Heaven was built after a dead Frenchman returned with a twelve-centimeter ring of magnetically coded steel locked in his cold hand, black parody of the lucky kid who wins the free ride on the merry-go-round. We may never find out where or how he got it, but that ring was the Rosetta stone for cancer. So now it’s cargo cult time for the human race. We can pick things up out there that we might not stumble across in research in a thou- sand years. Charmian says we’re like those poor suckers on thier island, who spend all thier time building land- ing strips to make the big silver birds come back. Charmian says that contact with “superior” civiliza- tions is something you don’t wish on your worst enemy. “Ever wonder how they thought this scam up, Toby?” She was squinting into the sunlight, east, down the length of our cylindrical country, horizonless and green. “They must’ve had all the heavies in, the shrink elite, scattered down a long slab of genuine imitation rosewood, standard Pentagon issue. Each one got a clean notepad and a brand-new pencil, specially sharp- ened for the occasion. Everybody was there: Freudians, Jungians, Adlerians, Skinner rat men, you name it. And every one of those bastards knew in his heart that it was time to play his best hand. As a profession, not just as representatives of a given faction. There they are, West- ern psychiatry incarnate. And nothing’s happening! People are popping back off the Highway dead, or else they come back drooling, singing nursery rhymes. The live ones last about three days, won’t say a goddamned thing, then shoot themselves or go catatonic.” She took a small flashlight from her belt and casually cracked its plastic shell, extracting the parabolic reflector. “Krem- lin’s screaming. CIA’s going nuts. And worst of all, the multinationals who want to back the show are getting cold feet. `Dead spacemen? No data? No deal, friends.’ So they’re getting nervous, all those supershrinks, until some flake, some grinning weirdo from Berkeley maybe, he says,” and her drawl sank to parody stoned mellowness, ” `Like, hey, why don’t we just put these people into a real nice place with a lotta good dope and somebody they can really relate to, hey?’ ” She laughed, shook her head. She was using the reflector to light her cigarette, concentrating the sunlight. They don’t give us matchs; fires screw up the oxygen carbon dioxide balance. A tiny curl of gray smoke twisted away from the white-hot focal point. “Okay,” Hiro said, “that’s your minute.” I checked my watch; it was more like three minutes. “Good luck, baby,” she said softly, pretending to be intent on her cigarette. “Godspeed.”
The promise of pain. It’s there each time. You know what will happen, but you don’t know when, or exactly how. You try to hold on to them; you rock them in the dark. But if you brace for the pain, you can’t function. That poem Hiro quotes, Teach us to care and not to care. We’re like intelligent houseflies wandering through an international airport; some of us actually manage to blunder onto flights to London or Rio, maybe even sur- vive the trip and make it back. “Hey,” say the other flies, “what’s happening on the other side of that door? What do they know that we don’t?” At the edge of the Highway every human language unravels in your hands except, perhaps, the language of the shaman, of the cabalist, the language of the mystic intent on map- ping hierarchies of demons, angels, saints. But the Highway is governed by rules, and we’ve learned a few of them. That gives us something to cling to.
Rule One: One entity per ride; no teams, no couples.
Rule Two: No artificial intelligences; whatever’s Out there won’t stop for~a smart machine, at least not the kind we know how to build.
Rule Three: Recording instruments are a waste of space; they always come back blank.
Dozens of new schools of physics have sprung up in Saint Olga’s wake, ever more bizarre and more elegant heresies, each one hoping to shoulder its way to the in- side track. One by one, they all fall down. In the whis- pering quiet of Heaven’s nights, you imagine you can hear the paradigms shatter, shards of theory tinkling into brilliant dust as the lifework of some corporate think tank is reduced to the tersest historical footnote, and all in the time it takes your damaged traveler to mutter some fragment in the dark. not Flies in an airport, hitching rides. Flies are advised to ask too many questions; flies are advised not to try for the Big Picture. Repeated attempts in that direc- tion invariably lead to the slow, relentless flowering of paranoia, your mind projecting huge, dark patterns on the walls of night, patterns that have a way of solidify- ing, becoming madness, becoming religion. Smart flies stick with Black Box theory; Black Box is the sanctioned metaphor, the Highway remaining x in every sane equa- tion. We aren’t supposed to worry about what the High- way is, or who put it there. Instead, we concentrate on what we put into the Box and what we get back out of it. There are things we send down the Highway (a woman named Olga, her ship, so many more who’ve followed) and things that come to us (a madwoman, a seashell, artifacts, fragments of alien technologies). The Black Box theorists assure us that our primary concern is to optimize this exchange. We’re out here to see that our species gets its money’s worth. Still, certain things become increasingly evident; one of them is that we aren’t the only flies who’ve found their way into an air- port. We’ve collected artifacts from at least half a dozen wildly divergent cultures. “More hicks,” Charmian calls them. We’re like pack rats in the hold of a freighter, trading little pretties with rats from other ports. Dreaming of the bright lights, the big city. Keep it simple, a matter of In and Out. Leni Hof- mannstahl: Out.