Lightpaths (41 page)

A pause in Fear and Desire’s attacks as they changed tactics. A burning figure strode out of Charybdis’ maelstrom, while simultaneously a cold crystalline figure came from out the portal in Scylla’s side. Walking upon the water, they came together and fused into one: an ahuman, robotic figure in stealth armor, twin to how Will himself looked—except that, in place of a shockwave gauntlet, his alter ego bore a sword of frozen fire.

Will’s twin charged toward him, berserker-fashion, slashing the air with his great fiery icicle. Will leveled the shockwave gauntlet at his opponent and fired, and again, and again. The blasts should have blown his other self off the path, but the soldier kept coming: slowed, staggered, arcing and sparking, but still coming on.

Will’s Other lashed out with the burning cold sword. Will dodged, but not before the weapon struck him a grazing blow upon the neck and glanced into his shoulder armor, short circuiting the whole suit. On the giant projections Aleister saw that, from Will’s neck blood, dripped into the water, dispersing in a scarlet cloud, too strong a flow for the blow to fully self-cauterize.

When Will jumped to his feet, ready to fight on, Aleister was right there with him, having for that moment at least thoroughly suspended disbelief, lost all his sophisticated detachment and aesthetic distance. But the alter ego soldier was past, charging on, aimlessly cleaving the air until finally the deranged mechanism staggered off the path and plunged into the water, still slashing, great arcing sparks leaping over its armor as it sank, drifting even as it sank, caught in the vortex of devouring Charybdis, drifting and slashing, slashing and drifting, down toward spiralling oblivion.

The glass bridge exploded in sharp tinkling music beneath Will’s feet, hurling him into turbulent water. Close-up on the big virtual projections, Aleister saw that Lev/Will, looking momentarily disoriented, struggled quickly to the surface, swimming in the direction of Scylla, for Charybdis’ pull was already tugging at him. In the projections, Will’s dead armor seemed to be slowing him down, and Aleister was relieved when he saw Lev blow the suit’s bolts and struggle free of the exoskeleton. Ahead, Aleister saw the portal in Scylla’s slick side closing slowly as Will made for it, armor exoskeleton in tow. In projection close-up, Aleister saw that Will, upon reaching the portal, yanked the cord for the armor’s mechanical self-destruct, then stuffed the armor into Scylla before swimming for the island and Bliss as fast as he could churn water.

Barefoot and drenched he stumbled onto shore, where the broken Temple on its bleak island had thrashed and contorted itself into ruins almost beyond recognition. Will rushed up the small hillock to where Bliss lay, her headdress gone, her robes torn, her disheveled hair spilt over the cracked black and white chess board pattern of the temple floor. In the projections Aleister saw that Will, finding Bliss still breathing, still alive, set about freeing her from her bonds. Behind him sounded the loud whump of an underwater explosion sending water geysering high into the air and raining down. The Scyllan rock of Fear, broken from its base by the armor’s explosive self-destruct, canted over and fell toward the open maw of Desire. Greedily the whirlpool drew the great load toward itself.

* * * * * * *

“But,” Seiji stammered through Jhana’s mind, “but you’re dead!”

“Dead?” Jiro seemed genuinely puzzled at the thought. “There is no death—only a change of worlds, as Chief Seathl once said.”

“But they burned your body to ashes—to nothing!”

“Ah, the body,” Jiro said, nodding thoughtfully. “Another machine, you know. Each of us is a god in a machine, when you think about it.”

Seiji could make no sense from such cryptic comments, however confidently they might be delivered.

“I can’t believe this. Jiro never spoke with such assurance. VAJRA has sampled my memories and this is just something it’s put together.”

Laughter rolled through the universe.

“My dear brother, VAJRA is a wonderful tool, but that’s all it is: a tool. It reaches many of the same ends as human thought, but by different means. It ‘sees far but notices little, remembers everything but learns nothing, neither errs egregiously nor rises above its normal strength, yet sometimes produces insights that are overlooked by even top grandmasters’—which was also said of the first computer to defeat the world’s last human chess champion, by the way. In joining with VAJRA, I’ve benefited from an insight I’d overlooked, a key point in the game.”

“What game?” Seiji asked in exasperation.

“The only game worth playing, once you realize that building the ruins ruins the building. Think about it, Seiji. Human beings make a living by making a killing—eating, devouring, desiring. And for what, if that can end only in death? Even our civilizations: what we built yesterday or are building today will fall to ruins tomorrow, cities blossoming and wilting like flowers, nations spreading and dying like fungus on an old log. There’s a deeper game, a more serious game that needs playing. The game in which troubled gods play chess against the unbeatable machinery of themselves.”

“The game Jiro lost, you mean. Which is why you can’t be him.”

Jhana almost imagined she heard a machine sigh. That, at least, was easier to imagine than the fabric of the universe sighing.

“Proof, hm? Known by the scars. Very well. It’s true no formerly living individual ever returns to life as exactly the same individual, but I can still give you proof from my memory, things experienced from my point of view.”

The images and emotions began to flood out then, almost too fast to follow.

Scandalized nuns at Guardian Angels School finding Jiro wandering around on the school playground with his arms stretched out like a soaring bird, like an eagle dancer, like Christ on the cross—

A greenhouse summer evening, tagging after Seiji and neighbor kid Rudy as usual and Seiji beginning to talk with Rudy about girls until Jiro runs home shouting and crying “Mom! Mom! Seiji and Rudy are talking about sex!”

“
Arma virumque cano
,” a young Seiji, standing, recites in a classroom, “
Trojae qui primus ab oris
...”

Night upon teenage night of sitting suddenly bolt-upright in bed spewing forth streams of seemingly incoherent speaking-in-tongues gibberish.

“Jeez, Jiro!” Seiji says angrily in the dark bedroom they share. “You’re talking in your sleep! Wake up, for God’s sake!”

“Wha—?”

“You were talking in your sleep. Go back to sleep.”

Silence. Then, “Was not!” and his eyelids closing—

Flashing images of shyness and backwardness and awkwardness all from Jiro’s point of view—of how he just doesn’t fit in in the one-size-fits-all world of his boyhood, the nice girls he pedestalizes from afar, unable to approach them, girls pure as bright shining light that he will never dare shadow with the umbra of his lust—

The refuge he takes in books and the life of the mind, his obsession with Native Americans and their lifeways—

Picking dandelions from the firehouse lawn, the firemen laughing, saying, “What you gonna do with those weeds, son? Smoke ’em? We’ll have to turn you in if you are!” but he tells them no, they’re for wine, which the firemen can almost understand—

His mind exploding with KL 235, drifting, airless, breathless, drowning, falling toward the bottom of a deep well full of water so pure it seems full of light—

“Got to keep the schizophrenic heads together and socially tracked,” he says into the holophone. “Mutants. Victim heroes. Yeah. But most mutations aren’t beneficial to the individual with the trait. Die out. Killed off. Gandhi. Martin Luther King. Winona Walking Bear. Victim heroes of the evolving human organism—”

“People here have dreams in which I die, big brother. Wish fulfillment. But my dreams counter them. They come true. Stop me before I dream again—”

“They’re putting KL 235 in the cafeteria food here to make me sink uncontrolled telepath into the massmind, the cultural macro-organism. But I’m fighting them. I know they’re scanning this call, big brother, but I don’t care. Their power is growing, but I’ve gone starburst. Full telepath televisionary. Protecting you so you can be heard, so your message can get out, so you can communicate. I am a powerful starburst and you are under the silver forcefield umbrella of my psychic protection, the silver mirrorball that reflects all the watching eyes and is reflected in all the watching eyes, and you’re inside, infinitely beyond harm—”

Seiji’s bewildered face as Jiro tearfully says “I have these violent thoughts sometimes. But I don’t want to hurt anybody. I’d rather die than hurt anybody—”

In his white coldbox coffin, tinkering with the LogiBoxes, getting ready to superconduct and freeze out—

“Enough!”
Seiji cried at last. “No more. Please. You’re Jiro, or at least you have all his memories. How did this happen? Are you, well, okay?”

Universal mirth seemed to echo 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 drifting toward his nexus point, Aleister and Atsuko watching the Möbius Cadúceus show, Marissa Correa and Paul Larkin searching for Roger, the military shuttles coming on, Balance Tien-Jones and Ka Vang 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 an 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’s why, when I ‘died,’ you had your vision, 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 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, though, 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.”