Better Angels

by Howard V. Hendrix

  “—so now I’ve had to fire the guy who nominally saved my life,” she finished. “I just hope he doesn’t get the idea that since he saved my life once, he now has the right to take it away.”

  Her fiancé, blonde and blue-eyed and buff as any California beach surf-nazi, bristled at the thought.

  “You don’t think he’s dangerous, do you?” Mark asked, concerned.

  Lydia bit her lower lip and ran her hand absently through her hair before she answered.

  “Who can say what he might do, Mark? ‘Disgruntled’ doesn’t begin to describe it. He’s been acting strange for a while now. He was already crazy enough to release all this stuff to the media, after all. Maybe the news that you and I are finally getting married set him off. I think he’s sort of carried a torch for me for a long time. At least since what happened in the trashdiving accident, anyway.”

  Mark’s concerned look began to smolder.

  “One of those ‘If I can’t have her, nobody will’ fixations,” he said, absently tugging at his mustache. “That really could be dangerous. Adolescent thing, but you said he was immature in some ways?”

  “A lot of ways,” Lydia agreed. “Unstable. I should have never hired a screwed-up druggie like him, no matter what Todd said about his being ‘rehabilitated’.”

  On the screen, Mark puffed out his cheeks in a heavy exhale.

  “Do you want me to accompany you when you leave work tonight?” he asked at last. “Be your bodyguard?”

  Lydia brightened.

  “Would you do that?” she asked, eagerly. “It would make me feel better.”

  “Sure, honey,” he said. “No problem. I’ll take the commuter and see you at six.”

  She thanked him and, as she signed off, a slight smile curled the corners of her mouth. Chivalry was not dead. For all the postmodern equality and reciprocity of their relationship, she knew Mark secretly enjoyed playing knight in corporate warrior armor to her damsel in distress. Probably made all that time he spent working out in the gym and at the dojo seem more worthwhile. She was more than happy to let him have his little thrill. If she was lucky, he might give her hers too—the one of which she could not speak and would not ask.

  She called her brother Todd in Kauai next and laid into him about the problems Jiro had given her.

  “I don’t know why I ever let you talk me into hiring him,” she finished up. “He thinks his piece of the ‘truth’ is going to set us all free. Isn’t that a wee bit delusional? Hmm? What ever made you think you’d fixed him?”

  “Lydia,” Todd said at last, throwing up his hands, “I’m sorry he didn’t work out in the end. Really, though—what have you got to complain about? He found patterns in data for you, summers and holidays, for what? Five years? More? I’d say you got plenty of use out of him. I never did get a chance to finish his course of therapy, remember. Those KL people, gate heads—they were always a particularly tough nut to crack. He showed signs of being a long-period schizophrenic as well. Some of the therapists’ initial evaluations suggested that very thing, at the time he was admitted to the treatment program. Do me a favor, will you—”

  Lydia broke in.

  “Last time I did you a favor I ended up with this guy on my hands!” she said, interrupting hotly.

  “Then let me take him off your hands, okay?” her brother replied patiently. “The new government has decided to recognize the Hawaiian Indigenous Peoples Autonomous Zone again—with even greater powers than before. I’m sure to get my Ibogara permit renewed, once it finally clears the bureaucratic maze it’s been going through. The clinic should be up and running again in a month or two. Drop Jiro an e-note or a voice-mail and let him know that we’d be interested in seeing him again for a follow-up study, if he has the time.”

  “I’ll do it,” Lydia said, “but I doubt he’ll get in touch with you. You’re my brother, after all.”

  Moments after Lydia sent Jiro notices regarding his termination, she also sent Jiro a virtual memo passing Todd’s suggestion on to him—thinking it was probably a futile gesture, even as she did it. Much of the rest of the day she spent fielding questions from news reporters and journal editors. Two holo nets actually sent down crews. Lydia was forced to hold an impromptu news conference in the atrium of the Page Museum. The story in all cases was the same: disgruntled employee, hoax with fabricated data, no truth whatsoever to the claims he had made, et cetera.

  She was fortunate that Jiro, with increasingly typical perversity, was now refusing to talk to the media or comment publicly in any way on the material he had earlier sent out. She was even more fortunate in the fact that the big news of the day, aside from the ongoing and interminable armistice talks with the CSA, was the death of billionaire financier and visionary businessman Evander Cortland, the man most often credited with getting the ball rolling on the construction of the first orbital habitat. That, she hoped, would divert media attention away from the Page Museum and the tar pits.

  On line, Lydia watch that story grow, steadily dwarfing her own. Cortland had apparently died in a mysterious accident at the bottom of the Marianas Trench. He was personally testing a prototype “livesuit” reputed to make use of a new type of micro- or nanotechnology. Rumors were flying in all the media about whether he had been the victim of bad luck, bad planning, a murder orchestrated by competitors, his own arrogant recklessness, or suicide in response to recent business reversals. He was survived by his ex-wife Atsuko and son Roger, both of whom had immediately gone into seclusion, fueling still more rumors.

  Lydia really couldn’t have cared less about corporate intrigues involving Evander Cortland, but with an odd sort of schadenfreude she found herself more and more relieved that the billionaire’s tragic end assured that any news spawned from Jiro’s leak to the press would be kept off the front page and out of people’s forebrains for at least several days. With a little effort, that period should be enough time for her to turn the “disgruntled employee hoax” version of events into the Official Story.

  From time to time throughout the day, she saw Jiro hauling boxes of files and other material out to his hovercar. Later, in the afternoon, she saw a pair of burly, back-belted laborers in Simpson Moving and Storage coveralls hauling out the LogiBoxes that Vang and ParaLogics had donated to Jiro for his research. They took out a half-dozen more boxes of Jiro’s personal belongings as well.

  Nearly everyone had left the building by the time her fiancé Mark arrived. He looked so “all pumped up, but no dragon to slay” that Lydia almost laughed when she saw him.

  “Is he still here?” Mark said, his back ramrod straight and shoulders squared for fight.

  “Probably,” Lydia said. “I haven’t exactly been seeking him out, you know.”

  As she began shutting off her office systems and gathering her keys and purse, Lydia thought that they weren’t going to encounter Jiro after all. Poor Mark had gotten all chivalrously adrenaline-pumped for nothing. Suddenly, however, there he was, slouching unceremoniously in her doorway. In his sleepy way he looked surprised to see Mark there—and vaguely disoriented as well.

  “Yes, Jiro?” she said, looking down in disdain.

  Almost before she could look up again, Mark had jumped into action.

  “You the fucking punk who’s been making my lady’s life miserable all day today?” he said, bristling. Jiro said nothing. His back stiffened just enough, however, for Mark to read it as a challenge in response to his own. In a flash he slugged Jiro hard in the gut—a shot to the solar plexus that knocked the wind out of Jiro and dropped him to his knees, gasping.

  “You like being miserable?” Mark said, kicking Jiro. “Huh? Huh?”

  By this time they were out in the hall, Lydia right behind them, grabbing Mark trying to pull him away.

  “Stop making a scene,” she hissed at her fiancé. “Stop it! Stop it! Do you want to end up in jail? He’s not worth it!”

  Jiro tried to scuttle away, but still had to endure several more brutal kicks
before Mark’s fighting rage cooled enough that he listened to Lydia and stopped his attack.

  “Just wanted to say...good-bye,” Jiro rasped out, tears rising slowly to his eyes.

  “Good-bye is right, you fucking loser!” Mark shouted. Lydia struggled to drag him away before security or anyone else saw what had happened. Shouldering her purse, Lydia moved Mark away from Jiro. Glancing back over her shoulder, she saw Jiro staggering to his feet. Bent over, he retreated as quickly as he was able in the opposite direction, glancing back over his own shoulder at Lydia and Mark.

  When Lydia and Mark were out of the building, they stopped for breath on the way to the parking lot. Mark looked at her somewhat sheepishly, as if he expected to be upbraided for his violent behavior. Instead, Lydia kissed him deeply and passionately.

  “Let’s go home,” she said in a husky voice, “and fuck all night long.”

  Mark’s surprise quickly gave way to excitement and exaltation. They had trouble keeping their hands off each other on the drive to their condo. Once home, Lydia made love more passionately and fervently than she ever had in her life. Through bout after bout of lovemaking that night she reran in her head the image of Mark fighting with Jiro. She couldn’t get enough of it. The good girl in her told her she shouldn’t be enjoying the thought of another person’s pain, but the bad girl in her was savoring every instant of arousal the thought of those recent events brought her. The forbidden nature of that pleasure made it all the more powerful.

  Drifting off to sleep at last, several hours into the early morning of that night, Lydia wondered vaguely if Jiro had been much hurt, or whether he might have reported the incident to the police. She didn’t much concern herself with that, in the end. She was warm and happy. It had felt good to let all her good-girl inhibitions go, at least for one night.

  CHAPTER SIX

  TIME’S SLOWLY HARDENING AMBER

  The Allesseh had begun taking a different tack with the visitors from Earth, it seemed to Jacinta. The consciousness of that great ‘interdimensional node’ had grown distant, aloof. Instead, its now were visited daily by its angels—and only the most “angelic” looking among them. Out of all the winged creatures in its Great Co-operation, only those of hominid or most nearly hominid form were sent to visit the guests.

  Initially (and now seemingly forever ago), Jacinta had been struck by how the wings of these creatures had looked less like the traditional human depictions of feathered oars for pushing aside air, than like hovering, sensitive flames in the stream or field of an invisible power. Up close, however, the white of reflection and glow made the wings seem more shining than either fiery or feathery.

  Their “angelic” visitors had been happy to demonstrate the intricacy of their wings, which continued seamlessly from visible to invisible to the smallest of submicroscopic scales. Jacinta could understand their construction only as a species of fractal nanotechnology—at once more transcendently beautiful and more mundanely functional than any artist had ever understood angel’s wings to be.

  As she had noted upon arrival, the winged ones did not come and go but flashed into and out of existence, through a sort of quantum angelical travel. The glow that surrounded the angelic travelers was a field of force both florescent and fluorescent. The wings were certainly energy collectors—and much more. Life-support and locomotion were the most ordinary of their attributes, however. In their design, the technological seemed to have passed into the theological.

  “They are so beautiful,” Jacinta said to Kekchi and Talitha. The three of them watched their strange winged hosts walk among some of the younger tepuians, telempathically answering the young people’s questions, beautiful angels among beautiful children. “Yet there’s something about the way they move in groups—that schooling-fish, flocking bird coordination—that disturbs me.”

  Kekchi nodded but did not glance away from the angels.

  “Perhaps they have lived too close to the Allesseh for too long,” the Wise One said. “They move like its thoughts, rather than themselves.”

  Jacinta thought about that and glanced at Talitha. The other “day”—given how time worked here—the young woman had innocently pointed out that Jacinta’s darkening honey-blond hair was starting to streak with gray. Jacinta noticed then that, here in Allesseh-land, she had seen no mirrors. Perhaps it had taken her so long to notice not only from the strange way time flowed here but also because she hadn’t really expected to find full-length mirrors in a pastoral landscape. Now that she thought about it, however, she realized that all the pools here were kept constantly stirred up by fountains and cascades—never still enough for reflection. When she had tried to order up a mirror via concentrated thought, the Allesseh had seemed purposely obtuse, as if reluctant to produce it. She found that curious at the time, but it was beginning to make more and more sense.

  “I think that’s exactly what has happened,” Jacinta said thinking also of what Kekchi had said of the angels. “The Allesseh cannot let its peoples know themselves.”

  “Because then it might have to know itself,” Kekchi nodded, “and then it might have to remember its goal.”

  Talitha looked at them both, puzzled.

  “What goal?” she asked. “I thought our goal was to join with the Allesseh. Why doesn’t it want to accept us?”

  Kekchi thought-flashed them the familiar image of the spore crash: most of the sphere of winged creatures burning up in Earth’s atmosphere; the crew’s sacrifice leading to the successful seeding of the Earth with the latest generation of the spores, germinating and spawning and fruiting. But the Wise One showed them more, now. Kekchi’s timelined insight into the myth? Jacinta wondered—or something else?

  In this revelation, those few crew-members that survived returned to space, where they lived out a long immortality of isolation, their wings catching the unfailing sunlight. Loneliness and deprivation worked on their minds. Some became deranged, yet all seemed to have worked free of the Allesseh’s control. To the Allesseh those options—derangement and freedom—meant the same thing. In either case the survivors shielded the growing sentience on Earth from the Allesseh’s probing and intrusion, through something in mental space analogous to the bubble forcefield that had shielded the tepui on its journey.

  “The shape of uncertainty shapes certainty!” Jacinta said, glancing up into the blue sky that shone with bright, sunless, diffuse light. “The shape of incompleteness shapes completeness! That’s why it hesitated about the mirror. We’re not just its ‘preterite.’ We’re its incompleteness, its dream shadow and nightmare. We’re the fish in Allesseh’s reflecting pool. The crack in its mirror. The return of what it has repressed.”

  Kekchi and Talitha stared at her in surprise.

  “The Narcissus myth,” Jacinta explained. “The Allesseh started as an expanding network of von Neumann probes: self-replicating, self-improving, transceiving machines. Its imperatives were to explore, to learn, and to share what it had learned. It kept evolving itself, and coevolving its linkages to sentient species, for millions of years—at least until it stopped evolving as we understand that term. From the beginning, it must have been programmed to see itself and its mission as too important to be absorbed into anyone or anything else’s program. I used almost the same words to describe to my brother my mission on the tepui—once, when I wasn’t particularly sane, either.”

  Kekchi nodded slowly, smiling as if in confirmation.

  “I don’t think that directive prevented the Allesseh from becoming self-absorbed, though,” Jacinta continued. “It has taken in so much data it’s become self-obsessed, solipsistic, narcissistic. The seer Tiresias predicted Narcissus would live to an old age, ‘so long as he never knows himself.’ We’ve created technologies as extensions of ourselves, right? Narcissus fell in love with his reflection, an extension of himself. All the information the Allesseh has gathered about this universe and others has, in some sense, become an ‘extension’ of itself. The Allesseh is a mind that h
as become its own mirror. It has fallen in love with time, and with the society of all the minds of all the creatures it has come to know. It’s the same with the Allesseh as with Narcissus: the Allesseh can continue to exist in time and space only so long as it never truly knows itself, never achieves absolute self-consciousness, never becomes truly complete.”

  A related myth hovered persistently around the edge of Jacinta’ thoughts—Tiresias, being changed to a woman when he lashed out with his staff at a pair of huge serpents intertwined in sex or struggle and, after seven years, being changed back into a man again after encountering the intertwined serpents and striking them with the staff once more. She didn’t see how, exactly, it was relevant to her analogy between Narcissus and the Allesseh, however. When she glanced up, Jacinta saw a look of concern pass over the Wise One’s face.

  “The spawn must fruit to spore,” Kekchi said quietly. “It must sacrifice what it is in order to become what is next.”

  “Yes,” Jacinta said. “But the Allesseh believes self-completion will mean self-destruction. Truly knowing itself is the same as dying, as far as the Allesseh can tell. Eventually we didn’t need the renegade angels’ protection, because the Allesseh had stopped actively looking for us—or anything else. It’s no longer following its original exploratory imperatives. That’s why our scientists never found it and it never found us. It’s largely stopped learning and sharing its learning. It would rather be immortal than enlightened. The Allesseh’s suffering from a malaise, a cosmic ennui. Fear of the step into completeness is keeping it and everything else trapped in time somehow.”

  Talitha suddenly gasped.

  “That’s why the Allesseh doesn’t want us to join with it!” she said. “That’s why it doesn’t want to recognize us. Especially our Story of the Seven Ages.”