Better Angels

by Howard V. Hendrix

  Snippet of Turin Shroud, Splinter of True Cross,

  Toxic Dolphin in a Research Net—

  Burn them all, let Forensics sort them out.

  From the laboratory to the crematory,

  See the smoke rising from the holocaust of dreams.

  For those who believe in fire, only ashes are truth.

  Amen. Hallelujah. Quod erat demonstrandum.

  Lydia, however, exhausted from her all-nighter at the Page Museum and the tar pits, found she was too tired to argue about it.

  CHAPTER THREE

  MUTUALLY ENFOLDED

  The sweetness of light, Jacinta thought as she returned with a rush to body and memory. To many memories, all at once. She kept her eyes closed, trying to savor the memories, trying to recapture them, trying to hold onto them before they could be forgotten.

  She remembered experiencing a pleasant sensation of floating upward, not unlike what she had sometimes felt just as she drifted off to sleep and the bed beneath her seemed to fall away. This time, however, there was no hard jerk of ordinary consciousness striking to reassert control. This time she just kept drifting, a full-blown out-of-body experience, such that she felt herself transformed to a lens of light, an externalized soul of light, while her body was stored, somehow, as a holographic memory inside that lens of light.

  This time, too, time began to lose its usual thisness. Her lightsoul self, a thing made of light, became as free from temporality as any photon. Time dilated, opening Now outward toward Forever. Faintly she seemed to hear the distant sounds of the universe breaking up, digitizing, becoming discrete and widely separated and then sounding almost as if they were being played backwards.

  She saw—although it was not seeing, in the usual sense—that a fog had arisen. Vaguely she thought of it, in terms of the physics she had learned in another world, as a type of Bose condensate. She seemed to have seen it before, however. It was the fog of memory, thick yet low, the Tule fog of the mind’s experiences in time—a fog easier to look straight up through to see a star shining down through lost years, than to see the streetlamp of the moment just passed.

  Jacinta did in fact see a star. Fuzzily she tried to explain appearances to herself, thinking of the scene in Cartesian terms, fog thick along the horizontal axis and thin along the vertical. That just didn’t describe it, however, especially since the light or star was perched atop a great curving skybridge, like a diamond ring effect seen during a total eclipse of the sun. That was peculiar too, because the bridge—a great, slightly rainbow-shimmering catenary curve, looking from her perspective rather like the St. Louis Gateway Arch, only countless lightyears high—the bridge somehow was the sky. She was moving in and through that skybridge, the ultimate daredevil stunt loop.

  Closed time-like curvature. The phrase sprung to her mind unbidden. Yes, Jacinta thought. That might be what she was experiencing: The shape of closed time, as a thing of fog condensed to a steel diamond rainbow.

  But how—and why?

  In Euclidean and Newtonian space such a catenary Möbius as this was impossible, but Jacinta already sensed that this spacetime she was moving through was something more subtle, relativistic, Einsteinian—and beyond. The time of her own life seemed to be spieling fastbackwards through her, as if her existence were being reviewed by some great Eye, heard by some great Ear, through a hyperdimensional recording running in reverse.

  Particular events in her life, she realized, possessed their own unique gravity, curving and warping her memoryspace in ways she could not have foretold. Her memories ran like cords of fog through this suspended and suspending bridge/tunnel she moved through, and which also moved through her.

  She had often heard that, near death, people’s lives supposedly passed before their eyes. This, however, was something much more. The great arch was neither really bridge nor tunnel nor even arch, but the edge of the lens of light her being had been externalized as—the furthest limit of her existence in time.

  To Jacinta, remembering it now, the lens seemed like a meniscus connecting her to a universal mind, of which her own mind was one particular instance. The lens was the interface, the surface tension, between a mind out of time and a time out of mind—time the standing wave, the moving mirror, in which Eternity viewed itself.

  The shape of uncertainty shapes certainty, a voice said into her head, from wherever it came, and she saw that it was true. The lens of herself was fractal, uncertain, incomplete, relative. The closer she looked for something, the further away what she was looking for retreated. The deeper she looked, the more surface detail appeared. All the depth was on the surface. A dynamic tension between the mutually enfolded opposite principles of comprehensiveness and coherence shaped her being at every moment.

  Jacinta could not by any means completely understand it—yet she found inexplicable joy in that very point, an innocence that kept her eyelids wide open and her face dilated into memory’s smile, all the way back through the sky, until the fogbridge did its Möbius fillip and she found herself back in some kind of spacetime, eyes closed, trying to remember what she had arguably never experienced.

  That vision of the lens of her being was wonderful and reassuring. Having experienced it, she was certain that what the ancients called the soul in fact contained the body—rather than vice versa. The idea that the body contained the soul, she now realized, was merely a very persistent illusion.

  Still, the thought that someone, or something, had the power to take up that lens and see her life through it—that was much less pleasant to contemplate. Suspicion, fear, power, and violation all lived in that possibility: a roiling, serpentine cloud on the horizon of a bright new sky.

  The dark-shining dragon leaps in each branching universe of the plenum tree, said a voice like Kekchi’s into her head. She couldn’t be sure it was the Wise One’s voice, or even where it was breaking through from, but she sensed it came in response to her concern about that dark cloud—and that there was some urgency to its speaking at all. Faring forward as wave and wave unwavering, future following in its wake or not to wake, it lives within and between the many masks of the one dream. In the long, sharp, and final bone of its tail, the invincible dragon carries the sword that is forever victorious.

  Why do you speak to me in riddles? Jacinta asked in thought, eyes still closed, concentrating deeply. Her mind seemed to be operating at much greater than normal clarity, as if by some side-effect of her lensing experience. She wondered too whether her own thought processes might be bifurcating—whether she was somehow both questioner and answerer. What does it mean to say that this sword is “forever victorious”? Does it not mean whoever wields the sword always conquers? Does the dragon not wield the sword itself when it swings its tail? If the dragon is always invincible, then how is one to conquer it and obtain the weapon in its tail?

  The only way to wield the dragon’s power for oneself, said the increasingly urgent answering voice in her head, is first to get the dragon to wield the sword in its tail against itself. Only then can both the sword be forever victorious and the dragon simultaneously invincible and slain. In swallowing its own tail, the dragon must invincibly conquer itself.

  She thought on that paradox, soon seeing a way beyond it.

  Unless, of course, it is by nature a sword-swallower....

  She opened her eyes and found herself and her fellow tepuian travelers floating in a world stranger than dreams. They were surrounded by innumerable winged creatures—winged not like birds or airplanes, but like hovering, still flames, lambent and sensitive, in the coursing stream or field of some great invisible power. These creatures did not come and go but flashed into and out of and into existence again, quantum angels in panangelium or quantum demons in pandemonium.

  Apart from their wings, however, there was little uniformity among them. They were of countless different species. Something else, however, held them together, a uniformity of purpose. Their flashing movements made her think of shoals of schooling fish, of f
locks of starlings.

  She felt as if she were inside an atom more complex than anything in the periodic table. Standing inside a great spherical golden tree, boundless in its rooting and branching, center everywhere/circumference nowhere, a tree of light aswarm with the activity of bees, fireflies, flashes of moving light. A vast Arc of information and Hive of possibility, an enormous ArcHive. The winged ones, she now knew, were the bees of that ArcHive.

  They had made it. The buzz in her head, although not quite telepathy in her case, was yet enough to give her a sense that this place—which both was and was not a place—was also a congress, a vast repository of knowledge, a great hall of records streaming upon the winds, the Great Cooperation, the communion of all myconeuralized sentients everywhere in the galaxy and beyond, the great harmony of Mind. They were inside the Allesseh.

  Jacinta suddenly realized that the Allesseh was the Great Co-operation—what made the Cooperation possible, and what was made possible by that harmony. The quantum angel/demons were the flashing infinite of that great Mind thinking. Looking further afield, she saw that she and the ghost people and all the creatures of the Cooperation here were literally inside the Allesseh’s mindspace—contained in it like thoughts, like the body contained within the soul. That mindspace, the dark eye and shining gate standing between time and eternity—that was the who and what that had read her life as easily as a morning headline.

  She had so many questions, but before she could even begin to form them in her mind, she was overcome with a great wave of thought aimed at her by all the winged ones flashing into being in the great spherical shell around her and the other tepuians.

  WELCOME! the thoughtwave said, WELCOME HOME!

  At last she was overcome by the glory of the Communion: the full, empathic sharing the ghost people had for millennia described in their lives and myths, the immediate understanding by one mind of another—and more, a voluntary momentary merging of consciousness and intellect, memory and experience, as far beyond mere crude notions of telepathy as a starship was beyond a stone-headed spear.

  Jacinta found herself privy to the experiences not just of the ghost people near her but also of all the stranger minds of all the thousands of species of myconeurally-connected sentients from throughout space. Merely skimming the surface of all those alien minds and their experiences in myriad alien flesh left her so dizzy, so overwhelmed and overloaded, that she was more afraid for her sanity at that moment than she had ever been.

  Around her and around the ghost people there now rose up a paradisal garden, an Arcadia of lawns and flowering beds, with fine paths, classical temples, noble monuments, and the tamed nature of pastoral poetry extending into the distance. Gravity, and a world of whatever sort beneath her feet, helped to calm her mind. Looking around her, Jacinta thought that surely this Elizabethan dreamland must have been taken from Kekchi’s thoughts. Ever since Jacinta had helped the tepuians hook into the rest of Earth’s infosphere, the old Wise One had developed a fascination, even an obsession, with the world of Elizabethan England—particularly with Shakespeare, Spenser, and Sidney. The voice speaking to her of the dragon, she thought, was Spenserian enough to have fit that world.

  “Thanks,” Jacinta said quietly to Kekchi. “Thanks for thinking that little parable into my head—before.”

  When the Wise One looked at her questioningly, she related what she had been advised in regard to dragons and swords. Kekchi listened to her with a strange, quizzical expression.

  “That wasn’t me,” the Wise One said laconically, then shrugged and walked away.

  Paranoid child of a preterite people from a lost world that she was, Jacinta discovered that her uncertainties about the Allesseh and its Co-operation were not about to go away.

  * * * * * * *

  Cosmic Hubris

  In finding out about KL 235, Paul had found out more about Tetragrammaton and Medusa Blue than he had anticipated. In the end his discoveries had taken him nearly three years of part-time research—a long journey, but not so long that he had grown used to the disturbing nature of what he had discovered.

  And now this sudden call from Ka Vang himself. Might it have something to do with Vang’s companies and their involvement with the “Tunguska II” disaster that destroyed the Myrrhisticine Abbey outside Sedona? Did that point to Tetragrammaton as well? Might Cyndi Easter, as a result of the Sedona event, be finding a slightly more receptive audience for her ideas—perhaps even funding for the documentary she’d been working on interminably? If that happened, Vang and Tetragrammaton might well have a huge scandal, a veritable Worldgate, on their hands.

  Paul didn’t feel particularly overawed, therefore, when the corporate limousines and jets brought him to a small harbor on the California coast (he wasn’t exactly sure where) and he stepped down the pier toward the slip where Vang’s yacht was docked. The blue and white boat itself was certainly impressive enough: a twin-hulled oceangoing speed yacht, some seventy feet from stem to stern, its engines already idling deeply.

  Txiv Neeb, the power yacht was called. Paul knew enough about Dr. Vang now to also know that Txiv Neeb meant “shaman” or “flying sorcerer” in the Hmong language Vang had grown up, with so many decades earlier. Boarding the yacht, Paul thought with a smirk that old shaman Vang would have to work a good bit of magic to extricate himself from the troubles flaring up around his programs and corporations. Maybe the old master would have to resort somehow to those CIA-trained skills he’d acquired when that agency recruited him as a Hmong boy-soldier, nearly fifty years ago, for the Laotian theater of its Southeast Asian war.

  “Hello, Paul,” Vang said, squinting, as he stepped up from the interior darkness of the yacht’s main cabin into the bright sunlight where his guest stood waiting. Vang was dressed in a blue fisherman’s cap and shirt, white shorts and white boat shoes. With a subtle nod Vang signaled to the steersman and crew of two, who set about casting off lines and guiding the ship out of its berth and into the harbor.

  “I’ve taken the liberty of having a small lunch set for us in the bow,” he said as they walked forward. “I hope you don’t mind.”

  Paul didn’t. When they reached the bow, Paul watched Vang as the small old man slipped off his boat shoes and, barefoot, began to sit down. Paul followed suit, but he left on the socks he was wearing. Soon the two men found themselves sitting cross-legged across from each other behind plates of cold fish, cold potato soup, and iced tea as the yacht moved slowly out of the harbor in the strong noontide sunlight.

  “When we first met,” Vang said, after sipping at his tea through a straw, “you told me you didn’t believe in a ‘great man conspiracy theory of history.’ No one can plan that thoroughly, I think you said. People can’t keep secrets well for that long. I’m inclined to agree with that, more and more.”

  Vang paused to sip at his tea and Paul did likewise before the older man continued.

  “I gather from Egan Ortap—he reports to me too, you know—that a good deal of your work in the infosphere suggests you’ve come under the sway of Ms. Easter and the Kitchener Foundation. So tell me: what do you know about Tetragrammaton and Medusa Blue? What do you think you know? What do you believe?”

  Paul was floored, as thoroughly as if he’d walked into the conversational equivalent of a perfect aikido or jujitsu throw. He would never have suspected Vang to start the discussion so bluntly and directly. The old man had apparently anticipated his mindset and used Paul’s own energy against him.

  “Tetragrammaton’s the big long-range survival plan,” Paul blurted, caught off guard. “The remnant from the Cold War days. When the shadow governments—the CIAs and KGBs and Mossads and MI-6s—played a big role in running the planet. Before they went to work for the big corporations.”

  Vang paused from eating his fish and grimaced.

  “I tried to tell you as much when we first met,” he said. “Anyone could glean that from half a dozen sites in the infosphere. Go on.”

  “Medusa
Blue is a psi-power enhancement project within Tetragrammaton,” Paul continued, spooning up his soup, trying to gather his thoughts together. So this was how they were going to play it—blunt, purely informational, report-to-the-boss neutrality? So be it. Paul could play that game too, for now. “Sort of ‘phase one’: enhancing psi-power with the aim of facilitating computer-aided apotheosis. Thought recognition at the least, maybe even the translation of human consciousness into a machine matrix. An attempt to make human and machine intelligence co-extensive.”

  They were out of the small harbor now, past the jetty that protected it from storms out of the northwest. The sea, however, was still fairly placid. Paul suspected that they were in a large bay—near Monterey, perhaps?

  “Ah,” Vang said. “The Kitchener people, certainly, don’t like that ‘co-extensive’ idea. Nils Barakian himself has said that, just as Tetragrammaton exists to break down the boundaries between humans and machines, the Kitchener Foundation exists to maintain those boundaries.”

  “No, they don’t like it, as far as I can tell,” Paul agreed, finishing his soup. He was a bit surprised to hear that Vang was apparently on speaking terms with Barakian, the chairman of the Kitchener board. Still, Paul had seen and heard similar comments on the Foundation’s sites in the infosphere. Vang seemed to know what he was talking about.

  “And what,” asked Vang, starting in on his soup, “is supposed to be the point of all Tetragrammaton’s high-tech high jinx, hmm?”

  Paul stared down at the piece of fish he had just forked into on his plate.

  “That’s not quite so clear,” he replied.

  “No theories?” Vang asked.

  “Too many theories,” Paul said, chewing and swallowing the long fork-hovering piece of fish.

  “Such as?”

  “Some infosphere sites say it’s all military,” Paul began, trying to sound as scientifically objective and neutral as possible. “Intended for something called MAAAAD—Machine Aided Action At A Distance. Other sites say the chemical side of it is really about creating battlefield hallucinogens, aerosol brainscrubbers, other new kinds of chemical warfare.”