Standing Wave

by Howard V. Hendrix

  With an effort turning away, struggling to break out of the all too lucid dream. Now the angels shifting to demons, transformed from cool, blue-white crystalline distance to steamy fleshly proximity, bikers and biker chicks straight from a red-black hell, bandanas above and below their eyes, dressed in the leathers of the Mongrel Clones, giving pleasure with one hand and pain with the other, moving in, surrounding, arms raised feebly without a chance of fending the demons off—

  She found herself on the floor of Oliver’s workspace, Robert Sullivan staring down at her, looking very concerned, his left arm under her shoulders.

  “Are you all right?” he asked worriedly. “You must have passed out. You fell out of the chair and went into spasm. Your eyes were remming like mad—”

  “I’m okay,” Mei-Ling said weakly, coming to a sitting position. “Just forgot I should only look at the reflection in the shield.”

  The joke was almost as weak as she was. Yes, she was all right, but this had never happened before—not this way—and that in itself was worrisome.

  * * * *

  Aleck narrowly managed to evict Sam and company from his lab before security came on dayshift duty. Sam and Janika and Marco and Hari had been wildly enthused about how things had “jelled” overnight and were already talking about a “concept project.” The band had adjourned to Sam and Aleck’s apartment with such speed that, by the time Aleck got home, they had whipped up an infosphere hype-sheet, a virtual poster full of twisting subliminal suggestions of biomechanical monsters in the background. In the foreground it read,

  Hugh Manatee

  in

  Tiffany Chains’

  Soft Slavery

  They proudly showed it to Aleck when he came in. He nodded and smiled, but he couldn’t make much sense of it. From the title he thought it could be a description of anything—from a bondage-and-discipline pornholo to a cultural-materialist critique of transnational corporate feudalism, or perhaps a combination of the two.

  In almost no time it became clear to him that Sam and his friends were all too hyped to sleep. Aleck realized for a certainty that they were going to be here most of the day. Already they seemed to have ruled out physically attending their classes for the day, opting for interactive at best, telepresent or asynchronous attendance, or simply complete absence, both physical and virtual. They were brainstorming, speculating about their future direction.

  “Personal integrity is more important than public success,” Sam declared. “Too many creative people are slaves to their talent.”

  “What do you mean?” Janika asked, peeved. Even from the snatches of conversation he’d heard since coming in, Aleck thought it was fairly clear that Janika found the idea of “public success” a lot less troubling than Sam did.

  “Their desire to perform for an audience is so overwhelming,” Sam replied, “that they end up selling themselves cheap, for only money, so they can get their ‘stuff’ into the market. That’s what.”

  “Right,” Hari agreed. “Just look at all the artists in all sorts of fields who get fat and lazy as soon as they make it big—then never again produce work as good as when they were young and struggling. They become the victims of their own success.”

  “In the end, pandering to the market has a crippling effect on their personal integrity,” Sam said sagaciously, “and their work inevitably suffers too. To keep a cutting edge, an artistic life, like a knife, has to be dragged across the hard sharpening-stone of rough street reality from time to time.”

  “Noise!” Marco said, laughing. “I’ve been on the street, and you can have it, man. You can starve to death in a garret if you want. Me, I’d rather be sipping a single malt scotch by my swimming pool.”

  This sort of speculation could go on forever, Aleck realized. It probably already had. No way was he going to be able to sleep at home today.

  The previous night’s events had left him too wired to sleep anyway. What he needed was what his grandfather—when the old man had refused to do his scheduled media or take his scheduled medication—used to call “a vacation from carbonation.” Walking out to the street and looking for a public podcar, Aleck thought he understood what his grandfather had meant.

  People and electronics had been rubbing him the wrong way now for weeks on end, until Aleck felt staticky as a long-haired cat in a room full of Van de Graaff generators. On the absolute spur of the moment, he decided to visit a place he hadn’t seen in more than a dozen years.

  Finding a satellite-tracked Public Option Driver vehicle, he thumb-printed the podcar open, climbed inside, then voice-printed and retscanned it into operation. After programming the car to head south of the Lunken light-industry park and then east toward the Mount Washington area, Aleck settled back into the seat and watched the world of his hometown slide by.

  The car came down from Clifton Hill and headed east, whirring past the long lines of river-view condos, apartments, and offices that lined the Cincinnati side of the river from downtown all the way to the confluence of the Little Miami and the Ohio. Aleck, however, was too preoccupied to pay the scenery that much attention. He was still spinning with thoughts about the previous night, in no particular order.

  In response to Hari’s physics theorizing, he wondered now why it should be that matter-energy was supposed to come first, and consciousness was supposed to arise out of that. Why couldn’t consciousness come first, then matter and energy precipitate out of it, instead? Why was it that matter and energy were supposed to shape space and time? Why didn’t space and time shape matter and energy?

  At the very least he thought there should be some kind of synergistic process whereby consciousness, space-time, and matter-energy all interacted strongly with each other, even if phrasing it this way did make it sound as if space-time and consciousness were somehow two types of the same thing....

  But what do I know? Aleck thought. I’m not a physics major. Hari would probably think these questions sophomoric, or trivial.

  The car crossed the road bridge over the Little Miami and purred into the overgrown green tunnel of Salem Road. Road names from his childhood floated through his head. Sutton. Salem. Kellogg. Of course those names would have meant nothing to the indigenous people that once lived hereabouts. If you don’t have roads, you don’t need words for them. Or maybe, if you don’t have words for them, you don’t need roads.

  As the car turned onto Wayside Avenue, he thought maybe words themselves were roads into the interior, the unknown. He thought of roads cutting inward to anatomize the wild land, words to dissect the wild mind.

  To use a language is to walk the streets of the city the dead have made.

  Thinking that, he shuddered a little as the car made its way along Wayside’s dogleg shape. It was too close to what the ACSA Autochristians claimed about language and culture: that separate languages are vectors for social disharmony and cannot be tolerated in the unified state. What if they were right? The stable security of sameness rather than the dizzy freedom of difference. How much should people be willing to sacrifice for the “unified state”?

  The car was coming up on the place where he wanted to stop.

  “Pull to the side of the road here,” Aleck commanded the car. When the vehicle had stopped, he got out. Hearing the electric vehicle locking and securing itself, he walked across the road, onto a private drive that angled downhill.

  He couldn’t really blame the citizens of the ACSA that much. Sacrificing freedom for security was at least as old as the shift from the greater vagaries of hunting and gathering to the supposedly lesser ones of farming and herding. The shift had only continued with the supposedly still slighter uncertainties of industrial and then information societies.

  Maybe “progress” was nothing else but this ongoing abstraction, he thought. This movement further and further away from the deep bitter-tinged softness of living as a mere creature in a created world. Maybe the march of technology was all a continuing alienation and estrangement from seasonal
rhythms, from the bright-dark beating of the heart of the earth and the sky.

  Aleck hopped a low fence just out of range of the first of the security cameras and trespassed into a place where his memories dwelled, green thoughts in their green shade. This stretch of woods not far from his childhood home on Wayside was the only significant greenspace left in the area and the only thoroughly good use he had ever encountered for hereditary wealth, privilege, and “private property”—namely, the inherited land of the Rohdes or Grotes or whatever the name of the family was that had kept this woods intact and in their family all these years.

  He made his way through a forest of beech and maple to a nameless small stream that, he knew from past experience, eventually led down to the Little Miami River. As a boy he and his friends had called the off-limits woods “Monster”—in much the same way that Gilgamesh and Enkidu had called their forest/spirit “Humbaba,” in a book he had read years later, as an undergraduate.

  He wondered how much had been gained and how much lost in the destruction of those ancient spirit-haunted forests. Those places were all pretty much gone everywhere, now. Progress proceeds via catastrophe, Aleck thought. Catastrophe proceeds via progress.

  Looking around as he walked the woods, it occurred to him that, with the eclipse of Nature, increasingly there was no reality but culture. That was sad. He knew he needed to get out of his own head once in a while. He suspected that the same could be said for humanity as a whole—that people needed to get out of the world they had built. It was important and necessarily humbling to be reminded that not everything was of human making, nor should be. In wildness lay not only the preservation of the world, as Thoreau had put it, but also the preservation of the soul.

  In this small patch of wildness where he walked now he had also walked as a boy, in every season of the year. This woods had taught him things without words, purely by the example of itself. Many years had passed since he’d last been here. Everything seemed smaller and more fragile—not because it had changed, but because he had, growing bigger and more powerful.

  He paused to look about him. Even now, time and this place still had their way of defamiliarizing the known and refamiliarizing the unknown. The larger the island continent of knowledge, he thought, the longer the shoreline of mystery rising out of the waves of the Unknown Sea. He felt a quiet joy in that realization as he hurried on.

  Soon he came to a broad deep spot where two stream branches flowed together into one, a place full of the frogs and turtles and snakes and salamanders of his memories. As a nine year old he’d called it the “Pool of Life.” That was how it had seemed to him at that age: a node of creation, a locus amoenus where life flowed out of formlessness into form. He hadn’t known “nodes” and Latin terms at that age, so with the directness of a child’s soul he had given it that grandiloquent name in straightforward English.

  The place looked smaller, but somehow it still merited that childhood name. He crouched down beside the pool, staring into it at tadpoles and minnows and crayfish darting through the reflection of his face, swimming through the sunburst anemone of his thatch of blond hair. Deeper underwater, a bird flew over his head. Beneath it all, fossil trilobites stood motionless in the stone of the pool’s bottom, far beyond the day-lit sky. All these creatures and more were in him, he realized—in his life, at least as much as they were in his reflection. Something hypnotic in the scene kept him staring at it minute after minute.

  When he finally stood up again, he felt more relaxed than he had in weeks. He walked on, more slowly, along the woodland stream, fording its waters on downed logs and impromptu stepping stones. He came to a waterfall that had been the Niagara of his youth, and was a bit disappointed to see that it was little more than a freshet tumbling over a ledge of shale into a clay-bottomed pool not more than ten feet below. It still proved a challenge to get around, though. He had to do some hillside scrambling before he was safely onto the lower bed of the stream.

  All was as he remembered it, at the very least, and more than once what he saw and heard around him called up details he had long forgotten. He came to the spot where another tributary flowed into the main stream. Instead of following the main flow the last kilometer or so to the Little Miami River, he decided to walk up the tributary. He hoped that something he remembered—a cave hole some kids had dug high in a sandy cliff—would still be there even after all this time.

  After a few turns up the tributary, he saw it. The hole was still there, and larger than he remembered, if anything. Perhaps succeeding generations of children had excavated it more fully. He made his way up the crumbly sandstone and climbed into the mouth of the hole. It only went back five or six feet, and was not quite tall enough for him to stand up in, so he sat down at the entrance, where its edge jutted out of the cliff like a small porch.

  Dangling his feet over the edge, he looked off to the northwest. His eyes scanned over the few remaining sod and popcorn fields of the floodplain, over the tree line along the river, to the robotic industrial park that had once been Lunken Airport.

  Looking over that vista, Aleck had an odd sensation that he had become dislocated in time. He had reverted to a much earlier type of human, a far-back someone who suddenly, while seated at the entrance of his cave, had peered unexpectedly through time into a far away future he could not hope to comprehend. Only gradually did the sensation subside. Either Aleck was ceasing to be that caveman, or that caveman was becoming accustomed to the future.

  Gazing up at the sky, Aleck thought of his parents. Strange that they at their age should have left their hometown, retiring to one of the orbital habitats, while he had stayed. He thought of his uncle, his father’s brother, who called himself Aleister McBruce but whose real name was Bruce McAleister. Uncle Bruce had lived up there in the first haborb for years.

  Living in space had never much appealed to Aleck. He tended to agree with Sam that the ’borbs were energy colonies, that they were for solar what the Navajo reservations had been for uranium during the last century. Like the Navajo rez too, the orbital complexes had continued to exist only upon the tender sufferance of governments and corporations.

  The fact that earthly powers had nearly gone to war and almost invaded the orbital habitat, not even months back, was proof enough for Aleck of the tenuousness of life in the ’borbs. Yet his parents and Uncle Bruce loved their lives there. That was clearer with every communication he got from them. They were always trying to get him to come visit, even offering, in his parents’ most recent invite, to pay his fare to the world up there.

  He lay back in the mouth of the cave, thinking about life on Earth versus life in an orbital habitat. Living up there would probably be as detached from nature as one could get—therefore the pinnacle of “progress.” He tried to figure out which world would seem everted and which inverted, but that was too tangled for him to contemplate at the moment. The day was warming outside. The wind rustled leaves in the trees and the birds called and the insects hummed, but here in the cave’s mouth it was cool and quiet. He grew drowsy, his thoughts becoming slippery, like electric eels in a sultry river, like lightning from a muggy sky.

  Maybe his love of nature was ridiculous, a romantic nostalgia with no place in the modern world, for no place that had ever really existed. Naive, unsophisticated. Maudlin. Sentimental. A place of gardens and children and waterfalls and birdsong. A utopian This Was The Tomorrow That Was. Bigger, better, faster, more. Smaller, worse, slower, less. The Ancient Future.

  I am coming from where I have yet to go, rising out of it, returning to it, never leaving it.

  Aleck came suddenly awake, sitting up in the entrance of the cave so abruptly that he almost fell out of the entrance and down the sand cliff. A voice had spoken quite distinctly in his head. “I am coming from where I have yet to go.” What did that mean? And where did the voice come from? It wasn’t his own, he was sure of that.

  Then where? For all his musing on Humbaba and such, he didn’t really believ
e in a spirit of the Earth. Or did he?

  He thought of his parents in the ’borbs. Inverted and everted worlds. Coming from where he hadn’t yet gone. Maybe he should take them up on their offer of a visit, after all.

  * * * *

  “Delicacies of Deutschland” was the special of the day at Planeteria Prime, so the place was all holoed out in an excess of Bavarian gemütlichkeit. Dark wood and steins and stags’ heads on the walls, lederhosened servers, oompahpah music, a hyperreal Oktoberfest atmosphere.

  Roger ordered a mushroom and tofu-based Holsteiner Schnitzel, thinking as he did so that, in the habitat, mushrooms were in some ways like jellyfish on Earth—signs of an environment “constrained’ in some particular fashion. Marissa picked a similarly faux Rouladen, complemented by two steins of a local HOMEBREW version of bockbeer. With their trays in hand they walked through a holographic wall out onto a plaza and took a seat at a mooncrete-topped table.

  Sipping his beer, Roger thought the inside-out world of the haborbs had in some ways become new again for him after his recent sojourn on Earth. Looking about, the view through the central sphere of the orbital habitat reminded him less of a county blown all around the inside of a great bubble than of a small city distributed about the pleasant environs of a U-shaped mountain valley—only here the valley reached around U, all the way to O.

  Over lunch Roger bemoaned to his red-headed lunch date the fact that the Light, for all it had accomplished, had not thoroughly remade the world, much as they might have hoped it would.

  “The response to the Light among people I’ve met,” he told Marissa as he cut into his schnitzel, “even of that minority who remember it at all, makes me think of something I once read. A twentieth century scientist said it, about the way his fellow physicists responded to the philosophical implications of some the bizarrer findings of quantum physics.”