On The Surface Tension Page 9

  “So what happened?”

  “He kept singing. Hymns, it turned out. Well in spite of being lowly giant arachnids, we had evolved a rudimentary intelligence and could communicate with each other through a vocabulary of hisses. After a while of listening to the old guy, I started hissing along with him. He heard that and actually encouraged me. Eventually, he taught me to speak in a hissing kind of voice.”

  “Wow. And what did you guys talk about?”

  “Not much, at first. And it started looking like there wasn’t going to be any long-term talking either, since he wouldn’t eat any of the human meat I brought him, and the fruit he would eat wasn’t enough to sustain him long-term. Water was difficult. We sang, him in his reedy little weak voice and me hissing. No danger of making the pop charts!”

  He paused, wistfully remembering. Tracy remained quiet.

  “Anyway, he told me that he was part of an order and showed me a trident. He wasn’t afraid of dying, said that he would continue on between the bubbles and be with God in the real world. I asked him if he was angry that he had been put in this predicament. He said no, that hardship and suffering were all just part of the grand story, and that stories would be boring and pointless without them. He said that was why we chose to be here. Eventually he got sicker and sicker and begged me to eat him.”

  Tracey raised her eyebrows. “You didn’t!”

  “I’m afraid I did. It ended his suffering, and I didn’t want the others to get to him. It didn’t seem right.”

  Tracey didn’t know what to say.

  “So anyway, the other scorpions moved on, disappointed. I lingered around the cave for a few days, when the most remarkable thing happened.”

  Tracey raised an eyebrow, sipping tea.

  “Some people came. There were two of them, a man and a woman. They weren’t like the other miserable victims; they came walking up instead of running for their lives. They were dressed in odd clothes, not rags or papery coveralls like the other humans. I assumed they must have come in their own ship. At first I was afraid that they had come looking for the old man to rescue him, and they might be angry or attack me when they found him gone. But they just stood at the mouth of the cave and looked at me.

  “After a while I realized that they weren’t angry. I told them, in my hissy little voice, that he was gone. And then they said the damnedest thing. ‘We aren’t here for him. We’re here for you.’

  “And then an even stranger thing happened. Water came out of my eyes! Out of my glassy, black, compound eyes. I had no idea what was going on, scorpions don’t cry. But there it was.

  “‘What is wrong?’ they asked.

  “‘I feel terrible,’ I said, ‘because he is dead.’ I didn’t want to admit that I ate him. I was still a little afraid.

  “‘Where is his body?’ they asked me. I didn’t know what to say, so I just writhed a little, clawing the ground. They didn’t say anything; they were just waiting for me. After a while, the silence became unbearable. So I started to hiss out a hymn we used to sing together. ‘Amaaa..zing Graaa…ce….’”

  Morrow stopped, and Tracey noticed him wipe the corner of his eye. She waited for him to continue.

  “So anyway, they were delighted and asked if I liked music. ‘What is music?’ I asked. They gave each other a knowing glance, then pulled out a little electronic device. It was a music player, I guess, among other things. Anyway, they played the hymn for real, but an instrumental version. I was shocked, because the only music I had ever heard was the old man’s weak singing. I found it wondrously beautiful at the time, but this was better.

  “‘Do you like that?’ they asked. I was speechless. So then they whispered to each other for a moment. They must have decided to really go for the jugular, because they put on Copeland’s ‘Appalachian Spring.’

  “Of course, I had never imagined anything like that. It was the most transcendent, mind-scrambling thing that I had ever experienced. In fact, I didn’t just experience it, I was transported out of myself and ceased existence for that time as a separate consciousness. By the time those little bells closed out the last of the song, I just lay there, weeping, willing to die because nothing else could ever match the beauty of that. Of course it occurred to me a few seconds later that there may be any number of other pieces of music out there.

  “‘You liked that?’ one of them asked. They seemed surprised that I had the capacity to. ‘There’s more,’ they said. ‘Lots more.’

  “I couldn’t bear the thought of a vast pool of music out there that I would never experience once they left. I asked them to take me with them. They were again surprised and whispered to each other while I waited.

  “‘We can’t take you—our ship is only configured for human beings,’ they said.”

  He paused, sipping his tea with a half-smile.

  “I can’t help but notice,” said Tracey, “that you are no longer a giant scorpion.”

  “Yes. Well, there you go.”

  “So how did they pull that off? Magic? Miracle? What happened to the ‘Ground Rules?’”

  “Yes, indeed! But we don’t know them all, and sometimes when something happens that we think violates them, it is merely revealing a deeper level of the rules that we didn’t know before. Which brings us to our current conundrum. Why are you here?”

  “You know why I am here,” she said quietly.

  “Well,” he answered with a wry smile, “I have an idea why you are here, and you have an idea why you are here. Spelling it out, however, has its own value. You see, I might have a Hawaiian body and an English name, but I have a 19th century German philosopher brain. Let’s define things.”

  “All right,” she said, placing her tea firmly on the saucer and then the table. “I want to find Ron.”

  “No you don’t,” he said. “You know exactly where he is.”

  She started to disagree, but then waived her hands in frustration.

  “I know vaguely where he is. He and Strong took the rift generator and went to explore an alternate universe line and somehow got trapped there.”

  “That was no ‘alternative universe line.’ Not like the one you were in when you were the wife of the richest man in the world because his grandpa knew where the gold was and what to invest in. No, poor Ron is in Hell.”

  “All right then,” said Tracey coolly, “if he is in ‘hell,’ what do you mean by that? Your turn to ‘define things.’ You can’t possibly mean the one with lakes of fire and little red devils with pitchforks.”

  “Oh, those are there, of course, but only because that image is so strong and maintained by humans. There is a lot more going on there than Dante’s Inferno, though, and a lot worse. We’ll look in on them later. For now, though, what do you want?”

  Tracey wondered why he was being such a stickler. It occurred to her that the forced formality was almost ritual-like, yet light-hearted. It occurred to her that it was similar to how Bell had acted when she was undergoing the test of the Dive.

  Must be a Trident thing, she thought.

  “So this is a test, isn’t it?” she asked.

  “You could say that,” Morrow answered, with a grin. “Although not one you can fail exactly. The only way you can fail is if you give up. The real question is whether you will succeed or not. Only one in a thousand does. And of those that do succeed only one in a thousand does it quickly instead of years and years.”

  Tracey’s heart sank.

  “So are you the one-in-a-million candidate?”

  “We’ll see,” she said flatly.

  “Good answer,” Morrow said with a little golf clap. “So what is it you want?”

  “Knowing that Ron is in ‘hell,’ I want to get him out of there.”

  Morrow pursed his lips. “Well, that is impossible, you know.”

  “Why impossible? Ron made it there—why would it be impossible for me?”

  “Because Ron had the rift generator, and you do not. Nor is there one anywhere in this univers
e that you can put your hands on and no way to contact anyone who does have one.”

  She resisted the urge to throw the teacup at him. She sat wondering what to say next. Morrow said nothing, just sat there with an inscrutable smile and half-lidded eyes. She realized he was not going to say anything; the ball was in her court. The test could be passed or failed on what she said next.

  But didn’t he say that I couldn’t fail?

  “Well I guess I need a miracle then,” she said.

  Morrow’s smile broadened. “Exactly so,” he said.

  Tracey was momentarily confused. She had spoken it as an offhand comment, but Morrow appeared to have taken it as a literal answer. She held her tongue.

  “So what does that mean, that you need a miracle? Let us unpack that statement, because if we understand it, I mean really understand it, you may have the seeds already planted that we can sprout into reality.”

  “Uh, ok,” Tracey said, with just the ghost of an eye roll.

  “Ah, we have a skeptic,” Morrow said with apparent relish. “It may surprise you to hear that skepticism here is helpful. This is not one of those things that requires blind faith to make it real. I mean, things are either real or not, right? As long as doubt doesn’t turn into rigid disbelief in the face of evidence and experience, it will help here, ok?”

  Tracey nodded.

  “Good then. So...who are you?”

  “I am Tracey Springs,” she said.

  “Who is Tracey Springs?”

  “A woman. A human being.”

  “And what is a human being?”

  She folded her arms.

  “I am a giant scorpion with a Hawaiian body with an English name with a German philosopher brain and a three-year-old’s habit of annoying questions,” he said. “But unless you become like a little child, you cannot enter the Kingdom of Heaven.”

  Tracey again wondered if his statement was literal or not.

  “Look,” she said, “I’m afraid I’m a little bit scientific and rational. I’m going to have a hard time believing in miracles. I have a hard time believing you were magically transformed from a giant bug into you. Just like I’m going to have a hard time believing that human beings are anything but animals that evolved intelligence and now build buildings and hang out in bars and read books and watch TV and go to work.”

  He nodded. “Yes, but is that all you are? Walking meat?”

  “I have intelligence. Sentience.”

  “And what is that?” he asked.

  “Electrical activity in my brain.”

  “And this is from the woman who made the Dive? Who shared consciousness with a cephalopod and an alien Flying Pickle? So what was ‘Tracey Springs’ while you were swimming around as a giant octopus? Or having one of your dreams, for that matter?”

  She considered this quietly. Her pugilistic attitude surprised her too. She was not only surprised at her urge to argue, but that she was taking the side of materialism. While agnostic, she certainly had done her share of “spiritual seeking,” including what she considered a spiritual, if not religious, experience during the Dive, as Morrow had mentioned. Morrow appeared to be making an argument for a certain worldview, taking a certain position, and she wanted him to fight for every inch of it.

  “Are you going to take the position of classical physics that everything is material, including the thoughts in your head?” he asked.

  She stubbornly remained silent.

  “So you are going to take the two-hundred-year-old Newtonian view that sees the world as elementary particles making atoms, then molecules, then compounds, then stuff of the world, including us and our minds. You are just going to ignore quantum physics, which shows us that consciousness starts everything, and the universe flowers out of delight in itself?”

  “I’m not going to deny that—I just don’t get it,” she said.

  “Oh, I don’t either: If anyone says they intuitively ‘get’ quantum physics, they are full of hooey,” he laughed. “Consciousness collapses the wave function. Brains are part of the wave function too, and are part of the material world that is getting collapsed; they can’t collapse themselves any more than the double-slit apparatus can. So it must be more than brains.”

  “Ok, smart guy, then answer me this: How did the wave function get collapsed before there was consciousness? Before we evolved, was the whole universe just an un-collapsed quantum state?”

  “A good question,” he said. “Many people wiser than we are have wondered that. If there is no observer, how did the world come into being? Did the universe simply coalesce out of nothing when we reached some arbitrary point of ‘enough intelligence?’ And what point was that? Can a dog’s observation collapse the wave function? Can a rock’s?”

  “Does a dog have Buddha nature?” Tracey muttered.

  “Exactly!” he said with relish. “Mu!”

  “Well once again, I have no idea why you are mucking around with this when I have miracles to discover how to do.”

  “The point is, why does it have to be human consciousness that collapses the wave function? Even before life on Earth, even before life anywhere, the wave function was collapsed by consciousness. So who was it?”

  “I guess you are going to say God,” she answered.

  “Yes, God, in collaboration with our shared Universal Consciousness, that made everything and is in everything. Atheists go to great lengths to start from the pre-supposition that since there is no God then the universe must have sprung out of nothing, in spite of the logical fallacy inherent therein. They use science as their religion.”

  “So you don’t like science.”

  “Of course I like science. Science is great. But science should be a tool of the mind, not a frame of it. You know the whole analogy of through a glass darkly? Science is great at examining the minutia of the glass, each little pore and ripple of it, each microscopic mote of dust on the surface and the patterns they make. But it denies that there is anything beyond the glass and doesn’t realize that the glass is part of a window looking out into the wide world.”

  She spread her hands helplessly.

  “The point is,” he continued, “where does this fit in with our present problem? How do you get a miracle and get Ron out of Hell? You need to start by understanding the Ground Rules, why some things are impossible and some things are not.”

  “Ah, the elusive Ground Rules again. Well that seems easy enough. If something is impossible, by definition it cannot be.”

  “Ah,” he said, “but are there not levels of impossible? I mean, not by definition, but in practicality? It is one thing to say that it is impossible to have a round square, and another to say it is impossible for the Mariners to win the World Series. Or somewhere in the middle, it is impossible to walk on water, for instance. I mean, some things are ‘impossible’ only because we have not been able to pull them off yet.”

  “So how far down on the ‘impossibility scale’ is getting Ron and Strong out of Hell?”

  “You need some way of getting them out, like one of those rift generators. So what are the chances of getting one?”

  “Cornish Bob had one, and that was in this universe. But he ended up giving it to Ron, and now it is gone from it. But that doesn’t mean that is the only one. Ron said he had the plans for one from his Pop, but how would we get a stasis field around a star and collapse it in order to make it? Maybe we could somehow get Cornish Bob’s by going back in time, since we are talking miracles here.”

  “Well, Tracey, unless you have a time machine or another rift generator, you are not going back in time to get Cornish Bob’s rift generator.”

  She sat quietly with a sour expression on her face, mulling this.

  “So why the talk of God collapsing the wave function and making the universe?”

  “Aha,” he said, sipping his tea. “We progress. So if you need a miracle, who is going to do it? Will it be done with your magical powers through the force of your ego?”

  �
��I suppose you are saying that it will be done through the power of prayer,” she said flatly.

  He raised an eyebrow.

  “But,” she said, “people pray for things all the time. They pray for winning the lottery, or for their cancer to be cured, or for their ‘soulmates’ to appear and whisk them off their feet. That doesn’t happen.”

  “Right. But why not? Because there are the Ground Rules.”

  “That is the third time you have mentioned Ground Rules, and the Mods kept bringing them up too,” she said. “So what are these Ground Rules?”

  He placed his teacup gently into the saucer. “Perhaps now would be a good time to visit the Scrytorium.”

  He stood and gestured her towards one of the hallways leading from the main room. She rose and tentatively began walking down it towards a high, arched stone doorway some distance down the hall.

  This place is certainly bigger than it looks from the outside of the building, she thought. It must be an Otherwhen thing, like the floor between floors, or the Strawberry Garden.

  This impression was made even more obvious once she passed through the stone archway: The room beyond was very large. It was almost a sphere, with only a small, flat area on the bottom upon which sat two stone slabs, where a person could sit almost prone in a scooped-out section in the middle of each. Tracey got the impression of a planetarium where two people could recline side by side and peer into the dome above. Between the two stone chairs was a stone pedestal topped by an earthenware bowl filled with a large, glowing, green globe. The surface of the green globe morphed and shimmered, hinting at structures and patterns beneath.

  Morrow took the seat on the left and indicated to Tracey that she should sit in the other. She did and discovered that the stone was not cool but warm, and she fit the contours most comfortably.

  “Scrying,” he began, “is the art of seeing things far away. You people have done this throughout history using crystal balls, the surface of water basins, and smoke and such. This is a little more advanced and elaborate than that.”