Better Angels (4 page)

Paul didn’t know if there was quite enough of himself left over to cover up the hole in the universe Jacinta’s going had left behind. He had returned to the area near Caracamuni three years back, hoping to find a spot in space and time for mourning his loss, but the mountain he knew was gone, vanished. Space and time couldn’t fill the void.

He felt so full of emptiness. He did not know if he went on rushing into nothing, or if nothing went on rushing into him. He did know, however, that the only things that stood against the dark tide were his memories, bright shadows cast inside the stone bubble of his skull, soft-tissued fossils that refused to die.

He looked at the empty bottle and wished it were a loaded gun.

A nearby unsteady alteration in the steady constellations caught his eye and he glanced toward it. As he stared, he saw a shifting—like the bending of light in water, a rippling piece of the night sky—coming toward him. Constellations are hallucinations turned into explanations by tradition and education, he thought with a giddy drunken flourish.

But no. He stood up slowly, watching more carefully whatever it was that was approaching. His heart pounded and he thought irrationally of Jacinta returning.

The shifting piece of the sky was almost on top of him before it stopped, a droning whisper of engines whirring in the moonlight close above him. A bright light flashed onto the ground near him, then probed toward him.

Aw Jeez, Paul thought, I’m not drunk enough to be abducted by aliens.

Something like a cross between a gangplank and a jetway extended downward into the cone of light, toward him. Amazed, he lost his grip on the empty Edradour bottle. It slipped from his hands and fell to the sand.

“Hello, Dr. Larkin!” said an amplified voice. “Please come aboard!”

Paul reached up and touched a safety rail, just to make sure this was all real. At least it felt real. He began to step upward into whatever kind of craft it was that was hovering above him.

Two thirds of the way up the incline, the pluperfectly perky Ms. Griego, the venture capital agent, stood waiting on a step, beaming a smile of considerable wattage at him, above a midnight blue dress of a cut and style that might well have suited a stewardess aboard a low-altitude, high-speed, deep-penetration bomber of the 1960s.

“Congrats, Paul!” Athena Griego said, shaking his hand vigorously and practically hauling him up the last third of the incline. “Dr. Vang is so interested in your fungus’s possibilities he’s come to speak with you himself!”

Paul was bedazzled by more than just the sudden brightness of the light. The craft he had boarded seemed solid enough, yet also airy and diaphanous, as if the Great Airship of 1887 and the flying saucers of the second half of the twentieth century had met and mated, to produce this craft as their offspring.

“What is this thing?” Paul asked, bewildered as his eyes kept trying to readjust to the light. He stepped into what looked like a cabin in a spacious yacht, all dark wood inlaid with mother of pearl. “And who is Dr. Vang?”

“That would be me,” said a small Asian man in a very neat suit, coming forward to shake Paul’s hand. The man looked to be in his sixties. “I suppose the most important thing for you to know about who I am is that I have money to invest in research on your fungus.”

Ms. Griego ushered them toward an off-white sofa and wheat-colored chairs where a cup of coffee was already waiting for him. Paul glanced around. In the center of the room was an elliptically-shaped wet bar. Literally wet, for the mirror-backed pedestal that supported the bar also encased what looked to be a salt-water aquarium: a living coral reef with anemones and sea fans, crabs and shrimp, eels and other fish less extreme in shape but more extreme in hue—blues and yellows and greens and reds so vivid and radiant Paul was tempted to look for their power packs.

“And this...?” he asked, gesturing to indicate the cabin and the larger structure within which it was embedded.

“My mobile ‘home sweet home’,” Vang said with a small smile, sipping at his coffee. “My ghost ship, if you like.”

“Ghost ship?” Paul asked, sipping his coffee too, initially out of politeness if nothing else. Good coffee, though. Very good.

“I like my privacy,” Vang said, with a seemingly disinterested shrug. His voice, however, could not hide a certain pride as he went on to describe the features of his flying home. “Several of my companies were involved in building it. Technically, it’s a stealth airship. An ‘invisiblimp,’ if you like, though it’s more accurate to call it an invisible dirigible, since it has an airframe. The wind-duction system that propels it also gives it superquiet hovering capability. Its engines leave virtually no infrared signature. Its structure both absorbs and bounces radar away tangentially. Engineers at ParaLogics and Crystal Memory jointly developed a chameleon-cloth smartskin for it—protective coloration, fast-reactive camouflage. In a cloudy sky it’s a cloud, in a blue sky it’s a piece of blue sky. On a moonless night like tonight, it’s obsidian, a soft-edged arrowhead flecked with stars.”

Vang smiled at his turn of phrase, but Paul was looking into the space above the other man’s head.

“Built for you?” Paul asked, taking it all in. “Or for something a bit more covert?”

“If I answered that, I’d have to kill you,” Vang said with a little laugh. “One could speculate, however, that—unlike satellites, which pass high and fast over any particular point of interest—a ship like this might be able to go in low and slow, to linger longer over whatever one might be interested in....”

“How did you get one?” Paul asked, as he continued to take in the features of Vang’s private airship.

“Alas, for all its stealthy virtues,” Vang continued, “it was detectable by certain oversight committees, even hidden deep in the black budget. The politics of project funding shot it down before it ever went into production. I bought back the prototype.”

Paul sipped more of his coffee, puzzled. He had heard of ParaLogics—high tera- and even peta-flops machines, if he recalled right. Vang’s name was also obscurely familiar.

“But if your work is in aerodynamics and computing,” Paul asked, “I don’t quite understand your interest in the fungus I brought back from Caracamuni.”

Vang nodded thoughtfully.

“Are computing and mycology really that far apart?” Vang asked rhetorically. “Think about it. In my lifetime alone I have seen the Age of Code dawning. The instructions for organic life were deciphered with the cracking of the DNA code and the mapping of genomes. The instructions for artificial life were enciphered with the encoding of languages for digital and biological computing. Mushroom mycelial networks are a good analog for parallel processing. Together the biotech and infotech revolutions are transforming Earth into Codeworld. Which it always already was, of course. My associates and I are multidisciplinary enough to see the overlap.”

Paul’s eyes strayed toward the colorful fish swimming about the reef in the wet bar, but his mind was focused on Vang’s words.

“Associates?” he asked. “You’re not just representing yourself and your companies, then?”

Ms. Griego smiled her floodlight smile.

“Dr. Vang represents a consortium with a variety of interests,” she replied, glancing at Vang for confirmation.

“To what purpose?” Paul asked.

Ms. Griego looked briefly flummoxed. Vang broke in, freeing Athena Griego to depart from them and go on about some undisclosed business out of sight.

“Allow me to tell you a little story that may or may not be true,” Vang said, looking up at him. Paul shrugged and Vang continued. “When I’ve finished, consider me an unofficial source who will deny ever having told you the story I’m about to tell you. Let’s say that, once upon a time, there was something called the Cold War—a period when each side mirrored the horror of the other, both invoking doctrines of Mutual Assured Destruction. Let’s say that, during that Cold War, there were various intelligence agencies, whose work too, on whichever side, tended to mirror the work of their opposite numbers. Let’s say that, in their looking-glass world, groups on opposite sides of the mirror began making secret contacts with each other. All right so far?”

“I follow you,” Paul said. “Go on.”

“Let’s say further,” Vang continued, “that the motive for these contacts was a shared fear. At the time, these opposite numbers—very intelligent and foresighted people, mind you—were afraid one or another of the various powers would sooner or later start a war that would result in the planet being nuked to uninhabitable status. Let’s say further that, as a result of their meetings, they started working on what they called ‘depth survival.’”

“Which was?” Paul asked, staring into his coffee cup.

“An attempt to see to it that some remnant of human population and civilization would be preserved,” Vang explained, “even through the very worst of their worst-case scenarios.”

Depth survival. Paul thought of the old rumors of vast secret underground bases and covert subterranean cities—apocryphal tales which had flourished in the loonier reaches of Cold and post-Cold War paranoia. He quickly brushed the visions away with a mental sweep of the hand, however.

“But the Cold War ended,” Paul said, puzzled. “Where were your deep survival programs then?”

“Let’s say the security apparats’ mirror-horror world really did end, as you suggest,” Vang continued, quietly. “The Cold War and older Soviet-style socialism both collapsed, despite occasional atavisms. Biblical Armageddon and Socialist Utopia both disappeared from the radar screen. Where were the deep survivors’ reasons to keep on keeping on?”

Paul nodded but said nothing.

“Let’s say that, at that time,” Vang said, “the security organizations these deep survival programs were embedded in were themselves struggling to survive. Let’s say those organizations were metamorphosing from national security apparatuses into corporate espionage and international intelligence brokers.”

“Which they have increasingly become,” Paul said, pondering it.

“Perhaps,” Vang said without inflection. “Let’s say the end of the Cold War period forced those participating in the depth survival programs to take a very long view of the human future. From the perspective of their looking-glass world, when the mirror shatters, the shatters also mirror.”

“How’s that?” Paul asked.

Vang glanced thoughtfully around the cabin.

“Let’s say their think-tank experts looked around,” Vang said, “and saw that human beings were simultaneously becoming obsolete and a glut on the market. Let’s say they recognized—popular media fantasies notwithstanding—that, for a global civilization once past the threat of total spasm nuclear war, the more likely and immediate dangers are not killer asteroids or alien invasions but the daily ongoing destruction of habitat occasioned by human population growth and humanity’s own expanding powers.”

“The death of a thousand small cuts,” Paul said. “The frog in the pot under which the flame is being slowly turned up—too slowly for it to notice.”

“Exactly,” Vang said, pleased. “As far as planetary carrying capacity was concerned, let’s say the depth planners’ most reasonable projections placed global human populations deep into an ecocatastrophic overshoot phase fifty years from their time zero.”

“That’s glut—and maybe gluttony,” Paul said, with a nod, “but I don’t see the obsolescence.”

Vang smiled again.

“Even glut means obsolescence,” he continued. “For creatures like ourselves that can build artificial brains and alter DNA, ‘Be fruitful and multiply’ is an obsolete biological imperative.”

Ooh boy, Paul thought. Such ideas weren’t likely to make Vang popular in the Vatican, or Salt Lake City either, for that matter.

“But you mean the other types of obsolescence the planners might have contemplated, I suppose,” Vang continued. “Might they have asked themselves too whether, particularly since the nineteenth century, industrial mechanisms had already increasingly obviated the need for human muscle? In the twentieth century, didn’t informational mechanisms begin making many capabilities of the human mind superfluous as well?”

“I see your point,” Paul said, not considering the idea quite so philosophically as Vang had.

“Let’s say, then, their experts were forced to reconsider their scenarios,” Vang continued. “The older, deeper questions they asked themselves had been something like: Are we and our organizations good? Are humans good? The new questions might well have been different: not only what were they and their organizations good for, but what are humans good for?”

“I presume they came up with an answer,” Paul said, after a downing a strong slug of coffee.

“In their own way,” Vang said slowly, looking at the aquarium in the wet bar as if contemplating the possibilities hidden in its waters. “Maybe their own fears of the death and meaninglessness of their organizations got tangled up with their search. Let’s give them the benefit of the doubt, and say what they finally came to was the idea that human consciousness was our unique contribution—and our best hope for avoiding the doom of becoming the reef of our own shipwreck.”

“Reef?” Paul asked, then shook his head. “I don’t quite follow you.”

By way of answer, Vang got up and walked toward the wet bar, with its enclosed coral reef. On impulse, Paul got up and literally followed him, taking his cup of coffee in hand.

“Do you know how a coral reef grows, Dr. Larkin?”

Paul crouched down and looked at the miniature reef in Vang’s bar.

“Coral polyps,” Paul said. “Soft-bodied creatures, coelenterates—kind of like jellyfish, only they settle down and secrete stony skeletons around themselves. The old skeletons are what most of the reef is made of.”

“Exactly,” Vang said, pleased in an almost teacherly manner, “except that the polyps are actually excreting the calcium that goes to make up the stone of the reef. Like most marine organisms, they have to dispose of excess calcium, so why not use it for building? They’re not the last animal to turn a waste product into a resource, either. Not by a long shot.”

Although he could have done without the lecture on a fine point of invertebrate biology, Paul nodded.