Standing Wave

by Howard V. Hendrix

  It didn’t matter. None of that brought any response. Kong’s gaze was fastened on the desk, drilling into its surface. In a lesser person it would have seemed petulant, but the grand obliviousness of the man in the death cube made his behavior quite chilling to both Robert and Mei-Ling.

  At last they had no option but to leave the strange captive behind and return again to a world that refused to see itself as either pitiful or little.

  * * * *

  “—the mind make constellations in the night sky,” Hari asked, a bit stumble-tongued, “or the night sky make constellations in the mind?”

  “I dunno,” Aleck said, staring at the heavens above them where the car stood parked beside a dark country road, “but this is more stars than I’ve ever seen before.”

  Ever since their success at Planet Noir, the members of Onoma Verité seemed to have been either partying with alcohol and other chemicals, or (rarely) sleeping. Calling in sick from his nightly monitoring of Hugh Manatee, Aleck had decided, more or less, to party with them tonight.

  Driving them way out into the countryside beyond Socioville-Foster Road hadn’t been his idea, though. That was Hari’s push. He was the only one of them who took into account things like the phase of the moon, “low-ambient, non-urban light levels,” “gegenschein,” and “degrees of arc”. He was also the only one who cared all that much about looking for the big new comet that was coming in, the one called Hsiu-Johansen.

  Looking up into the sky, Aleck thought Comet Hsiu-Johansen was impressive enough. Its tail streamed out across several fists of arc, until it disappeared into the solar backscatter that Hari called gegenschein. Under city lights, the comet was pretty much an oblong blur, God’s smudged fingerprint on the bowl of the firmament. Out here, beyond the conurbs and exurbs, it was a great streaming veil, a shower of incandescence falling ceaselessly across the sky.

  No wonder the ancients believed the appearance of comets portended a change in kingdoms, Aleck thought, remembering Comet Halley of 1066 and the Battle of Hastings. Omens and signs of a great shift in the life of the world.

  Aleck was even more impressed, tonight, by the background against which the Comet stood. A deep, thick river of golden stars shone in the sky above him, so thick as to make constellations difficult to discern. A standing wave of suns, the vortex of the Milky Way, always there, but usually blotted out by daystar Sol. Or by the bright moon. Or streetlights. From where they reclined on the hood of the car, Aleck and Hari stared at the flood of suns above their heads for quite a while.

  “‘The gods have their porch lights on’,” Hari remarked, “as the Albertians put it.”

  Aleck nodded. A few yards to his left, on a blanket laid out on the grass between road and field, he heard some sort of word game going on between Janika and Sam.

  “Oiling the midnight burn,” Sam said.

  “Ending the candle at both burns,” Janika countered.

  “No wick for the rested!” Sam said. They both laughed. Then Sam apparently began trying to prove that his four years at a Latin School had in fact taught him some Latin, however poorly he might be remembering it now.

  “Money takes up,” Janika said, “where Love leaves off.”

  “Pecunia incipit ubi Amor finit,” Sam replied, slightly sloshed. “A heraldic motto for prostitutes everywhere.”

  Hari moved to a sitting position on the car’s front end.

  “Hey, Sam,” he called, “how about ‘Art ends where Commerce begins’?”

  “Ars finit ubi Commercium incipit,” Sam said. “Motto of every lean and hungry artist who got fat and happy and saw his artistic abilities destroyed by success.”

  They heard Janika standing up from the blanket.

  “Artisté-speak, again,” she said sourly. “Just what exactly is your problem with making money?”

  “Pecunia incipit ubi Ars finit,” Sam said with a shrug.

  “I won’t even ask,” Janika said, walking and stumbling back toward the car.

  “I dream of a gratification so powerful it will dissolve the society which suppresses it!” Sam called after her, laughing. “Artistic alienation is a memory of the future. My memory of the future is the source of my artistic alienation!”

  “Yeah, yeah, yeah,” Janika said wearily.

  Aleck sat up on the front end of the car.

  “How about ‘Fear leaves off, where Understanding begins’?” he asked.

  “Do you mean understanding as in ‘accurate knowledge’,” Sam asked, “or understanding as in ‘sympathy or empathy’?”

  Aleck had to ponder that a moment. What he was getting at had elements of both, but he didn’t think Sam would like that answer.

  “Accurate knowledge, I guess,” he said at last.

  “‘Timor finit ubi Intellectus incipit’, according to Sam’s rubric,” Marco said, interrupting, coming out of the fallow field where he had been walking with his new exotic-looking girl-friend, Rama. “Though I don’t think that’s the most accurate Latin.”

  “Oh?” Sam said, sitting up on the blanket and taking a slight offense. “And you would know?”

  Marco shrugged his heavy shoulders.

  “Just because I look to be going nowhere doesn’t mean that I couldn’t have come from everywhere,” he said slyly.

  “Ooh, that’s a pretentious platitude,” Sam said.

  “At least I’m not altered enough to be spending my time making them up in bad Latin,” Marco shot back. “Nimium eruditionis habes.”

  Both of them laughed at that, their own private joke. A big shooting star slit the night sky for a moment and their laughter turned into a brief chorus of “ah!”s and “See that?”s. After the star passed, Aleck lay back on the car’s hood and spoke to Hari’s back.

  “I was thinking about what you said before,” Aleck said. “About whether it was the mind that makes constellations in the sky, or the sky that makes constellations in the mind. What about that, in terms of the Light that did or didn’t happen? Did the Light make constellations in our minds, or did our minds make constellations in the Light?”

  “Who knows?” Hari said. “Whatever it was, it just didn’t last long enough. It needed to last at least as long as that comet up there. Instead, it barely lasted as long as a shooting star. Insufficient data.”

  “‘Insufficient data’?” Sam said, incredulously, and slightly slurred. “Didn’t I give you that book to cure you of that? Stop being such an objective materialist! The universe isn’t objective—it’s interactive—”

  “‘Participatory’ is what my professors prefer to call it,” Hari said quietly.

  “Okay, fine,” Sam said, standing up from the blanket. He staggered over toward the car, then rapped his knuckles noisily on the hood of the car at his arrival.

  “If you people are up for it,” he said, insinuatingly, “Jan and I have got some things with us that are tools for participation, for interactivity.”

  Uh-oh, Aleck thought, remembering that, when he’d picked them up, Sam had been carrying a cooler and Janika toting a picnic basket. Both items were now residing in the trunk of the pod car. But what Aleck said was, “What tools?”

  “Open up the trunk,” Sam said, casting an all-too-conspiratorial glance at Janika, “and I’ll show you.”

  Aleck and Hari got up from their places on the car’s hood and began to walk around the car, toward the back. As they walked, Aleck overheard snatches of Sam speaking quietly to Janika

  “—definitely an ascomycete,” Sam was saying, “like morels and truffles, or the penicillin fungi. Or ergot-producing Claviceps on rye.”

  “Ergot?” Janika whispered. “That’s the one that came before LSD, wasn’t it?”

  Aleck beamed the UNLOCK command to the trunk and moved slightly aside as Sam and Janika and the rest crowded around the back of the car.

  “What’s in the cooler, Sam?” he asked, as the trunk swept up with a whoosh. “Claviceps-on-rye sandwiches?”

  Sam and Janika looked st
artled, then laughed.

  “Something like that,” Sam said, lifting out the cooler as Jan lifted out the picnic basket. On top of the basket was what looked, in the trunk light, like a goodly-sized portable VR player and several sets of mind-machine gargoggles. “You’ll find out.”

  “What’s with the tech?” Hari asked as they walked toward where the big blanket was already spread upon the ground.

  “Sam said we needed some mind-machinery for our party,” Janika replied, setting the player upright on the ground beside her left foot. “So I brought the box and some Wayne Takahashi stuff.”

  As everyone sat down on the picnic blanket. Sam and Janika, by flashlight, began spreading out their moveable feast: loaves of sourdough and rye bread, sliced turkey, ham, chicken, avocado, tomatoes, cucumber, bell peppers, assorted crackers and chips, sour cream, cream cheese, yogurt, wine, sun tea. They looked like any ordinary group of picnickers, Aleck thought—except that it happened to be the middle of the night.

  “And now,” said Sam, removing a covered china plate from the cooler, “the pièce de résistance!”

  With a flourish Sam uncovered the dish. Displayed thereon were six fresh, thick-bodied, fleshy, convoluted whitish things. Sam reached forward and picked one up, examining it more closely. Janika, Marco, and Rama followed suit.

  “Gatehead mushrooms,” Sam said. “The source. I got them from a guy who accessed them at a Möbius Caduceus show.”

  “I don’t know,” said Marco’s girlfriend, Rama, carefully examining the specimen she had picked up, “but it looks, um, phallic, if you ask me.”

  “Yeah,” Janika agreed, “like a cross between the brain and the penis of a bipedal mammal. What would Dr. Freud say, Sam?”

  The women laughed, but Sam shot back in his best Viennese accent.

  “Sometimes a mushroom is just a mushroom,” he said, smiling sardonically. Everyone laughed, then Sam continued sans accent. “If these things are the real thing, we should be thinking more about ‘set and setting’ than about possible Freudian interpretations.”

  “Exactly,” Marco said, dicing his mushroom slices into still smaller pieces on the cutting board. When he had finished he took Sam’s mushroom and began the same procedure. His hands freed, Sam turned his attention to uncorking one of the bottles of wine he’d brought.

  “I checked them out with a botanist friend of mine on campus,” Sam said, slowly shifting into tripmaster-shaman mode. “He confirmed that this mushroom is definitely not poisonous—and very likely psychoactive. That’s why we’re here in this setting: outdoors, on a beautiful night, with good food and drink and company. This is both a celebration and an exploration. Just be open to whatever experience happens, willing to learn from it. Especially anything it tells us about the Light. Good or bad, it’ll last only a few hours at most.”

  Marco finished dicing up the first four, then glanced at Sam, who looked toward where Aleck and Hari were sitting.

  “You two want some as well?” he asked, casually, though the pressuring undertones were there for everyone to hear.

  Aleck hated this part. Certainly he didn’t want to ruin everyone else’s good time, or to stand out, alienated from what they would be experiencing. He didn’t want to appear paranoiacally overcautious on the one hand—or weak-willed on the other. Part of his mind didn’t like to be pressured, either. His hand was being forced to try what he hadn’t tried before, at a time and place he hadn’t chosen. He already had a busy enough day scheduled tomorrow. After staying up all night he’d be tired tomorrow—and exhausted the day after that, which was when he usually felt the real, time-lagged consequences of an all-night escapade. He could feel Hari watching him, too, for some sign of the way the wave was going to break.

  “Sure,” Aleck said at last. Beside him, Hari shrugged agreement.

  “I want to be the first to try them,” Sam said. “I’m the one who procured them, so I get first dibs.”

  Marco gave to Janika and Rama the finely chopped mushrooms he’d been working on while Sam spoke with Hari and Aleck, then took Aleck and Hari’s mushrooms. The women mixed the mushrooms with the yogurt, or the cream cheese, or the sour cream, concocting three varieties of mushroom dip. Sam began pouring wine as Marco finished chopping and slicing the remaining fresh mushrooms, then Janika and Rama stirred them into the ‘dips,’ pale hands and dark hands working side by side.

  “A toast,” Sam said at last. He raised his wine glass with one hand, while dipping a piece of dark rye bread into the sour cream mushroom dip with the other. “Here’s to the entheogen Cordyceps tepuiensis ‘Larkin’—and good hopes for our first encounter with it.”

  Responding “Hear, hear!” everyone clinked their glasses together, and drank. Sam took a large bite of the dip-slathered rye bread and chewed thoughtfully. Everyone else watched him intently.

  “Hey, this is tasty!” Sam said after a moment. “These fungi are downright delicious!”

  One by one the rest of them dipped bread or crackers into the mushroom mixes and sampled some Cordyceps tepuiensis ‘Larkin.’ Aleck did so too, saying a silent prayer of sorts. He hoped that he didn’t share whatever twist in the DNA spiral it might be that made some folks prone to an extremely heightened psychoactive chemical sensitivity. He prayed particularly that he wouldn’t prove genetically predisposed to mental imbalances that might be blown wide open by exposure to entheogens like this fungus.

  To his surprise, Aleck found that Sam was indeed telling the truth, at least about the taste. He had expected something bitter and slimy, but these mushrooms were delicious. He could only describe their flavor as “meaty nutty”—meaty like fillet mignon and nutty like macadamias. From the expressions on Janika’s and Rama’s faces, he could tell they were finding them surprisingly tasty too. The mushrooms were so delectable that he found it hard to believe that anything tasting so good could be bad for him. Still, he could see that, like himself, his companions—particularly Hari and Marco—were all a bit tentative, waiting anxiously for any stomach-rumbling premonition of nausea, or gastro-intestinal distress, or full-blown food poisoning.

  No such signs were forthcoming. By the time Janika started setting up the virtual player and handing around the gargoggles, they were all spreading the mushroom dip onto sandwiches as well. Indian tabla music came pouring out of the player’s speakers as they ate.

  “I thought something ethnic but with a good beat would be appropriate, for now,” Janika said.

  “Classic Zakir Hussain, isn’t it?” Rama asked, identifying the music. Janika nodded and Rama smiled approvingly.

  “When you start to feel your head changing,” Janika said, “just put on the goggles. They’ll automatically activate your feed of the Takahashi program, from the beginning.”

  Twenty minutes later, the six of them had eaten most of the food and polished off two bottles of wine. Aleck soon began to realize, however, that he was beginning to experience something more than the usual post-prandial bliss and lassitude. He fumbled on the gargoggles, thinking distractedly what a beautiful study in contrasts Rama and Janika were—Rama dark and shorter and amply curved, Janika blonde and taller and less emaciated-looking tonight—more “willowy.”

  He was surprised to note that the goggles were primarily real-time screens representing whatever direction he looked in. The cryptic phrase DESCRIPTION IS NOT SYNONYMOUS WITH ADVOCACY appeared in overlay. Only then did he realize that the virtual goggles were something more than a sort of head-mounted closed-circuit TV.

  Seen through the lightweight goggles, the air around Aleck had begun to fill with shimmering and shifting dots and flecks of blue and yellow light. When he moved his head, the flecks of light “echoed,” tracking and after-imaging off the light sources out in the “real world”. He soon realized that slowly scanning the starry sky made for a particularly impressive effect. The heavens above him echoed with light. Dreamily he wondered how one would describe that in Latin.

  The afterimaging lights slowly began
joining to form fluid grids and honeycomb patterns, saturated colors flashing and fading, swelling and shrinking, rippling and distorting through everything in his (he was now sure) computer-augmented field of vision. Zigzag lightning softened to meanders, to waves, curves, filigrees.

  Aleck began to wonder where the Takahashi virtual in his eyes and ears left off and the effects of the entheogen in his head began. Squared spirals of red and blue shone fiercely against the night sky now, rotating and moving, enlarging and shrinking. The starry river and the lightfall of the comet above his head became almost overpoweringly complex in their imagery. For a while it seemed to him that he could see this flood of images only peripherally. Wherever he looked intently, for even a short while, a brilliant white hole occupied the center of his vision, the moveable bright eye of the storm.

  Somewhere in his head, Aleck remembered seeing an interview with Takahashi, remembered the artist explaining that what Aleck was now seeing was not the eye of the storm but the storm of the eye. These images were entoptic phenomena, patterns being generated within the eye, produced by the activity of the visual apparatus itself. Actually, not just his eyes but Aleck’s entire nervous system seemed to be doing it, becoming a new sense, a sixth or seventh or tenth or nth sense in addition to his usual five. That new sense was a producer of new sensations his brain was trying its best to make sense of.

  Then abruptly it didn’t matter. His mind was absolutely focused on what he was seeing. The present was unfolding before him in light. All irrelevant reminiscences were gone. No memories of the past or thoughts of the present or contemplations of the future lingered.

  The night sky was covered in luminous, translucent script, Arabic or hieroglyphic or cuneiform. The stars were a swirling dance of unreadable letters, celestial graffiti. The beat coming out of the player was the thudding of a million drums, a billion hearts, all drums one drum beating a planetary tattoo, a world heartbeat, unimaginable pounding harmonies, sounds bending and dilating, breaking up and digitizing until he could hear the music of the universe in the space between the notes.