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InterText Vol. 4, No. 5 / September-October 1994
================================================
Contents
FirstText: The Road More Traveled.................Jason Snell
SecondText: Here Comes the Flood.................Geoff Duncan
Short Fiction
Sometimes a Man_.................................Steve Conger_
The Gardener_.......................................Jim Cowan_
The Monkey Trap_.................................Kyle Cassidy_
Serial Access_...............................E. Jay O'Connell_
The Thieves_.......................................Levi Asher_
Underground, Overground_.........................Simon Nugent_
Fallen Star, Live-In God_....................Rachel R. Walker_
....................................................................
Editor Assistant Editor
Jason Snell Geoff Duncan
jsnell@etext.org gaduncan@halcyon.com
....................................................................
Assistant Editor Send subscription requests, story
Susan Grossman submissions, and correspondence
c/o intertext@etext.org to intertext@etext.org
....................................................................
InterText Vol. 4, No. 5. InterText (ISSN 1071-7676) is published
electronically on a bi-monthly basis. Reproduction of this
magazine is permitted as long as the magazine is not sold
(either by itself or as part of a collection) and the entire
text of the issue remains intact. Copyright 1994, Jason Snell.
Individual stories Copyright 1994 their original authors.
....................................................................
FirstText: The Road More Traveled by Jason Snell
====================================================
Welcome to Tortured Metaphors 101. Today, class, we'll be
discussing the tortured metaphor of The Road. But first, let me
give you an example:
The Road to InterText has been an interesting one. Though it's
now getting toward the end of 1994 and I'm editing a
electronically distributed fiction magazine that's read by
thousand of people on six continents, I was on The Road long
before InterText first appeared in early 1991.
Now, my first experience with Internet publishing was Quanta,
when it first appeared in 1989. This story goes back further.
In 1985 I was a high school student armed only with an Apple IIe
computer, a 300 baud modem, and a lot of spare time. So what did
I do? I ended up as the operator of the only computer bulletin
board system in Tuolumne County, California.
At the time, most of the Apple II bulletin boards I knew were
involved in only two sorts of business: software piracy and
adolescent chats about what your favorite pirated game was. And
so, for a while, that was what my bulletin board, Starbase 209,
focused on. Pirated software and inane conversation, all on an
Apple II with about 128K of RAM and 800K of disk space. It was a
cozy place, to say the least.
I lost interest in piracy pretty quickly. Instead, I was drawn
to another section of my system--a "library" of plain text
files, usually filled with information about piracy or how to
build letter bombs. Classy stuff.
What did I do with that area? I turned it into an on-line
fiction area, featuring stories that my friends and I had
written. Looking back on that time (and on those files--I still
have most of them), I wince at just how horrible my writing was.
The quality of the fiction I wrote in the mid-'80s isn't really
the issue, however. The key is that I had been drawn to creating
works of fiction, editing them, formatting them for the
limitations of the on-line format, and putting them out for
people to read. They became the most popular section of the
system, especially when a friend of mine and I began writing a
monthly adventure serial--always featuring a cliffhanger ending,
of course.
Though the audience was sorely limited and the quality of the
material was questionable at best, those stories were the dirt
road that became the paved thoroughfare that is InterText. I
shut down Starbase 209, went off to college, and began exploring
the Internet. On one Usenet newsgroup (probably
rec.arts.startrek, I read an announcement from a student at
Carnegie Mellon University saying that an on-line science
fiction magazine was starting up. I sent in one of those stories
that appeared on the bulletin board ("Into Gray"), and it
appeared in the first issue of Daniel K. Appelquist's Quanta.
In Quanta I read about another on-line magazine, Jim McCabe's
Athene, and subscribed to it. And when Jim McCabe announced he
no longer had the time to produce Athene, I decided that I'd
create something to replace Athene. On The Road again.
My rationale for starting InterText was that since Quanta was a
science fiction magazine, if Athene went away there'd be no
place on the Net for writers of non-genre fiction to go. And at
the time, it may have been true.
Of course, since then the size of the Internet has grown
radically and any number of on-line publications have sprung up.
More appear each day, and while some fade away quickly, others
seem to be in it for the long haul.
I'll bet some of the editors of those publications got their
start someplace like where I got mine--some bulletin board in an
out-of-the-way place. But now it's nearly ten years later, and
we don't have to toil in isolation anymore. We're all out here
on the Net together.
It couldn't have happened at a better time. Heck, if it happened
ten years ago, people worldwide would've seen the awful stories
I wrote at the age of 14. Instead, it's just people in my home
town. I can live with that.
I can see from my watch that we're all out of time for today.
But we're not done with The Road yet, class. Your homework: work
50 different permutations of the phrase "Information
Superhighway" into a two-page essay. My suggestion? Write a news
story about the Internet. It'll be _easy._
SecondText: Here Comes the Flood by Geoff Duncan
====================================================
I don't know if you've noticed, but the Internet is growing.
Sure, there's been plenty of off-line hype in the papers and on
the talk shows. Newsweek--that bastion of politics and
info-graphics--has a new page called "Cyberscope" in which they
profile on-line issues. CNN has developed a tendency to pounce
on stories about the Net and its culture, particularly when it
might involve something scandalous. And there's Wired, the
self-anointed travelogue for digital hipsters, preaching its own
revolution, flashing fluorescent colors, and declaring NCSA
Mosaic the greatest thing since the Last Supper. The New York
Times and the Wall Street Journal alternately declare the
Internet a ripe, fast growing market, then say its size is
overestimated. Whatever. It's clear The Establishment is
starting to plug in and get on-line.
Of course, the hype hasn't been limited to traditional media.
Commercial on-line services are engaged in a shoving match to
see who's More-Internet-Than-Thou. Delphi was the first to offer
significant Internet access as part of its package, but it
wasn't until America Online released torrents of "uncouth"
newbies into Usenet newsgroups that we started to see a culture
clash between long-time Internet geeks and people who thought <A
alt.cyberpunk was just another Billy Idol discussion group. And
it wasn't just casual users--businesses with AOL accounts
started to post rampantly to newsgroups, trying to tap into that
vast, untapped market in cyberspace. And now even the venerable
Compuserve is promising high-speed, full Internet access to its
customers within a matter of months.
And let's not forget that software companies are beginning to
strike poses. Apple's latest operating system includes with the
software Macs need to connect directly to the Internet; OS/2 and
the next version of Microsoft Windows aim to do one better by
bundling plug-and-play applications that put users directly
on-line (for a modest fee). All this will increase the number of
people and businesses looking to get on-line.
It's been happening for a while. Think of the fast-growing
commercial use of the Internet, with companies setting up
services to advertise products and take orders on-line. It's now
possible to shop for books, clothing, software and pizza via the
Internet--activities that would have been inconceivable as
little as three years ago. And there have been the first serious
abuses of the Net by commercial interests, such as the "green
card" fiasco brought on by the Canter & Siegel law firm and
the resulting backlash from the network community. And how many
direct messages for products and services have you received by
email? Admittedly, I'm a little more visible than the normal
network user, but I receive at least one unbidden advertisement
per week, for everything from X Windows software to mail-order
catalogs.
Is this what we really want? Is the on-line community doomed to
a deluge of infomercials and direct mailings, just like we are
in real life?
My feeling is that commercial users will eventually figure out
how things work on-line, if for no other reason than that it
makes financial sense for them to figure it out. No company is
going to want to go on the Net and make a fool of itself, thus
alienating a fast-moving and highly vocal market. But someone
has got to set an example for how to do it right.
That's where we come in. History has shown that commercial
interests have to respond to the demands of their customers. As
"the target market," the on-line user community can control the
direction of commercial activity on the Net by how we respond to
it. If you don't like the way a company is promoting a
product--by, say, sending you mail about it every Tuesday--tell
them why. If you think a particular commercial posting to a
newsgroup is inappropriate, don't let it pass by: _say_
something about it. One message is sufficient; there's no need
to start (or contribute to) a flame war. But let them know.
There are examples out there of how to be on-line effectively;
however, one person's example of ideal on-line marketing is for
another person a portent for the end of the world. The important
point is that, if you're on the Net to take advantage of it
resources and participate in what the future will bring, take
the time to support on-line efforts that reflect _your_ idea of
what that future should be. Similarly, take the time to point
out inappropriate activities and tactics, because if no one
speaks up, the people behind those activities will just get
better at being inappropriate.
For years the Internet has been managed by a kind of consensus
of its users--don't let commercial activity on the Net suddenly
make you feel you don't have a voice in the way things are done.
Sometimes a Man by Steve Conger
===================================
...................................................................
* Getting close to the natural world is a goal every weekend
camper can understand. But there's a big difference between
viewing nature from the outside and seeing it from within. *
...................................................................
I am five mice in a wheat field. From the distance, the great
thunder of a combine. Dust billows and swirls. Scurrying over
the shuddering earth to a clump of grass by an old fence. Watch
without blinking ten eyes.
Yesterday a magpie, black-winged, tipped with white, trailing a
long spear of a tail, hopping along the roadside picking at the
pulped remains of squirrels.
Sometimes a man.
Began perhaps as a man. Born with two hands and feet, mouth open
crying for air, squeezing it into reluctant lungs. Sponged off,
carefully wiping the blood and amniotic fluid from the corners
of the mouth, from between the small fingers, wrapped in a
blanket and left alone in a crib beneath a burning light.
Once a bear--a lot like a man. Stood erect in a huckleberry
patch, ripping leaf and berry from the branch, swatting at
yellow jackets, rubbing my back against the crumbling bark of an
old snag. Ambled through the darkness, sniffing at the slight
breeze. Sometimes ripped a rotting log open and licked up the
ants as they boiled loose. In winter, curled up in a hollow
beneath a log, snorted and snored, and occasionally woke up
listening, startled out of a dream like a man.
When a man, dreams came often. Sometimes sleepless for fear of
dreams. Read late nights or watched TV or wandered alone to a
bar and nursed a beer until it became as bitter and tepid as
those nights. No memory of what the dreams were about--only that
they opened on a great emptiness, like a winter sea at twilight,
the endless gray swells fading into the grayer curve of the sky.
Squalls, veils of black rain and a lone seabird poised silent in
the dim light. Awake arms would curve around a hollow, a cold
depression in the sheets, as if a form carved out of snow had
lain there and then had blown away.
When a coyote, loped along the edges of snow-swept fields, stiff
blond grasses poking through troughs of wind-crusted snow. Drank
from the trickle of small streams beside red bramble brittle
with ice, under the trunks of huge cottonwoods, their last few
leaves rattling in a cold breeze. At the sound of cars on the
road, slid into shadow and watch as they passed, testing the
scents on the wind, filled with a strange disquiet.
Her words returned sometimes in the rattle of cattails by the
pond in the long dead grass at summer's end. All things forming,
reforming every instant. Leaf falls to ground, mold, bacteria,
insects convert it to soil, roots reabsorb it, mix it with
light, buds flower, swell into fruit, fruit eaten, seeds shit on
the ground, new plants sprout.
Atoms dance--gnats in a shaft of sunlight. Her voice dancing.
We are all star stuff, cinders belched from the sour bellies of
dying suns. Matter is a self-renewing matrix, a spider's web
woven to catch passing energies and suck some use from them
before they pass through. The initiated can change the matrix,
respin the web, become other.
Easier, however, to change than to return. Home is the intuition
of a pattern, a structure through which atoms pass and become
you for an instant or less. The ego is not enough--made of words
more than of cells and tissue, a pleasant or unpleasant fiction
we narrate to connect across gaps of lost time. The intuition is
deeper than I. Without it--
Her eyes were an odd shade of green, and in her left eye was a
disturbing fleck of gold. Sometimes, making love, her pupils
would widen and it would seem as if the whole world were lost in
them--but then she would close them and hold tight and it
wouldn't matter if the world were lost or if it were ever found
again.
Don't remember the first meeting. Sense of a river bank, slow
curling waters, sunlight and the shadow of aspen leaves. A
flutter behind, as if a bird had landed, and she was there. Talk
came easily and something about her smile began to thaw the
winter loneliness.
She followed back to the apartment, curled catlike on the couch,
and stayed. Never questioned it, never looked for a motive,
afraid that if looked at too closely the magic would evaporate.
Alone again in the cold morning, heating water to make a cup of
instant coffee, listening to the radio for company. When she was
there the dull rooms breathed an air of excitement, scents of
warm fur and wild winds, feather, pine, huckleberry, wild rose.
Once, when an owl sitting on a dark branch that sighed and
creaked in the night wind, looked into a window steamed with the
moist evaporation of the breaths and teas within and sensed that
air. A form moving behind the misted glass like the moon behind
a thin cloud, shifting, dancing. Wind rustled the feathers on
the head and back. Sat and did not move.
Dreams pursued, as always when a man, but with her coming the
dreams changed. Nights were filled with the presence of animals,
the pad of a cat's feet, the whir of a wing, the pant of a dog,
the gleaming eyes of a raccoon sorting through a glittering
jewelry box, the rustle of mice on the closet floor. But always
when the dreams grew so strong that sleep broke, there would be
nothing but her, sitting on the bed, looking out the window at
the stars shining through the branches of the tree. _Don't you
ever sleep?_ She would just look gently and then turn again to
stare into the night.
When it happened.... Awoke one night, cold. The window was open
as she preferred it, but she was not there. The bed was still
warm beside. She must be in the bathroom or getting a drink of
water. Closed the window. But awake, listening, heard nothing,
no bare feet on the floor, no sound of water running. The low
electric hum of the alarm by the bed.
Ten, 20, 30 minutes and she did not return. Sleepless, not
daring to think, to open the gates, to let the night flood
in--afraid she may have left as silently as she had come, afraid
of infinite spaces, afraid of nameless things.
Driven out of bed by the ache of fear. Pacing the room, staring
out the window at the dark branches of the tree. The sidewalks
washed chalk white beneath the streetlamps. The empty streets.
The blank windows of the other houses. Tried to read but the
words swam on the page. Went down to the kitchen, walked through
the dark living room and then came back upstairs to the bedroom.
Pacing, empty, listless, finally settled into a chair neither
asleep nor awake.
In the half-light before dawn a scratching sound at the window.
Roused to look and saw two green eyes, a cat, balanced on a
branch, tapping at the window with its paw. Feeling a cold
deeper than the morning's, opened the window.
When a Canadian goose, would whirl up off the water in the
pre-dawn when the sky was pale and empty of stars except for the
morning star, before the sun flashed through the cattails and
the day began. Others would honk beside and would bank into the
wind and take a turn over the town and the houses outside of
town. Searching the rooftops, smoke smearing from chimneys,
hoping for a signature of something almost forgotten. Studying
the layout of the streets trying to read the labyrinth, to trace
the path that leads to some center. But then the sun would
explode onto the water and light all the windows on fire. Swirl,
bank, away.
"Teach me. Show me."
Desperately she--No. You want it too much. You should neither
want it nor not want it. You are too eager. Change should be a
fact uncolored by emotion, an inevitability, part of the
process, to be other, to be elsewhere.
Door closed, the cracks sealed with clothing, plastic taped
over, the windows shut, locked, the furnace vents closed, taped.
She awakens. _What are you doing? You cannot force me to--_ A
moth fluttering against the window, soft tap of its wings, an
ant slipping down the plastic sealing the doorjamb, a beetle
scuttling across the vents, a wolf pacing in the corner of the
room, a bear on its hind legs, a lion crouched, an eagle
screeching and falling talons-forward but stopping short of
scratching. Hours. A kaleidoscope of forms, but did not move,
unmoved, stonefaced, stone hearted. At last in the dawn she
came, herself, and sat at the end of the bed, hair wet and
curled on her shoulders. _You want too much._
"Help me."
"If I help you I lose you."
"Help me."
"You don't know what you ask."
"I won't let you go until you show me."
"Here," she sighed.
When a fish, would hide in the comfort of the bank's shadow,
moving just enough to hold against the current, waiting to see
what the stream would bring--a fly, a worm swept loose from the
shore wiggling red, eggs, larvae. Quick to react to the play of
light and shadow. Rising to a dimple in the surface tension, a
tiny pattern of ripples. Once rising, startled by the image of a
face broken on the facets of the water. Eyes that drew, but a
flick of the tail, darting away.
Her eyes green, pupils not quite round. Flecks of
phosphorescence, the one brown flaw.
"Why did you come to me if I am so unstable, If you believe my
self is so unformed?"
"You were so lonely."
A stone falling down a long well into cold water. "Don't worry
about me. I can do this. I'll be back. We'll travel this world
together."
"I hope that's true."
"Let's do it."
She sighed sadly. Unweave, weave, the new web, the hairs on your
arms are feathers, your bones are light and hollow, your lips
are hard beak curved to tear at prey. Your eyes tiny, sharp
enough to see a mouse stirring the grass 150 feet below. Toes
curled into talons. _Fly, eagle, but don't fly from me. I don't
think I'll be able to find you again, if I lose you now._
But to wings that have never felt the wind, the lift of air
warmed by stone, the world so wide--
A deer on the edge of the wheat field. Five mice scurry by
hooves. Looking up in terror at the combine billowing chaff and
dust. Nostrils flare. The scent of diesel, the scent of man.
Hesitant before running.
Sometimes a man.
Steve Conger (sconge@seaccd.ctc.edu)
--------------------------------------
Steve Conger is a poet and a computer instructor with a great
interest in languages from Homeric Greek to Visual BASIC. He
currently lives in Seattle, Washington and teaches at Seattle
Central Community College.
The Gardener by Jim Cowan
=============================
...................................................................
* In the tradition of Cardinal Bellarmine and Pierre Teilhard de
Chardin, here is a tale of a priest caught between doctrine and
his relentless pursuit of truth. *
...................................................................
Kyrie
-------
You, an emissary from the Holy Father himself, have come to
question me? I am sure you understand my surprise. I am an old
Jesuit sitting in the sun, dreaming away the afternoon in this
quiet seminary garden. What could I know that is of such
interest to Rome? Perhaps of interest to the entire world, you
say? Surely you know that my order has suppressed my thoughts
for 40 years. What has happened to arouse the Holy Father's
sudden interest?
Say nothing--I know why you have sought me out. I will tell you
the story you have come to hear and answer the question you have
come to ask. Indulge me. I am an old man and I may seem to
ramble, but I am no fool. I am a Jesuit and an ordained priest,
and I am a graduate of the Sorbonne's school of
xeno-technoarcheology, right here in Paris. You would do well to
pay attention.
You want me to tell you the story of how the quantum engineer
Angstrom and I went to the planet Paschal II. You want me to
tell you about Paschal's alien technology. I must warn you that
my story will answer the Holy Father's question, but I doubt
that the Holy Father will like my answer.
Isn't this garden beautiful? Let's take this path that winds
between these irises and lilies. Charming. Here we will sit in
this small, secluded arbor. I'll sit where the sun will shine on
my back and you may sit there, on that wooden bench, in the
shade, so the brightness will not shine into your eyes.
My story begins 20 years and three popes ago. I was 50 (I must
add that I was fit and muscular) when a signal was received from
an interstellar probe that had been silent for years and given
up for lost. The probe was one of our Catholic probes, one of
many such automatons sent out to seek the heathen.
Seeking the heathen. All that happened before you were born,
when ruins abandoned by an alien race were found in several
local systems. Your teachers probably did not teach you about
the period of theological anguish caused by these discoveries.
Non-human intelligence was seen as a mortal threat to man's
central role in God's vision of the unfolding universe. No, they
wouldn't teach you all the anguish. Instead they taught Rome's
charitable compromise: intelligent aliens became an untapped
source of heathen, making conversion the Church's obvious
interstellar task. Thus the Church, and through the Church all
mankind, was restored to its rightful place at the center of
God's plan.
These interesting ideas are worth examination. One must first
assume that heathen alien have real souls to save, which gives
rise to some absorbing theological disputes. One must also
assume that any converting to be done would be done by us, not
by the aliens. But I said I would not ramble. In the abandoned
ruins those first explorers found alien technology that was
functional yet quite inscrutable. These machines (the word
machine is misleading but there is no other word) manipulated a
mysterious relationship between thought and thing. Alien
technology is like the scent of honeysuckle on a calm, moonless
night. The scent reveals the presence of the flower, but not the
flower itself.
Is it true that Rome has aborted these futile attempts to find
the alien race? Does Rome finally believe they have not set foot
on their abandoned planets for a hundred thousand years? Perhaps
our young new pope has been convinced by a hundred years of
evidence. After all, he is trained as a scientist. Are you
surprised that a biologist could be elected pope? If I didn't
know better I would think I had been dreaming.
No matter. The aliens vanished who knows where, leaving behind
their dormant technology, and we xeno-technoarcheologists fumble
with its mysterious blend of material physics and spiritual
metaphysics.
Are you comfortable on that bench? Good. I like to rest here in
the afternoons. The drone of insects masks the hum of the
traffic outside the wall. Outside the _garden_ wall. That phrase
is important. To speak of alien ideas is very difficult and best
done through metaphor. In my forbidden writings I have said that
metaphor is the poetry of reason.
See there, beyond the linden tree--do you see the hule patiently
weeding amongst the flowers? A young official like yourself who
works inside the Vatican probably has no experience with hules.
They are manufactured creatures, wordless, two-legged things,
cobbled together in vats from assorted mammalian genes, slaves
bred for lives of toil. We took three hules to Paschal II. They
are part simian--see how he holds his hoe with his thumbs?--and
part canine. They have the eagerness of a dog and the
intelligence of a higher ape, which is why the path we took is
so well-swept. Although their hairy faces lack expression, one
can see from their gait that they wear their coveralls with
pride. They think they are more than animals.
But back to my tale. The probe had wandered light-years off its
programmed course. I will offer an explanation for this later.
Fifty light-years from here it had found an Earthlike planet
with a single alien ruin. From low orbit around this blue-white
globe the probe--which was equipped with a whimsical database of
minor figures from the history of Catholicism--named the planet
Paschal II. Even though we religious have time on our hands and
can learn many unimportant things, you may not know that Paschal
II was Pope from 1099 to 1118, anno Domini.
The orbiting probe reported on its survey of Paschal II. There
were cloud-streaked oceans and snow-capped mountains sweeping
down to gloomy forests. Lush jungles hid the bulk of the biomass
and dry savannas teemed with animals. On a clifftop beside a
broad estuary stood a white building, a massive dome resting on
slender pillars. This was the only sign of ancient alien
visitation. The temple, as we came to call it, stood at the
center of a wide terrace that looked over the eastern ocean.
The probe launched several pods of scientific instruments into
Paschal's atmosphere. They all failed during their descent,
reporting in their last seconds temperatures approaching
absolute zero. If that were true, Paschal II should have been a
wasteland of frozen gas. Right away the small community of
Catholic xeno-technoarcheologists suspected that the entire
planet was protected by an AMF--an anti-machine field. A few
other AMF's, small ones, were known at that time, but experience
with them was very limited.
Have you read my report of our expedition? Did you blow the dust
from its cover and read it in some corner of the Vatican
Library? Then you already know how Angstrom and I made the
descent from orbit, even though in an AMF all machines freeze
and fail when, and only when, you try to use them. Intent to use
is the mark of the alien technology.
What I admire most about alien tech is its elegance. There is no
structure, no obvious device, no clever machine--only an elegant
location where an effect is triggered by a certain state of
mind. My first encounter with alien tech was as a graduate
student on the planet Passion. The tech was a simple staircase.
Some people, some of the time they climbed it, arrived at the
top with memories of things that never could have happened. They
would talk as if their new memories were real, even write them
down, but if they walked down the stairs they forgot those
memories. We never understood what triggered these effects, or
discovered the purpose of this machine, if I can use that word.
We've never understood the workings of any alien tech.
AMF's are a rare form of alien tech. Only a few have been found,
and only on three or four planets. Each protects a small area of
space and--since on two occasions AMF's have appeared and later
disappeared--perhaps they protect small areas of time as well.
Did you know that it was I who discovered the Tower of Echo? No?
You haven't heard of the Tower of Echo? Well, I'm not surprised.
It promised to be truly dangerous... to Rome, I mean. But the
Tower is another story, and I promised not to ramble.
Paschal II is still the only planet completely protected by an
AMF, making it something of an instant Holy Grail.
Humor an old man for a moment. When you were in the library,
reading my report, did you see my proscribed essays gathering
dust in some corner alcove? Did you glance at any of my work?
No? Perhaps you didn't know my writing was the reason I went to
Paschal.
As a young man I would express my thoughts in small essays which
I would show to my friends. My ideas were well-received by a
widening circle of thoughtful readers and took on a life of
their own--electronic samizdat. In time, my essays came to the
attention of the Office of the Congregation of the Faith. What a
benign name--_The Office of the Congregation of the Faith_--for
what was once called the Inquisition. If I were not a Jesuit, I
would say with some pride that I believe my work was read by the
Holy Father himself.
Over 20 years I had several interviews with Curial officials.
Each interview followed months or even years of preparatory
examination of documents while I waited, mutely, for approval of
perhaps a single essay. My only rewards were long lists of
required revisions that might, in the future, make my work
acceptable for official publication.
During this time I continued my work as a xeno-
technoarcheologist. My scientific writing was of no interest to
the Church, but, unknown to Rome (and even to myself at first)
my scientific work slowly merged with my religious beliefs. In
my mid-forties I collected my ideas in a book that was to
encompass all my beliefs: _The Spiritual Evolution of Matter:_
_Dust, Man and Beyond._
A few weeks after my manuscript arrived in Rome, the
Congregation of the Faith leveled the specific and serious
charge of Unsound Doctrine. _The Spiritual Evolution of Matter_
contradicted fundamental Catholic dogma first set forth by
Aquinas over a thousand years ago. Saint Thomas said that matter
was merely matter and doomed to pass away, while spirit was
eternal spirit. Unlike mass and energy--which are
equivalent--ephemeral matter can never become eternal spirit.
You do have some scientific training, enough to know that matter
can be transformed into energy? Good.
This time there were no difficult passages, no suggested
sections for revision, no authority was assigned me to help me
clarify my thoughts. They simply told me that _The Spiritual_
_Evolution of Matter: Dust, Man and Beyond_ was profoundly
heretical and could never be published.
If I may digress for a moment, you might be interested to know
that I find heresy intriguing. It is a state of grace to which
one is summoned. Once appointed a heretic, one's unauthorized
thoughts are formally authorized. Unauthorized Thoughts. It is a
validation, and like garden weeds, they can never be completely
eradicated.
I believe that metaphor is the poetry of reason. Did I mention
that before? Well, the human mind is a garden of thought. There
are the flowers of human thought: the annuals of art and
science, and the perennials of faith. There are weeds, too. But
what lies outside the garden wall? Is there only desert,
stretching to a hazy horizon, or are there other gardens, alien
gardens of thought where we might wander if we only we could
find the narrow gate in the wall of our small garden? Perhaps
weeds in our garden might be flowers in other, alien gardens?
But, in our human garden, my heretical weeds were intolerable
and Rome said I must not write.
I am a Jesuit who is sworn to a life of obedience. We who have
sworn to obey know that, while God frowns on those who use
authority irrationally, He smiles on those of us who
irrationally obey. I felt He was smiling on me when, two years
later, Rome's lost probe discovered Paschal II.
There was nothing for me here on Earth. I asked to be sent to
the new planet. I knew there must be a great secret on a planet
protected by an AMF. Unlike other XTA's I had nothing to lose by
going to Paschal II. Even if I did not return I would be serving
God. If I did discover how to defeat the AMF then I could not
only return to Earth, but return in triumph.
And my friend Angstrom, why did he go with me? In my report I
don't think I mentioned that Angstrom was the son of a Paris
chef. Angstrom had inherited his father's love of food. Through
all the years I worked with him he never weighed less than 150
kilos. Arcs of sweat stained the armpits of his shirts and those
who worked beside him always breathed the faint smell of stale
sweat.
Although his professional peers were disgusted by his obesity
they were forced to respect his intellect. At the end of his
career his hunger for truth, not food, led to his professional
disgrace and ostracism. But more of that later. All you need to
know about Angstrom at this time is that he was a kind man and
that the chance of an uncertain quest on Paschal II offered him
more than the miserable certainty of his lonely life on Earth.
And what was the purpose of our trip? I think you understand
that it was to turn off the AMF and discover the secret that was
hidden on Paschal II.
Gloria
--------
I have never enjoyed space travel. Like many things that seem
exciting, space travel is quite boring.
We journeyed to Paschal II on a ship I renamed the
_Teilhard de Chardin,_ after a predecessor of mine. She was an
ancient, unsafe faster-than-light freighter owned by one of the
Vatican's labyrinthine holding companies. Rome said we could use
her because the _Chardin_ was on her way to the scrap yard. Do
you understand why an unspaceworthy ship was ideal? You don't?
Surely you see that I was a certified heretic, forbidden to
speak but still capable of thought. I was a constant threat here
on Earth. My unfortunate death in space would be a tragic loss
that would be quickly forgotten. And if the _Chardin_ did not
break up in hyperspace, Rome would be pleased to see me marooned
on Paschal II behind the impenetrable veil of the AMF. Ah, I can
see from the slight inclination of your head that you are no
neophyte in the ways of the Vatican. Perhaps you know that the
planning for the second, fully-equipped expedition--the one that
would be sent when ours unfortunately disappeared--was already
underway.
Before we left Earth we had our universal antibody boosters, so
that we could drink the water on Paschal II, so to speak. Like
us, the three hules had their antibody booster together with a
shot of a long-acting anti-gonadotropin to continue the
suppression of their self-replicating behavior. When breeding
mammalian intelligence in a vat there are some behaviors that
apparently cannot be eliminated. In lieu of pharmaceuticals I
had my vow of chastity and for Angstrom, well, as far as I know
he was functionally asexual.
Why did we take the hules? The hules would be our porters, our
bearers. Without machines we would be forced to explore Paschal
like 17th century adventurers from Europe's Age of
Discovery--those glorious days when scarcely a cape was rounded
or a river explored without a Jesuit on board.
For two days we coasted away from Earth's gravitational field.
To pass the time I took out the battered brass reflecting
telescope given to me by one of my teachers when I was a young
man. The stars shown as they do only when seen from space, a
myriad suns wheeling through the void. In time each sun would
die in a brief nova or rarer supernova, spewing forth gassy
clouds of star stuff. Eons later this dust would cool and
condense into new suns and planets. On a tiny fraction of these
planets liquid water would be squeezed from rock and the long
procession of life would begin. Half-alive slime at first, then
bacteria refining their cell walls and nuclei for a billion
years, then another billion years of microscopic multicellular
beings whose progeny, in another billion years or so, would be
fish and birds and mammals and creatures like men, with souls.
Be careful. You are listening to dangerous ideas, my young
friend.
Did I mention that the three hules were Rome's gift to our
expedition? Another example of Rome's threadbare generosity.
They were spare agricultural hules from this seminary. Spare
hules are a problem: junking them is a difficult moral question.
Industry quietly euthanizes them, but the Church is more
principled--or more squeamish--and assigns its surplus hules,
like aging nuns, to ever lighter duties. These three hules,
however, were assigned to our mission to live or die, as God saw
fit, marooned with me and Angstrom.
Sedated, the three slept through our five-day journey across the
light-years. Sometimes I would check on them as they lay in the
narrow bunks on the cargo bay. M. Jules was strong and willing
while Mlle. Marie was a delicate creature often found in the
company of M. Jules. M. Alain had a truculent air as if he
blamed all men not only for being a manufactured mutation but
also for being born a slave. Although they had no souls we
always addressed them as Monsieur or Mademoiselle. They were
more than animals and these honorifics eased the quiet
discomfort we felt in their presence.
Asleep in the _Chardin's_ cargo bay their shaggy faces were
impassive. There was no flicker under their eyelids, no
twitching, no soft moaning while they slept. Minutes before our
trip through hyperspace Angstrom, hunched over a subunit of the
quantum drive in the _Chardin's_ engine-room, churlishly snapped
at me, "Hules are like other animals; they only seem to dream."
Did I describe Paschal II? I think I told you that this planet
was more Earthlike than others found at the time. Like Earth,
Paschal even had a single airless moon. From orbit we looked
down on the estuary and the clifftop temple. The river's source
seemed to lie in lush upland forests which stretched to the edge
of a long escarpment. The river plunged over this scarp into
lowland jungles where it was a broad brown thing that wound for
miles and miles until it reached the sea.
Our descent to the surface was frightful. Angstrom, figuring
that a passive airfoil would not trigger the AMF, had built a
glider--a mono-wing without moving control surfaces or other
mechanical devices--that was designed to swoop erratically, like
a leaf falling from orbit, never flying faster than 200
kilometers per hour.
"No turning back. Let's hope we can turn the damned thing off
when we get there," he said. He meant the AMF of course, not the
glider. He pulled the red switch to fire the explosive bolts
that held us beneath the _Chardin._ There was a muffled thud and
we dropped down below the ship. Above us we saw the _Chardin's_
shuttlecraft hanging in its bay.
Strapped in, we sat in the darkness, listening to the rush of
air and the creaking of the prestressed airframe, feeling
nothing but nausea and fear. We were waiting for the sudden cold
of the AMF or the crack of a fractured strut, followed by the
rush of air as we fell from the shattered glider and plunged to
our deaths. Behind us the hules, whom we had wakened earlier so
they could stumble to their seats inside the glider, were
whining piteously. A sudden stench of vomit told us that one of
them had thrown up. For hours we lived with the sound of their
retching and with our own fear and swooping vertigo.
It was night when we hit the ground a few miles west of the
temple. As Angstrom had planned, the force of the crash tore
open the fuselage. A hatch would have been useless. Hinges and
latches would freeze the moment we tried to use them in the
anti-machine field. The glider skidded and tumbled to a halt.
Clouds of dust swirled through the torn fuselage and settled on
our lips and in our noses. The dust tasted dry and somehow
clean.
I clambered out and my boots crunched on sand and gravel. We
were on high ground, although alarmingly close to a ravine. I
could see the moonlit temple far to the east, beside the dark
ocean. A black lake filled a crater down the slope below me;
ill-formed mountains rose behind us. The whole landscape was
elusively evocative. I breathed in the cool night air and
remembered my boyhood in the Auvergne. Perhaps Paschal's
spectral landscape reminded me of those gaunt hills where my
father took me to hear country folk tell tales of mystical
quests in which the hero returned with his Holy Grail. When I
was older I realized that the hero was always subtly wounded by
his quest.
The cooling glider ticked and creaked. Angstrom squeezed his
bulk through the hole in the fuselage. He was wearing his old
safari jacket with its many pockets for tools and gadgets. I
wondered what he planned to put in his pockets here on Paschal.
Always the scientist, he walked around the glider examining its
mono-wing to see how his design had withstood its single
swooping flight. He touched the wing's leading edge but quickly
drew back his finger and sucked its tip.
He grabbed a crowbar from the darkness inside the fuselage and
jammed one end underneath a rock. Putting his shoulder to the
crowbar he heaved for a second. The bar snapped abruptly and
Angstrom staggered into the rock. At his feet the two halves of
the bar were already covered with hoar frost and the metal
crumbled to an icy dust.
"So much for the lever," he said. He pulled a threaded bolt from
his pocket. "Let's try the screw." He spun a nut onto the bolt
but after a turn or two the nut froze to the bolt and he dropped
the combination onto the sand and sucked the ice from his
fingertips. "Screw's out. That means the inclined plane and the
wedge won't work. This AMF's the same as all the others. Even
Archimedes' simple machines malfunction, let alone anything more
complicated."
Our own bodies were full of mechanical devices, muscles, tendon,
joints but alien tech was not triggered by the device itself.
The tech was triggered by the mind's intent to move inanimate
matter and use it as a tool. A tool, you see, is a marriage of
matter and spirit--the motion of the material substance of the
tool and the mind's purposeful intent.
We clambered back inside the pungent darkness of the fuselage to
help the hules stagger onto the sand. They mewled and chittered
to one another. Were they afraid, or surprised? Who could tell?
They were restless, sniffing the air and peering at their
strange new surroundings. I said that as long as they were
occupied they would be fine.
When our food and other supplies--clothing, ropes, my Bible and
other priestly apparatus--had been stuffed into the packs, I
showed the hules how to adjust the friction buckles on the
shoulder-straps. I mention the buckles to show you how we had
planned our expedition. Experience had shown that other AMF's
had no effect on static friction. We rejected the usual buckles
with its little tongue poking through a hole in the strap and
chose only buckles with no moving parts.
The hules staggered off into the gray half-light. Angstrom led
them and M. Jules followed. The other two shambled along behind
in single file. Their shapeless coveralls made them look
aimless.
I went over to the broken glider and checked to see that the
remote control that would bring the shuttlecraft down from orbit
was still stuffed in its pocket on the cockpit bulkhead.
Satisfied, I followed the others towards the temple. By the time
I caught up with them the sun was rising over the eastern ocean.
In mid-morning we were crossing a broad savanna. Herds of winged
para-deer were grazing on the dry grass. (XTA's aren't
interested in naming species--we just add the prefix _para-_ to
the name of whatever Earth animal fits best.) Once, in the
distance, we saw a horned, striped predator bring down a
bounding herbivore and tear its belly open. The hules sniffed
anxiously. I suppose the scent of blood was borne to them on the
wind. Angstrom stopped to watch. "Do you think we count as prey?
I picked up a stone and hefted it in my hand, thinking about the
hules and how to defend them if a para-tiger should attack. The
rock suddenly became as cold as ice--no, much colder--in my
hand. I dropped it before my skin froze and said, "Not much we
can do about if we are."
We approached the temple in mid-afternoon and faced a long climb
up a curving stairway to the clifftop terrace. The height and
width of each step was different, typical of alien architecture.
Some scholars said the aliens valued diversity above all else
but, I asked myself, how could anyone know what the aliens
valued? Even the concept of value might be too human.
Cautiously Angstrom put his foot on the first step. He waited
and the sweat soaked slowly through the back of his safari
jacket. Nothing else seemed to happen. We pressed on and reached
the top, panting, 15 minutes later. Once again we waited on the
last step, monitoring ourselves for change. A worn balustrade
which marked the edge of the terrace curved away in the distance
at the very edge of the cliff. The wind that ruffled our hair
smelled of ozone and tasted slightly salty.
We stepped onto the terrace. The first few white flagstones were
tilted, cracked and worn with age, but after a few more steps
the stones under our feet met perfectly. This was as we had
expected; the temple was protected by a preservation field.
These fields, using some mysterious stored energy, collapsed
slowly--a few inches every century--and peripheral decay like
this was found at many otherwise perfectly-preserved alien
sites.
We headed toward the temple. The white dome shone in the
sunshine, its ellipsoidal surface resting on columns that had
the thin strength of wineglass stems. Most alien structures are
based on this pseudo-conic geometry--ellipsoidal or parabolic
surfaces, often with negative curvature--that defy conventional
mathematical analysis. Angstrom and I approached slowly. The
hules lagged behind, sniffing the sea breeze.
Inside the temple there was a shimmering translucent sphere,
perhaps 20 meters in diameter floating two meters off the
ground. The surface of the sphere trembled in the breeze as if
it were alive.
We circled the sphere once but learned nothing. Angstrom put his
finger out and touched it. He pulled his finger back, looked at
me, and said "Try it."
I touched the sphere. The surface was cool--but there was no
surface! My finger sank into the substance of the sphere and was
surrounded by coolness. Ripples spread across the curvature
above my head. I pulled my finger out. My finger was unharmed.
"Amazing," said Angstrom. "If only we knew... if only we knew
what it was for, how it floats, had even a glimpse of how it
works." But another hour spent in the temple taught us nothing.
It was another alien enigma, wonderful, yet completely
frustrating. We withdrew to think about what we had seen. At
least we had not triggered any untoward effects.
The hules had wandered away to the balustrade looking over the
ocean. I called to them. At the western edge of the terrace,
away from the ocean, we found shelter from the sea breeze in a
clump of trees.
Living in the Vatican, you have probably never realized that you
must have tools to start a fire. In the AMF there would be no
camp fires to cook our food or warm us in the night. I was not
looking forward to eating our rations cold and sleeping, wrapped
in our blankets, in the open, but to my surprise Angstrom
gathered dry grass, leaves and twigs and piled them in a small
pyramid.
"An experiment," he said. From the pocket of his safari jacket
he pulled a magnifying glass. There was still some warmth in the
sunlight and in two minutes he had created a tiny flame that
licked at the tendrils of dry vegetation. "Passive, like the
drop of dew that focuses the morning sun to start a forest
fire," he said. The hules eyed the fire from a distance. They
were wary, uneasy. In their secluded lives in the seminary
garden I don't think they had ever seen a naked flame.
I brought water from the river for us to drink. We men ate with
our hands while the hules set their bowls on the ground and
lapped noisily. They seemed more comfortable with their dining
arrangements than Angstrom or I.
The moon had risen and we settled down for sleep, the hules
huddling close to us like dogs at a hunters' camp. I was tired
after the exertion of the day and was already half-asleep when I
heard one of the hules get up. It was M. Jules. He padded down
to the edge of the river, to drink I thought. The moon was
shining across the smooth water. He looked up at the moon and
threw his head back so that the tendons in his neck stood out in
taut relief. He howled. It was a mournful, lonely sound that
faded away across the water, rising through the air towards the
moon. There was no answer.
I had never heard a hule make a noise like this before. Picking
their way quietly across the grass and rocks, Mlle. Marie and M.
Alain joined him at the water's edge. Mlle. Marie threw back her
head and howled with him. Their bestial song was a poignant
duet, raw yet beautiful. M. Alain added his bass. The cool night
wind carried their bestial fugue across the water. Were they
homesick? Did they know that their quiet seminary garden was 50
light-years away, orbiting a faint star in the night sky
overhead? When they had spent their crude emotions they shambled
back to camp and lay down again.
Unsettled, I felt a need for solitude and prayer. I walked to
the eastern edge of the terrace and leaned over the balustrade
to look down on the estuary and the dark ocean. Waves crashed
against the foot of the cliff and once again I tasted the salty
ocean spray.
I stood there for a long time while Paschal's unfamiliar
constellations rose from the eastern ocean and climbed into the
sky. Filled with a sense of peace I turned to look back at the
temple where the rising stars were reflected on the surface of
the sphere. I was surprised to discover that I simply knew,
without the slow steps of reason, that the sphere was a lens and
the temple was a lighthouse that swept its invisible beam across
the miles of ocean and the light-years of the starry void
beyond. Thrilled, I understood that this beam had found and
lured Rome's missing probe to Paschal.
Do you remember? I told you I would tell you how the probe found
Paschal. Are you still comfortable? Good. Look down there on the
flagstones at our feet--do you see how the sun shines through
what hair I have, making a halo of light around the shadow of my
head. Did you now that the word "halo" comes from the Greek?
Halo means threshing floor, where the wheat is garnered and the
chaff rejected. Strange, how we religious acquire useless
knowledge. The evening air is not too chill? Good.
Suddenly and without any effort on my part, I knew that the
temple lens was made of water because, on Paschal II, the alien
tech was in the water of the world, hidden in the rivers and the
rains and the salty ocean spray that caked my lips.
The next morning Angstrom asked, "If the sphere is a lighthouse,
does it mark a safe harbor for travelers across the light-years
or does it mark a hidden danger that will destroy us all?"
"It marks the river," I said. "Safe or dangerous, the end of our
quest lies at the source of the river."
The river was wide, brown and slow. A few miles upstream we
entered a densely canopied climax forest. Raucous creatures with
bulbous eyes and more than four legs shrieked at us from the
treetops. Thick suckers descended from the canopy and, where
they touched the ground, grew roots and bark until they were
indistinguishable from upthrusting trunks. The light that
reached us was filtered through many translucent leafy layers 50
meters above our heads. When the gentle winds of Paschal II
tousled the treetops the dappled shadows ebbed and flowed at our
feet. Walking through these green shadows was like walking
underwater and we walked for many days like this, with the brown
river on our right and the green jungle on our left.
Building a boat was always an idea but proved impossible without
tools. Even a raft of logs lashed together with the rope from
our packs was beyond us. We had no way to cut down trees or trim
them to size. Besides, the AMF would have destroyed the oars or
poles we would need to navigate.
One morning I found the hules eating fruit from the trees. I was
too late to stop them. I watched them anxiously for the rest of
the day. If they sickened we could not continue upriver because
Angstrom and I could carry only enough food for a few days. As
the day wore on it seemed that the fruit had done them no harm.
Each day we rose at dawn, walked until mid-afternoon, and
camped. On a good day we walked 20 kilometers. After a month our
clothes were torn and ragged, our hair shaggy and our beards
unkempt, but we were tanned and fit and Angstrom had lost
perhaps 20 kilograms.
The insects, of which there were innumerable species, were more
like flying reptiles than chitinous beetles. They did not bother
us, nor did the larger animals that stalked their prey in that
jungle. At night we sometimes heard some victim scream.
"It's as if we are invisible," said Angstrom as we lay by the
fire one evening.
"We are. But is Paschal protecting or ignoring us?" I wondered.
Did I mention earlier that metaphor is the poetry of reason? I
did? Good. Well, I told Angstrom a story from the life of a
Jesuit priest whose biography I had read. He was a missionary in
21st century Africa who spent his life at the intersection of
Christianity, Islam, and Animism. Ministering to the wounded
during one of the cruel and petty wars of those times, he
witnessed a young woman leading a ragtag army dressed in
tattered fatigues. They were following her down a dirt road
toward the enemy. The woman was naked and walked backward. She
held a mirror before her face to look over her shoulder and
study the road as she walked.
A young mercenary, toying with the safety catch of his automatic
weapon, told the priest, "Because she is naked and does not look
at the enemy with her own eyes, they cannot see her. She is
invisible." The woman stepped on a land mine and there was
nothing left but bloodstains in the dust.
We religious see things few others see.
For example, I have seen the Tower of Echo, a windy tower in the
wall of an alien city. At the top of the tower, accessible only
by a winding stair, is an open space looking over the ruined
city and the lonely desert that surrounds it. There was an
inconsistent echo in that windy openness where there should have
been no echo.
Inconsistent? Yes. The strength of the echo varied with... well,
it varied with the truth of what was said. Mathematical theorems
echoed well, but some better than others, which is strange.
Echoes of Mozart's music were very strong while Brahms' echoes
were much quieter--I discovered that myself. Deliberate
misstatement--two and two are three--would generate no returning
sound at all.
We were very careful. Alien tech is dangerous. We assume that a
mistake by one of the XTA's investigating Pius III collapsed the
whole asteroid into a pinhole-sized black hole. The entire team
was lost. For all we knew, the wrong statement in the windy
Tower of Echo might turn off the tech, or worse. As always,
everything we did received prior clearance from the Vatican.
I suggested to my superior that we might ask some more complex
statements including some which Rome felt were untrue. I
suggested, for example, that we say, "Matter slowly evolves into
spirit." Unfortunately, further investigation was suspended,
perhaps on orders from the Holy Father himself, and we were
ordered home because, "We do not understand the workings of
alien tech and have no assurance that the tower is a machine for
determining the truth. Its purpose is unknown and may be only to
deceive."
The night before we left I wondered if I should go back to the
tower one last time and make statements from my own work, and
perhaps other statements such as, "God made man in his own
image." I also thought about saying, "Jesus Christ was the Son
of God," just to see what happened.
The Tower of Echo--a machine that knew beauty and material
truth, and perhaps spiritual truth as well--is the best example
of how alien tech blends the principles of physics and
metaphysics, bringing together the worlds of matter and of
spirit. I must admit I was very tempted to test the dogma of
Aquinas.
We walked upstream six days a week and rested on Sundays when I
said Mass for Angstrom, opening the little sack of communion
wafers I had brought from Earth. For wine I blessed water from
the river. Canon Law requires at least one worshipper at Mass.
You might wonder if Canon Law applies 50 light-years away from
Earth, but the answer to that is simple. Canon Law applies
wherever there are Catholics. The hules watched us idly,
scratching and sniffing at one another while we prayed. Their
animal behavior distracted me. Dogs sniffing at each other would
not have offended me but I realized that I wanted the hules to
pay attention. I found it hard to believe that matter would ever
evolve into spirit when the hules licked their genitals while I
was saying mass. I told Angstrom while I was putting away the
wafers, "I know this is wrong, but sometimes the hules disgust
me."
"Perhaps you should teach them to pray," he replied. I don't
think he was serious.
They started sleeping on the other side of the fire from
Angstrom and me. I wondered if they had understood my remark,
but that was impossible.
The hules did start to give us more serious trouble. M. Alain
developed a nasty habit of loosening the buckles on the straps
of his pack. I never caught him at it but several times a day
his pack would fall from his shoulders. I was sure he was trying
to quietly lose his burden so I tied the straps in place.
Somehow he learned to untie the knots and would let the pack
fall from his shoulders when I was least expecting it. Angrily,
I would retie the straps and, with luck, he would leave them
alone for a few more hours.
One evening I caught the hules eating the communion wafers from
my pack. M. Alain had the sack in his hands and was munching the
last wafer. The other two had crumbs on their shaggy faces. I
snatched the empty bag from his hands. "Get out of here," I
yelled, shaking the bag at them as if I were exorcising devils.
They slunk away like chastised dogs. After a few moments I felt
calmer. I had remembered that hules could be guilty of an
action, but were always innocent of motive.
Credo
-------
What was the journey like? What did we feel? Did I miss Earth,
my Jesuit brethren and my scholarly friends? Yes, I did miss
their companionship. Did I worry that we might not find the
source of the AMF, or be unable to extinguish the field? Yes,
but strangely, I did not worry much. For the most part I was
simply content.
Angstrom was good company. At the end of the day's journey he
would light our fire with his magnifying glass and when darkness
fell we would talk by the fire, lying under the strange stars of
that alien sky.
"What is your thesis?" he asked me one night. "By thesis, I mean
what is the central idea from which all your thought stems?"
Thoughtfully, I replied, "When I was five I sat by the fire the
first time my mother cut my hair. She cut off a lock and threw
it into the flames. It curled and burned and was gone. I saw how
fragile I was and how easily the stuff of my body could
disappear. The next day I buried a heavy old key in the garden,
seeking to prove to myself that at least some things were
permanent. Later I dug and I dug but I could never find it.
These two events bothered me greatly and, in some sense, helped
me decide to become a priest. I desperately wanted to enter the
world of the spirit, you see, for the tenuous insubstantial
world of the spirit is the world that endures."
"And your journey to Paschal?" asked Angstrom.
"We humans explore the material world using reason as our tool,"
I said. "We observe, experiment, question, hypothesize, refute
and refine our ideas. But in the spiritual world our tool is
faith. Experimentation is expressly forbidden and, by
definition, dogma cannot be refuted by reason. In defiance of
this separation, my thesis is that the material world of reason
and the spiritual world of faith are frail human interpretations
of a single deep reality."
Trained in theology, you know that this dichotomy between reason
and faith pervades our Christian thought, and all our science
too. But the aliens did not think in terms of reason or faith.
Their machines used both physics and metaphysics. Did I mention
the Tower of Echo? Yes, I remember that I did. But I can see you
look shocked. I told you I was a heretic, sometimes subtle, but
sometimes more brash. Sit back on your bench while I finish my
story. You can always say your prayers later, when I am done.
As for Angstrom, he had his own thesis. He said, "Like you, I
came to Paschal to answer a question. Like you, I work with an
impossible dichotomy, but mine is one of waves and particles,
momentum and position, the EPR paradox. Yet this quantum
dichotomy works. Quantum gravitational engines lifted the
battered _Chardin_ across 50 light-years but quantum theory
makes no sense. Behind the impossibilities must be a better,
more complete, truth. Perhaps alien minds have different logics
that resolve these problems."
"A truth you will find here on Paschal?" I asked.
"I hope I will. Alien machines manipulate time and space in
clever ways. Human minds scarcely know what is happening, let
alone how it happens."
Much of Angstrom's career was spent in advancing his thesis of
alternate logics which was, of course, ridiculed by his peers. I
remember Angstrom standing at the podium before an audience of
five hundred skeptics at a meeting of the American Academy of
Xeno-Technoarcheology in New York. The lights were bright for
the video cameras and the sweat shone on his bald head. After he
had finished his presentation, the first question from the
audience was, "Are you really proposing the existence of a logic
which is illogical to human minds, yet logical to other minds,
and though illogical, yields conclusions that are correct?" The
questioner was a confident young man who smelled blood and was
eager to impress his professors. He was from what they call in
America an Ivy League school. There was some laughter which the
questioner allowed the audience time to enjoy before he added,
"Perhaps you used this new logic to write your paper. That would
explain a great deal."
Angstrom seized the edges of the podium in his gigantic hands
and started to reply but his words were lost on the scientists
all jostling for the exits.
After this, the sweating, malodorous, iconoclastic Angstrom
became as welcome at scientific gatherings as Martin Luther at
the Vatican. His papers, unwanted in the editorial offices of
the journals of our field, were sent to his harshest critics for
peer review.
When my book was rejected by the Curia, Angstrom still had his
tenured position--in Quebec, I think it was. But by the time of
the discovery of Paschal II his whole department had been
eliminated. A purely financial decision, he was told, and
nothing to do with the fact that this was the only way to fire a
tenured full professor. At 50 years of age, with no family,
friends or professional future, Paschal II was as good a
destination for Angstrom as it was for me.
"Is professional vindication so important? I asked.
"No, but truth is," he said, and rolled over to sleep. The way
he pulled his blanket over his shoulder made me think he was
comforted by the discovery that we were following paths more
similar than we had thought.
I was less certain. I lay in the dark, thinking of the Tower of
Echo. The Roman poet Virgil wrote that bees were killed by
echoes. (Those of us with time on our hands acquire arcane
information. It is an occupational hazard of the priesthood.)
Eighteen hundred years later Gilbert White, an English curate
who was well-versed in Virgil and an excellent diarist, wrote
that he spent a summer afternoon bending over his hives,
shouting into a speaking trumpet to see if his bees would die.
Have I have already mentioned my love of metaphor?
Sanctus
---------
The next day we came to the falls. The river poured over the
escarpment, which was a steep, rocky cliff 200 meters high. We
chose to climb close to the edge of the falls where winter
floods had torn slabs of rock from the wall, affording an array
of ledges and handholds. I said a brief prayer and started to
climb. I planned to throw down a rope for the hules to climb.
Angstrom would come last. Although he had lost weight steadily
on Paschal, I thought I might have to use the hules to pull him
up the cliff.
The rock was wet with spray and slippery with the green slime of
algal life. I climbed for an hour, soaked, with my hair
plastered to my head. I resting every few minutes by jamming my
boots with their serrated soles onto some narrow ledge.
Irritatingly, my laces became untied while I was climbing and no
sooner had I retied one than the other came loose. When I looked
down--which out of fear I did not do very often--I could see the
four figures growing smaller far below, until they were tiny
foreshortened dolls standing beside the churning whiteness at
the bottom of the falls. The roar of the water drowned my
shouted attempts to reassure them. My arms and shoulders, thighs
and calves began to tremble until I scrambled over the top,
dropped my pack to the ground and flopped down on the wet rocks
like a landed fish.
When I got my breath I carefully knotted two lengths of rope
together, tied one end to a tree that was firmly rooted between
the flat rocks beside the river, and threw the other end over
the edge. It was a black thing, snaking as it fell through the
mist. Angstrom ran to it and I felt his tug. He handed the rope
to one of the hules.
The hule climbed slowly, sensing the great danger. After 50
meters or so the hule's pack came loose. The pack swung by one
strap. "Lord," I muttered. "Why didn't Angstrom check the
knots?"
The pack swung away from the hule's shoulder, the second strap
came loose and the pack fell away, tumbling through the spray
down into the surging foam. Angstrom waved his arms at me as if
to warn me.
The hule continued to climb. I watched his swinging movement,
arm-over-arm, very ape-like, and when he was almost halfway up
the cliff, just below the knot, I saw that the hule was M.
Alain. As he reached for the knot, he fell.
At first I thought the rope had broken but then I realized that
my elaborate knot had come undone. M. Alain fell away from the
cliff with the loose rope twisting through the air around him
like a black snake falling with him into the whiteness. He
tumbled into the heart of the maelstrom at the bottom of the
falls. I saw his head briefly bobbing in the surge and he was
gone.
Angstrom and the other two hules waited for a long time,
searching for M. Alain's body along the bank. In the late
afternoon they all climbed up the falls, the hules following
what was left of my scent on the wet rocks while Angstrom, who
turned out to be an agile climber, urged them on from behind. It
was evening when they reached the top and the sun was too low to
light a fire. M. Jules kept looking down over the falls. Mlle.
Marie crawled under a bush and curled up like a fetus.
"Maybe you should say a short requiem for him," said Angstrom.
"I can't do that for a hule. He had no soul."
"The other two might feel better if you did. Who's going to
know? It's 50 light years from here to Rome."
But Canon Law applies wherever there are Catholics so I read
some comforting words in a ceremonial way, a pseudo-service of
no deeper significance.
We ate cold rations and settled down for a miserable night in
the woods, shivering in our damp clothing.
I will always be grateful to Angstrom for saying nothing that
night about my carelessness with the knot. I walked away from
our camp to pray for forgiveness for my carelessness. Only those
familiar with the confessional will understand the anguish this
burden caused because I had no confessor.
I woke early and lay quietly in that stillness that comes at the
end of the night. Here above the falls the forest canopy was
lower and less dense and there were scattered grassy clearings.
The raucous monkey birds were absent, but there were many new
varieties of flying creatures, para-butterflies flapping their
iridescent blue-green wings, warbling songs that were pleasing
to my ears.
I dressed quietly but my laces would not stay tied. After the
third attempt Angstrom, who was lying on his side watching me
through half-closed eyes, said, "I think you're wasting your
time. Above the falls we are closer to the AMF's source. We must
have entered a region where mechanical friction is neutralized.
Your lace relies on friction. Above the falls, knots are
machines."
He was right. For days, M. Alain's truculent mind must have been
more sensitive to the AMF. I was still responsible for his
death, not through carelessness, but through blind stupidity,
which was worse.
I set my boots aside. The friction buckles on our packs were
useless and we could not tie the straps in place. The buttons on
our torn clothes were also useless. We were forced to leave our
packs behind, with all our supplies and food. I wrapped my books
carefully, hoping to recover them on the return journey.
Our pace was slow because our soles were sensitive. A mile or
two later, while we were climbing over some boulders, Angstrom's
magnifying glass fell from his pocket and was smashed to pieces
on a rock. The bottom seam of his pocket had unraveled.
"Sewing, weaving--they both rely on friction."
As we walked upstream all our seams were unraveling. The hules'
coveralls hung in tatters and by lunchtime our clothing had
literally fallen off our backs. Angstrom's white flesh wobbled
on his body but the hules moved with a certain muscular grace I
hadn't noticed before. Without the magnifying glass we could not
light a fire that night and so we slept on beds of dry leaves
that were still warm from the afternoon sun.
In this manner, naked, we wandered for days through this idyllic
landscape, always staying close to the river. We ate fruits from
the trees and I could see the fat was shrinking on Angstrom's
flaccid body. At first I felt a certain shame about our
nakedness. After all, I was a celibate priest. But as time
passed I became comfortable with our situation.
At one time we walked for several days through grassy glades
filled with wildflowers. Sometimes the stream (for that was what
the river had become) widened and we would bathe our brown
bodies in a warm pool. On other days the rain would wash the
sweat and the dirt from our skins.
M. Jules and Mlle. Marie would wander off for hours and when
they returned there was a certain glow about them. You might
think they were sneaking off, but that is not the case. They
just wandered off as if, like animals, they could do exactly as
they pleased. Of course, now that we had no packs, there was no
work for them to do. We were still their masters but we had no
commands to give them. They spent more and more time by
themselves. I suppose when they wanted to come back to us they
could track us by our scent.
Angstrom and I, naked, with our hair uncombed and beards long,
looked much like the hules. We wandered together through the
dappled woods, eating when we were hungry, and resting when we
were tired. We walked quietly, each with our own thoughts. Like
the hules, we no longer had any tasks.
Above the falls our thought was clearer. "You are looking for a
single truth that lies behind the dichotomy of careful reason
and dogmatic faith," said Angstrom. "I am looking for a single
truth that lies behind the dichotomy of quantum mechanics. The
single truths we seek might be the same truth."
He was right. As soon as he spoke the idea seemed quite obvious.
"Alien tech blends physics and metaphysics, spirit and matter,"
I said. "Behind the apparent dual nature of matter, behind the
apparent dual nature of thought, there is a single fundamental
truth. Alien tech is built on that truth. That truth is the
secret the aliens hid here on Paschal and why they set their
beacon to mark the hiding place."
The river had become much narrower. Inexplicably, the hules
began to make fewer forays into the woods. One afternoon we came
to the source of the river. A spring flowed from the base of a
large rock into a pool. The water was quite clear and there was
nothing at the bottom but a jumble of stones.
I knelt at the edge and dipped my hands into the water. Ripples
spread across its still surface. I cupped my hands and lifted
them. The water ran between my fingers and splashed and tinkled
back into the pool.
The hules were watching carefully, waiting to see what we would
do.
"You drink first," said Angstrom.
Once again I dipped my cupped hands into the pool and this time
I lifted the water to my lips. The water was cold and
refreshing.
I felt unchanged, at first.
Angstrom was looking at me, taut with curiosity.
"Drink," I said. "See for yourself."
He knelt beside me, bowed his head to the surface of the water
and lapped at the water like an animal. When he straightened up
he did not wipe the water from his lips and chin and it fell to
the ground in shining droplets.
"Yes," he said, slowly. "I see."
Like me, he did not say what it was he saw. But I think he saw
logics that were not human, ways of reasoning that were
surprising and completely alien, hinting at larger truths than
we had known before.
We sat in the shade of a small copse close to the pool.
"The temple is a library," I said.
We sat in silence for several minutes, inspecting the contents
of our minds. Do not think we had experienced a transformation.
Nothing was that simple. The best I can do is to tell you that
we had been granted the potential for transforming ourselves,
but the complete task assigned to us would require great effort
and take many years.
The idea of transformation captivates me. I have come to realize
that a man who truly transforms himself acquires the mysterious
ability to help others transform themselves. Would you agree? I
think any student of religion must.
We did know some new things that suddenly seemed quite obvious.
"We can turn off the AMF any time we want," said Angstrom.
"I know."
Like all alien tech, the trigger was intent. To turn it off, all
we had to do was _not_ to want to turn it off. I thought about
this for a moment and rose to my feet, picked up a dead tree
limb lying on the ground, put one end under a rock and levered
the boulder from its resting place. Dozens of dull black insects
scuttled away in the sudden sunlight, leaving behind hundreds of
glistening eggs. I examined the stick. There was no frost on the
branch, no brittle cracking of the gnarled wood, and my hands
were still warm. I looked back at Angstrom and saw, behind him,
the hules kneeling side by side and drinking from the pool,
lapping noisily.
They raised their heads and looked back at us. The water was
running from their snouts and their faces were impassive. They
turned back to the water and drank again. M. Jules stood up and
stared at us boldly, curiously. Mlle. Marie dipped her finger in
the pool, walked to me and stood before me, her hand held before
me, finger pointing down. A shining droplet hung from the end of
her finger.
"Kneel down. Open your mouth," said Angstrom, hoarsely.
I opened my mouth. She held her wet fingertip over my waiting
tongue. A single drop fell into my mouth. I swallowed.
The hules turned away and walked into the darkening woods. In a
moment they had vanished between the trees.
Agnus Dei
-----------
The next morning Angstrom and I began our journey downstream to
the falls.
The time after a climactic event is like the period of slack
water after a high tide; all the work is done, there is no place
for purposeful motion. During the days we traveled back to the
falls Angstrom and I found it was thought, not motion, that was
redundant.
At the top of the falls I untied the rope from the tree and
wrapped it around my shoulder. After we climbed down beside the
torrent we built a raft of driftwood bound with rope and we
floated away on the slow-moving current.
On one of the many evenings that we lay on our backs, drifting
downstream under the stars, Angstrom said, "If the aliens had a
purpose, then what is the purpose of Paschal?"
"It is a beacon," I said.
"Marking a vast store of knowledge?"
"Yes, a font of knowledge. But there is more. Paschal is an
evolutionary incubator, a machine for arresting the material
evolution of matter and accelerating its evolution into spirit.
What we have seen is the evolution of evolution."
"But why the AMF?"
"To strip away the objects and the thoughts that we have made
that make us what we are. Only when we have shed our
manufactured burdens may we pass through the single narrow gate
in our own garden wall and wander into other gardens."
Angstrom stayed behind at the temple where the knowledge of an
ancient race was stored in a drop of water. He was eager to
squeeze his frame through the narrow gate.
On my way back to the glider's crash site I thought of a Van
Gogh painting called _The Drinkers._ A copy hangs on the wall of
my whitewashed room. By the way, Van Gogh was said to be mad,
but I doubt that. Four figures, a child, a youth, a middle-aged
man and an old man, stand around a table and drink from a single
pitcher. The child drinks milk, the youth water, the middle-aged
man coffee and the old man wine, all from that single magical
pitcher. Van Gogh's figures crackle with energy in their
desperate attempts to slake their various thirsts. As I said, I
doubt that Van Gogh was mad.
I returned to the crash site of the glider, slid the remote
control from its pocket in the bulkhead and summoned the
shuttlecraft down from the belly of the empty _Chardin._ Rome
was surprised at my return. After all, the arrival in Earth
orbit of a naked priest, bearded, long-haired, tanned and
seemingly incoherent, is not a common event.
No one believed my story, of course. I half hoped they might see
me as a prophet coming out of the wilderness, but they sent me
back to this seminary and gave me easy work to do, as if I were
an old nun. Obediently, I have done as my order wished. I have
kept my peace and worked here quietly, thinking, making dreams.
Twenty summers and three popes have come and gone and I am still
working on the tasks assigned to me. All of them.
But the evening grows chill around us, the wooden bench you sit
on is quite hard, and we must conclude our business. You have
listened to my story and now I must answer your question.
Ah, do not speak yet. Did I not tell you I know what you came to
ask?
There can be only one reason that the Holy Father has sent you
here to question me in this peaceful garden. Something has
happened, something quite unexpected. The Holy Father has
received a message and he thinks it came from Paschal II.
Perhaps a passing freighter picked up a signal and relayed it to
Rome, or perhaps a subspace message from the planet was received
directly by a Vatican antenna at Castel Gandolfo, high in the
Apennines. Not so. I know the message came in a dream. Yes, the
Holy Father dreamed so vividly that he could not ignore his
dream.
What is so surprising about the idea of the pope receiving a
dream? After all, the Bible says that God spoke to many men
through their dreams.
Have you ever noticed that dreams are much more powerful at the
turning of the seasons? We religious have time to take note of
subtle things like that.
So who sent the message? You probably think it was sent by the
hules, or by their children who must have developed in
unimaginable ways while they were growing up on Paschal? Or was
the message from Angstrom, offering alien truth in place of
human knowledge? Let me assure you that neither Angstrom, nor
the hules--nor the aliens, if that is what you are
wondering--have any interest in talking to the Holy Father.
He does not know who sent the message.
But I do, even though the dream he received was an unsigned
invitation. The Holy Father has been asked to visit Paschal II.
He feels he has been summoned. He wonders if he should think of
the journey as a pilgrimage. He worries that the message may not
be an invitation, but a false temptation sent by Satan.
The Holy Father wants to know if he should go. He is young and
accustomed to dealing with facts, not dreams. After all, he is a
scientist, a biologist of some renown, I hear. Weren't you
surprised that a scientist, a biologist, a student of evolution,
should be elected pope?
I wonder how _that _happened.
No matter. Here is my answer to his question: When he makes this
pilgrimage he must remember the folk stories of the Auvergne.
You think that is no answer? I would have thought that you, a
clever official of the Vatican, would have enjoyed my indirect
response! Allow me to elaborate.
Like a folk hero of the Auvergne, when the Holy Father returns
from Paschal he will be changed, and subtly wounded. Now do you
understand?
What will this do to the world? Well, I have good reason to be
certain that Aquinas was completely wrong. (You are right in
your suspicion--before my trip to Paschal my obedience was not
always perfect.) The Holy Father will return from Paschal with a
radiant union of faith and reason which will wound the world.
Now do you understand?
Good. Why don't you sit here in the quiet darkness, in this
arbor at the very end of this path of worn gray stones, and
think about what I have said?
I must excuse myself and go to bed. Today was the last day of
the summer and in the morning I must rise early to my work. In
the new season I will be very busy pruning, cutting away dead
growth, and tearing out old unwanted vegetation by the roots.
Later I will be planting deep in the earth so that new flowers
will flourish in the spring. After all, this is a big garden and
the Holy Father might like to know that, quite recently, I have
become the gardener.
Jim Cowan (jimcowan@delphi.com)
---------------------------------
Jim Cowan has been an electrical engineer, high-school physics
teacher, physician and health-care executive and is convinced
that the right job for him is out there somewhere. He is amazed
and delighted that many wonderful things in the world can be
completely described by mathematics and he is equally amazed and
delighted that many wonderful things, including mathematics,
cannot. While struggling with this paradox he lives in
Bethlehem, Pennsylvania.
The Monkey Trap by Kyle Cassidy
===================================
...................................................................
* A cage is still a cage, even if you can't see the bars. *
...................................................................
Crazy people. There's crazy people and dying mice in the zoo
today. I see the crazy people milling about outside, preparing
for the big race which starts in the zoo, continues down Zoo
Avenue and ends somewhere in L'Harris Park. These people are
wearing black and pink spandex. Their wives or husbands are
holding the cellular phones, beepers, and laptops. They huddle
in the cold along the sidelines.
I see the mouse when I go into the monkey house and close the
door behind me. Michelle is already in there, wiping marmoset
footprints from the glass with a squeegee--an operation of
pointless repetition. The mouse, in misery with broken legs,
seems prophetic. It lies in the crack of the windowsill, trying
to hide itself behind the packet of roach poision, dragging its
hind legs. One of our vicious little primates has bitten through
its spine.
The monkeys pound at the glass, furious over its escape. The
tiny faces of the golden lion-headed tamarins are vestibules of
rage. Their open, screaming mouths are filled with tiny
needle-fangs; their voices are piercing squeaks. I point the
mouse out to Michelle and she tosses it into the trash can like
an orange rind. I frown and wonder if it hurts to be flung onto
a pile of straw and monkey shit when you have a broken spine.
"If you can't stand death," she says, climbing into the marmoset
exhibit, "get out of the zoo." She throws the squeegee into a
bucket and bangs a pan of Purina Monkey Chow and cut fruit into
the cage before closing the door. The primates chatter and
gibber.
"How's your life?" I ask. Michelle's got a new boyfriend in
Baltimore.
"Boring as hell," she says, ignoring the animals leaping around
behind her. "When you turn 28, your life gets boring." She opens
another cage and I sit down on the floor against the wall.
The tamarins won't touch the apple that she has hung in their
cage from a string.
"They think it's a trap," she says. "The last time they saw food
on a string they were in the jungle."
The marmosets swarm over their apple, taking tiny wedges out of
it like a school of piranhas. But the tamarins stare at theirs
like cave men looking at an automobile engine. They rush it,
yammer loudly, and run away.
"You either eat the apple, or you don't," she says to the
tamarins. "It's not a trap."
"Anymore," I say.
"What?"
"It's too late for them to realize that it's a trap or it's not
a trap. It doesn't matter anymore. They can't get any more
trapped, but they can't get back either. It doesn't matter."
"They have these monkey traps," says Michelle, looking into the
exhibit. "It's like some food in a jar attached to a tree, and
the dumb bastards'll stick their hand in the jar and grab the
food, but when they make a fist, they can't get their hand out
of the jar. They're stuck as long as they're holding onto the
food, and they're too stupid to let go of it. You can catch them
like that." She throws a handful of grapes through the partially
opened window, closes it, and locks it.
"Stupid, aren't you?" she says to the tamarins. They hang back
at the top of their cage.
Michelle puts the squeegee and bucket away. She hoses down the
floor, which is awash in dead and dying crickets. The crickets
are escaped monkey treats that have eaten the roach poision. I
wonder how many poisoned roaches the monkeys eat.
We shall always be the victors. The ones we don't want, we kill.
The ones we do want, we put in a cage.They will be the
representative sample of the ones that we kill.
Michelle and I walk outside. The race has started, and the
stampede of DuPont-employed, health-minded yuppie Delawarians
are running down Monkey Hill in the DuPont-Wilmington 5K Run For
Charity.
They run past the background of their parked BMW's. The
sprinters come first, down the cobblestones, following the cop
on his loud black-and-white Harley Davidson. Then come the
runners, lean and old and taunt. Then the joggers: the careless
men in round glasses pushing flourescent, aerodynamic
three-wheeled baby carriages with hydraulic shock absorbers, the
women in need of sports bras, carrying their walkmen, listening
to Paul Simon or George Michael. Then, finally, there are the
stragglers: the old men who came for the free beer running in
polka-dotted boxer shorts, the 70-year-old woman, out of place,
with an aged Bette Davis face coated with makeup, garish red
lips, huge dangling earrings, hair jutting out in twin,
carrot-colored pigtails.
Michelle is standing next to me, watching. She takes off her
gloves.
"This is what I have to look forward to," she says. "This is
middle age in Wilmington."
"No," I say. "Not for you, it isn't."
Kyle Cassidy (cassidy@saturn.rowan.edu)
-----------------------------------------
Kyle Cassidy is 27 years old and pays the rent by writing
Internet manuals and lecturing. His latest book, Stickman's
Way-Cool Guide to Network Wizardry (RCNJ Academic Computing
Press) will be published this month. He lives in New Jersey with
his wife, Linda, who looks a lot like the Little Mermaid--but
with legs. The marmosets adore her.
Serial Access by E. Jay O'Connell
=====================================
...................................................................
* There's something for nearly everyone on-line--no
matter where one's interests lie.*
...................................................................
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Thank you for your completed validation survey. We've noticed,
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ACCOUNT *STRANGEHACK* SUSPENDED PENDING VALIDATION
GO KILL SOMEBODY AND HAVE A NICE DAY
Congratulations Strangehack!
The Ziploc received at this week's post office box scores you
next week's number. To whom did (does?) this belong? You see,
the part contained isn't (strictly speaking) essential. It may
very well be your own. You know, Van Gogh, and all that. Anyway,
while it shows some spirit, it doesn't rule out the mortuary
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Please send us something a little more... essential. We're
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Remember the tree falling in the empty forest. People die all
the time, sometimes quite suddenly, sometimes messily. If you
don't take credit, the act is worthless. Meaningless. At any
rate, you've been admitted into the file downloading areas.
I'd look at the '80s CIA interrogation manuals at the very
least. They're not hard to find. A little dry, I know, but
crammed with information. We'll not see their like again, alas.
Not from the wimps currently in power. But I'm getting
political--I hate politics, really, but feel free to participate
in the on-line discussion of socialized medicine. I know, it's
everywhere! It's been going great guns since we started over a
year ago. Would you believe that, even here, there are
whimpering tit-suckers who defend it?
Strangehack,
Congratulations! I must say, your latest package really cuts to
the heart of the issue, eh? :-) I know, I know! I'm sorry.
Couldn't resist.
It's a small one, isn't it? And the newsclipping. So poignant.
The mother too--and first, of course. Yet... she was "homeless"
(how I *hate* that word!), wasn't she? Again, not to get
political, but there are those of us who find such victims...
easy? Again, whom do you wish to frighten? This may be a purely
personal thing, but really, in a certain light you're doing
society a favor. Nobody wants all these "people" underfoot,
decreasing property values, catching tuberculosis, creating
excuses for National Health, etc.
Doing them is like killing whores. A public service. Bottom
line, it's *banal.*
But it'll get you into the real-time chat areas. These are our
most sensitive feeds. A certain type of Very Technical Person
*might* be able to trace some of calls back to their original
sources. If you weren't the right kind of person, that would be
very, very bad.
You're in, Strangehack. You're in. Welcome to the club.
Strangehack,
We're sorry to have to interrupt your service, but even by our
standards, you seem quite insane. There is, quite simply,
nothing to your threats. You cannot `crawl down the wires and
suck the eyes from our skulls like pamentoes [sic] from olives.'
You cannot trace us. I have friends in this industry--good
friends--and they've informed me that the technobabble you're
spewing is gibberish. We're terminating your account.
Still, congratulations of a sort are in order. You have taken
the lead. Over 20 in less that 2 months! Aren't we the busy one?
And to think I leaked your first message to the press! It is
really quite sad, to kick you off. But you're making an ass of
yourself. We can't tolerate this kind of rudeness.
Psychosis is forgivable. Incoherence is not. Your spelling and
grammar are abominable. It is common courtesy in this community
to use a spellcheck. Never mind. You're history.
Strangehack,
Touche. You seem to have more than one account on this system.
I've hired a consultant to come in and thoroughly clean this
machine. His English is poor. And he is being paid very, very
well. So don't even think of trying to talk to him.
Good-bye. We won't be speaking anymore, away. Oh, and one more
thing.
Eat shit and die! You're stupid, and you take very poor candid
photos. Murky as hell. Your GIFs are among the worst I've ever
seen. Get a flash, buddy! And try using JPEG! <grin>
Strangehack,
I've begun to wonder about you. You've found us again and
created your own account. I showed some of your technobabble
around again. This time, the verdict's a little more... gray.
Yes. Well, the system will be down for about a week around
Christmas. Such a busy season!
We'll be rid of you in the new year, I expect. I've forwarded
all your calling data to the authorities--all your bragging,
threatening, misspelling, everything. Our phone number changes
as of now, and you won't find it again. I imagine they'll catch
you soon. Someone with as poor a grip on the language as you
can't possibly be all that smart, computer monkey tricks aside.
I've been watching the television psychologists. One of them
suggested that you may have had your itty bitty little penis
cooked off in a botched circumcision (it happens!). It wouldn't
surprise me in the slightest.
Strangehack,
You win. You've found us again. Well. It's time for a short,
shameful confession. I've never killed anyone. I run this board,
but I've never hurt a fly. Not that I wouldn't love to. Not that
I don't dream of it. I think I will, someday. I started this to
get going myself, you see, but somehow--well, I admit, I've been
living vicariously through you. A few of the old-timers gave me
a few credits, left my calling card. I'm a fraud, Strangehack.
But you said that all along, didn't you?
I've been studying you all for so long. I found a few of you in
various places on the net, filtered through a million poseurs to
collect *you*--the real McCoy. Flattery will get one everywhere,
eh? So I invited you into my home. And you were charming,
strange, witty, fascinating, banal, obsessed. Fun.
But it's gone too far, and I'm shutting this system down. I must
say, I'm fascinated by you, Strangehack. I would like to meet
you. Would you really do all those things to me? But I'm not
afraid of you. Not afraid in the slightest.
What would it be like, do you think, to be one of them? The
victims? What goes through their minds as you strip the life
from them?
A stupid thought. None of you ever seems to think it, I've
noticed. But I guess I'm just a poseur, when it comes right down
to it.
Good-bye, Strangehack. It's been interesting knowing you.
[The following message was posted anonymously to the USENET
newsgroup _alt.murder.phun_]
Strangehack,
Because of you I have abandoned my life--my clothes, my books,
my computers, (almost) all of my souvenirs. A liberating
experience. I was watching TV in a bar across town, when I saw
them going through my apartment. I thought Dan Rather was going
to cry! Oh, the humanity! I'd say it was luck, that I saw it on
television and escaped, but there is no such thing as luck, is
there? Only destiny, and the Will of God. Not to get religious
or anything. I'm posting this because I simply must talk about
what it was like, meeting you.
As per your instructions, I went to the little booth in the back
of that loathsome Vietnamese place. The grinning slant served me
something that looked like a pile of sticks and slugs, and I had
to pretend to eat it. I sat on the right side, facing the
mirrored wall, like you said, and waited.
It took me over an hour to realize that you were already there.
I saw you, and oh, the chills up and down my spine! Pity about
the ear. The tiny black hole winked at me from the still-pink
ring of scar tissue. I guessed right, eh? Still, it got your
nerve up, didn't it, to know you could do it? That you could
ignore the rather incredible pain, and slice through human
flesh, you, who had been squeamish about deboning chicken
breasts. That you could slice through living flesh, even if it
was only your own.
You're a dangerous fellow, aren't you? All the papers agree. All
the newscasters. You must be stopped. You're a brilliant
programmer. A brilliant murderer. A brilliant sociopath. A
brilliant victim of multiple personality disorder.
I saw you in the smudged mirror, and the bright surge of fear,
the sweet shock of recognition nearly made me come in my pants.
Psychologists are pinheads. Our penis works fine and is the
statistical average, size-wise.
Good-bye, Strangehack, and good luck. You will always have the
heart of a small child. In a jar, in your briefcase. Yes, I
know, I stole that from Robert Bloch. Such a small thing, the
heart--such a big thing. She was so beautiful, so tender. She
screamed so sweetly. I can hear it still. (Of course, I've got
it on tape! We posted the .snd file, as I recall.)
Virginity--such a wonderful thing. But we all lose it, and
there's no going back.
Looking forward to reading about you in the funny papers.
They'll never catch you, will they? I appreciate all your
efforts. And for the ones still to come, well, as they say
on-line--
Thanks in advance. :-)
E. Jay O'Connell (ejo@world.std.com)
--------------------------------------
E. Jay O'Connell lives and writes in Cambridge, Massachusetts
with his wife and the obligatory cat or two. A graduate of the
1994 Clarion West Writers Workshop, his work has appeared in
_Aboriginal SF_ and other publications.
The Thieves by Levi Asher
=============================
...................................................................
* In an insane world, what's impossible may be the only answer
that makes sense. *
...................................................................
When I was 25 years old I worked as a minimum-wage data-entry
clerk for an information-services firm in a small Connecticut
town. There were ten of us there, and our place of work was a
converted warehouse in a decrepit industrial park near the shore
of the Long Island Sound.
We sat at white formica benches and typed into huge greenish
bubble-shaped terminals that looked like futuristic TV sets from
the '40s. It was depressing and pointless work. Our terminals
were covered with a strange algae-like grime that we only
discovered after Judy spilled coffee all over hers, exposing a
pea-soup colored streak of plastic underneath. We weren't even
sure if we were allowed to clean our terminals, and we never
did; our collective sense of self was so low that we thought
ourselves less important than the grime.
To work there, you had to have been a failure at something else.
I had been trained as a cellist since early childhood and
graduated from a top conservatory in New England, but then I
went through a strange period that ended with my sudden and
inexplicable decision to enter law school.
I suppose I was trying to affirm my complete freedom in the
universe. In retrospect this was the stupidest thing I'd ever
done, although the move did successfully confuse my friends and
family.
But there was one problem, one thing I forgot to consider: law
school was _hard_. I'd had no idea. I guess I thought my
professors would allow me to pass through their classes just on
the basis of my profound sense of irony. They would see that I
was really a musician, that I posed no risk of ever taking work
away from real lawyers. My professors didn't see it that way.
For a while they found me useful as somebody they could count on
not to know an answer in class, but they soon stopped even
asking me questions. Picking on me was so easy it made them look
bad.
I dropped out after two semesters, and one of my professors told
me that he was hiring data-entry clerks for a small side venture
he was involved in. He had apparently admired the deft typing
I'd displayed in my term papers, although he'd given me a D in
his class. I was flattered that he considered me employable,
although I grew less flattered as I gradually discovered that
his small side venture was making him a fortune. He'd drive up
to the warehouse in a Jaguar to check on us occasionally, and
the employees who'd been there a while called him all kinds of
names behind his back.
My coworkers were around my age, but we didn't form close
friendships. Being there was kind of like sitting in a waiting
room at a psychiatrist's office: you're embarrassed to be seen
there yourself and don't exactly feel like getting to know
anybody else either. But we needed to break the monotony, so we
would drive into town together for pizza sometimes, or gather
around the coffee maker or the candy machine and talk about
anything we could think of. Roger, Susan, and I would spend ten
minutes discussing health insurance, a subject none of us were
especially interested in or knowledgable about, and then Roger
would go to the men's room and Michael would wander by and the
three of us would talk about football or the ozone layer or the
shape of Coca-Cola bottles, and then I'd leave Michael and Susan
to continue the conversation without me, and two hours later I'd
get into a rubber-band fight with Michael and Judy and Sean. But
there were no real relationships. The associations we formed
were like fractals: they grew according to random rules, they
were of random size, and they lasted for a random period of
time. And, ultimately, they meant nothing.
I was in a coffee-break conversation fractal with Harold and
Rachel and Sean one morning, and Harold was saying that he'd
been shopping for a new home computer. It struck me at the time
that I would very much dislike having a computer at home when I
spent all day on one at work. The fact that Harold wanted to buy
a computer was a new addition to the list of things I disliked
about him. The first thing was that he, alone of the ten of us
who worked there, did not seem to realize this was a horrible
job. The second was that he assumed that everybody watched the
same TV shows he watched and would come in to work trying to
discuss last night's _Charles In Charge_ as if no American would
do anything but watch _Charles In Charge_ on a Wednesday night.
Finally, he chewed loudly when he ate, and he'd stuff greasy
tuna sandwiches into his mouth and lick his fingers with
sickening aplomb. It was only because of the rules of fractal
formation that I was drinking coffee with him now.
Several days after Harold bought his computer, he started
worrying about his check. He'd put a certified check for $2,700
plus tax in the mail to Computers Unlimited in New Jersey. He'd
called them every afternoon since then and they hadn't recieved
it. We started hearing about this every time we were in a
fractal with Harold, and in fact some of us started avoiding
being in a fractal with Harold because we were sick of hearing
about his lost check. Still, Harold kept reciting his saga, and
it began to seep into our brains. Driving to work one morning, I
suddenly realized that I'd been sitting there thinking about
Harold's check, wondering what news of the lost piece of mail
this day would bring.
That was on a Thursday morning, and the check didn't arrive that
day or the next. The next day, Saturday, I was in a drugstore on
Main Street buying some allergy medicine. I was opening the
heavy glass door to leave the shop when the door was almost
pushed closed on me by a small group of young men. They seemed
like the kind a newspaper might refer to as 'a gang of young
toughs,' and they looked almost too much the part to be real.
The tallest one, who seemed to be leading the pack, was wearing
a long-sleeved striped shirt and tattered pants. A slingshot
stuck out of his back pocket. They all had shaggy, uncombed hair
and nasty smirks, and before they shoved their way into the
drugstore they'd been running down the street kicking lampposts
and scaring dogs and yelling to each other. The strange thing
was, I was sure that at the moment they pushed the drugstore
door back at me I heard one of them say "Harold's check." I
didn't entertain the thought that this guy could have actually
said it, of course, but I found it strange that I should have so
distinctly imagined I'd heard it. I stood on the sidewalk after
I left the drugstore and watched as they clamored out of the
store and ran into the distance, and I was surprised to hear it
again, this time in another one's voice: "Yeah! Harold's check!
All right!"
Harold lived in Old Fairfield, another small town about 20
minutes away. There would have been no reason for the letter to
come anywhere near the town where I lived.
But only a day after that, while I was driving home from work
along Main Street, I spotted the guys again, and they were
coming out of an appliance store carrying a cardboard box
containing a brand-new color TV. Shocked, I steered my car into
a parking space to watch them. There were four of them, the same
ones I'd seen over the weekend, and they were carrying the box
carefully and slowly, with one person at each corner, as if it
now belonged to them all together. It was a 25-inch set,
according to the box. I expected to see them put it into a car,
but they continued to carry it down the sidewalk, and since Main
was a one-way street I could not turn my car around to follow
them.
Where were they taking the box? And who were they? They seemed
to be in their late teens, so if there was a college nearby I
might have guessed that they were students. But there was no
college within miles. They could have been sharing an apartment
in the area anyway--although they could not have been around
long, because I was sure I would have noticed them before. They
really were an unusual-looking bunch. They seemed born for
delinquency. They looked uncontrollable, as if their hair could
never have been combed, as if no mother could have ever held
them.
And yet at the same time they seemed somehow benevolent,
although I could not figure out why. Perhaps it was because they
seemed to belong to a different era. Their striped shirts,
crown-shaped caps and brown leather shoes with sagging argyle
socks made them look like a cartoonist's drawing of a gang of
street toughs. Outdated as they seemed though, they were as
integrated (one of the four was black, and one Chinese) as a
birthday party on _The Brady Bunch._ I tried to memorize as much
as I could about them as they walked down the street. Before
long they'd walked so far down Main Street I could not see them.
A week later--and during this week Harold's check still did not
arrive--I was driving in a different part of town on an empty
strip of highway, when I was suddenly cut off by a screeching,
speeding car that careened in front of me with no warning at all
from a parking lot on the street. It was the four guys again,
now driving in one of the worst cars I'd ever seen. The jalopy
was huge and noisy and must have been 30 years old at least.
They hadn't had a car last week, so I was surprised to see them
in one now. I could see them clearly, because the convertible
top seemed to be stuck half open. They could have just bought
it, I realized, although I could not imagine anyone either
selling or buying a car like this one.
The four of them were speeding recklessly down the street,
ignoring the lanes, yelling and whooping and standing in their
seats calling out nasty remarks to ladies on the sidewalk. I
followed closely behind them, and when they swerved dangerously
into a 7-11 parking lot I followed them, parked, and waited. Two
of them ran in holding a fistful of rolled bills and came
running out with two six-packs of root beer. They jumped into
the car and tore out of the parking lot, screeching their tires,
yelling and waving their bottles of root beer happily.
Their car was as weak as it was noisy, though, and I didn't have
much trouble staying with them. They seemed to be going nowhere,
just driving all over town--speeding up between traffic lights,
braking hard to make their tires screech at each stop, and then
revving their puttering engine to sound menacing while they
waited for the light to turn green. At one red light I pulled up
right next to them. At that moment the one in the front
passenger's seat reached forward and took an opened envelope out
of the car's glove compartment. He removed from the envelope
what seemed to be some kind of bank slip, such as a reciept for
a cashed check. As I watched, stunned, this scruffy young man
gazed at the slip and suddenly kissed it, and then waved it in
the air and yelled something as the light turned green and the
driver stepped on the gas.
The next day at work I asked Harold what he'd heard recently
about the check. Not wanting to seem completely insane, I had no
intention of trying to explain to him what I'd seen, but I asked
him, "How do you know somebody didn't steal your check? What
else could have happened to it, anyway?"
"It wasn't stolen," he said. "I stuck it in a post office
mailbox. You can't steal a letter from a post office mailbox.
It's just lost. And anyway, even if somebody did steal it, they
wouldn't be able to do anything with the check. It's made out to
the computer store."
"They could forge a signature or something."
"Forge what signature? A guy's gonna walk into a bank and say,
'Yeah, uh, I'm from the computer store, can you put this money
into my personal account?' You think they'd believe him? You
don't just need a signature with a certified check. You need
identification, and a rubber stamp, and a company number, and
even then all you're allowed to do is deposit the money into the
company account. If you tried to cash it they'd get suspicious."
"Still, you don't know for sure," I said. "You should stop the
check."
"It was a certified check," Harold said. "It's the biggest pain
in the world stopping a certified check. I already called the
bank, and they said if I want to stop it I have to go down to
the main office and fill out a bunch of forms, and then I have
to get a voucher from the computer store signed by a notary
public. Look, I know the letter's gonna turn up. It'll get there
next week."
Everything he said made sense, but I still wasn't sure. I
realized, though, that if what I'd seen meant that his check had
been stolen and cashed, then stopping it would do no good
anyway. Also, as we were having this conversation a couple of
other people wandered into the hallway and joined the fractal
and the next thing I knew I had five people all yelling at me
that there was no way anybody could have obtained cash from that
check. I hate it when an entire fractal agrees on something that
I don't agree with and everybody starts yelling at me all at the
same time. I didn't know anything about how banks worked and I
didn't understand the subtle differences among bank checks and
certified checks and cashier's checks, and I didn't know why
everybody at work was suddenly so intensely caught up with the
subject, and I didn't particularly care either. I got out of the
fractal and drank my coffee alone at my desk that day.
That weekend I went for a walk in Burnside Park near my
apartment. Burnside Park was on an inlet that flowed out to the
sound, and it had a free ramp that people could use to get their
boats into the water. It was a nice day and there were a few
boaters lined up waiting to use the ramp. As I walked past I
heard some familiar voices yelling, and I was surprised to see
the same four guys again, this time in bathing trunks. They were
at the front of the line pushing a small powerboat off a trailer
onto the ramp. I looked at them and they looked at me and the
boat made a loud splash as it slid off the trailer and hit the
water. It was a new boat, not large or fancy but nice enough,
and the four guys were misbehaving as usual. One was spitting on
the ramp and shouting obscenities at the other boaters waiting
in line; another was standing in the boat and almost tipping it
over; and yet another chomped on a candy and tossed the wrapper
into the water. As the two who were pushing the boat jumped in
and started the motor, I was stunned to see that the name of the
boat, freshly painted in large black capital letters, was
HAROLD.
By the end of the following week, Harold had begun the
procedures necessary to stop his certified check. He had the
post office put a tracer on the lost piece of mail, which
apparently required several hours' worth of filling out and
delivering forms. Now his bank was sending him a form for a
voucher to stop the check, and he was going to have to mail the
form to the computer store in New Jersey, have the store mail it
back, go to a notary public, have the notary public verify his
signature, and mail the form back to the bank. Only then would
the bank allow Harold to begin the proceedings for acquiring a
new check. So Harold was pretty grouchy about the whole thing by
this time.
But one morning, a week or so later, he walked in to work with a
sunny expression. The post office had located the piece of mail,
he said, and was now sending it along to the computer store. We
all wanted an explanation of how it could have been lost for so
many weeks, but Harold said he'd been unable to get one. The
check had definitely been located, though he'd notified the
computer store and the bank and the post office--I wondered why
he'd neglected the local newspapers--and now everything was back
on track.
The way I saw it, now he was really in trouble. Somehow the post
office had mistaken some other piece of mail for this piece of
mail, and now Harold had thrown away his voucher and cancelled
his appointment with the notary public, and soon he was going to
realize that the check was still lost after all. The next
afternoon at work, though, he hung up his phone and said
proudly, "Well, they got it. They're delivering the computer
tonight."
Everybody congratulated him. As for me, I was somewhat
surprised. But I knew for sure that something was not what it
seemed to be. Maybe the post office had been lying and now the
computer store was lying. Or maybe Harold was lying. I said to
him, "So, you think now maybe the delivery guys will lose it and
it'll be another month?"
Harold wasn't amused. "I seriously doubt it," he said.
I was so sure that no computer would arrive at Harold's home
that I felt perversely excited in anticipation of the story
Harold would tell in the morning, after the computer failed to
show up. But that night as I sat in my apartment, I suddenly had
the crushing feeling that the computer really was going to be
delivered. This would make no sense at all--who had those guys
been, and where had they gotten all their money, and where had
Harold's check been all this time? Why had the boat been called
_Harold_? And I hadn't seen the four guys around town in the
past few days. Suddenly the fact that Harold's computer would be
delivered that night seemed certain. It couldn't be--and yet,
the moment it occurred to me that it might be, it suddenly
seemed obvious that it would be.
And it happened just that way. Not only did the computer arrive,
but Harold was blase about it in the morning and too busy with
his work to talk. All I felt was a terrible disappointment. Now
things were back to their normal state: Nothing made sense.
There was no secret pattern in anything, and I felt as if
something brilliant and beautiful had been snatched from my
hands.
Levi Asher (brooklyn@netcom.com)
----------------------------------
Levi Asher is a client-server consultant on Wall Street. He is
the creator of _Literary Kicks_, a World Wide Web site
(file://ftp.netcom.com/pub/brooklyn/WWW/LitKicks.html) devoted
to Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg and the Beat Generation.
Underground, Overground by Simon Nugent
===========================================
...................................................................
* "One can't believe impossible things." "I daresay you
haven't had much practice," said the Queen.
--Lewis Carroll (1832-98) *
...................................................................
Enter the Ghost. He steps calmly up to the AutoDoc as the fat,
sweating woman leaves clutching a vial of green liquid. He
inserts the credit card lifted from the person behind him in
line.
"Welcome, Mr. Newell," the machine modulates. "What is the
matter with you?" A barely noticeable whir. "I hope it is not a
recurrence of those migraines."
The man behind the Ghost thinks to himself that it is quite a
coincidence this man has the same name and also suffers from
migraines.
"I'm worried."
"What are you worried about?"
"Vampires."
"I beg your pardon?"
"Vampires. I'm worried about vampires." The real Mr. Newell
tries to pretend he's not hearing the conversation. He looks
furtively about for something else to observe.
"What is it about vampires that worries you?"
"I'm worried that they enter my room at night and suck blood
from my neck."
There is a noticeable pause before the machine answers. "Perhaps
you should see Dr. Mueller, the AutoAnalyst up the road. She is
fitted with an upgraded version of a very efficient
psychoanalytic application and is situated in a soundproof booth
for complete confidentiality."
"I can show you marks."
At this point it is customary for the people in line--who of
course haven't been listening--to turn away. Thus the real Mr.
Newell automatically turns and is, in fact, glad that he does
not have to witness the bizarre scene taking place behind him.
He is discomfited by such a display of unreason. Were it not for
the fact that the AutoDoc will surely have done so already, Mr.
Newell would feel compelled to report the man who bears the same
name as himself.
The Ghost peels off his shirt. The machine runs a wave of
ultrasound over his body, mapping out the contours. Two
penetration marks appear on the AutoDoc's four-dimensional
analysis. It runs through terabytes of data trying to find a
condition the symptoms of which correspond to those it sees in
the scan. It takes a saliva sample from around the wounds. Blood
type AB-negative, as opposed to Mr. Newell's O-positive. Enzyme
analysis shows proteins foreign to the human body.
"I am afraid, Mr. Newell, that I do not have the information to
deal with your ailment. Perhaps you are the victim of a
dangerously off-centered person. I suggest you call the
Equilibrators who will find this unfortunate and attempt to
restore his or her intrapsychic harmony."
"You don't think it's vampires."
"No. You know that no such creature exists. Watch your balance."
"Even though all the evidence suggests that I am being attacked
by vampires."
"Your hypothesis rests on the assumption that these creatures
exist. There is no mention of any such creatures in the medical
data, therefore your argument is flawed and unhealthy."
"But it is possible that vampires do exist, only for some reason
knowledge of their existence has been withheld from you. I
suggest you request additional information on vampires to the
central committee."
"The witholding of such information is possible only if you
attribute a large level of disequilibrium to the Equilibrators
who programmed me. Of course that would be a fallacy. Good-bye,
Mr. Newell. I hope your symptoms improve."
The real Mr. Newell, muttering a stabilizing mantra to rid
himself of the insidious idea that the Equilibrators might be
hiding something from the public, nearly cries out as a hand is
placed on his neck.
"Your turn now."
Exit the Ghost.
Mr. Newell arrives home before his current Social Partner, as is
usual. By the time she arrives he has begun preparing the second
of the two meals suggested by their meal planner. Over dinner he
relates to her the incident at the AutoDoc. How is it possible,
they ask each other, that people still believe in such things?
Yet going to bed that night Mr. Newell, after taking two of the
sleeping tablets prescribed by the AutoDoc, shuts the bedroom
window on the temperature-controlled night outside and locks the
bedroom door.
In spite of his medication, Mr. Newell spends a restless night.
He has no real dreams. Rather, images keep recurring like
obsessive thoughts. On a speeding train, a man with two
different-colored eyes watches an intense, awkward young man
with poor eyesight trying to maintain a conversation with a
prim, old-fashioned-looking girl who assumes an air of
superiority both of them know is a facade.
Mr. Newell wakes up to find the odd man watching him from a
chair in the corner of the room. Then he disappears, or Mr.
Newell just wakes up properly. It is a long time before he gets
back to sleep. Another young boy is following a beautiful girl
along finger of black rock surrounded by a stormy sea. The girl
walks off the rock and hovers in mid-air while the boy steps off
the rock, seems to touch the floating vision for an instant and
then plunges into the foaming water.
This time Mr. Newell is awake instantly, moaning loudly and
covered in sweat. In the morning his Social Partner berates him
for being such a turbulent bedmate. He is annoyed by her lack of
sympathy and goes off to work without kissing her.
This irritation stays with him throughout the morning. His mind
is also troubled by his encounter with the deluded "vampire
victim." He keeps repeating to himself that such creatures don't
exist, but the insidious thought comes back with equal
insistence: what if--_what if?_--they really do? It would mean
the universe Mr. Newell believes he has inhabited for 44 years
is unreal. It would mean there exists a level of creatures,
actions and forces of which he (and presumably the rest of the
population with few exceptions) are completely unaware. Were
bloodless corpses found with lacerated necks? Certainly there
was no mention of it in the news, but perhaps the Equilibrators
choose to keep such stories secret in order not to upset the
people.
Such thinking is dangerous and Mr. Newell knows it, but he
cannot help wondering if he might be prey to dark forces. He
decides to keep his eyes open for any signs which might suggest
a supernatural underworld.
Unfortunately, once he begins to look, Mr. Newell realizes that
there are many pieces of evidence pointing to the sinister
scenario he fears. Pre-classic literature is littered with such
signs. Of course, everybody knows the creatures in those poems
and books are fictitious--but suppose that the images came from
a subconscious realization that similar beings _did _indeed
exist? Perhaps, Mr. Newell worries, it is possible our forebears
were closer to the truth.
Of the many examples that spring to mind, the oft-quoted line
from _Hamlet_--"There are more things in heaven and earth,
Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy"--seems to best
sum up the danger.
And Mr. Newell's Social Partner, arriving home from work, does
nothing to allay his fears when she tells him how she heard from
a friend in the Central Committee that AutoDoc machines all over
the metropolis have begun to put in requests for information on
fantastic creatures. An outbreak of werewolf bites on the north
side. Incubi and succubi tormenting by night. Listening to her,
shivers run up Mr. Newell's spine. His fears are being
confirmed. He makes a note to include a clove of garlic with
their usual morning purchases. Again, despite the tablets, he
sleeps badly.
Days pass. Mr. Newell begins to wonder if in fact there is some
kind of plot. He never witnesses another example of what has
become known as "indecent irrationality," but stories filter in
of RoBusses filing requests for the location of El Dorado,
Gotham City, and The Sprawl. There is mention of Leisure Agents
turning away people looking for holidays in Avalon and Atlantis,
Ur and Ys.
Sitting in his place on the RoBus, on his way to work, Mr.
Newell worries. What if, he thinks, there are rival factions of
Equilibrators vying for control? But that is absurd. Had some
experimental scientist found a way of tapping into one of the
imaginary dimensions tangential to our own? Was this possible?
Mr. Newell didn't know.
Slotting his portable MediaMan into the interface in the arm of
his seat, he opts for "current affairs" and scrolls his way
through the morning news. His attention is caught by the
headline "Robot Genius in Death Dive." Apparently the
departments of Cognition, Bioengineering and Computer Science at
the University of Utah have been cooperating on a huge
government-funded project to develop an artificially intelligent
machine. The project (Brains Or Bytes) had been declared a
success last week when it was revealed that a robot had been
built who consistently scored 150 points in both Performance and
Verbal IQ tests.
This morning one of the team leaders had gone to fetch BOB for
his morning session with the Turing-Testers, whose job it was to
prove that BOB wasn't really intelligent. On entering the room
he found a piece of paper and a broken window pane. BOB had
written a suicide note before hurling himself out the window and
smashing himself to expensive pieces on the campus below.
The accompanying holograph showed pieces of metal and shards of
glass strewn over the section of concrete that had been the
point of BOB's impact. Neon police markers cordoned the area
off. Some smart-ass students had placed a sign against one of
the cones which read "CAUTION. ZERO CROSSING."
A collective gasp in the RoBus causes Mr. Newell to look up. On
the wall of a plastic laser factory something--surely not
somebody--had aerosoled in Day-Glo pink: "BEWARE THE
JABBERWOCK." The man opposite Mr. Newell, who had rarely said a
word to him even though they sit in these places twice each day,
leans over and whispers, "What do you make of that?" Somehow
this strikes Mr. Newell as an inappropriate thing to say.
"I am on my way to work on the RoBus as usual," writes Mr.
Newell, "when I realize that the man opposite me is not the man
who should be there. His face is familiar, though I cannot
remember from where. He stares at me for a while and then begins
to mutter something. I cannot hear what he is saying and lean
closer to him. I realize he is reciting a poem or rhyme of some
kind. I can remember the words clearly: _Yesterday upon the
stair, I met a man who wasn't there. He wasn't there again
today; I wish that man would go away._
"As I take in the words, I hear banging on the window of the
RoBus. Looking out I am horrified to see vile monsters of all
kinds pressing up against the plastex. I shrink back in fear but
the other man, who I now see to be myself, shouts out "And with
my vorpal blade in hand!" and leaps out through the window into
the throng of fiends who, instead of tearing him--me--to shreds,
assume a rather ridiculous mien and trot off like a motley gang
of stuffed toys."
Mr. Newell appends his password and sends this dream data to the
analysis computers of the Equilibrators as he does every
morning. This morning, he thinks, they will not appreciate my
dream.
Sure enough, a message comes blinking back on his monitor
telling him to recite certain stabilizing mantras, practice
certain ego-strengthening exercises and, surprisingly, to take
the day off work. It concludes "We will monitor the latent
content of your dreams tomorrow and if a sufficient resolution
has not occurred you will be required to report to the Central
Laboratories for further adjustment. Watch your balance."
Mr. Newell decides to go to a local exhibition of full color,
three-dimensional holographic plottings of partial complex
numbers on a Gottlieb hypersphere. He is particularly interested
in discovering how the artist has managed to depict the 2-D
numbers on a theoretical 4-D structure and reduce it to a 3-D
hologram. It proves not to be effective, and Mr. Newell is
forced to leave after a brief period. He keeps seeing dragons
and mermaids coming out of the holographic mountains and valleys
towards him.
At the AutoDoc, Mr. Newell waits to get something for the
migraine that has come on since leaving the gallery. He has been
in line some time and has heard--not listened to--a young girl
requesting contraceptives, an older man complaining about his
gradual loss of subcortical white matter and a woman whose rods
are being burnt out by continual use of a panoramic pleasure
simulator. Finally, it is Mr. Newell's turn.
His head bursting, dizzy, crowded, he inserts his card and is
greeted by the machine.
"Doctor, I have another migraine. But it's more than that. I
feel--haunted."
"Haunted? Can you expand on that?"
"I think I'm being haunted by, well, vampires."
"I know that."
"You do?"
"Yes, you told me a few weeks ago."
"Oh! But not just vampires. Werewolves and... goblins." He
pauses, something only just striking him, "By a man who isn't
here." His mind races. "By phantom cities--by Gotham City!" He
begins to grin. "By places that never existed."
Much to the dismay of the people behind him, who aren't
listening, he begins to laugh out loud. "I'm being hunted with a
vorpal sword, courted by mermaids, swooped on by dragons!"
He is now having difficulty speaking he is laughing so hard.
"And I'm being pursued by a... by a _jabberwock!"_ He shouts the
last word out and collapses against the wall, howling in mirth.
"Mr. Newell," puts in the AutoDoc quickly, "are you all right?
Take hold of yourself. Watch your balance."
"Peristalsis," chuckles Mr. Newell, _"Paracelsus_, even." Wiping
tears from his eyes he removes his card from the machine, turns
to indicate that he has finished and realizes that everybody has
fled.
He stands panting, still dissolving into giggles at some
thought, a ring of recently evacuated space around him. His lips
form a string of words whose relationship, if any, he alone
knows.
Vampire. Peristalsis. Catafalque. Jabberwock. Herbert. AutoDoc.
Simon Nugent (simon@helpdsys.demon.co.uk)
-------------------------------------------
Simon Nugent earns his crust in the computer industry and writes
cyberspoof after hours as therapy. He is currently working on a
follow-up to "Underground, Overground" that has lots of sex in
it. He doesn't read the blurbs on backs of books and is going
into hiding when the revolution comes.
Fallen Star, Live-In God by Rachel R. Walker
================================================
...................................................................
* People are attracted to the famous. But that attraction
works both ways--and not always for the best. *
...................................................................
All I hear is Jenny's breathing, now slow and steady. All I feel
is the cool twisted sheet coiled about my ankles.
Peace.
I never used to mind that Jenny didn't keep newspapers or
magazines around. After a while you get sick of reading about
yourself. Same with her apparent lack of a television. You don't
have to see _those_ tabloids, either.
And I didn't care that we never left her apartment. At first I
didn't even want to leave her bedroom. But now I'm starting to
wonder.
"Jake, this way!"
"Jake, let's see that smile!"
"Jake, is it true what they say about you and Hope Shelley?"
Everybody thinks I lost my virginity at 19, when I starred with
Hope Shelley in _Walking Away._ Hope believes it, too. But Jenny
found me at 16.
"Jake, over here!"
"C'mon, give us those teeth!"
"Jake, how do ya feel?"
I grew up in Dundee, Illinois, near Chicago. When I was 14, my
oldest sister Maggie got me a part in a college play she was in.
I tell interviewers that I felt something special the second my
foot touched the stage boards. It's a good line, but I've used
it so often I can't remember if it's true.
I remember the audience cheering. Thunder filled the theater and
echoed between my ears.
Chicago isn't New York, thank god, but it's true that you can do
enough theater in Chicago to make even Hollywood take notice.
At 16 I landed my first big role. _City of Lights_ wasn't
supposed to be my picture, but after opening night everybody was
talking about Jake Dooley, an astonishingly brilliant presence
as flash addict Mickey Randall. And after the premiere party at
Spago, there was Jenny, a surfer chick exalted by a teenager's
imagination into a goddess. Goddesses probably don't wear Cal
Tech T-shirts, though. And they sure don't lean close to
sixteen-year-old boys and whisper, "How would you like me to
make you howl?"
"_Jake!_ Jake, I _love_ you! I _love_ you, _Jake!"_
"Jake _please_ look this way Jake _please_ c'mon _pleeeez!"_
"_Jake!_ Omi_gawd_! Didja _see_? He _looked_ at me!"
Why _does_ she keep the second bedroom locked?
After _City of Lights,_ and after Jenny's apartment, I didn't
see her until _A Name For Baby_--the second flick of my first
three-film contract. The critics were kind to me. "A finer actor
than this movie deserves." "With a better script, Dooley
would've shone again." Dressed in flowing gray, Jenny found me
at Roxwell's after the first week figures came out. Once more
she ushered me into her Nissan and blindfolded me--and I didn't
care. I felt I deserved a firing squad. Instead, when the
blindfold was removed, I blinked the dust away and squinted in
the candlelight that set Jenny's heavy-curtained bedroom aglow.
"You deserve something special tonight," she whispered, pulling
me to the yet-untangled sheets, guiding my hands to her. "Let me
hear you howl."
"And the nominees for Best Actor are... Jake Dooley, for
_Silent Drums_..."
My next-oldest sister Eileen used to give herself screaming
nightmares from reading scary bedtime stories. Mom finally had
to throw out the book with the Bluebeard stories. Didn't help.
Eileen kept opening all the doors to make sure there weren't any
cast-off wives shut away in our creaky house.
What does Jenny keep behind her locked door?
A _father._
"It's me, Sean. Remember your ol' dad?"
A _son._
"Very pleased to meet you, sir. Sorry you have to leave so soon.
I guess old habits are hard to break."
The open _road._
"You force me to go on this crazy trip and _you didn't bring a map?_
You learn to drive the same way you learned to be a father?"
Together, maybe, they'll find... _Points To View_. Starring
Robert Harrigan. And Jake Dooley. Coming soon to a theater near
you. Rated PG-13.
I never liked The Bough: too noisy, with service worse than the
music. Roxwell's is where I usually take my meetings, but the
Roxwell's staff would pay too much attention to me. The Bough
people see so many celebrities that I was almost anonymous.
Exactly what I wanted for this meeting.
Lucas tossed his pale hair out of his bleary eyes. "Ya sure
y'want this?" He glanced nervously about The Bough. Everybody
was watching Hope Shelley (a brunette this season) dancing with
her latest. "I mean, y'don't even drink." His hands were shaking
worse than when we made _Louisiana Air_; their rhythm clashed
with the pulse from the speakers. "Whatcha want with TZ? Not
even a stellar trip. Just knock ya' assward. Gimme couple more
days--I'm a great shopper." He snickered, then put on an
ill-fitting sober expression. We still looked like brothers
around the eyes, but his were now shadowed and gaunt. "Meet me
here again Tuesday, and I'll have guaranteed DEA-pure anything.
No extra charge." A wavering craftiness lit the silvered blue
depths. "Maybe you could talk to Deni 'bout takin' me back. I
c'n still work. Whaddya say? F'get the TZ. Lemme getcha
somethin' better."
"I'm buying it for a friend."
"And the winner is... Jake Dooley, for _Dixie Wailing_!"
I knew she'd be looking for me. I stayed alert until I spotted
her glittering in silver and blue, tall and blonde, as graceful
and supple as when I was 16 and Hollywood was my new playground.
Maybe I'd get her surgeon's name for future use.
It wasn't easy to cut through the worshipping surf of the crowd.
If each touch had been a drop, I'd have been soaked by the time
I reached Jenny. But she never minded waiting. I slid a hand
through her silky hair and pulled her ear close to my mouth:
"How would you like me to make you howl?"
All I hear is Jenny's breathing, now slow and steady. All I feel
is the cool twisted sheet coiled about my ankles.
Slowly I slide off the mattress to the carpet, careful not to
knock the two empty tumblers off the bedside table. Pants,
Rolex--gotta watch the time. Her keys. I take the glasses and
rinse them out in the kitchen sink, just like Ari did when he
played crooked client to my idealistic defense attorney in _On
Closer Inspection_. Though this isn't a murder story; no one
will care about what made Jenny sleep.
8PM HBO MOVIE (CC)-Drama 2:15
"Blood and Oil" (R) Young intelligence agent (Jake Dooley)
clashes with commanding officer (Ron Cliffords) in this
absorbing look at the Gulf War.
Jenny must have bought this lock herself; it doesn't match the
other doorknobs in her apartment. The fourth key I try clicks. I
step inside and flip on the lights.
Three of the walls are covered with posters.
_City of Lights_. _Walking Away_. _Louisiana Air_.
_Silent Drums_. _Dixie Wailing._
And more: Below the posters sit two low bookcases, each with two
shelves apiece. One filled with paperbacks, the other with
scrapbooks.
The fourth wall is covered by a giant screen TV, almost as big
as the one I have at home. A VCR or laserdisc player underneath,
and a tall cabinet on each side of the screen. Next to the
right-hand cabinet, under a _Mad/Ave_ poster, is a stereo and a
filled CD rack. My bare feet are cold as I cross the
well-varnished floor to check the titles. All soundtracks. My
mouth twitches when I see the _'Blading_ album. If only the
movie had done as well. Maybe I _should_ have done my own
stunts.
Now the cabinet next to the TV. I pull open the doors and tilt
my head to read the videotape spines, the titles on the shelf
matching the posters on the walls. All here--even _Smoke Test_
and _A Name For Baby_, and _Dixie Wailing--_
I snatch the tape, frowning as I check the back. The studio seal
gleams beside the copyright infringement warning. Not a bootleg.
I check the picture on the front: There's me and Whit with our
saxophones in the New Orleans cemetery, a smaller version of the
poster hanging to my left. Gold letters celebrate my win from
earlier tonight.
This isn't out yet.
My agent would know. She always gets me a piece of the back end.
I slide the tape back onto the shelf, not slamming the door for
fear of waking Jenny, TZ or no. I investigate the other cabinet.
These shelves are filled with home videotape dubs, carefully
labeled in Jenny's tight compact script. My TV guest shots.
Interviews and profiles, organized by show and date. I close the
door, a niggling thought tickling the back corner of my mind. I
cross to the bookshelf with the paperbacks. Top shelf: movie
novelizations, complete with full color photos from the major
motion picture starring Jake Dooley. All clearly read many
times, a few held together by green rubber bands. I don't
recognize the stuff on the bottom shelf.
I cross to the bookcase under the _Louisiana Air_ poster with
its cypress swamp and air-brushed faces. I give Lucas and my
twenty-year-old self a sardonic grin, the one I used as the
rowdy younger brother who had to be steadied by Lucas'
character. Ha.
I pull out the first scrapbook. Newspaper clippings, sealed
behind plastic, from my Chicago theater days. Even a review of
that first University play.
She _is_ dedicated.
Chronological order? Probably--
_Dixie Wailing_ in the tape cabinet. The niggling thought leaps
from the wings to center stage. The dates on the interview dubs.
Chronological order.
My hands are trembling worse than Lucas'. I take the scrapbook
from the far right end of the shelf and flip through the plastic
pages. Ticket stubs. Reviews. Glossy eight-by-tens. Profiles
from fan magazines. Familiar headlines capturing slices of my
life flick past, until I reach the biggest, blackest one of all:
OSCAR WINNER JAKE DOOLEY MURDERED
Film Star Shot to Death Outside Roxwell's
Police Hunt For Mystery Assailant
There's a three-column photo of a sidewalk chalk outline next to
a studio portrait of me. My _Dixie Wailing_ character. I look at
the date above the headline.
Welcome to the Jake Dooley fan discussion group. This file will
serve to answer some questions users frequently ask in this
area.
Among the topics covered in this file:
* Conspiracy Theories
* Dooley Disciples
* Fantasies
* Favorite Flicks
* Jake Sightings
Back to the other bookcase and the bottom shelf. I have to
remove each book to see the titles--the spines are cracked white
with over-reading.
_The Jake Dooley Story_. _Fallen Star_.
_The Comet Life of Jake Dooley_. _God of His Generation_.
_Where Were You?: Remembering Jake Dooley_.
_Death Comes Unexpectedly: Losing Hollywood's Brightest._
Even a novel: not a novelization, but something unfamiliar with
the strange title of _Jake Dooley's Doing Fine on Callisto._
The copyright dates.
My hands are shaking. I check my watch; Jenny should stay under
for another 15 minutes or so, if Lucas can be trusted. I
carefully put the books back in place and leave the room,
locking the door behind me. In the living room another bookcase
stands near her desk. "Just stuff from school," Jenny had told
me once on the way to her bedroom. "Nothing interesting."
Nothing interesting _then_. But I'm not 16 anymore. Time to see
what Jenny's been studying at Cal Tech.
_Space, Time and Gravitation_, by Arthur Eddington.
_A Quantum Mechanics Primer_, by Daniel Gillespie.
_A Most Ingenious Paradox_, by Chandrapal Sarasvati Kumar.
Other authors: Stephen Hawking. Rudy Rucker. Poul Anderson.
Fritz Leiber. H. G. Wells.
I sink to her couch, ignoring the lumps and springs. The date
above the headline. The dates on the books and the tapes. I'd
believed Jenny to be about my current age. But if she's in her
mid-twenties, and I'm _here,_ I'm really old enough to be her
father.
_No._
The plot can change. I've demanded rewrites before--and I always
wanted to direct.
I won't let the screen fade to black on me. All I have to do is
wait for Jenny to take me back. She's built a _shrine_ in there.
She's worked hard for this opportunity--I'll take the offered
chance. I settle back against the lumpy couch and laugh. Every
good actor controls his exit.
OSCAR WINNER JAKE DOOLEY MURDERED
Film Star Shot to Death Outside The Bough
Suspect in Killing to be Arraigned Today
BIRTHS
Caitlin Marie Anscom, girl, to Harper and Paula Anscom.
Avery Kirby Dewey-Ingraham, girl, to William and Diana
Dewey-Ingraham.
Jacob Dooley Townsend, boy, to Jennifer Townsend.
Rachel R. Walker (rwalker@awod.com)
-------------------------------------
Rachel R. Walker was a lifelong Midwesterner until she moved to
Charleston, South Carolina, where she lives and works. Her short
fiction has been published in _Vision SF_ and
_Alternate Hilarities_. She has also published non-fiction
articles on such varied subjects as the Native American tribes
of the Southeast, carpal tunnel syndrome, and architecture.
FYI
=====
...................................................................
InterText's next issue will be released November 15, 1994.
...................................................................
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