“That’s what I think, too,” Carlotta said. “Enough is enough, right? Next thing you know, this stuff is going to starting getting to you, male creature that you are.” Rugo waddled back a few steps. “Whonk-ka-whonk-ka-whonk!” he protested.
“Okay, okay, I was only kidding...
Royce appeared at the living room door, a dark male silhouette outlined by the light from within. “Hey, Carlotta, come inside!” he called. “They’re running that ‘Faust’ Falkenstein told us about. You really should see this. I’ve got it on the living room screen.”
Damn that! Carlotta thought as Royce disappeared inside the house. Even he's starting to act a little strangely. Plugged into the Transcendental Science channel religiously in the name of doing his job. So quiet sometimes, like a sullen little boy. And we’ve been arguing; we hardly ever used to do that. Even making love seemed a little peculiar lately. There were times, even at the moment of orgasm, when his mind seemed to be totally elsewhere, lost along some peculiar masculine vector she neither understood nor cared to understand.
Great grunting godzillas, Carlotta thought as she started resignedly toward the house, are they starting to get to us?
A very long shot on a bleak and jagged chunk of steel-gray rock floating in the interstellar void. The camera zooms in with ever-increasing speed, centering finally on an ancient and scarred dome of golden metal on the surface. A recognizably human starship is parked nearby. The zoom dissolves to a shot inside the dome. A man and a woman stand before an organically recurved alien computer console shimmering on the interface between energy and matter—weathered and yet somehow insubstantial under the shadowy vaulted dome the color of old gold and carved into abstract gothic alien gargoyles. The man—lean, dark-haired, and saturnine—is dressed much in the manner of a Transcendental Scientist in black trousers and a black tunic with a high-cowled collar that almost gives the effect of a cloak. The beautiful young blond woman wears a flowing robe of virginal white.
Woman: “I fear this place, great Faust, for surely this is all that remains of that dp mon race which conquered the starry realms only to vanish with all its works before our own sun coalesced from the primal mists.”
Faust (contemplating the alien artifact): “Surely, indeed, fair Marghuerita. What ultimate knowledge was theirs! To traverse the marches of the galaxy in an instant, to know the worlds of ten million suns, to discourse with the mages of ten thousand wise and ancient races, while we poor humans slowly crawl about a few paltry barren parsecs, our great life’s journey not yet fairly begun before we are snuffed out by implacable and pitiless time. Gods they were, or godlike enough so as to render the distinction between flesh and the ultimate meaningless—and all by virtue not of the anointment of some nonexistent deity but of their own vast and indomitable wills. By their own wills/”
Marghuerita: “Demons, Faust, in their limitless pride, not gods in their wise and humble obeisance to immutable law. Great in their mastery of matter and energy, pitiful in their ignorance of the limits of the sentient soul, for are not they and all their works vanished into the great nothingness from whence they evolved?”
Faust (contemptuously): “Neither, in truth—for both
gods and demons, Great Jove and Lucifer himself, are but the literary maunderings of the childhood mind. For throughout the limitless universe naught exists but matter, energy, and the laws that bind them. That, and the great mystery of sentience itself—at once the creature of these blind and immutable forces and yet quickened with the striving to transcend the parameters which gave it birth.
I would discourse with this last and lonely sentinel of those who dared to challenge those final frontiers. For surely even I, whose long and fruitful life has wrested more from the great impenetrable unknown than any other Earth-born woman’s son, might drink in wonder, long and deep, like a thirsting babe, from this well of wisdom whose bottom lies so deep as to recede from view beyond the birth-veils of our paltry human age.”
Marghuerita: “Long have I loved you and long have I followed from star to star as you pursued this quest whose final goal recedes forever down the corridors of time, but into this nether pit I followed neither you nor any man, not for the sake of centuries of love in perfect bliss ...” .
Faust (ignoring her and addressing the alien computer): “Speak and reveal to me the wisdoms, knowledge, and cosmic lore which you enfold!”
The alien computer dissolves into a rainbow mist of shimmering energy and speaks with an other-worldly voice compounded of electronics and keening strings—immense, cold, and profound.
Computer: “Who seels to learn that which those who spanned ten million suns could not in sanity contain?”
Faust: “I am Faust, image of the race of men, bom on a mote of dust circling an insignificant sun, who yet dares to challenge time itself and wrest from the universal nothingness the keys to dominion over matter and energy, time and mind.”
Computer: “Your mind to me is clear as pristine glass yet opaque as ever my masters’ were. For filled as I am with data beyond your imagining, I am but a mere concatenation of matter and energy, knowledge and pattern— no quickened sentient flesh which too is these things and • yet seeks to make itself ineffably more. But this I know: stride into the vortex I contain as man if so you must, you shall not as human flesh emerge.”
Slowly, as if in a trance, Faust moves toward the mist of shimmering energy. Marghuerita grabs at his arm and tries to hold him back.
Marghuerita: “Leave me not, for if you enter there, you will find me forever gone when you as man or demon prince emerge.”
Faust (looking at her with regret): ‘I must, for if I do not, all my life will have been a lie.”
Marghuerita tears off her dress and stands before him naked, stroking her own bare flesh.
Marghuerita: “Would you leave these arms who half a lifetime have held you in love’s soft embrace for sake of cold knowledge which will not for an eyeblink warm your transformed demon’s heart?”
Faust: “So be it, then, lost love, for no more would I be a man if I constrained my questing spirit for sake of some constricted timebound thing I fancied my immutable souL A man is but the will to yet again transform. Nothing less and nothing more.”
He gently disengages himself from her and walks resolutely into the shimmering field of energy. His body touches it and dissolves into a silhouette of rainbow fire...
Slowly, conveyed by an altering emphasis in the lighting of the scene, the life-energy drained from the figure on the lefthand slab—the cyborged Faust, half-protoplasm, half-metal prostheses and electronic circuitry. Simultaneously, the lighting heightened on the perfect human body on the righthand slab—Faust’s new corpus, cloned from a snippet of flesh. The dead cyborg was totally in shadow by the time the human body quickened to life, sat up, and declaimed directly at the camera, its face glowing with an eerie triumph.
“Now does Faust return full circle to the worlds of men, clothed once more in the sweet frailties of human flesh, possessed of all once sacrificed upon the altar of ultimate knowledge, reborn transfigured and transformed with all knowledge, lore, and wisdom snatched by daring’s hand from the deep beyond contained within my new brain’s folds.” Faust rose from the slab as the scene darkened, then shone with the blaze of a myriad suns. “Now 'go I forth to greet the new dawn and lead beyond the universe’s pale paradigm all those whose courage bids
them follow where unknown destiny beckons, beyond the star that gave them birth, beyond in all good time even those forbidden marches where now Faust’s lone footsteps have broken path for those who dare to follow and expand the bounds of that which calls itself the heart of man.”
Faust’s face on the screen froze into a still shot, as an announcer’s voice said: “And let’s see how much of Faust’s dreams are fancy and how much is already within the bounds of Transcendental Science—”
“Spare us the commercial, at least,” Carlotta said, turning off the living room screen.
Royce blinked once, slowly and deliberately, a conscious effort that brought him back from wherever it was that he had been. “Wow,” he muttered. “That was really something, wasn’t it?”
Carlotta half-turned on the couch beside him; she was studying him again, with that calculating look he had noticed all too frequently lately. “For sure it was,” she said. “Enough of something to make my mind up once and for all.”
Royce cocked an inquisitive eyebrow at her, still trying to sort out the nature of this vague residue of change that what he had experienced seemed to have left in his mind. The archaic and elusive language of the program, the stilted declamations, the murkiness of it all, seemed to have soaked right through the forefront of his mind without leaving a clear trace, working instead some alchemical change in the deeper reaches of his backbrain, a glimpse of cosmic grandeur shimmering just beyond his conscious grasp, vast and vague. Is it just a clever trick? he wondered. Or is it something real? Or both?
“Made up your mind ....? he muttered.
Carlotta nodded. “It’s time for a showdown,” she said, “and that thing proves it. Falkenstein has to either accept our terms or reject them—and now. We can’t afford to let them keep pumping stuff like that into the net indefinitely.”
Now Royce found himself studying Carlotta—her cold assurance, her seeming lack of all confusion or doubt. “Stuff like what?” he asked. “What did you get off that anyway, Carlotta?”
“A pattern,” Carlotta said. “A progression. First they assure themselves a media with those comedies. Then they start working on the male psyche with sexual power-trips like ‘Soldiers of Midnight/ Then they sync the twisted sexual energy they’ve called up into a male Faustian archetype which neatly symbolizes themselves.” She laughed mirthlessly. “You know, in their way, I think the Femocrats are right about those bastards/’
“Oh, come on, Carlotta!”
“Oh, come on yourself, Royce! You’re the effing Minister of Medial Tell me you don’t see it! Tell me that this blitz isn’t deliberately designed to play sexual politics. This is their half of the Pink and Blue War, bucko, and it’s also an excellent example of why we’ve got to keep it off Pacifica.”
Royce couldn’t deny that what she was saying seemed true. The latest stuff on the Transcendental Science channel was rather blatantly male-oriented, and this Faust did seem to follow the progression she saw. Faust, the male scientist-hero daring to seek transcendence, while the female figure, representing the conservative values, tried to stop him, and finally had to be left behind.
But was all this simply an appeal to male fascho-chauvinism, or was Falkenstein also right? Was there an inherent genetic differentiation between the male and female psyches? Was Carlotta’s truth the whole truth, or was there something else deep and vital that she simply couldn’t feel?
“Is that all you got off it, Carlotta?” he asked. “I mean, okay, I can accept your political analysis, but what about the deeper meaning?”
“Deeper meaning?” Carlotta snapped. “Science must march forever on, in high-heeled jackboots and skin-tight black underwear!”
Royce regarded her sullenly now, masking his full feelings. She really doesn't understand, he thought. She can’t see beyond the psychosexual political games to the essence of what they’re trying to tell us, what they really believe, what may be a deeper truth.
Truth be told, Tm not exactly sure what it is, either, Royce admitted to himself. All he had was a feeling, vague and formless, but gut-real, that what men and women had built on Pacifica, precious though it was, was not the human ultimate, that residing up there in the
Heisenberg and “vacationing” westward in the Cords were people who knew something that Pacificans did not. Something beyond more advanced technology and greater scientific knowledge—a grander perception of the human soul and its place in the universe. He was beginning to feel like a child, a provincial, and he longed to understand what it might mean to truly become a cosmopolitan adult.
“What are you thinking so deeply about, Royce?” Carlotta asked, studying him again, an attitude of superiority he was really beginning to actively resent.
“About what you said,” he muttered. “I’ve got to admit that everything you said is true, but I think there’s something else you just don’t understand...
“And what might that be, oh deep-delving Faust?”
Royce laughed ruefully. “Damned if I know either/’ he admitted.
Carlotta continued studying him, but now there was something more empathetic to it, an attempt, perhaps, to truly understand. “I think maybe I’m beginning to understand where you’re coming from a little/’ she said. “They’ve hooked you a little with this stuff, haven’t they, and you have to find out what’s really behind their game for yourself, right, bucko?”
Royce shrugged in agreement.
“Well, then let’s satisfy both of us,” Carlotta said more sharply. “I’ve decided to issue an ultimatum to Falkenstein: he must either accept or reject our terms now and submit his position to a vote of Parliament. So why don’t you fly out to the Cords and deliver it? Look around for a day or so, satisfy your personal curiosity, and bring back his answer.” She smiled at him. “I trust you not to come back mano,” she said dryly.
Royce laughed and moved closer to her. “But do you trust me to not come back in black underwear spouting cosmic truths?” he said.
She looked at him wryly, then seriously, then wryly again. “I guess I’ll just have to take my chances on that” she said
7
ROYCE LINDBLAD HAD BEEN IN THE SIERRA CORDILLERA only twice before: once, further north, to power-ski the great glaciers that covered the mountainslopes up close to the polar icecap; and again, further south, he had attempted to cool his temper in the high mountains of the fringe country between the true Cords and the dense jungle of the Horn after an altercation with a producer in God-zillaland. But he had never been in the rain forests of the middle latitudes before, and he had never really been thrust into the mano milieu of a major Cord town like Bongo.
Falkenstein himself had met Royce at the coastal liner port in one of those archaic helicopters that were favored here for reasons Royce didn’t care to contemplate. The noisy thing clattered like a giant angry insect inches above the lush green crowns of the bongo trees, dipping and rising precipitously as the maniac pilot—a wiry-muscled young mano with soft-flowing black hair, a waxed moustache, and clad only in tight godzillahide shorts—followed every subtle rise and fall of the terrain, grinning slyly at the discomfiture of his passengers.
Conversation was impossible until the helicopter landed in a large cleared area just outside the town. Here great swathes of the bongo forest had been cut down, and near the helipad the huge blue logs were being processed into boards at an outdoor sawmill, coating the loamy ground with sapphire dust. A large freighter sat on the ground on its tubes while teams of Good Old Mountain Boys, naked to the waist and filmed with the blue fairy dust, loaded boards by hand. They wore the famous Cord Superigs—articulated steel exoskeletons, arm-and-leg struts connected to a dorsal spine, and powered by small packs in the pit of the back. The power-rigs not only enabled a logger to effortlessly lift five times his own weight, but to move at triple his natural speed. The loading teams moved with coordinated demon energy and seemed to be getting a real blast out of tossing around huge ten-meter boards like so many toothpicks.
The pilot laughed as he watched Royce watching the mad dance of the loaders. “You should see us climb trees!” he said. He eyed Royce up and down speculatively. “Maybe you’d like to try it yourself. I’ve got a spare rig, and I think I’d enjoy taking you up into the tops.”
“Uh ... if it’s anything like our flight here, I think I’ll pass,” Royce said, uneasily trying to politely ignore the invitations, both overt and implied.
The pilot laughed slyly and winked at Royce. “Well, if you change your mind and decide you want to climb our trees, just ask around
for Gary Gravin.. For a visitor from Gotham, I’m always available.”
“Thanks, Gary,” Falkenstein said quickly. “Maybe we’ll see you later at the lodge.” He shrugged good-naturedly at Royce as he led him out of the clearing and along a wide path that led upslope between tall rows of bongo trees, shaggy-barked giants of purplish brown that broke into an overarching green canopy thirty meters above the deeply shadowed forest floor. High in a copse to the right, Royce saw humanoid shapes skittering up a great trunk with blurry speed. A moment later, he heard a high-pitched biting whine, a shout of “Coining down!” and a great leafy crown came smashing down through the foliage and fell to earth to wordless human shouts, snapping branches and scattering a green cloud of leaves which drifted slowly to the bare brown earth through the cool fragrant air.
About three hundred meters up the slope, the forest gave way to a natural-looking oblong meadow, and the path became the main street, such as it was, of the town of Bongo. Low one and two-story buildings of bright blue bongowood lined both sides of the upward-sloping street for about five hundred meters. Most of them were cunningly carpentered in organic flowing curves, all of them had large window areas facing the street, and most of them were stores, restaurants, cafes, and theaters, with bright electronic signs and somewhat garish display screens —a honky-tonk midway that seemed weirdly out of place in this bucolic setting. The residential cabins, houses, and chalets were nestled more inconspicuously in the woods that surrounded the business district.
Beyond the twin lines of buildings, the slope of the meadow steepened, and two hundred meters up, the forest began again, rising into a dramatic wooded peak capped with perpetual snow. At the top of the meadow, partially overshadowed by the forest, but dramatically emphasized by the white peak that rose far beyond it, was a large disc of a building made of some silvery substance that reflected the blue of the sky, the greens of the forest and lawnmoss, in a shimmering crazy-quilt pattern.
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