Better Angels by Howard V. Hendrix Read Free Book Online Page B

life.
    With his brother Seiji he had tried to talk about his problems, but he’d never gotten very far. There seemed always to be a wall of enforced normalcy between them—a glass fishbowl wall, which made a certain sense, since Seiji had been intrigued by tropical fresh and saltwater fish and by fishbowl-helmeted astronauts for as long as Jiro could remember. To Seiji’s aquarist-astronaut way of thinking, any problem the Yamaguchi brothers could admit to having was the product of their being happa—half Nipponese, half Anglo—in what was still largely a Caucasian-dominated culture. Add to that being raised male with a docile daddy and domineering mommy and that could explain a multitude of problems, at least according to Seiji.
    If Jiro felt that the world leaked dreams, that he dreamed in other people’s heads and other people dreamed in his head—that was simply paranoia,by his brother’s reckoning. Seiji was particularly big on the once-repudiated but now revived theories of “schizophrenogenic mothers” and “marital skew.”
    “It’s no surprise we’re mentally bent,” Seiji said. “Home environment plays an etiological role in the development of schizophrenia—especially when a father has yielded to a dominant mother, so that the father doesn’t provide a strong masculine role model for the male child.”
    Jiro suspected his older brother was parroting what he had heard in his Intro to Psychology course. That was too simple an answer, however—especially when the renewed popularity of such “Blame Mom” theories was really more about keeping women in their place than anything else. Jiro soon stopped looking for answers in that psychosocial direction. Someday he might get desperate enough to seek them there again, but he hoped not.
    He searched through print and screen and the whole infosphere for answers—from science and religion, theology and technology. He suspected that his experience of this leakage of dreams between minds was an effect of something much deeper—of something he could only describe to himself as a unity in the universe, profound and undeniable, always there, no matter how hard it might be to pin down.
    That was not what he found in his research, however. From his searching it seemed to him that, over the past century and more, bleeding-edge theology had been pushing toward a religion without transcendence, and bleeding-edge technology had been pushing toward a transcendence without religion.
    He flirted with the idea of joining the Cyberite sect for a while. Their great myth was a messianic faith in the power of media—the idea that, if a correct-thinking band of rebel do-gooders could just take control of all global media for a few minutes and in those few minutes broadcast The Truth to the entire planet, all humanity’s problems would be solved. Jiro quickly came to suspect, however, that the Cyberite myth failed to take into account the fact that most people—when hit with too much confusing or uncomfortable or abrupt truth—quickly fall back on their established prejudices to do their thinking for them.
    The more traditional religions weren’t much different. Media, Gospel, Logos: what was the difference, really? For all the traditionalists’ talk of original sin, it seemed to Jiro that sin was never very original. Mostly, it seemed to be copied from parents and friends and neighbors and the whole social world, as far as he could tell. He searched the infosphere for a sustainable religion—one whose first law was not “Make more disciples!”—but he was damned if he could find one.
    All the traditional systems seemed to reduce human life to a chain-letter sent by God or Global Operations Director or DNA. In one form or another, the missive prophesied that, if he followed the genetic generic rules and kept the Message going (Procreate! Propagate the faith! Expand market share!), Good Things would happen to him, his stock would split and rise in value, he would go