Better Angels (8 page)

Once she’d finally decided that living with him was worse than being alone, Lydia made up her mind that they should dissolve their household and—over Tarik’s truculent and petulant objections—they had. Freed of Tarik, however, she found that she did not much like being alone. She didn’t like it at all.

Temporarily homeless, Lydia found herself living on her friend Kathryn’s living room futon. Above and beyond that, her research was threatened. The recently elected “New Commonweal” majority in Congress, along with the NC governor in Sacramento, had begun to shut off funding for any further research at Rancho La Brea, on the grounds that the tar pits research was “Darwinian” and therefore inherently “anti-Biblical.”

As far as Lydia could tell, the New Commonweal interpretation of the separation of church and state held that, if government moneys could not be used to promote religion, neither could they be used to attack religion. On coming to power, the new churchstaters slashed funding for any research they interpreted as supporting an evolutionary viewpoint. Lydia only hoped she could finish up the last of her doctoral research before the New Commonweal people took over the government altogether and prohibited outright any and all further research at the tar pits.

In the midst of all this personal and political turmoil, she had met Marty, tall and muscular and handsome, as well as charmingly innocent and naive in ways Tarik had never been. Marty was Kathryn’s office mate in Comp Lit, which was how Lydia had met him. He was single, quite unattached, a big happy overgrown boy. She had gathered him to her with astonishing swiftness and ease, and he had served as an anodyne to her loneliness—at least for a time.

Now, however, she sat hugging and rocking the big (and, at the moment, unhappy) young man in her arms on the edge of the bed, wondering how she could have stayed involved with him as long as she had. True, for a while he had been a good hedge against Tarik, who had kept showing up at odd times for odd reasons. Lydia had fantasized more than once that they would fight over her, but it had never happened. Now that Tarik had at last moved back east, it was less likely to occur than ever.

Even as she attempted to soften the blow of her dumping him, Lydia knew that she did not need Marty any longer. He was in fact turning into something of a burden and embarassment. Tomorrow she was scheduled to move in with two of her fellow female doctoral candidates, so she would no longer need to be living with Marty in order to have a place to stay. Her soon-to-be-roommates, too, had already let Lydia know that in the mate-selection races they thought she could do much better for herself than her current boytoy.

Now, with the recent slight thawing in attitudes from Washington and Sacramento, the tar pits and the Page Museum did not seem quite so likely to close down before she finished her doctoral research, either. Things had begun looking up for her. Gazing at the mirror opposite the bed, Lydia Fabro saw the gray that had already begun to shimmer in her dark curls, here, too soon after her thirtieth birthday. Time to start tinting and highlighting that right out, she thought. That would take care of that. She didn’t need to sleep with a young master’s candidate to boost her self-confidence any longer—and she’d be damned if she were going to support Marty through graduate school the way she’d already supported Tarik for years.

One more night, she thought. Maybe a farewell fuck for the sake of friendship and old times, but come morning she’d be done and Marty would no longer be a shadow on her present—only a memory from a quickly receding past, a fantasy of secret recklessness for that foreseeable future in which she had begun to grow a bit bored with the stable and responsible Mister Right she fully believed she would eventually marry.

Before Lydia had even finished comforting Marty, she was already living in that future, he was already in the past.

CHAPTER TWO

THE EYE OF GOD

—risk madness to reach truth? Jacinta was thought as Caracamuni tepui re-entered normal spacetime. Looking about her, she saw that all the ghost people looked exhausted. Old Kekchi seemed particularly drained—so tired as to be almost comatose. The quartz collecting columns still hovered in the air, but their pulsing had become much quieter.

What were those columns doing now? she wondered. Maintaining the bubble of force around the tepui top? Or something more?

Deciding that the ghost people were too dazed by their exertions to be able to tell her much, she left the Cathedral Room and went looking in the cave tunnels for the electronics gear she had brought with her to Caracamuni. At last she found what she had been looking for: monitors wired out to the surface, showing several views from cameras out on the tepui’s top.

The foreground in the first monitor was at least familiar in its alienness: the dense stone forest of balance rocks and pinnacles, columns and arches, the geological ruin from which time and wind and water had dreamed the surreal temples and cathedrals of an erosion city out of the stone of the tepui’s top, back on Earth. In the background, however—beyond the faint shimmer of the field of force ensphering the tepui—was something neither Jacinta nor any other human had ever seen: a sky so thick with stars that it was hard to find darkness there.

Examining the other monitors, she soon realized that what she had seen on the first monitor was a perspective looking down toward the center of a spiral galaxy’s great disk, probably from a few thousand light years above that center. Linking nearby space to the center of the galactic disk was a flood of softly glimmering light, like a cross between a distant lighthouse beam and a waterfall turned fountain.

Most of that beam-fountain, however, seemed to appear from and disappear into the celestial object nearest the tepui—a vast lens of ghostly fire, framed at its edges by a ring that appeared to be millions of kilometers in circumference and probably thousands wide. Biomechanical-looking somehow, the entire construction—lens and ring—rotated on its axis about what appeared to be a rapidly spinning mirror-sphere. Strangely,it made Jacinta think of an enormous machine, some sort of generator of cosmic proportions, for which the beam-fountain served as either exhaust or fuel feed—she couldn’t say which with certainty. Despite its great size, however, the whole structure had a certain living fragility, as if a bubble of mercury metal had been suspended inside a spinning hoop of faintly rainbowed liquid fire.

While Jacinta had been watching the awesome sight before her on the monitors, Kekchi and several of the other tepuians had quietlyjoined her. A tired but happy buzz began to pass among them, though they said no words. She looked questioningly at Kekchi.

“Allesseh,” the Wise One explained. “At long last. All the high roads lead here. Open a portal, there you go, here you are.”

They and the tepui surrounding them seemed to be falling toward the rainbow lens as it spun around its central, higher-albedo sphere. As they came closer, Jacinta began to discern a rough sphere of bright points outside the turning hoop, points flickering as they reflected the pale fire of the Allesseh itself. She thought they might be small moons or asteroids, until several of them detached from their loose spherical formation and moved purposefully toward the tepui.

“Looks like we’ve been spotted,” Jacinta said, thinking aloud. “They’re sending a welcoming committee.”

The ships—if that’s what they were—approached them with remarkable grace and fluidity, as if they were swimming through the sea of space. The craft were shaped like jellyfish and squid and mushrooms all at once. At the same time, they also looked like nothing she had ever seen.

The ships’ forward sections, shaped rather like half-opened mushroom caps, were not static but instead pulsed rhythmically like jellyfish bells, or even jetted, like squid. Each ship’s gill-cap forward section carried, behind it, a stemlike middle section. This was followed in turn by tentacular masses, at once as complexly connected as mycelia, as free-floating as jellyfish tentacles, and as tactile, graceful, and controlled as octopus arms. Patterns of color rippled and played over the surface of the ships, more like the sensitive communication patterns of giant cephalopods than the rigorous flashing of aircraft lights or movie UFOs.

For all their grace and fluidity, however, Jacinta could not escape the sense that what she was looking at were indeed purely machines, albeit mechanisms of a design exquisite almost beyond imagining. After much rippling and flashing among the welcoming party of ten or twelve craft, the largest of the ships darted forward and extended its arms in a probing caress of the sphere of force surrounding the tepui. Satisfied somehow, the ship became very purposeful and machine-like, diving rapidly downward. Behind it, wrapped in the strange ship’s limbs, the forcefield-ensphered tepui followed along—a bubble being dragged by a diving-bell spider down to its silken-roped underwater air chamber.

The ship, with tepui in tow, plunged on—toward the great ring that bounded the lens of soft rainbow fire, toward the lens that rotated about the central sphere. Soon, Jacinta could make out details on the surface of the spin ring. Even this thin rotor-edge of the entire vast Allesseh was imposing enough, as if an immense coral reef and a superconducting supercollider had been mated with a night-lit city thousands of kilometers wide and several kilometers thick.

Soaring over the lights of the spincityscape, however, Jacinta and the ghost people could appreciate its complexity for only a few moments. Ahead, near what Jacinta guessed was the axis of rotation for the enormous ring, a great blue door blossomed open to receive them.

The squidship released them. The ensphered tepui fell as unerringly into the opening as a bee into a long-throated lily. The tepui and its inhabitants fell and fell, until the eye of a god melted them into light sweeter than any nectar, and they were gone.

* * * * * * *

The Secret Experiment of Sex

“Egan!” Paul Larkin said, after the doctors and nurses had left, calling over to a blond man with short-cropped hair, a Van Dyck beard and faux eyeglasses. “You’re the liaison to Tetragrammaton for Lilly-Park, aren’t you?”

The younger man on the treadmill three units over looked at him narrowly.

“Not so loud,” Egan said as the treadmill—long since programmed by unseen medical personnel—rose in pitch, both in its angle of steepness and in the frequency of its motor’s sound. “That’s right, I am. Is there a problem?”

“Maybe,” Paul said with a shrug. “Yesterday evening I got an unsolicited web sticky-bomb. A unfinished documentary called The Five Million Day War. By a woman named Cyndi Easter.”

Egan Ortap gave him a pained look.

“She must be out of re-education again,” Ortap said quietly, absently stopping his right hand before he could scratch at one of the electrode disks stuck to his chest.

“You know her?” Paul asked. His treadmill sped up of its own accord and the pressure cuff on his left bicep inflated automatically. Somewhere a sphygmomanometer recorded his systolic and diastolic pressure as the cuff deflated.

“Not personally, no,” Ortap said. “Only by reputation.”

“Who is she?”

“Some crazy political filmmaker,” Ortap said. “Subversive type. During the last crackdown, she got sent up for drugs or child molestation or whatever the cover charges were at the time. Sounds like she’s on the loose, if she’s sticky-bombing people through the infosphere.”

As he listened, Paul could feel on his chest and sides the scratchy pressure of the plastic limpets of the cardio-monitoring electrodes. They followed his every motion and threatened to follow his emotions as well—at least as well as those might be deduced from his heart rate.

“Ms. Easter has some interesting things to say about Tetragrammaton,” Paul said, pounding along on the treadmill. “Confusing stuff, though. She says that this problem drug I’ve heard about in the media, Ketamine Lysergate-235, is extracted from our tepui fungus, Cordyceps jacintae. Of all the ‘combined tryptamines’ from the tepui our research has uncovered, though, I’ve never come across anything that would fit the name ‘ketamine lysergate.’ Sounds like some sort of joke or code name.”

Ortap shrugged but said nothing. Glancing down at the treadmill, Paul continued.

“What I really don’t get,” he said, flicking a bead of sweat from his brow, “is that Easter claims she was exposed to this KL stuff while she was still in her mother’s womb.”

“And?” Ortap prodded, carefully.

“And from what I’ve seen in the docu-film she bombed me with,” Paul continued, “Easter’s got to be well along in her twenties at least. That documentary looks a couple years old, too. That means her mother would probably have to have been given this KL-235 as early as the 1980s.”

“Which means—?” Ortap asked, as his treadmill sped up again.

“My sister Jacinta didn’t make her first trip to Caracamuni until 1995,” Paul said. “I didn’t obtain a copy of the spore-print until 2002. And I didn’t go to Damon and Griego and Vang with the spore-print until a couple of years ago, 2012. So how could this KL stuff have been extracted from Cordyceps jacintae thirty years before Cordyceps jacintae was even studied in a lab? It doesn’t make sense.”

Ortap laughed—a bit breathlessly, given how fast his treadmill was moving.

“Of course it doesn’t,” he said. “What did you expect? Unless you’re a Kennedy you’d have to be pretty paranoid to think your family was the subject of a conspiracy—or that your life and everything that’s gone wrong with it is a product of a secret experiment. So far as I can tell, having sex was the only secret thing my parents did to having me. Everybody’s life is a product of that ‘secret experiment’.”

Ortap inhaled heavily, then wiped sweat from his face with his right bicep in such a way that the latter motion degenerated into a shrug.

“Easter is a paranoid crazy,” Ortap continued, “with a vendetta against the Tetragrammaton project in general and Dr. Vang in particular. She’d be the last person in the world to give you the straight story on anything.”

Paul looked aside, to the cardio monitor where his heartbeats were rendered in electronic stitchwork.

“What’s her problem with Vang?” he asked.

“You’ve got me there,” Ortap said, increasingly breathless. “Maybe ol’ Vang did her mother and dumped her, or something. Don’t worry about it. We’ll shoot down her bird. The people in power don’t cotton to infobombers, if you get my meaning.”

Paul nodded. He was hardly a fan of the “new government” (now a couple of years old) and its privacy-invading ways, but this once it might actually be of help to him. He was also aware of Vang’s reputation as a womanizer, especially from his younger days.

He would have liked to ask more about Vang and the new government, but Egan Ortap had turned away, clearly intent on keeping up with the pulse-pounding speeds and pitches his treadmill had now achieved.

As he thought about what the liaison had said, Paul realized he wasn’t fully satisfied by Ortap’s explanations. True, a good deal of what Easter claimed in her documentary—among other things, that Tetragrammaton had “secretly administered experimental entheogens as ‘uterotonics’ to women in their first and second trimesters of pregnancy, in hopes that their babies might develop ‘unusual talents’“—sounded pretty conspiranoid and nutso. He didn’t have to stretch much to hear in those words some kind of warped reworking of that “Everybody’s life is a product of the secret experiment of sex” idea Ortap talked about. Yet, despite such lapses, the documentarist had mentioned the name of Vang’s own special project—Medusa Blue—and that was hardly common knowledge.

Her Five Million Day War work-in-progress had interview footage with Vang himself—his usual spiel about human pattern-finding, schizophrenia, and consciousness. That certainly appeared to be genuine. Every time Paul had met and talked with Vang over the last couple of years, the man had gone on about overlap between natural and artificial information processing systems, especially about DNA as a Turing machine. In Easter’s interview with him, Vang’s conversation glided easily just about anywhere he ever wanted it to go, the same way it always did every time Paul had talked with the man personally.

Word was that the “old man” was also heavily invested in—and sat on the boards of—numerous companies working on biological computing, especially “primordial soup” bioputers. When he gave Easter the interiew, Vang probably thought it would be good publicity for those interests and investments. Paul could think of no other reason why the billionaire would have consented to Easter’s questioning.

A lot of the other people Easter had interviewed seemed to know a good deal about the relationships between psychoactive substances and neurotransmitters, too. With a sigh rendered ragged by his pounding along on the treadmill, Paul wished he’d learned more about neurophysiology. It was just too far outside his training and expertise.

Then again, he had already managed to have three major careers—pretty good, for a man still in his forties. He remembered them all quite well—perhaps too well.

Not very long after he had gone public with the tepui story, Paul’s station manager at KFSN Channel 30 had tried to get him to cease and desist on that front. His boss held a firm opinion that reporters were to report on the news—not be reported on as news themselves. Paul, however, had refused to be muzzled. When his contract ran out, he was “not rehired,” supposedly on the grounds that KFSN was a respectable news station and his flying mountaintop story was damaging to the credibility, respectability, and prestige of the station.

Strangely, losing his job as a reporter had not hit him as hard as he first thought it would. As an undergraduate, with visions of becoming the next Eiseley or Sagan or Quammen, he had double-majored in Biology and Journalism, hoping someday to become a noted science reporter or popularizer of science. At the start, the TV news job as an “investigative reporter” had seemed a godsend.