“I was thinking of a spot on the Upper Ag Deck.”
“Later. Starting out, use the Sim. Accept the simulations it offers you for the first two weeks, the ones I’ll program for you. After that you can override if you want, using your judgment. After three or four weeks we’ll slowly bring you back out into the real world again. The Ag Deck might be a great place to start.”
I thought up some objections, and decided to hell with them. If she wasn’t smarter than I was, this was all a terrible mistake. “Okay. That was ‘first.’ What’s next?”
“I want you to get in shape. You’re healthy enough, but you’re quite out of condition for your age. Do what the Gym tells you.”
It was easier to think up objections this time, and they were better objections. The one I wanted to admit to was, “Where do I find the hours?”
“Shave them from either your farmwork or your music. Whichever is less important to you personally.”
It is annoyingly hard to object to a reasonable proposal. She was right. I was out of shape. “Okay. Meditate, work out. What else?”
“Study your destination. Learn everything you can about it. The star, first—where Immega 714 lies in the sky, why it took so long to discover, how it’s different from Sol. Then the planet: What kind of world is Brasil Novo, how is it like and unlike Ganymede, what’s living there already, what kind of place is it going to be for a kid to grow up in?”
To that I had no objections. “Done. Meditate, exercise, look out the windshield—anything else?”
She nodded. “Yes. I want you to start dating. Joel? Joel!”
“You go too damned far,” I said on my way to the door. It would not iris open fast enough to suit me, so I tried to hurry it with my hands and it jammed in its tracks, not quite all the way open. I had to stop in my own tracks, my exit spoiled by an absurd social dilemma. I could not walk away and leave her with a broken door like some kind of barbarian, but I had no idea how to repair it. I stood there, unwilling to turn around until I had some idea how to cope with the situation. I’m pretty sure in another second or two I’d have remembered that I was a rich man, now. But before I could think of it, behind me she said drily, “My door is always open.”
It is very hard to remain annoyed at someone who has just made you burst out laughing. I gave up and turned around and she was laughing, too. She had a great whoop of a laugh. We got into one of those things where each time you’re just about to get it under control, the other cracks up again. It always ends eventually with you smiling at each other, breathing like runners after the marathon.
“Okay,” she said finally. “If you can laugh like that, you can take a few weeks before you start dating again. Go do your homework.”
I nodded and gestured at the door. “I’ve got this.”
She nodded and put her attention back down on her screen, as she’d been doing when I’d first seen her.
I guess that was really the day I finally joined the colony, became a Brasiliano Novo—or at least, decided to try. I had already been utterly committed, physically, since the Sheffield had left orbit, but it was only after I left Dr. Amy Louis’s office that afternoon that I finally started to become emotionally committed to anything but numbness. Until then, I had been not only drifting, but paying no attention where I was drifting. Reefs or deeps, rough seas or doldrums, all had been the same to me. But from then on, I was at least back on the Bridge, trying to work out my position and best course, trying the rudder, learning how the sails handled, testing the diesels, scanning the horizon for clues to the weather ahead.
I don’t mean to suggest it happened in an hour. It took weeks to happen, months, years. But that’s the hour when it began happening.
Twelve
There is no easy way from the earth to the stars.
—Seneca
The first thing I did about it was not move out.
Everyone seemed to assume that now that I was stinking rich, I would of course move out of the prematurely decaying hovel I had been sharing with three hapless losers, leave Dear Old Rup-Tooey behind me in the dust, and settle into vastly more lavish solo quarters several decks higher, and with all the privacy, comfort, and (most prestigious of all) roominess that could be desired by a healthy young nouveau millionaire whose Healer had advised him to start dating.
But I had lived alone before. I had always lived alone before. Until I’d been accepted into the Tenth Circle, I’d had no idea how much that sucked. I remembered it well. I had no particular reason to suppose money would make it all that much better.
Also, I kept remembering that I might very well have been spaced as a danger to the Sheffield by now, if it had not been for my bunkies Pat and Herb. And for Solomon Short, who was one of the six wealthiest people aboard, and had chosen to be my friend when all I had to my name was a good sax.
Besides, as Mark Twain says, two moves equals one fire. I’d already moved once recently.
So I stayed where I was. But I reached out to another friend, as wealthy as Sol and considerably more practical, and sought his counsel. And George R smiled, and pointed me toward the best mechanics, engineers, artisans, electricians, cyberpeople, and plumbers aboard, and snipped some bureaucratic red tape to get me permission to clear out storage cubics immediately next door on either side and cut through some walls. When all the busy beavers had gone away again and the dust had settled, RUP-0010-E was the most solid, reliable, comfortable, luxuriously appointed, and technologically advanced living space on that deck—and its ’fresher was probably the best in the Sheffield, so unreasonably large that all four of us could have used it at once, with a guest apiece. And so advanced in terms of hedonic technology that we all suddenly found ourselves very popular fellows in shipboard society: people wanted to be invited over for long enough to need to use the ’fresher. It didn’t work well because we were usually in there ourselves.
Pat got all the data-chasing and pattern-spotting software his heart desired, and enough processing power to provide practical, real-time access to any historical datum on board. Or behind us in the Solar System, although that was already becoming more and more out-of-date as Einstein effect started to mount up. But historians aren’t in a hurry.
Herb received the power to seal off his quadrant of the room at will with two mirror walls that would not pass light or sound in either direction, within which he could not-write in privacy.
So did Balvovatz, but I doubt he got much writing done, because he never activated his field if he was alone in there, and never stopped smiling when he came out. He told me years later, weeping drunk, that it was the first place he had ever lived that a woman who did not love him desperately would come to. I laughed so hard he stopped weeping and began laughing just about the time I quit laughing and started to cry.
For myself, I settled for two major infrastructure improvements. First, a robot that made French Press style coffee from fresh-ground recently roasted beans on demand and adulterated it to my taste; it claimed to be fully automatic, but actually you had to push a little button. And second, a bunk that was as comfortable as any in the Sheffield…and on top of which I, my roommates, and Richie and Jules could all have piled at once and done jumping jacks without making it creak, much less rip free of the bulkhead. Nothing in that room was breakable by the time I was done with it.
So much for change in my physical environment.
On my way to the Sim Room for my first session, I wondered what sort of exotic locale Dr. Amy had programmed for me to meditate in. The Sheffield’s Sim gear was less perfectly convincing than what I’d experienced at the Conrad enclave back in British Columbia…but not by much. It was one of the few areas Kang/da Costa had splurged on. I guess I expected something grandiose and imposing and sacred—the Eiheiji monastery in Japan, or Jaipur Lake Palace in India, or Vatican City before the Prophet’s Angels got ahold of it. Or possibly some secular but stunning scenic vista: Vancouver Harbor, or Rio de Janeiro in old Brasil, or looking east from O
lympus Mons on Mars, or Titan seen from the Rings, or my own favorite, Jupiter from Ganymede, at night, through an aurora. Nor would I have been surprised by a simple flood of sheer kaleidoscopic imagery, like a screensaver display, or the fireworks you can sometimes see behind your closed eyelids.
I got a blank white wall. About half a meter from my nose.
I’ve since learned that several schools of Buddhism do that, too: meditate facing a blank wall. It makes a certain amount of sense. Minimal visual distraction, maximal visual canvas for any visualization imagery you may find useful—and a constant, ongoing, gentle reminder that you are doing something not-ordinary, that you are now removed from the conventional world where sensible people do not sit staring at blank walls.
An equal number of Buddhists find this appalling, and instead sit with the blank wall behind them, facing another one across the room…and any co-practitioners in the way. What distinguishes Buddhism from any other faith I’ve studied—from most human beings, really—is that the people who face the wall and the people who face away from it have never fought a war over it. They’re never going to agree…but they feel no need to. Buddha himself is supposed to have said, “People with opinions just go around bothering each other.”
I thought both sides were crazy myself, when I first started, and Dr. Amy too for assigning me that program. My second day I mutinied, and reset the Sim for a Ganymede vista, as close as it could come to my own pasture at night. But at the end of the hour, I realized I had wasted the whole thing thinking. And worse, feeling, which was even less helpful. Nostalgia hurt too much. I tried it her way the rest of the week.
I spent nearly every minute of that first week more than half convinced I was wasting my time, waiting for something to happen and then uncertain whether or not anything had. But at the end of the week, I found that I was looking forward to it. Imagine that you’ve been carrying twenty kilos of sand in a backpack without knowing it, all the days of your life. Then one day somebody shows you how to take it off for a moment. It was that much of a relief, I learned, to be able to set down now and then, for whole minutes at a time, the ongoing burden of thought, to briefly silence the constant chatter of my mind compulsively reassuring itself that I was still alive. For periods measurable in whole long seconds, I could sometimes become transparent to my own feelings and emotions. Occasionally there would be what I can only call moments of clarity, when I seemed able to see without distortion and accept without fear. After a week of staring at that silly blank white wall, I was sorry when the time came to change it.
Until I saw the new Sim.
It was a series of paintings, or rather two series, acrylic on canvas, by a PreCollapse artist named Alex Grey, who lived and worked on Terra, in New York, in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. You sat zazen for a while, and then you started up the image slideshow and looked at the paintings, and at programmable intervals they changed. That doesn’t sound very dramatic—but I’m talking about the kind of art that ought to be served with a whisk broom, so the customer can brush the sawdust off his shirt when he gets back up. Grey made timeless art that probably would have spoken to a Neanderthal. Indeed, many parts of his vision were at least that old.
All the twenty-one paintings in Grey’s Sacred Mirrors series are at least man-tall. First in the sequence is a pale gray human silhouette, facing you, arms slightly apart from its sides, palms outspread, almost as if to say, “Here I am.”
Second painting: the background goes to black, and the silhouette is filled by an extremely realistic skeleton, man-tall and detailed. Third painting: the same skeleton is overlaid by an incredibly detailed and accurate rendering of all the nerves in the human body; the complete electrical wiring system for the skeleton, brain at the top, and nothing else. The golden nerves seem to leap off the canvas, rendered with the same sort of gilt that medieval manuscripts used to he illuminated with. Fourth painting: the nerves vanish, replaced by the circulatory system, rendered in blue, heart in the center of the breast—and for the first time the body is recognizably male, with testicles. The fifth painting details the complete lymphatic system—but this body is female. Successive paintings detail male viscera, then a female musculatory system complete with fetus in a cutaway womb. And finally the body grows flesh, becomes a naked Caucasian woman, facing you calmly. The next painting morphs her into a naked Caucasian man; the next an African woman; then an African man; then an Asian woman, and finally an Asian man.
Each of these figures, from the skeleton on up, has been depicted with such exquisite realism that the next painting has more impact than it might have alone. It shows the psychic energy system. The flesh has melted away, leaving bones and organs and nerves and veins and staring eyeballs…but all are shot through now with gleaming shimmering crackling filaments of energy, and the six chakras of so many mythologies are visible at brain, throat, heart, navel, abdomen, and groin, glowing with power like white coals, and the entire body is enveloped by a translucent pale blue aura made up of infinitely tiny threads of energy, and it is quite clear that all of it—body, chakras, and aura—are physically connected to the rest of the universe, exchanging energy with it. The next painting takes that even further: the flesh and meat and bone melt away, leaving a human-shaped form composed almost totally of the strings and threads of energy that generate it, extending outward to meet the cosmos at head and feet, wrapped in a great bubble of unimaginable power. And in the next painting, even the vague body shape is gone, leaving only a boiling torrent of loops and circles and lattices of universal fire that Sol later told me was remarkably like the mental picture he had going through his head when he was doing his job.
There were more paintings in the series, but most were top-heavy with denominational religious iconography, so I usually chose to fast-forward through them. Such imagery was perfectly fine back in those days, indeed laudable…but now of course feels faintly indecent, a reference to a bloody period in history we would all prefer to erase, if it were not that the horrid lessons learned in it must never ever be forgotten. Those images have all joined the swastika: symbols of spirituality perverted, than which there is no greater evil.
After that came a different series of thirty paintings, which Grey called “Progress of the Soul.” Each depicted one or more of his strange, skinless, fleshless glowing people, connected by powerful invisible energies to the world around them, carrying out a variety of utterly basic human activities. A man with bowed head, praying, a halo of golden energy pouring from his head. A man and woman side by side, staring rapt at the heavens together, information flowing in both directions. A man and woman kissing in close embrace—surely the most intimate embrace ever rendered, since you can pick out every sinew, nerve, or capillary in their bodies, see the normally invisible pulsing energy they create being passed back and forth, heterodyning, lighting the world. The same couple, copulating—an almost nuclear explosion of energy indescribable in words. Then the same couple standing, he reaching around from behind her to touch the hugely swollen belly inside which their child can be seen; that particular painting is framed on either side by an ontogeny sequence of ten images, one for each month, starting with sperm meeting egg, and ending with a full-term fetus. Then one I found it easy to stare at forever, called “Promise,” in which the expecting lovers face one another, and promise each other what they will do for this child they’re making together. On the ground between them is a two-year-old…holding a skull.
There are quite a lot more in the series, but I’m going to stop describing them now, because the next one in sequence, “Birth,” is simply so powerful that I’ve never been able to endure looking at it for more than a few seconds; then my eyeballs start to cook and I have to look away.
But near the end of the series is one often considered Grey’s masterpiece, called “Theologue.” It depicts a man doing exactly what I was doing the first time I saw it: sitting zazen, legs folded beneath, hands placed on his lap in the mudra position, head slightly bowed
, meditating. A translucent golden round halo surrounds his head, and a transparent blue egg-shaped halo surrounds his whole body. He is seated at least a foot off the ground, on a kind of net made of interwoven strands of energy running in three directions, bright white and so intense flames lick up from them in the vicinity of the seated man, but do not come close enough to burn him. Behind him, through the grid, gray mountains can be seen to recede forever. All six of his chakras shine with universal fire. It is clear that he is engaged in theologue: in a dialogue with God. Who is himself.
Maybe I’ve conveyed nothing at all to you. If so, just take it from me that a few weeks’ exposure to those paintings helped me heal—physically, mentally, psychically, spiritually. Grey himself said one of the specific purposes of his work was to make people healthier. He had seen a study which showed that people who had just seen a frightening, disturbing 2D movie called The Exorcist left the theater with their immune systems weakened, more vulnerable to disease. He decided if art could do that, it could damn well do the opposite, too, and should—so he devoted his life to learning how to create images that left the viewer healthier. I could not begin to describe how he does it, even if I understood it. Just take it from me that if you are ever mindblown or heartsick, what you want to do is look up the works of Alex Grey, in the best reproduction you can find, and let them work on you.
Then for two weeks, I reset the Sim to place me on an imaginary satellite orbiting low over Brasil Novo’s equator, at a speed that kept the primary, Peekaboo, always behind me. I forgave the simulated satellite for impossibly having local gravity, since sitting zazen in orbit would have been impossible without it. And finally, I moved out of the Sim Room altogether, and set up my personal traveling zendo in the second of the two good spots I had mentally marked on the Upper Ag Deck.