Better Angels (34 page)

“I’m so cold I’m starting to ache everywhere,” Seiji said after a time, teeth chattering. Gooseflesh sprang up on Jiro’s back and arms, but Jiro ignored it, focused as he was on making out the silhouettes of the trout cruising like sluggish submarines in the slowly lightening water.

The light continued to rise but the temperature seemed only to drop as the wind blew colder and harder.

“The fish aren’t biting,” Seiji said. “It’s too damn cold.”

“They’ll bite.”

“In July, maybe. We’ll freeze before they bite.”

“Just give it an hour or two and the temperature will be fine.”

“And we’ll be dead.”

“Don’t wimp out, Seiji.”

“Wimp out? Ice fishing in shorts isn’t macho—it’s stupid.”

Seiji reeled in and secured his line, then turned around and, trying to bring feeling back into his toes and feet, stomped off from the edge of the lake, heading down the mountain, into the early morning light. Cursing him briefly, Jiro did the same and followed.

They said nothing to each other until they were almost back to the trailhead. By that time the sun was well up and, at that lower elevation, the temperature was bearable. With all the fresh snow melt everywhere, streams and freshets and waterfalls flowed and tumbled beside and across the trail, running headlong toward the valley far below.

“See?” Jiro said. “I told you. If we just would have waited a while longer at the lake, it would’ve been okay.”

“Just wait a while longer,” Seiji mocked, grumpily. “How long is long enough, Jiro? When they find your frozen corpse? Forget it. We’re back down now. Let’s just head south. Earlier in the week you were all fired up about showing me something at your lab in the Page Museum. Why don’t we just go there instead?”

Somewhat reluctantly, Jiro agreed. At the trailhead, they saw backpackers unloading from their vehicles all the fancy gear from which Jiro abstained. Grudgingly he admitted to himself that perhaps a little more planning, preparation, and premeditation might have saved this fishing trip after all.

The brothers drove east out of the mountains. Taking turns driving and sleeping, they headed south into the day’s rapidly rising heat. By the time they passed through Mojave, the temperature was nearing the century mark. It grew hot in the old hover, despite everything its antiquated air-conditioning system could do.

Driving from the outskirts of Balaam toward the heart of old L.A. proper, Jiro took the last shift while Seiji dozed fitfully in the heat. Jiro found that, despite his exhaustion from the all-night drive and fishing trip debacle, his enthusiasm for this part of the trip grew as he got closer to the newly reopened Page Museum of La Brea Discoveries.

He had good reason for that enthusiasm, too. What he was about to show Seiji he had not had a chance to show to anyone yet, not even Lydia. He wanted to be sure about his discovery first, as well. Premature release via the infosphere might screw everything up. When he was certain, then he would let Lydia know.

His find, after all, coat tailed on her own discovery of the strange scapula they had covertly extracted from Pit 129—the find they were privately calling the Angel’s Shoulder blade. Lydia herself had not yet made a public announcement of that find, although she had been made Director of the reopened museum and Jiro thought such an announcement would have made a nice coup during her installation as New Boss.

Seiji woke up as Jiro parked in an Employee space behind the Page Museum. Since his older brother had toured the Tar Pits before, Jiro planned to head straight to the fish bowl laboratory.

“I must have been doing too much media before we went on this trip,” Seiji said, stretching as he got out of the hover.

“How so?” Jiro asked as he remote-locked the vehicle.

“I just watched a commercial in a dream,” Seiji said, shaking his head as they walked. “A commercial my unconscious made up, for a product it made up.”

“What was it for?” Jiro asked as they walked into the museum.

“For a tent made out of a fabric that worked like a two-way mirror,” Seiji said. “It was mirror-opaque from the outside, but glass-transparent from the inside. So you could sleep under the stars and still see them all, from inside the tent, yet still have total privacy.”

“That’s a pretty good idea, actually,” Jiro said thoughtfully.

“Kind of weird, though,” Seiji said as they walked past a small crowd, watching through tall windows as curators and assistants prepared fossils. “The strangest part was that, when I woke up, I remembered the dream commercial but not the dream. Half-asleep, I thought to myself, ‘Hey, I produced that in my sleep? Not bad!’”

Jiro laughed

“I’ve always thought the brain worked kind of like TV,” Seiji said, smiling. “The physical world is the transmitter. The senses and the nervous system and the brain are the receiver. Consciousness is the screen, and memories are reruns.”

Jiro smiled at that.

“What about dreams?” he asked.

“Edits?” Seiji suggested. “Stuff on the cutting room floor?”

“Maybe,” Jiro said. “Or transmissions from somewhere else. But that model doesn’t quite work. If consciousness is a screen, then it would have to be both screen and viewer, a screen watching itself, aware it’s a screen.”

“Too meta-level for me,” Seiji said, smiling. “I concede the point.”

Jiro led his brother past the preparers cleaning, identifying, and cataloging larger fossils, then among and through curators sorting microfossils under magnifying lenses. At last they came to a large, white room behind the shelved bones and files.

“Our newest supertoy,” Jiro said, leaning against a large off-white piece of equipment that protruded into the room. “A live access, full suite unit for working in the deep-submicron range—all the way down past nano-range into fairly low angstroms. Milli-, micro-, and submicrowaldo manipulators. Electron and positron emission scopes for micrograph ultracloseups. Stereomicroscopy. Low-energy collimated particle beams. Scanning-tunneling x-ray microscopy—the works.”

Seiji looked over the heavily computerized and monitored system, then whistled.

“What did your boss do?” he asked. “Rob a bank?”

“Big corporate donation, actually,” Jiro said. “From ParaLogics—for our grand re-opening. Behind the wall there, we’ve got a room full of their top LogiBox equipment.”

“So this is where you get to play?”

“That’s right,” Jiro said, smiling. “Lydia has had me doing a lot of work with the angel’s shoulder blade.”

“‘Angel’?”

“Right,” Jiro said, powering up the deep-submicron access suite. Drives whirred, monitors lit up, holos took 3D form. “That started as sort of a joke. All we’ve got, for certain, is a weirdly-shaped scapula that’s about eleven thousand years old.”

Jiro flashed up a faux 3D video image of the fossil scapula. Seeing it once again reminded him of how much it resembled a sculpture done in mahogany and old bronze.

“Given the wear and the origin/insertion points for the musculature,” he explained, pointing to various parts of the image, “it seems to be from a bipedal creature Looks almost human, except it’s oddly reinforced and elongated. Pretty complex.”

“But why ‘angel’?” Seiji persisted.

“Lydia and I were trying to figure out what that elongation and reinforcement might be for,” Jiro said, “and I suggested wings. I wasn’t really serious, but it turned out Lydia had already been thinking along the same lines. I guess it makes a certain sort of sense. The biggest design challenge in building an angel would have to be the shoulder blades. That’s the hard part—where the wings attach, where what’s human and what’s beyond human have to mesh. Everything else is pretty straight-forward.”

“What do you think it is?” Seiji asked, absently stroking his beard. “I mean, really?”

Jiro shrugged and looked away.

“At first I thought it was some kind of mutation,” he said, calling up other images on the monitors and holos. “A hunchback or something. I’m not so sure, now.”

“Why not?” Seiji asked. “Can’t you just run DNA tests on it?”

“Lydia’s already doing that,” Jiro said. “She’s trying to take DNA samples for use as templates in polymerase chain reactions. No luck there, yet. She did find this goop in one of the distal sections, though. She thought I might be able to make something of it.”

Jiro brought up an image of what looked like tiny gray crystalline worms or cocci embedded in asphaltic matrix. The counter in the upper left-hand corner of the screen registered resolution in nanometers.

“Why’d she inflict this on you?” Seiji asked. “Looks like scud work to me.”

“Because of my ‘special talents’,” Jiro said with a laugh.

“That pattern-finding stuff?” Seiji asked, somehow obscurely embarrassed by the idea.

“That,” Jiro agreed, “and other things. I’m supposed to be good at working the cusp between the biological and the technological. Bio-infomatics. And scapulimancy.”

“Scapu-what?”

“Scapulimancy,” Jiro said. “You know how I’ve always been into studying Native Americans—especially their shamanism?”

“Yeah, yeah,” Seiji replied, absently drumming his fingers against the machine suite. “I remember you used to collect weird crap for your ‘medicine bundle’.”

“Still do,” Jiro said with a mischievous smile. “Anyway, a lot of New World indigenes engage in a form of divination involving the reading of charred shoulder blades—scapulimancy. I’m probably the only person Lydia has on staff who even knows what it is.”

Seiji stared at the crystalline worm and cocci things on the screen.

“So now you’re a hightech-mediated scapulimancer?” Seiji asked skeptically.

“In a manner of speaking,” Jiro agreed. “At least I think I’ve divined something of the future in this gunk.”

“What do you mean?” Seiji asked, a little hesitantly.

“I’ll show you,” his younger brother said, using a submicrowaldo to remove the asphalt-matrixed specimen and place another sample in the field of view. “The interesting thing about Rancho La Brea fossils is the way they were preserved. A combination of sedimentation and asphalt impregnation. The asphalt inhibits decay, so that what we have are samples of unchanged, original organic material—just have to clean it up. This sample has been prepared already. The asphalt has been boiled off it in solvent, then cleaned further in ultrasonic tanks.”

“Wouldn’t that destroy micro-organisms?” Seiji asked.

“Not these guys,” Jiro said, positioning a manipulator. “They’re tough. Now I squirt them with a little enantioviroid solution. E-viroid technology was developed as a vehicle for introducing new data into the cellular infostream. It took me a while to figure out how to apply it, but eventually I did. The solution to the problem of moving from scale to scale lies in phase-locking feedback. Now I spray it with a little iron in solution, then turn up the light, which means a swifter photon stream and—watch!”

On the monitor, the gray crystalline worms and cocci moved, squirmed, multiplied.

“So they’re alive?” Seiji asked.

“They’re machines,” Jiro said simply.

“What?”

“Biomechs,” Jiro said, watching them on the screen. “Nanorgs. Nanometer-sized organometallic mechanisms, at least 11,000 years old.”

“That’s crazy,” Seiji said, shaking his head. “People have been trying to produce high-quality nanomachines for almost forty years, with little real success. And now you say you’ve found the schmoo itself, the universal maker-stuff machines—and some Indian came up with them?”

“I’m not suggesting people came up with them at all,” Jiro said firmly, looking at the denizens of his screen busily deploying and employing themselves. “In anaerobic, iron-poor environments, these things exist in a ‘default’ condition and function like the toughest spores you can imagine. They can survive extremes of heat and cold that would make a million year drift through deep space seem like a walk in the park, for them.”

Jiro turned to look at his brother then, well aware of the enormity of what he was suggesting.

“Land them on a rock with iron and sunshine,” Jiro said quickly, hoping to finish before Seiji could interrupt, “and, after a couple of generations reproducing the default configuration—in a place that has water too—they begin to generate catalytic cycles in a chemical, pre-biological phase of evolution. They’re a lot more sensitive to incident radiation after they ‘demodulate’ out of default, but by then they’re chugging along pretty well so they can afford to sacrifice a sizable portion of their numbers. After that comes mutually-sustaining complexes of DNA and protein. Then, very soon after that, things that look a lot like the archaeobacteria you find in Yellowstone hot springs, black-smoker vents on the ocean floor, or in the deep terrestrial subsurface. The basic planetary bacterial web.”

“Aw, come on!” Seiji said, frustrated. “You don’t really believe that old Arrhenius ‘spores-from-outer-space’ crap for the origin of life on Earth, do you? Aliens deliberately releasing space-spores into the universe to colonize lifeless planets? I never have. It’s an infinite regress cop-out, so we don’t have to explain the deeper origins of life on this planet—life here came from somewhere else, which came from somewhere else, which came from somewhere else. Ad nauseam infinitum.”

“I’m not saying that,” Jiro replied. “The default configuration is a hypercycle starter kit. A coevolution primer that fosters conditions conducive to the production of basic informational molecules. DNA can’t make itself. Proteins can make the master molecule, but they have to have DNA to make themselves. Which came first, the snake or the egg? This stuff’s the spore before the spores.”

Sitting down on a chair in the opposite corner of the lab, Seiji waved him away dismissively.

“An alien nanotechnology,” he said. “And you’ve already managed to figure out how to program it. Right. Have you started using KL again?”

Jiro said nothing for a moment. In that moment it was clear to him that Seiji knew he was doing it, and that he knew Seiji knew, so why bother to fight over the obvious? Leave it the great Unspoken, the great unchangeable Change. That was all it could be between them, for now. They respected each other’s right to be wrong at least that much.