Jacinta laughed again.
“They’re not mine or anyone else’s,” she said. “We’re already gone from there, anyway. Got clean away at the first sign of their interest. Let these Tetra types have the hollow maze on top and the empty cave labyrinth inside. We don’t need it any longer. It’s the Tetras who need to be careful. The best corps of spies on this planet look like lost children compared to what the ghost people have become.” She caught herself. “We left something behind—but you do have some Cordyceps tepuiensis ‘Larkin’ already growing, I presume?”
“The fungus? Yes,” Paul said. “In an orbital biodiversity preserve aboard the first habitat, HOME 1.”
“Very good,” she said quickly. “We’ll see you there soon enough, then. Thank you for supper, Mister Cortland. Good-bye.”
So saying, Jacinta Larkin gave her brother a kiss before she and her tepuian escorts melted silently into the night, leaving as little trace as if they’d never been there at all.
“What do we do now?” Roger asked. He was more than a little relieved. He had gotten through the meeting without having to deal with the embarrassing subject of his post-Light talent, thank heavens.
“I think we turn in for the night,” Paul Larkin said. “I’m too old for this sort of thing. I’m overjoyed to see my sister back, but she’s giving out more energy and information than I can quite take in a single sitting. It’s given me a pounding headache.”
* * * *
In the shadowy confines of his minimally, almost monastically, furnished apartment in the psiXtian Sunderground, Ray Dundas sat sleepless on the hard futonoid “mattress” that came with his cell and pondered the importance of sleep. Dreaming is involved in memory and learning, he recalled. Dreaming organizes what has already been perceived. Deprive people of their dreams and they don’t organize what they’ve perceived—they don’t learn.
He needed sleep now to synthesize all he had perceived, to learn from it not least of all. But this “bed” was so damnably uncomfortable, so hard it would try the patience of Job—like everything about this place. These retrohippie psiXtians, who thought themselves so noble and idealistic and romantic, were just as often insensitive smelly slobs and spongers, as far as he could tell. He needed all the equilibrium and equanimity he could muster just to keep himself from beating some sense into the fools.
He thought of the big old bachelor bed he’d still had when he married, the bed he’d bought years before, stained and cheap, from an old Samoan woman with too many kids and too little money. His wife Marianne, when she’d come into the picture a few years later, had said the bed was too soft. For her back she needed support of the sort her own bed gave her, she claimed.
Dundas had always wondered about Marianne and that bed. Was there another reason? Was what had really bothered her the activity that had made that bed “too soft”? Had the bed been haunted for Marianne by the ghosts of his former lovers?
He thought of those women now, searched his memory for them. It beat counting sheep, he supposed. One by one he pulled up from his past the unfamiliar names and half-forgotten faces, gone now from his everyday thoughts for more than a score of years.
Ami Kumolos, his first, the Afro-bobbed brunette college student with the weak chin and her oh-so-significant trembling, which signified that she was, at last, ready to make love with him.
Big-shouldered, red-haired, scattershot-thinking Colleen O’Bannon, squinching her freckles in concentration toward orgasm.
Krista Ybarralek, heavy-hipped and small-breasted teacher, pert-nosed blonde ten years his senior, promiscuous beyond any definition of the word he’d ever known before, casually directing his performance in her oh-so-politically incorrect (but also oh-so-frequent) rape fantasies.
Dry-handed big-eyed cryptographer Joria Trin Han, approaching intimacy as if it were a secret code to be cracked.
Geneva Ost, the folk-dancer with the heart-shaved pubic hair, trailing her long, auburn tresses across his body, wanting his lust but not his love, his head but not his face.
Soft, pillow-lipped, quicksand-bodied Zandria Kohlwitz, solejob motherwoman, her eye-rubbing two year old son wandering in on them in flagrante from the other room, asking sleepily, “Is he our new Daddy?”
DNA sequencer Pandora Gellertov, her curly dark locks going early gray, making love with a ferocious, time-denying delicacy, rather as if he were a particularly touchy chemical assay.
Alia Zagorsky, short and increasingly drumround, mistress of Tantric simultaneity—yet they still ended by boring each other.
Duma Ocken, horny-handed island cowgirl, riding him moundpounding hard, as if breaking a new horse.
Drifting off, the voice of some long-lost preacher or politically-corrective teacher lectured him as sternly as conscience itself on how holding these images in his head was mean-spirited, a cruel objectification. So what? He was just being tough-minded, realistic. Not a romantic. Besides, they would never know. At least he remembered their names and faces. He would certainly not want to know how they pictured him after all these years—if they bothered to at all.
In the Sex Wars, who had been nobler—him with his requisite kills painted on his fuselage, notches on his gun, objectified memories in his head, or his Uncle Vance, who never haunted his narrow bachelor bed with lovemaking or women, at least not in the flesh, respecting the Other too much to dare disturb the universe, until he grew disturbed, the ghost of a man?
At least overblown respect was never his problem, Ray thought sleepily. If God didn’t intend for men to enjoy gazing at naked women, He wouldn’t have made them such a pleasure to look at. That was how he figured it. He regretted a little that he’d been such an equal opportunity voyeur, even putting his oar in without regard to creed or color, but at least he’d never gotten any of them pregnant—never caused Big Trouble in Little Vagina.
He’d married a good Christian white girl in the end anyway, and she was the woman who had made him a good Christian too —that, and what happened to his brother. When they were dating, he was so much in love with Marianne, torn with such violent passion, he sometimes found it difficult to tell whether he was an emperor in heaven or a slave in hell. Unfortunately, after they were married, all doubt was dispelled. She willingly granted him full headship in the marriage—financial, spiritual, sexual, any and all decision-making. He swept her off her feet, but not off her knees. He would soon join her there.
Oh, Marianne was a creature close to Heaven—so close she made his life a deadly dull hell. Like sleeping with the Thought Police. He should have expected it. Marianne’s father had been one of those big PK types. At first Ray was naive enough not to know what that acronym stood for. Seeing his future in-laws interact he assumed it stood for “Pop her in the Kisser.” Spare the rod and spoil the wife seemed to be Marianne’s father’s motto.
Having been schooled in it by her parents, Marianne had “submission” down to a fine marital, and very nearly martial, art. She had a black belt in passive aggressive behavior. She often got her way. He had hauled the big old bed off to the recycler, and it was Marianne’s bed they moved into their first bedroom.
Ray often tried to interest her in something new, inject a little difference or excitement into their love-life. Like his taste for watching women engage in sex together, and sometimes joining them in threesome. He’d picked up that little kink in the Evil Old USA. Trying to push it on his wife never worked, however. Invariably Marianne would, with a whipped spaniel look in her eyes, agree that yes, as a good wife she should do anything her husband reasonably asked to pleasure him. At the same time it was obvious Marianne found repugnant, evil, and unChristian the very idea of bringing any outsider into their intimate lives and she resisted it with every fiber of her being.
Several times he’d had everything almost set up with a bisexual Mormon woman—but nights of Marianne’s crying, nights of his shouting, the whole daytime façade of “happily married” life among the lawn order, yard-sale peasantry at last
defeated him. He sired the requisite two heirs and a spare more out of duty than love. Before long, he was more than willing to take those career-building duty assignments that sadly kept him long apart from Marianne....
Every woman he has ever known stands above him, about him, haloed in pure light. He trembles on the edge of tears. In their light he is a foul thing crawling on his belly through vile, stinking filth. Again and again, endlessly, filth moving through filth. He doesn’t dare touch them. Even to approach them, to talk to them, would profane. Yet they seem to speak into his head, asking him where being tough-minded ends and mean-spirited begins.
At last they fall silent and he hears the most beautiful and complex melody, like a previously undiscovered combination of Bach fugue and Thelonious Monk solo and much more—
Didactic voices weave through the music.
“Convenience is obedience to the rule of status quo,” says a female voice.
Dundas began to resurface from the dreaming, then the hypnagogic sleep state he’d slipped into. The voices fell abruptly silent. That indescribably complex and beautiful melody became merely the backup beeper of a recycler robot somewhere nearby in the maze of Sunderground. No footsteps sounded in the corridors nearby.
Dundas sat up in bed, shaking his head. He’d fallen asleep—gone under for just a moment, he realized. What incredible power the human imagination possesses to embellish—and deceive, he thought. A backup beeper romanticized into beautiful music. Thinking of his Uncle Vance had in turn generate the sort of self-loathing dream his Uncle might have dreamed. And the eco-groovy gospeling of the psiXtians crystallized by his own mind into “Convenience is obedience to the rule of status quo.”
That might come in handy with these people, he thought. Toss in some stuff about how if it’s convenient for people it’s probably very inconvenient for the planet, et cetera, et cetera. Make it all the easier for him to pass for a true believer here. Taking up a dimly glowing retro-stylus from beside his Spartan bed, he jotted thoughts into the memory of a solar-powered Personal Data Assistant notepad, a far more powerful (but equally retro and identically acronymed) reworking of the old-time Personal Digital Assistant. He then tried to get back to sleep, certain that, no matter how much more he slept, his night’s rest had already accomplished something.
CHAPTER THREE
Code-extracted SubTerPost fragment (infosphere source unknown; original independently verified as computer-stored confidential case files of David R. Morica, M. Div, D. Psych, Lt. Colonel USAF, Chaplain, Whiteman AFB, USAF, Missouri, USA):
Subject Carter Dalken, rank of Major, is married (wife Miriam) and the father of two young sons (Michael and Raymond). Subject demonstrates a recently manifested dire fear of keys. This extreme claviphobia seems to be part of a constellation of issues surrounding an identity crisis connected to his imminent loss of career and status as a Missile Flight Officer. The claviphobia seems obscurely linked to the fact that, as a member of Missile Flight F, the Subject—a very religious man—has been one of those who have “held the keys to kingdom come,” as he has put it.
Subject seems to be one of those men for whom military planners have planned a great many things, particularly when it comes to breaking the strong causal linkage between launching a nuclear-tipped missile and possibly bringing on the end of civilization, even the extinction of humanity.
In reviewing the available materials, I have come to the conclusion that, purposely or inadvertently, our USAF planners have developed a highly efficacious means of getting around this causal link. Whether purposely or not, continual testing of combat readiness has apparently allowed USAF planners to work a twist on the classic Pavlovian-Skinnerian loop: Have the silo soldier turn the key, but withhold the launching of the missile. Do it again and again, until the stimulus-response chain from key-turning to Armageddon is broken. Make the catastrophic routine and it ceases to be catastrophic. For the ‘response to extinction,’ substitute the ‘extinction of response.’
In the Subject’s case this system may have done its job too well. It has driven the dissociation between key-turning and the end of the world very hard—perhaps too hard in the Subject’s case, right up to unpredictability and chaos.
Subject is still unfazed by the operational use of his missile key. Every time turning a mundane key doesn’t result in catastrophe, however, instead of weakening the Subject’s associations of key and catastrophe as it normally should, the feared result’s failure to actually occur paradoxically amplifies and reinforces the fear response itself, making the Subject believe that the feared result is now all the more likely to occur. The more the expected fatal event has failed to occur in the past, the Subject believes, the more likely it is to occur in the future.
The result is the Subject’s recurring visions of houses, cars, and entire cities bursting into flame whenever he turns a key in a locked door or automobile ignition. Ignoring the visions has come to require greater and greater acts of will from the Subject, despite—or perhaps because of—the fact that the visions haven’t become real fire yet.
The visions themselves, however, have apparently grown more and more vivid, and more difficult for the Subject to put out of his mind. Their strengthening is analogous to the situation in Russian roulette of that type in which the revolver’s cylinder is only spun once, at the beginning of the “game,” then the gun is passed back and forth between two people. Each click of the hammer against an empty chamber signals the increased probability that the next chamber will contain the bullet.
That, apparently, is how the Subject’s ultraparadoxical abreaction phase functions. Unpredictably and paradoxically, the extinction of a specific response has become intimately linked to a generalization and amplification of another response, one incorporating several of the same key elements.
* * * *
Brandi hated seeing old pictures of herself in the media. What could she expect, though? She still wasn’t giving interviews—despite a flurry of requests—so naturally the reporters took what they could get. At least some of them were giving her credit for the Swallowtail’s design and were using shots from the launch ceremonies at the Orbital Complex. At least those were recent.
As Dwayne Hashimoto had predicted, her mother Cyndi and the Medusa Blue history had resurfaced. The coverage of all that was so sensationalized and superficial that Brandi felt her private life and family history had been violated, dragged through the streets and trashed—going all the way back to her grandmother, for heavens’ sake. It was enough to put her off watching webtubed, broadcast, or satellited holo and video, though Juan was still able to endure them. He gave her encapsulated versions when she asked for them and could stomach such reports.
Leaving him behind in the viewing room one evening, she steeled herself and webbed in again to learn more about the past she had avoided for so long. Eventually, among the open-access Kitchener Foundation materials, she found a catalog of her mother’s works. She swiftly scanned down the list backward, skimming first the brief descriptions of her mother’s final project.
“The Five Million Day War...the control of informational substances and information itself held to be threatening to the status quo...the war to confine the opened mind has been going on a very long time...exposŽ of the hypocrisy of power which tells the filmmaker’s own story within the larger historical context of the Long Suppression...the government that had seen to it that an illegal informational substance would be covertly administered to Cyndi Easter’s mother Marijke and the daughter in her womb...the same government which then suppressed the daughter’s attempt to convey her information on the story of the suppression in the name of protecting the young, the children....”
Brandi hurried over it, painfully, then read more fully the catalog notes on her Mother’s earlier works.
“Soap and Shadows. Feature-length historical documentary analyzing German, Japanese, and American styles of empire: Soap of concentration camp victims, Shadows of Hiroshima residents incine
rated in the atomic bombing. Soap and Shadows tracks backward to the Japanese campaigns in Manchuria and their scientific ‘experiments’ there; to nineteenth century German colonial adventures; to the building of American Dream on the sweat of slaves, the blood of Indians; to the reservation system as acknowledged prototype for concentration camp systems throughout the world. Documentary arcs forward to “low intensity” ethnic and resource conflicts of the latter twentieth and early twenty first centuries—”
That sounds like a happy topic too, Brandi thought wryly. No wonder her mother got into so much trouble. She must have definitely been of the “Truth is not polite” school. Brandi scanned on, still earlier into her mother’s career.
“Accidents Will Happen. IT’S ACCIDENTS WILL HAPPEN! THE SHOW WHERE WE PAY YOUR HEIRS BIG MONEY IF YOU DIE SPECTACULARLY IN FRONT OF OUR VAST VIEWING AUDIENCE! WITH YOUR HOST, CONVICTED SERIAL KILLER JAMES RICHARD UGOLINO! AND NOW, HERE’S JIMMY! Game/talk show parody on the role of media in a culture entertaining itself to death.”
“Craas TheoTek, Inc. ‘Our motto: If God made it, we can make it better.’ Satire of technological hubris in this fictionalized account of the hostile takeover of a bioscience firm.... “
“Gardening as Therapy: How Green Is My Valium. Parody of gardening how-to program in—”
Brandi stopped the catalog. For a woman who hadn’t lived all that long, her mother had accomplished a lot. Even from a cursory reading of her filmography, Brandi discerned a definite arc in her mother’s career, from early humorist and satirist to later, serious documentarist. Something seemed to have happened to Cyndi during or after the filming of Accidents Will Happen—something that eventually drove her mother to do the documentary that got her into the greatest trouble, “market censored” and shipped off to internment.
She might as well face up to it. Reluctantly, Brandi scanned back to The Five Million Day War and opened it up. An introductory note commented that the original prints and videos of the documentary had been destroyed. Only fragments and outtakes survived, Brandi saw, all of them in the collection of one Immanuel Shaw. His infosphere address placed him in the first orbital habitat. Odd, she thought. She had lived in the haborb long enough that she thought she knew everyone. Mister Shaw must keep to himself.
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