Better Angels Read online

  “The death of a thousand small cuts,” Paul said. “The frog in the pot under which the flame is being slowly turned up—too slowly for it to notice.”

  “Exactly,” Vang said, pleased. “As far as planetary carrying capacity was concerned, let’s say the depth planners’ most reasonable projections placed global human populations deep into an ecocatastrophic overshoot phase fifty years from their time zero.”

  “That’s glut—and maybe gluttony,” Paul said, with a nod, “but I don’t see the obsolescence.”

  Vang smiled again.

  “Even glut means obsolescence,” he continued. “For creatures like ourselves that can build artificial brains and alter DNA, ‘Be fruitful and multiply’ is an obsolete biological imperative.”

  Ooh boy, Paul thought. Such ideas weren’t likely to make Vang popular in the Vatican, or Salt Lake City either, for that matter.

  “But you mean the other types of obsolescence the planners might have contemplated, I suppose,” Vang continued. “Might they have asked themselves too whether, particularly since the nineteenth century, industrial mechanisms had already increasingly obviated the need for human muscle? In the twentieth century, didn’t informational mechanisms begin making many capabilities of the human mind superfluous as well?”

  “I see your point,” Paul said, not considering the idea quite so philosophically as Vang had.

  “Let’s say, then, their experts were forced to reconsider their scenarios,” Vang continued. “The older, deeper questions they asked themselves had been something like: Are we and our organizations good? Are humans good? The new questions might well have been different: not only what were they and their organizations good for, but what are humans good for?”

  “I presume they came up with an answer,” Paul said, after a downing a strong slug of coffee.

  “In their own way,” Vang said slowly, looking at the aquarium in the wet bar as if contemplating the possibilities hidden in its waters. “Maybe their own fears of the death and meaninglessness of their organizations got tangled up with their search. Let’s give them the benefit of the doubt, and say what they finally came to was the idea that human consciousness was our unique contribution—and our best hope for avoiding the doom of becoming the reef of our own shipwreck.”

  “Reef?” Paul asked, then shook his head. “I don’t quite follow you.”

  By way of answer, Vang got up and walked toward the wet bar, with its enclosed coral reef. On impulse, Paul got up and literally followed him, taking his cup of coffee in hand.

  “Do you know how a coral reef grows, Dr. Larkin?”

  Paul crouched down and looked at the miniature reef in Vang’s bar.

  “Coral polyps,” Paul said. “Soft-bodied creatures, coelenterates—kind of like jellyfish, only they settle down and secrete stony skeletons around themselves. The old skeletons are what most of the reef is made of.”

  “Exactly,” Vang said, pleased in an almost teacherly manner, “except that the polyps are actually excreting the calcium that goes to make up the stone of the reef. Like most marine organisms, they have to dispose of excess calcium, so why not use it for building? They’re not the last animal to turn a waste product into a resource, either. Not by a long shot.”

  Although he could have done without the lecture on a fine point of invertebrate biology, Paul nodded.

  “We humans,” Dr. Vang continued, “when we hunted and gathered, used to be rather like the jellyfish, nomadically drifting about the world. Eventually, however, we settled down and begin to secrete cities and civilizations around ourselves. Think of the ‘reef’ as the growth of human populations throughout history, along with our ‘excretions,’ all our trash and toxins, all the buried cities beneath and just outside our cities. The reef is the conversion of what is ‘not us’ into us and our products. The reef is that something reaching toward the light, as the past it is built upon sinks slowly deeper into darkness. The ‘ship’ is the full set of possible human scientific and technological capabilities. The ‘ocean’ is the medium of spacetime.”

  Paul stared at the colorful reef in the tank, not yet catching Vang’s meaning.

  “But what does it mean to say we will become the ‘reef of our own shipwreck’?” he asked, still trying to puzzle out that saying’s weird non-dual duality.

  “What if we don’t learn to turn all our rubbish into resources?” Vang said. “What if our reproductions and toxic productions outpace our capacity for invention? What if our biology and our technology converge in a mutually destructive fashion? What if we persist in our deep denial of the paradoxical fact that our very success as a species is the single greatest threat to our future survival as a species?”

  Suddenly Paul got what Vang was driving at. Watching the pleasant play of fish round and about stone, he suddenly saw the underwater scene more darkly, as if an unseen cloud had passed across the face of an unseen sun.

  “Then the ship will crack up on the reef,” he said quietly, “spewing toxins that will kill the reef in turn. A pretty grim scenario.”

  “Potentially, yes,” Vang said. “The two best alternatives to it would seem to be either learning to control the rate of the reef’s growth or, failing that, leaping out of the ocean entirely, toward that ‘light’ beyond space and time that we’ve always been growing toward. That’s where your fungus comes in.”

  Paul stood up—still a bit wobbly, despite the coffee—trying to imagine coral polyps leaping from the ocean and flying like pulsing jellyfish toward the sun. He looked at Vang.

  “Sounds like you’re talking about either something for controlling population growth or for travelling faster than light,” Paul said with a small smile. “I really have no idea how that fungus I brought back could help with either one.”

  “You don’t?” Vang said, as if he didn’t quite believe Paul. The older man walked into the ellipse of the bar. “My associates and I do. We have several ideas—and we are willing to pay you quite lucratively for the right to investigate those possibilities.”

  Vang gestured at a thinscreen document which had at that moment appeared in the top of the bar. Paul scanned the document, which read his eyes as he read it, so that it obligingly went to the next page each time he finished the previous one. The document, he saw, was a contract between Paul Larkin and something called the Tetragrammaton Consortium. The contract made Paul both a consultant and senior research scientist with Tetragrammaton, in addition to paying him quite handsomely for the right to patent any materials extracted from the Cordyceps fungus he had brought back with him from Caracamuni tepui. The amounts of money involved were extravagant beyond his most avaricious dreams.

  When he had finished reading the document, he straightened up, stunned.

  “Does the contract not meet with your approval?” Dr. Vang asked, concerned.

  “Wha—?” Paul asked, disoriented. “No, it’s fine. Generous.”

  “Good, good!” Dr. Vang said. “But then, what’s the problem?”

  “I’m not sure,” Paul said. “It’s just that this is all happening so fast, like some kind of anti-James Bond scenario.”

  Vang smiled broadly, pleasantly surprised by the Bond comparison. Maybe it brought up some kind of memory from the old man’s childhood, Paul thought.

  “How exactly do you mean?” Vang asked eagerly.

  “Instead of the billionaire telling Bond how he intends to destroy the world and kill Bond—” Paul began.

  “Here I am, another billionaire, telling you how I intend to save the world,” Vang said, nodding enthusiastically.

  —and give me a reason to go on living, Paul thought, though he did not say it.

  “Right,” Paul said. “I guess what we’ve talked about smacks of the same sort of great man’s conspiracy theory of history, for me anyway. I’ve never believed in such theories. People just can’t plan that thoroughly, or keep secrets that long.”

  Vang smiled slyly, but then covered it with a shrug.


  “The greatest conspiracy is the one that says there are no conspiracies,” Vang said, handing him a phone. “Think of this as a conspiracy for good, if you like. We have taken the liberty of running the contract past your lawyer, particularly in regard to the clauses on intellectual property rights. We have her on the line. Here—”

  Vang handed him the phone. Paul talked to Sarah Campbell, his legal advisor in the all-too-recent debacle with his former university employer. She very much approved of the contract and spoke forcefully in favor of it. Paul handed the phone back to Vang, who nodded and gave it to Athena Griego, who appeared again in her B-58 Hustler stewardess’s dress, seemingly out of nowhere.

  “Ms. Griego is our agent and witness in this matter,” Vang continued, handing Paul an electronic stylus. “If you feel confident enough of the document to sign, please do.”

  Without another thought and with only a glance at the fish in the aquarium, Paul signed. Vang smiled broadly and shook his hand again.

  “Welcome aboard indeed, Dr. Larkin. Happy to have you with us. My ghost ship is at your disposal. We will send someone for your car. Where would you like to go?”

  “West,” Paul said, lost in thought. “Oh, and I left an empty bottle of Scotch on the sand when you stopped for me. If someone might pick that up—”

  Vang nodded. The sound of the invisible dirigible’s engines rose slightly as it pivoted on its axis. The spore print, folded in paper enfolded in plastic, hung lightly over Paul’s heart inside his vest pocket, invisible with Paul inside the belly of Vang’s stealthy machine, heading west at a tenth of the speed of sound, rising into night above the Sierra Nevadas.

  * * * * * * *

  Weird-Wired

  Jiro sat bolt upright. He knew that he was dead, but his mouth still worked.

  “!begursprocketbombonanacatl?” he mouthed. He was trying to say how, if you try to throw your arms around the world, they’ll nail you to a cross and say it was a workplace accident because you were employed as a carpenter. “?losangelatintinnabiledictu!” He thought he was saying how, if you try to communicate your uncomfortable piece of the truth, they’ll assassinate you for it for your own peace of mind.

  “Jeez, Jiro!” Seiji said angrily from his bed in the dark bedroom they shared. “You’re talking in your sleep again! Wake up, for God’s sake!”

  “Wha—?”

  “You were talking in your sleep,” Seiji said again. “Go back to sleep.”

  Silence. Then Jiro blurting, “Was not!” before he fell horizontal again. He felt his eyelids closing, but now he fought against sleep, trying to make sense of his night visions.

  He had dreamed of a religion of flowers, not a religion of blood. A religion of bees, not a religion of ashes.

  He’d better not tell anyone about it, he thought. He still remembered how, back in second grade, he had scandalized the nuns at Guardian Angels School when they found him wandering around on the school playground with his arms stretched out like a soaring bird, like an eagle dancer, like Christ on the cross. The nuns were supposed to be brides of Christ, but apparently they preferred their spouse safely gone from the flesh—and they’d carefully punished Jiro for his imitation reincarnation of their groom.

  Maybe he really was “weird-wired,” as the neighborhood kids in every neighborhood he’d ever lived in had so often suggested in their not-so-subtle ways. Always their had been the strange mismatches, the overlaps, and double exposures in his picture of the world. The nights of sitting suddenly bolt-upright in bed, spewing streams of seemingly incoherent speaking-in-tongues gibberish, were bad and never infrequent enough—it drove his brother Seiji crazy—but that was nowhere near the beginning of his problems.

  Even as a small child he had not just seen and talked with imaginary friends but had experienced flashes of entire alternate realities, leakage from parallel worlds and other people’s dreams. He had never been able to put together what his parents told him with what the world told him, either. For as long as he could remember, whenever any reference to sex came up on the TV, in movies or holos, his mother always shut it away from her boys. Surely there must be something dirty and evil there, for his mother to always react so, but he had never been able to figure out precisely what it was.

  Jiro remembered a greenhouse summer evening six or seven years back, when he’d been tagging after Seiji and a neighbor kid, Rudy, as usual. When Seiji began to talk with Rudy about girls, Jiro had run home shouting and crying, “Mom! Mom! Seiji and Rudy are talking about sex!” After that, Seiji had looked at him with a mixture of fear and disgust.

  He was shy and backward and awkward. In the one-size-fits-all world, Jiro just didn’t fit in. He didn’t like seeing his own face in the mirror. Something about the widow’s peak in his dark, wavy hair, the wide-open innocence (always too soft and too lost) that his brown eyes imparted to his too-round face—all boyish to the point of femininity. He was good-looking for a boy, but too girlish to look like a man.

  In two years, when he finished his undergraduate degree in Computer Media Studies, he would be eighteen—a precociousness that hadn’t much helped. The mismatch was worst when it came to girls and dating and all the indecipherable rites of twenty-first century courtship. He pedestalized the girls from afar, unable to approach them. In his mind they were pure as bright shining light—brilliance that he would never dare darken with the shadow of his lust.

  Jiro took refuge in books and the net and the life of the mind. In his research and reading he had found a term for his condition: “socially maladroit.” Ever since he entered his teens, he had withdrawn more, cocooned himself. Socially, he had gone into cybernation, but that was okay. More and more people his age were doing that. All the experts said they would grow out of it.

  This was a world worth withdrawing from, what with the rise of the churchstaters and all. He glanced at one of Seiji’s obnoxious glow-in-the-dark holoposters, which showed a montage of humanity’s wars, murders, mayhem, fanaticism, famine, plagues and pollution, all being watched by wide-eyed, antennaed young aliens, the cautionary caption reading PROFESSIONALLY TRAINED STUNT SPECIES! DO NOT TRY THIS ON HOME PLANET.

  That about said it. The more arcane and the further away from mundane existence he got, the better. For years Jiro had been fascinated by birds, and from them he came to be intrigued by eagle dancers—then generally fascinated by Native Americans, by indigenous peoples of the New World and their lifeways. The walls of his side of the room were covered with full color holos of birds of prey, crowded with external memory media about New World indigenes. He had participated in online debates about the first arrival of humans in the New World, the old controversies surrounding Indian gaming, the reality or hoax of the South American tepui that had lifted off a decade and more ago—all manner of things distant enough to distract him from his daily 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 dom
inant 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.