The will. Mark summons his will, knowing that this navigation through the iron gate of the moment back down into dimensional space-time requires it. He must summon his will. He senses movement.
He passes through the I Ching sequence as if it were a cloud formation – the effortless binary expression of the universe. Ahh, he realizes, the creation of time and history were necessary. Without them, we'd never have created will. We need the will in order to move toward something. But what? Toward 2012. Toward the overmind. The galactic event. But now he must continue his descent.
He passes over a shamanic conference. Eight old men sitting in a spotlight. He is offered an apprenticeship by these dead warriors, but refuses. He's made the right choice, he thinks, and begins to travel faster. He's gained either power or stupidity.
He just needs to remember that everything is fractal; he just needs to find the fractal pattern on any level and the rest will fall into place. But stretch out too far and the pattern breaks. The illusion of personal reality is gone, and so goes the person with it.
Diana, Preston, and Nick come to the rescue, finding Heley stuck on the stairs, trembling. He can't even speak to them, but just their focus is helping. As they stare at Heley and call to him, he becomes anchored in the present. Then all the Heleys on each of the fractal levels are able to redefine into shape. He finally finds himself back on the stairs, leaning against the wall. Preston looks at him and asks simply, ''Are you going up or down?''
''If I only knew,'' Mark says, grinning.
''Mark had a really, really bad trip,'' Nick Phillip announces at his design studio the next day. "He took some Syrian Rue and LSD. He got a weird side effect and he was cog-wheeling. It took us two hours to get him into the car. He wouldn't let us touch him!'' Nick dials Heley's number angrily. Mark picks up the phone after about ten rings.
''You should fucking reevaluate what you're doing!'' Nick scolds him.
''It was brilliant, Nick. Just brilliant!''
''So brilliant!? You shouldn't do those bloody MAO inhibitors! You could die, you know!''
Mark hides his extreme weariness by speaking in clipped sentences.
''I experienced some polarities, that's all''
Nick covers the mouthpiece and talks to the room and to the air: ''That's sooo Mark Heley!''
''There were just not enough people to absorb the beam,'' Mark explains logically, "and I had to do it alone.''
The responsibilities of the technoshaman never end. Like the shamans of ancient cultures, they must translate the wave forms of other dimensions into the explicate reality for the purposes of forecasting the future and charting a safe path through it. And as Heley's adventure indicates, it's networking the potential of this beam that defines success in spiritual Cyberia.
Chapter 11
Neopagan Technology
There is a growing spiritual subculture dedicated to channelling the beam, and it is characterized by pagan ethics, reliance on technology, and interconnectivity through vast networks. The neopagan revival incorporates ancient and modern skills in free-for-all sampling of whatever works, making no distinction between occult magic and high technology. In the words of one neopagan, ''The magic of today is the technology of tomorrow. It's all magic. It's all technology.''
Again, it's easiest to get a fix on the neopagan revival back in England, where the stones still resonate from the murders of over 50 million pagans throughout the Dark Ages. Fraser Clark, pater of the Zippy movement (''zen-inspired pagan professionals''), sees the current surge of pagan spirit in the cyberian subculture as the most recent battle in an ancient religious struggle. Youth culture is the only answer.
As Fraser prepares to head to work (it's about one in afternoon) he invites me to read what he's just typed onto his computer screen:
Ever since they managed to blackball the Hippy to death, the correct mode of Youth (as hope and conscience of the culture) has been systematically schizophrened from its historical roots. And we're talking about roots that go back through the punks, hippies, rebels, beats, bohemians, socialists, romantics, alchemists, the shakers and the quakers, witches, heretics and, right back in the roots, pagans. Yet the human spirit still revitalized itself! We pagani (Latin for nonmilitary personnel, by the way) have been cooperating and breeding unstoppably, together with our personal gods and succubi like personal computers! Until now, just when the Roman Christian Monotheistic Mind State reaches out to grasp the whole planet by the short hairs, the Alternative Culture births itself.
Fraser has dedicated his life to the spread of pagan consciousness, specifically through the youth culture, which he sees as our last hope for planetary survival. "The system cannot be allowed to go on for another ten years or it really will destroy us all, it's as simple as that,'' Fraser tells me as we walk with his hairless dog from his house in Hampstead to Camden Lock Market. His tone is always conspiratorial, reverberating a personal paranoia left over from the sixties, and an inherited paranoia passed down through pagan history. "If we had this conversation in the thirteenth or fourteenth century, we'd be burned at the stake for it. We'd never even be able to imagine things being as good as they are now ... or as bad as they are now.'' Fraser brings a broad perspective to the archaic revival, helping would-be pagans to see their role in the historical struggle against the forces of monotheistic tyranny.
"The actual witch-hunts came in like waves of hysteria just like drug stories in the press do now. You know, every so often along comes a story about witches in their midst so let's burn a few. So it came in waves. Another thing that came in waves is the plague. The black death.'' I can tell that Fraser wants me to draw the parallel myself. Deep down, this man is a teacher. His theory (which has been espoused elsewhere in pagan literature) is that the sudden rises in black death can always be traced to a surge in witch killing and cat killing. The church would reward people who killed cats because they were associated with witches. The rat population would be free to increase, and more plague would spread. As he puts it, "Hysteria caused the plague.'' Meanwhile, our current and potential plague – IDS, pollution, nuclear war – are seen to be caused by similar repression of the pagan spirit, which he seeks to revitalize in the youth culture of England, in any way possible.
To this end, Fraser has become a spokesman and advocate for the modern, urban neopagans. Like both their own ancestors and the most current mathematicians and physicists, they have abandoned organized rules of logic in favor of reality hacking – riding the waves, watching for trends, keeping an open mind, and staying connected to the flow. It's not important whether the natural system is a forest, an interdimensional plane, a subway, or a computer network. For the neopagan, exploration itself is a kind of understanding, and the process of exploring is the meaning of life.
Interdimensional Scrolling
One urban neopagan, Green Fire, is a witch who works for Earth Girl at the Smart Drugs Lounge under Big Heart City and as a psychic for a 900-number phone service called Ultraviolet Visions. The house scene is like a self-similar hypertext adventure. Each new person is like a new screen, with its own menus and links to other screens. But they're all somehow united in purpose and direction. As though each member of the global neopagan network goes on his own visionquests, they are all on a journey toward that great chaos attractor at the end of time.