Better Angels (39 page)

They had been seated beside each other in the same row on that flight. As they got to talking, they soon realized that the parallels and similarities in their lives—Paul’s disappeared ethnobotanist sister Jacinta and his involvement in the history of KL 235, Seiji’s pattern-finding would-be Indian shaman brother Jiro, Jiro’s troubles with KL, even the paranoid schizophrenia that afflicted both Jacinta and Jiro—were too overwhelming to be ignored. The odds of their being seated next to each other on the same flight up the well were so improbable that only a very high-order synchronicity could explain the fact.

A year had passed since that flight docked with the habitat—a structure which Paul, on first impression, had thought looked rather like a ribbed cylinder that had swallowed a ball, at least from the outside. Most people, he learned, were reminded of such ungainly images on seeing the habitat for the first time. All the glossy brochure photos in the world couldn’t change that.

Since that time, however, he had come to appreciate the habitat’s aesthetics a good deal more. He had also unburdened himself of his Ancient Mariner’s tale—Jacinta’s research, the ghost people, the tepui liftoff, the whole history of KL as Paul knew it—to Seiji more than once during the past year.

Initially the solar engineer-and-landscape designer, for his part, had been reluctant to discuss his younger brother’s troubles with Paul. That had changed, however—most dramatically in the last few weeks. Paul felt he owed it to his young friend to help him in whatever way he could. Seiji had listened patiently enough to Paul’s own strange family history, after all.

Hearing the teapot whistling insistently, Paul walked into the house. He transferred the boiling water from the hot pot to a second, more ornamental pot with a tea ball inside. While he waited for the tea to steep, he heard footsteps on the gravel path leading to the door, then Seiji himself calling.

“Meet me on the patio,” Paul called toward an open window, then carried a tray of tea things out onto the patio himself. He found his dark haired, chin-bearded friend gazing absently at the meditation garden, a palm-top video player in his left hand.

As Paul put the tea things on the short table, they both sat down cross-legged at it in the Japanese style. The older man decided to cut straight to the heart of the matter and not waste time with the indirection of formalities and pleasantries.

“What’s that vidplayer for?” Paul asked bluntly.

Seiji knew the older man well enough not to be put off by his directness.

“You know how you showed me that video of yours,” Seiji began, “of that mountain in South America lifting off? Your ‘home movie’? Well, this is my home movie. I put it together out of some of my taped vidphone conversations with Jiro during the last year.”

“Ah, I see,” Paul said, smiling slightly from the corners of his mouth as he sipped his tea. “Payback for making you sit through mine. Go ahead, then. Fire it up. Let’s see it.”

An image of a young man, with a thin face and a thick beard, flashed up on the screen.

“I was picking dandelions from the firehouse lawn,” Jiro said. “The firemen laughed at me and said, ‘What you gonna do with those weeds, son? Smoke ‘em? We’ll have to turn you in if you are!’ I told them No, they’re for wine. The firemen could almost understand that—”

A moment of blank screen opened up.

“This next one was longlink from MIT,” Seiji said, “right before he dropped out of academia completely.”

Brief white noise was followed by another recording.

“It’s this,” Jiro said, having trouble keeping eye contact with the vidphone unit. “They’re trying to damp me down through my demons—my DMNs, the dorsal and median raphe nuclei in my brain. Through the plug they put in my head when I was born. The jack, the plug they put in everybody’s head, either then or when they’re knocked out to have their wisdom teeth removed. My head is not my head, your head is not your head. Not anymore. It’s OUR head. Occipital Umbilical Receptor: that’s what they call it. You think that acronym was an accident? A coincidence? No way. The white lab coats with the white lab masks and the unmelting eyes don’t make mistakes.”

Seiji paused the image and glanced at Paul.

“That was right before he quit everything and just holed up in an apartment he took in the outskirts of BALAAM,” Seiji said, “in Cherry Valley.”

Paul saw Seiji’s hand shake slightly as he picked up his tea mug from the table, but pretended not to notice.

“That’s pretty paranoid,” Paul said, nodding. “Did you try to get him to see a doctor?”

Seiji made an odd sad smirk.

“Are you kidding?” he said. “He wouldn’t hear a word of it. I’ve tried, believe me. I tried to get him to go back into that dolphin-Ibogara therapy. That seemed to work for him, last time. He resisted that too. Claimed he was taking care of it himself.”

“Self-medicating?” Paul asked, glancing into the neutral middle distance.

“Maybe,” Seiji said with a shrug. “After his breakdown, the laser-sharpness his mind used to have sure disappeared, as far as I could tell. He told me he was off the alcohol, as often as possible. Fasting and purifying himself, like a shaman. He’s gotten thin enough, God knows. Talked about ‘vision-quests’ and ‘ordeals’ for spiritual purposes. Said he even met a shaman. I’ve got some of that conversation here. I’ll see if I can find it.”

Seiji scanned around in the recording’s index until he found what he was looking for.

“—a little girl who got lost up in the San Bernardinos,” Jiro said, smiling slightly, “the mountains up above town here. So I went out looking for her, like everyone else. After a half hour or so I came up over this ridge. Down below I saw the little girl, and I saw this rabbit too, hopping about eight or ten feet in front of her. She was just following this rabbit. I hollered down to her, ‘Stay there!’ She stayed, and this rabbit just started circling around her. It took me another twenty minutes to get down to where she was. I got down there and she said, or rather I said, ‘What do you think you’re doing?’ because I was hot and sweaty from tramping the hillsides and everyone was looking for her, you know, because she had gone off the wrong way, but just then she said, ‘The rabbit told me if I stayed with him he would take me back to you.’ I know it sounds crazy—”

Seiji grunted and shook his head but said nothing more as Jiro continued on the recording.

“So a few nights later I went off on a jaunt and ended up at The Three Legged Dog Saloon. I started talkin to this Indian guy there. I told the girl-and-rabbit story to him. He said ‘I want you to meet my grandfather.’ It was actually his wife’s grandfather, but that’s beside the point. Anyway, we were both drinking and we were still kinda ripped but we drove out there, and then this old Indian guy—he wouldn’t see me. He was a medicine man and he told his grandson-in-law that I had to get all this crap out of my system first. I wanted to leave but the younger Indian says, ‘No, you stay here,’ and I said ‘Man I’m not gonna mess around with this all day, I’ve got some things to do’ and he says ‘No, you stay here. When you get all the alcohol out of your system, this man’ll see you. My grandfather will see you.’

“So okay,” Jiro continued, calm yet eager in the way he told his story. “You’ve heard of sweatlodges. I went through that, boiled all this booze and who knows what else out of my system, and you know what the old man does to me? He gives me peyote! And some mushrooms. I’m like, ‘Whoa!’ but it’s okay. Then he gives me some of this light brown stuff, says ‘Take this.’ I hit on that too and about fifteen minutes into it, I’m sure I know just exactly what it is, and it’s gonna be a trip to another world.”

The smile on Jiro’s face brightened in wide, happy memory.

“Seij, you know I’ve done mushrooms, KL, peyote, all that stuff—nothing compared to this. This shaman took me on a flight. I had this beak thing come outta my face like this, my arms turned into wings, and I flew around with this guy. Don’t believe it if you want, but that’s how I came back calling myself Asaroka, ‘Crow.’ I could tell you about this flight and you wouldn’t believe it. We flew around the world and we saw it all, we could look down on things, in my life and other people’s lives. We’d look down and watch ‘em go on about their lives like they had no idea we were there. Nothing I ever experienced was anything like it. I still had this beak thing sticking out in front of my face the whole time. He transformed me into a crow, I swear.”

Jiro was so happy he laughed. To Paul, watching, the thin man on the screen seemed almost drunk with the memory.

“But that’s beside the point,” Jiro continued. “We came back. The next day I was coming out of wherever it was and I woke up and I said to myself, ‘I don’t even believe this. No, I’m not even gonna believe this.’ Then I was asleep again but the old man comes back in and he wakes me up and he has these feathers—three crow feathers—and he gives them to me. ‘This one,’ he says, ‘you take and give it to who you want to. This one you’ll give to a little kid. This one, an old lady will come and get it from you.’ Okay, by now I’m thinking, This is too strange, and I just want to get outta here. So I take the feathers and I leave.

“A few days later I see these little kids playing around and I say, ‘Hey, want a feather? There you go.’ I’ve still got the two other ones, anyway. I know this woman at a restaurant in Banning, she’s kinda cute, so I said ‘Hey, you want a feather?’ and I gave it to her. I still had one left, stuck in my hat, and I wasn’t gonna do anything with it.

“So a couple weeks later, I’m back down at the Three Legged Dog and I’m sitting there and some of my friends from the Trashlands come in and they ask me about the feather, what’s that feather mean in your hat? and I tell them this whole story I just got through telling you. And they say, ‘Oh, yeah,’ and maybe they believe it, maybe they don’t.

“It wasn’t about two or three minutes later—I’ll swear this any way you want me to—but these people come in there, a bunch of Indians off the rez, and this little old woman, she stood about that tall and she had about one tooth in her mouth, and she saw me and she came right straight for me, grabbed that feather out of my hat, pop! stuck it in her bonnet, away she went.

“I just got through telling these other people what that crow feather was for, and they looked at me and just said ‘Bullshit, that’s too weird, we’re gettin away from you’—and they left!”

Jiro laughed until Seiji froze the recording. He glanced at Paul for a reaction.

“He seemed a lot healthier than in the previous one,” Paul said, truthfully. “Maybe a little manic, playing the Western raconteur a bit much, but healthier.”

Seiji nodded, finishing his mug of tea and pouring himself more.

“That’s what I thought too,” Seiji said. “His story was strange, but he seemed better. I thought he was getting better. But he lost touch with the ‘Indians’—he never used to call them that, when he studied their cultures when he was younger. But ever since he lost touch with those people, he seems to have gone steadily down hill.”

Seiji used the index-menu to scan around until once more he found what he was looking for.

“They’re putting KL 235 in the food around here,” Jiro said in a rush from the small screen, “to make me sink uncontrolled telepath into the massmind, the cultural macroorganism. Got to keep the schizophrenic heads together and socially tracked. Mutants. Victim heroes. Yeah. But most mutations aren’t beneficial to the individual with the trait. They die out. Get killed off. Gandhi. Martin Luther King. Winona Walking Bear. Victim heroes of the evolving human organism—”

Seiji scanned onward in the record, looking for something. When he found it, Paul saw that Seiji only looked all the more bewildered as he watched.

“People here have dreams in which I die, big brother,” Jiro said edgily, trying to make an awkward joke of it. “Wish fulfillment. But my dreams counter them. They come true. I have these violent thoughts, sometimes. But I don’t want to hurt anybody. I’d rather die than hurt anybody. Stop me before I dream again—”

Seiji shook his head, then looked down into his tea, not seeing, as if unable to read the past or the future there.

“I thought he was acting strange when he started talking about the dream wars,” Seiji said. “When he said people were having dreams in which he died, but he was using his own dreams to counter them. I thought that was as crazy as it could get. I was wrong.”

Paul barely heard the last of that, however. He was caught up in the sound of his own voice, in memory, saying to Jacinta, I thought you were crazy when.... But Seiji had already scanned on to something else, something more.

“But I’m fighting them,” Jiro said from the screen, an almost painfully thin man behind a bushy beard. “I know they’re scanning this call, big brother, but I don’t care. Their power is growing, but I’ve gone starburst. Full telepath televisionary. I am your psychopomp, protecting your soul so you can be heard, so your message can get out, so you can communicate. I am a powerful starburst and you are under the silver forcefield umbrella of my psychic protection, the silver mirrorball that reflects all the watching eyes and is reflected in all the watching eyes, and you’re inside, infinitely beyond harm.”

Seiji stopped the recording.

“What message?” he asked the screen where the frozen image of his brother stood. “I’m a solar engineer and a gardener. I don’t have any message—other than my life, I guess. Everybody has that.”

Seiji gestured at the screen and turned to Paul.

“See his eyes?” Seiji said. “So bright. Like the light of a supernova, escaping its own collapse into a black hole.”

Paul nodded in agreement. About that visage on the screen there was definitely something of the dark angel with a bright halo. At least that was how Paul thought of it.

“Any particular reason you’ve preserved these recordings?” Paul asked, the thought having just occurred to him.

“I wasn’t sure, at first,” Seiji said, before starting the player again. “Now I think it’s always been for evidence—in case the police might need proof that he ‘poses a danger to himself or others’. So they can go pick him up and bring him in, if it gets to that point. I’ve been thinking for a while about going back down the well to find him and try to help him, but he says he doesn’t want my help. Gets irate about it if I even mention it. Trips down to Earth and back aren’t cheap, either.”