Better Angels

by Howard V. Hendrix

  Lydia stared at her boss as they stepped back into Dr. Elliot’s office.

  “But think of all the suffering, all the deaths, the infosphere crashes caused,” Lydia said, sitting down in a chair opposite the seat her boss had taken behind the desk. “Why would anyone want to do such a thing?”

  “Power,” Kal said simply, shrugging out of the torso half of his coveralls, into his shirtsleeves beneath. “The control that comes from being out of control. Once the pulses were going, the out-of-control controllers could selectively take out sections of the infosphere all over the planet—least protected first. The transnational corporations, governments, and particularly the military have the most EMP-protected machine systems. The highest ranks of the powers-that-be collapsed the infosphere back down to what was under their immediate control. Now they’re in the driver’s seat like never before.”

  Lydia glanced around Kal’s office, at his cluttered desk, computing equipment, bound folders of data standing in rank upon rank on the shelves behind them.

  “Why are you telling me this?” Lydia asked cautiously. “And why now?”

  “Because it looks like this newest ‘new government’ is going to stick around, at least for a while,” Kal said. “I know about your role in the Rancho La Brea shutdown, so I thought you should learn about this sooner rather than later. If what I’m say is true, then you need to know how this is going to affect us here.”

  “How is this going to affect us?” Lydia asked, growing more annoyed as she grew more worried.

  Kal let out a sigh.

  “Very little, I hope,” he said, obviously having thought about the potential impacts before. “Non-military scientific research will probably take a massive hit under the new regime, but we’re fairly insulated. The Garbage Project has been doing analyses for over forty-five years, which means lots of inertia. The Project has established ties with four universities in four different regions of the country, so we’re covered there.”

  Lydia, her political antennae up and twitching, was not so sanguine.

  “But the Trashlands site has been digging for a while,” she worried. “Any chance somebody might push for a move to someplace else? Maybe into one of those other regions?”

  Kal thought about it and shook his head.

  “Unlikely,” he said. “Since the summary study of Fresh Kills back east was completed last year, we’ve been garbology’s biggest show on earth. We’re arguably the largest archaeological site on the planet. All the post-quake debris makes us unique—as do the Trashlander communities, the TechNots and Neo-Luddites over near Yucaipa. And they’re not likely to move.”

  Lydia nodded. She knew some of that history too. The Trashlanders’ holiest of holies was an old court decision, Greenwood vs. California, according to which trash was public domain once it was in a container on a curb. The recycleroids had built that into the Trash Access Law. Not even the new CSA government would mess with that, unless they wanted appropriatek-types rioting all over the country. Despite Kal’s assurances, however, Lydia was nonetheless starting to have full-blown flashbacks to the last days of the tar pits research.

  “What about funding?” she asked. “State? Federal? Local?”

  “We may be primarily an archaeological site,” Kal said, tapping a pen against the edge of his desk, “but everyone from structural engineers to social theorists does field research here. We are the Oxford of offal. We have comparatively little dependence on government funding of any sort—pretty impressive, considering the size of this operation. Some government agency funds from here, from Mexico, and from Australia. Some of our research foundation and university funding might be vulnerable, but our biggest single funder is private industry. The transnational corporation we have strongest ties to is Retcorp and Lambeg. They’re headquartered in Ohio, so no one back in the heartland can claim we’ve been too bi-coastal and overlooked them.”

  Lydia thought again of Kal taking down the Biblical paraphrase sign in the sunset light tonight.

  “How about ideological or religious reasons for shutting us down?” Lydia asked, all too aware of how powerful those could be.

  Kal Elliot gave her a quizzical smile.

  “I see you can think like an administrator when you have to,” he said, “despite all your ‘I’m just an apolitical working scientist’ shtik. I’d say, though, that we’re a generally non-controversial project. No anti-Biblical evolutionary biology here, Lydia. Our research also happens to give Retcorp and Lambeg insights into how people use, abuse, save, and discard packaging—including their packaging—so sponsoring us makes R & L look like a responsible corporate citizen.”

  Lydia stared at the floor.

  “I didn’t mean so much religious or ideological tests for the whole project...,” she said.

  “You mean for individuals?” her boss asked. “Workers whose history might ‘raise a stink’ for the Project? Hah! That’s a thought—someone in the Garbage Project raising a stink! You yourself seemed to have come away from the tar baby of the tar pits remarkably clean, actually. You’re right to be concerned, though. We seem to be in the midst of another of America’s periodic relapses into paranoia and persecution hysteria. Who can say how things will play out? All we can do is look to history and try to learn from that.”

  “Persecution hysteria?” Lydia asked, leaning forward. “Witchhunts, you mean?”

  “If you like,” Kal said with a shrug. “The Salem Witch Trials are the classic example, but the overall pattern is broader. That’s why I prefer ‘persecution hysteria.’ The term’s broad enough to include the Ku Klux Klan in the 1880s and 1890s, and their success at overturning any progress the freed slaves might have made since the Civil War. Broad enough to include the anti-alcohol persecution hysteria called Prohibition. That only succeeded in ballooning organized crime in the 1920s and early ’30s, pumping it full of new money, the bad synergy of attempted forced ‘temperance’ and bootleggers out to make a buck.”

  “That’s going back an awfully long way,” Lydia said, wondering about the relevance of such a history.

  “The anti-Communist persecution hysteria of the 1950s, then,” Kal continued. “That drove a lot of the country’s best brains overseas, where they ended up developing things like the Silkworm missile. Then the anti-drug persecution hysteria of the 1980s, which ended up ballooning the gang problem the same Prohibition way by making the gangbangers middlemen in the era of ‘zero tolerance’. About every thirty years the hysteria used to sweep through. Maybe it’s happening more often now. Think of the waves of anti-sex and anti-privacy persecution hysteria, all the pornographic Puritanism of our popular culture. All that’s really just been a continuation of last century’s news.”

  “I don’t see the continuity,” Lydia said.

  Her boss brought up a home-made graphic on one of his computer screens—a teardrop shape. At the top point of the drop was the word Individual, while at the swollen bottom end of the drop was the word State. At the top, off to one side, was the phrase Dispersed Control, while at the swollen end, again off to one side, was the phrase Centralized Control. Along the right side of the teardrop, under the rubric of Racial/Intuitive, were the phrases Modern Conservatism, Fascism, Nazism—each one further from the Individual point and closer to the State end than its predecessor. Under the rubric of Global/Rational, the same pattern of movement away from the Individual and toward the State also held on the left side of the teardrop, for Modern Liberalism, Socialism, and Communism, respectively.

  “Every government and corporation,” Kal said, pointing to the graphic, “is just a larger or smaller, weaker or stronger, subtler or more blatant aggregation of thugs wielding the mighty right of power. Human politics, parties, wings—all just one or another house of pain. A plague on all their houses.”

  Somehow, Lydia did not find this historical analysis reassuring. That unease must have shown in her face, for Kal once again strove to reassure her.

  “Don’t worry, kiddo,�
� he said, smiling. “I’d never join a club that would accept me as a member anyway. If we’re lucky, maybe real serve-the-poor, gospel-according-to-Mark sojourning Christians—among whom I’d like to be counted myself—will take control away from these fascist morality-mongers who are in charge now. The way I see it, the best analog for what we’re going through now is the English Revolution, mid-seventeenth century.”

  “How’s that?” Lydia asked, again not quite seeing the connection.

  “Nobody really thought that would come to what it came to, either,” Kal said. “Our twenty-first century Puritans have made a united front, until now, against their Great Satan, the Evil Empire of ‘internationalism and liberalism and environmentalism responsible for sixty years of cultural decay’. Now that they’ve got power, though, how long do you think it’ll be before they fall to factional squabbling and their coalition collapses? I don’t think their Christian States of America will last as long as England’s seventeenth century republic. This is traditional hierarchy’s last hurrah. After this it’ll all be networks rather than hierarchies.”

  Lydia found this part of the broad historical perspective strangely comforting, although not totally. She wondered whether networks, even if they might be more subtle, would be any less brutal than hierarchies in the long run.

  “Is that your plan, then?” she asked. “Just wait it out?”

  “Wait, yes,” Dr. Elliot said, leaning forward on his elbows, “but also watch. Eternal vigilance is indeed the price of our continued freedom, but we can afford it. We’ll make it through this, Lydia. Don’t worry.”

  They heard a computer phone ringing in a nearby office cubicle. It was a reassuring sound, since the infosphere crisis had knocked out communication for days and lower priority systems were only now coming back on line.

  “I think that’s mine,” Lydia said. “I’d better answer it. But hey, thanks for the words. I appreciate them.”

  Dr. Elliot gave a dismissive wave of the hand.

  “No trouble at all. I hope I’m just overreacting. Maybe I am.”

  The call on the computer phone was from her brother Todd in Kauai. Lydia was glad to see him. Since he’d cleaned up, freed himself from the rock monomyth, and found his new vocation as healer, they had been getting along much better. Sitting on his patio in Waimea, surrounded by a pocket Eden of fern and bird-of-paradise and bougainvillea and orchid, he looked surprisingly unhappy—unusual for Todd at any time, she thought.

  “They shut me down, sis,” he said glumly, running his right hand absently through his longish hair.

  “What?”

  “The dolphin-assisted drug treatment center ist kaput,” Todd said. “Martial law somehow overturns our permit from the Hawaiian Indigenous Peoples Autonomous Zone. Extends to all the off-shore clinics that use Iboga derivatives, too—don’t ask me how. They turned our loop-hole into a noose and hung us with it.”

  “How?” Lydia asked, bewildered.

  “The drug agents took everything—all the boats, the medical equipment, the underwater contact platforms, everything but the dolphins. Thank God they were still wild. They just disappeared out to sea when the patients stopped coming.”

  Lydia was stunned, especially after her conversation with Dr. Elliot.

  “But—but why would they want to do that?” she stammered. “The treatments worked. They worked for you—”

  “And my dolphin-Ibogara therapy succeeded with groups broader than just traditional addicts,” Todd said with a crooked smile. “Maybe that’s what they were afraid of.”

  “Why?” Lydia asked, unconsciously brushing her hair back from her face so she’d look more presentable on the compuphone’s camera.

  “I’m still trying to figure it out,” her brother said. “My guess is it has something to do with the fact that our treatments were using a drug to cure people of their dependence on drugs. If religion is the opiate of the people, then maybe the reverend generals are afraid a drug against drugs might work as a drug against religions, too.”

  “You really think so?” Lydia asked, intrigued by the idea despite its strangeness.

  “I don’t know,” her brother conceded. “Honestly, I hadn’t heard of anybody in the Ibogara therapy movement who was pushing in that direction. I was deluded enough to think the Constitution meant all of us—religionists and therapists alike—operated under a non-interference directive: They don’t push their religion drug on me, I don’t push my therapy drug on them. So long as nobody gets hurt, then nobody gets hurt.”

  Lydia shook her head.

  “Old Constitutional protections are pretty much a dead issue now,” she said.

  “Looks like it,” Todd agreed. “If you’re pushing a religion against drugs, you probably have no tolerance for a drug against religions. Maybe the God-pushers won’t be happy until everyone is shooting up with prayer.”

  “What are you going to do now?” Lydia asked.

  “Time to face the music again, I guess,” he said. “Do some recording. Maybe find some new talent and produce them, help them sound the way they want to sound. It’s not going to be easy, since mass media seems to be the God-pushers’ preferred delivery system. But that’s not why I got in touch with you.”

  “Oh? If not this happy news, then what was the occasion for your call?”

  “When you last came to visit,” he began, “I remember you saying how difficult it was to find people who could do large-scale data pattern recognition. It turns out I’ve got somebody, if you still need a pattern finder.”

  Lydia perked up.

  “I can always use that kind of talent,” she said. “We’ve got a couple of research analyst positions, still unfilled—hard to get top-notch pattern analysts with what we can afford to pay here.”

  “I’ve got somebody for you,” he said. “Jiro Ansel Yamaguchi. His resume and CV are in the file I’m attaching to this call, right now. He was one of my clients here. KL user, precipitated some paranoid ideation. He was almost finished with his treatment course when we got shut down. He definitely seems to be back in touch with reality now. Quiet guy, but nice—and he knows his stuff. What do you say? You do me a favor by finding a position for one of my clients, I do you a favor by getting you a pattern puzzler who’ll work cheap—at least initially.”

  “Sounds like a good exchange,” Lydia said, thinking carefully. “I’ll look through his materials. If he interviews well, I may be able to use him.”

  “Great,” her brother said. “I think he’ll appreciate it. I know I do.”

  They signed off. Lydia would normally have been very squeamish about employing someone who, until recently, had been a druggie. Things her brother and Dr. Elliot had said, however, had softened her attitude somewhat. She would wait and see what happened. That was all anyone could do, these days.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  A WAVE OF HALLUCINATION ON AN OCEAN OF MYSTERY

  In the Maxfield Parrish-meets-Capability Browne gardenscape that served as floating country hotel for the visitors from Earth, Jacinta wondered where the tepui had disappeared to, once she and the ghost people had been brought into this very different space. When she tried to look beyond the gardens and pastoral landscapes, she saw only the cave of night, wrapped around a sky filled with stars in false constellations—false, because those were the constellations of home, and they were far from home.

  With a sigh she returned her gaze to her surroundings in this beautifully green and flowered lotus-land. Almost any material thing she wished for—food, drink, a cool breeze—soon arose before her. She did not yet understand what sort of technical wizardry made possible this Land of Cockaigne magic, but when she saw Kekchi nearby, she thought that perhaps he might have an answer.

  “Kekchi—come here a minute!” she called to the Wise One, marveling once again at the difficulty of determining whether Kekchi was an old man or an old woman. As always, the Wise One was dressed in a robe intricate as a prayer rug in its weave—the same pattern as that seen
in the loincloths and robes all the other ghost people wore, only fuller and looser than the clothing worn by the rest. Garbed in such a manner, Kekchi showed only a genderless old age—a longhaired, gap-toothed, chin-fuzzed, slack-breasted, bright-eyed ageless age.

  “Hello, Jacinta,” Kekchi said, in the cracked falsetto of someone not much accustomed to speaking—and in an English far more flawless than the Wise One had ever achieved before their arrival in the world of the Allesseh. “Why aren’t you speaking mind-to-mind? You have the ability now. Among us, language is for children, for only children have need of it.”

  “Still more comfortable with words, I suppose,” Jacinta said with a shrug. “But that’s another thing I just don’t get. Full development of the myconeural symbiosis and its ‘telempathy’ takes about twelve years among your people, right? Certainly we haven’t been here that long.”

  Kekchi looked down, thoughtful.

  “Time is strange here,” the Wise One said at last.

  “How do you mean?” she asked, though she had felt it in an inchoate way herself, too.

  “This place is a timeline made out of timelines,” Kekchi said. “A sightline made out of sightlines. All places are that, to some degree, but this is different. It is almost as if time has stopped here. Stopped short of its goal.”

  “What goal?” she asked.

  Something—fragment of a memory? a dream? a sending from Kekchi?—flashed into Jacinta’s mind.

  Worldminds release spores, the spores burst into spawn, the threads of spawn absorb worldmindstuff and knit it into starmind—