Lightpaths (42 page)

Jiro stood, growing swiftly larger in the firmament.

“
Deus absconditus ex machina
,” he said, waving and smiling as if at some wonderful joke. “Time to wake up from the nightmare of time, to go through to the other side. Someone’s waiting there for me. Adieu, adieu. Remember me, and re-cognize yourselves, in the very near future—”

Jiro disappeared in light, vanished into more than visible light, and in the flash Jhana saw:

Roger Cortland, tightly hemmed about by refractors, spindle-paths of light surging and spiking round him, a lambent knot of flickering fire dancing above his space-helmeted head, his eyes jittering fiercely in his head, then gone: knot, lightpaths, refractor, Roger—

Will/Lev standing up with Bliss in his arms. A deafening roar belching up from the Charybdis of Desire as it blows apart, vomiting up with a prodigious surging and spewing of waters huge chunks of the too greedily devoured Scylla of Fear. Simultaneous eruption of light into the whole of the habitat, thousands of lightpaths, thousands of knots of flickering fire over the heads of everyone, over Paul Larkin’s head and Marissa Correa’s head, over everyone in sphere, ag tori, industrial sector, over the heads of everyone in the crowd, over Lev’s head, Atsuko’s head, Aleister’s head, everyone’s eyes remming furiously in their skulls for the instant the light blasts into their minds, then Bliss coming to, kissing Will, the island blooming instantly with fertile foliage and flowers, stage magic, finale music soaring and applause pouring down as Bliss and Will go into their bows—

More than visible light shining into the minds of the dignitaries waiting to christen the
Swallowtail
on her maiden voyage, shining into the brains of those waiting to open the two new habitats, also into the heads of the soldiers and negotiators in the troopships rocketing up the well, lightpaths spiking everywhere, eyes remming fiercely one and all, knots of flame lambent like speedily twisting rainbow snakes, like cycling salmon circles and mandalas and Möbius strips and infinity skysigns over every brow—

Supernal light to the bow of Earth bending in straight lines, surging spiking shining down, this Earth from every side clasped in wings bright with a billion billion lightpath pinions, clear light striking into every mind in every land, treading DMNs and demons down, speaking in tongues of flame and in flickering eyes restoring what was lost at Babel—

The light gleamed an instant and was gone. In Lakshmi’s workshop, inside and outside the machine called VAJRA, the metapersonality that called itself Jiro, his trefoil-beaded medicine bundle with all its odd assortment of trinkets, and his spirit-guide statue as well—all had disappeared as fully as if they had never been.

* * * * * * *

Disappearing into the deep channel-tunnel between the worlds, Roger had the distinct impression that something like a man-sized mole-rat was excavating out the tunnel before him. A strange chantsong arose in his head in words he should not have understood, but did. Even in translation the chantsong would have been gibberish to him, were it not that in his mind it was accompanied by images that allowed him to translate it into a myth-language he was more familiar with—that of science. It played in his head until he began to understand that it was a cosmic mythos, a Story of the Seven Ages of the Universe. At times it seemed a weird amalgam of various theologies and cyclic big-bang theory—with some space-opera thrown in for good measure—but there was something deeper to it as well, and a haunting sense that he knew whose myth this was.

In the void of endings
—the chant sang out, and in his mind he saw a perfectly uniform universe without matter, just time and the enormous blank sheet of space with its potential for gravity.

—
the spore of beginnings bursts into spawn. The threads of spawn absorb the voidstuff and knit it into stars
— Spore and spawn and fruiting body of the First Age: Big Bang, superstrings, first generation stars.

Stars release spores, the spores burst into spawn, the threads of spawn absorb starstuff and knit it into worlds
— The second age, the matter of those stars blown off in bursts of explosions, gravity’s configuring of that new matter, the planets condensing from that process.

Worlds release spores, the spores burst into spawn, the threads of spawn absorb worldstuff and knit it into life
— The third age, the vulcanism of some of those planets spewing out early atmosphere, the proto-organics threading out and chaining up, the self-organizing life of the cell that eventually results.

Living things release spores, the spores burst into spawn, the threads of spawn absorb lifestuff and knit it into minds
— The fourth age: reproduction, the threading out of chromosomes, of DNA and RNA making evolution and the whole panoply of life possible, and eventually the knitting of all that into consciousness, self-awareness, mind.

Minds release spores, the spores burst into spawn, the threads of spawn absorb mindstuff and knit it into worldminds
—The fifth age, the age of code: ideas, bedding out into roads, trade, exchange, civilization, until such spawn comes to the brink of either mushrooming up into cataclysm, or knitting into worldmindfulness. Where humanity stood in its history, had stood for all of his life, Roger realized: at the end of the fifth age, too-clever creatures trying to navigate the perilous strait between weapons production on the one hand and its own reproduction on the other, the thick spawn of human civilization struggling to achieve its fruition in either harmony or disaster.

Worldminds release spores, the spores burst into spawn, the threads of spawn absorb worldmindstuff and knit it into starmind
— A prophecy of the future already seen, the sixth age: interstellar travel, galactic civilization, eventual starmindfulness, though what that last might mean Roger was not quite sure.

Starminds release spores, the spores burst into spawn, the threads of spawn absorb starmindstuff and knit it into universal mind
— The seventh age, intergalactic travel and civilization and at last universal mindfulness, the emptiness able to contain the fullness of everything.

Universal mind, the void of endings, the void that has taken all things into itself, releases the spore of beginnings, the fullness that pours all things out of itself
— The compassionate void perfect and uniform, as it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be, void without end amen, which in the exact moment of its perfection always forever releases the spore that bursts outward again into spawn. The interwoven snake swallowing its tail to be reborn. Men and universes dying, but compassion going on and on.

No sooner had he gotten some handle on this when the scene shifted. Something told him that the episode running in his mind was an old old story, a tale of shipwreck. A contact ship from a sixth age civilization—which on closer examination appeared to be made up of a sphere of overlapping angels—this craft it was that got into trouble beyond the edge of the solar system, beyond the Oort cloud. Something to do with a passage between a red giant star and a newly formed black hole out in deep space, but the upshot was that many of the crew had died, the ship was crippled and had eventually begun falling toward the sun. From diverse worlds had the surviving members of the fully myconeuralized crew come, some beautiful to human eyes, some ugly as demons—winged, naked, eusocial tunnelers-in-the-sky burrowing through space like mole-rats through desert.

Yet, for all their varied experience, that crew of many species couldn’t save their vessel. They could, if they chose, break apart what was left of their sphere and live here in orbit round this sun. Or they could try to find a world that looked as if it might some day harbor intelligent life, and attempt a spore crash on it. The consensus was for the latter.

The world they found, Roger saw, was Earth—but an Earth strangely different from the one he knew. The continents weren’t right, or in the right places. This episode, he realized, had to be older than he first thought.

In the attempt, most of the sphere of angels and demons burned up in Earth’s atmosphere, but the crew’s sacrifice, Roger saw, was still successful: they managed to seed the Earth with spores, which germinated and spawned and fruited. Those few crew-members that survived returned to space, where their wings could catch the sun and they might live out a long immortality of isolation. The loneliness and deprivation worked even on such minds as theirs, though, and some became deranged.

Roger saw in his mind a long time passing—eons—without the development of a proper myconeural associate for the mushroom that grew from the spores they brought to Earth. Incident radiation and corresponding mutation rates were higher outside a host. Throughout most of the world the fungus that had grown from the spore changed, evolved, became denatured into thousands and thousands of species. Only in a few shielded biomes—caves, particularly—did anything like the original strain survive. Even there, though, changes occurred and over time the pure strained died out nearly everywhere, leaving Earth a preterite planet, passed over by the angels of empathy, save for those few of the saving remnant that yet survived in the solar system and its immediate alternate space.

Abruptly Roger found himself out of the tunnel between worlds. Around him a universe opened, an anvil-shaped mountain floating in the void before him. Of course! Only in the cavern inside Caracamuni tepui did the pure strain survive. Larkin had said that, according to the inhabitants, the spawn of the mushroom they found in that cave inside the tepui ‘remembered’ how it got there—ten, maybe hundreds of millions of years before—and their myths claimed it came “from the sky”—

A pair of angels were rising to meet him. His laser-blade was dead, but he didn’t feel much like slashing them anyway, not anymore. Instead he just watched them coming. Now that he saw them more closely, he noticed that the wings were more shining than feathery, the white of reflection and glow—and that they seemed vastly intricate, on the smallest of scales, but also absolutely functional. His own livesuit was cumbersome and clunky by comparison, and it occurred to him that their functions—life support? locomotion?—might not be so divergent: the angelic glow might be force-field, the wings energy collectors. Yet still they looked more theological than technological.

—mysterious ways,
he heard one of the angels say (though he saw no lips move), the one whose “feathered” headdress and wings looked less like something out of the Bible than out of a Western.
Not so different after all. Maybe the soul is also a tool, a vajra thrown by the divine hand, to which it also returns.

The other nodded, then turned her flashing eyes and floating hair to face Roger. He had seen eyes like those before, but only in his most perplexing dreams.

You’ll have to go back, Roger Tsugio Cortland
, she said in his mind.

“Why?” Roger asked, speaking it and feeling inadequate somehow—like someone sounding out words in a world full of silent readers. “Because I slashed at you?”

The angel stared fixedly at him, reminding Roger of someone from Larkin’s video.

Why did you strike at us? Why did you want to persecute us?

“Because you’re history. From the past. We don’t need you anymore.”

The angel smiled.

We’re not from your past. We’re from your future. You need us more than ever—more than in all the millions of years angels have watched you.

A van of angels, bright and glinting, joined the pair and began to ensphere Roger and move him back toward the gap in the fabric of space-time through which he’d come.

“Please—one more thing,” Roger pleaded. The pair of angels gazed at him with their eyes shining like eternity. “I’ve got to know: Why do you care what happens to us?”

The somehow familiar angel smiled again.

To care is why we’re here. The image of the divine is imprinted in all things. The just person justices, the true angel angels. We do what we are. All humans are incarnate codes, words made flesh sharing fully in the same flesh message with all the best and all the worst of human beings throughout time—a message that is itself only a variant of the message shared by all living beings.

We share a great deal, Roger
, said the angel who looked vaguely like a Native American shaman.
I’m as guilty as you are. I forcibly shared my piece of the truth with the world, altered consciousnesses without permission for a brief instant. I imposed my will, in an attempt to assure their bliss. You suffered for that—you, who only intended the same, ultimately. Those who attempt that imposition chemically, though, always face the stiffer censure. Still, we’re much the same—both reminders that even the bright dreams of reason and life cannot ignore the grim nightmares of madness and death. Always we must strike a balance between the angel and the rat—complete the circle at least temporarily, so neither stands alone.

The way the angel smiled at him—so gentle yet so knowing—disturbed Roger profoundly. The two angels were so alike, like twins born into different worlds or on different timelines—even more, the same person, but male here and female there, dead here and alive there, staying here and going there.

You’re still trying to cast everything into the past, Roger Cortland
, said the other, as if reading his mind,
but the question is not Who were the angels or Who was Divinity Incarnate? but rather Who is that and Who will be that?—fully, again and again. Who is and who will be willing to forget self for the sake of other? We cannot give up caring so long as there still remain any who are endarkened, unmindful. This universe, and the plenum of all universes, can embody right mindfulness only when all in it also do so.

The van of angels surrounded him completely then and Roger had a final vision. It seemed he saw every mind in all the universes, each decision shedding photons but also generating a minuscule black hole, a subnano-singularity. On the other side of each of those tiny black holes, a nearly parallel universe branched off. The road
not
taken here
was
taken there. As he watched, Roger saw that the total number of universes in the cosmos was essentially infinite, but with this peculiarity: from within any given universe, only that particular universe was “real”—all the infinitude of others was at best only “virtual”. This appeared to be true for each and every one of the universes—but not, he noticed, for each and every inhabitant of all the universes. Larkin’s sister here/brother there angelic pair flickered through his head once again. Parallel lines could meet in the space of mind, and mind in fact seemed to be nothing less than these meetings, the membranous infinity of portals and gateways between universes, the entire plenum of universes, the compassionate void conserving possibility and information the way the universe he’d been born into conserved matter and energy. He seemed to stand inside a great spherical golden tree, boundless in its rooting and branching but also rooted and branching in him, truly center everywhere/circumference nowhere, a tree of light aswarm with the activity of bees, fireflies, flashes of moving light, a vast Arc of information and Hive of possibility, enormous plenum ArcHive, flashing infinite of Mind Thinking—