Better Angels

by Howard V. Hendrix

  The breaking-off and re-establishment of contact, the tentative beginnings of his greatest detective work—that was nearly two years ago, now. He had bided his time, and in that time had learned much about the men who had battered him—and about Dr. Richard Schwarzbrucke and Crystal Memory Dynamics, too.

  Especially, though, he had learned about the “little people,” the “machine-elves,” the “reef angels,” the “underwater jungle monkeys,” as he had often and variously pictured them. Coordinated throughout the entirety of Earth’s infosphere, their Culture, hidden away in its Deep Background, could bring to bear computing, simulation, and predictive powers that made teraflop and petaflop speeds—the trillion and quadrillion floating operation points-per-second of the world’s fastest individual supercomputers—look like pebble scrapers and antler awls by comparison. The reef angels’ reality-simulating powers made chaos and nonlinear dynamics only a slightly subtler form of order. Butterfly effects could be exploited, dissipative structures created, steered, aimed....

  “Well, Michael,” Dr. Schwarzbrucke said when he came again for Mike’s decision, showing Mike once more the cocooned and tentacle-faced form of his possible livesuited future. “To abandon the body, or not to abandon the body?”

  That was the question, wasn’t it? Mike thought. Would what came out of that cocoon float like a butterfly and sting like a bee? Like a jellyfish? Like butterfly effects from innumerable floating operation points, stinging like incalculable swarms of bees?

  Only one way to find out. Only livesuited could he gain the full involvement in the infosphere, in the Deep Background, that his testing, and his justice, would require.

  Suit me up, he flashed Schwarzbrucke across the interface—a connecting space, he knew, that would soon grow to chasm, separating him from all other mortals.

  * * * * * * *

  Oil-Blackened Bones

  Crawling on her belly through the drainage culvert under Ogden Avenue to the west of Hancock Park, Lydia had to remember not to nod or shake her head in response to anything Jiro might be saying. Any vigorous movement of her head sent the focus of her headlamp bouncing everywhere.

  “Any plans for what we’re going to do if we get caught?” Jiro asked in a loud whisper from where he crawled along behind her.

  “We won’t get caught,” Lydia said quickly, sotto voce. “Look at all the good luck we’ve had so far. My key still worked in the lock on the grate cover. We didn’t even have to use the bolt-cutters. Once we get to the other end, we come up on the floor of the park’s streambed—inside the perimeter fencing.”

  The bouncing of the light from Jiro’s headlamp told Lydia that her partner in trespass had nodded his head. He coughed, too—from following along behind her, poor guy, in the dust kicked up by her passage along the leaf-littered and dry-silted bottom of the culvert. All rather uncomfortable, this crawling along underground in the heat of a late summer L.A. evening, along a concrete culvert, dressed in boots and work coveralls—the last not nearly as form-fitting as their trashdive drysuits had been, but very nearly as hot and sweaty.

  She and Jiro had a strange bond, no doubt about that. In the months since he had saved her from her own carelessness at the Trashlands excavation, the two of them had grown both closer and further apart than they had been before that episode. Something had happened in that rescue, a boundary crossed that could not—and would not—be transgressed again. He was too shy to push the line, and she was too wary to give him any sign that he should.

  Struggling on in the arduous belly-crawl along the drainage tunnel, Lydia thought that his shyness was unfortunate, actually. She had to admit that she found the lanky, absent-minded Jiro attractive in an odd sort of way. She had fantasized occasionally that he might have made an interesting last fling, now that she had found Mark.

  But no. Jiro was just too shy and inward—still a big, socially awkward teenager, at some level. His place in her heart and mind had to be relegated to her darker, more secret and remote fantasy of two men fighting over her as she watched—a role for which Jiro, in particular, was manifestly unsuited. She could only be truly serious about a man who was more mature, more socially sophisticated, more outgoing, more goal-oriented and—yes, assertive and aggressive. Maybe a bit hot-headed. Hot-blooded and passionate, certainly.

  A proper degree of sensitivity was a nice trait to possess, but if a man was too sensitive...she found that a nuisance. Their age difference, too, only exacerbated matters. Feeling no desire to play mommy to a man in his twenties, Lydia was secretly relieved that Jiro would soon be heading back to MIT to continue his doctoral work, not to return before winter break at the earliest.

  Mark Hatton was all Lydia had been looking for: a mature, ambitious, successful, mustachioed blond-haired blue-eyed man of about her own years—as light and outward as Jiro was dark and inward. Given how well the two months’ dance of their courtship had gone so far, Lydia was certain that she would not have to wait forever for her relationship with Mark to crystallize into something permanent.

  She had never mentioned Mark to Jiro (or anyone at the Project, for that matter). Aside from telling Mark the story of the trash pit rescue, Lydia had not breathed a word about Jiro to her new love, either. That story in itself had seemed to unaccountably annoy Mark. As a result, Lydia had found she was less likely than ever to mention the name of her co-worker to her lover again.

  Yet here she was, with Jiro, doing with him something that was important to her—and which she was sure she could never have done with Mark, her prospective Mister Right. Lydia could just hear Mark deriding this small adventure as a “crazy escapade”, “frivolous”, and perhaps “dangerous”.

  “I’m surprised this culvert is as big as it is,” Jiro stage-whispered behind her, interrupting her thoughts. “You’d think they wouldn’t need a drainpipe this size coming out of the park.”

  “It’s to handle the runoff from the winter rains,” Lydia whispered back. “This area of the L.A. basin has been crisscrossed by streams and marshes for the last forty thousand years at least. And good for us, too. We wouldn’t be able to crawl through this pipe if it were much smaller.”

  “Thank heaven for small favors,” Jiro said sarcastically. “But what should our strategy be, in case we get caught?”

  Lydia sighed and paused in her belly-crawling.

  “I presume you mean ‘caught’ by the authorities,” she whispered, grumpily, “and not ‘caught’ as in stuck in this culvert. In the highly unlikely event that we should encounter anybody once we come out on the surface again, we’ll just put a politically appropriate spin on what we’re up to.”

  “Such as?” Jiro asked, half coughing and half speaking.

  “Such as,” she explained patiently, “this: Realizing from my tenure at the Tar Pits the dangers posed by evil Darwinian stuff still here and—having undergone a profound religious conversion—I found myself bent on committing a little holy vandalism in order to prevent these Satanic materials from falling into the wrong hands or further corrupting the minds of the youth.”

  Jiro gave a stifled laugh behind her.

  “Nadarovich himself wouldn’t chastise you for such an undertaking, I’m sure,” he said, “although he might not agree with your methods.”

  They crawled a few body-lengths more before Jiro blurted out another thought.

  “What if we do manage to retrieve this skull and shoulder blade you mentioned?” he asked in a deep whisper. “What then?”

  “As long as Nadarovich and his Elect are in control,” Lydia said, “then nothing. Why incriminate ourselves? When the CSA begins to break up, then, if the new government is more pro-science, we’ll say we trespassed here in order to preserve an important scientific finding from destruction at the hands of religious fanatics.”

  They crawled a short distance further.

  “Turn off your light,” Lydia said. “We’re pretty close to the end of the tunnel now.”

  They turned off their lights and
crawled in darkness for the last several body-lengths. The hole ahead, which had been darkness at the end of the tunnel when their headlamps had filled the tunnel with light, was now transformed as their eyes adjusted. The black hole now became their only source of light, weak as it was, errant photons leaking in from the ambient lights of the city beyond the end of the culvert, beyond the edge of the park.

  Crawling the last lengths and emerging into the night at the bottom of the dry, walled streambed, Lydia and Jiro stood up inside Hancock Park, itself a dark space surrounded by the city’s streetlights and partly-lit office buildings. Only the County Museum of Art section of the park was not fenced off and closed to the public. The rest was still locked down as tightly as the day Lydia had left it. The two of them climbed up the short wall and out of the dry streambed, Lydia leading the way.

  Once back on the level ground above, she headed northwest in a quick, crouching run, Jiro close at her heels. Making their way past the locked buildings of the old Pit 91 Viewing Station and the Observation Pit, they came to a knee-high “roof,” the cover that sealed Pit 129. Clambering onto that low roof, they at last located the hinged, locked access cover over the square hole in its top—an assembly that served as both trapdoor and escape hatch for Pit 129.

  Lydia unlocked the access cover and they both climbed down the steep ladder-steps to the floor of the excavation pit. Not that it was really a “floor,” she thought, once they were inside and had turned their headlamps back on, so that she saw the pit’s interior again after all these years. The “floor” was actually a chaos of overlapping boards serving as walkways and gangplanks onto or scant inches above the sticky asphaltic matrix. The matrix itself was a gray, white, and black jumble, cracked and seamed like a view of river deltas from space, the scant black “rivers” here being fine seeps of groundwater mixed with asphalt. Old five-gallon sized asphalt muck-buckets—once white, now mostly black—stood on a wooden pallet near the northwest corner of the pit.

  “Watch your step,” she warned Jiro in a low voice. Now that they were out of the echoing culvert, she no longer felt the need to whisper.

  The walls about them were of heavy, end-bolted boards, braced at about middle height by a square of I-beam girders—a rectangle inset with a second, canted square of girders serving as angle braces. If the floor and lower half of the walls were studies in black and white monochrome, the girders and upper sections of the walls were an exercise in sepia tones: rust-reddened girders, faded redwood boards.

  “Whew,” Jiro said, his headlamp’s light joggling as he wiped sweat from beneath the elastic band that fastened it to his head. “Mighty hot and stinky down here. Any reason we couldn’t do this in the winter?”

  “Groundwater,” Lydia said simply. “Groundwater seep is lowest at this time of year. If we’re lucky we won’t have to turn on the water pump. It’s solar powered and quiet, but I’d prefer not to take the chance of it being heard—or not working at all, since presumably no one has run it for years.”

  Their headlamps darted through the underground space as Lydia stepped quickly toward the southwest quadrant. There, framed by gangplank boards and weathered archaeological grid strings, were the tops of a strangely-shaped skull and elongated shoulder blade—almost completely high and dry, and just as she’d left them.

  “There they are,” she said to Jiro. “Let’s extract them. Here, give me the tool bag.”

  Jiro handed over the mesh bag. Lydia removed small garden trowels for herself and Jiro and moved over to the edge of the board nearest the partially exposed, oil-blackened bones.

  “Grab a couple of those buckets from back there,” Lydia said, “and then we can start digging them out.”

  Jiro walked unsteadily over the impromptu board walkways, then came back with two buckets. Lydia pointed out the bones to be removed and—stressing care and caution—showed Jiro how to go about digging and peeling away the matrix, untangling the bones from other bones so that they might eventually pull the skull and shoulder blade free of the surrounding amalgam.

  “What you said before,” Jiro said, digging about the blackly-shining bones under their headlamps, then dumping asphalt excess into the buckets, “about wanting to preserve a scientific find from destruction by religious fanatics—is that why we’re here?”

  Lydia thought about that a moment as she tried to work the shoulder blade loose a bit with a gentle wiggle. It wasn’t budging all that much yet.

  “Actually,” she said finally, “I’m more interested in advancing my career through this find.”

  “And the other explanations were just cover?” Jiro said, not entirely approvingly. “That’s pretty Machiavellian.”

  Lydia shrugged.

  “Machiavelli was a pragmatist,” Lydia said. “The system works for those who work it. That’s all he was saying. He was beyond parties. His highest politics was personal. We could learn a lot from him, these days.”

  Jiro shook his head in disagreement, his light whipping around as the two of them found themselves momentarily digging in a darker space.

  “To be ‘apolitical’,” he said, “is merely to tacitly support the status quo.”

  “Not at all,” Lydia countered as she peeled away at the asphalt around the shoulder blade. “To be apolitical is to survive the status quo. If Dr. Elliot had learned that lesson, he might still be heading the Garbage Project, instead of suffering or dead in a spirit camp somewhere.”

  The shoulder blade they were working on was beginning to work loose.

  “I thought he was apolitical,” Jiro said, working to free the shoulder blade.

  “Khalid Elliot was anti-political,” Lydia corrected as she worked. “Subversive by nature. Happily opposed to all political systems. That’s different.”

  “But he was more religious than either of us,” Jiro said. “Yet he ends up in a spirit camp, while we’re still at the Project.”

  “Watch that about not being religious,” she said. “You don’t want to get ‘spirited’ away, do you? See, that’s what being apolitical really means. Looking out for yourself above all else. Being aware enough of power systems to know they can cause you a lot of pain—so you keep a low profile.”

  They worked the shoulder blade loose at last. It was still somewhat encrusted, and not all the asphalt had been cleaned from it by any means, but Lydia could tell already that this was not a typically shaped mammalian shoulder blade. Back in the old days she had seen dozens of those under her magnifying lamps in the Page Museum’s fish-bowl laboratory. None of those other shoulder blades had been human, but she was certain this one wasn’t human either. Too long, and seemingly reinforced along odd axes.

  She put it aside. If they succeeded in smuggling it out of here, she would have plenty of time to examine it later on.

  “Is that how you’ve survived the purges?” Jiro asked as they went to work removing the skull from the matrix of asphalt and bones surrounding it. “By keeping a low profile?”

  “And by watching my back and backside, too,” Lydia said. “By doing my science in an objective, value-neutral fashion. ‘Politics is for the moment; an equation is for eternity,’ as Einstein himself once said.”

  Jiro gave a slightly bemused grunt.

  “Some of those who died in Hiroshima and Nagasaki,” he said, “might beg to differ with the great physicist’s assertion. The ephemeral ‘political’ use of the ‘eternal’ equation, E=mc2, turned a lot of those people into ashes and ghosts. Including my great-grandparents’ siblings. Makes you wonder if any human activity can ever be ‘objective’ or ‘value neutral.’”

  The skull they were working on began to work loose, more quickly than they’d expected.

  “Maybe not totally,” Lydia conceded, “but it’s still an ideal worth striving for.”

  The skull, surprisingly in tact but for a couple of broken spaces and a missing lower jaw, came loose from the matrix of asphalt and bone. Holding the skull in his hand, Jiro, apparently unable to resist, gave
a quiet rendition of “Alas, poor Yorick—I knew him, dear Lydia. A fellow of infinite jest.” Lydia laughed, then took the skull—again noting how “not quite right” in shape it was—and wrapped both it and the shoulder blade in pads from the mesh tool bag, before placing the carefully wrapped bones back in the meshwork.

  “Let’s go,” she said, shouldering her bag of bones. “Put the muck-buckets back where you found them, then we’ll head up top.”

  As they climbed the steps to the hatch, Lydia thought again of bones under goose-necked magnifying lamps. Of tabletops laid out with row after row of asphalt-fossilized ribs. Sliding trays of vertebrae. Dissecting pans with small fossilized bird skeletons. Petri dishes for seeds, pollens, innumerable varieties of microfossils. She thought of museum-goers—watching her and her colleagues at work in the lab through tall, fishbowl windows—before wandering on to have their photos taken in front of the Harlan’s Ground Sloth or the Antique Bison.

  The world’s richest deposit of Ice Age fossils. For a while at least, that had been her life. Perhaps it would be again.

  They turned off their headlamps and came back onto the surface. Lydia felt less hurried now. Although she strode purposefully toward the park’s streambed and the culvert that had allowed their covert operation, she did not run.

  To the south and east was the Lake Pit with its life-sized fiberglass models of an Imperial Mammoth family, the trumpeting female trapped, her mate and offspring trumpeting helplessly from among the shore’s reeds and palm trees. Of course the tableau was incorrect. Of course the fossilized animals had actually died in shallow pools of tarry asphalt, the traps usually covered in dust and leaf-litter, not in deep watery lakes. Of course the reeds and palm trees about the lake had never been native to the site.

  Yet, despite its scientific inaccuracy and because of its inherent drama, the mammoth tableau had been retained all these years.

  Lydia had seen subtler dramas on the surface of the lake, not the least of which were the surrounding office towers reflected in the bubbling oily lake in the morning sun, their reflections suggesting an odd continuity between past and future. She thought of the murals and atrium garden of the Page Museum and wondered what had become of them.