Life to Life: Ashton Ford, Psychic Detective (17 page)

Jesus had spoken of many
mansions. All the great mystics had talked about the many states of
being and the necessity to progress through them all before any of
us may return to God. Dismiss it all, if you'd rather. And have a
nice day.

I could not.

Chapter Twenty-One: Grains of Smart

In the literature that
serves as the real history of our planet, from the oldest to the
newest, there is recorded indelibly between the lines the saga of
an indomitably persistent impelling force that moves the human
story along. It is not enough to try to understand this force by
simply naming it with a "there you go," especially if we name only
the effect and not the force itself.

Some would attempt to define the mankind
theme by invoking a single word: evolution. But that names only
one observable effect.

Many wish to label it with
religious terms alone, such as God's will, God's plan, God's this
and God's that—and though such terms may be comforting at times,
they go no further toward a meaningful understanding of the mankind
situation than they would toward an understanding of celestial
mechanics or nuclear physics.

So let's talk plainly here, pal, even if a
lot of people get mad at me for doing so. No matter what the angle
of approach, whether via science or religion, most people really
try to skirt the issue of who we really are and what the hell we
are doing here.

I said plain talk, so here goes. Each and
every one of the world's great religions is based on and governed
by some really insane ideas. Christianity is an insane religion. So
is Judaism, and Hinduism, and Buddhism, Shinto, Islam—all of it. Of
course I am talking "insane" from the viewpoint of logic and common
sense.

Let's just take Christianity as an example
of what I am getting at. God made Adam with cock and balls, Eve
with vagina, womb, and ovaries—the two capable of re-creating life
in their own kind by use of same equipment, same as the other
animals—yet sex is sinful for anything but animals, and we are all
born with the burden of Adam and Eve's original transgression. God
got disgusted with his experiment along about the time of Noah and
decided to wipe the slate clean—he didn't like us very much—but we
got a last-minute reprieve via Noah, although there could be some
question as to whether maybe Noah was no more than the first
ecologist; God needed him to save the other animals from
extinction.

But Noah's descendants
blew it, too, and made God sorry that he'd saved this particular
animal from extinction because we were living pretty much like the
others—and I don't get the logic of that, either.

But God tried again, and
this time he himself descended onto the planet but he did it in a
sneaky way—he came in through a virgin's womb, thus rehabilitating
the scandalous Eve (somehow) and wiping away her original sin
through an act of nonsexual reproduction. But this was not an
automatic, you see; first, all the folks have got to believe that
Mary was really a virgin, and then they have got to believe that
her baby was God incarnate (unless I misunderstand the idea of
"Holy Mary, Mother of God");
but
then
they have also got to
dis
believe long enough
to put the poor guy to a torturous death and
then believe
. See, it wouldn't have
worked without the Crucifixion. I mean, the poor guy had to suffer.
And somehow through the magic of insanity, all of mankind
who confess
to the foul
deed shall have life everlasting. It wasn't so foul, you see,
unless Jesus was God. I mean, hell, all the roads of the kingdom
were lined with other poor guys hanging from crosses, and we hardly
ever hear about them. So we have to admit that we murdered God and
that we thereby transferred all our shortcomings to him. If you
don't believe that then you are not a Christian. And even if you do
believe it but don't take satisfaction from it, you're still not a
Christian. But if you do believe it, and if you like the idea of
murdering your own God through your own damned lack of
responsibility for your own deeds, then okay: you're saved; you've
got it made; Jesus loves you.

See? This is insane. But it works for a lot
of people, so who's to knock it? The worst of it, from this
logician's standpoint, is that it all could be entirely true.

But I was talking about
the impelling force that moves us through all this. God's will does
not work it, for me. It's God's will that the stars are there,
sure. That does not tell me what the stars are for, what they're
made out of, what they mean to me personally. Someone who uses
God's will to explain all the events of human history is just plain
damned lazy and really does not want to be bothered with anything
but another nice day.

But I will turn that idea
back, just the same. If that is the way it works, then I feel this
way because it is God's will that I feel this way—so get off my
back and go complain to God about it.

Would that it were so simple.

Cancel that; I would not
want it so simple. Something stunningly beautiful and wondrous and
magical and
meaningful
is going on here with us humans. We are involved
in a hell of a game. It does not matter that we do not know the
rules of play or the object of the game. That
is
the game, I believe: to learn the
rules and to discover the object. But the game has subgames—and
maybe those subgames have sub-subgames and so on.

If you are content with the idea that the
sixty or seventy years of planetary time that have been allotted to
you here are all you are ever going to get—and that you are blotto
for the rest of eternity—then that is a game, too, of sorts, and I
have to respect your game. Go ahead. Do it. Have a nice day.

Or if you prefer to think that you were born
damned but that you have been saved by heavenly magic—that you will
rot in the grave after your sixty or seventy years until some
moment before the sun explodes when you will rise from the rot and
reconstitute it as flesh and blood, then you and Jesus will rule
the planet for a thousand years—okay, I respect that game, too. You
just might get it, and you just might deserve it.

But if you are not quite
sure about your game—if you have not yet found the name of it, or
your place in it—then you need to come along with me while I
investigate the impelling force that gave birth and life to Ann
Marie Mathison. Because, believe me, this one is a hell of a
game!

Say, for the purpose of
discussion, that you are God. So there you are, Lord God of the
entire universe because you built it—and you built it
smart
. You built it
smart because you have all the smarts there are, and you don't fool
around with dumb shit.

It is so smart that you
only had to do it once. You took everything that is now present or
potential in all of creation, and you engineered all of that into a
tiny capsule—tiny in a relative sense, of course, but it was
probably no larger than eight of earth's suns and that is
tiny,
that is almost
infinitesimal, in relation to the present universe.

That's no big deal, you may say as you place
an apple seed in my hand. Can I see the roots and branches, the
trunk and bark and leaves and blossoms, all the sweet delicious
fruit itself that an apple tree produces in a lifetime—can I see
all that in the apple seed?

But, see, the apple seed
itself was present in that original capsule; I could not have seen
it in there any more than I can see the tree within the apple seed,
but it was there. So were all the stars and all the planets, all
the gases and the rocks, the bacteria and the viruses and all the
living things; all of space and time forevermore were locked up
within that capsule eight suns large—and all the people, too. We
were all there as the
potential
and the
promise
of that primeval universe.

So you are God and you
have fashioned this fantastically smart capsule. With a finger
snap, then, you fertilized that cosmic egg and set it off. My
parochial and primitive intelligence sees the event as a big
bang—but that is also partly because of my limited point of view; a
cosmic big bang to me was a gentle sigh to you, and in that sigh
was carried all the smarts that you had built into this
production.

Smart, yeah, a
really
smart
production. All you had to do was sigh and set it off, then
you'd never have to fuck with it again if you didn't want to. The
sumbitch is self-propelling and self-regenerating, self-maintaining
and self-perpetuating. You built all that shit into the original
design. It's going to go on expanding and becoming forever; you
built it good, to last, and you have a right to be proud of
it.

But now part of the
potential of that cosmic egg (and maybe even the reason for it),
buried somewhere down there beneath the leptons and quarks, was
this idea called
life
and you'd provided all the support systems for that, too.
Some stars would have planets, and some planets would stabilize
into orbitary patterns that encourage the development of
biospheres, and some of those biospheres would encourage the
development of (or the release of) smartness—nothing like yours, of
course, but primitive smartness anyway maybe good enough to begin a
little curiosity and self-conscious examination of this whole
process. You are God, of course, and you built it that way so you
must have been expecting some such development. I don't know why,
but you built it and it is there so it must be what you
wanted.

So now here we are some
ten to twenty billions of years down the pike, and some of the
smartness potential you built into the cosmic egg has taken firm
hold aboard the third planet of a rather ordinary star near the
edge of a rather ordinary galaxy far from the center of creation.
You are God, remember, and you expected this to happen, but it
still may give you a little quiver of pride to note that the thing
is working the way it was designed to work.

So maybe you're taking a special
interest.

These little grains of
smartness have gone around and named every damned thing on the
planet; they've even named themselves
man
and they have developed cultures
and civilizations, sciences and technologies; shit they are
swarming
that biosphere
and taking it over completely.

Well...you built it. Wasn't that what you
wanted? Your will be done, you know. You couldn't possibly be
unhappy with them, could you, for fulfilling your design?

So sure, you like these
smart grains called
man
. You even intend a personal relationship with them, if they
ever get smart enough for that—and of course they will because you
will.

So here come three of these grains right
now. They've come to court to pay their respects.

The first one falls prostrate about fifty
paces out and grovels on his belly the rest of the way like a
reptile without legs. Not too becoming, really, of a self-conscious
grain of smart but of course you understand that he is just trying
to show respect. You can't see his face because he wouldn't dare
present it to you; he just grovels in the dust and cries out in a
loud voice that you are the One God, the True God, the Only God—I
mean, okay, it's boring and it's obvious— but you have to allow it,
don't you?

So you ask the guy what he
wants. He replies that he just wants to adore you. You ask, you
mean all the time? He said, yes, Holiness, allow me to grovel in
your shadow and sing your praises; I wish to adore you
eternally.

You may think that is not
so smart. And it may get a bit embarrassing to have this guy
following you around all over the place singing your praises and
adoring you in public, but what the hell? That's what he wants,
right?

The second grain of smart comes up and hugs
you. He claims a personal relationship with your son, tells you
that a place has been prepared for him and he's come to claim it.
You ask, where is that? He replies that he's not sure but he knows
it must be up here somewhere because he gave up sex and booze for
it. You ask, don't you want to sing and adore me? He says, no, he
just wants to go hang out with the kid. Well you're not sure which
kid he's talking about; but what the hell? That's what he wants,
right?

The third grain saunters
up with his eyes darting everywhere. He's taking notes with a pad
and pencil and he's so busy he doesn't even see you until he's
right on top of you. You say hi and he says hi. You say, what do
you want? He says, shit I want everything—what've you got? You say,
okay, that's what I've got; you can't have it all to yourself but
I'll share it with you. He says okay, where is it? You tell him
that it is exactly where he's at, no matter where he's at it's
always there. Use it and have a nice day. He says, there you go,
thanks, and goes back where he was because that's where he is.
Well...that is what he wants, right?

Let him have it, you say. Let them all have
what they want. I mean, you are God; you can afford it. Right? You
are the one who started this whole thing and it has nowhere to go
except where you aimed it in the beginning. Right? No matter what
any of them may want at any given time, that's okay because it's
only temporary; eternity is a long time for working things out so
all the pieces will come together sooner or later.