Better Angels (40 page)

The thin, bearded man appeared on the screen again

“This collect call must be costing you a fortune, big brother,” Jiro began again from the screen. “‘Big Brother’—get it? From an old book meant as a warning but taken as a blueprint. Keep thinking against them anyway. I know you need some dreams so I’ll send you some.”

Paul stared at the screen before Seiji scanned on.

“Has his condition changed since that last one?” Paul asked.

Seiji found what he was looking for on the vidplayer.

“I don’t know, now,” Seiji said. “Jiro’s disappeared. I just got this from my mother.”

A blonde-haired, blue-eyed, Scandinavian-looking woman appeared on screen—Seiji’s mother, apparently.

“Jiro’s quit work and moved off someplace,” his mother said worriedly. “No one knows where. Maybe into the Trashlands, we think. The last time I talked to him, he said he wasn’t going to be calling any more. He said I had nothing more to say to him and he had nothing more to say to me. I don’t understand it. The last words I said to him were ‘I love you, Jiro. I love you.’ “

Seiji scanned forward again.

“Then he goes and disappears like this!” his mother sighed, on the verge of tears. “He hasn’t called us in over a month, but the police out there still won’t list him as a missing person. They say they’ve seen someone they think is him. Has Jiro called you?”

“No, Ma, he hasn’t,” Seiji said on the other end—one of the few places where he apparently had not edited himself out, Paul realized. “I wouldn’t worry about it too much, Ma. The authorities can always trace him if they think it’s necessary, but you can’t arrest someone for not calling his family. There probably aren’t a whole lot of long-distance links he can plug into in the Trashlands, that’s all. You know Jiro. Remember his Shepherds Pass trip? He’s always at the edge, but he always comes back.”

Seiji shut the vidplayer off and looked at Paul.

“Shepherds Pass?” Paul asked.

“Yeah,” Seiji said, looking away, remembering. “Jiro and I have done a lot of backpacking and mountain-climbing over the years. Yosemite Half Dome, Mauna Kea, Mount Fuji, Kilimanjaro. Visited Korczak Ziolkowski’s Crazy Horse Memorial, and the ruins of the Rushmore Heads near there, too. The ocean of humanity laps everywhere around the parks and the mountains, but Jiro still manages to find places where almost nobody washes up but him. Like Shepherds Pass—‘the most difficult route in the Sierras,’ as he liked to say.”

Paul poured himself some more tea.

“You didn’t go with him on that hike?” he asked.

“A knee-breaker and lung-wracker like Shepherd’s Pass?” Seiji asked, incredulous. “Not me. He did that one alone. The trail rises sharply up the east side of the Sierras. From high desert through forest to alpine meadow, to mountain moonscape above the treeline. I didn’t have the time or inclination to climb it, especially not his way: no high-tech help—nothing. Besides, I had other business to attend to in Balaam that time.”

Seiji paused, sipping at his tea, then glanced meditatively at the Zen garden and the whole of the central sphere of the habitat beyond it.

“When Jiro got out of the aircar at the trailhead,” Seiji said again, when he was ready to continue, “I told him, ‘You’ll be back in exactly three days, okay? Don’t be late. You’ve got to catch the shuttle out of Edwards, and our schedule’s tight enough already.’ He says, ‘Right. I’ll be here.’

“I watched him hike away,” Seiji said, letting out a sigh. “It was a beautiful evening. Red tongues of sunset licking among the clouds and mountaintops. Like fire on the ramparts of a besieged castle. When I couldn’t see him any longer I lifted off in the hovercar and made a long, slow swing to the south.

“When I got back to the trailhead in the late afternoon three days later, Jiro wasn’t waiting there. Nobody was, except me. Two hours passed and he still hadn’t shown up. I sat in the hover and listened to some Valkyrie Eleison music, I remember. After three hours I got out and began hiking up the trail in the twilight. I shouted ‘Jiro! Jiro!’ until I was hoarse. No answers but echoes. Eventually I drove into Lone Pine and called the airline to cancel his flight. Then I called Mom and Dad, to tell them Jiro hadn’t come back in from Shepherds Pass and would probably have to take a later shuttle. I expected Mom to go into her usual overprotective hysteria, but she was surprisingly calm.”

Seiji paused to pour himself some more tea and see if Paul was still paying attention.

“The deputies in the sheriff’s office in Lone Pine,” he began again, “when I spoke to them, told me they couldn’t initiate any search procedures until the ‘subject’ was at least twenty four hours late for his scheduled rendezvous. Nothing for me to do but drive out there again. Out through the night and the high desert, to the base of the Eastern Sierra scarp, lights on, eyes open. Hoping to see him.

“Nothing. Later I ended up sleeping in the hover—an activity for which it was not designed. I remember thinking, as I tried to get some sleep, ‘Jiro, if you’re still alive, I’m gonna kill you for putting me through this’—same thing I told him after one of his dolphin-dives went awry, in Hawaii. He was pretty far away from the dolphins, by then. Probably even farther, now.”

Seiji stared off into the distances of the haborb’s central sphere again, seeming to lose the thread of his recounting.

“What happened after that?” Paul prodded.

“I caught what sleep I could in the hover,” Seiji said, his gaze becoming more focused. “Later that morning I took a last hike up the trail, looking for him. I scrabbled up a broken stone trail into trees and mountains, as far as I could go. Called and called his name until I couldn’t call any more. Until I could only stand there, breathing hard, watching and waiting.

“With no warning, Jiro appeared. He was sunburned. His hair was streaked lighter, I guess from time spent in thinner air, closer to the sun. His clothes were tattered and trail-grimed, torn into feathery shreds on his arms and back. His lips were cracked black and bleeding by sun and wind, but he was smiling like a happy idiot. As he came toward me he wasn’t slouching along the way he usually did. His stride was victorious, I guess you’d say. His eyes were gleaming like he was hearing standing ovations ringing and roaring in his head, cheers and applause only he could hear. It almost shut down my anger, seeing him so happy. That, and relief at seeing him alive again, period.

“I told him, ‘You’re eighteen hours late.’ Jiro says, ‘I know. Sorry. I took a wrong turn somewhere and ended up sleeping at the edge of a kilometer-deep gorge.’ I told him it was a good thing he didn’t roll over, but he hardly heard me. ‘It was great, Seiji!’ he says, and begins to jabber about lying down in green mountain meadows like God’s front yard. About streams meandering through islands of natural lawn and rock garden. And always about a sky you just wanted to fall up through and disappear into. He was as happy as I’d ever seen him—happier even than on KL, or booze, or teonanacatloids.”

Seiji paused and took a quick sip of tea.

“I told him we had to get him to a shuttle, pronto. We walked down the trail in late morning light, stopping only once. We rested at a tight spot between two lodgepole pines. I remember it too well. One of the pines was actually shorter but appeared taller because it was growing on a slightly higher piece of ground. It was in fair health, but the other you could see was slowly dying.

“I commented on it to Jiro, wondering what was causing that. ‘One is overshadowing the other,’ he said. ‘One will have to die if the other is going to live.’ Then we stood up again and walked down the trail without another word.”

Seiji finished his tea and put it aside.

“I wonder about that now,” he said quietly.

“About what?” Paul asked, looking at the table over his knees.

“About one overshadowing the other,” he said. “About one dying so the other can live.”

Paul shook his head.

“Don’t think like that,” he said. “You’re not your brother’s killer any more than you’re his keeper. You don’t even know what’s actually happened to him yet.”

“Maybe,” Seiji said with a shrug, glancing absently at the vidplayer. “Dammit, though. I should have gone to Earth to do something about it. I’ve been busy—too damn busy.”

“Nobody ever chose a good time to go crazy,” Paul said. “You can’t let yourself get sucked into your brother’s black hole. Your story and his story aren’t the same. They don’t collapse into one.”

“I know,” Seiji said, rising to a crouch, then standing and stretching. “I sure as hell don’t want him to send me his dreams, that’s for sure!”

At that moment Paul’s friend Diana Gartner strode into the garden. The lanky orbiter pilot was generally a cool and collected person, of about Paul’s age and at least as world-wary, but at the moment she was more agitated than he had ever seen her.

“Paul, switch on some of your media!” she said quickly after a brief wave and nod to Seiji. “Something big is happening on Earth. Some kind of biotech or nanotech has gotten loose. It’s killing a lot of people.”

The three of them left Paul’s tea-ceremony world behind and hurried inside, into the airy, tent-like interior of his domicile.

“I’m still testing the big new VR surround we bought,” Paul said as they walked into his entertainment room. “We can use that to media surf.”

“Testing?” Seiji said. “Paranoia tripping, you mean.”

“I think your brother might consider it cybernetic shamanism,” Paul said as he started the system up. “Aerial voyaging to another realm.”

“Entirely too much like Jiro’s blues,” Seiji said, shaking his head. Before sitting down, however, he donned head circlet and eyewalk gear to monitor the feed Paul would be running, just in case. Diana did the same.

“This tech wasn’t made for this application, exactly,” Paul said, strapping himself into the gimballed swivelstand and looking about him at the full 360 virtual surround. “It was built for the biodiversity preserve, actually.”

“What was it designed for, then?” Diana asked, a bit cross with the complexity of the system.

“To help us identify, analyze, and interpret raw ecological imagery,” Paul said, setting the swivelstand into motion. “We’re going to use it to create a sylvan simulacrum. An electronic forest to stand between the dirt, cellulose, and sunlight of the real thing, and the numbers, bytes, and electrons of the raw data. It surfs media really well, though. Even if it wasn’t designed for that use.”

Keeping manual control over the first thousand channels and the rate of switching, Paul started material from Earth’s infotainment nets and holozones and infosphere sites pumping into the virtual space around him, while Seiji and Diana eaves-dropped.

“—organometallic nanotechnology,” said an Asian man with perfect hair in holospace, “stolen from at least two locations—Prader Dome at MIT and the containment laboratories at Fort Dietrich, Maryland.”

“Hey!” Seiji said. “My brother used to work in Prader!”

Paul, however, had already scanned on. A newsnet splash-header filled the screen with THE WAR MITE PLAGUE then swung into an electron micrograph-filligreed background as a serious brunette woman interviewed a professorial looking African-American gentleman, whose own image was captioned with his name—“Dr. Martin Pugh”—and professional connection to the Massachusetts Institute of technology.

“A cell division shift in kinetosomal DNA,” said the professor. “Kinetosomes are the organelles from which sperm-tails and all other such cell whiptails grow. Originally Fort Dietrich hoped to use it as a last-resort bioweapon, to wipe out the possibility of an enemy’s future generations. That effort was discontinued when it was concluded that the biomechanicals could not be made to distinguish the spermatogenetic cells of friend from those of foe. The biomechanicals’ rapid replication rate and complete lack of biological or immunological controls—”

Paul scanned on, Seiji and Diana following along within him.

“—the enantioviroids were used to ‘program’ the nanotech,” said a bespectacled woman with wild hair, whom Paul recognized as a famous crusader against biotechnology. “My sources tell me that, after the failure of the Sperm Zapper application, the biowarriors at Fort Dietrich rediscovered some old work of Lynn Margulis’s suggesting that kinetosomes were once free-living spirochetes. In that research they found the idea that, in the nerve cell with its accompanying axons and dendrites, we are in fact looking at latter-day spirochetes. Nerve cells, and related cells in the endocrine and immune systems, long ago discarded the rest of the spirochete body, but they still retained the basic spirochete system of motility, almost as if they are always ‘trying’ but unable to rotate and swim like the bacteria they once were. Human thought is deeply dependent on the motility and communication connecting remnant spirochetes. That’s why human consciousness and spirochete ecology share fundamental similarities—”

Paul scanned again.

“—have severely restricted travel to and from the following areas,” said a dark-haired woman with the Liberty Bell in the background behind her, “on suspicion of plague outbreak: New York City, Washington D.C. and the surrounding beltway, Downtown Los Angeles in the Balaam regional cityscape, London and the entire Thames estuary zone, Paris Metroplex, Geneva, Moscow, Beijing, Tokyo Metroplex, Singapore, New Delhi, Buenos Aires, Rio de Janeiro, Nairobi—”

Paul scanned on until he came across a gray-headed anchor male providing an overview of the crisis.

“—have claimed responsibility,” said the talking-torso authority figure. “Here is the video material we’ve received from the most likely claimants.”

A clean-shaven and rather beefy-looking man—dressed in CSA combat fatigues, with a CSA cross-and-stripes flag and a 337th Guardian Air Assault pennon behind him, flanking a large painting of a surprisingly muscular and well-groomed Jesus—spoke from behind a plain oak table in a windowless room, his right hand upon a Bible. Diana gasped suddenly, as if she recognized the man, but said nothing.

“Using the sword created by their own secular evolutionist scientists,” the renegade soldier said, “we have struck a blow against the Satanic internationalist conspiracy which has blocked the realization of God’s kingdom on Earth in the Christian States of America. Note that the initial release locations of this Nanogeddon correspond to major United Nations, Corporate Presidium, and international banking facilities and installations throughout the world. The unforgotten martyrs of Smithville massacre have risen, to smite their demonic oppressors into the dust!”