Transcendence (51 page)

He runs as fast as he can, the Security woman chasing after him, “Stop, Liu! It’s okay! We need to talk, stop”; but Liu running so hard that his lungs burn yes and his eyes, but the burning eyes keeps them from running wet; but wet, yes, and wet, he loves the wet, far from the stupid gang-boys who only laugh and hate but don’t know anything, running, they only do it because they’re afraid, too; Liu running; soon the shiny, grey plastic plank juts out from the gangway—he looks down, below his feet the slits in the metal gangway show thousands of men and women and boys and girls walking or standing but all quiet maybe except laughing and one or two crying, always those few who cry who don’t know how to make sense of anything, whom Liu always felt a sympathy for since he couldn’t understand Father; but Father asleep in the water, oily whitish froth like a cloud around him like the dead boy floating underwater a year later, and no no no, not now, not yet until he talks to me and really takes me intheflesh to see the Great Temple of Mahabodhi; we only saw it 3VRD although yes Father it is very beautiful, I see the shiny birds landing on the roofs and bald men in orange robes chanting, yes, I love this and I love you Father and Mother, why don’t you hear me can you hear me have you ever heard me?

But he knows better than to say this aloud, because then maybe they’d never go anywhere or ever say yes we love you, yes let’s see the whole world and every world in the Solar System yes intheflesh; an open clamshell on the plank overlooking the sea, the plank with an electric winch and plastiweave cable hanging from it, clamshell dry with the fibers of meat inside hard and yellowish and knife-marks in the shell where some poacher who had stolen it from the sea had cut it open, nobody eats real clams whole, at least now here on the gangways; he looks down at the waves crashing but so quiet actually, everything grows so quiet, even the Security man with silver bulletproof overall clanging along the metal planking is quiet, and the air is quiet as his legs go slack and he falls to the water again like those years ago, even the splash is quiet; he falls again in the air, thick and soft through his hair and pulling at his loose shirt, watching so slowly as he falls the clouds sweeping the smog from the sky, the smog rising up from the fume-chambers so high above the shiny towers, a few windows passing him in his fall, one face peering out but not seeing Liu Miru, instead maybe a distant war somewhere; you shitless mannequin—angry thoughts just before splashing quiet beneath the waves—loving the wars; this is a war, he thinks, missiles shrieking through the electric air booming the soil ripped open like a wound, he crashing through the waves like the waves crashing against the Island, which won’t last forever; beneath the green and sunlight water again, watching a million years pass and salt chewing at metal, blood filling the empty chambers, blood and fire and he sees forever into the future until no Floating Island, just a sunken catacomb of fish-chambers, no Mother; she on the waves, too, swimming muscleless with her husband although he swam weeks prior; she never spoke to him, not really, so why does she swim with the dead? don’t think such things, she love, he love; doesn’t matter in death, always death, death everywhere except for the fish who die and me too but not yet; no, not yet.

Live dammit!
And another scene flashed to life in the multifaceted gem of landscapes in the mists. A grown man-boy laughing and ordering, “Fire torpedoes!” which scream hot sparkling exhaust along the external hull of the spacecraft, Jackson the Captain, Captain Jackson for the first time ordering torpedoes fired, impacting silently 100 kilometers away across blank space, sleepy and ravenous space, the dichotomy the same as that of the men who kill each other for the pleasure of virtual viewers, billions of viewers entranced on their living room couches, no whiskey just Captain Jackson, loving and hating and killing and laughing, laughing, the control cabin of the corvette rancid with sweat and fear, the smell of antiseptics and burning insulation, smoke burning the eyes, but not death! never death, death the enemy and the friend; this is the path to forget:

A beautiful woman at home, asleep intheflesh always but awake for everyone 3VRD, she lied at first lied always, oh how I loved her
. . .
see the love? this is love, a blinding of the past, washing of the soul, all words, only words, no I don’t know what is love; Megan asleep breathing softly soft hair soft buttocks soft voice muttering hours before, “never leave you,” ha never, never say never, never say die, firing missiles and laser cannons at Enemy: NKK, AMRCO, thugs in the street, oh yes and the Crusades continued when on the ground later—adult gang, the Boyoviky Internationale, man standing on the St. Louis street corner, Pehr strutting as he had always planetside would never again without a lie in each fall
clump
of his EConaut boots,
clump
, the Boyovik watching Pehr with slit-eyes, brown hair flat on scalp oiled greased, we greased ’em, electromag weapons ripping the night, Moon yellow through sparse trees and mountains of skyscrapers, Pehr oh weakling fearful, I hate old self screams, yes and nothing, no brave Crusades as when younger, no; but lied to Janus, the Crusades continued, shameful coward Crusades in space, roar of rockets and scream of missiles, eliminate NKK and no more gangs or street thugs or death, EarthCo the great kind friend, fight and release and death and, oh, I don’t know why I do it anymore.

A shift as he fell up and away from the worlds of memory.

Time, black and heavy against the skin and smelling of dust, passed.

He found himself seated on the edge of a landscape, legs hanging over like a little boy leaning on a railing overlooking the sea or straddling a sewerpipe over the river, water running or crashing, both smelling the same of rotting fish or decaying weeds or ammonia or worse, the mists like the sea or a river; Miru remembers the dolphin-swim he made through his life when he first entered the artifact.

“
Learning tool,” he corrects himself.

“
Hello, Liu,” Pehr says.

They turn away from the island-scenes floating through the mists, islands of a lifetime, of two lifetimes intermeshed somehow, both the same but different; “I’m like you,” one said; the other said “I am you”; swimming, the landscape as they call it in 3VRD language, headcard terminology,
landscape
, but this so much more, a million, a billion, near-infinite moments of lives strewn across the 4D space of a hollow globe; they smile at one another, wordless, understanding. Pehr has green eyes like deepwater sea and curly brown hair.

And now it was the first moment still, Liu Miru’s memories flooding through Pehr Jackson, Pehr’s memories flooding through Liu; the deluge continues until both understand, wearing them down yet girding them up with the knowledge,
I am not alone
.

Pehr hears Liu think,
Or is it me thinking? We are the scarred clam on the plastic plank with the electric winch over the sea. We are the knifed-open shell, bare and drying in the fierce sunlight of humanity
.

No. That is only the fearful, isolated, lonely shell. And not a clam. We, all of us—do you hear the voices? We are not alone, billions of others—but I do not know who they are—we are the oyster. Outside the artifact, we are the oyster. Not a clam but an oyster. When we enter, rather than gaining a shell, our physical surface is smashed away, vaporized, leaving exposed the hurt and lonely and fearful and longing child, the child seeing all the wonder and magic in the universe, the love buried in the electronic hearts of our parents, yes, and those others when we bump into love elsewhere; all the barriers here fall away, the shell crumbles in the fierce light of omniscience—Are we really omniscient?—Of course not, only all knowing of ourselves, each other; the shell is discarded, and all that remains is what lay within. We are only the soft and fragile and wonderful thing, the maybe damaged yet stronger by being damaged thing. Plus the hidden treasure. Yes, the hidden treasure within the ugly shell within the folds of self, the treasure formed by years of suffering and fighting the abrasion successfully
.

“
Successfully is the key.”

They are back, side by side, upon the edge of one scene, surveying scenes of themselves drifting to near-infinity. There runs the blind boy, the even-blinder man, the almost-empty adult. Oh, how small we were then.

“
Yes.”

“
So we are survivors.”

“
Yes.”

“
What is my pearl?”

And the question sweeps them off and away. Analysis will not work here, no, only experiential knowledge you cannot quantify, *Yes I see, we go again.*

With this new drive for quiet understanding, mutual understanding helping one another—*We are the same but different; Yes, but stronger than together outside, stronger than a million men, don’t you see?*—this new drive constructs new dimensions upon the previous landscape of tiered scenes like playthings from this outside/inside viewpoint, like toy soldiers only they cry when they are sad and skin their knees when they fall on the metal grating.

A new thing emerges, the globe of bracings or veins or skyways that Miru the Lone had seen when he had first entered the artifact. He and he, I and I watch the globe sprout spans from end to end, so almost infinite but I yes and he can see the ends touch the ends, we see forever yet right here; *What does it mean? Be quiet and understand.* The skyways had faded with the question but now they return. Immense and minute tubes link the scenes to one another, throbbing as if veins, boys and men running through the tubes—now transparent with their eyes closed, their hands over their ears, their mouths sewn shut with bullets and their hands gloved in thick rubber; only their headcards show them the world now, yes they can see that since those boys and men are he and I, me and him, we run and laugh and cry but we are not here, we are not alone. So the globe returns:

Universe-spanning tubes like branches stretch from lucid yesterday into the fog of tomorrow, extending from one end of the opalescent curvature of the sphere to the other, millions of branches or veins or skyways, sometimes linking with one another, complicated webweavings, but a few stretch all across without touching others. A ladybug, pale orange with black spots and waving antennae, kicking legs as it climbs a yellow-green stalk of uncut grass; only this in the whole universe at the same time as the branches. *You see, it is a city and it is not.*

He and he, I and I looked up from our perch and saw the tops of my head running with Teresa along the cloudy river, Captain Downward in his destroyer racing beside us. Down is up. I laugh, joy filling my heart. He laughs. This is true joy, is it not? To go where nobody has ever gone. Certainly not me
.

*Not me.*

*Look there*:

Finally, a killer whale.
How could I have forgotten? See, it was at 17 years of age
. She rises slow from the frothing waves like a mountain from the earth, white and black and eyes that know, she is lonely, yes you can see it now even though it is decades ago, you are here; she exhales water and steamy breath, then gulps air as she sinks back beneath steel grey water.
That is why I forgot; no one must know. She will live or die dependent upon my silence. We all live or die
.

“
That is such a simple thing. But I understand. Words mean nothing and everything here.”

“
No,” Liu—he is beside me now—touches his smooth forehead with a hand, the fingers creased and tan with pigment, not from exposure to sun, “no, not here the artifact. Here, in the mind. My mind, your mind. We are different now. We are only mind, but we two form a greater mind.”

“
How?”

Again, the globe fades, the scenes fog over, and only one scene remains in all the universe. Time—seconds or centuries—passes. The slack face, perhaps slightly tense even in death, the edges of his mouth turned down; the boy I murdered.

“
No, you did not murder.”

“
You’re technically right; I did not murder. But I caused him to be murdered.”

“
We all cause murders in our inactions. Murder is a constant, it is everpresent. We both know murder firsthand. We are all murderers, if you wish. But you and I are not murderers as you mean it.”

“
I am not alone.”

“
I am not alone.”

Time passes, like water across the skin, cool and soothing, wind through the hair with a wordless voice that even here is cryptic, constellations of crystalline stars twinkling in the turbulence. Now daytime, long ago.
Hiss
, a vivid orange leaf rides the wind, cracking as it lands in Teresa’s dark hair. She laughs and pulls it out, careful not to smash it. Two days later, she brings it to me in a glass jar. A year later, the glass jar lives in the eighter and not me.

“
I know what I am made of,” I say.

“
You are thinking murder again.”

“
No. I mean the shell, see? There, you understand. Do you feel me understanding you? I would have been afraid of this feeling before I came here, but not now. The shell is hateful, ugly sometimes.”