Standing Wave Page 15

  He supposed he should take a further glance through the books in his cargo. Vowing again to “know thy enemy,” he divided his attention in thirds, between the highway, a copy of Light Livelihood, and dozing off.

  Paging through the front matter, he saw that the book was in something like its fiftieth printing, and that it had first appeared back around the turn of the millennium. Flipping through it more deeply, he quickly located the sort of eco-pagan assaults on Christian belief he suspected might be found in its pages, in a chapter entitled “‘And God Gave Man Dominion Over The Earth’—NOT!”

  The chapter began with passages from Scripture. That really didn’t surprise him. Even Satan can cite Scripture. But then the psiXtian book went on the attack:

  These Biblical passages provide clear examples of the classic adversarial stance underlying the long war of humanity against the natural matrix out of which our species arose. In these passages cited above we can see sketched the premises and pretexts of that anthropocentric war. Nature is not indifferent, we are told, but is actively out to get us. We are led to believe that we cannot live with Nature—we can only subdue and rule ‘her’ or be subdued and ruled by ‘her.’

  Living with or within Nature is not an option, at least for those who adhere to an ‘inerrant’ interpretation of these religious texts.

  The link this dominance paradigm has to patriarchal power and hierarchical organization in general should be almost self-evident. The role such texts and their traditional interpretations play in authenticating, validating, and authorizing dominance of man over man, man over woman, man over nature—

  Dundas grimaced and looked out the driver’s side window at the fallow fields the highway was passing through. These people just didn’t get it, he thought. Hierarchy is ordained by God, it is God’s way, like that hawk stooping after the mouse in the field there. The hawk eats the field-mouse. These eco-pagans would have the field-mouse eat the hawk! The divine order is a golden chain running from God through the ranks of men—from those men who have earned His favor most to those who have earned it least—thence through the ranks of women, and then to and through children.

  Far below came all the animals, Dundas thought. All of them put upon the Earth to serve the needs of the supreme creation, Man. Earth was created to serve Man, not Man to serve the Earth. The world belonged to Man, not Man to the Earth. Only the Indians and other primitives had believed the opposite—and look at the way their “civilizations” had fallen before those with the True God on their side!

  Looking out the windows, at the fallow fields below the great earthen embankment holding back the San Luis Reservoir, Ray found himself growing homesick for the open expanses of the plains, the fields of winter wheat, of corn and milo further south. He drove the pang of homesickness back down, forcefully. Turning back to the scurrilous book, he flipped pages as the truck climbed up the hill beside Sisk Dam and higher into the coastal range.

  The rise of the first city was concomitant with the rise of agriculture and the steepening decline of both biodiversity and hunting-gathering as a way of life.

  We, at the turn of the millennium, find ourselves at the far end of that arc. Now, human populations thoroughly dominate the planetary surface, literally shouldering other species off the stage of life through destruction of their habitat in the name of our own. We have been fruitful and increased in number until now we literally fill the Earth.

  Ultimately this situation has been made inevitable by the inflated carrying capacity resulting from humanity’s most important—and most devastating—invention, agriculture.

  Just no pleasing these people, Dundas thought as the truck carried him smoothly through the hills. The psiXtians were worse than the Amish. What did they want—for people to give up their jobs and their homes and let their kids starve? Or not have any children at all? For what? The preservation of animals? That was totally out of whack. Not just anti-Christian—anti-human. And yet they had labs throughout Sunderground, working on “appropriate technology,” presumably tech for humans. He returned to the book, incredulous.

  At this end of the arc, the hunting-gathering lifeway is very nearly as extinct as most of the species that hunting-gathering peoples once depended upon. That lifeway too was based on the knowledge that life grows on death, that any individual continues by the end of another, by the consumption of the seeds or flowers or stems or corpses of other life. Low population pressure, and a sacred attitude toward the food source, made that way of life long sustainable—though it, too, inevitably caused extinctions.

  The invention of agriculture and pastoralism broke down much of the sense of the sacred nature of food, and that was when the long war—what one commentator has called ‘The Five Million Day War’—began in earnest.

  This shift in lifeway allowed the massive growth of populations and cities and the ongoing destruction of non-human species. So many billions of humans now live at the far end of that arc that far fewer types of cohabiting species are along for the ride with us today than at the beginning of the journey.

  Cruising down the last-rampart-but-one of the coast ranges, the truck whirred across a valley and past a town with a ragged sign proclaiming itself the “Garlic Capital of the World.” Papery garlic scale drifted on the wind, and Dundas was tempted to throw the ridiculous eco-tract out the window to join the other windblown debris. Then he thought better of it. No, he might get cited for littering, and that would assuredly harm his “initiate” status with the psiXtians.

  As the truck made its way into the last rampart of hills, Dundas thought it best to get through as much of the psiXtian polemic as he could stomach while he, as yet, had nothing really valuable to occupy his time.

  From the axiom of the hunter-gatherer—‘Sacrifice other life, for need, or risk your own through starvation’—we have now moved to ‘Sacrifice other life, for greed, or risk lowering your standard of living.’ From the production of children realistically for species survival, we have moved to the reproduction of children, most of whom—most of us—are long since excessive in terms of species survival and biological carrying capacity.

  Do these people hate kids, or what? Dundas thought. No single author was listed for the book, but he could have bet that the author or authors had no kids of their own—or were femwitch dykes of some sort, more likely. Apparently these hairshirts didn’t even much approve of circuses and zoos and genebanks, judging by the passages he found on the next page.

  —have reductively argued that, as long as we have the genomic ‘data’ of species, the fact that they are extinct in the wild and even in the flesh is of no real concern. This is emphatically wrong-headed. A species is more than just its genetic code. At the very least it is part of a large webwork of interconnections involving myriad other species and a specific bioregion or biotic context as a whole. Technologically recreated individuals and species are virtual creatures, enfleshed ghosts.

  A species from a lost environment is like a word from a lost language: untranslatable and ultimately meaningless. Such a reduced ‘reality’ is a virtuality not worth exchanging for all the life that has been made ghostly along the way—

  Yep, no way of pleasing these people at all, Dundas thought. At that moment, the “human-required” alarm went off as the truck began to negotiate the last of the hills in earnest. Dundas took the vehicle out of autopilot, thinking as he did so that he might as well take over control for the rest of the drive, down out of the range of hills and on to the coastal plain, from Watsonville to Aptos, ultimately past Capitola and into Santa Cruz. His reading was over for the day.

  Pretty country, he thought. Lots of bedroom communities for the Bay Area in-filling here, but still some redwoods and farm fields round about.

  In Aptos, he almost missed the psiXtian center—a combined effect of the foggy marine layer that had not yet burned off this close to the ocean, and the fact that the center was so fully integrated into the surrounding landscape. The building was three quarte
rs buried in the hillside, and the front of the structure, the only part above ground, was thick-walled adobe (probably straw bale, underneath) that flowed in curvilinear waves, no right angles at all. Dundas thought the structure was appropriate for recruiting psiXtians: a halfway house for tunneling groundhog-wannabes.

  The wiry couple who greeted him at the reception area—an older woman with flowing gray hair and a chin-fringe bearded man who looked to be about the same age—were happy to receive the book stock and newer media. When they asked after the state of things at Sunderground, Dundas was able to small-talk for a while, but then used the “I’m only an initiate there” gambit to beg off and be on his way. Driving out of Aptos, he told himself he didn’t need to waste time being polite with them. He already knew everything he needed to know about these folks from living with their ilk.

  The stores in cloudy Santa Cruz were a bit more interesting, in their perverse way. Aum Depot was a mystical and metaphysical lifestyles store patterned loosely on a Tibetan Buddhist temple. Throat-singing monks muzaked in the background throughout a space lit indirectly and naturally, in the main, and redolent of incense and the tang of purified butter lamps burning.

  Wandering through the place, Dundas saw that Aum Depot stocked all manner of neatly labeled mineral and crystal forms, malachite obelisks and obsidian spheres, goethite rainbows and stilbite bowties. He also found himself amid a bewildering array of feathers, beads, carved woods and cut flowers, along with a superabundance of idols and sacred images and paraphernalia.

  On the shelves and racks stood gnostic and mystic texts from a Rainbow Abomination of religious faiths, sects, and customizable belief systems. Dundas found the place disorienting rather than soothing in its diversity—thoroughly overwhelming in its Comparative Religiosity.

  Dundas waited as a customer burbled on to the owner about how impressed he was with her collection of stone “meditation objects”—“Nothing is quite so futuristic as a streamlined jadeite axe head, you know?” Blah, blah, blah.

  When at last Dundas’s turn came with the betrinketed proprietress, he was glad to be rid of Aum’s order—half books, have electromedia—and out in the truck once more.

  Ohmage Homage was more familiar, at least. Located in the convulsively consumerist Grand MallAmerica downtown, O.H. was a blaring, glaring, overlit, overaudioed, category-cluttered temple to electromediated youth culture, crass commercialism, and trendy income disposability. Its spastic wash of virtuals, holos, audios and videos—all in seemingly endless forms and varieties—competed for the customer’s attention with an indirect, market-darwinian savagery that would have done any electronic jungle proud.

  For Dundas, the effect, rather than being dazzlingly hip and attractive, tended by its sheer overabundance to point out the emptiness and superficiality of what was being offered for sale there. One-hit wonder bands, one-shot holos, virtuals destined to look dated in ninety days at most. Nothing lasting, all the depth on the surface, just entertainments to fill up the days of the young until they died of their bad habits or settled down, whichever came first.

  The jaded, nineteen-year-old nihilist clerk communed with the inventory computer on his eyeglasses and wristwatch, then took a bunch of psiXtian disks from Dundas. Was the psiXtian stuff a “hot seller”? He couldn’t see that, at least not in a place like this.

  Striding back out of the store, along the esplanades of the themeparkish mall, Dundas noted the garish hot pink holo for the shop cattercorner to Ohmage Homage: a place called Lotions, Potions, Emotions. He shuddered (a bit too deliciously) at what might be going on there, though a vivid image of naked copulating lesbian witches, tattooed and jewel-bedangled, flashed into his head—an image he quickly and carefully repressed, thereby also storing it for future use.

  Apokatopia Ethnotek, his last delivery, was in some ways the strangest of all. The motif was a cross between a pre-industrial village and some sort of post-nuclear mutant settlement on Mars. It apparently catered to customers who, judging by their argot, attire and demeanor, could have been from either the far future or the far past, or some place where the future and past become indistinguishable. Certainly they were not from any place in any present Dundas had ever encountered.

  As he walked through it, however, Dundas saw that actually the store was not all that different from Sunderground, in a lot of ways. The merchandise seemed to be a global variety of tribal and neo-tribal handcrafts, gatehead cult icons, low-tech eco-groovish household items (with a heavy emphasis on human-scale, single household power-generating devices), and scientific brain toys of an astonishing variety, from false color wheels to plasma spheres to light-and-sound circlets to portable Ganzfeld vortices. He also saw a good deal of “alternative lifeway” media: more light-n-lively groundhoggers, mycoengineer tree-torturers, and bubble-helmeted space migrators. Apokatopia Ethnotek took the rest of his cargo of vintage books and disks.

  Dundas, relieved of his Sundergrounded duties at last, headed for his meeting with his contact at Cthulhutessen. The restaurant, or whatever it was, had a street address on the boardwalk, at least according to the map display in the truck. When he got there, however, he learned that it was actually located some distance offshore.

  From a hawker standing by the boardwalk Dundas learned that the boat launch for Cthulhutessen left from the seaward side of the carnival complex on the south end of the walk. Striding quickly through the amusement zone, Dundas thought the place had an archaelogic feel to it—layers and strata of endless renovations and endless delapidations, fossilized chewing gum accretions on concrete and wood, rickety rollercoasters and tacky halls of mirrors and holographic haunted houses, game and fortune-telling machines with gaudy lights.

  No Disneyified order nor sanitized theme-parkeology here, he realized. Just the kitschy illogic of dream-kingdom juxtaposition. The kind of place that looked better bathed in neon night than it ever could in daylight, foggy or sunny or in rain. The kind of place where besotted sailors and their babes got into brawls with bikers and their chicks on sunburned Saturday nights in a previous century. Passing through and out of the boardwalk amusement park made Dundas feel distantly forlorn, overcome momentarily by a nostalgia for a nostalgia for a time that never really was.

  Not far beyond the point where a small river flowed into the fog-shrouded bay, a short boat pier ran out from the beach, ornamented with a sign and arrow, “To Cthulhutessen.” A red and black launch of shallow draught was just pulling up with what looked to be a lunch crowd—returning customers giddy and somehow grateful at being back on shore. As the arriving passengers left the boat, Dundas jogged onto and down the pier.

  Paying the ferryman for his crossing, he got into the boat and sat down, joining the dozen other passengers, mostly tourists with kids in tow and business-suited regulars, so far as he could tell. Dressed in his psiXtian work coveralls, he felt distinctly out of place.

  So many diversions, he thought, looking back at the city of Santa Cruz as the boat pulled away from the pier. All in a town whose name meant “Holy Cross.” He wondered how many passengers on this ferry, or how few, ever thought about that.

  In a moment the fog closed in, cool and damp, and Santa Cruz disappeared behind them like a dream on waking. The launch churned steadily on through the flat, dull waters of the bay, moving moment by moment more deeply into a world of leaden light and muffled sound. For all the landmarks available to them, they might as well have been a thousand miles out to sea.

  Just as the first of the tourists was about to check his watch and wonder how much longer it would be before they arrived, a large, composite shape loomed up ghostly from the fog. As they drew closer, Dundas saw that they were approaching a flotilla of what gradually became discernible as four ships—which the launch’s passengers managed among them to identify as a large freighter, a factory whaler, a two-masted schooner and a sizable yacht. All were lashed together by ropes and cables and joined by gangways and ramps into a single large floating complex. The four sh
ips had also been given the head of their considerable age and had decayed a goodly ways toward very rusty, crack-painted “derelict” status—a status reassuringly belied by the paint and polish of the gangways, ramps, and launches connecting them, and of everything near the waterline (as well as below it, presumably).

  Their own launch swung in beside the two smaller ships—the two-masted schooner Emma out of Auckland, and the yacht Alert out of Dunedin, according to the faded designations on their sterns, just barely readable through the fog. The launch drew up along the starboard side of the Alert, beside an external elevator box, into which the new arrivals crowded. The cage elevator carried them up to the top of its run, where they were disgorged onto the deck, to find their separate ways about the derelict flotilla.

  Dundas glanced about the foggy deck, looking for a bartender or some employee, but none were to be seen. The only structure of size atop the deck was a green monolith almost twice his height, and almost as broad as it was tall, like a giant version of one of the squat, carved malachite obelisks he’d seen at Aum Depot earlier. Approaching the monolith he saw that its fog-damp surface was aswirl with green-black fractal patterns, whorls flowing and quite distinct from the rigid angles into which the mineral’s surface had been carved. The patterns made the monolith’s surface seem mobile and alive for all its stony solidity. Something about its geometry wasn’t right, though—some optical illusion that made its angles and all the angles of the deck seem elusive and wrong.

  If “eerily menacing” was the effect the designers had been going for, then they got that right, Dundas thought. As he approached the largely pyramidal monolith more closely, he saw that it was covered with small carvings—perverse and bestial images, along with hieroglyphs of some unreadable sort. Mounted in the squat obelisk’s face was a broad carved door, wide at the base and narrower at the top, standing at an angle somewhere between that of an ordinary door and that of a storm-cellar entrance. Surrounded by lintel, threshold, and jambs densely covered with ornately carved tendrils and meanders, much of the surface of the green-black stone door itself was also carved in bas-relief—in the image of a nightmare creature, a cross between a squid and a dragon.