Tex and Molly in the Afterlife, page 36
The other dryads joined in. They all sang together.
All the songs were different.
Many of them contained strands of melody that had never been heard before. They were new creations—undreamt, unpredicted, never sung until this instant.
The songs blended. They clashed. They rose and fell, harmonized, grated, crescendoed, faded, and began again, with variations. They went on and on.
It was a wondrous sound, but not yet a beautiful one. It was clamorous, noisy, chaotic. Many of the parts were splendid (and some were horrible), but they were not yet whole.
Many instruments, but no symphony. Many trees. But not yet a forest.
PASSIO
From a Gulfstream II turbojet flying at 18,000 feet, approaching the Bangor International Airport—closer to his ancestral home in Scotland, he reflected, than to corporate headquarters in Houston— Burdock Herne enjoyed a sweeping view of some of the Gulf Atlantic real estate holdings in the Northeast. It was not a strategically vital sector in the overall scheme of Company operations. Gulf Atlantic had only recently arrived on the scene here in any major way, having acquired some territory that had been harvested and turned over by a South African concern, then piecing together an assortmennt of third-party holdings. Graphically, when color-koded on a map, the territory resembled that new Xerox logo: a couple of big geometric patches plus a lot of smaller bits and dots. It was dwarfed by the core Gulf Atlantic operations in the Southeastern U.S., in the Tongass National Forest, and in Malaysia. Nonetheless, the Company considered this to be a region of nearly incalculable promise: an important working asset for the future. Burdock Herne had personally invested an increasing amount of his attention up here over the past several months. The more probable it looked that the global climate change scenario was, in fact, going to play out, the more confident he became in a certain personal vision that he called the Great Green North. As the value of the Southeastern Sector declined (perhaps precipitously, over the next decade), so the value of these northern holdings, here and in Canada, proportionately increased. As yet, however, Gulf Atlantic's competitors had failed to move decisively to solidify their positions, particularly in Maine, where the regulatory climate was congenial. This opened a window of opportunity that Herne felt could not be—and had not been—left unexploited. The Company was actively acquiring land from Goddin northward, and plans were in the final stages to nail down the productive viability of this land before any shifting of the regulatory winds should occur. Not that any was anticipated; but where politics came into play, you had to hedge your bets.
All this was, of course, closely held information, and much of it was forbiddingly technical, even for Herne. He had put one of his hardest-charging young field managers in charge of the operation up here, and he did not believe in Monday morning quarterbacking. Hand the boy the ball and let him run with it.
The airplane banked. Sunlight flashed off ponds that looked shallow and almost perfectly round, like holes on a green. The surrounding forest spoiled the effect, though, because its texture was bumpy and its summer coloration far from uniform. Where timber production had come fully up to speed, the landscape had the deep glaucous hue of Kentucky bluegrass. Where the forest remained in a wild uncultivated state, you had pale greens and black-greens and yellow-greens and spots of purple and even patches of washed-out magenta that must be fireweed, moving in quickly to colonize a fresh cut or an opening left by a burn. It boggled Herne's mind that such vast expanses of land should be underutilized. On the other hand, it gave him a pleasant feeling of standing on a frontier, looking out (so to speak) across broad sweeps of prairie that had never known the plow. It buoyed him up, thinking of new fields that remained to be conquered. The old world was not yet done with its need for men like Burdock Herne.
"We're about 15 minutes out of Bangor, sir," the pilot called back over the intercom. "Want me to place any calls for you?"
"No thank you," said Herne. "They know I'm coming."
He settled back into his seat as the plane eased down through the thermal layers of air. Bit of an onshore breeze, this time of year. Sun warming the land, heating the air up, lifting it, creating a low-pressure region and hence an inflow off the ocean. Herne enjoyed thinking about such things: big things, large-scale phenomena, supra-human forces constantly at work. It gave him comfort, somehow, to think of himself as only an agent, an operative—a point man, as he phrased it—carrying out his assigned role in a greater drama: the drama of History, of the unfolding of Western Civilization, the grand movement of humankind (toward its unforeseeable destiny.
Herne did not pretend to know any better than the next person how things were going to turn out. He was as troubled as anyone else by the trends of modern times. He was no shortsighted fool, eyes only on the next quarterly earnings report. At times his position seemed a lonely and even an anonymous one—keeping a steady hand on the tiller through the dark passage of a stormy night. At other times he felt exhilarated, lucky to have been born who he was, to be alive in this minute, doing the things he was so perfectly suited for.
Well, life was complicated. You couldn't reduce it to a simple formula. It was tempting to try; Herne had seen many of his peers give in to that, especially as they got along in years. You can reach a point where you know so much and you've seen so much that you start to mistake your store of information for wisdom. But information is not wisdom. Experience and knowledge are valuable things, but if that were all it took, then any 80-year-old could come creaking out of his golf cart and take a seat at Herne's desk and do a better job than Herne himself was doing. Respecting the wisdom of the elders is one thing. Recognizing the difference between what is wisdom and what is just accumulated belief—that's where the problem lies.
Herne felt his heart pound once, unusually hard: an interruption of its smoothly regulated rhythm. He felt a strange kind of pressure at his throat, as though something were wrong with the cabin air supply. He laid a finger on the intercom button but held off from pushing it. The change in pressure, he thought, was coming from somewhere else. It was coming from inside.
Hastily he reviewed his recent train of thoughts, looking for a thread of anxiety that might have crept in. He found none. Rumination, a general taking stock of things, that's all it had been. The sort of thinking you do while coming down in a plane from cruising altitude—those drawn-out moments before you stretch your legs and enter the terminal and click over into moving-and-shaking mode again.
What, then, could be the trouble?
Herne touched a hand lightly to his chest, just by the rib cage on the left-hand side. The heart was doing fine now. It was strong and well cared-for and it had many good years left. He touched his throat. His breathing had normalized. Whatever disturbance had passed through him had not left any physiological trace.
Suddenly he understood. For an instant, like an echo, he heard in his mind the word wisdom. That's the word that had triggered the strange episode. Wisdom, he thought. He placed a question mark at the end of it.
Wisdom?
No answer came.
Then it hit him with double force—triple, quadruple force—in his heart and the throat and now other places as well. The lungs. The stomach. The head. And the eyes, especially the eyes.
Burdock Herne, he told himself, thou art a fool.
He sat there clutching the armrests with both hands. His eyes were pressed firmly shut. He took breaths in and blew them out slowly, at a deliberate pace. He was not going mad. Not having an attack of any sort. He was not even losing self-control: not really.
A crackle of radio chatter came from the cockpit. He could not make out the words through the closed compartment door, but he could imagine them well enough. The practiced, almost unconscious repartee between pilot and tower. Between the firm, unmoving ground and the swirling, flighty, capricious airplane. Cleared for landing, he imagined the tower saying. That universal Chuck Yeager drawl. Y'all come on in, now. We'll see ya back earthside.
"It'll just be a couple more minutes, Mr. Herne," said the voice on the intercom.
But Herne did not hear that. He pressed his forehead to the double-paned polycarbonate window, wishing it were cooler than it was. His eyes fluttered without opening. "Thistle," he whispered, in a voice that did not seem to be his own.
"Thistle, where are you?" the voice cried.
"Why won't you come back
to your daddy?"
or
could it be real?
* * *
Can all of these things really be happening? Tex thought probably not. Probably this was some kind of post-life dementia. Probably this is what happens when your physical body is dead but your etheric or dark-matter body still hangs together in scraps and tatters, like Miss Haversham's wedding gown. Maybe this—what would you call it?—slow fade-out just goes on, gradually lessening in intensity, for however long it takes for the thing to come unraveled, or succumb to entropic rot, or get chewed apart by astral moths. Until in the end you're only a memory. A lingering echo in the life-field.
"Bear," said Molly. Kind of an edge to her voice.
Tex lay with his eyes closed. The clock radio was playing dead air. He could hear the hiss of white noise through tiny speakers, the slap of water against the hull, the splutter of a lone lobster boat.
"Bear." She shook him. "Wake up."
And for an instant
—everything inside him crackled with energy, like a circuit suddenly electrified
—he thought
It was all a dream!
"Wake up," Molly commanded.
"Raven," he croaked, eyes flashing open. "You won't believe—"
Beside them, between them—interpenetrating them, for the Goddess's sake—lay Gene and Ludi, slumbering peaceably, innocently, the timeless look of blissed-out lovers on their still faces, like masks.
"Won't believe what?" said Molly. She sat on the edge of the bed with one of Ludi's knees sticking into her hip. The ultramarine murmur of dawn gathered itself behind the curtains. The clock radio read
AM 4:32
Tex sighed. "Never mind."
"Come look, then," said Molly. "You've got to see this."
No more surprises, Tex thought. Not just yet. He pulled himself up and loped out to the aft deck, facing east, where daybreak might or might not have been under way, depending on how strict your standards were. As far as Tex was concerned, it was still the middle of the night.
"Look," said Molly.
Tex looked. He saw the ghost-white cylinders of petroleum tanks across Cold Bay. He saw the silhouetted hump of Cadillac Mountain waiting to receive the morning's first sunbeams. He saw Ursa Major. He saw the fragile crescent of a waning moon, like a thin piece of bone.
"Look at what?" he said sleepily.
"It hasn't happened yet." Molly stopped short of adding, you silly old Bear.
"That's good," said Tex. "I'd really hate to miss it."
He eased himself down into one of the deck chairs.
Afterlife Factoid #18
The dead can dig having a comfortable place
to rest their bones.
The blue glow brightened by some small measure. Was this a digital or an analog calculation? Are we talking quantized photons or continuous waves?
"Raven," he said, "if you don't mind my asking, what the hell are we looking for?"
She looked at him round-eyed, open-faced. Grandly she said: "Dawn. On Midsummer Day."
"Oh," he said. "That's cool. Why didn't you say so?"
He straightened in his deck chair. He declaimed: "And the dawn comes down like bird poop Out of seagulls on Cold Bay."
"That's beautiful, Bear," said Molly. Then the dawn did come up. But first, something else happened.
GOD STUFF
"Where do you stand," asked Ludi, lifting the turquoise fetish of Bear, his back laden with a tiny medicine bundle, "on this god stuff?"
"What?" said Gene, who stood sleepily beside her, facing the altar in the pilot house. "Where do I stand on what?" He put a hand on her neck, moved it down softly to her shoulder. He kissed the skin there that still held the warm, breadlike smell of sleep.
The hiss of the clock radio had woken them up. Gene had turned the radio off, but Ludi got up anyway and wandered over to the altar, which seemed like the place to be on Midsummer Day. So Gene—like a sweet but pesky puppy dog—padded in after her.
He breathed deeply at her neck, as though trying to inhale her.
Ludi jostled him off. "This stuff," she said, waving her hand: the fetish, raven feathers, black and white candles, an arrangement of rocks. "Gods, goddesses, spirits. Higher powers. Whatever."
"Ah," said Gene. He blinked. He yawned.
Ludi poked him in the ribs.
"Aagh,'' he gasped, faking great distress.
She laughed. "Maybe I do love you. It depends."
"Not on where I stand on feathers and incense, I hope." He scratched his chest, naked except for the skull pendant dangling from its neon green shoelace.
"Why do men do that?" Ludi asked him. "Scratch and stretch and yawn like that? Why not just open your eyes and be awake?"
Gene shrugged. He had never in his life felt so precariously happy. Not even as a 9-year-old kid when his secretly acquired model rocket had shot straight up in the air and then come right down through the canvas top of the neighbors' convertible.
"That's an interesting question," he said, after some swirly and chaotic early-morning-type thought.
"About why men scratch themselves?"
He shook his head. "The god thing," he said. "I suppose you expect me to take some hard rationalist line. And in a way that's how I feel. That what we believe ought to make sense. But I'm not sure. There's this almost religious belief among cognitive science types that the problem of consciousness—intelligence and self-awareness and all that—eventually will be explained as a function of information processing and feedback loops and things like that. In other words, consciousness isn't a mystical thing, it's just an emergent property in systems that reach a certain level of complexity. So I ask myself, Where do we find systems of great complexity? And the answer is, Everywhere. Throughout the Universe. In fact, the complex system par excellence is the biosphere of Earth. So I have to think—if it's true that someday you'll have a computer, or something like a computer, that will achieve genuine awareness—why can't living systems of sufficient complexity also achieve awareness? Why can't there be some form of emergent consciousness in the living Earth? Am I right? And if there is such a thing, it seems to me that we might as well refer to it as Gaia, the Earth Goddess. I mean, consciousness does imply personality, right? It's like the Anthropic Principle, only applied to godhood."
"Oh, yeah," said Ludi. "That really clarifies things for me."
"Oh, come on. It's not that technical. Why don't people know anything anymore? The Anthropic Principle is just a commonsense idea in physics. It says, One thing we know for sure about the Universe is that it has to be the sort of place where intelligent carbon-based life-forms will naturally tend to arise. We know this because we are an intelligent carbon-based life-form, and we are here thinking about the Universe. So you could say, as an earthly corollary, that one thing we know for sure about consciousness is that it must arise naturally in complex living systems. We know this because we are complex living systems, ourselves, and we are conscious. So this being the case, it makes no sense to assume that consciousness would arise only in a single type of organism. Nature does not restrict itself that way. Once a trait is evolved—say, vision—then it tends to pop up everywhere. It even makes no sense, probably, to assume that consciousness arises only at the organism level. As opposed to, say, the hive level, or the pod-of-dolphins level, or the ecosystem level. This is probably something we'll understand a lot better in 100 years."
"Except that we'll be dead."
"Maybe. Don't count on it." He wiggled his eyebrows, as though he were in on something.
"You," she told him, "are a very strange man." She picked up the Bear fetish and tickled its polished round belly. "Isn't he, little Bear?" she said. "Sweet old thing. Come here and let Ludi give you a kiss."
"Can we go back to bed now?" said Gene.
Ludi shook her head. "Don't you want to see the sun come up? Like, just as a matter of scientific curiosity?''
"There is very little that I can learn from watching the sun come up. I've already seen it very many times."
"But this is Midsummer Day."
Gene could think of nothing to say about that. Like much else about Ludi, it was not a well-posed problem. Maybe it wasn't a problem at all.
"Which way is east?" he said.
Her long finger stretched out at the end of her long slender arm. She was very beautiful. In physics and sometimes in biology, it is often said that things that are sufficiently beautiful must, at some level, be true. "Stick with me," Ludi told him. "Maybe you'll learn something."
UP LIKE THUNDER
Gulls swirled around the mast. Their predawn screeches—louder, it seemed, than at any other time of day—began low-pitched, then rose abruptly to become piercing and shrill. They sounded like synthesized effects. So much of the natural world you wouldn't believe if you saw it in a movie.
Tex was just dozing off when dawn surprised him. It would have surprised anyone. Strange colors moved in the atmosphere: wide gashes of orange and indigo, with a lavender aura fading to barely perceptible pink. As the sky brightened, the mountaintops seemed to grow darker, even impossibly to swell, as though pushed up by pressure building within the planet. That was how mountains formed, Tex believed. But these were old mountains, eroded and weary. The Earth slid further down its gravitational trench and the great glob of thermonuclear radiance all those millions of miles away—a safe distance, but just barely—could almost be seen along the fringe of the horizon. And that is when Dawn arrived.
Tex had never seen it this way, face-to-face. He supposed it must have slipped past him every day of his life; but you could not imagine that, really, when you looked at it.
