Better Angels

by Howard V. Hendrix

  Jacinta glanced at Kekchi, but the Wise One was staring into the distance.

  “Yes,” Jacinta agreed, thinking it through. “It doesn’t consciously want to admit our existence to itself—even if, unconsciously, it might at the same time want to destroy us. That song cycle reminds the Allesseh and all its associated species of something this interdimensional node has yet to do. A part of its mission it has yet to complete.”

  “And is afraid to complete,” Kekchi said

  Jacinta glanced about the green and orderly garden universe surrounding them.

  “Kekchi,” she said, “after my ordeal in mindtime, when I asked you what would happen if the spawn didn’t sacrifice itself to the next step, you said the dream must always become real. What if the realizing of the dream is delayed?”

  Kekchi hesitated, then spoke.

  “Then the spawn becomes denser and denser without fruiting,” the Wise One said with a sigh. “Eventually it overburdens its environment and together they collapse and die.”

  “Life defeated by entropy,” Jacinta said, nodding. “Destroyed by our own success. I think the Allesseh has imprinted itself on us back on Earth too, Kekchi—although perhaps not consciously. Our darkness is the darkness it will not see in itself. Back home there are too many of us and all of us want too much. Our ‘spawn’ has grown too thick because we’re unwilling to engage in self-sacrifice as individuals. We are what it’s hiding from itself. Just by being here we’ve already reminded the Allesseh that it and its mission are not yet complete.”

  Talitha stared at her companions, imperfect and incomplete people in a perfect garden world.

  “Our mission is to help it complete its mission?” she asked. “To help it become complete?”

  “Yes,” Kekchi muttered. “A good way of putting it.”

  “Wise One,” Jacinta said suddenly. “You told me the Allesseh needs our dreams. Why?”

  “It wants to dream as the first dreamer did,” Kekchi said, “when the dreamer became aware inside its dream, and so created all things. Allesseh wants to be a conscious mind in a sleeping brain. Only then will it have the power to completely change the timelines. But to do that, it must first awaken to itself, which it refuses to do.”

  Jacinta nodded, thinking of the Wise One’s words in the context of her own shamanic flight to the other side of the wavebrane. Was that what the Allesseh wanted? To experience a high-order type of lucid dreaming—and thereby alter the range of possibilities in the implicate realm? To manipulate there the programming language for physical reality itself? Could that be done? Could the great machine crack the code on the other side of the quantum superposition of states—and thereby control a priori which possibilities were most likely to actually occur? Could it prevent completeness forever?

  No, she thought. Code only makes sense embedded in a network. Content only makes sense embedded in a context. Information only makes sense embedded in ideas—

  Despite those reassuring thoughts, into Jacinta’s mind flashed images from the past: Of the Allesseh as allone wherewhen, black hole and mirror-sphere and crystal ball and glittering memory bank, the not-knot gate between time and eternity, between space and infinity. And of the future: of that gate permanently blocked, the Allesseh grown too selfish to ever end or ever allow a new beginning, and the universe, perhaps the whole of the plenum, mired in time’s slowly hardening amber.

  And she shivered, despite the perfect climate in this perfect place.

  * * * * * * *

  A Good Time to Go Crazy

  Paul boiled water for tea, in expectation of the arrival of his guest, Seiji Yamaguchi. The heating stove top made the tea pot begin chortling to itself as it warmed. It would be a while before the pot began to whistle. Grabbing up mats and place settings from kitchen drawers, he made his way out of his domehome to the low table on the patio, beside his meditation garden.

  The vista when he walked outside never ceased to impress him. Paul’s own home stood amid the neighborhood cluster of airy tent-like domes shining at the top of their small hill. His place was set off from the rest by its spare greenery framing an untrammeled courtyard, a small rectangle of Zen garden, stone islands stolid in their sea of pale raked sand. Beyond the meditation garden, a hedge of golden goddess bamboo turned into an alley of the same. Beyond that, the ground fell down a sunny green hillock in steep maze-like garden beds, knit together visually by bright sinuous rills and streamlets, before giving way to a ghyll half-hidden in the cool shade of a grove of young cedars.

  Beyond that, however, the foreshortened and inverted horizon of the orbital habitat itself allowed for landscape effects never seen on Earth—effects he and Seiji, his landscaper, had fully exploited in designing the view from this garden spot. The plantings and structures in the foreground and middle ground blended seamlessly, calling the eye outward and upward, into the enclosed sky of the orbital habitat, a county blown onto the inside wall of a bubble, its buildings and gardens and streams and ponds and forests and savannas growing on either bank of a sun-flecked river arcing up and up until it hung overhead, a daylight Milky Way, which did not fall from the confusing firmament but instead wrapped all the way around, to right-side up again but still inside out, houses and forests and boulders and grasslands and trees and the river itself wrapping all the way around, before coming to ground again on the other side of the neighborhood of little domes—a snake of landscape swallowing its own tail, without beginning or end.

  Several of his neighbors’ tent-like homes had see-through roofs to take advantage of that inside-out, wraparound landscape/skyscape, but Paul’s roof was opaque. He felt it was more dramatic to hide the skyscape from those inside the house, so that when they walked out into it again they might see it new—especially from this prepared vista.

  Seiji Yamaguchi had helped him design the whole of the local neighborhood and its gardens. Since moving to the orbital habitat, the solar engineer had embarked on a second career as a landscaper and designer. Paul’s own career as a preservation botanist meant that the two men would have probably crossed paths eventually, but they had in fact met before Paul had even arrived at the habitat. Seiji had boarded the same single-stage orbiter that brought Paul to the space habitat, on his first trip up the gravity well from Earth.

  They had been seated beside each other in the same row on that flight. As they got to talking, they soon realized that the parallels and similarities in their lives—Paul’s disappeared ethnobotanist sister Jacinta and his involvement in the history of KL 235, Seiji’s pattern-finding would-be Indian shaman brother Jiro, Jiro’s troubles with KL, even the paranoid schizophrenia that afflicted both Jacinta and Jiro—were too overwhelming to be ignored. The odds of their being seated next to each other on the same flight up the well were so improbable that only a very high-order synchronicity could explain the fact.

  A year had passed since that flight docked with the habitat—a structure which Paul, on first impression, had thought looked rather like a ribbed cylinder that had swallowed a ball, at least from the outside. Most people, he learned, were reminded of such ungainly images on seeing the habitat for the first time. All the glossy brochure photos in the world couldn’t change that.

  Since that time, however, he had come to appreciate the habitat’s aesthetics a good deal more. He had also unburdened himself of his Ancient Mariner’s tale—Jacinta’s research, the ghost people, the tepui liftoff, the whole history of KL as Paul knew it—to Seiji more than once during the past year.

  Initially the solar engineer-and-landscape designer, for his part, had been reluctant to discuss his younger brother’s troubles with Paul. That had changed, however—most dramatically in the last few weeks. Paul felt he owed it to his young friend to help him in whatever way he could. Seiji had listened patiently enough to Paul’s own strange family history, after all.

  Hearing the teapot whistling insistently, Paul walked into the house. He transferred the boiling water from the hot pot to a second, mor
e ornamental pot with a tea ball inside. While he waited for the tea to steep, he heard footsteps on the gravel path leading to the door, then Seiji himself calling.

  “Meet me on the patio,” Paul called toward an open window, then carried a tray of tea things out onto the patio himself. He found his dark haired, chin-bearded friend gazing absently at the meditation garden, a palm-top video player in his left hand.

  As Paul put the tea things on the short table, they both sat down cross-legged at it in the Japanese style. The older man decided to cut straight to the heart of the matter and not waste time with the indirection of formalities and pleasantries.

  “What’s that vidplayer for?” Paul asked bluntly.

  Seiji knew the older man well enough not to be put off by his directness.

  “You know how you showed me that video of yours,” Seiji began, “of that mountain in South America lifting off? Your ‘home movie’? Well, this is my home movie. I put it together out of some of my taped vidphone conversations with Jiro during the last year.”

  “Ah, I see,” Paul said, smiling slightly from the corners of his mouth as he sipped his tea. “Payback for making you sit through mine. Go ahead, then. Fire it up. Let’s see it.”

  An image of a young man, with a thin face and a thick beard, flashed up on the screen.

  “I was picking dandelions from the firehouse lawn,” Jiro said. “The firemen laughed at me and said, ‘What you gonna do with those weeds, son? Smoke ‘em? We’ll have to turn you in if you are!’ I told them No, they’re for wine. The firemen could almost understand that—”

  A moment of blank screen opened up.

  “This next one was longlink from MIT,” Seiji said, “right before he dropped out of academia completely.”

  Brief white noise was followed by another recording.

  “It’s this,” Jiro said, having trouble keeping eye contact with the vidphone unit. “They’re trying to damp me down through my demons—my DMNs, the dorsal and median raphe nuclei in my brain. Through the plug they put in my head when I was born. The jack, the plug they put in everybody’s head, either then or when they’re knocked out to have their wisdom teeth removed. My head is not my head, your head is not your head. Not anymore. It’s OUR head. Occipital Umbilical Receptor: that’s what they call it. You think that acronym was an accident? A coincidence? No way. The white lab coats with the white lab masks and the unmelting eyes don’t make mistakes.”

  Seiji paused the image and glanced at Paul.

  “That was right before he quit everything and just holed up in an apartment he took in the outskirts of BALAAM,” Seiji said, “in Cherry Valley.”

  Paul saw Seiji’s hand shake slightly as he picked up his tea mug from the table, but pretended not to notice.

  “That’s pretty paranoid,” Paul said, nodding. “Did you try to get him to see a doctor?”

  Seiji made an odd sad smirk.

  “Are you kidding?” he said. “He wouldn’t hear a word of it. I’ve tried, believe me. I tried to get him to go back into that dolphin-Ibogara therapy. That seemed to work for him, last time. He resisted that too. Claimed he was taking care of it himself.”

  “Self-medicating?” Paul asked, glancing into the neutral middle distance.

  “Maybe,” Seiji said with a shrug. “After his breakdown, the laser-sharpness his mind used to have sure disappeared, as far as I could tell. He told me he was off the alcohol, as often as possible. Fasting and purifying himself, like a shaman. He’s gotten thin enough, God knows. Talked about ‘vision-quests’ and ‘ordeals’ for spiritual purposes. Said he even met a shaman. I’ve got some of that conversation here. I’ll see if I can find it.”

  Seiji scanned around in the recording’s index until he found what he was looking for.

  “—a little girl who got lost up in the San Bernardinos,” Jiro said, smiling slightly, “the mountains up above town here. So I went out looking for her, like everyone else. After a half hour or so I came up over this ridge. Down below I saw the little girl, and I saw this rabbit too, hopping about eight or ten feet in front of her. She was just following this rabbit. I hollered down to her, ‘Stay there!’ She stayed, and this rabbit just started circling around her. It took me another twenty minutes to get down to where she was. I got down there and she said, or rather I said, ‘What do you think you’re doing?’ because I was hot and sweaty from tramping the hillsides and everyone was looking for her, you know, because she had gone off the wrong way, but just then she said, ‘The rabbit told me if I stayed with him he would take me back to you.’ I know it sounds crazy—”

  Seiji grunted and shook his head but said nothing more as Jiro continued on the recording.

  “So a few nights later I went off on a jaunt and ended up at The Three Legged Dog Saloon. I started talkin to this Indian guy there. I told the girl-and-rabbit story to him. He said ‘I want you to meet my grandfather.’ It was actually his wife’s grandfather, but that’s beside the point. Anyway, we were both drinking and we were still kinda ripped but we drove out there, and then this old Indian guy—he wouldn’t see me. He was a medicine man and he told his grandson-in-law that I had to get all this crap out of my system first. I wanted to leave but the younger Indian says, ‘No, you stay here,’ and I said ‘Man I’m not gonna mess around with this all day, I’ve got some things to do’ and he says ‘No, you stay here. When you get all the alcohol out of your system, this man’ll see you. My grandfather will see you.’

  “So okay,” Jiro continued, calm yet eager in the way he told his story. “You’ve heard of sweatlodges. I went through that, boiled all this booze and who knows what else out of my system, and you know what the old man does to me? He gives me peyote! And some mushrooms. I’m like, ‘Whoa!’ but it’s okay. Then he gives me some of this light brown stuff, says ‘Take this.’ I hit on that too and about fifteen minutes into it, I’m sure I know just exactly what it is, and it’s gonna be a trip to another world.”

  The smile on Jiro’s face brightened in wide, happy memory.

  “Seij, you know I’ve done mushrooms, KL, peyote, all that stuff—nothing compared to this. This shaman took me on a flight. I had this beak thing come outta my face like this, my arms turned into wings, and I flew around with this guy. Don’t believe it if you want, but that’s how I came back calling myself Asaroka, ‘Crow.’ I could tell you about this flight and you wouldn’t believe it. We flew around the world and we saw it all, we could look down on things, in my life and other people’s lives. We’d look down and watch ‘em go on about their lives like they had no idea we were there. Nothing I ever experienced was anything like it. I still had this beak thing sticking out in front of my face the whole time. He transformed me into a crow, I swear.”

  Jiro was so happy he laughed. To Paul, watching, the thin man on the screen seemed almost drunk with the memory.

  “But that’s beside the point,” Jiro continued. “We came back. The next day I was coming out of wherever it was and I woke up and I said to myself, ‘I don’t even believe this. No, I’m not even gonna believe this.’ Then I was asleep again but the old man comes back in and he wakes me up and he has these feathers—three crow feathers—and he gives them to me. ‘This one,’ he says, ‘you take and give it to who you want to. This one you’ll give to a little kid. This one, an old lady will come and get it from you.’ Okay, by now I’m thinking, This is too strange, and I just want to get outta here. So I take the feathers and I leave.

  “A few days later I see these little kids playing around and I say, ‘Hey, want a feather? There you go.’ I’ve still got the two other ones, anyway. I know this woman at a restaurant in Banning, she’s kinda cute, so I said ‘Hey, you want a feather?’ and I gave it to her. I still had one left, stuck in my hat, and I wasn’t gonna do anything with it.

  “So a couple weeks later, I’m back down at the Three Legged Dog and I’m sitting there and some of my friends from the Trashlands come in and they ask me about the feather, what’s that feather me
an in your hat? and I tell them this whole story I just got through telling you. And they say, ‘Oh, yeah,’ and maybe they believe it, maybe they don’t.

  “It wasn’t about two or three minutes later—I’ll swear this any way you want me to—but these people come in there, a bunch of Indians off the rez, and this little old woman, she stood about that tall and she had about one tooth in her mouth, and she saw me and she came right straight for me, grabbed that feather out of my hat, pop! stuck it in her bonnet, away she went.

  “I just got through telling these other people what that crow feather was for, and they looked at me and just said ‘Bullshit, that’s too weird, we’re gettin away from you’—and they left!”

  Jiro laughed until Seiji froze the recording. He glanced at Paul for a reaction.

  “He seemed a lot healthier than in the previous one,” Paul said, truthfully. “Maybe a little manic, playing the Western raconteur a bit much, but healthier.”

  Seiji nodded, finishing his mug of tea and pouring himself more.

  “That’s what I thought too,” Seiji said. “His story was strange, but he seemed better. I thought he was getting better. But he lost touch with the ‘Indians’—he never used to call them that, when he studied their cultures when he was younger. But ever since he lost touch with those people, he seems to have gone steadily down hill.”

  Seiji used the index-menu to scan around until once more he found what he was looking for.

  “They’re putting KL 235 in the food around here,” Jiro said in a rush from the small screen, “to make me sink uncontrolled telepath into the massmind, the cultural macroorganism. Got to keep the schizophrenic heads together and socially tracked. Mutants. Victim heroes. Yeah. But most mutations aren’t beneficial to the individual with the trait. They die out. Get killed off. Gandhi. Martin Luther King. Winona Walking Bear. Victim heroes of the evolving human organism—”

  Seiji scanned onward in the record, looking for something. When he found it, Paul saw that Seiji only looked all the more bewildered as he watched.