White Light (Axoplasm Books) Read online

  “It’s all my possible lives,” I explained. “After I breathed in that smoke and whited-out I was able to see all my lives at once. And then it was like I sat down in all the parallel universes and typed out each life in infinite detail. Somehow the Library of Forms pulled them all out of me and wrapped them up together.”

  Franx had opened the book at random and was reading rapidly down one of the pages, his head turned to one side. “But this is phenomenal!” he exclaimed suddenly. “This page is completely accurate. It even has me saying this sentence…” He read further, holding the book open with his forelimbs. “It goes on to say what happens next…” He read further, his compound eye twitching faster and faster. Suddenly he stopped. “Oh my,” he said slowly. “How awful for me.” His legs began jerking spasmodically.

  I reached for the book. Had Franx actually chanced on the one true description of my life? As I took the book a gust of wind flipped over some pages. “It was here,” Franx said, flipping back a thin sheaf of pages, then another. He paused to read. “No, it wasn’t this…” He flipped forward, backward, read and reread… then abruptly stopped looking. “It’s no use. It said we wouldn’t find it again.”

  The wind across the crevasse made a low throbbing. Behind me stretched an endless white, and above me was the clear blue sky. Had Franx read my future?

  “Tell me what happens next, Franx.”

  “We’ll run into Georg Cantor. He’ll ask us to his house. And then…” His voice trailed off. His legs were twining around each other.

  I resolved to go into a speed-up and flip through the whole book, but soon realized this was impossible. The one true page was lost in the continuum of possible lives. It was funny that Franx had stumbled on it. There was something paradoxical about the situation, but I couldn’t quite put my finger on the paradox. I flipped a little more and read a page where I was a gunfighter in old El Paso. Yippie-tie-yay-ti-yo.

  The search seemed hopeless. After all the book had c pages, and c is strictly greater than alef-null. Which meant that I could never look at every page unless I could somehow regain that white-light ability to handle the uncountable infinities. I made a remark to this effect and slipped the book back into my parka.

  Franx suddenly looked up. “Now I’m supposed to say,” he deepened his voice and recited portentiously, “Did you say that book has c pages? Why, Felix, we can solve that problem you talked about…the Continuum Problem. Come, let us take the tunnel back to Flipside.” His intonation was stiff and self-mocking.

  “What’s the matter, Franx?”

  “Don’t you understand? I read the true description of everything that’s ever going to happen to you, including all our conversations and everything you see me – ” He broke off, then resumed with difficulty, “Even what I just said. And even this. And even this.” He stopped again in frustration. “It all seems so…so predictable, so futile.” He was twisting his legs in agitation, and went on haltingly. “And – and I read that I’m going to be murdered. It’s not so terrible going back to the Dump, I’ve done it before, but to have my head viciously beaten in by a bigoted cretin of a Godsquad thug…” His eyes flashed at me in resentment. “At least after that I’ll be free of your prophecies, you…”

  “Franx,” I broke in, “Take it easy. You’re raving.” Suddenly the paradox I’d been looking for jumped into relief. “It’s impossible that you could have read a true description of everything that will happen to us. Logically impossible, given that you don’t want it. I’ll prove it to you.”

  He stopped gnashing his mandibles and spat out, “I know. You’re going to ask me to choose between saying ‘Yes’ or saying ‘No’. I read that part too.”

  “Just listen Franx. It has to work. I’m going to ask you to say ‘Yes’ or say ‘No’. You pick. But wait! Think back on what the book said you did…whether you said ‘Yes’, said ‘No’, or didn’t answer at all. Don’t tell me! Remember what it said you did, and just do something different. O.K.? Now. Say ‘Yes’ or say ‘No’.”

  There was a long silence. Franx seemed to be engaged in a terrible internal struggle. Several times he raised his head to speak, but only managed a dry clicking. He was lying on his stomach on the ice, and all up and down his body the little legs were waving in frenzy. Once his wing-covers started to raise, and I feared he would simply fly off to be free of my future.

  But then he spoke. “No,” he whispered. Then louder, “No! No! No!” He rose to his feet and chirped in delight. “I said it, Felix. No! The page said I wouldn’t answer, ha, the page tried to protect itself, No, but I’ve conquered it. The philosopher-king has cut the Gordian knot. Let there be jubilation and great glee for I am free, I am free!” He did a little jig, kicking out his legs and rocking from side to side.

  I breathed a sigh of relief. Franx certainly seemed to have gotten a little unstable. “What did you see on your climb anyway, Franx? And how far did you get?”

  “I reached alef-one,” he said cheerfully. “Come on, I’ll take you to see it. The easy way. There’s a tunnel down here that goes right through Cimön to Flipside. It really would be interesting to compare your c pages to those alef-one cliffs.” He climbed onto my back and took hold with his legs and mandibles.

  I jumped off the ice-cliff and into the crevasse. Franx’s wings cut the air, and we angled over towards the staircase chiselled into the other side. We landed heavily.

  No. 14

  At Alef-One

  We started down the staircase, Franx leading the way. To the right was a sheer drop to the rushing torrent of icewater. As we went deeper the light grew fainter, and the shifting shapes in the walls of ice became more visible. Once I almost lost my footing when a ghostly catfish seemed to dart at me through the ice. The roaring of the stream made conversation impossible. I could only follow Franx’s domed back. Finally we reached the bottom.

  The dark frigid water went rushing past, its surface roiled in standing wave patterns. Here and there rivulets poured out of the glacier and into the torrent. Far ahead it disappeared back under the ice. Against my will, I found myself imagining how it would be to plunge into the water…to have every limb pulled in a different direction by the powerful currents, to be dashed against hidden teeth of ice, and finally to be sucked into black subterranean labyrinths. Why not? I was so scared of the water that I had a crazy urge to jump in and get it over with. I’d rematerialize at the Dump…

  I shivered and pulled myself together. Franx was crouching on the bank staring at the stream. What was the matter with him? I nudged him once, twice, and he began to move again.

  We walked along the stream until we came to a horizontal tunnel leading off to the left…towards the city I’d seen. The tunnel was a man-made tube some 7 feet in diameter…sort of like a drainage culvert. I followed Franx in. Gradually the roaring of the stream faded.

  Although the tunnel felt level underfoot, it kept looking like it was curving downhill. I couldn’t see ahead of or behind us for more than fifty feet, even though the tunnel was well-lit by a luminous stripe running along the side at waist level. This was really a window into the ice, and one could see the colored dreamshapes drifting about. Here and there a door was set into the ceiling like a submarine’s hatch.

  “Did you come this way before?” I asked Franx.

  “You didn’t ask that on the page,” he said brightly. “It’s such a relief not to know what I’m going to say. I speak well, but speech must be spontaneous, have a little Zen in it, you understand…”

  He had overlooked my question, and I decided to try a more interesting one. “Why is this tunnel slanting downhill when it isn’t?” He paused to think that one over, and I rephrased it, “Why does it look like we’re walking over the crest of a hill, when it feels like we’re on a level path?”

  “Oh that’s the…the seriousness? I mean the gravity. I am less well-versed in physics than in other disciplines. I have read widely and well, but there are lacunae…” I cleared my throat and h
e returned to the point. “Yes, yes, Felix. I can answer your question. I’m a little depressed and I talk more when I’m depressed. I had a rather disillusioning experience on Mount On, and I’m still finding my way, my endless weary way…”

  We walked in silence for a while. The tunnel seemed brighter than before. We seemed always to be coming over a rise in the ground. I could have sworn that by now we were walking perpendicular to the glacier’s surface, straight down into the surface of Cimön.

  Suddenly Franx began talking again. “Never fear, I haven’t forgotten your question. The force of gravity is variable in Cimön. Variable not so much with regard to intensity, but with regard to direction. We noticed that on the mountain, yes?”

  “That’s right,” I responded. “The face of Mount On looks smooth, but when you climb, it’s like a staircase. Sometimes gravity pushes you against the ground and it feels like a meadow, and sometimes gravity drags you back along the ground and it feels like a cliff.”

  “Correct. And on Mainside…I presume that you realize this is a tunnel from the Mainside of Cimön to the Flipside…on Mainside the gravity points almost directly into the ground and it feels like a huge plain.”

  “The Library and the snow and that city are all on Mainside?”

  “Of course. Now use your right-brain a little, Felix. Think of Cimön as an infinite strip of canvas with a painting on each side. I speak concisely. The lower portion is water on both sides. One can even sail across the bottom edge. On Flipside the top part is mountain. Mount On. A shrinking field fits the whole Absolute Infinity in. On Mainside the very top part is a great desert. A bad place. Below the Desert is an endless line of garbage. The Dump. Right below that are the cities of the plain. One for each world and for each era…each grown up around its own characteristic part of the Dump. The gravity on Mainside points into the surface of Cimön…this far up Flipside the gravity points parallel to the surface. To keep ‘down’ underfoot, the tunnel must curve. Fill in the blanks.”

  There was a spot of light ahead. The tunnel ended here. What had been horizontal on Mainside was vertical on Flipside. When I tried to see it all at once I got a sick, dizzy feeling. It was like staring too long at one of those Escher interiors where staircases lead off in every direction, everting and inverting as your anxious eye clings to the billowing surface.

  The tunnel ended with a stone arch leading onto a drop so sheer that the utter void of it practically sucked me off the edge. I already had vertigo from thinking about the tunnel, and I slipped lurchingly.

  There was a bar across the arch overhead…a sort of chinning bar…and I grabbed onto it with both hands. No matter which way was up or how far down was, I had something solid to hang onto now, and I was able to look down without being overwhelmed.

  As before, there was no next lower rock, no first step down, but now it was much worse. No infinite speed-up of alef-null eye twitches could bring my focus of attention from down there to up here. No matter how fast and how far I jumped my reference points I couldn’t pull my attention back up to alef-one. It was pulling me forward. I thought to close my eyes.

  When I opened them again I was staring at my hands gripping the bar across the arch. The knuckles were white and my palms were wet. Painfully I unclenched them and shuffled carefully to a spot a few feet back from the edge. I sat down on the floor and leaned against the wall. Franx had glued himself to the other wall, with his head sticking out over the abyss.

  “And I thought I had reached the end,” he said sadly. “One eye looks up and one eye looks down. I grow weary of looking up. Do you know how long I’ve been here, Felix? On Cimön?”

  “I don’t know. A long time.”

  “Twelve hundred years according to your time system. One point two millennia. One keeps track by talking to the freshers, bless their trusting hearts. Twelve hundred years and this is the farthest up Mount On I ever climbed. And any unthinking clod who cares to can stroll over here through the tunnel. Will it never end? Is there then finally no balm in Gilead?”

  I wasn’t sure what he was getting at. “You mean you didn’t know this tunnel existed?”

  “Of course I knew about the tunnel. There’s lots of tunnels to alef-one, and if you’re willing to chance going into the Desert you’ll find tunnels to alef-two, to alef-alef-null, to the inaccessible cardinals… I’ve seen them, I’ve peeked up God’s skirts like the others…gawked and gone home unchanged.” He sighed heavily. “At least I really climbed alef-one. At least I have that.”

  I tried to boost his spirits a little. “That’s fantastic, Franx, that you climbed all this way. Tell me how you did it.”

  “I will tell you more than that, Felix.” He fixed me with one of his faceted eyes. “As a mathematician, I take it that you are relatively ignorant of…which is not to say unreceptive to…the fine points of mystical thought?”

  “I’m not really a typical mathematician, Franx – whatever that means to you. I’ve read some Plotinus and done a little yoga. But no, I can’t say that I’ve really…”

  “Exactly. You have not informed yourself. So few humans are adequately prepared for Cimön. It is quite different on Praha. Even a larva, even a slave, can discourse as I now shall, with your genial permission.”

  “Just remember, Franx, I asked how you got up to alef-one.”

  “The flow of words, the give and take, how I relish it. A set-theorist. It is fortunate that we met, Felix, and not only for you, one of the first members of your race whom I can address as equal if not beetle. I would almost say you were enlightened, were it not for your lamentable delusion that you have not died. You should face facts. Accept the Dump you spring from, embrace it and only then can you cast it aside and truly move on. Already you control the white light, albeit with the aid of drugs, whereas I only recently managed…”He stopped talking for a minute, and then muttered, “Alef-one, just alef-one,” in a bitter tone.

  His mind really seemed to be slipping. I sat in silence for a few minutes thinking things over. Nobody wanted to believe that I was really still alive. I thought I was, but it wasn’t clear to me how I was ever going to get back. Jesus had said I should climb to the top of Mount On, but here Franx was telling me that alef- one was the farthest he’d gotten in twelve hundred years.

  I wondered how the time here fit in with the time on Earth. I’d left Earth on Thursday afternoon, flown up from Boston with Kathy. What if I got back to Earth and thousands of years had passed? My body would be long gone and it would just be back to Cimön. On the other hand, maybe the time here was sort of perpendicular to Earth time, and no matter how long I stayed it would still be late afternoon on Thursday, the thirty-first of October, 1973, when I got back.

  I began thinking about April, the two-note giggle she made when she was happy. We had met on a bus back in 1965. She had short hair then, and lipstick, and listened to me as no one else ever had. She would be worrying about me, I suddenly realized. I could almost see her wheeling Baby Iris down Tuna Street in the stroller…the baby’s blond curls, April’s smooth dark hair, her head turning, looking…

  “Well?” Franx said challengingly.

  “What?” A pebble was digging into me and I shifted a little to the left.

  “Don’t you want to hear?”

  “I’m sorry Franx. I lost track of what you were talking about.” I wasn’t going to bother arguing with him about whether or not I was really alive. Suddenly it occurred to me that even if I was stuck here, April would die and come to Cimön in fifty or sixty years. That was something to look forward to. But by then she would have found somebody else, somebody she loved more. Franx was talking again.

  “I was going to tell you how I got to alef-one, but perhaps you have lost interest?”

  “No, no, I’d like to hear it.” Franx seemed a little desperate, like someone who suddenly realizes there is no exit from a trap. I wondered how it would be to spend eternity in Cimön. There would be no escaping by suicide…you’d just be reconstituted
at the nearest Dump. But wouldn’t it be possible to finally reach perfect enlightenment, total union with the Absolute, the One, the ground of all being, God Himself? And there was Hell…

  As if he sensed my unspoken question, Franx began speaking again. “There is no way out of Cimön except into the Absolute. I have sought this way for many centuries. The time for surcease has come for me, will come for you.”

  “Wait a minute. You say there’s no way out of Cimön except into the Absolute. But what about Hell? You sounded pretty worried when you thought I was from the Devil.”

  “Touché. What was it the noble Virgil said? ‘The road to Hell is easy, but to return – ah, there is the bring-down, there is the drag.’ You can go from Cimön to Hell, but you can’t come back. Only your saviour, Jesus the Christ, has managed that trick. By symmetry, one would suppose that it is possible to go to Heaven and never come back. There should be an irreversible enlightenment, a Heaven, a union with God from which there is also no returning. There should be a losing of oneself in light as well as a losing of oneself in darkness.”

  I nodded and Franx continued. Talking about the Absolute seemed to salve some inner wound in him, and the frenzy and hostility which had marked his earlier utterances was fading away. “After you left I continued up the mountain. The meadows up here are no longer a problem. It was much easier without you to carry, and I no longer found it necessary to push off against the cliffs. I moved further out from the surface of the mountain and just flew. I could make out a sort of glow in the sky far ahead, and as I flew and stared towards the light I…” Franx trailed off and I had to urge him to continue.

  “I became the White Light,” he said finally. “You know what it’s like. It doesn’t faze you. I saw the One, I had it in my grasp, but then it all grew gray again, and rough rocks lay before me. I landed at alef-one.”