A.R.Yngve
ALIEN BEACH

Chapter Sixteen

The soldier woke up in the middle of the night, his head suddenly aching. His heart beating faster with eager, conditioned anticipation, he waited for the vision to come...

Nothing. Nothing came. He saw only the usual canvas walls of his tent, faintly illuminated by the moon and lights from outside... No, wait - there was something after all. But it had to work harder to come into his consciousness, struggling and flickering.

Now it flashed through his mind's eye, lasting a subjective few seconds: A dark forest of tall trees, shaped like giant gray corkscrews with thick black leaves for crowns. This was a remote inland part of his homeworld, but it wasn't Earth. In the sky hung a violet-tinted, thick gloom. He was standing there alone, away from his company, sensing the presence and ambience of animal life, somewhere in the darkness. A sudden whizzing sound - something darted past his head, too quickly for him to perceive if it was an animal or a thing.

Then he felt warm blood flowing over his face, and he knew he had been injured. A brief moment of panic -

The soldier blinked, and he was in his tent again. His hand flew up and felt his face. The injury was not real. But it meant something, clear and simple this time. Someone had been hurt, or would be. He had to be cautious and expect real, physical danger.

"We interrupt this program for a breaking news feature, live from the NBC studio in New York."

"This is Cathy Courier, live from the Today studio. Just a few minutes ago, not far from here, a visiting Sirian was witnessed being shot and injured outside the Disney IMAX Theater. Apparently, the Sirian male took part in a secret bus tour through the city, when he unexpectedly left his cover and moved out into the crowd watching a parade of impersonated Disney characters. Our roving camera team cannot reach the site now, since the police have sealed off the area in search of the one or several attackers who fired the shots.

"The whereabouts of the wounded Sirian are not certain; an unconfirmed rumor holds that he was immediately taken to the Bellevue Hospital.

"It has been known to the public for several days, that a covert Sirian tour of the world's countries was in progress; the sudden upsurge of police activity in New York, plus reports of similar activity in a consecutive number of countries, had indicated that New York was next on the list. Who was behind the attempt to assassinate a Sirian visitor is not yet known. The official leader of the ECT on Alien Beach, Carl Sayers, has been unavailable for a comment on the current crisis.

"Later on Questions and Answers, Polish science-fiction author Lew Stanislawsky will discuss the impact of this event on the extraterrestrial visit to Earth..."

DAY 86

"Tmmtenaa's going to make it, Mr. President. The shot hit him square on the head, but his suit stopped the bullet before it could enter his brain - no, I don't know how it was done. Invulnerable they are not, but the Sirian technology is unbelievably fast sometimes..."

Carl put his hand over the phone for a moment, and looked at his colleagues in the plane seats: Ann, Lazar, Takeru, and their linguist. The Sirians were also on the plane, in a separate compartment, watching over Tmmtenaa's recovery. The injured alien could not yet speak. There were all these people he were responsible for, Carl thought, and he had failed them all. He half wanted to ask the President to resign from the ECT, half feared becoming a public scapegoat if that happened.

"Yes, sir. We're doing fairly well, but we're all quite shaken as you can understand. What? I see... well, I'm grateful the Security Council didn't vote me out. Thank you, Mr. President, for me not having to face them in a hearing. Ha, ha. I know. Right. Thank you, sir. Bye."

He put away the phone and sighed deeply. Lazar awakened from his slumber and cocked his head in Carl's direction.

"Are the politicians looking to put the blame on you?"

"Since when did you become so cynical, Lazar? Early on, I pictured you as the great humanist who understood everyone."

"I do try to understand all men's thoughts, but I'm not forced to like everyone. Let's say the jetlag made us all surly."

Carl yawned, and replied: "I shouldn't even be here now, you know. Except for the Sirians who never seem to plan anything in detail, everyone thought they were going along with our plans. Head straight for the U.N. Building, talk to the world leaders, call for global peace, I take a week off and see my family - everyone's happy."

"Have you spoken to your wife and children after the shooting?"

"Just a few hours ago. The President and his blasted staff have been on me all day and night. Thank God I had the foresight to arrange that the media can't find me."

Lazar cleared his throat. "We need to talk, Carl. The whole team too, but you and me first. I'm starting to understand this whole process - the things that are going on between humans and aliens. It's like a psychic drama being played out with the planet as a stage - two different ways of thinking, colliding head-on... from a certain perspective, the attempt to kill Tmmtenaa was being forced through by humanity's collective imagination."

"Explain yourself. And why did he go out into the crowd anyway? The Sirians never even bothered to explain it to us - almost as if they took for granted we understood."

Lazar put his palms together before his face, features set frowning hard: "When it comes to Tmmtenaa's motives, I can only speculate. Assume... assume he was becoming claustrophobic, and was desperate to get out of the bus after all those days. Remember, these beings have been traveling through space for years, and they sleep in the ocean. The sight of the Sirian-impersonator was the impulse that made him act out an overwhelming desire for open spaces. These beings do tend to be impulsive sometimes, even playful."

"Go on..."

"The impersonator - was he arrested?"

"Yes - the police did suspect he was sent out as a decoy. They couldn't prove it though - his costume was genuine merchandise, and he was working on schedule."

"I'll take it as coincidence then. The bus was probably being followed by the attackers long before the shooting."

"You said 'psychic drama'? Explain yourself."

Lazar leaned closer. "I'm indebted to the Sirians for giving us those helmets, that record and play thoughts. I've been using mine every night, and it's really helped me understand myself... Have you been using yours?"

"No, no, not once."

"You were afraid of it, right?"

"No! There just wasn't time to..." Carl stopped, sensing his own guilt. Lazar shook his head - he saw straight through the lie. "Yes," Carl admitted, reluctantly, "I was afraid of it from the very start."

"So was I, Carl. But my professional curiosity was too great to resist using my machine..." Lazar straightened up, eyes widening behind his thick glasses. "Yes!" he said. "I realize now, that ever since poor Bruno broke down, you and the others have unconsciously repressed the existence of the mind-recorders!"

"You must be mistaken, Lazar. Early on, I told the crew they were free to use the devices on their own, and you did..."

"I did... no one else. Or at least, no one has even mentioned using them to me. On this little world tour, did you see anyone but me bring their helmets along with them?"

"Well, no."

"When we come back to Alien Beach, ask the team. I'll promise you very few will have even touched their mind-recorders while we were away."

"So... why the repressing?"

"This is complicated, but I'll try...

"All Earthlings know instinctively, that the Sirians are the ultimate outsiders. In spite of the fact that they look much like us - ironic, no? So on a sub-conscious or semi-conscious level, humans will tend to think of the Sirians as not being real - as an intrusion on our reality."

"The public thinks they are a fraud?"

"An intrusion on our reality. A hallucination come alive. A vaguely supernatural entity. A projection of our deepest desires and fears. And to experience that boundary between reality and imagination breaking down, does of course make you feel insecure, make you fear you're going crazy. Add to this the unexpected gift from the Sirians - a little machine that enables you to experience a dream as if it was waking existence! That's just too much. Our minds are not ready for that yet. So humanity treats Sirians as more than real, as... gods, maybe, or demons. Hence, us scientists repress these irrational impulses, and in particular our own dreams."

There was something about Lazar's matter-of-fact tone that made Carl's skin crawl. He had to suppress a weird urge to run away. "This is outrageous," Carl objected. "You could just as well suggest we, all of humanity, wished the Sirians into existence."

"And assume we did?"

Carl blinked. Lazar met his disbelieving stare without a flinch - smiling, too. Carl went cold with fear.

"Isn't it too much of a coincidence," Lazar continued, "that they made themselves known to mankind now? The public interest in UFOs has been increasing steadily for the past fifty years. The schizoid cases I've been studying during my long career have also changed. They used to imagine demons - now they think it's 'aliens' who are causing the voices in their heads."

Carl shook his head; now it was too obvious what was happening, too painful to repress. He had to break the news slowly.

"Lazar, you're starting to scare me. What if your using the dream-recorder is breaking down your distinctions between dream and reality? What if a kind of mental crisis hit the Sirian civilization long ago... and is now happening to you? What if that's why Tmmtenaa went out of the bus - because he and his kin are so confused about dream, artifice, and reality, that they took the Disney impersonators for real beings? He thought the fake Sirian was real!"

Lazar seemed startled, but only momentarily; when he answered, he sounded shocked.

"I thought I knew why the Sirians are so artless... no ornaments, no decorations, no clothes, no decorative colors, just one single font for all letters, just blank surfaces on all their things..."

Carl had the same thought; he stared before him, clasping his hands together hard to prevent them from jerking outward.

"They are clinically insane... all of them. A whole culture of hyper-civilized, peaceful schizoids. They can't have art or stories or dreams, because to them, making a fiction is to make up reality as well. That's how you survive if your dream-life is equal to being awake... you avoid imagining things. You don't dream. Anything."

Lazar nodded slowly; it was like in one of those nightmares of his childhood, where he could see the menace coming but was unable to move out of its way. Was it really himself he heard speaking?

"And they travel around the universe... because if you can't have an imagination, reality is all you have and direct physical experience becomes the most important thing! That's why they came in person the second time, instead of sending automatic probes... that's what Oanorrn meant, about dead things being real and thinking beings not being real..."

Lazar hid his face in his hands and broke down. "Oh God... I'm going insane..."

Carl didn't know whether to hate the Sirians for having hurt Lazar, or pity them. He hugged the sobbing old Egyptian, tried to comfort him; he could feel the man's aging limbs shake with each of Lazar's panicky heartbeats. As Carl patted Lazar's shoulders, he began to see the whole picture coming together. The humanoid, friendly appearance of the Sirians really was deceptive... but in a way he hadn't imagined.

And the Sirians, he thought, can no longer imagine what it's like for us, us who take the real/imaginary distinction for granted. All the mutual misunderstandings between humans and aliens, all the strange ideas Oanorrn had been trying to convey to Edmund Soto... now Carl understood them. That is, Lazar understood them better - because mentally, Lazar was becoming one of them.

How on Earth were they going to tell the President this? What wouldn't the generals and warmongers do with such an argument: The enemy is crazy, so it's no use reasoning with them. The amphibians probably considered "land-humans" to be crazy from their point of view. This truth was way too dangerous to reveal at once. Could he himself communicate any further with the Sirians now, knowing they didn't - couldn't think alike?

One other option: succumb to the Sirian paradigm. Carl could use the recording-device like Lazar had done, record his own dreams and play them up while awake, day after day, until he had no fantasy-world any more... just "real things" - rocks, atoms, energy, animated matter that resembled life...

"No!"

Ann opened her eyes, rose from her seat, saw the weeping Lazar and Carl who was staring at nothing, sweaty and wild-eyed.

"Why did you shout? What's happened?"

Carl looked at her with a face of utter despair. "I can't say... Ann... go back to sleep. Please. Dream something nice. He's fine. I'll see to it. Sleep. Please."

Ann started a little, confused and frightened. "Is it Tmmtenaa? Is he dead?"

"No! I mean... go check how he's doing."

Ann obeyed, and left the others alone in their compartment. The British linguist was still asleep in his seat. Dream, you lucky bastard, dream, Carl thought. How do they live that way? Do they suffer? All I wanted from them was answers to all the questions that've troubled me all my life... and the answers they give... I'm not sure I want them.

Midnight.

All the cult members on the island were gathered to hear their leader talk about the assassination attempt. A videotape of the TV news had been shown to them: edited by the Church, but enough to inform what had happened and its consequences. The soldier sat next to Patty, gazing up at the stage, which was lit up by lines of flickering torches. The Regional Elder, dressed for the occasion in a black robe, held a microphone in his hand, connected to a rather inadequate loudspeaker; he compensated for it by shouting until he went hoarse.

"Woe and pain! Woe and pain! This is how the evil forces strike at our collective heart! My poor friend Tmmtenaa - I can feel his pain even now, as his wound heals!"

The bloated cult-leader raised his free hand, seemingly writhing with telepathically induced pain, and the cult crowd roared with unleashed emotion.

Suddenly, the soldier was completely awake. He thought: "Feel his pain?" What a joke! That fat clown is preening like this was a rock concert. He's not in telepathic contact with Ranmotanii. The crowd is hypnotized all the same. Now is the time to escape!

The soldier clutched his mouth and stomach, feigned an attack of nausea, and made his way through the crowd to the dark edges of the open place. No one had attempted to stop him. He halted in a dark shadow, and caught his breath. The petty cash he had managed to collect wasn't nearly enough to get him to another island. He could seek shelter at the local police station - they would probably send him to Fiji and the U.S. Consulate - and he would never be allowed near Alien Beach again. He just knew it.

The soldier stopped and listened to the voice of the ranting cult leader.

"The time is nigh to join our amphibian brethren! Ranmotani speaks to me, even now, and his message to us is: Faithful ones, do not despair! You are still welcome to join us in the new world we will create on this planet - not on the polluted evil surface, but in the blissful, undisturbed underwater world! If your faith in the Sirian gospel is strong enough, we will transform you into amphibians, and be able to breathe water like us."

The soldier thought: No, you fools! Don't listen to him! But the assembled cultists, hundreds more now than when the soldier had first joined, sounded enthusiastic enough to try out breathing water immediately. The soldier was much too aware of where this madness might lead.

Patty.

He didn't particularly like Patty, he had told himself many times, apart from a vague physical attraction. She only had eyes for the cult itself and its leader; the soldier owed her nothing. And the Sirians, the real Sirians, obviously couldn't care less. He really should be running off now, and mourn Patty's fate later...

The soldier stood still.

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