Better Angels

by Howard V. Hendrix

  The colonels turned back to Paul, looking slightly embarrassed.

  “How did Dr. Vang respond to your protest?” the balding colonel asked.

  “You could ask him yourselves,” Paul suggested. The colonels and commanders ignored that idea and stared at him stonily until he continued. “Basically, Vang said that esoteric stuff was nothing but a sideshow. He denied responsibility for most of it. Not even on the main road to Tetragrammaton’s real goal.”

  “Which would be what?” the commander asked.

  “The next step in human evolution,” Paul said. “Tetragramm-aton he connected to the idea of the angel Metatron, who was supposed to be a better angel because he had once been human. Tetragrammaton is really about the transformation of human beings into better angels, through technologically-mediated transcendence. That was how he put it.”

  That set them off. The colonels and the commander quickly went into huddled, whispered conference. Paul couldn’t catch most of it, but he thought he did hear one very strange statement—“Deathlessness in an electric body would be death to the soul.” From the commander.

  Had he heard right? What did that mean, exactly? Paul turned the idea over again and again in his head while the colonels and commander continued in whispered conference. He had as yet made little more sense of what that statement might bode, however, when the other men in the room turned to him once more.

  “Thank you, Larkin,” the commander said, thumbing a buzzer for the guards who had brought him in. “That will be all for now.”

  The guards ushered him out of the room and back into the lonely, isolated night of the camp. Lock-down and lights-out had already been called. The perimeter fences were still lit but, with the sermonizing PrayerVision screens and holos off, it was dark enough to see the stars—for which he thanked God, with more fervor than a million exhortations to “Pray!” could ever draw from him.

  As the guards marched him back to his barracks, Paul almost thought he saw a ripple amid the stars, like the kind Vang’s invisible dirigible had made on that night, so long ago. Or perhaps like that the tepui had made, when it disappeared with his sister Jacinta, still more years ago.

  When he looked again, however, only the stars stood above him. No ripple waved the heavens. It must just have been a mirage, he thought. A hallucination risen from the overheated Earth. Or his own tired and overheated brain.

  * * * * * * *

  Stratification

  “I don’t quite get it, Dr. Fabro,” Jiro said as he and Lydia finished suiting up in the early morning light, preparing for their trash dive. “I work with computer data. Sometimes it’s garbage, yeah, but not literally.”

  “Think of this as raw information,” Lydia said. She zipped up the loud-orange plastic drysuit, breathable and disposable, and Jiro did the same. “Jiro, we’ve all seen how good you are at finding patterns in what looks to the rest of us like static and random electronic snow. I want to know what you see when you look at a slice through the rubbishscape. Kal Elliot originally suggested the idea. It just took me a while to come around to seeing its validity.”

  The shadow of Kal being hauled off to a spirit camp for re-education passed over the conversation like the shadow of a hawk over a henyard. If it was Kal’s idea then that pretty much sealed it, Jiro thought. They were going to do this thing.

  “You’re the boss,” Jiro said with a shrug.

  “At least for the present,” Lydia said, lifting her arms to the sides of her head and tying her dark hair back tightly against her skull. The drysuit was form-fitting and, with Lydia posed that way, it outlined her breasts and waist in a strikingly seductive manner.

  God but she’s a sexy woman, Jiro thought—as he’d thought so many times before in the three and a half years of summers and school breaks that he’d worked with Dr. Fabro. He’d never done anything about his feelings toward her, however. Never even asked her out on an official date. Of course not. She was his boss, and at least a dozen years older than he was. Her brother’s dolphin-Ibogara treatments had left Jiro mostly symptom-free since his days in Hawaii, but they still hadn’t cured his backwardness around women he to whom he felt attracted.

  They watched two Banning Drillers’ rigs come churning along the impromptu road, the trucks moving slowly up the steep slope of the landfill rubbish mound that Lydia and Jiro had, moments before, climbed in one of the Garbage Project’s ancient Jeeps. Two garbology grad students, Fred Page and María Jefferson, waved and pointed the trucks uphill, toward the flattened top of the mound where Lydia and Jiro waited, attaching the headpieces of their respective drysuits. When the headpieces were on, Jiro and Lydia stood clad in the form-fitting suits from top to toe, only the ovals of their faces showing. Thus aerodynamically outfitted, they resembled athletes poised and ready to compete in an Olympic trashdiving event.

  The first truck arrived and began extending hydraulic posts from the undercarriage of its derrick bed, the driver attempting to stabilize and level his vehicle on the truncated top of the landfill mound. While the first driver was leveling out the derrick platform to his own satisfaction, the second drill rig pulled up, loaded mostly with extra telescoping pipe for the excavation operation.

  Together the two drivers raised the derrick and positioned the auger, a piece of equipment big enough to carry two standing adults almost comfortably, if they didn’t mind riding in a steel and titanium bucket open at the bottom and tipped with eight graphite-tipped steel teeth, capable of chewing through just about anything once the bucket-auger got up to its operating speed of forty rpm.

  Jiro and Lydia snapped on their puncture-resistant rubber gloves and Lydia signaled the drillers to begin excavating a shaft into the landfill. Other vehicles began pulling up—four more grad students unloading sorting tables topped with various sizes of wire mesh, a smattering of microbiologists with lidded jars, and engineers carrying sheets of plyboard between them, onto which rubbish samples could be dumped then hustled back to the Retcorp and Lambeg mobile lab near the Garbage Project’s main offices.

  The derrick rig clanked as the roaring bucket auger plunged down and ground deep into the landfill mound on which they stood. When the rig’s operator brought the bucket back up, swung it wide and dumped it near the crew of waste anthropology and garbage archaeology grad students, the students—dressed in thick gloves and heavy aprons over disposable suits—swarmed over the steaming mess, measuring its temperature in Fahrenheit and Centigrade, cataloging its contents, and calculating its “strata date”, apparently oblivious to the sharp, nauseatingly sweet smell that rose from the pile.

  Jiro was not so inured to the stench. He quickly slapped on his mask and MiniOx tank harness and began to breathe through his mouth—though not yet through the MiniOx regulator, since he didn’t want to waste his air supply. Lydia gave him a look, as if to say “Why are you putting that stuff on already?” In fact she said nothing, just shrugged and went back to directing students and drillers and scientists as the morning’s dig became a bee-hive—or at least a fly-swarm—of activity.

  After a few more buckets came up, a student, who had safety-tethered herself to one of the trucks, stepped over beside the shaft the bucket auger had been excavating and spieled out an end-weighted tape measure into the hole yawning before her.

  “Twenty-five feet,” she called. Lydia, only a few feet away, gave her the thumbs up. Jiro grabbed one of the two winch-tethered harnesses that they’d earlier hooked to the twin winches on the front of the old Jeep. He strapped himself in securely. On looking up he saw Lydia staring at him, puzzled.

  “You’re way early!” she shouted. “We’re not bottoming out until fifty-five feet. We haven’t even set up the follow-spots for the descent.”

  Jiro smiled and waved her off. If he was being overly cautious and, yes, paranoid, then that was fine by him. He had been around these digs long enough to know the dangers—and not so long, like Lydia and the other veterans, that familiarity led him to take cavalier chances. If
you slipped and fell, untethered, into the shaft’s narrow gullet, you’d likely die of asphyxiation before anyone could rescue you from that noxious, oxygen-starved shaft. That was no way he wanted to die, thank you.

  The bucket auger continued to plunge and grind and retract, to plunge again and again. The microbiologists eagerly snatched up particularly nasty and slimy bits, to quickly drop and cap those specimens in near-anaerobic sample jars. The civil engineers got a good full load of steaming rubbish on their plyboard and ran off toward truck and lab, making Jiro think of toxic techs hurrying a rubbish patient on a garbage gurney toward a trash ambulance headed to a hazardous hospital.

  The bucket had just finished taking out another load and Lydia had moved close to the edge of the hole for one last look when it happened—almost in slow-motion, it seemed to Jiro. Something was caught in the bucket. Jiro began to run toward Lydia but was quickly brought up short by the winch cable attached to his harness. When the something in the bucket shook loose, it didn’t just fall to the ground as it should have. A broken section of streetlight stanchion—rusted and pitted postQuake debris—hit the ground, bouncing and rolling. People darted out of its way and shouted to Lydia, but she turned only in time for it to strike her and send her, scrabbling then plunging, down and into the shaft.

  In the spellbound instant when everyone stood looking at where Lydia had disappeared, Jiro began shouting orders.

  “María! Start the Jeep and my winch! Fred—check the speed with the brake button, but pay it out fast!”

  María and Fred broke out of their instant of shocked stupor and quickly moved into action. Others ran toward the hole. Making his own way to the hole in the landfill, Jiro slipped the MiniOx regulator into his mouth and jumped into the shaft, falling from morning into deepening twilight. Dimly he heard the drill rigs shutting off above him, then people calling “Dr. Fabro!” and “Lydia!” from the surface.

  Alternate plans ran through his head, bubbling just at the edge of consciousness. Why hadn’t he just grabbed up Lydia’s mask and air supply? Were they back in the Jeep? Had she brought her rebreather instead? Was she conscious? If not, would she need mouth to mouth?

  No time to think about that now.

  No time, and yet the descent seemed interminable. He glanced about him, at the shaft cut through the seemingly chaotic strata of the landfill, and abruptly his pattern-finding talent—his blessing and his curse—triggered.

  White noise. Streaming. Full blizzard roaring along. Too far from the surface to do anything but wait it out. Snowpack still fresh enough to dig into. Stop wandering around and dig down—

  Waves of incredible energy spasming in release. Buildings and overpasses shattering and slumping and tumbling to rubble. Freeways splitting open. Apparitions of angels and aliens and lenses of light over the broken city, conjured by brains resonating to the piezoelectric pulse of miles of granite snapping and slipping and discharging deep out of the earth—

  Dig into snow already turning evening blue in the hole—

  Roar of jetfighters over oil-hiding desert turns to soft hiss of car tires on wet streets—

  Dig a snowcave and stay there a night and a day buried in white darkness—

  Angels falling on our town, on our town, on our town. Angels falling on our town, by Our Lady—

  Wind and flakes whispering down—

  Ancient alien angel broken in heavenly battle, falling burning down the sky, crashing to break and gutter in a pit of tar—

  City of asphalt-covered Darwinian struggle—

  Whispering down to such silence the old headvoices inside begin screaming to fill it up—

  I know how dark and twisted I am inside. It’s, it’s like every woman I want is standing on a pedestal of pure light and I can only grovel on my belly in this filthy dark pit below—

  Girder work pit. Fluid movement of the asphalt matrix. No real strata. Pit wear. DNA out of asphalt-preserved bones. Baculum, dire wolf penis bone—

  Pure as bright shining light that I would never dare darken with the shadow of my lust—

  Jesus, Jiro, what melodramatic shit! You act like they’re all Virgin Marys dressed in blue and white with the world at their feet and stars at their head. They’re as human as you are. They’ve got their own twists and darknesses. Pull them off their pedestals and you pull yourself out of that pit—

  Jiro bumped to a stop at the bottom of the shaft. His head cleared as if he’d broken through the wall of a snow cave. It was dark down here but not as dark as he’d thought it would be. The follow spots they were planning to use—someone had thought to hook them up and shine them down here.

  He saw Dr. Fabro slumped against one side of the shaft, partially covered in debris. Jiro cleared rubbish away from her face. She was unconscious, bleeding from the left cheek. Quickly he listened for her breathing. Almost too shallow to hear, if in fact he did hear it. He inhaled and removed his MiniOx regulator. He tried to get her to take the regulator and breathe. That didn’t work—she was too out of it. He inhaled deeply from the regulator, opened her mouth, made sure it was clear of obstructions, and breathed into it. He inhaled from the regulator and exhaled into her mouth again, repeating the procedure time after time. He was beginning to despair when what had started as mouth-to-mouth resuscitation at last became something more like a kiss.

  Jiro pulled up short, staring down. Lydia smiled weakly up at him.

  “Hey, Jiro,” she said quietly, then took the regulator and inhaled deeply. They came shakily to their feet together. Jiro took a strong pull of air from the regulator and called up to the surface.

  “She’s okay! Winch us up!”

  Lydia wrapped her arms around his head and her legs around his waist as the cable strained at the harness on Jiro’s back and pulled them together toward the surface. He took another deep inhale from the regulator and then turned it over to Lydia for the duration of the trip. Since her face was against his left shoulder, he could not see her expression as they rose toward the surface, but he got the distinct impression that, when she wasn’t pulling air from the regulator, she was smiling—even almost laughing—at their predicament.

  Moving up the shaft, rising toward the surface of a rubbish ocean, Jiro let his air out slowly, like a diver returning from the depths. His pattern-finding talent flashed snow at him only once more, but not enough to precipitate a full-fledged rage of visions. Instead of seeing himself rising out of a trash sea, he saw himself digging out of snow again, into bright blue afternoon and white clouds far away.

  As the winched cable pulled them onto the surface like strange fish, those waiting for them, at seeing that they were both all right, broke into applause and even a few suggestive whistles. Those waiting about the top of the shaft helped Lydia and Jiro to their feet and moved them away from the edge of the hole before sitting them down again. One of the rig drivers approached with a first aid kit. Others helped them out of their drysuits. Jiro had trouble concentrating on all that was going on, however. The stench of the excavated rubbish piles and the shaft itself—which his mind had somehow blocked out while the rescue was going on—now hit him full force.

  “We’re going to have to pronounce J-I-R-O ‘hero’ from now one!” Fred Page said, laughing.

  In response, Jiro, unable to any longer hold back the nausea tsunami rising from his gut, promptly turned his head aside and vomited. A stunned silence opened up, from which Jiro’s own shy smile, as he turned back to them, wiping his face, suddenly elicited spontaneous gales of laughter.

  Some moments later, ambulance sirens sounded and the crowd of onlookers turned away from them, toward the sound. Jiro and Lydia slowly stood up.

  “Well, pattern-finder,” Lydia began, “were you too busy to see anything while you were playing hero?”

  “I saw something,” he said, thoughtfully. “Looks like, as the mounding is getting higher, the stratification is breaking down. Maybe the strata are giving way to a looser matrix.”

  Lydia looked
at him, then nodded slowly.

  “Thanks,” she said as she began walking toward the ambulance parked at the nearest edge of the trashlands. “I’ll look into that.”

  * * * * * * *

  Strange Attraction

  “A livesuit,” Dr. Schwarzbrucke said, seated on a stiff chair next to Mike Dalke’s cubicle. “You’ve been with us several years, I know, but it’s still a big step.”

  Yes, the next logical step, Mike thought. He looked at the artist’s rendering Schwarzbrucke had slotted into his visual field. The illustration showed a human body—presumably his own—completely cocooned in a semi-translucent, gray-green, state-of-the-art biotech bodysuit. Cocoon or mummy sleeping bag would almost describe it, except that it and the figure inside it floated in a large sensory-deprivation tank. At the head end the suit and its occupant were hooked up to all manner of tentacular umbilicals—air, nutrients, electronics. Through the clear plastic umbilicals housing could be seen the merest hint of a human face, almost completely overwhelmed by the rotund, paddle-fluked body.

  “The advantage to you, of course,” Schwarzbrucke continued, “would be the unprecedented infosphere access such a step would give you. For the price of doing a little data-minding for Retcorp and Lambeg, your brain would be immersed in continuous communion with all the electronic information systems of the entire planet—and beyond, out to the farthest-flung artificial satellites humanity has ever created. You would be floating in a quasi-weightless environment, with all your bodily needs attended to by the suit. You would never have to unplug.”

  Mike remained focused on the artist’s rendering. The overall effect was distinctly chimerical: simultaneously a cocooned human that also resembled a walrus or manatee coming to the surface for air, and a great tentacled squid reaching out of the sea, and a jellyfish adrift on unknown currents.

  “That does have its side-effects, however,” Schwarzbrucke continued. “Over time, your musculature would likely atrophy to the point that you would become, in essence, a prisoner of the suit and the tank, unable to live without them. This is uncharted territory, Michael. It’s as close as humanity has yet come to abandoning the physical body on the surface of the Earth for the body electric spread throughout space. Once you start down that road, it can’t be long before there’s no turning back. Be very sure of your reasons before you decide, one way or the other.”