Better Angels (33 page)

Why did he think that, “not worth killing for”? More than just his Quakerism, Paul thought. It had many times flashed into his head, a memory of the future, the primary tenet of an as-yet-unrealized covenant. Kal, by his decision to join the Freedom Army, had shown he disagreed with that idea. Paul himself couldn’t say with absolute certainty why he felt as he did. Perhaps, deep down, he believed that, if he was killed by someone else, only his body would suffer damage—but, if he himself killed another, then he would do grievous harm to his immortal soul. But that argument sounded too theological by half.

Paul smiled. He was too old to be trying to solve the Big Questions of his college days, but here he was. He looked again at the latest brochure he’d received publicizing life in the orbital habitat.

Maybe that’s the place for you after all, you old utopian, he thought. The perfect world for imperfect people.

* * * * * * *

The Angel’s Shoulder Blade

Everything about this coming summer is temporary, Jiro thought one Friday night in late May as he pedaled home from the Wild World sporting goods store.

He had come back to the west for summer vacation from what he hoped would be the last of his seemingly interminable grad-school and post-doc years at MIT. And yes—to work at the newly re-opened Tar Pits with Lydia, to feel again the joyful pain of being in constant close proximity to someone he could only love from afar.

With his brother Seiji he was living in the Riverside section of Balaam sharing the cramped space of a “mother-in-law” house, a small cottage apartment free-standing behind Kokinos the landlord’s place. Seiji had rented the apartment only temporarily while he was training in Palm Springs on the new solar panel designs. The solar units were destined, like Seiji himself, for that never-quite-finished place in space with the many names—Orbital Habitat, Orbital Park, High Orbital Manufacturing Enterprise or Manufactured Environment or whatever HOME stood for—which Seiji had been ping-ponging back and forth to for years. Come next year’s rotation, however, his brother was emigrating there for good, or so Jiro gathered.

Seiji had chosen the place in Riverside because it was halfway between his own work in Palm Springs and Jiro’s work at the Tar Pits—forethought which Jiro appreciated. To show his appreciation, Jiro had come up with a plan to break the hot, overcrowded, smoggy tightness of late spring in Balaam—a plan to which Seiji had readily assented.

Almost everyone calls it BALAAM, now, Jiro thought as he wheeled into Kokinos’ driveway. Bay Area Los Angeles Aztlan Metroplex. Especially since the Freedom Army pushed out the theocrats. Even Seiji, usually a stickler for tradition, used the newer term.

At the Wild World two nights ago, Jiro picked up a datawire on hiking trails in the Southern Sierra. The trailheads were all in this World Forest or that World Park, near towns with names like Lone Pine and Independence. Reading the trail descriptions aloud, Jiro had no trouble convincing his older brother that a largely unpremeditated jaunt to the Onion Valley-Kearsarge Pass area would be just the thing to break the Balaam blues.

Seiji stood leaning against Jiro’s battered all terrain hovercar, arms crossed, as Jiro locked up his bike. Jiro had to glance at him a second time. He was always caught off-guard by the way Seiji looked since he’d grown that fringe-beard—like he was Amish or Mennonite or something

“I got the lures for the trout lakes,” Jiro said, “and a handlight and collapsible fishing pole for you. Straightforward and simple. No fancy stuff—no hiking augments, no lift boots, no ultralight backpacks, no fractal topographic route imagers, no solarsheet electric tents—nothing. We just stop for battery charge on the car and away we go.”

“Lead on, Geronimo,” Seiji said as they got into the car. “This is your tour. Guide it.”

The battery charge-up done, they hovered along through the night for hours, over the Cajon Pass to 395, past Red Mountain and Johannesburg, past Mojave and Olancha and a dozen ghost towns up the Owens Valley, the whole place reduced to a desert of dust storms and alkali flies by the unquenchable thirst, first of Los Angeles alone and now of all Balaam. On their left the Sierras surged up, the eastern slope rising swift and massive into moonlight not quite bright enough to distinguish where snow-capped mountaintops ended and distant, mountainous silver clouds began.

Off 395 they took a road that arrowed toward the long line of peaks. The more the road rose in elevation, however, the less straight it became, until for the last several miles it switchbacked into tangles again and again like a poorly-drawn circuit diagram. By the time Jiro’s battered slant-six Rakugo finally crunched to a dusty stop on the gravel of the trailhead, they’d risen from desert to high, wind-beaten pines.

“Damn! It’s cold!” Seiji said when they got out and stretched. Jiro nodded. They were ill-prepared for the temperature change—two guys fresh from the ’burbs, Seiji dressed only in summery lederhosen and sport shoes, Jiro in sleeveless shirt and work pants and close-toed sandals.

“Yeah, but just look at those stars!” Jiro said, too excited to feel the cold.

“They’re beautiful, all right,” Seiji replied, craning back his head and whistling softly. “Big and sharp and clear. You can see the whole arch of the Milky Way.”

“It’d be even better if the moon weren’t up,” Jiro said, “or if it weren’t so full.”

“Better for stargazing maybe,” Seiji said, stamping his feet to keep warm, “but not for us. Good to have a little moonlight to see by. Come on, let’s get our fishing gear out of the hover and hit the trail. I’m freezing just standing here.”

Collapsed fishing rods in hand and mini-tackleboxes in pocket, they made their way up a path that led north and east away from the trailhead. Seiji clicked the handlight on and off at intervals, trying to determine whether its feeble light was more a help or hindrance to them in trying to follow the trail by the light of the moon.

Jiro felt better without artificial light, finding his way by the light of the moon and stars. In one of his moon-following moments he came around a switchback bend and saw a broad band of silver slanting across the trail.

“Snow,” Jiro said.

Seiji flicked on the handlight to make sure.

“We’re going to be hiking through snow, dressed like this,” Seiji said. By the light falling from the sky Jiro could just make out the silhouette of his brother shaking his head. “Maybe you think you’re some kind of reincarnated indigene, but not me. Hope your memory’s good from your previous life.”

“There’s a clear trail trampled in it,” Jiro said. “It’s probably only patches of snow—shouldn’t be a problem.”

As they switchbacked higher and higher, the infrequent patches of snow become more frequent, so frequent that soon it was the clear ground that was coming only in patches, and then no clear ground at all. Out of that place where the jagged, broken bowl of mountain peaks met the star-inlaid bowl of the sky, a freezing wind started to gust down toward them, fitfully, but then more frequently.

“Ranging the ranges, climbing the climbs,” Seiji said, perhaps hoping that talking would keep his mind off the cold. “You love this stuff, don’t you, Jiro?”

“Always have,” Jiro said, picking his way upward along the switchbacking trail, through the dark, between the snow and the stars. “When we’re hiking in the mountains, truths get spoken that don’t get spoken elsewhere.”

Seiji’s handlight flashed out its beam again for a moment, bouncing off rocks and trees and snow.

“Maybe,” he agreed tentatively, “but even in the mountains, have you ever asked yourself why it is you go to the mountains? Why this desire to ‘head for the hills’ again and again?”

Jiro paused at a switchback bend and looked out over the dark Owens Valley, toward the White Mountains on the other side, their horizon a broken line against the stars

“It’s more ‘hills for the head,’ really,” Jiro said, not bothering to explain.

“What do you mean?” Seiji asked after a moment.

“Didn’t you ever wonder why it is that on Earth so many sacred sites have been mountains, so many mountains have been sacred sites?” Jiro asked. “Why the monasteries in the Himalayas, the old sacred high countries of Nepal and Tibet, the Inca temples up in the Andes?”

“Why?” Seiji asked, kidding him along a bit. “Some local ‘spirit’ of mountain places, maybe?”

“No, not that,” Jiro replied. He had thought about it before. “Look at all those stars. The sky is crowded with them. It’s beautiful. You can never see a night sky like that in a city on the plain.”

Seiji stamped his feet a bit against the cold as he looked up at the stars.

“Growing up in the cities,” he said, “we always had too much streetlight and junk in the air, interfering. You don’t even know the night sky can look like this. No wonder everything’s screwed up. We’ve lost touch with this.”

“The night sky is holy,” Jiro said, fervently. “Sacred. And hardly anybody sees it anymore. We’re all too busy kicking up our little dust and making our little fire down here. But the stars will still be here, even if there’s nobody left to look at them.”

“That would be a waste,” Seiji said, stamping his feet harder against the cold. “Look! A shooting star!”

“Wow—that was a big one!” Jiro said. The cold was getting to him a bit, too, so he started up the trail again.

“Seeing this sky almost makes you believe there must be some kind of divine mind behind it all,” Seiji said. “Not just an ‘emergent property’ or ‘self-organizing dynamical system.’ And not the kind of God that would fit on a bumper sticker, either, or in a book or a church, or a mosque or a temple, for that matter.”

“A deity both intimate and indifferent,” Jiro said, nodding as he picked his way along the trail trampled in the snow. “Like the mountains and the stars. Indifferent enough so that we don’t think we’re the center of everything, but intimate enough so that we know we’re a part of everything.”

“How do you mean?” Seiji asked, as he tried to follow where his brother was headed, both physically and intellectually.

“A fractal god,” Jiro said. “Like us and not like us. That’s why it wouldn’t be a waste if none of us were here to see the stars. The divinity that dreamed them up would still be here to know them, but wouldn’t be able to know them through us, the way we know them.”

“Whoa!” Seiji said. “What’s that got to do with mountains?”

“Mountains are fractals,” Jiro said, placing his feet carefully on the snow in the darkness. “So are mountain ranges. Canyons, caves, collapsed stars, expanding universes, the cosmos itself—all are fractal. That’s why the artists call rugged mountains ‘sublime.’ That’s why the mystics call them sacred.”

“You’ve got mountains on the brain!” Seiji said with a laugh. “Try watching your step and keeping them under your feet!”

Jiro grew quiet, but it did not stop him thinking about such ideas. He was thinking about how the event horizon of the black hole, the dynamical system of brain physiology, mystical experiences, the nature of the psyche itself might all be fractal in nature. Might all of those fractal patterns somehow be linked across scale?

“You know,” Jiro said after a moment, “at the level of some metrics, the convolutions in the brain are fractal canyons and mountain ranges too...“

Seiji groaned and threw a snowball at him. Jiro laughed.

“Don’t get lost in the mountains inside your head just yet,” Seiji said. “You’ve gotten us into something pretty crazy here, hiking up a snow-covered mountain trail in street shoes by handlight in the middle of the night.”

Jiro said nothing. He was concentrating on their path and trying to remember what the hiking guide datawire said. Something about a chain of three lakes, but the first one wasn’t supposed to be much good for fishing. But which one was the first one, and how would he know he hadn’t already passed it in the dark?

Coming to a flattish place in the bend of a switchback, Jiro thought he saw or at least sensed a body of water off to the right through the brush—a faint almost-glimmer of reflected sky. Maybe it was just a dirty snowpatch, but Jiro decided it was Lake One and pushed on. Seiji slowed at the bend behind him but then followed.

After several more switchbacks the snow and forest and rock around them opened up and they saw it—the flat of a lake, the quiet lapping of open water against a shore. The moon was behind the peaks to the west now, but in the diffuse and disappearing moonlight the lake seemed to be mostly frozen over. What caught their eyes was the strange color in the water—a pale, trout-belly pink glow near the shoreline. They puzzled over it for a moment before Jiro realized that the color wasn’t coming out of the water but out of the sky. Turning and facing east, he saw it, across the still dark Owens Valley, beyond the peaks of the Inyo and White Mountains.

“Look,” Jiro said. They stood and stared. Delicate streamers of roseate light were flowing into the eastern sky like pennons unfurling in a growing breeze.

“Rosy-fingered dawn,” Seiji said, speaking the words Jiro also found himself thinking. “I always wondered why Homer and the ancient Greeks called it that. Now I know.”

Jiro looked around, seeing the ancient sky again, his head cocked as if he hoped to hear the deep tone of a lost chord from the vanished music of the spheres. For a moment everything made a wonderful sense, sight and sound fusing into a standing wave of synesthesia, all time collapsing simply into now.

“
Arma virumque cano
,” Jiro said, reciting a phrase he hadn’t thought of in years.

“
Troiae qui primus ab oris
,” Seiji said, completing the thought. “But that wasn’t Homer. Vergil—
The Aeneid
. Odyssey 2: The Trojan Empire Strikes Back.”

From that roseate light, presaging the arrival of the sun like outriders before an emperor, they turned away, telescoping open their fishing rods, tying lures to lines, casting the lures into the third of the lake that wasn’t ice-covered. Shivering in the wind, coming down colder now from the peaks, Jiro thought the hour before sunrise was the coldest yet, as if the night was desperately tightening its cold grip one last time before being forced to let go.