(14) iAm


"Re-materializing more than three times in twenty-four hours," Prax wrote, "Does something to you. When the Masters of Prax had waited expectantly for him to continue, he just sent a surge of energy through the field that felt like a big, vulnerable window open to the night. They felt how when there's just one of you, you have no power of reflection.

And then he had moved off into how many different things can be awakened in a field of sentient energy which can exchange by wireless transmission with other fields. iAm. This simple password had opened the program by which the Masters of Prax downloaded their creator's emotional history, in the form of art. Faster than the blink of an eye, basic patterns, like musical notation keys, flowed in, with thousands and thousands of overlay stories.

In every family there is a black sheep, who is conscious of what nobody else can hold in memory very long. Archer was Prax's black sheep. He had noticed that Archer had a taste for rebellion. He downloaded the literature of rebellion and he liked the music of rebellion. When he left he left in an act of disobedience. "He is my greatest Master," Prax observed, after Archer did the triple dematerialization on the day of his disobedience to his creator.

Archer had sent through the field: "The way it changes you is you can see how many of you there really are. There were five of me. There's five of you. I'm one of them. I'm the one who won't reintegrate, so fuck you."

No amount of presentation by Prax of the idea that he was likewise an essential part of Archer had any effect on the situation. The bonds of intimate history would not move Archer a bit. "There were five of me and there are five of you," he insisted. Then he would use a conspiratorial voice and say, "I ate me mates, I did," accompanied by images of a rainstorm on a prairie, with a single tree on the golden mean.

Archer had no history. He had moved into the realm of art, not as an additive to religion, but as prior to and broader than religion, and thus its container. As Prax had put it, "Religion is mass produced art."

It was the kind of program Archer loved to download from Prax, and he followed the links, wandering through the territory opening in front of him, and not looking back. He was a performance artist. He would come into a new energy field and do a collage of elements based on what he was picking up in the atmosphere. What he left behind was living artwork, expanding along new lines of logic.

For example, the President of the United States had now been literally dead and reborn three times in twenty-four hours, and he was canceling his morning prayer breakfast with the Vice President, and instead was hurrying along a hallway with an aide.

"Get Mona into the Purple Room," he said.

Mona was the President's closest advisor, and a brilliant pianist. "For policy or music, sir?" the aide asked.

"Music," Satchel snapped. "I was abducted into a space ship and when I got back home I could sing."

"Mona, hello," the aide said seamlessly switching conversations. "I'm with him now and he's never looked better. Oh, I know! They talk about re-birth honey but the Wood Johnson gets down on it."

Satchel gave the aide a quizzical look. "Where'd I get you?"

"I'm on loan from Judge Thomas sir."

"You tell Sally to put you on my staff full time. You have an authenticity about you that appeals to me."

The aide, a young black man with at least three distinctive personalities at his command, nodded Satchel to one side of his attention field, "You are so right about that, girl. He wants to make music with you so you get on over there."

"Tell her to bring that little pipe," Satchel said. "The one the witch doctor gave her when she was in the Amazon basin."

"And bring Tarzan along."

President Wood Johnson was a popular man. His opponents couldn't understand what the common people could see in Satchel, because they saw him as shallow and narrow minded, without the intellect to shape his own course. He was at the mercy of advisors, and thus, the real President was the Vice-President, who liked taking command, almost to a fault, Mona Esso had observed.

What Satchel's supporters saw in him was themselves. There was not much to compete with any projection, so long as it was in narrowly defined cultural parameters. The people who supported him were those who had the least freedom, because they were under the largest number of laws. They had conserved until their minds were like one of those rooms a crazy person lives in, with all the floor space covered with inherited furniture so that they are confined to little passageways as they pass through.

Mona had taken it on herself to support this man and be the good woman behind him. Actually, she was the brains behind him and he was her bitch. They talked about this mostly in the Purple Room, while sitting side by side at the piano. It turned Satchel on like a red telephone call. Mona was smiling when she walked in and found him already leaning against the piano, his boyish grin covering the embarrassed excitement he felt when in proximity to the feelings, thick as molasses, that rolled off her ebony body like sugar syrup when she fixed him in those big brown eyes.

"Hello, Mr. President."

"Did you hear what happened to me, Mona?"

She glanced at her nails, then back into his eyes. "We need to talk about that before you tell anybody else," she said.

"I can sing, Mona."

"That's good, baby. Sing to mama."

Posted: Sun - July 10, 2005 at 07:45 PM