Better Angels

by Howard V. Hendrix

  In his study at home, Paul had a desk drawer filled with memories, all carefully filed away. The specific details of his sister Jacinta’s life and death receded and faded and vanished, yet the emotions surrounding those memories grew always nearer and more powerful. He could not resolve the paradox of that, so he tried to live in it.

  Through the sparse brush he staggered his way toward a sandy scarp he had seen while driving into the desert valley earlier in the evening. Looking about him at night and desolation, Paul realized that he had not done very well trying at living in paradox. Instead, he had tried to fill the empty space of Jacinta’s disappearance with work and study and research.

  In the drawer at home with his memories of his sister there were also clippings and notes about quartz: fused from silicon and oxygen, the two most common elements to be found in the crust of Earth and Earthlike planets; harder than steel, fashioned into weapons for the past fifty thousand years; beloved by ancient Sumerians and Egyptians, Bedouins and crusaders, Oriental craftsmen, electronics manufacturers, shamans and witches, alchemists and New Age spiritualists. He read the notes and sometimes wondered about the source of humanity’s long romance with that rock.

  Though it was certainly not his field, he had for the sake of Jacinta’s memory read with a certain dislocated interest the speculations that the indigenous Tasmanians, extinguished a few hundred years ago, had a Mousterian toolkit—and physiological features too that would later be described in terms of neandertalensis and soloensis.

  In memory of Jacinta he also kept any notes and clippings he found about living fossils, the small groups of plants and animals that are the last living representatives of ancient categories of life, time-frozen creatures still resembling relatives that lived tens or hundreds of millions of years ago, even billions of years ago. Such creatures seemed to him undying memories in the mind of Life.

  He stared again at the plastic sleeve and the folded paper that contained the spore print. Why had he guarded so closely the existence of this living fossil, if it was that? Why had he been so reluctant to release the spore print to the world, when he’d been so eager to show the videotape of Caracamuni? The spore print, if the ghost people’s mushroom could be grown from it successfully, would present at least the proof of a species never before known to science—although that alone, of course, did not require that anyone believe the whole strange story of the milieu from which the mushroom had come.

  What else would the release of that spore print bring, though? He wondered, for the ten thousandth time, what his obsession with the print and the fungus it produced was really all about. Organic alien technology? Or a mask for his own fears of the death and decay of a loved one?

  He thought about that. Was Jacinta’s disappearance—the singularity at the heart of the black hole of his obsession—pulling all his research and all his life inescapably down into its deadly gravity? Or was it only his own fear of mortality and meaninglessness, death as event horizon, from whose bourne no further signal escapes?

  He tripped on a stone and fell. With drunkard’s luck he somehow managed to avoid landing on anything sharp. He was glad he hadn’t plunged face first into a jumping cholla or something equally nasty.

  Looking and feeling about himself in the moonlight, he found he had landed in sand, amid the crisping remains of the ephemerals that had flowered that Spring. He grunted and took another swig of the Edradour, carefully putting the plastic-sleeved spore print sheet into his vest pocket. He felt remarkably clear-headed in his thoughts, despite what the scotch seemed to be doing to his physical coordination.

  He pondered that mind-body split, then picked up a seed capsule from one of the blown flowers and rubbed it between his thumb and forefinger. The desert ephemerals had bloomed in great profusion all through the Spring, the result of the long rains. Jacinta had always loved the desert blooms, especially during El Niño years. The past winter’s rains had been the result of the fourth big southern oscillation since she disappeared. The El Niños were coming more frequently and lasting longer, or the climate had gone into a permanent El Niño cycle, as some claimed. Greenhouse warming making the weather more chaotic, extreme, unpredictable. Or something.

  Looking at the intricate seed capsule in the light of the rising full moon, it seemed to him that the natural world possessed an old dreaming wisdom, deeper and more subtle than human knowledge. We’re arrogant upstarts, he thought, to believe our few thousand years of technology, our few hundreds of years of science, could be wiser than the wisdom embedded in the systems this planet has dreamed up on its own, over billions of years.

  Wilderness is the great unconsciousness where the world dreams, he thought—setting off an inebriated cascade of ideas. Conscious creatures desperately need that. If we don’t dream we don’t learn. Evolution is life’s long unconscious learning. To wipe out species is to end learning. We’ve been burning the classrooms and killing the students for a long time.

  Falling back full length on the sandy patch he’d stumbled into, Paul stared up at the night sky and drank down the last of the Edradour. The warm sizzle of the scotch trickled slowly through his body, moment after moment. A sandy-haired man trying to sink into the sand—that’s what I am, Paul thought with a smile.

  The world is a given, he speculated to himself. Even death. All science and engineering have been reverse-engineering, when you think about it. Just trying to figure out how it’s all put together, how it all works. Maybe the goal of the mind is to engineer an escape from the mortal technology of the body. The way the nervous system and the immune system are hooked up together in the same network...maybe consciousness itself is a sort of super immune system, trying to develop immunity to mortality. Maybe in the end death does not conquer consciousness; consciousness conquers death.

  “I must be drunker than I thought,” he said with a laugh, “to be thinking things like this.”

  Thinking of Jacinta, however, he grew more somber. Tonight was the tenth anniversary of her disappearance. It was probably all too reasonable to conclude that she must be dead, by now.

  At the thought of her death, however, Paul was never able to cry—at least not while he was awake. He had never cried for her, yet, whenever he thought deeply of her, he somehow always found himself on the verge of tears. He told himself it was all too deep for tears, yet he feared the tears might be too deep for him—that, once he allowed himself to cry, he’d never be able to stop, that it would break down the dam he’d built in his soul and overwhelm his small sanity in the flood of his grief.

  Since Jacinta’s disappearance, he had “gone on” with his life, but differently. His destiny had gone awry, like a Jesus who wakes up to find he’s thirty-four and has somehow missed the crucifixion. Jacinta would understand about messiahs gone awry, he thought.

  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, ho
wever.

  “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.”