Slowly, Brandi started to remove her jumpsuit. She knew she should feel afraid, but numbness and a strange dreamlike distance still pervaded her being. She was outside her body, looking down at the strange tableau, wondering vaguely what fantasy of twined limbs and lips and tongues this was all supposed to be playing to in Dalken’s head.
She glanced at Diana, who still stared rigidly ahead. Brandi thought that perhaps she might on her own have come to love this woman, even to make unforced love with her of her own accord, but that wasn’t the issue at all now. The issue here wasn’t love. It was force, power, control—Ray Dalken’s. This wasn’t about women or women’s bodies. It was about this unhappy man’s ability to manipulate them for pleasure in his sight, to carve them up into the tangle of mere bodies—
Nearly naked, her dazed and faraway self still heard something clang and slither across the hull of Witchcraft above her head. With abrupt anger Dalken slammed the pistol toward Diana’s head.
“What’s that noise?” he yelled. “You trying to pull something?”
Diana shook her head as much as she could, given the gun that was being held firmly to it. She scanned through her interface before she spoke.
“Two large objects have appeared in space on either side of us,” she said. “Check the monitors. Look out the windows. If you don’t know anything about them, then you know as much as I do.”
More clangs and thunks, and then the scraping, slithering noises, sounded overhead and beneath their feet. Dalken turned to the windows and the monitors. Almost despite herself, Brandi, coming back from her great introspective distance, did the same.
The sight that appeared before her was incredible in the extreme. On both sides of the ship floated two virtually identical buildings—the twin towers from under which Dalken had “liberated” his cocooned and now bag-tanked brother! Both towers stood sphered in a bubble of force. Brandi was powerfully reminded of the bubble forcefield she had seen enclosing the anvil-shaped mountaintop when it had come descending toward Earth, seemingly ages ago now.
Other forcefield-bubbled rocks were also settling in flotilla around the flying buildings now. No denying it, this time: on the outside of all of them, rough rock and geometric buildings, people were moving about beneath the sheltering bubbles. Several of them were clad only in loincloths or loose robes. They appeared to be hastily anchoring lines to raw or shaped stone, lines attached to grappling hooks that were being fired through the force bubbles—at, onto and around Witchcraft.
“We’re getting a narrowcast from them,” Diana said. She played it into the cabin.
“—xander McAllister of the Partons,” said the youthful voice of someone who sounded as if he were enjoying all this entirely too much. “You have absconded with persons or property belonging to Retcorp and Lambeg. As an R & L employee, I am authorized to retrieve the aforementioned. Lay down your arms and prepare to be boarded.”
“What is this?” Dalken said. “Space pirates? This is crazy. This can’t be happening.”
Clangs and thuds and scrapes and slithers continued to sound. Manqué appeared from the back compartment. He cast a sidelong glance at the still largely nude Brandi, who had cautiously begun to clothe herself again. Manqué grimaced and turned to Dalken.
“What’s going on?” he asked, bewildered.
“We’re about to be brought up alongside and boarded,” Dalken said, dazedly, then turned toward the compartment where his brother was housed. “Keep a gun on these two. I’ve got to ask my brother about this.”
As Dalken disappeared, Diana smiled at Brandi. Relief and hope began to shine in both their faces at last.
“I knew I should have gotten off this bus in Cincinnati,” Manqué muttered quietly
* * * *
Jacinta Larkin came forward, carrying with her, like an aura, an almost otherworldly assurance in the face of all that they’d learned. Behind her, at first incongruously, captioned holo images out of paleontology, archaeology, and anthropology began to appear and cycle from her notepad PDA. The first of them was little more than a series of scratches labeled “Oldest Symbolic Human Artifact: Meander Pattern on Bone, 300,000 years.” Images of mazes and labyrinths followed, along with myths about them. Then came images of dance notation, flow charts of chant patterns, iterative children’s language and song games, Shang ritual vessels, Tlingit and Klikitat dualized art motifs, Bronze Age Celtic art. The incongruity was heightened by juxtaposed images of deep space and diagrams of singularities.
“What we’ve seen and heard presents us with paradoxes,” Jacinta began. “Armageddon or Immortality? Wave of concrescence or wave of destruction? I have already spoken with some of you about what the virtual machinery of the infoburst node reminded you of. It reminded Ms. Magnus of what appeared over the Myrrhisticinean Abbey at the time of the Sedona Disaster. Mr. Cortland was reminded of something he saw at the time of the Light, something he called the Arc Hive.”
Roger wondered how she knew that. He remember mentioning it to someone, but not her. Maybe he had but he’d just forgotten. So much had been happening.
“Both of those are symbols of this phenomenon’s deeper reality,” she continued. “Because I’ve lived and traveled with the people of Caracamuni tepui into deep space, I saw it as something called the Allesseh, the Great Co-operation. A portal between the infinite eternal and the finite temporal. Between being and becoming. The Allesseh started as a vast network of what we might call von Neumann probes: self-replicating, self-improving, transceiving machines. It long ago became something much more than that, however.”
Speciation graphs and images out of neuroanatomy appeared holographically as she continued.
“Like the brain and evolution itself,” she said, “the Allesseh developed as a selective recognition system. It observed certain features in the environment from a large number of possible configurations or arrangements, then selected specific arrangements from among those possibilities. It is directly connected with that universal dynamical system Professor Stringfield mentioned earlier. The experiences of every individual and species are copied into that system as a superimposition of pattern. The Allesseh has become the attractor of that universal dynamical system. That system becomes more complex as the patterns of every individual experience are added to it. The Allesseh complexifies along with it.”
Surround-images appeared, captioned with the names of the great parietal art caves, the ceremonial centers of Altamira, Lascaux, Tito Bustillo, El Castillo, Cuevo del Juyo. Along with them came a murmuring academic program and text discussing how these locations demonstrated dichotomous usage. The accompanying narrative discussed a split between a mundane “domestic space” in the light and above ground at the cave entrance, contrasting with a sacred “ceremonial space” in the dark galleries below ground, where the religious mysteries were to be encountered.
“Technically,” Jacinta continued, “any organism or phenomenon connected with the vital force of that universal dynamical system should be able to connect with its patterns. All knowledge already exists in the mind of the Allesseh. It just needs to be recalled into consciousness throughout the rest of the universe.”
“Then what Doctor Stringfield suggested is true?” Ka Vang asked. “Our universe itself is becoming a conscious, unified entity?”
“Absolutely,” Jacinta said with unshakeable confidence. “From what Atsuko Cortland and Marissa Correa have remarked, and from the prospect of the destructive instanton, it also appears that our universe is experiencing a great sickness. That sickness ultimately originates in the Allesseh itself.”
As she paused to let that sink in, from the public display came images of negative and positive handprint paintings from Gargas and other sites. The accompanying scholarly program murmured that, given that modern human beings are generally right-hand dominant, it was interesting to note that the representations of both whole and mutilated hands traced or painted on the walls of the Upper Paleolithic site at Gargas were overwhelm
ingly left hands, done in either red or black pigments.
The color red, the scholarly program said, was associated with power, life, and sex, as well as with the red ochre found in Middle and Upper Paleolithic burial sites. Presumably it symbolized the persistence of life beyond death, a painted or artificial version of “birth blood” linked to notions of rebirth after death. Black, the learned text said, was associated with death and decay. One did not have to be a disciple of Freud, Roger thought, to find an echo of sex and death, Eros and Thanatos, in such red and black hands. For an instant another red and black image also appeared, a redshifted black hole.
“I suspect this because, in our encounter with the Allesseh,” Jacinta continued, “the Allesseh was disturbed by two things. The first was the cosmic myth of the people of Caracamuni, called ‘The Story of the Seven Ages.’ The second was the Light associated with Jiro Yamaguchi’s transcendence. Three of my tepuian colleagues and I will now perform the song of their cosmic myth. Simultaneous translation will appear in the public display.”
The three tepuians came forward to join her before the fountain. Rising into the cavernous space of HOME 2—itself a cave in the sky—their ancient chantsong began, a strange low sound, atonal yet melodious, with echoes of didgeridoo and throat-singing and mouth music, but also something else, something far older. The translation scrolled through the public display:
In the void of endings, the spore of beginnings bursts into spawn. The threads of spawn absorb the voidstuff and knit it into stars. Stars release spores, the spores burst into spawn, the threads of spawn absorb starstuff and knit it into worlds. Worlds release spores, the spores burst into spawn, the threads of spawn absorb worldstuff and knit it into life. Living things release spores, the spores burst into spawn, the threads of spawn absorb lifestuff and knit it into minds. Minds release spores, the spores burst into spawn, the threads of spawn absorb mindstuff and knit it into worldminds. Worldminds release spores, the spores burst into spawn, the threads of spawn absorb worldmindstuff and knit it into starminds. Starminds release spores, the spores burst into spawn, the threads of spawn absorb starmindstuff and knit it into universal mind. Universal mind, the void of endings, the void that has taken all things into itself, releases the spore of beginnings, the fullness that pours all things out of itself.
Long before the song echoed away, Roger remembered all too well what their song meant to him. He had heard it before, at the time of the Light, in his own strange passage between the worlds. It would be interesting to hear Jacinta’s interpretation of it.
“Like all of us,” she began, “the tepuians can only symbolically access the plenum system which the Allesseh models directly. We can speak of that system as ‘entelechial’, a ‘vital force’, or ‘universal dynamical,’ but the specific content of the knowledge accessed must be filled in context by the individual who connects with the system. The individual’s interpretations of that symbolic pattern or form will inevitably be influenced by her or his culture.
“Because the tepuians are mushroom totemists, they symbolically contextualize what they have accessed in terms of the mushroom life cycle—thus ‘spore’ and ‘spawn’ and ‘fruiting body,’ or mushroom. Since most of the rest of us are twenty first century age-of-code people, we tend to understand the symbolic content better in terms of our own myth language—that of science.”
As if in purposely ironic counterpoint, the murmuring scholarly documentary program flashed images of handprints and corporate shamanic logos. The way those images reappeared and continued suggested that history fell between the prehistoric cave-painted hands at Gargas and the posthistoric corporate shamanic X-ray Body Glove hand logo.
“Professor Stringfield’s discussion and my knowledge of the tepuian cosmic myth shape each other,” Jacinta continued, calling up an image of double spirals snaking, expanding then contracting in their turns, to encompass a sphere. “From the tepuian cosmic myth, I see the universe’s evolution as a spiral staircase that gyres out to a sphere then returns to a point. That point is somehow the same and not the same as the point from which it started. The horizon of that future event Professor Stringfield says we may only know from its reverberations. That event casts its shadow ahead of it, into the past. That shadow is seen in meander patterns made by humans as early as 300,000 years ago. That future event has a long past. It is the leap to the next step of that spiral staircase—both a quantum leap and a leap of faith.”
Jacinta called up a new set of parallel images.
“Now we’ve heard Professor Stringfield’s discussion of the opposite of the instanton bubble,” Jacinta said. “We’ve heard about those droplets of different internal space, in which black holes would turn into spiraling strings and spiraling strings would turn into black holes. As a result of his presentation, I now understand what the tepuians call ‘the void of endings’ and ‘the spore of beginnings’ differently than I did. I used to think of the void of endings as the perfectly uniform universe without matter, just time and the big blank sheet of space with its potential for gravity, the way a blank sheet of paper has the potential to be inscribed with words.
“We now must think of particles that are also waves and black holes that are also spiraling strings. In such a framework, universal mind—the fulfilled universal dynamical system, total consciousness, ‘the void that has taken all things into itself,’ ‘the void of endings’—also just is the spore of beginnings, the fullness that pours all things out of itself as ‘spawn’.
“The black holes and the spiraling strings are the same. The singularity at the heart of the black hole and the uncurling, higher dimensional spiral string are one, the way the particle and the wave are one. The end of the last stage, universal mindfulness, total consciousness, in the exact instant of its perfection, ends time as we know it and begins something other.”
Roger was surprised by Jacinta’s insight. He hadn’t thought of that before. Despite the vast scale of such a conception, Roger was comfortable enough with that. He had heard all of it in his encounter with the Light, except for the last part.
Could it be true? Glancing around him he saw that the others also seemed to be surprisingly comfortable with it too, almost hypnotically soothed, as if they also already knew all this, and just had to be reminded of it.
As he considered what she’d said, he became aware of the images the scholarly program was still hurling up in the background. It was still murmuring about how the body as a whole is like the shamanic X-ray hand—caught up in hopes of power, sex, and life on the one hand, and fears of mortality, death and decay on the other. But which hand it was—a ‘true’ left hand palm outward, or the impression left by a right hand—remained unclear. The left and right hands exhibited mirror symmetry, so the provenance of the disembodied hand was difficult to determine.
Yes, mirror symmetry, Roger thought. Whether you saw the eschaton as the void, as a black singularity swallowing the universe at the end of time, or as the spore, a white singularity pouring a new universe out of itself—did that just depend on which side of the mirror you were on? Had Jacinta already taken all this into account for her presentation? Surely the juxtaposition of her speech and its images couldn’t be coincidental....
“That end/beginning, that transformation of existence, is where the Allesseh balks, however,” Jacinta explained. “Systems evolve toward greater dynamicality as they accumulate energy. The Allesseh has been accumulating energy and becoming increasingly dynamical. As it has continued to become increasingly dynamical, it has become increasingly mode-locked to all the forces driving universal dynamicality.
“The Allesseh has become a self, the chaotic attractor in universal mind. It is the ongoing reflexive image of that mind as a unique entity. It is the unique, fractal, identifying pattern of the dynamical system of consciousness in the universe. It has hooked into the eternal and infinite intersection system which imprints itself upon every pattern in the universe and is, in turn, impressed upon by every pattern
in the universe. The Allesseh has increasingly blocked much of the access to that system, however.”
“Why?” Nils Barakian asked forcefully, anticipating—indeed demanding an answer.
“I’m not certain,” Jacinta admitted. “Perhaps allowing sentient organisms and other phenomena to recover and more fully share in that system will increase dynamicality even further than it has already gone. That might well blow the Allesseh fully into what it now fears: total consciousness.”
In Jacinta’s pause to let all that sink in, Roger heard the murmuring background program claim that the cave art, for all its impressiveness, should not be viewed as the summit of Upper Paleolithic cultural expression, but as a few remnant hymnals left in an abandoned cathedral from a vanished empire of song.
“But why should it fear that?” Paul Larkin asked. “Doesn’t the Allesseh’s initial programming, taken to its logical extreme, inevitably lead to exactly that transformation point?”
“Yes,” Jacinta replied. “The universe trends toward total consciousness, toward ‘enlightenment,’ in religious terms. The universe itself might be bodhisattvic, however. Then it would not move on fully into the Other, the next transcendent step, until all within it are also totally conscious. Perhaps the Allesseh has confirmed, however, that all that is necessary for the universe to be blown into total consciousness is for a single point of the universe to become totally conscious. That is why it is so resistant.”
Roger recognized much of what Jacinta was saying as paralleling his own earlier thoughts and experiences, but he found himself distracted again by the scholarly program. Now it was going on about how the ancient empire of song was vast in both space and time. That the remains of the religious art of the cavern ceremonial centers were uniform over a wide area of Europe and well into Asia. The murmuring text argued that the influence of its songs likely spread much further.
“If a single point, a single trigger system, became completely dynamical,” Jacinta continued, “the entire universe would become totally conscious. One doesn’t exactly cause the other. The dynamical relationship between the individual point, or mind, and the entire universe insures that both happen simultaneously. I think that’s precisely why Jiro Yamaguchi’s transcendence and his Light bothered the Allesseh so much. Jiro came closer to being the trigger for that event than the Allesseh might have liked.”
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