In the Ocean of Night (17 page)

“Mr. Walmsley? I wanted to continue our discussion.” Fresnel advanced from the opened slideway, framed by the murmuring party beyond.

The frog comes in on little flat feet, Nigel thought. He tossed his wine glass away and turned to meet the man.

“Surely you understand, don’t you, that we have all, all of us, come at last to terms with ourselves? With our finiteness? Our little amusing perversions? Mr. Lubkin’s Three-D was demonstrative. It illustrates how far we have come. Progressed. Econometrics—”

Nigel watched his fist blossom in midair and home with elliptical accuracy on Fresnel’s forehead. There was a fleshy smack. Fresnel staggered. Lurched. Did not fall. Nigel set himself and estimated the geometry of the situation with a precise eye. Fresnel was wobbling, a difficult, challenging target. The man’s face beaded with perspiration in the silvery light. Nigel launched his left fist along an ascending parabola. Angle into angel. There was a jolting impact. Flesh colliding, wetly. His hand went numb. Lick the lips: salty. Fresnel melted away. His nostrils sucked in a rasping new breath. Nigel tottered. Relaxed. He studied the fog layer. It was tilting. Tilting in the smooth air. It seemed to take a long time.

TEN

His Immanence resided in a recently purchased Baptist church. The building squatted on a scruffy, midwestern-looking street corner among the flatlands of lower Los Angeles. Nigel squinted at it skeptically and slowed his walk, but Alexandria and Shirley, on either side of him, tugged him on.

They’d never have gotten him here but for a moment of contrition over Fresnel. Scarcely anyone at the party’d noticed except Alexandria, who glimpsed Nigel tipping over. Fresnel had been insulted but surprisingly, dismay-ingly unhurt; the women had been shocked; Nigel had rather enjoyed the whole bash, and still relished the memory of Fresnel going down, ass over entrails.

He braced himself for the ordeal to come. They entered through a side door and passed through a large auditorium packed with saffron-robed figures being lectured. Shaved heads, bright garlands of flowers. The salty tang of Japanese food. Through a clicking beaded curtain, out the back door, around the temple. They entered a small garden through a bamboo gate, nosily slipping the latch.

A small, browned man sat in lotus position on a broad swath of green. A breeze bestirred the trees overhead. The man regarded him with quick, assessing yellow eyes. He gestured for the three of them to sit and Alexandria produced three round yellow pads for them. Nigel sat in the center.

They exchanged pleasantries. This was a wing of the New Sons, those who felt in tune with the eastern roots of man’s religious heritage. This seated man with his face of sagging flesh was an Immanence, for there was no one sole Immanence, just as a universal God had an infinite store of representations.

Nigel explained, with long uncomfortable pauses, his own rational skepticism about religion in any form. Most men sought some undefinable something, and Nigel admitted he did too, but the grotesque distortions of the New Sons—

The Immanence plucked a leaf from a bush and held it to Nigel’s eyes. He blinked and then stared at it steadily.

“You are a scientist. Why would anyone spend his life studying this leaf? Where was the gain?”

“Any form of knowledge has a chance of resonating with other kinds,” Nigel replied.

“So?”

“Suppose the universe is a parable,” Nigel said uncertainly. “By studying part of it we can read the whole.”

“The universe within a grain of sand.”

“Something like that. I feel the laws of science and the way the world is put together can’t be accidents.”

The Immanence pondered a moment.

“No, they are not accidents. But except for their practical use, they were always unimportant. The physical laws are but the bars of a cage.”

“Not if you understand them.”

“The central point is not to study the bars. It is to get out of the cage.”

“I think the act of reaching out is everything.”

“If you would come to fullness you must stop reaching and manifest a more basic spirit.”

“By dancing in two circles?”

“Another facet of the Many Ways. Not ours, but a Way.”

“I have my own way.”

“This world can best be understood as an insane asylum. Not an asylum for the mind, no. For the
soul.
Only the flawed remain here. Are still here.”

“I have my reaching out to do here. Out between the bloody bars, if that’s the way—”

“That is nothing. You must try to escape and transcend the cage.”

Nigel began to speak rapidly and the old man waved away his points.

“No,” he said. “That is nothing. Nothing.”

Rubbish,
Nigel thought.
Utter rubbish, what that dried prune of a man had said.

So thinking, he dipped a wing.

The airfoil caught and he felt a tug, pressure. Up he went, the momentary image of that dreadful Immanence bloke fading as quickly as it had come (
odd, to think of it here, now
) and the wind sang through the struts.

“How is it, Nigel?” Alexandria’s voice came in his ears.

“Incredible,” he said into his throat mike. He peered down at the spinning earth—which the instructor had warned him against, but what in hell was the point, really, if you couldn’t do that?—and saw her, an orange speck.

“Can you hold the spiral?” she called.

“Bit tough on the arms,” he grunted.

“The instructor says to relax into the harness.” “Right. I’m trying. Oops—” He lurched. The glider bit into a surge of wind and climbed sharply. The invisible funnel of air, warm as it swept in from the Pacific, lofted him further up his lazy spiral. The wind rose like a transparent fountain here on the coast, where breezes moving landward struck first the steep hills and then the westward wall of Arcosoleri, the kilometer-high city of cubes and apses. Nigel glanced at the glittering windows of the Arc as he swooped nearer it, judging the distance. He still had a safe margin of distance from the pinkish concrete face. The circling tunnel of air held him in check.

Below, the turning world.

Purple-ripe clouds mottled the arc of the sea’s horizon, showers of rain like skirts beneath them. And here, Nigel, banking and rising, felt a sensation like a
swoosh
of breath leaving him as his spirit lifted free of this spiraling body and joined the air. He shook himself. It was as though he had stopped struggling, stopped trying to swim through mud. The scooping wind moaned at the slit in his face mask and he tilted his wings to rise higher, Icarus re-born as he left behind everything below him. It was all in the past now, he hoped—Alexandria was recovering, the Snark was on its way. A pure blind joy possessed him. The unacknowledged fear that had gripped him at the beginning of the flight now fell away like a weight and he felt smooth and sleek, birdlike, darting in these high winds. Corkscrewing up, up from the enveloping earth. Soundless happiness. Mortality seeped out of him, froze in the chill high air and fell to shatter with a crystal tinkling on the California below. He turned in a slow circle, carving Earth’s skin of air, glinting ocean waves below waving at him randomly. A wing foil flapped, then straightened. Icarus. Wax wings. Do not go softly into this good sky. Soaring. The spinning Earth a basket below. The twin dots of Shirley and Alexandria like pins on a map

coins in his lap

Yes.

He lofted free.

They stayed overnight in a luxury suite of the Arc, rather than catch a bus southward to Los Angeles. Shirley dialed a holo and Nigel lay back in their room’s center pit, letting the delicious ache that came from exercise seep through him.

“Do you really think NASA will approve of your taking a chance like that?” Shirley said.

“Ummm? Flying a one-man glider, you mean?” Nigel shrugged. “Whacking lot they can do now.”

“I thought you were supposed to check with them on anything dangerous.”

“Piss on ’em and leave ’em for dead.” Nigel sighed noisily and watched quick splashes of color flick, jewel-like, across the inside of his eyelids.

“You don’t feel boxed in by what they’ll think?” “Hardly.”

“Then you wouldn’t mind signing an endorsement of a People’s Referendum?”

Nigel opened his eyes lazily. The holo abstract was a seething vision two meters above the pit, like an oozing ruby in oil. “What for?”

“To prohibit sale of LHS foods.”

“LHS?” Nigel frowned. A signer of a People’s Referendum Call guaranteed that he would help pay for the cost of having a nationwide vote on the issue in question, if it was turned down by the voters.

“Left-Handed Sugars.
You
know. We digest only sugars with a right-handed spiral molecule in them.”

“That’s what natural sugars are—right-handed.”

“Yes. Only now they’re making left-handed ones to use in food, so the body doesn’t turn them into fat. It’s a kind of diet food.”

“So what?”

“Well, it’s an insult to other countries to have that happening. When people are starving, I mean, almost everywhere. Will you sign, Nigel?”

He tilted his head back and studied the seamed concrete vault above them. Someone had once asked him to sign a Referendum Call against this Arc, even while it was becoming obvious that the first one, Arcosanti, was already an enormous success. It was still growing faster than Phoenix, which lay sixty klicks to the south of it, and yet wasted no space or energy on transportation systems. Everyone who lived inside it was within a fifteen-minute walk of work, play, entertainment, shopping. It had the urban complexity without the Losangelization, the separation from nature. But somebody had opposed it, for reasons now forgotten.

He sighed. “Think not.”

Her “Oh?” was carefully put.

He opened his eyes again and studied her. She wore the simplest of black dresses. Long panels of gossamer cloth hung down from a deep neckline. They were artfully arranged to hint at the tanned flesh beneath. She had a well-scrubbed sheen on her nose but her face was clouded by an odd, compressed tension.

“Shirley, old girl, you know I’m no revolutionary.” “Do you feel the same way about what those Brazilians want to do?” she said sharply. “They’ve got great little ideas about how to make the airline cost-effective again.”

“How?” Nigel said guardedly.

“During peak periods, when the computers don’t have enough solid-state electronics banks left to do the job, they’re planning to use human neural inventories.”

Nigel blinked, surprised. “Alexandria didn’t tell me.” “She probably doesn’t want to bother you while you’re busy planning your trip.”

“Probably… But look, why not use animals to tap into, for computer memory?”

“They don’t have—what’s it called?—anyway, they lose detail too easily.”

“Holographic data-storing capability, you mean.” He paused. “I’d heard about the experiments, but…With the cost of manufacturing computers these days, and the power drain, I suppose it’s smart economics…”

“Is
that
what you say?
Economics?
To hook poor people into machines, rent out their frontal lobes?”

“Granted, it’s unappealing. A zombie life, I suppose.” “It’s beneath human dignity.”

“How dignified is it to starve to death?”

Shirley leaned forward and said fiercely, “Do you really believe such a simple-minded—? You
do,
don’t you? Nigel, you’re greedy. You don’t know a thing about social problems and you want your life undisturbed.”

“Greedy?”

“Of course! Look at this room. It’s packed with every rich man’s amusements—”

“I didn’t notice you hanging back at the threshold.” “Okay, I enjoy a holiday too. But—”

“Why aren’t you down in Brazil? That’s what those types are going to do, isn’t it?—use grunt labor from Brazil to beef up—you’ll excuse the phrase?—American computers? Why not go down there and work with the poor people on the spot, in some little dimple of a burg?”

“This is my home,” Shirley said stiffly. “The people I love are here.”

“So they are. And you have wondrous thighs, Shirley, but they can’t encompass all the world’s teeming troubles.”

“Sarcasm won’t—”

“Listen.” Nigel cocked his head. “Alexandria’s coming in from her walk. I don’t want a chuffup over this, Shirley. I want no bother before we go off. Right?”

She nodded, her mouth twisted slightly as though under pressure.

Nigel saw that the mood in the room would be detectable when Alexandria came in, so he leaned back, yawned elaborately and began in a heavy Welsh accent,

“Aw-ee lasst mah-ee hawrt een ahn Angleesh gawrdaan,

Whaar thah rawzaz ahv Anglahand graw…”

ELEVEN

He and Alexandria lifted three days later. They had booked well in advance to get a flight over the poles; they reentered the atmosphere as a flaring pink line scratched across the sky of the north Atlantic.