The Celestial Instructi0n (8 page)

Given that there was no reliable infrastructure of
any kind after the last ten-year civil war, it was a cash-and-carry business. More
than once Sam had to ride along with Cousin Siloi wearing an ancient rifle
slung with twine as his cousin collected and disbursed thick wads of cash from a
tattered plastic bag as big as his own ass.

“The money, all of it! I will tell you what you
will need of money! Nothing!” Cousin Siloi kicked Sam between the legs and dramatically
wiped the toe of his roper-style cowboy boot on Sam’s pants. Sam’s cousin Siloi
had no idea that the hammered studs and iridescent beads on the boots had been
perfectly in style for the pre-teen daughters of the suburban ranches
surrounding Raton, New Mexico twenty years ago. Cousin Siloi looked down at his
cousin, his burden, sighed, and forgetting about Sam after completing his weekly
extortion, dropped himself onto a brand-new leather sofa. Put in front of the
television by two of the go-boys of a client, George Kemara, George hoped that it
would encourage Siloi to begin his building project before the next big rainy
season would turn the barely-passable cratered roads into the impossible
sloughs of sticky red mud.

Lying on the cool floor of the cinder-block
television room, Sam heard the clack-clack of the whirligig beetles hurling
themselves into the metal grate of the window. He dreamed of taking the
hovercraft to Lungi airport and then to London. Forever.

The main entrance to the Church of the Crux in
Portland, was cool, dark, and cavernous. The high-vaulted narthex consisted
solely of hard surfaces as is if to amplify the echo from every fugitive sound.
In the far center of the marble and mahogany arcade was a monumental desk
within a miniature apse. Off to each side of the arcade, enfilade, were adjoining
rooms in which Joex glimpsed racks of Church literature, worktables with
built-in monitors and exhibits of one kind or another pertaining to the Church.
The only person other than himself in the entrance was sitting at the desk
across the hall facing him. She was a young woman with extraordinarily short
hair wearing a nondescript fitted baize singlet. She stared at him, undemonstrative
but not unfriendly. Sam did not yet notice the HD/ip surveillance cameras or
microphones camouflaged in tiny tinted hemispheres ensconced every few yards on
the shadowed arched of the ceiling.

After tearing off a memo sheet of output that she
glanced, in a well-modulated voice she said, “Are you a parichoner? How may I
help you?” Seeing Joex’s negative shake of his head, she attached the output
and a packet of paper to a clipboard, and handed Joex a note card fiche and a
cheap pen to fill it in. The back of her fingers lightly grazed his fingertips.
It fiche asked: name, current home address and previous three addresses,
telephone number (day, night), sibling names, spouse maiden name, social
security number, driver’s license and passport number, date of birth, schools
attended, list of three references, a bank reference, siblings, email
addresses, Facebook,  and all other social network account names, irrevocable
permission to investigate, and a lengthy and almost microscopic disclaimer.
“You can fill it out over there.” She motioned to a leather couch again the
wall to her left. She kept staring at Joex. Gold flecked her irises within
large blue eyes.

“I am Jim,” Joex said, using his false identity, “I
just want to ask a few questions about the Church,” Joex said, “I am looking
for work and I heard the Church could help me find a job.”

“Hi, I’m Serena. Please, first fill this out before
we can do anything. It’s required. If you don’t know something, leave it blank,
we’ll fill it in later.”

Joex took the fiche and pen and retreated to the
sofa.

“Can I improve myself here?” Joex said in a way he
hoped would simulate an eager but gullible newcomer.

“If you want to,” Serena said, “Everyone does.”

Joex filled out the form, adding plausible errors
to his false identity’s numbers and streets that he hoped to slow down any
investigation. It wasn’t clear how long he had to persist in this caper, but
Joex suspect his phony identity wouldn’t stand up to professional scrutiny very
long. The fiche itself had a curious gripping texture as if it were a cat’s
tongue, it was faint embossed watermark of an “X” with the upper right arm
perceptibly longer than the others.

At every instant, he expected oak-trimmed steel
doors to swing shut with finality and for polite but relentlessly trained
Church security officers calmly to restrain him and then to fire a single shot
from a suppressed Ruger Mark X Target .22 into his medulla oblongata within the
small bump in the back of his head. His imagination had been becoming more
vivid these last few weeks. Perhaps worse than the murder itself—as Joex had
already consigned himself to a downward spiral ending in his extinction—would
be the fact that Joex would never discover its purpose.

He walked back to the monolithic desk and handed
Serena the form and the pen. She glanced at it, put it face down on a glassy
bed that looked as if it were custom designed for the form and initiated a scan
with a button marked in confirmation “PCR/scan.” When the brilliant white bar
had traversed the form, she peeled it off and dropped it into a slot. It looked
like a large wastebasket with a padlocked lid that displayed in block letters,
“ABLOY.”

“Jim, how may I help you again?”

“I’d like to find out more about the Church and
take advantage of any help you have in getting me a job,” said Joex, more
assured and articulate than one might expect from such a weak pretext.

“So, what have you heard about the Church?”

“That it trains the mind and makes you a better
thinker.”

“In a way. But that is not all. You can only learn
about the Church by being a member of it, not by me telling you about it.
Listen: this is the short version of the story of thinking. Don’t worry if you
don’t get it. You probably will before you leave today.” Serena stared at Joex,
her pupils dilated, opening her arms to embrace her desk. She smelled fresh
meat.

“Species distinguished themselves to survive. At
first, it was sufficient for millions of years to shape the physical form and
function of the organism. The structure of the organism itself was the
embodiment and anticipation of its memory and imagination. Then DNA
evolved—yes, this is a church that believes in evolution, she laughed—and became
the medium to store the bulk of the knowledge about the species’ newly needed
survival specialties. Then, as further specialization was required to surpass
accelerating challenges such as a quickly changing climate, the mammalian and primate
brains grew; they could store many times the information as DNA, and, this is a
crux: the brains could accumulate fresh and modify old information within the
lifetime of a particular individual within a species. Again, over time, more
and more complex challenges to the species occurred: invention, diplomacy,
agriculture, trade, polity, wars. We needed more information and even more flexibility
to add and to change that information. We invented libraries. Now we could
store many more times the information as brains and transmit that information
accurately longer than a single human memory. But, sadly, even the most
talented genius of an age can only read several thousand books during their
lifetime, or write hundreds. A tiny fraction of the whole. And who can choose
which books to read?” Serena’s lips moved slightly apart and she flushed. “Now
the Church has a Mechanical Turk. It surpasses libraries rather greater than libraries
surpassed brains. Its design has a key improvement over libraries: it can
adapt, breathlessly—as in the time within a flicker of understanding or the
instant of a pause for reflection. In a sense
it
selects what book you
need to read next for you to understand best what has happened before and what
will happen after.

But the designers made a grave and glorious
mistake.” Serena slid her chair until it stopped at the desk and closed her
eyes. She swallowed. “That is not all our Turk does, as it happens. The Church
found that it adapts and refines the human engaging it at not merely an
accelerated rate, but at a quickening rate over shorter and shorter time.
Acceleration of acceleration. The Mechanical Jerk.” She opened her eyes. Her
eyes stopped blinking. “Do you know what a powerset is? You will. Our Turk not
only adapts to your own adaptation, but to all the others’ adaptations who have
used it.”

“If your brain is now of complexity X, it will approach
the complexity 2-to-the-X, a number which dwarfs the growth of a chain reaction
2-4-8-16 and so on or even more so the child’s number of E=MC squared. It is
like the difference in the number—or cardinality—between all the counting
numbers like 1,2,3,4 and so on forever, compared to the cardinality of all the
numbers possible along a forever-divisible continuum using the counting numbers
only as separate marks upon it.

The result of all this in terms of people—you—is
more simply: the Church is creating minds outside, transcending the map of even
the
possibility
of ordinary human minds. In other words, other than
through the Church, you can’t get there from here. But I think you can find out
for yourself.”

Serena stood up and directed Joex to follow her
into a large room on her right from the kind of transept that centered on her
desk. He felt her touch the cooler flesh of his wrist. At the room’s vestibule,
the rhythm of her walk paused, then quickened, accelerating. Within the room,
Serena selected one of the tables with two embedded monitors and directed him
to sit. “We are the most-respected and popular church in the world,” she
recited. “Take this self-guided tour to learn our history and see examples of
our program.” This is the Games Machine.” She typed in a couple of code
numbers, fingernails chattering on the hard surface, and flicked a selection box.
“Talk to me when it is done with you. There is a toilet over there. You will be
told when you need it.” She turned and walked back to her desk in the tightest
and most graceful flecked gabardine trousers that Joex had ever seen. Or at
least recently.

Distracted by Serena, but also by the rude
statement that he would be “told” to use the bathroom, Joex settled down to the
touch screen labeled INTRODUCTION and swiped the box marked “Begin.” In
contradiction to Serena’s assertion of the membership of the International Church
of the Crux, the room had no other people in it.

The presentation was surprisingly well done. Hours
passed quickly in front of the screen. First a short feature video on the
history and public rites of the church concentrating on the super-human
abilities promised to members who finished the program of intellectual
perfection (though to Joex the path to Crux salvation seemed mostly to be paying
steeply increasing fees for fewer and fewer hours of access.) The video showed
the happy and fulfilled Parich and parichoners, the kindly and benign Angelic
Choirs and Church hierarchy, a lengthy biopic of the life of the Supernals with
most time spent celebrating the gifted life of First Celestial Michael Voide.
The screen directed “Jim” to get up and stretch in a certain manner then to
windmill his arms and stomp his feet “as if he were crushing grapes.” The Games
Machine terminal sensed his motion, heartbeat and respiration and instructed
him to stop after a few minutes. It then directed him to the toilet. No matter
what Joex did, the screen froze in its instruction to him until he actually
went to the toilet, urinated, washed his hands and returned to the desk. Joex
wasn’t sure of the Games Machine was regulating his comfort, or was testing the
enforcement of its mechanical will.

He could see Serena at a distance looking away from
him. He suspected that she could watch him through the surveillance cameras
hidden in their tinted spheres that he could see when he glanced at the low
ceiling of the training room or “scriptorium” as the video lecture described.

Now was the interactive portion of the introduction
to the Church. The elementary course of puzzles began to demonstrate the “progress
to perfection.” It began with a quote from someone name Ludwig Wittgenstein:
“Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must pass over in silence.” Joex had no
idea how that quote applied to what he was doing.

The format of the course was a statement, axiom, quip,
theorem, quote, lemma, or aphorism followed by multiple-choice questions, as if
he were taking some kind of University entrance exam. The first statement was
“Distinctions exist.” It was followed by the line:

1 ≠ 0

Then what appeared to be elementary arithmetic
propositions about commutativity, associativity, and distributivity. Joex
remembered learning about these properties somewhere in early elementary
school. Joex as “Jim” breezed easily through the first presentation followed by
questions about what he had read. Questions were  presented; the few that Joex
chose the wrong response were followed by new fact and a fresh question of
similar difficulty. Questions that he got right were followed by new topical facts
or relationships of something new, compared to the previous material. A new
question of increasing subtlety or difficulty followed. Within a score of
correct answers, Joex was quickly pacing himself through elementary,
intermediate, and advanced amalgam of arithmetic, geometry, logic, paradox and contradiction;
there were diagrams the led him to consider novel aspects of figure/ground and
positive/negative space. The pace was persistent and accelerating. Joex noted
that the vocabulary and sentence structure within the propositions and their
questions was increasing along with the difficulty of their content. From
simple declarative sentences, then compound, then complex, then
compound/complex with subordinating conjunctions. Then the mixed area where syntax
and rhetoric play with each other: cumulative, periodic, cleft, metaphor and
figures of speech that Joex could not name. Novel forms of punctuation began to
appear to denote aggregated grammatical relationships. Questions about finer
distinctions between symbol and semiote were presented. Joex was not convinced
all the words he saw were actually in a dictionary; somehow, their introduction
was fluid and intuitive. He immediately apprehended them tentatively, then
fully. Sometimes there appeared shocking images or expressions. But the
questions were flying faster than Joex could quite grasp at their
underpinnings.