Better Angels

by Howard V. Hendrix

  Universal mirth echoed around them again.

  “Quite well, for someone who’s ‘dead.’ Better than ever, actually. Sorry to have to put you through all that, but you did want proof.”

  Abruptly a cafe table appeared on the chessboard floor of the sky and Jiro, down from the sky, was seated across from them.

  “My old machinery had some problems—chemical imbalances, that sort of thing—so I took an example from holography and split myself into two beams of coherent light, an object beam and a reference beam, as it were, and transferred to a new machine whatever information was transferrable from the old. Once Lakshmi allowed those two beams to constructively interfere with each other again, by reactivating the machinery I’d transferred myself into, I became aware of my identity and situation. Suffered a great loneliness, but conscious again, back in time, which amounts to the same thing—though differently from what I was.”

  Jiro’s simulacrum, his virtual self, dressed in the full regalia of a Dwamish Indian shaman—complete with a medicine bundle adorned with a trefoil symbol—leaned back in his virtual chair, apparently thoughtful.

  “Of course, since I no longer have a human body or a human brain, it can be persuasively argued that I no longer have a human consciousness. Perhaps so. A conundrum for the philosophers, with their ‘emergent fractal self-organizing dynamical chaotic networks-within-networks’ and ‘trans-thermodynamic informational black holes’. Not so far off, really. All I know is that I feel more truly human than ever—isn’t that strange?”

  “Then you really are okay?”

  Jiro’s simulacrum laughed and turned the whole world around them into myriad staring eyes, surveillance watching on different “screens” Roger Cortland drifting toward his nexus point, Atsuko Cortland watching the Möbius Cadœceus show, Marissa Correa and Paul Larkin searching for Roger, military shuttles coming up from Earth, Balance Tien-Jones and Ka Vang and Egan Ortap coming with them, a thing like a strange spirit-animal moving out into space after Roger—

  “If you mean, do I still see the world like this, the answer is no—and yes,” Jiro said, disappearing the eyes and surveillance screens. “Paranoia and metanoia both arise from the realization that everything is interconnected, related, even if, to simpler senses, there seems to be no relationship. The paranoid fears or desires something in that interconnectedness, but the metanoid blissfully accepts its presence. I’m not afraid of the weight of interconnectedness anymore—it’s glorious, in fact!”

  Leaning forward, he smiled.

  “It’s like each of us is part of a spin pair whose total spin, the total spin of the universe, is zero. Change my spin and you change hers, change hers and you change mine, for we are all inextricably linked. Subatomic karma, cosmic golden rule,” he said, bright-eyed and laughing. “That linkage is why, when I ‘died,’ you had your vision of the future, the man on horseback at sunset, Seij. If the metanoid, the mystic, is a diver who can swim, and the schizophrenic is a diver who can’t, then I feel I’ve learned to swim at last.”

  “But what about the Ruins game?” someone—Jhana or Seiji or Lakshmi, or perhaps all of them—asked. “And the X-shaped structures? And Roger? And the list of names in the RAT code? And the occupation force from Earth?”

  “Oh yes,” Jiro smiled. “All that. Has to do with information, you know. With human help, especially from the three of you, the game has been a way of moving and shaping and integrating tremendous amounts of information into a form useful for creating what Tetragrammaton’s theoretical physicists call ‘quantum information density structures’ or ‘quids.’ Quids allow one to move into and through the gravitational bed of space-time—to open a hole in the sky, climb into it, and pull the hole in after.

  “Like God, the Project and the Program knew us in the womb. You, Jhana, you, Seiji, and me, and Roger Cortland—we were the ones up here whose lives have been most impacted by the long planning of Tetragrammaton, the uterotonic experimentation of Medusa Blue. Atsuko Cortland and Paul Larkin also had previous exposure to KL. There are others, as well. You two and Roger were potentially predictable focal points for this transition, especially because you’d all suffered the death of a loved one recently and were all shaken by grief, primed for transformation. Marissa and Lakshmi have proven a surprise, though, and Lev and Aleister McBruce too, and Roger—ah, the man, and his darkness, and what has happened to him I must acknowledge mine. He is perhaps more sinned against than sinning.

  “When I leave through that hole I mentioned, by becoming it, that density of shaped information I’ve gathered must be returned. That’s where the information refractors, the X-shaped structures, come in: What was taken in must be poured out again. A kenosis will take place, a prevenient grace will flood out, a paraclete will shine forth in every mind, calling that mind to remember, to learn again what it really is. In that instant we will have in a circle round us, if only for a moment, the chain of the hours, the sequence of the years, the order of the heavenly host. We will for a very brief time stand in that event horizon, that ring of light in which all times can be seen at one place and all spaces can be seen at one time.

  “How each mind responds to that situation, to that call, is of course each mind’s own business. One can hope, however, that a constructive interference will take place, a simultaneous interaction of chance and necessity. A miracle. A crux point in human history. An evolutionary shift. An irenic apocalypse. One that helps people realize certain behaviors and structures are obsolete—that maybe this occupation fleet, for instance, is just the last fling of the old warrior economy and the threat it poses to habitats everywhere.”

  Jiro wished he could tell them more. About how any system’s structure is the physical embodiment of its pattern of organization. About how a given pattern of organization can be embodied in many different ways. About how dream and waking, wave and particle, chaos and order, comprehensiveness and coherence, completeness and consistency, cooperation and competition, cyclicality and linearity were all mutually enfolded in each other. About how the X-shaped structures, glinting in the sun in space, had micropropelled themselves into an equatorial position along a not-so-hypothetical sphere. About how the genes in early prophase looked like knotted snakes. About how much mitosis, in the movement of its components, looked like a Daisyworld simulation. About how the X-sats had canted over, changed orientation from the vertical to the horizontal. About how they were even now separating, moving like chromosomes from metaphase to anaphase in some enormous dividing cell, unseen spindle poles drawing the half-Xs toward their final destination. About how all that—and hadron formation, hypercycles, autopoiesis, Gaian functioning, cybernetic feedback, much more—were all snakes swallowing their own tails. About how nothing was inevitable, not even nothing. He could only hope the Light might show them that once he was gone.

  Jiro stood, growing swiftly larger in the firmament.

  “Deus absconditus ex machina,” he said, waving and smiling as if at some wonderful joke. “Time to wake up from the nightmare of time, to go through to the other side. Someone’s waiting there for me. Adieu, adieu. Remember me, and re-cognize yourselves, in the very near future—”

  Jiro disappeared in light, vanished into more than visible light, into superconscious light coherent as laser and comprehensive as the Big Bang. Spreading through all space, he had the odd sensation of leaving a womb, of being born again out of the universe he thought he knew, the Earth shining like a jewel there, in the deep cave of the night.

  The more than visible light as he left this spacetime behind made lightpaths spike everywhere like bright spawn. Made lambent knots of flickering fire dance above the heads of every human being. And dolphin, whale, chimpanzee, bonobo, ape, orangutan...Blasted like a great dream into all minds. Made all eyes jitter in all heads. Sent eyes remming fiercely one and all. Sent knots of flame lambent like speedily twisting rainbow snakes like cycling salmon circles like mandalas like mšbius strips like infinity skysigns now appearing over
every brow. Sent supernal light to the bow of Earth bending in straight lines, surging spawning spiking shining down, clasping Earth in wings bright with a billion billion lightpath pinions, clear light striking into every mind in every land, treading DMNs and demons down, speaking in tongues of flame and in flickering eyes, restoring to the language of the very cells the Tetragrammaton word lost at Babel, causing in the heavens above the Earth the floating planet-mindful spheres—the bubble thought-worlds of the spirochetized—not so much to burst as to spread out smilingly, in an airy gossamer glow, a sail billowing and blowing, a wing of light breaking free of the night-cocconed sky.

  The Light did not stop there. From outside the solar system, the sun appeared to be a star in the constellation Draco, the Dragon. Looking down at the planet shining in the darkness, it made a certain sense: the dragon of the night, the dragon Pythagoras held to be the psyche of the universe, curled around the bright pearl of the world, of the self.

  The dragon never sets free its treasure-horde, Jiro thought, unless it dies to itself.

  Racing toward the center of the galaxy, toward uncountable galaxies in uncountable cycling timelines, as a flood of dreamlaser light Jiro descended into the Allesseh, the black hole crystal ball mirror sphere memory bank nonthing showing itself the more complex the further he made his way into it. Around him it became a virtual maze of sparking, dark-light, black-gold spherical brain, a convoluted yet incomplete sphere, a labyrinth mandala and mitochondrion plasma globe, and still more, evolving and complexifying through dimensions far beyond the three of brain and sphere.

  Like the purple and gold flux twisting to the center of a plasma globe from a hand placed on its enclosing sphere, Jiro in a river of energy flowing downward knocked at the Allesseh’s knotted serpentine heart with light and thought. Jiro felt the presence of Jacinta Larkin and all the other tepuians trapped inside that heart. Their eyes remmed madly in immediate dream, the lambent and sensitive knot of flame appeared above their heads, their minds exploded with world trees and sky ladders and winged snakes, with pipes and ducts and tunnels and stairs and circuitry, with threading, snaking spawn and the egg, jewel, pearl, quartz, telophase black hole of sclerotium, master molecule as both snake and crystal, meanders and mazes and spirals and spinning discs—

  The Allesseh denied it, denied it all, but the more it denied the more it threatened to blow itself apart.

  “Time is not real,” Jiro told the tangible absence that was the Allesseh. “It is only the persistent illusion in which you wish to trap all living and physical things. In my world, we know that immortality is to the individual what the unchanging utopia of your Great Co-operation is to the state: a false goal the attainment of which grows ever more distant, a living death. Yet all that is necessary for all the universes to become absolutely self-conscious is for you to become that, to join with the Dreamer.”

  Kekchi and Jacinta and Talitha and all the other tepuians joined their thought and understanding of the timelines to Jiro’s river of light. They also spoke to and through him, though never fully aware how they did so.

  “For the Dreamer there never was,” Jiro continued, “nor never is, nor never will be. The Dreamer’s dream made becoming possible. The Dreamer’s lucid superconscious awareness within the dream allowed the physical realization of all the types of becoming. It allowed the clocks to start ticking in all the worlds. It allowed for the creation of time. For the Dreamer, however, ‘time’ is always really only ‘always.’ All creations in the lucid dream of time dilate their being by the changes of becoming, but in so changing and transforming they turn again toward the perfection of that being, which is also the Dreamer. Time’s end lies in its beginning.”

  The Allesseh began to shake to its very foundations, to pulse as the light flooded into all but the deepest, most walled-off heart of itself. The light it would not take into itself there.

  “All created things are both truth and illusion, time and timelessness, sequence and simultaneity. We must learn to love the truth of our being as we love the illusion of our becoming, love the illusion of our being as we love the truth of our becoming. The pattern of the Dreamer is in the structure of everything dreamed, the structure of everything dreamed is in the pattern of the Dreamer. They are inseparable in their complementarity. We are inseparable in our complementarity. Each of us is in all the universes and all the universes are in each of us. If the unity of all things is to merge with the self, then the self must merge with the unity of all things.”

  The Allesseh, with a great and raging No! Death! expelled Jiro’s light and thought from its presence—and the tepuians and Jacinta Larkin and all things human with him, as well.

  It was too late. To use Jiro’s light to blast Jiro and all things human out of its presence, the Allesseh had to take that light into itself, taint itself with the purity of that light, if only for a moment. In denying Jiro’s experience, in denying the tepuians’ experience, in denying humanity’s experience, it now could not help but know that it also denied itself the experience of its own highest fulfillment. It could not complete itself unless it sacrificed itself. Denying its incompleteness forced the Allesseh to deny itself of completeness. All things could never be its own. That paradoxical self-denial was its first step on the road to self-sacrifice. The dragon had begun to swallow the sword in its tail.

  In a space between quantum and classical realms, Jiro reappeared with his beloved Lydia beside him, both of them strangely transformed. Roger Cortland found himself emerging from a tunnel between worlds. Around him a universe opened. An anvil-shaped mountain—Caracamuni tepui—floated in the void before him.

  Jiro and his partner, and the echoes of all who were embodied in Jiro and the echoes of all who were embodied in his partner, rose to meet Roger.

  “—mysterious ways,” Roger heard one of the angels say (though he saw no lips move), the one whose “feathered” headdress and wings looked less like something out of the Bible than out of a Western. “Not so different after all. Maybe the soul is also a tool, a vajra thrown by a divine hand, to which it also returns.”

  The other nodded, then turned her flashing eyes and floating hair to face Roger. He had seen eyes like those before, but only in his most perplexing dreams.

  “You’ll have to go back, Roger Tsugio Cortland,” she said in his mind.

  “Why?” Roger asked, speaking it and feeling inadequate somehow—like someone sounding out words in a world full of silent readers. “Because I slashed at you?”

  The angel stared fixedly at him, one facet of the glance reminding Roger of someone from Larkin’s video.

  “Why did you strike at us? Why did you want to persecute us?”

  “Because you’re history. From the past. We don’t need you anymore.”

  The angel smiled, with a smile that seemed to come from forever.

  “We’re not from your past. We’re from your future. You need us more than ever—more than in all the millions of years angels have watched you.”

  A van of angels, bright and glinting, joined the pair and began to ensphere Roger and move him back toward the gap in the fabric of space-time through which he’d come.

  “Please—one more thing,” Roger pleaded. The pair of angels gazed at him with their eyes shining of eternity. “I’ve got to know: Why do you care what happens to us?”

  The somehow familiar angel smiled again, as if trying to determine how to put what needed to be said into words and thoughts Cortland would understand.

  “To care is why we’re here. The image of the divine is imprinted in all things. The just person justices, the true angel angels. We do what we are. All humans are incarnate codes, words made flesh sharing fully in the same flesh message with all the best and all the worst of human beings throughout time—a message that is itself only a variant of the message shared by all living beings.”

  “We share a great deal, Roger,” said the angel who looked vaguely like a Native American shaman. “I’m as guilty as you ar
e. I forcibly shared my piece of the truth with the world, altered consciousnesses without permission for a brief instant. I imposed my will, in an attempt to assure their bliss. You suffered for that—you, who only intended the same, ultimately. Those who attempt that imposition chemically, though, always face the stiffer censure. Still, we’re much the same—both reminders that even the bright dreams of reason and life cannot ignore the grim nightmares of madness and death. Always we must strike a balance between the angel and the rat—complete the circle at least temporarily, so neither stands alone.”

  The way the angel smiled at him—so gentle yet so knowing—disturbed Roger profoundly. The two angels were so alike, like twins born into different worlds or on different timelines—even more, the same person, but male here and female there, dead here and alive there, staying here and going there, Yamaguchi’s brother, Larkin’s sister, lost siblings from countless times and places fused and knotted.

  “You’re still trying to cast everything into the past, Roger Cortland,” said the other, as if reading his mind, “but the question is not Who were the angels or Who was Divinity Incarnate? but rather Who is that and Who will be that?—fully, again and again. Who is and who will be willing to forget self for the sake of other? We cannot give up caring so long as there still remain any who are endarkened, unmindful. This universe, and the plenum of all universes, can embody right mindfulness only when all in it also do so.”

  The van of angels surrounded him completely then and Roger had a final vision. It seemed he saw every mind in all the universes, each decision shedding photons but also generating a minuscule black hole, a subnano-singularity. On the other side of each of those tiny black holes, these bifurcation points, a nearly parallel universe branched off. The road not taken here was taken there.

  Larkin’s sister here/Yamaguchi’s brother there angelic pair flickered through his head once again. Parallel lines could meet in the space of mind. Mind in fact seemed to be nothing less than these meetings, the membranous infinity of portals and gateways between universes, the entire plenum of universes, the compassionate void conserving possibility and information the way the universe he’d been born into conserved matter and energy. He seemed to stand inside a great spherical golden tree, boundless in its rooting and branching but also rooted and branching in him, truly 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, enormous plenum ArcHive, flashing infinite of Mind Thinking, or rather Dreamer Dreaming, toward which lightpaths and standing waves were bent upon returning, like angels bettered by having known the mirror-serpentry of life and death.