“So, as you see, we have more freedom of choice than ever, the freedom to remain human, and to trade in our status as demi-gods, and eventually even as gods. Grant you, pressure will remain high to uplift ourselves so we can be of more use to Mother. But She will come to value the diehard holdouts as much as the ‘true believers’ as part of a full spectrum of consciousness She depends on for information, as each of us depend on one another’s diverse perspectives on the big picture to cobble together any true sense of it.”
From the way Drew was smiling at her, looking not the least shocked or amazed, or even overly impressed, Seriana could tell Robin had taken him on a similar magical mystery tour, extrapolating using transcendental logic of her own, stepping into the mind of Mother even ahead of Her physical incarnation on Earth.
“I think what Seriana is describing, Huang, is managed risk,” Drew said. They all laughed on cue, exploding the bubble of tension forming around Huang Chung.
“Enough for now,” Seriana said. She pressed the button on her belt and dropped the shields. “Time to decompress. All things to their season, no?” She bowed deferentially to Chuang Hung. Drew bowed in tandem with her. “It’s time, everyone!” Seriana shouted to the throng.
Everyone threw on their parachutes and headed for the edge of the rectangular platform they were standing on that would ultimately house the penultimate penthouse floor.
With wild screams, the flock of would-be birds descended on the streets of Seattle surrounding the building, which for today, had been closed off.
Guests came in for landings atop tables long enough to simulate landing strips for the kite-humans. They were helped with slipping their equipment off by a retinue of staff waiting on the ground to attend their every need. Most would spend an hour or more in the air riding the particularly favorable air currents for the time of their lives before descending, courtesy of more atmospheric manipulation from Seriana’s cloud-seeding planes above.
Drew landed alongside Seriana, who wanted to be the first to descend to properly greet her guests as they landed. He collected up his parachute unassisted, showed poise and deftness in this as with all activities. The man did give meaning to style and panache for all occasions. He had an action-hero element about him that came out under the right circumstances. Seriana chose to believe that around her the circumstances were just right for Drew to be all that he could be, and that she was beating Robin Wakefield at her own game of freeing others from themselves. “Thank Robin for me,” Seriana said.
“I will,” Drew replied. “Otherwise, I couldn’t follow your end of the conversation and still hold a poker face. She does take a lot of the shock value out of life. I mean that in a good way, of course.”
“Do you?” Seriana asked teasingly, with mock insecurity. Maybe not so mock as all that.
Drew, ever the gentleman, gave her a reassuring kiss. “When to shock, and when not to… I suppose it is an art form.”
Reading between the lines, she said, “Was it you trying to shock Robin back into the moment with talks of Mother? Or the other way around?”
“Me. She’s been on safari with her mind a lot of late, astral traveling to discover what she can about the other Renaissance types. Usually our heady debates paradoxically help to ground her. But not of late. I suspect until she can get to the root of how the naturals like yourself do what they do, she won’t make more room in her head for Mother or the Renaissance types that use technology as a crutch to reach the same heights.”
***
Seriana gazed up at Drew through milky white eyes which really couldn’t see anything. And yet, curiously, he’d never felt more exposed. “What is it with those eyes?” he said.
She laughed leisurely, and stroked the skin on his forearm, glided lightly over the hairs intermittently as if plucking a mandolin. “They say I see too far with them, clear down to people’s souls. They say I don’t have the surface distractions of sighted people, so it makes sense. I think sighted people say these things to console themselves. They feel guilty for their impotence to do anything about my blindness. You tell me, which strikes you as truer?”
Seriana’s humor shifted like the wind into sullenness. Drew’s response was more muted than it once was. Her disposition always shifted with the winds, nothing drastic. She still avoided the label of “temperamental” by cascading subtly up and down adjacent hues of the moodiness rainbow; so subtle were the shifts that you really had to be placing close attention. Maybe it was her way of making sure her man was playing close attention. Maybe it was her way of compensating for being sightless, by opening internal vistas keyed to each emotion, each alternate reality every bit as broad as the one his eyes could take in.
The gondola drifting downriver looked only ever so slightly out of place. Anywhere outside of Venice, it could be expected to turn heads. The river was wide enough to accommodate bigger boats, which was undoubtedly the way to go, considering the risk of being capsized by one of them. With the sun at this angle, the water shimmered like a bed of diamonds, on a necklace of rubies and emeralds and sapphires and other precious stones that were the reflections of the flowers blooming along the riverbank and up amidst the gorgeously landscaped gardens of the rich people’s homes. Not so rich as Drew was used to, but pretty damned impressive by New World standards.
“You’re missing the most beautiful day my eyes have ever beheld,” Drew said, not sure if that remark was simply cruel, or if it was even more wrong not to share what he was feeling with her.
“Am I?”
Her hair was cut short, above the neck, not quite boyish, more all-business woman-of-the-world. The trim accentuated the chiseled beauty of her face, which in turn accentuated the sharp mind beneath it. No classical ideal of beauty this one, with big lips and eyes to suggest passiveness, the type men were socially programmed to chase after, to ensure their dominance. Maybe Drew wasn’t put off because he just wasn’t an alpha-male. Maybe he was even more trapped in a Woody Allenesque world of high-functioning types discernible only by their unique neuroses, because women dead from the neck up, that is, no longer questioning anything about their existence, just going through the moves on automatic, didn’t lend themselves to his life-as-art dictates.
He would think the socialites accustomed to wealth and leisure and the good life would be perfectly suited for him precisely because they would never question his perfect world. But as it turned out, when they refused to question anything about themselves, he just felt lonely, like a stranger in a strange land. He felt increasingly divorced from the puppet theater world that was his life, not more immersed in it. He needed women who forced his A-game, for who pleasing and exceeding their expectations was more of a herculean feat, and earning their undying love was never a fully settled matter, but a moment by moment contest. It forced him to be spontaneous, to surprise himself, to resurrect his heaven-on-earth from one second to the next the way Robin loved to rebirth herself.
Working to hold his world together in the storm front of his beloved’s ever-shifting demands meant he had no choice but to be a god among men. A god alone could do battle with the demons of his past and have a chance of winning. Of course, in all fairness, he had only obtained demi-god status to date, often losing control of the moment. But the theory was sound; the more he could withstand the quicksand pit of the present, the better he could resist the downward pull of his past in those dreamy nights when it came to snatch him away, where he could no longer walk on water, and his impressive powers to remake the world in his image no matter what seemed to have been left behind in the other world.
“How can a woman be blind and look so well appointed?” he asked, gazing down at her stretched out in his arms. “Victorian women with a retinue of caregivers couldn’t manage the air of subtle refinement you keep about yourself.”
She laughed like ice tinkling in a glass of rum and coke. “I married a beautician.”
“The best, I hope?”
“He gets called to do the Quee
n of England on formal occasions,” she said.
“He must dote over you, his masterpiece. Sounds suffocating.”
“I appreciate you saving me the long explanations as to why I’m here.”
He smiled.
“That was a plaintive smile. I could feel it in your shins.”
He laughed softly.
“That was a condescending laugh. I could feel it in the three-point-two on the Richter scale earthquake in your ribs.”
“You never ask me about Robin.”
“I never ask you about any of the women in your life.” She used her nails to stroke him, titillating his skin in an entirely new manner.
They didn’t speak. An upwelling of breeze brought sounds from a distant shore.
“I appreciate you letting the silence do your talking for you,” Seriana said. “I can tell you, all your women are of a kind, all powerhouses in their own right; they soar gracefully above life, ride the tradewinds with their sleek aptitudes, which allow them to outpace the competition.”
“How do you know all this?” he said, feeling unmasked.
“Because it’s all about acting a role with you, always the same role, the person you want to become. The person you can’t let yourself be. The person who has to prevail over each woman’s impossible expectations of what constitutes the good life. So one day, you’ll be able to put them all together to please the ultimate critic, your mother, I presume. It always comes back to mommy with the boys, the ones who wear their gentility on their sleeves to hide a wounded heart, at any rate. I don’t know what she did to you, and I don’t much care. I suppose I’m grateful. If it weren’t for her, there’d be no room in your life for me. You should be grateful, too. Without her, you’d never feel the need to live so many lifetimes all at once.”
“Except I don’t take much joy in any of them.”
She playfully slapped him to indicate she didn’t appreciate the insult.
“I cherish the reprieves, of course, from the haunting memories of the past. I embrace the chance to stand tall the way I never could in her presence. Robin doesn’t seem to need fire-starter. She can keep the flames burning around herself constantly. You dissatisfied married women are the only way I know to stoke the fires.”
“Was she like that, your mother? Jumping from one drama to the next to find herself by losing herself? Like Goldilocks, no one drama feeling just right for long.”
“Yes. That was her entirely.”
“So this is also your way of loving and forgiving her, by becoming her in order to empathize better.”
“Sounds like something Robin said. Hard to remember. With her, the force of any one revelation gets buried under the avalanche of all the others. In her presence, this Renaissance age becomes an age of revelations.”
“Maybe the constant perspective shifts saves her the more strenuous undertaking you’ve set for yourself—of remaking yourself in the arms of one woman after another.”
Drew undid a button on Seriana’s blouse, exposed her breasts more fully. “You’re like a lighthouse beacon sweeping the coast for lost souls before they crash against the shores of their outmoded habits, like so many leaky boats.”
“She’s like that, isn’t she?”
“She’s entirely like that,” Drew said, after a moment. As to why he hesitated, he had no idea. “Maybe you should become a full time seer yourself, renounce the workaday world.”
“That’s not where my best talents lie. Besides, I get sick of it after a while. Just comes too easy. Maybe I did that in another lifetime, and have nothing to prove, anymore. And playing business tycoon seems more of a challenge. The soul-reading skillset is just one of many aptitudes you need to survive in that world. I suppose well-roundedness takes many forms.”
Drew grunted, managing to stuff into the condensed pre-syllabic sound, both his agreement, and how impressed he was by her thinking.
FIFTY-ONE
“Damn it! This is just like her,” Drew shouted. He threw down the VR helmet that allowed him to see through solid rock and to zoom so far into the distance; he may as well have been looking into the future. Unlike a conventional periscope, which wouldn’t have done him much good this far underwater, the VR headgear had an unencumbered field of view in all directions, even through the solid hull of the ship. He didn’t even want to ask about the proprietary technology involved.
The fact that they pulled off the impossible at these depths as a matter of course was hardly a surprise when you considered there was virtually no other way to survive down here year round. And why come down this far, except to advance the science? Why else commit to a life like sewer rats running the course of a very finite underground tunnel closed off at both ends, never to come up for air? These people weren’t just visionaries, they were maniacs. Drew was beginning to wonder if the twenty-first century had room for anyone else.
“Take me to where she’ll be coming aboard,” Drew said, surprised he didn’t know the vessel by heart by now. If he could find his way around a castle, he should damn well be able to find his way around this tub without an escort. But he wasn’t adapted as they were to life at these depths. Too many magnetic fields messing with his inner compass.
The nanococktails and drugs they’d shot him up with, what’s more, barely kept his head from exploding. That’s because the crew didn’t rely on a pressurized sub. At least, not entirely. The vessel could crack open and expose them to the crushing pressure of the sea, and they could swim out and suture it back together, breathing as easily in water as in air with their additional gill modifications. But that didn’t protect him from the migraine, which was probably affecting his mood. Under ordinary circumstances, he wasn’t given to outbursts of any kind, as it was the province of the inarticulate and the unrefined, rather the opposite of what he cultivated. Then again, Maya brought out the hunter-predator in him, which moved with another kind of grace, like a panther in the night. Maybe he was just getting into character for her for when she came on board as opposed to losing it from the unending headache.
Striding through the sub, designed by her own people, was better than an undersea tour on one of those glass-bottom boats. The sweeping vistas afforded by the transparent metal windows certainly dampened the claustrophobia. And the sub could light up the vicinity better than the bioluminescent creatures parading about at these depths. Though they scarcely needed to, precisely due to the wealth of glowing life forms.
Drew calmed himself and changed the subject in an effort to relieve the tension. “It’s pretty down here,” he said.
“Maya knows how much you like your fine living,” Trotsky said. He was as young and ageless and über-fit as all the rest. Clearly the present, as much as the future, had little room for anyone over the age of twenty-five. No one who wasn’t at peak health and at the top of their game could hack the rat race, anymore, and few could pull off peak performance from within an aging, breaking down body. Though Drew supposed some did pull it off. For a while. Just no one down here. “In the morning,” Trotsky said, “she’ll take us up so you can see what we’ve been up to.”
“You mind telling me how you stay off radar?” Drew asked. “It must be crawling with subs down here. Between the subs deployed for national security, and the drug lords with their private submersibles, it’s a wonder there’s any room for the fish.”
Trotsky smiled in a way that communicated his perpetual impertinence. The glib manner contrasted mightily with his military posture and bearing, his crisply-cut, form fitting bodysuit, and precise movements that wasted absolutely no energy. Drew would have thought anyone wrapped so tight wouldn’t waste the energy required to be so slack with his emotions. He was probably lethal in combat. Those were usually the only types who reduced movement to its bare essentials and still managed to seem more graceful than a ballet dancer. He seemed like just the type Maya would favor. She liked them cocky, just so long as they could back up the Nietzschian self-confidence. The rest of the crew was probably just
like him in this respect, as well. But they were the first of their kind, the first fulltime underwater generation. Maybe with enough intermarrying and gene mixing, the homogenized society would bust out of its genetically and psychologically constrained straightjackets. If opposites attract, they were poised for a Cambrian explosion of life down here. If Drew could be allowed to give Robin a go for her money at predictions, he’d say genetic engineering would be on the menu soon enough.
Maybe that was one of the things she was up to down here. Scoping out new underwater niches she could bioengineer her people to fill. She didn’t like being separated from her underwater domain, which explained why it was hard to entice her aboard, even with his presence having been announced.
Trotsky said, “We run more silent than they do, with the cavitation technologies that propel us along. The interlaced magnetic fields allow for better sonar deflection, so we’re more invisible than they are, as well. In a very real way, we don’t live in the same timezone they do; we’re too far off in the future with our technologies. They just don’t have the eyes and ears to see that far into the future.”
They at last arrived at the pressurized diving bay that allowed for the entry and exit of off-loadable submersibles, turning the nuclear powered vessel they were on into a mother ship. The area was longer than three Olympic-sized swimming pools strung end to end, and just as wide. The pool had lanes, just like in standard competition, that the off-duty staff used to race one another. Their body suits allowed them to speed through the water with a grace and speed which no dolphin could surpass. Their physiques recalled Michael Phelps with his long V-backed torso, his size sixteen feet, like inborn flippers. Because they had gills, taking their heads out of the water remained optional, though he would see them do so occasionally to keep an eye on him. They communicated with whale sound rather than normal speech, which traveled father underwater, and allowed them to stay in sync with one another across the distance of the pool. Maybe it wasn’t whale sound, just based on the same concept, with an expanded vocabulary to accommodate their needs.
Renaissance 2.0: The Entire Series (books 1 thru 5) Page 164
