The day of the Iddhi (part 3)

by Suhotra Svami    

 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.