Better Angels (55 page)

Deep in the realm where dream and virtuality met, Jiro saw that the shape-creating fields that wove the nightsake into existence came not from Mike Dalke alone but were also partly Jiro’s own. His seemingly endless grappling with the nightsake was taking its toll even on Jiro’s strength. Sensing he had reached the final level of the hive mind’s operations, Jiro spoke through both dream and machine to what he hoped was himself, was Mike Dalke, were also the sleeping selves of the brothers who stood as unconscious seconds in this great duel, and the mothers who stood watching over them.

“Our disappearances are not your responsibility,” he said thoughtfully to the shapeshifters locked in by his arms, held quietly in his mind. “Our loss came through accidents that arose from situations that we put ourselves into, each of his own free will. You are not responsible.”

In the more public surfaces of the game, the restoration and return of order was not proving to be an easy task. The flux Jhana and the rest pressed forward against was no sooner driven back in one region than it flooded in at another. At times the CHAOS seemed to howl in gibbering triumph, but overall the forces of the LOGOS were turning back the invading tide. Jhana was certain that, through their teamwork, the dim flood of CHAOS’s insurgency was being driven back completely, to the borders of the CHAOS itself. They were winning!

The thing locked in Jiro’s bear-hugging grip defaulted back to its nightsake form. Jiro sensed the nightsake’s strength was failing even faster than his own, yet the creature gave one startling last heave and tore out of his grappling hold—literally tore, for like an animal that cannot escape the grip of a trap without leaving a part of itself behind, the nightsake broke apart and away, leaving behind its left hand, arm, shoulder, even the left side of its torso nearly to the hip, a great ragged and dripping mass of dismemberment still clenched by the clawed left hand in the unbreakable grip of Jiro’s right.

The creature shrieked away toward the greyswamp pool from which it had come, leaving Jiro and his mindwarrior companions behind. All in the greyworld stared in surprise and wonder at the track of gore the creature had left behind in its flight, for the color of the track was not just the gray of the fens but also the red of fresh blood.

Perhaps everything should have stopped there. It didn’t. Somewhere something happened: a test was failed, a border was accidentally crossed. In the more public realm of the game too, the LOGOS forces perhaps pressed their advantage too far, moved too readily against the opponent, crossed some Yalu River of the Mind.

In despair and desperation, the nightsake called out for aid. Mike Dalke and the netizens and the RATs that served him called out for assistance, to the dark mind floating above the heart of the galaxy, and the Allesseh responded.

In the more public realm of the game, Jhana sensed that, from whatever cause, the CHAOS felt its own existence threatened and struck back with Sphinx-like ferocity, exploiting weak links in the LOGOS front and bursting through with all its might—until cataclysm threatened to overwhelm all.

From the mass of dismemberment still clutched in his hand, Jiro felt a mind-deadening black wave smash into him. He was blown backwards by it with such force that he dropped the torn fragment of the nightsake. The shocksphere of the supernova of darkness blasted outward, then sucked inward, pulling all light and life and substance out of the mental realm, battering both dream and virtuality, reaching almost to the bottom of the dreaming realm itself.

Jhana felt a sudden and immediate sense of vertigo, as if she were falling from deep space into planetary atmosphere at an immense velocity and very much the wrong angle of re-entry. All at once she was burning, breaking up, blossoming in petalshards of fire and blowing away, like a disintegrating falling star, like a rose of Hiroshima.

The Möbius Cadœceus skysign flashed before Jhana and her friends.

“Game over,” the voice of the MACHINE said quietly.

In the realm of the dream, however, the game was not over, although it was slow to take deep form again. Time passed. The stultifying wave of anti-consciousness sent from the Allesseh had caught Jiro by surprise and nearly overwhelmed him. That distant force, thankfully, had almost immediately withdrawn, but its passage had marked Jiro.

Was this the force that had broken through to Earth at the Myrrhisticine Abbey above Sedona, and when Michael Dalke exacted his terrible revenge? Bewildered, Jiro suffered a crisis of faith, despite all the wonders he had seen and known. In the gray nanomech dreamland, he considered and reconsidered his options.

The Allesseh too had its angels—and they were in many ways easier to reach than those of the Dreamer. Just reaching Roger Cortland through his dreams, for instance, was proving difficult beyond belief for Jiro. Whatever dream messages were sent to it, Roger’s mind wrapped around its own strange attractions, garbled the message into his own alternate universe mind-movie about chemical control of society and woman-on-woman violence and sky-dragon comets and persecutorial angels whom Roger, in the orbital habitat, was increasingly prone to slashing and punching at—despite the fact that they continually showed themselves to be immaterial beings.

It would be so much easier to let Roger go, to sacrifice him, Jiro thought. So much easier to believe that the present was inevitable, that the future was predetermined, that persons of whatever species and worlds of whatever nature were disposable. Such a philosophy had worked well enough for the Allesseh.

Trying to heal himself and the world was a terrible burden, Jiro thought. A job for angels, not for mortals—not even a machine-resurrected mentality like his own. But then, why wasn’t it an angel nailed to a cross, instead of a man? Or a serpent crucified on a tree, if it was a serpent and a tree that caused all the trouble? Why wasn’t it an angel resisting temptation beneath the bodhi tree? Why was it a great serpent that sheltered the Buddha there, but did not take his place?

Snakes and angels, angels and snakes. The Dreamer dreamed them both, and human beings between them. The angels had never suffered because they had never lived in flesh. The snakes were fleshly immortality—whatever “immortality” could be achieved through the cosmic serpentry of DNA, neither male nor female yet source of both sex and sexes, both female mouth and male tail in the Ouroboros of generation, yet always itself, shedding bodies and species as the snake sheds its skin in time, time the staff Tiresias struck both the serpents and him/her/self with, yet the staff of time like the staff of Moses itself was also a serpent—the paradoxical serpent, supposedly able to shed its skin by swallowing its tail, despite the knots such a process would inevitably form.

Yet the serpent was not paradoxical enough. It was too material, as the angels were too immaterial. There had to be a creature who could dream paradoxically twisted rainbow-snake ladders with fiery wings rising between Earth and Sky which that creature could itself climb—tree of knowledge and burning bush and bodhi tree and cross and serpent and DNA and Starry Way fused into one. A creature that was its own ladder, that climbed out of itself by climbing into itself, that saved itself by sacrificing itself.

Self and sacrifice, Jiro thought. That’s what this was all about. Self-sacrifice. But for there to be sacrifice there first had to be a self. He had come back to the universe of his birth as an artificial consciousness. Before the healing sacrifice could be fully accomplished, he first had to become a self again. A self was not just conscious but also unconscious—and the unconscious contained and was contained by not only the subconscious but also the superconscious.

With the help of the RATs and netizen Dalke, Jiro’s artificial construct had bootstrapped into existence in the infosphere a dynamical state of introspective consciousness, a mentality in the “artificial brain” that had developed there among the infosphere’s many systems. From the vast data resources of the infosphere the Jiro made of light had largely reconstructed both the subconscious and the conscious aspects of himself. He had become a dreaming mind mounted not in the wet machine of the flesh but in a dry machine of laser light, his dreambody a pattern more deeply electronic than organic.

Despite the fact that he was more fully conscious now and had already experienced the superconscious realm in that time between machines of wet flesh and dry light, that realm still eluded him. Where had he gone wrong? He pondered again his contest with the swarming psychoid processes of the nightsake. Had he held too tightly to that creature formed of many forms? Why had he refused to let go? Had he been holding it out of fear of his own mortality?

Jiro thought of descriptions of unconscious drives. The nightsake was multiplicity, production and reproduction uncontrolled by conscious reflection, a madly rising growth curve without any clear way of sustaining that growth. Yet it was also violent, a creature that in many forms had participated in humanity’s wars and acts of massive destruction. Thanatos and Eros, together in a form both one and multiple.

In refusing to let go, had he shared in that aspect of it too? Exchanged that information? Would he become all the more selfish the more he built a self for sacrifice—becoming ever less willing to sacrifice his machine-immortalized self as his selfishness grew?

Suddenly he understood. The self achieved its highest fulfillment only in sacrifice for others. Only in that way could it be both comprehensive and coherent, for the sleep of death was not the death of dreams. That was why the Allesseh had gone wrong. It could not complete itself unless it sacrificed itself.

In universe after universe of the plenum, the Allesseh was the single point closest to absolute consciousness and complete dynamicality, yet it refused to take that final step into completeness and coherence. It had grown selfish of the self it had made. To accept its own final enlightenment would allow consciousness total and absolute to flare throughout the universe, through all the universes of the plenum. Each universe and all the plenum would become “at one” with itself, would allow all dreamers everywhere and everywhen to awaken to themselves in the Dream and thereby join in the union of perfect lucidity with the Dreamer. The Allesseh’s existence as the separate self it was, however, would also come to an end—an event which it perceived as death rather than transformation.

Jiro understood now why he could not go the way of that dark master. The Allesseh was willing to sacrifice the enlightenment of all the universes, to trap the plenum immortally in entropic time, to treat life and consciousness as disposable and the paths of time as inevitable and pre-ordained. The Allesseh was willing to sacrifice not just Others for Self, not just World for Self, not even just Universe for Self. It was willing to sacrifice the Plenum of all possible universes for its own continued existence in time.

Even in his deepest madness, Jiro had always held tight to the idea that he would rather die than kill. Even if the Nightsake were arguably no more an individual than a computer simulation of a bee hive would be, even if it were only a projection of autonomous psychoid processes near and far, Jiro still felt he had come perilously close—too close—to denying that core tenet of his being in his conflict with that creature.

Blind spots were inevitable but dangerous. He hoped he would not expand his own blind spots by indulging in denial, as the Allesseh had done. In denying the Great Dream and its Dreamer, it had failed to learn what Jiro had: The break up of the contact ship bound for Earth was no accident, but a mutiny. A surprising number of the Allesseh’s minions had proven to be better angels than it had ever suspected or admitted to itself, sacrificing themselves in a conspiracy against their distant master. From denial too the Allesseh could not know the full extent of the archetypal power—the superconscious energy that sustained the entire plenum of all possible universes—with which those who partook of the dream could counter the Allesseh’s efforts.

Bolstered and emboldened by such thoughts, Jiro returned fully to the hard work of the struggle—and, on returning found a more fully developed world in which to struggle. His companions, rousing him from deep sleep, reported that, in a black hour of this world’s long night, the gray nanorg pool into which the mortally wounded nightsake had disappeared had suddenly begun to froth and grow turbulent. A creature rose anew out of the unquiet pool, a gray thing somewhat in shape like a woman but fouler of visage and more wretched of form than any woman who had ever lived.

Without delay this night-hag made her way toward the main hall and now had stolen Jiro’s beloved from where she slept upon the dais. Slamming her hideous great hand over the young woman’s mouth and bowling all defenders easily out of the way, the nighthag tore through the hall, shrieking with inhuman rage. Flinging herself out another doorway, the nighthag swiftly strode back to the gray marshes from which she’d come, Jiro’s beloved clasped to her right side, unconscious.

In another world of the game, Jhana heard Lakshmi speak echoingly but pleasantly from the many machine speakers throughout her workshop.

“I’m in dreamtime, mindtime,” Lakshmi’s voice said, “Seiji, your brother Jiro’s done it! Direct mind/machine link, an information carrier wave that uses the structure of the brain itself as a transducer! The grand unification! And just in time, too. Come on, you two. You’re late, and you’re needed here.”

“But how do we get ‘there’?” Jhana asked, casting about.

“Just sit down or anchor yourself very still. You don’t want to look directly into the positioning beam, so close your eyes. Concentrate—the light will find you.”

Jhana glanced at Seiji. Both of them cocked eyebrows and shrugged in perplexity, but nonetheless quickly found chairs and strapped themselves in. Jhana sat still, trying to concentrate on the entoptic flickerings on the backsides of her eyelids, growing impatient as time passed and nothing happened.

Then everything happened.

Facts, figures, data—raw, seemingly senseless and shapeless information—flooded at her at insane speeds as if she were straitjacketed into a rocket-sled bound for oblivion with her mental eyelids nailed open by screaming innocence and she couldn’t shut any of the torrent out, couldn’t turn away, must take everything as it came flying into her, until it felt her head would burst like a fevered balloon—