Adrift in the Noösphere (23 page)

“Our children grow up and become us,” the physicist pointed out uneasily.

“Not all of them,” Deems said. “Not those that miscarry in the womb. Not the abortions. Not the ones the Zetans engender and pilfer from the uterus of an abducted woman. And there's a lot of it going around, trust me. Put your wife under hypnosis and ask her. Or your daughters.”

Both interrogators looked back at him without noticeable emotion, although there was the faintest tinge of abhorrence in the physicist's voice. “So. UFO aliens are the souls of the aborted.”

“To be precise, they're the WILP complexity-correlates of the human fetal central nervous system,” Daimon told them, as he had told the others like them during the past week. Nobody listened. Nothing he said seemed to get cross-indexed from one interrogation team to the next. Someone further up the chain of command was insulating this knowledge. And who could wonder at it? This was appalling news, after all. This was diabolical news. This, clearly, was why the truth about UFOs had never been made public, and never would be, not by the political and spiritual princes of the world. The Zetans, in one grotesque and illuminating revelation, had snatched away the foundations of human self-esteem, aspiration, had snatched away meaning itself.

“This is insane,” the physicist said angrily. “You're telling us that another kind of evolution is going on, parallel to the universe of quarks and leptons and photons and gravitons. And you want us to accept that the sorry accidents of reproduction, the genetic waste, the biological excess, the mutations, the discards—that these are the heirs of the Kingdom of God?”

“That's what your favorite scriptures tell you,” Deems said flatly. He really did not care any longer if they believed him, if they listened, if they paid attention. The gray proctologists would find him, even here under fifteen floors of subterranean steel and concrete, and lift him away to their gassy white operation rooms. The little shits were probably here right now, he thought, sitting in the middle of their air which was the heavy crust of the visible earth, listening in their puzzled way to this dreary exchange between three animals without souls.

“How could an ecology like that evolve before humans invented abortion?” Tanner said, still angry, getting angrier. “Is spiritual progress so swift that they developed their nifty starships in the ten thousand years since the invention of the...what, Leo? What did the Paleolithic sluts use to scrape themselves out? Gnawed twigs?”

Unexpectedly, the psychiatrist spoke to him sharply. “Control yourself, Professor Tanner.” Spiegle met Daimon's gaze steadily. “They taught us in medical school that spontaneous human abortions account for up to eighty percent of all conceptions. I've always wondered why a replicating system shaped by evolutionary pressures would be so wasteful of metabolic energy and ecological resources.”

“Well.” Deems shrugged. “The
real
question is, why do so many of us go to term and live our pointless lives? But remnant life does have its useful side, you see. We're their parents, and they have to keep us on our toes. Darwin was right in his limited way. The cockroaches haven't beaten us yet in the Red Queen's Race. Or the retroviruses. All those other creepy little fuckers at the top of the food chain.”

“What Red Queen?”

“He means the evolutionary arms race. One species gets smarter or quicker or more wired, and then all the others have to hustle to keep up in the same spot. My God. Abortions. Negative reincarnation. This is, this is....” The government's man looked at him with detestation. “This is techno-gnosticism.”

Deems gave a yell of laughter. “I like that! Techno-gnosticism! I'll use it in my next book.” Suddenly he hurled his empty coffee cup violently across the room, where it smashed on a white wall. The fragments lay curled on the tan carpet like thin ceramic fingers. “If you sons of bitches ever let me out of here.”

viii.

From Rev. Daimon Keith,
The Scionetic Paradigm
, Chapter 13, “The Meaning of Life,” Los Angeles: Jerome Tarcher, 2002.

Perhaps by this point some of you will have a few doubts about the truth of what I have written, or even about my sanity! Despite widespread reports of UFO abductions, despite the eerily common elements recorded in hundreds of cases world-wide, many people continue to attribute this testimony to fraud, hysteria, substance abuse or mental breakdown. Some psychiatric specialists believe the experience is caused by a brain disorder known as “transient temporal lobe dysfunction.”

I have no argument with these skeptics, for I spent several years examining such explanations myself. Certainly I was not eager to believe in the truth of my dreams of UFO abduction, or even to take literally the dozens of hours of careful hypnotic retrieval of those terrible ordeals. Even when I came to understand that these memories were largely accurate, were not fantasies or confabulations, or masks for childhood sexual abuse, I resisted the message of the Harvesters. Who wants to face the dismal fact that human life is meaningless? What kind of stoical stalwart can deal, day after bleak day, with the awful news that we all—child and adult, felon and saint—have no more significance in the darkly radiant scheme of spiritual evolution than...what? A snake's discarded husk? A male spider chomped by his female mate after his small spasm has inseminated her?

Worse: than the severed placenta thrown carelessly into a hospital bucket after the bloody labors of birth?

But it is so. I must not hide the truth from you, or from myself.

We are of no more significance in the real universe, the invisible, impalpable immensity of dark matter that comprises the true cosmos, than a lump of bloody afterbirth.

But of course, that is only true from the narrow perspective of our puffed human pretensions. A placenta, after all, however lowly and disposable, is not without meaning to the child it nourishes for nine months in the womb. The growing snake's skin has protected it for a season, before it splits into tatters and is left by the side of the road. A baby's first teeth loosen and fall out within a very few years, and for a day we treasure them whimsically, placing them beneath the child's pillow and promising that a fairy will bear them away to some finer land. We pay our gappy infants in good coin for the privilege. As we tuck a dollar bill beneath the pillow, and whisk the milk tooth into the trash, we do not despise that small fragment of organic detritus. But we do not believe our fairytale, either.

The meaning of the lost tooth is not salvation in a heaven of tooth fairies, it is the adult dentition that springs up to fill its gap. And the meaning of terrestrial life is not a transcendental afterlife for the dying human—starving child or withered sage, automobile accident victim or cancer patient, AIDS patient or his selfless helper. The meaning of human life is not afterlife but afterbirth: we are a disposable stage in the production of the Children of Heaven, our Scions, the first casts, the happy miscarriages, the uncorrupted abortions. Those who perish in the flesh before crude matter has infected, corrupted and swiftly corroded their potentially immortal souls. Little wonder that all the false religions of pomp and human glory, intellectual and fundamentalist alike, denounce abortion as the vilest sin. No. Far from being a sin, a crime, an atrocity, it is the release of our Scions into eternity, and so, even as the churchmen pretend to squabble among themselves, they conspire wickedly to prevent this sacrament, this single good deed of human flesh, this midwifery of heaven.

ix.

Three days after his outrageous revelation, on a gorgeous Californian summer's day, Benjamin picked me up in his black retro-fitted Porche 944 Turbo and drove me to my father's West Coast home in Malibu.

I was all of a dither, as you will understand, but I did what I could to hide my emotions. This was easily enough done, given my childhood conditioning, but I also wished to avoid slipping into some disabling multiple personality confusion, so I gave vent to my mixed feelings by squeezing my wide brimmed ozone hat in my hands until its sturdy genetically engineered cotton was crushed into a shapeless lump. Benjamin certainly noticed these small convulsions but, adroit therapist that he was (and is), he refrained from comment.

“Did you get the book I sent over?”

I had been studying the yellowed pages of
The Dying Breed
all morning. None of the photos was labeled, so I could not even be sure if Margaret was included. One woman poised on top of an old automobile, haughty and proud, bore a certain resemblance to the face I saw in the mirror, when I could bear to look in the mirror. Still, it had given me a curious and visceral thrill to see her name on the dedication page, placed there by the man who was allegedly my father. And there was a suite of portraits of babies viewed through glass, rows and ranks of the tiny wrinkled things, big pink heads and squinty eyes, and a wry nurse standing to one side of a complex bit of machinery sustaining a tiny little creature barely alive by the look of it. I had a terrible feeling that one was me.

“Yes, thank you. Yes, thank you. The courier service is more reliable than the damned post office.” The mail had never recovered after the 9/11 terrorism horrors. and the competition from email.

“Have a look at these,” Benjamin said, and passed me a folio. He was a handsome man of 45, more boyish than distinguished, and I trusted him implicitly, which is more than I'd been able to do with anyone else since the day I'd escaped from the cult. The photographs were in a variety of styles and voices. I peered out, two or three years old, in big eyed fascination from some of them, or painted colorful daubs with my fingers, or stuffed food into my mouth, laughing and happy. This time I recognized myself at once, and my adult eyes burned with misery and loss. I turned the sheets slowly, examining each hungrily. The first convincing shot of Margaret caused me to utter a soft cry, a hand squeezed at my diaphragm, for it was me staring back at myself: an offbeat beauty, if one made allowances for her awful seventies” haircut and make-up and clothes: defended, waspishly amused. They had burned all her photos at Harmony, of course. Restrained by my seat belt, I leaned forward in the urban racing seat to hug the picture to me, eyes prickling, breathing in little gasps.

x.

The Reverend Daimon Keith lived in ecologically responsible luxury. Behind a high fence laced with sensors and lethal devices, his marvelous house, designed according to principles allegedly revealed by UFO architects but thought to resemble certain embargoed ideas from blockaded Saudi, sucked at the sun and polluted air like a flower and turned it into a cool, faintly rose-scented breeze, gentle indirect lighting, and full-surround musical background. I walked into a round white room carpeted in pale green, with startling art works suspended on the walls: thick slabs of wood in bright gold and purple and crimson, curves and arcs above and radiating bars below, Samuel Barber's exquisite Violin Concerto entering its second movement and tearing my heart out as it did so, and my father, clad for the occasion in normal business suit, having forsaken his silver flying saucer garment or rainbow robes, standing up to greet me from a sunken pit in the center of the room. His throat worked visibly, and he swayed, and to my astonishment and immense gratification he burst into tears.

“Jesus,” he blurted. “Margaret!” Then he shook his head, squeezed his eyes shut, came toward me like a man dazed. “I'm sorry, Flake. Oh God.”

We went into each other's arms as if we had never been separated, and everything went very runny and snotty for a while.

xi.

Daimon flew me to Sydney, where his wife Zelda preferred to live, and we walked along Bondi Beach while a pair of inconspicuous Scionetics heavies paced us for our own protection. Somehow the Australians had managed to clean up the foreshore with its wonderful white sand, and depollute the blue and white surf, which had been turning into a sewer, Deems told me, last time I'd been here with my murdered mother. We rolled up our trouser legs and splashed at the edge of the mild winter sea.

“I don't understand any of it,” I told him, holding his hand. By rights, according to the symptomatology of my condition, I should not have been able to bear his touch, or anyone's. Alternatively, I should have been hard at the task of seducing him with glancing laughing eyes and hints of cleavage, all that. Somehow, though, wonderfully, this was, for the moment at least, simply homecoming. I was all wept out by that point, and my heart was torn two ways at once: by uncomplex happiness and by a more profound dull emptiness that made mockery of the happiness. “What does it mean?” I asked my father, who had made hundreds of millions of dollars and bought the huge old building up on the top of the bluff by telling hundreds of thousands of desperate people his awful answer to that question.

“Come on,” he said, “let's get some fish and chips.”

We bought piping hot fried shark in batter—it is called “flake” in Australia, which made us both laugh—and french fries (“chips”), and a six-pack of lite beer to wash it down with. One of the heavies fetched a thick woven blanket so we could sit on the sand without getting piles, my father said, wincing at some memory, and a pair of light, insulated capes to keep the breeze at bay. Daimon tore open the paper bag of french fries and inhaled the dietetically dubious odor of salt and vinegar.

“The meaning of it all? Darling, let me tell you what I've learned, what the grays have taught me. You won't enjoy hearing this, but it will,” he said seriously, “set you free.”

I was apprehensive.

“You're going to say that human life has no meaning,” I told him. I knew already that this was his scandalous doctrine, because I had gobbled up a couple of potted and scathing magazine exposes of Scionetics in the previous days, and I wasn't buying it.

He popped the top on a beer can (a “stubby”) and sucked froth into his mouth. The sun, burning down from the north of the sky, caught his machine-tanned forehead, slipped down the laugh lines beside his eyes. He should have been wearing a hat, of course, as I was, because the ozone hole was straight overhead in Sydney, but he was protected against cancer, he said, by the painful ministrations of the Harvesters.