fault” and “stupid asshole”, but he’d obviously inherited my habit of strangling undiplomatic remarks as well as my physical appearance. He pulled himself together and said: “What now? Do you want me to drive?”

I looked out at the bare patch of road illuminated by the headlights. It didn’t seem unreal, but I knew that it was only pretending to be a bit of English B-road. It was actually a very different highway.

“Where or when were we driving to?” I asked him. “Surely not all the way home? Converting second-hand Volkswagen Polos into time machines can’t be that easy.”

“A…lay-by,” he said.

“Right,” I said. “Presumably, you could get a signal on your unwristwatch, even though I couldn’t get one on my mobile, so you were able to call the temporal AA. One up to future technology. Are you thirty-first century or forty-first? If you were still counting by means of calendars, that is.”

His eyes were fixed on the barrel of the gun, and he was literally quaking with fear, but he forced himself to reply, seemingly trying to humor me and make sure that I didn’t do anything violent. “It’s not a matter of centuries,” he said. “My era is a billion years from yours.”

“A billion years,” I repeated. “You just crashed a time machine from a billion years in the future into a twenty-first-century oak tree?”

“It wasn’t an oak,” the time-traveler said. “It was an ash.”

“You picked up the language very cleverly,” I observed. “Almost as cleverly as you picked up my appearance. What do you really look like, inside your plastic bag?”

“Would you like me to drive?” he asked, again—in a manner suggestive of some urgency.

“All you had to do was say,” I told him. “All you had to do was say: Please don’t take me to A-and-E in Ringwood, because I need medical help from my own kind. All you had to do was say: There’s this little interdimensional lay-by not a million miles from Nomansland, and if you could drop me there I’d be ever so grateful. And I’d have said: Sure—always assuming that I can get back again. Can I get back again? I mean, you wouldn’t want to rip me out of the time-stream permanently, would you? That would be tantamount to changing history, and I know how sensitive you time-travelers are about that sort of thing. Even if we humans are no more to you than a Mesozoic butterfly might be to us, you never know what changes might unfold over a billion years if you were to take me out…not to mention my poor little Volkswagen.”

“There were no butterflies in the Mesozoic era,” the pedant couldn’t help saying—but he knew what I meant. “Yes, you can get back. I’m sorry I didn’t ask politely. It just seemed…such a very dangerous time.”

“Is it really that bad?” I asked, curiously. “So the ecocatastrophe’s scheduled to unfold quickly enough to cause a major economic collapse before the century’s end?”

“Worse,” the time-traveler replied tersely.

“How much worse? Extinction of the species?”

“Yes.”

“Before the end of the century?”

“Yes.”

“So, when I say Can I get back? I really ought to be asking Do I have to go back?”

“Yes.”

“Well,” I said, after a few moments thought. “Do I?”

“Yes. I’m sorry about that—but you wouldn’t like my world.”

“Why? It must be a lot better than 2006 if the thought of being stranded there is so utterly terrifying. I wouldn’t be that bothered about being the only human being alive, you know, even if I were in a zoo. I’m not long divorced, you see—I’ve no ties and I’m suffering a certain amount of endemic disenchantment with the world of corporate insurance. Anyway, it would beat imminent extinction.”

“You still wouldn’t like it,” the time-traveler insisted.

“I might,” I insisted, in my turn. “What exactly were you doing in the twenty-first century, anyhow, if it’s such a frightening time?”

“Passing through. Is there any way that we can settle this quickly and be on our way? If I don’t get to where I’m going soon enough, I won’t be anywhere—and neither will you.”

That raised all sorts of questions. How could time be a problem to a time-traveler—even one who’d crashed his machine? What would happen to us if we didn’t get to the lay-by? How come we were stuck at all, given that the chameleon had such awesome powers that he was able to conjure up guns out of nowhere? It was obvious, though, that he really was in a hurry. He was obviously up against some kind of deadline.

I wound down my window and threw the revolver out into limbo. Then I put the car into gear again, and moved off. “I figure you owe me one for that,” I said. “I know you didn’t really understand what you were doing, but some people might get upset at being treated the way you’ve treated me. Personally, I’m still happy to get you to wherever you need to be, even if I do have to take a detour outside the universe, but I want to know where you come from, and why I wouldn’t like it, and what you were doing in these parts. I don’t want any more terse bullshit, like just saying yes and passing through. You owe me as much of an explanation as you can give me, okay?”

He thought about it for a few seconds, and then he said “Okay”—exactly as I would have done if I’d have been in his shoes, instead of him being in mine.

I can’t put what he told me in his words, because most of his words weren’t in English, although I seemed to understand them well enough at the time. He obviously still had tricks up his sleeve, even if they hadn’t done him any good when I took him by surprise and turned the tables on him.

What he told me, in a nutshell, is that life on Earth a billion years hence is very different from life now. Evolution has moved on, as you might expect, although you’d still be able to identify most of the animal species that exist as analogues of the ones that have existed for the last few hundred million years. Some are adapted for life as herbivores and some for life as carnivores; some fly, some swim and some crawl. The most important difference is that all the animal species that exist then, and most of the plants too, are conscious and intelligent.

That might seem surprising to you, given that you’re probably used to thinking of humans as the top of the evolutionary tree, but human intelligence will come to seem like an evolutionary disaster in the not-too-distant future, when the species becomes extinct. The intelligence that’s widespread a billion years hence is the result of an adaptive radiation a long way in the future, by which time the whole apparatus of complex animal species will have rediversified from worms a dozen times over. There’ll be a lot of interesting times between now and then, so I’m told, although he couldn’t give me details. The inhabitants of the future a billion years from now don’t call the Earth’s ecosphere by a name equivalent to our Gaia; they call it after a mythical creature whose nearest contemporary equivalent is the phoenix.

There are creatures that look not unlike humans in that future world. At any rate, they’re as similar to humans as humans are to baboons. They don’t live much like humans, though. The human monopoly on contemporary intelligence makes animal husbandry uncomplicated, but in a world where all animals are intelligent the politics of meat-eating are much more complicated. Even the politics of herbivore lifestyles can be awkward, in an era when so many plant species are as smart and knowledgeable as animals—smarter and more knowledgeable, he said, if the claims made by some of the million-year-old trees and fungi can be believed. He didn’t seem to believe it himself.

You might think that the situation would be a recipe for all-out warfare, with herbivores forming alliances to wipe out carnivorous species and carnivores trying to enslave or lobotomize whole populations of herbivores, but it doesn’t work that way. Smart predators are very well aware that what’s good for their prey species is good for them—and that what’s good for the plants that feed their prey species is also good for them. Similarly, the prey species recognize that it wouldn’t actually be a good idea to exterminate their predators, because the consequent explosion of their own populations would only lead to famine and warfare—though not to disease, since the larger creatures in this future have long since come to a proper understanding with their indwelling bacteria and viruses. The top predators are, of course, vulnerable to exactly such population explosions, and have to be smart enough to find their own ways to avoid them, partly by birth-control and partly by regulating inter- and intraspecific competition.

To cut to the bottom line, prey species a billion years hence—and the smarter plants that feed herbivorous prey species—accept that a certain proportion of their population will go to feed other species. Just as the predators take measures to regulate their own numbers, the prey and smart plant species do their utmost to take control of the process, and manipulate it to their advantage. A billion years hence, evolutionary selection is a wholly conscious process, with every intelligent species devoting itself to eugenic planning—and because every species is doing it, they all compete to do it as artfully and as productively as possible.

Some species are content to be as they are, and merely seek to refine their own imagined perfection, but the great majority are intent on further change, on metamorphosis into something finer. There are, inevitably, disagreements, both within and between species, as to the directions that the evolution of individual species and the collective ensemble ought to take. Politics a billion years hence is an extremely complicated business, although there’s only one fundamental political philosophy, whose name can best be translated as “creationism”. A billion years hence, evolution isn’t something that intelligent beings merely believe in, or don’t, but something that every intelligent species is actually doing—a cause to which everyone is committed, and work that everyone takes seriously.

No matter how much they may disagree about details, everyone who lives a billion years hence is interested in intelligent design. Everyone, the traveler assured me, is trying with all his might to make the design of life and the design of destiny better than any kind of nature could ever contrive unaided. No one then seriously expects that the Phoenix will never die again, but everyone is determined to make sure that it becomes as glorious as possible before some cosmic accident puts an end to their particular adventure. It certainly sounded like a world that was—will be—very different from this one. I think he was trying to be kind when he said I wouldn’t like it, trying to soften the blow of his not being able to take me with him.

Obviously, I couldn’t get my head around all of this immediately, and I knew that we were running out of time. Rather than simply let him ramble on—as he surely would have done—I started asking questions again, in the hope of focusing his account on matters of more immediate interest.

“And the time travel is part of that project, is it?” I asked him. “You’re trying to apply intelligent design to the past as well as the future—laying the foundations for your wonderful world by inventing things like the bacterial flagellum and dumping them in the pre-Cambrian. Why doesn’t it lead to paradoxes? Or are you just hiving off new alternative prehistories into an infinite manifold of possible worlds?”

“Time travel is part of the project,” he agreed, “but not in the way you mean. There’s only one Earth, only one history of life. We need to understand it, but we can’t change it. We can sample it, in certain relatively unobtrusive ways, but it’s mostly a matter of copying information for future use.”

“Only one Earth and only one history of life?” I said. “What about all the other worlds in the universe—all the other Phoenixes? Surely ours will develop space travel eventually, even if humans die out before we can master the trick—and even if our world doesn’t, some of the others surely will.”

“Maybe,” he said. “We don’t know. Our view is that space travel simply isn’t practical.”

“Unlike time travel?”

“Time travel is definitely practical, provided that you’re very careful. The lay-by’s just up ahead.”

If the road was really a road, then the lay-by was probably really a lay-by—but I didn’t believe it. I pulled off just the same, and parked the car. There was nothing outside but the shadows of trees; I couldn’t tell whether they were oaks or ashes.

“Where were you going, in your very careful fashion, when that deer got in your way?” I wanted to know.

“Home,” he said. He was being annoying again, probably to pay me back for the ironic remark about his very careful fashion.

“Where had you been, then?” I asked. “Collecting dinosaurs?”

“Much further back than that,” he told me. “Collecting alternatives to DNA, from the era when there was a chemical contest to determine the fundamentals of Earthly life. You can imagine how many individual moments I had to pass through in a five-billion-year journey. They were all supposed to be vacant of solid material—until you changed history.”

“Me!” At first I was outraged, but then I caught on to what he meant. I’d been supposed to hit the deer. The deer shouldn’t have jumped sideways. But he was still wrong. It hadn’t been me who’s changed history—his history—but the deer. I remembered the way it had looked at me before it left the scene of the accident…if it really had been an accident.

The time traveler had implied that history couldn’t be changed, but what he’d actually said was that he and his kind couldn’t change it, and it seemed to me that his remarks about the practicality of time travel might imply that he actually meant “wouldn’t” rather than “couldn’t”. For them, perhaps, there really might be only one time-track, one history of Earthly life…but they weren’t arrogant enough to think that they would be the end of the Phoenix’s story, or the very last word in intelligent design, and they weren’t stupid enough to think that everything they couldn’t do was necessarily impossible or impractical.

“Your friends might not be able to come and pick you up,” I said. “If that bloody animal wiped out the history of the next billion years, your entire world might have been blanked out of existence.”

“They’re already here,” he countered, smugly, pointing to the driving mirror.

When I’d pulled into the lay-by it had only been big enough to accommodate one car, but now there was an empty space behind us, in which another vehicle was forming. It didn’t have its headlights on, but its shadowy form was uncannily similar to a Volkswagen Polo.

The thing that got out of the driving seat, however, didn’t look anything like me. It was wearing a plastic bag, but it looked vaguely reminiscent of a shaggy crocodile walking on its hind legs, although it bore about as much resemblance to a twenty-first-century croc as a twenty-first-century croc does to a lichen-encrusted warthog.

The time-traveler turned towards me, and stuck out his hand. “I’m truly sorry about the gun,” he said. “I didn’t know you as well then as I do now. You’ve been you for an entire lifetime, so you’re probably used to that awful chaos and confusion of motive and desire, fantasy and perception, but it was all extremely strange and disturbing to me.”

He opened the door as he was speaking. The car’s internal light came on. I saw that the cuts and bruises had almost healed, and that his features were almost exactly like those I see in a mirror when I shave—except, of course, that they were the wrong way round. I’m not the most symmetrical person in the world, alas.

Automatically, I took the hand in my own and shook it.

“You couldn’t give me a few tips, I suppose,” I said. “Tactics for avoiding the worst effects of the world’s impending end—that sort of thing.”

“Study Stone Age survival techniques and move to Antarctica,” he said. “That’s if you want to drag it out. Otherwise, don’t wait too long before buying that antique revolver and blowing your brains out.”

“I really would like to come with you,” I said. “I might not like your world, but.…”

“No can do, Jim,” he said. “Very sorry. Thanks for the lift. Just turn around and go back the way we came. You’ll be home in no time at all.” Then he shut the door, and walked back to the other car with the shaggy crocodile in the plastic bag. They seemed to be arguing about something as they went, but they certainly weren’t doing it in English.

The time-traveler got into the other Volkswagen’s passenger seat. The vehicle moved off a minute or so later, swerving past me and continuing along the road in the direction of the unknown.

For a couple of minutes I thought about following it, but I knew that time travel couldn’t possibly be as simple as that, and that I’d probably get lost in limbo. Doomed or not, the familiar world seemed the more attractive option. I put the car into gear, did another three-point turn, and headed back the way I’d come.

I had a lot to think about, and whatever the time traveler had said about “no time at all” I’d had a very long day. I was so used to the fake road being empty that I wasn’t really paying attention. I didn’t notice the road become real again, and I didn’t see the deer until it was far too late.

It wasn’t a big deer—a roe deer, I think, and not fully grown at that. I braked hard, but I knew it wouldn’t be hard enough, because the damn thing just stood stock still until I hit it. In the last split second before the impact, I stopped wondering whether it might be the same deer as before, realizing that it had to be exactly the same deer. This time, though, it wasn’t going to leap aside. This time, the time traveler’s history would be conserved.

The luckless deer slammed into the windscreen, and the windscreen broke. A deer—even one that’s hardly more than a fawn—can really make a mess of your face when it’s traveling along with the shards of a windscreen at God-only-knows-how-many miles per hour, but it didn’t knock me unconscious. To tell the truth, I think most of the blood must have been the deer’s, not mine. I was able to bring the car to a halt, unbuckle my seat belt and step out on to the road.

“The bastard,” I said. “I wonder whether he and his mate fixed things so that it never bloody happened, or whether the dent in history was just snapping back into shape.” I was glad, though, that I still remembered every moment of what had happened, even if it hadn’t happened any longer. Neither he nor history had been able to take that away from me.

I couldn’t be absolutely sure, of course. How could I begin to guess what the temporal AA, or the natural resilience of the time-stream, might be able to achieve?

I stuck the deer in the boot, although rumor has it that collecting road kill still counts as poaching in the eyes of the law. I got a friend in the business to butcher it for me, and split the legs and rump with him. Unfortunately, every time I eat a bit I remember the way the damn thing looked at me that first time, immediately after it had caused the time machine to crash. I don’t know for sure, but it still seems to me that the deer had known what it was doing. Perhaps, in some parallel universe, it still does—but in ours, it seems, intelligent designers seem to be content to work in less ambitious and more mysterious ways.