Ian Watson - Alien Embassy

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If all knowledge were within a man, and ignorance

were wholly absent, that man would be consumed

and cease to be. So ignorance is desirable, inasmuch

as by that means he continues to exist...

Jalaluddin Rumi Discourses

PROLOGUE

'Come in, Rajit,' the Teacher called; and the boy in the turban followed the echo

of his knuckles into the room.

(This must have been how it happened;)

On one of the white plaster walls an emerald lizard poised, - the membrane of its

throat trembling convulsively. The table bore crockery, school exercise books, a

bronze statuette of a Tibetan god copulating with a highly gymnastic partner, and

a large box. A louvre window intersected the rows of palms and the flowering

tree outside, producing a chequerboard effect One of the two cane chairs was

occupied by the African Teacher, the other by a Chinese whose olive green tunic

and customary holster (which may or may not have contained a pistol) showed

him to be a Dobdob, one of the police wing of the Space Communications

Administration, Bardo, which also handled all the world's internal affairs.

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Ian Watson - Alien Embassy

'I hear you'd like to be a lama when you're older, Rajit?'

The boy nodded firmly.

'More than anything!'

'Why's that?' A pucker of amusement creased the face of the Chinese.

To see India one day-' the boy blurted out.

The Chinese cut him off angrily.

'Do you feel confined, here in Africa? Here, is the same as everywhere else - part

of human society. If you're a lama, what do you think you'll be preaching about?

Tourism?' He made the last word sound obscene, which it was. 'What sort of

people travel the world nowadays?'

'Some sailors do.'

'Oh yes - carrying essential supplies! That's just because everywhere isn't self-

sufficient. Even the biggest of the sail-barges only need a few husband and wife

teams to crew them-'

'A computer trims the sails, I know.'

'The barge is their world, not the ports they call at,'

Rajit flushed.

'But you travel, sir. There's nothing wrong with travel if you're really

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Ian Watson - Alien Embassy

contributing something.'

'You're forthright, at least! Bardo officials travel, right enough - to co-ordinate

the world and see that everyone is fed and cared for and correctly educated.

Perhaps to find candidates for starflight, if we're lucky-'

'I only want to visit places ... to contribute. Like you, sir. Only slowly, as a lama.'

'Quite! The trick of being a lama is just that. To move gently from place to place,

to teach the people social ecology. To repeat the good news of how the human

body-field can be used to contact our star friends, without squeezing the world

dry to build rocket-ships and other paraphernalia. The lama proves by his own

example that there's no need for people to waste energy that way. He doesn't

wander from town to town because he's been, allotted some sort of magic carpet,

but because he's the perfect compass needle to point the true way. That way

always points right here - wherever he is, in a little village like your Bagamoyo

or a big far-off city like Bombay.'

'I agree, sir.'

'But you'd still like to see Bombay? Well, honesty's a fine thing, Rajit, At the

same time, the really honest man also knows when to tell a lie. He knows when

it's more true to tell a lie. Sometimes we have to tell little lies and play games,

don't we? He who doesn't know how to do this is a fool. No one would want him

for a lama.'

The Chinese smiled.

'You'll be a lama if you study hard - and learn to tell a lie convincingly, for the

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Ian Watson - Alien Embassy

sake of pointing the way. In fact, you can even start right now, I have a little

service to ask of you confidentially.'

'I won't tell a soul, whatever it is,' Rajit promised fervently.

A stray mosquito had blown into the room along with Rajit. It flew about now,

trailing legs like loose threads, whining ever so faintly but persistently. The

lizard made a rush across the plaster and froze above the Dobdob's head, a green

flame.

'You see that box on the table? Inside there's a coco-de-mer. Yes, a real one. It's

quite heavy. Take it down to the shore. Secretly. I want you to dump that coco as

though it had been washed up by the tide - but nowhere too conspicuous. Then

get of the box. Smash it up. Now, there's a girl in this village Nailed Lila.'

'Yes, we're good friends.'

'So I've been told. I want you to make sure she finds that coco. By herself,

though; on her own - that's essential. I'll leave it up to your own ingenuity to

arrange. Point her the right way without her realizing it; and keep the other

children out of the way. After she finds it-'

Rajit listened carefully to every word.

Outside, a dog barked in the hot dust, and the blue jacaranda bloomed.

ONE

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When I was just eleven years old and my breasts were freshly budding I found a

coco-de-mer washed ashore. It was tangled up in damp seaweed, though

strangely it was quite dry itself. Cocos are huge, double coconuts. Because they

resemble a woman's parted thighs and vulva, they've always been powerful ritual

objects. The ocean had brought this one all the way from the Seychelles Islands,

for me! Forgetting my sandals in the excitement of being singled out by fate (for

I firmly believed I was destined for Bardo even then, though it was to be six

years before the Dobdobs came to confirm it) I ran barefoot through the

Bagamoyo streets, staggering under its weight, to show the prodigy to my

friends. The Bardo Building - the former mosque - contained an ebony carving

of a coco-de-mer, which we children had to dust and polish; but we'd never seen

a real one. They're only found in the Seychelles. The southern equatorial current

generally bears them all the other way: to India and Sri Lanka, where they've

been treasured for centuries.

Yussuf, Rajit, cousin Rose and Timothy crowded round.

The black, polished double shell stood as high as my kneecap on the dusty road.

The central cleft where the shell divided was smooth and milky white. Symbol

of human love and joy - and more than that, the gateway to the stars.

Our own thin, lanky, domestic coconut palms spiked the blue sky everywhere.

Their clusters of nuts were only a fraction of the size of my coco: little skullfuls

of milk. Tattered parasols of leaves drooped from the tops of their knobbly,

banded trunks, providing the only shade for our village, apart from a few

corrugated awnings along the shops, and an arcade outside the dispensary where

patients could squat and gossip.

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Dun, humpbacked cattle with tight, ribbed hides grazed right down on to the

beach under the shade of these palms, nibbling seaweed at the high tide line, ,

(Mer means sea in French,' Rajit said knowingly. (All those facts crammed into

his turban along with reams of oily black hair.)

They never spoke French in India,' Yussuf protested. 'People always performed a

ceremonial when they found a new coco!' Rajit said. 'We must do the same. Out

at the tombs. That's the proper place!'

'She ought to take it straight home,' mumbled Timothy the albino. He was scared

of the old ruined Arab graveyard. Scared of spooks, since he looked like one

himself. His skin was mottled pink and ivory, and his flesh had a poachy texture

like thick sour milk. He was a sickly boy. We all know that he'd probably die in

his early twenties, since albinos only live a little while. Rajit took an unkind

advantage of his appearance in our games. Timothy was the perfect ghost.

However, we were children, we didn't care, and Timothy still followed us round

sheepishly, grateful not to be excluded. Tears sprang to his eyes as he begged us

not to go to the tombs, and we told ourselves that it was just the sunlight hurting

them.

Cousin Rose and I were both black and glossy as polished ebony. We wore our

hair plaited in tight corn rows. Our mothers, spent hours unwinding and retying

them every weekend - a whole morning of fidget and chatter, during which we

heard (for example) how Bibi Mwezi had poured boiling water over the

contracapsule in her arm in her anxiety to conceive a child, and how she put up

with the worsening pain for weeks till Mboya, the Barefoot Doctor, was hard put

to it to save her whole arm from amputation. Or we heard the tale of how the

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baobab tree gets its strange shape - for a baobab looks as though it's growing

upside down, with its crown buried in the soil and its roots poking in the air.

That tree is somebody whose head got stuck in the 'Divine Ground' by

experimenting with Tantra, the yoga of love, without proper knowledge or

safeguards. This was a cautionary tale put about by the lamas, and I mention it

mainly to illustrate how we behaved with Timothy - because a huge baobab

loomed over the Arab tombs and one day the tale suggested a game to Rajit. He

uprooted a large stone to make a hole in the ground, and forced Timothy to stand

on his hands, with his head hidden down the hole, while we stood round

laughing at this white baobab tree with legs wagging in the air. Other times, we

collected the fallen baobab pods, smooth as the heads of babies, with the lightest

down of hair, to crack than open for their sweet sherbet.

The graveyard sang with heat and insects. It was just after noon. For centuries

now the old pillar tombs bad been rotting back into their natural state of coral,

Pockmarks gnawed the blocks and columns; their plaster mouldings had nearly

all fallen off. Most of the lime and gypsum mortar had washed loose during the

past four hundred and fifty years, although there were still a few geometric

friezes and even an unbroken blue and white Chinese bowl inset high up at the

top of one pillar just underneath the turban-like knob. It bore the Chinese

character for 'long life' (according to Rajit). All other inset plates and bowls had

long since fallen out or been stolen.

I carried my coco-de-mer up to the base of one tomb and propped it against the

carved coral.

'Whose tomb is it, Yussuf?'

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Yussuf, who could read Arabic, squinted up at the remains of the squiggly dotted

script.

'It says, that this is the tomb of the Muslims ...He is as Sultan Shonvi la-Haji...

He died in the year something after the Flight of the Prophet, He must have been

a salt trader Sultan Shonvi, The salt boss. That's what it means.'

I tried to visualize the bearded Arab in his flowing robes and jewels. The slaves,

the sacks of salt on their backs. Whipcracks. Laden dhows in the now silted-up

creek. Before the Europeans came to this part of Africa. Then went home again.

Before Americans brought sacks of grey dust from the seas of the Moon, and

bags of red sand from the Martian deserts, at incredible cost. And abandoned the

whole enterprise. Before the human race discovered the true way to the stars

through the sexual union of Man and Woman.

We were all so young then. Even Rajit, with the first soft bristles on his chin,

was merely cruelly innocent when he made us carry out the masquerade that

afternoon among the graves. He insisted that Timothy and I should act out the

copulation of Black Kali and White Shiva. Kali the Destroyer stands for the

ravages of time, Shiva for the eternal spirit of creativity. Thus, though Shiva is

slain, a white corpse, he still has an erection, even in death, Kali rides upon his

body, her four arms brandishing weapons, her red tongue sticking out in scorn.

She's supposed to do so in a graveyard, by night.

After dark the graveyard was always full of great scuttling crabs marching up

from the sea, and the baobab tree glowed ghostly in the starlight. Sighs of wind

through its branches sounded like lost souls to take possession of you.

However, the sun was shining down on us right then, from overhead. Ants were

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tunnelling through the bones of the long-dead Salt Boss, turning them into flutes

and trumpets; and the hum and buzz of insects round about us sounded like

music played on them, filtering up above the ground.

'You'll have to take your clothes off, both of you,' ordered Rajit. 'Timothy must

lie down with his eyes wide open. He's dead. He's the white corpse of Shiva. He

has to be virile, of course.'

'How can he be?' wondered cousin Rose. There's nothing to excite you when

you're dead.'

'But Timothy isn't really dead, he's only pretend-dead! Anyway, it has to be this

way because Kali on top of Shiva means that you're leaving your physical body

behind - by means of the sexuality of the body. Right, Lila? It's just a symbol for

Bardo flight. So Timothy has to be virile just by thinking about it. He isn't to

touch himself, because he's dead. He can't move, see?'

'Tim will get awfully sunburnt. You know that his mother won't let him take his

Clothes off to swim, in case his skin peels,' said Yussuf.

'That's the salt water, not the sun!' '

The only occasion when I'd seen Tim naked, he had looked like a great fat

maggot, his flesh as spongy as white bread, with pink blotches as big as saucers.

I loathed the prospect of touching his naked body with my own; no doubt Rajit

was aware of this - and it added to his sadistic glee. Both Rajit and Yussuf had

proved their newly-acquired virility recently, standing in the surf, squeezing

their own white seed into the foam. But could Timothy produce anything? To be

sure, he had a contracapsule implanted in his arm, just as they did, but the

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Barefoot Doctor might only have given him one as a kindness, to save him, from

the scorn of his peers. So, despite my repugnance, I was curious.;

As we stood arguing a giant green mantis sprang on to a knob of the Salt Boss's

tomb and glared at us - ten centimeters long with saw teeth on its open arms

ready to snap shut like an animal trap; with globe eyes and very little brain

behind them. A Female; and she was pregnant. Her swollen egg-case slumped

beneath her angel's wings. A green Kali had come to watch over our little

ceremony. Her arrival settled the matter.

Timothy stripped off awkwardly and laid his blotchy body down by the tomb. It

was a beached gasping fish's body. We all felt at once guilty, fascinated, excited.

'Open your eyes,' said Rajit. 'Dead Shiva's eyes must stare,'

'But what at?' Tears welled in Timothy's eyes.

'At Kali, obviously. Now take your things off, Lila. Don't squat on him till he's

virile, though. He has to do it by thought power.'

'I can't!' said Timothy.

I slipped off my Java-print frock and handed it to Rose.

'Let's use the coco to help him!' giggled Rajit, 'Concentrate on the magic coco,

Tim!'

Rajit picked up the heavy coco and deposited it on Timothy's thighs, while I

straddled them, pinning him down. Then Rajit pressed my hands down on the

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IanWatson-AlienEmbassyï»¿Ifallknowledgewerewithinaman,andignorancewerewhollyabsent,thatmanwouldbeconsumedandceasetobe.Soignoranceisdesirable,inasmuchasbythatmeanshecontinuestoexist...JalaluddinRumiDiscoursesPROLOGUE'Comein,Rajit,'theTeachercalled;andtheboyintheturbanfollowed\theechoofhisknucklesinto...

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