Vang said nothing, just switched off the timeline and watched his boat move slowly down the harbor channel.
“Not only have we dislocated the mushroom from its environmental and cultural context,” Paul said, “but in the name of international insecurity first and now corporate profit, people are still being exposed to the supertryptamines who have no framework at all for understanding their effects. The indígenas of Caracamuni tepui had an entire ancient mythological and cultural framework to plug their sacred mushroom into. Street kids or college students doing ‘gate’ in a back alley or a dorm room—what have they got to fall back on? Vague ideas about the sort of mind-set and ambience appropriate to taking KL.”
Paul shook his head in sad frustration.
“We’ve created thousands of long-period schizophrenics,” Paul said as the boat turned toward its berth. “Paranoid infojunkies who spend all their time grubbing information to patch together their private conspiracy-worlds. Blown catatonics staring endlessly at their own mental wallpaper—”
“Old news,” Vang said dismissively. “The supertryptamines are becoming illegal worldwide. There are pharmaceuticals available for treating schizophrenia and catatonia, at all events.”
“Every generation believes it has found the cure for schizophrenia,” Paul replied sourly. “How convenient. In letting the supertryptamines escape into the streets, we’ve given a whole crop of people a new world of symptoms they will have to medicate to alleviate. The pharmaceutical combines that pumped out the supertryptamines while they were still legal are the same ones that will pump out the ‘cure’ once the supertryptamines become fully illegal. Profit-taking at both ends.”
As the boat eased into its slip, Vang turned toward Paul, a hard look on his face.
“You seem intent on seeing me as some sort of thalidomide-LSD-BZ Mengele,” the older man said, subdued anger in his voice. “A demonic embodiment of all sorts of ills for which I don’t even bear responsibility. So be it. Dr. Larkin, we can delineate links between genetics and environment and the function and dysfunctions of the human mind until the Final Judgment. You asked me before, was it worth it? I’ll tell you something: If I had been in charge during the worst excesses of Tetragrammaton and Medusa Blue, I would do it all over again. Our mission is that important.”
Paul looked at Vang in disbelief as the crew made fast the yacht’s mooring lines.
“You’re going to create your world of faster-than-light angels,” Paul said, “even if you have to kill a million people to do it.”
“Ten million!” Vang said. “A hundred million! The long term survival of the human species is at stake. Earth is too small a basket for humanity to keep all its eggs in, but if we have to break a few eggs to save the rest, we’ll do it—and gladly. Mark my words, things are going to get very dark, very soon. Even the completion of the first stage of the orbital habitat is just a minor ray of light in a darkness that is much more encompassing. We’re at a catastrophic cusp in human history.”
“For Tetragrammaton, you mean,” Paul said. “You’ve got a Worldgate-sized scandal on your hands. There’s no way you can cover it up.”
Vang laughed and began walking his lunch guest toward the stern.
“We won’t have to!” the older man said with manic assurance. “Tetragrammaton’s woes will very soon be back page news. Much bigger things are about to break. The worst, most atavistic forces will come into their own before it’s over.”
“What?” Paul asked, genuinely taken aback.
“The current US constitutional crises over separation of church, state, and government funding of science,” Vang said, “over the US government sharing military command structures with international agencies and organizations—that’s just the beginning. Within a month or two, as soon as conditions are right, there will be a massive attack on the infosphere. Too much freedom there, you see. Has to be quashed.”
“That can’t be done,” Paul said. “The infosphere is involved with just about everything.”
“Precisely,” Vang said with a nod. “The breakdown will undoubtedly be indirectly responsible for many deaths, but it will be blamed on a terrorist electromagnetic pulse bomb, or a particularly strong solar storm, something like that. The majority of the global infostructure will go down for a while, and then it will come up only selectively. Digital counterrevolution. Covert apocalyptic aggression. Out of the ashes of the old American order will rise a new theocratic regime bent on ‘cleaning up’ American society, fully believing they can establish their ‘rule and reign’ for a thousand years. It’ll make the original New Commonwealers—for all their ‘dominion theology’ and ‘Christian Reconstructionism’—look enlightened by comparison. You had better beware, for your own sake.”
Vang stopped with Paul at the ramp leading from the yacht down onto the dock.
“I think that’s all we need to discuss, for now,” Vang said, too breezily. “Let’s see, though: I forgot something. What could it be? Oh, yes, that’s it. I forgot to kill you!”
Vang laughed heartily, pleased perhaps by the symmetry—apparently closing Paul’s relationship to Tetragrammaton with a Bond reference, just as that relationship had initially been opened with a similar reference.
Paul found the joke an eerily uncomfortable one, nonetheless.
“Just kidding, Dr. Larkin,” Vang said with a broad smile. “I mean you no harm. You won’t be in the Tetragrammaton Consortium’s employ after today, so we can’t protect you from what’s coming. I still need you, however, perhaps more than I know. Just as you need me. You’ll keep getting your royalty payments for turning over the tepui fungus to us. We may even meet again in the future. Until then, I bid you farewell.”
A strong armed chauffeur appeared from nowhere to escort Paul down the ramp and dock, toward the waiting limousine. When, halfway down the dock, Paul glanced back over his shoulder toward the good ship Txiv Neeb, Dr. Vang was still smiling and waving.
* * * * * * *
Experimental Treatment
Not a disturbed sense of self, Jiro thought, but a disturbed self doing the sensing. Words apparitioning as visual and spatial presences, colored and imaged, mobile and alive. Inner experience occurring in a different sequence from external reality—
“So you’re ready to dance with the dolphins?” Todd Fabro says. The rock-god shaman with the new cure, as Seiji describes it. Shipboard MediTox, then priming on Ibogara for the dolphin ultrasonic therapy.
Jiro sees his mother rushing toward him through the Honolulu air terminal, an eager blur of Nordic blonde smotherliness, while his father follows more slowly behind.
Going home again is always also returning to the scene of the crime.
Jiro spends more and more time “doing the dead man’s sink,” particularly when there are dolphin pods about. Primed by Fabro’s treatment staff, he plops overboard in full dive gear and swims down among the dolphins, while Seiji watches worriedly from one of the Treatment Center’s small boats at the surface.
Only about forty per cent of yearly drownings occur to people who are swimming or playing in the water. Jiro meditates on this, but drowning itself is his deeper mediation. Perhaps he is destined to be the bodhisattva of suffocation in water, a being who has wakened from the painful sleeping whirlpool of births and deaths to accomplish—what?
“To die, to sleep—” Jiro says, reading Hamlet in Hamlet in their family time because Dad thinks their teenschool is culturally limited, that “teachers” have become mere “student processors” ever since education signed on to the corporate model. Seiji and Jiro must suffer heavy loads of enrichment tutorials. “To sleep, perchance to dream—ay, there’s the rub, for in that sleep of death what dreams may come, when we have shuffled off this mortal coil, must give us pause.”
Even if most of his childhood was not spent in Hawaii. Even if it was primarily the world halfway between his mother’s and father’s, to which they’d now retired. Even if Jiro is here to take the cure, to be re
habilitated—and the weirdness has come so far, blown him out so hard, that no one in his family wanted to talk about it.
Panic, a contributory cause in almost all swimming accidents, is a sudden, unreasoning, and overwhelming terror that destroys a person’s capacity for self-help.
“It’s so good to see you,” his mother says after kissing him, gripping his left arm almost painfully tightly with her fingertips, only a hint of the perennial nervousness in her voice.
“Yes,” says his father, a man of medium height and black hair gone largely gray, “it’s good to see you.”
Seated in lotus position on the “contact platform,” Jiro removes his regulator, pinches off its airflow, and gradually blows out his air. The dolphins gather in a rosette about him, motionless. For endless moments he sits there like a drowned Buddha. Occasionally he takes a breath of air from his regulator, the dolphins lift their blowholes to the surface.
In most waters, the main threat to life during a prolonged immersion is cold or cold combined with the possibility of drowning.
On duty at the Global Atmospheric Information Agency, Dad is looking at an infrared satscan of a hurricane over the Atlantic and chanting “Coriolis rose/blossoms over night ocean/petals shatter lives” again and again when the psychs come for him.
“It’s stress,” Mom says nervously. “Job-related stress from working so hard for that damn GAIA. Your father will be all right again. He’s just under the weather.” A short sad bitter laugh.
Recognizing the drowning victim is sometimes difficult. Once a true drowning situation is recognized, the idea of swimming after the victim should be entertained only after all other less hazardous ways of rescuing the drowning person have been exhausted. Too often the would-be rescuer becomes another victim.
“Your brother is waiting at the car for us,” his mother informed him. “We’ll just go to baggage claim and get your bags—”
Seiji is two years older and better than Jiro is at most things. Except the childhood exploit of doing the dead man’s sink.
“Watch!” Jiro says. At the edge of the deep end in the Sunlite Pool, Seiji watches, prepared to be unimpressed. Jiro slides beneath the water’s surface, face down and arms outstretched before him like Superman in flight. He begins to exhale bubbles then streams of air from his mouth and nostrils—and he starts to sink. Faster and faster the air floods out of him, faster and faster he sinks. When the last burst of bubbles has belched surfaceward, he lies dead flat against the pool’s blue-painted rubbery bottom, motionless. Second after lengthening second slides slowly by, and still he doesn’t move.
“Well, boys,” Dad says as they walk onto the Park grounds, “what do you want to see first?”
“The fish,” Seiji says.
“The birds,” Jiro says.
Each boy is adamant in his choice.
“It’s always this way, isn’t it?” Mom says, shaking her head. “What now?”
Dad looks at the touchscreen map of the Park, glowing like a green sash at the waist of the city’s encircling greenbelt.
“According to the map, the Aquarium is on the way to the Aviary, so we’ll see the fish first, then the birds—”
“Yay!” Seiji shout. Dad tousles his older boy’s hair, drenched very nearly red from swimming in the eternal summer of the Sunlite Pool.
“He always gets his way,” Jiro says, looking downcast through his dark bangs.
Ten motionless seconds tick by. Seiji begins to get worried. The water lifts Jiro’s thick brown hair. Fifteen. Sways it back and forth like seaweed. Twenty.
When executing a rescue, it is good to let the victim know your intentions. Talk to the victim. Keep in personal contact.
“I don’t have any baggage,” Jiro says. “All I brought is what I’m carrying.”
His parents seem a bit discombobulated by that, but they recover. They make their way toward the car and there’s Seiji, shaking Jiro’s hand and relieving Jiro of his pack and duffle bag apologizing that he’s been out of touch, small-talking about the quality of Jiro’s flight aboard the flying wing “view front” jet from the mainland, about the contract job Seiji’s just finished at the orbital habitat, installing the first of the new macro-engineered photovoltaics up there—about anything, except why they’re all right here, right now. Jiro tries to keep a handle on his mind’s rambling, tries to keep his eyes from darting too fiercely from his head, round and about, searching his surroundings.
Twenty-five seconds. Anxiously Seiji looks around for a life guard. Thirty. He begins to wade toward Jiro. Thirty-five seconds.
“Timor mortis conturbat me,” twelve year old Jiro says, reciting words about death in a dead language, the learning of which his parents believe will help broaden Seiji and him enough so that they won’t end up weather-observers for the Global Atmospheric Information Administration (like Dad), or Food Service workers (like Mom).
Exhaustion is simply loss of energy and the resultant inability to make the necessary movements to keep afloat and make progress through the water.
“I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each,” their father reads. “I do not think they will sing to me. I have seen them riding seaward on the wave, combing the white hair of the waves blown back, when the wind blows the water white and black.”
At forty-five seconds Jiro pushes himself off the bottom and surges toward the surface, breaking out of the water with a great insuck of breath, almost knocking Seiji down where he stands over him. Seiji’s fear and brief anger turn perversely to elation.
“Hey! How’d you do that?”
“Just blow out all the air,” Jiro says with a shrug, “and you drop like a rock down the well.”
Buoyancy of a body depends on the type of body. Some bodies are fairly buoyant. Others have marginal buoyancy. Still others have no buoyancy at all.
At the car out in the humid Hawaiian sunshine, Seiji and Jiro take the front seat while their parents ride in back.
“You still doing that summer job?” Seiji asks as they pull out of the parking lot and onto the highway. “Finding patterns in data or whatever it is?”
“Data pattern recognition,” Jiro corrects mildly. “Yeah. But I don’t know if I’ll be able to keep the job much longer. My bosses aren’t happy. They say I’m finding patterns that aren’t really there.”
“Oh, Jiro!” their mother says, sounding simultaneously sad, worried, and exasperated.
“Honey,” their father says, “leave it alone. Please.”
A mystic is a diver who can swim. A schizophrenic is a diver who can’t. If you get too far out of your depth, you’ll drown. If you don’t get out of your depth at all, you’ll never learn to swim.
“Let me see it again,” Seiji says.
“Okay.”
When Jiro slides under this time Seiji submerges too, eyes open, watching him. Air like a stream of molten silver flows up out of Jiro’s face, past his floating hair, as he sinks. A final burst of bubbles rises through the blue water, ripples the silver underside of the sky—and Jiro lies again at full length, flat as his own shadow against the bottom. He seems almost to embrace the pool’s bottom, his face learning to love that drowned pavement, to breathe no more than it does.
Experience teaches rescuers how far into the water they can safely go and how much of a load they can bear.
Seiji tries to do it too, then. He blows out air, but by the time he gets to a forty five degree angle the emptying of his chest underwater has become a tangible claustrophobia. Panicking, he inhales water and bolts to the surface, spluttering and gasping.
Parents and grown sons drive along in silence for a time, the crowds and colors of the island flowing round them like a strange blend of Polynesia, Tokyo, and Las Vegas.
“Well, maybe the rock-god shaman can help you with that,” Seiji says.
“Maybe.”
Out the window, above Kauai’s flower drum palm frond color carnival, the sky is a piercing blue. The clouds highpiled at the horizon
are so white they seem backlit. The whole scene stands out with a vividness greater than the real, suffused with a persecuted grandeur like that of a mad artist’s dream.
Seiji gives drowning his best shot again and again, but it’s frustrating. He’s the older brother, he’s supposed to lead the way, to take the risks, to teach—but it’s Jiro who tries to teach him how to drown, and he doesn’t even prove to be a good student.
“Your body tells you to breathe, even when you know you’re underwater,” Jiro says. “It’s stupid. Don’t pay attention to it.”
Eventually Seiji gets to the point where he can sink fully to the bottom—just barely—but he never does manage to let go that last burst of air, to breathe it all out so his face might sink fully forward, to kiss the unyielding pavement in that perfect passionate stillness his younger brother achieves so effortlessly.
The depth to which a rescuer may go to retrieve a victim will depend upon the depth itself and how long the breath can be held after swimming to the site.
“It explains a lot,” Jiro says, electropenning thoughts as they occur to him. “The high youth suicide and car accident rates here, everything.”
“What do you mean?” Seiji asks warily.
“If society is a second womb,” Jiro explains, “then suicides and accidental deaths are spontaneous abortions, while socially sanctioned wars and executions are willful ones. That’s what all the controversy was about in the last century: whether women individually should be allowed to do inside their wombs what men for millennia had been doing collectively inside the womb of patriarchal society.”
Seiji shakes his head.
“Maybe you’re brighter or crazier than I am,” he says at last, “but I don’t see that. Sounds like the KL is talking again, bro. Either that, or you’ve been studying too much of that history—especially the Gender Wars. Whichever, I wouldn’t let Mom and Dad hear you say this stuff, if I were you.”
Jiro fully masters the art of the dead man’s sink while still in his teens. “People are mostly just water walking around, right?” he says. “If you can just get over the fear of suffocating in water, you can let it all go. It’s easy.”
Better Angels Page 15