Far Thoughts and Pale Gods

by Greg Bear

  Thierry had been an actor in his youth. He had played small roles in bad chemstock films, one or two tiny appearances in good ones. He was known to film buffs but not to many others. In time he found his real strength lay in putting together deals, and so he began to produce and even direct films not so much bad as lusterless, soon forgotten.

  By the late 1980s he had made a reputation as the director of a series of bizarre mystery films in which a peculiar flavor, half lunacy, half ironic humor, attracted a faithful following. He began to lecture at colleges and universities. He allegedly once told a screenwriter in New York that “Movies are a weak shadow. Religion is where we ought to go.”

  And so he went. Not an uneducated man, he joined the chorus of psychologists then intent on knocking the last crumbling chunks of Freudian doctrine from its pedestal. He tried to add all the rest of psychology to the scraps; his first wife had been a psychotherapist, and the parting had been memorably cruel to both.

  Then, when he was forty-three years old, came a night of revelation. Sitting on a beach near the California city of Newport, he was confronted—so he claimed—by a massive figure, tall as a skyscraper, who gave him a piece of rock crystal the size of his fist. The figure was female in shape, but masculine in strength, and it said to him, “I don’t have much time. I’ve been dead too long to stay here and talk to you in person. This crystal tells the entire story.”

  Thierry surmised that the huge figure was a hologram—which seemed to me to be primitive technology for a god to use when manifesting herself, but then, Thierry’s imagination was limited by his times, and to reach his presumed audience of scientific naives, he used the jargon and concepts of the 1990s.

  He stared into the crystal, wrote down what he saw in a series of secret books not published in his lifetime, and then produced an epitome for public consumption. That epitome was called The Old and the New Human Race, and in it he revealed the cosmic science of Chromopsychology.

  The enormous hologram had been the last of the True Humans, and the crystal she had given him had helped him unlock the power of his mind. He published and promoted the book personally. It sold ten thousand copies the first year, and five hundred thousand copies the next. Later editions revised the name and some of the doctrines of the cosmic science: it became Logology, his final break with even the name psychology.

  The Old and the New Human Race was soon available not just in paper, but in cube text, LitVid, Vid, and five interactive media.

  Through a series of seminars, he converted a few disciples at first, then multitudes, to the belief that humanity had once been godlike in its powers, and was now shackled by ancient chains that made us small, stupid, and dependent on our bodies. Thierry said that all humans were capable of transforming themselves into free-roving, powerful spirits. The crystal told him how to break these chains through a series of mental exercises, and how to realize that humanity’s ancient enemies—all but one, whom he called Shaytana—were already dead, and powerless to stop our self-liberation. All one’s personal liberation required was concentration, education, and discipline—and a lifetime membership in the Church of Logology.

  Shaytana was Loki and a watered-down Satan combined, too weak to destroy us or even stop strong individuals from breaking free of the chains, wily enough and persistent enough to convince the great majority of humans that death was our destiny and weakness our lot. Those who opposed Thierry were dupes of Shaytana, or willing cohorts (as Freud, Jung, Adler, and all other psychiatrists and psychologists had been). There were many other dupes of Shaytana, including presidents, priests, and even his fellow prophets.

  In 1997, Thierry tried to purchase a small South Pacific island to create a community of Unchained. He was rebuffed by the island’s inhabitants and forced to move his seedling colony to Idaho, where he started his own small town, Ouranos, named after the progenitor of human consciousness. Ouranos became a major political center in Idaho; Thierry was in part responsible for the separation of the state into two sections in 2012, the northern calling itself Green Idaho.

  He wrote massively, still made movies occasionally. His later books covered all aspects of a Logologist’s life, from prenatal care to funeral rites and design of grave site. He packaged LitVids on such topics as world economics and politics. Slowly, he became a recluse; by 2031, two years before his death, he saw no one but his mistress and three personal secretaries.

  Thierry claimed that a time of crisis would come after his own “liberation,” and that within a century he would return, “freed of the chains of flesh,” to put the Church of Logology into a position of “temporal power over the nations of the Earth.” “Our enemies will be cinderized,” he promised, “and the faithful will see an eon of spiritual ecstasy.”

  At his death, he weighed one hundred and seventy-five kilograms and had to move with the aid of a massive armature part wheel-chair, part robot. Press releases, and reports to his hundreds of thousands of disciples in Ouranos and around the world, described his death as voluntary release. He was accompanying the spirit who had first appeared to him on the beach in California on a tour of the galaxy.

  His personal physician—a devoted disciple—claimed that despite his bulk, he was in perfect health, and that his body had changed its internal constitution in such a way as to build up massive amounts of energy necessary to power him in the first few years of his spiritual voyage.

  Thierry himself they called the Ascended Master. Allegedly he had made weekly reports to his mistress on his adventures. She lived to a ripe old age, eschewed rejuvenation legal or otherwise, grew massive in bulk and so the story went, joined her former lover on his pilgrimage.

  A year after his death, one of his secretaries was arrested in Green Idaho on charges of child pornography. There was no evidence that Thierry had ever participated in such activities; but the ensuing scandal nearly wrecked the Church of Logology.

  The Church recovered with remarkable speed when it sponsored a program of supporting young LitVid artists. Using the program as a steppingstone to acceptance among politicians and the general public, Logology’s past was soon forgotten, and its current directors—anonymous, efficient, and relatively colorless—finished the job that Thierry had begun. They made Logology a legitimate alternative religion, for those who continued to seek such solace.

  The church prospered and made its beginning moves on Puerto Rico. Logologists established a free hospital and “psychiatric” training center on the island in 2046, four years before Puerto Rico became the 51st state. The island was soon controlled by a solid 60% majority population of Logologists, the greatest concentration of the religion on Earth. Every Puerto Rican representative in the United States Congress since statehood had been a Logologist.

  The rest was more or less familiar, including an in-depth history of the Io purchase and expedition.

  When I finished poring over the massive amounts of material, I was drained and incredulous. I felt that I understood human nature from a somewhat superior perspective—as someone who was not a Logologist, who had not been taken in by Thierry’s falsehoods and fantasies.

  Arrogance can swing both ways.

  Already, something was haunting me.

  I dreamed that night of walking along an irrigation canal in Egypt. Dawn came intensely blue in the east, stars overhead still shining like little needles. The canal had frozen during the night, which pleased me; it lay in jumbled cubes of ice, clear as glass, and the cubes were rearranging themselves like living things into perfect flat sheets.

  Order, I thought. The Pharaoh will be pleased.

  But as I looked into the depths of the canal, I saw fish pinned under the cubes, unable to move, gills flexing frantically, and I realized that I had sinned. I looked up to the stars, blaming them, but they refused to accept responsibility; then I looked to the sides of the canal, among the reeds, and saw a copper torus on each side, sucking soundlessly.

  All my dream-muscles twitched and I came awake.

/>   It was eight hundred hours and my personal line was blinking politely. I answered; there were two messages, one from Rho, left three hours earlier, and one from Thomas Sandoval-Rice, an hour after hers.

  Rho’s message was voice only, and brief. “Mickey, the director wants to meet with both of us today in Port Yin. He’s sending an executive shuttle for us at ten hundred.”

  The director’s message was extensive text and a vocal request from his secretary. “Mickey, Thomas Sandoval-Rice would like you meet with him in Port Yin as soon as possible. We’d like Rhosalind to be there as well.”

  Accompanying the message was text and LitVid on Logology—much of the same material I’d already studied.

  I cleared my schedule for the day and canceled a meeting with family engineers on generator maintenance.

  Rho was uncharacteristically somber as we waited in the Pad Four lounge. Outside, it was lunar night, but the brilliant glow of landing field lights blanked out the stars. Earth was at full above us, a double-thumbnail-sized spot of bluish light through the overhead ports. All we could see through the lounge windows was a few hectares of ashen churned lunar soil, a pile of rubble dug out from the Ice Pit warrens decades before, and the featureless gray concrete of the field itself.

  “I feel like they’re shoving my nose in it,” Rho said. The lights of the executive bus became visible above the horizon. “Pretty fancy treatment. The director never paid us so much attention before.”

  I tried to reassure her. “You’ve never reeled in Great-Grandma and Grandpa before,” I said.

  She shook her head. “That isn’t it. He sent a stack of research on Logologists.”

  I nodded. “Me, too. You’ve read it?”

  “Of course.”

  “What did you think?”

  “They’re odd, but I can’t find anything that would make them object to this project. They say death isn’t liberation unless you’re enlightened—so frozen heads could just be more potential converts …”

  “Maybe Thomas knows something more,” I said.

  The bus landed, sleek and bright red, an expensive, full-pressure­, full-cabin late model Lunar Rover. I had never ridden on the Sandoval limo before. The interior was impressive: automatically adjusting seats, a hot and cold restaurant unit—I’d already eaten breakfast, but nibbled on Rho’s eggs and mock ham—and a complete communications center. We could have called Earth or Mars or any of the asteroids using Lunar Cooperative or even the Triple satellites if we’d wished.

  “Makes you realize how far out of the Sandoval mainstream we are at the Ice Pit,” I said as Rho slipped her plate into the return.

  “I haven’t missed it,” she said. “We get what we need.”

  “William might not agree.”

  Rho smiled. “It’s not luxury he’s after.”

  Port Yin was Procellarum’s main interplanetary commerce field and largest city, hub for all the stations in the ocean. Procellarum was the main territory of Sandoval BM, though we had some twenty stations and two smaller ports in the Earthside highlands. Besides being a transportation hub, Port Yin was surrounded by farms. We fed much of the Earthside Moon south and west of the ocean. For lunar citizens, a farm station of sufficient size also acts as a resort—a chance to admire forests and fields.

  We passed over the now-opaqued rows of farm domes, thousands of hectares spaced along the southeast edge of the port, and came in at the private Sandoval field half an hour before our appointment. That gave us little time to cross by rail and walkway through Yin City’s crowds to Center Port.

  The director’s secretary led us down the short hall to his small personal office, centrally located among the Sandoval syndic warrens.

  Thomas Sandoval-Rice was trim, resolutely gray-haired, with a thin nose and ample lips, a middling seventy-five years old, and he wore a formal black suit with red sash and mooncalf slippers. He stood to greet us. There was barely room for three chairs and a desk; this was his inner sanctum, not the show office for Sandoval clients or other BM reps.

  Rho looked at me forlornly as we entered; this did indeed seem like the occasion for a dressing-down.

  “I’m pleased to see both of you again,” Thomas said as he offered us chairs. “You’re looking well. Mickey, it’s been three years, hasn’t it, since we approved your position at the Ice Pit?”

  “Yes, sir,” I said. “Thank you.”

  “No need. You’ve done well.” Thomas noticed Rho’s wary expression and smiled reassurance. “This is not a visit to the dentist,” he said. “Rho, I smell a storm coming, and I’d like to have you tell me what kind of storm it might be, and why we’re sailing into it.”

  “I don’t know, sir,” Rho said steadily.

  “Mickey?”

  “I’ve read your text, sir. I’m puzzled, as well.”

  “The Task-Felder BM is behind all this, everybody’s assured me of that. I have friends in the United States of the Western Hemisphere Senate. Friends who are in touch with California Logology, the parent church, as it were. Task-Felder BM is less independent than they want to appear; if California Logology nods its hoary head, Task-Felder jumps. Now, you know that no lunar BM is supposed to operate as either a terrestrial representative or to promote purely religious principles … That’s in the Lunar Binding Multiples Agreements. The Constitution of the Moon.”

  “Yes, sir,” I said.

  “But Task-Felder BM has managed to avoid or ignore a great many of those provisions, and nobody’s called them on it, because no BM likes the image of making a council challenge of another fully chartered BM, even one with terrestrial connections. Bad for business, in brief. We all like to think of ourselves as rugged individualists, family first, Moon second, Triple third … and to hell with the Triple if push comes to shove. Understood?”

  “Yes, sir,” I said.

  “I’ve served as chief syndic and director of Sandoval BM for twenty-nine years, and in that time, I’ve seen Task-Felder grow powerful despite the distaste of the older, family-based binding multiples. They’re sharp, they’re quick learners, they have impressive financial backing, and they have a sincerity and a drive that can be disconcerting.”

  “I’ve noticed that, sir,” I said.

  Thomas pursed his lips. “Your conversation with Janis Granger was not pleasant?”

  “No, sir.”

  “We’ve done something to offend them, and my sources on Earth tell me they’re willing to take off their gloves, get down in the dust and spit up a volcano if they have to. Mud, mud, crazier than mud.”

  “I don’t understand why, sir,” Rho said.

  “I was hoping one or both of you could enlighten me. You’ve gone through the brief on their history and beliefs. You don’t find anything suggestive?”

  “I certainly don’t,” Rho said.

  “Our frozen great-grandma and great-grandpa never did anything to upset them?”

  “Not that we know of.”

  “Rho, we’ve had some two-facing from our fellow BMs, haven’t we? Nernst and Cailetet are willing to design something for us and take our cash, but they may not stand up for us in the Council.” He rubbed his chin for a moment with his finger, making a wry face. “Is there anyone else interesting in the list of heads, besides Great-Grandma and Great-Grandpa?”

  “I’ve brought along my files, including the list of individuals preserved by StarTime. There’s a gap I was not aware of, sir—three intact individuals, not named—and I’ve asked StarTime’s advocate in New York for an accounting, but I have yet to get an answer.”

  “You’ve correlated the list?”

  “Pardon?” Rho asked.

  “You’ve run cross-checks between Logology connections and the list? In history?”

  “No,” Rho said.

  “Did you, Mickey?”

  “No, sir.”

  Thomas glanced at me reproachfully. “Let’s do it now, then,” he said. He took Rho’s slate and plugged it into his desktop thinker. With a start,
I realized this small green cube was Ellen C, the Sandoval thinker, advisor to all the syndics. Ellen C was one of the oldest thinkers on the Moon, somewhat obsolete now, but definitely part of the family. “Ellen, what do we have here?”

  “No interesting strikes or correlations in the first or second degree,” the thinker reported. “Completed.”

  Thomas raised his eyebrows. “Perhaps a dead end.”

  “I’ll look into the unnamed three,” Rho said.

  “Do that. Now, I’d like to rehearse a few things with you folks. Are you familiar with our weaknesses—or your own? What about the many weaknesses and failures of the lunar BM political system?”

  I could not, in my naïveté, come up with any immediate answers. Rho was equally blank.

  “Allow an older fool to lecture you a bit. First, let’s get personal. Grandpa Ian Reiker-Sandoval favored Rho, doted on her. Gave her anything she wanted. So Rho got the man she wanted, someone from outside who didn’t meet the usual Sandoval criteria for eligible matches. And she got him his project.”

  Rho looked stubbornly unperturbed.

  Thomas smiled. “Still, William has done his work admirably, and the project is interesting. We all look forward to a breakthrough. However—”

  “You’re saying I’m spoiled,” Rho anticipated.

  “Let’s say … that you’ve had a rich girl’s leeway, without the corruption of free access to fabulous wealth,” Thomas said. “Nevertheless, you have substantial BM resources at your disposal, and you have a way of getting us into trouble without really seeing it coming.”

  “I’m not sure that’s fair,” I said.

  “As judgments go, it’s extremely fair,” Thomas said, staring at me with no further humor. “This is not the first time … or are memories short in the younger Sandovals?”

  Rho looked up at the ceiling, then at me, then at Thomas. “The tulips,” she said.