Better Angels Page 2

  The lines showed them their mission, generation after generation—even predicting Jacinta’s arrival and the role she would come to play in helping the ghost people sing their mountain to the stars. Inside this tepui a refugee people had settled for good. Why should they continue to travel through all the world, when their sacred mushroom showed them that all the world could travel through them? They had come home to go home for all humanity—to the home humans had never known and that had never known them.

  Swept away in the otherworldly music of it, Jacinta sensed that the song was very close to completing itself now—conjuring at last a picture quite the opposite of the wild angelic contact ship’s arrival. Not an appearing in this universe but, this time, a disappearing out of it: the hole opening, the sky rippling and bending and funhousing with wave upon wave of light, a bubble bursting into heaven.

  Awkwardly, distantly, Jacinta tried to translate what she was seeing into the varieties of theoretical faster-than-light travel methods she’d once encountered, in physics courses during her undergraduate days. Was what she was witnessing the creation of both sides of the particle/antiparticle pair in Bell’s Nonlocality Theorem? An Einstein bridge? Or some sort of super holographic wave function, disappearing here to reappear there?

  Is the universe friendly, or not? That question—Einstein’s answer to a reporter’s query as to what was the most important question the great physicist could imagine—rose unbidden in Jacinta’s mind. In the closing of the ghost people’s chantsong, was she now looking at the future, instead of the past?

  Around her the ghost people sang the long coda of what had been so long embedded in the genes of their particular cultural obsession: The code hidden in their totemic mushroom, the key for opening the transluminal door, the ticket-to-ride on the galactic rapid transit system. Fully aware at last that she would soon be leaving the world of her birth behind her, Jacinta felt herself reaching out toward her brother one last time.

  Thinking made it so. She found herself looking out at the world through her brother’s eyes—and saw that time was passing much more rapidly in Paul’s world than in hers. With him she stumbled and careened up the long slantwise cave tunnel behind his flashlight’s madly bobbing beam, feet tangling in power cables leading to chambers where screens bled information from space into space. With him she tripped and fell and surged to his feet again, until brightness shone from around a corner and Paul found himself plunging headlong into evening light....

  Snatching up his backpack and gear from where he’d left them at the entrance, Paul saw the sky above him shimmering—iridescent blues, salmon pinks. Panting hard, he hastily averted his eyes, focusing his attention on flat cloudforest green of the tepui’s deep central cleft, afraid to look into the tall strange chalice of that sky.

  In the waning light Paul forded the flood that thundered away to falls at the southeastern end of the gorge. Making his way upward through the cleft now, through the drowned world of tepui cloudforest twilight, he surged at last onto the plateau’s barren, storm-swept top like a swimmer breaking surface after a long dive. Wandering only a short exhausted way through the maze, he shed his gear and radioed in to the local guide Garza and his men. Something in his voice must have confirmed the locals in their traditional fears and superstitions of Caracamuni, for their words seemed smug, condescending.

  Collapsing beneath a ledge, Paul did not know whether he slept or not. The air around him thundered and the earth shook, and through it all he thought he heard the ghost people, singing and singing in the very rocks.

  The next morning the hollow labyrinth on the tepui’s crown seemed a maze of inverted cave tunnels, or a brain and all its convolutions turned inside out by some topology-transforming supercomputer. After several hours of numbed walking, Paul strode free of the maze.

  His guide Garza and his men, when Paul joined them, were full of horrified tales of apparitions and earth tremors and streams of lightning leaping up from the highest stones. They were overjoyed at Paul’s return—and the immediate prospect of their leaving. Their descent from the tepui’s top was swift, passing him in a blur. The weather co-operated, rains falling only lightly for a few hours, so that by mid-afternoon the men had descended the bulk of the tepui’s height. By evening they were on the lower ridge, making camp for the night, looking back at that mysterious height from which they had so recently descended.

  Somehow, Jacinta realized, she and Paul were now in different timeflows, different relativistic frames of reference. A bifurcation had occurred, a cusp reached which made her think backward to the contact ship disaster and forward to a meeting with what had sent that ship so long ago. Despite the forking in time’s paths, however, her peculiar deep empathy with her brother persisted, even as it became more a strain to maintain it. In Paul’s frame—

  —the sun had just set when it happened. The earth shook with such violence that the men were knocked from their feet and the forests below them seemed to toss like waves in a storm. The tremors calmed for a moment and, looking wildly around, Paul saw it: a great ring of dust about halfway up Caracamuni’s height. The tremors gradually stopped and from where he lay sprawled on the ground, Paul saw something that made him instinctively grab up his videocam and frame the scene in his viewfinder.

  Caracamuni appeared to be growing taller. As its top continued to rise, though, he saw that it was not growing but separating, top half from bottom half, at that ring of thinning dust. In moments the top half had risen free and a space of clear sky intervened between the sundered halves of the ancient mountain.

  Caracamuni was decoupling from the earth, rising smoothly as a mushroom in the night. Garza stood beside Paul, seeing it too, crossing himself and murmuring prayers he probably hadn’t said since he was a boy. After a time, seeing that framed in the viewfinder it looked like trick photography, cinematic special effect, Paul continued taping its ascent only out of habit, mostly watching it unframed, with his own eyes.

  Jacinta too now sensed a shift in the ghost people’s singing. It had become less urgent and more dreamlike. In the waking dream the chantsong now induced, she saw Caracamuni tepui as the ghost people had always known it, skirted so persistently by clouds that it had long seemed an island of stone floating among them, one of that misty billowing company grown solid, wreathed in drifting fog and drizzle. Crowned by a forest of rainblack stones, the nutrients of Caracamuni’s soils had been ceaselessly pounded out of its top by incessant storms, until it truly embodied the paradox of a raindesert island above a rainforest sea. Caracamuni tepui had stood haunted and holy for eons, sanctified by isolation, until more than half the species on its top came to be found nowhere else on earth.

  Now, at last, it was becoming the actual floating island its isolated inhabitants had long dreamed it would become. Now it was about to become more remote than ever. No part of all its uniqueness—none of its strange bromeliads and sundews and fungi—would be found any longer upon the Earth.

  Dreamily, Jacinta remembered reading once that angels and photons, both traveling at the speed of light, sensed no passage of time, no time at all, an Eternal Now, from their point of view. What she was experiencing was not quite that, however—not yet. Remembering those long ago physics courses, she thought it was more like another type of bifurcation, the two spacetime frames surrounding an imploding star when it reached critical circumference. To those looking down from “normal” spacetime onto the star’s implosion, the implosion stopped and froze forever at the critical circumference, at the event horizon. But for observers on the star itself (if there could ever be such creatures) the implosion continued on and on, far beyond critical, all the way down to singularity’s infinite density and zero volume.

  Jacinta vaguely wondered which side of what kind of singularity she would soon be standing on.

  The anvil-shaped top of the mountain called Caracamuni was beyond the highest clouds when the sound hit the men in a great wave that drove Garza’s Pem”n assistants to bury
their clenched faces against the bosom of the earth. It was a fearful, prodigiously powerful sound—

  —but one which Jacinta had heard before, more softly. It was the song of thought strengthened by stone uncountable times.

  Is the universe friendly, or not? Jacinta asked herself that question again, making it her own, trying to keep mental contact with Paul until the latest possible instant. Looking through her brother’s eyes at the mountaintop disappearing into the sky before him, Jacinta hoped her escape hatch would not prove to be a trap door.

  The sun shone full upon the ascending mountaintop, now clear of earth’s curve, where the men lay in deep twilight below. Caracamuni was ascending in a bubble of force, its high waterfall plunging down only to spread out again in a broad swirl along the boundary’s edge. As the cave’s deep chamber stood ensphered in the stone bubble of its mountain, so too the mountain itself now stood ensphered in the bubble of force. From the mountain in its sphere a pale fire began to shine, increasing in intensity until—

  Looking through her own dreaming eyes again, Jacinta sensed that she was on her way to discovering an answer to Einstein’s great question. No time like the present—

  —in a brilliant burst of white light—

  —to find out—

  —the many fields of ensphering force dispersed—

  —the present is like—

  —the mountaintop disappeared—

  —No Time.

  —as silently and completely as a soap bubble bursting into a summer sky.

  * * * * * * *

  Unsteady Alteration in the Steady Constellations

  Paul Larkin had come to Death Valley to get drunk, wander off into the desert, and disappear. The idea of it, when he was sober, had shone in his head: elegant, simple, hard and bright as diamond. He had felt tired for too long, too tired to continue with the facade of his life. Best to put an end to it at his earliest possible convenience.

  He had awakened to an omen that very morning—or rather, from one. A vision in a dream, actually. Paul usually didn’t remember his dreams, but he woke up in the middle of this one, so he remembered it. In the dream he was sitting in an overstuffed armchair, talking pleasantly to two older people. Dreaming, he knew who they were, but when he woke he couldn’t quite remember. Maybe they were his parents.

  In the dream he was conversing in that pleasant living room when he happened to glance over his left shoulder. There, standing in the archway to the darkened room behind him, half in shadow and half in light, were his Uncle Tim, who had died recently, and his sister Jacinta, who had been gone, disappeared, ten years now. Someone else he knew was also there, but he couldn’t remember on waking who that person might be.

  He did, however, remember thinking in his dream, “Oh, these are the dead, standing behind me, watching and waiting.” That thought knocked him right back to consciousness. He was sure the dream had something to do with all that had happened to him recently—and with the prospect of the plan that had been forming in his mind for the past week.

  Sitting in his dusty, battered car, he took another sip from the bottle of Edradour—“Single Highland Malt Scotch Whisky from the smallest distillery in Scotland”—which his Uncle Tim had brought back as a gift for him, years before. Tasting the warm, peaty sting and sizzle of the scotch lingering in his mouth and throat, Paul turned his attention to a piece of paper sealed in a plastic sleeve, lying on the seat of his car.

  Breaking the seal on the plastic, he removed a carefully folded sheet of age-brittled white paper, upon which could be seen a dusty blue image like the photo-negative of a brain. It was the spore print he had first found in an envelope ten years earlier, buried deep in his backpack, after he emptied the pack on returning home from Caracamuni tepui.

  Whether the spore print had been secretly planted there while he was in the cave, or during that last long night on the tepui top—and by whom—Paul did not know. He only knew that for a decade he had never been able to bring himself to make public the print’s existence. Nor could he bring himself to destroy it, any more than he could destroy any of his information on Jacinta. Information, as she had been fond of saying, is everything. Even information held in the limbo of the lost.

  He had gone public with other matters from that time. Maybe too public. Ten years back, when he and his guide and native porters had returned from the tepui backcountry, they had told their story and shown their video recording of Caracamuni’s top lifting off, de-coupling from the Earth—to anyone who would listen, anyone who would watch.

  Despite the fantastic nature of their story, or maybe because of it, no one really seemed to care. Another obscure piece of remote Amazonian real estate had disappeared—so what? That stuff was going up in smoke all the time back then. The kinder seismologists and vulcanologists interpreted their tale of the ascent of Caracamuni as an “anomalous volcanic eruption” and filed it away for future reference. Those less kind had interpreted Larkin’s short tape of the tepui rising as a video hoax, nothing more.

  Fash’s anthropologists and archeologists, initially intrigued by what Jacinta claimed to have found on and in Caracamuni, cancelled their expedition. The controversy over the arrival date for human beings in the New World—to which Jacinta had contributed—continued unabated. The idea that a pocket of living-fossil Homo sapiens neandertalensis had survived into the present day on an isolated tepui in South America was dismissed out of hand. Those organizations that had granted or loaned Jacinta funds and equipment hassled Paul and his parents for a time but eventually wrote off both Jacinta and her failed expedition under something called a “forgiveness clause.”

  After Paul’s brief emergency leave from KFSN—to take care of “family matters”—had ended, his employers expected to go on with his life as if nothing had happened.

  Nothing but flying mountains. Nothing but mushrooms from space. Nothing but incredibly ancient indigenes and failed white goddesses gone native. Nothing but “forty-odd aboriginal astronauts and a crazed ethnobotanist as humanity’s first personal ambassadors to the universe.”

  Taking another sip of the Edradour, he held the square of paper lightly, contemplatively, a relaxed arm’s length away. Symbol for him of all the events he had endured at Caracamuni tepui, the square of paper stood as well for all the pain and trouble those events and their telling had caused him since. Through the smoky haze of the scotch, he tried to remember who had first mentioned that “forty odd aboriginal astronauts . . .” et cetera phrase—had it been him? The media? The media quoting him, when he was still part of the media? Before the “trashy controversy” over his Caracamuni tape had cost him his first career as a broadcast journalist?

  Now, the “flying mountaintop” story had cost him a second career, the one he had built laboriously built for himself over the past decade. The old sensational story had reappeared in the media and, in his refusal to disavow it, Paul had completely unraveled his career in Biology—all within the last four months. He didn’t want to think about it, but his mind kept going there, like a tongue to the empty socket of a pulled wisdom tooth.

  Paul stared hard again at the spore print. His last card, the strange ace in the hole he had never wanted to play. He had played it, at last, but what good had it done him?

  Two months back, desperate at being reduced to the status of “independent researcher,” Paul got in touch with Professor Phil Damon, who had headed his dissertation committee. Damon had been reluctant to help a tainted former student but he had, mercifully enough, listened to the story of the spore print and the bizarre fungus it might grow. Damon agreed to examine the spore print and have some of it plated out and grown.

  Taking another smoky sip of the Edradour and examining the spore print now, Paul could see the blank area in the upper left hand corner. Almost six weeks ago, Damon and a mycologist colleague, in a chamber under a ventilation hood, had scraped spores from that corner of the paper, then shaken them onto a series of Petri dishes filled with various growt
h media, before handing the print back to him.

  Three weeks into his testing of the fungus, Damon had called and quite unexpectedly announced that he had set up a meeting between Paul and Athena Griego, a “venture capital agent.” Griego claimed to represent a number of investors and pharmaceutical firms that might be interested in further research on the fungus.

  Ms. Griego had turned out to be a very high-powered and intense woman in her early forties, small of frame but with the sort of preternaturally high-riding and large spherical breasts that suggested structural augmentation. During the meeting she had struck Paul as shady somehow, a wheeler-dealer, an operator. Griego had promised to get back to him in a week, but he had heard nothing since. Some sort of response was very much overdue. The agent, for all her signifiers of power and augmentation, had apparently turned out to be much talk and no action.

  Yeah, he thought as he re-folded and re-sleeved the spore print, whatever string of good luck I might once have had, I ran it all out a long time ago. Taking up the bottle and getting out of the car, he wondered why: Why had he been so obstinate? Why couldn’t he have just kept his mouth shut about the tepui and what had happened there—from the very beginning? Why had he thought it so important for the world to know?

  Maybe I’m just self-destructive, he thought. Maybe I’m doomed to crash every merry-go-round I make for myself, just as soon as I get it spinning up to speed.

  As he staggered away from the car, Paul knew his stubbornness had to be more than just that. To bury the truth of what he’d seen at Caracamuni would be to bury the memory of his sister, to bring her disappearance closer to the death he feared that disappearance had already become. To turn ten years’ absence and “might as well be dead” into quite dead indeed. He didn’t want to bury Jacinta when she—or at least some part of her—might still be alive somewhere.