Verdugo Dawn

by Blake Banner

“Which—in turn—are made of…?”

  I took a deep breath, raised my eyebrows and thought. “Well, there is a nucleus around which spin electrons and protons…”

  “Hah!” Olaf gave a great bark of a laugh. “You seek power and knowledge, yet you are completely ignorant of the very foundation stones and building blocks that make up not just the world in which you live, but your very body, and the mind you treasure so much!”

  I was startled by the intensity of his reaction.

  “Let me tell you, and listen with great care. An atom is a vacuum.”

  “A vacuum?”

  “A vacuum, at the center of which there is a nucleus, which is in turn made of quarks. But the size of that nucleus is an insignificant fraction of the size of the vacuum—so small as to be virtually nothing by comparison. And not only that, not only is it a microscopic fraction of the size of the vacuum, but occasionally it will wink out of existence altogether!”

  “That isn’t possible.”

  “And yet it is true. I shall tell you more. The electrons, the particles which whiz around the vacuum. They too are infinitesimally small by comparison with the vacuum around which they whiz. And they too occasionally wink in and out of existence. So we have this huge, absolute vacuum—huge in subatomic terms, you understand—with an insignificant nucleus which only exists sometimes, and insignificant particles spinning around it, that also exist only sometimes, and these are atoms, the building blocks of matter—rocks, massive trees, mountains… But there is more.”

  I was frowning, staring hard at Olaf. “More?”

  “Yes, more. What are these particles, which are, after all, the only solid—for want of a better word—bit of the atom, what are these solid bits made of?’

  I shook my head. “I have no idea. Energy?”

  Olaf laughed. “Energy! Wonderful word, meaning nothing. Energy. Do you mean traction? Thrust? Momentum? Or perhaps you mean electricity, which is made of the flow of those electrons, so it can’t be that. So, what is this energy, this mysterious energy, which in such minute particles, can turn a giant vacuum into a solid tree, or a rock, or a planet?”

  I stared at Olaf for a moment, then turned and stared at the tree, trying to dissect it with my mind as though I might be able to see the minute particles of… of what?

  Olaf shrugged. “In a sense, the Council was right. We no longer have the machines that allowed the scientists before the Floods to investigate these things. They never found out what those particles are made of, but they came close.” His face creased into a smile and his eyes glinted as he watched my expression. “The closest they could get to describing what these particles were made of was to say that they were made of potential. Or, like little bits of information.” He rubbed his palms up and down his thighs, licking his lips. “There were two kinds of particles, very roughly speaking: those that made up the atoms, and those that communicated force between them. Information and communication.”

  He burst out laughing, perhaps at my expression, perhaps at the idea itself, and then added, “And like bits of information, they can be in many places at the same time, more like waves than particles, but when you focus on them, they are more like particles.”

  He leaned back on the bench and watched me. I didn’t say anything for a long while, then I shook my head and said, “It’s impossible to grasp.”

  “Difficult, not impossible. And this is why I said to you that the tree was not really a tree. It is more like the thought of a tree, or absolutely all the information about a tree. Which brings me rather neatly to the second part.”

  “The second part?”

  “Your subjective experience of the tree.”

  I looked away. “I see.”

  “Do you?”

  “I don’t know.”

  I rose to my feet and walked to the tree. I placed my palm against the rough purple and silver bark and slowly ran my fingers over it, as though by doing so I could reach inside its fabric with my mind.

  “Why does it reject me? Why is it hard? Why can’t I push my hand right through it?”

  Olaf shrugged and shook his head as though the answer were obvious. “Don’t forget that you are made of the same vacuums.” He raised a finger and pointed at me. “But now we are coming to the interesting bits. When two particles—or atoms—come close to each other, one of two things happens. Either they come together and bond, or they reject each other. But they never actually touch. This field of potential, this field of information, sends a message that either holds or rejects the other.” He stopped, staring hard at me. “When you touch the tree and find that you cannot penetrate it, that feeling of hard, unyielding wood is nothing more than an extraordinarily complex stream of messages, saying, ‘I am a tree! Go away!’ It is not wood—or if it is, then wood is nothing more than a message saying, ‘I am this thing called wood.’ Indeed, let us go further, it is your interpretation of that message.”

  I spread my arms, indicating the world around me. “So, all of this, this entire universe, is nothing more than trillions upon trillions of bits of information, exchanging messages about what they are…?”

  Olaf nodded, then said, “Information communicating with information. Nothing more than that. That is what we are.” I drew breath, about to say something, but Olaf cut across me. “I am going to ask you to take another step.”

  I looked at him sharply. “What do you mean?”

  Olaf got to his feet and walked to the giant pine.

  “Come with me. A moment ago, you placed your palm on the bark. You were trying to penetrate the tree with your mind, by feeling it. Now place your hand upon the tree again, but this time, do not try to penetrate the tree, pay no attention to the tree, rather focus on yourself, on your feelings. Close your eyes…”

  I had placed my hand on the tree and did as Olaf said. I closed my eyes and let my mind run over my hand and the sensations on my skin. I heard Olaf’s voice as I did so. It seemed to drone softly, and not unpleasantly.

  “Relax. Do not search. Just allow your mind to feel. I am going to show you something interesting. Just allow your mind to feel, as though it were a hand, with fingers of its own. You can feel the sensation of the bark, can’t you? And what you have in your mind is the sensation of the bark. The sensation of the bark is the sensation of your mind in your skin and the bark together. What you have in your perception, in your mind, is the sensation of your skin and the bark together. That is right, isn’t it?”

  “Yes.”

  “Now, you also have the sensation of the air touching your skin, on your face and on the backs of your hands. What you have in your perception, in your mind, is the sensation of your skin and the air in contact. This is the sensation that you have. That is right, isn’t it?”

  “Yes.”

  “And my voice. And my presence. My voice is a sensation which is in your perception, in your mind, just as my presence is a sensation in your mind. That is what my presence is, a perception in your mind. That is right, isn’t it?”

  “Yes.”

  “In fact, what you are aware of in all of these things, as in everything in life, is your sensations, the perception that arises in your mind. You are not aware of the tree itself. You cannot be aware of the tree itself. You can only be aware of your experience of the tree. You cannot be aware of the air, of my voice, of me. You cannot be. You can never be aware of anything but your own experience. Your entire universe is made of your experience, of your perception! That is all it can ever be…

  “Open your eyes.”

  I opened my eyes and it was as though I had opened them for the first time. There was a clarity and brilliance which was startling in its stillness. The colors seemed to have doubled in their intensity and sharpness, but I was frighteningly aware that the colors, the smells and sounds, were real only as my perceptions.

  “Everything you see, everything you hear, smell, taste and touch, is just a sensation, a perception, a thought that arises in your mind. It may or may
not have an existence beyond your experience, but you will never—can never know. All of this…” He spread his arms, imitating the gesture I had made a little earlier. “All of this, is your mind.”

  A feeling of terrible fear overwhelmed me. My legs seemed to be drained of strength and a hot, sick pellet burned in my stomach. I shook my head.

  “No.”

  Olaf smiled. It was an unearthly expression and for a moment, it was as though the entire, infinite cosmos was looking at me through his eye sockets, as though I were looking back at myself through my mentor’s eyes.

  “Don’t worry, this is not a burden for your shoulders. It is not a burden for any man’s shoulders. Take one more step with me. If everything you see, and hear and touch, and taste and smell, is just a thought in your mind, tell me this, can you see yourself? Can you touch and taste and smell yourself? Can you hear yourself?”

  I went cold. My skin prickled. I leaned back against the trunk of the ancient pine. I was suddenly intensely aware of myself as a separate thing. I was aware not just of my hands and arms and legs and feet, of my whole body, as something separate which I could witness, but also of the backs of my eyes and the inside of my face, as though I could observe my own personality there, and my thoughts and feelings, working and interacting with each other before me, separate and observable. I watched them all—me—and knew that they, like the tree and the air, the sky and the mountains, and the stars in the heavens—that I myself, and everything that made up “me” was observable, was something that I could hold at arm’s length and look at and observe.

  “But who is looking? Who is observing?” I turned to look at Olaf.

  A flash of clarity. Less than a second. An intense awareness of my existence as something indefinable—the thing that was always looking. My mind flailed and struggled, seeking to see, to analyze, to comprehend, to hang on to a single point of reference, and the awareness was gone, but left me somehow scarred. I slid down the trunk of the tree until I was sitting among the brown pine needles.

  I said, half-whispering, “What am I?”

  The strange look was gone from Olaf’s face. He seemed strangely normal now. He said, “The Eye can never see itself. It knows that it exists because it sees.”

  “Cogito ergo sum.”

  Olaf laughed. “And now we seek the comfortable refuge of intellectualism. Well,” he said, rising. “That is all right. You have just lost yourself. You have just died. Your mind needs reassurance. That is fine. But do me a favor. Look, one last time, at that great tree…” I climbed to my feet and turned to look at the tree. Olaf said, “It isn’t there, is it?”

  And it was not. There was no trace that it had ever been there. There was just the empty space which it had once occupied. I turned wildly to face Olaf. Olaf shrugged and smiled.

  “The most substantial of things, the most solid and enduring, are nothing but thoughts in your mind. And what you must remember is that that includes you!”

  I looked back and the tree was once again there, as though it had always been there. Olaf was walking away, receding toward the house.

  I shouted after him, “Who am I?”

  He shrugged without looking back. “I guess you’ll have to go and ask in DC!”

  A sudden flush of rage made me shout, “Goddamn it! Who are you?”

  But the only answer was his laughter in the hot, dusty, desert afternoon.

  WHAT'D YOU THINK?

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  ALSO BY BLAKE BANNER

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  DEAD COLD MYSTERY SERIES

  An Ace and a Pair (Book 1)

  Two Bare Arms (Book 2)

  Garden of the Damned (Book 3)

  Let Us Prey (Book 4)

  The Sins of the Father (Book 5)

  Strange and Sinister Path (Book 6)

  The Heart to Kill (Book 7)

  Unnatural Murder (Book 8)

  Fire from Heaven (Book 9)

  To Kill Upon A Kiss (Book 10)

  Murder Most Scottish (Book 11)

  The Butcher of Whitechapel (Book 12)

  Little Dead Riding Hood (Book 13)

  Trick or Treat (Book 14)

  Blood Into Win (Book 15)

  Jack In The Box (Book 16)

  The Fall Moon (Book 17)

  Dead Cold Box Set #1: Books 1-4 (SAVE 25%)

  Dead Cold Box Set #2: Books 5-8 (SAVE 25%)

  Dead Cold Box Set #3: Books 9-12 (SAVE 25%)

  Dead Cold Box Set #4: Books 13-16 (SAVE 25%)

  THE OMEGA SERIES

  Dawn of the Hunter (Book 1)

  Double Edged Blade (Book 2)

  The Storm (Book 3)

  The Hand of War (Book 4)

  A Harvest of Blood (Book 5)

  To Rule in Hell (Book 6)

  Kill: One (Book 7)

  Powder Burn (Book 8)

  Kill: Two (Book 9)

  Unleashed (Book 10)

  The Omicron Kill (Book 11)

  9mm Justice (Book 12)

  Kill: Four (Book 13)

  Death In Freedom (Book 14)

  Omega Box Set #1: Books 1-4 (SAVE 25%)

  Omega Box Set #2: Books 5-8 (SAVE 25%)

  Omega Box Set #3: Books 9-12 (SAVE 25%)