Better Angels (11 page)

“No,” Jiro said, glancing away.

“It should,” Seiji continued. “Your self-image has sunk so low you’ve manufactured this god-conspiracy out to get you/help you. It must really bolster your ego to be chief victim, the center of a great conspiracy’s attentions. Oooh, you’re so important! Knock this crap off, Jiro! What’s wrong with you? You been taking KL again since I last saw you?”

Jiro kneewalked to the edge and looked down into Yosemite Valley’s tree- and meadow-floored depths before he answered.

“Yeah, some,” he admitted. “Chemopsychotherapy, you know? KL ages you. It’s great! Makes you grow up fast! Years of experience in a single night! Rocketsled the timelines! Psssshhhooooo! Instant maturity! Take and eat!”

“What the hell are you talking about?” Seiji said, anger shading into worry—and fear.

“Physics,” Jiro said, pulling back from the edge and the abyss beyond it. “Observation by consciousness makes the universe real. Quantum superposition of states. Ordinary human consciousness limits the universe to a single reality. An omnipresent and omnipotent consciousness, on the other hand, holds in its mind all possible states of all possible being simultaneously. The dreaming mind of God does not collapse the wave function. Ketamine Lysergate gives you a glimpse into that alternity. All the possibilities are real, in all the universes, all the time, all at once.”

“Gatehead bullshit,” Seiji said, shaking his head. “Crazy. All it really does is burn tracks in your brain.”

Jiro gave a strange, high-pitched laugh.

“Come on, Seij. Everybody does it—it’s just that no one admits it. Society-wide rite of passage.”

“‘Everybody does it—no one admits it’,” Seiji mocked, his voice sinking to a growl as he grabbed his brother’s pipe and tossed it over the edge, then grabbed his brother up by the sleeves and shoulders of his shirt. “‘I’m such a nobody everybody’s out to get me!’ More paranoid generalizing. KL’s no good for you, asshole!”

“It is good!” Jiro persisted, despite the rough handling by his brother. “Before I started doing KL, we would never have been able to talk like this!”

“We never needed to,” Seiji said, staring into the face of his brother held close before him. “You hadn’t shoved yourself to the edge then.”

“We always needed to!” Jiro said, his voice breaking. “But we never did! I never used to talk. You remember. The paranoia’s a plus, that way—it’s helping me out of my introversion.”

“What?”

“My paranoia’s so intense it makes me talk to people,” Jiro said, still hanging limply in his brother’s grip. “I ask people who they are, where they’re from—all the social small talk—because I want to know their role in the surveillance system.”

“You never talked about this crazy shit, before KL!” Seiji shouted in his brother’s face.

“I was asleep—I was dead—before,” Jiro said. Seiji’s grip on him began to loosen and slump.

“And now that you’re alive and awake the nightmare is killing you,” Seiji said, exhaustion returning to his voice. “No way to win. I might as well throw you over the edge. Then follow you down myself.”

Seiji did neither, however. Disentangling his hands from his brother’s shirt, he let Jiro slump to the ground. He walked a few paces away, then dropped to his haunches, shielding his eyes with his hands. A long silence opened between them.

“Seiji,” Jiro said at last, “why are you so angry about this? It’s my life, not yours.”

“I’m not angry, you idiot,” Seiji said, still shielding his eyes with his hands. “I’m afraid. You’re scaring me, can’t you see that?”

“You’re the one who was going to throw me off the top of Half Dome,” Jiro said with a weak smile. “How can I be scaring you?”

Seiji pulled his hands away from his reddened eyes but still did not look at his younger brother.

“Did you ever stop to think,” Seiji asked, “that I’m the person most like you in the whole damn world? Nature and nurture, genes and environment? If you go crazy, bro, then what does that say for my prospects?”

Before Jiro could respond, however, they were interrupted by a loud whooshing sound rising toward them. In a moment, a young athletic-looking couple soared up over the edge of the dome. Each of them was strapped into a maneuvering unit powered by pulse rockets. The couple circled the top of Half Dome twice, then landed about fifty yards away. The man and woman waved to Seiji and Jiro.

“Damned jetpackers,” Seiji muttered, though he waved pleasantly enough to the new arrivals. He turned to Jiro. “Popping into the view we had to sweat for. Come on. We’ve been up here long enough.”

Jiro gave his older brother a crooked smile.

“Confession’s over, Father? But you haven’t given me my penance yet.”

Seiji shook his head.

“Hiking back down to the valley floor will be act of contrition enough,” Seiji said, beginning to work his way back down the cables.

At the end of the day, that penance was adequate, for them both.

* * * * * * *

Disappearing into Simulation

Mike read from plump blonde Tanya Stautberg’s paper. “‘I think Earth’s impoverished masses are poor because they want to be. If a person wants a job bad enough, they can always find one.’ No, Ms. Stautberg—you can’t say that.”

“Why not?” she squealed, political bristles rising.

“You can’t say ‘a person...they.’ A person cannot be a they. ‘Person’ is singular, but ‘they’ is plural. A person can be ‘he,’ or ‘she,’ or ‘he or she,’ but not ‘they’. Confusing singulars and plurals makes any language less exact, Tanya. Also it’s not ‘bad,’ it’s ‘badly’.”

“It’s Tannya, not ‘Tawnya’,” she said, peeved. “I thought this was tutoring for a course in history, not grammar.”

“It is. But unfortunately for you, I have a background in languages, too.”

Shortly thereafter, Tannya left his cubicle, still not getting it. Never try to teach a pig to sing, Mike told himself with a sigh. He flicked off his shoulder the long, brown-blonde pony-tail he’d been growing out since leaving home. He looked at the poems he had posted on the walls of his cubicle. Since his arrival in Humboldt, rather than getting angry at his students, he had begun writing cynical poems—juggling his frustration into words, fusing it and polishing it into images—as a way of venting his spleen. His eyes flashed on a brief one posted about a third of the way up the left hand wall of the cubicle:

UNLESS IT’S PARADISE LOST

Poetry’s short

so maybe you’ll have time to feel

(you accomplished) something.

That about captured his students’ attention span, all right. Most of them had TV monkeys on their backs, major Holo Joneses to maintain. Yet another poem, on the cubicle wall in front of him, caught a different aspect of his disgruntlement with the summer school students he had been tutoring.

THE POETRY OF THE INARTICULATE

like—

like—uhh—

like—um—you know?

like—you know what I mean?

like—um—you know what I’m saying?

like—um—you know what I’m talking about?

like—um—you know.

like—um—anyway.

like—uhh—so—

you get the point?

How had this happened? Mike asked himself. Graduate school was supposed to have been just a way to get his foot in the door. So he could talk and write about what he wanted to talk and write about. So he could debate with his fellow historians the major questions in their discussions of a century-old war. So he could help clarify their understanding of the sinking of the Jutland. Instead, here he was, tutoring Gen Ed courses for ungrateful undergraduates.

No matter how enlightened a corner Humboldt State was supposed to be in the endarkened American mindscape, the campus still had no towers ivoried and ivied enough to block out the ideological wars raging through the country at large—the Jesus vs. Darwin celebrity death-match mudwrassle to which contemporary American intellectual culture had been reduced. He thanked the divine ground of all being that he wasn’t teaching a political minefield course like Evolutionary Biology, or The Bible as Literature. How much longer would the used-Christ dealers, the politicians and preachers of the pre-owned Jesus, continue to allow such heretical courses to be taught? He shivered involuntarily, despite the warmth of the day and the open windows of the Humanities building.

Not that the gadgeteers in the academic sciences were much better, he thought. He had encountered students enough already who were possessed of a messianic faith in technological progress: sophomore physics majors who felt no connection to the Earth at all—just a planet to be used up and thrown away before moving on to the next oasis in space, hopefully at faster-than-light speed.

Humanity as Trashers of the Universe. How different were those physics majors, really, from the stubborn millenialists and apocalyptists with their “Use it up ‘cuz you’re gonna lose it in the Rapture anyway” mentality? On the right wall of the cubicle he had posted poems about that too, but none of them seemed to work.

All too philosophical, he thought. His poetry, with the rest of his thoughts, had taken that turn since he’d left home, since he’d hitched that ride with the defrocked academic IT guy heading from Montana to San Bernardino. He only had one poem on his walls from the time before his move west, an experiment in haiku:

flowers above snow,

Spring daffodiligently

forgets forgetting.

Was it better or worse than what he was writing lately—or only different, as he himself was different?

Was it the KL he’d been doing that had made him different? He didn’t want to think about that, if he could avoid it. Certainly there was a good deal more to life than the latest brain candy. Why, then, had he DSBed—engaged in “drug-seeking behavior”—almost immediately upon arrival in Humboldt? Linking up with the marijuana traditionalists, and through them the whole entheogens/hallucinogenics crowd? The Blue Spike people at the fringes, too—they were the really scary ones....

He exhaled slowly. Putting on a pair of eye-phones and turning on his desktop oracle, his system came on singing the “Sound of Music in One Verse” with which he’d programmed it:

Climb every mountain, search high and low,

Follow every byway—Nazis are coming, let’s go!

He began searching in the infosphere for some of his new local and nonlocal friends. They usually hung out in the virtual public that had spawned from the Lyceum entheogen library. He cruised the chats, trying to determine if anybody he knew was on-line at the moment.

“The way we perceive the world is at best a brilliant distortion,” said a starscape-bodied digital persona, trolling, lines out for conversation, “bearing no more resemblance to the real than van Gogh’s ‘Starry Night’ bears to the depths of space.”

No one he knew. He scanned on, into a group personaed as several different species of owl.

“‘Anti-sex’?” said a barn owl. “Not at all. I’m a big fan of consensual sex. Less of a fan of sex for procreation. No fan at all of ‘sex’ that is really a mask for abuse of power. Your kinks per se don’t bother me. But I draw the line when the whole point of your scheming and manipulating is anti-consensual: Getting others—men or women—to do what you want them to, against their will, and without their consent. I know of few libertarians who would support the infliction of unsought physical and mental cruelty as a ‘sexual right’—”

Rights, privileges. More death-match mudwrassle culture. Nope. Nobody he recognized there, either, though it sounded very much like one of the campus NeoLiberty Theory chats. Mike scanned on, into a fractal-patterned zone peopled by rainbow-hued personae playing some sort of dizzying word-jumble or association game in a circle—all of them anonymous or using obvious aliases. Ah, Mike thought, this is beginning to look familiar.

“Consciousness is the object of a transcendent idea,” said the first player-persona in the new round, a.k.a “Schopenhauer.”

“Transcendence is the object of an ideal consciousness,” said the second player.

“Transcendence is the consciousness of an ideal object,” said a third persona.

“Ideas are the objects of a transcendent consciousness,” said a fourth persona.

“Objects are the ideas of a transcendent consciousness,” said a fifth persona.

“Transcendent consciousness is an ideal object,” said a sixth persona.

“Object consciousness is a transcendant idea,” said a seventh persona.

“Consciousness is the idea of a transcendent object,” said an eighth, newly joined in the game.

Hm, Mike thought. Start with a philosophical statement then run it through a deconstruction/reconstruction process to see what gets generated. That sounded like it might be one of Chrysantha Clark’s loony “research modalities.” She was a graduate student specializing in the philosophy of language, heavily involved in “adaptive linguistic computation strategies” and “semantic evolution games.” This had the earmarks of one of her research games, all right. It developed fast, too: they had already moved into a new level of the game as he was thinking about it.

“If objects are the ideas of a transcendent consciousness, then subjects are conscious objects in the mind of that consciousness,” said the second persona.

“Humans are therefore conscious ideas,” said the third persona.

“Consciousness objects to conscious objects because conscious objects are subjects,” said the fourth persona.

“To be conscious is to be an idea in the divine mind who is aware it is an idea in the divine mind,” said the fifth persona.

“Is consciousness the effect of a transcendent cause (God creates us) or the cause of a transcendent effect (we create God)?” asked the sixth persona.

“If God could create a universe that evolves,” said the seventh persona, “then why not a universe which could evolve a God who creates?”

Well, Mike thought, that would certainly explain the Biblical inerrantists’ fear of evolution. This stuff was head-spinning enough to be annoying, after a while. Certain that “Schopenhauer” was actually Chrysantha, he left the idea-processing circle chat and sent Chrys a virtual mail on her private line.

“Hey, ‘Schopenhauer,’” he asked, “when you get tired of being a disembodied mind on line, would you be so kind as to give me a heads-up on any parties happening tonight?”