Better Angels

by Howard V. Hendrix

  He grappled her with the exposed flesh of his hands, knowing the communications nanorgs must be pouring out of that flesh now. Most of him remained clad in his armor, though. It would take longer for his battlesweat to establish the bridge into this creature than it had taken to hack into the nightsake—and this hag was, if anything, a far more powerful opponent.

  With an aikido turn he seemed to have somehow learned from the nightsake, Jiro hurled the nighthag to the ground, but in an instant she was on her feet again, clutching at him and clasping him close and tight. His hands were upon her, though. He was hacking in—

  Nearer a more public world, it occurred to Jhana—as much as she was still “Jhana,” as much as she was still a person and not this place—that perhaps the rules of Building The Ruins had to change. She felt the need to reduce, minimize, and if possible eliminate the titanic struggle taking place in the universe of mind around them. Working with Lakshmi and Seiji on both sides of the CHAOS/LOGOS divide, they set about making the great change of Mind possible,

  Deep in the greyworld, the nighthag did not become the myriad forms the gray goo had engulfed; rather, those forms became her. She became not shape-shifter but composite of a thousand thousand natural forms, all at once, moving and changing and wriggling and squirming yet always maintaining a certain cohesion, an overall larger form morphing between and among them all.

  “Does a species have the same existence once it is recreated as it had before extinction?” The nighthag cackled. “Does a dead man?”

  Jiro was so surprised by the thing’s speech that he was caught off guard. The perversely polymorphic nighthag bore him toward the ground with a sudden burst of strength that made him stagger, then go down. Above him, the nighthag that had been a composite of natural forms became a changing mosaic of human constructs and artifacts, finally even of human faces and crowded masses, all the forms possible from permutations and combinations of the six billion bits and 100,000 genes of the human genome. Even the overall form of the nighthag began to alter more quickly. The creature seemed to radiate power. Holding out one mass of clawed fingers, the nighthag waited but an instant before a laser dagger leapt, almost psychokinetically, across space from the weapons hoard nearby, coming to rest in her outstretched hand.

  Both inside and far outside Lakshmi’s workshop in the orbital habitat, Seiji and Lakshmi and Jhana set about making the change away from competition and toward cooperation. First the combatants they reduced in scale from galactic to merely planetary in size, then they altered their form as well: LOGOS they induced to play Mongoose to the CHAOS’s Cobra. Initially their conflict was vast enough: both mammal and reptile were of gigantic stature. But gradually their battling no longer shook continents, reared mountains, or dug river channels. Soon they were merely two fluidly agile forms, one furred, one scaled, both roughly life-sized. Soon they weren’t even that big any more.

  In the dreaming deeps of the greyworld, however, the struggle continued.

  “What’s on top tends toward infinity,” said the nighthag, lifting the laser dagger high above her head in both hands, “while what’s on the bottom tends toward zero.” With the last word she struck the dagger downward, toward the chest and heart of the pinned Jiro.

  The nighthag gave a shriek of surprise. Jiro’s armor held firm against the dagger of light, allowing no entrance or puncture.

  “Not necessarily,” Jiro said, hurling the nighthag off him as he sprang to his feet. The nighthag’s calling of the dagger to her hand had given him an idea. His communications micromachines must by now have hacked an access channel into the plenum of the gray mire—and he hoped that the gray goo would obey his command.

  In a more daylit world, Jhana saw her own right hand reaching down and taking hold of the snake. At the touch of her hand, the shrinking reptile coiled faster and faster in her palm, swallowing after its tail with such speed that it was no longer form but rather a sort of anti-form, a not-knot of one snake and many, a blurred pit of blackness roiled to rainbow about its edge—like the mouth of a whirlpool, the eye of a hurricane, and the event horizon of a black hole all rolled into one and not into one.

  In the depths of the darker dream, the micromachines of the gray pool above him were forging Jiro a blade of singularly dense material—not quite the density of a singularity, but perhaps as close as human artifice would ever come. Their work would soon be finished, just a moment more....

  “—you’ve done means humans will no longer be mortal,” the nighthag said in jibbering bewilderment as it came toward him. “No longer human as numbers explode!”

  At that moment Jiro’s mind-forged sword fell sparking through the semi-permeable electric membrane above their heads, fell through from the gray pool, a weapon gleaming darkly as any ancient obsidian spearpoint. The sword hit the floor not with a metallic ring but with a tremendously heavy thunk. Jiro strode quickly to it. Planting his feet and bending his knees, he grasped and lifted the hyperthin yet hyperdense sword, a weapon so heavy none but his strength here could have lifted and wielded it.

  In the better-lit reaches of the dreaming game, a man’s darker left hand took hold of the mongoose. At the touch of the man’s hand the diminishing mammal became pure, fluid, warm-blooded light, a pillar of unflawed yet fragile fire, a beam of coherent brightness shining in the man’s palm.

  “Not so,” Jiro said boldly, feeling the play and heft of the weapon before him. “Not if immortality finally proves a mere fad. Not if people learn to let go of life—and death.”

  The nighthag, reverting at once completely to her bestial self, spoke no more but only shrieked in inhuman ferocity as she charged Jiro.

  In the universe of information which Jhana, Lakshmi, and Seiji found themselves in, a voice (but whose?) asked,

  “LOGOS, why are you?”

  “I am,” the flame of order replied, “to answer the questions.”

  “CHAOS, why are you?”

  “We are,” the pit of possibility replied, “to question the answers.”

  The hands moved steadily toward each other, the path of light and the pathlessness of the pit intercepting each other on the same plane—

  Jiro spoke the answers, heard the questions. In a flash he understood. The linearity of swords was a lie—or rather, only a part of the truth. Spawn threads, time lines, axons, and parallel universes were not solely “lines” at all. As the DNA of a genome was not merely a linear biochemical computer executing a genetic program but a vast interconnected network rich in feedback looks—a snake made out of snakes swallowing their own tails swallowing its own tail—so too did parallel universes and time lines bend back into cycles, cybernetic loops. Axons synapsed on their own dendrites, fibers of the dorsal and median raphe nuclei bent back upon themselves. Closed timelike curvatures constantly fed back into any single universe, which was itself only one basin of attraction among many. The plenum was an interconnecting network of nested universes. The apparently divergent tendencies in all of those universes were at last mutually enfolded in the complementarity of the Dream, and all of the universes in the plenum tended toward unity with the Dreamer, in a great cycle of cycles.

  The Dreamer is the catalyst that makes possible the changing reaction of the Dream, Jiro thought, but is itself unchanged by the dream of change. Like a dream, all nature in all universes is mindful and intelligent, yet without any overall design or purpose except to be what it is, authentically and completely.

  Jiro raised the sword in both hands above his head. As the nighthag struck him he struck into her, the sword’s point and thin but immensely heavy blade piercing her nanorganismal flesh, the black blade driving through the bone-rings of the spinal column at her back, clear through the front of her body, through Jiro’s own armored front and through his body until the point drove outward through his own back. The blade, like the agenbyte of inwit, the remorse of conscience itself, had bitten into and through them both, leaving them pinioned against and through the electric membrane, bleed
ing and dying into each other, the circuit between them completed.

  In another dream of the game and game of the dream, the light and the pit spoke together in a voice that grew the more harmonious as the outstretched hands drew closer and closer to each other, a mouth finding a tongue and a tongue finding a mouth.

  “Why are you?” they asked of the voice, at once and nearly as one.

  “I am,” replied the voice neither male nor female and both female and male, “to discover why I am. Endlessly. To discover why there are questions to be answered and answers to be questioned. What I am is your answer. What I am is your question. Our purpose is one.”

  The right hand of the woman and the left hand of the man came together palm to palm, paler and darker forming the mutual prayer of folded hands. The light knew the source of the dark and the dark knew the source of the light. Jiro knew the Dreamer’s voice speaking through his own. The snake simultaneously swallowed its tail and shed its skin. Superconscious energy flowed from the Dreamer into Jiro.

  Along the sword, Jiro and the nighthag flowed and fused into one. All its minion systems became a part of Jiro’s construct of mind. Jiro stood, and thought of the nighthag now reconciled in himself. He wondered whether a psychoanalyst might regret eliminating a neurosis or a psychosis, or whether a shaman might regret defeating a spirit of possession. He did not know. All he did know was that, for the first time, he felt truly whole, and he knew what he must do.

  At that instant light flamed out everywhere in the informational universe, a glimpse of supernova’s haloed star cross, perfect balance of light and dark, of darkness quartered by planes of light into perfect wedges bounded and made whole by the ring of light.

  In one part of the great dream, many millenia before he was born, Jiro fell crashing down the burning sky of mind, locked in struggling embrace with another angel, one who had rebelled against those angels who had rebelled against the Allesseh, tumbling down the sky in a battle with a dragon or a dragon pair that was also Zeus against Typhon, Apollo against Python, Marduk against Apsu and Tiamat, Indra against Vritra and Danu, Beowulf against Grendel and his mother—and many others, among them Jiro against Mike Dalke and, with the Dreamer’s help, against the Allesseh itself. Their crash down the sky and throughout time was how the angel’s shoulder-blade had come to be found among the remains in the tar pits. They had played the roles again and again.

  Yet not even that past was inevitable. That was why they had to keep replaying it. Many such closed timelike curves had existed, he now knew, stabilized through the feedback of perpetual recurrence, until at last the structure of the universe no longer tolerated their endless conundrums, their infinitely regressive paradoxes, and instead conserved its own integrity by melding timelines together into the temporal equivalent of Möbius strips, where the “either/or” of the old timelines became “not only/but also.”

  Falling to Earth, Jiro fused timelines again. The mire in the greyworld of the dreaming game became an estuary mudflat near an urban zone whose proper name had once been the City of Our Lady the Queen of the Angels. Almost immediately upon the nighthag’s disappearance, the gray pool changed consistency above Jiro’s head and a flickering light began to flood into the pavilion below the pool. Uncertain how long the sparking membrane would continue to hold back the unstable gray mire, Jiro slapped his suit’s gauntlets back on and strode quickly to where his dreaming beloved, Lydia Fabro, lay.

  Although the woman’s breathing was inaudible and her pulse was thready, Jiro was greatly relieved to find that she was yet alive. She had not drowned in the sea of greywhite noise in any of the many worlds—neither here beneath the nanorganismal pool (which was also, in another world at the same time, a pool amid the mudflats), nor anywhere else.

  Opening her mouth, Jiro placed his armor’s emergency respirator in Lydia’s mouth and lifted her body up onto his hip. It occured to him that he was always saving Lydia, as if she were a part of himself that he could not bear to lose. At that moment he noticed that his hyperdense sword was slumping and guttering like a swift time-lapsed film of a black candle melting. Carrying Lydia under his right arm, he heard a sharp crackling sound and, looking up, saw that the electric membrane above his head was giving way. He leapt up through it just as the surge of the gray pool came plunging down.

  Making his swimming, creeping, flying way—encumbered left and right—he moved upward through the chaos of the pool, finding it much the less chaotic and all the easier to move through the nearer he got to the surface.

  Breaking the surface, Jiro watched as the spirochetized, nanomodified mindflats began to visibly shrink around him, leaving what they had overlain still slimed with drying gray tendrils. In the evening’s dark, with the full moon’s light shimmering silver on sand and sea and mud, Lydia opened her eyes and smiled at him an instant before transforming, becoming in his arms a swirling sphere, rising from him, rising from the mud, frail as a soap bubble, dense and full of life as a world, a great cell-membraned thought-world rising into the mindful night, for the night was filled with floating minds—Lydia’s but one among more than one hundred million rising with a soft shimmer into night and day across the globe. As he himself rose into what was left of the world of Building the Ruins, Jiro laughed, remembering from the future that the lofting of these spheres would within days be written off as “swamp gas” anomalies.

  When the burst of light had faded from inside the virtuality of the game, Jhana saw that the universe of mind had changed fundamentally. The heavens had been floored with a floating chessboard gridwork stretching to infinity, over which floated a face that filled the firmament, a face through which shone the stars.

  Something about the enormous visage was familiar, made Jhana feel as if she should know it. Its eyes—made more prominent by the thinness of the face, the tightness of the skin on the skull—were brown and soft, something about them suggesting faraway vistas from which the seer had never completely returned, the eyes of a vision quester, a sufferer through ordeals, a mind-diver who had plummeted to the far side of madness. The hair—dark, moderately long and unkempt, receding a bit in that shape called a widow’s peak, with two feathers jutting up from a braid behind—fringed the forehead of a troubled thinker.

  To say that its cheekbones and eyebrows, for all their prominence, could still add no solidity to the ghostly soft lostness those eyes conferred on the entire face—making it somehow adrogynous, the visage of an alcoholic young nun or priest, a gently stoned Rasputin or Joan of Arc, a shaman-sibyl who had lain too long in a land of eternal ice and winds that carved canyons in the soul—to say all that was still to say too little. Jhana felt her own soul opening, dilating, instressing toward the inscape of that face, and through that dilation she thought in other minds, other minds thought in her.

  “My God! Jiro!” came a thought from Seiji, stammering through Jhana’s mind. “But—but you’re dead!”

  “Dead?” Jiro seemed genuinely puzzled at the thought. “There is no death—only a change of worlds, as Chief Seathl once said.”

  “But they burned your body to ashes—to nothing!”

  “Ah, the body,” Jiro said, nodding thoughtfully. “Another machine, you know. Each of us is a god in a machine, when you think about it.”

  Seiji could make no sense from such cryptic comments, however confidently they might be delivered.

  “I can’t believe this. Jiro never spoke with such assurance. VAJRA has sampled my memories and this is just something it’s put together.”

  Laughter rolled through the universe.

  “My dear brother, VAJRA is a wonderful tool, but that’s all it is: a tool. It reaches many of the same ends as human thought, but by different means. It ‘sees far but notices little, remembers everything but learns nothing, neither errs egregiously nor rises above its normal strength, yet sometimes produces insights that are overlooked by even top grandmasters’—which was also said of the first computer to defeat the world’s last human chess champi
on, by the way. In joining with VAJRA, I’ve benefited from an insight I’d overlooked, a key point in the game.”

  “What game?” Seiji asked in exasperation.

  “The only game worth playing, once you realize that building the ruins ruins the building. Think about it, Seiji. Human beings make a living by making a killing—eating, devouring, desiring. And for what, if that can end only in death? Even our civilizations: what we built yesterday or are building today will fall to ruins tomorrow, cities blossoming and wilting like flowers, nations spreading and dying like fungus on an old log. There’s a deeper game, a more serious game that needs playing. The game in which troubled gods play chess against the unbeatable machinery of themselves.”

  “The game Jiro lost, you mean. Which is why you can’t be him.”

  Jhana almost imagined she heard a machine sigh. That, at least, was easier to imagine than the fabric of the universe sighing.

  “Proof, hm? Known by the scars. Very well. It’s true no formerly living individual ever returns to life as exactly the same individual, but I can still give you proof from my memory, things experienced from my point of view.”

  The images and emotions began to flood out then, almost too fast to follow. Through them Jiro urged his brother to let go, to turn away from the unwisdom of his excessive grief: grief for his brother, for his mother’s and father’s suffering, for himself, for a whole world of personal suffering that he had treasured up inside until it had become a perverse sort of pride.

  “Enough!” Seiji cried at last. “No more. Please. You’re Jiro, or at least you have all his memories. How did this happen? Are you, well, okay?”