In War Times (40 page)

She smiled at him. He looped her hair, with its still-purple streaks, behind her ear and kissed her.

Bette’s new zendo was in a hill-perched rambler in Manoa, the University District. Bette parked the car down the block. Sam followed her, barely awake, as they climbed the stairs to the main level of the house, which had been remodeled into one large room.

In darkness and in silence, those who “sat” assembled in the zendo and, well, sat. The room was full of people silently sitting. In fact, it was about the most profoundly silent place he’d ever been in.

As quietly as possible, he settled next to Bette on one of the zabutons they’d grabbed from the cubbies in the hallway. She used the lotus position and he the half-lotus, just situating one foot on the opposite thigh. “It’s the straight back that matters,” she’d told him. “You can do this in a chair as long as you keep your back straight.”

He didn’t close his eyes, either, but just lowered his eyelids as she’d prescribed. And paid attention to his breathing, giving each breath a number.

Immediately he found that the mental space between each number seemed to last an infinity. Thoughts grew thick as a forest, each with many branches, and he followed that thought until he realized that he’d forgotten to count and started again…
one
…

The absolute, attention-filled silence was strangely energizing. A car drove past the zendo; solitary bird calls gathered others until they formed cascades of sound. He felt his attention drifting upward, until he seemed to hover above his body…
Whoops—yet another thought…one
…

He might never make it past one…
Damn, that was another thought!…One
…

A deep gong reverberated and around him the sitters stirred, stretching, picking up their zabutons.

“Like it?” asked Bette.

“Definitely interesting.”

And then—

Was that Hadntz across the room?

He felt that rush of thinking a stranger might be someone he knew, and the scrambling to match old mental pictures. It had been ten years, and she was a master of disguises. This woman’s hair was white. What made him think it might be Hadntz? Her large, dark eyes? Simply the way she moved as she bent to pick up her zabuton?

Dawn, which came quickly here, flooded the room and she met his eyes,
yes
.

He tried to control his spin of disorientation. The war, Keenan’s loss, the wave of darkness returned—all the things he’d worked so hard to mitigate. “Did you know she’d be here?” he asked Bette.

“No,” she whispered, a sad, resigned look in her eyes.

Hadntz walked over to meet them. “The two of you together. Perfect.”

“I haven’t seen you in a long time,” said Sam. Apart from his surprise, he was very apprehensive.

“No,” she said.

Her long hair, though silvery white, was still vibrant and curled wildly. Her face was tan and weathered, with deep lines. She wore loose, black cotton pants and a plain white T-shirt. Sam could not read the look in her eyes, but then, he never had been able to.

There was a moment of quiet, when none of them said anything.

Then Hadntz said, “This is not a coincidence. I planned to meet you here. Come, let’s go for coffee.”

Numb, Sam stashed his zabuton in a cubbyhole; the two women did the same. Bette appeared to be as shocked as Sam.

Out on the street, with its mixture of little shops, cheap restaurants that catered to students, and older, shabby houses brightened by potted plants and friendly chairs on porches, Sam began to feel more normal. He could breathe again.

He realized that he did not welcome this impingement of Hadntz, and all that her presence implied, into his life.

They followed her into a Vietnamese pastry shop. Sitting at a Formica table on aluminum tubular chairs while students lined up for coffee and pastries at a window outside, they all ordered Bette’s favorite, sweet, strong, iced Vietnamese coffee.

The three of them had never been together before.

Or had they, in some configuration of time he no longer recalled?

Hadntz seemed more hesitant than she had ever seemed before, as if doubt had eroded her previous certitude. “I was hoping I would see you here. I mean…” She searched for words and shrugged. “We need a new vocabulary for concepts of time and space.”

“It’s like bebop.” Where scales intermingled, with explosive results.
Two coinciding events, which come from their own pasts, share a few beats of unison, and then diverge into their own futures
.

“As I said before, jazz gives you a supple mind. I am a professor of physics at the University of Hawaii. Somewhen, anyway.” An ironic smile crossed her face, then faded. “Here-now? Nowhere? Anyway, we have work to do.”

“What kind of work?”

“All right. I actually live in…otherwhen.” Another quick smile. “You would think that with speaking as many languages as I do I could think of a good term for this.” She picked up her strong iced coffee and took a long swallow. “I am only here for a short interval. So here is my news: In otherwhen, I have finally developed a device for averaging the future potentials any particular instant holds.”

Sam glanced at Bette. She was regarding Hadntz with utter seriousness.

Hadntz continued. “The probabilities of consciousness are manifold, infinite. Each instant of time, as we know it, is composed of uncountable units of consciousness. You might call them quanta of consciousness; they are measurable and discrete and composed of infinite layers which we are only beginning, in otherwhen, to be able to sense, to measure, to
use
, as here you are using nuclear energy to generate electricity. Just as we were able to delve into the atom when our sensing tools were refined, we are beginning to be able to understand the roots of human consciousness in all of its plasticity. So many variables feed any instant of sensory awareness! The outer and inner world meet in what I can only describe as an exquisite dance.”

Sam relaxed into her poetry, realizing that she was trying to describe the indescribable. He imagined, in her otherwhen, a College of Consciousness Studies of which she was the head.

“Intent, desire, and will emerge from our cellular roots. We now know, in the timestream in which I live, how to describe these systems hormonally, electrically, biochemically. We can actually
see
which parts of our brains are used in various and very specific tasks and thoughts. It’s all quite astonishing. For instance, people can actually laugh themselves to death if the wrong part of the brain is stimulated.

“We have sciences which strive to understand social patterns, social will, happiness, fear, love, hate. We are finally learning what the physics of
life
are. Our individual minds filter
this
moment”—she raised her hands in a graceful gesture that took in the entire room, the mountains, the universe—“down to a specific set of describable phenomena through unconscious, precise biological processes which do not present the information gathered to the conscious mind. Consciousness is a tool that preserves the organism. In the same way, histories at some point become either concrete or discarded. For instance, I might think about getting up to fetch another cup of coffee, and then discard that thought for reasons I might not understand at all, reasons that are fed by underlying phenomena deep beneath my conscious mind. We are able to pinpoint these instants using various technologies, and thereby study the processes. In the same way, we are able to treat the world as one organism, and to pinpoint tipping points in history. They are often small, seemingly inconsequential. Our computers can map these possibilities.”

“The computers must be huge,” said Sam.

“No. They are actually very, very small. But they are widely distributed.”

Sam thought immediately of the HD4. From the startled look on Bette’s face, he knew she was too. Was the HD4 simply so fine, so small, that what he had now was an unimaginably huge number of them?

“They are in constant communication, like a single organism. I know, for instance, that there will be very few times when I will be able to meet you in this way.”

“So you know everything that is going to happen?”

“No, of course not. But we do understand what makes a time well and what makes a time sick, if you want to use the analogy of a body. We are subject to fewer illnesses; we understand what makes the human psyche go to war. It was a pretty unanimous decision for us to decide that war is not good for humans, that it only leads to more and more war. Death, tragedy, unhappiness, revenge. Is there another trajectory, one that leads to more and more health? A social environment in which people, no matter what their differences, have the ability to respect one another? More and more happiness, satisfaction, the creation of an environment in which all of our creativity and possibilities can bloom? You might think that this sounds like a rather bland sort of place, but, as Jesus said, consider the flowers of the field.”

“The lilies,” interjected Bette. “They’re the lilies of the field.”

“Yes. Consider biological reality in all of its complexity and beauty. We are the only species that systematically kills others of its kind. This propensity has become a serious design flaw. There is a way in which we are able to make another human being invisible, to deny that their suffering is real. We convince ourselves that their suffering is necessary for the survival of ourselves and our children.”

Her voice was low, persuasive. Her Eastern European accent did not seem out of place in this many-accented environment. Sam was dimly aware that numerous philosophical conversations were taking place around them, and that the college students, if they happened to overhear, would not think that anything unusual was taking place.

Bette’s face had lost the hard-won happiness she had lately effused. She lit a cigarette with a nervous movement. He knew that movement, that look. She was making decisions, becoming Bette of Wartime, in a war that hadn’t ended, not really. He also knew what she was thinking—that she in particular had made herself hard, paradoxically, to the suffering of others in the process of becoming happy.

“Bette,” he interrupted, “happiness is not necessarily selfish.”

“Mine is.”

Hadntz said, “She is right, Sam. And I am actually here to give you information so terrible that it is almost impossible to understand.”

Sam looked away from both of them. The students at the other tables were all young, filled with life. A young Korean man spoke earnestly to an audience that included a Thai woman, an African woman, and a Hawaiian man. The clatter of the coffee shop, the shouted orders, the smell of exotic pastries and potent espresso defined this present, along with his foreboding.

He looked back at her. “What is it, Eliani?”

She paled, and seemed to find it difficult to speak, which surprised him. Then she surged into it, her words coming rapidly.

“In this when, which is the when to which I seem to be most deeply attached emotionally, there is not much future. Relatively speaking. In all probability, this when will reach nuclear winter within the next hundred years or less. The technology of nuclear weapons will proliferate until someone—it doesn’t much matter who or why—releases them. Like a deadly bloom. This event could well lead to the cessation of
all
whens. We have determined,” she said quietly, “that
here
is where the problem lies, in your timestream. Like the root of a cancer, when the cell mutates.
This
is the point. This, and the next several years, and an event we have yet to define, but which could rocket through many whens, changing them profoundly. Just as life appeared, it can also disappear.”

“What can we do?” asked Bette quickly.

“I’m not entirely sure,” she said, surprising Sam immensely. “But I keep thinking of time and consciousness in terms of flowers, seeds, and potential.”

“So we have to cross-pollinate?” asked Bette.

“Sort of. Yes. But we need to gather and disseminate more information. I see it as a process, with no particular end. I only feel the need to intervene, as one must when a child is suffering and you have the means to relieve them.”

“What if this does—work?” asked Sam. “
Does
something, anything—how could I…deliberately initiate changes? How could anyone possibly make such choices?”

“It would not be just your choice. It would be the choice of many. Sensed deeply, biologically, in an evolutionary sense. We are still evolving, all the time, adapting to what is happening. This is a new adaptation to a new circumstance—that of the possibility of complete annihilation.

“Or—this might be a more useful analogy for you. Think of these seminal events as V-1 rockets. And think of us—yourselves, me, Wink—as the M-9 Director. We each have different functions in the workings of this antidisaster mechanism. As it becomes more refined, we hope that we can accurately pinpoint the key events and simply vaporize them, nullify them, shoot them out of the air, out of the realm of possibilities. I left you, in London, with the plans for the M-15, and it has evolved, here, into the M-17. I think you call it HD4. The next generation, the M-25, is presently collecting information at a speed which is getting closer, all the time, to the speed of light.”

Sam was not completely happy with this news.

“Wink will be your contact in the future. We are living in something that might be described as a woven piece of music. There are resonances, harmonics, intersections of rhythm and melody, overtones that spread like ripples in a pond. It has unimaginable complexity. We are feeling out the new dynamics through time, improvising when necessary. Evolving into a new biological paradigm.”

“Like bebop,” said Sam.

“Whatever you need to think. Something previously unknown in history, but that can change what we think of as “the past,” modify it with a corrective current. Something like the telescope, the microscope, the printing press, technologies that open up the mysteries of this medium in which we live.”

“And move, and have our being,” said Bette. She smiled. “I’m an Episcopalian, and they live and move and have their being in God. That was one of the things I loved saying when I was a kid. It made everything so…immediate. Intense. So whatever God is, this is it. This is God. This is satori.”