Better Angels Read online

  Taking a seat in a pucker-upholstered booth, Mike soon realized that the music coming over the speakers was thoroughly unrecognizable, weirdly distorted, reverbed, misdigitized. As he glanced at the menu, he wondered whether the KL was causing him to experience auditory hallucinations, or the bowling alley’s speaker system was monumentally screwed up, or both. Whatever the cause, it was a very discomfiting experience.

  A woman, garbed and made up like a waitress in Ming the Merciless’s favorite Marsside cafe, asked Mike what he would have. The exhaustion in the thin, overworked woman’s voice was faintly reassuring—an anchor of reality in the surreal world ballooning all around him. He ordered a shake and fries. When she turned toward the kitchen and left, he was sorry to see her go.

  There was only one person bowling, someone dressed in what, at this distance, looked like an orange prison jumpsuit. Even a solitary bowler’s game was more than noise enough for Mike in his current state, however. The dopplershifting of the ball rolling down the lane began to say strange things to him—the mouthed and muttered echoes, in some benighted crowd, of unseen actors speaking from a hidden stage, talking of mind viruses and science fiction religions and human fertility cults, telling him that the stars are gods and we are their ashen tears.

  Are alien abductions the Zeus rapes of our time? the dopplershifting asked him. Are humans the consciousness of the planet who kill the planet they are conscious of? Is a nervous breakdown like hitting the Reset or Restart button on the psyche?

  Is the gravediggers’ dirtpile the positive of the gravehole in the ground, or is the gravehole in the ground the positive of the dirtpile, viewed from the other side?

  His food came, blessedly breaking him out of the hastening downspiral of his thoughts. Mike ate, trying to concentrate on nothing but what he was eating. That activity, at least, was enough to fill his senses and his mind while the experience lasted.

  He had just finished eating, laid out his money for the bill, and leaned back to relax and digest, arms outstretched atop the curved back of the booth, when someone tapped him on the shoulder.

  “Hey,” said a pale, hippo-corpulent man dressed in orange prison coveralls, “want to bowl a few frames? Knock ’em dead?”

  Mike stared up at the man. His complexion was the color of bloated meat maggots. His eyes, behind his steel-rimmed spectacles, were the yellow-brown of grub worms’ heads. His visage squirmed under long, wild, muddy gray-white hair that seemed as unhealthfully alive as a nest of poisonous snakes. The man and his appearance struck paralyzing fear into Mike’s heart, so much so that he could only nod mutely in response to the bowler’s request.

  The pale, bloated bowler watched diligently as Mike traded his street shoes for bowling shoes, then signed for Mike to follow him. Walking along past the empty lanes, Mike could not help noticing that the pins were in fact people frozen in the same rigid, repeated stance. The bowling balls in the returns, too, were human skulls.

  Once they reached the lane on which the bloated bowler had been warming up, the game began. They bowled frame after frame. Mike felt terrible as he bowled each skull down the alley and sent the rigor-stiff pin-people flying—especially when he glimpsed the ghoulish, robo-zombie pinsetters working behind the scenes, then the reaper’s scythe coming down and clearing the pins at the end of each frame—but he bowled his absolute best nonetheless, sensing that quite literally everything was at stake.

  His pale, bloated opponent grew more and more furious as Mike maintained a slim lead into the final frames. At last the corpulent competitor could bear it no longer. In fit of rage the bloated, maggot-skinned man snatched off his glasses, ripped off his own head, stuck his middle and ring fingers into his eye sockets and his thumb into the mouth, then gave the ball of his head a carefully aimed and mighty heave.

  The flop-haired ball roared down the lane, shaking the whole building as it went—or rather, the world was shaken by the thunder not of one ball moving down one lane, but of infinite and innumerable bowling balls moving down infinite and innumerable lanes. The instant all those myriad balls struck their ten-times- myriad pins, a mighty blast obliterated everything, the explosion hurling Mike cruciform into the air, sending him flying until his left shoulder caught on something.

  “Hey,” said someone, shaking his shoulder. “Sir. Sir!”

  Mike woke to see, bent toward him, the waitress and a balding man in a dandruff-speckled suit with a tag that said KARL, MANAGER. Karl was shaking his shoulder and talking. “We’re glad you liked our food and feel so comfortable here, but if you want to go on sleeping you’re gonna have to find a hotel. Okay?”

  “Yeah,” Mike said, rubbing his eyes and mouth, looking around. The bowling alley was empty, except for the three of them. No one was bowling. “Okay.”

  Getting his gear together, he glanced at his watch and saw that he’d been asleep for nearly two hours. Getting up to leave, he noticed that the bowling alley now looked far more tawdry than surreal. Mike thought he must be coming down from the KL the driver had given him—a realization that brought him much relief, but also a little regret.

  He had trusted to the kindness of strangers and it had gotten him a night out bowling with Death. Are we having an adventure in moving yet? Mike asked himself with a smirk. He’d had enough adventure for one trip, and enough trip for one adventure. Before he walked out of Reno Lanes, he asked the waitress for directions to the nearest bus station. She was only too happy to provide them.

  * * * * * * *

  A Shadow on Her Present

  Catching Marty blissfully slow-convulsing on some perverse mix of alphanumeric chemicals—“delta nine and 5-MeO DMT,” as his trip-sitting derelict buddy Rick explained—had scared and infuriated Lydia at first. Now, however, with Mary okay and Rick ushered out of the apartment, Marty’s secret drug escapade and Lydia’s own unexpected return from a weekend out of town had combined to provide her with a pretext for something she should have done weeks before.

  “I’ll do whatever you want me to do,” Marty said, pleading with her.

  “I don’t want you to do whatever I want you to do!” Lydia said, shaking her curly dark hair vigorously about her head, letting him hear the frustration rising in her voice.

  She looked at Marty and saw his eyes filling and reddening to a very different color than his full head of red hair. Oh God, he was starting to cry on her. Obviously, their sleeping together for the last month and a half had meant considerably more to him than it had to her.

  “Look, Marty,” she said, taking him into her arms to comfort him and also so she wouldn’t have to see the tears that were beginning to trickle down his face. “I’ve really enjoyed the time we’ve had together, but your drugging out and hanging around with Rick just confirms what I’ve been thinking for a couple of weeks now. Your life’s just too chaotic. I’m afraid it could never work. I need stability in my life right now. We can’t keep going on this way. I hope we can still be friends, but we just aren’t compatible in the long run. You can see that too, can’t you?”

  He blubbered something that sounded affirmative. She gave a slight sigh of relief. This might turn out to be easier than she’d expected. She hugged Marty and comforted him for a while longer, thinking that she would never have gotten involved with a man nearly half a dozen years her junior—a second year graduate student in comparative literature, at that—if she hadn’t been on the rebound from breaking up with Tarik.

  Not that breaking up with Tarik had been a bad thing. Lydia had lived with him for nine years, after all. It had been because of Tarik that she’d moved to California from the East Coast in the first place. He’d wanted to pursue his ambitions as a folk-punk musician and she had been his overweight and insecure “biggest fan.” Not long after their arrival, she and Tarik had survived and bonded more deeply together amid the devastation wrought by the Great Los Angeles Earthquake, the so-called Niner Quake.

  Both of them had seen the madness of bright-shining angels and UFOs at that
time—and had been deeply relieved to learn that, the statements of UFO or angel believers notwithstanding, those sightings were most likely not supernatural but natural, side-effects of the earthquake’s sudden tectonic stress relief. The slippage of all those miles and depths of granite, with its embedded quartz, had piezoelectrically generated high-amplitude electromagnetic disturbances. The concomitant electromagnetic energy bursts had affected the interpretative cortex in the temporal lobes of hundreds of thousands of individuals—Lydia and Tarik among them—causing them to see lights and angels in the sky.

  Even that strange bonding had worn off eventually, however. Living through the Great Quake and its aftermath had changed her. Her own dormant ambitions had reawakened. Within weeks of the quake, she took up running. She lost forty pounds in six months. She kept running and kept the weight off. She enrolled in a joint graduate program in biochemistry and paleontology, working toward a doctoral specialization in paleogenetics. Her presentations and articles on her work with DNA samples, taken from the Harlan’s ground sloth remains at Rancho La Brea, had made a big splash at Page Museum conferences and in the online journals. Her future seemed assured.

  Tarik’s career, meanwhile, had gone absolutely nowhere. His folk-punk ethic made both the idea of working a day job and the idea of achieving financial success as a performer equally distasteful to him. The fact that Lydia’s own brother, Todd, was a success in the music industry only made things worse. To Tarik, Todd Fabro was “that pop sellout” and he bristled at any offer of help from that quarter. Tarik was determined to be an artiste endlessly perfecting his art for his art’s sake—while Lydia supported both of them.

  Once she’d finally decided that living with him was worse than being alone, Lydia made up her mind that they should dissolve their household and—over Tarik’s truculent and petulant objections—they had. Freed of Tarik, however, she found that she did not much like being alone. She didn’t like it at all.

  Temporarily homeless, Lydia found herself living on her friend Kathryn’s living room futon. Above and beyond that, her research was threatened. The recently elected “New Commonweal” majority in Congress, along with the NC governor in Sacramento, had begun to shut off funding for any further research at Rancho La Brea, on the grounds that the tar pits research was “Darwinian” and therefore inherently “anti-Biblical.”

  As far as Lydia could tell, the New Commonweal interpretation of the separation of church and state held that, if government moneys could not be used to promote religion, neither could they be used to attack religion. On coming to power, the new churchstaters slashed funding for any research they interpreted as supporting an evolutionary viewpoint. Lydia only hoped she could finish up the last of her doctoral research before the New Commonweal people took over the government altogether and prohibited outright any and all further research at the tar pits.

  In the midst of all this personal and political turmoil, she had met Marty, tall and muscular and handsome, as well as charmingly innocent and naive in ways Tarik had never been. Marty was Kathryn’s office mate in Comp Lit, which was how Lydia had met him. He was single, quite unattached, a big happy overgrown boy. She had gathered him to her with astonishing swiftness and ease, and he had served as an anodyne to her loneliness—at least for a time.

  Now, however, she sat hugging and rocking the big (and, at the moment, unhappy) young man in her arms on the edge of the bed, wondering how she could have stayed involved with him as long as she had. True, for a while he had been a good hedge against Tarik, who had kept showing up at odd times for odd reasons. Lydia had fantasized more than once that they would fight over her, but it had never happened. Now that Tarik had at last moved back east, it was less likely to occur than ever.

  Even as she attempted to soften the blow of her dumping him, Lydia knew that she did not need Marty any longer. He was in fact turning into something of a burden and embarassment. Tomorrow she was scheduled to move in with two of her fellow female doctoral candidates, so she would no longer need to be living with Marty in order to have a place to stay. Her soon-to-be-roommates, too, had already let Lydia know that in the mate-selection races they thought she could do much better for herself than her current boytoy.

  Now, with the recent slight thawing in attitudes from Washington and Sacramento, the tar pits and the Page Museum did not seem quite so likely to close down before she finished her doctoral research, either. Things had begun looking up for her. Gazing at the mirror opposite the bed, Lydia Fabro saw the gray that had already begun to shimmer in her dark curls, here, too soon after her thirtieth birthday. Time to start tinting and highlighting that right out, she thought. That would take care of that. She didn’t need to sleep with a young master’s candidate to boost her self-confidence any longer—and she’d be damned if she were going to support Marty through graduate school the way she’d already supported Tarik for years.

  One more night, she thought. Maybe a farewell fuck for the sake of friendship and old times, but come morning she’d be done and Marty would no longer be a shadow on her present—only a memory from a quickly receding past, a fantasy of secret recklessness for that foreseeable future in which she had begun to grow a bit bored with the stable and responsible Mister Right she fully believed she would eventually marry.

  Before Lydia had even finished comforting Marty, she was already living in that future, he was already in the past.

  CHAPTER TWO

  THE EYE OF GOD

  —risk madness to reach truth? Jacinta was thought as Caracamuni tepui re-entered normal spacetime. Looking about her, she saw that all the ghost people looked exhausted. Old Kekchi seemed particularly drained—so tired as to be almost comatose. The quartz collecting columns still hovered in the air, but their pulsing had become much quieter.

  What were those columns doing now? she wondered. Maintaining the bubble of force around the tepui top? Or something more?

  Deciding that the ghost people were too dazed by their exertions to be able to tell her much, she left the Cathedral Room and went looking in the cave tunnels for the electronics gear she had brought with her to Caracamuni. At last she found what she had been looking for: monitors wired out to the surface, showing several views from cameras out on the tepui’s top.

  The foreground in the first monitor was at least familiar in its alienness: the dense stone forest of balance rocks and pinnacles, columns and arches, the geological ruin from which time and wind and water had dreamed the surreal temples and cathedrals of an erosion city out of the stone of the tepui’s top, back on Earth. In the background, however—beyond the faint shimmer of the field of force ensphering the tepui—was something neither Jacinta nor any other human had ever seen: a sky so thick with stars that it was hard to find darkness there.

  Examining the other monitors, she soon realized that what she had seen on the first monitor was a perspective looking down toward the center of a spiral galaxy’s great disk, probably from a few thousand light years above that center. Linking nearby space to the center of the galactic disk was a flood of softly glimmering light, like a cross between a distant lighthouse beam and a waterfall turned fountain.

  Most of that beam-fountain, however, seemed to appear from and disappear into the celestial object nearest the tepui—a vast lens of ghostly fire, framed at its edges by a ring that appeared to be millions of kilometers in circumference and probably thousands wide. Biomechanical-looking somehow, the entire construction—lens and ring—rotated on its axis about what appeared to be a rapidly spinning mirror-sphere. Strangely,it made Jacinta think of an enormous machine, some sort of generator of cosmic proportions, for which the beam-fountain served as either exhaust or fuel feed—she couldn’t say which with certainty. Despite its great size, however, the whole structure had a certain living fragility, as if a bubble of mercury metal had been suspended inside a spinning hoop of faintly rainbowed liquid fire.

  While Jacinta had been watching the awesome sight before her on the monitors, Kekchi a
nd several of the other tepuians had quietlyjoined her. A tired but happy buzz began to pass among them, though they said no words. She looked questioningly at Kekchi.

  “Allesseh,” the Wise One explained. “At long last. All the high roads lead here. Open a portal, there you go, here you are.”

  They and the tepui surrounding them seemed to be falling toward the rainbow lens as it spun around its central, higher-albedo sphere. As they came closer, Jacinta began to discern a rough sphere of bright points outside the turning hoop, points flickering as they reflected the pale fire of the Allesseh itself. She thought they might be small moons or asteroids, until several of them detached from their loose spherical formation and moved purposefully toward the tepui.

  “Looks like we’ve been spotted,” Jacinta said, thinking aloud. “They’re sending a welcoming committee.”

  The ships—if that’s what they were—approached them with remarkable grace and fluidity, as if they were swimming through the sea of space. The craft were shaped like jellyfish and squid and mushrooms all at once. At the same time, they also looked like nothing she had ever seen.

  The ships’ forward sections, shaped rather like half-opened mushroom caps, were not static but instead pulsed rhythmically like jellyfish bells, or even jetted, like squid. Each ship’s gill-cap forward section carried, behind it, a stemlike middle section. This was followed in turn by tentacular masses, at once as complexly connected as mycelia, as free-floating as jellyfish tentacles, and as tactile, graceful, and controlled as octopus arms. Patterns of color rippled and played over the surface of the ships, more like the sensitive communication patterns of giant cephalopods than the rigorous flashing of aircraft lights or movie UFOs.