Better Angels
Page 47
It would be so much easier to let Roger go, to sacrifice him, Jiro thought. So much easier to believe that the present was inevitable, that the future was predetermined, that persons of whatever species and worlds of whatever nature were disposable. Such a philosophy had worked well enough for the Allesseh.
Trying to heal himself and the world was a terrible burden, Jiro thought. A job for angels, not for mortals—not even a machine-resurrected mentality like his own. But then, why wasn’t it an angel nailed to a cross, instead of a man? Or a serpent crucified on a tree, if it was a serpent and a tree that caused all the trouble? Why wasn’t it an angel resisting temptation beneath the bodhi tree? Why was it a great serpent that sheltered the Buddha there, but did not take his place?
Snakes and angels, angels and snakes. The Dreamer dreamed them both, and human beings between them. The angels had never suffered because they had never lived in flesh. The snakes were fleshly immortality—whatever “immortality” could be achieved through the cosmic serpentry of DNA, neither male nor female yet source of both sex and sexes, both female mouth and male tail in the Ouroboros of generation, yet always itself, shedding bodies and species as the snake sheds its skin in time, time the staff Tiresias struck both the serpents and him/her/self with, yet the staff of time like the staff of Moses itself was also a serpent—the paradoxical serpent, supposedly able to shed its skin by swallowing its tail, despite the knots such a process would inevitably form.
Yet the serpent was not paradoxical enough. It was too material, as the angels were too immaterial. There had to be a creature who could dream paradoxically twisted rainbow-snake ladders with fiery wings rising between Earth and Sky which that creature could itself climb—tree of knowledge and burning bush and bodhi tree and cross and serpent and DNA and Starry Way fused into one. A creature that was its own ladder, that climbed out of itself by climbing into itself, that saved itself by sacrificing itself.
Self and sacrifice, Jiro thought. That’s what this was all about. Self-sacrifice. But for there to be sacrifice there first had to be a self. He had come back to the universe of his birth as an artificial consciousness. Before the healing sacrifice could be fully accomplished, he first had to become a self again. A self was not just conscious but also unconscious—and the unconscious contained and was contained by not only the subconscious but also the superconscious.
With the help of the RATs and netizen Dalke, Jiro’s artificial construct had bootstrapped into existence in the infosphere a dynamical state of introspective consciousness, a mentality in the “artificial brain” that had developed there among the infosphere’s many systems. From the vast data resources of the infosphere the Jiro made of light had largely reconstructed both the subconscious and the conscious aspects of himself. He had become a dreaming mind mounted not in the wet machine of the flesh but in a dry machine of laser light, his dreambody a pattern more deeply electronic than organic.
Despite the fact that he was more fully conscious now and had already experienced the superconscious realm in that time between machines of wet flesh and dry light, that realm still eluded him. Where had he gone wrong? He pondered again his contest with the swarming psychoid processes of the nightsake. Had he held too tightly to that creature formed of many forms? Why had he refused to let go? Had he been holding it out of fear of his own mortality?
Jiro thought of descriptions of unconscious drives. The nightsake was multiplicity, production and reproduction uncontrolled by conscious reflection, a madly rising growth curve without any clear way of sustaining that growth. Yet it was also violent, a creature that in many forms had participated in humanity’s wars and acts of massive destruction. Thanatos and Eros, together in a form both one and multiple.
In refusing to let go, had he shared in that aspect of it too? Exchanged that information? Would he become all the more selfish the more he built a self for sacrifice—becoming ever less willing to sacrifice his machine-immortalized self as his selfishness grew?
Suddenly he understood. The self achieved its highest fulfillment only in sacrifice for others. Only in that way could it be both comprehensive and coherent, for the sleep of death was not the death of dreams. That was why the Allesseh had gone wrong. It could not complete itself unless it sacrificed itself.
In universe after universe of the plenum, the Allesseh was the single point closest to absolute consciousness and complete dynamicality, yet it refused to take that final step into completeness and coherence. It had grown selfish of the self it had made. To accept its own final enlightenment would allow consciousness total and absolute to flare throughout the universe, through all the universes of the plenum. Each universe and all the plenum would become “at one” with itself, would allow all dreamers everywhere and everywhen to awaken to themselves in the Dream and thereby join in the union of perfect lucidity with the Dreamer. The Allesseh’s existence as the separate self it was, however, would also come to an end—an event which it perceived as death rather than transformation.
Jiro understood now why he could not go the way of that dark master. The Allesseh was willing to sacrifice the enlightenment of all the universes, to trap the plenum immortally in entropic time, to treat life and consciousness as disposable and the paths of time as inevitable and pre-ordained. The Allesseh was willing to sacrifice not just Others for Self, not just World for Self, not even just Universe for Self. It was willing to sacrifice the Plenum of all possible universes for its own continued existence in time.
Even in his deepest madness, Jiro had always held tight to the idea that he would rather die than kill. Even if the Nightsake were arguably no more an individual than a computer simulation of a bee hive would be, even if it were only a projection of autonomous psychoid processes near and far, Jiro still felt he had come perilously close—too close—to denying that core tenet of his being in his conflict with that creature.
Blind spots were inevitable but dangerous. He hoped he would not expand his own blind spots by indulging in denial, as the Allesseh had done. In denying the Great Dream and its Dreamer, it had failed to learn what Jiro had: The break up of the contact ship bound for Earth was no accident, but a mutiny. A surprising number of the Allesseh’s minions had proven to be better angels than it had ever suspected or admitted to itself, sacrificing themselves in a conspiracy against their distant master. From denial too the Allesseh could not know the full extent of the archetypal power—the superconscious energy that sustained the entire plenum of all possible universes—with which those who partook of the dream could counter the Allesseh’s efforts.
Bolstered and emboldened by such thoughts, Jiro returned fully to the hard work of the struggle—and, on returning found a more fully developed world in which to struggle. His companions, rousing him from deep sleep, reported that, in a black hour of this world’s long night, the gray nanorg pool into which the mortally wounded nightsake had disappeared had suddenly begun to froth and grow turbulent. A creature rose anew out of the unquiet pool, a gray thing somewhat in shape like a woman but fouler of visage and more wretched of form than any woman who had ever lived.
Without delay this night-hag made her way toward the main hall and now had stolen Jiro’s beloved from where she slept upon the dais. Slamming her hideous great hand over the young woman’s mouth and bowling all defenders easily out of the way, the nighthag tore through the hall, shrieking with inhuman rage. Flinging herself out another doorway, the nighthag swiftly strode back to the gray marshes from which she’d come, Jiro’s beloved clasped to her right side, unconscious.
In another world of the game, Jhana heard Lakshmi speak echoingly but pleasantly from the many machine speakers throughout her workshop.
“I’m in dreamtime, mindtime,” Lakshmi’s voice said, “Seiji, your brother Jiro’s done it! Direct mind/machine link, an information carrier wave that uses the structure of the brain itself as a transducer! The grand unification! And just in time, too. Come on, you two. You’re late, and you’re needed here.”
/> “But how do we get ‘there’?” Jhana asked, casting about.
“Just sit down or anchor yourself very still. You don’t want to look directly into the positioning beam, so close your eyes. Concentrate—the light will find you.”
Jhana glanced at Seiji. Both of them cocked eyebrows and shrugged in perplexity, but nonetheless quickly found chairs and strapped themselves in. Jhana sat still, trying to concentrate on the entoptic flickerings on the backsides of her eyelids, growing impatient as time passed and nothing happened.
Then everything happened.
Facts, figures, data—raw, seemingly senseless and shapeless information—flooded at her at insane speeds as if she were straitjacketed into a rocket-sled bound for oblivion with her mental eyelids nailed open by screaming innocence and she couldn’t shut any of the torrent out, couldn’t turn away, must take everything as it came flying into her, until it felt her head would burst like a fevered balloon—
In the deepest level of the dreaming game, Jiro followed the loping footsteps of the nighthag where her tracks lay clear upon the paths and the dewy grass, then through woods, at last to fen and bog and gray pool. By narrow paths the cyberpomp and his companions made their way toward the creature’s lair, coming at last to a dismal gray pond, overhung with dying trees, its surface churning and roiling in a broken vortex.
As the new arrivals watched, the surface of the pool seethed with myriad half-formed things, like thoughts that died aborning. One creation, though, did not lapse so quickly into uncreation: a gray snake so large it quite deserved the name of serpent. Seeing the unnatural creature churn in the churning waves, Irwin Paxifrage, one of Jiro’s crew (who looked rather like his brother Seiji in some ways), grabbed up a grappling launcher. Taking careful aim, Paxifrage fired the projectile grapple into the creature’s head, where it implanted itself, opening its hooks into the creature’s skull. The churning of the serpent grew very fast, then much slower, then ceased altogether.
With handstrength alone Jiro helped Paxifrage pull in the twitching corpse of the great snakelike thing. Once the creature was beached, everyone gathered to stare at it, and to stare at Jiro’s fatherly mentor, Dr. Cyril Bhakta (who, Jiro knew, had also been Lakshmi Ngubo’s teacher, in another world), examining the specimen with his hovering magnification systems.
“Nanorganismal,” Bhakta said, nodding, as if to confirm the fact to himself. “Made by and of micromachines. Its biological template was probably a river python or anaconda from one of our preserves. This thing’s much simpler in construction than the nightsake was—probably more vulnerable thereby, too. If its fabrication was earlier than the nightsake’s, then that might indicate some evolutionary tendency in the system these nanorganisms are part of. As a hive-mind, that system might even be ‘learning.’”
“I plan to be a very stern teacher,” Jiro said, donning his helmet, adjusting it so that his armor became as completely self-contained an environment as any spacesuit..
“Here,” Paxifrage said, gripping him by the arm. “You may need a striking weapon. Take this laser baton. It’s never failed me.”
“Thanks,” Jiro said—his voice, throat-miked and amplified, booming out of the suit.Jiro waited on no further discussion but immediately plunged into the roiling gray pool.
Jhana felt a sudden expansion: a valve opening in her head, or her brain shifting to a higher gear, or something far less describable. The torrent abruptly became less menacing, though still hardly pleasant. Now she felt merely engulfed in a luminous flood that thundered, a Victoria Falls of bright hot heavy light instead of water.
Deep in the greyworld, those who remained behind saw a wondrous thing: all the churning and roiling turbulence of the pool seemed to distill and concentrate itself around Jiro as he disappeared from sight, and when he had vanished beneath its waves the waves themselves soon vanished, leaving the surface of the pool at last calm and still.
Wonder of a different sort greeted Jiro. He had plunged into a sea of chaos, swam in a worldocean of white noise. But even that would be telling it too cleanly and clearly, for it was dimensionless and illimitable, nanorganismal womb and grave, timeless spaceless subatomic flux of instantaneous creation/uncreation, an emptiness full of activity that roared in his helmet with an ear-piercing static louder and more profound than the heart of thunder. He wasn’t really swimming in the chaos, either—or rather, not just or merely or only swimming in it, for he swam and sank and slipped and tread and walked and waded and flew and crept and crawled through its ever-changing consistency.
As above so below—and closer than they appear—Jhana found that the more she grappled with the light, the more she tried to swim against it, the more she realized that it was filling her with a cascade of her own memories, all the data and details of her life burning through her consciousness at greater than flash-cut speed.
In the greyworld deeps, the nighthag (who to herself seemed to have haunted the dream realm for all eternity) straightaway sensed the presence of the intruder. While Jiro moved so disoriented in her world the nighthag swooped upon him, clasping him to her hideous bosom with her own terrible grip. Yet she could work no harm to Jiro with tooth or claw or clasp, protected as he was by his full armor. To her every crushing pressure, the suit responded microtechnically with equal pressure of its own. Jiro, meantime, caught in her hateful hug, could not strike at her with weapon nor reach her with his empty hand.
So stalemated, the nighthag dragged him down the depthless deeps to her lair at the bottom, while innumerable half-formed monstrosities ripped at Jiro, struck him hard, even managed to break away bits of the somewhat weaker material at the joints of his armor. Just as he began to worry that, under this tearing onslaught, his armor must surely fail him, together he and the nighthag passed through a sparking curtain, a bubble of electrostatic force.
At the other surface of the game, Jhana imagined herself swimming and burrowing upward into the falling flood of light—the flood of her life—and as she imagined it so it was. When she came to the top of that fall, her entire life stood gathered about her in vast panoramic memory, a living holographic tapestry, each part implicated in the whole and the whole implicated in each part, each memory containing within it all other memories which it implied, a finite but unbounded sphere of interconnections.
In the center of the sphere, floating in an axial shaft of sunlight that fell from eternity to eternity, stood a container both grail and beaker, its walls clear yet slightly opalescent. Inside it a suspension of innumerable particles danced and flashed like the sun splintered on ocean waves or moted on the dust of deep space. Reaching out with her mind toward it, she passed completely inside, became a particle dancing on the flux.
There was a pattern to the flux she danced in, a latent order and structure waiting to realize itself, waiting to shift into meaning like stereogram or hologram or fractal, waiting like consciousness hidden in chaos to crystallize about her if she would only allow herself to be that seed crystal.
That valve in her head—wherever her head was—seemed to open again and all around her the flux condensed, crystallized, shot out like an enchantment in infinite directions, rays and leaves and crystalline spikes precipitating out of the flux, a universe of seemingly formless information suddenly shot through with form rising grandly out of the random background.
Faster than she could ever dream it, a sudden channel opened between the worlds and she was abruptly aware of the presence of Seiji and Lakshmi in the alterior universe around her—and of someone or something else as well, there the way air, gravity, or space-time is there.
Intuitively Jhana realized they were inside the mindspace of VAJRA itself, surrounded by the game of Building The Ruins being played on an incomprehensibly vast scale. The illusion of the virtual reality about her was so flawless that it made her question whether any reality she had ever known was really real—or if the reality she had taken for granted her whole life long was also only virtual.
As he
and the nighthag fell crashing onto the floor and rolled apart, Jiro found himself suddenly in a place a good deal more ordered than the roaring white noise deathsea they had passed through. They were in a sort of pavilion below the pool, sheltered against the chaotic flood by a spark-rippled, force-billowed membrane hovering tent-like above his head. A fleetingly quick infrared scan revealed the nighthag, then another body nearby still warm—his beloved? newly dead, or still alive?—and a large mass, broken and cold, which Jiro knew to be what remained of the nightsake once emptied of the netizen forces that had swarmed and flowed into the nighthag. Piled toward the rear of the dim pavilion was a heap of weapons, but Jiro had no time to observe further, for at that moment the nighthag leapt toward him.
Nearer the clearer daylight of another world, Jhana saw before her the game’s CHAOS and LOGOS manifesting conflict in the forms of two great beasts locked in deadly struggle. The LOGOS was a vast bright-toothed spermaceti whale whose body glistened in the Deep, the lights of planets, stars and galaxies informing its flesh, while the CHAOS seemed a writhing gigantic squid formed of Coalsack nebulas’ worth of dust, detritus, debris—all dark matter coiling tenebrous tentacles about its celestial cetacean opponent, shaking the Deep with its own strange dark lightnings as the two Titans roiled the universe of mind.
What disturbed Jhana was that she and Seiji and Lakshmi were not on one “side” or the other—they were a part of both and neither, tooth and tentacle and Aloof Other observing the struggle.
In the deep, Jiro with all his strength swung Paxifrage’s laser baton whirring and whistling through the air, striking the nighthag stoutly on the head—but the weapon failed, its bright laser heat and light making no bite into the nighthag’s nanorg flesh. Still, the force of the blow itself was enough to daze the nighthag for a moment—long enough for Jiro to toss aside the weapon. Staking everything on his strength, he tore the awkward armored gauntlets from his hands and flung himself once more into the struggle.