“Such as that Jung said spirals and waves were archetypal images, for instance. In dream theory, waves are symbols of energy and emotion. Spirals are representations of evolution, of movement toward or away from consciousness. The spirals contained within a maze are a mandalic image.”
“Of what?”
“The shape of the mind as a whole, and its need for order. Even a link between the individual being and the ground of all being, a window or door onto eternity.”
Roger lifted his eyebrows quizzically.
“Dream logic is a rather outré route,” Roger said, smiling, as they got up to leave, “though it still might get you there, I suppose.”
“I’ve always been a tangential thinker,” Marissa said with a smile, then stood up from the table. “Helps me see in things and people what other people might not think is there. Doesn’t have to hit me in the face to get my attention.”
Roger winced. He remembered all too well his grievous misstep before the Light—and how Marissa had suffered for it at the hard-handed end of his rage. Marissa saw his pained look and took him lightly by the elbow as they walked out beneath HOME 1’s sheltering sky.
“What hits you plumb in the face isn’t the whole story anyway,” she said as they strode along. “The obvious is usually what is most in need of further analysis.”
“And understanding,” Roger said quietly, staring down at the path they walked along. “And forgiveness.”
Marissa kissed him lightly on the cheek.
“Let’s hope some changes are permanent,” she said with a smile.
“Fine by me,” he said quietly. “There’s no one with whom I’d rather fall apart together.”
A gaze, earnest and deep, passed between them then. They turned away, thinking of the maze of the heart and the turbulence it structured.
* * * *
The idea of going to visit the General Sherman tree, “the largest single organism on the planet,” with a bunch of Gaia-worshipping ecogroovy all-natural-fibered psiXtians appealed to Dundas about as much as a case of the shingles, but now he had managed it so that he was afflicted with both.
Sitting on one of their crowded sunbuses as it purred along Highway 180 past the mighty metrop of Minkler, Ray’s only solace crossing the central valley was seeing the occasional FOLLOW JESUS OR GO TO HELL bumperstickers on ancient camo-painted four-wheel-drive pickups. Good to see that not all Jurists’ Christian Assembly or Christian Identity folks were back home in the ACSA.
Such righteous, God-fearing locals were half an hour behind them now, however. He could feel the prodromal edginess coming on as the skin across his left temple grew tight. His parents had, unfortunately, been anti-vaccinists, and now colonies of perversely unvaccinatable new chicken pox, or zoster opthalmicus B, or whatever it was left over from his childhood had started growing again on his cranial nerves. Soon the tightness in his face would be persistent pain around his left eye and all about the left side of his head, then large pimply bulges, skinshine, and suppurating, crusty sores all over the left side of his forehead—as if he were some kind of bizarre, bumpy-head alien. Soon the emotional edginess would be outright rage. What a joy.
Before he’d had his two previous eruptions of this bane, he’d always thought of shingles as a (usually) curable old ladies’ disease. Both prior flare-ups had presumably been stress-induced. They had both happened when he was on duty back at headquarters in Billings, and his marriage was coincidentally unraveling. He had been trying to put his wife aside gracefully, so that their marital bliss-turned-blisters did not become obvious enough to catch the attention of his family-valuing superiors and thereby damage his own career. Instead he’d literally broken out in blisters.
At least he’d never had an outbreak while in the field on deep-cover duty, until now. The mere thought of it was embarrassing: the Spy with the Shingles.
As the bus climbed through the hills of oak giving way to pine above Miramonte and Dunlap, he realized that maintaining his brave façade among the happy utopian psiXtians must be more stressful than he’d realized. The trip to Santa Cruz must have been the last straw.
Still, Dundas thought, he might be able to make his body’s betrayal work for him. Most anti-vaccinists (unlike his parents) were dyed-in the wool Greens, and he could always hint that his current stress was caused by his “deep desire to succeed as an initiate into the ways of the psiXtians.” That sounded about right. Make it a plus, turn it into a signifier of his hope and zeal, rather than a proof of the difficulty of maintaining the façade.
The psiXtians on the bus oohed and aahed as they spotted the first of the obvious Big Trees not far from the Sequoia-Kings Canyon entry gate.
Ray Dundas smirked at their awe. Just another tree, only bigger. More board-feet of timber. From the awe in the expressions of these people you’d think they’d just witnessed the second coming of the Lord.
These psiXtians, with their “negative capability” and “compensatory lack,” were easy to impress. He’d seen their optimistic gullibility in action during an initiate eco-study meeting he’d attended, after returning to Sunderground from his deliveries in Santa Cruz. During the meeting he tossed out that axiom he’d dreamed up—“Convenience is obedience to the rule of status quo”—along with some eco-cant context for it. Immediately he’d upped his station in the community of initiates by at least half a dozen notches. His dreaming of that heretical phrase must have been providential, a blessing on his mission, he now realized. Truly, God works in most mysterious ways.
As the sunbuses hummed into the Kings Canyon side of the two-headed park, word spread around him that they weren’t going straight to see the General Sherman tree, but were stopping at the Grant Grove of Big Trees first. Dundas hoped he could contain his ecstasy at that prospect.
As the bus he rode in made its way up the road toward the visitor center, then down the steep turns toward Grant Grove, Ray overheard a conversation between an ancient, bald and bearded white psiXtian and a younger black man.
“—the place names around here,” said the young man, shaking his head. “Groves of trees named for generals.”
“Names are powerful talismans,” said the oldster. “People take them very seriously. I remember when I was a young man living in Fresno, I showed up at a rally in support of changing the name of Kings Canyon Boulevard to César Chávez Boulevard. Chávez had died not long before. I went to the rally because I felt Chávez tried to bring about social change in a nonviolent fashion. Whether you agreed with everything the man was about or not, he was obviously a figure of historical importance in the valley. I thought it only made sense that a street should be named for him.”
“Were we being a bit naive?” the younger man asked wryly.
“You bet,” said the older man with a nod. “When I showed up, I wasn’t carrying a sign or anything, just holding a painting of Chávez—no caption or anything else. That’s all I was doing. The mediacudas swarmed me, probably because I was a big dumb white guy in a sea of Chicano faces. The next day, there was my picture on the bottom of the front page of the Local News section, me holding that painting of Chávez. The caption read, ‘Hunter Kaprin shows his support for the renaming.’”
“Your first time in the paper?” the younger man asked.
“Not at all. Over the previous several years I’d written op-ed articles and letters to the editor on a bunch of controversial topics—drug persecution hysteria, door-to-door religion, war, you name it—but I’d never heard back so much as a peep from anyone who might have read them. But that picture went out and boom! The death threats started coming in to our voicemail before I’d even picked the paper off the front stoop. My wife and I woke to the sound of a woman yelling from our answering machine, saying how, because she was a good Christian, she knew that Kings Canyon had been named for the Three Kings in the Christmas story. How it wasn’t Chávez but a Filipino who’d founded and built the farmworkers’ union. How I’d better get my facts straight. She ended he
r diatribe by saying ‘I hope you get a bullet up your ass.’”
The two men laughed. The prodromally edgy Dundas found it all he could do to keep from exhaling in a derisive hiss at both of them.
“Interesting anatomical specificity,” said the younger man, “but that doesn’t sound very, um, ‘Christian’.”
“Everyone has bad days, I suppose,” the old man Kaprin said with a shrug, in a tone Dundas found annoyingly condescending. “I didn’t think my life was in danger from her, though. Allowing herself to be taped on an answering machine didn’t exactly fit the profile of a deadly ‘stalker.’ The ones that scared me were the ones who, when I picked up the phone, said things like, ‘You better have a good life insurance policy, fella,’ then hung up.”
“I can see how they would be scarier,” the younger man agreed. “How did you deal with the calls?”
“We just stopped answering,” Kaprin said. “Then we got an unlisted number. The one silver lining was that, because we were getting death threats, the phone company didn’t charge for getting our number switched to unlisted!”
“That’s pretty small compensation,” the young man said.
“True,” Kaprin agreed. “But any good news was a big plus, at the time. The reaction of those readers caught me totally off guard. Nothing I had written previously, no matter how controversial, had ever elicited so violent a response as that single innocuous picture with my name under it. In the eyes of those callers, I was honoring the guy who tried to take away their slaves, or something. I had become a ‘race traitor’ overnight, just by holding a picture of Chávez in public—”
The bus stopped then and they all piled out to look at the big trees of Grant Grove—a good thing, for Dundas’s irritability had grown almost past the point of containment.
The idiots! he thought as he walked up the path into the grove, almost oblivious to the enormous trees around him. What did these mystico-pagans, practically falling to their knees before these big weeds, know about being a good Christian?
They probably thought Jesus was a Jew, for heaven’s sake. To be expected, when they’d been living under a Zionist Occupation Government all these years. They had undoubtedly never studied the Bible enough to realize that the white race was the actual “lost” tribe of Israel. Not lost, but fled north, into the Caucasus Mountains, hence “Caucasians.” These people surely had no inkling of the proof Guaranty had provided, in Myth’s Edge and Nation, that Jesus and his parents were part of a mission from the North to the other tribes. No idea at all that the years of Jesus’ life lost to scripture he had spent in those same Caucasus mountains.
Did these people understand the first ten amendments to the Constitution? The Magna Carta? He doubted it. They were all too ZOGged out. And they most certainly hadn’t read and appreciated Genesis 1:27-30.
He looked at them now, in their simple homespun garments, gazing in rapture up at the tall trees. From what he overheard them saying, he knew that, instead of seeing the big trees as examples of the divine handiwork put on Earth for Man’s use, they were reveling in the fact that the trees had been “preserved” from the timbermen. He heard their petulant tsk-tsking over how few were left, especially since Yosemite and its groves had been privatized.
Their kind were all meddlers, muddlers, lumpers, makers of mud people, Dundas thought. No respect for what God’s will decreed about boundaries between sexes, races, and species. Making everything and everybody a big mess of “equal rights.” Denying God’s ordained hierarchy, and ready to unleash anarchy in its stead. Scratch a psiXtian and who knew what kind of ecofem witchery would come oozing out....
Did these Zionized race-mixing sympathizers even consider the realities of race betrayal? Did those who were nominally white among them ever think that they constituted only about ten per cent of the global population? Did they ever consider the fact that, if this race-mixing went on, white people would be hybridized out of existence?
Of course not. The result of their “diversity” wasn’t a rainbow—it was mud. Look at these initiates. Non-descript melanoskins from everywhere. Even a dozen half-savages from some God-forsaken jungle mountaintop in South America!
Walking through the inside of an enormous fallen sequoia, Ray read a plaque, the inscription on which contended a single giant sequoia contained more wood than was to be found on several acres of the finest virgin timberland in the Pacific Northwest, when there had still been virgin timberland there.
Looking about at the enormous downed tree through which he walked, Dundas shook his head. What a waste. Think of all the houses this single grove could make for the poor of the Christian States! Think of the jobs it would provide!
He walked out of the downed tree, on toward the California Tree and the Oregon Tree, thinking of geography. True, what remained of old Canada and the United States still surrounded the Autonomous Christian States of America—but not forever.
How long would it be before already majority-Hispanic California’s brownboy governor, Martín Gutiérrez, completely opened the border with Mexico? A month or so ago he’d begun making those very noises. When the State of California became the Alta California of Mexico once more, Gutiérrez would of course have to assert territorial hegemony over Arizona and New Mexico as well. If Gutiérrez played his cards right, he’d end up president of all a greatly expanded Mexico.
According to the strategists back in Billings, the states of Oregon and Washington would then also declare their independence from the federal government back east. They would most likely join with the former Canadian Pacific provinces and Alaska in the “Pacific Rim Bio-regional Coalition” the Greeners in that area had been advocating for years. Florida would secede and join the browns and blacks of the Caribbean. From Texas through Georgia, to the Virginias and out to Missouri, the South would rise again in a new form, almost nine score years after the Civil War had ended.
Despite the prodromal pain of his oncoming stress-engendered shingles, Dundas smiled to himself. Of course the ACSA would be the great beneficiary of such changes. All the rational white people—God-fearing, or soon destined to be—would come flooding in. Émigrés and refugees would swarm to the mountains and plains of the Autonomous Christian States. The Bible-based South would quickly become an ally.
In no time at all, white people, with a strong tradition of Christian soldiering, would again rule all of the old United States as they once had. The days of that blessed theocracy would return. The United States of America would again become the Christian States of America, as it had been all too briefly. The New Troubles might have prematurely ended the CSA, it might have forced the ACSA secession from a re-secularized USA, but that could be turn around again. With a vengeance.
Once America was again Christian from sea to shining sea, God’s true chosen people could at last begin moving against the great nests of perversion. The first targets would be the orbital habitats, with their Wemoon’s Edens and their demonic “diversity”. At long last the righteous could re-educate or exterminate everyone in that cislunar Pandemonium, down to the last man-hating, ball-cutting witch!
Lost smilingly in such pleasant thoughts, he had unthinkingly come to the vicinity of the General Grant Tree. He heard the ranger interpreter, an Asian woman, describing the tree as the second largest living thing in the world, after the General Sherman. The thin young black woman next to Dundas looked at him and chuckled.
“Look at that smile on your face!” she said in a friendly, joshing tone. “I feel the same way. Does the soul good to see something so big and so old and so alive, don’t you think?”
“Absolutely,” he said, his mask of devout tree-paganhood once again providentially maintained.
He moved on among the big trees, impressed almost despite himself now that he took notice of them. Their thick, reddish-brown columnar trunks stood many arm spans around and twenty-plus stories in height. Rather like looking at a two thousand year old living office building, he thought. One that was still growing
too, topped with rugged limbs and feathered with ropy bracts of greenery.
He hoped that he would live long enough to see the day when California became part of a Greater ACSA or a restored Christian States of America. When that time came, he would see to it that he exercised his God-given dominion over these trees. He’d have one of these giants felled and split, converted into fencing to surround his home in Montana and his summer cabin in Idaho.
Soon the psiXtian group boarded the buses again and headed into the Sequoia section of the double park. Yes, he thought as the buses hummed along, things weren’t perfect in the ACSA—especially since that Light thing supposedly happened. Some of the Mormons had begun acting up again with their independent revelations. Too many citizens were saying heretical, mystical things like “The Book will crumble and the Steeple will fall but the Light will be shining at the end of it all.” In his youth he had blown away Quakers for less heretical statements than that.
He was glad to have learned through his hidden satlink that the churchstates were finally squelching such people but good. About time. He would almost have thought the Light was some sort of secularist plot against the churchstates all over the world, except that it seemed to have caused as much trouble in the secular world as it had in the theocracies.
The buses parked across the road from the Sherman Tree and Congress Trail areas. This grove was crowded enough that the psiXtian group didn’t merit a human guide. Instead everyone was handed a pre-recorded multi-channel handset with descriptions of the Sherman Tree and points of interest along the Congress Trail.
Walking around the old, snag-crowned tree, Dundas mainly heard the handset spew a cascade of numbers—height, weight, age, ground circumference, base diameter, height of first large branch, diameter of largest branch. Ray gathered that the volume of the trunk was the key number, since it was by volume that the Sherman Tree was the largest living thing on Earth.
Watching the psiXtians move in slow procession around the big tree, Dundas realized that this was their kind of altar in their kind of cathedral. No doubt they were smug about the fact that this tree pre-dated the birth of Christ by five hundred years. It provided them too with their own version of the parable of the mustard seed—namely, that the trunk weighed sixty billion times as much as the seed that had produced it.
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