He turned (no doubt and no reflection, only the merging of action and awareness) with a slow smile (clear goals, clear understanding) toward Janika. She was printed and tattooed all over with the same shimmering translucent script (no need or desire to control the situation) and smiling too. Sam was in much the same state.
He looked at the backs of his hands and (no self-consciousness) found they were no longer familiar but had instead become alien topography, netted with nerves and roped with blood vessels, highways trafficked with the lights of firing neurons, the pulsing gridlock of platelets, X-ray vision of and through skin and flesh and bones, swarmed over by glittering pulsing geometric forms. (No question of how he could see them, clear as death vision. He just could, in starlight, see them—as if his eyes were sucking in more light.)
The empty whole formerly known as Aleck began mouthing a soft and interminable unwordable word (a sense of present reality deeper and more diffuse than that of his usual senses) to Rama. She got up and began to dance to the beat that seemed now not to come from the player but from the earth and air and sky. Janika and Marco and Hari and Sam and Aleck rose, all one, to join her dance, pounding a dance floor into the low grass. Whirling and spinning the flood of bright and dark geometries came faster, the bright center of the eyestorm no longer right in front but ahead, down a tunnel or at the bottom of a vortex, the white hole from which the flood of all perceptions came surging, realer than real, hypersolid, yet dreamy with the floating sensation that sometimes accompanies sleep’s onset.
They were all one innocent child floating half-adream in a rotating tunnel walled with electric bricks, every brick a panel or screen mounted in shimmering fluid lattice or matrix, dancing in waves of entoptic geometries. Watching and dancing they saw that every bright brick they stared into was in its turn a tunnel or living breathing passageway, a portal depicting on its walls, over and over again, dancers dancing and watching, watching and dancing endlessly. Each passageway was a different dance, a different space in time.
They fell out of their bodies into a thousand different dances, joined Shakers shaking in their Circle Dance, punks slamming and thrashing, pit dancers moshing, Indians doing the Ghost Dance, Tarantists spinning, Sufi dervishes whirling, nineteenth century French girls and Carolingian jugglers and Kuchean Buddhists scarf dancing, can-can dancers and ecstatic dancers of Hathor, Elamite and Greek and Sioux line dancers, group dancers, masked dancers, penitential dancers and dancing Bacchantes, morisco and carneval and formal ball dances, chain dances and rondos and hasta moudra hand dances, dances of warrior youths and maidens and shepherds and buffoons, Shivite sacred dancers, Chinese sleeve dancers, Japanese Kabuki, Russian ballet, dances to the tune of flageolet, tambourine, oboes, horns, trombones, double bass, string orchestra, guitars, castanets, bagpipes, violin, flute, lute, viols, transverse flutes, trumpets, shawm, rebec, triangular harp, lyre, sword and lance on shield, tympanon, aulos and double aulos, frame drum, skull drum, bullroarer, turtleshell rattle, song, handclap—
How much Takahashi’s? How much theirs? How much his own? It didn’t matter. Across time and space they shared the same experience, the same impersonal Great Dance of it all, the long complex choreography, out of the First Handclap’s fastest of fast dances, stars whirling out of whorling gas, planets spinning into being from cooling starstuff, thunderbolt and cloud and volcano, dance of chemical hypercycles, first cell of shape-changing life, blue-green algaprokaryoteeukaryotecoelenteratetrilobiteammonite Gastropodcephalopodinsectfishamphibianreptilebirdmammal—until a present both far future and far past at once, a great, spiral, turning, dance pilgrimage, with many others, reddish-pelted, rightbrainwise, cerebellar, left-handed, supraorbital, nocturnal, heavy brow-ridged, auditory, barrel-chested, short-extremitied, cold-adapted, all walking, to Allesseh, all dancing, through the worldweb, all singing, mushroom-eating, moon-worshipping, snake-adoring, spider-loving, troll ancestral, low-foreheaded, skycave dwelling, red ochre symboled, second-sighted, magnetited, archaeofuturosapiens, all walking down spiral sunmoonlines, all dancing up the soulspring, all singing up and down innumerable timelines, walk, dance, song, all one, at once. Then, now, next, all one, at once.
Allesseh the whole way to Allesseh, Allesseh is the way. Allesseh timeline sightline, dancers dancing to it in it, toward it of it, walking amid stars in the cave of the sky, to the bottom of the vortex of vortices, Allesseh, floating black hole crystal ball mirror sphere memory bank, all outside it inside it, all time space histories stories together there, each for each who gazes in, sees own, Allesseh the shining gate between time and eternity—
The moment of aching clarity, of awe and weird and wordlessness. Of fascination that Eternity is not just very much time but the absence of the existence of time. That Infinity is not just very much space but the absence of being located in space. Deep union with overpowering, mysterious, radically-other vitality. Recognition that I and We and That are one—
Aleck slowly felt himself becoming enfleshed again, in the flesh he had never left. The Allesseh—where is it? he wanted to ask. But he saw that it had turned its face away from itself, so that everything turned and burned away, toward the last dance, the slowest slow dance of entropic maximum, the mere universal vibration of that endless end....
He came back to himself more fully then, to find himself still dancing in the sunrise of this high bright just-morning in a windy place beside Socioville-Foster Road. Gazing slowly around, Aleck wondered at the time and where it had gone. The stars and comet were fading to nothingness. Had he been dancing in trance? How long? The music and images from the player had long since stopped, but he had been dancing to the beat of a music beyond the music of what happens, amid scenes beyond the screen of what is.
Aleck suddenly wondered if he’d been dancing asleep all his life, if the past night’s strange vision within a dream within a hallucination was the most wide-awake he’d ever been, the most vividly he’d ever perceived anything. Removing the virtual goggles, he wondered who he should thank—the genius of Wayne Takahashi for his triggering visuals, or the genius in that strange fungus he had eaten.
The shimmering, breathing, mental-wallpaper patterns of his entoptics were beginning to fade. He realized vaguely that he was almost back from that elsewhere he had journeyed to. He felt both regret at leaving alterreality behind and relief at returning to the staged world where he could play once again his usual part.
Breaking away from the dance—only Rama and Marco were also still dancing, he noted belatedly; Janika and Sam and Hari had disappeared—Aleck stumbled off to urinate behind a tree. His spatial sense must still be distorted, he realized, when he discovered he was a giant pissing a flood on the small distant broccoli plant of the tree. As he zipped up, he wondered with a shiver if perhaps his regret and relief at coming down and coming back might as yet be a bit premature.
“Aleck!” Sam called, from nearby, but sounding far away. “This stuff is way more potent than I imagined. We’d better start bringing everybody back to reality.”
Sam and Hari were both approaching him. Hari’s eyes looked owlishly big as he approached, despite the growing daylight.
“Suggestions?” Aleck asked, his mouth working again, slowly, thickly, at last.
“This has been more a party than an experiment,” Hari said, a bit pantingly, as if he found speaking a considerable exertion too. “We don’t have much info in terms of exact dosages. No dry weights of the mushroom material ingested, no exact body weights of the participants, that sort of thing. We do have our subjective experiences, though. We can talk people down if we need to.”
Aleck nodded—with interminable slowness, it seemed to him.
“Then we can get some sense of the time frame,” he said, thoughtfully.
“Right,” Hari said. “When was the first onset of the altered state? How long did the altered state of consciousness last? What stages did it pass through? Even this stuff can be handled in a rigorous, scientific manner.”
&nb
sp; “Right,” Sam agreed, gazing about them. “Sure. Look, it’s getting to be morning. Where are Rama and Marco and Janika? We should all be getting back to our place or to campus.”
Aleck nodded. With the others, he wandered over the fields, which for some reason felt more like a flat-topped mountain this early morning. In the dawn light, looking for Marco and the women, his words with Sam and Hari as they walked were still a starlit conversation of myth and participation mystique and divination, out-of-body-experiences and astral projection and mystical union and transcendence.
They found Rama plopped down on their makeshift dancing ground, wiping tears from her eyes. Marco knelt beside her in the trampled grass, motioning them to go on looking for Janika, which they did reluctantly. As he walked away, Aleck heard Rama saying something about “souls frozen in deathless bodies.” He was still trying to make sense of whatever that might mean when they walked in on Janika. Standing atop a rock, arms spread as if to embrace the whole world and sky, she was smiling radiantly, even maniacally, communing happily with all creation.
“Gentlemen,” she said when she turned to them at last, “you wouldn’t believe where I’ve been.”
“What? Did you see God?” Aleck asked, trying a tired joke.
“See God? I was God. The devil too. Everything. Went from Chartres Rose Windows and mandalas on the backs of my eyelids all the way out to the edges of the Rorschach universe. I learned great things, important things.”
At last she came down off her small height. As they walked back toward the remains of their picnic and the impromptu dancing ground, Hari kept speaking to Aleck in such rapid fire fashion that Aleck had trouble following him. Aleck finally told Hari he should save it, that they were going to be writing down or recording all this just as soon as possible—at least that had been Sam’s suggestion. Hari agreed that it was a good one.
Back at the blanket site they helped Marco and Rama stow the picnic leftovers in cooler and basket and daypack. They gathered up the virtual player and packed away the outing’s trash. In the morning light they shook out and folded the blanket, then walked back toward the car.
Each of them from time to time looked back at the spot of flattened grass where the picnic had been. Something in their eyes said they couldn’t believe what had happened there. Because it had happened, though, they would never see that place, or themselves, or the world, in quite the same light again.
The others waited as Aleck unlocked the doors and the trunk. As they loaded up and then locked away their impedimenta, Sam remarked that there was coffee always on the brew back at their place, and they were all invited for a “debriefing.” Aleck eagerly anticipated the coffee. He was exhausted and his mouth was saturated with a bitter taste, as if he’d licked the latex leaking from a thousand sleepy poppies.
On the way home, Sam clicked on a recorder, in case anyone had particular experiences to relate. At first the desire to talk about what had happened seemed to have passed out of them, or the recorder kept them silent. Aleck wondered if Sam had brought along his recorder for nothing.
At last, they began to describe what they’d been through. Rama explained her nightmare of souls breaking the cycle of incarnations—not through achieving satori or nirvana but by achieving static deathlessness in the flesh. Hari, growing particularly voluble, talked about how he had really seen for the first time a “universe strange, uncertain, and incomplete”. About how the more you know about where you are the less you know about where you’re going. How the more self-consistent a theory is the less complete it necessarily must be. About “superposition of states” and how everything that is possible in the universe is actual, until observation occurs and sifts out one state as “real” from all those superposed states. About the nine billion lives of Schrödinger’s cat—
That got Marco going, talking about timelines, dim futures of barbarism come round again. The demand for “social order” and “morality” completely suppressing imagination, even consciousness itself. Then Sam talked about a vision of alternate pasts, including one in which Timothy Leary became John F. Kennedy’s chief science advisor. Leary, through Kennedy concubine Mary Pinchot, had passed on prescient details from a Harvard psilocybin test-subject’s visions describing, a year and more before it happened, the assassination attempt of November 22, 1963. The early warning thus prevented the assassination and assured fellow Irish Catholic Leary’s rise to a post in the cabinet during Kennedy’s second term, as well as a major role in the extension of Camelot into a full blown American Aquarian Age.
Janika talked about visions of lens-shaped objects, “temporal mirages” that had appeared at various points in history. Foo fighters over Europe and the Pacific during the Second World War. Fireballs over Tenochtitlan just before the city fell to Cortes’ forces. Phenomena in the heavens at a thousand crux-points in human history.
As Aleck related his own vision of grand-scale cosmological and biological evolution, however, he began to have his doubts. He had a long-time interest in biology, after all. Janika and Sam were intrigued by drug culture and weird history. Marco was paranoid about social-control tech. Rama came out of a reincarnationist cultural tradition. Hari was an aficionado of heavy-lifting physics.
Were they all just projecting, then? How much of what they’d experienced was just them, projecting onto It—and how much of what they’d experienced was It, projecting onto them?
Constellations and the Mind. Still, the stars are real, aren’t they? Even if you don’t have words for them? Almost with a gulp, Aleck related his experience of mystical union. Of that thing which gatehead subculture called the ‘Allesseh.’ Of standing in the gate between time and eternity, space and infinity.
It was as if he’d opened the flood gates. Abruptly all of them began to discuss their visionary experiences more openly. Yes, they had all experienced something very much along those lines. Was it embedded in the Takahashi virtual? Aleck wanted to know. Janika assured them it wasn’t, as far as she could tell. She’d experienced Takahashi’s piece previously, in a workaday state of consciousness.
Watching the others talking as they got nearer home, Aleck noticed how pale and drawn, how wrung out and strung out Sam and Janika and Rama and Marco and Hari all looked—as if they had been on a long journey and returned home strangers to themselves. In their drawn faces their eyes were still intent on things no longer seen but remembered with a vividness more powerful than perception.
As they pulled up outside the apartment, Aleck realized that he too must look the same. He knew that, though it was not yet ten in the morning, a thousand years had already passed and everything had changed. As they tramped upstairs and into the apartment, Sam announced that he was putting an internal antifungal medication on the table—two tabs for each “participant”—since allowing the Cordyceps to keep on growing inside them was not recommended.
Aleck, however, was preoccupied. The message lights of his t-com answering systems were flashing. Portentously. Watching them, he had a premonition of big things about to break, of waves and comets and a change in kingdoms. He sighed. Something told him that changing the world would be easier than worlding the change.
* * * *
Finally, Atsuko, Roger and Marissa were on their way to Seiji and Jhana’s housewarming party in the new world of HOME 2. First, however, they were to shuttle from the central sphere of HOME 1 out to low-grav to pick up Lakshmi Ngubo.
When the three had strapped into the shuttle, the transfer ship slipped free of the turning habitat, headed for the still point of the habitat’s turning world, the micro-gee manufacturing facilities situated at a non-spinning and hence “weightless” part of the habitat’s axis. For Roger, the trip had no particular resonances. For Atsuko and Marissa, however, who had traveled this way together before, it was haunted with a sense of what had happened the last time they’d come this way.
They were aboard the transfer ship only a moment before Marissa informed Atsuko of the further progress that
had been made with Marissa’s immortalizing vector, and Marissa’s concern at the growing potential for an Immortality Plague.
“This is bad,” Atsuko said, shaking her head. “Very bad indeed.”
“Aren’t we over-reacting a bit?” Roger said, glancing out the shuttle portal at Comet Hsiu-Johansen in the distance. “The only place major work is being done on it is in the ’borbs and among the psiXtians in California. They aren’t likely to trumpet the vector’s existence, and neither are we—if it even works to begin with.”
Both Marissa and his mother shook their heads.
“You have more faith in security controls than I do,” Atsuko said. “If it works as it seems to, word will get out.”
“Maybe it should,” Marissa said, thoughtfully. “Then there’s at least a chance people will get to make a conscious decision about it.”
Roger nodded, agreeing almost despite himself.
“You don’t think telling people ‘just say no’ to immortality is going to work?” he said archly, still watching the comet out the shuttle’s window.
“That’s the real problem,” Atsuko remarked. “Especially since, once you’re past nuclear war, the human future is mainly a race between population and consciousness.”
Roger returned his gaze to the interior of the cabin and to his mother and Marissa.
“How do you mean?” he asked.
“Just that the denser the population,” Atsuko said, beginning to list and link from one fingertip to the next, “the more interdependent its members. The more interdependent its members, the more pressure for social conformity. The more pressure for social conformity, the stronger the attacks on the whole notion of individuality. The stronger the attacks on individuality, the greater the erosion of privacy, the greater the destruction of introspective mental space and inwardness. The greater the devastation of privacy and inwardness, the greater the destruction of consciousness itself. The greater the destruction of consciousness, the more rigid the social program and the less the capability for responding creatively to environmental contingency. The smaller the capability for responding to contingency, the smaller the chance of continued species survival.”
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