Mei-Ling stopped then too. She was suddenly struck by the thought that the Henge was a form of sympathetic magic, a maze to catch the light of sun and moon.
“So what were all those extra googlebytes of processing power for?” Robert asked, beside her.
“The ‘divine plan’ of the Myrrhisticineans,” Mei-Ling said, walking on again. “Which, by the way, Manqué did not believe in. He was a self-proclaimed heretic to their order.”
“Hold up there,” Robert said, bringing their walk to a stop yet again. “You’ve lost me.”
Mei-Ling stubbed her toe at the grass beside the path.
“How much do you know about Myrrhisticine beliefs?” she asked.
“Just that it was some sort of Teilhardian neo-mystical stuff,” he said, “with a high-tech twist.”
“Oh, it was—is—much more than that,” Mei-Ling said, walking onward. “The Myrrhisticineans believed that the Rainbow Door opens into the World of Light, but only on the Day of Doom. Phelonious Manqué’s heresy was that he believed every day is doomsday, every day is judgment day.”
“In what sense?” Robert asked, a bit confused. They began to walk along again slowly.
“For Manqué,” Mei-Ling said, “Earth itself is the rainbow door in the vault of heaven. He contended that at any moment we can walk into the World of Light. All that’s necessary is the will to make it happen. Phelonious was, maybe still is, an apocalyptist. The mainline Myrrhies were essentially gradualists—”
“Wait a minute,” he said. “I’m not much up on obscure religions. You’ve lost me again. Better explain that.”
“You know the meaning of Tetragrammaton to some apprentice sorcerers, right?” Mei-Ling asked.
“The ‘Word To Shake The Foundations of the World,’” Robert said. “In the beginning was the Logos, in the End will be the Tetragrammaton. Landau is always on about that ‘half-digested-Crowley’ stuff.”
“Right,” Mei-Ling went on. “That’s clearly apocalyptic. But according to Teilhard, it’s not so much an apocalypse as it is a ‘co-evolutionary convergence’ that has been coming toward us. Simultaneous movements toward both a single planetary culture and a psychical concentration. The noösphere is becoming involuted into what Teilhard called a Hyperpersonal Consciousness. That consciousness will be fully achieved at what Teilhard called Point Omega. Matter and consciousness will reach the terminal phase of their convergent integration and become one. Absolutely indistinguishable. Myrrhisticineans called that endpoint the Rainbow Door. Maybe it’s also what Doctor Vang and the Tetragrammaton types call an information density singularity.”
Some quality of the moonlight, Robert realized, made the Henge and the landscape they walked through seem as if it were underwater. He remembered the Henge’s association with Atlantis and wondered what it was about the moon and water, the way one could suggest the other. Surely it was more than just the tides...
“I know something about that last bit, of course,” Robert said. “But you seem to know a great deal more about all this Myrrhisticine mythology.”
“I was there undercover, as I mentioned,” she said with a shrug. “With the team from Kerrismatix that installed the ALEPH, the Artificial Life Evolution Programming Heuristic.”
Sullivan laughed
“Sexy allusions to Kabalah and Borges and Gibson intentional in that name?” Sullivan asked.
“Mainly marketing,” Mei-Ling said, downplaying it. “Manqué was the Abbey’s systems manager. He saw potential for the ALEPH that wasn’t there in the advertising.”
“What potential?” Robert asked as they walked along.
“The chance to speed things up,” Mei-Ling said. “Despite everything they believed, the Myrrhisticineans were basically waiting for The Thing to happen, rather than making it happen—the way Manqué felt they should. The Myrrhies believed that eventually all personal consciousnesses would become completely integrated at Omega, through Love, the spirit of Christ at work in nature.”
“That sounds a good deal more theological than technological,” Robert said with a grin that Mei-Ling could see quite clearly even in the moonlight. She nodded as they started another lap of the asphalt course that encircled the old stone temple.
“Teilhard didn’t foresee how much the development of machine intelligence would speed up the movement toward Omega,” she said. “Neither did the Myrrhies. Sister Clare, the Abbess, thought of the Kerrismatix ALEPH program only as a good way of modeling the future. She thought it could provide scenarios for all the changes leading up to the Rainbow Door.”
“Manqué thought differently, I gather?” Robert said.
“Very,” Mei-Ling said with a nod. “What Manqué saw in it was a way to bring the biosphere, noösphere, and infosphere into conjunction—a key to opening the door in the vault of heaven, right now.”
“Why the big hurry?” Robert asked.
Mei-Ling walked in silence, remembering.
“Manqué felt that, given human greed, we were headed straight for the massive pain and suffering of a hard eco-collapse. No time to waste, or to wait.”
Robert stopped and scratched absently at his head.
“If Manqué was such a heretic, as he claimed,” he asked, “then why did the Abbey bother to keep him on?”
Mei-Ling glanced down at her feet a moment, then returned her gaze to Robert beside her, and the moonlit Henge beyond him.
“He was the only one who fully understood the Abbey’s computer system,” she said. “He was also a good friend of Doctor Vang, at Paralogics. You can ask him yourself, because that’s where we have to go next.”
“What?” Robert asked in surprise. “I didn’t know he could be visited. Most of the world believes he’s dead.”
“‘Phelonious Manqué’ has been dead since Sedona,” Mei-Ling said. “That was his handle, his permanent alias. He made sure the first part was spelled with a ‘ph’, in the long hacker/cracker/phone phreaker tradition. The man behind the persona—Martin Kong—is still very much alive. Kong is serving a life sentence at the Electronic Crimes Maximum Security Penal Facility in California.”
“Amazing,” Robert said as they turned and took one last look at the great henge beneath the high moon. “I knew that the Manqué name, and most of what the man was, disappeared when he dropped out of the infosphere. There’ve been persistent rumors of his life or death since then. Everything must have been under very deep cover, though, if someone with my clearance level was unable to find out that Phelonious was serving time in Silicon Bay.”
“It wasn’t that hard to vanish him,” Mei-Ling said as they walked toward the car. “He actually helped us make him disappear, accidentally. The constant careful security precautions he took before Sedona prevented anyone from learning the ‘true identity’ of Phelonious Manqué. Those precautions helped us a lot.”
“I see,” said Robert with dawning understanding. “Since, in almost all respects, Martin Kong was Manqué, his public existence was predominantly virtual.”
“Right,” Mei-Ling said, nodding. “It was relatively easy to disappear his true identity completely. Nearly everybody who bothered to look ended up assuming he must have died in the Sedona disaster.”
They left the circle and walked together down the ramp, toward the path on the lower level, the walkway that led beneath the road.
“How did he escape that fate?” Robert asked “I’ve seen the amateur video of the ‘event’, of course. Looked like that ‘black hole sun’ thing ate all the Abbey aboveground and a good chunk of the mesa, belowground.”
“It did,” Mei-Ling agreed as they walked into the parking lot, “but Manqué’s Stonehenge computer complex was far enough underground that, even when that portal or whatever it was opened up above, my coworkers and I were able to shut down the info-feed it depended on before it consumed down to Kong’s level—and ours. I don’t think he’s ever forgiven me for that.”
They made their way through the largely deserted lot, toward t
he car.
“Why is that?” Robert asked as they walked.
“Because he thought he had succeeded in bringing on the end of the world,” Mei-Ling said. “He might have pulled it off, too, if his info-singularity had reached a critical size and become self-perpetuating. When we pulled him out of the wreckage of the Abbey and his Stonehenge, he was in a towering rage. ‘Why did you stop it? Why did you save me?’ He was mad as hell about still being alive—like someone angry over being brought back to life after a suicide attempt.”
“What happened to him after that?” Robert asked, quickening his stride as they came within sight of the car.
“There was a very nice, very quiet trial,” Mei-Ling said. “Martin Kong was eventually sentenced to several hundred years in prison. No possibility of parole. All access to electronic devices invented since about 1890 absolutely denied.”
“Ouch,” Robert said, beaming the car doors unlocked as they walked up beside it. “That must have hurt. Worse than a death sentence for someone like Phelonious Manqué.”
They got into the car. The engine purred on and they pulled away through the parking lot.
“Any particular reason we need to see the madman formerly known as Phelonious Manqué—now?” Robert asked as they pulled back onto the highway.
Mei-Ling gazed out the window as the Salisbury Plain unrolled beside the road.
“I think some of the guides, the angels and demons I’ve been picking up from the death sites,” she said, “are based on Manqué’s RATs, the Real-time A-life Technopredators. He built those with the aid of the ALEPH, which I helped install at Sedona. Versions of those same RATs also showed up everywhere in the infosphere, especially in and around HOME 1, just before the Light happened.”
“These RATs must have survived the Sedona disaster, then?” Robert ventured.
“Apparently,” Mei-Ling remarked, puzzled. “Even if their creator wasn’t free to set them free. They’re all connected somehow—Manqué and Sedona, the Light and that orbital habitat, our topological voyeur and his parallel kills.”
Robert Sullivan glanced at her, impressed by her reasoning, in spite of, or perhaps because of, his inability to fully follow it himself.
“Before we go to see Manqué/Kong,” he said, “you wouldn’t happen to have something like Myrrhisticism for Beginners, would you?”
Mei-Ling smiled and, reaching into her bag, took a small disk out and handed it to him.
“Scientific Bones in Mystical Flesh: The Basic Teachings of Sister Alicia Gonsalves,” Mei-Ling said. “It consists mainly of dozens of short definitions, Q&A, vignettes, koan-like episodes.”
“You just happened to have a copy of this in your bag?” Robert asked, incredulous.
“Not at all,” Mei-Ling said. “I picked one up a couple of days ago, when I first starting thinking about links between my deathsite flashes and Manqué’s RATs. You can’t expect me to remember everything, you know.”
By the light from the dashboard, Robert Sullivan gave her a freckled and dimpled smile and shook his head.
“Oh, by the way,” Mei-Ling said in afterthought, “I think we’re going to have to go to the haborbs after our visit to Manqué. We’d better contact Landau about funding and clearance for that, A.S.A.P.”
Robert nodded, keeping his eyes on the road. Mei-Ling glanced out the window one last time, for a final view of Stonehenge by moonlight. She got the powerful impression that, from this distance, the ancient stone structure looked complete once more—not a ruin, but a sacred astronomical maze restored to wholeness.
Must be the moonlight playing tricks with my mind, she thought. Or my mind, playing tricks with the moonlight.
* * * *
The Planet Noir Wine Bar huddled deep in the cavernous, century-old spaces beneath the streamline-deco edifice of Union Terminal. In a cone of light falling from one of the occasional illumination units—less “fixtures” than punctures—Aleck waited at his table for a band called Tatterdemalien to finish up their set before Sam and company, now calling themselves Onoma Verité, took the stage.
Tatterdemalien’s lead singer was a voluptuous woman who called herself Lotus Yoni. Sam said she was actually named Gina Lotisoni. Whoever she really was, as she began to belt out another number she absently burned yet another hole in a costume already more tatters than imagination.
I’m tired to death
of being
tired to death
of being
tired to death
I am tired to death.
I’m tired to death of being
everyone else’s fond memory
the snapshot in the album
of someone they loved and then left.
I’m tired to death of being
everybody else’s “experience”
the one who they learned from
who still never passed the test.
I’m tired to death
of being
tired to death
of being
tired to death
I am tired to death—
The woman had a great angry voice, Aleck had to admit, perfect for expressing rage. But the song seemed to go on and on—and even heartfelt rage eventually became, well, tiresome.
Finally, Lotus Yoni announced in her surly manner that their next song, “Heart Medicine”, would be the last of the evening. Their fans yelled and whistled as Yoni sang and Aleck listened, for a while.
On the north and shady side of our love
the beautiful poison flowers grow.
True perennial foxglove, strawberry tachycardia spikes,
Monkshood, bluewhite aconite, to relieve
the pain, reduce the fever, of living.
Come, put your finger on my pulse.
I will draw the hood down over your eyes.
Love and life the more intense,
but hatred and death the more enduring—
The music wasn’t that bad, Aleck thought. It was just that he’d have preferred their stage presence to be a stage absence. Apparently so did they. Amid the applause, Lotus Yoni briefly re-introduced Cunning Lingam (Len Cunningham, according to Sam) on electronics and Kink Freudman (Ken Friedman) on percussion. They said good night and swiftly exited the stage, followed by loud applause and rowdy whistling.
While their fans kept signaling for an encore from the rather scary depths of their appreciation, Aleck glanced around Planet Noir, at the decor he hadn’t paid much attention to when he came in. The place was all done up as some kind of ritual cave: Delphic oracle and Cumaean Sibyl statuary and such toward the front, Abo and San and Lascaux cave wall paintings further toward the back, in mildly luminescent ocher tones. From the ceiling, pictographs and petroglyphs in subdued holo and neon glowed, abstract and aloof.
The crowd largely matched the environs: trendy, darkly glimmering people, sucking on cold N2O-CO2 faux cigarettes. Several of them had those flight-capable Personal Data Assistants, notepad computers done up as little cherubs and owls and parrots and pterodactyls and all sorts of winged things. They had become ridiculously popular in the last few weeks.
Aleck was surprised but also not surprised to see two of Sam’s ex-girlfriend groupies. They’d once been introduced to Aleck as Digit Alice and Tabu La Raza, or something like that. They were talking to three indígena-looking types, who might actually be closer to what this place supposedly represented than the place was itself. Imported local color? Aleck wondered. He hoped his Uncle Bruce—or “Aleister,” as he preferred to be known these days—would not be too put off by the faux of it all.
After his visit to the woods of his childhood, Aleck had finally called his parents and accepted their invitation to come visit the ’borbs at the end of the school term. They were overjoyed that he’d be coming to visit. They informed him that his uncle was already planetside and would soon be passing through Cincinnati. Almost before he knew what had transpired, Aleck had scheduled himself to meet his uncle and one of his uncle’
s friends during Onoma Verité’s performance at Planet Noir.
Tatterdemalien had long since finished to raucous applause and whistling, but their die-hard fans were only now picking up on the fact that the band refused to do an encore. A classic comedy holo came up, to catch the audience’s attention as the tech crews broke down Kink Freud’s gear and set up for Onoma Verité. Aleck sipped at the expensive Schwarzkatz he’d ordered and watched the holo of one-time comedy great Bunny Shurger. The clip was so old, he saw, that it wasn’t even a real holo—only video or film, computer enhanced with false shadows and depth to make it appear 3-D. Ms. Shurger’s routine probably went back to the turn of the millennium.
“Ever since the day-after pill came out,” the fake-holo ghost of Shurger said, “children are like cigarettes—sometimes you want one after sex, sometimes you don’t...Me? I’m a non-smoker.”
When the comedy routine finished, Aleck was surprised to hear some sort of scholarly program in anthropology or paleontology murmuring in the Noir’s background. Turning around, he saw the strange ambience media playing on a number of screens placed discreetly throughout the space. Captions scrolled in time to its images and the narrator’s tones.
The program was saying that, since history was a by-product of the technology called writing, then prehistoric essentially meant before writing, or at least before symbol systems modern human could ‘read.’ Posthistoric, the program maintained, meant simply ‘after writing,’ after the technological primacy of written communication had passed. Aleck gave the program a fuller portion of his attention, supposing it was intended to fit in with the decor somehow.
“The Gargas handprints are ‘writing before writing’,” the scholarly background text murmured and scrolled, “in much the same way that the machine languages of computers are ‘writing after writing’—coded messages, both in binary. The series of zeroes and ones in the Gargas handprints are, for each hand, red or black, left or right, whole hand or fingers bent/missing, positive (‘painted in’) or negative (‘outline traced’). Two choices in each of four categories yields four binary sets, 2 x 2 x 2 x 2, or sixteen different ‘characters’ possible. If, instead of reading ‘whole’ or ‘mutilated’ hand as a binary variable, we read it as a numerical value 1 to 5, yields 2 x 2 x 2 x 5, or 40 basic characters. English, for instance, contains only 26 such characters.”
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