Watson, Ian - Novel 06 Read Online Free PDF

intention/consciousness) will make it work. (The journey is
imaginary?)
     
                 I (it) will judge/diagnose your best/most
suitable souls.
     
                 Let some hard (evil? unresponsive?) souls
ballast your ship, so you will travel more steadily (or slowly?). For all are
called, both sheep and goats, and all WILL BE chosen in the end.
     
                 The
‘God’s World broadcasts’ ceased after seven days, having persuaded many that a
contemporary, ecumenical God had sent messengers, or aspects of Himself, to
intervene in human history once more to save mankind, or merely to indicate
that all religions were equally true. They persuaded many more people of the
exact opposite, namely that particular forms of belief had been declared
authentic—a situation fraught with Jihad and bloodshed. Others interpreted the
messages as overt contact by alien intelligences of a superior order who had
been influencing the growth of human religions in the past. A final
interpretation, to which ‘sane’ men clung, was that here indeed was a message
from the stars—from a star in the straggling star river of Eridanus —calling
for aid and comfort, or at the very least begging for contact and support (if
in a somewhat authoritative way); and this message was transmitted in the only
way that such contact could apparently be made with human minds—by triggering
religious imagery, tapping mythical levels of the psyche (a numinous node in
the brain, almost) in geographical locations where the sense of worship was
most powerfully imprinted.
                 The
distribution of the broadcasts, with fade-out at the 44° latitude line,
appeared to rule out, among nearby candidate stars in that constellation,
Epsilon Eridani, since any broadcasts from Epsilon should have blanketed the
northern hemisphere (though what wavelength were they transmitted on?). The
second leading candidate, twice as many light years from Earth, though even
more likely in theory to possess a habitable world, was the star 82 Eridani;
and this star was only visible from those latitudes where angels and avatars
appeared.
                 What
of the promised ‘instrument of light beyond light’? (To be interpreted as
‘faster than light’?) To be found beyond the Himalayas and beyond Tibet , yet south of the 44th parallel? Satellites
angled their orbits over that terrain in the far southwestern stretches of the Gobi desert on the desolate border between Mongolia and China ; spy planes overflew, peeling away only at
the very border ...
                 And
so the interviews continued at a guarded, woodland-girt chateau outside Paris with small groups of candidates, as the
Joint Space Liaison Committee shuffled and reshuffled its cards, mixing and
remixing its cocktail.
                 The
Chinese woman, Wu, wore an orange badge. So she was not an activator of the
High Space drive. Peter wore a green badge, as did I, so we were, and so was
the tall black American woman Zoe Denby. We had already been flown into
Tyuratam (by night, seeing nothing of the Cosmodrome) and passed the ‘psych
test’. Now we four sat ‘informally’ around a circular table in a
chandelier-hung room, with Generals Patrick Sutton and Grigory Kamasarin (who,
strangely, wore a green badge too) and Chen Yi-piao, drinking coffee.
     
                 “.
. . It is a message from the stars,”
Peter argued (and here perhaps my love for him began). “But not in matrixes of
prime numbers or whatever. This is in terms of revelation, vision—in
mythological language, burrowing deep into the human psyche and borrowing from
that. So we don’t have pi, but
symbols which all rational people believed had been discarded. Yet here they
re-emerge in all their devastating pristine force, like an upsurge of repressed
material into consciousness. They were never really lost, only overlaid. The ‘psychs’
among us are