At one time in my life, I would not have believed that such a relationship of intimacy could exist, that two people could be naked together and not be overwhelmed by the fact; and in fact, could actually be so unconscious of their sexuality-whatever sexuality they shared between them-that their nudity would be irrelevant. It not only would not dominate their interactions, it would not even be present; but now, having achieved such a state of peacefulness and grace, I understood the deeper connection that it represented. We really were partners.
As I washed her-thoroughly, appreciatively, and with the kind of respect that only intimacy can inspire-we talked about our work, and for once, we left behind all the pain connected to it, all the pressures, and all the frustrations. We quietly talked about the puzzles that we were struggling with as if they were simply interesting puzzles. We could appreciate the wonder of the challenge for itself. The anguish had been acknowledged, now we could work.
I told her what I was thinking about, unformed and half-realized as the notions still were. Talking about the ideas might help clarify them. Lizard listened without comment, only occasionally interjecting little sounds of encouragement, sometimes about what I was saying, sometimes about where I was washing. After the third or fourth time I had worked my way methodically up and down again, she took the washcloth from me and began returning my attentions.
"I think there's a transformation happening," I said. "Several transformations. Many transformations. But most important, I think there's a transformation possible in the way we perceive the infestation. I think my little piece of it in the computer is only a tiny fragment of the whole thing, but I think it's a place to start."
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."