Better Angels (29 page)

She wondered if she were dying. She wondered if she had already died. She wondered if she would ever come back to the universe she had known.

Through time’s mirror.

She wondered if she would ever come back to the universe she had known. She wondered if she had already died. She wondered if she were dying.

Something of her lingered, beyond the divergence, the bifurcation. Something was experiencing these swirling depths, these dimensions beyond anything she had ever known. Something had moved into a deeper reality, one underlying the world of appearances but far removed from it.

Something of her, scales flashing like a ruby and emerald fish, came into a realm of waves like the interference patterns of a hologram, apparently chaotic until the right kind of light could be shone through them. Space and time had not yet unfolded at this level, had not yet crystallized or frozen into form. Here was only the pattern beneath the structure of time, the mathematician’s or quantum physicist’s “real but not physical,” nothing more.

Still, as she swam about, shadow vectors swarmed around her—some luminous, some obscure. Alternate presents kept breaking in on her present in their own ghostly fashion. Alternate futures suggested themselves. She saw that the probability distributions were denser in some areas than in others, indicating greater likelihoods of actually occurring.

Into her head came laughing voices—

“A day is a mushroom on the mycelium of time, growing in the nightsoil of eternity!”

“Eternity is real as shit!”

“A universe is a mushroom on the spawn of the plenum!”

“Much room in the mushroom!”

—and she saw that the voices were speaking from a fiery tree or burning bush of multiple universes—

“My father’s house has many mansions!”

“The burning bush is the fly agaric, flaming in orange and red!”

—a structure of infinite branching timelines. Parallel universes grown from black hole-shrouded bifurcation points. The wormhole-connected mycelial spawn-bed of the plenum itself. The quantum superposition of all states and multiplicity of all universes.

She leapt up from the waves of that sea, flashing fish flying, becoming a ruby and emerald hummingbird, a jeweled honeybee, darting above a sea of mushroom lotuses, every bloom a fruit, a universe, a physical reality mushrooming up from a collapsing of some subset of the myriad possibilities of the mycelial plenum. Each event in every universe, she saw, was a fruiting body mushroomed together by the collapse of a wave, by the stress of regard, by conscious observation forcing possibilities into the formality of physically occurring.

Universes are the golden apples of the burning bush, Jacinta thought, dreamy from the hum of her wings. The jeweled lotuses floating on the quantum flux. The mushrooms that grow when the spawn-bed of dreams becomes conscious of its own dreaming.

The hum and green-red flashing grew gradually more distant. Jacinta thought detachedly that all these visions were appropriate to her mindset and setting, given that she was here among the mushroom-totemist ghost people, amid the world created by the Allesseh. The very detachment of that thought told her that she was reconverging, was on her way back from wherever and whenever it was to which she had gone.

She also became aware of the ghost people performing near her their ancient chantsong story of the Seven Ages. She did not know how long the strange low sound of their atonal yet somehow melodious singing had been echoing around her, but as she listened she seemed to hear contained in it all music ever played, from the most contemporary electronically synthesized sounds all the way back to bullroarers and didgeridoos and turtleshell rattles, from vocodered voices back to throat-singing and mouth music and handclaps.

In the void of endings—the chant sang out. In her own mind Jacinta always translated the ghost people’s origin myth into the myth-language she was most comfortable with, that of twenty-first century science. The result, she admitted, sometimes sounded a little too New Age Science Fantasy Space Opera for her taste, but it at least made sense to her.

Given her scientific mythos, she had (almost naturally) always thought of that void as a perfectly uniform universe without matter, just time and the enormous blank sheet of space with its potential for gravity. Now, however, she wasn’t so sure. Now it seemed more than that, the ‘night soil of Eternity’ as the laughing voices she had heard would have it. The eternal and infinite void—not just lots of space and time, but the absence of space and time, beyond or outside of spacetime.

—the spore of beginnings bursts into spawn. The threads of spawn absorb the voidstuff and knit it into stars—Images of spore and spawn and fruiting body of the “First Age,” as the ghost people called it. She had always before translated that into the scientific language of Big Bang, superstrings, first generation stars. As she listened now, however, she thought that, though such a description worked within a single universe, it too hinted at something larger. The eternal and infinite void, she thought, was not just about a single universe, but the plenum of all possible universes.

Had Kekchi perhaps given her a clue with that emphasis on dreaming? Was the dream always the plenum, the threads of the spawn bed? Was “bursting into spawn” also the divine dreaming? Was the Big Bang itself the sign of a shift in the dreaming void? The creation of spacetime and physical reality, as a result of the dreaming void becoming conscious of the dream, awakening to the fact that it was dreaming? Was the ignition of the stars—and everything else that had followed—the result of the dreamer becoming lucid within the dream?

Stars release spores, the spores burst into spawn, the threads of spawn absorb starstuff and knit it into worlds—That was the ghost people’s description of the “Second Age.” Jacinta had always previously translated it in terms of the matter of those stars blown off in bursts of explosions, gravity’s configuring of that new matter, the planets condensing from that process. Now, though, she thought that, if it was consciousness that caused (and continued to cause) physical reality to emerge out of creative possibility and eternity, then that put a broader spin on the Second Age too. Especially since most of the scientific world believed just the opposite: that it was creative possibility and time that had allowed consciousness (in its human form) to emerge from physical reality.

Worlds release spores, the spores burst into spawn, the threads of spawn absorb worldstuff and knit it into life—The ghost people’s “Third Age” which, translated into the scientific mythos, was the vulcanism of some of those planets spewing out early atmosphere, the proto-organics threading out and chaining up, the self-organizing life of the cell that eventually resulted. True enough, but might life’s confounding of entropy just be another, higher-order echo of dreaming too?

Living things release spores, the spores burst into spawn, the threads of spawn absorb lifestuff and knit it into minds—The ghost people’s description of the “Fourth Age” which, when translated, was all about reproduction, the threading out of chromosomes, of DNA and RNA making evolution and the whole panoply of life possible, and eventually the knitting of all that into more consciousness, self-awareness, mind.

Something fractally self-similar about all this, Jacinta thought. The plenum’s threads of infinite possibility collapsing down into the physical reality of individual universes, planets condensing from wisps of gas to form geospheres of earth and air and ocean, the biota’s threads of genetic possibility coiling into individuals and species, living diversity weaving within itself a creature aware that it dreams and dreams that it is aware—all inside a vast dream made physical by the dreamer’s conscious awareness of dreaming.

Minds release spores, the spores burst into spawn, the threads of spawn absorb mindstuff and knit it into worldminds—The ghost people’s “Fifth Age”, which Jacinta readily translated into the language of her own birth-culture’s Age of Code: ideas, bedding out into roads, trade, exchange, powerlines, all feeding the sprawling mycelial circuitry of cities vertical-fruiting into skyscrapers, throwing off tentative spores of aircraft and satellites, invisible waves of electromagnetic communication, until such dreaming spawn came to the brink of either mushrooming up into cataclysm, or knitting into the fruit of worldmindfulness. Where humanity had for decades hung suspended in its history: the thick spawn of human civilization struggling to achieve its fruition in either a dream of harmony or a nightmare of disaster. Having seen what she had seen in her own dream vision, Jacinta could not help thinking that, in all echoing, mirroring self-similarity, it was no accident or coincidence that the shape of decision hanging over humanity for most of the last century had been a cloud in the shape of a mushroom.

Worldminds release spores, the spores burst into spawn, the threads of spawn absorb worldmindstuff and knit it into starmind—A vision of the future Jacinta had already seen in the Allesseh, and in the ghost people’s “Sixth Age,” which Jacinta had translated as interstellar travel, galactic civilization. Yet the ghost people’s epic cycle went on, went further—while the Allesseh, curiously, had not.

Starminds release spores, the spores burst into spawn, the threads of spawn absorb starmindstuff and knit it into universal mind—The “Seventh Age,” which Jacinta translated as intergalactic travel and civilization and at last universal mindfulness, what the ghost people described as the emptiness able to contain the fullness of everything.

Why had the Allesseh not gone intergalactic? Or had it? And if it had, why had it hidden that from its constituent species? Why had it not achieved the “universal mindfulness” the ghost people’s myths spoke of?

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—Here, where the snake ate its “tale,” was the most difficult passage of all. If pressed, she could accept the ghost people’s idea of the compassionate void. If the void’s awareness of its dreaming had created physical reality, then it was at least plausible that that dreaming void should feel compassion toward all things, since they were forever born from its awakening to the fact of its dreaming. Certainly, for a void “perfect and uniform,” or “as it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be, void without end, amen,” there were scientific precedents and religious examples enough.

The idea, however, that in the exact moment of its perfection the void always forever releases the spore that bursts outward again into spawn—that idea always gave her more difficulty. Unless what she saw in her vision, going out and coming back, was true: Individuals, species, and universes die, but the dreaming plenum goes on and on, eternal as the void itself. If somehow the plenum and the void were “one”, or two aspects of the same something, then the interwoven snake could swallow its tail to be reborn.

The snake swallowing its own tail, the dreamer creating physical reality through conscious awareness of its dreaming—somehow those were feedback loops. Everything in all the universes was caught up in that feedback process. But how? A “plenum void”—fullness empty? full emptiness?—was a contradiction in terms.

Then she thought again of recent visions and distant college physics. The mushroom-bejeweled interface, the wave membrane, the mirror at the border of the quantum flux, the Planck length and Planck energy, the speed of light, the physics of the first instant. She had been there, and beyond—had stepped through to the other side of the looking-glass, through the wave membrane, to the parallel, reversible, non-sequential, everything-all-at-once, quantum superposed, multiple universe wonderland. She had crossed over, from the daily blatant thingness-of-ones to the eternal latent oneness-of-things—and come back again.

The idea of the “plenum void”—or even the idea that the “void of endings” and the “spore of beginnings” might somehow be one and the same—no longer seemed quite so impossible, to her. Not any more. Even if the only way she could picture it—as a string that somehow became a hole and a hole that somehow became a string—struck her as nonsensical in the extreme.

Jacinta stopped dancing and opened her eyes again. The drumming and the dancing still went on around her, and a wind began to blow strongly through the clearing. She almost didn’t notice those things, however, for a thought had struck her. The plenum void: creative, conscious, compassionate and dreaming. Both full and empty, complete and incomplete. The Allesseh was not that. Not by a long shot.

The ground in the gardens had begun to tremble, but Jacinta barely noticed. For all its talk of complementarity, the Allesseh had gotten it wrong! The plenum as a system, Jacinta realized, was inconsistent but complete. The system of the physical universe, however, was self-consistent but incomplete. The wavebrane is semi-permeable. Yes, the virtual here is the real there, the real here is the virtual there, but the void, plenum, and real all interpenetrated in a dreamlike fashion. The Allesseh hid in incompleteness while pronouncing itself complete!

The ground began to shake so violently and the wind to blow so fiercely that the drummers stopped drumming, the dancers stopped dancing. Above their heads, the heavens were doing a very plausible imitation of a very mean sky, flashing gray and thundering.

“Our Seven Ages performance has apparently angered the Allesseh,” Kekchi said to her, as the two of them and all the tepui travelers began seeking shelter in the few garden temples and roofed gazebos they could find in view.

“By reminding it of the fact that it has not completed its mission,” Jacinta said over the wind as she ran with Kekchi. “Our existence itself—especially the Seven Ages story—is proof of the Allesseh’s incompleteness.”

“Proof that—this weather suggests—it denies,” Kekchi said with a nod as they clambered up the stairs of a pseudo-Dionysian temple.

Watching her footing on the steps, a thought occurred to Jacinta.

“Kekchi,” she began, “what happens if the spawn doesn’t sacrifice itself to the next step? What happens if the spawn becomes too dense?”