Starchild

“It’s life’s illusions I recall. I really don’t know life at all”

from the song, Both Sides Now, by Joni Mitchell

Chapter 1 An encounter on the path Monday 2nd August

Samantha Martin followed the footpath through a small wood until it emerged at a farm track. Beyond the track grew a field of barley – mostly golden but streaked with some remaining traces of green. It would soon be time for the harvest. The path then continued through the crop for another one hundred metres until it met a stile.

She stopped at that fenceline, took off her rucksack and removed a water bottle from one of its outside pockets.

As Sam drank, she glanced up the slope which ascended to her right, beyond the style. On its summit stood an interesting building, though not one that could be described as architecturally coherent. From glancing at its history on the Internet, she knew the building had been a Cistercian monastery in the twelfth century, although much of the original structure had been demolished after the dissolution. In the late sixteenth century, the land had been gifted to a relative of James IV, and it had remained in the hands of that family until the nineteen-sixties.

Periodic expansions since the sixteenth century, undertaken in styles of the times, had now given the mansion the appearance of having been designed by a committee – like the proverbial camel. Small square windows stood adjacent to arched, stained glass panels that would have looked at home in a parish church. The roofline changed, in a seemingly random fashion, from pitched to flat to castellated.

The walls were constructed from various materials and in varying styles. Her imagined design committee had clearly held very discordant views.

Sam returned her water bottle to its rucksack pocket, brushed her blonde hair from her eyes and lifted the rucksack once again onto her shoulders. Her hair was cut to a French bob, and the fact she had just parted it at the front was a reminder that it required cutting. She climbed over the stile and walked onwards along the path.

The day was hot, and temperatures of thirty-two degrees had been predicted for around this time in the early afternoon. She had carefully applied sunblock earlier because she knew that her fair skin was prone to sunburn. It was certainly not an ideal temperature for a country walk. She had, however, come to visit an old friend in Waterford for just a few days. He had business in London today, and it had therefore seemed a good opportunity to re-explore the local countryside.

It had been mid-winter when she had last visited and had attempted to walk this route. The track she had just followed through the barley had then been a bog, and it had been very difficult and unpleasant to navigate. Now was a far better time to enjoy the circular walk around the Aashirya Temple.

She glanced up the slope once more towards the main building and wondered about the monks who had occupied the mansion since the mid-nineteen-sixties.

They did not appear to be any kind of secret sect. She knew they hired-out part of the building for secular conferences, and they advertised accommodation for retreats without specifying any particular tradition. Her ignorance about their spiritual focus was simply because she had not read their website in sufficient detail.

A short distance up the slope, to her right, towered a large cedar tree. Beneath the shade of its sprawling branches had been placed a wooden bench. Samantha was fifty-five years old and very fit. She could easily have continued along the track. This was not an endurance hike, however, and she changed direction with the intention of sitting for a while on the bench and taking-in the view it afforded of the South Downs.

Her new vantage point gave a fine vista of the rolling Downs, and she could also discern the distant outline of the Isle of Wight. The comet was partly obscured by the tree’s canopy, although it could still be glimpsed as it followed the path of the sun across the sky.

P/2015 Y1, to give it its official name, had been tracked by astronomers for several years but had only become visible to the naked eye in mid-December of the previous year.

Exact calculations of its trajectory had concluded it to be a periodic comet which would have last appeared in 5 BCE. This had added further to its magic in the minds of the public because the great comet recorded by Chinese astronomers in 5 BCE had become widely accepted as the explanation for the star of Bethlehem.

The name of the discoverer, which by convention had been added to the comet name, had soon been forgotten when the popular press had christened the object “Beth”. Astronomers, including the discoverer, had entered into the spirit of the Christmas joke to the extent of officially renaming the object for Bethlehem.

Beth was certainly an inspiring sight. She was brighter than the full moon – though appearing of a similar size to Venus or Jupiter – and her colours had noticeably changed during the period in which she had been performing for the public. Red had changed to yellow, then green, and now Beth was becoming increasingly blue.

Before Beth had been visible in the sky, there had been an often quoted theory that the Bethlehem star could not have been a comet because comets were viewed in antiquity as harbingers of doom. Beth had brought this idea into question, however. Some people now reasoned that such a marvellous spectacle might easily have been viewed as a bringer of joy and good news. It was a very special thing.

Sam must have been sitting on the bench looking at the comet for about ten minutes when she suddenly became aware of someone else nearby. She sensed a familiar presence behind her, moving silently towards her.

Her new companion stopped just a metre from the back of the bench.

‘Hello, Sahadeva,’ Sam said without looking round but with a tone of surprise in her voice. She then stood and turned to face the man. He was short, of slim build, and had a round face with soft features. His face suggested an age somewhere around his mid-fifties, and his features, together with his dark skin, suggested his Indian heritage. Sahadeva had a clean-shaven head – as if he might be a monk from the temple – but he was wearing sandals, old jeans and a crumpled tee shirt which gave the impression that he might have just taken a break from gardening.

Both Sam and Sahadeva smiled and then gazed at each other in silence for many seconds. Finally, Sahadeva spoke. ‘You didn’t know I lived here. You didn’t deliberately come looking for me.’

‘There’s an old schoolfriend I sometimes visit in Waterford. I’m just out for a country walk.’

Sam walked around the end of the bench and went up to Sahadeva. They hugged.

‘This isn’t a random coincidence, is it?’ she ventured.

‘As you very well know, nothing is random coincidence.’ Sahadeva pointed towards the temple. ‘Would you like to join me for lunch while we work out what’s brought us back together?’

‘I’m certainly up for lunch.’

They both began to walk up the slope. Sam glanced sideways at Sahadeva. ‘Do you already know what this is about?’

‘I’ve got a pretty good idea.’

Chapter 2 Taking a trip

Monday 2nd August

Ben Clarke showed his identification to the armed soldier who stood at the entrance to the modern L-shaped ward block at Lakenheath Military Hospital.

‘Thank you, Sir,’ said the guard.

Ben passed through the revolving doors and was immediately hit by a cold blast from the air conditioning. He shivered. Ben had heard many people complaining about the heatwave of the past five days, but he was pleased to experience it. Although he had been born in England, his parents had come from Barbados at the time of the Windrush, and he still occasionally visited relatives in the Caribbean. England didn’t seem as cold these days as he recalled from his childhood – when his mother had constantly complained about the temperature. Nevertheless, he wished that the current outdoor temperatures occurred more frequently.

Ben was walking towards the reception desk when he noticed an attractive young woman emerge from an adjacent corridor. She was about thirty years of age, had long blonde hair and was wearing a white coat.

‘Hello, Doctor Melton,’ Ben called to her.

The woman smiled as she walked up to him. ‘Hello, Ben.’

Without speaking and with no more than a slight sideways movement of his head, Ben asked the question that had brought him to the hospital.

‘Much the same as when you were last here, I’m afraid. I’m just going to look in on him. Would you like to join me?’

‘Thanks.’

Ben followed Sue Melton along a corridor. Sun streamed in through windows on one side of the passage, illuminating a series of doors on the other. Each door had a small window set at eye level.

She stopped at one of those doors, glanced through the window, and then pressed a button on the nearby wall. The door silently slid sideways into a recess.

They both entered the room.

The side-ward was sparsely furnished with just a hospital bed, an armchair, another upright chair and a table. The walls were painted in a pale blue emulsion, and a window in one of those walls looked out upon a courtyard. The room had a small connecting bathroom.

A man of about fifty years sat in the armchair. He was wearing pyjamas and a dressing gown. A woman in a nurse’s uniform sat on an upright chair beside him.

The man remained motionless – simply staring into the space in front of him.

Sue Melton walked to the chair where the man sat and crouched down so their faces were at the same level. ‘Hello, John, it’s Doctor Melton. I’ve got Ben with me. We’ve come to see how you are.’

The man did not respond. He remained motionless, continuing to stare at nothing.

As Ben approached, he could see that John’s stare was not fixed upon an object. It was as if he was looking into the far, far distance with an expression for which Ben found it hard to find an adjective. ‘Serene’ might have fitted the bill. It was as if the Head of Rehabilitation at the Bodhiisha Rehabilitation Unit had not a care in the world. It reminded Ben of the mortician-crafted look that had been on his father’s face when Ben had visited the undertaker’s chapel of rest to pay his final respects.

‘There’s been no change,’ said the nurse. ‘I periodically talk to him or sing or tell a story, but he’s said nothing else.’

Ben looked at the nurse. ‘Nothing else other than what?’

Sue replied for her. ‘He woke in the small hours of this morning, sat up and calmly repeated four words for about twenty minutes.’

‘What were those words?’

‘Stairgate. Fourth of September.’

Ben looked thoughtful. He then made an attempt to talk to John but quickly concluded, in the light of the earlier comments by the nurse, that he would have no greater success than the professionals. Ben, after all, hardly knew John.

John managed the mental health rehabilitation and research unit at the Bodhiisha Temple in Diss. The unit had closed three months previously. Ben was a freelance psychologist and had been commissioned by the MOD to undertake a routine, retrospective review and evaluation of the project. John had been the only staff member remaining at the unit, overseeing the final arrangements for its decommissioning. Ben had arrived on the evening prior to John’s hospital admission and had talked to him for less than an hour.

Ben had not been told why the MOD had decided to close the unit, but it seemed to have been an intriguing project while it had lasted. An order of monks had been granted permission to build the Bodhiisha Temple on Ministry of Defence land near Diss in Norfolk. This had included an agreement that the monks would teach meditation techniques to military personnel experiencing post-traumatic stress disorder. A conventional residential treatment unit for those patients had been built alongside.

‘Have further medical tests revealed anything new, Doctor Melton?’ asked Ben.

‘As you know, we found elevated levels of certain markers in his blood which imply that he might have taken a hallucinogen like LSD in the period prior to his admission. Any such drug had either metabolised before he got here or was not easily detected. We can’t be certain what it was. Scans have shown no obvious damage, although an EEG this morning detected unusual brain activity.’

‘Unusual brain activity?’

‘Fontal and parietal lobe activity remain very low, but there’s been increased activity in other areas of the brain. The overall picture’s complex, but the smart EEG analysis software suggested that John’s brainwaves resemble the sort of patterns seen in experienced meditators.’

‘After effects of a bad trip?’ Ben ventured.

‘Could be.’ Sue answered. ‘Do you know if he habitually took hallucinogens?’

‘I’ve no idea, I’m afraid. I’d only just met him.’

‘We’re simply going to have to monitor this, day by day. We’ve still not been able to contact his brother, who appears to be his only relative in this country. He’s a daughter and some grandchildren in America, but, for some reason, they haven’t been in touch for years. Is there anything else you want to know, Ben?’ Sue looked at her watch. ‘I should have been off duty an hour ago, and if I don’t leave soon, I’ll miss the next bus.’

‘Where are you going?’

‘Thetford.’

‘I’m driving through there on the way back to Diss. Can I give you a lift?’

Chapter 3 The Bay of Bengal

Monday 2nd August

Wing Commander Doug Miller levelled his Lockheed Martin Lightning F-35B at fifty thousand feet. He glanced at the data from his helmet-mounted display. Number one cruise missile was still seeking an orientation lock. It would be another five minutes of flight time before the aircraft entered its launch zone.

The gaps in the cloud below him allowed Doug to clearly see the Bay of Bengal and the coastlines of Myanmar and Bangladesh. As he waited, he wondered again about the objective of this secret mission. Even he did not know the intended target of the missile that was shortly to be automatically released.

He would not have been so curious had he been flying in stealth mode over the Persian Gulf or the Red Sea. There were any number of reasons why the MOD would wish for an unattributable attack in countries within the thousand-kilometre missile range of those launch zones. Also, large explosions in places like Iran, Iraq and Syria were commonplace, and true statements about who did what, and why, were rare or non-existent. Based upon no evidence, governments accused with vitriol whoever it was politically expedient to blame for any attacks that occurred. Sometimes the alleged attacks had never happened at all or had been perpetrated by themselves. Nobody took any such sabre-rattling seriously.

The Bay of Bengal posed a very different scenario. Doug Miller knew of no military reason why the RAF would want to take the risk of hitting a target in India, Bangladesh, Myanmar, Nepal, Bhutan or China. Certainly not the latter – unless they had the explicit intention of starting World War Three.

A green light flashed on Doug’s headset display. A calm, female voice said, ‘Missile One. Launch sequence activated. Do you wish to abort?’

A green button and a red button appeared on his touch screen display. He tapped the green button. ‘Launch sequence, phase two, initiated,’ the voice confirmed.

Doug felt a slight jolt as the missile was released. He watched it as it veered away to his left. He then glanced upwards and to the right at Beth’s shining glow before turning and setting a course back to the carrier.

Chapter 4 Lunch at the Temple

Monday 2nd August

Sam and Sahadeva sat at a picnic table in front of the Aashirya Temple.

Their location afforded a wonderful view of the South Downs, and, despite the slight haze that accompanied the day’s high temperatures, some individual buildings could even be discerned in Ryde, across the Solent on the Isle of Wight.

A monk brought trays of sandwiches and drinks to the table and then departed.

‘How long have you been the Abbot here?’

‘About five years.’

‘That’s about as long as I’ve been visiting my friend in Waterford. He moved here about five years ago, and I’ve come down from Northumberland about twice a year.’

‘What do you do in Northumberland?’

‘I live and teach on Lindisfarne.’

‘Isn’t the island rather commercial these days?’

‘I don’t think so. You might imagine that all the spiritual tourism would have led to shallow New Age mysticism with its related commercialisation, but you can’t take away over a thousand years of spiritual history. I lead retreats and provide guidance to those who are seeking to look beneath the surface of day-to-day reality.’

As Sam spoke, Sahadeva looked at her more closely. He hadn’t seen Sam for twenty-six years since they had both been employed by the Ministry of Defence and been seconded to the US Stargate project in Maryland. Her appearance had changed much less than he might have expected. He knew she must be about fifty years of age, but she could easily have been many years younger. Her skin had lost the suntan it had possessed when he had last seen her in America, but that was only to be expected from living near the Scottish border.

‘You can really Adam and Eve it,’ she said, smiling at him and using cockney rhyming slang to affirm that what she had just said about Lindisfarne was true.

They both laughed.

Despite having lived in various locations worldwide, Sahadeva had retained a slight east London accent from his childhood when he had lived with her parents in Walthamstow, North London. He would have been a cockney had he been born a century earlier, but the sound of Bow Bells had long since been obscured by buildings and background noise. Nevertheless, Sam had used to tease Sahadeva about being a cockney.

Sam picked up a knife and cut a slice of cheese from the block on the table. ‘I’m so pleased to see you after all this time, but you said it wasn’t a coincidence. What do you think brought me here?’

‘When we left Fort Meade, it really looked as if they’d wound up Stargate, and it was obvious to us why, wasn’t it?’

‘Yes. The CIA report was very clear and well-considered. They found that, statistically, remote viewing had been proven to be a real phenomenon. It was just that, in any individual situation, accuracy couldn’t be guaranteed. They couldn’t base military decisions on intelligence that only had a thirty or forty percent chance of being right, and the nature of Stargate prevented the greater accuracy that could have been possible.’

‘They recognized that the state of consciousness required to view remotely, required absence of ego, but that attempts to identify enemy installations and movements with a view to gaining a military advantage was an egoic pursuit.’

‘Catch 22. If you want to view remotely for the reasons the US and UK military wanted to view remotely, then it doesn’t reliably work. It only reliably works if you have no intention of making military use of the results.’ Sam laughed. ‘I love that. I particularly loved the way the US military were attempting to outmanoeuvre Reality by trying to trick remote viewers, RVs, into believing that viewing the layouts of Russian military bases was an act of selfless love beyond the bounds of ego.’

‘They soon realised they were on a hiding to nothing with that one. I’ve occasionally wondered since why Halbeck and Rogers maintained such a determined, adversarial, military perspective. What they learned never seemed to open them to awakening. You might have thought that because Stargate’s glimpses of Underlying Reality pointed to the unity of all things, they might have shown some interest in investigating what existence really was. Instead, they just became frustrated that they couldn’t employ transcendence as a weapon to help one manifestation of the Underlying Unity blast the hell out of another manifestation of the same Underlying Unity.’

They both laughed.

‘Of course, they finally wanted to get rid of us too,’ Sam recalled. ‘I think, even after we’d explained it all to them, Halbeck and Rogers still suspected we were being difficult for ideological reasons.’

‘Once delusional thinking has taken people down the rabbit hole with Alice, it’s very hard to bring them out again.’

Sam noticed within herself the sense of deep intuition that had positively identified Sahadeva an hour earlier when he had done nothing more than walk up behind her as she had sat on the bench under the cedar tree. The coincidence of their meeting and their reminiscences of Maryland came together at a deep level of knowing. ‘So, Stargate has restarted or never ended. They’ve come up with a new approach to outwit Reality that’s less inept and possibly more dangerous than the earlier one, and I’m in just the right place at the right time to try to make sure they don’t do too much damage.’

Sahadeva smiled at her. ‘I received an anonymous letter last Thursday from someone who obviously knew about the work at Fort Meade in great detail. The letter warned that a new and more dangerous system had been developed and was ready for deployment. How would you like to join a retreat in Norfolk next week as a representative of the Aashirya Temple?’

Chapter 5 Sunrise over Kangchenjunga

Tuesday 3rd August

While he had been eating his evening meal of bread and goat meat on the previous evening, Dhyansh had heard a low rumbling sound around him, echoing from the Nepalese mountains.

He knew it was not thunder, although it might have been an earthquake. There had been earthquakes in recent times north of Chepuwa and into Tibet. These had usually been accompanied by aftershocks, although that possibility did not excessively concern him. Dhyansh always erected his yurt with an eye to where it would be safe from rockfalls – a precaution taught to him by his father, many years previously.

Last evening, there had been no aftershocks, and by the time he had retired to sleep, the earlier disturbance had faded from his memory.

Dhyansh emerged from his yurt into the early morning sunlight and began to walk towards the higher ground where his goats would be grazing. He shortly reached a minor peak that allowed an excellent view of the sun rising above Kangchenjunga. It would be another four hours before the now-familiar sight of the comet, which the Nepalese had named the Skydragon, would follow the sun into the sky – like a dog pursuing its master.

He glanced to his left, down the mountainside. He then looked at Kangchenjunga once more, and finally, with an expression of puzzlement overlaying his brown, wrinkled face, he glanced behind him at the familiar ridge which obscured his yurt.

There was no doubt about his location, and yet something was very different this morning. The monastery of Balapuspika should have been visible about ten kilometres to the north. Today, however, it was simply not there.

What appeared to be wisps of grey smoke rose into the air at the location where the monastery usually stood.