Spears of God Read online

  Spears of God is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  A Del Rey Books Trade Paperback Original

  Copyright © 2006 by Howard V. Hendrix

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Del Rey Books, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

  DEL REY is a registered trademark and the Del Rey colophon is a trademark of Random House, Inc.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Spears of God : a novel / Howard V. Hendrix.

  p. cm.

  "A Del Rey Books trade paperback original"—T.p. verso.

  eISBN-13: 978-0-34549548-8

  eISBN-10: 0-345-49548-9

  1. Scientists—Fiction. 2. Meteorites—Fiction. 3. United States—Fiction. 4. South America—Fiction. 5. Middle East—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3558.E49526S64 2006

  813’.54—dc22 2006042705

  www.delreybooks.com

  v1.0

  To Laurel, again—

  But the trew fayre, that is the gentle wit,

  And vertuous mind, is much more praysd of me.

  –Spenser, Amoretti 79 lines 3–4

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  My thanks to agent Chris Lotts of Ralph M. Vicinanza Ltd., and editor Steve Saffel, then at Del Rey Books, for giving me the green light, in 2003, to write a book about meteorites, mushroom stones, Mawari, and Mecca. My thanks to Steve for his extensive notes on the manuscript, to editor Jim Minz for shepherding the book to publication, and to everyone at Del Rey for their patience with my long research and writing process.

  Thanks are also due to electrician Roger Coates, who in September of 2005 unwittingly gave me the worst kind of shock a writer can experience, and to Horton Newsom, museum curator at the Institute of Meteoritics at the University of New Mexico, for alleviating that shock by roundly refuting the shibboleth of “highly radioactive meteorites.” Thanks, too, to Dr. Lisa Weston for pointing out Martin Frobisher’s connection to John Dee, and suggesting that at least the initial “black stone” discovered by Frobisher’s 1576 expedition to Meta Incognita might be meteoritic. And thanks again to Michael Lepper, for showing me his specimens of benitoite.

  PRELUDE

  NATIVE TO THE SKY

  “Don’t worry about the rattlesnakes,” Uncle Paul said as they stepped out of the August sun into the twilight of the shaft’s entrance. “They won’t hurt you so long as you stay outside striking range.”

  The boy nodded absently as the slithering, rattling chorus rose around them. Shining the feeble beam of his flashlight into the space before his feet, he still managed to notice that nearly all of the dozen or so snakes hereabouts seemed to be coiled up, poised to strike. Their triangular heads, dark bronze necks, and diamondback patterns might have seemed beautiful if he weren’t so busy thinking of them as fatal.

  His uncle, dressed in gray shirt and blue jeans, moved on ahead of him, casually flipping one rattler or another out of the way with his crooked walking stick.

  “Your uncle Paul’s not exactly OSHA-approved,” the boy remembered his father saying, “but you can learn a lot from him if you pay attention.”

  Once past the gamut of snakes, the gangly fourteen-year-old warily followed the mine shaft as it angled downward into darkness. His parents had also talked about his uncle’s “dangerous” obsession with caves. It had something to do with a trip to South America, and the death of his aunt Jacinta.

  The boy had never quite been able to piece together the whole story on that. He wasn’t exactly sure what he was supposed to be learning at the moment, either, but at least he felt a good deal cooler here than he had outside in the late summer sun.

  The coolness of the mine shaft was probably why the snakes spent the day here. This late in the afternoon, at nearly four thousand feet above sea level, the temperature in the Diablo Mountains still hovered near the century mark. Yet even that was better than the 112-degree readings they’d endured down on the floor of the Great Central Valley.

  “We’re in an exploratory shaft that one of the mining companies abandoned,” his uncle said suddenly, playing his flashlight over a lumpy wall. “My bet is there’s still some good stuff hereabouts, in all this graywacke and blue schist. See where it sticks out like that, Michael? Those just might be nodules. Find a seam—a crack where it attaches to the wall. Hold your flashlight in your mouth and see if you can’t cold-chisel open one of those cracks.”

  The old man followed his own advice and set to work. Watching him, the boy Michael did as he was told.

  Even in the cool darkness of the mine shaft, the work made them sweat. Before long, however, they’d both broken lumps loose from the wall. Michael mouthed “Wow!” at what he saw in the sheared face of the stone—and the flashlight fell from his mouth. He had to scramble after it.

  “Got something, eh?” Uncle Paul grunted, stifling a chuckle. “Let’s have a look.”

  The boy cradled the chunk of rock in both hands. It was an unimpressive blue-gray on the outside, but the shear face revealed an interior that was quite another story: large bright crystals of sapphire blue and jet black, embedded in shining white.

  “The white stuff is a natrolite matrix,” his uncle said. “The black crystals are neptunite. The blue is what we’re really after. Benitoite. Barium titanium silicate gemstone. Bluer than sapphire, more fiery than diamond, rarer and more valuable than either. The only place in the world where you find gem-quality benitoite is right here, in San Benito County, in the outcrop that runs through these hills.”

  As the boy set down the rock and returned to his work with renewed enthusiasm, his uncle continued his commentary.

  “Back in 1907, a prospector named Couch discovered the benitoite,” his uncle said, hammering away at the rock wall. “He was looking for cinnabar. He was clearing away brush, and found himself staring, all unexpected, at an exposed slump of benitoite and neptunite and natrolite—just like what you broke loose, only a lot bigger. He must’ve felt like he was standing inside an open-faced geode as big as a barn door.”

  The boy nodded. The seam he was working on cracked away into two wedges, each about the size of a generous slice of blueberry pie.

  “Couch and everybody else thought the blue stuff was sapphire,” his uncle said, cracking off a big hunk full of blue crystals. “Then a Professor Louderback from Berkeley examined it. Proved it was a new ‘species’ previously unknown to science. The first example in nature of a ditrigonal dipyramidal class of hexagonal crystal. Only hypothetical up to that point. Eventually—in the 1980s, I think it was—they named it the California state gem.”

  Soon they’d chiseled out several more good-size specimens. They were at last forced to stop working away at the rock when the boy’s flashlight went dead, and his uncle’s was fading fast.

  Uncle Paul clicked his off, then pulled a battered Zippo lighter out of his shirt pocket and thumbed it into spark and flame. By its light they made their way back toward the entrance. As they approached the mouth of the tunnel, Michael wondered for a moment about the snakes, but all he heard were crickets and the crunch of rocks beneath their boots. He hoped that maybe the rattlers had moved on, or grown lethargic in the chill of evening.

  Night had already fallen in the world outside. The light of the Zippo, held up ahead of Michael in his uncle’s hand, was a closer star among stars. Uncle Paul flicked it shut and they made their way by starlight.

  His uncle skidded down through rock and brush to where his pickup truck was parked. He returned wit
h two medium-size duffel bags and some fresh batteries. Two more trips into the hillside and the bags were loaded with as much as Michael and his uncle could safely carry out.

  Winded from toting the rock-laden duffels down the hillside, the boy and his uncle tossed the bags into the pickup bed, and then leaned against the truck. They paused, staring into the night sky. Shooting stars streaked by overhead, above the scattered pine trees and rounded peaks.

  “Hey, Uncle Paul,” the boy said, “if this benitoite is so special, if it’s rarer and more valuable than diamonds, how come I’ve never heard of it?”

  “Because it is so special,” the older man said, pulling out his pipe, packing it with tobacco, and using the Zippo to light it. “Diamonds are precious enough, and kept just rare enough, to support a world market.

  There are enough of them to create broad demand. Some things are too rare to support that kind of market. Benitoite is like that. There’s not enough for anyone to make a big business out of selling it, so there are only a few of us who pay much attention to it. I’ve been able to make my fortune because I’ve got a knack for picking customers with good taste who are willing to pay good money for this rock.”

  Michael thought about that, then nodded.

  “Then it’s the rarest gem on earth?”

  “Nope,” said the man wreathed in pipe smoke. A moment later, he pointed at a shooting star as it made a quick, fiery slash across the vault of heaven, then sheathed itself again in night. “That’s the rarest.”

  “A shooting star? What do you mean?”

  “It’s a meteoroid when it’s traveling through space, a meteor when it’s burning in the atmosphere. It becomes a meteorite when it reaches the ground. The ‘ite’ part is added to indicate that a rock is native to a particular place.”

  “Like benitoite comes from San Benito County?”

  “Right. ‘Meteor’ means ‘sky,’ or ‘high in the air,’ and that’s where each meteorite comes from. That makes it the rarest rock on earth, because it’s not from here. It’s a stone that’s native to the sky.”

  He puffed on his pipe a moment, lost in thought, before continuing.

  “Pallasite meteorites and pallasitic peridots are the only true cosmic gemstones on earth. There’s plenty of them up there, I suppose. Just not down here.”

  The boy nodded again.

  “Meteorites go way, way back, too,” his uncle added, staring at the sky. “People forget that part of it.

  Meteorites are more than just space ships; they’re time ships. They’re the oldest rocks we’ve got. Most of them go back billions of years, to before our planet even existed. Heck, collisions of meteoroids, asteroids, and comets are what the planet probably formed from in the first place. Fragments, fused together by gravity.”

  Young Michael Miskulin followed his uncle’s gaze and saw another falling star. Might that very object, or one of its extraordinary brethren, might somehow manage to survive the fiery descent, perhaps to find a home on his own world? To become one of those rarest of gems? At that moment, the full wonder of it dawned on him.

  Which was, perhaps, exactly what he was supposed to learn.

  ONE

  GHOST PEOPLE

  After a long, arduous climb, Doctor Michael Miskulin and Professor Susan Yamada finally came to the top of Caracamuni tepui, island of stone floating among clouds. Scores of the remote and inaccessible tepuis clustered where Brazil, Venezuela, and Guiana met. Tablelands perched atop vertical rockfaces hundreds and sometimes thousands of feet high, many of them remained unexplored. Most were home to plants and creatures endemic to a particular tepui—found only on that cloud-mesa and nowhere else on earth.

  Yamada and Miskulin had left the half dozen hired porters of their expedition below the clouds and made the ascent by themselves. Alone together in the drifting fog and drizzle atop Caracamuni, amid the nearly two-billion-year-old ruins of ancient geology, Michael and Susan found themselves in a solitude sanctified by isolation in both time and space.

  Crossing the high plateau the previous afternoon, Susan collected what she was sure were several sundews, pitcher plants, and assorted bromeliads previously unknown to science. She also identified what appeared to be an endemic clawed frog, a creature unable to swim. If it followed the same evolutionary history of clawed frogs on other tepuis, its kind had lived here since before the continents broke apart, and came together, and broke apart again.

  “This place is incredible!” she said over a campstove dinner in their tent the previous evening. “I’ve heard of tepuis before, but being here is different from what I expected, or even imagined.”

  “I know what you mean. It’s a lot chillier, for one thing. Especially after the heat of the sabana and the rain forest.”

  “No, that’s not it. I mean, to be told there are places where the precip is so persistent it drives the nutrients from the earth—and creates a desert caused by rain—that’s one thing. But to be hiking across a rain-desert island dotted with swampy little Edens full of carnivorous plants—that’s a whole different story.”

  Michael nodded but said nothing. Later, however, once he was asleep in his mummy bag, the day’s experiences shaped his dreams.

  His nocturnal travels were as full of ancient stone black with endless drizzle as his gray daylight hours had been. Fog, rain, algae, and fungus shaped rocks into the columns and arches of a meandering dreamcity, a labyrinth of stone clouds hiding furtive people whose runneled faces and bodies were covered with lichens and mosses….

  The rain had stopped by the time he woke this morning. Outside their tent, the myriad soft-hard shapes of the eroded maze still stood about them—a dreamscape refusing to disappear upon waking. Already up and busy, Susan crouched in the midst of that landscape, packing her specimens. Michael stepped out into morning sunlight broken by high cloud. Susan stood and stretched, turning around and taking it all in.

  “Even if your aunt’s crazy stories about ‘ghost people’ turn out to be totally delusional,” she said, “I’m still glad we made this little expedition.”

  “And that my uncle paid for it,” Michael said, out of her sightline and urinating behind a boulder.

  “That, too.”

  As he finished up, he stared absently at the surface of the rock before him, until it caught his attention more fully. Half a dozen types of lichens and mosses overlapped one another, and the underlying rock substrate, too—yielding a fractal frenzy of red ochre, yellow, white, slate blue, dark green, and black.

  Doctor Rorshach, meet Jackson Pollock, he thought. He tried to remember what the splotchy palette reminded him of. Then, as he zipped up, it hit him: the encrusted stone looked almost exactly like the false-color satellite image his uncle had shown them of this very tepui viewed from space—right down to the cleft or abyss bisecting the labyrinth top into two convoluted hemispheres.

  At the bottom of that midline depression were supposed to lie cloudforest and the entrances to a large cave inside Caracamuni, the home of the ghost people, if his aunt’s stories held any truth.

  “‘Ghost people’ probably isn’t what they call themselves,” he said, helping Susan break camp. “If they really exist at all. That’s what the Pemon down on the plains below call them.”

  “‘Spirit people,’ ‘ghost people,’ ‘sky people,’” Susan said, nodding. “‘Mawari’ or ‘Mawariton,’ too. I did my research, you know. That’s why I think they’re mythical.”

  “Oh?”

  “A reclusive tribe rumored to live on nothing but mushrooms and insects? Come on, Michael. That sounds like faeries or menehune, to me. ‘Magical folk who peopled the land in days of yore.’”

  Michael only grunted as he worked to smash the tent fabric into a stuff sack that always seemed too small for what it was intended to hold.

  “It’d be great if they actually existed,” Susan said. “A great ethnobotanical find, at the least. But I doubt they have much basis in fact—Pemon myths and your aunt’s stories notwith
standing.”

  “We’ll find out soon enough,” Michael said, shrugging into his backpack and helping Susan on with hers.

  Hiking under the broken sky of high cloud, he found the walk at least a bit warmer and drier than the drizzle that had prevailed the previous day. As he watched his feet move over the uneven ground, he found his thoughts drifting back to before they left the north.

  Back home, he, too, had found the Mawari history—and his family’s connection with it—improbable, if not outright crazy. There might be an occasional tribe somewhere in the deep backcountry still waiting to be discovered, but all the blank spaces had long since been more or less eliminated from the map. Or so he had believed.

  Yet his aunt Jacinta had claimed to her brother Paul that she had discovered the people whose existence formed the basis of the Pemon legends of sky beings—a tribe that, despite the many names given them by others, had no name for themselves besides “the People.” Except for confiding about the People to Paul, Jacinta had kept her turn-of-the-century discovery of them a secret from everyone. Paul, too, had apparently done nothing to prove or disprove his sister’s claims, until now.

  Unfortunately, Aunt Jacinta had also been documentably crazy. From her late teens on, she’d been variously diagnosed as depressive, bipolar, or long-period schizophrenic. Whichever diagnosis was correct, the truth was that, up on Caracamuni, she went native in a most extreme fashion.

  Before them now, a cloud-filled gorge came into view.

  “Somewhere down there is where Jacinta’s ghost people are supposed to live,” Michael said, as he and Susan surveyed steep walls plunging away into mist.

  “Obscured by clouds. How appropriate.”

  Together they swiftly descended into the fine cloudmist that blanketed the abyss. Walking through the increasingly dense undergrowth they came upon what seemed to be a game trail, though neither of them had seen anything on the tepui that would pass for game, big or small.