Dreams (18 page)

When we finally did it the biggest surprise was Who did it, followed in order by Why, How, and anything else you'd care to ask. Of course, some people were surprised that we did it at all, but that's another matter.

We finally settled the answer to the question that anyone with the sense to wonder about such things had been asking for centuries, if not millennia:
Are we alone?

And the answer—well, before we get to the answer, let's examine the question first, and kick around a handful of ideas. Come on, you have a few minutes to spare, haven't you? If you hadn't, you wouldn't have picked up this book or magazine or logged onto this website or wherever the heck you're reading these pages. Or screens, or pixels, or whatever.

If we treated the thing like some high school debate we'd have started out with something like,
Resolved, that there are other species than humankind in the universe, who are intelligent, civilized, and technologically advanced.

The argument proffered by the affirmative side would be essentially mathematical. The scratchy-voiced boy in the ill-fitting hounds-tooth jacket would say, "We know that there are billions of stars in our galaxy. We know that there are billions of galaxies in the known universe. And beyond that we can only speculate upon the possibilities of other universes in other dimensions. There are trillions, quadrillions of stars. And we are learning that most stars have planets circling them. The number of worlds upon which life may exist is therefore not only huge, it's gigantic—titanic—incalculable—mind-boggling. If only one planet out of a thousand—a million—pick your number—has life on it, and only one such planet out of a million that has life, achieves intelligence and technology—it's inevitable that there will be huge numbers of technologically advanced civilizations."

Thus would argue the debater taking the affirmative side.

The debater taking the negative—let's imagine an attractive young lady garbed in a short-sleeved sweater and modish skirt—would say something like this, "All of those numbers of stars and galaxies and dimensions and other ideas out of a science fiction television series are very impressive. But if the universe is really teeming with little green men and purple octopus people and intelligent rose-bushes and all the other weird races that those writers dream up, then
Where is everybody?
Why hasn't the proverbial flying saucer ever landed on the White House lawn? As the great Dr. Carl Sagan once said, building upon the argument of the philosopher David Hume, 'Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence,' and the evidence for life anywhere but here on Earth is simply absent."

And the kids would resume their seats and make eye contact with each other while the judges conferred and eventually one team would go home with a genuine simulated gold loving cup and the other team would go home with a bucket of sour grapes.

That is, until we did it.

"We" being, actually, a self-styled psychic who used the professional name of Madame Olga. She lived in a modest home on Marwood Drive in Arcata, California, a onetime logging town in the northern end of that state. Once a thriving logging community, Arcata now sustains itself as the home of Humboldt State University and the center of a large and prosperous agricultural community, the chief crop of which is cannabis sativa.

Now, about Madame Olga.

Olga was her name. Really. Olga Smith, believe it or not. She had started life in Wheaton, Illinois, a conservative community whose customs and values bear a greater resemblance to those of the Bible Belt several hundred miles to the south than to those of Chicago, the sprawling, brawling, brilliant city a few miles to the east.

One of some seven children of assorted genders and temperaments in the Smith family, Olga had taken leave of her relatives and her home town at the earliest available opportunity. She was able to hitch-hike to the West Coast, spent time in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Seattle, and both Vancouvers before a friendly middle-aged marijuana farmer gave her a ride in his ancient Toyota Forerunner, planted an avuncular smooch on her pretty cheek, and let her out on the main street of Arcata.

Olga might not have liked the straight-laced lifestyle of Wheaton, Illinois or the bustling big-city pace of Chicago or Los Angeles, but she was a sociable young woman who made friends easily. She soon had a job waiting tables in a café that catered mostly to college students, and a room in a pleasant Victorian home that had survived the exigencies of more than a century of fog, rain, occasional snowfall, and earthquakes of varying degrees of severity.

Once she'd established California residency she enrolled at Humboldt State, trying out a variety of courses that appealed to her intelligent mind and her variegated interests. She had always been interested in off-beat theories and unconventional philosophies, and wound up absorbing any number of books on reincarnation, Tarot, palm reading, automatic writing, the
I Ching
, Theosophy, telepathy, human auras and the Akashic Records.

Before long she was conducting informal seminars of her own on these esoteric subjects. Friends would assemble in her rented room in the evening and ask her to deliver lectures. Olga found herself concentrating more intensely on these topics of her personal quest than the subjects she was officially studying at Humboldt State.

One thing that her parents had taught, and that Olga did absorb, was the idea that one finished what one started. The Smiths—the Wheaton Smiths—weren't quitters and they didn't like quitters and they taught their children not to be quitters.

So Olga slogged on through four not-unpleasant years in the classroom while waiting tables in the afternoon and conducting her own unofficial classes in the evening. It was a busy life, but a good one. She managed to earn a bachelor's degree with a major in art. Her grades were good but definitely unspectacular. Her senior advisor, a kind-hearted former editorial cartoonist for the San Francisco
Chronicle
who had been downsized into involuntary retirement and semi-rustication, invited her in for a farewell conference.

"You have some talent," Olga was told. "A nice sense of composition, and your renderings are clear. But commercial art is an overcrowded field and the odds against your achieving success are daunting."

Olga thanked her adviser and took her leave. And then she set up in business for herself. Not as an artist, although she still kept sketch pads handy and drew to amuse herself.

She was not a pretentious person. At first she was plain Olga Smith, and she conducted study groups in various esoteric doctrines. She was an interesting lecturer as well as a pleasant and personable individual, and people were quite willing to pay modest tuition fees to enroll in her informal academy.

She also offered personal sessions in such specialized subjects as interested her students. She could read Tarot cards or palms with equal facility. She yielded to suggestions that she obtain a crystal ball as an aid to concentration. For this purpose she consulted an online catalog and selected an inexpensive battery-powered, self-illuminating snow globe that purported to show a scene of the Primal Atom exploding to give birth to the entire sidereal universe. Olga thought it looked like a miniaturized fireworks display, but she liked it.

How plain Olga Smith became Madame Olga isn't much of a story, either. Students—now they were more like clients—started calling her Madame. They seemed to expect her to dress in exotic robes, too, and being an accommodating soul she found a fabric store in town, bought some prints with an astronomical theme, apparently intended for use as children's bedspreads, and made herself a variety of robes and gowns. She even discovered a website that purported to show how to knot a turban and practiced until she was actually quite good at it.

She never made any special claims and she didn't advertise in the local weekly. A reporter for that publication, the Arcata
Argus,
had been a classmate of hers at Humboldt State. The ex-classmate, one Robyn Marten, familiarly known as Birdie, came by Olga's new home one day—Olga had moved from her single rented room into a small house—and suggested doing a feature story for the
Argus
. Olga yielded to some friendly persuasion and the next week's edition of the
Argus
ran a flattering article on Arcata's most famous (and only) psychic. There were even a couple of photos of Olga in her robe and turban, looking suitably exotic and yet very attractive.

Some quirk caused an internet news service to pick up the story, and one of Olga's siblings still living with Mom and Dad in Wheaton, Illinois, stumbled over it while web-browsing. This was Olga's younger brother, Milton, an inveterate role-playing gamer. He emailed Olga and asked if she was all right and if he could come and live with her as soon as he was of age. She wrote back that she was doing just fine and Milton could come and use her spare room any time he wanted.

By this time you have inferred that Olga had a strong individualistic streak. This applied to many aspects of her life including her taste in music. Her friends were mostly divided into three or four groups when it came to music. There were the rockers, who were looked down upon by the jazz buffs, who were looked down upon by the classical music lovers. That's three, isn't it? Well, the fourth group was the people who just weren't very interested, and as the Romans used to say,
De gustibus non est disputandum,
loosely translated as "Whatever turns you on," and if life on this planet teaches us anything, it's that there's no arguing with that idea.

If you had to put Olga in one of those three or four groups, she would probably fit in best with the classics-lovers. But of course those were divided as to their favorite era, style, and composer. They were a sizable and eclectic crowd and various among them championed Mozart, Beethoven, Bach—and Dmitri Shostakovitch and Philip Glass and Charles Ives and—well, you get the point.

Olga Smith—Madame Olga—used to play recorded music ever so softly during her psychic sessions. And her chief favorite was the Danish-born organist and composer of music for keyboard and voice, Dietrich Buxtehude. Asked what had first attracted her to Herr Buxtehude she quite candidly admitted that it was his interesting name. She'd never heard of a Buxtehude before, she had no idea what the word meant—if anything—but her curiosity had been piqued. She sought out a sampling of his works and decided that, funny name or no, this was the composer for her.

She even researched Buxtehude and discovered that—at least according to musical folklore—the young Johann Sebastian Bach had walked several hundred miles to study organ technique with the master, Dietrich Buxtehude.

Our Olga may or may not have been a phony. After all, what percentage of self-styled psychics, palm readers, crystal gazers, trance mediums, tea-leaf interpreters, mind readers, or spirit channelers do you think actually have supernatural powers? Maybe, oh, zero?

But Olga used to sit in front of that crystal ball with the explosion of the Primal Atom eternally taking place in its center, darken the room, set a couple of sticks of incense going, turn on some Buxtehude music—her very favorite piece was the
Suite for Harpsichord in G Minor
—and go into a trance. There are such things as trances, and you don't have to believe in supernatural forces to believe in trances, or even to have a trance experience.

When the stars are right, or whatever.

And sometimes Olga would feel herself slowly sinking into a state that was neither conscious nor unconscious, as we usually think of those conditions. George Ivanovich Gurdjieff—genius or scoundrel or both, this is not the place to debate that very colorful oddball—would have loved to hear about this. Sometimes Olga would simply fall asleep, and have strange dreams of drifting in formless realms of color and sound, herself bodiless, her reality utterly bereft of physical objects. Sometimes she would feel that she had entered that crystal ball and become one with the Primal Atom and consequently one with the entire sidereal universe.

She would describe these experiences to her closest friends, to her onetime classmate, Birdie, who wrote for the Arcata
Argus,
or to her brother, Milton, who by now had followed his sister's example and made his way to the West Coast and was happily settled in her spare room, waiting out a residency requirement before enrolling at Humboldt State. Sometimes Olga would describe her dreams to her boyfriend.

Oh, about Olga's boyfriend. His name was Walter Macintosh and he sometimes claimed that the computer of the same name was so-called in recognition of his having given the basic design to the Apple Computer Corporation in the interest of promoting the public good. Nobody believed him.

Now here is where the Law comes into the story. Surely you've been wondering why this story is called "The Law." Your patience is appreciated, and it is about to be rewarded. The Law to which the title refers is the famous Law of Unintended Consequences.

You know, Henry Ford invents the Model T to furnish cheap, reliable transportation for the American family. And in order to get very, very rich, of course. Well, he succeeded at both. But he also provided a means for young swains and the objects of their affections to get out from under the watchful eyes of Mama and Papa and go off by themselves, thereby sparking the greatest change in courting rituals in several centuries and leading, in due course, to the Sexual Revolution.

Law of Unintended Consequences, you see?

Ready for another one?

Okay. At the height of the Cold War some geniuses in the Pentagon and their colleagues in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and Palo Alto, California, get worried about staying in touch under nasty conditions such as a nuclear attack. They invent something called ARPANet or DARPANet—never mind those crazy acronyms—which evolves into the Internet.

Next thing you know—well, actually it took several decades—you've got people buying and selling things from their desktop computers, billions of emails zipping around the globe at every hour of the day and night, tens of thousands of brick-and-mortar stores going out of business, the postal service yanking your corner mailbox out by the roots because nobody uses it any more, and—well, you see?