Life to Life: Ashton Ford, Psychic Detective (22 page)

The point of it all, in
the police mind, is that McSweeney and Milhaul had been engaged in
an extortion plot with Annie the victim. She fought back, but in a
method not sanctioned by law.

I had other stuff—all too vague and
uncertain to bring out at this point—involving other people in
Annie's past.

I will give you just this
one little morsel, as a promise of things to come:

Annie's second husband, Donald Huntzermann,
had several children from an earlier marriage, all of whom were
apparently quite bitter about his marriage to young Ann Mathison.
One of these was a daughter, Mildred. Mildred had married a man
named Samuel Carver—and that marriage produced a son, David, who
grew up to become a cop.

There you go.

Frankly, I did not know
where to go with this damned case. It was almost a total confusion
in my mind. Where there was not confusion, there was bafflement.
What the
hell
was
going down, here?

Oh, I had a
sensing
, sure, a
feeling.
But you don't
just let yourself leap off to an insane conclusion, not if you can
help it. I was trying my damnedest to help it. But I did not know
where to go for that help.

So I went back to the Center of Light, which
was deserted, and I sat in the gazebo for a while studying my
notes on the tutorial that had come down during my earlier
visit.

Think I told you that I
used to do some work in cryptography. Analytical cryptography
demands a pretty good understanding of semantics. In logic,
semantics is a study of the relation between signs and symbols and
their meanings. In linguistics, it is a study of the meanings of
speech forms, and particularly with regard to the evolution of
language.

Cryptography today, as it
is practiced by the various world governments, is largely done by
machine. But a lot of that stuff is doubly encoded. You break a
code with your machinery, for example, and get a message that
reads, "The cock crows thrice." So what the hell does that mean?
This is where the analyst comes in, and he'd better have a good
semantic feel for language and lingual symbology.

Semantic decipherment
involves quite a bit more than just scrambling words around to find
the meaning of a phrase. I mean, don't go in to your boss and tell
him that the solution to the cipher is "the crows have three
cocks." You would be closer to the truth of this particular cipher
if you began to wonder who was disclaiming whom—or if the message
really had something to do with the passage of three
sunrises—perhaps an instruction to take some action at the third
sunrise. But you have to know the context.

I did not pick that
example from thin air. I did solve an actual cipher a few years
back that was a play on the New Testament story of Jesus before the
betrayal at Gethsemane when he foretold that Peter would deny him
"thrice" before the cock crowed. You try to consider the words as
elements that play against each other and toward each other. In my
little example, above, the fully deciphered message could be
ordering a terrorist attack upon some preselected Christian target
in the Mideast. But you do consider the context.

Context is all-important,
in fact. If the
cock crows
double cipher had been intercepted on its way to
a Russian sub operating beneath the polar ice, the symbology could
be very puzzling. I would have to pull the file on that Russian
skipper and try to understand why he'd been doubled with that
particular phrase instead of a hammer striking an anvil or
something to do with the victory of the working class.

So I knew that I was
working out of my own depth with this message from another world—if
that, indeed, is what it was. I had not yet decided what the hell
it was or that it meant anything beyond warmed-over bromides served
up purely for my bedazzlement. But I had to reach for something
and that was all I had, at the moment.

So I took "peril precedes peace" and read
that as simply a setup, a prefacing statement, like "be
careful."

Then we had "sorrow accompanies joy." That
could simply mean that you pay for what you get: be prepared to
pay.

Next was "strangers become lovers" and
"lovers become strangers." Nothing is forever, all is in flux, be
prepared to drop old alliances and forge new ones.

How about "the virgin lusts while the satyr
rests?" There's a goodie. I passed, for the moment.

"Authority corrupts
compassion" means exactly what it says. Someone—need we ask who?—
is in for a hard time with the people in charge of
justice.

"Dispersion feeds reversion." That's almost
a homily. It's like the major fear of ethnic groups who want to
preserve their culture. Or, perhaps more in context, you take a
band of savages and make Christians of them. Long as you keep them
all together, they'll probably remain good Christians. It's like
peer support. Let them start drifting away, though—dispersing—and
they will go back to their old habits of eating the
missionaries.

"Community bests disunity" could mean about
the same thing except for the choice of "bests" instead of "beats."
We get here a feeling of disunity being overthrown by an organized
attempt to bring everybody together. Read these two together as a
single statement for the best understanding.

The next two are
definitely a pair; they even rhyme. "Flesh decays when the spirit
weeps; Life delays what the devil reaps." This reminded me of a
line from the eighteenth-century poet, Christopher Smart: "For he
counteracts the Devil, who is Death, by brisking about the life."
But I am reserving this one, too, because something biblical is at
the tip of my tongue and won't get on.

The rest of it seemed fairly obvious, but I
still decided I was wasting my time on this stuff. I simply did not
have the deep context, nor even an understanding of what the
tutorials in general were supposed to do. Janulski had hinted that
they were some sort of heavenly revelation fraught with
significance. I withheld judgment on that idea, too. I would have
loved to see an official translation. But that was not in the
cards, either, because the whole place was locked up tight and a
notice on the bulletin board by the gazebo announced the
cancellation of all scheduled activities until further notice.

So I put the notes away and broke into the
joint.

And I very quickly wished that I had not
done that.

The general offices were in quiet bedlam. If
that sounds like a contradiction of terms then you just do not
understand how loud quiet can get in the spirit world.

A séance or whatever was
in progress in the reception area. I guess they were doing it there
because it was the only room large enough to contain it. Twelve
people were scattered about on leather couches and chairs, each a
channel, and microphones had been carefully placed to record each
precious whisper.

Except that you really
cannot call that sound whispering. Sibilant, yes, but harshly so,
and all mixed together from the twelve mouths all moving at once
yet integrated somehow so that no two spoke at precisely the same
moment. But the flow—the
flow
—like water over a dam was
unbroken, an endless phonetic sigh emanating from twelve separate
sources to produce a single flow. But it did not sound like a flow.
It sounded like bedlam, and it was bedlam.

Other people were up and
moving hurriedly about through all that, to and fro between the
other offices and along the corridor to an inner courtyard, like
the seemingly confused frenzy of ants at a picnic, moving files and
records outside and dumping them in a common pile. Must have been
twenty people in all, counting the séance mediums, and Bruce
Janulski was one of those on the move.

He walked past me twice without
acknowledging my presence—without even seeing me, I believe. I
thought about putting an arm on him his second time through but
decided against it. He was like a man in trance, moving with a
single purpose.

None of them noticed me, except to step
around me when I got in the way. I saw Ted, the medium, except he
was not mediuming at the moment—he was one of the ants—and I
recognized one of the office ladies, but I was really all alone
with myself in that nuthouse.

So I wandered on through
to the courtyard and checked out the growing pile of papas. Hell,
it looked like financial records, computer printouts of membership
rolls or something, ream after ream of writings—probably
tutorials—stacks of corres-pondence, inventories—anything and
everything relating to the activities of this
organization.

These people were getting ready for a
bonfire!

I swiped a few pages from a stack of
tutorials and went on through to the other side of the complex,
into the auditorium which officially served as the church
facility.

There was nobody in there but I was
following a hunch, went on to the room behind the stage.

Annie was "there," yeah. Naked, standing in
the same shaft of light, arms upraised in that same pose.

But she was not the only one.

The other three spotights
were shining, too, and their beams were occupied by three more
dazzlingly naked females.

One of those was the busty Rachel who had
channeled for me earlier. The big tits were not her only
attributes, let me tell you.

I did not recognize the other two—but of
course I had never seen them in that particular light before, so
maybe...

They were all sizzling.

I just stood there frozen for maybe thirty
seconds.

And then Annie very slowly abandoned her
pose and turned to look at me. Our eyes joined and I swear
something in me fused to something in her.

She gave me a beatific smile and said to me,
"I knew you'd come."

I think I went a little crazy there, then,
because the next really coherent memory I have of that experience
finds me standing naked, also; the beams have merged into a single
shaft of light and we all share it; my arms are raised in that same
pose with all the girls and I am at the center; their bodies are
gripping mine like a hot dog bun surrounding a wiener; and that,
pal, was the very end of coherence.

Chapter Twenty-Seven: A Relative
Objectivity

I was falling through a
shaft of light that seemed endless. I did some skydiving once and
that is the closest experience I can relate it to—the freefall
stage—but this was freefall with no restricting medium, like
falling through a vacuum, absolute zero gravity; and it was
pleasant, very pleasant. Annie and I were embracing. I adored her
and she adored me; the surge of complementing emotions was almost
overpowering, like I wanted to laugh and cry all at once. Yet it
was not like hysteria; it was sweet and good. I was peakingly aware
but the peak never decayed; it just hung there, sharp and
wonderful. I could feel her heart beating against my chest and I
could feel her hair on my face and taste it and smell it; I was
stunningly aware of her flesh on my flesh, the soft little belly
warm against mine, legs restlessly intertwined, hands caressing
hands and faces and shoulders. But it was her eyes that were
absolutely tearing me up, eyes deeper than all the reaches of space
and pouring love from all those depths; and I knew for the first
time what love can really be; love is where it's at and what it is
and the reason for all the reasons.

"We shall meet again; we shall fall in
love."

At such a moment, I thought of that—and I
understood it and accepted it. We had met again and we were
falling, in love.

I understood something
about love, too, in that moment. It is an ever-seeking force, and
it seeks itself. At this moment it had found itself and I was
exultantly participating in that discovery.

But there was a problem. A problem, of
sorts. I was fully extended in all my dimensions, and sexuality is
one of those; my sexual extension was at infinite limit; immersed
in all that sweet and tender and understanding love, I was also at
the same moment an infinitely swollen penis shaking with the
frenzied need for union, and that was the problem. Recognition of
the problem added another dimension to my understanding of love;
love without sex is a postponement of love's fulfilling power, a
diversion or scattering of the force. It added also to my
understanding of sex without love; sex without love is the
consolation sought by the scattered pieces.

I said to Annie, "There is too much sex
without love because there is too much love without sex."

And Annie replied to me, almost whimpering
with sweet stress, "Yes, but please be patient with me. I am
trying."

She was trying, yes, but without notable
success. My sexual extension was about to burst.

We kept falling through nothingness and
Annie kept trying. Suddenly she stiffened against me, inhaled
sharply; said, "Ohhh. Yes. Ohhhhh."

And I really understood, then, what love
truly is.

I was in a very different place. Different
from what, I don't know; just different; no, very different. There
was no up or down, no side to side, no depth extension. Yet there
was no lack of any of that, either.

I puzzled about that for a moment and then I
realized that what was lacking was relativity. There was no
relativity.

There was an up but it was the same as down;
a side but the same as the other side; a depth but all was
depth.