Finally, he faced the question he was trying to hide from. The one which had plagued him so long, the Zen koan: What is my true nature?
An excellent question.
He closed his eyes, then opened them again to the blazing sky and allowed himself to know the truth: the last vestige of an ancient, brave, massive experiment. One called consciousness. One by which the universe had been seeded with hope and intelligence.
What is my true nature?
Hanalb.
He had no doubt that it was true. He wondered what form his brother and sister Hanalb had inhabited, on what far planets, before metamorphosing to wings. He had always thought that all the beings in the universe must be related, often wondered what odd twist of mind poets, artists, scientists, and those seeking God shared, and why.
He stood, and tried to brush the mud from his filthy robe, then ripped it off and threw it down in a heap.
As he walked toward his cave, he yanked clumps of sweet grasslike fronds out by the roots. Sugar. By the time he got there, he had an armful, which he dropped next to his spring.
Now what? Yes, he had to get one of the cooking vats. It would be heavy.
He headed down into the main valley, saw no one, and was glad. He wouldn't have cared if they had all wandered out onto the plains, troublesome creatures.
He certainly didn't plan to. At present, that stubborn thought was all he had.
He strode into the cooking area and grabbed a vat. He turned it on its side and began to roll it back up the hill, wrestling it over the rocks. Sweat stung his eyes, and he sat down to rest.
He regarded the vat.
The huge, battered container was made of soft metal. It was used by a race of beings that travelled to other galaxies. In it, they cooked simple grains in boiling water.
His laughter began slowly, and grew until it echoed against the rocks and he was gasping for breath, sides aching.
Between the arms of the valley, the lava plains glittered like the blue Pacific of his childhood. But he would never see white sails upon them, or watch fish scatter at his approach in the shallows. And neither would anyone else. Ever.
It had never hit home before.
Kyo gazed at the landscape with new eyes.
Death had shattered him once. But now, the thought of all that was gone, and the fact, suddenly apparent, that life, its near-extinction, and its re-flowering as galaxies bloomed and died, had been happening infinitely - the incomprehensible weight of it, and its attendant, vast, lightness and release - hit him like the Roshi's stick, like the opening of Linda's white wings in flight.
He grasped the vat and continued up the hill, pushing it ahead of him with renewed energy. Arriving at his grotto, he righted it. The vat rang like a great gong as it hit the rocks.
He bent a thousand times to fill it with spring water from his small bowl, loving the splash of water falling into water. The winnowed grain spilled through his hands like millions of smooth, dry, tiny fish; the green slush of pounded plants smelled sweet as a newly split coconut. He performed each step, registered each sensation, as if he had repeated them through infinity and perfected them. Perhaps this was all he was good for: to spread the life of the yeast.
That, at least, was something.
Finally, he opened the bag and poured all of his precious yeast into the vat. Now all he had to do was wait.
He sampled it several times a day, thinking about the slow yet inevitable translation of matter as the yeast fed. And with each brief taste, always different, the universe seemed renewed. Why hadn't he noticed its perfection before?
One day he dropped his spoon. He bent to pick it up, straightened, and paused.
The light pervading the landscape penetrated him, as if the particles which he thought of as himself were loosely connected and barely maintained in the particular form of Kyo.
The force of truth cleared all else from his being.
The thought registered briefly: Universe can reprogram mind. Mind can reprogram body. We may be the last, but we will not walk out on the plain.
Wings were meant for flight, for joy.
Hope was gone. Only stark reality was left.
That was enough.
Koans for his charges appeared in his mind, complete and powerful, precise puzzles which could cause thought to transform the very atoms of those who experienced the solution. Each thought a new pattern in a re-formed mind.
As days passed and the beer brewed, in waking and in sleep, Kyo's world was filled with light: constant, strong, and insistent, a brilliant power he did not understand and did not even care to. He only knew exactly how to share it. His companions progressed swiftly through his koans and checking questions, which tested each state of individual realization.
On the twentieth morning, he found the beer perfect.
Kyo readied two bowls, next to the most beautiful part of his grotto, where purple and red flowers sprouted from the rocky wall.
He sensed excitement outside, and smiled. He did not hear footsteps, for bare feet made no sound on the path.
Kyo.
Kyo turned.
Roshi stood in the bright light; gasshoed, then straightened.
Do you have a question? asked Kyo.
Only one: can you save me?
Kyo looked straight into Roshi's eyes.
An absurd question. Why ask? I only know one thing: I make excellent beer.
For a moment, all was still. Light poured over beautiful blue lava. Bands of colour wavered in interlocking trapezoidal patterns on the floor of Kyo's pool.
Roshi and Kyo burst into laughter like children.
Kyo's sides ached; he wiped tears from his face, took a deep breath. He was aware only of light, filling the grotto as if it were a pool, permeating them both.
Roshi's new wings, as he accepted Kyo's bowl of beer with immense solemnity, caught that pure light and shone.
Walls of Flesh, Bars of Bone
Damien Broderick and Barbara Lamar
Damien Broderick is an award-winning Australian SF writer, editor and critical theorist, a senior fellow in the School of Culture and Communication at the University of Melbourne. Barbara Lamar is a Texan tax lawyer, permaculture farmer, and co-author of their forthcoming novel Post Mortal Syndrome. Lamar and Broderick married in Melbourne, Australia, in 2002, and live in San Antonio, Texas. Broderick has published 45 books, including Reading by Starlight, The Spike (the first full-length treatment of the technological Singularity), and Outside the Gates of Science (a study of parapsychology). He edited Chained to the Alien, and Skiffy and Mimesis, essays from the fabled Australian Science Fiction Review. His 1980 novel The Dreaming Dragons (now updated as The Dreaming) is listed in David Pringle's Science Fiction: The 100 Best Novels. His latest US releases are the novels I'm Dying Here, and Dark Gray (both with Rory Barnes). Recent SF collections are Uncle Bones, Climbing Mount Implausible, and The Qualia Engine.
"The question of whether the waves are something 'real' or a function to describe and predict phenomena in a convenient way is a matter of taste. I personally like to regard a probability wave, even in 3N-dimensional space, as a real thing, certainly as more than a tool for mathematical calculations... Quite generally, how could we rely on probability predictions if by this notion we do not refer to something real and objective?"
- Max Born,
Natural Philosophy of Cause and Chance
Hanging onto the desk's edge, I eased myself back, then slumped down again while the floor got itself on an even keel. I'd drooled on the interdisciplinary dissertation I was meant to be assessing. Psychoanalytic cinema theory, always such fun these post-postmodern days. Ob(Stet)Rick's: A/ob[gyn]jection, Blood and Blocked de(Sire) in Casa[blank]a. I closed my eyes again, feeling ill.
Lissa was shocked. I wasn't all that pleased myself. Slightly reproachful, she said, "Dr Watson, your appointment with the committee chair." I squinted at the blur of my watch, did a sweep of the cluttered surface of my desk. No glasses i
n immediate view. You need to be wearing them in order to see where they are, but if you're wearing them you already know where they are. That was the kind of pseudo-paradox this grad student's dissertation was cluttered with. The inside of my head gonged.
"Yeah." I tried to clear my throat. "Thanks, Liss."
"Ten minutes. Shall I bring you a cup of coffee?" Delivering coffee was explicitly not part of Lissa's job description as administrative assistant, but I seemed to bring out the motherly instinct in her, although she is too young by a generation and a half to be my mother.
"Sure. You're a sweetheart." Inside my head a Hell's Angels convention were thrashing their hogs and tearing the town apart. Probably shouldn't have brought that bottle of Jack Daniels to the office. Only meant to take a swallow to calm my nerves.
I shoved the (th)esis on to the floor, where it landed with a (th)ud, then dug through the random drifts of paperwork on my desk. My reading glasses were three layers down. I jammed them on my face. Where the hell had I put the notes for the meeting? I was stern: Lee, my boy, do this in an orderly manner. Here was the title page from Jerry Lehman's chapter on the effects of adrenergic stimulants on the signification behaviour of non-autistic children. I was supposed to be reviewing the damned thing. Two months behind, so far, but I'd catch up, soon as I got things worked out with Beverley.
Map of Vancouver. Another unfinished dissertation I was supposed to be supervising: Queer Lear, Queen. Brochure advertising whole-house entertainment systems. Article from the Irish Journal of Post-Psychoanalytic Semiotics I'd been meaning to read.
"Here you go, Dr Watson. Fresh from the microwave." Lissa set the cup down on a small bare spot on the credenza behind me. Even before I took the first sip I could tell it was stale, left over from 7:30 in the morning. What the hell, this was medicine.
"Can I help you look?" She glanced at her watch; her voice held a tinge of panic. Funny, I wasn't a bit tense, and it was my career that was on the line. Up for promotion to full professorship, financial security and independence for the rest of my life. Fat chance.
"I'm looking for the notes I need for the meeting with Patterson. It would be six pages stapled together."
"Handwritten?" Good girl. Woman. Person. She was already attacking the mounds of papers.
"Printed." I leaned back in the leather chair Bev had given me three, no, five years ago, sipping my awful coffee. All the time in the world. I'll be okay, I told myself. I'll be fine, soon's the caffeine takes hold.
"I can't find them anywhere, Dr Watson." Lissa pushed her hair back from her forehead, sighed. "Are you sure you brought them to the office?"
I goggled my eyes sadly behind my goggles and shook my head. I wasn't sure of anything these days, except that if I let myself think too hard it hurt too much. "It's okay, Lissa. I can wing it." I stood up and the floor was steadier. "Better get going."
"Like that?"
I glanced down at my Dept. Of Psychoceramics tee shirt with a pang. A gift from Mandy the year before the dreaded menarche hormones kicked in and she went from adorable to teen werewolf. Lissa was right. It was a little frayed around the edges, and maybe the sentiment wasn't ideal for the inquisition. "Not to worry." I kept a suit jacket hanging behind the door for emergencies. Buttoned up snug, started out, stepping lively, a man who knows where he's going and what he's doing. But when I got out to the hall, away from the safety of my own office, I stopped short. Professor H. Patterson would expect me to say something at least moderately intelligent. You didn't get to be a committee boss in the Department of Psychosemiosis and Literature at the University of California at Davis without expectations of that sort. And I realized I didn't have anything remotely clever to tell her and the committee. Furthermore, I didn't give a shit. There was a probability of about 0.5 that cancelling the meeting now would end my career. On the other hand, if I went in there half crocked oh c'mon Watson, not half, 80% at least truthfully, the probability was close to 1.0 that I'd be out on my ass with no further ado, and so much for tenure, increasingly a dead letter.
"Lissa?" I looked over my shoulder, tried for my most pleading, boyish look. "Do me a favour?"
"Call Professor Patterson and tell her you've had a stroke."
"Something like that, yeah. Um..." Mental wheels turned sluggishly. "Tell her they called from my daughter's school and there's been a crisis and I had to go right away." Like anyone would call me about anything connected with my child.
"I didn't know you and Bev had kids."
"One. Not Bev's, from a former marriage."
"You're a dark horse, Dr Watson."
I grabbed my helmet and cantered off for the Department's outer door as fast as I could without tripping over any of my legs, and en passant grabbed a square, flat package from my inbox. No return address. Another orphan film from my mysterious benefactor, had to be. My spirits lifted as I made my escape to a brilliant afternoon that smelled of sage and ripe crabapples.
My apartment was dark and empty, though, shades drawn against the afternoon light, as it had been for the five months I sulked in it. My estranged wife Beverley used to find me pathologically optimistic, but that was before she threw me out. I could picture the mocking way she'd raise her eyebrows at me if she could see how eagerly I opened the mailbox and scanned the bills and junk mail for her handwriting. No such luck; instead, there was a letter from Virta and Crump, P.C., Bev's lawyers. I tossed it on the deal-with-it-later pile along with a couple of month's worth of bills and headed for the fridge. Nothing like a cold beer to take the edge off incipient depression.
The package was indeed an orphan film. The label on the slightly rusty metal canister read "#11: Reverend Willard D. Havard, New York City, January 10, 1931." No accompanying letter or card. Now that I was living on my own, the movie screen and the old Bell & Howell Filmosound projector had become a regular feature of the décor, so there was no need to set up. I took a swig of beer and began threading the film through the machine.
Orphan films are movies that have been abandoned by their owners, sometimes because of copyright problems, more often because they didn't seem worth saving. But films that seemed worthless soon after they were made - old newsreels, for example - are now priceless windows into the past. I'm easily entertained and can spend hours absorbed in some unknown family's home movies from the 1950s. Whoever was sending these mystery films seemed to be a connoisseur with finer tastes than mine. He or she was sending stuff from the earliest days of simultaneously recorded picture and sound.
Film #11 was only a little over 3 minutes long. At the beginning, a tall bearded man with a Santa Claus belly was delivering a sermon on a street corner. The sound was scratchy, and you could hear car engines and horns honking in the background, but still you could make out most of the Reverend's pitch.
"On my way down here today, I saw a little girl, couldn't have been more than five or six. This little child was standing on the sidewalk selling chewing gum and mints. I asked myself, brothers and sisters, why is this little girl standing here selling chewing gum instead of sitting at a desk at school? Is she just trying to get some spending money? Is she helping to support her family?"
He had a certain charisma. It took an effort to redirect my attention from the Rev. Willard to his audience, if you could call eight or ten motley hobo types plus a couple of young boys an audience. One of the kids gave the other a rough shove as I watched; this was returned with compound interest, and soon they were rolling on the sidewalk like a couple of tomcats.
The Reverend reached the climax of his presentation. "As I was telling you earlier, my friends, God sends us trials and tribulations to give us a chance to shine in His Light."
A fellow about my age had passed in front of him, turned his head quickly to the camera and then away. Startled, I blinked, but he was gone. The scuffling boys seemed so intent on their struggle that they'd lost track of where they were. One landed with a thud on an ancient duffle bag. Its elderly owner thwacked both the kids across t
he shoulders with his cane. Indignant, for a moment they stopped fighting, then the sound track of the film clearly picked up the shorter kid yelling at the taller one, "Your mother's a [something] slut." And they were rolling on the ground again, just as the Reverend Willard reached for his tambourine, which had been passed from hand to hand. The full weight of both boys slammed against the Reverend's shins; he went down on his massive butt, the tambourine went flying, scattering a few coins across the sidewalk. Instantly the boys stopped their scuffling. The taller kid, closer to the lens, grabbed a couple of coins. The other, grinning, ducked down so his face was visible under an armpit, and did something that flashed white and was gone. Instantly, then, both boys ran swiftly and gleefully out of the frame, their differences apparently forgotten. And that was it. The end of the film.
I rewound a short way and played the last few seconds again. There had been something familiar about that fellow walking past, something that prickled the back of my neck.
No mistaking it, once noticed and reviewed. It gave me the strangest shiver. I watched that segment of the film again, and again, and once more again. He was me. I mean, the guy bore an uncanny resemblance to yours truly. Allowance made for the antique style of his clothing and his cap, the very spittin' image. That was undeniably me in the 1931 movie. The year before my grandmother was born.
I saw something else that creeped the hell out of me: just before the scuffling lads rammed into the Reverend Santa Claus, my double turned his head, caught the eye of the photographer, and winked at him. In effect, through the recording lens, at me.
What the fuck?
My hangover was gone, and my lethargy. Adrenalin can do that. I wanted to look more closely at this fragment of images from the past without risking the fragile orphan footage any further. It took me an hour setting up the old mirror box that reflects the image from screen to camcorder lens (I'd bought it on eBay, they don't make them any more), and then saved the digital feed to my hard drive. Doing this properly would require a bunch of money and a professional transfer house tech, lifting off the dust and other crap from 80 years of careless storage, paying frame by frame attention to brightness and other parameters. Maybe I'd get to that, but my grant money for orphan restoration had just about run dry, and I wanted something quick and fairly easy.
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