Better Angels Read online

  For all their grace and fluidity, however, Jacinta could not escape the sense that what she was looking at were indeed purely machines, albeit mechanisms of a design exquisite almost beyond imagining. After much rippling and flashing among the welcoming party of ten or twelve craft, the largest of the ships darted forward and extended its arms in a probing caress of the sphere of force surrounding the tepui. Satisfied somehow, the ship became very purposeful and machine-like, diving rapidly downward. Behind it, wrapped in the strange ship’s limbs, the forcefield-ensphered tepui followed along—a bubble being dragged by a diving-bell spider down to its silken-roped underwater air chamber.

  The ship, with tepui in tow, plunged on—toward the great ring that bounded the lens of soft rainbow fire, toward the lens that rotated about the central sphere. Soon, Jacinta could make out details on the surface of the spin ring. Even this thin rotor-edge of the entire vast Allesseh was imposing enough, as if an immense coral reef and a superconducting supercollider had been mated with a night-lit city thousands of kilometers wide and several kilometers thick.

  Soaring over the lights of the spincityscape, however, Jacinta and the ghost people could appreciate its complexity for only a few moments. Ahead, near what Jacinta guessed was the axis of rotation for the enormous ring, a great blue door blossomed open to receive them.

  The squidship released them. The ensphered tepui fell as unerringly into the opening as a bee into a long-throated lily. The tepui and its inhabitants fell and fell, until the eye of a god melted them into light sweeter than any nectar, and they were gone.

  * * * * * * *

  The Secret Experiment of Sex

  “Egan!” Paul Larkin said, after the doctors and nurses had left, calling over to a blond man with short-cropped hair, a Van Dyck beard and faux eyeglasses. “You’re the liaison to Tetragrammaton for Lilly-Park, aren’t you?”

  The younger man on the treadmill three units over looked at him narrowly.

  “Not so loud,” Egan said as the treadmill—long since programmed by unseen medical personnel—rose in pitch, both in its angle of steepness and in the frequency of its motor’s sound. “That’s right, I am. Is there a problem?”

  “Maybe,” Paul said with a shrug. “Yesterday evening I got an unsolicited web sticky-bomb. A unfinished documentary called The Five Million Day War. By a woman named Cyndi Easter.”

  Egan Ortap gave him a pained look.

  “She must be out of re-education again,” Ortap said quietly, absently stopping his right hand before he could scratch at one of the electrode disks stuck to his chest.

  “You know her?” Paul asked. His treadmill sped up of its own accord and the pressure cuff on his left bicep inflated automatically. Somewhere a sphygmomanometer recorded his systolic and diastolic pressure as the cuff deflated.

  “Not personally, no,” Ortap said. “Only by reputation.”

  “Who is she?”

  “Some crazy political filmmaker,” Ortap said. “Subversive type. During the last crackdown, she got sent up for drugs or child molestation or whatever the cover charges were at the time. Sounds like she’s on the loose, if she’s sticky-bombing people through the infosphere.”

  As he listened, Paul could feel on his chest and sides the scratchy pressure of the plastic limpets of the cardio-monitoring electrodes. They followed his every motion and threatened to follow his emotions as well—at least as well as those might be deduced from his heart rate.

  “Ms. Easter has some interesting things to say about Tetragrammaton,” Paul said, pounding along on the treadmill. “Confusing stuff, though. She says that this problem drug I’ve heard about in the media, Ketamine Lysergate-235, is extracted from our tepui fungus, Cordyceps jacintae. Of all the ‘combined tryptamines’ from the tepui our research has uncovered, though, I’ve never come across anything that would fit the name ‘ketamine lysergate.’ Sounds like some sort of joke or code name.”

  Ortap shrugged but said nothing. Glancing down at the treadmill, Paul continued.

  “What I really don’t get,” he said, flicking a bead of sweat from his brow, “is that Easter claims she was exposed to this KL stuff while she was still in her mother’s womb.”

  “And?” Ortap prodded, carefully.

  “And from what I’ve seen in the docu-film she bombed me with,” Paul continued, “Easter’s got to be well along in her twenties at least. That documentary looks a couple years old, too. That means her mother would probably have to have been given this KL-235 as early as the 1980s.”

  “Which means—?” Ortap asked, as his treadmill sped up again.

  “My sister Jacinta didn’t make her first trip to Caracamuni until 1995,” Paul said. “I didn’t obtain a copy of the spore-print until 2002. And I didn’t go to Damon and Griego and Vang with the spore-print until a couple of years ago, 2012. So how could this KL stuff have been extracted from Cordyceps jacintae thirty years before Cordyceps jacintae was even studied in a lab? It doesn’t make sense.”

  Ortap laughed—a bit breathlessly, given how fast his treadmill was moving.

  “Of course it doesn’t,” he said. “What did you expect? Unless you’re a Kennedy you’d have to be pretty paranoid to think your family was the subject of a conspiracy—or that your life and everything that’s gone wrong with it is a product of a secret experiment. So far as I can tell, having sex was the only secret thing my parents did to having me. Everybody’s life is a product of that ‘secret experiment’.”

  Ortap inhaled heavily, then wiped sweat from his face with his right bicep in such a way that the latter motion degenerated into a shrug.

  “Easter is a paranoid crazy,” Ortap continued, “with a vendetta against the Tetragrammaton project in general and Dr. Vang in particular. She’d be the last person in the world to give you the straight story on anything.”

  Paul looked aside, to the cardio monitor where his heartbeats were rendered in electronic stitchwork.

  “What’s her problem with Vang?” he asked.

  “You’ve got me there,” Ortap said, increasingly breathless. “Maybe ol’ Vang did her mother and dumped her, or something. Don’t worry about it. We’ll shoot down her bird. The people in power don’t cotton to infobombers, if you get my meaning.”

  Paul nodded. He was hardly a fan of the “new government” (now a couple of years old) and its privacy-invading ways, but this once it might actually be of help to him. He was also aware of Vang’s reputation as a womanizer, especially from his younger days.

  He would have liked to ask more about Vang and the new government, but Egan Ortap had turned away, clearly intent on keeping up with the pulse-pounding speeds and pitches his treadmill had now achieved.

  As he thought about what the liaison had said, Paul realized he wasn’t fully satisfied by Ortap’s explanations. True, a good deal of what Easter claimed in her documentary—among other things, that Tetragrammaton had “secretly administered experimental entheogens as ‘uterotonics’ to women in their first and second trimesters of pregnancy, in hopes that their babies might develop ‘unusual talents’“—sounded pretty conspiranoid and nutso. He didn’t have to stretch much to hear in those words some kind of warped reworking of that “Everybody’s life is a product of the secret experiment of sex” idea Ortap talked about. Yet, despite such lapses, the documentarist had mentioned the name of Vang’s own special project—Medusa Blue—and that was hardly common knowledge.

  Her Five Million Day War work-in-progress had interview footage with Vang himself—his usual spiel about human pattern-finding, schizophrenia, and consciousness. That certainly appeared to be genuine. Every time Paul had met and talked with Vang over the last couple of years, the man had gone on about overlap between natural and artificial information processing systems, especially about DNA as a Turing machine. In Easter’s interview with him, Vang’s conversation glided easily just about anywhere he ever wanted it to go, the same way it always did every time Paul had talked with the man personally.


  Word was that the “old man” was also heavily invested in—and sat on the boards of—numerous companies working on biological computing, especially “primordial soup” bioputers. When he gave Easter the interiew, Vang probably thought it would be good publicity for those interests and investments. Paul could think of no other reason why the billionaire would have consented to Easter’s questioning.

  A lot of the other people Easter had interviewed seemed to know a good deal about the relationships between psychoactive substances and neurotransmitters, too. With a sigh rendered ragged by his pounding along on the treadmill, Paul wished he’d learned more about neurophysiology. It was just too far outside his training and expertise.

  Then again, he had already managed to have three major careers—pretty good, for a man still in his forties. He remembered them all quite well—perhaps too well.

  Not very long after he had gone public with the tepui story, Paul’s station manager at KFSN Channel 30 had tried to get him to cease and desist on that front. His boss held a firm opinion that reporters were to report on the news—not be reported on as news themselves. Paul, however, had refused to be muzzled. When his contract ran out, he was “not rehired,” supposedly on the grounds that KFSN was a respectable news station and his flying mountaintop story was damaging to the credibility, respectability, and prestige of the station.

  Strangely, losing his job as a reporter had not hit him as hard as he first thought it would. As an undergraduate, with visions of becoming the next Eiseley or Sagan or Quammen, he had double-majored in Biology and Journalism, hoping someday to become a noted science reporter or popularizer of science. At the start, the TV news job as an “investigative reporter” had seemed a godsend.

  Whatever god had sent it, however, had also taken it away. Blocked on the journalism and telecommunications side, he went back to school—specifically to graduate school in Biology. The events at the tepui had kept itching at the back of his skull, pushing at him. He’d hit the books very hard in response. He quickly became something of an expert in the cryopreservation of threatened species—a wide-open field during the first decade of the third millenium.

  After completing his doctoral work at UC Santa Cruz, he did a postdoc at the Center for the Reproduction of Endangered Wildlife (CREW) at the Cincinnati Zoo Ark. He returned to California when he got a push-through appointment with the California State University system, a senior researcher position which was supposed to very soon result in a tenured professorship. Everything seemed to be falling into place for him at last—until the spectacle of the flying mountain reappeared in the fringe media.

  In some chatgroup somewhere, he thought, an editor or producer must have remembered or rediscovered the tepui story. Then the diggers began to dig. They discovered Paul’s current status as a serious university scientist—one who had, unfortunately, also previously made claims outside his professional field. Interest in the flying mountain began to build again, even in the more mainstream outlets, as the media’s echo-chamber effect took hold of the old story and breathed new life into it.

  All too soon he found himself besieged by phone, fax, email and street mail—with “requests” for interviews that too often sounded more like demands. When he had finally been cornered on campus by a particularly persistent young producer drumming for History’s Unexplained Mysteries, he refused to recant his previous statements on the tepui story.

  His comments, travelling the globe in waves moving at the speed of media, soon also carried him into emergency “discussions” with his department chair, school dean, academic vice president and university president. They too all wanted to muzzle him, to prevent him from speaking further to anyone on this “embarassing” issue. He refused. Annoyed at Paul’s obstinate refusal to sacrifice his piece of the truth for the sake of the university’s reputation, the university president—a short but very fit man with a full head of silvered hair—called Paul a “boor.”

  During his early days as a biology student, Paul had studied the territorial behavior of captive lowland gorilla groups in several California zoos and wild animal parks—particularly the behaviors of silverbacked alpha males. Dominant males had a nasty habit of flinging dung at human observers who looked at them too closely. Annoyed at being called a boor, Paul voiced an abrupt equation between the behavior of such silverbacked gorilla dung-flingers and silver-haired university presidents who engaged in ad hominem attacks.

  The president had found the analogy neither particularly amusing nor particularly flattering.

  The university’s chain of command very soon let him know, in no uncertain terms, that his career had derailed once more. The higher-ups promised him they would leave “no stone unturned” in seeing to it that he never got tenure at the university. They assured him that he would receive no positive recommendations once he was out on the job market again, either.

  When the academic year ended soon thereafter, Paul found himself reduced to the status of independent researcher, scrambling for work and funding wherever he could find it. His friends, too, quickly drifted away—all but Professor Damon, as it had turned out. That series of blows had brought him to a personal nadir—to the dark night of the soul when he had hoped to get drunk and wander off to die in the desert.

  Paul felt that Vang’s arrival in his invisible dirigible had quite literally saved his life. The Tetragrammaton consortium had gotten him a fine job with Lilly-Park as a biological researcher specializing in the preservation of pharmacologically valuable ethnobotanicals and zoologicals. This third career looked like the charm for the rest of his life—until Easter’s web-bomb hit his terminal this morning.

  He didn’t want to believe it. Certainly Easter’s chronology and the popular nomenclature for this KL-235 drug were all wrong. He couldn’t see Lilly-Park getting involved in covert drug work like that, either. The company was health-obsessed and drug-persecuting in the extreme—hence the treadmill cardio-tests the employees endured every six months, the frequent random urine tests, the blood tests.

  Those tests had initially irked Paul as an invasion of his bodily privacy, but since he had nothing to hide he felt he had nothing to fear. Lilly-Park, he was sure, could not be so duplicitous, so cynical and hypocritical as to persecute informed-consent drug use among its employees while simultaneously involving itself with Tetragrammaton in a scheme to foist powerful drugs onto an uninformed and unconsenting public, as Easter alleged Tetragrammaton had done.

  Pounding through the final speed run on the treadmill and starting to pour sweat, Paul felt his thoughts gravitating once more to the Easter material. That woman. She also seemed to know a damned good bit about Vang’s interest in technologies for getting around the lightspeed limit, too.

  Did he have something to hide? Something to fear? Perhaps his own fear of finding out something dark and deceitful about his gracious employers? Something that would make his continued employment with them ethically excruciating? No, he really, really didn’t want to know.

  “Have a good run,” Egan Ortap said, leaving his treadmill, his diagnostic run apparently over. As he passed Paul, Ortap whacked him on the shoulder and smiled. “Don’t worry about that Easter junk. We’ll take care of it.”

  Paul nodded distractedly as he held onto the read-console of the speeding treadmill. Despite the heat and exertion of his diagnostic run, something about Egan’s words and smile made Paul shiver. Too much friendly, make-those-trains-run-on-time efficiency to his banter. Ortap’s smile was likewise also too slick—bright and empty as the smiles of the used car dealers and hard shell preachers-turned-politicians who had taken over the country of Paul’s birth and jettisoned much of the old Constitution.

  We’ll shoot down her bird, Ortap had said. Paul’s shiver deepened. How did Egan know Easter’s stickybomb had appeared in the form of a white bird icon? Had Paul mentioned that? He didn’t think so—but then how could Ortap have known that detail?

  A tone sounded. The pitches of both speed and steepness on
the treadmill began to decline. Paul felt himself relax, at least slightly. The company doctors must have decided they had gotten all the data they needed from him for their reports—for now. The motor continued to slow and the bed of the treadmill to lower, to his considerable relief.

  Getting off the treadmill, Paul pondered Ortap’s words and his own future. Despite misgivings for his continued employment, he decided he would have to look up the actual structure of this KL 235. That was the only way he could be certain that Easter’s documentary was, in fact, a fiction.

  * * * * * * *

  Half Dome

  Seiji and Jiro rose in darkness from the city of Ash and passed through forested gates with the dawn.

  Beneath apple trees they left the world of the wheel, to pound up switchbacks with their heavy boots on.

  They clean-pumped water from above the falls. They dropped salt sweat on sand paths as they plodded higher, loving the tall pine shade when they found it, suffering the taller sun when they could not avoid it.

  They saw the snow on peaks all around. They read a metal thunderstorm warning sign that didn’t apply under a sky blue sky.

  They lifted their knees up stiff stone steps, until they viewed the much-pictured monument’s seldom-seen other face, its cracked and weathered brow.

  They pulled on gloves and hauled themselves up a giant’s spine—part bridge suspended by stanchioned and cabled steel, part ladder runged with dead trees’ bones—leading from earth to air over a tall frozen wave of stone.

  They felt their muscles going cramped, their throats going dry, their heads going dizzy, their nerves going frayed, until at last they walked out onto the summit, between the two halves of heaven.

  Not trusting their legs, they crawled on their bellies and looked over the edge into the abyss, long enough for the abyss to look back over the edge into them.