Standing Wave

by Howard V. Hendrix

  Dalken, flamethrower-cleaning finished, punctuates his comments with quick, short blasts of fire. Acton bends down for a closer look at the creek as it flows past.

  “Heaven knows these people deserve death,” Dalken says confidently. “Dig deep enough, and who knows what Satanic rites we might have found? I have it on good authority that many of them were drug users or child-molesting homosexuals or both.”

  “Well, Lieutenant, you’d know more about that than I would,” Acton says, staring at the chocolate-gray confusion of the turbulent stream. Beneath Acton’s reflection, in the shallows, a crayfish is wriggling its pale self loose from the exoskeleton it has outgrown. Acton watches, seemingly fascinated that the creature should have chosen to molt now, when the stream is so turgid. Finished at last, the crustacean scurries away again into the chaos of the rain-swollen flood.

  Rising from his squatting position on the stream bank, Acton sees that Dalken has gone. He smiles wryly to himself. Removing his voice-activated sub voc unit from the helmet, carrying the helmet under his left arm, he begins to record his log.

  “Neo-Brunist Communal Area secured with maximum prejudice,” Acton says. He walks along the stream’s course as it winds its way through the meadow. “Informed by Morals Officer that body count is two five zero.” With the words “Channel Two,” he activates a special encryption track for his private log. “Personal note. Appears we were protecting the children again. Too bad none of them survived. I know I shouldn’t be thinking this, but does making the world safe for six year olds mean that no one is allowed to think thoughts a good six year old wouldn’t think?”

  Acton glances toward the mountains off to the west. The rainhere, now ending, has left a bright-shining new blanket of snow, there. Acton begins recording again.

  “Commune buildings destroyed. Weather is clearing. Will bivouac here tonight before proceeding west at 0900 tomorrow. Channel Two: I remember living in the mountains near here. The forests were stripped for firewood as more and more people moved in all the time. Be fruitful and multiply. Landslides, rockslides followed. Erosion with every rain. Silt-choked streams. God gave Man dominion over the Earth.

  “Heresy, of course. All encrypted as usual. To be erased after use. For memoirs that maybe no one will ever hear or read. It’s hard to always keep flying low and under radar. Have to, though—or one day I’ll wake up and find designer chemicals or gay kiddie porn planted in my bunk. All the ‘good authority’ needed to end debate and find for guilt. Got to protect those six year olds.”

  As Acton watches, spotty sunlight splashes gold upon the peaks, above the broken and scattering clouds below. The rain has ended.

  “Channel Two, personal notes, continued: Shafts of sunlight are slanting down out of the clouds. ‘Angel slides,’ my mother called them, when I was a boy. The only angels sliding down them today are my troops.”

  The Captain watches his men returning from mop-up operations. Acton flashes back on his briefing by two colonels.

  “Of the three men sent to infiltrate the Brunists,” says the bespectacled colonel on his right, “each reported for only the first month or so—and then went ‘native,’ for lack of a better term.”

  “In their fragmentary reports, however,” says the balding colonel on his left, “there are numerous suggestions of a ‘power’ of some sort at the commune. We think it may be a remnant of one of the Old Government’s secret projects.”

  “What type of ‘power’?” Acton asks.

  “We’re not certain,” says the bespectacled colonel. “Our infiltrators unfortunately never got around to saying.”

  “Speculation at Service Command ranges from a perfect brainwashing chemical or device,” says the balding colonel, “to, on the wild fringes, the suggestion that the Brunists might have a ‘Starburst’ among them.”

  “Which is—?” Acton asks hesitantly. The colonels glance at each other a moment.

  “The name persistent rumor gives to ‘shield telepaths’,” the bespectacled colonel says. “The possibly mythical creations of the perhaps equally apocryphal Project Medusa Blue.”

  The scene returns to Acton in the present, watching his men at work. He records again on the sub voc.

  “Our assault encountered no countermeasures of any sort. We continue to reconnoiter the area. Channel Two. Personal note: I expected to confront brainwashed but well-armed hordes, or even convincing illusions projected against us in the skies. I half-believed I’d have to fight off an invisible hand, reaching into my mind, trying to flick off the switch labeled ‘Duty.’ Instead we found no noble contest at all, only routine death and mundane destruction. The Brunists never had a chance.”

  Seeing Reverend Lieutenant Dalken approaching, Acton manually switches off his sub voc. Dalken salutes.

  “Permission to select two men to torch the orchards and fields, and accompany me in identifying the bodies, sir,” Dalken says.

  “Granted,” Acton replies, returning the salute.

  Smoke billows up into the westering sun. Acton speaks into his sub voc, reactivating it.

  “Channel Two: How much does Dalken know about the spies’ fragmentary reports? As Morals Officer he is an Intelligence watchdog, but the reports are Service Command property—”

  Acton tunes in on Dalken’s words to his subordinates.

  “...feast of Samhain among the ancient pagans,” Dalken says over the intermittent whoosh of the flamethrower. “Festival of the Harvest Moon. A night when the worlds of the dead and the living were supposed to be especially close, with a lot of commerce back and forth between them. Even after nominal Christianity came in, the pagan feast survived into modern times as a Satanic remnant called Halloween—”

  Flashback. A plump, devout woman, with shining eyes and very pale skin, dresses a child in a “Full Armor of God” costume.

  “There you go, Willy,” the woman, Acton’s mother, says. “A little Christian soldier, on this unhallowed night.”

  The boy parades the chill October streets, proclaiming “Trick or Treat” at every door he comes to. People smile or shrink back in mock fright—then hand him candy, apples, popcorn.

  The boy, slightly older, stands before his mother.

  “Will, I know how much you liked Halloween,” she says, “but I’m afraid there won’t be any more Halloweens from now on. The new government has banned it. Long overdue, don’t you see? Razors and needles in apples, drugs in the candy. Halloween was just too dangerous to little ones to be allowed to continue.”

  From his despondent expression, however, it is clear the boy does not “see”.

  In the present, Acton’s glance falls on the Cross and Stripes patch on his combat armor. He makes another brief comment to his sub voc.

  “Channel Two: Dalken regaled the troops with a story of Halloween. I remember that ‘Satanic remnant.’ I am old enough to remember when the flag still had many stars on the field of blue, instead of the single gold cross there of the Christian States of America. Maybe I remember too much. Lieutenant Dalken has often sermonized on the tempting evil of nostalgia. Presumably it’s for my benefit. My men are young. They have never really known anything other than life under the CSA and, before that, the ossifying of the USA that led up to it. They do not have my memories, or my questions.”

  Seeing Dalken and the rest of the men beginning to fall into formation before him, Acton allows the sub voc to shut itself down.

  “—only spirits gonna be hoverin’ round here tonight is the souls of dead heretics, Lieutenant,” one of the men says. Dalken laughs. The men come to order.

  “Mop-up operations completed, sir,” the Lieutenant says, coming forward and saluting smartly. “All Brunist communards accounted for except seven women. According to intelligence reports, one of the missing, a Diana Gartner, is an important witch among them. The other women might well be her attendants. They may all have simply been absent at the time of our arrival, sir, but I suggest we bivouac here tonight and continue light patrols i
n the morning, on the off-chance we might still come across them.”

  “Very well then,” Acton says, nodding. He looks over his armor clad men. “I had planned to bivouac here in any case. Men of the 337th Guardian Air Assault, you may stand down. Take a break, wardogs.”

  The remaining helmets come off and the men have faces again, young faces, bland faces, squeaky-clean faces. Dalken, his short blond hair slicked back above a visage round as the full moon, filches an apple from the spilled basket of a dead woman and bites hungrily into it. Some of the troops deploy shelters, some break down weapons and check armor, some begin preparing their evening meal, some stand talking. Though no one drinks or smokes, conversations grow spirited nonetheless.

  The twisted skein of the stream leads Acton away from the camp, into the deepening twilight, alone. Helmet under his arm and sub voc in hand, he seems to walk with no particular objective in mind, except perhaps a desire to be by himself. Behind him, in the background, Lieutenant Dalken leads the men in a prayer of thanksgiving for their great victory. As Acton walks on, he shrugs in his armor, as if it has grown particularly burdensome.

  “Channel Two. Personal note. I know I’m supposed to admire the technology that makes this suit of armor possible, but tonight I don’t. The science that makes a soldier faster than a speeding bullet, more powerful than a locomotive, able to leap tall buildings in a single bound, has also made the human being inside the armor almost completely obsolete.”

  Acton strikes off up a side branch of the stream, one that plunges down out of rocky, tree-lined slopes. The water is calmer here. In places below rumbling falls, the stream broadens into calm pools. He sits down on a log beside one such pool, scrutinizing in the water’s surface his reflected face: stubbled, dark, weary. Night begins to fall around him. His voice activates the sub voc log’s Channel Two again.

  “Once I sat on a boulder,” he says, “beside a wild mountain river roaring past with turbulence and white water and the full heart of spring thaw in its voice, and I was happy. I remember it well. Remember the deep broad pool on the other side of the boulder in the river bend. The clear green water of its depths. The long, chaotic strands of bubbles, slowly twirling, moving up out of those depths. I peered a long time into that pool. Wondered if I might see a trout or two. Just wondering—not wanting. In that moment I had everything; there was nothing more to want.

  “I didn’t see any trout,” he continues, moving his face slightly in the stream’s reflection. “Eventually I felt the moment slowly fall apart into words—‘Now is forever, here is everywhere.’ The very act of thinking those words made them no longer true. ‘Be happy with what you have, for you can never be happy with what you want.’ Truths, no doubt, but also just more words, even further from that perfect moment. Already I was wanting—wanting that experience of ‘nothing more to want’—again. Wanting it more than anything. I still want it. Why else would I keep coming back to it in my dreams?”

  Acton takes off his armor slowly and, once naked, dives quickly into the pool. The water is cold; he resurfaces as if he’s had the air knocked from his lungs and it’s all he can do to keep from letting out a loud, shocked whoop. He swims, as quietly as he can. Crouched in the shallows of the cold pool, he feels the stillness descending around him. The moon rises. From somewhere further upstream comes a sound, indistinct at first but gradually growing clearer, until it sounds like female voices, women softly singing.

  Leaving the water, he grabs from his gear his service automatic pistol in one hand and his sub voc in the other, then scrambles up the rocky gorge, toward the sound. His bare knees bash against boulders, his feet scrape on stones, water beads on his cold flesh under silver moonlight, yet he is smiling wildly.

  The singing grows louder, more insistent. The moonlit world blurs past him, fluid, swaying, as if he’s running beneath the waves of a crystalline sea.

  Suddenly he comes upon them. Instinctively he raises his gun. All unknowingly he has darted into the broad entrance of a cave, an arching roof of rock above him, a mountain spring bursting forth from one side, a broad pool with sedgy grass growing near the entrance for sunlight, catching only moonlight and firelight now. He sees it all by the light of the torches held by the six young women standing about the pool—and the seventh woman too, in the center of the pool, beautiful and nude, torchless yet glowing, as if by her own light.

  One of the six handmaidens sees him, and her song becomes a scream. The others follow suit, rushing inward toward the center, surrounding the torchless woman, attendants protecting their mistress, hoping perhaps to hide her nakedness with their bodies or catch the bullet intended for her, though either goal is futile. The woman at the center is head and shoulders taller than any of those attending her.

  For her part the tall woman seems thoroughly unconcerned. As they take him in, his nakedness, his raised gun, her pale eyes seem to radiate spokes of reddish light. Abruptly she laughs a laugh that echoes and shakes the cave’s stony vault, a laugh to split the sky and start time over again—

  A spike of blue-white light drives itself into Acton’s forehead. Then blackness, and falling, falling....

  Brandi paused the film in her virtual space, and pondered. How much of this was true? She had heard that the CSA—or was it the ACSA?—had engaged in some remarkably hideous purges, but how much of this was accurate, and how much dramatized? There’d been that reference to Medusa Blue and to some sort of secret project of the “Old Government”, but how did that tie into “starbursts” and “shield telepaths” (whatever they were)? And how did any of this connect with that inhabited meteor-mountain she had surfed past as it came in?

  Frustrated but intrigued, she commanded the film to continue.

  Acton falling inside himself.

  “What is past is present elsewhere,” says a soft-spoken female voice inside his head. “What is future is present elsewhere. To remember the past, to remember the future, is to be present elsewhere. You are going elsewhere.”

  Images of infinity flood his head. Starlight makes ringing music on the gong of the atmosphere. Torrents of impressions, the mind of the world falling into his mind. With golden oars of joyful wisdom he rows a canal of stars. Around him shooting stars fishflash great gold sword cuts until they sheath themselves in an unbounded scabbard of black velvet. Toothed whale of light, giant squid of darkness struggle out of view in skies luminous with excess of deep dark. The galaxies mere oases of light in vast deserts of darkness—

  Images of eternity, vast stretches of nothing until light lets there be, light from excess of dark, drops and puddles and storms of light blowing and booming outward. Planets, life, the nightmare blood and claw of evolution, the bleeding, the broken, the buried beneath brick and wood and stone and history, refugees wretchedly fleeing destruction like salamanders writhing out of the fire, a world of ghost people in ghost buildings, diaphanous, dissolving, disappearing ghosts watching ghosts, shadows watching shadows, in every always dying room, swarms of ghosts like motes of dust, dust devils, whirlwind of ashes twisting over scorched earth everywhere, smoky clouds of ghost bees in their high hives, their ghostly skyscrapers, moths, butterflies to flames, dependent for hire or fire on the ghostly business of empire, fires swallowing fires, ashes swallowed in mouths of ashes, burning buildings inevitably ruins before building, forever forever the Iron Man topping his brazen whore Liberty in the red-black corpsefield with fire-naked horizon all around, the sun only a light inevitably blinking out, all the stars falling going out like cigarettes tossed from passing starships—

  Then glorious accident, image of a golden eyed amphibian, eye at the center of the storm, third eye above the mortal two, despite all, despite—

  Acton wakes at last to early morning sunlight and the sound of distant flamethrowers. Dalken and the men burning bodies. Dew lingers on his cheek. His gun is gone, but he still holds his sub voc. He is smiling an otherworldly smile as he Channel-Twos his waking thoughts.

  “I should be back
in armor,” he says, “back in uniform, back beneath the mask. I’m in no hurry. I’m home again, at that place where there’s nothing more to want, at least for a while. The woman—Diana Gartner, witch, starburst, whatever—is apparently gone, along with her attendants. Today is the first of November. The cave entrance is dark, the daylight world contains no trace of what happened here last night.

  “Whoever she was, she shared so much with me, and I thank her for that,” Acton says, standing slowly in the cave, dazed yet incredibly happy. “I know what Medusa Blue achieved, despite itself. For those who suffered and survived, the Project opened the golden amphibian eye. For seeing in two worlds, in this one and not this one. The eye of the salamander writhing free out of the fires of space and time. The eye at the limit of the divine that showed me all of it. The further I went from myself, the closer I came to myself. The entirety of the universe was more intimate to me that I am to myself. The eye through which I saw infinity was the eye through which infinity sees me. The eye through which I saw eternity is the eye through which eternity sees me.”

  Acton pauses, glancing out from the mouth of the small cave.

  “I’ve learned so much, been given so much,” he says into the sub voc. “I know now why Giordano Bruno was burned alive. And why those people-products of Medusa Blue, those called starbursts, might gravitate toward his work. Bruno’s religious experience was the reflection of the universe within his own memory, proof that mind itself is universal and divine. He taught the art of memory, the art of mind. The heresy that the kingdom of God is within each and all, and that to kill any person is to kill a universe. All things partake of the divine, all time and space is one time and space, in that eye. Brutus and Caesar, Judas and Jesus, Cortes and Montezuma, Mocenigo and Bruno, all variations on the same theme. Infinite worlds in infinite space, infinitely one. For that revelation, Bruno had to die….”