Lizard turned me around so she could scrub my front. I lifted my arms for her. She asked, "What kind of a transformation do you think it will be?"
"If I knew, then we would have already had the transformation, and we wouldn't be waiting for it, would we?"
She smiled at the unsatisfactoriness of the answer. We all had too many more questions than answers.
"It's like a jigsaw puzzle," I said. "One of those very big ones with fifty thousand pieces that takes a lifetime to complete. We can look at individual pieces and know that this one is a piece of sky and that one is a piece of forest and this other one over here is a piece of worm, but we still can't put them all together to get a sense of the whole picture. We're starting to get parts of it, sections here and there, but even that isn't enough. We still don't know how the sections fit together. But there are so many of us working on it, we're so close, and we're putting so many pieces together now that I think-I feel it-that any moment now, the cosmic aha! is going to happen, and suddenly everything that we're looking at, without any change at all, will stop being a collection of disjointed sections. We'll take a step back, or we'll look at it upside down or sideways, or we'll just wake up in the morning and there it'll be in front of us, the shape of the whole thing like a great big outline just waiting to be filled in, and we'll start pushing sections of sky and forest and worm into place, and then even though there'll be a lot of little bits that we still don't know, the process will have shifted from one of trying to fit a zillion separate pieces together, to one of trying to fill the holes in the big picture. I think the mandalas are key to it. I think we have to think about mandalas, not worms. Like we think about beehives and ant colonies instead of bees and ants."
"I always hated jigsaw puzzles," Lizard said. We were toweling each other off. "They always required so much work. And then when you were done, what did you have? Just this big picture that filled your dining room table. After a couple of days, you had to break it all up and put it back in the box. I could never see the sense in that."
"Well, if we don't solve this jigsaw puzzle, it's us who are going to be broken up and put back in the box," I said grimly.
"Shhh, sweetheart." She put her arms around me and rested her head on mine. "Not tonight. Tonight is for us."
We stood there, just holding on to each other for a long, quiet moment. At last, however, Lizard reached around me to glance at her ringwatch. "We're going to have to hurry. Come on-get dressed. You'll find a new dinner jacket in your closet. I had the tailor shop make it up for you this afternoon."
"Oh-" I must have looked crestfallen. "I didn't get anything for you."
"You got me a baby," she said. "That's enough. Now get dressed before we both get distracted. We mustn't keep the captain waiting. What do you think of my dress? I decided on white, after all-"
Whether the neural symbiont is actually a symbiotic partner or merely a parasite depends on the specific organism infected. While it is clearly symbiotic in its Chtorran manifestation, in Terran organisms the same creature is unable to contribute to its host and can function only as a parasite.
The pattern of neural symbiondparasite infection roughly parallels that of stingfly grubscattle, horses, donkeys, sheep, goats, llamas, ostriches, pigs, dogs, cats, and humanssuggesting that the stingfly is also the method of transmission for the neural animal.
—The Red Book,
(Release 22.19A)
Chapter 46
The Garden of Heavenly Delights
"The existence of life on Earth proves that Murphy's Law is universal. If anything can go wrong, it will."
-SOLOMON SHORT
Captain Harbaugh's idea of a private little dinner made me think of Alexandre Gustave Eiffel. In 1889 this French engineer built a tower on the left bank of the river Seine, overlooking the heart of Paris. At the very topmost level of the tower, he installed a private suite for himself, exquisitely suitable for entertaining. It included a dining room, a parlor, and even a bedroom. Monsieur Eiffel must have clearly appreciated the romantic possibilities of his… uh, erection. Pun intended.
Captain Harbaugh's private lounge was astonishing. It was a garden. Gold light filtered from unseen sources, illuminating a space that was filled with verdant greenery. A walkway of polished wood wound through a small park, then leapt gracefully across a series of glowing ponds filled with red and ivory koi so large they looked threatening. Even Lizard gasped in surprise and delight. "I had no idea-"
Harry Sameshima, one of the two stewards who had escorted us forward, beamed proudly at our reaction and began pointing out sprays of orchids and bougainvillea, birds of paradise and cascades of something with a long Latin name. On my own, I was able to identify a hibiscus and a crimson amaranth. Patiently, Sameshima explained the spiritual meaning of the entire airborne garden; something about this being a representation of the garden of heaven and the twelve bridges representing the twelve steps to enlightenment. I wasn't paying close attention, I was trying to calculate the weight penalty this garden in the sky must represent. lt didn't make a lot of sense to me-on the other hand, it definitely made dinner with the captain the event of a lifetime. Considering whom this airship had originally been built for, I could understand the logic of the expense.
Lizard turned to Sameshima abruptly. "This is your work, isn't it?" Harry didn't even pretend to be humble. He was a short man, given to fleshiness, and his Asian ancestry gave him an ageless demeanor; but when Lizard turned the full force of her industrial strength smile on him, the poor man could barely stammer out his reply. He flushed and nodded and bowed and lost the last vestiges of his ability to speak.
Lizard was as elegant as a queen. But now she did something that surprised even me. She took poor embarrassed Harry's hands in hers, lifted them gently to her lips and kissed them as if they were royal treasures. "These are the tools of a true artist," she told him. "They are blessed by all the gods of heaven. I am humbled by the vision that these hands have made. May these tools bring very good fortune to the worker who bears them."
She let go of his hands then, and Harry Sameshima bowed deeply to her. When he straightened, I could see that his eyes were moist with emotion. He probably didn't meet many people who could appreciate his work so deeply. He led us over the twelfth and last bridge to a sheltered gazebo, set with a simple table. Then he left us alone.
I looked to Lizard. She was still gazing around in awe, her face bright with wonder. "This is amazing-" she breathed.
"You made that man's whole voyage," I said. "I didn't know you knew so much about Japanese gardens."
"I hardly know anything about Japanese gardens," she replied. "But I do know gardeners. My dad was a gardener," she added. "A Japanese garden is a delicate little world. It's an evocation of wu ideal. It's a place of beauty and meditation. The position of every stone and every flower is carefully considered. A Japanese garden isn't just a garden; it's a prayer. It's a portrait of the gardner's vision of heaven." She turned around slowly, waving her hand gracefully to include everything around us. "This garden is a devotion. It's as holy a place as I've ever seen…" She fell quiet in wonder then, and so did I.
After a moment, she took my hand, and after another moment, she slid into my arms. "I had no idea," she whispered to me, "that there were still places this beautiful on the Earth."
"This place isn't on the Earth," I whispered back. "This place comes to you, lifts you up, and takes you anyplace you want to go. It's not just a holy place, it's a magic place."