Standing Wave

by Howard V. Hendrix

  Brandi stared through the interfaces and heads-up displays at the world that now had grown rapidly to fill the sky before them.

  “But a lot of the people down there,” she said quietly, “believe it’s their God-given right and duty to reproduce.”

  Diana shook her head vigorously.

  “It’s not a right or a duty,” she said as they plunged into and through the thickening atmosphere. “It’s a privilege. I got myself fixed because the human species is broken.”

  “No regrets?” Brandi asked.

  “None,” Diana replied. “It used to be that, at birth, the infant cried while all around her smiled—and, at death, the deceased smiled while all around her cried. If things go on like they have been, though, we’ll all be crying with the newborn and smiling with the dead.”

  A pause opened between them as they thought about what Diana had said.

  “Children are often so beautiful, as you said,” Diana continued. “But too much beauty can become baroque, kitsch, even grotesque. A beauty that eats beauty. Here, look at this.”

  Into a corner of their shared interface Brandi called up from her PDA an excerpted passage from Albert’s Spontaneous Human Consciousness. Fingers of coastal radar caressed Witchcraft’s skin and were gone in only a portion of the time it took Brandi to read the passage from D. B. Albert:

  God did not give humanity the “right” to reproduce. God gave humanity consciousness, from which instincts and drives can be controlled. Human birth is not a “miracle”, nor is life itself; these are mindless, spiritless biological processes.

  What is a miracle is consciousness. It is the direct intervention of spirit in the world. Ever-increasing quantity of human life threatens the existence of consciousness. The miracle lies in choosing alternatives to this biological progression...Sex does not have to mean reproduction, nor does anger have to mean physical violence.

  Brandi whistled softly.

  “That probably didn’t make him too popular with the ‘be fruitful and multiply’ crowd,” she said, “especially with their priests and preachers.”

  The glimmer of sunset fell redly from Witchcraft’s wings as they began their final descent over the Pacific, six hundred clicks from touchdown, their speed dropping at last below Mach 1.

  “I don’t think it was intended to,” Diana said. “His works are regularly bookwormed by attack programs in the infosphere, as well as banned and burned in consensus reality. Mostly by hard-core religionists, which is too bad, since Albert’s writings actually demonstrate a profound spirituality. Here—look at this.”

  Brandi watched more of Albert’s text appear in a window of the interface as they sailed through the salmon-colored clouds of the west and darkness rose out of the east.

  What is important in any religion is the personal connection it makes with the spiritual, and the transformative power that connection holds for that individual. What is unimportant in religion is the social doctrine that grows up around it, for doctrine and dogma too often interfere with the spiritual connection.... The essential truth of Christianity, or of any religion, for that matter, is not given by its history, nor by its theology, nor by its “morality”; the essential truth lies in the nature of what must be believed. For Christianity, what must be believed is the Absolute Paradox, the thing which is impossible for reason, even conscious reason, to understand and comprehend: that God and Man became one and the same, that the eternal and infinite became temporal and finite, that a logical and empirical paradox came into existence.... The capacity for faith—a belief in that which neither reason nor custom nor history can explain—is unique to consciousness. Faith is a reaching of consciousness toward an archetype, a leap beyond the mental faculties, a bootstrapping event, a connection of spirit and mind through an archetypal image.

  The leap of faith does for Christianity what participation mystique does for the old religions—it reconnects the psyche with spirit, in Christianity’s case bootstrapping consciousness by the archetype of the Absolute Paradox.

  “That’s great stuff,” Brandi said. “Undeniably spiritual too.”

  Diana nodded as she began tight-beaming her arrival to their landing site.

  “Right,” she said. “Maybe if more of those folks in the ACSA had read Albert’s descriptions of metaphysical morality, and really thought about it, they’d be less eager to try to shoot me down every time I try to fly over their territory.”

  Brandi stared at her, shocked.

  “They do that?” she asked. “But I thought this starjet was undetectable.”

  A great cryptogram of landing lights bloomed on ahead and below. At Diana’s command they cut in the vertijets and began to drift toward the ground.

  “Usually my broom is undetectable,” Diana said, with something very much like pride. “A sliver of moonwing Braille too sleek, in radar cross section, for any electromagnetic blind-dates to grope a reading from her. Usually she’s just the ghost of an angel on their screens, already over them and long gone before they can pin us down.”

  Brandi glanced at her as the starjet touched down in dust vortices and the two of them began to untrode and disjack.

  “But not always?” she prodded.

  “Afraid not,” Diana said with a smile as they finished shutting systems down, the creaking of alloy and polymer surfaces sounding around them as the ship continued to cool. “I’ve scared up some nightmare fighters from time to time over the ACSA. Squadrons of Christknights, mostly, but they’re more used to cluster-bombing unbelievers than engaging in high-Mach aerial pursuit. Automated laser cannons are worse, in some ways.”

  The older woman stood up, stretched, and began walking aft. Brandi followed suit.

  “Better get moving,” Diana said as they walked down the SHADOW’s belly ramp and into the night outside. The landing lights were already off, as dark as if they’d never been. “We’ve got people to meet and work to do.”

  * * * *

  Belly to the ground and binoculars set to night vision, Ray watched the starjet land, and eventually disgorge Diana Gartner—and someone else, whom he could not positively identify. That was some small cause for concern, but overall he remained confident about his mission—despite the fact that his shingles had again begun to flare painfully from time to time. A nuisance.

  His brother’s ghostly form had contacted him again via satlink, providing the detonation code key sequence to be used over Laramie as promised. The latest revisions in his orders had come in, too. Mike informed him that he was to be joined by an ally, someone who was identified only by a moniker that was obviously a code name.

  Ray also learned from the latest message that, as God’s will would have it, he would not have to raid the psiXtian lab for the antisenescence vector after all: the lab techs would be bringing up the very materials he was after, for Diana Gartner herself to fly out!

  Though he had already memorized the location and description of the lab and its materials, Ray was relieved to have avoided storming the lab—and storm it he would have had to do, what with all those way-south-of-the-border Indian types hanging around the place. Such a raid might well have clued everyone in—and also caused Gartner to abort her landing here, into the bargain. Instead, things were all working out perfectly, as if a power greater than that of mere mortals had arranged these events. As he fervently believed, and as, indeed, could only be the case.

  Easing off the ground, he went into a crouch. He checked his PDA link to the swivel-mounted smart mortar, and the six golf ball-sized guided mortar shells in its clip. Not much to look at, but he knew just how much havoc these little spherical wonders could cause. Satisfied that he had full remote control of the smart mortar and its system, he switched off the safety on his flechette gun and eased forward, closer to where the starjet stood, still creaking softly as it cooled.

  At the edge of the flat open space, considerably less than a football field’s length from the starjet, he was close enough to hear a pair of techies talking—eit
her ground crew or lab rats, he couldn’t tell from their coveralls. Silently Ray settled back onto his belly to watch, and wait.

  “—the big fish-tank baggie inside,” said the male tech. “Like a big water bed, pulled into a cube.”

  “I heard the last wild one got hit by a boat or something a while back,” the female tech confirmed with a nod. “Diana said they’ve got a breeding pair in the Cincinnati Ark.”

  “Ouch,” her male colleague said with a short laugh. “That’s going to be a tough extraction. I just saw on the news that a mob of hard-shell religioids have laid siege to that one, too.”

  “I saw the coverage,” said the woman. “So misguided. Did you see their faces?”

  The man nodded.

  “Pale and neurotic,” he said. “Ascetic. Squeaky-clean. Hollow-eyed and underfed.”

  “Mostly quantity-of-life kids,” the woman said, “with bricks and pistols in their hands. God what a mess.”

  “The sieges stopped for a while there,” the man said. “For a couple of weeks after the Light. Now they’re back—maybe even worse.”

  “You know what I think the Light was?” the woman asked rhetorically. “I think it was someone or something trying to make everybody down hear one hundred per cent conscious, if only for an instant.”

  “At least we had that much,” the man said. “But it’s like someone else is trying to push things one hundred per cent the other way, now.”

  “Could be,” the woman agreed with a shrug. “Or maybe we’re just making ourselves sick enough to heal—”

  Their conversation broke off as Diana and her companion came up the ramp from Sunderground’s tunnels and corridors into the soft, windy night. Ray watched the starjet’s interior lights come on, spilling light from the interior storage space, out the rear cargo doors and onto the belly ramp. The two women stood or leaned against the starjet as white-suited lab technicians pushed carts toward them in exasperatingly slow, careful motion. Back by the entrance the way-south-of-the-border types, the indígenas as he’d heard them called, lounged about with a quiet alertness that Ray Dalken had begun to find disturbing in the extreme.

  As soon as he saw the two women shaking hands with the lab techs and reaching for the carts to push them up the storage ramp, Ray opened fire. He sent three smart mortar shells hooting toward the Sunderground entrance and the little brown guys lingering there, then stood up and began firing flechette rounds into the carts. With luck he’d perforate the vials or test tubes or whatever container it might be that was preventing the antisenescence vector from escaping into the atmosphere.

  Seeing the shock on all the faces there, Ray couldn’t help smiling. Complete surprise! Scientists and indígenas scattered and fell like spooked doves. Red flowers blossomed with time-lapse suddenness on the biotechs’ snowy white uniforms. Ray ran forward in a crouch.

  In a moment it was his turn to be dismayed. His opponents were recovering from their surprise all too quickly. Gartner and her girlfriend were already shoving the lab carts up the ramp and into the Starjet’s belly storage area. Before Ray even entered the merest whisper of light, he could hear the tiny-helicopter sounds of throwing knives coming from the direction of the Sunderground entrance and whistling by perilously close.

  Those little brown guys are good! Ray thought, in grudging admiration, even as he sent the last three guided shells into skyward arcs intended to take his opponents out—or at least keep them busy until he could get aboard the starjet.

  As the shells exploded he charged toward the belly ramp. Diana and her girl friend had made it inside with the carts. Now the vertical lift jets were beginning to come on as the ramp began to retract. He was still a dozen yards away when the throwing knives came flying toward him. One grazed the top of his scalp, and he felt real fear.

  The angry coughing of an old-style heavy machine gun sounded and the knives stopped coming toward him. Ray sprinted the rest of the distance and jumped up onto the belly ramp, realizing that his single back-up, his reinforcement, must have arrived. As the noise of the vertijets intensified, blotting out the sound of machine gun fire, Ray wedged open the cargo doors with a crush-proof cryonic storage tank half as long as he was tall. He could hear alarms protesting from somewhere up toward the front, sounding very far away.

  He’d barely had time to think Come on! Come on! before a head-shaved man with much gray in his goatee tumbled in over the cryonic tank, breathing very hard. Ray kicked the tank out and away. The cargo doors closed, and he turned to his fellow stowaway.

  “Ray Dalken?” said the panting man with the machine gun, extending his free hand. “Phelonious Manqué, at your service.”

  * * * *

  As the vertijets slammed on and Witchcraft began to lift off, alarms screamed wildly around Brandi and Diana in the cockpit cabin. The belly ramp was not retracting. The image of a mob of zealot Christian Soldiers dragging her from the starjet, gangraping her, then burning her as a witch flashed through Brandi’s mind and was gone.

  “What’s wrong?” Diana asked, madly busy with the flight controls.

  “The belly ramp’s not retracting,” Brandi said, smashing her palm down on a manual override control pad again and again, “or the doors aren’t shutting.”

  Finally something worked loose and clattered in. The ramp finished retracting and the doors finished closing, at least according to the monitors.

  “We’re clear,” Brandi said.

  “Then let’s get the hell out of here,” Diana said as she poured on the main thrusters.

  Behind and below them a grass fire started. In the cabin, the force of acceleration drove them hard into their g-seats as Witchcraft climbed steeply against gravity and angled to the east. Diana risked a quick radar pop-up and was relieved to see that, whoever it was had attacked them, they apparently had no air support.

  “Go back into the cargo area,” she said to Brandi once they reached cruising altitude. “Check the carts and see if any of those antisenescence vials were punctured.”

  Brandi nodded and unharnessed herself from the safety restraints and her interface hookup. No sooner had she slid the cargo hatch open and stepped inside, however, than she felt a hand grab her roughly by the chin and a gun barrel press firmly to her temple.

  Two men had been waiting for her. One was baldish, with a gray goatee. The other had young blond hair on his head, old dark lines in his face, and a tightly-bunched, hard muscled body. The blond one signaled her to silence with a finger upon his lips, then jerked her back around and pushed her toward the cabin.

  Amid all the audio-visual input of her interface, Diana smelled something—a sulfurous stink, a smell of gunfire and thermite, a whiff of explosion and burning. Suddenly she knew why the belly-ramp and cargo doors were slow to close on take-off. She jerked out of interface and stared behind her.

  “Howdy, techwitch!” said a figure dressed incongruously in hempen psiXtian togs and a gunbelt. Bruised and bloodied about his forehead, he kept himself propped against the back wall of the cramped cockpit cabin with one hand while with the other he held a gun to Brandi Easter’s head. “Remember me?”

  And suddenly Diana did remember him—remembered him from a day long ago, but even more from all the times she had heard his voice in the research material for Cyndi Easter’s Five Million Day War.

  “Raymond Dalken,” she said at last in a hollow voice.

  “Bingo!” Dalken said with a smile. “My friend back there with the machine gun—he’s called Phelonious.” The goateed man gave a rather jaunty wave for a man who had blood crusting on one cheek. “Heck of a ride so far, Miz Gartner. Banged us up a bit, back there in the cheap seats. Let’s make it a little smoother from now on, okay? Otherwise your girlfriend here might find the going a bit rough on her, too.”

  Diana glanced at Brandi, then nodded slowly.

  “Good,” said the man holding the gun to Brandi’s temple. “Now we’re just going to alter your course a bit. We’re going to the Christian stat
es, flying over Laramie. Mach 4 or 5 ought to do nicely.”

  With his free hand he reached down and plugged his satlink into an access port.

  “Don’t dawdle, or try any other foolishness,” he said. “My machine’s keeping an eye on your machines. Do as we say and you and your friend will make it through this just fine. Adjust your course and speed. Now.”

  Though she doubted everyone would make it through “just fine,” Diana did as she was told. In a moment, Dalken’s satlink chimed and spoke, indicating that they were traveling at over Mach 4. A moment later the unit chimed again, a different tone. The voice this time indicated that they were on an optimum course heading for the ACSA and Laramie.

  “All right then,” Ray said. “Now if you’ll just sit down, Miz…?”

  “Valeriano,” Brandi said, returning to her co-pilot’s chair, a glance passing between her and Diana. Inwardly the older woman gave a sigh of relief, thankful that Brandi had remembered who Ray Dalken was—and realized that giving “Easter” as her name might not be a wise idea.

  “Right,” Dalken said, checking his satlink, his gun pointing loosely in the direction of both of his captives. Phelonious preferred to switch his attention and gunsight from one target to the other at random intervals. “Let’s see...Our ETA over Laramie is now fourteen minutes. You two can just relax until then.”

  Diana felt obscurely relieved. So that was all it was going to be? Just highjacking her ship for its tech value? And then probably some kind of kangaroo tribunal for herself. At least what Ray Dalken had in mind seemed almost rational, for a terrorist. Hopefully he wouldn’t get it all mixed up with some kind of twisted revenge tragedy. Maybe Brandi would get out of all this unscathed.

  As they approached Laramie, Diana noticed that Dalken was speaking quietly to his satlink, programming it to tightbeam instructions toward Laramie through Witchcraft’s directional radio beacon. Thinking he was communicating with a tower at one of the military bases in order to begin their landing, Diana started to ease up on the throttles. Alarms began to sound from Dalken’s satlink.