Lightpaths
Page 36
At last the paraded images of human suffering and pain and rage began to thin, the discordant clashings of instruments softened and faded before Will as the jarring sounds and scenes fell back toward their sources. The paincries of those entering and those exiting life began to quiet, the smoke to clear somewhat. Standing at the edge of the reflecting pool, he and the audience with him saw looming over the water the sources of all the floods of noise and image: a towering weapon-studded megalith glinting like ice or crystal, and a whirlpool glowing with pale pink fire at its mouth, churning like a horizontal waterfall. Myriad ghostly images of souls dying and aborning paraded endlessly between the two guardians, while beyond them stood the temple island, with Bliss bound between two pillars upon it, an airily beautiful wordless song of purest vocalization bursting from her even as parts of the island temple toppled and burned around her.
* * * * * * *
Outside Roger’s maneuvering livesuit, the Earth spun visibly, sleeping like a top, dreaming like a gyre. In its dark empty setting the blue-white planet of his birth, flecked here and there with russet continents, shone brightly as any jewel.
The most frightening feature of unreason is its failure to recognize itself, said a voice in Roger’s head, again and again, until it too began to break up, splintering oddly, so that “recognize” sounded like “re-cognize”.
Roger’s dead father appeared before him abruptly, a light-fringed apparition pointing to the world Roger was looking at.
“Looks simple, doesn’t it? But you wouldn’t believe how complex and interrelated everything is down there. Every human being, every artificial intelligence, every information processor of whatever size is a ganglion in an immense global mind. All telecommunications, all telegraphy, cable, telephony, radio, tv, trideo and holo: it’s all being plugged into the older sensory systems to create a new network, one trafficking information to and from a developing mind so vast that our lives are only its passing thoughts—a mind with such enormous capabilities we can see only the vaguest outline of its potential.”
Shivering in the perfect environment of his livesuit, Roger raised his laser dirk. Blessedly, his father’s apparition disappeared, leaving only the Earth before him. Only a memory, Roger reminded himself, only the logic of hallucination. Why he had called it up so lucidly now he could not say, but he had seen no vast mind out there then, when his father had first spoken those words, and he saw no vast mind out there now—only a place whose light was too bright for him, making his head hurt till he had to turn away.
The void itself glistened brightly now, and those damned angels—they were growing worse! But at least every time he struck at one it would disappear, and that painful brightness of their wings would leave him for a moment.
He thought he’d located the point in space from which the angels were emerging—a spot not so far away from the habitat, where the light from the stars seemed to be warping out in an arc or ring. He’d been making his way to that spot as quickly as he could but he seemed to be going nowhere—and taking forever to get there. Another angel flashed into the space before him, making his eyes hurt.
“Damn you bastards!” he cursed in his helmet. “Leave me alone! You’re extinct! Obsolete! We don’t need you any more!”
His laser blade sent a blue-white arc sparking in the void as he lashed out with it, but the angel was already gone. He found he was breathing heavily, too heavily, that his heart was pounding in his chest, his neck, his forehead. His gaze strayed toward Earth, where in low orbit he could see at least half a dozen bright points of light flashing on.
HaHa! They were coming, then—the ships of the occupation! Just a few hours more and HOME would be changed forever!
He cast about until he saw the distant gleam of the two new colonies, the shine of the asteroid tug. Those too would be changed, he thought.
His glance strayed toward the X-shaped structures glinting in the sun. Something about them had changed already: had they canted over, changed orientation from the vertical to the horizontal? As he watched they seemed to be slowly separating, like chromosomes moving from metaphase to anaphase in some enormous dividing cell.
He wondered a moment what unseen spindle poles the half-Xs might be moving toward, but he shrugged it out of his thoughts as he plunged on to do battle with his angels, the painfully bright things mocking him yet again with their chants about unreason unrecognized.
* * * * * * *
It occurred to Jhana—as much as she was still “Jhana,” as much as she was still a person and not this place—that perhaps the rules of Building The Ruins had to change. She felt the need to reduce, minimize, and if possible eliminate the titanic struggle taking place in the universe of mind around them. Working with Lakshmi and Seiji on both sides of the CHAOS/ LOGOS divide, they set about making the great change of Mind possible, shifting the game from competition to cooperation.
First the combatants they reduced in scale from galactic to merely planetary, then they altered their form as well: LOGOS they induced to play Mongoose to the CHAOS’s Cobra. Initially their conflict was vast enough: both mammal and reptile were of gigantic stature. But gradually their battling no longer shook continents, reared mountains, or dug river channels. Soon they were merely two fluidly agile forms, one furred, one scaled, both roughly life-sized. Soon they weren’t even that big any more.
She saw her own right hand reaching down and taking hold of the snake. At the touch of her hand, the shrinking reptile coiled faster and faster in her palm, swallowing after its tail with such speed that it was no longer form but rather a sort of anti-form, a not-knot of one snake and many, a blurred pit of blackness roiled to rainbow about its edge—like the mouth of a whirlpool, the eye of a hurricane, and the event horizon of a black hole all rolled into one and not into one.
A man’s darker left hand took hold of the mongoose. At the touch of the man’s hand the diminishing mammal became pure, fluid, warm-blooded light, a pillar of unflawed yet fragile fire, a beam of coherent brightness shining in the man’s palm.
In the universe of information they found themselves in, a voice (but whose?) asked,
“LOGOS, why are you?”
“I am,” the flame of order replied, “to answer the questions.”
“CHAOS, why are you?”
“We are,” the pit of possibility replied, “to question the answers.”
The hands moved steadily toward each other, the path of light and the pathlessness of the pit intercepting each other on the same plane, a mouth finding a tongue and a tongue finding a mouth, the light and the pit speaking together in a voice that grew the more harmonious as the outstretched hands drew closer and closer to each other.
“Why are you?” they asked of the voice, at once and nearly as one.
“I am,” replied the voice neither male nor female and both female and male, “to discover why I am. Endlessly. To discover why there are questions to be answered and answers to be questioned. What I am is your answer. What I am is your question. Our purpose is one.”
The right hand of the woman and the left hand of the man came together palm to palm, paler and darker forming the mutual prayer of folded hands. The light knew the source of the dark and the dark knew the source of the light, and in that instant Jhana saw the face of the man behind the hand: Michael, her Michael and himself, as she remembered him and as she’d never seen him, with so much sorrow and forgiveness and expiation shining from his eyes as she could only hope shone from her own.
At that instant light flamed out everywhere, a glimpse of supernova’s haloed star cross, perfect balance of light and dark, of darkness quartered by planes of light into perfect wedges bounded and made whole by the ring of light.
When the burst of light had faded, the universe of mind had changed fundamentally. The heavens had been floored with a floating chessboard gridwork stretching to infinity, over which floated a face that
filled the firmament, a face through which shone the stars.
Something about the enormous visage was familiar, made Jhana feel as if she should know it. Its eyes—made more prominent by the thinness of the face, the tightness of the skin on the skull—were brown and soft, something about them suggesting faraway vistas from which the seer had never completely returned, the eyes of a vision quester, a sufferer through ordeals, a mind-diver who had plummeted to the far side of madness. The hair—dark, moderately long and unkempt, receding a bit in that shape called a widow’s peak, with two feathers jutting up from a braid behind—fringed the forehead of a troubled thinker. To say that its cheekbones and eyebrows, for all their prominence, could still add no solidity to the ghostly soft lostness those eyes conferred on the entire face—making it the visage of an alcoholic young nun or priest, a gently stoned Rasputin or Joan of Arc, a shaman-sibyl who had lain too long in a land of eternal ice and winds that carved canyons in the soul—to say all that was still to say too little. Jhana felt her own soul opening, dilating, instressing toward the inscape of that face, and through that dilation she thought in other minds, other minds thought in her.
“My God,” came a thought from Seiji. “Jiro!”
* * * * * * *
A flash of light, brief but dazzlingly intense, made Roger blink. When he opened his eyes, the half Xs were much closer—and seemingly headed for the same spot in space toward which he himself was headed. He marvelled at this, but only for a moment. He was quite convinced he had now lost his mind for good and all. How else to explain the incredible speed with which the large half Xs seemed to be moving? How else to explain the fact that, even when he tried to throw his lifesuit’s maneuvering unit into reverse, it made no difference—as if some spindle fiber of gravity were towing him down to a center he could not imagine?
Yes, he must certainly be crazy, he reasoned at last. The mushroom must have seen to that.
The revelation affected him so profoundly that, even with the angels flickering right in his face, he struck at them only halfheartedly. By the time the battery of his laser-blade was empty, the great half Xs were all about him. They had all very nearly reached their common destination.
* * * * * * *
A brilliant flash seemed to fill the whole of the sphere a moment. Aleister wondered if it was part of the show—though, truth to tell, it seemed to come from everywhere at once. As he opened his eyes Aleister found himself staring toward Will at the edge of the reflecting pool and wondering about the costume armor Korchnoi was wearing. His dimly glowing Program Notes said it was the real stealth soldier article.
Wonderful, Aleister thought, looking up. Just what the well-dressed occupation forces will be wearing this season. Yet most of his fellow colonists seemed to see it only as a costume in a production half-opera, half performance art extravaganza.
Before him the temple where Bliss was manacled continued to collapse and contract. The armored Will began to stride purposelessly atop the water toward the island while the music played, Aleister becoming for a moment more aware of the lyrics than he’d been before, aware that Bliss’s song now had words after all.
Excerpted lyrics from Möbius Cadúceus song, “Sayonara, Deathship Sailor”:
To know One Future belongs
To Everyone
Or to know one
Is to love one
When it’s over
Turn me over
Keep my face
In time
Keep my face
To the fire
Sayonara, Deathship Sailor
Have a nice walk
Upon the water.
Aleister didn’t know quite what to make of that, except the walk upon the water part—that tied in to the performance, anyway. But surely it was just a glassine path of some sort that Will was walking on, wasn’t it? Something just below the surface?
As Will came closer, the icy, fearsome Scylla-mechanism lashed out at him with its arsenal of arrow and bullet, spear and missile. The burning, yearning Charybdis stopped its insuck and spewed up—once, twice, three times—iron-teethed demon cherubs that devoured everything in their path. Swatting them aside with blasts from his shockwave gauntlet, Will seemed unstoppable.
A pause in Fear and Desire’s attacks as they changed tactics. A burning figure strode out of Charybdis’ maelstrom, while simultaneously a cold crystalline figure came from out the portal in Scylla’s side. Walking upon the water, they came together and fused into one: an ahuman, robotic figure in stealth armor, twin to how Will himself looked—except that, in place of a shockwave gauntlet, his alter ego bore a sword of frozen fire.
Will’s twin charged toward him, berserker-fashion, slashing the air with his great fiery icicle. Will leveled the shockwave gauntlet at his opponent and fired, and again, and again. The blasts should have blown his other self off the path, but the soldier kept coming: slowed, staggered, arcing and sparking, but still coming on.
Will’s Other lashed out with the burning cold sword. Will dodged, but not before the weapon struck him a grazing blow upon the neck and glanced into his shoulder armor, short circuiting the whole suit. On the giant projections Aleister saw that, from Will’s neck blood, dripped into the water, dispersing in a scarlet cloud, too strong a flow for the blow to fully self-cauterize.
When Will jumped to his feet, ready to fight on, Aleister was right there with him, having for that moment at least thoroughly suspended disbelief, lost all his sophisticated detachment and aesthetic distance. But the alter ego soldier was past, charging on, aimlessly cleaving the air until finally the deranged mechanism staggered off the path and plunged into the water, still slashing, great arcing sparks leaping over its armor as it sank, drifting even as it sank, caught in the vortex of devouring Charybdis, drifting and slashing, slashing and drifting, down toward spiralling oblivion.
The glass bridge exploded in sharp tinkling music beneath Will’s feet, hurling him into turbulent water. Close-up on the big virtual projections, Aleister saw that Lev/Will, looking momentarily disoriented, struggled quickly to the surface, swimming in the direction of Scylla, for Charybdis’ pull was already tugging at him. In the projections, Will’s dead armor seemed to be slowing him down, and Aleister was relieved when he saw Lev blow the suit’s bolts and struggle free of the exoskeleton. Ahead, Aleister saw the portal in Scylla’s slick side closing slowly as Will made for it, armor exoskeleton in tow. In projection close-up, Aleister saw that Will, upon reaching the portal, yanked the cord for the armor’s mechanical self-destruct, then stuffed the armor into Scylla before swimming for the island and Bliss as fast as he could churn water.
Barefoot and drenched he stumbled onto shore, where the broken Temple on its bleak island had thrashed and contorted itself into ruins almost beyond recognition. Will rushed up the small hillock to where Bliss lay, her headdress gone, her robes torn, her disheveled hair spilt over the cracked black and white chess board pattern of the temple floor. In the projections Aleister saw that Will, finding Bliss still breathing, still alive, set about freeing her from her bonds. Behind him sounded the loud whump of an underwater explosion sending water geysering high into the air and raining down. The Scyllan rock of Fear, broken from its base by the armor’s explosive self-destruct, canted over and fell toward the open maw of Desire. Greedily the whirlpool drew the great load toward itself.
* * * * * * *
“But,” Seiji stammered through Jhana’s mind, “but you’re dead!”
“Dead?” Jiro seemed genuinely puzzled at the thought. “There is no death—only a change of worlds, as Chief Seathl once said.”
“But they burned your body to ashes—to nothing!”
“Ah, the body,” Jiro said, nodding thoughtfully. “Another machine, you know. Each of us is a god in a machine, when you think about it.”
Seiji could make no sense from such cryptic comments, how
ever confidently they might be delivered.
“I can’t believe this. Jiro never spoke with such assurance. VAJRA has sampled my memories and this is just something it’s put together.”
Laughter rolled through the universe.
“My dear brother, VAJRA is a wonderful tool, but that’s all it is: a tool. It reaches many of the same ends as human thought, but by different means. It ‘sees far but notices little, remembers everything but learns nothing, neither errs egregiously nor rises above its normal strength, yet sometimes produces insights that are overlooked by even top grandmasters’—which was also said of the first computer to defeat the world’s last human chess champion, by the way. In joining with VAJRA, I’ve benefited from an insight I’d overlooked, a key point in the game.”
“What game?” Seiji asked in exasperation.
“The only game worth playing, once you realize that building the ruins ruins the building. Think about it, Seiji. Human beings make a living by making a killing—eating, devouring, desiring. And for what, if that can end only in death? Even our civilizations: what we built yesterday or are building today will fall to ruins tomorrow, cities blossoming and wilting like flowers, nations spreading and dying like fungus on an old log. There’s a deeper game, a more serious game that needs playing. The game in which troubled gods play chess against the unbeatable machinery of themselves.”
“The game Jiro lost, you mean. Which is why you can’t be him.”
Jhana almost imagined she heard a machine sigh. That, at least, was easier to imagine than the fabric of the universe sighing.
“Proof, hm? Known by the scars. Very well. It’s true no formerly living individual ever returns to life as exactly the same individual, but I can still give you proof from my memory, things experienced from my point of view.”