Standing Wave

by Howard V. Hendrix

  Ronnie Angell was the real thing, all right. Rising from the table, Dundas felt a strong swell of admiration for the woman. She was being humble when she suggested that he was in as deep cover among the psiXtians as she was among these Cthulhu people.

  Looking about himself, Dundas shivered involuntarily. This foggy, faux-derelict, demon-haunted “entertainment complex” off the coast of Tree Hugger Land gave him the creeps. He was anxious to be on land again, to be on the highway again. Walking toward the launches that would take him away from this crazy flotilla of ghost ships, he was amazed time and again that Ronnie had been able to maintain her sanity here, much less her cover.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  SubTerPost-embedded fragment (infosphere source unknown; original source independently verified as R.E. Stringfield’s Beyond the Sky of Mind: Quantum Cosmology and Quantum Consciousness):

  Perhaps our universe contains so much dark matter because we are living inside a black hole, or rather, a black whole. According to one variant of plenum theory, every universe reproduces by budding, and these buds, from the perspective of our universe, are called black holes. Black holes are essentially regions of ‘otherness’ contacting our spacetime. Those observers inside such a bud would, however, see our black hole as their universe, and their universe in its turn would likely be spawning other universes through black hole budding.

  Though all things within a universe may die, the plenum of universes is immortal in the same way that a single-celled organism is immortal. The ‘genes’ of a universe are, in this model, its fundamental constants, the special numbers that lie at the heart of all physics in that universe. When a mature universe gives rise to a daughter universe, the fundamental constants undergo slight random changes, like genes mutating between generations of an organism.

  The larger and more complex a system is, the more slowly it reinvents itself, however. Technological change proceeds at a faster rate than social change; social change proceeds at a faster rate than biological change; biological change proceeds at a faster rate than geological change; and geological change proceeds at a faster rate than cosmological change.

  Thus this grandest evolution, this change not only of worlds but also of universes, would likely proceed very slowly over all eternity.

  * * * *

  Brandi had not been to HOME 1 for an extended visit since the ship she’d designed, the Swallowtail, was christened and fired up her launch tubes for the trip to the Apollo Amors. She was glad to be coming back now, to a wraparound garden and forest conservatory in space. This world, inside its odd-shaped bubble floating between Earth and Moon, was the only place she really thought of as home.

  She hoped she’d eventually develop a similar sort of attachment to her residence with Juan aboard the Freeman Lowell OBU. That sense of connection to and affection for the place hadn’t happened at Lowell yet, but she hoped that was where her heart was and would come to be content and “at home” someday.

  Juan had come with her on the trip over. Having no particular interest in meeting Immanuel Shaw, he had decided to pay a visit to his orbital park superiors. Brandi, meanwhile, looked for this man Shaw who, she believed, must have some connection to her through her mother.

  Shaw was not as reclusive or privacy-freaked as she had presumed. Brandi found that his place was listed in the directory—an address in the agricultural tori—and that he was accessible through the Public Sphere locator. Punching up his code she saw that he was currently to be found in a park not so very far from her present position. When she put in a call to him, a man with close-cropped white hair and a carefully trimmed white moustache answered.

  “Mister Shaw? My name is Brandi Easter. I wonder if you might be able to speak with me in person? It’s about my mother, Cyndi Easter. I saw that you had the originals of a lot of her work.”

  Shaw seemed momentarily disoriented by what she’d rattled off so quickly, but then he recovered. On the virtual, Brandi could only see him to about mid-torso. He appeared to be dressed in what looked like rubber coveralls.

  “Yes, I have a good deal of her work,” Shaw said at last. “I knew your mother. When would you like to get together?”

  “As soon as possible.”

  “How about now? I’m sludging out the kettle of a pond, but if you don’t mind talking while I work—”

  “I’ll be right over,” she said. They signed off. As she made her way to the park indicated on the locator, Brandi tried to puzzle out what “sludging the kettle of a pond” might mean. She had been to Shaw’s current locale the habitat before, but it had been many years.

  She found the man in the middle of a drained pond, a lagoon-shaped depression fringed with raked up mounds of water hyacinth, water lilies, Acorus, and bog iris. She saw now that he was dressed in chest-high waders, and was doing some sort of maintenance work on the pond.

  Walking toward him, she passed what looked like a portable pump with a long hose hookup and coarse filter on one end, not far from where Shaw was shoveling. The man himself stood below the rest of the pond’s bottom, knee-deep in a boxlike depression which, she presumed, was what he had meant by a “kettle”. He was dumping shovel-loads of thick mud into a large wheelbarrow. The hose from the other end of the pump emptied into a much larger version of the wheelbarrow, a large open tanker cart filled with similarly thick, smelly organic muck and ooze.

  Mud-bespattered, Shaw stood up to take a breather from his shoveling, then saw Brandi and waved. She found something about the man instantly familiar and likable, though she could not have said why.

  “Hello, Ms. Easter,” he called, stepping up out of the kettle and onto the bottom of the pond. “I knew our paths would cross sooner or later, though I really didn’t expect to be doing this when we met.”

  Brandi laughed.

  “That is one duty I’m glad I never pulled while I was living here,” she said, watching the wiry older man strip out of his waders, revealing the thigh-length body suit he was wearing beneath them. “What exactly are you doing?”

  “Officially, it’s ‘organic nutrient resource recycling’,” he said. “The pump gets most of it, but I always end up doing some of this. ‘Shoveling shit pudding’ is how I think of it. I’m not big on jargon and euphemisms.”

  Brandi glanced more carefully at the stinking stuff.

  “That describes the consistency and the smell, all right,” she agreed.

  “For the farmers out in the ag tori and the gardeners here in the central sphere it’s black gold,” he said, coming up to her and shaking her hand. “Contains the dung, debris, and detritus of scores of aquatic and semi-aquatic species. I sometimes wish the designers had figured out some sort of automated system to store and pump this stuff directly to everybody who needs it, but they didn’t. ‘Passive-energy residences require active, energetic residents,’ as the alternative-energy folks used to say.”

  They sat down on a bench beside the drained pond, watching as two other volunteers with rakes and pitchforks began gathering up a number of the water hyacinth mounds and loading them into a wagon hooked to an electric cart. For local composting, Brandi guessed.

  “You said before that you expected our paths to cross...,” Brandi said, turning to Shaw.

  “Ever since I heard of your existence,” Shaw said with a nod, staring fixedly at her. “During the publicity surrounding the launch of that space tug or whatever it was that you designed. A big accomplishment for someone so young. You’re your mother’s daughter, all right. The clothing and hairstyle’s different, but everything else—! Uncanny, how much you look like Cyndi.”

  Brandi averted her gaze, breaking eye contact.

  “You knew her well, then?”

  “I was the last person ever to know her,” he said, looking out to where the volunteers were, with some continuing difficulty, pitchforking up the mounds of water hyacinth. “And I never heard her speak of your existence. I never heard of you until a couple of months ago, when your ship design became big
local news here in the habitat.”

  Brandi followed his glance out to the volunteers.

  “We might have gotten in touch then,” she speculated. “I was living in the habitat too.

  “I couldn’t be sure you were any relation to Cyndi even then,” Shaw said, shaking his head. “Not until the last couple weeks, with that stuff in the media about your UFO sighting or whatever it was. The infotainment people confirmed the connection. Over and over again.”

  “You say she never mentioned my existence?” Brandi asked him, pained at the idea despite herself. “I have no memory of her—”

  “When I learned your age,” Shaw said, making a gesture of dismissal with his left hand, “I realized that she never spoke of you because she couldn’t have known about you. You were born seven or eight months after she died. That’s why I’ve avoided getting in touch with you over the last few weeks. The whole thing just didn’t make sense.”

  “But the Kitchener people always told me she died shortly after I was born,” Brandi said.

  “Impossible,” Shaw said. “I was with her when she died. She had no children and was not pregnant, at least as far as I knew then. Now I’m beginning to wonder. But the Kitchener people must have known when she died. I turned to the Foundation for help immediately upon her death. They sent their crew in without a moment’s hesitation. They took care of the body, the death certificate, the burial arrangements.”

  He looked away with a sigh.

  “God knows I was glad they did, at the time,” he continued. “I was a wreck. Melodramatic as it may sound, your mother was the great love of my love, Brandi. We were engaged to be married.”

  “You—you were lovers?” Brandi asked. “When she died?”

  “Her love for me may have been what killed her,” he said quietly, staring out over the drained pond. “That was another reason I’ve been reluctant to contact you, if it turned out you were Cyndi’s daughter. The guilt of that has not been an easy thing to live with.”

  “What do you mean—her love for you might have killed her?” Brandi asked, distressed and confused. “I was always told she was experimenting with illegal drugs and VR when she died.”

  “That’s only partially true,” he said, looking down at his hands folded in the space between his body-suited thighs. “How much do you know about Cyndi Easter’s life?”

  “Everything that you’ve made publicly accessible in the Infosphere,” she said. “Her films, her imprisonment, Project Medusa Blue, all the latent talents—”

  Shaw glanced at her, nodding slowly.

  “It’s my memorial to her work,” he said, “but what’s in the public domain is not the whole story. First off, her talent wasn’t really ‘latent.’ She knew how to trigger it—and did, for us. For me, really. She died a little, each time she triggered it. Twice. Until she died a lot, the third time.”

  “I don’t understand,” Brandi said, crossing and uncrossing her legs nervously. Shaw leaned forward, gripping the bench with his hands.

  “Neither did I, really,” he said. “For years I tried to make her talent fit into the old scientific framework, the one I was most familiar with. It just couldn’t be forced into that. Eventually I realized that trying to understand the universe through a physical approach alone is like taking a tour through the ruins of a great ancient cathedral with a structural engineer as your only guide. Sure, you learn a lot about the physical fabric of the cathedral, but the cathedral’s larger meaning—historical, aesthetic, spiritual—inevitably escapes you. Some things traditional science just doesn’t do very well.”

  Brandi stared hard at him, trying to understand.

  “And what my mother could do with her talent,” she said, “that was one of them?”

  “Yes,” Shaw said, nodding slowly again. “Her talent fell into what I used to think of as ‘metaphoric science.’ Scientific theories so untestable with current technologies that they were merely metaphoric. Ironic. Unacceptable. Yet only metaphoric science could explain what your mother could do.”

  “But what was that, exactly?” Brandi asked, feeling impatient, as if she had to resort to coercion to get answers out of the old man. Shaw spoke in a circuitous fashion, to say the least.

  “She would take a witch’s brew of hallucinogens, or what she called ‘entheogens’,” he said. “Psilocybe, and Cordyceps fungi, and a circumpolar subspecies of Amanita muscaria. Some Ipomaea morning glory seeds thrown in for good measure. Then she’d sit down at a virtuality station programmed to channel-switch at greater-than-flashcut speeds—as an information trigger for going ‘elsewhere.’ Elsewhere was also elsewhen, even nonwhen and nonwhere.”

  Brandi shook her head and glanced down.

  “I don’t get it,” she said. “Sorry.”

  “No need to apologize,” Shaw said. “I didn’t get it either, at first. Your mother had to explain it to me. She talked about time as a ‘structure of possibility.’ She said she could move around in that structure while under the influence of heavy bursts of information and informational substances. Claimed she used her witch’s brew and info-bursts to bring on a particular type of chaos in her mind—to open her perception out, beyond its normal boundaries.”

  An uneasy shiver passed through Brandi. She tried to hide it by shifting about slightly on the bench. She found the idea of such mind-chaos more than vaguely repellent. Despite, or maybe because of her own physical thrill-seeking, she had always been obsessed with control. The idea of purposely pushing one’s own mind out of control Brandi found more than a little repugnant—especially when it was her mother who had done so.

  “What happened to her when she took that stuff?” Brandi asked.

  “She’d have visions,” Shaw said, gesturing vividly with his hands. “Swirling depths. Dimensions beyond dimensions. Everything moving and happening much faster than life. Until she got there, where she could see time lines branching and weaving and knitting. Maybe she was just seeing what she was looking for, already present in the chaotic patterns. Maybe she was actually weaving the threads of probability within that possibility structure, in that ‘elsewhere’ outside the here and now. Maybe by weaving them, she was making them ‘come true.’ She was never very clear about it. I didn’t figure it out myself, until the end.”

  “But what use could there be for a talent like that?” Brandi asked.

  “It was obvious to me,” Shaw said, remembering it with a grimace even as he ticked examples off on his fingers. “Too obvious. Stock quotes for all the big winners and losers on all the exchanges—from a week or a month into the future. Advance information on moves in big transnational ‘security’ industries. Prophetic data on the chilldown, the consolidation of state and corporate intelligence into the single global network of the original ISIS. All well ahead of time, all for people willing to pay top money for such advance notice.”

  “And you asked her to do all that?” Brandi asked.

  “Yes,” Shaw said, so quietly the word was barely a breath. “Always doing everything for me. For more money. For fancier tech toys. Our own expensive little arms race against the big net security conglomerates.”

  “How could that have caused her death, though?” Brandi asked, standing up and wringing her hands nervously, unconsciously.

  Shaw looked away again, into the middle distance of memory, above the drying and cracking bottom of the drained pond.

  “Because I couldn’t stop,” he confessed. “I kept pushing on Cyndi because I was being spurred onward myself by a ‘net friend’ who snared us. A guy who called himself Dash Chandler. Turned out he was working for Tetragrammaton. He knew what was going on with all of it before I did. Cyndi suspected it too, but she kept undergoing her ordeals for my sake anyway. I really didn’t see how much each of her journeys to Elsewhere was taking out of her, until it was far too late. I’ve only just worked out recently—after all these years—how Dash used me to kill her.”

  Brandi turned fully on him.

  “How?�
� she asked. Her own voice when it came sounded too shrill to her. She told herself she must be a bit overwrought, tired and lagged from the trip over from Freeman Lowell.

  “I managed to do some research,” he said with a slow, sad shrug, “until I got some answers and explanations. From Diana Gartner, for one. She was a friend of your mother’s, back in the bad old days. Worked with her on Five Million Day War. You should meet her you’re both here. She helped me understand your mother’s talent, through the same metaphoric, ironic science I discredited for so long.”

  “But how could it work?” Brandi asked. “I still don’t see it!”

  “The way Diana explained it,” Shaw said, “Cyndi in her ordeals was somehow moving into the quantum flux. Into dimensions smaller than Planck length, energies higher than Planck energies. Near-death experiencers have supposedly been doing it forever, in an accidental and uncontrolled fashion. The act of dying apparently shifts consciousness away from our consensual reality, into what Diana called ‘holographic reality’, the ‘implicate order’, the ‘frequency domain’.”

  “I think I’ve heard the terms before,” Brandi said, “but I’m not familiar enough with them to really know what they mean.”

  Shaw grasped her hand and lightly pulled her back down onto the bench beside him.

  “Think of it as a deeper reality underlying our world of appearances,” he said, “Think of it as made up of waves, like the interference patterns of a hologram which appear chaotic until you shine the right kind of light through them. Out of the ‘implicate’ reality our own space and time unfolds, crystallizes, freezes into form. Cyndi went into the implicate. She used the subtle power of her own thought to reorient structures of possibility, shift threads of parallel universes. She wove possibilities and futures out of the stuff of herself. Each time she did it, it was a small death. Until at last it was a big death.” Shaw turned his eyes fully on Brandi. “But even that, I know now, wasn’t a final death.”