The Dreaming Dragons Part 17

'You speak filth.' He slaps the young man. Impalpable hands seem to turn him aside, leave him crouched amid ice and ancient stone. 'The Eucharist is a mystery of G.o.d's incarnation, a symbol of the sacrifice -- '

'It is a recollection at a hundred removes,' Mouse tells him with magisterial authority, 'of the sacred ceremony of _Saurus sapiens_.'

The sun leaps to a new position in the sky. Snow is gone, long emerald gra.s.ses toss in a warm breeze, dotted with gold, with crimson, with violet blooms. A huge throng gathers in the meadows, falling lightly as leaves from the bright blue of the sky. Within the immense, mountainous translucent pyramid that soars above them into lacy clouds, the Sphere of the Vault hovers like a pearl.

'We are ten thousand years in the future,' Mouse says, and even his clear young voice is hushed.

'It's _not_ our world,' Alf says, sighing. He looks at his nephew in perplexity, his features drawn and lined in the clarity of sunlit morning.

'It is our planet Earth,' Mouse says cryptically. 'It is the world of _Saurus sapiens_, immortal, triumphant, a species poised at the culmination of thirty million years of peaceful civilisation. They await the Parousia.'

Fragrance billows on the breeze, and the sweet musk of the fearful descending throng. Alf stumbles forward into the tall, blowing waves of gra.s.s; daffodils open their golden throats to the sun; his hand brushes the thorns of a rose bush, and a droplet of his blood sinks into the red velvet of its petals; yellow marigolds lie before him in drunken profusion, violets and hyacinths reflect the sky, poppies sway on their furry stems in a vivid delirium of crimsons and saffron. His chest heaves; he labours under some insupportable emotion. Mouse touches his torn hand.

'This is their glory and their tragedy, Alf. They have come to this place on this day to die, every one of them, and in dying to share the gift of consciousness and immortality with the lost dead who went before them.'

'I don't understand,' the man whimpers. At his side, the general is rocking, rocking, oblivious.

'Look upon the living brain,' Mouse says. Without departing from the meadow, they stand somehow in a hazy glory of neural processes, a vast fluorescent veil nebula, magnified beyond comprehension. 'You've been taught,' says the young man, 'that the brain is the seat of consciousness, that memory and thought and will are functions of these ten or a hundred thousand others, a biocomputer of 10^17 bits of storage capacity. Yet your neurologists also know that great sections of the cortex can be excised without impairing mental function. They have already discovered the proteins and peptides that activate synaptic junctions, and they have calculated correctly that to store the memories of a lifetime would require more than 100 kilograms of these minute amino acid chains.'

'Lashley,' Sawyer mumbles in the dull tone of a somnambulist. Slowly he raises his head. 'Karl Lashley said that memory was simply not possible.'

Mouse nods. 'And that was half a century ago. Today, the fact is indisputable. What the theorists have neglected is the connection _between_ human beings, the constant flux of data we transmit and receive in the ultralow frequency band. The human brain and nervous system,' he tells them, expanding the glowing display into a gigantic web of light, 'are an indexing system, a file of coding procedures, a folded aerial a million metres in length. The deep grammars of thought and language are a common property, spread with ma.s.sive redundancy through the brains of every human alive on the planet. We are one another.'

Their attention returns to the bright meadow. It is dense with the hues of feathered beings. A strange music flows and lifts: the dinosaurs are singing. Waves pa.s.s through the throng, crossing and recrossing, like interference bands in a spectrum: the beautiful creatures are dancing. Above them, crystalline and glorious, the pyramid cups its s.h.i.+ning jewel. 'Why, this is h.e.l.l,' the general says wanderingly, 'and these are the dead. I had not thought h.e.l.l would be so pretty.'

'These are the living,' Mouse corrects him. 'Those are the dead, the immortal dead, in the Soul Core.' He lifts his hand toward the Sphere. 'Your priests had an intuition of it, and called it the Kingdom of Heaven. The Hindus were closer to the truth. They termed it the Akasic Records.'

Sawyer flinches, but refuses to speak. Alf says, with growing excitement, 'Of course. Of course. For every neuron, every synaptic connection, they've built a record in non-biological archives. The Sphere is a redundancy, a one-to-one map of the central ident.i.ty of every individual. But surely at death -- '

'Death is the release of individual consciousness from the constraints of the body. It is the extension of life into a realm of absolute connectedness, of collective consciousness, governed by the laws of liberated imagination.'

Swirling to a song like wind, the plumed serpents dance like dervishes. The gra.s.s is crushed and muddy beneath their taloned feet. There are no children among them.

'Do you see,' Mouse asks, 'why they held their beloved Ancestors in such reverence? It was a respect for their sources which human beings cannot yet begin to appreciate. So finally, when their technology advanced to the point when the manufacture of the Soul Core was feasible, the aspiration was born to share this potential eternity of life with those who had perished.'

'_Not_ from the stars,' Alf breathes. He stares at the reptiles as they still their dance and press forward to the stupendous perimeter of the translucent pyramid. 'From the future. From a ... different ... future.'

'Yes,' Mouse says. The air is brightening about them, filling with enormous energies. Streamers of violet light leap from the crystalline faces of the pyramid, las.h.i.+ng the sky. Moaning, the dragons are taking each other's hands. A lance of blinding radiance hurls from the sky. s.h.i.+mmering like a new sun, the Sphere, the Soul Core, pulses in its cage. In the absolute hush, the humans see the mult.i.tude fall slowly in a ma.s.sive spill of unresisting muscle, bone, flesh. The Sphere blinks and is gone. They stand beneath its great curve in the cavern under the Australian desert.

'They all -- died?' Sawyer says, his voice peaking to a paralysis of horror.

'They live,' Mouse tells him. 'They are all around us. We know them in our dreams. Your faith calls them Cherubim and Seraphim.'

A shudder pa.s.ses through Alf's body. 'Something went wrong, didn't it, Mouse? Instead of saving their ancestors, they -- aborted them. And left us here instead.'

'It was a star,' the young man tells them. 'A supernova. The time machine was accelerating into its history, with the Soul Core locked under an impenetrable gluon s.h.i.+eld. A rudimentary Ancillary Core was on board, programmed with minimal consciousness, to enable emergency crews to function. Those crews were governed more by ritual than by true intelligence.'

And standing in the shadow of the Vault, he shows them the poignant history of disaster: of the generation hatched to set right the tragedy -- Anokersh huj Lers and Mistress Diitchar, maimed Riona, vengeful, baffled T'kosh huj Nesh. The devastating exile of the feral pongids.

'But even then the dragons failed,' Alf says. 'They destroyed themselves.'

A melancholy beyond grief sweeps over Mouse. 'The crew was excluded by the gluon s.h.i.+eld from partic.i.p.ation in the full consciousness of the species. The supernova pulse ruined the control system of their craft, and they lacked the understanding to repair it. So the damaged craft stopped too late. It overshot its destination by half a million years.'

'The _Vault_ caused the extinction of the dinosaurs?'

'And of _Saurus erectus_, the dragons' primeval ancestors. The species had only just begun to emerge. The presence of the Vault consciousness was as searing and destructive to that primitive _gestalt_ mind as the glare of the sun on an eye forced open to it.' Mouse's formal diction cannot mask his anguish. 'Their tentative intelligence shrivelled under a radiance it could not blink from. The evolutionary option closed to them. They perished still-born, with the rest of their kind, and the small stupid mammals took their kingdom by default.'

Sawyer is crouching, and his mouth is b.l.o.o.d.y where teeth have sunk into the flesh of his lips. 'No,' he says, with terrible, threatening intensity. 'No, no. We are not descended from those feral beasts. We are formed in His likeness, not from the garbage of a mutant slave. I will not.' He pauses. Red spittle foams at the corners of his mouth. 'Believe.' Tensed to leap, to murder, to avenge the pitiful mythology of his life, he falls instead and weeps, convulsively, in bursting sobs.

Mouse crouches beside him and cradles the man's head in his lap.

'We are not the ferals' children,' he says gently. 'We are the sons and daughters of the Soul Core. The pongids were scattered into realtime like chaff, spread across a thousand years. They emerged into a different history, twenty five million years ago, long before humankind had evolved. They had known only _The Soul_, after all. They were strangers in a strange land and they used the consciousness of the Soul Core to help them escape it forever. That installation on the moon was the pongids' work, Joseph, the machine they built to catapult them to the stars.'

'We've never found any trace of them on Earth, Mouse. Surely a species capable of star travel would leave evidence of their presence behind.'

'How much of Antarctica's ice have you dug up, Alf?'

'I do not believe it,' Sawyer says. 'Why would they abandon the Earth? It was an empty paradise.'

'Yes, the reptiles were gone, for the crew were sterile. But the minds of the dragons remained in the Core, like G.o.ds who had driven the ferals from the garden. They felt as you do. They would not serve. Perhaps their children are waiting for us out there. In the world they left, our own hominid ancestors evolved to take the dragons' place.'

Mouse ascends from himself to the balm of the hundred billion minds abstracted in the mirror of the Soul Core. His role as Intercessor is almost done. Soon he will submit to the temptation that took Bill and Hugh too early from the flesh to the soaring freedoms of eternity. If that joy is permitted him. Distantly, he is aware that Alf kneels before him, searching his pa.s.sive face.

'How did the hominids do it? By slow adaptation to the Vault intelligence? But Mouse, _h.o.m.o sapiens_ evolved in Africa, on the other side of the world, and was never restricted by such limitations on movement.'

'Nor were the saurians, after the Soul Core was built. It's a sublimely sensitive amplifying device, Alf, a gluon lattice denser than neutronium, with the properties of a single perfect crystal. At the lowest biological frequencies, especially the 7.8 and 14.1 cycles of the brain, atmosphere and ground act as a wave guide, a resonator, which carries the output of each brain around the world with hardly any attenuation. Each of us, from before birth, embeds a characteristic 'fingerprint' signal in the Vault, and for the rest of our lives each cortical impulse is stored in a specific, identifiable matrix. When all transmission and reception of signals is cut off,' he adds, 'as it was for Bill and Hugh and Anne under Kukushkin's gluon s.h.i.+eld, the brain is reduced to a babbling parody of intelligence, a halfwitted indexing system just barely capable of puns as its highest level of accomplishment.'

The anthropologist struggles for objections. 'The lunar astronauts, Mouse. Why weren't their mental functions impaired?'

Mouse grins impishly. 'Would anyone have noticed?'

'Come off it.' The man's self-possession is a frayed string. 'There'd be at least a three-second lag due to the to-and-fro time for radiation -- '

Mouse sighs. 'Alf, you can't expect to grasp the workings of a biotechnology thousands of years in advance of human science. The Soul Core is not restricted to electromagnetic modes. A full spectrum of faster than light quantum connectivity is available to it, and humans have evolved to take advantage of the fact. Telepathy and precognition are not solely the result of leakage from mind to mind within the Core -- some paranormal phenomena are purely non-local. Eventually, when you have learned to communicate with the dead in the Core, all these things will be made clear.'

'You smug little b.a.s.t.a.r.d.' Alf drew back with abrupt aversion. 'When your thousand year Reich dawns? With Hieronymus Dean as its Messiah?' He stumbles, shocked by his own words. 'It sent you, didn't it?' he says. 'It decided the time was ripe for its revelation, and it caused your mother to overdose herself with LSD. My G.o.d. My G.o.d.'

Dreamily, scarcely audibly, Mouse says, 'The Rainbow Serpent, Alf. The Roadmaker, the Opener of Wombs.'

The man's mouth tightens; he pushes himself to his feet. 'Is there no end to it, Mouse? Do we have any freedom? Did it make me an anthropologist so I'd fetch you to it twenty years later? Did it turn Bill delFord on to auras and mysticism, then discard him when he'd done his job? Jesus, Mouse, did it put the structure for 17-Tg-M in somebody's mind, at the risk of nuclear war and worse, just for the benefit of its belated self-disclosure?' The anger of his aura beats in Mouse's vision like tongues of ruddy flame.

'Alf,' the strange child says at last, 'the Core is not demonic, it is not divine. It's us -- you, Joseph here, me, Bill, Hugh, Victor, my mother. It's humanity, and the saurians. We are larger than you've ever conceived, Alf; at our profoundest depths, we are a unity of consciousness at last ready to find its ident.i.ty.'

He bends over the unconscious general, tenderly cleaning the b.l.o.o.d.y mucus from the man's face. When he looks up to Alf once more, he finds himself filled with a tranquil exultation. 'Alf, Alf, it won't all come at once. You'll lose nothing of yourself, I promise you. But what lies ahead for us...'

Mouse closes his eyes, and opens himself to the intuitions of eternity. Galaxies glow in veils of fire to the farthest dark, aflame with knowledge and awareness and love. It is a vision of an almost unimaginably distant future. He knows, with a joyous satisfaction, that he will be part of it.

For the present, there are immediate tasks. To his uncle he says, 'Give me a hand with Joseph, Alf, and we'll get him to the doctor.'

Behind them, as they lug Sawyer to the brilliant lights at the tunnel's mouth, the pale immense sphere of the Soul Core hovers, patiently attune to the clamour, the emotions, the restless dreams of a world warming to the sun of its second spring.

THE END.