Standing Wave

by Howard V. Hendrix

  Maybe the “P” or the “S” or the “I” stood for other leaders among the retrohippy crones and ecogroovy geezers here. Some of these tribe-heads he’d already met formally. He’d seen some of them in the showers and hot tubs. Old men gone gray all over. Not silver-backed alpha males but flaccid ash-backs still living their acid flashbacks. In their old age, they had apparently turned into White Light New Age Veggie Karma Nazis. Preaching “light-livelihood” and “minimal impact economy” they’d taught all these lost children here that walking around in hempen robes and rope sandals was a life worth living.

  The only thing he could imagine that might be worse than these Forestiereans would be living among the Erlandsonian “Tree Circus” freaks. The thought of being cooped up inside their “myco-engineered botanic architecture”—burl-bubble living tree houses—sent a shiver through him.

  As he continued through the rabbit-warren maze of the psiXtian “mandalic community,” Dundas passed one sun chimney after another belling up toward the surface. Dappled light and Venturi-spun breezes fluttered in the corridor. Directly beneath the sun shafts, right where the scanty rain and moisture entered from above, stood large planters from which citrus and other trees had grown, straight trunks stretching up to the surface. Seeing how artfully their leaves and branches were pruned up there, above ground, “Dundas” recalled how inordinately proud the psiXtians were of the fact that all their many fruit trees looked like mere bushes on the surface, and no ladders were ever needed to harvest the fruit.

  The temperature on the surface must have been halfway to the boiling point of water, but the shaft-lit, rough-hewn corridor underground was remarkably pleasant. His spirits began to rise of themselves—until he passed one of the psiXtian schoolspaces where a man who looked to be in his mid twenties was speaking to a small class of teenagers.

  “The Luddites fought not the machine itself,” he said, “but the exploitive and oppressive relationships intrinsic to the industrial capitalism expanding throughout England at that time. The Luddites resisted the factory owners’ attempts to turn people into tools, into implements. They rejected the idea that human beings were to function as meat-machines according to the pleasures of government or corporation.”

  Dundas gritted his teeth but—Know Thy Enemy!—listened to the history lesson. Every word confirmed his suspicions of the watermelon nature of the psiXtians’ “green libertarian socialist” political beliefs—green on the outside, red on the inside. A girl in the class asked about the relationship between nineteenth century Luddism and twentieth-century environmentalism.

  “As Luddism was an early prole critique of industrial capitalism,” said the instructor, “so environmentalism was an early boozh critique of informational capitalism. Neither machine-breaking nor monkey-wrenching was a substitute for a fully-developed opposition to human automatization, but they were important first steps. In between, the trade union movement—”

  Dundas moved on. He had heard enough. Those old crazy ideas definitely survived here. Perhaps some of the remnants of the secret projects once undertaken by the old government did too, however. That was his hope and suspicion. Ever since that strange Light episode, the numbers of the psiXtians had been swelling with new initiates of all creeds and colors, recent joiners from outside. If the “Starbursts”—the shield telepaths developed under the old regime —were likely to show up anywhere, it was here.

  He would be waiting. Not to kill them this time, if he could avoid it. Rather to capture them and take them back home, so they might fulfill their purpose in the Lord’s plan. Perhaps they might even play a part in the ACSA’s own recently reawakened Operation E 5-24. There had been rumors of a “control pheromone” coming out of the orbital complex before that Light thing happened. If the rumors had any truth to them, a Starburst might prove more valuable than ever....

  Dundas reached the showers and turned one “full blast”—actually an insubstantial flow from a showerhead water-conserving in the extreme. No sooner had he started to cleanse away the dirt when, from the sauna not far away, came a sound like a muezzin calling the faithful to prayers this noontime.

  Good God! Dundas thought, suddenly furious and very tempted to drown out the unchristian noise of this new initiate with a bellowed version of “A Mighty Fortress Is Our God.” No—that would of course draw too much attention to himself and possibly to his mission. Besides, he didn’t want to descend to their level. He didn’t sing hymns in a public shower. He knew the appropriate places to pray. Did these people have no sense of decorum at all?

  The man calling himself Dundas decided he would just have to smile in grim multiculti ecumenical tolerance for now, but his day would come. Go right ahead, he thought. Keep on singing those sand-nigger blues you call prayers. God will answer—but not in the way you expect.

  As he left the shower and toweled down, Raymond Dundas smiled, despite the annoying noise from the gentleman in the sauna.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Fragmentary “response” to Light, one of many encrypted examples found in SubTerPost underground virtual mail materials linked to infosphere killings:

  Nonviolence only succeeds when backed by the threat of overwhelming violence—Gandhi and his Indians outnumbered the British by something like 10,000 to one. Political powers do not give up their piece of the pie willingly. The victim is as much a perpetrator of violence as the aggressor.

  * * * *

  “I know what I saw,” Brandi said levelly. “Those were people down there.”

  “None of the broadcast records show that, Ms. Easter,” Dwayne Hashimoto said firmly. “Maybe it wasn’t so much that you ‘know what you saw’, but that you saw what you know—or want to believe.”

  Brandi glanced at her husband Juan, sitting beside her, back now from his unannounced trip up to the main orbital habitat—for parts and exchange, he’d claimed. Whatever. She was glad to have him back for moral support, at least. When Hashimoto had shown up at their airlock in person, she knew something big was up. Something about the man said he was earning the gray in his hair today.

  “What do you mean, ‘saw what I know’?” Brandi asked, obscurely offended.

  “Well,” Hashimoto said, clearing his throat, “there’s a long tradition of inhabited flying islands, flying cities, cities in the clouds, that sort of thing. So common that some of our psych people are saying it’s an archetype, something inherent in the preconscious mind. Look where you live, too.”

  “What’s that got to do with it?” Juan asked, compulsively running his hand through his thick, dark hair—behavior which Brandi recognized as a sign that he too was getting annoyed.

  “You’re near the orbital habitat, for one,” Hashimoto continued. “That’s a sort of floating world. And this place here is too. Funded by that old eccentric, Nils Barakian. Do you know why this is the Freeman Lowell Orbital Biodiversity Unit?”

  Brandi didn’t really know the answer to that. She glanced at Juan, who was staring down into the table at which they were seated.

  “Freeman Lowell is a character in Silent Running,” Juan said, quietly, “an old film Mr. Barakian remembers fondly from his childhood.”

  “Exactly!” Hashimoto said. “I scanned it on the way here. Freeman Lowell is a mythical character. In this old movie—made in 1971, for God’s sake—he and his fellow crewmembers are in space, maintaining forests-under-domes. The national parks have been dissolved and the last of Earth’s, or at least America’s, forests have been exiled into space. Something like that. Forests under domes in space—sound familiar?”

  “Sounds prescient,” Brandi said.

  “Sounds nutty for that time it was made, you mean,” Hashimoto said, smirking. “In the film, Lowell and his crew, because of budget cutbacks, are supposed to nuclear self-destruct the domed forests and return home. Rest of the crew is fine with that—just following orders. So Lowell kills them to preserve his beloved Last Forest. Later he jettisons the last forest off into deep space with miraculo
us lights and a cute little robot groundskeeper to tend all its needs. Then he suicides by self-destructing his own ship. It’s crazy. Lowell was a fictional proto-ecoterrorist! Barakian’s got you living inside some fantasy image from his childhood!”

  Hashimoto subsided, shaking his head vigorously.

  “It’s not crazy if it works,” Juan said. “Whatever else you want to say, this place works. We’ve got technology the filmmakers could have barely imagined sixty-some years ago. I’ve seen Silent Running. It may be simplistic, but fundamentally it’s right. Biodiversity must be preserved and this is one way of doing it.”

  “Yeah? Well, it’s still all giving me a headache,” Hashimoto said, rubbing his eyes. He glanced at Brandi. “I mean, the media got leaked a copy of your broadcast somehow—with your ‘people’ statement on it. The spin they’re giving it is that ASGuard is trumping up the threat of alien invasion to increase its funding! To make things worse, of all our people it had to be you who did that wonderfully reckless and courageous close flyby. And your last name would have to be Easter.”

  “So what?” Brandi asked, puzzled.

  “So that brings up your mother Cyndi, and her career, and all that Medusa Blue stuff, that’s what.”

  “Wait a minute, Mr. Hashimoto,” Brandi said, stopping him with an upraised hand. “I never knew my mother, or my father, if I had one. I wasn’t so much born as decanted. I was raised by the Kitchener Foundation. This ‘Blue Medusa’ or whatever it is—that’s all news to me.”

  Hashimoto shook his head in disbelief.

  “I know you’re young,” he said, “but can you really be that naive? Do yourself a favor: look up whatever you can find on Project Medusa Blue and then forget I ever told you about it. And please: for my sake and the sake of ASGuard, don’t give any interviews to anyone, until we get this all straightened out. Promise me that, okay?”

  Brandi glanced at Juan, who shrugged then nodded slightly.

  “I give you my word,” she said finally. “I won’t tell my story—but that doesn’t change the reality. I saw people on that rock as it was descending toward Earth.”

  Hashimoto threw up his hands slightly, but also smiled sardonically. He got up from the table and prepared to go.

  “Fine. I have done. I do want to tell you, though, Ms. Easter—that was quite a feat of ‘surfing you pulled off.”

  “Thank you.”

  “Don’t do it again.”

  “I hope there’ll be no cause to.”

  “I couldn’t agree more,” Hashimoto said, gathering his gear, glancing around at the sylvan surroundings. “Crazy as this all is, still, it’s a nice place you’ve got here. Reminds me of the California north coast when I was a boy. Enjoy it while you can.”

  After Commander Hashimoto had left, Brandi and Juan went to Flambe where it stood in the docking bay, awaiting fairly extensive repairs. Brandi removed the onboard disk recording of her flight and Juan popped it into an optical reader. They fast-forwarded to the images before, during, and after her statement about “people down there.”

  True, the image was very jittery and unstable. What she had called people might merely have been an assemblage of very strangely shaped smaller rocks among a maze of strangely shaped larger rocks. Nonetheless, she and Juan were sure that what they were seeing were human beings. Certainly ASGuard, with its image enhancement tech, should have been able to confirm or deny the presence of those people all the more fully. Why were they balking? Were the higher-ups purposely stonewalling on this? Had she stumbled on some covert project?

  She and Juan gazed at the replayed image again and again. There had to be an explanation.

  Dwayne Hashimoto had suggested some directions, perhaps despite his better judgment. Brandi webbed in and began searching through the infosphere. She cross-referenced “Medusa Blue” to her mother’s name and to the holdings of the “Kitchener Foundation for Interdisciplinary Studies in the Arts.”

  Brandi had never done much research into her mother Cyndi’s work. As a child she had heard that Cyndi had run afoul of a reactionary government by making a “subversive” docudrama. She was told her mother had eventually died as a result of some kind of illegal experimentation involving drugs and virtual reality. Brandi had long been secretly ashamed of her mother: the rebel druggie, the bad seed, the woman who hadn’t been there for Brandi at all while she was growing up. That had been all she’d needed to know. Brandi had not pursued her mother’s history and her own beyond that level—no point to doing so, and no connection, until now.

  The last thing she would have expected to appear in her search was a surviving section from one of her mother’s films, but that was precisely what popped up: scenes from The Five Million Day War, a film by Cyndi Easter. The filmmaker’s daughter watched it now, carefully, and for the first time:

  In an orchard, gentle rain falls, wet blackness on tree trunks. Autumn. Some trees persist in their old green confusion, some have turned to fire, some to bare-branched ashes. Among the simple people harvesting the fruit there, tense expectancy fills the air. Everyone in the orchard seems to be waiting for something. No one seems to know what to do, so everyone is just waiting.

  A woman picking apples looks up. “A sky out of the dark ages,” she says. Her male companion nods.

  In the northern quarter of that sky from another time, dark specks like rags of cloud come, moving swiftly, becoming figures, man-shapes flying in low over the fields and trees. Shock troops in rocket packs and stealth combat armor.

  “Take cover! Take cover!” shout the man and woman, running through the aisles of fruit trees, shaking their fellows out of the trees and onto the ground beside them, all running, fruit baskets still in their arms.

  It is too late. The faceless, stealth-armored soldiers land with gunfire and death. The apple pickers are gunned down as they run, spilling their baskets of bright red apples everywhere. The point of view shifts to the troops.

  “Hey, Captain Acton!” one of the troopers calls over his helmet battlecom as he perforates a family of four seeking refuge in nearby thickets. “What kind of heretics we got here?”

  “Brunists,” Captain Acton responds, reducing a farm wagon and its passengers to blood and splinters, wood and bone, with a round from a smart mortar. “But that’s not your need to know. They’re cultists. Good enough?”

  “Yessir!”

  Acton’s men fan out, lobbing cluster and fragmentation grenades into groups of fleeing pickers. Concussion and implosion bombs unbuild in an instant the cabins and cottages on the hillsides above the orchards and fields. The platoon’s heavy munitions man fires a semi-nuke at the commune’s main hall. Laser guided and smart, the projectile does not miss. The high hall erupts in a ball of fire and is gone.

  Acton carefully oversees the choreography of his platoon’s deadly efficient battledance, throughout the entire engagement.

  “Begin mop-up operations,” he commands over his battlecom at last. “We’ll regroup south side of the stream, where the plank bridge crosses it.”

  His men break up into two-man patrol units, flying low over the trees and brush. Sporadic gunfire sounds, all from his men. No fire returns from the ground below.

  Acton flies over the field, above corpses clad in bloody jeans, flannels, and bullet-holed homespun. He swings at last over the broad meadow, lands beside the stream and its bridge, where his men have already begun establishing their command post. On the battlecom he hears a voice—identified more formally by his helmet computer as Lieutenant Ray Dalken, his second in command and Reverend Morals Officer.

  “Thank you, Lord!” Dalken says, blessing the carnage. “Praise be! Thank you, Jesus! Thank you, Jesus!”

  Surveying the broken bodies scattered among the trees, Acton sees a few heretics who are not dead—only fatally wounded, their faces in expressions that show they are crying out in pain, even if he hears none of their agonies. The sensors in his smart armor automatically filter out all information deemed irrelevant to b
attle.

  “Bloody mess, eh Rev?” Acton tightbeams to Dalken as the Reverend Lieutenant lands beside him.

  “And glorious, sir!” Dalken says, out of breath. “I estimate the number of apostate dead at two hundred and fifty.”

  “Glorious?” Acton says, then shrugs. “Not so sure about that. Better if there’d been more fight to these Brunists. They were duller than last week’s Quakers.”

  “But even greater heretics,” the Reverend Lieutenant reminds him fervently, while at the same time managing to removes his helmet. Unhelmeted, Dalken looks surprisingly young, his face still round and thoroughly unlined. Even in his battle armor, it’s clear that Dalken is pudgy, as if the baby fat has yet to be burned off him. “They’re followers of the ancient heresiarch, Giordano Bruno.”

  “Can’t say I know much about the man,” Acton says, watching absently as the command tent automatically deploys itself.

  “The Catholics burned him at the stake over four hundred years ago,” Dalken says, breaking down his armor’s built-in flamethrower, scratching carbon residue from the unit. “Unfortunately his writings and ideas survived. He denied the divinity of Jesus, declared that the Bible was mythical in nature, said that all its books could be boiled down to ‘do unto others as you would have them do unto you’—and the rest could be thrown away.”

  Removing his helmet, Acton turns and strides toward the stream. “Still,” he says over his shoulder, “I’d feel better if there’d been more fight to these Brunists. Taking them out was easier than shooting doves in the high desert. Used to do a lot of that when I was a boy.”

  “With all due respect, sir,” Lieutenant Dalken says, looking up from the hot end of the flamethrower he’s cleaning, his voice betraying only the slightest hint of irritation, “I must remind you that how much or how little ‘fight’ they put up is irrelevant to our mission. What’s important are the crimes of these cultists against our holy state. Bruno’s occult Art of Memory is obviously still contaminating minds. What’s worse, it’s gotten thoroughly mixed together with a lot of other heretical claptrap: Earth Mother goddess worship, witchcraft, pantheism, druidism, magic—all that cultishness.”