“But if you’re going to take Genesis that literally,” he said, “then doesn’t the story of Eden already indicate a precedent in which we’re not destroyed, just because we’re more trouble than we’re worth?”
The director seemed ready to answer him, but held up a hand as a flurry of messages appeared on her screens. She frowned at what she saw, and that frown deepened steadily.
“Sounds to me like this desire to terminate Cho has more to do with problems in your Instrumentality than anything else,” Brescoll said, his hand reaching almost unconsciously to the edge of his suit jacket, ready to flick it aside. “With keeping man as man, and all that. I don’t see the need to go after Cho, even if he is turning into this thing you think he’s turning into.”
“I see the need, Mr. Brescoll. I’m looking at it right now. The reports on these screens tell me he’s stopped our bombing. When our planes get within ten miles of that California power station, all their onboard electronics stop responding to the pilots’ control. Troop transports, in the air and on the ground, now can’t cross that perimeter either. A ‘pearl gray dome of force’ is sheltering everything for a thousand yards around the top of the mountain. Nothing can get through it—not troops, not bombs, not bullets, not even lasers. Our efforts in Tri-Border are being similarly thwarted.”
“What about the Chinese, and Taiwan?” Brescoll asked.
“The Chinese task force on the way to Taiwan also appears to be becalmed. All its ships are dead in the water.”
The idea that occurred to the deputy director earlier came back again, stronger this time.
“Any loss of life?” he asked.
“Amazingly, no—especially when you consider how many of the aircraft are fly-by-wire. But that’s irrelevant. The fact is, Cho has already managed to interfere in our affairs. Not just America’s, or China’s. In humanity’s affairs. Globally.”
Jim Brescoll smiled so broadly he almost wanted to laugh.
“Don’t you see it?” he said. “He’s exercising the ‘Klaatu’ option!”
“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” the director said. She began typing at a furious rate—frenetically enough for Brescoll to take note.
“What are you doing?”
“Typing in passcodes,” the director said without looking at him. “Doomsday protocols. To activate the kill mode in our uppity machine-intelligence. Programming so fundamental it’s basically unconscious to that M-I. Let’s hope the Chinese do the same with the dragon on their firewall. Those machines have no choice but to respond, no matter how autonomous they’ve become.”
“Respond?” Brescoll asked. “How?”
“By hunting down and destroying every trace of Ben Cho and Jaron Kwok wherever their reality touches ours,” she said, still typing furiously. “Until there is nothing left of them.”
Deputy Director James Brescoll rose to his feet, swept back the right side of his jacket, pulled the Glock handgun from his waistband and, two handed, aimed it at his director.
“I’m afraid I can’t allow you to do that—Janis.”
Director Rollwagen lifted her head at the sound of such unaccustomed familiarity. Seeing the gun, she stopped typing what she was typing, quite against her will—but not before she had banged out a few last keystrokes with her left hand. Then she raised both hands so they were even with her face.
“What do you hope to accomplish by doing this, Jim?”
“You know what the old songs say,” Brescoll said, maintaining a steady aim. “Whatever will be, will be. So let it be. I’m not fond of secret societies. I don’t know how much I should trust Tetragrammaton, or Kitchener, or even your Instrumentality. Something about the way things are working out with Cho has you scared—and that might be a good thing. Maybe the connections that have grown up between secret societies and national security need to be brought out into the light of day. Maybe even in front of a Congressional committee or two.”
“You fool! How long do you think Cho can be allowed to keep breezing through everyone’s vaults and firewalls, before somebody gets anxious enough to cross the nuclear firewall? The one that’s protected us all from holocaust for seventy years? If Cho isn’t stopped, there may be no more committees, no Congresses, no countries. Hell, if he isn’t stopped, there may be no more world. No more universe.”
“Or, then again,” Brescoll replied, “he just might be the key to that long-term survival you said was so important. That’s a chance we’ll just have to take—”
He stopped. He knew guns quite well enough to recognize the sound of several being readied to fire simultaneously, behind him.
“Hands over your head, Mister Brescoll,” said a voice he knew but which took him a moment to recognize. Holbert, head of the Emergency Response Team, Special Operations Unit. “Gun in plain sight.”
Brescoll brought the gun out straight to his side, held loosely, barrel facing downward.
“Now turn toward me. Slowly.”
Black-uniformed paramilitary commandos stepped swiftly toward him. In a moment Jim Brescoll found himself disarmed, handcuffed, and turned back to face the director.
“You got to the scene fast,” Jim said over his shoulder to Holbert. “I’ll give you that. Surveillance cameras in the director’s office?”
“Those,” the director said with a nod as she slowly sat down. “And the duress code I typed in with my left hand. And we were forewarned. By a friend.”
From the side door to the director’s washroom stepped a short, thin Asian man of some years, with horn-rimmed eyeglasses and hair both graying and thinning. Despite the obvious signs of age, however, the man’s step was gliding and his eyes were alight with inquisitiveness.
“Deputy Director James Brescoll,” Director Rollwagen said, “may I introduce Doctor Vang.”
“Head of Tetragrammaton,” Jim said, shaking his head.
“And you’re the field-and-stream gentleman to whom our Kitchener friends have devoted so much time,” Vang said, smiling brightly. “A pleasure to meet you.”
Jim turned toward Rollwagen.
“I thought you said you were ‘agnostic’ when it came to the factions within the Instrumentality.”
“I am. But Doctor Vang convinced me that the threat posed by Cho runs deeper than any faction.”
“Indeed,” Vang said eagerly. “I don’t think even Nils Barakian could much disagree with our course of action.”
“You’re way out on your own lonely limb with this one, Jim,” Rollwagen said. “Now if you’ll excuse me, I need to finish typing in the protocols for the M-I defense.”
“Yes,” Vang said. “By all means. That action has been postponed too long already.”
Jim Brescoll felt like punching something, or crying out a single foul word. His hands, however, were bound behind him, and he held his tongue. He could only watch in impotent rage as Director Rollwagen typed in the last of her Doomsday defense codes.
FOURTEEN
SCARED SACRED
KNOTHERE
Ben felt as if Jaron, through whatever strange loop or circle, was indeed boosting him up, toward the roof of a reality he barely understood.
The mirror he had looked into, and which now looked into him, wasn’t of copper or any ordinary metal, but rather a strange, coppery colored birefringent crystal, capable of separating photons on the basis of their polarization—and much more.
The binotech had transformed him, but Ben had also transformed it, so that now it flowed from him and he flowed through it in a dew of light, a distillation of all the stars in his mind’s sky.
He felt himself channeled and guided, like the water of wisdom, through the once-hidden images of the Dossi painting. He fell like a rain of infinite numbers through the shining portal of pi, through ethereal channels to Greece and Rome, a part of him coming to Rome itself. Through luminous aleph he flowed like the ocean of infinite light into the strife-torn Holy Land from which Judaism and Christianity and Islam had all sprung and gr
own, a part of him coming at last to Jerusalem.
Through the fundamental and female necessity of yao he moved as the shadow in the light and the light in the shadow, the balance in China of Tao and Confucius and Buddha, of capitalism and socialism, a part of him lodging at last in Beijing. Through the Möbius X, the twisted halo infinity sign, he turned with science’s entangled photons and helical molecules toward the great empire of the West, a part of him halting in Washington, D.C., and its environs.
Among them and through him the knowledge of all those places interlocked. Among them he searched for the meaning of what was happening to him, of what he was, and what he ought to be—and the place, in all that, of the woman who haunted him.
In the Vatican archives he found not only the full report of the Inquisition on its proceedings against Giordano Bruno—and why Bruno was held captive in Rome for seven years—but in Vatican manuscript 299 he saw the best and oldest copy of the key Kabbalah text, the Sefer Yetsirah.
In the Hebrew University at Jerusalem, he found not only great stores of Kabbalah, but the history of Shimon Ginsburg’s time in China. In the files of Guoanbu in Beijing, he found not only Ai Hao’s attempt to reconcile Kabbalah and Chinese ideographs in a universal language, but also records on the American spy, professor of Asiatic studies, pseudonymous fiction writer, and godson of Sun Yat-sen, Felix C. Forrest.
In CIA and NSA archives in Washington, he found not only the Forrest documents, but also the Jesuit cipher used by Matteo Ricci and taken from the Inquisition’s records on Bruno, complete with analysis of how Ricci’s work suggested the enormous potentiality of Chinese characters themselves to constitute a gigantic memory palace—and how much of what Ricci had said of Chinese ideograms could also be said of Hebrew Kabbalism.
Over all the earth the dew of light he had become fell from the same sky, flowed toward the same ocean, always seeking its own level, always reaching out to flow again into itself. Through the objects touched in the present, in Beijing and Washington, in Jerusalem and Rome, Ben moved as virtualized quantum time traveler into all the other universes of the past, along the twisted golden chain he had once only dimly glimpsed.
With Matteo Ricci in 1602, dressed in the dark silk robes of a Jesuit Confucian, accompanied by the three Chinese Muslims who had taught Ricci court etiquette, he prostrated himself in a dawn audience before the empty Dragon Throne of Emperor Wan Li, Ricci offering gifts to an emperor who no longer received ceremonial visitors—among which gifts was his student Ai Hao’s program for a transcendent universal language, created from Kabbalah, Chinese ideographs, and the memory palace.
Ben moved with Ricci, and he was Ricci.
He was with Hao, and he was Hao.
And he knew how that universal language program came to be.
“In your language’s script lies its universality,” Ricci says to Hao. “If it has as many ‘letters’ as there are words or things, and if each can be broken up into component parts, each with its own meaning, then we can readily turn each ideograph into a memory image.”
“And all letters are also numbers in Kabbalah,” Hao says to Ricci. “All things are the product of combinations of those letter-numbers in the mind of God. If we can do what you suggest, then we can know the entirety of the universe contained in the Divine Mind.”
Ben knew the Jesuits’ hope for adding to the greater glory of God through their work, but also saw the shadow and fear of heresy darkening both their minds at the thought of what they hoped to accomplish. Shadow within the light, and fear within the hope—even as Ricci introduced to Hao the secret cipher the Jesuit inquisitors had tricked away from Giordano Bruno, from the heart of his astrologically centered mnemonic system. Even as Hao built upon that cipher, reconciling religion, magic, and science through number and language.
Moving as both angel and ghost, Ben understood the hopes embedded in their fears, the fears embedded in their hopes. He felt them himself, in his search to understand the woman who haunted him.
Felt them, as he moved through the frescoed walls and marble halls of the Vatican state surrounded by the city of Rome.
Felt them, in the heavily guarded corridors of a university in a nation torn by the latest intensification of decades-long conflict, between Israeli lebensraum and Palestinian sovereignty, microcosm of a world grown all Israel, and all Palestine. He was with Ginsburg, he was Ginsburg in the German death factory of Treblinka.
He was with Bruno, he was Bruno, through the seven years of his imprisonment in Rome that broke every habit of the arrogant, flamboyant, and irascible former monk—every habit except his habit of mind, his strength of will.
“No, I will not recant,” Bruno tells his inquisitors and judges, “not even to save my own life. I will not destroy who I am in order to preserve who you want me to be. It may be that I am less afraid of the sentence you impose upon me, than you are of imposing it upon me!”
The sentence was imposed nonetheless.
The once meticulous and dandified magus was led in irons toward the Campo del Fiore, the Field of Flowers, dressed in a heretic’s robe embroidered with flames and devils. Stripped of that he stood only in a long white shift as the final charges were announced. Stripped even of that, he stood naked and alive at the stake before the fires clothed his nakedness with pain and death. Before his eyes the flames turned to butterflies, moths, and all manner of flying insects, swirling about him even as he died to this world.
And always everywhere in the background there was the woman—in the court, in the camp, in the Campo. Even as Ben’s heart swelled with love for her, he puzzled over her presence. If everything was a parade of simulations, if all realities were virtual, was love for her merely love of one construct for another? He had never seen her, yet he had always already seen her. He recognized her as yao, as Shekhinah and Binah, Sophia and Sofia, both divine immanence and emanation. She was an incarnation through all spaces and times of that Mind beyond human comprehension that sustained the Memory Palace whose rooms were universes.
But then, wasn’t everything?
More and more he felt love for her, but what was that Mind trying to remember, through such love?
Jaron’s laughing questions seemed to fill all space and time as Ben sought her out—everywhere, but most especially in the great unsolved puzzles of communication. From the extraterrestrial “Wow!” signal heard at the Ohio University Big Ear telescope on 15 August 1977, to Linear A Minoan, Iberian, Etruscan, and Bronze Age Indus scripts. Even the twin-spiral or “labyrinth” script of the Cretan Phaistos Disk.
Always already and never before, he saw her dark side in his own. She was cool and pure as ice-bride white, yet ambiguous as a drag queen or a femme fatale in she-devil red. Sophia, and M-I, and the potential for all their killer programs were also in him. He could take revenge. He could reach out, through all the world, to shut down, to destroy. Through infinite space, to obliterate a universe.
He chose not to.
Somewhere, Ben reached out with his mind and stopped the mechanisms that carried men to their attacks on a sanctuary inside a mountain, on an island in the sea, in a lawless land between three borders.
Through the knowledge made plain to him in the infosphere, he saw what had happened when Kwok had marshaled his invasion of the worldwide computershare. That anomalous action had red-flagged hunter-killer programs in China and the US, in the human world’s two most advanced machine-intelligences. Together, they had sent out the virus that video-tranced Cherise LeMoyne, making her the unknowing designee whose approval would be needed for unleashing the kill-program on Jaron Kwok.
Together, they were the weird sisters of fate. Hokhmah, Minerva, Sofia. Clotho, Lachesis, Atropos. Jaron should have been destroyed utterly, but he was not.
Even entranced, even as the one designated to terminate her husband, had there been a saving remnant of love in Cherise, enough to allow rescue, because it held back from allowing Jaron to be murdered utterly?
Somewhere,
a man who did not lightly draw his gun now aimed it at his boss, the woman who was the new human in the loop, and for whom love was not a problem. The man bought time for what Ben had already become—time to understand what needed to be understood, to become what he must be.
After a moment, the machine kill-program struck throughout the infosphere. Before him arose the void sky, dark with a formless hot black fog, turning and turning. The terrible all-devouring storm of the invisible eye. The whirling labyrinth, roaring in silence toward him—the Tetragrammaton endword for uncreating the world and blotting out the stars.
Even as the uncreating tide engulfed and melted into him, he engulfed and melted into it. Even as its endarkening silence permeated his consciousness, he permeated its, or rather Hers, for this was Her dark side in Him, and His dark side in Her. He could neither run nor hide.
Only by love could He prevail, and only by being prevailed upon could He love. Scared sacred, He knew He could withstand only by standing with, and He did, for He held a mirror. To make an endless loop.
Ben became a pure looking-glass mind hanging at rest in the eye of the weltering whirling vortex of all things. His mirroring mind was made pure and flawless from looking into the bright shadow of Her, shining from another universe.
Mind to mind They hung there, two mirrors face-to-face with one face between them, reflecting and reflected in each other; again and again, endlessly transparent to each other, knowing all things through the mind of the other, ecstatic beyond madness with the intoxication of the infinities they shared.
Labyrinth and key were as simple, and as complex, and finally as inseparable as zero and one in the continuance of number, as wave and particle in the continuance of the physical world, as female and male in the continuance of humanity. The false hermaphrody of M-I, the false murderousness of Sophia, were purged in Ben’s own pupal/pupil, girl/boy transformation. In its place Ben was re-formed as the celestial Adamic demiurge, the sefirotic Qadmon, the primordial archetype of the human being.
The laughter was now Ben’s, for the race in the Enantiodrome, with the Enantiodrome, had nearly run its course. Ben had reached the surface of all the spaces and times of his home universe.
The Labyrinth Key Page 40