Lightpaths (32 page)

Passage embedded in RAT code:

For most of history human beings supported themselves on what they could take from the Earth. They never had to support it, never had to give back much. In the habitat the residents have to stay constantly mindful of what must and must not be done, or the world they’ve built could all come crashing down in an instant. The children who are raised in the habitat, even more so the children who are born there—they grow up with interdependence as part of their day-to-day life.

The residents’ recognition of interdependence is really only the first step. Ultimately, the citizens of the habitat are trying to correct an error that is at least as old as Plato. That error is the idea that the universe is really a duoverse, the world of dung we inhabit, temporal and material, and the world of diamond, eternal and immaterial, that is the habitation of the divine. Despite occasional excesses and sometimes sophomoric ideas, the residents of the habitat are striving to realize something of the unity of the universe: to be no more the hostages of the world as it appears to be—divided—but free, thinking subjects at one with the world as it truly is. They hope to efface whatever wall of flaming swords it is that keeps human beings out of paradise and paradise out of human beings. Diamond is dung and dung is diamond—all holy, to those who have the eyes to see it.

Roger’s troubles with angels had been growing steadily, leaking out of his dreams and into his daylight existence—enough to make him want to find out more about the contents of his nightly visitations, some rational explanation for them. He went personally to the Archives, for its data links gave Roger access not only to all the Archive holdings but also to virtually all Earth’s public and electronically-archived material as well.

Searching through the infosphere, he was surprised how much information he found on what might be called ancient human powered flight. He popped up holographic illustrations of the flying cherub wagon of Ezekiel, the flights or flight attempts of Daedalus and Icarus, of Pegasus, of Fama. Into his virtuality came the report (in Suetonius) of an actor who feathered his arms and tried to fly at a feast given by Nero—only to plunge to his death in the attempt.

Scanning further, he also came across the record of a reportedly successful flight by one Abu’l Kasim ’Abbas ibn Firnas, a Saracen of Andalusia whose flight supposedly took place in A.D. 876. Ibn Firnas, though, had apparently not communicated his flying secrets to his co-religionists: in A.D. 1008 the attempt at human-powered flight by one al-Djawhari ended in his death.

Then Roger found it. According to the chronicler William of Malmesbury, Eilmer, also a Brother of the Abbey at Malmesbury in England, “collecting the breeze on the summit of the tower, flew for more than the distance of a furlong. But, agitated by the violence of the wind and swirling of the air, as well as by the awareness of his own rashness, he fell, broke his legs, and was lame ever after. He used to say that the cause of his failure was his forgetting to put a tail on the back part.”

Roger ran a find-scan, but William of Malmesbury had nothing else to say of Eilmer, save for one cryptic reference relating to April, 1066: “A comet, a star foretelling, they say, change in kingdoms, appeared trailing its long and fiery tail across the sky. Wherefore a certain elderly monk of our monastery, Eilmer by name, bowed down with terror at the sight of the brilliant star and sagely cried, ‘Thou art come! A cause of grief to many a mother art thou come; I have seen thee before, but now I behold thee much more terrible, threatening to hurl destruction upon this land!’”

That was it—the full extent of historical reference to Eilmer of Malmesbury, proto-aviator, prescient predictor of the invasion of England by William the bastard duke of Normandy, later called “the Conqueror”. Fast-scanning through the following millennium’s worth of references, Roger noted that they were all more or less elaborate re-tellings of William of Malmesbury’s initial tale.

Roger found other references to the proto-history of human-powered flight—to DaVinci and Michelangelo and a thousand others who tried their wings before the successful gliders of the nineteenth century, before the Wrights’ initial machine-powered flight at Kitty Hawk. Most of the studies Roger examined eventually wound their ways to the advent of Paul MacReady’s Gossamer series, the vehicles with which the era of human-powered flight might be said to truly have begun—though the great blossoming of such flight had to await the appearance of the space colony with its juxtaposition of atmosphere and low gravity.

No matter what research tactic he tried, though, he could find no full-length movie, no trideo, no holomentary on Eilmer of Malmesbury—only fragmented artist’s renderings, brief re-enactments. Where was the source for the movie that ran in his dreams—in which the aged Eilmer was recruited by political forces in England to perfect his gliders, and they used those very mechanisms to help defeat William the Bastard’s forces at Hastings? No place. It was crazy, a film sent from an alternate universe by an angelic conspiracy—a movie from another reality which he seemed always already to have seen, the memory of a matinee experienced in a theatre in another dimension.

He hoped there might still exist an old movie or video in this reality, some obscure culture-shard that somehow all his computer searches were missing. But he hesitated, wondered. From his dream-movie, Roger felt he knew things he shouldn’t know, things not recorded in any historical source. The exact year of Eilmer’s flight, for instance: A.D. 1010. The exact construction of his flying apparatus: wings of thin, lightly waxed linen stretched over frames of light wooden splints and hollowed bone, four of them, two long wings (one for each arm, and each of these over two ells in length) and two short wings (one for each foot, and each of these an ell in length). Each and every wing surface was one ell broad as well, the long primary wings being secured to each other by a harness of strong light wood and thin iron, the two shorter secondary or foot wings secured by a smaller harness of similar design.

Where had he learned all that? How the hell did he know what an “ell” was? How did he know that William of Malmesbury was wrong about Eilmer’s rashness—that in fact Eilmer had gained the approval of Abbot Leofric for the building and testing of his apparatus, once he, Eilmer, had explained his visions of angels and flight to the abbot? How did he know that Eilmer’s essential mistake was that he had followed Aristotle’s incorrect dictum that “In winged creatures, the tail serves, like the ship’s rudder, to keep the flying thing in its course”?

Roger didn’t recall ever having read that passage in Aristotle—so how did he know that quote? How did he know that Eilmer had treated movement through the air according to the same principles as those that apply to movement through water? How did he know that, unaware of the faulty analogy between horizontal bird’s tail and vertical ship’s rudder (as well as being thoroughly ignorant of the role of the tail as “flap” and “pitch control”), Eilmer had deemed a tail unnecessary for straight-line flight? How was he supposed to know all this? Was he channeling the long-dead monk? Was he the monk’s reincarnation? Was he linking into some aspect of the collective unconscious the old psychoanalysts had never suspected? All that stuff was at least as crazy as some trans-dimensional angelic conspiracy.

Even worse was the vividness of some of the material he recalled, especially the dreams-within-dreams of angels lecturing him/Eilmer on aerodynamics. He had dreamed within his dream that he was standing in a vast windswept field while, high above him, an angel soared and hovered, flapping its wings not at all. Nearer the ground, every kind of large soaring bird—hundreds of them—glided and drifted upon the winds.

“See the handiwork of Almighty God in the shape of my wings!” trumpeted the angel. “See it in the shape of the wings of all God’s flying creatures! This it is that allows us to fly!”

Then the winds and air itself suddenly seemed made of myriad tiny angels, moving along paths and currents like minnows in a stream. The great angel flew nearer to him and he/Eilmer saw more clearly what was taking place. Moving against the currents of tiny angels, the shape of the great angel’s wings was such that the tiny angels flowing over the top of the wing moved faster and farther apart, while the angels flowing beneath the wing tended to bunch up and crowd. In his dream within a dream, he/Eilmer concluded that the respective pressure of angels along the top and bottom surfaces of the wing was the means by which an upward force was maintained.

No mean feat of aerodynamic reasoning, for the Middle Ages, Roger thought. With a thousand years of hindsight, though, he could see that it was not only Aristotle but also the shape of the angel itself that had led him—Eilmer—to assume a flying man would need no tail.

Roger also knew (without knowing
how
he knew) that while Eilmer fever-dreamed in pain and infection after his disastrous laming flight, the angel had appeared to him again, carrying him up above a floor of clouds into a sky filled with peoples of every nation riding in what seemed to Eilmer fantastic vessels of the air, flying mechanisms powered by small windmills or roaring barrels mounted on the wings or bodies of their vessels. The shadows these vessels cast upon the cloudfloor were like those that would be cast by thousands of crosses sailing in the sky. In such apparently blessed craft, men and women and children moved on errands of business and pleasure toward places their forefathers had not even dreamt of. A setting sun tinted silver and gold the wings of these myriad craft and even in dreams within dreams he—Roger? Eilmer?—seemed to swoon in awe before the scene.

Abruptly the clouds parted and he saw in the twilight below a vast strange city sprawling like a dark mold on bread. Out of the sunset black fliers came in high and fast, raining down dark seeds that blossomed up in fire wherever they touched the ground until the city burned everywhere, the sun sank blood red in a sky of smoke.

Greatly perplexed by what the angel had shown him, he/Eilmer had begged some sign whether his flying apparatus, when perfected, would bring more peace and good to the world or more evil and war upon it. Night fell around the angel, who said nothing but only gestured toward an area in the sky where a star trailed a banner of ghostly fire like the hair of angels or the writhing of bright Medusan snakes. Abruptly the angel vanished, leaving him to fall down the sky endlessly toward a world that kept rushing up at him but upon which he never seemed to land or impact.

That last image would explain Eilmer’s trepidation at the appearance of Halley’s Comet, Roger realized—and, if he had, as a boy, perhaps read of Eilmer’s story or seen it somewhere, then the dream was easy enough to explain, for nothing in it was beyond the technology of Roger’s times or the experiences of his own life.

But what of the final appearance of the angel, the final dream-within-a-dream? That vision seemed to have taken place during the aged Eilmer’s recuperation, after he collapsed upon seeing the comet in the sky again during 1066. The angel of his visions had appeared to him a final time and taken him into the starry heavens themselves. As they rose through the air, fliers of ten thousand kinds ravaged the Earth below, some blasting sprawling cities with bursts of pure hellfire, scorching the ground black for years and sending invisible horrible death even to people going innocently about their work and play far away.

Angel and dreamer rose higher and higher, past strange fliers like pylons or obelisks, fliers with tiny wings or no wings at all, often without a soul aboard yet roaring swiftly skyward on pillars of fire by night and columns of cloud by day to place peculiar artifacts among the stars themselves or to wait for a chance to pounce with Satanic fury onto a world beautiful and shining like a holy sacrament, a world adream on a bed of stars—and turn that world’s dreams of life and beauty to nightmares of death and horror.

At the distance of the moon the dreamer and the angel came to a stop, invisible there among the strangely clad men who themselves drifted like wingless faceless angels between orbed cities floating in space. Winged fliers of unimaginable design rode out of the world on winds until they flew so high the winds ran out and on tongues of fire they continued their journeys to the floating cities and the mines of the moon.

At that point in the dream-within-a-dream the most disturbing thing always happened: Roger had the distinct impression that he was no longer looking out into a dreamed universe through Brother Eilmer’s eyes, but rather the eleventh-century monk was staring through Roger’s own eyes into the cislunar space of the twenty-first century. Time and space, past and future—all became one eternal mind-filled moment, all separation and distance and alienation lost.

Would the far-flung settlements in the whispering darkness remain in true peace or burst into strange fire, pierced by beams of killing light or crushed like eggs by the pressure of Luciferine blasts? Would the soul-crushing tyranny of Endless War keep the stars, like a blanket of pure snow, always out of reach, beyond barbed wire? Or would that tyranny turn even heaven itself into just another vaster concentration camp of falling bodies? Planets and stars and galaxies trudging pointlessly round and round the prison yard of the universe, to the pointed witness of almost-angelic astronauts bringing their barbed wire with them wherever they might go? In Roger’s dreams the answers were unknown, all unknown, except to know that everything balanced upon a moment which was all moments and a decision which was all decisions.

The angel always turned to him then, its eyes vast islands of stars adrift in vaster seas of darkness, eyes expanding to become the whole of the sky, all skies, the only sky, eyes taking in everything like the undertow of eternity, eyes flashing dark with excess of bright, piercing through and through the pall of Death’s black peace until unearthly light burst forth in a van of angels winging about a hollow sphere, circling latitudes of shimmering ethereal creatures, flocking around him, carrying him away—