Queen of Angels

by Greg Bear

  This does not mean that the “subconscious” has been completely charted. Much remains a mystery, particularly those structures that Jung referred to as “archetypes.” I have seen their effects, their results, but I have never seen an archetype itself and I cannot say to which category of organon I would consign it if I could find it.

  —Martin Burke, The Country of the Mind (2043-2044)

  52

  LitVid 21/1 A Net (AXIS Direct Report with Visuals, David Shine): “We are receiving these remarkable visuals from AXIS at nineteen hundred hours PST. The resolution is poor because these are real-time images, relayed with AXIS’s usual data flow across four light years. Doubtless AXIS will provide higher resolution squeeze burst images later…

  “This is the ocean AXIS has dubbed Meso, for middle. It is a large body of fresh water—there are no salt oceans on B-2—very nearly girdling the planet. As you recall, B-2 has a single great polar ocean, the only blue sea, and this other beltlike sea and a few scattered lakes. All the tower formations are within a few hundred kilometers of these seas which are filled with an amorphous organic soup. So far no large life forms have been discovered on B-2 and therein lies the mystery—earthbound scientists have been given no clues to explain how the towers might have been formed. But as you can see…These pictures, assembled from dozens of mobile explorers scattered around the Meso ocean, show a virtual tide of organic material rising from the water, moving across the littoral that is coastal region, and then breaking up into these remarkable, one can only call them rollers or sideways tentacles, moving at a rapid pace much as a sidewinder does on Earth across the sand and gravel.

  “There is great excitement at AXIS Control on Lunar farside, in Australia and in California, where the AXIS simulation is overseen by Roger Atkins. We have no direct interviews available at this moment; everybody is very busy. But we do have transcriptions of AXIS’s commentary and these are available on your Lit text band…”

  AXIS (Band 4)> This migration of organic material began three hours ago. I have delayed transmission to allow all my mobile explorers and nickel children to move into ideal positions. Three explorers have in fact come too close and been bowled over by organic material; one may be completely out of action. The other two report they will recover. Roger, this is a remarkable phenomenon but not completely unexpected. I have been analyzing the possible internal structures of the rings of towers and have concluded that periodic deposition is a probable explanation. I could only assume that any living thing or things responsible for such structures would come out of the oceans. Now we see the beginning of a possible phase of gathering and deposition. There is no way of knowing whether or not new formations will be constructed.

  The towers vary in individual width. Some towers have almost joined together, forming solid circles; many of these seem to have fallen into decay, as if abandoned. It seems there may be a connection between the decayed circles and the completion of a ring, that is, when all towers have fused together to form a squat cylinder.

  The motile forms of the organic material rising from Meso are fascinating. My explorers and children have seen worms moving like terrestrial annelids, other forms moving like snakes, and large flat mats or masses of material crawling on what may be newly grown cilia or thousands of tiny feet. The entire region surrounding the Meso ocean to a distance of three kilometers is covered with millions of lumps, extrusions and motile forms. My orbiter reports that the paths of these migrating bodies point in ninety percent of cases toward a ring of circular towers.

  If this is in fact a suitable explanation for the towers, I have certainly erred in suggesting they might have been created by intelligent beings. What my different extensions witness here is primordial, betraying no more culture or intelligence than the crawling of a terrestrial slime mold.

  David Shine: “This is a truly remarkable development, and so sudden that it has taken all our experts by surprise. The general impression is that all of AXIS’s designers and programmers are busy reassessing AXIS’s mission in light of the possibility that the towers are completely natural not artificial…”

  !Roger Atkins> Jill. I have a squeeze burst band two self diagnostic of AXIS separated from the realtime flow. Why did AXIS send this to us? It’s not scheduled.

  !JILL> I am analyzing. Analysis complete. AXIS is reevaluating the character of its mission in light of new information.

  !Roger Atkins> Do I have any reason to be concerned?

  !JILL> AXIS Simulation is now conducting such a reevaluation. There are several responses that seem to be anomalous in primary AXIS.

  I am investigating these anomalies.———

  Roger, these anomalies are within expected variation of model versus primary. They may be the result of the only circumstance we cannot model in AXIS Simulation as it is currently designed; AXIS Simulation is aware that it is not in AXIS primary’s exact circumstance.

  !Roger Atkins> What does that mean, Jill?

  !JILL> It is here, and not out there.

  !Roger Atkins> Well, for Christ’s sake, that’s obvious.

  !JILL> Very obvious. But perhaps significant. AXIS primary is experiencing some disturbance while it reevaluates its mission. AXIS Simulation does not replicate these disturbances.

  !Roger Atkins> Jill, I think it’s time I sent a few tracers and confirmation routines through AXIS Simulation. I did not know that AXIS Simulation realized there was a difference.

  !JILL> I apologize for not reporting this eventuality earlier.

  !Roger Atkins> No apologies necessary. I’ve been slipping up, obviously.

  Imagine somebody else being allowed to lucidly dream within you; to be awake yet explore your dreams. That’s part of what the Country of the Mind experience is like; but of course, our personal memories of dreams are confused. It is even possible for two or more agents to dream separate dreams at the same time—further adding to the confusion. When a dream intersects the Country at all, it does so like an arrow shot through a layer-cake, picking up impressions from as many as a dozen levels of territory. When I go into your Country I can see each territory clearly and study it for what it is, not for what your personal dream-interpreter wants it to be.

  —Martin Burke, The Country of the Mind (2043-2044)

  53

  Martin examined Goldsmith critically.

  Goldsmith’s couch rhythmically massaged his back, legs and arms; his head and neck were cushioned on a gently undulating pillow.

  Carol hummed as she marked off their procedures on her slate. They were alone in the theater with the sleeping man, surrounded by the busy quiet of electronic equipment and the subdued murmur of air from the theater blowers. The rest of the team was resting or eating dinner.

  “How are the connections?” Carol asked, walking around the cot to join him. Martin bent to look at a spot on Goldsmith’s neck two inches below the corner of the jawbone. A few bristles of beard then a smooth shaved circle; within the circle a fine pattern of silvery lines. The nano within Goldsmith had created direct circuitry running from the brain to the skin’s surface at the neck; a connector would link this circuit to similar circuits from their own brains, through the mediating computer, which would clean up and interpret the flow of information from Goldsmith, Neuman and Burke. No buffer. That still concerned Martin.

  “They look very good,” Martin said. “I think we’ve done about as much fussing as we should. Time for our own dose.”

  Carol called in the team. David and Karl would help them prepare; then Margery and Erwin would prepare David and Karl for their role as backups. When the full investigation was on there would be five people lying on couches in the theater, apparently asleep.

  Carol and Martin retired to their couches. Nano was fed into their arms and necks, as with Goldsmith. Margery turned on the inducers that would lull them into sleep; they would stay asleep for several hours while the nanomachines found their loci, grew the appropriate circuitry and emerged on their own necks; then they wo
uld be brought to a state of neutral awareness, suspended above bodily sensations but wide awake and capable of opening and moving their eyes. For the first level of investigation, they would also be capable of talking out loud.

  Martin thought about his boyhood bedroom. The robots he had made, big and small; his grandfather buying him books, bound paper items becoming rare even then. His first infatuation with a young girl who called herself Trix.

  There was no sensation as the nano took up its stations within his body.

  Dull comfortable lassitude. Opened his eyes just once to look into the gallery. Saw Albigoni there chin on folded arms resting on the window railing. What would he do.

  What are we going to do.

  Margery woke Martin up at twenty-two hundred. His senses seemed particularly sharp but he did not try to move. He could smell the sharp cheesy odor of nano; he had ignored it before. He felt a pang of hunger though he had eaten well. They would not be eating for many more hours. “Everything’s fine, Dr. Burke,” Margery said. “We’re going to hook up your cable now.”

  “Good.”

  Karl and David slung the thin lightweight optical cables across the room and around the barrier that blocked their view of Goldsmith. Karl locked the cables into guides mounted on the couches. “Be still,” Karl said lightly, bending close to Martin’s neck. Martin felt the connector cold and soft against his skin. David and Margery examined the readout on the cable monitor, decided the connection was optimum and moved to Carol’s side.

  Just minutes, Up Country again. Anabasis. A one way at first and then a loop, Burke and Neuman within Goldsmith like hikers preparing to trek a new land. Not even Goldsmith had seen this part of himself. Nobody directly experienced this part of himself.

  “You should be getting a visual neural pattern from Goldsmith in a few seconds,” Margery said from the other side of the barrier.

  “Carol,” Martin said.

  “Yes? Hi there.”

  “I’m glad you’re with me.”

  “I know. I’m glad to be here.”

  “Enough chatter please,” David said pleasantly. “What do you see, Carol, Martin?”

  Martin closed his eyes. On the edge of his vision fluttered a somber brightness limned by electric green. The electric green blossomed into an infinite regression of twirling fractals, inner-mind geometries familiar to all brain researchers: visual interference patterns from occipital lobe signal smear.

  Martin had first seen such patterns as a child, pressing his eyelids with knuckles at night, causing pressure on the optic nerve.

  These were his own patterns, not Goldsmith’s.

  “Nothing but visual smear,” Carol said.

  “Ditto,” Martin concurred.

  “We’re still searching and tuning,” Margery said. “I’ve got a level one signal here. I’m feeding it through now.”

  Martin saw a vivid mandala of wildly twisting snakes, tails at the periphery noses in the center, eyes yellow bodies pearl-gray, each scale feverishly sharp. “Snakes.”

  “Snakes,” Carol said simultaneously.

  “Looks like a limbic ID signal,” Martin said. “It must be Goldsmith’s. We’re close.”

  “Tuning,” Margery said. “Separating out a new frequency. How’s this?”

  Clouds. An endless cycle of clouds and rain again in a mandala, storms racing in a circle around a twisting wheel of lightning. The lightning threatened to turn into snakes. Martin exulted; they were on track, observing the layers of limbic signs, symbols exchanged between the brain’s autonomic systems and higher personal systems. “Clouds and lightning, lightning trying to go back to the snakes layer again.”

  “Ditto,” Carol said.

  “Another frequency,” Margery said. “I’ve got a strong one now. How’s this?”

  A cubic room with dirty brick walls, dank, water dripping, water on the floor, water crawling up the walls like something alive. In the middle of the water a tiny yellow skinned or perhaps golden skinned child bald but for a topknot sat on a sunny desert island playing cards.

  “Jesus,” Carol said. “This certainly looks personal to me.

  The child looked up and smiled. Its face was suddenly painted over with a chimpanzee in full grimace, gray bearded, snout protruding, brown animal eyes infinitely calm. This was a deep symbol but definitely personal and definitely Goldsmith.

  “We seem to be in a closed room. Let’s see if it opens.”

  From their perspective near the dripping brick ceiling, the water on the floor changed color. It became a gray, storm covered ocean, a red wine colored lake, a mud puddle sprinkled with rain. Still the desert island remained, and the child, repeating its endless cycle of glance upward, chimpanzee face, back to playing cards. This was a special case of the Country; an assigned symbol to some intermediate personal layer taking on characteristics abstracted not from genetic heritage but from Goldsmith’s own early infant experiences.

  What the room and child and chimpanzee face were symbolic of did not matter here; possibly such deep layers could never truly be mapped with a one to one meaning correspondence.

  Martin had encountered such deep layer personal myth idioms many times before, always enigmatic, often profoundly beautiful. They were probably determined by archetypal problem solving early in childhood; they might be cast off closed loop artifacts of individuation, a process usually completed by the age of three or four. Whatever, they were fascinating but not precisely what he and Carol were looking for.

  “Looks like a myth idiom,” Martin said. “A closed loop. Try another.”

  “No doors out,” Carol said.

  “Another stronger frequency,” Margery said. “I’m switching to another locus, another channel in a deeper cluster.”

  An opening out. Sensation of immensity. Here was something undoubtedly acquired after personality formation, perhaps even from adolescent experience. An impression of three infinite highways running side by side through sunwashed desert. Barren sand drifts. Martin concentrated on exploring this image, taking what was being sent to him and controlling what he could focus on a point at a time. This caused a dizzying adjustment of the image and he found himself standing on the middle highway. He had no sensation of weight or even of presence; the sun was brilliant with that somber brightness characteristic of the Country, but it did not warm him.

  Martin looked down at himself. He wore faded denim jeans, paint stained white workshirt, childhood running shoes. He had worn this outfit before in Country.

  “We’re setting up crosslink subverbal now,” Margery said. Her voice sounded distant and hollow. “Let us know when you want out.”

  From now on Martin and Carol would not talk out loud until the test was completed.

  |Carol?

  An impression of something huge above him, like a descending asteroid. Another personality: Carol.

  |Here with you.

  She appeared beside him on the road, fuzzy, a mere ghost at this stage. Only with a complete loop established would they see each other clearly, and even then what they saw would not necessarily match each other’s self image.

  |This looks convincing enough, Martin said. I think we can use this as a channel for entry.

  |Welcome home, Carol said.

  Martin opened his eyes. The images of highway and theater clashed for a moment and then the Country faded like a wisp of dream. Albigoni stood in the gallery above the theater, hands in pockets. Lascal sat behind his employer; his feet were visible on the railing.

  “All right,” Martin said. “Tune to this locus and channel. Might as well lull us into a good sound sleep while you’re fixing the points and finishing the tune.”

  Margery leaned over him. She squinted and looked at the connector display. “Everything’s fine,” she said. Erwin stood beside Carol’s couch.

  “How long until we go in?” Carol asked.

  “Three hours to get the frequencies fixed and logged,” Margery said. “It’s eleven thirty five now.”
<
br />   “It’s going to be a long night,” Martin said. “Wake us up at nine hundred. You’ll have plenty of time to get David and Karl prepped as backups. All of you get a good night’s sleep. We want people fresh and alert.”

  He turned his eyes to the gallery again. Albigoni had moved his hands to his hips. “Cive Mr. Albigoni a briefing. Tell him we’ll probably be finished by noon tomorrow.”

  “Will do,” Margery said.

  “See you in my dreams,” Carol said lightly.

  Margery adjusted the inducer. Martin closed his eyes.

  1100-11100-11111111111

  54

  Thinking back, never in his entire life could Richard Fettle remember being so miserable. Not after the death of his wife and daughter not during the long years of recovery and putting his life back together. The war within caused a pain greater than he had felt at any of those times. This depth of anguish perplexed him.

  If he simply killed the woman lying next to him and entered into the next phase of his life, all might be resolved. It was an actual effort to keep his arms by his side. Surely she would feel his inward struggle if only through the faint vibration of the bed as he shifted back and forth, muscles in conflict against each other. But she slept soundly.