“That is an … intriguing … possibility.…”
Ashley licked his lips. Here he could make a real difference. By the time Redwing got back to the ship, he could put himself at the middle of the big things happening. A chance to move up! Smiling, he began a negotiation.
THIRTY-NINE
THAT OLD MIND/BODY DUALITY
If the human brain were so simple
That we could understand it,
We would be so simple
That we couldn’t.
—EMERSON PUGH
Redwing felt the anger and fear in him mingle. Revulsion, gut-clenching sour acid. Idiot red agony. He hated the big woman-ape thing before them. Something made him want to attack her. Furiously. His trigger finger tightened—
Then the clamp came down on him again.
With a snap. In his field of vision, Viviane froze, halfway through saying something. No movement. No sound. Just—stop.
Then a voice. “You need to see yourself more fully.”
It was Twisto’s flat voice. But Redwing could see Twisto to his left, also frozen in place. The Fungoid Sphere must be doing this. That enormous thing hung in the distance, as big as a building and glistening with moisture. It had somehow installed some doorway into his mind. Something to do with the filaments that slowly circled him, glowing in soft amber?
“You need to see all your mind.”
Redwing could not move his mouth, but he thought—and heard himself say in a small, echoing voice—“My mind hears you.”
“Only your conscious mind. What the Folk of the Bowl term your Overmind. I can expose to you how the Folk see their entire minds. Your Undermind will then tell you why you feel as you do.”
“My conscious mind is all I’ve got.”
“True, in a way. But! Your Undermind controls your Overmind, at times such as this. You should know that now, when you most need to.”
“My conscious mind is what—a construct?”
“A partial view. The operating theater that proudly thinks it is all there is, on the stage of self.”
“Okay…” Redwing simmered in anger now. He shot back a retort he had only recently heard, “If the conscious self is an illusion—who is it that’s being fooled?”
“The you who talks now.”
Then it came.
—from the flood sprung from nothingness came desires urges thoughts forking like summer lightning across the somber vault of himself, so he had no choice but to merge with them, fast and furious came it all. Merging so became a drowsy blur, ideas thoughts memories like arrows colliding in air, snap and bristle as ricochets struck and stuck, “who talks now”—as Viviane sparks to life and launches across the coiling vapor trails toward him, colliding as he thinks, wants the memories had lost the power to hurt, the deaths under his command, then gone as desire for her aches yet again, memories always memories now, most with mingled pain or joy, they fall into place and give back the past—
* * *
Viviane grabbed Redwing and shook him, but his head lolled and he would not come around. “What have you done?” she shouted at Twisto.
“He needs to see his deepest.”
“Why’s he drooling, then?”
“You may hold him but try not to speak.”
She wrapped him in her arms and legs, a cocoon against the sobs that racked him now.
* * *
—they came at him onrushing trainwreck images: monstrous, abortive shapes, sweaty and grunting, emerging from the abysmal murk of millennia, things slouching, runt hominids, even pre-mammalian … forms never quite resolving into discrete organisms, spilling over and into one another, he is uncertain where one ends and another begins, awful: ghastly glistening flesh … tentacles coiling and clasping, stretching and contracting, groans, lidless slit-eyes eerily waving on slender stalks … lumbering brute fleshy thighs, squamous hides, eerie biting barbed quills, the sheen of yellow toxins, serrated tails, craggy horns, sallow fangs, gleaming talons … fragrances fungal and poisonous, shambling thick-armed leering, thick brows, sharp yellow teeth, knobs for knuckles, lumps for knees, sickly iridescences undulating across pallid, gelatinous underbellies, skin shimmering slick, filmy scales—
—and the alien woman, blending with all these memories, the imagined horrors, her thick broad piggish ears, snout nose, all of huge ugly things—all triggering his disgust, bile rising in his gut—her awful gaping maw mouth, leering smile, like that fat woman at the beach who sat on me, crushing me with gobs of white puckered flabby, smothering me, can’t breathe, she rolls over surprised she’s on me but just cackles and rubs herself all over my body, her secretions sour choking me—
* * *
Twisto said, “Mind the predators.”
A flock of angry birds swarmed Viviane. They pecked, shrieked. She batted them aside. More swooped in. Going for her eyes. She smacked them hard. A sharp gouge in her back. She cried out. One caught her tongue in a biting beak.
* * *
—and there it was, the memory bare—woman on the beach, he so small …
—he has to forget it again—think of something else—
—shadows of moving spiders flicker on the surface of a cratered moon, Ashley the ignoramus doesn’t know poetry from a cabbage, it’s a wonder I’m not an old shriveled bag before my centuries are up, time telescopes, agenbite of inwit drifting down, drifting drown, the big riverrun beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past, where only the young die good, drowning maybe in awful deep-down torrent and the sea the sea crimson regret and horror both at once—
Part of him knew these had come lancing up from his Undermind. Something festered there. Now propelled out, calling, dread flowed in the shadowy Undermind. In the theater of self, he could watch the show with a dirty tingle of relish.
* * *
She slapped two squawking birds so hard they flew to pieces. These are devices, she thought. Fragments tumbled away.
Twisto ignored the birds, talking to the writhing Redwing. “Your ape Undermind often uses its trickster mode, slipping words and even phrases into your speech, in its keen, eager way. Jokes about Underminds escaping control were a staple of your classic literature and current japes; I have read many. Freudian, whatever that means to you.”
* * *
—he fights off the fat-woman memory, his naked fear of her mass crushing his skinny body, smothering him—
The way out of it was to nod, pass by the fetid memory, focus on better thoughts, now he has seen the worst of it, look ahead, get control of his own mind back—
—Redwing flies through gobsmacking sensations but keeps enough of himself to feel hopeful spikes of muted joyful zeal. Eukaryotic multicellular bilaterians, words flying by beside awful visions. God is what mind becomes when it has passed beyond the scale of our comprehension, something shouts but as he turns to see where he is, the suffocating air narrowing—it congeals. He finds no pivot to spin around, but has the nagging sense of a felt quality to it all. Memories surge through him: the rich hues of Tuscany at sunset, the spark of insight, the pangs of gray grief, all scattershot coming at him so hard and fast he can feel each word of a slow voice that must be the Overmind, somehow the words booming with a solemn weight, saying,
silicon
may
not
be
the
proper
medium
for
consciousness
look to carbon
to form
thick long compounds,
for unlike
silicon,
carbon
forms double bonds
with vastly
more complex
chemical
differences
so silicon
gives rise
to a different kind
of consciousness,
not hindering
silicon’s
ability
to proc
ess
information in
superior
manner.
—and Redwing sees clearly he is just a note in a symphony, has always been, a wheel in hardworking machinery, a node in a giant information processing network, some of his heart valves don’t properly close, right chambers are enlarged, so a heart arrhythmia and a fickle vagus nerve that pulls the plug every once in a while, so he falls into darkness where only the Undermind thrives.
* * *
Viviane watched, smarting from the bird attack. “You did that just to stop me from waking up Cap’n Redwing, didn’t you?”
Twisto ignored this with a grand four-hand wave and said, “Underminds use that curious primate gait—a continual, controlled toppling upon those hindfeet, move by always catching their fall, motor memory, you term it. Unsteady! So, a key clue to your ability to improvise.”
“We’ve evolved that, right?” Viviane waved at the big woman, with a grandiosity that satirized Twisto’s—who watched this all patiently, eyes deeply intent. “They, these big apes like us, they have it, too, right? So primates can hop to new ideas far more readily—be more inventive!—than you who have no unconscious at all.”
Twisto nodded, gave a ghastly smile. “So, yes, with us and the Folk of the Bowl. To know the Undermind, when we like, is essential to forming a stable, long-lived society. We can mute our underlying stresses. All the ancient intelligent species do so! They and we developed such long ago, before we could even fly to planets.”
“So we’re too damned primitive for the likes of you?”
Twisto took this with a frown, also distressing and ugly. “An instructive example: You social apes showed on the Bowl your ability to form a quick bond-alliance with the ones you term the Sil. An example—another two-footed species, young and immature and dangerous.”
“So the Sil are proto-apes?” Viviane had no idea of, or experience with, the Sil—but what the hell—wing it.
“They were happy until your sort came.”
“Happiness isn’t everything, y’know.”
* * *
—the damn birds are coming at her, he can see that, diving hawking cawing nasty beaks while he is frozen solid, cannot move more than his eyes, and then the birds scream and plunge away, because not every experiment works, does it?—and on he goes, the riverrun stream that presents you as the subject, viewing the show a sort of stage where your “mind’s eye” fiction walls off the muggy cellar mysteries work their furious industry, “I think this is the wrong fairy tale,” Redwing somehow says and he registers the gentle press of his trigger finger, clasping the gun he had put away yet some part of him—he is not just in the screen of consciousness anymore—had grasped it forth anew and now the pistol butt kisses his hand like an old-time succulent lover.
* * *
The twisted thing said, nattering on, “You will in time realize that principle of maximum diversity says that the laws of nature, and the initial conditions at the beginning of time, are such as to make the universe as interesting as possible. As a result, life of all vagrant kinds is possible but not too easy. Maximum diversity often leads to maximum stress. In the end we survive, but only by the skin of our teeth. That is the drama we inhabit.”
The twisted one looked back lovingly at the Fungoid Sphere.
* * *
—infinitesimal frozen moments stack up as if waiting to be witnessed before their death, much like people, cloaked in layers of filled silence, his bones a lattice of calcium robs strung by stringy muscles striving, breath whistling from him through his dry pipes, he brings the pistol up—
The greased pig of the world itself slipped away always, and Redwing paused. This was beyond mere grasp, elusive-seductive-enchanting, sucking them all, forward, endlessly forward into moments yet again unsuspected, spiced like a throat irked by raw whiskey, so Redwing says, “I don’t like this strange woman, but I like you less.”
—the sentence dispatches itself from that always attentive Undermind, all laid out sure as each word fetches forth from his library, Anglish as anguish, instants made eternal by being past, in this sliced moment all can go to smash and scatteration—
—he can forget the fat woman at the beach centuries ago, her repulsive smothering slabs of flesh, her yellow teeth, snout nose, cackling laugh—put it away, yes—
He can inspect his instant intuitions now. Know where they came from. Take a long wheezing breath and focus. Let his reasoning mind consider. Judge. Instruct. Wisdom congeals in him like a damp fog.
This is an ability he now grasped fully. To know your full mind is to command it.
But this Fungoid Sphere brought that out, too. And this fake alien of the Twisters, they brought it forth, they caused all this pain and hurt to surface in him, to come bursting out as disgust. The damned Twisto that led Beth’s team into danger, let people get killed, that will pay for that—
—he pulls the trigger.
—out spits a hard clap, a bright noise into crystalline space.
Twisto accepts the slam momentum by spinning backwards. Its face crumples yet reveals no true pain. For indeed the thing is finally an it, a copy at best, of something that was once a creature intact—
Redwing snaps back into real time. He is released. Can move. Brings the pistol back to aim, expecting some reply.
Viviane is there. Frightened now.
And the big ape woman like a Neanderthal but equal to them all, he saw now.
The anger and fear and hate were gone. Now mere memory. The short sharp shot had redeemed his fear and rage.
Somehow. Just from acting.
His mind—yes, his conscious mind—felt crowded, seething with ideas. He’d have to do something about the Diaphanous. The plasma beings must all be related, he realized: they’d ride solar flares to cross between stars. Daphne and Apollo must have found communication easy.
The methane folk: they must have done something beyond terrible. Hiding like this, hunted by … what? Whatever they feared must be something as powerful as the grav wave establishment. Something pretty damn ferocious. Colossal arrogance …
And why fear humans? It dawned on him that they could have committed a terraforming offense: tried to reshape a world already occupied by creatures at the level of human civilization.
Redwing felt his mind racing. He could sense the seethe of his Undermind. It was trying on ideas for size, seeing what fits the knowledge residing in his conscious Overmind.
So … Try to strip away its oxygen? Let a reducing atmosphere replace that, using volcanoes driven from below by Methaners? Nasty, if physically possible. Plenty buried history here. In the long run, the endlessly curious humans would find out.
Head buzzing with intuitions. The Methaners can’t be trusted. Treaties were paper promises. To be sure of them, they’ll have to be tested. Soon. Meanwhile—
Redwing tried the link to SunSeeker. Some hash, then it went through.
“Captain? Good!” Ashley Trust barked at him. “Sir, I’ve got a lot to tell you. We’ve solved some problems, the Glorious and I. We can get the Away Team to the surface of Glory, I’m pretty sure. Glory, not the Cobweb. But there’s a price.…”
FORTY
ETERNITY’S SUNRISE
He who kisses the joy as it flies
Lives in eternity’s sunrise
—WILLIAM BLAKE
There was a zingo on watch in the cloudy sky. It kept changing shape. That was a new feature. Cliff frowned and speculated: “It’s a altering audience that’s studying us. The plasma Glorious are shifting watch.”
Beth squeezed his shoulder but didn’t answer.
The land to either side was an alien forest, plants weird and lovely; but the land before her was a barren strip hundreds of kilometers across. The year-old colony’s fifty-odd citizens were nearly all gathered here, to watch.
Shadow fell across the sky. Then the clouds roiled and parted.
The cylindrical zoo came streaming down through the air. It was lu
minous from the heat roiling into yellow flares at its edges. It filled the sky with an ominous black darker than night.
Beth could see a cylinder bigger than a rolled-up Hawaii, seas included, braking into Glory’s air. A dark mass. Bright orange plasma made halos all around it. The enormous dark tube came coasting down from the stratosphere like an angelic metaphor ringed in fire.
“Beautiful,” Cliff said beside her.
“They’ve got tech we can’t even imagine,” she said. “How in hell do they decelerate a whole damn continent-wide roll? No rockets visible.”
“The braking energy, it’s gotta be huge.”
“Maybe that plasma around it is a lot of Diaphanous.”
“Smart piloting, sure.” Cliff put his arm around Beth and hugged her. “Staying warm?”
Beth snuggled up to him, and the little girl in her arms wriggled around to join the warmth. The sky lit with flaring energies.
* * *
As Beth watched from the valley rim, she recalled how she had noticed Cliff first in a crowd of students watching the World Chess Championship on 3-D. This was a humans-only game, still a draw for the sort of guys she liked. She noticed that the start player, an Israeli kid of fourteen—a favorite of her gang—took his full time before making his board move, while guys and gals around her called out moves to the screen. “Knight to King!” and “Bishop to Rook,” the usual stuff. Cliff was over to her left and usually took the full interval to think, softly calling out his suggested move just before the upstart player made his. And the Israeli kid made the move Cliff had murmured. Maybe should meet that one, she had thought.
Now, centuries later, she stood on a ridge watching the impossible. A continent descending. He was her knight and she his queen, surveying their arriving kingdom, on columns of fire.
Glorious--A Science Fiction Novel Page 37