Better Angels

by Howard V. Hendrix

  Officer Strom blew his whistle and called a prayer break, but as usual didn’t enforce it. As far as guards went, Strom was okay, Paul thought. If you didn’t want to pray during your break, Strom wouldn’t try to force you to. He even allowed the penitents to talk among themselves—as long as they were quiet about it.

  Paul eased himself up straight from his bent-over work position. The muscles in his back and shoulders and the calluses on his hands reminded him of their existence with persistent catches and aches. The older black man next to him on the work line groaned, perfectly voicing the way Paul felt. Paul had seen the man once or twice. New in camp.

  “I’m too old for this cultural-revolution crap,” the man said in a quiet, tired voice. Paul smiled.

  “I hear that,” he said, introducing himself, extending his hand for the other man to shake.

  “Khalid Elliot,” the older man replied, shaking Paul’s hand. “What brought you to this happy little work party?”

  “Illegal drugs and ideas,” Paul said, glancing down at the ground. “I had a spore-print of the mushroom that KL 235 comes from. They got me for possession of pernicious literature too—Marx, Darwin, Sagan, Gould. A secular humanist library. Banned information, banned informational substances.”

  “How’d they catch you?” Elliot asked.

  “Jenn Reynolds, the woman I was seeing,” Paul said. “She turned out to be a morals agent. Planted a little personal-use marijuana at my place too—just to make the bust stick.”

  Kal Elliot gave a sad smile.

  “Your lady set you up and turned you in?” he asked. “Man, that’s cold.”

  Paul shaded his eyes against the September afternoon sun. The man didn’t know how cold. When the police had banged so loudly at his apartment door, Paul had come out of the shower with only a towel wrapped around his waist to see what the crisis might be. Before he could even walk across the living room, however, the police had broken his door down. The next thing he knew they had him pinned to the floor and were cuffing his hands behind his back with electronic monitor “bracelets.”

  As the cuffs clicked onto his wrists like hungry mechanical mouths, the police informed him they had a bench warrant for his arrest already in hand. In the old days they might have read him his rights, but not now. Over the noise of their ransacking “search” of his apartment, he asked them if he might put on some clothes. They ignored his request, then dragged him out of his rooms while his neighbors looked on. When the towel slipped from his waist, the arresting officers had merely draped it over his head as they paraded him toward a police van, a naked but “anonymous” man.

  Apparently the repressive norms for modesty and chastity the ruling theocracy promulgated didn’t apply to those rendered non-human by their supposed crimes, Paul thought. More sanctimonious hypocrisy from the preacher-politicians’ bottomless supply of the same.

  “I’d only been seeing her for maybe six weeks,” Paul said. “Things weren’t going too great for me by the time we met. I had had a falling out with my boss. Lost my job. Then I was out of work for eight months before I met her. I thought, Hey, unlucky in life, but lucky in love. So much for luck. How about you?”

  “I knew too much,” Elliot said, “and then I went and shot my mouth off about it.”

  “About what?” Paul asked, glancing at him, squint-eyed against the westering sun.

  “About how the infosphere crash was a set-up too,” Elliot said, looking away, idly cracking a clod of dirt under the toe of his boot. “I tried to play Paul Revere and warn people. The truth will set you free, the cost of freedom is eternal vigilance—all that. The wrong people intercepted one of the messages I sent out through what I thought was a secure, untraceable channel. It wasn’t.”

  Paul looked at Elliot. This wasn’t the first time he had heard rumors about that technocrash conspiracy idea. Maybe I shouldn’t trust this guy, Paul thought. Maybe this is all just some elaborate new form of entrapment. Then he shrugged the thought off. Hell, you have to trust somebody, sometime, at some point.

  “When the cities and the counties and then even the states started banning Halloween as a ‘dangerous Satanic holiday’,” Paul said quietly, “that’s when we should have known all this was coming. Now Christmas is banned. Soon maybe it’ll be Easter too.”

  Kal Elliot nodded.

  “Just like the Puritans banned them,” Elliot said, “almost four hundred years ago, during the English Revolution.”

  “The British were luckier,” Paul said. “They could export their religious fanatics to the New World.”

  “Where they could establish settlements and burn witches to their hearts’ content,” Elliot said with a tired smile. “But we’re fresh out of new frontiers—at least until they build a lot more of those orbital habitats. Funny, though. I predicted all this to one of my colleagues at our Project, a few years ago now. All except the part about my piece of the truth getting me a ‘Go To Jail Free’ card.”

  “That’s always the hard part,” Paul said, tossing a small rock. “Being able to see everything about the future except your place in it.”

  “Temporal blind spot,” Elliot agreed. “Funny thing about it is, I got so much of the rest of it right. I told my colleague that President General George Nadarovich is a lot like Oliver Cromwell—a social conservative and a religious radical, intent on turning us all into saints. I told her Nadarovich and his self-appointed Elect would do no better here and now than Cromwell did at turning the English into saints—and our morals ministers haven’t succeeded, either. I told her that their unified front would fall into factional fighting, and it has. Right on target with all of those. The CSA can’t last very long, and it won’t.”

  Paul heard a tractor coming down the road and saw the guards beginning to stir themselves. He hefted the pick-and-hoe onto his shoulder, thinking again how prescient Dr. Vang had been about the infosphere crash—eerily so, until he remembered Vang’s long connection with various intelligence services.

  “In your crystal ball, did you see whether you would outlast it,” Paul asked, “or whether it would outlast you?”

  Elliot smiled and raised the his own pick to his shoulder.

  “That I didn’t,” he said. “Blind spot, again. But I saw the rest. Saw to it my colleagues at work and my people at home would be safe, even if I didn’t dodge the spear myself. I wasn’t going to end up like that pastor in Hitler’s Germany—Niebuhr, Niemoller, something like that. You won’t hear me saying, ‘When they came to take away the homeless, I said nothing, because I wasn’t homeless. When they came to take away the drug users, I said nothing, because I wasn’t a drug user. When they came to take away the homosexuals, I said nothing, because I wasn’t a homosexual. When they came to take away the radical thinkers, I said nothing, because I wasn’t a radical—’”

  Strom blew his whistle and shouted that the break was over.

  “I haven’t kept my mouth shut for any of those,” Elliot said, finishing up. “Gotten me into trouble, I guess, but I’m kind of proud of that. Most of all, you’ll never hear me saying, ‘When they came to take me away, there was no one left to say anything.’ I’m not about to go gently into that good night—”

  Officer Strom walked closer, glancing back over his shoulder at the tractor. Probably didn’t want the tractor driver to see anyone on the crew not hard at work, Paul thought.

  “Quit your flappin’, gents,” he said. “Back to work.”

  The sun had nearly set by the time they were allowed to knock off for the night. The crew had cleared brush from miles of roadside, then cleaned culverts and patched road surface over all those miles. In the twilight they were marched double-time to the crew transports and driven back to camp—sweat-stinking, sore, dirty, and blistered.

  “Stick a fork in me,” Elliot said to Paul as they jumped down stiffly from the window-barred buses that had brought them back to their Spiritual Revival Camp, “I’m done.”

  As they walked across the ground
s of the Camp, Paul marveled once again at the relative ease with which this involuntary community had been created out of the sagebrush scrubland. A few bulldozers and graders to scrape away all trace of vegetation to bare earth in a twenty acre square, some post hole diggers and penitent labor to put in the perimeter fences and wires, a score of prefab watch towers, solar powered perimeter lights, air and soil motion sensors, laser-break alarms, several rows of long tent barracks and dining halls and composting latrines and the big PrayerVision 3-D screens showing the most uplifting sermons by the greatest “moral thinkers” of the day and—voila! A camp for concentrating thought-criminals away from the righteous, an arena for breaking them of their wildness and returning them to the compliant, domesticated herd.

  The evening meal was the usual stringy-protein, heavy starch and carbohydrate fare. A prolonged mass-repetition of grace led by Reverend Morals Officer Curtner served as appetizer, a constant low background roar of pre-recorded stadium sermonizing from all the screens sounded during the meal itself, followed by a dessert of canned inspirational music. The men had just been dismissed from dinner when a brace of guards sidled up to Paul on his left and right.

  “Larkin?” said the taller, dark-complected guard. “Commander wants to see you in his office.”

  Elliot gave Paul a worried look. Whether Elliot’s glance was out of concern for his new friend’s fate—or for his own, since that friend was so new and might be a spy or who knew what—Paul could not tell. Paul shrugged and followed the guards out of the dining hall tent, through the spotlit darkness of the camp, toward the command building—the only non-tent building in camp, besides the watchtowers and latrines.

  Paul had been to the commander’s office often enough to have a good suspicion that it also functioned as an interrogation room. As the guards sat him down—hard—in a chair opposite the white-haired commander, he noticed again the two colonels, one balding and one bespectacled, whom he never saw in camp except in this room, except during these “discussions” with the commander.

  Behind and to the right of where the bespectacled colonel leaned against a towering file cabinet, there also stood a closed door with mirrored glass. Paul had, on previous occasions, sensed the presence of invisible people in that other room, beyond the door—with such certainty that he had simply come to believe that the door’s window was in fact a two way mirror.

  “In the days of the old, corrupt government,” the commander began, “you worked for Lilly-Park Pharmaceuticals—isn’t that right?”

  Paul hesitated. “Old government” and “new government” were terms people had been tossing around loosely for the past ten years. In fact, before the infosphere crash and to a lesser extent since, there had been a series of new governments, which had quickly become old governments. Best to stick to the clearer, less rhetorical part of the question.

  “Yes,” Paul said. “I once worked for Lilly-Park.”

  “Your official title with them was ‘Biodiversity Preservation Specialist’,” said the balding colonel. “What exactly did such a job entail?”

  “Preserving and propogating endangered species,” Paul said. “Cryopreservation. Tissue culturing of plants, cloning, in vivo and in vitro collection of germ plasm. Finding universal surrogate mothers for lab-created embryos of species already extinct in the wild. Analyzing endangered species for their production of potentially valuable medical or industrial materials. I worked primarily with plants and fungi. Ethnobotanical preservation, mostly.”

  “Is that how Lilly-Park gained access to a viable strain of Cordyceps jacintae?” asked the bespectacled colonel.

  “Only indirectly,” Paul said. He knew where this line of questioning was headed. “Through the professor who had been my dissertation director, I offered that particular fungus to an agent for venture capitalists. Through that agent I met with Dr. Ka Vang, who recruited me to work for an organization called Tetragrammaton. Tetragrammaton got me the biodiversity preservation job with Lilly-Park.”

  “And biodiversity preservation was all you did for Tetragrammaton?” asked the commander.

  “That’s right.”

  “Did you ever work on a Tetragrammaton project called Medusa Blue?” asked the balding colonel.

  “No,” Paul said simply.

  “Did you ever work on projects specifically augmenting human paranormal or ‘psi’ powers?” asked the bespectacled colonel. “On ‘starbursts’? ‘Dream leakers’? ‘Dream shifters’? ‘Shield telepaths’? ‘Empath boosters’?”

  “None of them,” Paul said when the list was done. He had been down this road, with these interrogators, before. “I was a biodiversity preservation specialist, as I’ve said.”

  “You did, however, provide the initial spore print for reproduction of a viable strain of Cordyceps jacintae—isn’t that right?” asked the balding colonel.

  “As far as I know, yes,” Paul said, glancing down at his hands in his lap, particularly at the non-removable electronic bracelet on his left hand that tracked his every move. He thought of the anklet version above his right foot, and the fact that if either of the two bracelets got more than eight feet away from the other, alarms would automatically sound.

  “And the substance generally called KL 235 occurs nowhere else in nature except in that fungus?” the bespectacled colonel asked.

  “I believe that’s true, yes,” Paul said.

  “Did you develop delivery systems for KL 235 so that it might be given to pregnant women as a uterotonic?” asked the commander.

  “I did not,” Paul said. It always got back to the uterotonic issue with these people. Paul wondered if the stories of headship re-education camps for uppity women might not be true after all.

  “Do you know why it was given to pregnant women as a uterotonic?” asked the balding colonel. “Was it to encourage the development of psi talents in the children of those women? Or was it intended to have a calming or controlling effect on the women themselves?”

  “I do not know why it was given as a uterotonic,” Paul said. “Since I have no direct knowledge of any psi power enhancement or female control program, I would be engaging in hearsay and speculation if I answered your last two questions.”

  The commander rubbed his excessively clean-shaven chin.

  “Then speculate, Dr. Larkin,” he said with a scowl. “Why do you believe that KL 235 was given as a uterotonic?”

  Paul glanced from one to the other of his interrogators.

  “Everything I learned about Tetragrammaton beyond my job description,” Paul began, “came from public sources, mostly from throughout the pre-Crash infosphere. As near as I can tell, the model for covert dispersion of KL 235 was based on earlier intelligence-community covert dispersals of potent psychoactive chemicals, particularly LSD and BZ. If you examine the history of LSD, you’ll find that chemical’s discoverer, the Swiss biochemist Albert Hoffman, was working on uterotonic chemicals when he discovered LSD.”

  A quick series of stares and glances passed rapidly back and forth among the colonels and the commander. Apparently this possible explanation was not one that had occurred to them before.

  “How can you be sure that those who were working on KL 235 in the early days were familiar with such a history,” asked the bespectacled colonel, “unless you were involved in that initial work yourself?”

  “We’ve been over my involvement before,” Paul said, suddenly feeling very tired. “Your own records should show you that the initial extraction of KL 235—from a degraded specimen—predates my involvement with Tetragrammaton by decades.”

  “But your sureness, your certainty—” the bespectacled colonel prodded.

  “I’m not sure of my explanation,” Paul said, “but I believe it’s possible because of the name itself that they gave to the extract: KL 235. Ketamine Lysergate 235. Those who made the initial extract were most likely biochemists. They would have known that the substance they’d extracted, and later artificially synthesized, bears at most only a
superficial resemblance to either ketamine or the lysergics in terms of its structure and effect. It’s in fact part of a class of supertryptamines.”

  Paul glanced around at the officers. Apparently they still didn’t get it yet.

  “The full name Hoffman gave to his unexpectedly hallucinogenic ‘uterotonic’ was LysergiSureDiethylamide-25,” Paul continued. “LSD 25. ‘Sure’ is German for ‘acid.’ 25 because it was the twenty-fifth sample in the test series. KL 235 is going the old master one better—or rather a couple hundred and ten better. The name is an inside joke, a sort of tongue-in-cheek code. It demonstrates the familiarity of those biochemists with the history of another, extremely potent psychoactive substance.”

  The colonels and commander stared at each other again. They did not look convinced.

  “Do you mean to say,” the commander asked, “that administering this stuff as a uterotonic was to some degree the result of an intentional misreading of history?”

  “And that’s all it was?” the balding colonel asked incredulously.

  “Initially, yes,” Paul said. “I believe it was a misreading, as the commander called it. I don’t think that was all it was, as it turned out. It seems to have become other things.”

  “What other things?” asked the bespectacled colonel.

  “Maybe some or all of those strange projects you talked about,” Paul said, thoughtful. “Psi-power enhancement. Starbursts. Shield telepaths. God only knows what all. I lost my job because I protested to Dr. Vang about it. Just because I’d given him the spore print for the great mushroom didn’t mean I was going to put up with being treated like a great mushroom forever myself.”

  The commander laughed slightly, then stifled it. The colonels looked at him expectantly.

  “They ‘keep me in the dark and feed me lots of shit,’” the commander explained. “Like a mushroom. An old saying.”