Books
Standing Wave
Prologue
Light mazed every mind's sky and was gone. At the surface of the world's oceans the voices of dolphins in air called excitedly, reacting to what the Light had given them. Great whales came together in rosettes, heads turned inward toward each other, flukes away, still and concentrating, pinging information directly into each other's skulls like a telepathic conference call. At their Yerkish keyboards, chimpanzees smiled slyly as they pounded out poems parodying passages from Shakespeare. Bonobos, excited by the Light, fell immediately into orgies of heavy grooming and joyously prolonged sex. Orangutans pondered the possibility that all the world's a tree, and all its inhabitants merely branches. Gorillas contemplated the labyrinth of self and hoped they would not get lost there.
A computer-interfaced porpoise at a marine park in Hawaii, queried across the datasphere by its female human interrogator, remarked simply that "The sea is in the wave as the wave is in the sea," then shaped a blowhole bubble into a perfect halo and swam through it. Ordinarily, the observing scientist would have written this statement off as just one more example of the bubbly topological mysticism porpoises seemed prone to — but not this time. Now the koan-like statement spoke to her condition, for the Light had already spoken to her too, as it had to all her fellow human beings.
The originator of the Light had assumed, mistakenly, that humans would be the sole creatures for whom the light would shine. He would have been overjoyed at his error. As he had predicted, though, the effect would not be lasting, in most minds. Life would go on very much as before, perhaps importantly different for only a few.
Yet even in that there was hope. The passage of the Light left its cloud-chamber traces curling and spiralling in innumerable memories. An ancient design motif suddenly became the rage, in everything from clothing to architecture. Called a "Greek key" but actually a variant of meander-images found throughout the world since long before the dawn of history, the motif was variously described as time-frozen waves, or linked letter Js, or Rs, or Js and Rs.
A very few specialists were aware that this particular meander pattern, bent into a circle, formed the key recursive element of the Classical labyrinth. None of them, however, could explain the precise source of its new-found popularity, nor why its repetitive imagery had begun cropping up globally.
1
Code-extracted SubTerPost fragment (infosphere source unknown; original source independently verified as Keeping My Brother In Time: Meditations on A Life and Death by Seiji Yamaguchi):
Jiro's abstinence from food and drink, from sex and violence, was all about chastening the id, the instincts, the Eros and Thanatos drives. His isolation, like that of holy people throughout history in hermitages and monasteries, in deserts, on islands and mountaintops, deep in caves — that has always been about distancing the self from the influence of the social psychoid process.
My brother's life and death have taught me a great deal about the self, about both living and dying — and about transformation. Think of that old drill in elementary logic: 'Socrates is a human being, all human beings are mortal, therefore Socrates is mortal.' A circular argument, I know, but any valid argument has a conclusion from which its premises can be derived, so any sound argument is in that sense circular. The question is not whether or not the argument is circular, but how much is gained and what interesting discoveries are revealed as we make our way around the circle.
The same is true of life and death. Near the end of his Faerie Queene, Edmund Spenser has the spirit of Nature, ultimately speaking of the Fall in Eden and the entrance of death into the world, remark of all things that, 'being rightly weighed/They are not changed from their first estate;/But by their change their being do dilate:/And turning to themselves at length again,/Do work their own perfection so by fate:/That over them Change does not rule and reign;/But they reign over change, and do their states maintain.' So maybe our lives, too, make a circular argument.
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Asleep in a forest floating in space, Brandi Easter was remembering in a dream a word without a language, wondering whether that word was a living fossil from a lost tongue, or a foreshock from a system of meaning yet to be invented. Then the alarms all began to sound in her virtual hookup, and she came instantly awake.
She did not need this. The mass-driver ship she had designed, the Swallowtail, had been successfully launched. She had taken a nice quiet day job as an Astronaut Service Guard in order to rest. What could be more restul and uneventful than monitoring space for the astronomically unlikely appearance of the putative Doomsday Asteroid, not due any time in the next several millenia?
No one knew if ASGuard, with its nuclear surplus warheads, could really do anything against such an incoming Gibraltar — kilometers in diameter and on a collision course with Earth — other than maybe break it up, turning one deadly projectile into half a dozen. The system had been built largely to prop up the dying macrodefense industries of the spacefaring nations, a works project for aerospace engineers. Few people expected it to be put to the test any time during the next few thousand years.
Yet in her virtual space all the flashing and howling screens said that here it was, something as big as a mountaintop, appearing out of nowhere, estimated trajectory placing it on direct collision course with Earth — and already in cislunar space! How, she wondered, had this nightmare thing escaped detection on the way in from the asteroid belt, or the Oort cloud, or wherever it came from?
Automatic systems began cycling up for launch. Radio chatter exploded over the comm, ASGuard launch box commanders desperately querying each other for information. They had to do something to deflect it, and fast, but they didn't want to end up nuking Earth or causing this damned thing to calve into a dozen pieces.
This can't be happening, she thought. Brandi glanced out of her workroom into the ferny forest greenery of the Freeman Lowell Orbital Biodiversity Unit, which her husband Juan Valeriano managed. Juan, however, was nowhere to be seen. When she returned her gaze to her arrays, she noticed that, of all the ASGuard stations, this thing was coming in closest to hers.
Then something else caught her eye. She checked and re-checked it, carefully, until she was sure — while, on the comm all around her, her fellow ASGuards were arguing about how best to nuke whatever it was that was headed for Earth.
"Wait a minute! Wait a minute!" she called over a priority clear channel. She identified herself. "Don't fire! This thing's not ballistic — it's slowing down!"
Comm quieted a moment as everyone else on the system checked their readouts. Sure enough, the incoming object was steadily decelerating, braking strongly as it fell toward Earth, in absolute contradiction to the expected behavior of a rock obeying the dictates of gravity. Then chatter exploded over the commlink again, at still higher volume, as everyone began talking about this Unidentified Falling Object and what to do about it.
"It's closest to my station," Brandi said quickly, almost without thinking. "Request permission to perform close reconnaissance."
Some discussion on line followed as to whether this might best be handled by remote sensing. Finally her commanding officer — Dwayne Hashimoto, whom Brandi had never personally met — came on line.
"Permission granted to inspect object at close range," the grey-haired Commander said on screen. "If it accelerates or demonstrates hostile intentions, get out of there immediately. We won't waste time waiting for you before we blow it out of the sky."
Brandi signed off and darted out of the workroom. She ran through the spinning orbital preserve until she reached the docking bay.
Damn! Juan had taken their skysled! She cursed him for not telling her — and herself for volunteering before checking to see if she still had transport. Staring desperately round the docking bay, she saw it: her big board, the Flamb.
As part of the small corps of thrill-seekers variously called astrosurfers, fireboarders, and meteorriders, Brandi had played shooting star more than a dozen times, coming in from orbit and surfing deep into atmosphere before popping chutes over clouds and ocean down below.
At her locker she stripped and climbed into her spacesuit, shrugging back her thick blond hair from her face as she slipped her small frame into the bulky suit. Even as she calculated the risks, her mind was already made up. The big fat board had all-new ablative shielding and deflection tiling, along with the best astrogation and avionics tech she could afford. The fuel tanks had enough juice so that on hard burn she could probably intercept the unidentified object before it went too far into Earth's atmosphere.
Climbing atop the big flame-red board and sliding her feet into the augmented footlocks, Brandi realized that this was not going to be without risks. She had to approach the object and Earth's atmosphere at low enough angle and high enough speed so that she'd bolide just right, bouncing in and skipping back out. She would be coming in far too fast to make it all the way through the depths of the atmosphere this time. If she didn't skip back out just about perfectly, all the ablative shielding, deflection tiles, and astrogation tech in the world wouldn't save her from flaming fully into the shooting star she had so often imitated.
The airlock doors dilated open, preparing to birth her from the small womb of satellite into the far vaster womb of Mother Night. Her heads-up display pumped readouts all around her helmet. The rail gun in the docking bay shot her on her board out the wombdoor. Brandi took a deep breath and, with a fierce scream from her adrenalin-pumped lungs, kicked on her thrusters to maximum.
Acceleration punched back. She found herself falling through silence — blindingly fast. Her target and trajectory appeared in the displays. She shifted on her board, steering with tender control the forces she rode and those riding her. The object on radar was not only moving but also slowing in not exactly predictable stepdowns. She thanked the heavens for her astrogation gear. Calculating Earth-atmosphere clearance and the decelerating object and her own trajectory made this very nearly a full bore N-body problem — just about impossible to calculate on the fly without her gear's massive number-crunching capability.
She activated Flambe's on-board cameras, synching them up so that whatever she saw beyond the bubble of her helmet the cameras would also see and record. She commcast their images real-time to ASGuard's watching monitors. Despite the object's deceleration, she saw that it was still further "down" than she had hoped. She would be perilously close to redline on the board's capabilities (and her survivability) by the time she passed the object. No chance to turn back now. She was committed.
Her thrusters cut out. She didn't have to rely only on her displays any longer, for the object was quite clear now even to the naked eye. It was big: several kilometers across, she estimated. The ablative shielding on her board began to burn, as it was designed to do. She shifted again, angling the board up slightly in its trajectory. Before long the board was putting out more light and heat from its friction burn than when the thrusters were going. In her rearview cams she could see that she was leaving a long fiery streak behind her. She was a shooting star — and redlining.
The object below and before her appeared to be made of stone, but it was more or less flat, like a plateau or anvil-top. Not conical like a mountain, or roundly irregular like most asteroids. Even more oddly, a halo shimmered all around it, as if it were enclosed in a sphere or bubble of force.
She tried to keep her platform steady for the cameras, but that was getting harder. Under her feet the big board's ride felt bumpy and turbulent. It threatened to buck out of trajectory as its ablative shielding burned and ashed away beneath the board from nose to tail. Even with the augment systems synched up to the footlocks, it was all she could do to keep her board steady on her redlining course.
Through the ensphering shimmer she could see the top of the big rock plateau more and more clearly. It was not completely flat. Columns and pinnacles and arches stood on its top, a ruined city or broken maze hewn out of stone not by hands or tentacles but by erosion, fault-block freezing, rain and wind. This rock had known a world of water, once upon a time in its past. She hoped the cameras were getting all this. She was shooting past so fast she felt like an ant riding a burning plank out of an explosion in a fireworks factory.
The plateau before her looked like it was going to make planetfall somewhere in South America. She glanced along the great rock, now almost beside her. Time stopped as she stared in disbelief.
"Those are people down there!" she said aloud, at last, not trusting the cameras alone to catch the sight. "Pointing and — waving!" he sped past and was gone. The board felt lighter now — almost too light. Nearly all the shielding must have burnt off. The tiles glowed red hot and more, and the board was still burning. She hoped she had already passed nearest Earth on her trajectory and that even now she was skipping back out of the atmosphere. In an instant she would know.
To her relief she saw the trajectory plotter moving back toward green. Yes! She had caught the curl of the skywave, ridden it, then slipped right out the back door!
Brandi could exult only for a moment, though. The last of the ablative shielding burnt off and the astronav system shorted out. She was on her own.
Her augments were still operative. Making a long slow zigzag, she dropped dying fire behind her as she climbed away from Earth's atmosphere, slingshotting further and further from the gleaming blue-white planet below.
Voice-activating her emergency radio beacon, she was relieved to find it worked flawlessly, rough treatment not withstanding. She sighed, then surveyed her board. Flamb was scorched pretty badly and her tanks were bone dry, but the deflection tiles were largely in tact. The big board was still usable. Nothing to do now but wait to be picked up by the nearest rescue craft.
She looked back at the Earth. No light of doomsday impact shone anywhere, nor any sign at all of the light-ensphered plateau she had blazed past just moments before.
"Cowabunga," she said tiredly