Better Angels (42 page)

Nothing is except as thinking makes it so, Jiro thought, walking on. With the Nanogeddon underway most of the governments on the planet had gone into permanent crisis mode. Many of them were already in permanent states of martial law. Yet people kept dancing almost as much as they kept dying.

“Of course their marriage didn’t work out,” he heard an old woman cackle around a methane campstove. “He’s a sexist—and she’s a hexist!”

Jiro walked on past the laughter of the woman and her cronies, until he passed another campstove.

“Yeah, I saw the angels when Los Angeles fell,” said one of the Jebson uncles to two of the children. “Saw them again too, when the old government fell.

Jiro was glad that he hadn’t been living in Balaam during either of those events. Even way out in Hawaii his head had gone wild with angels during the infosphere crash, and he hadn’t been anywhere near the worst pulse zones. If he had been in LA or near the North Pole at the wrong times, he might have lost it completely.

As he crossed a landfill hill and left the squatters behind, the North Pole got him thinking of hypothermia again. Only natural, given what he planned to do. It was in his research on hypothermia, too, that he had come across the J wave. All the medical references noted that, in victims of accidental hypothermia, the ECG often showed an early characteristic “J wave” in the heartbeat—a small positive deflection following the QRS complex in the left ventricular leads—which, the medical references claimed, was found in no other condition. If, after the appearance of the J wave, bodily temperature fall was uninterrupted, death usually occurred from ventricular fibrillation or cardiac standstill.

The medical references were wrong on at least one point, Jiro thought. That J wave—early, small, and characteristic—could be found in one other condition.

Darkness was falling as he came to his encampment on a “completed” landfill flat. At the center of his camp was an ancient abandoned refrigerator he’d hulled clean and rigged to lock from inside. Of course, calling it a refrigerator was something of an understatement. It was a big lift-top freezer, big enough to store several sides of beef or frozen dinners for about two hundred people. Playing with the deep “coffin” idea, Jiro had lined its walls with some plushy red velvet drapes he had scavenged.

The heart and brains of the mechanical system weren’t in the coldbox, anyway. The really important gear was the equipment set up in the small outbuildings he’d constructed on either side of the coldbox. Those structures housed all his expensive high-tech electronics, his state-of-the-art number-crunching and virtuality gear. Big black LogiBoxes from ParaLogics, full-sensorium virtual systems from DiaGnosTex, links and interfaces from Crystal Memory, everything he could afford from his patent moneys and Vang’s original donation. Better living through corporate giving, he thought. Or better dying for corporate spying.

Here, in the middle of the methane-flared trashlands, he had built a node of processing power significant in the entire infosphere, yet almost no one knew of its existence. More covert Messianic complexity. Jiro almost laughed when he thought about it. It would be great scavenging for somebody after he was gone.

Behind the far end of the coldbox were his liquid nitrogen tanks and regulators, notably lower tech than the rest of his devices, but at least as important to his plans. Power lines ran between and among coldbox and tanks and infotech. All of them plugged into his pirate microwave receiver, which diverted power from the solar satellite grid’s nearest beamdown node, on a hilltop outside Beaumont. He usually pulled as little power off the beamdown as he could, not wanting to attract attention from the utility’s engineers. Balaam used such a torrent of power he figured the few electrons he snagged and stored in his banks of batteries wouldn’t be missed. His clandestine power diversion had apparently not been detected, so far.

That would probably all change tonight, he thought as he walked to his tech and tank outbuildings, switching everything on, bringing all his systems up to full power. He would be utilizing everything in his batteries and tapping the main downflow far more than he ever had before. That was bound to set off alarms somewhere.

As Jiro listened to the compressors firing up on the liquid nitrogen tanks, descriptions of hypothermia flashed through his head. “Exposure to dry cold temperatures well below freezing results in frostbite and accidental hypothermia. Susceptibility to cold injury is increased by dehydration, alcohol or drug excess, impaired consciousness, exhaustion, hunger...In hypothermia, the falling core temperature leads to increasing lethargy, clumsiness, mental confusion, irritability, and hallucinations. The final stages include slowed, irregular, and finally arrested heartbeat—yet a victim should not be considered dead until ‘warm and dead.’”

Charming phrase, that—warm and dead. Even if his plan, his “memory of the future,” did not work out, the worst that would happen would be his death of instant hypothermia inside a liquid nitrogen cloud. Such an instantaneous freeze-out sounded like a very peaceful way to go. Jiro could think of far worse.

He could hear in his head what Seiji might think of his plans. Even if everything worked, it was suicide transcendence, transcendental suicide, at best. Seiji would be sure to warn his poor, misguided little brother that suicide was no guarantee of transcendence. And if everything went awry? Accidental suicide, suicidal accident. A magic trick gone wrong.

Jiro pushed such thoughts out of his head as he finished powering up his systems. If a magician was a secular mystic the power of whose illusions came from how carefully he had practiced to make his practice invisible, then Jiro had practiced enough. The thought occurred to him that the same criteria might also be applied to a mortician, but he drove that idea from his head. He reminded himself that he had done enough of the physics research to satisfy almost anyone, even an engineer like his brother. He knew what he was getting himself into, at least as well as anyone could know that. The greatest illusionists, after all, were those for whom their practice had become invisible even to themselves.

In some ways, he thought, his disagreement with Seiji was older than they were. It was the same disagreement Einstein had with Bohr. Einstein said no signal could travel faster than the speed of light, so it was impossible that the measurement performed on one member of a particle pair would instantly determine the direction of the other, which might be light years away. Bohr, though, contended that the two-particle system was actually an indivisible whole and could not be analyzed as though it were made up of independent parts—no matter what the distance separating the particles. Regardless of distance, the two particles were always linked by instantaneous nonlocal connections, “influencing” one another rather than communicating with each other.

Einstein’s view of reality—that there were things-in-themselves, independent, spatially separated and determined elements and events—was incompatible with Bohr’s interconnected and interdependent universe of quantum theory—that full, bright, busy emptiness where no thing exists as the thing-in-itself but only in relation to everything else, including the mind of the observer.

Seiji was a lot like Einstein in that way. He didn’t like “spooky action at a distance.” Too magical. That the traditional scientific approach—of breaking the “problem of the universe” up into bits and creating numerous partial theories—might not work anymore was anathema to him. But, Jiro thought, if everything in the universe depended on everything else in some fundamental/transcendental way, it might be impossible to achieve a solution by investigating parts of the problem in isolation—especially if you wanted to understand the underlying order of the world, the connectedness of events. A holistic physics, one emphasizing that the behavior of any part is determined by that part’s connection to an ultimately universal whole, had to discard the classical notion of cause and effect because those connections could never be known precisely.

That was where things got too weird for Seiji. Chaotic quantum fluctuations in energy spawning infinite universes. An eternally self-reproducing cosmos, functioning as a self-organizing dynamical system. Black holes as universe bifurcation points. The black hole itself fractal, existing at the borderline between two orders, a gateway between those orders. All points in the universe potentially gateways, because the whole thing is holographically self-similar across all scales. The possibility of a correlation between quantum interconnectedness and the strangest of parapsychological phenomena. No, Seiji could never accept the dreaming universes implied by the quantum theorists, by the artists, by the ancient shamans, by all the magicians—but Jiro had. He believed in it enough to stake his life, death, and future on those ideas. And in that order.

On one timeline in one twentieth century on one Earth, one Marcel Proust had written, “When a man is asleep, he has in a circle round him the chain of the hours, the sequence of the years, the order of the heavenly host.” Shakespeare had written, “In that sleep of death, what dreams may come?” Eliot had written of “death’s dream kingdom.” Shamans from Lao-Hmong txiv neeb to Siberian utagan to Australian aboriginal “clever fellas” to Guajiro dream-priests had all seen the connection between the dream world and the waking, two masks of the one dream.

Jiro knew the shaman’s dragon-guarded paradoxical passageway to the dream world, the death world—the path which the shaman as psychopomp could use and yet live. He knew the Desana shamans’ drawings, showing their twin river pythons or anaconda/rainbow boa pairs dwelling in the fissure between the right and left hemispheres of the brain. He knew the Rainbow Serpent of the Australian Aborigines with the quartz crystal before its head. He knew the great snake at Serpent Mound in Ohio, with the magick cosmic egg at its head. He knew the axis mundi, the world birch or fir-tree, the tree of knowledge with the snake round its trunk and its mycorrhizal associate, the red or golden “apples” of the Amanita muscaria mushroom, growing at its base.

He knew the Sufis of the Isfahan metaphysical schools with their alam al-mithal. He knew the work of Suhravardi, Dilthey, Damad, Sadra, Corbin. He knew Jung and synchronicity. Tibetan tulpas. The psychologists and psychophysiologists with their discussions of rapid eye movement and the dream state, which took place during what they had originally called “paradoxical sleep”—a term Jiro loved. The quantum physicists with their idea that the event horizon and lightspeed limit might be breachable if the connections between particles were not signals in the causal-event Einsteinian sense but acausal influences. All those and so much more in what he had researched pointed to the dreamland underlying the waking world, the latent beneath the blatant.

Jiro pushed open the big, heavily insulated flip-top of the coldbox and climbed in. Before he shut the top again, he stood in the coldbox, taking one last long look around. Was he really willing to bet his life on the chance that he could wake up inside the dream of death? The grave too is a black hole. What if Proust’s ring was just the coronal circle of light surrounding an eclipse? What if that bright dumbshow was only what the doomed space traveler sees all about him or herself at the event horizon of a black hole? The ring of light in which all times can be seen at one space and all spaces can be seen at one time—was that really only the physicist’s way of talking about your life passing before your eyes at the instant of death? What if, to the world outside the black hole, the image of the space traveler just went on forever toward death, getting fainter and fainter forever as it went? Who was he trying to save by the “lucid witness dying” he had planned?

Unbidden, the thought came to him how each member of a virtual particle/antiparticle pair must seek out its partner and annihilate with it. At the Schwarzschild radius of a black hole, however, one virtual particle might fall into the black hole and become a real particle, in which case it no longer had to annihilate with its partner. The remaining virtual particle might then become real as well, escaping from the vicinity of the black hole into infinity, in the form of Hawking radiation. Why did he think of Seiji when he thought of that scenario? Too metaphorical again. They were brothers, not particles. They were not Einstein and Bohr. They were not Cain and Abel. They were not Gilgamesh and Enkidu. Was it just plain crazy to believe that something larger echoed and reverberated in their relationship?

The transformation he planned—was it really worth it? He thought of other long-sought and much hoped-for transformations.

Through the use of nuclear fissile materials, physicists had added fundamental particles to lead, thereby transforming it into gold, achieving the old dream of the alchemists. The process itself, however, was far more expensive than the value of the gold it produced.

Dark lead transmuted to bright gold, Jiro thought. Transformation brought about through interaction with the deeper darkness of plutonium, metal of the god of the dead and ruler of the underworld. The alchemists too had dreamed of gleaming islands in the universal soul...

Jiro thought of his brother and his parents. He had said he would rather die than hurt anybody. Had “anybody” not included himself? Wouldn’t he also hurt others by dying? He wondered: What is the half-life of grief? How much time will have to pass before the glowing, Geiger-crackling pain of loss decays to a leaden mass in the soul, dark and dumb and inert?

Jiro cut off his questions before they weakened his resolve any further. No, he thought as he stared about the trashscape and beyond, toward Cherry Valley, where he had once lived. He had to believe that death’s gleaming pain would transmute his own leaden soul into something bright and shining.

Jiro knelt down and closed the roof-lid to his coldbox home. The lights inside came on automatically. In one corner of his deep draped coffin he saw the beaded leather pouch of his medicine bundle, with its trefoil Biohazard symbol. Knee-walking to it, he opened it up and, one by one, took out the talismanic objects he had collected.