Better Angels

by Howard V. Hendrix

  In the void of endings—the chant sang out. In her own mind Jacinta always translated the ghost people’s origin myth into the myth-language she was most comfortable with, that of twenty-first century science. The result, she admitted, sometimes sounded a little too New Age Science Fantasy Space Opera for her taste, but it at least made sense to her.

  Given her scientific mythos, she had (almost naturally) always thought of that void as a perfectly uniform universe without matter, just time and the enormous blank sheet of space with its potential for gravity. Now, however, she wasn’t so sure. Now it seemed more than that, the ‘night soil of Eternity’ as the laughing voices she had heard would have it. The eternal and infinite void—not just lots of space and time, but the absence of space and time, beyond or outside of spacetime.

  —the spore of beginnings bursts into spawn. The threads of spawn absorb the voidstuff and knit it into stars—Images of spore and spawn and fruiting body of the “First Age,” as the ghost people called it. She had always before translated that into the scientific language of Big Bang, superstrings, first generation stars. As she listened now, however, she thought that, though such a description worked within a single universe, it too hinted at something larger. The eternal and infinite void, she thought, was not just about a single universe, but the plenum of all possible universes.

  Had Kekchi perhaps given her a clue with that emphasis on dreaming? Was the dream always the plenum, the threads of the spawn bed? Was “bursting into spawn” also the divine dreaming? Was the Big Bang itself the sign of a shift in the dreaming void? The creation of spacetime and physical reality, as a result of the dreaming void becoming conscious of the dream, awakening to the fact that it was dreaming? Was the ignition of the stars—and everything else that had followed—the result of the dreamer becoming lucid within the dream?

  Stars release spores, the spores burst into spawn, the threads of spawn absorb starstuff and knit it into worlds—That was the ghost people’s description of the “Second Age.” Jacinta had always previously translated it in terms of the matter of those stars blown off in bursts of explosions, gravity’s configuring of that new matter, the planets condensing from that process. Now, though, she thought that, if it was consciousness that caused (and continued to cause) physical reality to emerge out of creative possibility and eternity, then that put a broader spin on the Second Age too. Especially since most of the scientific world believed just the opposite: that it was creative possibility and time that had allowed consciousness (in its human form) to emerge from physical reality.

  Worlds release spores, the spores burst into spawn, the threads of spawn absorb worldstuff and knit it into life—The ghost people’s “Third Age” which, translated into the scientific mythos, was the vulcanism of some of those planets spewing out early atmosphere, the proto-organics threading out and chaining up, the self-organizing life of the cell that eventually resulted. True enough, but might life’s confounding of entropy just be another, higher-order echo of dreaming too?

  Living things release spores, the spores burst into spawn, the threads of spawn absorb lifestuff and knit it into minds—The ghost people’s description of the “Fourth Age” which, when translated, was all about reproduction, the threading out of chromosomes, of DNA and RNA making evolution and the whole panoply of life possible, and eventually the knitting of all that into more consciousness, self-awareness, mind.

  Something fractally self-similar about all this, Jacinta thought. The plenum’s threads of infinite possibility collapsing down into the physical reality of individual universes, planets condensing from wisps of gas to form geospheres of earth and air and ocean, the biota’s threads of genetic possibility coiling into individuals and species, living diversity weaving within itself a creature aware that it dreams and dreams that it is aware—all inside a vast dream made physical by the dreamer’s conscious awareness of dreaming.

  Minds release spores, the spores burst into spawn, the threads of spawn absorb mindstuff and knit it into worldminds—The ghost people’s “Fifth Age”, which Jacinta readily translated into the language of her own birth-culture’s Age of Code: ideas, bedding out into roads, trade, exchange, powerlines, all feeding the sprawling mycelial circuitry of cities vertical-fruiting into skyscrapers, throwing off tentative spores of aircraft and satellites, invisible waves of electromagnetic communication, until such dreaming spawn came to the brink of either mushrooming up into cataclysm, or knitting into the fruit of worldmindfulness. Where humanity had for decades hung suspended in its history: the thick spawn of human civilization struggling to achieve its fruition in either a dream of harmony or a nightmare of disaster. Having seen what she had seen in her own dream vision, Jacinta could not help thinking that, in all echoing, mirroring self-similarity, it was no accident or coincidence that the shape of decision hanging over humanity for most of the last century had been a cloud in the shape of a mushroom.

  Worldminds release spores, the spores burst into spawn, the threads of spawn absorb worldmindstuff and knit it into starmind—A vision of the future Jacinta had already seen in the Allesseh, and in the ghost people’s “Sixth Age,” which Jacinta had translated as interstellar travel, galactic civilization. Yet the ghost people’s epic cycle went on, went further—while the Allesseh, curiously, had not.

  Starminds release spores, the spores burst into spawn, the threads of spawn absorb starmindstuff and knit it into universal mind—The “Seventh Age,” which Jacinta translated as intergalactic travel and civilization and at last universal mindfulness, what the ghost people described as the emptiness able to contain the fullness of everything.

  Why had the Allesseh not gone intergalactic? Or had it? And if it had, why had it hidden that from its constituent species? Why had it not achieved the “universal mindfulness” the ghost people’s myths spoke of?

  Universal mind, the void of endings, the void that has taken all things into itself, releases the spore of beginnings, the fullness that pours all things out of itself—Here, where the snake ate its “tale,” was the most difficult passage of all. If pressed, she could accept the ghost people’s idea of the compassionate void. If the void’s awareness of its dreaming had created physical reality, then it was at least plausible that that dreaming void should feel compassion toward all things, since they were forever born from its awakening to the fact of its dreaming. Certainly, for a void “perfect and uniform,” or “as it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be, void without end, amen,” there were scientific precedents and religious examples enough.

  The idea, however, that in the exact moment of its perfection the void always forever releases the spore that bursts outward again into spawn—that idea always gave her more difficulty. Unless what she saw in her vision, going out and coming back, was true: Individuals, species, and universes die, but the dreaming plenum goes on and on, eternal as the void itself. If somehow the plenum and the void were “one”, or two aspects of the same something, then the interwoven snake could swallow its tail to be reborn.

  The snake swallowing its own tail, the dreamer creating physical reality through conscious awareness of its dreaming—somehow those were feedback loops. Everything in all the universes was caught up in that feedback process. But how? A “plenum void”—fullness empty? full emptiness?—was a contradiction in terms.

  Then she thought again of recent visions and distant college physics. The mushroom-bejeweled interface, the wave membrane, the mirror at the border of the quantum flux, the Planck length and Planck energy, the speed of light, the physics of the first instant. She had been there, and beyond—had stepped through to the other side of the looking-glass, through the wave membrane, to the parallel, reversible, non-sequential, everything-all-at-once, quantum superposed, multiple universe wonderland. She had crossed over, from the daily blatant thingness-of-ones to the eternal latent oneness-of-things—and come back again.

  The idea of the “plenum void”—or even the idea that the “void of endings” an
d the “spore of beginnings” might somehow be one and the same—no longer seemed quite so impossible, to her. Not any more. Even if the only way she could picture it—as a string that somehow became a hole and a hole that somehow became a string—struck her as nonsensical in the extreme.

  Jacinta stopped dancing and opened her eyes again. The drumming and the dancing still went on around her, and a wind began to blow strongly through the clearing. She almost didn’t notice those things, however, for a thought had struck her. The plenum void: creative, conscious, compassionate and dreaming. Both full and empty, complete and incomplete. The Allesseh was not that. Not by a long shot.

  The ground in the gardens had begun to tremble, but Jacinta barely noticed. For all its talk of complementarity, the Allesseh had gotten it wrong! The plenum as a system, Jacinta realized, was inconsistent but complete. The system of the physical universe, however, was self-consistent but incomplete. The wavebrane is semi-permeable. Yes, the virtual here is the real there, the real here is the virtual there, but the void, plenum, and real all interpenetrated in a dreamlike fashion. The Allesseh hid in incompleteness while pronouncing itself complete!

  The ground began to shake so violently and the wind to blow so fiercely that the drummers stopped drumming, the dancers stopped dancing. Above their heads, the heavens were doing a very plausible imitation of a very mean sky, flashing gray and thundering.

  “Our Seven Ages performance has apparently angered the Allesseh,” Kekchi said to her, as the two of them and all the tepui travelers began seeking shelter in the few garden temples and roofed gazebos they could find in view.

  “By reminding it of the fact that it has not completed its mission,” Jacinta said over the wind as she ran with Kekchi. “Our existence itself—especially the Seven Ages story—is proof of the Allesseh’s incompleteness.”

  “Proof that—this weather suggests—it denies,” Kekchi said with a nod as they clambered up the stairs of a pseudo-Dionysian temple.

  Watching her footing on the steps, a thought occurred to Jacinta.

  “Kekchi,” she began, “what happens if the spawn doesn’t sacrifice itself to the next step? What happens if the spawn becomes too dense?”

  The Wise One paused at the top of the steps, thinking.

  “I’m not sure,” Kekchi said, “but the dreaming must always become real.”

  As they walked under the edge of the temple’s roof, Jacinta shook her head.

  “Maybe what we’re seeing is only a small part of the picture,” Jacinta hazarded as they walked deeper into the temple, its white roof blocking out the darkening sky, for a time at least.

  “Yes?”

  “Maybe the Allesseh is not only in this galaxy,” she continued, “but also in galaxies throughout this universe, and in universes throughout the plenum. If it is incomplete here, perhaps it is incomplete in all the galaxies and all the universes.”

  Kekchi nodded.

  “Though in any one time and space we will always be outnumbered,” the old Wise One said, “our allies are still essentially infinite.”

  Jacinta stared hard at Kekchi as bolts of lightning speared down around them, shaking the air with thunder in accompaniment to the ground-shaking of the quakes.

  “If it comes to that,” she said, “the Allesseh could obliterate us in an instant, here.”

  “It won’t,” Kekchi said with a shake of the head, long gray hair wetly flying.

  “Why not?”

  “It’s still a machine,” the Wise One said. “It needs our dreams. The Allesseh’s dreaming can only become real when it realizes it too is dreaming.”

  * * * * * * *

  Three-Quarters Starved and Half-Drowned

  The escape was Paul’s idea. Conditions in the spirit camp just kept getting worse. As rumors of fighting to the west grew steadily louder and more persistent, the amount and quality of food for the penitents had gone steadily downhill. The scream and sonic boom of jet fighters had grown more common as more sorties were, apparently, being flown with each passing day.

  On the ground in camp, however, the amount of physical labor had not changed. In the work gangs, men were dropping more and more frequently from fatigue, hunger and disease. All the penitents were looking skeletal. Even the caloric allotments for the guards seemed to have gone down in recent days.

  To Paul the situation for the penitents in camp had grown to look more and more like a race between starvation and liberation—and starvation seemed to be winning, pulling further ahead with each passing day. Only such an intolerable situation could have led him to contemplate an escape as risky as the one that, out of desperation, he devised.

  The work gang he was on had been clearing winter debris from a mountain canyon road beside a swift-flowing river. Through a haze of hunger and exhaustion, Paul realized that he had been on this river before—with the woman who had betrayed him to the morals police, Jenn Reynolds. They had gone whitewater rafting in this same stretch of the canyon.

  Paul soon saw again the Wayfarers Rafting Company camp, with the same little ichthys Christian-fishy on the sign at the roadside. Paul remembered making a joke to Jenn that he hoped that fish didn’t mean they expected him to swim the rapids. Not the wisest witticism, in hindsight.

  The owner of the rafting camp must have some political clout, Paul thought, to have the slave labor of penitents clearing his road and grounds. Especially when full scale civil war was rumored to have broken out against the generals and preacher-politicians of the CSA.

  Pausing from his attempts to help Kal Elliot and Al Brewster pry-bar a boulder into the backhoe’s bucket, Paul wondered why the rafting camp was still closed, here in early June. Were the rumors of civil war true? Was that why the place was still in off-season lockup—no customers? Or was it simply that the mountains’ deep snow pack and late spring runoff, unusually high and strong this year, made the river as yet too dangerous to run?

  After they had cleared the side road into the Wayfarers rafting camp and cleaned the grounds, the work crews continued up the main road, removing boulders that had tumbled down onto the road surface during the winter and clearing brush from the roadsides for another seven miles further. Before their late lunch break—more break than lunch, these days—Paul sighted the old jeep road that angled off the main road and ran further along the roaring river.

  In a rehabbed school bus, the Wayfarers river guides had driven Paul and Jenn and forty others in that day’s rafting party along that road, to the calmer stretch of river where they would all be putting in for their four-hour rafting run. If Paul remembered right, somewhere up that road there stood a big old shed with an array of tools, as well as life-vests, paddles, and rafts for eight rafting groups of six persons each.

  During lunch, Paul convinced Kal and Al that they should take a walk with him along the jeep road. Once his two companions had, out of curiosity, agreed, Paul informed Officer Strom that they were going to take a short walk up that road. Glancing at their electronic monitor bracelets and anklets, then at the steep walls of the canyon, Strom waved them on with an admonition to be back by the end of break—fifteen minutes—and not to make him have to come looking for them. The three penitents agreed and started off down the road.

  Paul’s immediate plan was to stroll in a leisurely fashion along the river, pry-bar in hand as a walking staff, until a bend in the road and the river took them out of sight of the guards. Seeing the river up close as they walked, however—and noting how much higher, stronger, and faster its flow was now than it had been on that trip all those years ago with Jenn—Paul’s heart misgave him. His resolution to follow through on the plan forming in his mind wavered. Once they were around the bend and out of sight of the guards, however, his resolve strengthened once more.

  “We’re going to have to jog from here,” Paul said, beginning to pick up speed. His comrades gave him perplexed looks.

  “What are you talking about?” Al asked, jogging weakly along despite himself. Paul noticed
that even Al, once a moon-faced, heavy-set gray-haired man, was looking pretty lean and gaunt—and unhealthy too, as if he were keeping himself going only by the sheer force of his will.

  “We’re supposed to be taking a break!” Kal said, still walking.

  “Do you want to get back to the world,” Paul replied, “or go on starving in camp?”

  “You planning on growing wings, or what?” Kal said, jogging tiredly along, trying to catch up.

  “Water wings,” Paul said, wishing he’d left the heavy pry-bar behind. “There’s a storage building up ahead here—for that river-rafting camp we cleaned up this morning. Their put-in point is higher up river, near here. The building is full of rafts and paddles and gear.”

  Kal glanced over at the river roaring alongside them, not twenty yards away from the edge of the road embankment. When the wind shifted, they could feel the mist from it, or at least thought they could.

  “You want to go down that?” Kal asked, incredulous. “Are you out of your mind?”

  “Maybe,” Paul said with a shrug as he thumped along over the dirt road, which stood dusty in the high spots and muddy in the low. “It’s got to be better than starving and working ourselves to death in camp, though.”

  After half a dozen minutes of running, they came into an area where the canyon widened a good deal. The river channel widened with it, so that the river’s flow, though swift, was clear and not broken by rapids. In a moment more they were standing in front of the storage building, a peeling, white-painted wooden structure, with a large roll-up door in front and a sizable, four-pane glass window in each of the other walls, for light. Those windows apparently hadn’t provided quite enough illumination, for there were also three solar panels—much newer than the building—mounted on the roof.