by Ian McDonald
“Luka’s right,” said Marcus Cranitch. “It’s the blind spot effect we talked about. It’s there all right.” Qwerty icons were summoned. “If I enlarge the image by a factor of ten…”
The visual nothingness opened like a lotus blooming and engulfed them.
It was awe and it was wonder. It was beauty and it was terror. It was purity and it was judgment. It was everything and nothing, void and light, annihilation and creation. Alpha and Omega. The Primal Fiat. The Great I Am. It was love and truth and justice and holiness and might, everything every book, every verse, every mantra, every sutra, said it was. It was every spiritual experience, every dervish dance, every glimmer of nirvana, every shaman trance, every elevation into rapture. It was more. Vastly more.
It was the face of God. The room shook. The computer suite was filled with the sound of a rushing mighty wind. Tongues of fire seemed to dance on the heads and hands of the trinity of observers, their lips moved with ecstatic utterances in languages never before heard on the tongues of humans.
After a time that seemed like a foretaste of eternity, Luka’s voice was heard. “ ‘My face you shall not see, for no man may see my face and live.’ ” Her words seemed to come through a cavernous white roar, as of angels’ wings beating before the throne of God. “But we see, we fucking see, and live!”
Every word of Marcus’s was a boulder of rationality pushed up the asymptotic incline of ecstasy.
“I accessed the National Gallery’s datacore for religious art and icons and set the program parameters to flag me every time it came on something that corresponded to my definition of the spiritual, the numinous, the irrational. Have you any idea how many Madonna and Childs I had to look at before I got a big enough sample? It took the machine three days to collate and render the samples I stored, another overnight fifteen-hour run to enhance the image.”
“And what came out in the end is something that stimulates the human facility for religious ecstasy,” Ethan said, his words slipping, sliding into the light-filled voice of God.
“You got it. All those icons, all those mandalas and Sanskrit mantras and illuminated Celtic manuscripts, they’re just reflections, hints, memories, explorations. This is the true glory.”
And the transfiguration was gone. The glory lifted. God’s face turned away. Only painful afterimages remained and a piercing sense of Paradise Lost. Luka’s hand moved from the off switch.
“We aren’t supposed to see these things. God hides his face for a reason. Humankind cannot bear too much divinity.”
“Secrets too terrible for Mankind to know?” Marcus’s scorn flayed. “Old sci-fi hokum. This is just the start. If there’s one, there’ve got to be others. And I’m going to find them.”
Luka shook her head.
“Dump it, Marcus. Erase it, smash it, get rid of it. It’s dangerous. It’ll burn you. It’ll destroy you. I promise.”
SHINGON AND THE ART of Mountain Bike Maintenance. I am up before dawn. It is a good time, the new hours, the fresh hours; the best time. Things are clearer. The air is crisp, cold, clean, the sky a prefaded shrink-fit denim blue deepening over the zenith to fresh, prewash indigo. The moon has been down for an hour. I sit on the curb dwarfed by the monolithic masses of trucks pulled in for the night at the coffin hotel, working patiently, steadily. When your safety depends on diligence, you do not rush your repairs. There is much value in tinkering with bicycles. As much as in riding bicycles, there is a state one enters where I and you cease to matter, where subject and object are abolished, where you and it become one thing, one unity, one awareness. True cyborg: man/machine fusion.
As I thought, the seatings for the thumb-shifts have worked loose. I tighten them with a small screwdriver from my toolkit, lubricate with a squirt or two of oil from the aerosol spray I carry in my belt pouch, and the sun comes over the roof tiles of Temple Nineteen on its hillside.
A hand touches my shoulder.
Mas. Bike ready. Bags packed. Kitted up.
“Just fixing the index system,” I say. “It kept slipping out of gear yesterday.” He nods, slides his wraparound shades beneath the dome of his henro hat and we are off, running down through the streets with the town waking up around us. Shops roll up their steel shutters; children hurry to school, multicolored backpacks swaying; delivery vans hum and purr through streets decorated with bunting and lanterns and banners for the Shinto festival. I share their sense of jubilee; of being on holiday, with one’s own agendas and destinations while elsewhere the world grinds on in the mundanities of work/eat/TV/sleep/work/eat/TV/sleep.
This stretch of henro path, from Temple Nineteen to Temple Twenty-three, is dense with connections to the life of the Daishi. The next valley over from Twenty contains the temple’s inmost sanctuary, a deep cave at the head of a narrow canyon where the saint meditated. Perhaps next pilgrimage. At Temple Twenty-one, atop Mount Tairyu—we must leave the bikes, and scramble up on foot—the Daishi attempted to invoke his guardian deity, Kokuzo, in a month-long ritual. No priest now—none are prepared to make the daily climb—but the diskperson guides from the yencard dispenser relish in the esoteric detail of the Daishi’s ritual: chanting the Mantra of Light one million times, painting the moon on a pure white sheet, and on the moon an image of Kokuzo, and on the image of Kokuzo a crown, and on the crown forty Buddhas, and in the palm of each Buddha an open lotus, and in each lotus a pearl emitting yellow rays…
“And so ad infinitum,” I comment.
It was not on the mountaintop that Kobo Daishi attained enlightenment, but in a sea cave at the eastern tip of the Muroto peninsula. And it is toward Cape Muroto, toward the sea, that we journey through whispering groves of bamboo—always, to me, a deeply spiritual sound, the voice of the Buddha of the valley. I can smell the ocean now beyond the hills where Temple Twenty-two lies hidden like a pearl in a lotus. As ever, it fills me with its divine discontent. Sea changes. Mas has not spoken to me, but I sense that his spiritual tide is on the turn. Our silence is the silence of two friends who do not need words to express their closeness. We have passed the barrier gate.
The henro path from Twenty-two to Twenty-three has been overlain with blacktop and is now the pawing ground of monstrous, fast-moving juggernauts. Our maps mark an alternative coastal route: a good-riding switchback of a path with sheer forested hills on one side and the serene blue Pacific on the other. Nirvana between the mountains and the sea. We cross a rocky headland and before us is a curving beach of white sand. At the end of it, the town of Hiyasa and the many-colored steeple of Temple Twenty-three’s pagoda.
I yell to Mas; he is as willing as I to pause awhile in this beautiful place. The water is cold; almost a physical shock. Air says late May, ocean says early March. I yell and flap and flubber enough to convince my long-cherished ambition to swim in every major ocean, then come running out, flicking long ropes of droplets from my hair. Mas waits beneath the outstretched branch of an ancient pine, like a blessing hand, drawing with light, fluid strokes of a brush pen. Turtles.
It’s good to see him drawing again.
“Every spring, about this time, they come to lay their eggs,” he says. “Every year, for millions of years, something calls them back to this beach to lay their eggs by the full moon. Long before we were, they came; long after we are gone, all of us, and all our plans and ambitions, they will return still.
“I take great reassurance from that.”
He signs and dates the drawing in his sketchbook, titles it Turtle Beach, Temple Twenty-three, Moon’s Third Quarter: Namu Daishi Henjo Kongo.
After a time, Masahiko speaks again.
“I remember, years ago, we talked. That summer we all came down to your place, we talked about graphic entities that stimulated direct physical responses. A typeface that embedded subconscious images so that the reader would find it impossible to resist what the message said.”
“I remember that conversation.”
“You did it, didn’t you?”
My g
loved fists clench instinctively. To relax them takes a mighty effort of will.
“Tell me, Ethan.”
“Yes. We did. Yes.”
“The Morikawa girl.”
“Healing is one of them. Laughter too. Tears. Ecstasy. Fear. Pain. Many many more. We named them after angels, the Sefirahs, but they deceived us.”
Mas laughs, bitter and theatrical; a kabuki laugh. “All this time, and I never knew I was traveling in the company of Danjuro 19 himself.”
“I’m no superhero, Mas. There are no superheroes, there is no James Bond; life isn’t anime.”
“Those akiras.” The word is like vomit to him. “You could have—I don’t know—frightened them, blinded them.” An unsuspected tight, clenched anger in Mas explodes. “Burned out their fucking brains.”
“I didn’t need to. You heard them say Kabukiman was always the friend of true akiras. They thought you were God.”
“I didn’t ask them to be Kabukiman freaks. I didn’t ask to be God; I didn’t ask for their adulation and hero worship and telling me how Danjuro stands for everything that is holy to them when everything they stand for, everything they are, makes me sick; sick, Ethan, like cancer in my stomach, and angry, and afraid; sick, angry, and afraid.” He is silent, tight, clenched within himself so long I think he has nothing more to say. It is only the pause for a deeper pain to percolate through the sands of the spirit.
“We were going to get married. She was a PR manager for my Tokyo distributors. I met her at the Free Queensland Kabukiman! launch. I loved her. Like that.” Five fingers snap, like a trap closing. “It can happen.” I know. “More often than people think.” I know that too, Masahiko.
Out on the ocean, million-ton ore carriers are moving ponderously between probabilities of tropical storms. Beyond them, a low dark smear is an offshore arcology burning, staining the horizon with oily smoke. Down the beach toward the town, two kids are throwing sticks for a woolly dog.
“She moved in with me after three days. She was like that, she would do things because she felt like doing them. She had this bobtail cat: a mi-ke, the rarest kind, blind in one eye. It would sit in the window and look down at the street. Sometimes it would bat at the people it saw moving down there. It thought they were insects. Didn’t have 3-D vision, you see. I had to work a lot at night—got into bad ways at art college, you remember, when I had to steal computer time to work on Kinjiru Cyber Les-girls, that’s where Kabukiman started, Danjuro had a walk-on part. She would bring me endless cups of coffee. She made the only perfect coffee. She measured it, you see. Funny; the big things fade, her face, her body; it’s the small things that remain; cats, coffee. She used to play volleyball up on the roof, in those tight, cute shorts they wear, and kneeguards and elbow pads. Kneeguards, elbow pads, and shorts, they remain floating in space. I can’t see her anymore. Isn’t that strange? I loved to watch her running, jumping, shouting, totally unself-conscious. She was beautiful, I loved her.
“They killed her.”
An aged aged couple comes poking along the tideline with sticks, turning over wrack, driftwood, looking for treasures floated from mythic California. An aircraft makes a long, slow left turn, beginning its descent toward the Tokyo Bay hypurbation.
“That stupid car. It was one of the first of the new model Daihatsu 4x4s, when the biomotors were being introduced and it was a real status symbol to have one. She could be very stupid that way, about things like status. Very vain, sometimes. ‘Give it up,’ I told her. ‘It’s only a damn car, let the akiras have it.’ She sat there with both hands on the wheel with that piss-on-you look I knew so well, the one she’d turn on me when I did something she didn’t approve of, and everyone was shouting, all there was was shouting and the sound of police sirens approaching and she said to me, ‘Get in we’re going’ and—you know the way it happens in films when it all goes slow motion and you think reality is nothing like that, but it’s true—it was like I saw it all in slow motion: the Boss taking one step back to get a clear shot, the way the machine-pistol jerked in his hand as he emptied the magazine into her, the way it opened her up, like a fish—can you believe it, that was what I thought, like a fileted bonito, the sound the last cartridge case made as it hit the concrete, the blare of the horn as she fell against it and how suddenly it stopped when they pulled her onto the street, how much blood there was, an amazing amount of blood, I didn’t think there could be so much blood in one body… Funny, isn’t it? The one thing I can’t remember is the sound of the firing. They took the car. Incredible, she was still alive when the ambulance came. She didn’t make it to the hospital. They got the akiras, you know. Chiba Security put the heads on display at the main district shrine.
“She was beautiful. I loved her. They killed her. Ethan, what is happening to my country? What’s gone wrong?”
He cries unashamedly. Cold and wet, I fold him in my arms, offer him comfort. The aged aged couple pass by and murmur fondly to each other, misunderstanding. The tide advances up the beach. The big ships vanish one by one below the horizon. The edge of night approaches low across the ocean. Growing chill, I pull on shirt, zip-up jacket, track bottoms. I think about the turtles moving out there under many, many fathoms of water. I think about the burning arcologies.
MALKHUT: WHO SEES THE face of angels, obeys.
Yesod: Empire of the senses, domain of limitless pleasure.
Hod: glory: full frontal God.
Nezah: pain: emotional anguish, spiritual torment, physical agony, existential angst.
Tiferet: healing and wholeness.
Gevurah: terror. Pure. Raw. Absolute. Terror.
Hesed: arousal to orgasm in under three seconds.
Binah: the fracter that annihilates the sense of time the creator of order.
Hokhmah: forgetting. Utterly, instantly, irrevocably.
It was as if that one glimpse of the face of God had set in motion a wave of crystallization that precipitated entire choirs and chapters of visual entities. Every night, at the Hour of Harassed Cleaners, perceptual pioneers Cranitch and Ring would watch the un-images—fracters, Ethan Ring’s coinage—unfold from their blind spots into things that sent them into paroxysms of laughter or hysterical weeping or plunged them into suicidal depression or took them to highs that the designers of the new mass-market synthetics could only hope for in wet dreams or left them paralyzed, immobile, dropped into stasis by a display that annihilated their sense of time until the fail-safe timer blanked the display and released them. Marcus, having digested The Illuminati during his teenage paranoia years, suggested naming them after the ten Sefirot of the Hebrew Cabala.
Luka now only visited the C.A.D. suite to issue warnings to Ethan. Marcus she must have thought beyond hope of salvation. Her visits to the sixth floor and the mayhem of Design Communications decreased correspondingly. She no longer came knocking on his downstairs door. It was months since she had slept with him, or stolen his shopping. Ethan stopped her on the stairs one Thursday evening in the hope that a confrontation might cause her to relent.
“Why? Close encounter between two Trans-Atlantics this morning?”
“A smart mouth isn’t you, Eth. Okay. Why. You’ve been lucky so far, what happens one day you’re gawking at the screen and up comes something that induces psychotic rage? Or total amnesia? How about schizophrenia, how about epilepsy, or suicidal depression, or worse? It frightens me. There. That’s it out in the open. Luka Casipriadin, that girl who isn’t afraid of nothing? This scares her. Just because I got this natty Mohawk doesn’t make me a cyberpunk ice-queen. This. Scares. Me. Fuckless. It scares me fuckless because I love you, Ethan Ring, and you’re too fucking stupid to realize it.”
Ethan reported the conversation, minus the last eighteen words verbatim.
“Worse,” Marcus mused. Their experiments had now taken them into the realm of the Diabolicals, subfracters—now numbering over one hundred—evolved from permutation of the Sefirah program parameters. “Gives you that cold prickle ri
ght down in your balls, doesn’t it, Eth? Like when you know you’re going to get laid. She always could put her finger right on it. There is bigger game out there waiting for us. The biggest game. Epilepsy, amnesia, psychosis, sure. But sometime you got to put it all on the line for the big one. Live on the edge. Kiss the razor. Every explorer knows he’s taking a risk. That’s what we are, Eth; mental explorers, psychonauts, going deep in the darkest places of the mind.”
“One hundred percent pure rockist macho bullshit,” said Ethan Ring. “You’ll be asking me to sniff your armpits next.”
“You going to let Luka Casipriadin tell you what’s game and what’s not?”
Two fistfuls of black denim shirt. Face ten centimeters from face. The closest range of social interaction: lovemaking range, violent anger range. Taste-my-breath distance.
“You are within this of having your face pushed through that screen, Marcus Cranitch.”
Illuminatus. Ethan Ring saw the unsuspected depths of anger within him, the fear he had made appear on Marcus’s face, and was afraid. It was as if one of his mothers had sat him down and told him, quietly, fearfully, of some hitherto unmentioned congenital defect: schizophrenia, hemophilia, AIDS, lycanthropy. Ethan Ring, his life, his history, were a pretense, a robing and masking of the glass-hearted monster that was the true Ethan Ring. For an instant—brief but real—he had been filled with a hot, unclean excitement at the image of Marcus’s face smashing the curved glass of the monitor into cubes and crumbs. He fled the computer suite. He fled the university and everything to do with it. He hid for three days behind his artless posters and CDs and scraps of unsuccessful projects. Then he could no longer bear to look at the face of his anger and went to ask forgiveness. There was one light in the darkened, murmuring computer suite.
“Marcus.
“Marcus, I’m sorry. I just sometimes go kind of mad, you know?
“I’ve come to apologize, Marcus.
“Say something Marcus, don’t make me feel worse than I do now.