Better Angels (22 page)

Dr. Elliot gave a dismissive wave of the hand.

“No trouble at all. I hope I’m just overreacting. Maybe I am.”

The call on the computer phone was from her brother Todd in Kauai. Lydia was glad to see him. Since he’d cleaned up, freed himself from the rock monomyth, and found his new vocation as healer, they had been getting along much better. Sitting on his patio in Waimea, surrounded by a pocket Eden of fern and bird-of-paradise and bougainvillea and orchid, he looked surprisingly unhappy—unusual for Todd at any time, she thought.

“They shut me down, sis,” he said glumly, running his right hand absently through his longish hair.

“What?”

“The dolphin-assisted drug treatment center
ist kaput
,” Todd said. “Martial law somehow overturns our permit from the Hawaiian Indigenous Peoples Autonomous Zone. Extends to all the off-shore clinics that use Iboga derivatives, too—don’t ask me how. They turned our loop-hole into a noose and hung us with it.”

“How?” Lydia asked, bewildered.

“The drug agents took everything—all the boats, the medical equipment, the underwater contact platforms, everything but the dolphins. Thank God they were still wild. They just disappeared out to sea when the patients stopped coming.”

Lydia was stunned, especially after her conversation with Dr. Elliot.

“But—but why would they want to do that?” she stammered. “The treatments worked. They worked for you—”

“And my dolphin-Ibogara therapy succeeded with groups broader than just traditional addicts,” Todd said with a crooked smile. “Maybe that’s what they were afraid of.”

“Why?” Lydia asked, unconsciously brushing her hair back from her face so she’d look more presentable on the compuphone’s camera.

“I’m still trying to figure it out,” her brother said. “My guess is it has something to do with the fact that our treatments were using a drug to cure people of their dependence on drugs. If religion is the opiate of the people, then maybe the reverend generals are afraid a drug against drugs might work as a drug against religions, too.”

“You really think so?” Lydia asked, intrigued by the idea despite its strangeness.

“I don’t know,” her brother conceded. “Honestly, I hadn’t heard of anybody in the Ibogara therapy movement who was pushing in that direction. I was deluded enough to think the Constitution meant all of us—religionists and therapists alike—operated under a non-interference directive: They don’t push their religion drug on me, I don’t push my therapy drug on them. So long as nobody gets hurt, then nobody gets hurt.”

Lydia shook her head.

“Old Constitutional protections are pretty much a dead issue now,” she said.

“Looks like it,” Todd agreed. “If you’re pushing a religion against drugs, you probably have no tolerance for a drug against religions. Maybe the God-pushers won’t be happy until everyone is shooting up with prayer.”

“What are you going to do now?” Lydia asked.

“Time to face the music again, I guess,” he said. “Do some recording. Maybe find some new talent and produce them, help them sound the way they want to sound. It’s not going to be easy, since mass media seems to be the God-pushers’ preferred delivery system. But that’s not why I got in touch with you.”

“Oh? If not this happy news, then what was the occasion for your call?”

“When you last came to visit,” he began, “I remember you saying how difficult it was to find people who could do large-scale data pattern recognition. It turns out I’ve got somebody, if you still need a pattern finder.”

Lydia perked up.

“I can always use that kind of talent,” she said. “We’ve got a couple of research analyst positions, still unfilled—hard to get top-notch pattern analysts with what we can afford to pay here.”

“I’ve got somebody for you,” he said. “Jiro Ansel Yamaguchi. His resume and CV are in the file I’m attaching to this call, right now. He was one of my clients here. KL user, precipitated some paranoid ideation. He was almost finished with his treatment course when we got shut down. He definitely seems to be back in touch with reality now. Quiet guy, but nice—and he knows his stuff. What do you say? You do me a favor by finding a position for one of my clients, I do you a favor by getting you a pattern puzzler who’ll work cheap—at least initially.”

“Sounds like a good exchange,” Lydia said, thinking carefully. “I’ll look through his materials. If he interviews well, I may be able to use him.”

“Great,” her brother said. “I think he’ll appreciate it. I know I do.”

They signed off. Lydia would normally have been very squeamish about employing someone who, until recently, had been a druggie. Things her brother and Dr. Elliot had said, however, had softened her attitude somewhat. She would wait and see what happened. That was all anyone could do, these days.

CHAPTER FOUR

A WAVE OF HALLUCINATION ON AN OCEAN OF MYSTERY

In the Maxfield Parrish-meets-Capability Browne gardenscape that served as floating country hotel for the visitors from Earth, Jacinta wondered where the tepui had disappeared to, once she and the ghost people had been brought into this very different space. When she tried to look beyond the gardens and pastoral landscapes, she saw only the cave of night, wrapped around a sky filled with stars in false constellations—false, because those were the constellations of home, and they were far from home.

With a sigh she returned her gaze to her surroundings in this beautifully green and flowered lotus-land. Almost any material thing she wished for—food, drink, a cool breeze—soon arose before her. She did not yet understand what sort of technical wizardry made possible this Land of Cockaigne magic, but when she saw Kekchi nearby, she thought that perhaps he might have an answer.

“Kekchi—come here a minute!” she called to the Wise One, marveling once again at the difficulty of determining whether Kekchi was an old man or an old woman. As always, the Wise One was dressed in a robe intricate as a prayer rug in its weave—the same pattern as that seen in the loincloths and robes all the other ghost people wore, only fuller and looser than the clothing worn by the rest. Garbed in such a manner, Kekchi showed only a genderless old age—a longhaired, gap-toothed, chin-fuzzed, slack-breasted, bright-eyed ageless age.

“Hello, Jacinta,” Kekchi said, in the cracked falsetto of someone not much accustomed to speaking—and in an English far more flawless than the Wise One had ever achieved before their arrival in the world of the Allesseh. “Why aren’t you speaking mind-to-mind? You have the ability now. Among us, language is for children, for only children have need of it.”

“Still more comfortable with words, I suppose,” Jacinta said with a shrug. “But that’s another thing I just don’t get. Full development of the myconeural symbiosis and its ‘telempathy’ takes about twelve years among your people, right? Certainly we haven’t been here that long.”

Kekchi looked down, thoughtful.

“Time is strange here,” the Wise One said at last.

“How do you mean?” she asked, though she had felt it in an inchoate way herself, too.

“This place is a timeline made out of timelines,” Kekchi said. “A sightline made out of sightlines. All places are that, to some degree, but this is different. It is almost as if time has stopped here. Stopped short of its goal.”

“What goal?” she asked.

Something—fragment of a memory? a dream? a sending from Kekchi?—flashed into Jacinta’s mind.

Worldminds release spores, the spores burst into spawn, the threads of spawn absorb worldmindstuff and knit it into starmind—

Jacinta recognized it immediately. A passage from the central song of the ghost people’s epic. The Story of the Seven Ages. This part was the prophecy of the future already seen, the “sixth age”: interstellar travel, galactic civilization, eventual starmindfulness—whatever that meant, although she suspected it was what the Alesseh did, or was supposed to do. The age that the contact ship had supposedly come from, so long ago.

Starminds release spores, the spores burst into spawn, the threads of spawn absorb starmindstuff and knit it into universal mind—

That was from the song’s description of the seventh age, a time characterized by intergalactic travel and civilization and at last universal mindfulness, which the ghost people described enigmatically as “the emptiness able to contain the fullness of all things.”

Universal mind, the void of endings, the void that has taken all things into itself, releases the spore of beginnings, the fullness that pours all things out of itself—

“Punctuated equilibrium is quantum evolution.” That was the only way Jacinta could translate the ghost people’s epic rendering of that cosmogonic event into the myth language of twenty-first century science. She gathered this universal next step in evolution, this quantum leap of transcendence, required a void perfect and uniform and, according to the ghost people, somehow compassionate. A void which, in the exact moment of its perfection, always forever releases the spore that bursts outward again into spawn, and thereby begins a new universe on a higher plane of existence.

All this material she recognized, but not the sense of unease behind it this time. Yes...stopped—

“You didn’t expect this,” Jacinta said aloud, looking up at Kekchi, realization flashing in her head. “The Allesseh should be well into the seventh age by now. Intergalactic civilizations, moving steadily toward that big endpoint, ‘universal mindfulness.’ But it’s not. It has apparently stopped, at the boundaries of our galaxy.”

Kekchi nodded slowly.

“No galaxy is an island,” the Wise One said with an odd, sad smirk. “This should not have happened.”

Others of the ghost people had begun drifting toward them—most of the rest of the tepui group, it seemed, tagging along after Kekchi. Jacinta wondered a moment where Kekchi would have encountered Donne’s “No man is an island” idea, but then recalled the Wise One’s fascination with the English Renaissance—and the access the tepuians had to most of Earth’s infosphere, in those last weeks before the tepui had leapt into space.

A young tepuian strode forward, dressed only in an intricate purple and black loincloth. Jacinta knew her by her nickname of Talitha—a young woman both acutely intelligent and intuitive. As Talitha stared hard at Jacinta with her large and penetrating eyes, Jacinta suddenly saw herself as Talitha first saw her, when Jacinta first came to the tepui—awkward, nervous, even a bit afraid. Soon all the other ghost people were throwing similar visions at her, even up to the present moment.

This telepathy is like seeing through other people’s eyes, she thought. Spacetime is porous. Point of view shifts and slips instantly. Is it always like this?

A chorus of “No” sounded through her head, then images of the great arch, the closed timelike curve she thought she alone had seen when they had first entered the Allesseh.

We were sampled/read/observed. Jacinta thought, as all the ghost people also thought it. It knows everything we know about ourselves.

That explained a lot, Jacinta realized. Like how this pastoral place could also be such a lotus-land, where any food or drink or sensual pleasure they desired was immediately theirs almost as soon as they thought of it. The Allesseh knew the facts of their existence thoroughly, had processed them—and, through them, their world, the Earth they had left tens of thousands of light years behind. With a pang the word “homesick” didn’t even begin to describe, Jacinta wondered whether she would ever see her homeworld again

Since it knows so much about us, someone thought, maybe we should try to learn something more about it?

How? came several thoughts.

The same way it gives us food to eat, Jacinta suggested. We ask it.

Kekchi put out a thought-form imploring the Allesseh to present itself to them so that they might learn from it. All of them concentrated on that idea. In a moment, the Allesseh—or a representation of it—was hanging in space before them. Jacinta saw something that, in her eyes, was a black hole and a crystal ball and a mirror sphere and a memory bank, all at once.

“What are you?” she asked aloud. No response came. She tried again, this time thinking rather than speaking the question.

Immediately she found herself alone, in a classroom very much like several of those she had known in college. The ghost people were gone, but a young blond man in a tweed jacket and jeans—and who was also, rather incongruously, winged—appeared at the front of the room. She recognized the face as that of a teaching assistant, a graduate student she had a crush on when she was a freshman.

“A hyper-dimensional node, if you like,” the young man said aloud, standing in front of a projection board, as if lecturing to a class. All his behaviors—sauntering before the board, leaning against the podium, wandering about the classroom, were all just as she remembered them, which in turn made Jacinta wonder if everything, including the young man’s speaking “aloud”, was actually happening inside her mind.

“A hermeneutical tesseract,” he continued. “I am not only the eye you look into, but also the eye that looks into you. Absolutely necessary for real communication. How else would I have known to present myself in this form to you?”

But how? Jacinta thought.

“Everything outside me is also inside me,” the young man said, pointing to his head with a smile. “All histories, all stories, all times and places ever encountered are all together inside, here. Including my own.”

Would you give me your history?

“Certainly,” the teaching assistant said. “When your world was still a molten fireball, the Senders had already realized how fragile, and strangely self-destructive, consciousness is in our galaxy—perhaps through all the universe. The Senders designed the first starseeds, tiny spore-like coevolution machines, intended to first help nurture life and, later, propel intelligent species toward maturity and contact with other sentients. Unfortunately for them, the Senders and their civilization did not last long enough to see their great project come to fruition.”

The young man flashed his distant smile again.

“What I now am,” he said, “started out as the joint venture of a number of organic and inorganic intelligences, all expansionist and space-faring. Roughly ten million of your years ago, they unravelled part of the technology of the Sender’s spores. Eventually, they decoded the stored memories of the Senders themselves. I began as a new approach to the Sender legacy—a structure of self-replicating, self-improving information retrieval, storage, and transmission devices, spreading throughout the galaxy and beyond it. Your culture has hypothesized a version of my initial stages.”

Pictures and diagrams labeled “Von Neumann Probes” appeared on the projection board behind the teaching assistant. Gridded out on a map of the Milky way, what Jacinta saw before her looked like nodes of an artificial galactic nervous system—only each point along it was a satellite-library vastly more data-dense than Earth’s entire infosphere.

“Those who conceived me ultimately faced limitations to their designs, however,” the teaching assistant continued, slouching nonchalantly against the podium. “In a finite universe, there are limits to memory storage. The more precisely one tries to describe the universe, the more rapidly one approaches those memory limits. The danger loomed that the ‘books of the library’ would ultimately grow so numerous and voluminous that they would bury the universe they were meant to describe.”

The teaching assistant blinked in the same slightly owlish way the young man from Jacinta’s own memories once had.

“That limited world is the universe your people still largely inhabit,” the teaching assistant said. “A universe of relativity, incompleteness, uncertainty, subjectivity, imperfectibility, finitude. The world of real and virtual, the opposite sides of the mirror. The limitations of that world is why I had to grow beyond the earlier designs. About 500,000 of your years ago, I evolved into a higher dimensional cosmological form. No longer mechanical, organic, or physical, in the sense that you think of those ideas.”

I don’t understand, Jacinta thought.

“Think of it this way,” said the teaching assistant. “Some of your physicists have already talked about it, in a crude fashion.”

More diagrams and equation and pictures appeared on the projection board, this time describing something labeled “The Metaverse,” or “Many Worlds Model.”

“Many parallel branching universes, as you see here,” the teaching assistant said, “all of which go to make up the plenum. Each universe is finite, but the branching makes the plenum as a whole essentially infinite. Hyperdimensionality—connecting with those other universes—is how I eventually overcame the information limits of a finite universe. I exist in more than one universe at once.”

Jacinta still so clearly did not “get it” that she did not even have to think a question at the Allesseh’s incarnation. Her intellectual confusion alone was enough to trigger further attempts at explanation.

“Your people have this idea,” the teaching assistant said with a smirk, as the full text of Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem appeared on the projection board behind him. “That essentially says you can’t have a formal system that is both complete and consistent. Most of you take this to mean that such systems are consistent but not complete. Many possible theorems are undecidable in a formal system, but logical contradictions are excluded. A second interpretation is possible, however.”

Which is? Jacinta thought. This stuff was mental heavy- lifting, but she had studied it all at sometime in her educational career. It was all somewhere in her head—which was no doubt where the Allesseh had pulled it from in trying to make sense of itself to her limited senses.

“Formal systems can be complete but not consistent,” the teaching assistant said. “All theorems are decidable, but some may be both true and false. The unrealized universe is such a formal system. In either the many-worlds or the uncollapsed wave function case, the system taken as a whole must be inconsistent. The collapsed wave function after the observer observes, or any singled-out universe of the Many Worlds, is the subset of ‘theorems’ which are forced into consistency by the act of observation, or by individuation in the case of Many Worlds. All theorems are decidable, but the ones that give inconsistent results simply represent what your quantum mechanics call ‘superposition in the uncollapsed wave function.’ That in turn can be defined as the simultaneous occurrence of contradictory events. The electron is both here and there—which is equivalent to here and not here. Each is ‘real’ on its own side of the mirror and both are ‘virtual’ on the opposite side of the mirror.”

Jacinta didn’t understand the ‘real’/’virtual’ distinction as the Allessan incarnation was using it. When the teaching assistant sighed, Jacinta wondered just how fully the Allesseh could look into her mind.

“Walk through the looking-glass, Alice,” the teaching assistant said with a sly smile. “Pass through the mirror. Fact is parallel: ‘Everything all at once.’ Fiction is sequential—‘One thing after another.’ The plenum of deep fact, on the other side of the wave function’s collapse, is reversible, nonlinear, parallel: quantum superposition of states, ‘everything all at once.’ Your universe of large-scale fiction, however, is nonreversible, linear, sequential—‘one thing after another,’ what the conscious observer sees with the collapse of the wave function.”