Better Angels

by Howard V. Hendrix

  “A baby would not be Dad.”

  “Selfish—that’s what you are! Selfish, just like your brother! You and that husband of yours won’t even share your lives with a little baby! It goes against everything—it goes against God!”

  “Look, Mom,” Lydia said, trying to remain calm. “Calling down that idea of God on me won’t change my mind. We’ve been over all of this before.”

  Her mother made a disgusted sound and hung up.

  How could she tell her mother? She had planned on having kids, but things with Mark just weren’t working out the way she hoped. Not at all. This thing with the war mite plague and her involvement with it, too. This just wasn’t the best time for bringing a child into the world, she thought. Then again, it probably seldom was.

  Shaking her head at the heretical turn her thoughts were taking, Lydia pulled into a parking spot on a slope above the deserted beachfront. She got out of her car and walked across the lot toward one of the trailers serving as a lab for the recently resurrected Federal Emergency Management Agency and the Centers for Disease Control. Once inside, she donned her Biohazard suit and headgear, then headed out the back door for a tidal flat from which the bodies had been recently removed—and which was reported to be aswarm with spirochetized human cells.

  At the flats she took sample after sample, carefully labelling each in its leakproof container. She returned to the lab trailer with her specimens, turning them over to one of the assistants. During lunch she felt a bit unfocused, but well enough. Probably an aftereffect from the morning explosions with Mark and her mother, she told herself. On her computer she saw that her brother Todd had left a message, so she returned his call. He answered from the field, somewhere outside the mighty metrop of Woodruff, Arizona.

  “What’s that you’re working on?” Lydia asked, once she’d gotten his attention.

  “Clocking wind speed and direction,” Todd said absently as he worked. “Then I’ll mark the time when I activate this row of lofting-prone irrigation foggers. They’ll fountain watercolors into the air and across these canvases here. For my Wind Paintings series. Want to watch?”

  “Sure,” Lydia said with a shrug.

  Todd triggered the system. A rainbow of watercolors plumed for a brief moment into the wind, then shut off, leaving a luminous, entangled skein of colors hanging and drifting in the breeze. When the skein had settled to the ground, Todd positioned the field camera so that Lydia could see the painting that had resulted from his collaboration with the wind a moment before. The final product was a chaotic yet delicate pointillism in which an instant’s flows and turbulence were recorded. Lydia applauded lightly.

  “Intriguing,” she said, “but does life irrigate art, or does art irrigate life?”

  Todd laughed and groaned at the joke.

  “More like ‘When the Pope says you paint the ceiling, you paint the ceiling,’” he said.

  Lydia nodded, recalling fragments of the context for her brother’s presence in Arizona.

  “So these whatever-they-ares,” Lydia said, “they’re paying you well to forsake Hawaii for the desert?”

  “The Ascended Order of Sweetness and Light is paying me quite well,” he said. “It’s only for a couple of months. Things were slow at the clinic and with my music anyway. I was glad to get a chance to explore another avenue of my creativity—and make money doing it.”

  “‘Ascended Order of Sweetness and Light’?” Lydia said, laughing lightly. “Sounds like some kind of New Agey benevolent society, to me.”

  Todd smiled from the desert.

  “They’ve been benevolent to me,” he said, brushing his graying hair away from his face. “I won’t deny that.”

  “Why ‘sweetness and light’?”

  “Because they’re into bees and physics,” Todd said, panning the camera around toward a complex of oddly shaped buildings nestled into a tan and orange striated cliffside—courtyards spiked with tensegrity sculptures, surrounded by hexagon-celled Fuller domes, under bright sun and blue sky. “In their ArcHive monastery here, the Ascendeds have more research on bees than you would ever want to know. Bee navigation and its relation to azimuth and the ephemeris function and God only knows what all else. History, too.”

  “I didn’t know bees had a history,” Lydia said lightly.

  “Sure,” Todd said as he turned the camera back toward himself and his work. “Bee carvings have been found on ancient Egyptian temple walls. Bee designs are carved in the tomb of Ramses III. In ancient Egypt bees were worshipped as symbols and messengers of eternity, even as a source of eternal life. Over the main entrance to the library the Ascendeds have carved this line from some poem—‘singing masons building roofs of gold.’ Isn’t that a great description of a bee hive?”

  “Very sweet,” she said, impressed by her brother’s childlike enthusiasm. “And the ‘light’? The physics?”

  “The honeybee’s ‘waggle dance’ is a symbolic system,” Todd explained as he set up more canvases and foggers. “A language for describing space and time. According to some theorists, the bee dance is a projection of a six-dimensional flag manifold into two-space.”

  “Whoa,” Lydia said. “You lost me there.”

  “I know it sounds complicated, but it’s not that difficult. Really. The dance is like the way the notes and staff of sheet music look in relation to the way music sounds. What the bee does is dance notation in two dimensions for a performance in six dimensions.”

  “Sounds like these people get a pretty high rating on the mystic woo-woo scale. Lydia said, skeptical.

  “Maybe,” Todd said with a shrug. “They work with a lot of unassailable higher mathematics, though. That and quantum physics are their holy of holies. ‘Physics and mysticism are complementary aspects of a single reality.’ The Ascendeds are very fond of that Wolfgang Pauli quote, since he won a Nobel about eighty years ago. Not exactly hard science or soft magic, I guess. More a sort of hard magic.”

  “What do you mean?” Lydia asked, managing to be simultaneously curious and repulsed by the drift of the conversation.

  “The luxon wall, the speed of light, all that,” Todd said with a small smile. “Brother Phillip, one of their big experts, told me, ‘If the stars are jewels in the vault of heaven, then maybe we’ll be the first safecrackers to tumble the right numbers and swing open a vault door heavy as time and thick as the universe.’ Something like that.”

  “Sounds crazy,” Lydia said, worried about the people Todd had gotten himself involved with. She wondered if they were an offshoot of those Myrrhisticine cultists. Hadn’t they been in Arizona too? “Be careful.”

  Todd laughed.

  “Who’s to say that the mad are not the better artists, the truer believers?” Todd asked, imitating the voice of an RKO horror-movie madman. “The world of one’s own creation is where the parallel lines of genius and madness meet! Socrates, Jesus, van Gogh—”

  Lydia shook her head.

  “Sometimes I think it was easier in the old days,” she said, “when you were just whacked out on your rock-monomyth quest.”

  “The hero with a thousand vices?” Todd asked innocently. “Moi?”

  They laughed and signed off. One of the lab techs came in with the microscopic analysis the assistants had performed on her morning samples. She read through it, then did some scope work of her own until her headache would allow her to do it no longer.

  By the time she got back into the field to do some further collecting, the sun was getting low on the horizon. Lydia had taken only a few samples, however, when she realized that her headache was getting worse rather than better. Her eyesight blurred and shifted, then contracted into a tightening tunnel. She began to feel herself coming undone. She only denied it for a moment before she realized what was going on. Her suit or her mask or her gauntlets—something, including her skin, must have had a pinhole tear somewhere. She had been infected with the war mites.

  How long ago? The mote-machines the military had buil
t from the alien nanotech Jiro Yamaguchi had discovered—on the angel shoulder blade she herself had discovered—had now become more intimate to her than she was to herself. In her last moments, she was suddenly glad that in all the ensuing years she had never made public the existence of the strange skull she had excavated with Jiro.

  Hoist by my own petard! she thought, not knowing whether to laugh or cry. She was too busy to do either as, compelled beyond all reason, she stripped herself out of her biohazard suit and her clothes and lay down in the mud. She remembered her day, her argument with Mark, her phone call from her mother, her thoughts on God and religion, her talk with her brother—all of it, as runnels then streams and floods of spirochetized cells exited her body.

  An overwhelming feeling of peace came over her and she thought that maybe she would get some answers now. She drifted out and away from her body, seeing everything in every direction, then shot away with incredible speed through incredible dark vastness.

  Light grew around her again as she sped through a helix, its spiraling spinning round her so fast that it seemed a cylindrical vortex. The light at the end of that tunnel was an oncoming reality, a continuum-warping spherical thing that was all at once a glittering world, a hive aswarm with moving flashes of golden light, a branching tree unconsumed by its own fire, an infinite Mind Dreaming in every instant of every possible universe. She fell into its golden light, thinking of singing masons building roofs of gold, of the phrase I believe, I believe, help my unbelief! , of dancing through the wall between what is and what ought to be—to a world of their own creation where the creators never die.

  Then, in a time stayed upon the pillars of eternity, not just her day but her life came before her, not just remembered but relived, everything that had happened to her, everything she had done and everything that been done to her, all the effects of all her actions and thoughts on others and theirs on her, as if she were herself and her own dream of life, but also a character in the dream life of the big dreamer. She knew the omniscience of that dreamer, partook of it in awful and beautiful ways. She relived all her successes and shortcomings, the thread and reason of her entire existence, all the joy and pain she had caused. She dwelt particularly on that episode with Mark and Jiro, re-experiencing it again and again. but not with pleasure.

  Abruptly Jiro appeared, welcoming her, smiling happily.

  “It’s not time yet,” he said. “You still have things to do. I do, too. Don’t worry. We have powerful allies on this side. Here, look.”

  He showed her a strange vision of herself transformed: a great swirling sphere (one of many), frail as a soap bubble yet dense and full of life as a world, rising from the wet earth. Then he sent her back. To the east, ranks of military shuttles continued to fall, landing lights ablaze, down the evening sky toward Los Angeles International, constellations without names, haloes without saints. She did not see them. Her thoughts grew expansive, touched others like herself, stretched across acres, spread over miles, flashed along shorelines, ventured into the vast blue darkness of the sea. The earth spoke plainly to her, through her. Slowly, she began to learn how to think like a living world.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  SCLEROTIUM

  Both before and after coming to this Allessan Wonderland, Jacinta had thought that nothing could shock the ghost people’s old Wise One, but now she saw that she was wrong. Shock was the only word for the expression on Kekchi’s face as the Wise One came toward her.

  “The timelines are moving. Shifting. Mindtime is being changed at the deepest levels.”

  The fact that Kekchi was strictly using spoken words—no telempathic communication, which the Allesseh could more easily read—underlined the seriousness of the Wise One’s concern. Jacinta hoped her puzzlement wasn’t altering the expression on her own face too much.

  “How?”

  Kekchi glanced at the unearthly earth of the pastoral landscape through which they walked.

  “We have only stories about this,” the Wise One said. “Shakespeare’s Wise One, Prospero, says ‘We are such stuff as dreams are made on.’ We believe also the opposite: Dreams are such stuff as we are made on.”

  Jacinta nodded, intrigued despite herself at the way Kekchi had become a particular fan of Prospero in The Tempest. Given the ghost people’s spiritual beliefs and daily practices, however, she could understand that. During her time among them Jacinta had come to see how modeling their conscious experience as a dream also made it easier for them to model their dreams as conscious experiences. They probably experienced more lucid dreams per capita than any other people in the history of Earth. The Wise Ones were always the most lucid dreamers among them, so it was almost natural that Kekchi should be intrigued by the character of a wizard in a play about dreams and the illusory nature of physical reality.

  “When we travel to where the time lines branch and weave in waves,” Kekchi continued, “we see what we are looking for, already present in the patterns there. The most powerful Wise Ones can also weave some small new threads into the deep spawn—weave them together with those that are already there. Do you understand?”

  “I think so,” Jacinta said, trying to fully picture it. She had, after all, been to the other side of the wave membrane—had passed through that strange surface tension between what is and what could be. Perhaps, in that realm of possibility, in that implicate ‘elsewhere’ outside the here and now, actuality itself was so unstable it could be shaped by the mind—even if she herself had only “seen” the other side and had not (as far as she could tell) manipulated the statistical likelihoods and probability distributions there.

  “By weaving them,” Kekchi said, glancing up at the faultless blue sky the Allesseh had bent into place above them, “the Wise One makes those timelines real—the way your people say dreams ‘come true.’ But even the most powerful Wise Ones can only shift things about in small ways. We do not do it often or lightly. Wise Ones can weave possibilities and futures only out of the stuff of their own existence, their own lives in the present. That weaving drains the life out of the weaver. Doing it more than a few times always kills anyone who attempts it.”

  Jacinta nodded slowly, trying to imagine using the subtle power of her own thoughts, even her own existence, to reorient patterns of possibility, to shift the threads of parallel universes.

  “You asked me once,” Kekchi continued as they slowly walked, “what would happen if the realizing of the dream is delayed. If the spawn refused to fruit. I said that then the spawn would become denser and denser until it overburdened its surroundings and died. That is not the only possibility, however. From the life cycle of our sacred mushroom, we also know of another. What your science calls the Sclerotium.”

  The word was from such a different context that, for a moment, Jacinta had to search her memory to find it. Then there it was: Sclerotium. The hardened, usually dark-pigmented mass of mycelia found in the resting or vegetative phase of some fleshy and non-fleshy fungi. A hyphal not-knot brought on by environmental stress to the spawn bed. Capable of surviving long dormancy. From which either fruiting bodies or viable mycelia could arise periodically.

  “I should have thought of that,” Jacinta said slowly. “Maybe since all your spawn beds in the tepui were happily fruiting away, the existence of that stage in your mushroom never occurred to me.”

  Kekchi gave her a piercing stare.

  “Yes, you should have known,” the Wise one said. “Whenever our expectations of final fulfillment were high, whenever we thought we had waited and labored more than long enough already, we have consoled ourselves with the story of the Sclerotium: Someday, there would come a Wise One able to move and shape the timelines in the most powerful of ways. A Wise One who would return us to the heart of the dream forever, who would reunite us with the great dreamer. When we saw you and your technologies in our timeline visions, we thought you were the Sclerotium. That is why we welcomed you so readily.”

  Jacinta abruptly laughed. Kekchi gave he
r an odd look.

  “Sorry,” she said, “but you just reminded me of something my brother Paul once said. He accused me of being a mushroom messiah for you and your people. It turns out he was at least partly right!”

  “But you are not that,” Kekchi said, with an odd expression, a sort of melancholy smirk. “For all your mushroom paleness, you are still alive. You cannot weave the timelines that way.”

  “Not a burden I would have wanted to undertake, thank you,” Jacinta said with a slight smile. Kekchi’s expression, however, grew steadily more serious.

  “In thinking that the Sclerotium was just about the ghost people and our impatience,” the Wise One said with a frown, “I was thinking too small. The Sclerotium is about the whole world, and all the stars, and all the universes. The Sclerotium is the One who can weave great changes in the timelines, without dying—because the Sclerotium is already ‘dead’. The Sclerotium appears when the spawn has become too thick for its world. The Sclerotium is one whose sacrifice into death reminds the Dreamer of responsibility for the Dream.”

  Jacinta pondered the strangeness of what Kekchi was telling her. The vision of a “mushroom person”—a human figure made entirely of masses of mushrooms, far denser even than the mushrooms sprouting from the bodies on the corpse island in the tepui—flashed through her head and was gone.

  “This sclerotian messiah,” she began, “it’s human, then?”

  “For us it always has been,” Kekchi said. “Now I think it might appear to others in other ways, also.”

  “Is the Sclerotium weaving these big changes you spoke of?”

  “I don’t know,” Kekchi said with a small sigh. “Until we became here, I thought the Allesseh itself might become the Sclerotium. Its mind is vast enough to bring about universal changes. But it’s blind to the dreams of the other side. The timelines are shifting and the Allesseh acts as if it knows nothing of the changes.”

  “Or is denying that they’re taking place,” Jacinta ventured. Thoughts of the Sclerotium oddly juxtaposed themselves in her head with images of the “void of endings” and the “spore of beginnings” as being somehow one and the same. That peculiar image of a string that becomes a hole and a hole that becomes a string flashed into her head again, beside the image of the sclerotium as a knot woven of the strings of mycelia—a knot capable either of bursting into mushrooming fruit or of bursting into strings of mycelia once more.