I watch television in my dreams
I see my dreams on TV when I’m awake
Must be some kind of connection
Has to be some kind of link
Don’t know what is real
Can’t tell which is fake
Much less than I can think
Still more than I can take
—gradually transforming into fleeting images of other ancient-future thinking beings of innumerable species moving down spiral lines representing sun and moon, all dancing, all singing—
Allesseh the whole way to Allesseh, Allesseh is the way
Allesseh timeline sightline, dancers dancing up the soulspring
—and then that was gone too, and all that was left was the inside of another universe, floored with a chessboard gridwork stretching to infinity. An enormous tesseract, an unraveled hypercube, floated above it, beneath skies human beings could never before have known.
As she stood there looking up, Mei-Ling recognized the image as Dali’s “Christus Hypercubus”—except for the fact that, here, the crucified one had come down off the equal armed Greek cross. Looking at it, she understood the hypercube cross better than she ever had before. Its vertical elements now symbolized for her the single, unitary “trunk” timeline, space collapsed into time. Its horizontal elements were the multiple, branching alternativity of universes, time evaporating into innumerable spaces. The cross the crucified one was transfixed to was the intersection felt by all conscious beings: higher-dimensional spiritual Other nailed to space and time.
Looking around as she and all the others moved forward, she understood that they were well within the endvoid’s event horizon. In the farther sphere of sky round them stood, in permanent firmament, the chain of the hours, the sequence of the years, the order of all hosts celestial and infernal. They were inside the aleph. The eschaton particle. The universal singularity. The omphalos of the plenum. The thing of innumerable names in innumerable languages, only incompletely described by each of them alone and by all of them together.
At last, directly beneath the skysign of the floating unraveled hypercube, they came upon two figures playing chess on a board which stood as microcosm to the macrocosm of the great chessboard-floored universe around them. Both of the players glowed numinously. One Mei-Ling readily recognized as Jiro Yamaguchi. The other she suspected was the Allesseh, the shining gate between time and eternity, black hole crystal ball mirror sphere memory bank, the allone wherewhen—humbly incarnating itself in the form of Michael Carter Dalken. Like seconds in a long slow duel, Seiji Yamaguchi stood behind Jiro on his side of the chess board, while the man standing behind Michael Dalken she knew somehow was his brother, Ray.
“I knew your kind would be trouble,” Mike Dalken/Allesseh said, contemplating a move on the board. “Knew it as soon as I heard your tepuians and their myth. The void of endings that has taken all things into itself, which in turn, releases the spore of beginnings, the fullness that pours all things out of itself. Trouble.”
“So by sacrificing humanity,” Jiro said, watching the player across the board from him, “you thought you’d be able to avoid facing the fulfillment of your own mission.”
Dalken/Allesseh sighed and looked up from the board.
“Certainly you should be able to understand my reasoning,” he said. “One of your own human physicians once observed that mortals die because they cannot join the beginning to the end. You cannot invert your death one hundred and eighty degrees and attach it to your beginning to achieve a rebirth any more than I can. You can understand why I chose what I chose.”
Jiro made a move and looked up.
“Yes,” he said, looking at the chessboard and seeing more there than just a game, “but you know that joining the beginning to the end is the snake swallowing its tail. The Ouroboros. The symbol of immortality. The snake that swallows its tail just goes round and round. Immortality is a highway that goes nowhere but takes forever to get there. The snake that eats its tail can’t shed its skin. It cannot die to the old so it can live in the new.”
“So?” said Dalken/Allesseh, not looking up from the chessboard.
“So, in the old way, you played upon Phelonious Manqué,” Jiro said. “Because he was willing to sacrifice the world to his individual end-time vision. You could use Ray Dalken because he was willing to sacrifice the unchurched, so long as he was saved as one of the elect, immortal headman in the kingdom of God. Michael ‘Hugh Manatee’ Dalken recognized that his drive to destroy his individual consciousness continued to lead him to kill. He knew he couldn’t intersect out the way I had, so he replaced the possibility of intersection with a death-grip on life. Control over death is the ultimate control, even if it meant destroying others and, ultimately, himself. He was of use to you because he was willing to sacrifice the world if doing so would give him the personal, physical immortality he sought.”
Dalken/Allesseh nodded absently, as if pre-occupied.
“Of course, the RATs and the Deep Background microsociety could have gone either way,” the form incarnated as Michael Dalken added after a moment and another move, “and of course they did—yours. If they hadn’t, we probably would not be having this conversation now. Left to my own devices, I would have been quite content with keeping this universe immortal and in time, until the end of time.”
Mei-Ling abruptly remembered the burning cherub PDA that had pulled her to the surface out of her dream lethargy. She wondered if its actions had somehow been a reflection of what Dalken was saying about the RATs and the Deep Background.
“Ultimately, real consciousness,” Jiro said, nodding and moving another piece on the board, “is what makes the decision to hold on to life immortally, or to let go, and go beyond living. The decision you face is faced, to a lesser degree, by every consciousness.”
“Hm,” Dalken grunted, staring at the board.
“Yet neither world nor self need be sacrificed,” Jiro continued. “Especially if you’re willing to jump out of the system. Sacrifice is always a metaphor for something larger than itself. Reconciliation, in this case. Self and World, microcosm and macrocosm, coherence and comprehensiveness—all can become one. Absolutely authentic. In that moment, neither the individual self nor the universe ends; they are transformed. Individuality retained, as we become part of something larger. Participation without consumption. Oh, by the way, I believe this is checkmate.”
Dalken/Allesseh nodded and stood up.
“Yes, I know,” he said. “Well played. This has all made its intended point. The void that takes all things into itself must also take the void into itself. Take itself into itself. Which I guess is another way of saying ‘becomes one.’ It all makes a paradoxical sort of sense. Otherwise, how would the spore of beginnings pour all things out of itself?”
Then Mei-Ling saw something she had seen before, in a shadow cast forward from this transformation of time that stood outside time. She saw Dalken’s hand now fall heavily on the marble chess cube on which they had played. A light formed around the cube as his hand seemed to press the cube into the larger chess pattern on the floor. In fact, though, the height of the cube was shrinking, becoming a flat two-dimensional sheet, still marked with the light and dark squares of its chessboard top.
“So you’re ready for the leap?” Jiro said, smiling.
“Yes, I think so—at last,” Dalken/Allesseh said, taking the thin stone chess sheet in hand and rolling it up into a cylinder. “Since you pioneered the way.”
“Oh?” Jiro asked.
“To open a hole in heaven,” Dalken said, rolling the cylinder tighter, growing it longer, until through topological wizardry he had made of it a strange checkerboard stone hose with meanders running through it. “To climb into it, and pull the hole in after.”
“By becoming it,” Jiro reminded him, nodding, watching Dalken take the ends of the hose and bring them together into a thin donut shape.
“Yes,” Dalken said, shrinking the donut shape sma
ller, working it like a ribbon of clay in the process, until one edge thinned and the other bulged, until the donut shape metamorphosed into a small sphere. “The hole into wholeness.”
Mei-Ling thought of systems pulled by forces centrifugal and centripetal. Of suns balanced between explosion and collapse. Of singularities that brought old ends to new beginnings, not in a circle but in a spiral. Of purposely dropped stitches in Persian rugs and purposeful flaws in illuminated manuscripts. The hole into wholeness....
Dalken/Allesseh pushed the sphere down into a point, smaller and smaller until, tossing it into the air toward the floating cross of opened hypercube, the chess-space disappeared—and so did the chess-floored universe. Jiro and Dalken, transformed to tree-orbs of light and dark (all trace of left temporal dent at last healed and gone from Dalken’s), came together into one, at that point of singularity where an Absolute Paradox transfixed the cross of spacetime.
The void took itself into itself, and all spacetime with it. The cross at the center of the maze—a maze made out of her, made from waves and transforming those waves, like the maze she had built and that had been built through her in another time and another world—opened outward into a spiral, collapsed outward to make transcendence out of destruction, ecstasy out of catastrophe—
“Ha, ha!” said a voice of both agony and laughter which they once knew. In the last instant outside time a dozen moons filled the sky and the Fool’s face, made out of stars, filled the firmament. “A smile through the pain. Gyre transcending a starcase. The void of endings and the spore of beginnings are one. It is finished!”
Then the clocks in another universe began ticking as a wonderfully balanced fractal form of light blue then white flashed into being, growing, unspiraling, dimensions unfurling like the crosiers of young fern fronds blooming and booming outward in light, surging in all directions at once, full-blown constellation of the crux of gyres, stellate and cruciate, hybrid product of Celtic cross circle quartered and carved all over with mazes of spirals, and haloed star cross for the star-crossed who see a miracle in a time-telescoped photo of a distant supernova—a sign for new heavens and new earths, of darkness quartered by perpendicular planes of light into perfect wedges bounded and made whole by that light.
EPILOGUE
The consciousness which had once called itself Brandi Easter, called itself Mei-Ling Magnus, called itself Roger Cortland, called itself Aleck McAllister, called itself Ray Dalken, called itself Diana Gartner, called itself Robert Sullivan, called itself Marissa Correa, called itself Stewart Albert Michaels, called itself Janika Gesterkamp, called itself Hari Mowat, called itself Marco Nicollazini, called itself Veronica Angell, called itself Immanuel Shaw, called itself Gopal Mulla, called itself Vasili Landau, called itself Paul Larkin, called itself Atsuko Cortland, called itself Aleister McBruce, called itself Lev Korchnoi, called itself Seiji Yamaguchi, called itself Jhana Meniskos, called itself Lakshmi Ngubo, called itself Martin Kong, called itself Michael Dalken, called itself Jacinta Larkin, called itself Kekchi, called itself Jiro Yamaguchi, called itself by all the names of all the living and the dead, human and non-human, on uncounted worlds—each and all became more like itself than it had ever been in all its days walking amid stars in the cave of the sky.
From matter up to spirit working, all of them now become part of that plenum, holographical and higher dimensional, from which all universes come, from which angels and bodhisattvas, archetypes and spirit-guides all come. In such forms and many others, all those in the great litany of the conscious continue to serve—constellations in the new universe now born unspiralling and unwinding from the old one they had known, new branch unfurling on the plenum tree, vaster Midgardsorm reborn from the shedding of its skin.
They still have work to do. Much work. After all, here is only one universe that has become enlightened. Only one more has become fully authentic, gyring in to singularity and out to universe, microcosm and macrocosm unified, as above, so below, and absolutely indistinguishable.
Everything happens twice: first as technology, then as theology. And vice versa.
The universe is waving.
Wave back.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
HOWARD V. HENDRIX’s first four published novels appeared from Ace Books (Penguin Putnam): Lightpaths (1997), Standing Wave (1998), Better Angels (1999), and Empty Cities of the Full Moon (2001). His fifth novel, The Labyrinth Key, appeared from Ballantine Del Rey in April 2004. His sixth novel, Spears of God, was published by Del Rey in December 2006.
His most widely available works of shorter science fiction can be found in his “double” short story collection Human in the Circuit/Depth of Perception (Borgo Press 2010), Möbius Highway (Scorpius Digital Books, 2001), the Full Spectrum original anthology series, Vols. 1, 4, and 5 (Bantam Books), and in The Outer Limits, Volume 1 (Prima).
He has also published numerous poems, political essays, book reviews, and works of literary criticism, including his book-length study of apocalyptic elements in English literature from Langland to Milton, The Ecstasy of Catastrophe (1990). An avid gardener, his book on landscape irrigation, Reliable Rain (co-authored with Stuart Straw), appeared in March 1998 from Taunton Press.
His degrees range from a B.S. in Biology to an M.A. and Ph.D. in English Literature. He and his wife Laurel both teach at California State University, Fresno, and live near Shaver Lake, California, where they enjoy backpacking and snowshoeing in the Sierra Nevada.
Table of Contents
COPYRIGHT INFORMATION
DEDICATION
INTRODUCTION
PROLOGUE
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
EPILOGUE
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Standing Wave Page 48