Standing Wave

by Howard V. Hendrix

  rising over an eastern desert plain

  we had high piled a Tower) because

  In the Beginning was the Word (

  and all people spoke alike) because

  we were words made flesh (

  and we wished to be in better) hearing

  of the Word (

  but when the Tower had risen) gleaming (

  from the dead) earth brown and sear

  the Philosopher looked upon it

  and said words (are) nothing

  and all we have they are) nothing

  no meaning no sense they are) babble

  (in the end) babble nothing more mere) babble

  and the Tower) dissolved (into incoherent

  murmuring that could support no weight)

  and we fell to earth our mother

  we were dust again

  as foreigners all to each

  we chattered)

  one to the others

  could tell no thoughts (if we thought)

  or feelings (if we felt) toward others

  and tasting of ashes in our mouths

  the dust of wordless time

  covered (all that) was

  unspoken and unheard

  “I’ve heard a lot of their stuff,” Brandi said, “though not this one. I don’t quite get what’s going on with the parentheses.”

  Larkin nodded as the ridge cart eased toward their stop and they began to gather their gear.

  “One of their obscurer pieces, no doubt,” Larkin said. “I think Lev Korchnoi was operating his machinery under the influence of Albertian theory, when he wrote it. It’s got that sort of rebellion against ‘linguistic absolutism’ to it.”

  They left the bullet cart, which slid dutifully back into its tube and was gone. Walking round the small commons that the bullet had appeared and disappeared into, they made their way toward Manny Shaw’s home, through the enormous greenhouse conservatory of the torus curving away from them to vanishing point on either side. Walking along in silence, they at last found Shaw working in a nitrifying field of Dutch clover not far from his residence.

  “Hey, Manny,” Brandi called as they approached him, then gestured good-naturedly toward Larkin where he walked beside her. “Do you vouch for this guy’s wild story?”

  Manny stood up from where he was working in the dirt with his hands and cocked his head at them.

  “As much as I would vouch for your own,” he said, slapping his hands against each other to knock the dirt from them. “Find out for yourself if you like. Diana got us an invitation to Jhana and Seiji’s housewarming party on HOME 2. There should be people there who can confirm or deny it.”

  “I’ll be there myself, too,” Larkin said. “I haven’t seen the guest list, but I asked around a little after I got my invitation. Most of the people invited just happen to have been cranium-deep in that whole Light thing when it came through. From what I know of Jhana and Seiji, this is going to more than just a ‘housewarming’ party!”

  As they walked together toward Larkin’s home, Brandi wondered just what that might mean.

  * * * *

  Since arriving in California, Mei-Ling had insisted on driving. That was fine with Robert, for it gave him time to listen to, and take notes on, the Scientific Bones in Mystical Flesh material she had given him. As Mei-Ling piloted them along the California coast toward the Electronic Crimes Maximum Security Penal Facility, popularly known as “Silicon Bay”, Robert watched the rugged coastal scenery slide quietly by. He tried to concentrate, listening carefully as the Myrrhisticinean material played throughout the cab of their black, teardrop-shaped motorpool electric.

  Question: Why ‘Myrrhisticine’?

  Answer: Sister Alicia devised the name as a way of combining associations: ‘myrrh’ for its religious connotations as the gift of aromatic incense presented to the infant Christ child, and ‘myristicine,’ the scientific name for an important chemical found in nutmeg—

  Mei-Ling gave a short laugh. Robert clicked off the player and glanced questioningly at her.

  “That’s not quite the whole story,” she said, watching transparent aquamarine sea meet deep brown stone in white spume and wave, below and before them, as she drove. “What they don’t tell you there is that myristicine is a psychotropic. Sister Alicia had her first great vision while dosed up on nutmeg.”

  “But I thought she actually was a real, Catholic nun in the old days,” Robert said.

  “She was,” Mei-Ling assured him. “At the time of her great vision she was reading Teilhard de Chardin’s books and working with death-row inmates. They were the ones who turned her on to nutmeg jags. She was blessed and tormented with visions from then on.”

  “Hmm!” Robert said, electropenning notes and nodding as he clicked the player back on. It had scanned on to the next selection, something called “Jet Noise and Frog Song.”

  In the midst of cloudless Spring afternoons, Brother Étienne noticed that the frogs began calling every time a jet thundered in low overhead—only to fall silent again once the roar from the sky had died away.

  “I’ve never been able to locate a scientific article explaining the phenomenon,” Brother Étienne said as he and Sister Alicia stood beside the abbey’s vernal pool. “I wonder whether the frogs might be mistaking the noise for thunder, for the onset of rain and prime breeding conditions—”

  “The more I listen to it, Brother,” Alicia said with a smile, “the less it seems to have to do with the wet necessities of sex. I really think their calling is an amphibian hymn of sorts, an expression of faith.”

  Brother Étienne thought about Alicia’s words every time the jet noise made the frogs sing. So like the Abbess to believe that, he thought. And she didn’t hear it as a primitive prayer chanted to a green fertility god raining far away in the sky, either. For her it could only be an expression directed to the Most High.

  At least the frogs would probably never learn their mistake, Brother Étienne thought. No matter how often the roaring god proved false—just another dry metal thunderer without rain. They would never experience the spiritual dryness Étienne himself had known. Even when they began to experience parching physical dryness, the frogs would go on croaking, the most resolute of the faithful, true believers to the last.

  On the first day of Summer, the vernal pool went dry. Brother Étienne understood the meaning of Alicia’s words and became enlightened.

  A pause of silence, dead or thoughtful air, opened after the vignette. Mei-Ling had nothing to say about this one, so Robert just kept jotting notes. Over the soft purr of the engine they could hear the crashing of surf, not so very distant from the road on which they drove. In a moment more another vignette, “Loss,” began to play.

  Two biological sisters became sisters in the spirit and entered the Abbey together. After they had been part of the sisterhood for some years, they were driving home to the Abbey one evening when they were caught in a severe thunderstorm and flash flood. Crossing a broad desert wash that had begun to flood, their vehicle stalled in midstream just as a tall wall of muddy water began to sweep toward them. One of the sisters managed to climb onto the roof of their vehicle and was lifted to safety by a Mountain Rescue helicopter. The other sister had not yet gotten out of the vehicle when another, stronger torrent of mud and water lifted the stranded vehicle, rolled it, and carried it down the wash. The sister inside was crushed and drowned.

  The sister who had been lifted to safety grieved greatly and suffered much guilt as a result of having survived while her younger sister had perished. She became so morose that many in the Abbey felt she would kill herself. Sister Alicia was sent for and came to speak with her.

  “Grief is a wound,” Alicia told the grieving sister, “and your wound is deep. In your heart is a hole in the shape of your sister. You do not know if there is enough of you left over to cover up that hole. Remember this: where you are most wounded, there you most fully touch reality. Mortality is the self-inflicted wound o
f the knowledge which makes us human and real. Death, like the Rainbow Door, is a wound into reality. For most of us, reality hasn’t begun yet. For your sister, it has.”

  The mourning sister heard these words and the flood of her grief returned within its banks.

  “She really was a wise old woman,” Mei-Ling said, speaking of Sister Alicia, “as well as a crazy crone.”

  Robert clicked off the player once more.

  “You knew her, then?”

  “Met her,” Mei-Ling corrected him. “Only for a little while. As near as anyone can tell, she died during the Sedona disaster.”

  The sound of the surf below the road fell into the silence between them once more. Robert clicked on Scientific Bones in Mystical Flesh and a vignette called “Holy Life” began to play.

  Sister Alicia was asked why so many converts to the Myrrhisticine revelation are celibate, though celibacy is nowhere required of Myrrhisticineans.

  “Perhaps they realize,” contended Sister Alicia, “that our biological roles as mothers and fathers have been superseded by our roles as spiritual midwives and obstetricians, standing witness as the Fullness of Time is born from the Womb of Eternity.”

  This remains one of the hard sayings of Sister Alicia.

  “That’s putting it mi—” Mei-Ling began, but was interrupted by the insistent chiming of Robert’s infocom unit.

  “Right,” he said into the speaker, turning off the disk player as he did so. “Pump it through.”

  A holodisplay popped up above the infocom, reports and photos, at least from what Mei-Ling could see from the driver’s seat. Robert scanned them quickly yet thoroughly.

  “It’s that information you requested on Richard Schwarzbrucke’s death,” he said to Mei-Ling, by way of explanation.

  “And—?” she asked eagerly.

  “He did die with three other men,” Robert said, confirming Mei-Ling’s earlier experience. “Mongrel Clone-connected gentlemen: Edward “Big Ed” Hilbert, Martin “Mac” McCurdy, and Wayne Davis. All three were tied into the Blue Badge corruption investigation. Also to the Oregon Blue Spike trade and CMD.” He quickly rescanned a portion of the info he’d been sent. “Blue Spike seems to have some links to KL 235, as well. The strangest part is that there seems to be a security video record of the deaths. Both external and internal shots taken by Schwarzbrucke’s household security system.”

  “Why does that not surprise me?” Mei-Ling said, thinking of their topological voyeur’s penchants. “Play it.”

  Robert obliged. Mei-Ling divided her attention between watching the road she was driving and the grainy little vid being projected into the space in front of Robert, on the passenger’s side of the car.

  The first scene was an exterior sequence—a veritable electric fence of lightning bolts spearing all around Schwarzbrucke’s house from a dense storm cloud. The next sequence was interior: images from an entertainment console, in fact from all the TVs and holojectors and computers in the house. A CT scan movie of a semi-skull, dented in on the left side in the shape of a rifle or shotgun butt. That image then blown up and highlighted, apparently for the four men in the den.

  A series of what looked like PET, NMR, and interferometric images followed, of the same injury and of subtler, apparently drug-induced damage done to other subjects. Destruction of sites labeled “Broca’s area,” and some also labeled “Wernicke’s Area.”

  The closed-circuit footage showed one of the men, police-labeled as Ed Hilbert, breaking for the door. Apparently the electric locks had been slammed tight. Schwarzbrucke picked up the phone, then made a disgusted sound as noise not so very unlike a modem’s carrier wave filled the room.

  From the screens and holos in the den innumerable morphing kaleidoscopic angels swelled into light and life before the men, until Schwarzbrucke and his guests had to shield their eyes. As the light from the screen faded, a new boom sounded, not of thunder, but of something else.

  “That would be the house’s fuel-oil tanks,” Robert said, scanning a report in split-screen display. In the taped record itself, the power went dead and the security system switched to auxiliaries. Next came an external shot of a section of the Schwarzbrucke house being engulfed in a wall of fire.

  Then Mei-Ling saw again a scene she had seen before: forces beyond her understanding warping the air around the men in the den, warping something even much deeper than the air itself, smoothly if fatally everting the men, turning them wrong side out—

  “That’s it!” Mei-Ling said. “Why hasn’t this stuff been linked to the topological voyeur killer before now?”

  “It’s years and years old, for one thing,” Robert said, putting the display into pause mode. “According to the reports, the inversions were attributed to ‘tornadic pressure changes’ caused by the storm and the deaths to fire—also storm-related. The bodies were burned beyond recognition when the house went up. The record itself has largely been ignored. Irrelevant.”

  Mei-Ling shook her head so vigorously that for a moment Robert was afraid she was going to drive off the side of the road, plunging them on to rocks, surf and sea below.

  “Wrong!” she said emphatically. “That was our topological voyeur’s first cluster-kill. Schwarzbrucke and those Mongrel Clone bikers did something to ol’ TV. He was making them pay back plenty. This episode, all those years ago, was his vengeance, pure and simple.”

  “How do you know the topo voyeur is a ‘he’?” Robert wanted to know.

  “I don’t,” Mei-Ling said. “Not for sure, anyway. Good enough as a hunch, though. Get everybody Interpol can spare working on discovering and locating someone who suffered brain damage at the hands or through the drugs of those three Mongrel Clones—or through the research of Richard Schwarzbrucke. That’s your basic skanky on this guy.”

  Robert glanced out the car window, at the sea throwing itself against the land, again and again, until Mei-Ling turned toward him once more.

  “Any more word on that SubTerPost pirate postal system?” she asked, catching her partner off guard. He called up the most recent information on his unit.

  “More of the same,” he said, scanning reports. “The link between it and the deaths seems to be strengthening. As to locating its source—that’s more of a problem. These temporary autonomous postal systems are designed to be hard to find.”

  “How, exactly?” Mei-Ling asked. She was not all that familiar with such systems. In the past she’d generally considered them rather trivial nuisances.

  “The addresses are as bounce-routed and massively encrypted as the messages,” Robert said. “If you don’t have access to ‘hidden keys’ embedded in their control code, then they’re damned hard to break into. They exist outside government and corporate control of the infosphere, so they have to be built to resist detection and shut-down.”

  “Highly distributed?” Mei-Ling ventured.

  “Right. This one seems to be more mobile and shifting in its distribution than most. That supports the idea that its ‘camouflage’, at least, is under the control of a big machine intelligence of some sort.”

  Mei-Ling nodded, thoughtful. Robert looked out the window again, but his questions gnawed at him until he turned back toward Mei-Ling

  “Look,” he said, staring hard at her, “if you want me to be of help, you’ve got to be a little more forthcoming with what your thinking is on all this.”

  “What do you want to know?” she replied, in a tone that said she really didn’t want to be asked.

  “Well, is the killer running the machine intelligence that’s running SubTerPost, or just using it?” Robert asked. “And how does this connect with Sedona and the orbital habitat, if it does? Or with Manqué’s RATs and the Light?”

  Mei-Ling stayed quiet long enough that Robert started to wonder if he’d pushed too hard.

  “I’m not sure yet,” Mei-Ling said. “Sorry. I wish I could say more, but at least this lead seems solid. We need to get everyone moving on this change in our SCANCI. It�
�s a start.”

  Dissatisfied but dutiful, Robert set to work, punching in codes, pressing the explanations hard with his superiors. When he’d finished, however, he still had questions about what they were trying to do.

  “Mei-Ling,” he asked as they turned off the coast highway, “how much were you involved with what Manqué did at Sedona?”

  She stared out the windshield at the road unwinding before her, as if preoccupied.

  “I was part of the Kerrismatix team that installed the ALEPH, as I said,” she replied.

  “I know that,” Robert said. “I know that it stands for Artificial Life Evolution Programming Heuristic. But what does all that really mean? And how did it influence what happened at Sedona?”

  Mei-Ling took a deep breath. She really didn’t want to be getting into this, not now, but she didn’t seem able to avoid it.

  “Doctor Kerris had done an incredible job developing it,” Mei-Ling said, remembering. “A mountain of research in cybernetic chaos and complexity theory had gone into developing the ALEPH. The complexity and sophistication of its modeling is precisely why the Myrrhies were interested. The other evolution programs on the market had all turned out to be too simplistic for their needs. Reductive, competition-only models. The ALEPH had the sort of depth and feedback layering they were looking for. Especially the way Kerris had plugged in organismal behavior as an environmental constraint on changes in gene frequency. That’s what Phelonious especially liked about it.”

  Robert turned, glancing away from the view out the car window of Big Sur mountains wading into the Pacific.

  “He liked the ALEPH’s understanding of complexity, you mean?” he asked.

  “Yes,” Mei-Ling said with a brief nod as she drove the winding surface road. “I remember him lecturing me on how a brain is not a computer—how that analogy was entirely fallacious.”

  “Oh?” Robert asked, curious. “How’s that?”

  “Computers are designed, brains are evolved,” Mei-Ling said, watching the countryside unwind around them. “Computers can manipulate information only under the direction of a program. They do what they are built and programmed to do. They’re limited by their designer’s intentionality.”