Standing Wave

by Howard V. Hendrix

  Manqué stared out a window, thinking of more immediate concerns.

  “What about these pirates or whatever they are beside us?” he asked

  Dalken waved a dismissive hand, as if batting away a gnat.

  “Just an annoyance,” he said. “Mike’s going to collapse HOME 2 through their micromachines. The idiots there left their nanotech controllable through the infosphere! The structure of HOME 1 is ‘dumb’, but my people have already launched an attack against it, in retaliation for Laramie. Any moment now the comet Mike’s brought in will send out its shining wave. That will counter the way the other side has been linking up. We will unleash a new, true Light of humility, the opposite of that ‘Light’ of pride, that falling Satan’s star of theirs, which confused so many minds—”

  “Then it’s true?” Manqué asked. “The Rainbow Door is about to open?”

  Before Ray Dalken could answer or even understand the question, Brandi indeed felt a wave pass through her—a wave of dullness, sapping all vividness out of the Real. As she stared at the flight console it seemed she could see right through it to the floor of the cabin. Even the floor was becoming insubstantial. The spaces between its atoms suddenly too vast to hold her up. In space the stars and planets seemed to fade.

  She thought of the Swallowtail, still blithely cruising outward from the sun, beyond reach and beyond concern of all who had launched it. She wished she call it back, reset its course against this comet, this soul-killing wave.

  “Darkness come round again,” she thought she heard Diana say in a heart-wrenchingly sad voice. Brandi felt a dizzying vertigo. The floorboards of the Real had completely given way and she was falling down and down, plummeting from empty world to empty world, dropping down toward the arbitrary center of an insubstantial universe. She leaned her head into her hand and waited for the dizziness to subside. At the corner of her eye, she saw a black star burst into being and expand rapidly. Darkness split by fire flashed toward them, toward everything.

  Before it could reach them, however, Brandi saw Diana smile brilliantly. A coherent beam of light shone on and from Diana’s forehead. From her person a slow bright blizzard of light came pouring—a starburst flooding in all directions.

  For an instant Brandi thought she saw HOME 2 orbed as the descending anvil mesa of Caracamuni had been, sphered in a bubble of light. In that instant, however, a wave of another sort passed smoothly into them, a wave higher and longer than the universe, carrying everything with it and in it, until all she had ever known about life and time was transformed utterly.

  CHAPTER TEN

  Code-extracted SubTerPost fragment, source unknown:

  Consciousness seems to require a psychic connection between environment and spirit. Can society take the place of the earth? Does human consciousness lose its humanity when it loses its connection with the earth? Do only artificial consciousnesses develop in artificial environments?

  * * * *

  Light like the spokes of wheels shone from the eyes of all her companions. Bending and rippling mountain ranges of light haloed them. Others’ thoughts moved in her head, and at last Mei-Ling Magnus knew then what all of the cascade of words had prepared her for. The Deep Background, the RATs and their ALEPHish code, the infosphere, chaotic and dynamical systems from individual consciousness to the cosmos: all had lined up, locked onto and entrained upon one another in an ultimate conjunction. The lightpaths of spontaneous consciousness had come flashingly, lastingly on.

  They had crossed the wave front of that other eschaton particle, toward what she now knew could only be the Allesseh itself. Round about her and her strangely-sensed companions appeared giant versions of those twin, dimension distorting lights that had hovered about the deaths of the parallel-killed. She now saw them for what they were in their full grandeur. One was the infinitely blue-shifted white singularity of selfless grace and archetype, the other was the infinitely red-shifted black singularity of selfish desire and instinct. One poured forth spacetime and the other swallowed spacetime, but that did not matter, for they were beyond space and time.

  From those lights swarmed what her consciousness still constellated as bluewhite angels and redblack demons, celestial whales and flying giant squids, Neanderthals and ammonites. She saw Alicia Gonsalves, saw loves lost and found—Marissa and Roger, Cyndi Easter and Immanuel Shaw, countless others, herself and Robert, too. Distant parents and children reunited around her. Captain Acton smiled and waved to Diana Gartner. All who had ever lived and died, all who had ever been lost were to be found here. She just knew who they were, that’s all.

  Animal consciousnesses spoke to her. Alien species of every conception and misconception filled the space around her. Trolls and ghosts and fairies and elves, all the figures of faith, myth, folklore, nightmare and dream, all that humans had ever conjured were here. About them and among them and in them charged and retreated the constellated forms of archetypes and instincts. The War in Heaven was joined once again for the very first time—at least in this cycle.

  “That was what I understood least about the Light,” Jiro Yamaguchi said in her head. “During portal experience, personal and universal intersections join. But once the Light passed, each system—body and brain, mind, otherness, the universal dynamic system—each returned to its characteristic patterns. Those characteristics then began to dominate the activity of each separate system once more. The portal experience was a superimposed pattern which could not last. The mode-locking that was brought into focus by the Light quickly began to recede. Each system returned to something like its original state, its basic attractor. The challenge now is to see the portal experience through to permanence.”

  Mei-Ling was stunned to find that, although she had clearly become fully part of something larger, yet she retained her own fundamental individuality. She had no idea, however, how large that “something” might be. She seemed to feel Diana Gartner’s presence, somehow connecting all their thoughts more firmly together than Mei-Ling had ever dreamed possible. Roger Cortland stood with those restructuring the past as Marissa Correa stood with those remaking the future. All of them were working in perfect tandem with Jacinta Larkin and the tepuians. Through the ghost people, but especially through Brandi Easter’s eyes, she saw Earths and myriad other worlds on time lines where planet-destroying wars had in fact occurred, where consciousness itself had been snuffed out.

  These powerful connections made her an undeniable part of the forces waging strange battle and unceasing mental fight here. Yet she remained also herself. And strange battle it was, for though they themselves and all the constellated entities all around them could be driven to and fro, they proved to be made of immortal substance. None who fought here could be killed except by impossible annihilation.

  On the immeasurable plains and in the strange skies of mind above them, better angels and innumerable alien and animal allies drove their opposites from a field of battle vaster than universes. In a timeless time their opposite numbers returned with weapons that tore open the fabric of space itself. These sent into disarray even the archetypal forces of which Mei-Ling and her colleagues—and many more once-human and non-human people besides—had themselves become a part.

  Mei-Ling saw herself and her friends and all their recovered allies reach down and tear up mountains of the plenum and hurl them upon their adversaries. She remembered something Manqué had shown and told her ages ago: that mountains are the shape of the cosmos, on a scale humans can comprehend—and more, the noumenal fractal pattern underlying both and everything, at human and nonhuman scales.

  She saw their adversaries begin to do the same thing. They too were tearing up great ranges of light. It dawned on Mei-Ling that they were hurling not mountains at each other, but entire virtual universes, alternative world lines that had not yet undergone the formality of actually occurring, and now might never.

  She reeled at the thought of such madness. So too, apparently, did that part of the Allesseh that still knew reason
. Even that entity, which had manipulated the Parallel Killer Michael Dalken, his zealot brother Ray, the infosphere mass murderer Manqué/Kong, as well as uncountable others in histories human and inhuman, on uncountable worlds over so many millennia—even it was appalled.

  That flash of self-revulsion, of remorse and the agenbyte of inwit, opened a way into change. Under Jiro’s lead the archetypal forces became a part of a tremendous wave restructuring this branch of the plenum of universes. Under that wave they began to heal the Allesseh, repair its flawed vision of itself. Its myopia. Its small errors and stupendous shortsightedness. That error in perspective, such that from one angle the cosmos appeared to it as all “trunk,” all purely chronological positions on a single time-line which itself only was real. That other error in perspective, from which the cosmos appeared to it as all “branches,” endless alternative time-lines, all equally real.

  Roger Cortland’s vision of the Arc Hive played powerfully among, informing their wave full of innumerable faces, human and not human. The wave of faces passed over the universe like the most fractal sleep of dreams, transforming the Allesseh’s understanding of the plenum into a cosmic tree of true shape. Root and trunk and branch of that tree was alight with the flame of becoming, but remained unconsumed by it.

  The great wave drove their adversaries before them. Those seeming powers disappeared, as memories of false time itself disappeared, into the Deep behind them as the wave rolled away.

  Mei-Ling thought she saw waves of stone rise and ebb across innumerable continents on innumerable worlds. Were those just mountains? Or was the wave subtly restructuring all the universes of the plenum as it moved so powerfully through one particular universe? An ocean of smoothly branching waves spread across the vault of eternity, as if a stone had been dropped into a pool but had rippled the stars.

  Strangely, she also saw Michael Dalken, aka Hugh Manatee. She saw the precipitating trauma that had started him down the road of risk, revenge and triumph, the road that had ended in the parallel killings, the topological mutilations throughout the infosphere.

  She saw the injustice he has suffered at the hands of men whose faces were hidden as they bashed his head in with gun butts. Men who were never brought to public justice in that other time. With the result that Dalken became the once and only human being ever outfitted with Blackbridge’s crystal memory implants. Tricked out with the matrix and structures, all the microcomponents of that grandiose self-assembling interface. Until Mike Dalken himself was a non-repeatable experiment, the only person who’d been to his particular mountaintop.

  A man who met machine angels, who took his soul to commune with a darkbright distant supermind. A man who came back with his own visions of ‘gleaming islands in the soul.’ A heretic, lunatic, mystic and murderer in an aquarium tank. Driven mad by what living in the world with other human beings had done to him. Driven to find his brother Ray and fellow-traveler Manqué. Driven finally to end history, as the only possible justice that could match the crime.

  “Wake becomes wave, rounded, smooth, well-defined, unwavering,” the Fool’s voice said in her head, “but wake the sleeper and the dreamwave collapses.”

  Mei-Ling found herself falling, meteor thunder in her wake again, beside her a burning babe, a burning cherub Personal Data Assistant, a falling angel plunging underwater with her. To sit with her in the back-forth seaweed tidings of time and tide. In an undersea grotto living room, watching a silverbubble holovision set deep underwater. Running out of air, Mei-Ling went to turn off the hv so she could surface, so she could get into the air. As she tried to turn it off red-black, lobster-crab claw-arms sprung from it, clasped round her neck, pinched off her head.

  Blood-bubbled blue oblivion woke her. She was drowning like a mermaid floundering in a Saharan sea of air with no oasis in sight. Her thinning pale consciousness drifted up as she began to sit down for more holovision—easier, headless—but her better angel would not let her. The blistered cherub tugged her to the surface, where she found herself whole and breathing again—and back once more in a newer version of the Fool’s mad amusement paradise, Dreamland.

  She and the rest made their way to the shore as a wave. Beyond the beach that had once been snowfield, she saw the Great Gyre apparatus as it apparently was: a strange-looped orb, spinning rapidly outside and inside itself, a Möbius sphere inverting and reverting constantly, a coiling coupling of Ouroboroi serpents unable to shed their skins, an Escher tesseract glowing vividly beneath glaring neon.

  The Fool, undisguised of mask and jester’s crown of coxcomb, now showed the face Michael Dalken still imagined for himself. Giant-sized, he was bound to the immense strange sphere of the Gyre, which tore him apart and put him back together ceaselessly.

  Mei-Ling and the rest ran forward in a wave. The rippling spirals of the Gyre-sphere began to spin faster as their wave approached. The coiling snakesphere threatened to rip itself and the Fool to pieces permanently. They halted.

  “—naked we enter, naked we leave,” gasped the Fool’s delirious, throat-miked voice over Dreamland’s public address system. The real and the virtual had coincided, at least to the degree that his words were once again appearing as scrolling captions even as he spoke them. “Able to leap from tall buildings in a single bound. Shuffle off to Buffalo this mortal coil. All is changed beneath the Moon where the craters boiled and exploded. Shields, colors, ships speared by rods of molten moon magma hurled spaceward. Blown to success via apocalypse. Blown to shimmering ethereal angel aliens covered with the stardust of their celestial highway to kingdom come and take me by the hand of God lead me not into temptation through the ruined wall of my bedroom onto the night-damp lawn in the blue light of a dozen moons and guide me to your towering starship, glowing moonpale fire in the night, lift me, aboard your ship, silently leap into the eternal, day beyond Earth’s shadow, head for planets with gold seas, green skies—”

  Mei-Ling and all the rest now saw the full strangeness of it. Every time the Gyre ripped the Fool open, myriad small fools appeared, to examine his dismemberment, as if to read or understand or shape the future from it. Endlessly. But the great Fool, recalcitrant system, kept coming back together.

  “—is it tomorrow, or the end of time?” The Fool’s voice rasped, struggling for coherence. “It’s the twenty first century: Do you know where your children are? Dreamland, Promised Holy Waste Land, where blessed mutant victim heroes die for our sins. Portents of the future. Comets blazing across the sky. God pitching dirty snowball curves around the sun for old monks to read. Icarus falling, Daedalus flying, creator of the Labyrinth I hid myself in, Minotaur and Perseus, O give me the grace before meals, O give me a home, O give me the wisdom to know where the buffalo roam—”

  Around them, Mei-Ling could see that, as the Gyre continued to spin faster, Dreamland began to crash and blow apart.

  “O how can a snake that swallows its tail shed its skin?” the Fool shrilled with a rising, somehow strengthening shrillness. “Hydrogen sacrifices itself to light. Photons sacrifice themselves to photosynthesis. Plants sacrifice themselves to animals. Animals sacrifice themselves to soul. What does soul sacrifice itself to? Light again? Revelation through apocalypse. The wake-up call. Mutant victim hero. DNA. Doppel gyre. Adenine Thymine Cytosine Guanine. A T C G. All Things Considered Gyre. Double helix gyre spiral. Diploid DNA Staircase. Ladder of generations deployed. Climbing time. Nude. Descendants a Staircase. Transcending a Starecase. Quantum leap after death leap. Quantum. Go—leap from level to level instantly. Without walking up. Waking up. The Gyre a hole of strange loops transcending a staircase beyond the stages of dying is death’s life—”

  The roar and the whine of the Gyre mechanism became nearly intolerable. Even amidst its impending collapse, however, Mei-Ling could see that this Fool incarnation, this self-representation for humans and from human stuff by the Allesseh, was attempting a sort of Gyromancy, a spinning out of time and fate that was already beyond control. The Fool in his tattered i
nternational motley was a jack-in-the-box in a high-speed centrifuge, little more than a blur of color. The hideous sound of rending and ripping metal screamed from the twisting Möbius orb of the Gyre as it began to buckle and tear and snap loose from its moorings.

  “—Gyre is more is soul turning,” said the Fool. His spoken words had become as blurred as his image, though the self-captioning still seemed to work. “Is room in nothing for a spin a twist a gyre is everything the infinity between zero and one what is with a spin is nought without a spin a zero is an empty one the constructive interference between zero and one nothing with a spin is something particles paired between forces up in down out jammed between channels of darkness seed drill without seed bloodlinked manhood summers cropped feed my earth to time we rejoice in the softly rasping whitenoise of breathing up and in down and out the same molecules everyone forever has breathed forever and counting our breaths till the heartaches go and we can finally sleep—”

  The rent in the Gyre grew still more, as did the cacophony of its imminent destruction. Still the Fool kept trying to get across whatever message it was he was trying to get across.

  “—in the cradling gyre universe staircase no more starcase scenario of our case starcase the universe we know just a box to keep the stars in a space and time in which to store the eternal infinite between zero and one not enough for the Gyre! Not enough! So help me! Now’s the time for this Jack to jump out of this box!”

  The Gyre flew apart in a catastrophe of flapping and twisting and exploding that sent sparks and shrapnel everywhere. The Fool disappeared. The Dreamland holojectors went dead. Mei-Ling heard faintly an old song being performed by Onoma Verité and Möbius Caduceus—