Standing Wave

by Howard V. Hendrix

  Aleck glanced around for a moment, thinking that someone was looking at him. No one seemed to be. Most of the crowd was a ignorant of his presence as it was of the background program. With a shrug he turned his attention back to it.

  “Extending the coding key beyond the handprints to other classes of Upper Paleolithic symbols,” the narrator said quietly, “the result is a consistent co-occurrence between certain colors and symbols such as claviforms and tectaforms—even between particular colors and particular ‘naturalistic’ images. Bulls portrayed in black and the cows in red, in depictions of aurochs or wild cattle at Lascaux, for instance.

  “This color sequence links as well to other discernible patterns. We find specific animal behaviors depicted, such as seasonal migrations, rutting, spawning, and breeding. Also prominent are ‘male’ and ‘female’ symbolic orders, lunar calendric tallies, and various entoptic marks associated with hallucinogenic ritual. Put it all together and the result is a system capable of awesome informational complexity.

  “If religion is, at some level, a technology for coping with the human condition, then in the religion of the caves the Upper Paleolithic peoples possessed an impressive technology indeed: a common ideology, and a universal symbolic grammar for expressing that ideology. Just as the Aboriginal rock art of Australia reflects only a tiny percentage of the informational complexity of the predominantly oral tradition of the songlines, the cave art of the Eurasian landmass likely expresses only a very tiny fraction of a much vaster oral (probably sung) tradition—”

  Someone tapped Aleck on the shoulder. Turning, he saw his uncle. Aleck recognized him immediately, though he hadn’t seen the man in years.

  “Uncle Bruce!” Aleck said, getting up from his chair to give the older man a handshake and a hug. His uncle’s head was a little balder (if that were possible), his beard was definitely grayer, and his bulk had grown even more fleshy. Since beard color and baldness and bulk could always be fixed, Aleck wondered why his uncle hadn’t gone in for body-mod the way his own parents had. Aleck shrugged inwardly. Maybe Uncle Bruce was into that “natural aging” thing that was getting so big with people of his parents’ cohort.

  “Aleck!” his uncle boomed. “Only people as young as you are can get away with being so scrawny as you are—without looking emaciated.”

  “Thanks, Unc,” Aleck said, “I think.”

  His uncle moved slightly aside, gesturing to a very tall, very pale, slightly stooped man dressed in stark but fashionable clothes.

  “Hey,” Uncle Bruce said, “let me introduce you to your elder concentration-camp twin, here. This is Lev Korchnoi.”

  Shaking the hand of the tall, blonde, almost albinoid Korchnoi, Aleck kept thinking that he knew this man’s name, even his face, from somewhere. Maybe the guy had been a six minute starface someplace in the popular culture. If it had been during the last few years, though, Aleck might as well have been living on another planet. School and work and life in general had been keeping him far busier than they had any right to.

  Bruce and Lev pulled up chairs and sat down at his table. Another filler of “classic comic” had come on. A Peruvian former newspaper editor who had gone on the circuit as the Daily Llama was doing a Buddhist monk shtick built around arcane puns. He was performing in front of an oddly-costumed convention audience of some sort.

  “What do you call it when a bodhisattva uses paranormal powers aboard an airplane?” the Daily Llama asked. Someone, in the studio audience of that long ago day when the holo was recorded, shouted out, “Siddhis in Flight!” The Daily Llama smiled, folded his hands, and bowed his head. Aleck didn’t get it.

  “So,” Aleck said, ignoring the holo and turning to Uncle Bruce and Korchnoi, “what brings you Earthside—and to Cincinnati, of all places?”

  His uncle cast a quick, almost furtive glance at Korchnoi before answering.

  “Have you heard anything about people who’ve been murdered while linked into the infosphere?” his uncle asked, almost reluctantly. “The ones the media are calling the Topo Voyeur killings?”

  “Maybe something,” Aleck said, truthfully. “I don’t keep up with much news—no time—but I do keep myself minimally informed if it’s computing-related. It’s my major field, after all.”

  “Yes,” his uncle said. “I remember your father saying as much.”

  “We have a friend up in the habitat,” Lev Korchnoi put in, “who is something of a professional infosphere paranoid. Lakshmi has been using her systems up there to monitor the big bursts of information that coincide with the deaths of those people who were infosphere-linked.”

  Aleck listened attentively, though he had no idea what all this had to do with their being in Cincinnati.

  “The problem is,” his uncle said, “each fatal infoburst and the signals involved with the voyeur’s scene-capture are all packeted data. They are rerouted what amounts to a countably infinite number of times—combinations ranging from googolplex to Skewes’s number.”

  “Then you can never track who’s doing it,” Aleck remarked. That was obvious enough to anyone with even a cursory background in machine intelligence.

  “Yes—and no,” his uncle continued. “For any given infoburst event, no. Over a significant number of events, though, patterns begin to emerge. Lakshmi’s been doing some heavy-lifting mathematics—prime factoring, sieving, fast Fouriers, decompositing, hidden and public key searches, God only knows what all. Massive number crunching.”

  “Any luck?” Aleck asked. He knew enough about this stuff to be at least mildly interested.

  “She has managed to narrow the burst-origins down to ten big infosphere presences,” Korchnoi said. “The data constructs of ten major corporate headquarters, corresponding to ten cities.”

  “And Cincinnati is one?” Aleck asked, a bit incredulous.

  “Correct,” said Korchnoi. “You can probably guess the corporation.”

  “A big user?” Aleck asked rhetorically. “Has to be Retcorp & Lambeg.”

  “Bingo,” his uncle said with a nod. “We went to visit the pyramid by the river today, trying to get some access to their records.”

  “No soap?” Aleck suggested.

  His uncle smiled, catching the product reference.

  “You might put it that way,” he said. “They’re very tight-fisted with their corporate data.”

  “Our HOME liaison, Atsuko Cortland, got us Corporate Presidium clearance to take a look around,” Korchnoi added, “but it didn’t matter. It will take ISIS or Interpol at least to pry R & L’s fists open.”

  “In the meantime,” his uncle continued, “we’re also scheduled to visit other corporate headquarters in other cities. We’re setting up performance dates for Lev’s people. I’m their manager, of sorts—”

  Their conversation was interrupted by Sam, Janika, Hari, and Marco, “Onoma Verité,” taking the stage and beginning to play. Aleck had wanted to tell his uncle that he worked for R & L himself, if Bruce didn’t already know. He wondered what “performance dates for Lev’s people” might be about, too. That would have to wait, though. It was all Aleck could do, over the music, to shout back in answer to Lev’s question about Onoma Verité being acquaintances of his that Right, the band members were his friends.

  Given the decibels they were cranking out, Aleck had no choice but to sit back and listen to the band—especially when he realized that many of the images accompanying the show had been recorded during that night down in Hugh Manatee’s Dreamland. Was that how Sam had gotten this gig so fast? Had he already begun shopping around what they’d recorded that night—as a demo?

  Stars like perfect snow beyond the barbed wire

  Thick and clear, cold, aloof, and distant

  Barbed wire crisscrossing the sky

  Endlessly, everywhere

  Concertina wire orbits ringing the planet round

  Spy satellite spiders weaving webs over everything

  Only their metal bodies visible

  H
igh and fast against the night

  Trailing threads too thin too high to see

  Cocooning the world all the same

  Ignore it! Ignore it! Ignore it!

  Drop the lead shutters, bring up the holo screens!

  Sell your soul! Let the good times roll—

  “The lyrics are a bit erratic,” Korchnoi said over Sam and Janika’s strangely hard-driving duet, “but it’s got a deep groove. And this compiled stock footage or whatever it is, is great!”

  Aleck nodded, but wished Hugh Manatee, floating in his tank beneath the Partons, might somehow get credit for at least his part of this.

  Almost as if to prove their lyrics (in response to Korchnoi’s critique) could be stronger, Onoma Verité began downshifting in perfect segue into a monkishly spare, tonal piece. Sam called out the lyrics of “Gingko” in a sort of chant halfway between singing and spoken word poetry.

  your leaves fall

  two hundred twenty million years ago

  fans of delicate maidens

  pressed between pages of coal

  beneath your boughs strut the lucky dragons

  but no boneshadows record

  that color of crushed dreams in their eyes

  when their fortunes change

  you grow weary, dwindle toward sleep

  until the awakening priests come to plant you

  in the Pure Land of their temple gardens

  that those who may not eat meat may eat of you

  men of science snatch you from the temple precincts

  a new geisha to join their harems

  coelacanth and nautilus and platypus and you

  the most hopeful fossils are those still living

  out of love we plant you beside our stone roads

  to inhale our burning smoke, to exhale your sweet air

  you are patient, so patient you do not worry

  who will love you after we are gone.

  Images of trees and leaves and dinosaurs, monks and scientists, fossil creatures and modern parks stood interspersed among mad dream-energetic scenes lifted from Hugh Manatee. Korchnoi and Uncle Bruce stared at each other in pleased surprise and clapped enthusiastically when the song ended. They listened carefully when “Song of the USD” surged up with its kaleidoscope of wild amusement park images (from Hugh again) and its twisted, synth-calliope cover version of a positively ancient Apolkaleptics tune.

  Do they ever read Levi-Strauss?

  Do they ever think Mickey Mouse

  was a Nazi

  in Disneyland?

  Do they really love phallic porn?

  There must be another reason

  for the Matterhorn

  in Disneyland.

  Are those fireflies on wires?

  Are those robots chasing desires

  in Disneyland?

  No you needn’t worry—

  it’s not obscene—

  it’s just the Pirates of the Caribbean

  in Disneyland.

  Everybody there eats their eats

  Everybody there drinks their drinks

  We have a good time and nobody thinks

  in Disneyland.

  And so it went, song after song, piece after piece, until at last the band finished with a song called “Autoscope”.

  That piece featured their only big prop—a large, spinning, electrostatically bound mercury-metal mirror, “tuned” somehow to make music of the light bouncing off it. Aleck thought it looked like just the sort of physics gizmo Hari would dream up.

  This is a mirror for misinterpretation.

  It does not communicate

  As still water with the sky

  Communicates.

  As silver funnel then, stirred by stir of silver spoon?

  As mirror vortex in draining water?

  As whirlpool? Waterspout?

  But no. This is more than the echo of light in spinning water.

  It’s not the mind you read by this, but the mind I can’t; not the

  Hurricane radar picture live via satellite in a distant TV room, but the candle the picture improbably makes flicker there—

  That matters.

  Even a mirror shattered by spinning too fast can still give back

  a crazed reflection. Insanity’s not a problem—

  it’s a solution.

  The spinning liquid mirror, in its plane-bound amorphousness, reflected strangely the Hugh-dreams and other film-stock imagery throughout the first verse. As the second began, the electrostatic field controls changed and the mirror transformed into a spinning vortex, a liquid metal fall, wrapping round to meet itself in a spinning funnel of shining mercury. During the third verse, pinspots played over the mercurial vortex until, just before the last verse, the electrostatic field changed again and the vortex broadened out into an electron-cloud storm of orbiting mercury globules. The music and the spin-field abruptly cut off together. The globules hung in the air a moment, then crashed earthward.

  Their metal splash had barely sounded in the air before Planet Noir was flooded with a torrent of applause, whistling, and cheering from a very appreciative audience. The members of Onoma Verité, looking somewhat bewildered and bedazzled by what they had wrought, hesitantly—then quickly with more confidence—took their bows.

  Despite himself, even Aleck was impressed. During this performance the band members, after all their long rehearsal putzing about, had finally come together into something that was an order of magnitude more impressive than anything any of them had ever done alone. Slowly Aleck realized that he had been present at the birth of something that might yet prove to have real greatness in it.

  Uncle Bruce and Lev were eager to meet the members of the band, so Aleck volunteered to introduce them. After getting lost once in the warren of backstage rooms, Aleck made his way through that maze again with the other two men. At last the buzz of the mob of mostly instant fans (with a few friends mixed in) led the three of them toward where the members of Onoma Verité were giving facetime to their public.

  As Aleck and Bruce and Lev moved through the crowd, Aleck was surprised by the way the buzz changed and the crowd parted around them. Aleck didn’t know what exactly was going on, but he happily took advantage of it.

  “Great show,” he said, shaking hands with Sam. “So was that ‘Hugh Manatee in Tiffany Chain’s Soft Slavery’?”

  “Not yet,” Sam said, almost—was this possible?—shyly. “Just the ‘Living Fossils’ section of the larger work.”

  Aleck noticed that Sam was looking rather nervously past him, to where Bruce and Lev were standing.

  “Oh, I forgot myself,” Aleck said politely. “Let me introduce two guests visiting from the ’borbs—my Uncle Bruce and his friend, Lev Korchnoi.”

  The crowd buzz changed again, inexplicably but not quite imperceptibly. Lev and Bruce shook hands with the band members all around, congratulating them on their performances. Lev Korchnoi then reached into his pocket and handed each of them one of those fancy, holographically compressed business datacards.

  “We’re looking for opening acts on our tour,” Lev said. “Let’s keep in touch.”

  The members of Onoma Verité assured him they would. Bruce and Lev edged away to depart. Turning to walk away with them, Aleck saw Sam flash him a smile and a discreet thumbs-up sign. Aleck smiled back at them, then followed Lev and Bruce back through a crowd that seemed oddly quiet, as if stunned.

  Outside, Aleck shook hands one last time with his uncle and his uncle’s friend.

  “It’s been a very rewarding evening, Aleck,” Lev said. “A pleasure meeting you.”

  “We may be swinging through again in the near future,” Bruce said. “If we do, we’ll be sure to look you up—and your friends, too.”

  Aleck watched them walk away down Rail Plaza. He waved goodbye, then turned back inside. Maybe he could be of some help to the band in striking their fairly minimal set and breaking down their performance gear.

  The fans had mostly disp
ersed by the time Aleck got back to where he and his guests had congratulated Onoma Verité just minutes before. Aleck found the band in Planet Noir’s “green room” (actually several different shades of ocher). Sam, Janika, Hari, and Marco were jumping about, like a bunch of drunken cowboys happily bent on shooting out the stars to make a darker night.

  “Hey, Aleck—!” Hari said, spotting him. The band members all quickly came over toward him.

  “Hi. Just thought I’d see if I could be of any help—”

  Sam laughed and put his arm around Aleck’s shoulders.

  “Man, you don’t know how much help you’ve already been!” Sam said. “Thanks—thanks for the intro to Korchnoi.”

  “Sure,” Aleck said with a shrug. “No big deal.”

  “No big deal?” Marco asked, staring so hard at Aleck it made him uncomfortable. “Hey—do you even know who Lev Korchnoi is?”

  “A friend of my uncle’s,” Aleck said, warily. “Why? Who ‘is’ he?”

  “Aleck, you silly idiot,” Janika said with a smile, “Lev Korchnoi is the brains behind Möbius Caduceus. Maybe you’ve heard of them? Biggest selling performance work for the last month straight? With their own label and satellite channels?”

  “Oh,” Aleck said. Maybe Sam had been right. Maybe he should get out more often.

  * * * *

  “Calling your mother’s place a ‘house’,” Marissa said as she and Roger walked up the pathway toward Atsuko’s, “is like calling a seaplane a boat.”

  Roger laughed as their footsteps crunched up the walk.

  “‘Kinetic archisculpture’ is what the designer called it,” he said, gazing up at the white building whose wings were, well, wings, moving and shifting gently in response to light angles and the breezes. “It’s supposed to be the most environmentally responsive housing form possible, short of growing a home biotechnically, or using real-time nano feedback.

  “Calatrava meets Calder,” Marissa remarked, pausing to look at it more carefully, “by way of computer.”