Better Angels (23 page)

The teaching assistant looked at her with a penetrating glance unlike anything the original had ever flashed her way.

“Your fact is fiction, and your fiction is fact,” he said. “The real there is the virtual here, the virtual there is the real here. Your problem is that you fail to see that what’s on the other side of the mirror is not an opposite. What appear to be opposites are actually complementarities.”

Our problem? Jacinta thought. Our problem is your problem too. We were meant to be part of your great harmony of Mind here. If everything’s inside you, then how did you pass over our whole world?

“I didn’t,” the teaching assistant said with a deep frown. “One of my subprograms, after all, long ago developed the final version of the myconeural symbiont, the one your ‘ghost people’ encountered on their tepui. Part of the ancient Sender mission, to ‘spread the faith’ of sentience. The contact ship missed you, yes. It returned to normal space in the wrong place—with disastrous results for all. Unfortunate.”

Jacinta mentally grimaced at the understatement of that, but the Allesseh’s teaching-assistant incarnation seemed not to notice.

“True, everything all my associated species have learned is in me—and much more,” he continued. “They haven’t always known where to look, however. Or bothered to. Why should they? Your history and fate are, in the great arc of the universe, insignificant. Your record was inside me, yet lost as far as all other sentient species were concerned.”

The teaching assistant now glared at her with something that Jacinta could only interpret as malice, even as she wondered where such emotion could be coming from.

“And this has perhaps been a good thing,” the teaching assistant said. “I know you. The motion of your history is a wave of hallucination on an ocean of mystery. All your wars and wrongness are the proof. Don’t look inside me if you don’t want to see inside yourselves.”

Jacinta defiantly returned the gaze of the teaching assistant persona, this animate memory through which the Allesseh had chosen to manifest itself—and suddenly, that figure was also gone. In the teaching assistant’s stead, horrific time-collapsed visions poured into Jacinta’s head.

Battles and massacres roiled like tempest clouds or the surging waves of an angry vortex, waves and sea and clouds crested with crimson blood and gore, a foul ocean of dying red life and charred entrails and spattered broken machinery, a sky of darkness and armies falling upon each other, vast ravenous million-headed creatures, tearing each other limb from limb, ripping flesh, snapping breaking sucking bones clean in an instant, amid a welter, a tornadic steaming spouting of blood and fire, whose roar was the death screams of men and women—

The Allesseh’s vision had taken it all in, had absorbed all humanity’s dark history of violence the way a black hole devours light, then spewed it back into her mind until it made Jacinta want to scream. But she could not. She could only experience it as the Allesseh understood it.

Seen from the Allesseh’s vast and coldly timeless heights, humanity’s cities were mere fogs of stone clinging to coastlines, all its machineries mere mists of metal flowing along river valleys and across hillsides. The living were ghosts more insubstantial than the stone fogs of the cities and towns they moved through. Again and again, novelty became decadence as style triumphed over sense—and in so doing novelty showed itself to be something never truly new. Human institutions proved themselves absurd, unjust shadows in a dream of justice.

Cities burned slowly in lichens and rust and water and wind, or rapidly in fire and demolition. Building fires and firing buildings proved ultimately the same: the former was always really only building a stack of ashes, the latter was always really only ashing a stack of buildings. Every edifice began falling to ruin before it was completed, every tree was blighted in the seed, every life bore death in its birth, Entropy ruled as only lord of all that great dance.

Earth, spinning fast, proved sunrises and sunsets to be only a dizzy local illusion. Jacinta’s home planet, washed to gray by speed, showed no more noons nor midnights than would the surface of the sun. Life blossomed and withered and blossomed again, glaciers advanced and retreated, rivers writhed like snakes in their shifting beds, oceans rose and fell, volcanoes blotted the sky a moment and were gone, mountains surged high and crumbled low, the tectonic bump-and-grind dance of continents came together and moved apart in the long blind night, backward and backward, until at last all sank into the fireball that was their first mother.

Jacinta might have seen more than this—back to the creation of the solar system, to the birth of the universe, even to the origin of the plenum before that—had not the vast wave of information-overload mercifully caused her to lose whatever strange consciousness she dwelt in. When she woke, she found several of the ghost people gathered around her, looking down at her, concern on their faces. Above them all, the cave of night had been replaced by the eggshell of day, finely raked white clouds shining high in the blue sky, just the way she remembered them.

Of course.

* * * * * * *

Deathlessness in an Electric Body

Life in a Spiritual Revival Camp, Paul Larkin had discovered, mainly meant grunt muscle work all day and listening half the night to sermons or exhortations to pray. Although like everyone else Paul was to be saved by faith alone and not by the sweat of his brow, the Christian Soldiers claimed that hard labor was conducive to a humble and contrite heart and the making of an “opening” for the entry of the Holy Spirit into the soul of the hardened sinner. So it was Paul found himself hacking away with a pick-and-hoe at flammable brush along a roadcut, looking for any opening that might allow him to escape for even a moment the hell his life had become since he had been arrested and made a “penitent”.

Things could be worse, he thought. During the first years of the CSA regime there had been persistent rumors of flying squads of soldiers in jetpacks sweeping down on pagan and Wiccan gatherings in northern California, Christ Knight pilots firebombing New Age communes in New Mexico, re-education camps in Missouri where women were experimented on to make them more accepting of male headship....

Glancing at the armed officers overseeing his orange-clad roadwork crew, Paul thought again that there were two kinds of prison guards: those for whom it was just a job, and those who really enjoyed doing it—for whom it was a “calling.” The latter were by far the worse. Fortunately, their overseers today were prime examples of the former.

Officer Strom blew his whistle and called a prayer break, but as usual didn’t enforce it. As far as guards went, Strom was okay, Paul thought. If you didn’t want to pray during your break, Strom wouldn’t try to force you to. He even allowed the penitents to talk among themselves—as long as they were quiet about it.

Paul eased himself up straight from his bent-over work position. The muscles in his back and shoulders and the calluses on his hands reminded him of their existence with persistent catches and aches. The older black man next to him on the work line groaned, perfectly voicing the way Paul felt. Paul had seen the man once or twice. New in camp.

“I’m too old for this cultural-revolution crap,” the man said in a quiet, tired voice. Paul smiled.

“I hear that,” he said, introducing himself, extending his hand for the other man to shake.

“Khalid Elliot,” the older man replied, shaking Paul’s hand. “What brought you to this happy little work party?”

“Illegal drugs and ideas,” Paul said, glancing down at the ground. “I had a spore-print of the mushroom that KL 235 comes from. They got me for possession of pernicious literature too—Marx, Darwin, Sagan, Gould. A secular humanist library. Banned information, banned informational substances.”

“How’d they catch you?” Elliot asked.

“Jenn Reynolds, the woman I was seeing,” Paul said. “She turned out to be a morals agent. Planted a little personal-use marijuana at my place too—just to make the bust stick.”

Kal Elliot gave a sad smile.

“Your lady set you up and turned you in?” he asked. “Man, that’s cold.”

Paul shaded his eyes against the September afternoon sun. The man didn’t know how cold. When the police had banged so loudly at his apartment door, Paul had come out of the shower with only a towel wrapped around his waist to see what the crisis might be. Before he could even walk across the living room, however, the police had broken his door down. The next thing he knew they had him pinned to the floor and were cuffing his hands behind his back with electronic monitor “bracelets.”

As the cuffs clicked onto his wrists like hungry mechanical mouths, the police informed him they had a bench warrant for his arrest already in hand. In the old days they might have read him his rights, but not now. Over the noise of their ransacking “search” of his apartment, he asked them if he might put on some clothes. They ignored his request, then dragged him out of his rooms while his neighbors looked on. When the towel slipped from his waist, the arresting officers had merely draped it over his head as they paraded him toward a police van, a naked but “anonymous” man.

Apparently the repressive norms for modesty and chastity the ruling theocracy promulgated didn’t apply to those rendered non-human by their supposed crimes, Paul thought. More sanctimonious hypocrisy from the preacher-politicians’ bottomless supply of the same.

“I’d only been seeing her for maybe six weeks,” Paul said. “Things weren’t going too great for me by the time we met. I had had a falling out with my boss. Lost my job. Then I was out of work for eight months before I met her. I thought, Hey, unlucky in life, but lucky in love. So much for luck. How about you?”

“I knew too much,” Elliot said, “and then I went and shot my mouth off about it.”

“About what?” Paul asked, glancing at him, squint-eyed against the westering sun.

“About how the infosphere crash was a set-up too,” Elliot said, looking away, idly cracking a clod of dirt under the toe of his boot. “I tried to play Paul Revere and warn people. The truth will set you free, the cost of freedom is eternal vigilance—all that. The wrong people intercepted one of the messages I sent out through what I thought was a secure, untraceable channel. It wasn’t.”

Paul looked at Elliot. This wasn’t the first time he had heard rumors about that technocrash conspiracy idea. Maybe I shouldn’t trust this guy, Paul thought. Maybe this is all just some elaborate new form of entrapment. Then he shrugged the thought off. Hell, you have to trust somebody, sometime, at some point.

“When the cities and the counties and then even the states started banning Halloween as a ‘dangerous Satanic holiday’,” Paul said quietly, “that’s when we should have known all this was coming. Now Christmas is banned. Soon maybe it’ll be Easter too.”

Kal Elliot nodded.

“Just like the Puritans banned them,” Elliot said, “almost four hundred years ago, during the English Revolution.”

“The British were luckier,” Paul said. “They could export their religious fanatics to the New World.”

“Where they could establish settlements and burn witches to their hearts’ content,” Elliot said with a tired smile. “But we’re fresh out of new frontiers—at least until they build a lot more of those orbital habitats. Funny, though. I predicted all this to one of my colleagues at our Project, a few years ago now. All except the part about my piece of the truth getting me a ‘Go To Jail Free’ card.”

“That’s always the hard part,” Paul said, tossing a small rock. “Being able to see everything about the future except your place in it.”

“Temporal blind spot,” Elliot agreed. “Funny thing about it is, I got so much of the rest of it right. I told my colleague that President General George Nadarovich is a lot like Oliver Cromwell—a social conservative and a religious radical, intent on turning us all into saints. I told her Nadarovich and his self-appointed Elect would do no better here and now than Cromwell did at turning the English into saints—and our morals ministers haven’t succeeded, either. I told her that their unified front would fall into factional fighting, and it has. Right on target with all of those. The CSA can’t last very long, and it won’t.”

Paul heard a tractor coming down the road and saw the guards beginning to stir themselves. He hefted the pick-and-hoe onto his shoulder, thinking again how prescient Dr. Vang had been about the infosphere crash—eerily so, until he remembered Vang’s long connection with various intelligence services.

“In your crystal ball, did you see whether you would outlast it,” Paul asked, “or whether it would outlast you?”

Elliot smiled and raised the his own pick to his shoulder.

“That I didn’t,” he said. “Blind spot, again. But I saw the rest. Saw to it my colleagues at work and my people at home would be safe, even if I didn’t dodge the spear myself. I wasn’t going to end up like that pastor in Hitler’s Germany—Niebuhr, Niemoller, something like that. You won’t hear me saying, ‘When they came to take away the homeless, I said nothing, because I wasn’t homeless. When they came to take away the drug users, I said nothing, because I wasn’t a drug user. When they came to take away the homosexuals, I said nothing, because I wasn’t a homosexual. When they came to take away the radical thinkers, I said nothing, because I wasn’t a radical—’”

Strom blew his whistle and shouted that the break was over.

“I haven’t kept my mouth shut for any of those,” Elliot said, finishing up. “Gotten me into trouble, I guess, but I’m kind of proud of that. Most of all, you’ll never hear me saying, ‘When they came to take me away, there was no one left to say anything.’ I’m not about to go gently into that good night—”

Officer Strom walked closer, glancing back over his shoulder at the tractor. Probably didn’t want the tractor driver to see anyone on the crew not hard at work, Paul thought.

“Quit your flappin’, gents,” he said. “Back to work.”

The sun had nearly set by the time they were allowed to knock off for the night. The crew had cleared brush from miles of roadside, then cleaned culverts and patched road surface over all those miles. In the twilight they were marched double-time to the crew transports and driven back to camp—sweat-stinking, sore, dirty, and blistered.