The others had risen from the stream with her and, moving forward, they drove the cloudy tide back before them, the beautiful new world establishing itself around and behind them, scene after scene as they pressed on.
The regions they were helping the LOGOS recover now seemed better somehow—more beautiful because less sterile, less rigidly perfect than those regions of the LOGOS that had never been touched by the CHAOS. Whether from taint of contact with the CHAOS, or from touch of human consciousness, or from whatever cause, the element of randomness and unpredictability had been introduced into all the recreated regions so that they were now more truly beautiful than all those undisturbed realms of perfect order. No, they had not put “dirt” into virtual reality: it was more like “soil”, or even “soul”.
The restoration was not an easy task. The flux they pressed forward against was no sooner driven back in one region than it flooded in at another. At times the CHAOS seemed to howl in gibbering triumph, but overall the forces of the LOGOS were turning back the invading tide. Jhana was certain that, through their teamwork, the dim flood of CHAOS’s insurgency was being driven back completely, to the borders of the CHAOS itself. They were winning!
Perhaps everything should have stopped there. It didn’t. Somewhere something happened: a test was failed, a border was accidentally crossed. Perhaps the LOGOS forces pressed their advantage too far, moved too readily against the opponent, crossed some Yalu River of the Mind. Whatever the cause, the CHAOS felt its own existence threatened and struck back with Sphinx-like ferocity, exploiting weak links in the LOGOS front and bursting through with all its might—until cataclysm threatened to overwhelm all.
Jhana felt a sudden and immediate sense of vertigo, as if she were falling from deep space into planetary atmosphere at an immense velocity and very much the wrong angle of re-entry. All at once she was burning, breaking up, blossoming in petalshards of fire and blowing away, like a disintegrating falling star, like a rose of Hiroshima.
The Möbius Cadúceus skysign flashed before them.
“Game over,” the voice of the MACHINE said quietly.
Back in Lakshmi’s workshop, Jhana looked about her at a room full of dreamers waking from strange dreams, Atsuko and Seiji and Marissa looking just about as disoriented as Jhana felt.
“Every game is different—and the same,” Lakshmi said. She and Lev seemed more familiar with the game’s parameters and, consequently, much less disoriented—especially Lakshmi. “Innumerable scenarios, but underlying them all is the same pattern.”
“Yeah,” said Lev. “The damn thing’s teaching us how to lose—and we’re learning.”
“Vajra has been marketing receivers and hookups both here and on Earth through network and multi-level sales structures,” Lakshmi continued, ignoring Lev’s comment. “Billions of hours of game-time have been logged already. Building the Ruins has very quickly become the world’s master game—in less than a month’s time.”
“But is it just a game?” Jhana asked. “All those billions of human hours, all those scenarios logging back in to Vajra, all that information—what is it being used for? Maybe the game is more serious than we think.”
Marissa nodded. Apparently she’d been thinking the same thing.
“Certainly there’s more to it than some trivial trideo game,” Marissa seconded. “It’s an ancient pattern that’s being played through again and again here, especially the idea that the perfection of the LOGOS can be amplified from its ‘having known imperfection’. That goes all the way back to Genesis, to the idea of the ‘fortunate fall’—that Adam and Eve’s primal sin was ultimately good because it made necessary the incarnation of Christ. With the loss of perfection, change and history came into the world.”
“What our experience in the game demonstrates, though,” Lakshmi put in, “is that by their changes things aren’t completely changed from their first perfection. Through apparent change everything in the game dilates its being until at last it becomes truly itself again, works its own re-perfection, moves from perfection to new perfection, cognition to re-cognition.”
“The end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time, as Eliot says,” Marissa suggested.
“So even CHAOS is just a more subtle form of order, eh?” Lev Korchnoi asked Marissa skeptically.
“Yes,” she said with a nod. “Discord is merely harmony not understood, and partial evil must be subsumed within universal good.”
“That’s putting a nice rhyming spin on it, and maybe that’s how it will work out in the end,” Korchnoi said with a shrug, “but right now what’s going on in the game seems to be a reflection of what’s really going on in the world. Or a parody of it. A parodic reflection—a fun-house mirror. Think of our era’s fascination with acronyms, and the way the game parodies that—”
“Maybe the game is simply implying the world that produced it,” Atsuko speculated. “Self-similarity across scales—less like a fun-house mirror than like a section of a fractal or a small piece of a hologram.”
“Okay,” Lev said, “but what kind of world is it a ‘self-similar’ chunk of? Lately Vajra—and whatever ‘distributed consciousness’ is ghosting it—has been taking in unprecedented amounts of seemingly random information. Maybe the global brain has gone insane, is seeking suicide to end its pain. Maybe the goal is to save it, but maybe not. I wish I could be as sure of the outcome as Marissa is, but I’m not. All I know is that the MACHINE always wins, no matter which side we’re on. We always get blown out of the system at last.”
Lakshmi called up food and drink, and thin supple robotic arms began to move.
“When I’m playing that game it feels like I’m in the midst of some sort of psychomachia,” she said, pausing, as if unsure of what she was aboutto say, “though whose soul or what soul is being contested I can’t say.”
“I felt it too,” Atsuko said. “Almost as if it were the struggle for the soul of the proverbial ‘new machine’. Or maybe a struggle for the World Soul, the Mind At Large.”
Seiji had been unusually quiet since they came out of the game, intent upon examining the iconic assemblage, but Jhana noticed that he had glanced over when Lakshmi and Atsuko spoke of struggles for souls. Still, as the evening wore on and all of them drifted amidst conversation and zero gravity and robotic arms and icons and fellowship, Seiji volunteered nothing of his game-playing experience. Lev and Lakshmi went into no further detail about what relation his brother’s personal effects might have to what was going on, though at one point Lakshmi suggested that the icon ensemble seemed shamanic to her somehow—almost like a fetish or an image of an animal spirit-guide. Seiji very much agreed with that interpretation.
Gradually their meeting evolved into an informal dinner party, Lev regaling them with stripped-down guitar-only versions of the many new numbers Möbius Cadúceus would be performing at the Temple Guardians event.
“I’m surprised you were able to get away from rehearsal,” Marissa said to Lev at one point during the evening, “with that performance so near.”
“Oh, the band has a tradition,” Lev said, tuning his guitar during a pause. “We always take a break from each other a night or two before the show—to avoid getting too slick or over-rehearsed. Got to keep at least a little spontaneity in it, after all.” He struck a chord tentatively. “Speaking of the spontaneous, sorry we’re not much closer to understanding the skysign’s power to evoke images or whatever in you, Jhana and Seiji, or in Roger, but I assure you that our group will retire the logo immediately after the performance of Guardians.”
“If it wants to be retired,” Lakshmi said. By way of comment, Lev merely began to play his guitar and sing again.
So the party continued for a long while, until all at last said their farewells and everyone save Lakshmi departed by transfer ship for the habitat’s central sphere. Jhana noticed that Seiji
still seeming pressed upon by his private thoughts, and perhaps she was beginning to understand why.
Chapter Eleven
Passage embedded in RAT code:
For most of history human beings supported themselves on what they could take from the Earth. They never had to support it, never had to give back much. In the habitat the residents have to stay constantly mindful of what must and must not be done, or the world they’ve built could all come crashing down in an instant. The children who are raised in the habitat, even more so the children who are born there—they grow up with interdependence as part of their day-to-day life.
The residents’ recognition of interdependence is really only the first step. Ultimately, the citizens of the habitat are trying to correct an error that is at least as old as Plato. That error is the idea that the universe is really a duoverse, the world of dung we inhabit, temporal and material, and the world of diamond, eternal and immaterial, that is the habitation of the divine. Despite occasional excesses and sometimes sophomoric ideas, the residents of the habitat are striving to realize something of the unity of the universe: to be no more the hostages of the world as it appears to be—divided—but free, thinking subjects at one with the world as it truly is. They hope to efface whatever wall of flaming swords it is that keeps human beings out of paradise and paradise out of human beings. Diamond is dung and dung is diamond—all holy, to those who have the eyes to see it.
Roger’s troubles with angels had been growing steadily, leaking out of his dreams and into his daylight existence—enough to make him want to find out more about the contents of his nightly visitations, some rational explanation for them. He went personally to the Archives, for its data links gave Roger access not only to all the Archive holdings but also to virtually all Earth’s public and electronically-archived material as well.
Searching through the infosphere, he was surprised how much information he found on what might be called ancient human powered flight. He popped up holographic illustrations of the flying cherub wagon of Ezekiel, the flights or flight attempts of Daedalus and Icarus, of Pegasus, of Fama. Into his virtuality came the report (in Suetonius) of an actor who feathered his arms and tried to fly at a feast given by Nero—only to plunge to his death in the attempt.
Scanning further, he also came across the record of a reportedly successful flight by one Abu’l Kasim ’Abbas ibn Firnas, a Saracen of Andalusia whose flight supposedly took place in A.D. 876. Ibn Firnas, though, had apparently not communicated his flying secrets to his co-religionists: in A.D. 1008 the attempt at human-powered flight by one al-Djawhari ended in his death.
Then Roger found it. According to the chronicler William of Malmesbury, Eilmer, also a Brother of the Abbey at Malmesbury in England, “collecting the breeze on the summit of the tower, flew for more than the distance of a furlong. But, agitated by the violence of the wind and swirling of the air, as well as by the awareness of his own rashness, he fell, broke his legs, and was lame ever after. He used to say that the cause of his failure was his forgetting to put a tail on the back part.”
Roger ran a find-scan, but William of Malmesbury had nothing else to say of Eilmer, save for one cryptic reference relating to April, 1066: “A comet, a star foretelling, they say, change in kingdoms, appeared trailing its long and fiery tail across the sky. Wherefore a certain elderly monk of our monastery, Eilmer by name, bowed down with terror at the sight of the brilliant star and sagely cried, ‘Thou art come! A cause of grief to many a mother art thou come; I have seen thee before, but now I behold thee much more terrible, threatening to hurl destruction upon this land!’”
That was it—the full extent of historical reference to Eilmer of Malmesbury, proto-aviator, prescient predictor of the invasion of England by William the bastard duke of Normandy, later called “the Conqueror”. Fast-scanning through the following millennium’s worth of references, Roger noted that they were all more or less elaborate re-tellings of William of Malmesbury’s initial tale.
Roger found other references to the proto-history of human-powered flight—to DaVinci and Michelangelo and a thousand others who tried their wings before the successful gliders of the nineteenth century, before the Wrights’ initial machine-powered flight at Kitty Hawk. Most of the studies Roger examined eventually wound their ways to the advent of Paul MacReady’s Gossamer series, the vehicles with which the era of human-powered flight might be said to truly have begun—though the great blossoming of such flight had to await the appearance of the space colony with its juxtaposition of atmosphere and low gravity.
No matter what research tactic he tried, though, he could find no full-length movie, no trideo, no holomentary on Eilmer of Malmesbury—only fragmented artist’s renderings, brief re-enactments. Where was the source for the movie that ran in his dreams—in which the aged Eilmer was recruited by political forces in England to perfect his gliders, and they used those very mechanisms to help defeat William the Bastard’s forces at Hastings? No place. It was crazy, a film sent from an alternate universe by an angelic conspiracy—a movie from another reality which he seemed always already to have seen, the memory of a matinee experienced in a theatre in another dimension.
He hoped there might still exist an old movie or video in this reality, some obscure culture-shard that somehow all his computer searches were missing. But he hesitated, wondered. From his dream-movie, Roger felt he knew things he shouldn’t know, things not recorded in any historical source. The exact year of Eilmer’s flight, for instance: A.D. 1010. The exact construction of his flying apparatus: wings of thin, lightly waxed linen stretched over frames of light wooden splints and hollowed bone, four of them, two long wings (one for each arm, and each of these over two ells in length) and two short wings (one for each foot, and each of these an ell in length). Each and every wing surface was one ell broad as well, the long primary wings being secured to each other by a harness of strong light wood and thin iron, the two shorter secondary or foot wings secured by a smaller harness of similar design.
Where had he learned all that? How the hell did he know what an “ell” was? How did he know that William of Malmesbury was wrong about Eilmer’s rashness—that in fact Eilmer had gained the approval of Abbot Leofric for the building and testing of his apparatus, once he, Eilmer, had explained his visions of angels and flight to the abbot? How did he know that Eilmer’s essential mistake was that he had followed Aristotle’s incorrect dictum that “In winged creatures, the tail serves, like the ship’s rudder, to keep the flying thing in its course”?
Roger didn’t recall ever having read that passage in Aristotle—so how did he know that quote? How did he know that Eilmer had treated movement through the air according to the same principles as those that apply to movement through water? How did he know that, unaware of the faulty analogy between horizontal bird’s tail and vertical ship’s rudder (as well as being thoroughly ignorant of the role of the tail as “flap” and “pitch control”), Eilmer had deemed a tail unnecessary for straight-line flight? How was he supposed to know all this? Was he channeling the long-dead monk? Was he the monk’s reincarnation? Was he linking into some aspect of the collective unconscious the old psychoanalysts had never suspected? All that stuff was at least as crazy as some trans-dimensional angelic conspiracy.
Even worse was the vividness of some of the material he recalled, especially the dreams-within-dreams of angels lecturing him/Eilmer on aerodynamics. He had dreamed within his dream that he was standing in a vast windswept field while, high above him, an angel soared and hovered, flapping its wings not at all. Nearer the ground, every kind of large soaring bird—hundreds of them—glided and drifted upon the winds.
“See the handiwork of Almighty God in the shape of my wings!” trumpeted the angel. “See it in the shape of the wings of all God’s flying creatures! This it is that allows us to fly!”
Then the winds and air itself suddenly seemed made of myriad tiny angels, moving along pat
hs and currents like minnows in a stream. The great angel flew nearer to him and he/Eilmer saw more clearly what was taking place. Moving against the currents of tiny angels, the shape of the great angel’s wings was such that the tiny angels flowing over the top of the wing moved faster and farther apart, while the angels flowing beneath the wing tended to bunch up and crowd. In his dream within a dream, he/Eilmer concluded that the respective pressure of angels along the top and bottom surfaces of the wing was the means by which an upward force was maintained.
No mean feat of aerodynamic reasoning, for the Middle Ages, Roger thought. With a thousand years of hindsight, though, he could see that it was not only Aristotle but also the shape of the angel itself that had led him—Eilmer—to assume a flying man would need no tail.
Roger also knew (without knowing how he knew) that while Eilmer fever-dreamed in pain and infection after his disastrous laming flight, the angel had appeared to him again, carrying him up above a floor of clouds into a sky filled with peoples of every nation riding in what seemed to Eilmer fantastic vessels of the air, flying mechanisms powered by small windmills or roaring barrels mounted on the wings or bodies of their vessels. The shadows these vessels cast upon the cloudfloor were like those that would be cast by thousands of crosses sailing in the sky. In such apparently blessed craft, men and women and children moved on errands of business and pleasure toward places their forefathers had not even dreamt of. A setting sun tinted silver and gold the wings of these myriad craft and even in dreams within dreams he—Roger? Eilmer?—seemed to swoon in awe before the scene.
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