Two years after I exposed the conspiracy to con- ceal from the general public the existence of the Wormwood, attention is already moving on—and we have yet to start work on the great project of our survival.
Indeed, the Wormwood itself is already having advance effects. It is a cruel irony that just as, for the first time in our history, we were beginning to manage our future responsibly and jointly, the pros- pect of Wormwood Day seems to render such ef- forts meaningless. Already we've seen the abandonment of various voluntary waste-emission guidelines, the closure of nature reserves, an up- graded search for sources of nonrenewable fuels, an extinction pulse among endangered species. If the house is to be demolished tomorrow anyhow, peo- ple seem to feel, we may as well bum the furniture today -
None of our problems arc insoluble—not even the Wormwood. But it seems clear that to prevail we humans will have to act with a smartness and selflessness that has so far eluded us during our long and tangled history.
Still, my hope centers on humanity and ingenu- ity. It is significant, I believe, that the Wormwood was discovered—not by the professionals, who weren't looking mat way—but by a network of am- ateur sky watchers, who set up robot telescopes in their backyards, and used shareware routines to scan optical detector images for changing glimmers of light, and refused to accept the cloak of secrecy our government tried to lay over them. It is in groups like this—earnest, intelligent, cooperative, stubborn, refusing to submit to impulses toward su- icide or hedonism or selfishness, seeking new so- lutions to challenge the complacency of the professionals—that our best and brightest hope of surviving the future may lie....
VIRTUAL HEAVEN
Lobby was late arriving at Revelation Land. Kate was still waiting in the car lot for him as the swarms of aging adherents started pressing through the gates of Billybob Meeks' giant cathedral of concrete and glass. „ This "cathedral" had once been a football stadium;
I they were forced to sit near the back of one of the stands, 1 their view impeded by pillars. Sellers of hot dogs, pea- H nuts, soft drinks and recreational drugs were working the ji crowd, and muzak played over the PA. "Jerusalem," she f, recognized: based on Blake's great poem about me leg- Is endary visit of Christ to Britain, no.w the anthem of the ^ new post-United Kingdom England.
A The entire floor of the stadium was mirrored, making it a floor of blue sky littered with fat December clouds. i At the center there was a gigantic throne, covered in t stones glimmering green and blue—probably impure !s quartz, she thought. Water sprayed through the air, and arc lamps created a rainbow which arched spectacularly. More lamps hovered in the air before the throne, held aloft by drone robots, and smaller thrones circled bearing elders, old men and women dressed in white with golden ;- crowns on their skinny heads.
And there were beasts the size of tipper trucks prowl- ing around the field. They were grotesque, every part of their bodies covered with blinking eyes. One of them opened giant wings and flew, eagle-like, a few meters- ^, The beasts roared at the crowd, their calls amplified by a booming PA. The crowd got to its feet and cheered, as if celebrating a touchdown.
Bobby was oddly nervous. He was wearing a tight- fitting one-piece suit of bright scarlet, with a color- morphing kerchief draped around his neck. He was a gorgeous twenty-first-century dandy, she thought, as out of place in the drab, elderly multitude around him as a diamond in a child's seashore pebble collection.
She touched his hand. "Are you okay?"
"I didn't realize they'd all be so old"
He was right, of course. The gathering congregation was a powerful illustration of the silvering of America. Many of the crowd, in fact, had cognitive-enhancer studs clearly visible at the backs of their necks, there to com- bat the onset of age-related diseases like Alzheimer's by stimulating the production of neurotransmitters and cell adhesion molecules.
"Go to any church in the country and you'll see the same thing, Bobby. Sadly, people are attracted to reli- gion when they approach death. And now there are more old people—and with the Wormwood coming we all feel the brush of that dark shadow, perhaps. Billybob is just surfing a demographic wave. Anyhow, these people won't bite."
"Maybe not. But they smell. Can't you tell?"
She laughed. " 'One should never put on one's best trousers to go out to battle for freedom and truth.' "
"Huh?"
"Henrik Ibsen."
Now a man stood up on the big central throne. He was short, fat and his face shone with sweat. His am- plified voice boomed out: "Welcome to RevelationLand! Do you know why you're here?" His finger stabbed. "Do you? Do you? Listen to me now: On the Lord's day I was in the spirit, and I heard behind me a loud voice like a trumpet, which said: 'Write on a scroll what you see ...' " And he held up a glittering scroll.
Kate leaned toward Bobby. "Meet Billybob Meeks.
Prepossessing, isn't he? Clap along. Protective colora- tion."
"What's going on, Kate?"
"Evidently you've never read the Book of Revelation. The Bible's deranged punch line." She pointed. "Seven hovering lamps. Twenty-four thrones around the big one. Revelation is riddled with magic numbers—three, seven, twelve. And its description of the end of things is very literal. Although at least Billybob uses the traditional versions, not the modem editions which have been re- written to show how the Wormwood date of 2534 was there in the text all along...." She sighed. "The astron- omers who discovered the Wormwood didn't do any- body any favors by calling it that. Chapter Eight, verse ten: The third angel sounded his trumpet, and a great star, blazing like a torch, fell from the sky on a third of the rivers and on the springs of water—the name of the star is Wormwood..."
"I don't understand why you invited me here today. In fact I don't know how you got a message through to me. After my father threw you ,out—"
"Hiram isn't yet omnipotent, Boh»by," she said. "Not even over you. And as to why—look up." '
A drone robot hovered over their heads, labeled with a stark, simple word: GRAINS. It dipped into the crowd, in response to the summons of members of the congre- gation.
Bobby said, "Grains? The mind accelerator?"
"Yes. Billybob's specialty. Do you know Blake? To see a World in a Grain of Sand, / And a Heaven in a Wild Flower, /Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand, / And Eternity in an hour ... The pitch is that if you take Grains your perception of time will speed up. Subjec- tively, you'll be able to think more thoughts, have more experiences, in the same external time. A longer life— available exclusively from Billybob Meeks."
Bobby nodded. "But what's wrong with that?"
"Bobby, look around. Old people are frightened of death. That makes them vulnerable to this kind of scam."
"What scam? Isn't it true that Grains actually works?"
"After a fashion. The brain's internal clock actually runs more slowly for older people. And that's the mech- anism Billybob is screwing around with."
"And the problem is—"
"The side effects. What Grains does is to stimulate the production of dopamine, the brain's main chemical mes- senger. Trying to make an old man's brain run as fast as a child's."
"Which is a bad thing," he said uncertainly. "Right?"
She frowned, baffled by the question; not for the first time she had the feeling that there was something miss- ing about Bobby. "Of course it's a bad thing. It is ma- levolent brain-tinkering. Bobby, dopamine is involved in a lot of fundamental brain functions. If dopamine levels are too low you can suffer tremors, an inability to start voluntary movement—Parkinson'sdisease, for instance— all the way to catatonia. Too much dopamine and you can suffer from agitation, obsessive-compulsive disor- ders, uncontrolled speech and movement, addictiveness, euphoria. Billybob's congregation—I should say his vic- tims—aren't going to achieve Eternity in their last hour, Billybob is cynically burning out their brains.
"Some of the doctors are putting two and two to- gether. But nobody has been able to prove anything. What I really ne
ed is evidence from his own labs that Billybob knows exactly what he is doing. Along with proof of his other scams."
"Such as?"
"Such as embezzling millions of bucks from insurance companies by selling them phony lists of church mem- bers. Such as pocketing a large donation from the Anti- Defamation League. He's still hustling, even though he's come a long way from banknote-baptisms." She glanced at Bobby. "Never heard of that? You palm a bill during a baptism. That way the blessing of God gets diverted to the money rather than the kiddie. Then you send the note out into circulation, and it's supposed to return to you with interest... and to make especially sure it works, of course, you hand the money over to your preacher. Word is Billybob picked up that endearing habit in Colombia, where he was working as a drug run- ner."
Bobby looked shocked. "You don't have any proof of that."
"Not yet," she said grimly. "But I'll get it."
"How?"
"That's what 1 want to talk to you about...."
He looked mildly stunned.
She said, "Sorry. I'm lecturing you, aren't I?"
"A little."
"I do that when I'm angry."
"Kate, you are angry a lot...."
"I feel entitled. I've been on this guy's trail for months."
A drone robot floated over their heads, bearing sets of virtual Glasses-and-Gloves. "These Glasses-and-Gloves have been devised by RevelationLand Inc., in conjunc- tion with OurWorld Corporation, for the full experience of RevelationLand. Your credit card or personal account will be billed automatically per online minute. These Glasses-and-Gloves - -."
Kate reached up and snagged two sets. "Show time."
Bobby shook his head. "I have implants. I don't need—"
"Biliybob has his own special way of disabling rival technologies." She lifted the Glasses to her head. "Arc you ready?"
"I guess—"
She felt a moist sensation around her eye sockets, as the Glasses extruded membranes to make a light-tight junction with her flesh; it felt like cold wet mouths suck- ing at her face.
She was instantly suspended in darkness and silence.
Now Bobby materialized beside her, floating in space, holding her hand. His GIasses-and-Gloves were, of course, invisible.
And soon her vision cleared further. People were hov- ering all around them, off as far as she could see, like a cloud of dust motes. They were all dressed in white robes and holding big, gaudy palm leaves—even Bobby to and herself, she found. And they were shining in the s, light that streamed from the object that hung before ^ them. <
It was a cube; huge, perfect, shining sun-bright, utterly dwarfing the flock of hovering people.
"Wow," Bobby said again.
"Revelation Chapter Twenty-one," she murmured. f. "Welcome to the New Jerusalem." She tried to throw ^ away her palm leaf, but another simply appeared in her hand. "Just remember," she said, "the only real thing here is the steady flow of money out of your pockets and into Billybob's."
Together, they fell toward the light. f:
The wall before her Was punctured by windows and a line of three arched doorways. She could see a light within, shining even more brightly than the exterior of the building. Scaled against the building's dimensions, the walls looked as thin as paper.
And still they fell toward the cube, until it loomed before them, gigantic, like some immense ocean liner.
Bobby said, "How big is this thing?"
She murmured, "Saint John tells us it is a cube twelve thousand stadia to each side."
"And twelve thousand stadia is—"
"About two thousand kilometers. Bobby, this city of God is the size of a small moon. It's going to take a long time to fall in. And we'll be charged for every second, of course."
"In that case I wish I'd had a hot dog. You know, my father mentions you a tot."
"He's angry at me."
"Hiram is, umm, mercurial. I think on some level he found you stimulating."
"I suppose I should be nattered."
"He liked the phrase you used. Electronic anaesthesia. I have to admit I didn't fully understand."
She frowned at him, as together they drifted toward the pale gray light. "You really have led a sheltered life, haven't you, Bobby?"
"Most of what you call 'brain-tinkering' is beneficial, surely. Like Alzheimer studs." He eyed her. "Maybe I'm not as out of it as you think I am. A couple of years ago I opened a hospital wing endowed by OurWorld. They were helping obsessive-compulsive sufferers by cutting out a destructive feedback loop between two areas of the brain—"
"The caudate nucleus and the amygdala." She smiled. "Remarkable how we've all become experts in brain anatomy. I'm not saying it's all harmful. But there is a compulsion to tinker. Addictions are nullified by changes to the brain's reward circuitry. People prone to rage are pacified by having parts, of their amygdala— essential to emotion—burned out. Workaholics, gam- blers, even people habitually in debt are 'diagnosed' and 'cured.' Even aggression has been linked to a disorder of the cortex."
"What's so terrible about all of that?"
"These quacks, these reprogramming doctors, don't understand the machine they are tinkering with. It's like trying to figure out the functions of a piece of software by burning out the chips of the computer it's running on. There are always side effects. Why do you think it was so easy for Billybob to find a football stadium to take over? Because organized spectator sport has been declining since 2015: the players no longer fought hard enough."
He smiled. "That doesn't seem too serious."
"Then consider this. The quality and quantity of orig- inal scientific research has been plummeting for two de- cades. By 'curing' fringe autistics, the doctors have removed the capacity of our brightest people to apply themselves to tough disciplines. And the area of the brain linked to depression, the subgenual cortex, is also associated with creativity—the perception of meaning. Most critics agree that me arts have gone into a reverse. Why do you think your father's virtual rock bands are so popular, seventy years after the originals were at their peak?"
"But what's the alternative? If not for reprogranumng, the world would be a violent and savage place."
She squeezed his hand. "It may not be evident to you in your gilded cage, but the world out there still is vio- lent and savage. What we need is a machine that will let us see the other guy's point of view. If we can't achieve that, than all the reprogramming in the world is futile."
He said wryly, "You really are an angry person, aren't your'
"Angry? At charlatans like Billybob? At latter-day phrenologists and lobotomizers and Nazi doctors who are screwing with our heads, maybe even threatening the future of the species, while the world comes to pieces around us? Of course I'm angry. Aren't you?"
He returned her gaze, puzzled. "I guess I have to mink about it.... Hey. We're accelerating."
The Holy City loomed before her. The wall was like a great upended plain, with the doors shining rectangular craters before her.
The swarms of people were plunging in separating streams toward the great arched doors, as if being drawn into maelstroms. Bobby and Kate swooped toward the central door. Kate felt an exhilarating headlong rush as the door arch opened wide before her—but there was no genuine sense of motion here. If she thought about it, she could still feel her body, sitting quietly in its stiff- backed stadium seat.
But still, it was some ride.
In a heartbeat they had flown through the doorway, a glowing tunnel of gray-white light, and they were skim- ming over a surface of shining gold.
Kate glanced around, seeking walls that must be hun- dreds of kilometers away. But there was unexpected art- istry here. The air was misty—there were even clouds above her, scattered thinly, reflecting the shining golden floor—and she couldn't see beyond a few kilometers of the golden plain.
... And then she looked up, and saw the shining walls of the city rising out of the layer of atmosphere that clung to the floor. Th
e plains and straight line edges merged into a distant square, unexpectedly clear, far above the air.
It was a ceiling over the atmosphere.
"Wow," she said. "It's the box the Moon came in."
Bobby's hand around hers was warm and soft. "Admit it. You're impressed."
"Billybob is still a crook."
"But an artful crook."
Now gravity was taking hold. The people around them were descending like so many human snowflakes; and Kate fell with them. She could see a river, bright blue, that cut across the golden plain beneath. Its banks were lined with dense green forest. There were people every- where, she realized, scattered over the riverbank and the clear areas beyond and near the buildings. And thousands more were falling out of the sky all around her. Surely there were more here than could have been present in the sports stadium; no doubt many of them were virtual projections.
Arthur C Clarke - Light Of Other Days Page 6
