Chapter 2
A Jog Through the Ogham-Rune Trees
Charles
cambered, bracing his hands upon his knees as he breathed deeply. Soon the
emotional storm passed. He stood up, still taking deep breathes, and closed his
eyes. Every morning since 1987 he’d risen
before dawn to do puja (an offering
of incense, flowers and leaves of tulsi,
a type of Laimaceae plant held sacred by Hindus.) to
the Sudarshana Shaligram. This was a deep black spiral-shaped stone that came
from the Kali Gandaki River
in Nepal.
Called ammonites in the western world, Hindus consider them direct forms of
Lord Vishnu. Ammonites of a remote similarity are found along the coast of Whitby in England, where
they are known as snakestones.
Wiederay
had been given this stone by his Gurudeva, Kathia Baba Sri
108 Ahirbudhnya Nagaji Maharaj, the Mahant or leading sadhu-guru of the Uttara Vrinda sect of the Nimavat sampradaya. After his puja, which took him about ten minutes,
including the recitation of the Purusha-sukta
hymn of the Rig Veda, Charles—whose
spiritual name was Akshobhya-tathya das, would sit down and vibrate klim krsnaya govindaya gopi-janavallabhaya
svaha for about an hour. His Nepali gurudeva
had given him this mantra on the condition that he would chant it 1008
times thrice daily, in the early morning, at noon, and at sunset. He learned how to do this chanting at the
level of madhyama-vak, “the midpoint of articulation,” the
line that separates conception and utterance. During mantra-yoga, he settled his mental focus within the anahata-chakra, the heart of his subtle
body, the meeting point of all the nadis or
flowlines of prana.
Every
thought, Charles knew, appears as vak,
a vibration of prana, the subtle air of
life-force known to the ancient Greeks as pneuma.
To the Norsemen it was oend and
to the Anglo-Saxons it was wind (both
words relate to the Sanskrit vati,
“it blows”). In China
and Japan
it is chi or ki. In Genesis the Hebrew word ru’ach
means “the spirit-blown wind” that moved the face of the deep. In the Koran it
is ruch.
According
to the Vedanta school of Indian
philosophy, prana first appears in
the unmanifest (avyakta) realm of the
adha (lowest) chakra called muladhara. As it rises to the manipuraka-chakra
above the navel, the spanda (vibration)
of prana changes from para-vak
(inchoate desire, unexpressed except as ethereal waves in the subconscious
mind) to pashyanti-vak (desire expressed
as a thought-portent, like a comet streaking across the inner sky of the mind).
The dynamo of the whole system is the heart chakra. Here prana is churned into ten biodynamic airs. The heart’s power crystallizes the vibration of desire into madhyama-vak, subtle forms and feeling. When the pranic vibration of desire pushes upward from madhyama (the midpoint of the heart) to the next chakra, vishuddha in the throat, it turns into vaikhari-vak. Literally vaikhari means “that which is given form
apparent to the senses.” Form apparent to the senses begins with verbal
utterances, the audible voice, the first outward expression of the will. The
cry of the newborn.
Thinking,
feeling, willing. The midpoint—feeling—is crucial. If feelings and their
objects, thought-forms, are kept pure, then impurities carried by thoughts just
entering the mind at the pashyanti stage
will pass out of awareness unnoticed, like ambient sounds we automatically
ignore. The power of will that moves vak beyond
the midpoint of contemplating the the realm of the senses, will naturally seek pure
speech and pure activities.
Spanda is the vibration generated in prana by the whirling kalachakra or wheel of time. According to the Vedic view, there is a great
chakra of time that determines the
creation, maintenance, destruction and recreation of the universe. The
vibration or spanda of that great chakra the origin of all cosmic
phenomena.
And
so the Bhagavat-purana 9.5.3. addresses
the sudarshana-chakra, the same wheel
of time in its spiritual form as the fiery disk-weapon of Visnu, in this
manner.
tvam
agnir bhagavan suryas
tvam somo jyotisham patih
tvam apas tvam kshitir
vyoma
vayur matrendriyani ca
You are fire, you are the most powerful sun, and you
are the moon, the master of all luminaries. You are water, earth and sky, you
are the air, you are the five sense objects [sound, touch, form, taste and
smell], and you are the senses also.
Within
the human body, at seven points from the lower spine up to the top of the heard
are seven chakras that generate a
microsocsmic spanda within the body
that interacts with the macrocosmic spanda
to produce the impressions we have of internal and external experience.
Being time-bound, all such impressions—even at the sahashra or crown chakra,
celebrated among yogis as the gateway
to liberation—are different levels of maya,
the great macrocosmic illusion that
binds the eternal soul, who without divine intervention is unable to see beyond
the material effects of spanda.
The sahashra-chakra is the abode in the
human body of Devi Taaraa or Taarikaa (on the new ASAT calendar, Vidya-Taarikavara
was the name for Monday). The sa of sahasra stands for “he”, the soul in his
own glory. In a sense, then, to reach the sahasra-chakra
is to achieve the conception of the self as a non-material being. But
Taaraa, the goddess who presides over this chakra,
is the deity of the germ of duality in Brahman—bhava (the impersonal Brahman, the clear light of the consciousness
of eternality) plus bhaava (the subtle
material existence, or pradhana).
Nagaji
Maharaja, the guru of Akshobhya-tathya,
and Swami Prabhupada, who founded the ISKCON movement that his wife and
children had been initiated into, agreed that the level of realization
represented by the sahashra-chakra was
the last snare of maya or world-illusion.
At any of the seven levels of ascension through the yoga-chakras, the material vibration of spanda in prana can
become the cause of the growth of doubts, egoism, lethargy, and misgivings. Wiederay
knew that all his doubts were the result of an increase of the spanda within his subtle body or linga-sarira. But why were they
increasing?
There is
another vibration, however, called kampa.
This is the sound of mantras or aural
spiritual energy. Being the divine sakti (potency)
of Godhead, kampa acts as a transcendental
carrier wave that extends the vision of the drasta
(the seer, the spirit soul) extend his vision beyond the spanda-universe and into the spiritual
world. Feelings are central to
this breakthrough. One must learn by practice to cease feeling pleasure from
material spanda—for example, in the
form of mundane music—and develop attachment to transcendental kampa.
Feelings
are kept pure by mantra-yoga focused
in the heart. This is the viewpoint taught by Acharya Nimbarka in his
commentary on Vedanta that he wrote long,
long before Shankaracharya’s much more famous Sharirakha-bhasya. Kathia Baba told Wiederay that the Nimavats
astrologically date Nimbarkacharya’s birth at 15 years after the start of
Kali-yuga, or about 5000 years ago. The
palpable antiquity of Nimbarka’s philosophy impressed Wiederay so very deeply.
Nimbarka
wrote, atha karmayogadyanusthanarupajna
planavya jeprasannena bhagavatadhiyamana, which means that the dhiyamana
(inclination of the mind towards) bhagavata (Bhagavan, the Supreme Person), is the equal of
the inclination of the senses to their objects. Thus meditation upon the Lord
with heartfelt feelings counts as a full expression of will.
Some
four thousand and a half years after Nimbarka, Keshava Kashmiri, the greatest
late Medieval scholar and commentator in the Acharya’s disciplic line, illuminated
bhagavatadhiyamana (the inclination
of the mind towards Bhagavan) in Vedanta-kaushtubha-prabha.
Jagadvijaya Keshavabharati, as he was known in his younger years for having
thrice defeated all the famous scholars in India, brought bhagavatdiyamana into sharp focus by cross-referencing it to ashtanga-yoga, the traditional system of
meditation in eight stages.
The
source text for ashtanga-yoga Patanjali
Muni’s Yoga-sutra. Patanjali recommends “inclining the mind in
devotion to Ishvara, the Lord” (ishvara-pranidhana).
But what this means practically is not revealed. Keshava Kashmiri defines each
one of the eight stages as of yoga as
a stage of devotion. The fifth stage, for example—termed pratyahara by Patanjali, which is usually taken to mean “withdrawal
of the senses from their objects”—is positive dedication of the mind to
Bhagavan alone. Jagadvijaya Keshavabharati’s interpretation of the eighth
stage, Samadhi, is continuous and
uninterrupted meditation on Bhagavan.
Most
importantly, in Wiederay’s opinion, Keshava Kashmiri proclaims this eightfold
process open to everyone. It is open even to those with no social caste nor
religious order (varna
and ashrama) within the ancient Vedic
social system. As Charles knew so well, as long ago as the time of the Buddha, varna-ashrama dharma was a mere shadow
of its ideal as presented in the Rig-Veda
and the Manu-samhita. The Buddha
rejected the whole of varna-ashrama;
yet down the millennia since then to
the present day, it persisted as a shadow that instead of fading away just
became increasingly shadowy and distorted—like a ghost. Even in that “gigantic
sun of high technology that is just breaching the Eastern horizon,” as a recent
news report described the India
of today, the ghost of caste lives on. The ontologically-challenged (“Just what
is reality?”) and existentially-challenged
(“If there even is a reality, what do
we do with it?”) Western civilization
world was in the process of trying to hold itself together by synthesizing its own
version of a caste system. It was being drawn from its pre-Judeo-Christian
roots with one eye on India
for reference.
In
the countries formerly known as the United States and Great Britain,
for example, the Celtic-Nordic model of four levels of human consciousness had
become the blueprint of social reoganization over the last three years. At the
top was a community that encompassed a dual purpose. One side of it was a priesthood
of mystically-minded thinkers—scientists and philosophers. They were the
Ceugant. The thinking community was balanced by a sacred order of doers—the
Hlithsjalf. The two were to be understood as collectively comprising the
Platonic philosopher-king or the ancient Vedic rajarshi. For brevity’s sake they were called Axis-Mundi, representing
as the immovable hub of Truth (Axis) round which the World-Ideal (Mundi) revolved.
Below
Ceugant/Hlithskjalf was the community of the Gwynwyd, who made up the “organs”
or “senses” of the uppermost level. According to their merit and wisdom, members
of the Gwynwyd were eligible to rise to Ceugant/Hlithskjalf.
The
next level down was the Abred. In terms of numbers, it largest community the
Abred were the good folk who had voluntarily set their lives upon the track of re-education
for the down from above. Members of the
Abred who went into government service had the best chance of rising to Gymnwyd.
At
the bottom was the Annwn, people too ignoble in their habits to be re-educated.
The better among them could at least be kept on a tight leash and contribute in
some way to the goal of the hieratic social order. The Annwn who couldn’t that
were more or less banished to peculia (a Latin word for “the villages,”
conserved within the English word peculiar). Hence the fate of those who were
too peculiar was that they form their own small, scattered rural communes and
at least cooperate amongst themselves for the basic necessities of life.
Wiederay’s
thoughts returned to the teachings Keshava Kashmiri. Leaving the social order
of varna-ashrama behind, Keshava then
addresses the pure spiritual qualifications of the candidates for bhagavatdhiyamana. He declares that even
if one is untrained in the six formal kinds of surrender to Bhagavan (anukulasya sankalpa and so on), practice
of the yoga of bhagavatadhiyamana is enough to ensure perfection in transcendence.
This is so because it pleases the Lord and attracts His mercy.
The
sunlike (nimba-aditya) Nimarka, writing in Mantrarahasyasodashi, personally
revealed the method of meditation, declaring it “the eternal, hidden
secret of all truths.” The method is the chanting of the eighteen-syllable akshara gopalmantra imparted by the guru who is authorized to transmit the
teachings of Nimbarkacarya.
Some
thirty years before, Charles Wiederay received this mantra from such a guru. It came with the instruction that it must
be mentally repeated at least 1008 times before sunrise, then at noon, and at last sunset. This was the
gurupasatti-sadhana that Nagaji
Maharaja had bestowed upon him along with the upasaka-name Akshobhya-tathya das, which was how he was addressed
within the small circle of devotees who lived in this city.
Yayoi,
his wife, whose initiation name was Mukhya-vayu dasi, would sometimes remark
about her husband’s sadhana, "Anata tonaenaino. Kangaeru dakeyo"—“You
don’t chant it [your mantra], you
think it.” She would even half-jokingly tell the twins, their children Mohana
and Mohini, "Otosan no koto anmari
kikanai hooga iiwayo. Kangutte bakari irukara"—“Don’t listen to your
Dad. He’s a mental speculator.”
The
spiritual master of his wife and children, Kirtanakara Maharaja, a
grand-disciple of ISKCON Founder-acarya Srila
Prabhupada, was fond of making public statements like, “Nonsense talk breeds
nonsense thought; nonsense thought breeds nonsense action; nonsense action
breeds birth, old age, disease and death.”
Wiederay—Akshobhya-tathya dasa when he was among devotees—didn’t care to
argue. What Swami Kirtanakara said was not exactly untrue. It just wasn’t technically accurate. Thought preceded
the action of speech! Every Vedantist knew this—why did these ISKCONians
reverse the natural order of subtle to gross to gross to subtle?
Akshobhya-tathya
respected ISKCON’s founder-acarya and
particularly found solace in three volumes of Srila Prabhupada’s writings.
Unfortunately it seemed ISKCON devotees hardly ever read these particular
three. One was Calling Out to Srila
Prabhupada by Satsvarupa Gosvami. In this book many extracts of Srila Prabhupada’s
letters were presented in a cryptic form that reminded Akshobhya of Heraclitus.
Once he pointed out to Swami Kirtanakara what Prabhupada stated on page 89.
The whole Bhagavatam
is glorification: yad kirtanam yat
smaranam. Either you praise Him or meditate on Him, or you sit down in
front of the Deity and go on seeing. Do nothing else, simply see “How nicely
dressed is Krishna, how nicely dressed is
Radharani.” It is said, yad iksanam,
if you cannot chant or you cannot fix up your mind because it is so disturbed
then the chance is given: Here is Deity.
You simply see.
Kirtankara
Swami brusquely answered, “That’s for people like you, who refuse Lord
Caitanya’s greatest treasure to the world, the congregational chanting of Hare
Krsna Hare Krsna Krsna Krsna Hare Hare/Hare Rama Hare Rama Rama Hare Hare. You
Nimbarka followers—you’re too absorbed in seeking liberation from your own
disturbed minds. Just chant!”
Akshobhya-tathya das had not seen any point in speaking with Kirtankara Swami.
Swami sPrabhupada clearly states, “If you cannot chant,” not “if you will
not chant”—so Kirtanakara’s reply seemed a complete non sequitur.
It
didn’t matter to him anyway. Charles treasured the knowledge and discipline he
had received at the Uttara Vrinda Ashram perched upon the rocky crags above the
town of Baglung
on the sacred Kali
Gandaki River.
He found that because of mantra-yoga,
and the three years he spent in the Zentsugi Monastery in Japan as a
novice in the Shingon sect of Buddhism, his younger days seemed unwilling to
let go. In his late sixties, he was still trim, clear-eyed, agile. The skin of
his face was as firm as it had been twenty-five years ago, except maybe for a
few deepening wrinkles at the corners of his eyes and mouth. Three days a
week—Monday (Vidya-Taarikavara), Wednesday (Vaagbhavavara) and Friday (Sarasvatiivara)—he
would jog nine times around his Frith. It look him three and a half hours at
the steady pace he had developed over the years.. As he limbered up for his run,
he looked around him.
. The ogham-rune trees. Nine rows of them
encircled this township of the city. Only they didn’t call city townships or
divisions or precincts these names anymore. Nor were countryside towns “towns.”
They were all Friths. Every Frith was encircled by between five and nine rows
of trees. Everybody who lived in an Frith—and you had to have the special
qualifications to live in a Frith that was a division of a “city”—was
encouraged to use the dirt tracks between the rows of trees for jogging.
His
Frith was called Gendenwitha. The word Frith came from the ancient Anglo-Saxon
language; it meant sanctuary. Gendenwitha was the Iroquois name of the Native
American goddess of the morning star. The government introduced these name
changes as a major part of its ASAT re-education program. ASAT stood for the
Age of Sigil-Actuated Transcognition. A sigil
was a runic word that stood for any kind of magical stimulus of
consciousness, and transcognition was—in his cynical view, anyway—what years ago
people used to term “the hive mind,” the single-pointed collective
consciousness that possessed ants or bees.
The
Landsvaettir—the new social services department of what was formerly the
Federal Government of the United States of America—hailed transcognition as the
gentle solution to war, criminality, alienation, and the break with perception
of our unity with the cosmos. A Landesvaettir tract he’d recently found in his
mailbox proclaimed,
Each individual creature is a stage of cosmic
embryology, whose culmination is the human being. The human mind possesses the
capacity for transcognition, or functional consciousness that is not dependent
upon physical actuation, including even the actuation of external sensory
stimuli. Each of us can know reality from the inside. Our forefathers and foremothers
knew how to awaken transcognition by means of sigils, ritual magickal symbols represented as words and sounds, lights
and colors, music and dances, herbal potions—and ultimately, the greatest of
wonders, thought itself.. By the practice of transcognition at last one realizes
the whole universe as a vast arabesque of sigils.
Let our universe be one of your mind at one with the minds of all other
sentient beings. Be whole, be well, and be peaceful.
The
tract ended with some lines of a poem by Rene Schwaller de Lubicz. There was
something audaculous about the fact that “de Lubicz” was a title that Schwaller
received from Lithuanian poet and diplomat O.V. de Lubicz Milosz. Wiederay wondered
what his mother would have to say about de Lubicz’s empasm upon the world of
matter:
Tumble with the rock which falls from the mountain.
See
light and rejoice with the rosebud about to open:
labor
with the parsimonious ant;
gather
honey with the bee;
expand
in space with the ripening fruit.
Physically
and mentally he felt young, but whenever Wiederay had to face this barmy welken-vision
promoted by the apparently guileless Landsvaettir, he felt obsolescence
creeping up behind him. He recalled that the English word welkin, “the vault of
heaven,” was related to the German work wolken,
“cloud.” The Germans had a sarcastic expression, Wolkenkuckuksheim, “cloud cuckoo-land.” He always thought of that
whenever he saw the Landsvaettir bustling about the city dressed in their official
colors—which in Wiederay’s mind, could only be compared to school uniforms. grinning
just a little too widely for comfort.
Strange—he
glanced up at the ogham-rune trees and a tingling sensation at the nape of his
neck told him that they were looking back at him. It must be simply that they
were the only visible living things in his neighborhood at this hour. It was a
retirees’ quarter—er, Frith—after all.
He surveyed the street. The Andruss Palmerin was long gone. He saw not another
soul, neither on the residential side of the street nor—as far as he could
see—on the nine tree-lined jogging tracks encircling Frith Gendenwitha.
He
felt himself in the grip of what he could only think of as a psychic hammerlock.
But almost as soon as he felt it, it disappeared. He stood completely still,
reviewing his physical condition as best he could. Nothing seemed amiss. “My
sweet Lord,” he said aloud. “Life in this brave new world is overshadowed by
the effortless power of a few men who seem to be able to turn their dreams into
reality at the merest thought. But what dream do they think they are herding us
into?” Heralictus sumed it up this way:
The mysteries current among men initiate them into
impiety.
The
root of the Latin word mysterium is
traced back to the Greek mu, “the
groan of a mute person.” The root of the Sanskrit word muudha (fool) is muuh,
illusion. An educated person is called vidvaan
(vid—“learning”; vaan—“replete with”). A fool who tries to pass himself off as educated but ought better
keep his mouth closed is called vimuudhaan.
In Calling out to Srila Prabhupada,
Satsvarupa dasa Gosvami rendered a remark Srila Prabhupada made about the vimuudhaan in this way:
This is going on, the vimudhaan, They are proud of education, everything is all right,
complete. But real knowledge, do you know
God? That he cannot explain. He will say say something hodge-podge. This is
the disease, therefore they are vimudhan.
For
a fleeting instant he remembered himself at age ten, under the covers, head
propped up by two pillows, his tall, thin, green-eyed mother Laima reading to
him from an old French book that she said had been published in the 1920s, but
was about “wise people from long ago.” He could still see in his mind the faded
art-deco design of the dust-jacket, and the florid title, Gnostiques. Printed in more
prosaic typeface below was “avec Jacques Lacarriere.” Laima read in French,
then paused every few moments to translate it into English. She loved the
French language so. .
…this knowledge, born out of their own
meditations or from the secret teaching they claimed to have had from Jesus or
from mythical ancestors, leads them to see the whole material creation as the
product of a god who is the enemy of man. Viscerally, imperiously,
irremissibly, the Gnostic feels life, thought, human and planetary destiny to
be a failed work, limited and vitiated in its most fundamental structures…But
this radical censure of all creation is accompanied by an equally radical
certainty whch presupposes and upholds it: the conviction that there exists in
man something which escapes the curse of this world, a fire, a spark, a light
issuing from the true God …this God who was unknown, or imperfectly known, to
all preceding religions.
The
anti-God, or demiurge responsible for mundane creation, some Gnostics named
Ialdabaoth. He was but the shadow of chaos from whom material heaven and earth
came into being. He himself was a creation by Sophia, a spiritual goddess of pure
wisdom who was at once responsible for placing souls in illusion, yet responsible
for freeing them by bestowing upon them true
knowledge by which they might know the true
God beyond the shadow Ialdabaoth and beyond even Sophia. To gain this knowledge
(gnosis) was to declare war against the earthy nature of humankind. As the
French book explained,
…without…an asceticism operating conjointly on man’s
mental structures, [one] could achieve nothing more…than changing one master
for another, and therefore one alienating factor for another, all the more
dangerous in that people would believe they had abolished the cause of
alienation.
This,
Wiederay scowled, was ASAT, the Age of Sigil-Actuated Transcognition—just one
alienating factor being substituted for another. It was remarkable that these
people seemed to have some grasp of the Sanskrit language. Didn’t they know
that asat means “unreal?” Then he
remembered a class of ancient Indian philosophers who followed a doctrine
called asatyakaravada, the belief
that there is no cause behind the world. It would not surprise him in the least
if the offices of our New Age government were full of New Age asatyakaravadins. Krishna
speaks of them in the Bhagavad-gita 16.8.
asatyam
apratistham te
jagad
ahur anisvaram
aparaspara-sambhutam
kim
anyat kama-haitukam
They say that this world is unreal, with no foundation, no God in control.
They say it is produced of sex desire and has no cause other than lust.
“And
now,” he spoke aloud to the ogham-rune trees, just in case they were listening,
“you’ve got ternaxophrenia spreading through the population of your brave new
world, and you can’t find the cause. Well, how can you if you don’t really
believe in cause?” He had a pretty good idea of the cause, but he was keeping
that to himself. In the one or two old-style newspapers that were still
published in this town, ternaxophrenia was called the AIDS of the 2020’s. But
that was just sensationalism. It was not a communicable disease. It was not
even a disease of the physical human organism. It was purely mental. The Landesvaettir were calling
it a “mass hangover of archaic sexual inhibitions.” But they were wrong and
they knew it. Ternaxophrenia—like the AIDS before it, for which still no
vaccine and been developed—scared the hell out of the new government.
The
official figures for the city were that ternaxophrenia, or “thistle mind,” had
in the last three years “overtaken” (to say it “spread through the population”
was to patently ignore the facts) about ten percent of the city. Percentiles
for other regions were being withheld “pending investigation.”
What
could not be covered up was that ternaxophrenia was a New Ager’s worst nightmare. It was not an STD—sexually transmitted
disease. The slightest thought of sex
brought it on. The victim instantly felt as if his or her genitalia, and within
minutes the entire surface of his or her skin, was being pierced by
needle-sharp thistles, just as if he or she were blindly blundering through a thick,
head-high briar patch. There was no question: one one had contracted it, ternaxophrenia
ruled out any type of sexual activity.
Yet
no marks appeared on the skin of afflictees. No disease vectors could be
detected in their blood or tissues. Brain scans turned up nothing. Only
Kirilian photography occasionally showed strange patterns in the aura around a
victim’s body. But these patterns fit no general pattern—each display of odd
colors and eerie shadows was unique. They had only shown up in perhaps one
dozen of thousands of afflicted persons.
Some
print and radio journalists (old style again) pointed the finger at the SBY com
system that had totally replaced television. All known afflictees were SBY
subscribers. TET, the government communications regulatory agency that had
dictatorially taken over SBY from its commercial developers since the dark days
of Armageddons I and II just prior to Year 0 ASAT, and their ever-compliant
agents of optimism, the Landsvaettir, insisted—quite correctly, insofar as the scientific
evidence could demonstrate—that no cause-effect chain of evidence even remotely
connected SBY and ternaxophrenia. Thus absent of any idea of a cause, there was
no question of any cure.
Charles
Wideray had good reason to believe he knew both the cause and the cure. But his
deinosis deterred him from mentioning what he knew even to his wife, who was a government-employed
biologist. Charles and Yayoi—or as they addressed one another whenever they
met, Akshobhya and Mukhya—would probably agree, after a ten-minute talk, on what
was behind ternaxophrenia. Mukhya sincerely wanted to advance knowledge useful
to the human race. But Charles believed even she would drop the matter after that
first discussion with him. She was a realist, after all—in some way even more
than he was, for she did not look at the world through a glass as darkly as did
her husband. Years ago, though, she had come round to agree with him that
Heraclitus was right when he observed,
Not comprehending, they hear like the deaf. What they
are told is the witness of this, for it is present while absent.
Or
in the language of the Bhagavata-purana ,
pashyati na pashyati—“they see but they do not see.”
As
he jogged, sorrow again swelled in his heart. He would never be never be able
to separate these ancient aphorisms that had given him solace through the ups and
downs of life from a good man, Captain Yamato, whose death he was at least in
part responsible for.
Despite
her brighter view of the modern world situation, at the end of the day, Mukhya
would agree that among the fools who had so eagerly and blindly embraced SBY technology—which
had clearly not been run through the
gauntlet of rigorous scientific safety tests that it should have before it was
unleashed un the public—who would
take the necessary steps to put a stop to ternaxophrenia? This would mean
putting a stop to SBY.
In
his opinion, SBY amounted to a powerful electronic neurosemiological drug—and
something even more sinister. A few times he had tried to explain to a few
acquaintances what this technology, this “Magickal-Aetheryic Tool,” was opening
their psyches to, but none believed him. Even if they believed him, do addicts
even care? And finally, if he took the whistleblower route, he’d be going up
against TET, which was going up against the priesthood of the presiding idol of
today’s world.
Enough of this. He’d limbered up and now
it was time to jog. His right foot thumped the earth as he sprang forward. A
small flock of birds flow out of a holly tree to his right. A purple martin
winged right in front of him for a few brief moments, almost as if it was
leading the way, before rising into the foliage above and disappearing. He began
the first lap on the innermost track, the sidewalk to his left and the
single-row stand of holly trees to his right.
He
settled into his rhythm. As his feet carried him past the trees, his thoughts
reached out to them. Living letters, that’s what they were. Let’s see…Holly is
T, for the Celtic Tinne. The ancient letter—some
said it was the script of the Druid priesthood that some New Agers believed
supervised the building of Stonehenge—was
written as per the mark painted in white on the trunk of every dozen or so
tree. There was probably an arcane system the Landsvaettir had worked out for
which trees in each of the nine rows to paint. The mark, tinne, had a horizontal base line from which three parallel
vertical lines climbed. The base was
longer than the triple lines were tall. Tinne
stood for strength in adverse situations.
As
he ran he felt a lump growing in is throat. “God, this is maya,” he thought. “Why
should I care that they renamed the whole country Triushas, after adding to it Canada and Mexico? Triushas.
It’s Sanskrit. A simple and beautiful word. “Three dawns.”
But
what else will they change? The shift from October to November’s coming up. Would
they revive the pre-Christian Samhain in
place of Halloween (All Hallows Eve)?
His
perspective of time, space and motion was shifting at bit. The smooth pace, the
regular beat of his shoes against the dirt—could it be having a hypnotic
effect? Charles saw himself going nowhere, as if on a treadmill. The Holly oghams
were parading by, showing off their glossy evergreen leaves amd their regularly
spaced white- painted letters. But each tree was a letter. A living letter.
Nine parallel rows of them, snaking around his “township,” his “division,” of the
city that was once the Capital of the nation he spend five years of his life
defending.
The
city wasn’t as big as it used to be. Quite a lot of it had been erased and not
rebuilt. Whole sections were bulldozed, the debris carted away, the empty lots
returned to nature. What was left wasn’t called a city. The word was obsolete.
“Language is alive,” went one of the slogans. “A living thing renews itself.”
Stamp
stamp stamp stamp stamp rang out his running shoes. Shankaa, the doubt in his heart,
whispered, “Where is all this lead to?” Wiederay refused to listen. Keep
the breath steady. This was something he knew how to do. Daily yoga since the early seventies,
beginning with his Shingon Buddhism training. Pranayama.
“Hey
there, elder trees!” he called to the next row over. Small trees, eight feet
high at the most, raggedy-looking this time of year, but beautiful in the
summer, bearing flowers and berries. “Having a parade too, huh? Elder, elder,
elder, that’s…hmmm…ruis! Right, the
letter R.”
In
the ogham script, R looked was written as four slanted parallel lines, like,
hmmm, “Like a gang of drunks” he
fairly shouted at them, “staggering down the street, leaning a little to the
right, shoulder to shoulder, for support. With a horizontal slash through the
middle.”
Stamp
stamp stamp… “Now, you holly troopers, you elder brigadeers, and hey, yes, I’m talking you to, you big
Wych elm militiamen over in the third row! Gyfu,
right? Or is it maybe Goofy?”
Gyfu was a rune letter, not an ogham
letter. The letter’s shape was X. He could see these in white paint on some of
the Wych elms standing tall and droopy over the elders.
“Do
they still use your wood for making coffins?” he asked the elms. “‘The death
aspect of Mother Earth,’ that’s how our friendly civil-servicemen and women—the
Landsvaettir—describe you in their public service announcements. Do you like
that? What’s that slogan they tell us when they explain you to us in these ways?
‘Linguistic engineering equals social reality!’” Stamp stamp stamp stamp…
Nearing
the middle of the first lap, he could see the big TET broadcasting tower. Not
only was it was the tallest structure in Frith Gendenwitha, it was the tallest
in the whole “city” of Evaki. Another Iroquois goddess, Evaki—the one of night
and day. This was the name that three years ago had replaced “Washington D.C.”
Just as the city of Washington
is no longer supposed to be called by that name, neither is Evaki supposed to
be called a city. It is a hierofide now.
Charles
said it out loud, just the way they wanted you to pronounce it: HEE-ro-FEE-day.
Hierofide Evaki. Hierofide was military-style Latin, like Semper Fidelis. Go to
the post office expecting a package, like the expensive Macadamian nuts Ingvaldssen
those used to send him once in a while. Before he died. The lady would shake
her head sadly and tell him, “I’m sorry sir, we did get the package, but it was
wrongly addressed. So we returned it to sender. Instead of Washington D.C.
it should be labeled Hierofide Evaki.”
No.
Actually, that wasn’t right either. It was supposed to be addressed to Hierofide
Apex Evaki. Apex indicating that
among hierofides (cities), Evaki was a capital. But no longer capital of the
whole country. Things didn’t work that way now.
Hierofide
means “faith in the holy” or “faith in the holy offices.” There were other
interpretations too. Fide (faith, traced back to the Sanskrit priya) was the root of all the “fed”
words—federal, federation. You picked up from it a sense that only those who
had faith in the priesthood that ran the city would be able federate themselves
with the place. That was one of the ideas behind these words—resonance, they called it.
“’Know
resonance, or no residence!’ Who thought that one up?” he called out to the
trees.
City,
you never had to think twice about that meant. Cities were America’s
lowest common denominator. That’s why they’d gotten so bad. But hierofides...they were exclusive. If you
wanted to live in one, you had to be able to pronounce it. And explain it. And deserve it. Especially this Hierofide Apex, Evaki. Capital city
of the old Eastern Standard Time Zone.
Now
the time zones were called Terashita-sato, cobbled-together from two Japanese
words that together added up to “enlightened land.” The fifty states of the
union were no more. “Not attuned to nature, to time, space and sunlight, like
our new Terashita-sato satrapys,” he addressed the trees once more. “But why
weren’t the old states natural? They had
American Indian names. Em-eye-ess-ess-eye-ess-ess-eye-pee-pee-eye.”
Yeah,
well. The Axis committee, the Ceugant, decided four big zones with weird names
like Warnovaldam, which was the Terashita-sato that Evaki was the Hierofide Apex
of, was better than having states named Mississippi
and Ohio. Then
the Mundi committee, the Hlithsjalf, made sure it happened. If you didn’t like
it, sooner or later some friendly young lad or lass from the Landsvaettir, wearing
a grin on his/her face just a little too big,
would pay you a visit. “Just for a talk.” They might pay a couple more visits
if they felt they had to. If you were a lost cause, the last visit would be
from the Morgana.
“Help!
Morgana!” Charles shouted to the trees. The New Age police. Oh, a very efficient outfit. Relocate you in
one night to a Peculium. The new word for village. Actually the old Latin word
for village. Who lived in the Peculia? Only the peculiars, those who couldn’t
adapt. Like the ragged remnants of the population that held on to Judao-Christianity.
Armageddon I, four years ago, had cost them their standing as the pre-eminent
religion in the world. Now they were pariahs.
Anyway,
back to Terashita-sato. The Ceugant figured that since the Japanese and Chinese had visited America perhaps as early
as 800 A.D., and since the red
man—excuse me, the Native Americans—had crossed the Bering Strait from Mongolia
or some place in East Asia when the Strait played host to a land bridge (even
though more and more scientists admitted the probability that other humans—may even whites, and
blacks—were already in North America
when the red men arrived), Terashita-sato was a good name for a time zone.
There
were four Terashita-satos. Warnovaldam, the former Eastern Standard Time Zone; Tarmendre,
the former Central Standard Time Zone; Salumandran, the former Mountain
Standard Time Zone; and Xhorasia, the Pacific Standard Time Zone. Under the
present administration, they were autonomous zones. Each had its own Hierofide
Apex. The new names of these zones meant nothing in the sense that they could
be found in no dictionary of the languages of Earth, at least as far as he
knew. They meant nothing on the surface,
that is. He sensed something swimming in the deep beneath the syllables of each
of them.
Just
like those ogham-rune trees. Harmless living letters. Nine neatly-trimmed rows
of holly, elder, elm, hawthorn, whortleberry, juniper, linden, poplar, and
service trees. The boundary spelt something nine letters long, that began T, R,
X…or was it T, R,G? From concentrating on
keeping his running pace steady throughout nine laps around Frith Gendenwitha, Charles
Wiederay couldn’t apply his mind to it right now.
The
TET tower loomed before him. From what he had heard, Tet was an Egyptian
hieroglyph. “Hiero” again. Somebody had told him Tet was a four-headed god that
rose out of the Causal
Ocean. He was the
Egyptian version of the Hindu Brahma. Whether the name was a hieroglyph or an
acronym, the TET tower was the deity of the immachination of the ASAT world. Its very form and height induced hypnopiasis
in all who gazed upon it. It’s Ithyphallic Highness ruled from a large open
park across the road from the ogham-rune boundary groves.
Fifty
meters in front of the TET tower, on the edge of the sidewalk that separated
the park from the edge of the street, stood a large artificially-constructed
cave. The inside was illuminated by some sort of phosphorescence. The cave’s
walls were painted with sixty-four hands, just like the original Paleolithic
hands painted in the cave
of Gargas in southern France.
But
the hands were background design. The actual purpose of the TET cave was to
provide shelter for a (Charles had to admit it) beautiful, life-size chromium
reproduction of the female robot in Fritz Lang’s 1926 film Metropolis. There
was a brass plaque set in stone before the exhibit, featuring some words from contemporary
German philosopher Gunther Gebauer.
The
cave of Gargas has whole compositions of hands,
sixty-four in all—an artistically arranged composite world of hands. In these images
one can see a key to Paleolithic ideography. The symbolism emanates from the
human body. With his body, man enters into his system of symbols, serving it
simultaneously as a standard for representation, as a module, and is he himself
seized upon by the symbols and transformed into signs.
…..
In
the Paleolithic cave man finds himself face to face with pictures of himself and
his position in relation to the others…In the cradle of the cave one finds
one’s own image. The fascinating images virtually defy the effort to tear
oneself away from contemplating them. In this sense the cave has never been
abandoned once and for all…Our inner being has its origin in the topography of
the cave…In the search of the ideal place, the earth’s interior plays the lead
role. The earth gives scope for a natural kind of symbolism. Her center was
interpreted as being feminine in Paleolithic times.
…..
Our
imagination remains captive in the cave. We do, in fact, repeatedly seek out
the cave in a different form. In one way or another, all our notions of
paradise are linked with situations of the cave.
Standing
back behind the cave-robot exhibit was a 360 meter-high silver needle the shape
of an inverted golf tee, with a huge planetoid sphere perched atop it. The
structure had distinct sections. The lower third of the needle was plain except
for a few oddly-shaped windows: a porthole facing north fifty meters up, an
octagonal window to the east twenty meters higher, an oval window to the west
another twenty meters up, and a pentagonal window fifty meters above that,
facing south.
The
middle section of the needle was spiked with oddly placed rods of different
lengths that pointed in different directions without any symmetry. Several of
them jutted out for ten or twelve feet, dropped at a right angle for one foot,
then stuck straight out again at another right angle for three more feet. Scattered
among the more or less straight rods were a few corkscrew-shaped coils.
The
upper third of the needle served as a mount for a crazed array of dishes and
disks, rectangular and cubic boxes of various configurations. These too pointed
all over the place. Topping the needle was a golden-orange metal ball, sixty
meters in radius. Around its middle it was encircled by fourteen disks that
stuck straight out from the side, their flat and glassy bottoms pointed down at
the ground below, each crowned by a half-dome the same color as the great
sphere they ringed. From the rear of each dome a large metal segmented cable
extended along a mount into the golden-orange metal ball. The flat crystal
disks were held in place at their edges by shiny grommets. For every other
crystal disk, these gromments served as suspension-points for cylindrical
pilasters, each about five meters in
length and swaying gently in the breeze. A pilaster is a decorative column of Southeast
Asian architectural style. These were made of intricately carved, woven bamboo,
silken cloth, tinkling silver bells and multicolored glass beads.
Atop
the sphere was large phyathat of Burmese style. This beautifully silvered, traditionally-designed
tiered roof of a religious or royal building might have been purely decorative,
but it so suggested a tasteful array of antennae that the phyathat might have
been as functional as it was artistic. The TET tower was clearly intended to
convey that above all there is Being that can be appreciated by reason. Yet TET
has a reason of its own for being, a reason so alien from anything we human
creatures could ever hope to think of. Perhaps that is what Gebauer meant when
he wrote, “Our imagination remains captive to the cave.”
Wiederay
was so caught up in looking at the TET
transmission tower that he failed to see the black Andruss Palmerin parked on
his side of the road until he was upon it. Suddenly a young woman in uniform—a
jacket of a reddish violet intended to represent the early light of dawn,
offset by yellow epaulets on the shoulders and same-color striping on the
lapels, grey pants and black ankle-high black boots—stepped out from behind the
trees into the path. His path. With
her left hand she held up an ID folder.
He
saw the Aegishjalmur badge, a circular design of eight evenly-spaced tridents
pointed outward from a small central hub. Behind each three-pronged head of the
tridents, the staff of each was divided into sections by a row of three lateral
crossbars, the one nearest the hub being the shortest, the one nearest the base
of the trident the longest.
“Excuse
me, sir,” she said in a flat voice, looking at him evenly, her face set to
unreadable. “I am an agent of the Landsvaettir. Would you be so kind as to
stop?”
Unlike
regular Landsvaettir “representatives,” as they liked to call themselves, this
woman was armed with a Tezcat. Her right hand was dropped meaningfully to the
holster on her hip.
Charles
Wiederay abruptly stopped some two meters in front of her. His panting slowed
after a moment so that he could get out the words, “You say you’re Landsvaettir
but you’re armed like the Morgana.” Even though he was out of breath, the ring
of authority was creeping into his voice, as it always did in these kinds of
situations—which nowadays, considering his age, were few and far between. That
naval intelligence officer identity from so long ago, even before he met his
wife, was still hard-wired into his central nervous system.
“People
from the Landsvaettir I’ve met—and I’ve met quite a few, being a government
retiree with full medical and all—always refer to themselves ‘representatives,’
not ‘agents.’ Ma’am, I need to take a few seconds of your time and have a
closer look at this ID you’re holding up.”
The
woman glanced away for a heartbeat. Her eyes just as quickly flicked back to
coolly meet his. Simultanous with the darting away of the eyes, her mouth just
as momentarily twitched into a nervous sneer. In an instant she was
tight-lipped again. “Very well, sir.” The shift of her stance as she waited for
him to take in her card spelled impatience. The ID folder wasn’t trembling in
her grasp. She was sure of herself. So far.
Both
the photo and her face presented the same oval made waif-like by large ianthine
eyes a little bluer than the color of her jacket. Her forehead was high and
broad. The mouth was a bit small, giving her a touch of the tomboy. He guessed
from the way her lips pursed that she didn’t have much to smile about in life;
it even suggested she ground her teeth a lot. Yet she had a girlish touch of
the cute: a scattering of pale peach-colored freckles across the fair skin of
her nose and cheeks. These Gaelic (one could even say elfish) features were
offset by her shoulder-length, straight, raven-black hair. “Japanese-black
hair,” Wiederay thought, picturing his wife Mukhya-prana dasi and the twins,
son Mohana and daughter Mohini.
Her
name was McKay Paydon. McKay? She was
born in the city 28 years ago to an Abred-class family. Her stats worked out to
her being a head and a half shorter than Charles and ninety pounds, or about
forty-four kilos lighter. Her marital status was S. Yet on the ring finger of
the hand the held the ID she wore a gold band. She had six years experience
with the Landsvaettir.
In
every way except for two her documentation was that of the government’s
artificially-friendly civil service. One exception was the round golden seal glued
below her photo, its upper edge slightly overlapping the bottom of the picture.
The seal was embossed to display three concentric rings around a circle or disk
that was deliberately off center to the north. Thus the upper arc of the inner
disk covered the upper arc of the third, innermost ring. The “north pole” of
the central disk therefore rested edge-to-edge against the middle ring. Within
the central disk were the letters NSU in Roman lettering. Beneath that, and
smaller, were the runes nyd, sigel and ur and ogham nuin, saille and ur.
The
other exception was that indeed she was identified on the card as an AANSU, Agent
Assigned to the NSU. Wiederay nodded to her, signaling that the ID seemed
official enough. But asked her about the seal.
Still
holding up the card so that he could check what she said against it, Agent
Paydon recited in a monotone, “My name is McKay Paydon. My serial number is AANSU
14B-44C, Neurosemiology Unit for Hierofide Apex Evaki.”
She
dropped her ID into a jacket pocket and lifted her right hand away from the
Tezcat. It darted behind a jacket lapel and came out with a clear glasslike gandr (wand) the size of a large drinking straw that
extended from a black handle about the length of the rubber grip of a tennis
racquet.
He’d
heard of gandrs but had never seen
one. From what he could observe of it in her hand, the part that she held was probably
ergonomically designed for precisely her hand and nobody else’s. He guessed it had
the ability to distinguish her from anyone other person that might pick it up,
so that the gandr would work for her
and her alone. It was possible that it drew energy from her body for whatever
it did. Well, lady, bring it on, he thought. I’m curious.
Beyond
the grip, the handle thickened considerably and extended for a couple of
inches. Then it narrowed like the bud of a black rose. The glass wand (more
likely made of some exotic crystal that conducted electricity than plain glass)
was mounted into the tip of the bud.
The
thickened part between the wand and the grip appeared to be inlayed on three
sides with tiny luminous viewing screens. The fourth side, over which her thumb
was poised, was a circular mini-control panel of four LEDs.
Agent
Paydon pointed the wand at him and touched, didn’t push, two LEDs with her
thumb. For a couple of seconds they flashed on and off. Then they stayed on.
She touched the third, which did the same. She glanced at one of the displays.
“I
see that you are Charles Perseus Rathemus Wiederay of 221 Irmin Street of this Frith. I’d never
have guessed you’re that old. You
worked in two highly classified capacities for the pre-ASAT government. You’re on
CCA retirement status.” Her voice brightened slightly. “Code Champ Ardent? If I
could be so lucky when I reach retirement age.” She glanced at a different
display, then sharply eyed him. “You never sat for a SBY scan. Why is that,
sir?”
He
let his face register something between puzzlement, annoyance and disgust
before matching her flat tone nuance for nuance. “That acronym says it all. The
pronunciation of SBY is no different from the pronunciation of ‘spy.’ It’s a
poor tradeoff to have your thalamus scanned and its emission rates logged with
TET just so that you can tune up your brain to be the hero of ‘Towers Open Fire III.’And,” he added with
firm but calm emphasis, “risk ternaxophrenia and who knows what else while you
wallow about in a dreamland of brain-induced virtual reality.”
Her
attitude of distant officialdom was changing for the worse. She seemed to think
she had something on him now, and as her ahamkara
(false ego) fed upon this imaginary power her police work, or whatever the
hell she thought she was doing, drifted off the beam into sloppiness. Yet…somewhere
in the back of his brain a caution light flashed on and off—was this just an
act she was putting on for someone else? He glanced at the Andrus. Because of
the tinted windows it was hard to see within, but he caught the shape of a head
and shoulders behind the wheel.
“Father’s
getting more cynical the farther he gets over the hill? Is that it?” Her words
dripped sarcasm. “Sir, the SBY system is a key component in…”
“…our
Hierotic Government’s efforts to further consolidate the Age of Sigil-Actuated
Transcognition, of which we are now in Year 3.” He made sure his face and voice
showed maximum boredom as recited the A.S.A.T. slogan.
“Agent
AANSU 14B-whatever-your-number-is, I just have two questions for you. One: just
what is this NSU outfit that you represent? Your’re dressed as a Landsvaettir
rep but you’re acting Morgana cop. Two: what the hell kind of first name is
McKay for a woman?”
She
bent her head slightly to one side as if she was studying a bug from a
different angle. The skin of her neck was reddening. He chuckled to himself
pre-verbally. “Getting to you, aren’t I?”
She
resorted to the age old desk-clerk tactic of torment by procrastination.
Instead of answering him, she paused thoughtfully, looking down at her wand.
Finally she thumbed a LED.
“I
get it,” he thought. “Advanced biofeedback relay. Thought transference through
the electrical resistance of her skin. She’s slowing down because she doesn’t
want whoever’s on the other end to know I’m upsetting her.”
The
wand buzzed like a fly and a display flashed twice. She looked at it, then
slyly at him. “Your unhierotic attitude has been noted.”
She
glanced at the viewer again. “Ah! Good news!” Hardly good to her, by the tone
of bitterness that welled up out of her throat chakra..“No indication of consumption of ancinard, singchang, moringmo,
ololiuqui, odhroerir nor nepenthe in the last 24 hours. So you weren’t jogging
under the influence.
“And…”
she rotated the wand in her hand to check a second viewer, “more good news.
Your wife is Japanese, and you’ve both parented two children. Congratulations,
sir, and thank you for contributing to the unity among the peoples of the
Sevenfold Dainanaten. The new Japan,
Kin Ren Koku, and own own new land, Triushas, share the same vision at the Ceugant
and Hlidskjalf levels. It is a vital task of all government agencies,
especially TET and the Landsvaettir, to see to it that the identical vision pervades
all levels of the Dainanten international federation.”
Now
he had her. When you’ve got it, flaunt it. “Agent Paydon, Code Champ Ardent
retirees and their dependents are automatically Gwynwyd level. Now, would you mind
telling me if McKay Paydon is perhaps a double last name? If that is so, and
you did not tell me your first name, you have not identified yourself fully to
me. As a Gwynwyd hierotype I can have you, a mere Abred, before a Fidelity
Inquiry Board first thing tomorrow morning. Is that how you’d like to start
your next working day, Agent Paydon?”
In
the time it took Wiederay to say these words, the red on her neck flushed
brightly and rose like thermometer mercury measuring the temperature of magma.
In a moment her face up to the roots of the black hair on her forehead was
steaming. She quickly pressed an LED button on the wand and looked at the first
viewer again. It flashed twice. She stood for a long moment studying it.
He
sensed he’d managed to make Agent Paydon uncomfortable, but he had to admire
how she held on to her professional aplomb. This woman was not easily rattled. She
was, however, snatching at time however she could, just so that she could plan
her next step. When she spoke at last, it was with sincerity. Her waif-like
facial features, particularly the big violet eyes, registered “beseeching mode”
very well. Too bad it was all so self-centered.
“I’m
very sorry, Mr. Wiederay. The NSU is a new branch of the Landsvaettir. Our job
is specialized. The fact that all Code Champ Ardent retirees have Gwynwyd
status is not an item of knowledge required of me. Gandr Central confirms that everything you’ve advised me is
correct.
“Mr.
Wiederay, allow me to explain myself. The reason I’ve run this check on you is
because a complaint came in that you were bothering our ogham-rune trees with
what was characterized as mocking prattle.”
It
was dawning upon him. My sweet Lord, those trees…
“The Landsvaettir encourages jogging
around the Ogham tree-boundary. But when someone, no matter the hierotype,
commits verbal assault upon the trees, sir, that falls under NSU authority. She
put up her left palm to signal, “It’s OK.”
Those
damned trees…
“Don’t
worry, sir, my information is that you did not cross the line into tree abuse.”
He
couldn’t help himself. “Wait one…tree
abuse? Is that a crime now?
“Not
at your level, sir, as a—er—a Gwynwyd hierotype. But it is my duty to advise you
that you came uncomfortably close to it, though. Our ogham-rune trees are sensitive
beings with a very important role in protecting the security and well-being of
the residents of Frith Gendenwitha and the whole of Hierofide Evaki.
“As
to your question about the NSU, we, not the Morgana, police the realm of neurosemiotics.
That’s the technology that the Sevenfold Dainanaten are developing into supra-technical,
purely psychic sigil-actualization. But with all respect, Mr. Wiederay, this
information is highly sensitive. I’m sure that as someone who’s not even into
SBY, these areas of knowledge don’t interest you. Oh, and…” she allowed herself
a small, efficient smile, “McKay is my legal first name.”
Wideray
returned her little grin her his best and broadest Chesire cat smile. “Well,
Agent Paydon, as you knew when no TET data came up about me on your wand, it’s
true I have no personal stake in these matters, one way or another. Having said
that, I do know a few things about what you’re hinting at. My own military
intelligence work revealed that certain breakthroughs in neurosemiotics or kigooroniwere made by Japanese
scientists during the Second World War. An example was a program of experiments
called oto nashi no ohna, ‘soundless
sound waves.’”
Agent
Paydon’s tough lady cop act melted away. She was fully attentive to what he was
telling, a look of unabashed fascination upon her face.
“Japanese
scientists were using what was then called magnetophone tape—the first tape recording
technology. It was developed by the Germans during the war years and was one of
the few cutting-edge technologies that they were serious about sharing with the
Japanese. That’s because the Germans were impressed with Japanese traditions of
the ways that vibration can be put to use in mental concentration and martial arts
use. Kotodama, for example. ‘Word
spirit.’
“The
Japanese were the first to experiment with magnetic recording tape as the
medium for the preservation of signals at infra-low frequencies. One aim of ono nashi no ohna was the development of
‘stealth’ military communications. The hope was the enemy wouldn’t even detect
the signals. Another aim was for communicating with submerged submarines from
land-based transmitter-receiver stations.
“It’s
a little-known fact that in World War Two the Japanese had some of the best,
most innovative, and top secret subs of any belligerent nation, including the
Germans. Take the I-400 class, for example. It had a displacement of 5,550 tons, a length of 400
feet, a maximum speed of 19.7 knots surfaced and 7 submerged, and a cruising
range of 34,000 miles at 16 knots. It was armed with eight torpedo tubes and
one 5.5-inch deck gun. In addition, the I-400 was a submersible aircraft
carrier. In a hangar tube on the main deck, each submarine carried three bomber
aircraft. Each weighed in at about four tons. They were capable of 290 knots
speed. They carried a weapons load of one bomb of 0.8 tons or one 18-inch
air-launched torpedo. You know, when the US Navy commissioned the world’s first
nuclear-powered submarines in the mid-50s, they were bigger than any sub ever
built—except for Japan’s I-400!”
Wiederay paused and looked
thoughfully at the ogham-rune trees to his right. Then he turned to the left
and look up at the TET tower. Finally he looked and Agent Paydon, who appeared
to have not taken a breath since he stopped talking.
“Yet another aim of the ono nashi
no ohna program was kigooroni or neurosemiotics
as you call it. The Japanese were trying out non-verbal communication with
other life forms. Other species.”
Paydon’s
eyes got impossibly bigger than they already were. “Yes, ma’am, they did do
some promising work in that area. It’s still classified. It formed the basis of
our own military’s development of synthetic telepathy in the 1990s.”
What
Agent Paydon did next caught Wiederay completely off guard. In the blink of an
eye she had pocketed the gandr and
stood in a Weaver stance, pointing the black, glassy, blunt business end of the
Tezcat straight at him. He didn’t see the slightest quiver in her aim. The right
rear door of the Andruss Palmerin popped opened.
“Mr.
Wiederay, please slowly get into the automobile. I am taking you in for a
friendly session of interrogation. This is a detainment procedure authorized by
NSU protocol. I am not placing you under arrest. I am not authorized to arrest
a citizen of Warnovaldam—except, of course, as a private citizen I witnessed
you commit a crime and no Morgana were nearby. But should you fail to obey me,
that would be a crime. In that event
I would unfortunately have to turn you over to the Morgana. I believe both you
and I would prefer to avoid that.
“You’ve
just revealed information that is of great interest to an investigation I am
presently assigned to. I intend to find out everything you know about the
previous government’s experiments in neurosemiology.
“Sir,
with all due respect to your Gwynwyddon status, the Tezcat in my hand is set to
stun. Even if I have to throw your paralyzed body into the back seat of that
car, I will do that. I ask you not to force me to go that far. Every time a
Tezcat is discharged anywhere in Evaki, its signal is registered by the TET
tower and instantly relayed to the Morgana. They would be here in a minute and a
half max, and there would be nothing I could do to save you from the interrogative
methodology of our civic security apparatus, well-known to be much more
harrowing and invasive than NSU’s. The choice is yours. Please choose wisely.
“As
a CCA Gwynwyddon, you ought to know about duty. To me, the security of Triushas
and the Sevenfold Dainanten is paramount. Especially after what we went through
in Armageddon I.”
Charles
Wiederay wordlessly nodded, raised both his palms, and eased himself into the plush
auto. Agent McKay Paydon was right to be careful, especially with him. Her Tezcat
wouldn’t do her much good if he didn’t wish to comply. He could slow down the
rate of her right hand’s pranic spanda just
by a glance, which would render her trigger finger inoperable. With a second
glance he could leave her unconscious in the ogham-rune grove and walk away. But it wasn’t worth it. Besides, he was
curious as to what the present government was up to in fields like shinkei-kigouron.
Finally, he’d come
to the conclusion that there was something personal behind Agent Paydon’s
actions. She was not merely acting as a tool of AANSU. Perhaps she herself was
trying to get to the bottom of something. Perhaps she could help him with the
doubts that had bothered him since Bjoern’s death.
