The Labyrinth Key

by Howard V. Hendrix

  Beech laughed lightly and turned away, reaching for something out of Ben’s line of vision, but then turned back to him again, continuing in a low voice.

  “You have to admit, though, we did a good job. You didn’t even realize that you were related, did you? Blood may be thicker than water, but ethnic markers need only be skin deep.

  “Perhaps seeing to it that you and Jaron roomed together in college, or that you both got assigned to the Forrest documents—maybe that was a little brash of us, but it proved a point. All worth it, for all humanity.”

  Beech stood up and spoke more loudly, for Hon’s benefit. “And now, a little modified supertryptamine chaser, to make you a more willing participant than you might otherwise be.”

  Overwhelmed by his helplessness, Ben almost didn’t feel the supertryp injection. He did feel himself being wheeled back onto the stage elevator, with the help of Zuo’s men. As the elevator rose, Hon called out a system check for the link connecting Ben with the worldwide computershare, and Ben saw the same system checks running on his AR glasses. Beech responded by referring to the binotech population in Ben’s body and calling out rising activation percentages. In virtuality Hon posted graphs showing increasing “complementarity overlap” between Watson-Crick automata and quantum systems.

  The stage elevator stopped, level with the stage itself, and Ben felt himself being wheeled onto the platform. Inside the Sun Yat-sen Memorial Hall, the auxiliary houselights came up, casting the whole of its vast interior space in a twilight glow.

  Ben began to feel as if he himself was becoming suffused with that same soft glow. Strangely enough, he no longer felt afraid, or even worried. He wondered, for a brief instant, if that supertryptamine shot was responsible for the lassitude. But his musings were calm, even contemplative.

  “All the world’s a stage, Ben, and we are merely players,” Beech said, smiling. Then he checked his watch. “I would bet you’re coming on to the right ‘set and setting’ just about now. We’ll try to better control the link between your implants, the binotech activity, and the visualization material we want you to work on, so that—hopefully—what happened to Jaron Kwok won’t happen to you.”

  “We have to do this,” Ms. Hon offered, almost apologetically, “to determine whether optimal activation of the Kwok binotech occurs only in the biological system of your body.”

  Beech nodded.

  “In which case we need to keep you around. But if we can isolate all the activation factors from your blood, then we’ll have no further need of you. I think we can kill the neuroparalytic, Ms. Hon.

  “Good. How are you feeling now, Ben?”

  He found that he was able to speak again. As he tried to do so, he realized that the lassitude he had been feeling was spreading and changing, now flooding his limbs and head with that warm, clear glow. He felt as if he were vanishing, like a Cheshire cat, behind the smile that he found blossoming across his face.

  “I feel good,” Ben finally said to the somehow avuncular-looking Beech. “I feel really good.”

  “Glad to hear it! Eager to please, too?”

  “Yessir.” He knew he shouldn’t be so cheerful about his situation, but he couldn’t resist.

  “No pain? Amazing. Look at the way the binotech is growing out of his temples, Ms. Hon. Coming out of the pores, fusing with the ’trodenet and AR glasses—from the inside out! Making its own connections, and without any bleeding!”

  “Yes, I see it,” Hon said quietly. Ben saw a look of awe in her expression, and found it strangely amusing.

  “All right, Ben. We’re going to give you something to puzzle out for us. We think you may already know something about our quandary. Here’s an image you already know.”

  In the field of vision created by the augmented reality glasses, the painting attributed to Dosso Dossi appeared before Ben. The scholarly, unhappy gentleman in the oddly shaped hat, standing before a curtain and behind a low parapet. Looking away from the ten-circuit labyrinth graffito to which his left hand pointed. All, through the AR glasses, seemingly projected onto the structure of the Memorial Hall itself.

  “What we want you to find for us, Ben, is simple—at least so we hope,” Baldwin Beech said. “How does the Dossi painting relate to the Memorial Hall, and why did Jaron Kwok spend so much time here? What about this place is important to his memory system? Can you help us with that?”

  “Sure,” Ben said, struggling to get the questions answered despite the wave of lassitude that was making him feel all fuzzy-minded. “But why are you doing all this? What do you want, Dr. Beech?”

  Beech looked surprised, then thoughtful again, as if considering his answer.

  “I don’t suppose it would hurt to tell you. Might even help guide you through the work we want you to do. Very well. We think there might be something hidden in this place which, in conjunction with information from the Kwok holo-cast, you can use to fully trigger that binotech that’s now moving around inside you.”

  “Trigger it to do what?” Ben asked, trying to keep from losing control over his thoughts even as they became more slippery.

  “That’s the big question, isn’t it? If we have better control this time, and what happened to Kwok does not happen to you, then what will the result be? Will that binotech make you the ultimate code breaker and code maker? Will it allow us to project controlled cryptastrophes, like thunderbolts from the hand of Zeus, only much more powerful? Either way you—or that binotech inside you—will become the ultimate weapon we’ve been looking for. Maybe even something much more important: undeniable proof that the course of evolution must be bent toward the inextricable melding of man and machine. Will you help us?”

  Ben nodded, or at least his head lolled around on his chest.

  He was buoyed on an unknown tide then, drifted and lifted upward in euphoric weightlessness, as if he had been lofted from his earthbound bed by a wave of longed-for sleep. Slowly he realized that the ocean of that tide was the vast unconsciousness formed from all the thinking machines to which he had now become so intimately joined.

  He felt himself cease to be, in the limited sense of “him” or “self.” With languid ease, he split into innumerable others, dissociated into multiple and uncountable persons, autonomous processes, intelligent agents and artificial intelligences. Knowbots and showbots. Beneath the sheltering sky of who he’d once been, they began to rearrange the furniture of sleep inside his waking dream, spreading throughout the infosphere, until he didn’t so much feel he was in touch with the Babel library of all human thought, as that he had become that.

  “Ben—what are you doing?” Beech asked. “What are you finding?”

  Ben showed him. He didn’t know how exactly he did it, but from manywheres out of that vast ocean of information-processing machines he pulled images and flashed them onto Beech’s screen, and onto his augmented reality glasses. Some of these sights he was familiar with, but others were new to him.

  Hide insane plight in plain sight. The Akkadian word babilu, “Gate of God,” root of Babel’s tower. The Greek letter pi, transcendental number and ratio of the circumference to the diameter of the circle. The Hebrew letter aleph, sign of the infinitude and the unity of God, and of Cantor’s transfinite cardinal numbers. The Chinese ideograph yao, in its “necessity” and “Western woman” configuration. The twisted Möbius X, infinity sign of both DNA double helix and entangled photons. At each corner a beautiful pair, illustrating entanglement and complementarity.

  “I’ve seen all this before,” Beech said, and there was disappointment in his voice. “Show me something new.”

  “Redundancy resists entropy,” Ben said with a hollow laugh, speaking slowly but thinking more rapidly than he ever had before. His self, hovering above its world of myriad agents throughout the infosphere, had become something high and clear, like the thin atmosphere on the edge of space through which his will, like a spy plane, flew at great heights and vast speeds.

  “Don’t be a stubborn ass
about it,” Beech said, frowning. “Just do it.”

  “I am doing it,” Ben said, “because Asinita is what it’s all about.”

  “Ass-in-what? What do you mean?”

  “I can show it to you, but I can’t understand it for you,” Ben said, his distant body laughing again. “To paraphrase Ms. Sin.”

  “Then show it to me!”

  From out of that unconscious webwork of the myriad systems he was accessing, he pulled up the virtual image of the Sun Yat-sen Memorial Hall, then began to manipulate that image in accord with the imagery embedded in the Kwok holo-cast. The result was to turn the virtual Hall like the dial on an old-fashioned vault.

  No need to dwell on the “insane plight” hidden “in plain sight,” he supposed. Images of forests dying and ice shelves cracking would do no good. No, better to give Beech something he’d understand.

  Rotate the image of the Memorial Hall’s interior, he thought, in double accord with the image of the ten-circuit labyrinth in the painting and the Hall’s role as memory palace. Reveal the labyrinth that had always been there. Depict the path to be followed by the dial on the door to the vault of heaven—the combination to turn the tumblers and teach the numbers.

  The image of the hall, rotated in such manner, turned and returned at each of the more deeply embedded images in the Dossi painting.

  “What is all this twisting about supposed to mean?” Beech demanded, speaking to him from very close, like a therapist—or an inquisitor. But Ben barely noticed—he felt detached, distant. Even his speech became increasingly oracular.

  “The labyrinth’s ten circuits in the painting relate it to the tetraktys of the Pythagoreans,” Ben said. “Also to their discovery of irrational numbers completely identifiable only at infinity, the best known being pi. Also to the Kabbalah’s ten possible permutations of the holy name of God—”

  “The Tetragrammaton?” Beech demanded. “Yod Heh Vov Heh?”

  “To the ten sefirot. The numerical entities who, taken together, make up the primordial androgynous archetype of the human being. The qualities and emanations of God, which relate the mind to the infinitely divisible One.”

  “But there is no yod, heh, or vov in the painting. The only Hebrew letter encrypted in the painting is aleph!”

  “Which is the letter designating the Ein Sof, the mystical Nothing and Point at Infinity that also encapsulates the ten sefirot.”

  “The Chinese ideograph encrypted in the painting, yao, how does that relate? Is it the tenth letter?”

  “No. Yao is the ideograph of the first word in the first of the ten commandments, in the first translation of those moral laws into Chinese by Ruggieri and Ricci.”

  “Very well—but what does all that have to do with this hall?”

  “In tracing the labyrinth as he has, Jaron relates the Sun Yat-sen Memorial Hall to the mnemonic Tree of the Sefirot. Transposes, in one another, the Dossi labyrinth and that Tree. A beautiful and unlikely pair, made one in this Hall of Memory.”

  “What do you mean? I don’t see it.”

  “The turning of the labyrinth correlates to the planes or dimensions of the universe associated with the formation of that tree. To the labyrinthine movement of the divine emanation out of the infinite, the ray of supernal illumination traveling its winding path among the ten sefirot.”

  Ben tried to ease his inquisitor’s befuddlement by flashing up a transposition of labyrinth and Tree, beside images out of the holy code systems of gematria, notarikon, and temurah. He brought up into virtual space images of Raymond Lull’s memory trees and combinatory wheels, Bruno’s mnemonic wheels. But his captors seemed unable to make the connections.

  “What about the images in the painting?” Beech asked, changing his tack. “The donkey?”

  “Asino. Italian for the domestic ass or donkey. In Bruno’s work it’s the symbol of the Holy Ignorance that is the highest wisdom.”

  “Bruno knew of this painting, then?”

  “Yes. From seeing Andrea Alciati’s emblem number seven, which depicts an ass with a statue of Isis on its back. That image led Bruno to Alciati’s minotaur emblems about military secrecy. The best extant portrait of Alciati himself was painted by Dosso Dossi. That discovery led Bruno to search out Dossi’s other works, particularly this portrait of a gentleman.”

  “But why an ass?” Beech asked, sounding uncomfortable even asking the question, as if he were setting himself up for a punchline that would make an ass out of him.

  Ben juxtaposed the image of the burdened beast with pictures of the domestic ass ridden by Jesus into Jerusalem on Palm Sunday, and with illustrations of the ass ridden by the prophet Balaam, the beast through whose mouth spoke the angel sent by God.

  “For Bruno,” Ben said, “the ass stands for the Holy Ignorance necessary for the transformation and passage of the mystic into and through the bestial, in attainment of the sefirah of Wisdom—called Hokhmah, in Kabbalah. In the Brunian system, Hokhmah is the embodiment of wisdom in the eternal world, as Minerva embodies it in the physical world, and Sofia stands for it in the human soul. The Tree of Asinita functions like a ladder, through which the magus climbs to mystical perfection, and abandons his humanity.”

  “And the lightning?”

  “The lightning threatens both the game-burdened ass and the church. Holy Ignorance is loaded down with deathly trivialities, while human religious institutions have become so pedantic they can do nothing to prevent the destruction that threatens all who look to them for guidance.”

  At a deeper level, Ben also understood Bruno’s image of the ass not only as sign of transformation and passage, but also as symbol for the mystical death that ends one state and begins another—which Jaron had reinterpreted, in the twisted X-ray light of both entangled photons and the double helix, as a hermetical/Kabbalistic prefiguring of what happens in quantum teleportation.

  Since Beech asked nothing about all that, however, Ben said nothing about it.

  “Trivialities, indeed!” Beech stormed. “I’ve had enough of this. If you’re trying to distract me, Ben, then stop immediately. What interested Jaron about this place—all your labyrinthine explanations aside? Tell me now, if you don’t want what happened to Kwok to happen to you!”

  The dark-suited armed men came forward, as if there to back up Beech’s bluster. Ben almost felt like laughing. His journey down the dialed labyrinth had in fact pointed him to the exact location where Jaron had discovered and rehidden the critical puzzle piece containing Shimon Ginsburg’s algorithm complex. That finding would undoubtedly be the most important discovery, for Beech.

  But it wouldn’t be for Beech—it would be for him, and it would be the next stepping stone on the path to what Ben now knew he must become. Only by taking that step could he break the mind-forged manacles of this zombification Beech had worked upon him. With luck he might even be able to prevent Beech and his ilk from gaining control of their “ultimate weapon.”

  Ben’s voice, when he spoke, had gone far beyond merely oracular. It sounded alien—distant and toneless—even to himself.

  “On my virtual rendering of the Hall,” he said to Beech, “you’ll find what Jaron Kwok was looking for, and where he found it. Behind that tile, above the lintel on that highlighted door. Go there, bring what you find to me, and I’ll translate.”

  “This had better not be a trick,” Beech said, then called to Zuo and Sin. “Get a ladder! If you can’t find one, boost up one of your men on the shoulders of two of the others. We need to pry up that wall tile! Hurry!”

  No ladder was readily available, so Zuo’s men formed a human pyramid. As from a great distance, Ben heard the sound of a knife scratching and prying away at a tile, then shouts of discovery. In a moment, they brought before him a small plastic player with a disk inside.

  Looking at it, Ben understood. In 1936 Ginsburg had successfully escaped to China from Hitler’s Germany—only to be captured by the Japanese and returned to the Reich, where he perished in the
death camps. But he had left a great work, hidden away in the Sun Yat-sen Memorial Hall. To honor Ginsburg and that work, Jaron Kwok had recoded and recorded Ginsburg’s secret, returning it in this newer, less perishable form to its old hiding place in the Hall.

  Kwok had been willing to risk death in order to reach truth, just as Ginsburg had been. Ben hoped he could live up to their legacy.

  “Turn up the volume,” Ben said, “and press PLAY.”

  When they had done so, a series of tones began to sound, and Ben began to smile. He felt increasingly absent from the conversation and from the world as those went on around him. The majority of his mind had already begun to focus on cracking the aural code, and identifying its place in the mazed memory palace to which Ben had come.

  “Sounds almost like twelve-tone music,” Helen Sin ventured.

  “More like random noise, if you ask me,” Beech said, increasingly annoyed. He turned to Ben. “What’s it supposed to be?”

  “It’s a Pierce code,” Ben said. “Another member in the same family of Pierces was the first scholar to champion the fictional works of Felix C. Forrest. You should know that. You took over the university chair named for Forrest, didn’t you?”

  “Yes, yes—but how does it work?” Beech asked, impatient with the digression.

  “The key involves tone generation. To each combination of sounds in a given language, assign a tone. These particular tones are based on the characteristics of an early Hewlett Packard–type audio oscillator, but programmed here to produce the myriad tones needed for the sounds of all known languages—maybe more. It’s a tonal key to the labyrinth of Babel.”

  “The key is in the labyrinth, as the labyrinth is in the key!” Beech said. “I knew it!”

  “But what are we listening to?” Patsy Hon asked.

  “Not twelve-toned music, but ten,” Ben said, his voice growing fainter and harder to hear, even in the echoing silence of the Hall. “The chorus of the ten sefirot. The music of the ten spheres. The constellations for the soul’s migration. An intricate example of an echo-hiding watermark, too. The detection of the spaces between the echoes is beyond the limits of the human auditory system, under normal conditions. But then, I’m not under normal conditions.”