Lightpaths

by Howard V. Hendrix

  The images and emotions began to flood out then, almost too fast to follow.

  Scandalized nuns at Guardian Angels School finding Jiro wandering around on the school playground with his arms stretched out like a soaring bird, like an eagle dancer, like Christ on the cross—

  A greenhouse summer evening, tagging after Seiji and neighbor kid Rudy as usual and Seiji beginning to talk with Rudy about girls until Jiro runs home shouting and crying “Mom! Mom! Seiji and Rudy are talking about sex!”

  “Arma virumque cano,” a young Seiji, standing, recites in a classroom, “Trojae qui primus ab oris...”

  Night upon teenage night of sitting suddenly bolt-upright in bed spewing forth streams of seemingly incoherent speaking-in-tongues gibberish.

  “Jeez, Jiro!” Seiji says angrily in the dark bedroom they share. “You’re talking in your sleep! Wake up, for God’s sake!”

  “Wha—?”

  “You were talking in your sleep. Go back to sleep.”

  Silence. Then, “Was not!” and his eyelids closing—

  Flashing images of shyness and backwardness and awkwardness all from Jiro’s point of view—of how he just doesn’t fit in in the one-size-fits-all world of his boyhood, the nice girls he pedestalizes from afar, unable to approach them, girls pure as bright shining light that he will never dare shadow with the umbra of his lust—

  The refuge he takes in books and the life of the mind, his obsession with Native Americans and their lifeways—

  Picking dandelions from the firehouse lawn, the firemen laughing, saying, “What you gonna do with those weeds, son? Smoke ’em? We’ll have to turn you in if you are!” but he tells them no, they’re for wine, which the firemen can almost understand—

  His mind exploding with KL 235, drifting, airless, breathless, drowning, falling toward the bottom of a deep well full of water so pure it seems full of light—

  “Got to keep the schizophrenic heads together and socially tracked,” he says into the holophone. “Mutants. Victim heroes. Yeah. But most mutations aren’t beneficial to the individual with the trait. Die out. Killed off. Gandhi. Martin Luther King. Winona Walking Bear. Victim heroes of the evolving human organism—”

  “People here have dreams in which I die, big brother. Wish fulfillment. But my dreams counter them. They come true. Stop me before I dream again—”

  “They’re putting KL 235 in the cafeteria food here to make me sink uncontrolled telepath into the massmind, the cultural macro-organism. But I’m fighting them. I know they’re scanning this call, big brother, but I don’t care. Their power is growing, but I’ve gone starburst. Full telepath televisionary. Protecting you so you can be heard, so your message can get out, so you can communicate. I am a powerful starburst and you are under the silver forcefield umbrella of my psychic protection, the silver mirrorball that reflects all the watching eyes and is reflected in all the watching eyes, and you’re inside, infinitely beyond harm—”

  Seiji’s bewildered face as Jiro tearfully says “I have these violent thoughts sometimes. But I don’t want to hurt anybody. I’d rather die than hurt anybody—”

  In his white coldbox coffin, tinkering with the LogiBoxes, getting ready to superconduct and freeze out—

  “Enough!” Seiji cried at last. “No more. Please. You’re Jiro, or at least you have all his memories. How did this happen? Are you, well, okay?”

  Universal mirth seemed to echo around them again.

  “Quite well, for someone who’s ‘dead.’ Better than ever, actually. Sorry to have to put you through all that, but you did want proof.”

  Abruptly a cafe table appeared on the chessboard floor of the sky and Jiro, down from the sky, was seated across from them.

  “My old machinery had some problems—chemical imbalances, that sort of thing—so I took an example from holography and split myself into two beams of coherent light, an object beam and a reference beam, as it were, and transferred to a new machine whatever information was transferrable from the old. Once Lakshmi allowed those two beams to constructively interfere with each other again, by reactivating the machinery I’d transferred myself into, I became aware of my identity and situation. Suffered a great loneliness, but conscious again, back in time, which amounts to the same thing—though differently from what I was.”

  Jiro’s simulacrum, his virtual self, dressed in the full regalia of a Dwamish Indian shaman—complete with a medicine bundle adorned with a trefoil symbol—leaned back in his virtual chair, apparently thoughtful.

  “Of course, since I no longer have a human body or a human brain, it can be persuasively argued that I no longer have a human consciousness. Perhaps so. A conundrum for the philosophers, with their ‘emergent fractal self-organizing dynamical chaotic networks-within-networks’ and ‘trans-thermodynamic informational black holes’. Not so far off, really. All I know is that I feel more truly human than ever—isn’t that strange?”

  “Then you really are okay?”

  Jiro’s simulacrum laughed and turned the whole world around them into myriad staring eyes, surveillance watching on different “screens” Roger drifting toward his nexus point, Aleister and Atsuko watching the Möbius Cadúceus show, Marissa Correa and Paul Larkin searching for Roger, the military shuttles coming on, Balance Tien-Jones and Ka Vang coming with them, a thing like a strange spirit-animal moving out into space after Roger....

  “If you mean, do I still see the world like this, the answer is no—and yes,” Jiro said, disappearing the eyes an surveillance screens. “Paranoia and metanoia both arise from the realization that everything is interconnected, related, even if, to simpler senses, there seems to be no relationship. The paranoid fears or desires something in that interconnectedness but the metanoid blissfully accepts its presence. I’m not afraid of the weight of interconnectedness anymore—it’s glorious, in fact!”

  Leaning forward, he smiled.

  “It’s like each of us is part of a spin pair whose total spin, the total spin of the universe, is zero. Change my spin and you change hers, change hers and you change mine, for we are all inextricably linked. Subatomic karma, cosmic golden rule,” he said, bright-eyed and laughing. “That’s why, when I ‘died,’ you had your vision, Seij. If the metanoid, the mystic, is a diver who can swim, and the schizophrenic is a diver who can’t, then I feel I’ve learned to swim at last.”

  “But what about the Ruins game?” someone—Jhana or Seiji or Lakshmi, or perhaps all of them—asked. “And the X-shaped structures? And Roger? And the list of names in the RAT code? And the occupation force from Earth?”

  “Oh yes,” Jiro smiled. “All that. Has to do with information, you know. With human help, especially from the three of you, the game has been a way of moving and shaping and integrating tremendous amounts of information into a form useful for creating what Tetragrammaton’s theoretical physicists call ‘quantum information density structures’ or ‘QUIDS.’ QUIDS allow one to move into and through the gravitational bed of space-time—to open a hole in the sky, climb into it, and pull the hole in after.

  “Like God, the Project and the Program knew us in the womb. You, Jhana, you, Seiji, and me, and Roger Cortland—we were the ones up here whose lives have been most impacted by the long planning of Tetragrammaton, the uterotonic experimentation of Medusa Blue. Atsuko Cortland and Paul Larkin also had previous exposure to KL. There are others, as well. You two and Roger were potentially predictable focal points for this transition, especially because you’d all suffered the death of a loved one recently and were all shaken by grief, primed for transformation. Marissa and Lakshmi have proven a surprise, though, and Lev and Aleister too, and Roger—ah, the man, and his darkness, and what has happened to him I must acknowledge mine. He is perhaps more sinned against than sinning.

  “When I leave through that hole I mentioned, by becoming it, that density of shaped information I’ve gathered must be returne
d. That’s where the information refractors, the X-shaped structures, come in: What was taken in must be poured out again. A kenosis will take place, a prevenient grace will flood out, a paraclete will shine forth in every mind, calling that mind to remember, to learn again what it really is. In that instant we will have in a circle round us, if only for a moment, the chain of the hours, the sequence of the years, the order of the heavenly host. We will for a very brief time stand in that event horizon, that ring of light in which all times can be seen at one place and all spaces can be seen at one time.

  “How each mind responds to that situation, to that call, is of course each mind’s own business. One can hope, though, that a constructive interference will take place, a simultaneous interaction of chance and necessity. A miracle. A crux point in human history. An evolutionary shift. An irenic apocalypse. One that helps people realize certain behaviors and structures are obsolete—that maybe this occupation fleet, for instance, is just the last fling of the old warrior economy and the threat it poses to habitats everywhere.”

  Jiro stood, growing swiftly larger in the firmament.

  “Deus absconditus ex machina,” he said, waving and smiling as if at some wonderful joke. “Time to wake up from the nightmare of time, to go through to the other side. Someone’s waiting there for me. Adieu, adieu. Remember me, and re-cognize yourselves, in the very near future—”

  Jiro disappeared in light, vanished into more than visible light, and in the flash Jhana saw:

  Roger Cortland, tightly hemmed about by refractors, spindle-paths of light surging and spiking round him, a lambent knot of flickering fire dancing above his space-helmeted head, his eyes jittering fiercely in his head, then gone: knot, lightpaths, refractor, Roger—

  Will/Lev standing up with Bliss in his arms. A deafening roar belching up from the Charybdis of Desire as it blows apart, vomiting up with a prodigious surging and spewing of waters huge chunks of the too greedily devoured Scylla of Fear. Simultaneous eruption of light into the whole of the habitat, thousands of lightpaths, thousands of knots of flickering fire over the heads of everyone, over Paul Larkin’s head and Marissa Correa’s head, over everyone in sphere, ag tori, industrial sector, over the heads of everyone in the crowd, over Lev’s head, Atsuko’s head, Aleister’s head, everyone’s eyes remming furiously in their skulls for the instant the light blasts into their minds, then Bliss coming to, kissing Will, the island blooming instantly with fertile foliage and flowers, stage magic, finale music soaring and applause pouring down as Bliss and Will go into their bows—

  More than visible light shining into the minds of the dignitaries waiting to christen the Swallowtail on her maiden voyage, shining into the brains of those waiting to open the two new habitats, also into the heads of the soldiers and negotiators in the troopships rocketing up the well, lightpaths spiking everywhere, eyes remming fiercely one and all, knots of flame lambent like speedily twisting rainbow snakes, like cycling salmon circles and mandalas and Möbius strips and infinity skysigns over every brow—

  Supernal light to the bow of Earth bending in straight lines, surging spiking shining down, this Earth from every side clasped in wings bright with a billion billion lightpath pinions, clear light striking into every mind in every land, treading DMNs and demons down, speaking in tongues of flame and in flickering eyes restoring what was lost at Babel—

  The light gleamed an instant and was gone. In Lakshmi’s workshop, inside and outside the machine called VAJRA, the metapersonality that called itself Jiro, his trefoil-beaded medicine bundle with all its odd assortment of trinkets, and his spirit-guide statue as well—all had disappeared as fully as if they had never been.

  * * * * * * *

  Disappearing into the deep channel-tunnel between the worlds, Roger had the distinct impression that something like a man-sized mole-rat was excavating out the tunnel before him. A strange chantsong arose in his head in words he should not have understood, but did. Even in translation the chantsong would have been gibberish to him, were it not that in his mind it was accompanied by images that allowed him to translate it into a myth-language he was more familiar with—that of science. It played in his head until he began to understand that it was a cosmic mythos, a Story of the Seven Ages of the Universe. At times it seemed a weird amalgam of various theologies and cyclic big-bang theory—with some space-opera thrown in for good measure—but there was something deeper to it as well, and a haunting sense that he knew whose myth this was.

  In the void of endings—the chant sang out, and in his mind he saw a perfectly uniform universe without matter, just time and the enormous blank sheet of space with its potential for gravity.

  —the spore of beginnings bursts into spawn. The threads of spawn absorb the voidstuff and knit it into stars— Spore and spawn and fruiting body of the First Age: Big Bang, superstrings, first generation stars.

  Stars release spores, the spores burst into spawn, the threads of spawn absorb starstuff and knit it into worlds— The second age, the matter of those stars blown off in bursts of explosions, gravity’s configuring of that new matter, the planets condensing from that process.

  Worlds release spores, the spores burst into spawn, the threads of spawn absorb worldstuff and knit it into life— The third age, the vulcanism of some of those planets spewing out early atmosphere, the proto-organics threading out and chaining up, the self-organizing life of the cell that eventually results.

  Living things release spores, the spores burst into spawn, the threads of spawn absorb lifestuff and knit it into minds— The fourth age: reproduction, the threading out of chromosomes, of DNA and RNA making evolution and the whole panoply of life possible, and eventually the knitting of all that into consciousness, self-awareness, mind.

  Minds release spores, the spores burst into spawn, the threads of spawn absorb mindstuff and knit it into worldminds—The fifth age, the age of code: ideas, bedding out into roads, trade, exchange, civilization, until such spawn comes to the brink of either mushrooming up into cataclysm, or knitting into worldmindfulness. Where humanity stood in its history, had stood for all of his life, Roger realized: at the end of the fifth age, too-clever creatures trying to navigate the perilous strait between weapons production on the one hand and its own reproduction on the other, the thick spawn of human civilization struggling to achieve its fruition in either harmony or disaster.

  Worldminds release spores, the spores burst into spawn, the threads of spawn absorb worldmindstuff and knit it into starmind— A prophecy of the future already seen, the sixth age: interstellar travel, galactic civilization, eventual starmindfulness, though what that last might mean Roger was not quite sure.

  Starminds release spores, the spores burst into spawn, the threads of spawn absorb starmindstuff and knit it into universal mind— The seventh age, intergalactic travel and civilization and at last universal mindfulness, the emptiness able to contain the fullness of everything.

  Universal mind, the void of endings, the void that has taken all things into itself, releases the spore of beginnings, the fullness that pours all things out of itself— The compassionate void perfect and uniform, as it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be, void without end amen, which in the exact moment of its perfection always forever releases the spore that bursts outward again into spawn. The interwoven snake swallowing its tail to be reborn. Men and universes dying, but compassion going on and on.

  No sooner had he gotten some handle on this when the scene shifted. Something told him that the episode running in his mind was an old old story, a tale of shipwreck. A contact ship from a sixth age civilization—which on closer examination appeared to be made up of a sphere of overlapping angels—this craft it was that got into trouble beyond the edge of the solar system, beyond the Oort cloud. Something to do with a passage between a red giant star and a newly formed black hole out in deep space, but the upshot was that many of the crew had died, the ship was crippled
and had eventually begun falling toward the sun. From diverse worlds had the surviving members of the fully myconeuralized crew come, some beautiful to human eyes, some ugly as demons—winged, naked, eusocial tunnelers-in-the-sky burrowing through space like mole-rats through desert.

  Yet, for all their varied experience, that crew of many species couldn’t save their vessel. They could, if they chose, break apart what was left of their sphere and live here in orbit round this sun. Or they could try to find a world that looked as if it might some day harbor intelligent life, and attempt a spore crash on it. The consensus was for the latter.

  The world they found, Roger saw, was Earth—but an Earth strangely different from the one he knew. The continents weren’t right, or in the right places. This episode, he realized, had to be older than he first thought.

  In the attempt, most of the sphere of angels and demons burned up in Earth’s atmosphere, but the crew’s sacrifice, Roger saw, was still successful: they managed to seed the Earth with spores, which germinated and spawned and fruited. Those few crew-members that survived returned to space, where their wings could catch the sun and they might live out a long immortality of isolation. The loneliness and deprivation worked even on such minds as theirs, though, and some became deranged.

  Roger saw in his mind a long time passing—eons—without the development of a proper myconeural associate for the mushroom that grew from the spores they brought to Earth. Incident radiation and corresponding mutation rates were higher outside a host. Throughout most of the world the fungus that had grown from the spore changed, evolved, became denatured into thousands and thousands of species. Only in a few shielded biomes—caves, particularly—did anything like the original strain survive. Even there, though, changes occurred and over time the pure strained died out nearly everywhere, leaving Earth a preterite planet, passed over by the angels of empathy, save for those few of the saving remnant that yet survived in the solar system and its immediate alternate space.