If not for Bashir Shouman’s spite wall, my internal struggle over Lena Faye, and the anomalous shuffling of “Joe Way” into my overloaded F/A deck, I’d’ve thought myself the luckiest chap in town, if not the whole rosy world.
Levant’s studio well in the Sabra Intercontinental Hotel was wrapped by a field shield. Behind the shield, as audience, sat five tiers of educated foreigners and Beiruti locals.
Envision, then, six vivid figures on the set, four of them holojections in simseats, one an eccentric emerald virrogate (who’d materialized in the well as a substantive presence an hour before the coming of the others), and me, Cherokee George Gist, in a Danish chair of shiny aluminum tubes and interwoven flaxen straps.
Iman Bahadori, Pope Jomo, and the Dalai Lama sat across from Jennie Pilgrim, me, and our flickering pseudo-virrogate, Joe Way. A dozen autocams gyro-gimbaled around us at different heights and angles, all under the control of Khalil Khalaf, F/A’s Maronite Catholic director.
“Good evening, ladies, gentlemen, and brighter-than-average children,” I began the taping. “This evening we commence a series of shows on which I plan to browbeat our distinguished guests about their respective spiritual positions and the fading hope for harmony among religio-ethnic factions and their increasingly rigid doctrinal positions.”
With courteous fervor, my handpicked audience applauded. Via satellite and fi-opt cables, millions more would thrill, later, to this same lead-in. I then introduced the Pope, the Iman, the Dalai Lama (who, even as a holofeed, didn’t look much like either the dead artist Salvador or a Peruvian camel), and the large but attractive Jennie Pilgrim.
“And I’m Joe Way,” said the su’lakle in its many-celloed voice. “From deepest outer space.”
“DOS, eh?” said the Dalai Lama’s holojection from his suite in the fully renovated Hotel St. Georges. “Is DOS a freshly protected cyber territory?”
“Mr. Joseph Way comes to us tonight,” I said hurriedly, “as the proxy virrogate of our far-flung viewers, to represent them in a telegab of great historic importance.”
“Joe. Joe Way. Not Joseph.”
“Johweh?” said Pope Jomo in his Kikuyu-flavored English. “I hear echoes of both my name and that of the tetragrammatic Hebrew deity.”
“Pardon me, Your Popeness,” Joe Way said as quickly as a cello section may do, “but, in your view, what comprises the most basic heartfelt desire of any sentient entity?”
I tried to retake control: “If you’ll wait a—”
“Salvation and eternal life in God’s very presence,” said Pope Jomo readily enough.
“Amen to that,” said Jennie Pilgrim. The two beamed at each other. (Given their status as holos, beamed is something more than a metaphor.)
“Nirvana,” said the Dalai Lama. “Preferably after a good leg of lamb and a glass of fine wine.”
“A passionate blessed martyrdom,” said Iman Bahadori, “followed by heavenly immortality.”
“Does anyone of a more secular persuasion in the studio have a differing opinion?” asked Joe Way, the wings of his manta-ray head rippling subtly.
Beyond the field shield, several members of my audience boldly spoke up:
“Earthly immortality!”
“More money than King Croesus and Austin-Antilles Corporation combined!”
“Eternal youth!”
“An unending orgasm of painful cosmic sweetness!”
“Power!” cried one pale, marmoset-eyed young man. “Power, power, and more power!”
Lifting my hands, I stood up and shouted: “QUIET!”
My studio audience quieted.
“Better! Much better! Forum/Againstum isn’t five minutes old, people, and you’ve let this green virrogate usurp both my role as host and the religio-philosophical agenda embodied, at least potentially, in the presence of these estimable spiritual leaders! Let’s get back on track! Okay?”
“Actually,” said Jennie Pilgrim with a melancholy sigh, “the ‘most basic heartfelt desires’ shouted out here testify to a real eschatological ignorance and a nasty decline in age-old Judeo-Christian values.”
“I concur,” said Iman Bahadori, visibly gloating.
“Actually,” Joe Way put in, “although wrong, these desires do have their honesty to commend them.”
Annoyed, I turned on the su’lakle. “‘Wrong’? Isn’t one’s basic heartfelt desire a matter of private choice? How, then, can you label any single such opinion wrong?”
“Mr. Way is correct,” Pope Jomo said. “The basic heartfelt desires spoken out here are bankrupt illusions. None bestows true happiness because all are—”
“Happiness!” shouted a member of the studio crowd: a late response to Joe Way’s question.
“There is only one route to genuine happiness,” the Pope said. “Namely, the Way, the Truth, and the Life.”
“Wrong again,” said the su’lakle. “One’s most basic heartfelt desire is the route to happiness, but that route is ‘the Way, the Truth, and the Life,’ or ‘martyrdom for Allah,’ or ‘out-of-body perfection’ only to those who have given up on that longing which has dwelt hidden within them since the first conscious moment of their being.”
Khalil Khalaf gave our global audience a skillful close-up of Pope Jomo’s handsome ebony face, wreathed in a smile. “As I still say, that longing, whatever it is, is an illusion. One must sacrifice it to that which has lasting, and obtainable, spiritual validity.”
I couldn’t help myself. Looking directly at Joe Way, I said, “But what is that longing?”
“Indispensability.”
Everyone—guest, studio-audience member, or tape-delayed Levant Limitless Broadcasting subscriber—gaped at Joe Way. In his guise as a pseudo-virrogate (if the oxymoronic irony of that term doesn’t render it totally meaningless), Joe Way pulsed like a living mist, kaleidoscopically kinking inside the illusory integument affording him his green-glowing creaturely outline.
The Dalai Lama, a bald, brown, spexware-bearing man in his late twenties or early thirties, recovered first. “Nonsense, Mr. Way. I know many persons with the soulfulness to wish for nothing more—in worldly terms—than to live forever in that perfect instant just before sunrise. Or to make some small but lasting private contribution to our species.”
“And if you want secular basic heartfelt desires,” the Right Reverend Ms. Pilgrim said, “I’ve known two or three half-decent but unsaved gentlemen who longed for nothing but a lake, a john-boat, a cane pole, and lots of time to fish. For them down-home bubbas, indispensability didn’t enter the picture at all.”
“These desires came upon them,” Joe Way said, “after the world had disillusioned or corrupted them.”
“After reality’d set in,” Jennie Pilgrim countered. “And they realized how hard this world works to thump the backsides of malingering spiritual babes.”
“Amen,” said Iman Bahadori, surprising both her and me.
These guests could’ve conducted Forum/Againstum without benefit of host or studio audience. Exasperated, I tried to wrench my program back from the su’lakle: “Tell me, Iman, what issues do you plan to raise at the general session of the NMEC this Friday?”
“It nonetheless remains the case that all human beings—indeed, all conscious entities universewide—long at bottom not for power or immortality or spiritual riches, but for that attribute, alone among attributes, that confers them all; namely, indispensability, the only quality that assures the being possessing it that if aught evil befalls it, including its own extinction, the universe and all its many components, sentient or otherwise, will perish in train. Face it. All human grief stems from the hurtful knowledge that the universe has so little care for one’s own existence that the end of that existence will affect neither the operation nor the integrity of the universe a sparrow’s fart. Selah.”
“How about that, Pope Jomo?” I said. “Do you—?”
“With due respect, I must point out that your flamboyant virrogate’s opinion is nonsense,”
said the Pope.
“Allah akbar,” said Iman Bahadori. “The only indispensable Being is God Himself. Does Mr. Way intend to imply that we should all strive to become as God?”
“I have no problem with that ambition,” said the Dalai Lama.
“Well, I have beaucoups with it,” the Right Reverend Ms. Pilgrim retorted. “Smacking, as it does, of self-idolatrous pride.”
“Each person here wishes at heart, or once upon a time wished, that he or she were indispensable to the health of this physical reality,” said Joe Way unequivocally.
Jennie Pilgrim said, “Gist, you’ve unleashed an infantile ijit on us. A mewling babe.”
“Alexander the Great died. Caesar died. So did Mohammed, Queen Elizabeth, Shakespeare, Newton, and Sadat. Even Einstein died. Ditto the Marx Brothers, Jack Benny, Buckminster Fuller, Bear Bryant, Dick Clark, Imelda Marcos, and Norodom Sihanouk. The world continued without them. Secretly, we long for such a profound in-knitting with the world that, should we grow sick, or falter, or even lapse and die, the world that these famous ones left without even rippling its basic contours would, as a direct consequence, founder in shock and fall to irreclaimable nothingness.”
The Reverend Ms. Pilgrim wrinkled her brow at the Dalai Lama. “This is a guy thing, right?”
His Tibetan Holiness shrugged.
“I didn’t expect to encounter such denial among you,” Joe Way said, splotchily pulsating emerald, lime, and radioactive chartreuse. “Perhaps it’s a function of the trained-up religious frames of mind pheromonically drawn to the NMEC.”
At that, several members of my studio audience began to whistle, boo, and/or stamp their feet.
The Pope raised one long, eggplant-purple hand. “Hush.”
Everyone hushed.
The hand stayed up, in calming benediction. “It seems to me that this one anonymous viewer—” the Pope gestured at Joe Way “—has stolen a disproportionate amount of our time with pathological musings of a private and, I trust, treatable nature. Now, however, I would—”
“I know whereof I speak. Because the august telepresences here this evening refuse to acknowledge their most basic inborn longing does not mean that I have misnamed it.”
“Look,” said Jennie Pilgrim, “who are you, anyhow?”
Oh, God, I thought. Don’t answer that.
“How do you know?” Iman Bahadori asked the su’lakle before it could ID itself.
“Because I am in fact a being possessing the attribute for which all of you long. Indispensability. Instant by instant, I help sustain the fabric of reality.”
Iman Bahadori raised an eyebrow. “You are God?” His lip curled in contempt. Then he began to snicker. But, thank God, he demanded neither Joe Way’s immediate exile nor a sacrilege-avenging global manhunt and a beheading.
For, of course, only Lena Faye and I, of all those in the studio, understood that the su’lakle existed as the fabricated material essence of his kind rather than as the virrogate of a geographically distant human viewer.
The Dalai Lama leaned toward Joe Way. “I beg you, sir, to repeat your last assertion.”
“I am indispensable.”
“Really?”
“Simply indispensable. I help sustain the world. My end would speed that of this expansion-contraction phase of this particular universe at its every spatial-temporal extension.”
“I think we’d better break for a message from Glom-Omni Foods and Printed Circuits,” I said.
Khalil Khalaf, bless him, took that desperate cue and cut away to a spectacular canned pitch for hydrosnap peaches and high-torque magnelev motors.
I looked up and saw Lena Faye sitting among some Beirutis on our studio’s highest tier.
She smiled. In Cherokee hand language, she signed, Don’t get rattled. You’re doing fine.
The six-hour taping floundered on. Joe Way dominated the first hour, which aired later that same evening, but had only a couple more bombshells to drop, petards he lobbed during the taping’s third and sixth hours.
“Reincarnation within this expansion-contraction phase of this particular universe does not occur,” he informed the Dalai Lama in the third hour. “You hope for it in vain.”
By this time, the other guests had begun to humor him as if he were an unhinged brother or an incontinent pet cat.
“I don’t hope to return to the world of maya as either a housefly or a bodhisattva,” the Dalai Lama said. “I hope to escape the cycle of death-and-rebirth entirely.”
“You hope for that in vain as well.”
Jennie Pilgrim shot the Pope a conspiratorial look. “Do you mean to say there’s no such thing as an eternal afterlife?”
“Depends on what you mean by eternal.”
“Pardon?”
“We su’lakle have gone through this six or seven times before, Reverend Ms. Pilgrim. Souls caught in each cycle’s afterlife get funneled into the primordial singularity from which the next cosmos bursts forth. They emerge as unconscious matter. The intervals are so long, though, that most gladly, or perhaps indifferently, relinquish awareness out of boredom. Moreover, the crowding during the epoch of ultimate collapse is terrible. Who wouldn’t want to pull a terminal phase-shift back into affectless nonbeing?”
For a moment, no one—I chief among the speechless—could think of anything to say to this. Then a professor from the American University in our audience said, “The souls of sentient creatures don’t migrate into a region of sempiternal superspace?”
“No way to get to it,” Joe Way said shortly.
The rest of that hour, my other guests discussed the links, conspicuous or subtle, among their belief systems. Joe Way stayed silent. In fact, I had the nagging suspicion that he had gently withdrawn his essence from the pseudo-virrogate on the stool to my right.
Toward the end of the sixth hour, despite two weeks of heavy preparation and a slew of off-camera cue cards, I’d just about run out of questions. I realized Forum/Againstum was in deep trouble when Iman Bahadori produced some laminated photos of his kids and I took a genuine interest.
Jennie Pilgrim, by choice a single woman, jumped to the show’s rescue. She leaned around me and said, “Mr. Way, I’ve been meaning to ask, how is it, exactly, that you think you’re ‘simply indispensable’ to the universe?”
The su’lakle had gone pretty pale over the past two and a half hours. His swirly-curly innards looked more like watered limeade than melting emeralds; the fins on his manta-ray head drooped like windsocks on a still desert night.
“Mr. Way!” Jennie Pilgrim insisted. “Mr. Way!”
At last the su’lakle appeared inhabited again. “Forgive me. My ‘mind’ wandered.”
Ms. Pilgrim restated her question.
Joe Way’s answer took several minutes. Anyone interested in its details need only consult—quickly—any video of my final Forum/Againstum broadcast. Basically (Joe Way told us), he, or his virtually immortal kind, had the ability to perform recurrent key observations at the quantum level that “support the structure of the physical universe by actualizing a sequence of key observables in such a way that the fundamental physical laws that govern the cosmos cohere.”
Pope Jomo winced. “Oh, Mr. Way, you make my head ache. Of what ‘kind’ are you, if not the human kind?”
“A su’lakle.” And steeling myself for the inevitable hostile reaction: “An alien energy being.”
“From DOS,” said the Dalai Lama evenly. “Deepest, Outer, Space.” This idea passed unchallenged, as if everyone in my studio, future-shock junkies, had already suspected as much.
A woman in a silk sari stood up. “Are you saying you can select among the many potentialities of microscopic particles? Can, in fact, direct the observer-induced ‘collapse of the wave function’ common to quantum mechanics?”
“Yes, I am,” said Joe Way, audibly relieved.
“But no one can dictate the value—the position, or energy state, or momentum—that the specific measurement of a particle
actualizes,” said the woman, sitting back down. “No one.”
Replied Joe Way, “No one human. So far as I know, we su’lakle alone, at least for now, have that talent. We not only understand the structuring subatomic codes, we can twiggle them.”
(Twiggle?)
“How?” Lena Faye called out from her lofty perch.
“The su’lakle—I am One—intrinsically possess a quality of intensified self-reference or -observation enabling us to alter our own consciousness. We thus influence ‘reality’ through externally directed observations of several specific sorts.”
“This must be very hard work,” said the Dalai Lama.
“No lie. Often, though, we can peer through the maya of this space-time realm to the suprareality of the overcosmos.”
“Again, a claim to Godhood!” said Iman Bahadori angrily.
Jennie Pilgrim said, “Mr. Gist, you’ve let a funny-farm hacker loose on y’all’s premises.”
“On the other hand, collapsing this realm into ‘reality’ from its various superpositions, eon after eon, eventually acquires a debilitating tediousness. Even if the actualizers—we su’lakle, along with a few other observing species across the cosmos—initially accepted that responsibility out of equal measures of self-challenge and love.”
And those were Joe Way’s last words during the sixth hour of our taping, an hour that wouldn’t get fi-opted until this coming Saturday evening.
Khalil Khalaf signaled Cut! from his director’s booth. I’d successfully shepherded my human guests, and the wild card of an incognito interstellar visitor, through a grueling marathon taping session.
So, of course, I began contemplating the best spot in my towerhouse for another Peabody or Emmy.
Unceremoniously, Pope Jomo I, Iman Bahadori, the Dalai Lama, and Jennie Pilgrim vanished. Who could blame them? They’d given me over six solid—i.e., unbroken, substantive—hours of interview time; they deserved medals.
Brighten to Incandescence 17 Stories Page 29
