Standing Wave

by Howard V. Hendrix

  Ray’s brother Mike had hated Dad’s new life and the ACSA too—before it was the ACSA, even before the CSA, for that matter. Mike had fled the “‘Rock of Ages’ Rocky Mountains,” as he called them, for a life of promiscuity and debauchery on the permissive Left Coast. Drugs and alcohol had turned Mike into a back-to-the-Garden lunatic, living like a bum, cut off from society. His brilliant but erratic brother, nine years older than Ray himself, had been not quite twenty-seven when he had been shotgun-butt whipped to permanent coma. Mike had gotten himself tangled up in some sort of drug-deal vengeance, on the backcountry borders between Oregon and California someplace. Just a week before the CSA had replaced the old USA.

  So many years ago, but it was still with him.

  Michael’s loss had left a hole in Ray’s life that could never be filled. Ray got on with his life after the tragedy, but he never got over it. There were times when Ray hated his brother for having allowed himself to get into a position where he would very likely die, and from which he could not be saved. Then Ray would feel guilt for having thought such hateful things about his brother.

  Ray never felt guilt for hating what he felt sure had been the primary cause of his brother’s loss—namely, the type of society that so valued an individual’s freedom that it put the individual’s life at risk. Through its toleration of “lifestyles” and sexual practices and states of consciousness that any believer in the literal truth of God’s Word must find unnatural and abhorrent, the USA had made Mike’s death almost inevitable. To tolerate evil is to permit and encourage it, Ray was certain, and the USA had given its stamp of approval to precisely those ways and means and nightmare schemes that had done Mike in.

  His brother’s loss made Ray become more like himself, more what he truly was. In response to Mike’s tragedy, Ray had joined the military of the Christian States, then gone into intelligence. He had stayed in, even after the CSA had collapsed down to the ACSA. Mike’s loss had taught him that the wayward must be brought back into the fold of church and kitchen and children, by force if necessary.

  He would never again stand idly by as people followed the primrose path to the various self-destructions they had “chosen.” If such people and their societies and their whole world had to be destroyed in order to be saved, then that too was God’s will.

  Such was certainly true of the psiXtians. They tolerated—and therefore permitted and encouraged—an outlandish number of diverse evils. Homosexuals and drug-users were to be found among them in appalling numbers. Their whole ideology of “living lightly upon the Earth” denied God’s grant of dominion and His Command to be fruitful and multiply. Those among them who could be saved would be, Ray thought. Those who could not would, in their deaths, at least be prevented from the perpetration and perpetuation of further evils—

  Ray reverie abruptly broke. He had the odd sensation that someone or something was watching him from inside the infosphere. He was about to disconnect from the unit when he was overcome by—convulsions? No, he thought in a detached and distant fashion. Not convulsions. Overpoweringly intense, prolonged, almost sexual ecstasy. Entirely within his head. Drowning in waves of love his soldier’s will to fight it.

  White light. The image of a male figure, fatherly and brotherly at once. Smiling eyes framed in shaggy dark hair and beard. Smiling beneficently, in absolute approval upon what Ray had been thinking and doing. Michael! It was Michael!

  The sensations stopped. Ray found himself once more in an infospheric universe that was nominally under his control. He disconnected himself from the infosphere entirely and removed the screen-trode circlet. Sitting in the scrubby wash in the very real light of day, he pondered what the experience he had just had might mean.

  Too much. He didn’t want to think about it. Not now. But he knew he would, sometime. Inevitably.

  Putting the unit quickly away and returning it to its hiding place beneath the cairn of rocks, Ray shook his head and sighed inwardly. He hoped Gartner flew in soon. He enjoyed the solitude, but not the introspection that came with it. Back home in the ACSA, he just knew how things were supposed to be. He didn’t have to think about them the way he did here.

  Being alone is dangerous, he thought—and not just in terms of the “buddy system” and “safety in numbers.” Here in deep cover among the psiXtians, he was always alone, forced to maintain a secret space that was itself somehow dangerous to moral character. Something was inherently evil in solitude and inwardness. He had to grope around to put his finger on what it was, exactly.

  Guaranty, in his Myth’s Edge and Nation had been right to condemn meditation as an evil of Eastern religion. Looking inward to oneself rather than upward to God, who knew what confusions and heresies might arise? Ray craved a respite of action, away from the contemplative lifeways of these psiXtians. These people were driving him nuts. He longed for a chance to make things happen, rather than this endless, maddening waiting for them to happen.

  CHAPTER SIX

  SubTerPosted excerpt (infosphere origin unknown; original source independently verified as Spontaneous Human Consciousness: The Selected and Collected Not-Philosophy of D. B. Albert):

  The energy that feeds the universal intersection system appears as portal experience in consciousness and as event horizons in the world. Consciousness and portal experience are different aspects of the same thing, related as microcosm is to macrocosm. Consciousness is the intersection of body and spirit in the mind of the individual, while portal experience is a joining of personal and universal intersection.

  Like the distinction between particle and wave, however, as human consciousness has continued to evolve under the influence of the archetypes, the distinction between the microcosm and macrocosm has begun to dissolve. Through mode-locking, universal energy is available dynamically, though not necessarily causally, to every dynamical system in the universe. The energy that fuels the black hole furnaces in quasars and the galactic cores in the physical universe is the same energy that archetypes fuel within psyche—moving systems beyond causation, to dynamicality.

  Since all consciousness is a variety of portal experience, then consciousness is simply where Other meets World, just as event horizon is where singularity meets space time. Mystical experiences in religious vocabulary, and consciousness in Jungian vocabulary, and event horizons in scientific vocabulary are all the same thing expressed in different languages: points at which other or spirit meets the spatiotemporal world.

  * * * *

  Brandi’s parting from Juan had not been pleasant.

  “Why is it that you can zip over to one of the ’borbs just about any time you feel like it?” she demanded. “For you, it’s no big deal, so how come, if I want to spend some time here, it’s a different story? Why do you feel all neglected and abandoned and want us to hurry home?”

  “Look, Brandi, I’ve got work to do,” he said as he got his gear together. “Are you coming with me or not?”

  “All I want to do is take some time off work and track down a bit of my history,” she said, obstinately refusing to get her things together. “I just want to know more about my mother—and my father too, if that’s who Manny Shaw is. I want to know more about my linkage to their lives. Christ, you’ve been acting like I’m shopping for a lover here or something.”

  An odd expression flashed across Juan’s face. What had been odd hints began to fall together into a suspicion.

  “For all I know, Juan,” she prodded, “you might have a mistress up here.”

  He made a disgusted noise and continued to get his gear together. She sensed he was avoiding the issue, but that only made him all the more suspect. When he had introduced her to his boss, that Renault woman, had there been something more to her standoffishness than merely the stiffness of introduction? Something covert? Some tension of unease in the air? Jealousy? Private secrets and public lies?

  “Maybe you do,” she pressed, but then stopped herself, afraid she might find out more than she wanted to know just y
et.

  “Believe whatever the hell you like,” Juan said, growing angry. “I’ve got work that needs doing back at Freeman Lowell. I’m out of here.”

  “I’ll be back,” she said, more sullenly than she’d intended to. “After I meet with a few more people and take a flight with Diana Gartner.”

  Juan shrugged and acted as if he didn’t care. His camouflage of Duty didn’t quite cover the angry stomp of his footsteps as he departed.

  What had happened to them? There had been a time when their nibbling, nipping, biting loveplay had brought them flowing together like water finding its own level. A time when their lovemaking had made her knees feel weak in ways she hadn’t felt for a long time.

  Not, in fact, since she’d exultantly dallied with a female climbing partner atop a big dome of rock on the California coast. They’d just finished scaling a six-pitch route. An earthquake had struck in the very midst of their very midst. Planet waves had passed through her exactly when she was climaxing. She had felt herself cutting loose, peaking precisely amid all the intense energy and vast consummate release that comes to continents after the millennially-long, slow, bump-and-grind of their tectonic lovedance. All that wave had come flowing through her, all that energy passing through her body, at precisely the right moment.

  Since then, despite the occasional happy experimentation, she had generally swung hetero. At first, sex with Juan had been even more like that. No earthquake needed, just the two of them. They had “felt the Earth move” when in fact they weren’t anywhere near the surface of that planet. Their early intimacy had been the most sensuously gratifying days of her life.

  Things had cooled faster than she’d suspected. Still, there had continued to be those occasions when they slipped from two bodies into one and experienced new, awkward rhythms, the clashing streams of their separate histories joining into a single harmony, flowing broad and deep as their life together in time, at least for a moment.

  Now, though, they had worn on each other. They could hardly enjoy at all time spent in company together. Her beloved romance-holos he reduced to “chick flicks” that were “nothing but fantasies of mate selection, always about multiple suitors and a single heroine.” She had retaliated that his action holos were “dumb dick flicks” about multiple sex-object women available for the singular hero to choose from. They had both regretted saying such things. They were really such minor and unimportant issues, weren’t they? Yet those things had been said, and both of them knew what such discussions were really about: the way their own life as a couple was failing.

  Brandi was so tense after Juan left that she needed something to take her mind off the whole mess. Whether Manny was her father or not, it was him she told—in a most father-daughterly way—where she was headed, in order to relax and not think about what was going on with Juan.

  In one section of the central sphere two biomes stood separated by an artificial cliff—a sculpted mooncrete scarp thirty meters high and about one hundred meters long, one of the few topographically notable features inside the habitat. The cliff wall was modeled after Charlotte Dome, a tall rock face in the central Sierra Nevada and a favorite spot among technical rock-climbers back on Earth. Its surface was studded with the bumpy rock projections climbers called “chickenheads.” In her years living in HOME 1, Brandi had soloed the Wall a dozen times. She had never grown bored of it because she was always able to find new routes across it.

  On the off chance that she might want to climb, she had brought her rope and gear with her over on the shuttle from Freeman Lowell. Today’s climb was more a matter of “need” than “want,” however. To make the climb even more challenging and distracting, she decided to do it without chalk for her fingers and hands. She’d do it in street walking shoes, too—not in the classic sticky boots, or any of the newer electrostatic surface-bond tech. Several of the routes up the rock were rated 5.11 and 5.12, so at least street-climbing those would be something of a challenge.

  She looked at the cliff, eyeing chimneys and stemspots, cracks and holds and rugosities. As she stared she began calculating a new climb, one that broke away from the established route called Big Pop-A-Top. Having decided on a route, she walked to the base.

  No sooner had she started up the face than her anxieties began to fade, lost in her concentration upon the vertical, three-dimensional chess problem before her. Almost mechanically she popped in the old-style protection she’d brought—stoppers and nuts and camming “friends” wedged in cracks and spaces, snap-linked onto her rope line.

  The very thing that most disoriented climbers visiting from Earth—the optical illusion unavoidable climbing the Wall—was precisely what she loved most about it. The orbital habitat was an inside-out world, so the landscape was also skyscape, lakes and streams and trees and houses wrapping all the way around the sky, with only a few rare clouds floating about the central axis in between. As a result, climbing up the Wall inevitably also felt like climbing down it, face first, toward the lake at the opposite side of the sphere.

  Brandi had learned how to climb on Earth, spending a pair of earthbound summers doing routes all over the Alps and the Sierras. She’d done Yosemite runs and even the rather easy Charlotte Dome itself. None of them, however, for all their paths into deep sky, had felt quite like this fantastic impression she always got here, climbing the Wall. Here she seemed to be clawing headfirst, not up toward sky against gravity, but downward, with gravity, toward a landscape seen distantly through the clouds far below.

  She was nearing the top of her route when Brandi noticed that she was no longer alone. When she glanced over at him, the small gnomish-looking older man waved at her.

  “Hello, Ms. Easter,” the man called to her, waving a hand cinched into a stonelock, one of the new suction cup-like units that created powerful, temporary electrostatic bonds between itself and the rock surface.

  “Hello,” Brandi said back, as politely as she could. The stonelock tech allowed for a form of free-climbing which Brandi, traditionally trained, sniffed at as a bit of a cheat. But hey, this guy was pretty old, after all. Maybe he needed the break. “Do I know you?”

  “You will in a minute,” said the gnomish man. “You’re the one saw the big anvil-top rock coming down toward Earth a while back, aren’t you?”

  Great, Brandi thought. An old ink-stained wretch of a mediacuda, come to get her story.

  “What newsgroup are you with?” she asked grumpily, using a heel hook to make a big stretching stem move toward her next handhold.

  “News—?” the old man said, looking bewildered as he moved the four points of his stonelocks, hands and feet, over the rock surface toward her, his rope protection dangling out behind him, just in case. “Oh, no—I’m not with the press. Name’s Paul Larkin. Manny Shaw told me I might find you here. I just wanted to let you know you did in fact see what you thought you saw—no matter what everyone else may have been telling you. That was the top of Caracamuni tepui coming in, returning home after a long voyage.”

  Brandi glanced at him again. The guy didn’t really look like a crazy. She could still hope he wasn’t. Something about his name was familiar too, although she couldn’t quite place it at the moment. She tiptoed and finger-clung a series of thin nubbins on the rock face—some so small as to be virtually invisible—until she found a nice line of chickenheads big enough for her to dyno back and forth, off and up a final pair of rock faces that stood like the pages of an open book in relation to each other. Her ascent was rapid, after that.

  When she came over the lip of the new route she’d just completed, she waited for Mr. Stonelocks Larkin to catch up to her. Eventually he flopped over the top, breathing hard.

  “What’s this about a ‘long journey’?” she asked the panting man.

  “That’s right,” he said. She began entering the separate coded frequencies that activated the self-extracting feature of the nuts, stoppers, and cams of the rope protection she’d left behind her. Larkin did the same for his gea
r. A series of metal pings sounded as the anchoring pieces freed themselves from where they had been wedged. Hauling up their off-belayed ropes, Brandi and Larkin carefully coiled them, removing the anchor-pro pieces as they came over the lip. While the lines and gear came up, Larkin launched into his strange story.

  He told Brandi about his formerly schizophrenic ethnobotanist sister. He told her of the Cordyceps tepuiensis mushroom, as it had now officially been renamed in an on-line mycology announcement. Told her of the tepui ghost people and their myconeural symbiosis. Of their unprecedented mind-powers and crystalline technologies. Of the departure of the tepui top and its decades of disappearance. Of Larkin’s own “selling out” of the fungus and its KL 235 extract, to government and corporate intelligence interests, years before, in the long meantime.

  Strange stuff, Brandi thought, but it had enough points of contact with her mother’s history that she could almost believe it.

  The two of them, with their ropes and gear over their shoulders, walked toward the nearest bulletcart station entrance. As they walked, Larkin tried to complete the background behind Brandi’s own sighting of the mountain, orbed in light and heading toward Earth. Larkin told her what his returned sister Jacinta had told him—about the Allesseh and its mission. That was stranger still.

  “I can’t quite wrap my mind around this,” Brandi told him as they got in and took their seats in the cart headed for the ag tori, where Manny lived. “This Allesseh thing sounds like a cross between a black hole, Galactic Telephone and Telegraph, the Library of Alexandria, and the Tower of Babel before Jehovah decided to cancel that project.”

  Larkin laughed at the Babel reference as they unburdened themselves of their climbing gear and placed it on the empty seats beside them. Taking out his notebook computer, he rummaged around among its electronic category headings until he located the lyrics to a Möbius Caduceus song called “Wittgenstein’s Sin.” He showed the lyrics to Brandi, who obligingly read them.