Descent (5 page)

There were a lot more of them, and brighter and more various than they’d seemed at first. Funny that. They only glowed for a while after the light went off. Perhaps my eyes were more dark adapted than usual, what with the distended pupils that my father had so embarrassingly noticed.

Across that childish starry sky, something moved. I blinked hard. It was still there, a crawling dot of light, moving at the exact speed and course of a satellite crossing the real sky. For a moment I thought, absurdly, that some exotic firefly had found its way to my room. In another moment – a beat, a pause before a punchline – everything resolved. I realised, with a chill as cold as if the ceiling and roof had really lifted and exposed me to the night air, that I was looking at the real stars, in the real sky above Greenock, and watching a circumpolar satellite. Shifting my gaze a little, I could even see clouds coming in from the west.

Then I thought: Oh, shit. I’m having actual hallucinations now.

I didn’t feel frightened. I felt that very adult impatience and resentment that’s been so well expressed by Dorothy Parker: What fresh hell is this? I thought I was shot of whatever had warped my brain the previous afternoon and evening. I thought I’d slept it off, and woken clear-headed and none the worse. A fury arose in me. I was going to dispel this illusion. I made to sit up, intending to rise and touch the now invisible but undoubtedly still solid and present ceiling.

I couldn’t move anything but my eyes.

In the shock that shot through me at that realisation came another: I was not alone in the room.

Someone, or something, was standing at the foot of the bed.

With petrified reluctance I tore my gaze from the real or imaginary stars, and looked. I was not surprised to see black, lidless, tilted, almond eyes look back.

Terrified, but not surprised. The creature was a cliché, your average working alien, a bog-standard Grey. About four and half feet tall, with a big oval head, skinny torso, spindly limbs, a ditto of nostrils and a lipless little em-dash of a mouth.

It stretched out an arm towards me and extended a long finger, then raised its arm to point slowly upward. And up, floating, I went, into the starry sky above. I’d been lying naked under the duvet. The duvet didn’t come with me and I didn’t feel it slipping off, but this discrepant detail didn’t seem a pressing problem at the time.

You have to remember that I knew I was hallucinating. I even had a clear understanding of the processes involved. As well as having read or watched many tales of just this kind of scene, I’d read their sceptical, scientific debunkings. I knew, or firmly and with good reason believed, that I’d woken up, and that, while gazing at the starry ceiling, I’d drifted into sleep without realising. What I was experiencing, then, was a classic falling-asleep hallucination along with sleep paralysis, its content pathetically predictable from conscious and unconscious worrying about my strange encounter, and the associated images of UFOs and aliens with which my mind was as well stocked as anyone’s. I knew, from my sceptical reading, that artificial electrical stimulation of the brain could induce bizarre mental states. I knew of the speculations that some baffling UFO encounters could be accounted for by some poorly understood natural atmospheric or geophysical electrical phenomenon which could induce experiences interpreted as alien communication or abduction.

The apprehension I felt, which was enough to have made me quake if I’d been capable of even involuntarily moving a single skeletal muscle, was that of someone sliding helplessly into a nightmare that they know is a nightmare but that they know, too, will take its inevitable course to its unpleasant end.

As I rose toward the rapidly growing disc of dark against the stars above me, I could already imagine the quasi-medical scene awaiting me within: the bright sourceless light, the examining table, the invasive procedures, the metallic implants, the probe up the arse. I could imagine the scenario as vividly as you can. I’m still proud, in a way, that I was prepared for all that.

I was not prepared for what happened on the ship.

What happened on the ship was this.

As I came close to the underside I glimpsed structure – radial ribbing, perhaps circumferential pipework – and a central circular area that opened like a camera iris. It was just wide enough for me, still lying horizontal, to rise through. It couldn’t have been more than a couple of metres across. As I passed through it I screwed up my eyes, expecting a flood of bright light. None came. Warily I opened my eyes wide. In the dim, reddish lighting I could see a low, domed ceiling above me, with some kind of thin, curving radial struts, rather like the inside of a yurt made from taut Mylar and bicycle spokes.

My upward levitation stopped, and was replaced by a movement sideways then down. I felt my normal weight pressing me against a flat, slightly yielding surface that might have been stretched canvas. Like, say, an operating table.

Uh-oh. Here it comes.

Then I found myself sitting bolt upright. My mouth opened and I yelled. It was as if my body were completing the action that the sleep paralysis had prevented. In the confined space, the scream rang in my ears. I took a ragged gasp to fill my empty lungs, closed my mouth, then drew up my heels to my crotch and my knees to my chest, clasping my arms around my legs. As I did so I found I was no longer naked, but wearing the clothes I’d worn on the hill, all as clean as they’d been before I’d fallen in the black ash. I stared in shock at what I saw in front of me.

A man and a woman, tall, good-looking, stood between the foot of the bed-table and a sloped shelf or bank of flickering lights and instruments that seemed to encircle the craft’s interior. Their clothing reminded me absurdly and predictably of
Star Trek
Starfleet uniforms (original series, at that – the woman’s outfit was a long-sleeved flared mini-dress that skimmed her hips and then stopped). Both had dark complexions and black hair: the man’s cropped like an astronaut’s; the woman’s wavy, trimmed to just above the neckline of her brief tunic. Their features, fine and regular, seemed to come from some attractive melange of every human race. They were looking at me with expressions of compassion and concern.

‘There’s nothing to be afraid of,’ the woman said.

Her voice was warm, and more finely modulated than any voice I’d ever heard. She had an accent that was likewise new to me. But in a sense I recognised her, and the man. I’d encountered their like in the UFO rubbish I’d read when I was young and naïve. In the first bright dawn of the flying-saucer delusion – the early 1950s – before people started meeting or being abducted by sinister Greys, they met tall, blond, silver-suited, Nordic-looking folk they called Space Brothers, who spouted theosophical rubbish. The two people facing me were obviously an updated, multi-racial version of these half-forgotten visitors. I was on the point of saying something defiant, secure in the knowledge that this was a dream from which I would awake, when I realised what having my clothes on meant.

This might not be a dream. I could be reliving a memory of what had happened already, on or above the hill. I had survived that, but with no idea of what had happened or what had been done to me, and I was about to find out.

‘Where’s …?’ I looked over my shoulder. The Grey – or a Grey, anyway – stood with its back to the instrument panel behind me and to the right. It raised its right hand, palm open. Three fingers and a thumb, all long. The entity was naked, and had no visible genitalia. Its skin seemed to have fine scales, like a small lizard. There was a pulse at its throat. I could read no expression on its face. I turned away with some unease.

The craft’s two human-seeming occupants were still looking at me, now with friendly smiles. Their teeth were perfect.

My mouth was dry. I summoned spittle, and swallowed.

‘I’m not afraid,’ I said. I clutched my legs harder to stop them shaking. ‘I know this is a dream or a hallucination. I know what caused it. I know what’s going to happen.’ I put my hands on the bed beside me and let my legs relax, to straighten and splay. ‘Ah, fuck it, go ahead. Do what you have to do. Get it over with.’

They both laughed, politely, like the peals from a light and a heavy bell chiming in harmony.

‘That’s an unusual reaction,’ the man said. His voice was a mellow bass; his tone suggested some unshared reason for amusement.

‘What do you expect us to do?’ the woman asked.

‘Oh, the usual,’ I said. ‘The medical examination. The probe.’

Defiantly, knowing this was a dream or a memory, I stuck up my middle finger at her.

Her face clouded a little.

‘There’s no need for that,’ she said. ‘And there’s no need for an examination in your case.’

‘Or in most others,’ the man added, hurriedly, with a glance to my right. ‘There’s been a change in policy.’

Of course, I thought. The dream-logic was working itself out, giving me some reason to avoid the traumatic scene I’d dreaded.

‘So what are you going to do?’ I asked.

‘We are going to give you our message for humanity,’ the man said.

Of course they were.

‘If you have a message for humanity,’ I said, ‘you can give it to humanity, on every channel and network on Earth. You don’t need me.’

‘Oh, but we do,’ the woman said.

Of course they did.

‘Why?’ I asked, wondering what my subconscious mind would come up with.

‘Those you call the Greys could have given their message directly to the whole of humanity,’ the woman went on, ‘at any time since we became human. They chose not to, because our culture would then have become merely another part of theirs. Our distinctness is valued by them, and by others. That is why they work through human allies, like us, and why we in turn seek to persuade those such as you. We can show you the path, but you must choose it yourself and walk it in your own way. That is how and why we have always worked through teachers. I need not name them, but your name may one day be counted among them.’

Not bad, I thought. A bit New Age and Von Daniken, but not bad. At the same time I was trying hard not to giggle, because ‘teachers’ to me meant not saints and prophets but primarily (so to speak) people like my mum.

‘So what’s this great message?’

Wait for it, wait for it … the importance of wisdom, love, and peace; the dangers of climate change, nuclear weapons, genetic engineering …

‘You must rely on reason and science,’ she said, ‘and be guided by a likewise rational ethic of human concern. You must do your utmost as individuals to improve your understanding, ability and compassion. As a species you must maintain and extend your presence in space, and from that vantage do what you can to repair the Earth. Whether or not you succeed, you must never give up.’

‘That’s not what I expected,’ I said.

‘But it’s true,’ the man said.

‘It’s not what you used to say, or what the teachers you claim to have worked through said.’

‘Ah,’ said the woman, ‘their message was for their own time. This is the message for yours. And for you.’

They stood looking at me as if expecting something: thanks, probably. No way, Space Brother, Space Sister, no fucking way.

‘That’s it?’ I said. ‘Can I go now?’

The woman and the man looked at each other, and this time both glanced to my right, toward the Grey.

‘We still need your genetic material,’ the woman said.

Of course they did.

‘DNA?’ I opened my mouth. ‘Take a swab.’

The woman smiled.

‘I meant gametes.’

‘You can make them from stem cells,’ I said. ‘Even we can do that.’

‘We prefer to get them directly.’

‘Oh,’ I said.

She drew a finger from her collar down to her midriff. The top of her tunic fell open, and she shrugged out of it. Then she stepped out of it, and stood to the full height of her lithe beautiful naked body. She didn’t look away from me the whole time.

She stepped forward, placed her hands on the end of the table, and deftly jumped up to kneel facing me, just in front of my feet. I pulled my legs up again and scrambled into a kneeling position, aware that I wasn’t getting out of my clothes in anything like as dignified and graceful a fashion.

‘Go ahead,’ she said. ‘Do it.’

Her face was close to mine; her nipples brushed the sparse hair on my chest. Her breath smelt sweet and her eyes were violet.

‘You want me to have sex with you?’ I asked, unbelieving.

She rocked back a little, with a look of surprise.

‘No,’ she said. ‘I want you to have a wank.’

‘But …’ I looked around. The Grey and the man had gone. Or become invisible, what did I know?

I reached out to touch her shoulder.

‘Don’t,’ she said. She leaned away further, then placed cool fingertips vertically across my lips, as if asking me to be quiet. I felt a small shock, a tingle like tonguing the terminals of a low-voltage battery. She glanced down, then up, and smiled. ‘You can do this.’

And I did. Just before I came she reached to the underside of the table and brought out a small container, which a moment later, I filled.

Then, banal as it sounds – and was – she capped the container, put it back where it had come from, and handed me a tissue.

‘Thank you,’ she said, and hopped off the table and climbed back into her uniform and closed it up.

Flushed, still panting, I stared at her.

‘Why do you need … that?’

I wondered what rationalisation my mind would come up with, and I wasn’t disappointed.

The woman laughed. ‘Not for human-alien hybrids, as some in your position have thought. We’re as human as you. Our ancestors came from Earth. We have no wish to become a separate species, so we take every opportunity to interbreed with the parent stock when we can, as now.’

‘Haven’t you heard of sperm banks?’

She shrugged. ‘This is the simplest way.’

Of course it was.

While we spoke, the man and the alien had returned without my noticing how.

‘Everything all right?’ the man said.

‘It’s all fine,’ said the woman.