Spears of God Read online

  Stranger still were the reports from Santa Elena de Uairén, the largest town in the Gran Sabana region of the Venezuelan state of Bolivar. These news items cited statements by Doctor Michael Miskulin and professor of ethnobotany Susan Yamada. The two had apparently stumbled on the massacre of members of a tribal group recently discovered in the tepui country thereabouts.

  Several linked sites revealed that the tribe’s neighbors, the Pemon, had long described these tepui people—variously called Mawari, Mawariton, and Imawariton—as “tall, shadowy man-shaped spirits” who possessed the ability to “beam” their thoughts into the minds of those who encountered them.

  The problem, Brescoll soon discovered, was that the Pemon were themselves far too Westernized. The more he read their accounts, the more and more they sounded like something out of The X-Files, with weird lights in the sky, sightings, crop circles, and abductions. The scientists Miskulin and Yamada, however, had at least managed to prove the existence of these Mawariton, if only to chronicle their extinction.

  Strangest of all, however, was the link to a highly debated lecture by Miskulin himself, on directed litho-panspermia, or Cosmic Ancestry:

  We should consider the possibility that most of the amino acids we’ve found encapsulated in fullerenes are not just the product of the partial combustion of meteoroids in the atmosphere, but function as prebiotic enzymatic material—prepackaged, as it were. The soccer ball–shaped, metadiamond cages of fullerenes make perfect packaging for such material, perhaps even for nanoparticles or nanobial organisms.

  Complexity is the trick that life uses to overcome entropy, so once such prebiotic programmed space-seeds encounter a planet with habitats for life, these prebiotics continue their evolution to living cells. Perhaps, if they encounter a planet with the potential for more complex life, their job is to help organize that environment to support a further growing complexity.

  There’s the rub, though. Not even metadiamonds are forever. If Cosmic Ancestors sent out prepackaged prebiotics—space-seeds—on random trajectories, then it’s likely that much of what they released into the vastness has fallen into stars and burned up, or has been drifting for aeons and become corrupted in other ways.

  Human genetic material, for all the complexity it has already achieved, likely still possesses a great deal of unrealized potential—more than either evolution or genetic engineering have been able to yet tap into.

  The entire history of humanity, in fact, strongly suggests that our code is corrupted, that we are lacking some key puzzle-piece for realizing our potential as a species. But what if, out there among the stars, is the missing piece of genetic programming that is essential for some next step here on earth? What if there is a higher level of evolution available in those genes lost to us here on earth, but still remaining to be discovered out there?

  Perhaps our fascination with the stars is in part a realization of a lack within ourselves. The good news is that the missing piece may still be available to us, not only around suns so many light-years distant, but also delivered 24/7 to our doorstep by Planetesimal Express.

  Long before the clip ended, cautionary flags began to rise in Jim’s mind. To him, panspermian hypotheses had always seemed prone to the copout of infinite regress: cosmic ancestors all the way down, the question of the origin of life endlessly deferred.

  There was something else Brescoll found more disturbing than that, however. The emphasis on “next” or “higher evolutionary” steps. The emphasis on the darknesses of human history, too, as proof that the species was missing or lacking something.

  Making up for some human “lack” or “flaw” was the sort of thing that had piqued the interests of secret societies throughout history. The Freemasons a few centuries back, Phi Beta Kappa in the 1700s, the Carbonari in the early nineteenth century, and, much more recently, the Instrumentality. That had nearly ended badly—very badly—even if it had put Brescoll in the position he occupied today.

  The Instrumentality people, especially their Tetragrammaton wing, used to be quite fond of making those kinds of noises. About the humanity after humanity. Making up the “difference” had been a goal of the Tetra types, particularly. Which was, in the end, the source of the rift within the Instrumentality itself—between the Kitchener faction, bent on keeping “man as man,” and the Tetra types, bent on fostering a cyborgized, posthuman humanity.

  Jim shook his head, remembering.

  As much as cosmic ancestor worship struck him as cargo-cult biology, however, machinic descendant worship struck him even more as cargo-cult sociology. He was glad the Tetra types had taken such a hit from the Kwok-Cho affair. Someone like this Miskulin fellow might have found their rhetoric of elitist saviorism more than a little seductive.

  Maybe they’d already gotten to him? Tetra was too large and interwoven with the social order to be entirely obliterated, after all. With Kwok and Cho gone, might they still be around in some less organized fashion, working on a new project to while away the time?

  But no; in this tepui incident Miskulin seemed somehow more a victim than a perpetrator. Jim could see how meteorites—stolen, or market-cornered, or worshipped, or whatever—tied in to all that cosmic ancestor stuff. But how could it possibly be relevant to the machine-descendant crowd?

  When he at last figured it out, it all felt too familiar—and with good cause.

  Brescoll had, some months back, gotten himself appointed to the joint committee charged with recruiting researchers for the DARPA Combat Personnel Enhancement Program. He’d wanted to keep an eye on any high-level posthuman push, and he figured that particular camel’s nose would show up in the supersoldier tent before it got in under the tent flaps anywhere else.

  He usually didn’t have much trouble with such joint committee work. DoD, State, they were generally okay with him, but there had always been something about the CIA. Too many operatives in the Company had too much torture-chamber time for him to feel all that comfortable with career ghost-warriors—especially when the politicians meddled with their work. Of course, the same could be said about the covert “Strategic Support” and “Special Planning” offices at the Pentagon, and elements of NSA’s own history too, particularly the presidentially mandated “special access” electronic surveillance of the previous decade, but those were aberrations within the overall structure….

  Wasn’t one of the researchers recruited for the DARPA program somebody already working on meteorites? Isolating exotic biologicals from them? He seemed to recall such a job description.

  Brescoll took off the AR glasses and rubbed his face. He stared at the ARGUS blinks in his hand. He knew what the acronymn stood for, of course—Augmented Reality Graphical User Spectacles, web-linked—but it was still an odd name, when he thought about it. Wasn’t the whole thing about Argus, the hundred-eyed watchman of Greek myth, the fact that he didn’t blink? That at least some of his eyes were always open?

  Planet Earth, it seemed to him, had increasingly become an Argus planet, never completely closing all its eyes anywhere. The intelligence community was no small part of that growing wakefulness—the agency he himself headed, too, especially in the area of electronic intelligence. Pictures of many of NSA’s older worldwide listening posts now hung in the halls and on the walls of offices here in Crypto City—images of nondescript government and military buildings surrounded by satellite-dish chalices, by mushroom puffball and geodesic golfball radomes hiding their eavesdropping antennas.

  NSA’s sky-eye builder, the National Reconnaissance Office, was also a big part of the Argus Effect, with its Keyhole-and Lacrosse-class satellites, its computers combining multiple-angle satellite imaging from both its photographic and radar sources among the sky-eyes and ears.

  And the brains behind those eyes and ears. The human ones—the cryptolinguists and crypto computer scientists like Wang at Princeton, the physical scientists and infotheorists like Lingenfelter at the University of Maryland. Most important, the thousands of mathematici
ans and linguists, analysts and engineers and technicians, codemakers and codebreakers who took the off-ramp from the Baltimore-Washington Parkway to their everyday secret jobs in Crypto City, not far from the much smaller and less covert town of Annapolis Junction, Maryland.

  The machine brains, too. The forerunners of an ultimate cryptoanalytic device, a “universal key” for breaking all codes. Out of the search for that grail had come all the strangeness of the Kwok-Cho affair.

  The whole dark side of the quantum cryptologic arms race and its assorted potential catastrophes. The conflict with the secret Special Computing Institutes, China’s “Bletchley Park,” driven by their goal of countering American hard-tech superiority through targeted “soft” or information-war programs.

  Even the SCIs releasing hunter-killer programs against the human world’s most advanced machine-intelligences, however, had been small potatoes compared to what had happened during Ben Cho’s almost globally apocalyptic transcendence. The cover story Brescoll had himself helped cobble together—in the perhaps vain hope of explaining away the whole series of events—suggested that a number of short-lived “control failures” in military and civilian systems led to a bad synergy of computer warfare errors, which in turn very nearly brought on a genuine shooting war between the United States and China.

  The two countries had sealed off their respective force-field blister zones and named them Mutual Assured Quantum Cryptologic Security Stations—the MAXX, as the guard troops called the one in California—the existence of which was supposed to guard against such “bad synergies” in the future.

  True, the MAXX was somehow ensuring quantum cryptologic security, but no one knew how that was being achieved, exactly. Especially when—given this message Markham, Benson, and Le Moyne had sent him—those inside the U.S. MAXX, at least, could breach that same security at any time of their choosing. No one knew how they were able to do that, either.

  If Brescoll knew how flimsy that cover story really was, he had to assume at least a few other people did, too. The world had dodged the big bullet, but who knew for how long? What if the whole affair wasn’t just about the PRC and the USA anymore?

  He put the blinks on his desk and rubbed his forehead, thinking of his predecessor, and of Argus. Janis Rollwagen was gone, taken out by the blind spot hidden in the very means she had used in hopes of avoiding all blind spots. She had become such a big spider in such a big web of information and intrigue that she lost touch with the reality to which that web was ultimately attached.

  He didn’t like killer blind spots himself—and the terrae incognitae under the force-field domes certainly showed a lot of potential in that direction. He hoped to avoid getting too distant from ground truth the way his predecessor had, but it wouldn’t be easy. The web of things for Argus to guard was bigger than ever, and it was ever easier to become a spider trapped in a web of one’s own making.

  Much to do, and much to delegate—although how much it would be safe to delegate he could not yet say. Rollwagen’s fate was a cautionary tale always warning him what might happen if too much of the hands-on part of this job was left in the hands of others.

  NSA Director Brescoll had no choice but to keep all his eyes, ears, and options open. No choice but to treat as real this dimly emerging new constellation in the mind’s sky. He set to work.

  THE MADNESS OF THE WORLD

  For a moment, Avram Zaragosa stared uncomprehendingly at the inscription. It stood on a heraldic banner, in the lower left-hand corner on the outside of a Book of Remembrances. The book was from his daughter’s memorial service.

  He will turn the hearts of the fathers to their children, and the hearts of the children to their fathers. Malachi 4:6.

  His daughter Enide had been only seventeen—the same age as Fatima Halabi, the Palestinian girl with the explosive device strapped to her waist. The detonation had killed five and wounded twelve at the Aquarius Discotheque in Jaffa.

  His estranged wife, Olivia, had opposed having their daughter join him on this trip, because of the danger.

  Enide, however, had been eager to go with him. He told Olivia that he didn’t think his daughter should have to live in fear.

  He assured her he had taken all the necessary precautions—he had himself lost a cousin to terror bombing, after all, so of course he was cautious. Security for the scientific delegation was absolutely solid. When they took trips separate from the group, Avram was always careful to take his daughter only on private tours, on private tour buses, to private tourist sites.

  He knew full well that life in Israel had a roulette-wheel quality to it—these days much more than when he had visited as a boy. In that long ago time, Israel had been a secular and socialist state, and the kibbutz had stood as a proud pillar of national security. Or so he and his parents had liked to think.

  Israel these days wasn’t so very different from what his native Argentina had once been, after all. His homeland was infamous worldwide for having once been the haven of Adolf Eichmann and many other Nazis after World War II. Few people realized that it had also been home to more than half of Latin American Jewry, and the first choice of Theodor Herzl, the founder of modern Zionism, when he was contemplating a place for the Jewish homeland.

  Avram’s family were secular Jews rather than observant, yet they, too, had known terror. When he was a boy, the Argentinian military dictatorship that ruled from 1976 to 1983 had caused more than thirty thousand people to disappear. A disproportionate number of them, over two thousand, had been Argentinian Jews. His parents, always quiet academics and even more quiet leftists, had found good reason to be more soft-spoken than usual during those years.

  In the last decade of the twentieth century the Israeli embassy and the building housing AMIA—the Argentina Israelite Mutual Aid Association—had both been bombed, with much loss of life. Avram’s firebrand cousin Enide, for whom his own daughter had been named, had died in the AMIA bombing, all her passion and rage for justice notwithstanding.

  In the first decade of the new century, the Libertard Synagogue in Buenos Aires had been likewise leveled. Hezbollah and affiliated terror groups had taken credit for the destruction.

  Nor had it been unheard of for Argentinian Jews to die in Israel. Many who told the story of the brave fifty-one-year-old security guard, Julio Magran, and the fifteen-year-old bystander, Gaston Perpinal—both Argentinian and both killed in the same suicide bombing attack—spoke of it as if it had happened yesterday, rather than years and years ago.

  Madness, all madness.

  He had responded to those events with the same revulsion he once felt at the news that American-born Israeli Baruch Goldstein had walked into a prayer hall and gunned down dozens of Palestinian Muslim Arabs while they were at worship.

  Yet for all his awareness of the world’s madness, he had not thought that the terror would ever strike so close. Certainly not when he and his daughter parted on the street, Avram going to a bookstore for coffee and a paper, Enide going to the Aquarius for an hour with Ilana, a girl she had befriended on the tour.

  Not when he thought he heard thunder from a cloudless sky, ten minutes later. Not when he knew it was an explosion.

  Not even when he found himself running in the direction his daughter had gone, just a few moments before.

  Running. Through a strange silence punctuated by the sounds of men yelling in anger and urgency, of women wailing in despair. Growing closer. Until he came upon the rubble of what used to be the Aquarius, transformed now into a nightmare land of horribly bloodied and wounded young people staggering about, dazed and in shock, gasping in a cloud of slowly settling dust.

  Not even stopping when he saw the look in Ilana’s eyes—Ilana the still living, tended by yellow-vested emergency personnel. Ilana, who had suffered the passage of ball bearings through her skull and brain.

  Ilana, once bright and independent, who would henceforth be neither.

  Then, in a street strewn with blasted brickwork and blood
y rags and body parts, he came to a dead stop. Because he recognized the shoe—the low-heeled sandal still strapped, the golden anklet above it still clasped, around a foot and ankle and lower leg still perversely perfect and young and vital, until it ended abruptly in ragged slaughterhouse meat and bone and blood, just below what would have been the knee.

  The rest of the girl’s body was simply gone, vanished, blown to pieces too small to readily identify.

  He tried not to think that this was his daughter. He tried to look about him for other pieces of this poor unfortunate. Perhaps he could be of help to the emergency services people, the forensics people, the mortuary people. He was a geochemist who specialized in meteoritics and impact geology. He knew something about strewnfields, about blast patterns….

  When at last he could not deny any longer the great and horrible proof that lay before him, he picked up the severed leg, tenderly, tentatively. Slowly he turned it so he could see the gold anklet more clearly.

  The clasp was in the shape of entwined dolphins, the square golden letters spelled out ENIDE.

  Embracing the severed limb, cleaving to it as if to force it to become part of his own body, he howled into the evening gloom reddened by dust and twilight. The emergency people could not pry the limb from him—no words either, beyond “My daughter, my daughter!”

  Only when the forensics people came did anyone manage to finally free the remains of his daughter from him—a wrenching parting, for by then the blood from the leg, smeared into his shirt, had dried enough that it was almost necessary to cut his shirt free to take the limb away.