In Spirit
Page 8
“Who are all of you?” Raed yelled across the open space.
He got no answer. The casual-dressers were too focused on the task at hand: remaining in physical contact with people who were beginning to scramble away in disbelief—
A loud clattering drew Raed's eyes back to the desk he was standing in front of.
“Oh God, oh my God.” The young blond businessman had dropped the phone receiver and was on his feet, gaping at the windows behind Raed. A woman's voice squeaked out of the receiver inches from Raed's hip: “Steve? You still there, Steve?"
The older man in silver track pants clung onto Steve, his face pained—
Then everyone was breaking free from their casually-dressed companions and fleeing, falling over chairs and furniture in desperate attempts to escape. And all the ribbon-wearing clingers left behind turned toward Raed.
“Why did you bring me here?” he cried as he backed right up against the windows, wanting this to be over quickly. A shadow fell across the area of desks—
Revived again, safely back in his cage in 2033.
Raed focused blearily past the bars and across the main projection arena, where a hundred other volunteers hung suspended in cages too, most of them mere image-people, half here, half there, still currently ghosting somewhere. In some of the closer cages, volunteers appeared to be crouched over something in the past, or clutching onto someone. Those in the closest cages seemed to be in some kind of pain.
But a number of volunteers were no longer glowing images. Their projections had just ended, just like Raed's. In one or two cages, he could see people being revived with smelling salts....
In his own cage, the Muslim psychologist was again consulting with the big medic, both standing just below him. Raed waited until the medic slipped back out before he summoned to will to say to the psychologist, “I need to ask something."
“Ask."
He gestured toward the cages filling the main arena. “Those people are all ghosting back to 9/11, aren't they? They've been accompanying me...."
“They have their own business in that target-time,” she told him.
Tackling what I've been avoiding, Raed thought. The hard part.
“But yes,” the psychologist went on, “they are accompanying you, in a way—they're projecting through folds oriented identically to your own.” Behind the burqa-veil, the woman's eyes seemed disappointed. “Is that your question?"
He would not disappoint her. He said, “They're the group of ‘interested citizens,’ yes? The ones who petitioned to get me into this program."
She nodded. “Is that your question?"
“Who are they?” Raed asked. That was the question.
“The grown children of your victims, mostly,” she told him. “Plus a few victims’ nieces, nephews, friends, one or two of the surviving spouses."
Raed swallowed, a soft clicking deep in his throat. “And you?"
“Yes,” she answered without hesitation, her liquid-black eyes swallowing his question. “I'm also the child of one of your victims.” She adjusted the folds of her burqa to show him the red ribbon she was wearing. The same ribbons worn by the out-of-place clingers and companions in the past—the people in the cages beyond the Plexiglas.
Raed bowed his head. If the woman below him was his daughter, then Haifa, his wife, was surely another of Raed's victims. And if the woman below him was his daughter, surely it was no surprise she'd become a psychologist—not with a father like Raed to try to comprehend.
She said to him: “I was one of those curious to see if you were capable of making it through this program.” A beeping drew her eyes to her slate. She turned, nodded to the projection operators at their consoles, and glanced up at Raed again. “Looks like we have time for just one more."
“Just one more,” he agreed, even though he felt wearier than he'd ever imagined he could feel—weary down in his soul.
But there was one more place left to face, wasn't there? Raed watched the psychologist step out through the bars, then watched the world of 2033 slide away as the cage tunneled him back to—
That oh-so-familiar tubular space. He was back where his night of projection began, back in a seat on board a large passenger jet.
This jet, however, was airborne.
Flight 175, Boston to Los Angeles. Raed was sitting in a window-seat about halfway up the plane. The oval portal beside him offered a good view of the Atlantic beyond the wing, and the Eastern seaboard. The plane was already well off its flight path, well on its way to its doomed target. But the familiar Manhattan skyline was not in sight yet; there was still a little time left.
Raed shifted out to the empty aisle seat, saw that the back half of the plane behind him was crammed with passengers. There were even people crouching in the aisle. Directly across the aisle, in the same row as Raed, a sturdy-looking man in his late thirties was dialing someone on a cell phone. After a few seconds the man began to speak. Raed instinctively drew back, then forced himself to listen: “...flight's been hijacked,” the man was saying. “I'll try to call again, but don't know if there'll be time."
You must be Tom, Raed thought, recognizing the voice and recalling a bright kitchen with an answering machine in a warm Rhode Island home.
“Whatever happens, Angie, know that I love you,” Tom went on, maintaining his unearthly calm. “That I'm thinking of you now, and the kids too....” He let out a breath. “They'll be fine with you as their mom,” he said. “So don't let them be sad for too long."
Raed stared across the aisle, humbled by Tom's ability to pass beyond denial of his dire situation into an acceptance of it. This man was neither hysterical nor paralyzed by terror—he was just terribly lonely.
“I'll always be with the three of you. And Angie,” Tom finished, “in my heart I know we'll meet again.” He shut off his phone, and turned to stare out the window.
That's when Raed caught a glimpse of someone seated on the far side of Tom, tucked up against him. Raed pulled himself to his feet, stepped into the aisle, and saw a sixty-something woman with her hands wrapped round Tom's arm, her head on his shoulder, her face drawn tight, concentrating.
She wasn't wearing a seatbelt because she didn't need one, of course.
Raed wanted to ask the woman her name, but sensed it wouldn't be appropriate. Besides, he knew who she had to be: “Angie"—Angela or Angelica—Tom's spouse. An old woman now, yet still strong enough to ghost back to her lost husband's side, strong enough to withstand the discharge of his dread long enough to add a little of her own calm to his. Angie was comforting Tom on the way to that greater comfort the man clearly had faith in.
The plane rolled, awkwardly changing direction, tossing Raed off balance. Through the windows of the forward seats he spotted distant skyscrapers, including the towers of the World Trade Center. Up in the cockpit his cousins and their pilot friends were beginning the approach to the South Tower, intent on bringing it down. And because Raed had known their intentions before his cousins and their comrades ever boarded this plane, he was just as responsible as they were. He could no longer deny it, now that he was actually on board with them. He'd always been on board with them, in some sense or other....
So the thought of walking up to the cockpit door and eavesdropping on Nazir and Sayf's final words held no interest for Raed. His cousins’ hold over him disintegrated long ago, in the awful period after the Twin Towers came down.
Raed turned his back to the cockpit, and began to walk down the aisle, looking over the people filling the rear of the plane—his cousins’ victims, his victims too. He knew there'd only been sixty-five passengers on Flight 175, but he could see closer to a hundred crowded into the rear rows. Before him a sad and beautiful truth was playing out.... The plane banked again and Raed reeled on his feet, but not because of the deficiencies of the pilot. What he was seeing was almost too overpowering to witness.
The back of the plane was packed with lonely people, many of them being comforted by their o
wn ghost-children—mostly full-grown forty-somethings now, adults strong enough to come back to this unthinkable moment, to tackle the hard part and take on the two-way interaction “biomass” unleashed: strong emotions flooding from the passengers into these ghost-descendants.
And weak emotions seeping from the ghosts back into their long-lost loved ones.
Whatever weak effect we have on the past, the researcher Francis told Raed, it was made the first time around, if you get my meaning. So nothing can be changed!
Cause and effect aside, every row Raed passed held an anguished-looking adult in track pants or jumpsuit, a red ribbon pinned to their collar. The ghosts were squeezed in behind the seats of some passengers, leaning over headrests, arms draped down around the shoulders of a mother, or an aunt, or a family friend they'd come back to comfort. A few were even kneeling in the aisle, their heads tucked onto the laps of passengers. All these agonizing visitors were soaking up the frenzied emotions of the passengers, while oozing an ounce of serenity back the other way, an ounce of certainty that their loved ones were with them, in spirit.
It was all they could do. Raed understood that now, and he understood what the projection-team was putting him through. He saw the method underlying their rehab program, ghosting him back to see things that should help him know what to do, like those two firemen taking turns in the crow's nest of their pumper truck, falling out exhausted, then climbing back in again to help douse the raging fires.
That's just what Raed was witnessing in the rear of Flight 175, as some ghost-comforters overcome with emotion simply vanished, others immediately appearing to take their place. The volunteers from his own time were projecting in, in wave after wave, taking turns taking on the pain of relatives and friends in their moment of greatest need.
The plane dropped lower, and a cry rose up from several passengers on Raed's left. Through the oval windows he saw the smoke-trail from the North Tower, both buildings drawing inexorably closer.
Time to face the hard part himself.
In the second-to-last row, a woman was curled up with a tiny, tired-looking child, a girl the age of the Basma he'd lost. A middle-aged man in coveralls stood behind the woman's seat, his head bowed, his arms draped down over the woman's shoulders, while her own arm was wrapped tightly round the shoulders of the child in the aisle seat.
Raed lowered himself to his knees, falling into a prayer-position in the aisle beside the child, a victim of the pitiless madness of Raed's own youth. But pitying her now, he placed his arm across her, received the awesome discharge of her emotions, concentrated, and tried hard to push his own feelings and his fatigue back onto her: FORGIVE ME-FIND PEACE IN YOUR MOTHER'S ARMS-ADD MY WEARINESS TO YOURS.... The child's drooping eyes finally closed, Raed felt her fall unconscious as the plane accelerated down, saw some of the fear ease from her face in the last second of his embrace—
END OF FIRST
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DEEP-PROJECTION CASE
Many more cases and depositions were presented to the World Court over the course of the hearings on deep-projection technology. Some were further examples of New Spiritualist experiments, like the program designed for the inmate Raed. These positive-result cases sparked far greater interest among the worldwide audience following the hearings than the overstated cases claiming negative consequences. So by end of the hearings the court made its controversial decision, lifting the ban on deep-projection “for limited use"—such use to be governed by a duly-appointed body that would oversee and approve projection programs.
I, Francis Drummond, am the head of that governing body.
The Hague hearings dramatically boosted the number of New Spiritualist volunteers, as it became apparent to the public that emotions transcend time in some miraculous way, and in a two-way direction.... From that day to this, our movement has spread into every culture, changing the nature of the mid-twenty-first century entirely. Projection arenas have been reopened or built anew in thousands of cities, and now hundreds of thousands of volunteers ghost back to the past, participating in programs designed to open their eyes to the universality of tragedy in cultures other than their own.
The result has been a wider recognition of our present as the precious, precarious climax to all our ancient pasts. After millennia of struggle and strife, back-breaking labor and bad luck, madness and sadness and small successes piled one atop the next, most societies are making that final leap up the ladder of progress toward a transcendent, tolerant civilization.
The goal of New Spiritualism is a reawakening to the truth of what has gone before us, what it has taken all of us to get here. And though the controversy rages on, today that goal is being achieved. Waves of volunteers are returning to comfort their own ancestors—or comfort mere strangers caught in the tragic forces of world history—as a way of thanking the generations whose sufferings helped bring about a world they feel fortunate to live in. The target-times these volunteers revisit are mostly old and familiar turning points of the past, key moments in the histories of many cultures. The oldest stories in the book, you might say, and each one defined by a truth that volunteers of all cultures report witnessing: down through the ages the greatest humanity is always to be found in the midst of tragedy and catastrophe, as the living cling to loved ones lost with hearts unbound.
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