Heart to Heart: Ashton Ford, Psychic Detective (18 page)

Chapter Twenty-Three: Things Celestial

I have been exposed to weirdness for most of
my life you know. Still, I do not find it easy or acceptable to
simply shrug away weird things when I encounter them. The more, in
fact, that I am exposed to this sort of thing, the more insistent
becomes the need to understand.

I mean like if you've
never had a three-dimensional object wink out right before your
eyes, then you've probably never felt any strong need to understand
how something like that could happen. But it does happen, and much
more frequently than you might imagine. If it happens with you, you
are probably either going to convince yourself that it did not
happen or else you are likely to go batty trying to understand how
it did happen. If it keeps happening, time and again, then you
might start to wonder about your sanity.

For myself I had long ago
worked out a handy little syllogism to keep myself centered in the
confrontations with weirdness. Goes like this:
major
premise, reality is infinite
and eternal;
minor
, man is finite and temporal;
therefore,
all of mankind combined
within space and time can never experience all that is
real.

So what do I know? We can believe anything,
but we can know only that which we have experienced. Tell an
aborigine who has never been exposed to Newton and celestial
mechanics that up is really down and that he moves about and has
his being suspended by the feet from the outer surface of a sphere
spinning through space, and that aborigine will smile tolerantly
and go right on living on his flat earth where obviously his feet
are down and his head is up.

The major difference between the aborigine
and most of thee and me lies in the fact thai most of thee and me
have been properly indoctrinated into believing most of anything
that we may read, especially the pronouncements of any vague
authority, whereas the aborigine has not cultivated the luxury of
relying on secondhand information; this guy lives in a very direct
relationship with his environment and depends for his survival upon
the terms of that relationship. The world to him is real and
immediate, never abstract or even potential: it is what he
experiences.

But thee and me live in a
world that has been defined for us by other minds. In order for us
to accept that world, we often must refute the evidence of our
senses and we must do so trustingly else all is chaos; therefore
the pronouncements that define our world must come from authority
and with authority. Never mind that there is no true authority
beneath the heavens. Doesn't really matter anyway whether the
definition is right or wrong; it matters only that we all accept it
as right and that we behave in accordance with that
acceptance.

Which is why we get into trouble with
weirdness—that which falls outside the orderly definition of
reality that binds us together in common mind. Or common sense.

So...physical objects that
can be measured, weighed, and perceived by the senses are said to
exist within space and time and therefore must
submit
to the laws laid down by our
authorities for the behavior of objects in space and
time.

That is why so many of our thinkers have so
much trouble with flying saucers and close encounters of any kind.
Those saucers and those encounters do not obey the paradigm. In
the first place, nothing is allowed to move that way in space-time;
second, nothing is allowed to live long enough in space-time to
bridge the enormous distances within the galaxies. These thinkers
should try my little syllogism; perhaps it would help them as it
has helped me to leap the mind beyond dogmatism and into the
realization that all the scientists and philosophers and preachers
combined who have ever lived on this planet have not yet
experienced all of reality. They have, in fact, only just begun
man's exploration into the mysteries of existence.

So I reserve a small void within my own
common sense within which I may examine various items of direct
experience that seem to be colored weird. And I try to not freak
out when the impossible suddenly seems possible.

That covers just about all things
celestial—even flying saucers and all close encounters of the
shivery kind.

But we really do not have
to go celestial in order to examine the phenomena that were afoot
at Pointe House. Actually one needs go no further than the time
dilation phenomena of Einstein's general theory of relativity and
the specious time of William James—also the view of reality
afforded by quantum physics shows that the human world is largely a
construct arising from the peculiarity of sense perceptions and
synthesized within the brain: that is, from the total recipe of all
that is, our brain reacts to only those few ingredients to which it
is particularly attuned and cannot even sample the others except in
theory.

Thus reality for us is that part of the
whole which our brains can discriminate.

To say that anything
whatever is impossible is to say that our brains have sampled all
of the possibilities of existence and this ain't one of those. It
simply ain't true. We are mere infants in this matter of
possibility sampling—still 99 percent blind, 99 percent deaf, and
99.8 percent stupid. Ask the newborn babe about the physical act
that brought him into this existence; ask him about investments for
his college education; ask him what he wants to be when be grows
up. You may as well ask him for a description of God. The possible
reality to that newborn babe is a warm nipple upon a comforting
breast; don't ask him to define existence beyond that
experience.

In any realistic analysis
the impossible boils down to merely the inexperienced; the
impossibility is merely that which is not commonly experienced. So
let's not attempt to lay down the law to those who are doing
something we cannot do. Let's not call Hai Tsu back into the room
and demand that she leave it in a proper way, the way we do to a
child who leaves the door ajar. Instead let's try to figure out how
Hai Tsu did that—and maybe even wonder if we can do it
too.

Apparently St. Germain did
it as a common experience. This is one of the ways he "astonished"
the courts of Europe. Let's go back a moment and consider the
eighteenth-century world of astonishments. It was ruled by a
relatively small number of individuals connected by birth and
anointed by God himself to rule. Even the church—especially the
church—observed and encouraged this hierarchical order of reality;
it was the worst tyrant of all and defended its preeminent position
through every manner of forceful coercion and atrocity.

But this was not just the eighteenth-century
world: it was the real world of mankind from that point backward
into the total history of man as man.

That order—that old order of things—began
toppling during the recorded time of Le Comte de St. Germain. The
new world order that arose in its place is the present real world
of mankind in the general sense. We still have popes, yes, and
petty tyrants and even institutionalized tyrannical
governments—but all of us inhabit the new reality in which at least
lip service is given to the idea of the essential nobility of every
man—human dignity, equality, and rights to self-determination.

It was not that way before St. Germain.

I do not say with any sense of certainty
that his influence added one ounce to the weight of the present
reality. Indeed the record indicates that St. Germain was a friend
of royalty and sympathetic to their eighteenth-century plight with
the world rising up against them—but that

record is fragmentary at
best and totally obliterated in the overall tapestry woven by
recognized historians of the era. We do not know precisely whom the
mysterious figure operated upon, nor do we know his various
strategems, psychologies, modes of operation; we know only that the
man was there at virtually every trouble spot and at crucial
moments in the unfolding history of the time.

Most of what we get of St. Germain is the
record of astonishment that accompanied him wherever he went.

I believe that St. Germain was of the order
of things celestial. And let us now define things celestial as the
full range of all impossibilities of human experience as we
commonly identify those today.

In the order of things
celestial time is a mere convenience of human perception—which is
to say that both past and future are present now; space is that
theater into which all of physical existence swirls in patterns
only now and then perceptible by our sensory probes; existence
itself is a matter of infinite possibility unbounded and
unconditioned by
anything
imaginable to the human mind.

Things celestial constitute all of man's
impossibilities.

Got that? If so then you are now ready to
travel with me into the longest night of my life. Time, you know,
is always relative. And it can stand still.

Chapter Twenty-Four: Transported

Caves come China, eh? Okay. We'd see about
that.

Right now I wanted to know where the money
was coming from, so I called a friend in Switzerland who loves to
play with computers. He's on the faculty of the Center for
Strategic Studies in Berne, an internationally respected scholar,
it would damage him to mention his name here, so let's just call
him Sam. Sam is the most ingenious computer hacker I have ever
come upon. Once, on a dare, he hacked in on a super security
Kremlin mainframe, accessing it by telephone through a Russian
embassy in the West, and got out of it undetected. Man's a genius.
I suspect also that he is a bit of a silicon psychic, but he won't
admit to that. I've done a bit of small-time hacking myself, but
nowhere in Sam's league.

I gave him the numbers of
the Swiss accounts that had been feeding Sloane, Sloane and
James—also several transaction codes for steerage—and he seemed as
happy as a kid on Christmas morning to work the problem for me,
even though the nine-hour time difference put my voice into his ear
in the middle of his night.

It could take a while even for Sam to crack
that money mystery but he promised to get right on it. Meanwhile I
had all the mystery a mind could handle boiling up all around me. I
decided I wanted some real-world objectivity to keep me anchored,
so I called Sergeant Alvarez and invited him to dinner. He sounded
a bit surprised by the invitation but quickly accepted. Then I
called Hai Tsu and told her to set another place for dinner.

She seemed a bit disturbed by that but gave
me no argument, responding simply, "Yes, Ash Shen. Name of guest,
please?"

I replied, "Alvarez. One
of the policemen who were here today. Any problem with
that?"

"No, Shen. What does Alvarez Sergeant
eat?"

I told her, "Anything that's free, probably.
Don't worry about it. He probably won't touch a bite, anyway."

Then I finished dressing
and sat down with the Sloane file to study the architectural
records of this castle beside the sea. Apparently there had been
several major additions and renovations over the years, numerous
small ones, but the original foundations had not been altered in
any way. The latest major renovation had occurred twenty years
earlier and involved also the addition of several sleeping suites
on the upper levels, including the one I now occupied, and the
conversion of a ballroom into the studio now used by
Francesca.

All in all the record was one of almost
continuous updating and upgrading, though the original structural
dimensions had remained more or less constant.

For what?

Tons of money had been
poured into the place, with tons more going for purely custodial
care.

For whose benefit?

The building abstracts
could not give me that answer, so I went out seeking it for myself.
I explored the entire joint from top to bottom and back to top
again. What I found was pretty much what I'd seen already, just
more of it. Ten suites nearly identical to mine but each one
reflecting a different personality, different clothing styles,
different cultural tastes—yet no sign of human habitation—that is,
no personal stamp, except in Francesca's suite; and she was so
clearly evident there, though absent at the moment, as to
accentuate the lack of the other suites. Know what I mean? Those
other suites were filled with clothing and various personal items
but they were like movie sets—stage dressing. I got no feeling
of
people
there.

I even invaded the
domestics' quarters. They were all busy in the kitchen so I let
myself into the small apartment and just nosed around. I saw small
in a relative sense, as compared to its surrounding space. But it
was really quite roomy, comfortably furnished, and there was every
evidence of people there. The three bedrooms now were small by any
yardstick—each contained only a single bed, a chair, a dressing
table, small chest of drawers, small closet —hardly more than a
cell in a convent—but the sitting room obviously shared by all was
outfitted for the usual modern animal comforts, including
television and VCR, hi-fi, racks of magazines, a small desk with
electric typewriter and electronic calculator; it did not look
like a movie set. Something was lacking there still, but I could
not put a finger to it.

I could not find a cellar though I did note
a door on the kitchen wall that could lead to one.