Standing Wave

by Howard V. Hendrix

  “That’s reason enough,” Marissa said with a smile.

  “Wait...,” Roger began. “I’m getting a flicker of the latent rectangle in the Greek key. I don’t see the wave within the wave yet, though.”

  “You will,” Marissa said. “You just have to become accustomed to a new way of seeing it.”

  Atsuko rubbed her eyes and splitting head.

  “I don’t know if I want to,” she said, “if it’s going to be this painful.”

  Roger glanced about at the wraparound worldscape of the habitat’s central sphere, then down at the table once again.

  “New ways of seeing are always painful to learn,” he said.

  * * * *

  Living among the psiXtians had given Dundas a new appreciation for the supposed virtues of solitude. After the diagnosis of his shingles became known, he’d had to deal endlessly with the well-meaning solicitude of his fellow initiates—and the innumerable stories from others, usually older women, sympathetically sharing tales of their trials and travails while afflicted with the same scourge.

  At least his condition had freed him for a week from most of the trials of his initiation into the psiXtian ranks. He was allowed to indulge his newfound interest in solitude undisturbed. Patting down his pockets, to make sure the infodisk on Gartner was there, he started off on his quest for a little privacy.

  Walking to the surface by the shortest route he knew, Dundas passed through the daily life of the psiXtian commune. In the nearest cafeteria, a small group was voicing “The High Hard Way: A Mountain Prayer.”

  Shaper beyond all shapes who dwells

  in every shape:

  With the mellowing geometries

  of your proud humble mountains

  Shape me.

  Light beyond all lights who dwells

  in every light:

  With the starsplashed night,

  with the warm star of day,

  Light my way.

  Sound beyond all sounds who dwells

  in every sound:

  With the air ocean whisper

  of the high pine wind,

  Sound in me.

  Teacher beyond all teachers who dwells

  in all that teaches:

  Teach me the lessons of forever

  to be understood from a single day,

  Teach me your high, hard way.

  On first hearing, it didn’t really sound that heretical, Dundas thought. He had heard, though, that it had once been a major text of the now largely defunct Myrrhisticinean sect. Certainly it must be heresy, given the nature of these supplicants here and the likely origin of their prayer.

  The God he himself knew and worshipped was no unnamed spirit manifested predominantly in the sights and sounds of nature. Obviously. His God spoke to men directly, through the Word of the Book He had authored.

  Dundas passed on through the light-pooled underground passageways. Near a food-preparation area, he slowed, seeing a plainly-clad group of young men and women slicing fruit and vegetables in the dappled light coming from the big, fruit-tree covered hole above them. The light came in from that same gap the tree itself had followed. The tree had grown from its large planter here in the center of the underground space, up to the aboveground world, where its canopy would doubtless appear no more than a rather misshapen bush. The shifting light that flowed down through its leaves seemed pleasant enough to work by, Dundas had to admit.

  “Both the physicist Bohm and the mystic Sri Aurobindo would agree on the universality of consciousness,” a young man with tightly ringleted dark hair said. “They both emphasize the wholeness and interconnectedness of the universe.”

  “True,” said a red-headed woman, “but only Aurobindo says, ‘If any single point of the universe were totally unconscious, the whole universe would have to be totally unconscious.’”

  A couple of the others looked up from their straightforward work in the dappled light.

  “Yes,” a turbaned black woman said, “but would both of them also hold the opposite?”

  “The opposite?” asked the dark-haired youth.

  “Would they agree that, if any single point of the universe becomes totally enlightened, then in that same instant the whole universe becomes totally enlightened?”

  Hearing the young people begin to blather excitedly about “As above, so below,” “Bell’s theorem,” “Matter teaches space how to bend, space teaches matter how to move,” “the Ineffable refuses to limit itself to any final form or expression”—hearing it all, Dundas quickened his stride.

  All that stuff was mumbo-jumbo. He had an uneasy mistrust of “visions of other worlds and dimensions,” “voices”, and all supposed “feelings of numinosity and union with Nature.” As far as he was concerned, most “mystical experiences” were only a short step up the ladder from drugs and drunkenness. From there it was an even shorter step down to clairvoyance and astral projection, and then inevitably to occult magic and witchcraft.

  What was “real” among such mystical experiences was probably demonically inspired, he felt, at least in most cases. The situations in which the Lord used such a route were rare. The Bible was prove enough of that.

  As he walked through the subterranean labyrinth of the Sunderground, Dundas suspected that those people back home, the heretics of “the Book it will crumble and the Steeple will fall but the Light will be shining at the end of it all” crowd, were more than a little influenced by such mystical claptrap. The anarchy of everybody having his or her own authoritative visions had to be evil, if only because it left no room for the wisdom of the Bible or the preacher—even denied that wisdom, in the most extreme cases.

  The air grew warmer as he came closer to the surface. Or maybe it was only that he was passing a classroom, he thought sourly. The hot air-filled “social analysis” going on there made him grit his teeth and caused his shingles—vibro-zapped as they already were—to flare in pain nonetheless.

  “—tried to minimize technological unemployment by capturing the machines for the workers,” a student giving a report said. “As the emphasis shifted from a military-industrial worldview to an informational one built around media and medicine, however, merely capturing the machines or destroying them wasn’t enough. Media and medicine internalized the social control mechanism. Virtual reality systems, the infosphere, and distributed machine intelligences in smart homes and offices can be interpreted paradoxically as ‘ever more intelligent habitations for ever less intelligent inhabitants,’ or, more bluntly, ‘smart environments for stupid people.’ Such a dumbing-down fostered dependency on human productions, further weakening participation in the natural world. The symbolic nature of participation mystique is reduced to joysticks, graphics, and interactive media.

  “Any strong critique of these trends necessarily has to call for reconnection to the natural world, deautomatization, decameralization, delateralization, disurbanization. As Albert remarks, ‘The surveillance and drug-testing machines can be smashed, all of them. As long as they remain they will be pressed into service by the social psychoid process. The machines can be smashed, the talk shows can go unwatched, the morality lectures and sermons can go unattended, all without the loss of a single human life’—”

  Recognizing the heretical claptrap of Philosophical Luddism when he heard it, Dundas hurried past, striding up a ramp of compacted soil and finally into the aboveground world. He was pleasantly surprised to find the heat less than stifling. A cold front bearing unseasonably humane weather must be passing through.

  Looking around himself as he walked, Dundas was once again struck by how unlike a city Sunderground looked from the surface. At first glance it seemed that he walked through orchards and groves and gardens and nothing else, men and women manuring and pruning and planting, working on the land. “Giving back to Big Mama” was the Gaia-worshipping phrase he’d heard them use for such technopeasant field work. Dundas shook his head. The psiXtian settlement was like an iceberg, with most of its citified f
unctions invisible, beneath the surface.

  In his travels, Dundas had often remarked on the fact that, the bigger the city, the more it could be anywhere, the more detached it already was from where it was, the more it was always already someplace else than the country or countryside of which it was supposedly a part. That was distinctly not true of Sunderground.

  He walked on in the warm morning sun, past the parking and maintenance area filled with electric cars and trucks and tractors and backhoes. Beyond that stood an old cemetery in a grove of valley oaks, apparently left over from the days before the psiXtians took possession of the land. Like the electric vehicles in the lot, most of the headstones in the graveyard looked dusty and neglected. It occurred to him that headstones, like cars, probably always looked best in the showroom. He couldn’t think of too many people interested in taking Death for a test drive, however.

  Even after passing through the graveyard, solitude was not yet his. Apparently others among the psiXtians had noted how fine a day it was. A small group sat having a picnic in the shade of some olive trees. One of their number, a blond-haired, bespectacled stick of a man, was cadencing a piece of poetry about paper nautiluses or something equally obscure:

  pulp-muscled mollusk, eyes, mouth, tentacle-arms

  fluttering awkwardly at sea

  you move encased in your protective prison

  of whispery spiral shell

  each day another air chamber sealed off behind,

  another crank of the spiral

  the shell of chambered days growing in emptiness,

  impossible to shed

  carrying the calcareous past makes for awkward motion,

  a jerky ratcheting

  you move forward by moving backward,

  the only way to stay afloat

  when all your brethren are supposed extinct

  —though not so the large many-chambered ammonites who,

  their shells spiraling toward infinity, grew fully conscious of

  sorrow, pure-mind metaphysicians adrift in meditation upon

  the ancient seas

  their final achievement not extinction but hyperconsciousness,

  winking them out of our saltwatery universe, to elsewhere and

  elsewhen

  what would make them do such a thing?

  unless it be the solace they seek

  for the grief of living on and on

  while others still die.

  The other picnickers clapped politely. One mentioned the idea that a diary or a book is also a sort of paper nautilus. Then another remarked that a spiral resembles phase state trajectories converging to an attractor. That soon degenerated into a discussion of spiral versus chiral.

  Dundas left the poets and poetasters to their interpretation-spinning. He passed other groups among the trees, including one engaged in some sort of holovision-facilitated “distance learning” lecture on the dangers of mechanized mentation.

  “—Thall hypotheses,” said a distant lecturer. “Logical sequential calculations pushed to the speed of light move beyond the logical and the sequential. Simultaneity emerges from sequence, the mythic arises from the historic, the unpremised from the logical. Holism thus becomes the dominant form of thought, with day-to-day control exerted by micro-management elites. As a result, we see that computing was, from the very beginning, inevitably destined to destroy democracy and freedom—”

  Shaking his head, Dundas moved on. Sometimes living among the psiXtians was like being surrounded by a bunch of demented philosopher-kings. Instead of building a castle in the air and moving in, though, the lunatics here had dug their asylum underground.

  Dundas kept walking until he was out among weedy scrub. He looked for landmarks by which to find again the small transceiver satlink he’d buried under a cairn of stones—along with his service issue flechette machine pistol and ceramic knife. When at last he found the cairn, he set about removing the stones until he found the satlink unit. Although little bigger than a traditional paperback book, it was a gateway to much more information. Beneath it, still unmolested, were the binoculars and other gear he’d buried here, on the morning of the day he’d first walked down to “join” the psiXtians.

  Setting the satlink unit up, Dundas again thought of its history. He’d heard that ACSA researchers had originally developed these units as front-line hardware, equipping soldiers with C3I-hookups in an attempt to improve battlefield coordination of troop movements and such. Not much use for that here.

  He turned on the unit, then slipped the circlet neuro-hookup onto his head. Via narrow-beam he linked in to a pair of satellite back channels, thence to the big computers back in the ACSA that made the unit much more than just the dummy terminal it at first appeared to be.

  Inserting the disk Ronnie had given him, he security-cleared and reviewed the Diana Gartner material once more. Calling up the photo and video images of Gartner, he was again amazed by how little the woman had changed since he’d first seen her picture, on the eve of that long-ago raid upon the NeoBrunist compound. The traitor Acton must have somehow helped her to elude capture, that time. Now Gartner had, if anything, grown more vital—and more dangerous.

  All that was hidden history in more ways than one, he thought. He had been a more ordinary soldier then. The higher-ups would not have looked kindly on his flash-frying a superior officer without at least some due process, even so backslidden an officer as Acton had become. Ray thought he had covered it up pretty well at the time, but then that damned Easter woman—with Gartner’s help, of course—had included the Brunist episode in her subversive documentary.

  After that, he had never again been able to use his Christian name, Raymond Dalken, in the field. He had lost weight, muscled up, changed his looks. Gartner and Easter might have blown his old cover, but he had been determined to become the better for it, and he had.

  As if all that weren’t bad enough, the film had also led his superiors to reopen their investigation into the assault on the Brunist compound. Especially Acton’s disappearance during the course of it. It was only the dismissable nature of Easter’s film evidence—particularly “Acton’s” clearly contrived sub-voc narration—that had allowed Dalken to escape with his military intelligence career intact.

  Ray had good reasons indeed for wanting to nail Ms. Gartner to the fullest extent that law—or vengeance—would allow. Thinking again of the history of that first near-miss made his shingles pulse with pain, which in turn led to a pounding headache. Ray decided to focus on something else. He called up everything he could find on the witch’s broom Gartner was riding these days.

  SHADOW, Stealth High Altitude Delta Observation Wing, the gadgetboys had acronymed it. Modified trans-atmospheric spyplane. Sheathed in radar-absorbent and reactive hull armor. Top speed of Mach 30. Cross between bat and boomerang and space shuttle. Descendant of flying wings like the N1-M, the XB-35, the YB-49, the B-2 Stealth. Creature of the Northrop continuum, godfathered by the Horten Brothers in Germany and G. T. R. Hill in Britain. A high-lift, low-drag, computer-stabilized pure wing aircraft.

  Ray had to admit he found the SHADOW beautiful and graceful in its looks. One of the orbital habitat consortia had bought it, a military surplus prototype, when the government and corporation that had built it stood in need of quick cash. Quite the broom for a witch like Gartner—and quite a trophy, if he could capture it for the Christian States!

  Gartner had not yet filed a flight plan with her people in the orbital complex—and, incidentally, with the ACSA informant there—but when she did, Ray would know immediately. He would be ready for her.

  He scanned back to the matter of Ms. Gartner herself. Know thine enemy. Studying the material, Ray was surprised to find there that Gartner had lost a sibling as a young adult, just as Ray himself had—and apparently under similar circumstances. Drug and alcohol abuse, precipitated by KL 235 exposure. Gartner had lost a younger sister, as Ray had lost an older brother.

  Strange that family los
s should have driven them in such different directions, Ray thought. Gartner had become a radical Green witch, always affirming her sister’s “right to be wrong.” He had become her complete opposite, a contemporary witchfinder and Inquisitor, swearing just as powerfully that the “rights” Gartner so valued were inherently wrong—and destructive. Thinking about it, Ray fell into memories of what had happened to his own family, particularly his father and his brother Michael.

  His father as a young man had originally been trained as a silo soldier in the old USA, working at that fast track career until the Cold War ended and the Air Force began cost-cutting and phasing out the missile flight groups. The remaining silos all eventually went to full automation and his father was out of a job. His silo-soldiering turned out to be a fast track to a dead end.

  In his father’s last days in that career things got very strange. Dad’s job performance in the missile silo had not been affected—no hesitation turning the key there. At the same time, though, Dad hesitated more and more to turn all other keys, outside the launch box. He became extremely anxious about anything associated with unlocking doors or starting cars. Not only did Mom have to drive him everywhere, but when he got home from his silo-duty shifts—sometimes at very odd hours—he had to have Mom open up the front door from the inside to let him in. He was irrationally but absolutely convinced the house would explode into flames if he unlocked the door.

  At Mom’s insistence he talked about it with the base’s do-gooder chaplain-cum-headshrinker. Reverend Social Gospel only mumbled about “claviphobia” and “clavian amnesia” and “ultraparadoxical abreaction.” Eventually Dad had been retired out, tranked and rehabbed, literally put out to pasture when he bought a farm in Wyoming complete with silos of another sort.

  In the long run, however, that had gone even worse. Banks and county bureaucrats had bankrupted their family, stolen almost the last shred of Dad’s pride and will to live. Only God’s intervention—in the form first of Christian Identity, then the Justice movement, and at last the rural amnesty that was granted once the Christian States of America replaced the old USA—only those had saved his broken-hearted father, year after year. Only that had prevented the man from committing suicide.