“Alex!” She stopped so suddenly he collided with her. “Look up! Up and to the right. What do you see?”
“I see … Yes. There’s an opening all right. But how do you figure …?”
She waved aside his objections. It felt right. Her internal compass, her ever-nervous, never-satisfied sense of direction … called her that way. She suppressed a voice of doubt, one that said she was grasping at straws. “Let’s give it a try, okay? Shall I give you a boost up? Or want I should go first?”
Alex sighed, as if to say, What have we got to lose?
“Maybe I’d better go, Teresa. That way, if it looks like a true passage, I can reach down and lift you.”
She nodded in agreement and bent over, lacing her fingers to form a step. Gently, he took her waist and turned her around. “There, that’s better. Are you ready then?” He planted one foot in her hands.
“Ready? You kidding?” she asked as she braced to take his weight. “I’m ready for anything.”
Even after they had traveled quite some distance along the steep, twisty new path, half crawling, half slithering up slanted chimneys and narrow crevices, Teresa kept refusing his offer to share the goggles. He was doing fine as leader, and she used the excuse that they couldn’t risk a transfer in all this chaos. To drop them would be a catastrophe; they might slide or tumble out of sight and never be found again.
But in truth, Teresa felt a queer craving for sightlessness right now. It was strange—difficult to explain even to herself. Why should anyone prefer to stumble along, hands waving, groping in the dark, utterly dependent on another for warning about what low overhang might lay only centimeters from her forehead? What precipice yawned beneath her feet?
And yet, twice she stopped Alex from taking a route that must have seemed reasonable by sight—the wider or flatter or easier path—urging him instead to take a lesser route. They were climbing most of the time, and though Teresa knew that was no guarantee against some dead end just around the next corner, at least upward meant they had only a mountain to contend with, not an entire planet, twelve thousand kilometers across.
This can’t be George Hutton’s route anymore, she knew after a while. There couldn’t have been this many diversions, this many narrow, twisty crawlways indicated on the map they’d lost. Alex certainly realized it as well, but said nothing. Both of them knew they’d never remember how to retrace their steps. The easy banter of an hour ago (or was it four hours? six? fourteen?) gave way to clipped, hoarse whispers as they saved their strength and tried not to think about their growing thirst.
They were blazing their own path now … going places no caver must have ever seen before. Teresa didn’t see them even now of course, but that didn’t matter. The textures were new with every turn. Under her fingertips she became familiar with many different types of rock, without associated names or images to spoil the perfect reality. Substance unsullied by metaphor.
Alex made the tactical decisions, step by step, meter by meter, small-scale choices of how to move each foot, each knee and hand. “Watch your head,” he told her. “Bend a bit more. Turn left now. Reach up and to the left. Higher. That’s it.”
Not once was there any implied rebuke in his voice, for her having led them this way … a blind woman pointing vaguely heavenward one moment, the other way the next, quite possibly taking them in circles. I’m supposed to be scientific. A trained engineer. What am I doing then, trusting both our lives to hunches?
Teresa quashed the misgivings. True enough, logic and reason were paramount. They were wiser ways by far than the old witchcraft and impulsiveness that used to guide human affairs. But reason and logic also had their limits, such as when they had no data at all to work on. Or when the data were the sort no engineer could grapple with.
We have many skills, she thought during one rest period, as Alex shared the last crumbs of protein bar and then let her lick the wrapper with her dry tongue. Some are skills we hardly ever use.
If only water-finding were one of hers. Occasionally they heard what could only be the plinking drip of liquid, somewhere beyond the beam of Alex’s goggles—often resonating tantalizingly beyond some rocky wall. Pressing your ear against a smooth surface, you could sometimes even pick up the distant roar and gurgle of the river, or perhaps another one that coursed and threaded these hidden countries below ground.
Sometime during their next stretch, she heard Alex gasp, backing up from what he described as a “bottomless pit.” Teresa remained calm as he guided her round an unseen trap that would have been their ossuary if he hadn’t spotted it in time.
They rested again on the other side. Hunger and thirst had long since become acute, and then begun fading to dull, familiar aches. But these didn’t worry Teresa as much as her growing weakness. Perhaps, a few rest stops from now, they would simply not get up again. Would their bodies then dessicate and mummify? Or was the dryness seasonal? Perhaps in a few months a slow seepage, rich in minerals, would return to these passages and gradually glue their bodies to the rocks where they sat, to seal their crypt and lapidify their bones. Or some wayward, springtime torrent might come crashing through this way, crushing and dissolving their remains, then carrying the bits all the way to distant seas.
Perhaps none of those things would have time to happen. It was still quite possible for Spivey and Hutton to lose control over the Beta singularity, in which case, even the mountain-tomb surrounding her now would prove no more solid than a house made of tissue. The distance between Teresa and her friends in the outer world seemed infinite right now, but would become academic once the taniwha reached its ravenous, final maturity, when all their atoms would rendezvous in a sudden, intimate, topological union.
Teresa wondered what that might feel like. It almost sounded attractive in a way, as she contemplated the immediate prospect of starvation. Did other lost explorers get this philosophical when they neared the end?
She wondered if Wegener in Greenland or Amundsen in the Arctic pondered the vagaries of human destiny as they, too, plodded on and on beyond all realistic hope. Perhaps that, more than cleverness, has been our secret power, Teresa thought as she and Alex got moving again, choosing yet another branching path. Even when you run out of answers, there are still possibilities to consider.
After a while though, even that consoling line of thought petered out. Tiredness settled over her like a numbing weight, thankfully dulling the ache of countless bumps and cuts and scratches. Her knee pads might have been lost some while back, or not, for she could hardly feel anything from those quarters anymore as she crawled or crouched or sidled edgewise through cramped or slanted defiles. All that remained to focus her attention was the rhythm. And an obstinacy that would not let her stop.
She had no premonition when Alex stopped suddenly. Through the hand on his arm, she felt a tremor run through his body. “Come here, Rip,” he urged in a hoarse whisper, pulling her alongside him and then over to an inclined shelf. When she was seated on the cool stone, she felt him take her head between his hands and turn it to the left, then downward a bit. “I can’t tell,” he said in a dry voice. “Is there something over there?”
Teresa blinked. By now she had gotten used to the speckles and entopic flashes the retina seems to “see” even in total darkness—the lies your eyes tell in order to pretend they still have something to do. So it took her a moment to recognize that one of those glimmers was maintaining the same vague, half-imagined, blurry outline, keeping position whichever way she tilted. Teresa gingerly bit her cracked upper lip so the pain would rouse her a bit. In a voice parched and scratchy from thirst, she asked, “Um … want to go check it out?”
“No, of course not,” he answered with wry, affectionate sarcasm, and squeezed her hand before beginning to guide her down the new channel, this one layered deep with some sort of dust that gave off a strong, musty aroma.
Teresa inhaled and finally realized what was so attractive about the smell. It was a rich pungency, and she could o
nly hope her suspicions were true, that the fragrance wafting her way rose from the thickly lain droppings left by endless generations of flying mammals … animals who sheltered below ground, but made their living flying and hunting outside, under an open sky.
Round more bends and turns they followed the faint glimmer, until Teresa began making out the dim outlines of walls and rough columns, contrasting at first only in faint shadings of black, but then with hints of gray and sepia creeping in to lend a detail here and there. Soon she found herself no longer needing as much help from Alex, guiding her own footsteps, detecting obstacles miraculously at long range, while they were still meters away.
Sight … an amazing sensation.
It took more steep descending after that, taking care not to make some fatal error in their haste, but at last they came to a place where the floor leveled off and was littered with a carpet of small bones which crunched under their feet. Now, overhead, they could make out thousands of brown, folded forms, hanging from every crack and crevice. The denizens of the cave gave them little notice, wrapped within the cocoons of their wings, sleeping through the day.
Day. Teresa blinked at the concept, and had to hold up a hand to cut the glare reflecting directly off one last cave wall—one facing a source of light brighter than anything she had ever imagined. I’m sorry I doubted you, she told the sun, remembering how in her dream she’d presumed it could ever have a rival.
Alex removed the grimy goggles and they looked at each other, breaking out in silent grins over how filthy, horrible, battered and positively wonderful each of them looked to be alive.
They were still holding hands, purely out of habit, when they finished scrambling through the brush covering the cave entrance and stepped into a morning filled with clouds and trees and a myriad of other fine things too beautiful ever to be taken for granted again.
ATTENTION! You have been targeted by a very special net search routine. Please don’t purge this message! It originates with the World Association of Mahayana Buddhism, one of the great religious orders of history, and your selection to receive it was not random. This is an experiment, a melding of modern science and ancient ways in our continuing search for certain very special individuals.
Those we seek are tolkus.… reincarnated beings who in lives past were saintly, enlightened men and women, or bodhisattvas. In the past, searches such as this were restricted to within a few days’ journey of our Himalayan monasteries. But of late, tolkus have been found all over the world, reborn into every race, every native culture and creed. It is cause for rejoicing when one is discovered and thereby helped to full awareness of his or her true powers.
Even when tolkus live their lives unannounced, forgetful of their past or even skeptical of our word, they nevertheless often become teachers or healers of great merit. These powers can be amplified though, through training.
We emphatically denounce claims that Eastern meditation traditions are simply glorified biofeedback techniques for inducing natural opiate highs. Chemical comparisons are crude and emphasize only the superficial. They miss the essential power that can be unleashed by the concentrated human mind. A power you may have refined in prior lives and that even now may be within your reach.
Our search is of great importance, now more than ever. Recent strange portents, observed all over the globe, appear to indicate a time of great struggle approaching. Like those of many other faiths, we of Mahayana Buddhism are preparing to face the danger ahead. We have sent into the Net these surrogate messengers to seek out those whose lives, courtesy, works of charity, and creditworthiness indicate they may once have been masters of enlightenment. We ask only that you meditate on the following questions.
Do you believe all beings, large and small, suffer?
Do you believe suffering ends, and that one end can come through what some call Enlightenment, a piercing of life’s veil of illusion?
Do you sense that compassion is the essence of correct action?
If these questions resonate within you, do not hesitate. Use our toll-free account to arrange an interview in person.
You may be more blessed than you remember. If so, we have faith you’ll know what to do.
• BIOSPHERE
“So tell me. What do you think of Elspeth?” Dr. Wolling asked as she poured and then passed him a cup of tea.
Nelson stirred in a spoonful of sugar, concentrating on the swirling patterns rather than meeting her eyes. “It’s … an interesting program,” he said, choosing words carefully.
She sat across from him, clattering her own cup and spoon cheerfully. Still, Nelson figured this wasn’t going to be an easy session—as if any with this teacher ever were.
“I take it you haven’t a lot of experience with autopsych programs?”
He shook his head. “Oh, they had ’em, back home. The school counselors kept offerin’ different ones to us. But y’know the Yukon is, well …”
“A land of immigrants, yes. Tough-minded, self-reliant.” She slipped with apparent ease into a North Canuck accent. “De sort who know what dey know, and damn if any wise-guy program’s gonna tell dem what dey tinkin’, eh?”
Nelson couldn’t help but laugh. Their eyes met and she smiled, sipping her tea and looking like anybody’s grandmother. “Do you know how far back autopsych programs go, Nelson? The first was introduced back when I was just a little girl, oh, before 1970. Eliza consisted of maybe a hundred lines of code. That’s all.”
“You’re kidding.”
“Nope. All it would do is ask questions. If you typed ‘I feel depressed,’ it would answer either, ‘So you feel depressed?’ or ‘Why do you think you feel depressed?’ Good leading questions, actually, that would get you started picking apart your own feelings, even though the program didn’t understand the word ‘depressed’ at all. If you’d typed, ‘I feel … orange,’ it would have answered, ‘Why do you think you feel orange?’
“Funny thing about it, though, Eliza was positively addictive! People used to sit for hours in front of those old-fashioned screens, pouring their hearts out to a fictitious listener, one programmed simply to say the rough equivalent of ‘Hmm? I see! Oh, do tell!’
“It was the perfect confidant, of course. It couldn’t get bored or irritated, or walk away, or gossip about you afterward. Nobody would cast judgment on your deep dark secrets because nobody was exactly who you were talking to. At the same time, though, the rhythm of a true conversation was maintained. Eliza seemed to draw you out, insist you keep trying to probe your feelings till you found out what hurt. Some people reported major breakthroughs. Claimed Eliza changed their lives.”
Nelson shook his head. “I guess it’s the same with Elspeth. But …” He shook his head and fell silent.
“But Elspeth seemed real enough, didn’t she?”
“Nosy bitch,” he muttered into his teacup.
“Who do you mean, Nelson?” Jen asked mildly. “The program? Or me?”
He put the cup down quickly. “Uh, the program! I mean she … it … kept after me and after me, picking apart my words. Then there was that, um, free-association part.…”
He recalled the smiling face in the holo tank. It had seemed so innocuous, asking him to say the first word or phrase to come to mind. Then the next, and the next. It went on for many minutes till Nelson felt caught by the flow, and words spilled forth quicker than he was aware of them. Then, when the session was over, Elspeth showed him those charts—tracing the irrefutable patterns of his subsurface thoughts, depicting a muddle of conflicting emotions and obsessions that nevertheless only began to tell his story.
“It’s the second-oldest technique in modern psychology, after hypnosis,” Jen told him. “Some say free association was Freud’s greatest discovery, almost making up for some of his worst blunders. The technique lets all the little selves within us speak out, see? No matter how thoroughly a bit or corner is outvoted by the rest, free association lets it slip in that occasional word or clue.
&n
bsp; “Actually, we free associate in everyday life, as well. Our little subselves speak out in slips of the tongue or pen, or in those sudden, apparently irrelevant fantasies or memories that just seem to pop into mind, as if out of nowhere. Or snatches of songs you haven’t heard in years.”
Nelson nodded. He was starting to see what Jen was driving at, and felt intensely relieved. So all of this has something to do with my studies, after all. I was afraid she wanted me to face that program ’cause she thought I was crazy.
Not that he felt all that sure of his own mental balance anymore. That one session had exposed so many raw nerves, so many places where it hurt—memories from a childhood he’d thought normal enough, but which still had left him with his own share of wounds.
He shook his head to knock back those gloomy thoughts. Everybody has shit like that to deal with. She wouldn’t be wasting time on me if she thought I was nuts.
“You’re tellin’ me this has to do with cooperation and competition,” he said, concentrating on the abstract.
“That’s right. All the current multimind theories of consciousness agree on one thing, that each of us is both many and one, all at the same time. In that sense, we humans are most catholic beings.”
Obviously, she had just made a witticism, which had gone completely over his head. Fortunately, the session was being recorded by his note plaque and he could hunt down her obscure reference later. Nelson chose not to get sidetracked. “So inside of me I’ve got … what? A barbarian and a criminal and a sex maniac …”
“And a scholar and a gentleman and a hero,” she agreed. “And a future husband and father and leader, maybe. Though few psychologists anymore say metaphors like that are really accurate. The mind’s internal landscape doesn’t map directly onto the formal roles of the outer world. At least, not as directly as we used to think.
“Nor are the boundaries between our subpersonae usually so crisp or clear. Only in special cases, like divided personality disorder, do they become what you or I would call distinct characters or personalities.