Better Angels (56 page)

In the deepest level of the dreaming game, Jiro followed the loping footsteps of the nighthag where her tracks lay clear upon the paths and the dewy grass, then through woods, at last to fen and bog and gray pool. By narrow paths the cyberpomp and his companions made their way toward the creature’s lair, coming at last to a dismal gray pond, overhung with dying trees, its surface churning and roiling in a broken vortex.

As the new arrivals watched, the surface of the pool seethed with myriad half-formed things, like thoughts that died aborning. One creation, though, did not lapse so quickly into uncreation: a gray snake so large it quite deserved the name of serpent. Seeing the unnatural creature churn in the churning waves, Irwin Paxifrage, one of Jiro’s crew (who looked rather like his brother Seiji in some ways), grabbed up a grappling launcher. Taking careful aim, Paxifrage fired the projectile grapple into the creature’s head, where it implanted itself, opening its hooks into the creature’s skull. The churning of the serpent grew very fast, then much slower, then ceased altogether.

With handstrength alone Jiro helped Paxifrage pull in the twitching corpse of the great snakelike thing. Once the creature was beached, everyone gathered to stare at it, and to stare at Jiro’s fatherly mentor, Dr. Cyril Bhakta (who, Jiro knew, had also been Lakshmi Ngubo’s teacher, in another world), examining the specimen with his hovering magnification systems.

“Nanorganismal,” Bhakta said, nodding, as if to confirm the fact to himself. “Made by and of micromachines. Its biological template was probably a river python or anaconda from one of our preserves. This thing’s much simpler in construction than the nightsake was—probably more vulnerable thereby, too. If its fabrication was earlier than the nightsake’s, then that might indicate some evolutionary tendency in the system these nanorganisms are part of. As a hive-mind, that system might even be ‘learning.’”

“I plan to be a very stern teacher,” Jiro said, donning his helmet, adjusting it so that his armor became as completely self-contained an environment as any spacesuit..

“Here,” Paxifrage said, gripping him by the arm. “You may need a striking weapon. Take this laser baton. It’s never failed me.”

“Thanks,” Jiro said—his voice, throat-miked and amplified, booming out of the suit.Jiro waited on no further discussion but immediately plunged into the roiling gray pool.

Jhana felt a sudden expansion: a valve opening in her head, or her brain shifting to a higher gear, or something far less describable. The torrent abruptly became less menacing, though still hardly pleasant. Now she felt merely engulfed in a luminous flood that thundered, a Victoria Falls of bright hot heavy light instead of water.

Deep in the greyworld, those who remained behind saw a wondrous thing: all the churning and roiling turbulence of the pool seemed to distill and concentrate itself around Jiro as he disappeared from sight, and when he had vanished beneath its waves the waves themselves soon vanished, leaving the surface of the pool at last calm and still.

Wonder of a different sort greeted Jiro. He had plunged into a sea of chaos, swam in a worldocean of white noise. But even that would be telling it too cleanly and clearly, for it was dimensionless and illimitable, nanorganismal womb and grave, timeless spaceless subatomic flux of instantaneous creation/uncreation, an emptiness full of activity that roared in his helmet with an ear-piercing static louder and more profound than the heart of thunder. He wasn’t really swimming in the chaos, either—or rather, not just or merely or only swimming in it, for he swam and sank and slipped and tread and walked and waded and flew and crept and crawled through its ever-changing consistency.

As above so below—and closer than they appear—Jhana found that the more she grappled with the light, the more she tried to swim against it, the more she realized that it was filling her with a cascade of her own memories, all the data and details of her life burning through her consciousness at greater than flash-cut speed.

In the greyworld deeps, the nighthag (who to herself seemed to have haunted the dream realm for all eternity) straightaway sensed the presence of the intruder. While Jiro moved so disoriented in her world the nighthag swooped upon him, clasping him to her hideous bosom with her own terrible grip. Yet she could work no harm to Jiro with tooth or claw or clasp, protected as he was by his full armor. To her every crushing pressure, the suit responded microtechnically with equal pressure of its own. Jiro, meantime, caught in her hateful hug, could not strike at her with weapon nor reach her with his empty hand.

So stalemated, the nighthag dragged him down the depthless deeps to her lair at the bottom, while innumerable half-formed monstrosities ripped at Jiro, struck him hard, even managed to break away bits of the somewhat weaker material at the joints of his armor. Just as he began to worry that, under this tearing onslaught, his armor must surely fail him, together he and the nighthag passed through a sparking curtain, a bubble of electrostatic force.

At the other surface of the game, Jhana imagined herself swimming and burrowing upward into the falling flood of light—the flood of her life—and as she imagined it so it was. When she came to the top of that fall, her entire life stood gathered about her in vast panoramic memory, a living holographic tapestry, each part implicated in the whole and the whole implicated in each part, each memory containing within it all other memories which it implied, a finite but unbounded sphere of interconnections.

In the center of the sphere, floating in an axial shaft of sunlight that fell from eternity to eternity, stood a container both grail and beaker, its walls clear yet slightly opalescent. Inside it a suspension of innumerable particles danced and flashed like the sun splintered on ocean waves or moted on the dust of deep space. Reaching out with her mind toward it, she passed completely inside, became a particle dancing on the flux.

There was a pattern to the flux she danced in, a latent order and structure waiting to realize itself, waiting to shift into meaning like stereogram or hologram or fractal, waiting like consciousness hidden in chaos to crystallize about her if she would only allow herself to be that seed crystal.

That valve in her head—wherever her head was—seemed to open again and all around her the flux condensed, crystallized, shot out like an enchantment in infinite directions, rays and leaves and crystalline spikes precipitating out of the flux, a universe of seemingly formless information suddenly shot through with form rising grandly out of the random background.

Faster than she could ever dream it, a sudden channel opened between the worlds and she was abruptly aware of the presence of Seiji and Lakshmi in the alterior universe around her—and of someone or something else as well, there the way air, gravity, or space-time is there.

Intuitively Jhana realized they were inside the mindspace of VAJRA itself, surrounded by the game of Building The Ruins being played on an incomprehensibly vast scale. The illusion of the virtual reality about her was so flawless that it made her question whether any reality she had ever known was really real—or if the reality she had taken for granted her whole life long was also only virtual.

As he and the nighthag fell crashing onto the floor and rolled apart, Jiro found himself suddenly in a place a good deal more ordered than the roaring white noise deathsea they had passed through. They were in a sort of pavilion below the pool, sheltered against the chaotic flood by a spark-rippled, force-billowed membrane hovering tent-like above his head. A fleetingly quick infrared scan revealed the nighthag, then another body nearby still warm—his beloved? newly dead, or still alive?—and a large mass, broken and cold, which Jiro knew to be what remained of the nightsake once emptied of the netizen forces that had swarmed and flowed into the nighthag. Piled toward the rear of the dim pavilion was a heap of weapons, but Jiro had no time to observe further, for at that moment the nighthag leapt toward him.

Nearer the clearer daylight of another world, Jhana saw before her the game’s CHAOS and LOGOS manifesting conflict in the forms of two great beasts locked in deadly struggle. The LOGOS was a vast bright-toothed spermaceti whale whose body glistened in the Deep, the lights of planets, stars and galaxies informing its flesh, while the CHAOS seemed a writhing gigantic squid formed of Coalsack nebulas’ worth of dust, detritus, debris—all dark matter coiling tenebrous tentacles about its celestial cetacean opponent, shaking the Deep with its own strange dark lightnings as the two Titans roiled the universe of mind.

What disturbed Jhana was that she and Seiji and Lakshmi were not on one “side” or the other—they were a part of both and neither, tooth and tentacle and Aloof Other observing the struggle.

In the deep, Jiro with all his strength swung Paxifrage’s laser baton whirring and whistling through the air, striking the nighthag stoutly on the head—but the weapon failed, its bright laser heat and light making no bite into the nighthag’s nanorg flesh. Still, the force of the blow itself was enough to daze the nighthag for a moment—long enough for Jiro to toss aside the weapon. Staking everything on his strength, he tore the awkward armored gauntlets from his hands and flung himself once more into the struggle.

He grappled her with the exposed flesh of his hands, knowing the communications nanorgs must be pouring out of that flesh now. Most of him remained clad in his armor, though. It would take longer for his battlesweat to establish the bridge into this creature than it had taken to hack into the nightsake—and this hag was, if anything, a far more powerful opponent.

With an aikido turn he seemed to have somehow learned from the nightsake, Jiro hurled the nighthag to the ground, but in an instant she was on her feet again, clutching at him and clasping him close and tight. His hands were upon her, though. He was hacking in—

Nearer a more public world, it occurred to Jhana—as much as she was still “Jhana,” as much as she was still a person and not this place—that perhaps the rules of Building The Ruins had to change. She felt the need to reduce, minimize, and if possible eliminate the titanic struggle taking place in the universe of mind around them. Working with Lakshmi and Seiji on both sides of the CHAOS/LOGOS divide, they set about making the great change of Mind possible,

Deep in the greyworld, the nighthag did not become the myriad forms the gray goo had engulfed; rather, those forms became her. She became not shape-shifter but composite of a thousand thousand natural forms, all at once, moving and changing and wriggling and squirming yet always maintaining a certain cohesion, an overall larger form morphing between and among them all.

“Does a species have the same existence once it is recreated as it had before extinction?” The nighthag cackled. “Does a dead man?”

Jiro was so surprised by the thing’s speech that he was caught off guard. The perversely polymorphic nighthag bore him toward the ground with a sudden burst of strength that made him stagger, then go down. Above him, the nighthag that had been a composite of natural forms became a changing mosaic of human constructs and artifacts, finally even of human faces and crowded masses, all the forms possible from permutations and combinations of the six billion bits and 100,000 genes of the human genome. Even the overall form of the nighthag began to alter more quickly. The creature seemed to radiate power. Holding out one mass of clawed fingers, the nighthag waited but an instant before a laser dagger leapt, almost psychokinetically, across space from the weapons hoard nearby, coming to rest in her outstretched hand.

Both inside and far outside Lakshmi’s workshop in the orbital habitat, Seiji and Lakshmi and Jhana set about making the change away from competition and toward cooperation. First the combatants they reduced in scale from galactic to merely planetary in size, then they altered their form as well: LOGOS they induced to play Mongoose to the CHAOS’s Cobra. Initially their conflict was vast enough: both mammal and reptile were of gigantic stature. But gradually their battling no longer shook continents, reared mountains, or dug river channels. Soon they were merely two fluidly agile forms, one furred, one scaled, both roughly life-sized. Soon they weren’t even that big any more.

In the dreaming deeps of the greyworld, however, the struggle continued.

“What’s on top tends toward infinity,” said the nighthag, lifting the laser dagger high above her head in both hands, “while what’s on the bottom tends toward zero.” With the last word she struck the dagger downward, toward the chest and heart of the pinned Jiro.

The nighthag gave a shriek of surprise. Jiro’s armor held firm against the dagger of light, allowing no entrance or puncture.

“Not necessarily,” Jiro said, hurling the nighthag off him as he sprang to his feet. The nighthag’s calling of the dagger to her hand had given him an idea. His communications micromachines must by now have hacked an access channel into the plenum of the gray mire—and he hoped that the gray goo would obey his command.

In a more daylit world, Jhana saw her own right hand reaching down and taking hold of the snake. At the touch of her hand, the shrinking reptile coiled faster and faster in her palm, swallowing after its tail with such speed that it was no longer form but rather a sort of anti-form, a not-knot of one snake and many, a blurred pit of blackness roiled to rainbow about its edge—like the mouth of a whirlpool, the eye of a hurricane, and the event horizon of a black hole all rolled into one and not into one.

In the depths of the darker dream, the micromachines of the gray pool above him were forging Jiro a blade of singularly dense material—not quite the density of a singularity, but perhaps as close as human artifice would ever come. Their work would soon be finished, just a moment more....

“—you’ve done means humans will no longer be mortal,” the nighthag said in jibbering bewilderment as it came toward him. “No longer human as numbers explode!”

At that moment Jiro’s mind-forged sword fell sparking through the semi-permeable electric membrane above their heads, fell through from the gray pool, a weapon gleaming darkly as any ancient obsidian spearpoint. The sword hit the floor not with a metallic ring but with a tremendously heavy thunk. Jiro strode quickly to it. Planting his feet and bending his knees, he grasped and lifted the hyperthin yet hyperdense sword, a weapon so heavy none but his strength here could have lifted and wielded it.