(Sign Eight) CONSTRUCT AN “ELECTRON SHELL” BY SYNCHRONIZING ELECTRON REVERSAL. THE LOCAL SYSTEM WILL THEN FORM A TIME-REVERSED MINICOSMOS & PROCEED HINDWARDS TILL X ELAPSES WHEN TIME CONSERVATION OF THE TOTAL UNIVERSE WILL PULL THE MINI-COSMOS (OF THE VSTM) FORWARD INTO MESH WITH UNIVERSE AGAIN I.E. BY 35 PLUS 35 YEARS.
“But how?” we all cried. “How do you synchronize such an infinity of electrons? We haven’t the slightest idea!”
Now at least we knew when he had set off: from 35 years after 1985. From next year. We are supposed to know all this by next year! Why has he waited so long to give us the proper clues?
And he is heading for the year 2055. What is there in the year 2055 that matters so much?
(Sign Nine) I DO NOT GIVE THIS INFORMATION TO YOU BECAUSE IT WILL LEAD TO YOUR INVENTING THE VSTM. THE SITUATION IS QUITE OTHERWISE. TIME IS PROBABILISTIC, AS SOME OF YOU MAY SUSPECT. I REALIZE THAT I WILL PROBABLY PERVERT THE COURSE OF HISTORY & SCIENCE BY MY ARRIVAL IN YOUR PAST (MY MOMENT OF DEPARTURE FOR THE FUTURE); IT IS IMPORTANT THAT YOU DO NOT KNOW YOUR PREDICAMENT TOO EARLY, OR YOUR FRANTIC EFFORTS TO AVOID IT WOULD GENERATE A TIME LINE WHICH WOULD UNPREPARE YOU FOR MY SETTING OFF. AND IT IS IMPORTANT THAT IT DOES ENDURE, FOR I AM THE MATRIX OF MAN. I AM LEGION. I SHALL CONTAIN MULTITUDES.
MY RETICENCE IS SOLELY TO KEEP THE WORLD ON TOLERABLY STABLE TRACKS SO THAT 1 CAN TRAVEL BACK ALONG THEM. I TELL YOU THIS OUT OF COMPASSION, AND TO PREPARE YOUR MINDS FOR THE ARRIVAL OF GOD ON EARTH.
“He’s insane. He’s been insane from the start.” “He’s been isolated in there for some very good reason. Contagious insanity, yes.”
“Suppose that a madman could project his madness—”
“He already has done that, for decades!”
“—no, I mean really project it, into the consciousness of the whole world; a madman with a mind so strong that he acted as a template, yes a matrix for everyone else, and made them all his dummies, his copies; and only a few people stayed immune who could build this VSTM to isolate him—”
“But there isn’t time to research it now!” “What good would it do shucking off the problem for another thirty-five years? He would only reappear—”
“Without his strength. Shorn. Senile. Broken. Starved of his connections with the human race. Dried up. A mental leech. Oh, he tried to conserve his strength. Sitting quietly. Reading, waiting. But he broke! Thank God for that. It was vital to the future that he went insane.”
“Ridiculous! To enter the machine next year he must already be alive! He must already be out there in the world projecting this supposed madness of his. But he isn’t. We’re all separate sane individuals, all free to think what we want—” “Are we? The whole world has been increasingly obsessed with him these last twenty years. Fashions, religions, life-styles: the whole world has been skewed by him ever since he was born! He must have been bom about twenty years ago. Around 1995. Until then there was a lot of research into him. The tachyon hunt. All that. But he only began to obsess the world as a spiritual figure after that. From around 1995 or 6. When he was born as a baby. Only, we didn’t focus our minds on his own infantile urges—because we had him here as an adult to obsess ourselves with—”
“Why should he have been bom with infantile urges? If he’s so unusual, why shouldn’t he have been born already leeching on the world’s mind; already knowing; already experiencing everything around him?”
“Yes, but the real charisma started then! All the emotional intoxication with him!”
“All the mothering. All the fear and adoration of his infancy. All the Bethlehem hysteria. Picking up as he grew and gained projective strength. We’ve been just as obsessed with Bethlehem as with Nazareth, haven’t we? The two have gone hand in hand.”
(Sign Ten) I AM GOD. AND I MUST SET YOU FREE. I MUST CUT MYSELF OFF FROM MY PEOPLE; CAST MYSELF INTO THIS HELL OF ISOLATION.
I CAME TOO SOON; YOU WERE NOT READY FOR ME.
We begin to feel very cold; yet we cannot feel cold. Something prevents us—a kind of malign contagious tranquillity.
It is all so right. It slots into our heads so exactly, like the missing jigsaw piece for which the hole lies cut and waiting, that we know what he said is true; that he is growing up out there in our obsessed, blessed world, only waiting to come to us.
(Sign Eleven) (Even though the order of the signs was time-reversed from his point of view, there was the sense of a real dialogue now between him and us, as though we were both synchronized. Yet this wasn’t because the past was inflexible, and he was simply acting out a role he knew “from history”. He was really as distant from us as ever. It was the looming presence of himself in the real world which cast its shadow on us, molded our thoughts and fitted our questions to his responses; and we all realized this now, as though scales fell from our eyes. We weren’t guessing or fishing in the dark any longer; we were being dictated to by an overwhelming presence of which we were all conscious—and which wasn’t locked up in the VSTM. The VSTM was Nazareth, the setting-off point; yet the who Je world was also Bethlehem, womb of the embryonic God, his babyhood, childhood and youth combined into one synchronous sequence by his all-know- ingness, with the accent on his wonderful birth that filtered through into human consciousness ever more saturatingly.) MY OTHER SELF HAS ACCESS TO ALL THE SCIENTIFIC SPECULATIONS WHICH I HAVE GENERATED; AND ALREADY I HAVE THE SOLUTION OF THE TIME EQUATIONS. I SHALL ARRIVE SOON & YOU SHALL BUILD MY VSTM & I SHALL ENTER IT; YOU SHALL BUILD IT INSIDE AN EXACT REPLICA OF THIS LABORATORY, SOUTHWEST SIDE. THERE IS SPACE THERE. (Indeed it had been planned to extend the National Physical Laboratory that way, but the plans had never been taken up, because of the skewing of all our research which the VSTM had brought about.) WHEN I REACH MY TIME OF SETTING OUT, WHEN TIME REVERSES, THE PROBABILITY OF THIS LABORATORY WILL VANISH, & THE OTHER WILL ALWAYS HAVE BEEN THE TRUE LABORATORY THAT I AM IN, INSIDE THIS VSTM. THE WASTE LAND WHERE YOU BUILD, WILL NOW BE HERE. YOU CAN WITNESS THE INVERSION: IT WILL BE MY FIRST PROBABILISTIC MIRACLE. THERE ARE HYPERDIMENSIONAL REASONS FOR THE PROBABILISTIC INVERSION, AT THE INSTANT OF TIME REVERSAL. BE WARNED NOT TO BE INSIDE THIS LABORATORY WHEN I SET OUT, WHEN I CHANGE TRACKS, FOR THIS SEGMENT OF REALITY HERE WILL ALSO CHANGE TRACKS, BECOMING IMPROBABLE, SQUEEZED OUT.
(Sign Twelve) I WAS BORN TO INCORPORATE YOU IN MY BOSOM; TO UNITE YOU IN A WORLD MIND, IN THE PHASE SPACE OF GOD. THOUGH YOUR INDIVIDUAL SOULS PERSIST, WITHIN THE FUSION. BUT YOU ARE NOT READY. YOU MUST BECOME READY IN 35 YEARS’ TIME BY FOLLOWING THE MENTAL EXERCISES WHICH I SHALL DELIVER TO YOU, MY MEDITATIONS. IF I REMAINED WITH YOU NOW, AS I GAIN STRENGTH, YOU WOULD LOSE YOUR SOULS. THEY WOULD BE SUCKED INTO ME, INCOHERENTLY. BUT IF YOU GAIN STRENGTH, I CAN INCORPORATE YOU COHERENTLY WITHOUT LOSING YOU. I LOVE YOU ALL, YOU ARE PRECIOUS TO ME, SO I EXILE MYSELF.
THEN I WILL COME AGAIN IN 2055. I SHALL RISE FROM TIME, FROM THE USELESS HARROWING OF A LIMBO WHICH HOLDS NO SOULS PRISONER, FOR YOU ARE ALL HERE, ON EARTH.
That was the last sign. He sits reading again and listening to taped music. He is radiant; glorious. We yearn to fall upon him and be within him.
We hate and fear him too; but the Love washes over the Hate, losing it a mile deep.
He is gathering strength outside somewhere: in Wichita or Washington or Woodstock. He will come in a few weeks to reveal himself to us. We all know it now.
And then? Could we kill him? Our minds would halt our hands. As it is, we know that the sense of loss, the sheer bereavement of his departure hindwards into time will all but tear our souls apart.
And yet. . . I WILL COME AGAIN IN 2055, he has promised. And incorporate us, unite us, as separate thinking souls—if we follow all his meditations; or else he will suck us into him as dummies, as robots if we do not prepare ourselves. What then, when God rises from the grave of time, insane? .
Surely he knows that he will end his journey in madness! That he will incorporate us all, as conscious living beings, into the matrix of his own insanity?
It is a fact of history that he arrived in 1985 ragge
d, jibbering and lunatic—tortured beyond endurance by being deprived of us.
Yet he demanded, jubilantly, in 1997, confirmation of his safe arrival; jubilantly, and we lied to him and said YES! YES! And he must have believed us. (Was he already going mad from deprivation?)
If a laboratory building can rotate into the probability of that same building adjacent to itself: if time is probabilistic (which we can never prove or disprove concretely with any measuring rod, for we can never see what has not been, all the alternative possibilities, though they might have been), we have to wish what we know to be the truth, not to have been the truth. We can only have . faith that there will be another probabilistic miracle, beyond the promised inversion of laboratories that he speaks of, and that he will indeed arrive back in 1985 calm, well-kept, radiantly sane, his mind composed. And what is this but an entree into madness for rational beings such as us? We must perpetrate an act of madness; we must believe the world to be other than what it was—so that we can receive among us a Sane, Blessed, Loving God in 2055. A fine preparation for the coming of a mad God! For if we drive ourselves mad, believing passionately what was not true, will we not infect him with our madness, so that he is/has to be/will be/and always was mad too?
Credo quia impossibilis; we have to believe because it is impossible. The alternative is hideous.
Soon. He will be coming. Soon. A few days, a few dozen hours. We all feel it. We are overwhelmed with bliss.
Then we must put him in a chamber, and lose Him, and drive Him mad with loss, in the sure and certain hope of a sane and loving resurrection thirty years hence—so that He does not harrow Hell, and carry it back to Earth with Him.
THY BLOOD LIKE MILK
This tale is for the sun god, Tezcatlipoca, with my curses, and for you Marina—whom I never knew enough to love—with apologies and blessings, somewhat tardy . . .
Have you ever screamed at your nurse to go away—to leave you in peace—and hated her, as bitterly as you’ve ever hated anybody? And begged her, as you never begged anyone in your proud life before?
Ten of us lay in the ward in the plastic webbing imprisoning us, yet only three of us really counted, Shanahan, Grocholski, and me, for we were the only presidents. Yet a big haul for them, indeed, three presidents! How cleverly the hospital distinguished between us and the ordinary runners: the extra dose of nerve sensitizer in the syringe, the absence of any opiates. We hung on the raw edge of pain, gritting our teeth as the taps were spun and at times—when our bloodstreams burned like second nervous systems on fire in our bodies, and it seemed like we were being roasted on a gridiron, from our insides outwards—at such times we let go and screamed. Whereas when the runners were being drained they moaned but did not need to scream. Mixed in with their quarter-pint soup of drugs (anti-shock, anti-coagulant, vitamins, iron) they received the opiates that let them still catch the idea of pain, but be somewhat glassed off from it—while we three were locked up in bright tin boxes with the howl of a thumbnail on slate a thousand times amplified. The nerve sensitizer wasn’t merely sadistic, but meant to aid the nurse monitoring the effects of the milking on our bodies; the opiates were supposed to block off the worst of the sensations arising. I might say that according to the compensation laws we should have all had opiates. But that’s how they ran a punishment ward. Idiot thinking. Shanahan, Grocholski, and I—we didn’t hold each other’s occasional screams and pleas against each other. The pain just happened to be unbearable. As simple as that. In the eyes of the runners our agony confirmed our presidencies. The Aztec priests were tortured by the Spaniards before their congregations. So the Aztec priests screamed and begged, when their turn came? Their congregations still believed in them.
“You scum of the earth!” Marina hissed as she jabbed our tethered buttocks with that cruel syringe, an Ahab tormenting her own private whale over and over again. (But I did not know her, did not know you as Marina yet.) “Do you know what will happen to you today? We’re going to take so much out of you and for so long that your brain will starve for oxygen, you’ll be half way to an idiot, a drooling vegetable.”
“You know that’s illegal, you bitch,” I snarled as you tickled my bare flesh with the syringe anticipatorily making my nerves try to crawl away.
“Anyone may make mistakes,” her eyes gleamed.
Only a scare, a put-on. Panic. She wouldn’t dare.
“You must be a pretty girl under that mask. Why do you hate us so bitter?”
“Why give you the satisfaction of knowing?”
“You gave me the satisfaction of knowing just then—there’s something to know.”
And the syringe hit my flesh hard, at that, and dug in.
The hot-acid gruel washed into me. My veins now lava-flows cursed with a consciousness of their own heat and motion. The exquisite agony of being emptied out. The pain of my tortured body racing to make more and more blood as the metabolic drugs goaded it on.
And under and around this pain, the fear that as life-blood flowed out through the taps, my brain was starving and impoverished, on the brink of becoming the brain of an animal, a toad, a stone—
“Bitch!” I screamed.
Out through one set of pipes flowed my rich blood, in through another the miserable substitute fluid that my body raced to build upon. And Marina (whom I did not know as Marina yet) danced the empty syringe before my eyes, to conduct the music of my torment—keeping an eye on the dials and gauges but pretending not to. Why did she hate us so bitter? Well, I hated her just as bitter! Why ask why. I knew it when I rode for the sun, I might end up here if they found one single excuse to lay their hands on me.
Then the pain got too bad to think about anything else.
No windows in the ward. What was there to look out on? We were outside any Fuller dome, in this hospital. The pollution crawling up and down the sides of the building, dark grey to pitch black. A general turbidity over the land: over the great plains where the braves of another age and world hunted buffalo; on the treeless hills, where it had long since snuffed out the pines; pressing soft on the Great Dead Lakes, and, further out, pressing soft on the dark cesspool of the North Atlantic. Pressing upon the superhighways where mostly automatic traffic crawled and where we had hunted in our packs for that rare bird of paradise, that dark orchid, the patch of clear sun—the “sunspot” that blooms mysteriously amid the murk, shafts of gold piercing a funnel of light down to earth whereby the clear sky could be briefly glimpsed and worshipped. Were not the deaths we caused on the highways only petty sacrifices to ensure the coming of the sun?
And the murk lay thickly on this hospital, Superhighway 31 Crash Hospital, Prison Wing, in whose ward we swooned in pain as we gave up our lifeblood to recompense the beneficiaries of this murk, authors of the forever eclipse of the sun . . .
When did I set out upon the sun trail? When did I drive down my own superhighway of the spirit, choosing my own side of the split world, the zone of blood and the sun? Oh these years of hunting for the sun—down ten times a thousand miles of gloomy darkness, oily globules crawling on our windshields, eyes glazed by the green gleaming radar screens of our sun buggies as we swung them, steering blind, through the rivers of automated slave cars, slave trucks riding their guide lines! Brains blazing with the data stream from Meteorology Central—the temperature gradients, the shifting chemistry of the pollutants, the swirling shapes of air turbidity, the cat’s cradle of contrails spied upon by the satellite stations high above! (Have you seen a picture of the Earth from satellite? The masked globe, in its gossamer spidery web of contrails, a mud of many shades of brown ochre grey stirred slowly, punctured in several magic shifting locations by the white walls of sunspots drilling their way to the barren ground or the dead seas or the great photophobic anaerobic algae beds (where, perversely, the light kills them) or the dots of Fuller domes where the wasp world lives out its memories of middle class existence.) Grabbing the data with our minds to make a gestalt of it that will lead us to the sun! Th
ese years of hunting for the sun—and finding it! Being first to reach those clear fresh zones of radiance, where the flash harvests green and bronze the earth, and tiny flowers rage and seed and die within the span of thirty minutes. Being the only men to see it. To know that nature was still fleetingly alive, in an accelerated abbreviated panic form, still mistress of a panic beauty. These years of discovering the sun and duelling for it on the highways, and ever in the back of our minds somewhere awareness of the Compensation Laws—the blood-debt to be settled.
“Hey,” called Shanahan, as Marina came to him next in line with the syringe primed and loaded, a little bit of machismo on his part. “Why not come for a ride in my sun buggy after I get out of here? I’ll drive you into the deep dark countryside and we won’t hunt for no sunspots either. What we’ve got to do, we can do in the dark! Hey—but come to think of it—why not just come on a sun hunt with me? Put a blush of real genuine sunburn on those delicate while limbs of yours. Or could it be that you’re just a wasp that buzzes about a sundome for her holidays, and never flies out?”
“Yes I’m a wasp, this is my sting.”
And she stung Shanahan’s quivering buttocks with the syringe, putting an abrupt end to his taunts. He hung in the white plastic webbing, twitching with pain, fat fly in a spider’s web that he couldn’t break out of. Marina spun the taps, spiderlike sucked him dry, until he howled.
Till he screamed like ice, like thumbnails on slate.
And Marina—with what grim delight you watched him writhing.
With as much magic and mysticism in the hunt for the sun as there was meteorology, remember how we met together to plot strategies, when our own sun club—Smoking Mirror—first coalesced (later to be known as Considine’s Commandos)? And the Indian runner, Marti, who said that his great great granddaddy had been an Indian magician, who stayed with Smoking Mirror till one black afternoon he pushed his buggy too fast, too wildly for a mere machine, down a highway crowded with slave traffic, perceptions throbbing with input, idea associations swarming, sense of time and space distraught—for he’d taken a peyotl pill to commune with his magical ancestry. Marti, who knew all the sun myths of all the Indians, South and North, of the Americas. Marti, who said the name we should call ourselves by—Smoking Mirror—alias of the savage wealthy treacherous Aztec sun god, Tezcatlipoca. Marti, who wore the obsidian knife round his neck on a leather thong. The same knife (stolen from a museum case) that the Aztec priests used to tear out the palpitating hearts of the prisoners sacrificed to Tezcatlipoca.
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