Standing Wave

by Howard V. Hendrix

  As they moved up the Congress Trail, the psiXtians’ talk was full of “peripheral pressure ridges” and “leaning trees” and “resinless bark” and “tannin preserved trunks.” Dundas gathered that, unless they were consumed by fire, these trunks were so resistant to decay that the downed trees often lasted longer dead than even all the thousands of years they had known while alive. Around him the psiXtians eagerly discussed the trees’ life cycle, from egg-sized cone and tiny seeds, through Christmas tree-like saplings, to young trees with spired crowns, to mature trees with rounded crowns hundreds of years old, on to snag-crowned oldsters of several thousand years, and on at last even to the maze-rooted fallen giants sprawled across the forest floor.

  I’m on the Nature Walk from Hell, he thought grumpily as he plodded along with them.

  They talked eagerly of the white firs and sugar pines and Jeffrey pines scattered through the grove, the chinquapin and corn lily and orchis and bracken fern and lupines and leopard lily and senecio. They fascinated themselves with the nature of plant succession and the role of fire in the climax community. They spoke reverently of forest food webs, of chickarees and insects and mule deer, of coyote and bobcat and pine marten and black bear, of ravens and kinglets and owls, of chickadees and sapsuckers and juncos and woodpeckers.

  The psiXtians pronounced those names like a litany of saints, Dundas realized as he followed them past the President Tree. Their litany continued as he walked with them past the tall, straight, pantheon-columns of the Senate and House groups, through Circle Meadow, to the Lee and McKinley trees.

  Returning with them in a great circle back toward the Sherman Tree, he passed a shattered trunk and suffered through another tsk-tsking discussion of the evils of the logging which brought down these giants, each earth-shaking fall heard half a dozen kilometers away.

  They approached the Sherman Tree once more. Ahead Dundas saw the psiXtian greeners start forming up into a human chain to circle round the biggest living thing on Earth, and he had a vision of sorts. Not of the psiXtians all meditating round the big tree—that was real enough and happening already—but of semi-simian, arboreal subhumans, living in the trees as in high rise apartments, the trees themselves engineered to serve as living homes. The followers of Axel Erlandson, half a hundred generations on...?

  Standing in line with the meditators, Dundas was profoundly disturbed by his dark vision, by this prospect of a humanity that had completely forfeited its God-given role of dominion.

  After the psiXtians’ sage-smudging and readings from John Muir and tree prayers, and the usual four-compass-point ritual rigmarole, Dundas was glad to be getting back on the sunbus. He was exhausted—yet another sign of his pending shingles outbreak.

  Passing off to sleep, he was glad that the time of the degraded, simian subhumans had not yet come, and that quality, high-tech, vibro-resonant health care (which didn’t respect the equal rights of microbes) was still available....

  Diana Gartner flying in from orbit on a dark and stealthy witch’s broom. Staring at him, crucified again—transfixed by old-style hypodermic syringes through each of his hands, another syringe through his overlapping feet, an electrode crown of thorns on his brow. Then himself, pierced no longer by needles but only by light and a VR circlet upon his brow. Then bleeding bright shining light, from wounds in his hands and feet and side, from the lacerations in his scalp, stigmata—

  The bus came to a stop at a turn and he awoke. Gingerly he moved aside the blond hair from his forehead, perversely heartened to find, not stigmata, but merely the first of his shingle-bumps erupting. He glanced surreptitiously at his hands and was glad to find no oozing eldritch marks there—just his ordinary palms, slightly sweaty.

  Still, the image of crucifixion troubled him. His was a religious faith that emphasized the empty cross of the promised Easter, not the tortured crucifix of Catholicism’s Good Friday pain. Diana Gartner’s presence troubled him even more. Fighting back sleep the rest of the trip to Sunderground, he shivered much of the way. He told himself it was just the chills accompanying the onset of his condition.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Code-extracted SubTerPost excerpt (source possibly infosphere killer related; original source is Jayne’s Military Technologies of the ACSA):

  Researchers discovered the Low Intensity Maser Barrage Induced Catatonia (LIMBIC) effect accidentally. Masers, they learned, could be used to trigger unforeseen responses in their troops’ satellite-link hookups. ACSA researchers found that maser interference caused the satlink systems to generate voltage potentials in specific areas of the brains of those soldiers using such units. These “headsparks,” as the troops referred to them, amplified the brain’s built-in electrochemical chaos.

  ACSA researchers further learned that areas of the brain could be specifically targeted for this chaoticizing effect. Symptoms ranging from epilepsy-like convulsions to total immersion in “oceanic feeling” could thus be induced. Simulated near-death and out-of-body experiences were also reported by soldiers equipped with such units. For these reasons, ACSA commanders have restricted the use of satlink neural systems among their forces.

  That restriction has not stopped the technology from leaking onto the streets, however. Civilian populations worldwide, particularly among youth subcultures, have long since discovered that maser interference with such headsets and implants can also be used to generate low-voltage electrical stimulation of the central pleasure zones, particularly the septal area of the brain. Cheap, maser-modified headphone-like units, commonly called “Sexophones,” can be found on the street corners of virtually any impoverished urban area in the world.

  A generation of stim-addicts has resulted, their septal areas high-wired for “mental masturbation” in the fullest sense of that phrase. Many of these “wireheads” have literally starved to death, their electronic addiction far more powerful than the need for food or drink to sustain life.

  * * * *

  “You were right,” said the tall, lithe woman. From the gray streaking her thick fall of dark hair and the slight pouchiness of the skin around her chin and at her elbows, Brandi thought she looked to be in her fifties. “The resemblance to Cyndi is incredible.”

  “See?” Immanuel Shaw asked rhetorically. “I told you.”

  “Too incredible, if you ask me,” the woman, Diana Gartner, said, joshing him. “Doesn’t look like there’s any of you in this girl-child at all, Manny. She must have been cloned or ovular-merged!”

  Shaw gave Gartner a sidewise and slit-eyed skeptical glance. Gartner laughed.

  “You’re the same Diana Gartner who was in my mother’s Five Million Day War?” Brandi asked.

  “I’m the historical person,” Gartner corrected her, as they walked about the small, meadow-like commons near Shaw’s house in the ag tori. “I didn’t play the role in the documentary. I helped your mother work on the screenplay for that section, though.”

  Brandi pinched a cluster of purple flowers from a broken stem alongside the path as they walked through the small commons.

  “That must have been a challenge,” she said.

  “Not really,” Diana Gartner said. “I found Will Acton’s sub voc recorder. There was an unbelievable amount of material in that.”

  “Will Acton was real too, then?” Brandi asked, watching her feet as they moved over the path.

  “Absolutely,” Gartner said with a nod as they approached a large, high-backed, crescent-shaped bench. Brandi saw it was made of some kind of mooncrete. According to the affixed plaque, it was based on an original lovers’ whispering bench at Wilton House in England. There was no denying that it had unique acoustic properties. Even though they were spaced far apart on it, they could hear each other perfectly well.

  “Horrible thing, what happened to Acton,” Gartner went on, after they sat down. “He was the proverbial ‘good soldier’, doing his duty, but very much bothered by it. His sub voc record makes it pretty clear he had his doubts. I saw what was left of his
body afterward. The bastard that did it to him, Ray Dalken—he’s still alive, as far as anyone knows.”

  “The ACSA really did do what my mother’s documentary shows?” Brandi asked, leaning backward into the high-backed crescent bench.

  “Not the ACSA,” Manny Shaw corrected. “The old CSA. I know you grew up in the haborb, but jeez, get the history straight, girl.”

  “The Christian States of America came first,” Diana said, remembering. “That regime rode a wave of millennial fervor to power over the old fifty United States of America. The churchstaters were in control of the whole show for almost twelve years.”

  “That’s the time frame for what happened to Acton and the Neo-Brunists and a whole lot of other ‘unbelievers,’” Shaw said.

  Brandi nodded, patting the bench absently with her hand.

  “I remember some of that history,” she said, “but I don’t really remember how the CSA became the ACSA, so they kind of run together in my head.”

  “That’s true for a lot of people,” Manny said with a smirk. Diana glared at him.

  “There was a very short and very bloody Second Civil war,” Diana said. “At the end of it, the churchstaters retained control of twelve states in the Rocky Mountains and the northern plains. That’s the ACSA. The remainder of the old fifty took the name ‘United States of America’ again.”

  “Not that it really makes all that much difference,” Manny put in, leaning forward. “CSA or ACSA, they’re mostly the same narrow-cranium Adolph Christler types. The kind of folks who’ll proclaim loudly that they’re praying for your soul while they march you off to the ovens. They’re still around, even outside the ACSA. Here—just look at this holo clip my friend Paul Larkin found and v-mailed me. A bunch of religioid types, laying siege to another Zoo-Ark, somewhere down in the American Midwest—right now. I’ve been wanting you to see it in particular, Di.”

  Shaw already had his notepad Personal Data Assistant out and ready. He set the clip to play in public display mode, so Diana and Brandi had little choice but to watch it.

  “—we have returned,” boomed a folksy white-maned preacher, media captioned as a Rev. William Grindstaff. “All those worldly people out there, taking their 7:06 Beast train to their offices in Downtown Satan City—they have tried to ignore our truth. It can no longer be ignored. The Scripture is clear on this. In order for the new heaven and new earth to come among us, the old earth must be exhausted, utterly used up. Extinction of lower orders and types is not an accident—it is the will of God and central to His Plan. Conservationists and eco-sympathizers delay the Second Coming! The Lord’s Own must make straight the way for the coming of our Great King. We will allow no ark of Satan, nor tree-hugging people-hating Greens, nor earth goddess-worshipping pagans to stand in His way!”

  Choruses of “Amen! Amen!” and a wave of applause broke over the preacher, who smiled righteously upon his people, hundreds or perhaps thousands of zealots, wearing crosses and gun belts, shooting and shouting and shaking their guns before a sandbagged perimeter defended by private security forces in riot armor.

  “See?” Shaw said. “And that’s taking place in what’s left in the USA. You can just imagine how they’re behaving in the ACSA!”

  Diana Gartner frowned, lifting one foot onto the bench and resting her chin on her knee.

  “I’ve dealt with them, Manny,” she said. “It’s not that simple—or that monolithic. Most of them are people of genuine faith. They are usually people of good will and intentions, even if they are often misguided or consciously manipulated by their leaders.

  Shaw grunted in disbelief but said nothing.

  “It’s true,” Diana continued. “It’s just that they are profoundly disturbed by a world that’s been changing faster than they care to. They’ve been trying for a long time to reconcile irreconcilables—global scale corporate ‘free market economy’ on the one hand, and small-scale family-style ethics on the other. Each works against the other.”

  Shaw laughed.

  “I’m amazed you can be so understanding of them,” he said. “They hate you and your fly-outs. You’re flouting the ‘rule of extinction’ that’s part of God’s dominion-over-earth plan, as far as they’re concerned. Sanctimonious, power hungry hypocrites, the lot of them.”

  Shaw crossed his arms and set his jaw, as if daring her to respond.

  “There are scam artists among them, undeniably,” Diana said, “but that’s true for any group or movement. They’re generous and good to people who are like them and believe as they do. They are strong on ‘me and God’ and ‘us and God’, just not so strong on ‘those other people and God.’”

  Shaw made a dismissive gesture that told Brandi that these two had argued these points before and little was likely to change now—their personal experiences having long since hardened into concrete political outlooks.

  “They see any difference as absolute,” Shaw said. “With them it’s all wheat versus chaff, sheep versus goats, if you’re lukewarm I’ll vomit you from my mouth. If you’re not with us, you’re against us. Zero, one. Good, evil. Heaven, hell. Binary thinkers. Manichean.”

  “What about Purgatory?” Brandi asked innocently.

  “That’s a Catholic thing,” Shaw said. “Even the notion of purgatory is a logic too fuzzy for them. The ACSA basically tolerates only one language and one religion. Monoculture. Homogeneity. You’ve seen the news footage of their wheat fields being harvested. A big mechanical Combine eating wheat, spitting out grain, shitting bales of straw? That’s what the ACSA is too.”

  “How do you mean?” Brandi asked. “I thought they were mainly just a bunch of grumpy neo-puritans.”

  “Their churchstate is a Nazis-For-Jesus Combine,” Shaw said firmly. “Eating people, spitting out souls, shitting bodies. Who knows how far they’ll go to knead the dough of souls into the bread of God?”

  Diana shook her head, almost sadly, it seemed.

  “The churchstaters don’t have a corner on the intolerance market,” she reminded Manny, placing the leg she had earlier propped up back onto the ground. “It wasn’t them who coined the phrase, ‘If you’re not part of the solution, you’re part of the problem.’ Anyone can call anybody else a Nazi. Over the last century he term has been so overused that most of the meaning has been leached out of it.”

  Shaw subsided grumpily, leaning back into the bench, temporarily outmaneuvered. Brandi saw a chance to bring the conversation around to where she wanted to go with it.

  “How did you meet my mother?” she asked Gartner.

  “Initially through the research she was doing into Medusa Blue,” Gartner replied. “We also had a deeper simpatico, though. We were both ‘experimental products.’ She was exposed to the Project’s manipulation while still in the womb—as I was. It just so happened that I was one of the few ‘KL kids’ who got picked up again by the Project. In the latter days of the old US government, there was a covert project to shift some gate kids’ ‘latent’ talent over to ‘active.’ Some of us clicked over into direct mind-to-mind shield telepaths and empath-boosters, codenamed ‘starbursts.’ Everything was always for that seamless mind-machine interface the Project and its parent program had been working on. We were a sort of unexpected step along the path.”

  “You mean you can speak directly into other people’s minds?” Brandi asked, remembering the “Art of Memory” sequence she had seen from The Five Million Day War.

  “True enough,” Gartner said with a small nod, “although it’s not quite that straightforward. It’s a talent I’m tempted to use about a thousand times more often than I actually do. The person I’m sending to has to be somehow responsive to what I’m putting out.”

  “That’s incredible,” Brandi said, genuinely impressed. Diana smiled.

  “It’s been a blessing and a bane,” Diana said, “but at least it’s made me a bit more sensitive to the fragility of free will than our friend Manny here. Coercion isn’t the way to go. People have a right to be wr
ong, even dead wrong.”

  “Just so long as I don’t end up dead, to protect their right to be wrong,” Manny shot back. “Their right to be wrong does not supersede my right to go on living, or my right to live the life I choose, so long as my living that life doesn’t tread on anyone else’s right to the same.”

  “Do unto others...,” Diana Gartner suggested.

  “More than that,” Shaw said. “Fundamental respect for persons. That’s what the hairshirts and hardshells are lacking. I don’t know—maybe I just lost too many gay and counterculture friends to the churchstate purges. Some types of intolerance are too virulent to be tolerated.”

  Diana shrugged and shook her head.

  “A lot of my friends were killed as witches, remember?” she said. “You know what that was a codeword for. But if we can’t get beyond the hate, then we never escape the cycle of fear and retribution.”

  Shaw grunted dismissively again but Diana pressed on.

  “If we never learn to let go of fear,” she said, “how will we ever manage to grab onto hope? Always armed to the teeth. The whole planet. You saw what almost happened the haborb here, before the Light. An armed planet isn’t a polite planet—it’s a paranoid planet. Our little bubble world here almost got popped in the nastiest of ways.”

  “True, true,” Shaw agreed thoughtfully. “We did come pretty close to having our oasis in space blasted into so much space junk.”

  Brandi lifted to her nose the cluster of purple meadow flowers she had pinched from a broken stem along their path. The flowers exuded a light sweetness. She wondered what they were.

  “Right after the Light,” Diana said, “I thought that, at long last, we were on the correct course. The pilot seemed to have awakened, for a while. It seemed we were sailing safely between the Scylla of nuclear war on the one hand and on the other the Charybdis of eco-collapse, from consuming all the resources and drowning in our own waste. Big sigh of relief, right? Now I’m not so sure.”