Better Angels

by Howard V. Hendrix

  “Kekchi,” she asked at last, “if what’s altering the timelines is this Sclerotium, what do you think will happen once the Allesseh stops denying the changes that are shifting the timelines?”

  The Wise One pondered that, absently raking with a big toe the smooth gravel of the perfect garden path they walked upon.

  “The self-sacrifice of the Sclerotium,” Kekchi said, “may be the deepest reminder of the Allesseh’s failure to complete its journey toward the Dream. I do not think that reminder will please it.”

  “Are we in danger here?” Jacinta asked, unable to avoid a certain worry at the thought. Kekchi shrugged.

  “We always have been,” the psychopomp said. “But we are not the Allesseh’s real problem. All the shadows it has been afraid to acknowledge as its own—all humans, the Sclerotium, others it may also have denied, among the worlds of uncountable universes—that is its real problem. To deny the dreamers and the Dream is also to deny the presence of the Dreamer in itself.”

  Jacinta nodded. Concepts cascaded in her head. Complete, comprehensive. As opposed to consistent, coherent. She understood the Allesseh’s dilemma now. It was a self trapped between completeness and consistency, oscillating between comprehensiveness and coherence. The impulse toward completeness and comprehensiveness was a centrifugal force driving it outward, while the impulse toward coherence and consistency was a centripetal force driving it inward. Like the physical universe, it could be consistent but not complete. Like the plenum of all possible universes, it could be complete but not consistent. As a self it could not be both complete and coherent at the same time. To be complete was necessarily to be incoherent. To be coherent was necessarily to be incomplete.

  So the Allesseh was trapped between centrifugal and centripetal forces, between forces in itself as expansive as desire and contractile as fear. It desired completeness but feared incoherence. It desired coherence but feared incompleteness. Between the comprehensiveness of chaos and the coherence of order, it was left spinning about itself, a dynamic tension between those forces, a soliton vortex like a tornado or a hurricane or the long-lived storm of the Great Red Spot on Jupiter. A dissipative structure far from equilibrium, a mindstorm with the potential for incredible violence.

  “Not being its ‘real problem’ is not to say,” Jacinta began, thinking of Kekchi’s claim of their insignificance to the Allesseh’s larger concerns, “that it might not attempt to destroy any or all of us.”

  “No,” the Wise One said. “Although the ‘rarer action is in virtue than in vengeance,’ as Prospero says, we cannot expect that the Allesseh must follow that higher, harder way.”

  Prospero again, Jacinta thought, shaking her head. Well, our little life might be rounded with a sleep, but she preferred that her life be as large and her “sleep” as little as possible. The chaos of dreams, the order of waking—certainly that was a false dichotomy, certainly they were mutually enfolded, yet she would gladly take the insomnia of living over the sleep of the grave anytime. And in that, she supposed, she was not so different from the Allesseh, after all

  * * * * * * *

  Energies

  As the transatmospheric shuttleplane made its long climb toward the orbital habitat and home, Paul glanced at the seatback screen the passenger diagonally across from him was watching. It was showing what passed for an “in-depth” newscast.

  “—War Mite crisis being officially over,” said the Director of the Council of Spacefaring Nations, “does not mean we should allow ourselves to grow complacent. We have lost over one hundred million lives in the worst episode of mass terror yet visited upon humanity.

  “I am proud to announce, therefore, the expansion, re-invigoration, and virtual re-creation of the High Orbital Manufacturing Enterprise, with greater governmental and far greater corporate support than orbital habitat projects have ever before enjoyed. This infusion of funds and expertise will ensure a much expanded human presence on the high frontier, precisely because, as a thoughtful futurist once put it, ‘Earth is too small a basket for the human race to keep all its eggs in.’”

  Expansion was right, Paul thought. Whichever groups and individuals were ultimately behind the release of the hybridizing nanotech, their full identities and involvements would never be revealed for good and all—probably because there were state and corporate secrets to be kept, and more than enough blame to go around among more than enough organizations anyway. The crisis had been over some time, but the habitat authorities, still waiting for closure, had only removed quarantine restrictions three weeks back. Yet there was already more money, expertise, and new population growth than the habitat had ever before seen.

  Although the Nanogeddon had lasted less than a year, it nonetheless seemed to have shaken the ruling powers enough to wake them up and get them moving in a new direction. The madness of the Mite Plague was as much over as it was ever likely to be. He could only hope that the smaller but related madness he had gone through with his friend Seiji these last few days was also coming to an end. Paul glanced over at him.

  “A man on horseback at sunset,” Seiji said, shaking his head in continuing disbelief. “I don’t know which was stranger—that, or the whole thing with my cousin John.”

  Paul nodded.

  “Both pretty strange,” he agreed. “You don’t want to push too hard on those types of synchronicities. Who knows where you might end up?”

  Seiji nodded, then turned away and tried to sleep. It had been a long few days. Paul, however, was still too tired to sleep. He decided to stay awake until this whole circuit down to Earth and back up was finally complete.

  He remembered precisely the moment it all began. He and Seiji had been in one of the habitat’s archival buildings—the mediary/library dedicated to horticultural and ecological records, in fact. A “weekend” day, when they were free of their workaday jobs in solar engineering and cryopreservation, free to pursue their gardening and landscaping avocations. Before them, framed by media storage shelves, there abruptly appeared a gaunt, sharp-featured young man in thoroughly stained gray spacer’s coveralls, maroon knit cap, and heavy space boots. His hair was somewhat long and unkempt, his beard thin, his eyes deep-set behind anachronistic wire-rimmed glasses.

  Paul saw Seiji’s head shake in startlement. For an instant Paul thought he might be looking at Seiji’s younger brother, whom Paul had never seen in person and Seiji himself hadn’t seen in nearly three years.

  “Seiji Yamaguchi?” asked the apparition, extending a hand for Seiji to shake. A strong smell emanated from the apparition. Black workgrime was plainly visible beneath the apparition’s fingernails. The man looked a bit down and out, Paul thought.

  “Yes?”

  “John Drinan,” said the apparition. “Your second cousin?

  “Oh...yes! Of course!” Seiji said, recovering. “Sorry—I’ve never seen you except over vidlink from out beyond the moon, a couple weeks back. The picture was kind of snowy.”

  Drinan smiled awkwardly and Seiji introduced Paul as a friend who knew all about what had been going on with Jiro. Together they walked with Seiji’s cousin through the Mediary stacks. Coming to a study lounge, they sat down. Paul thought the poor guy looked travel-worn and in need of a good bath.

  “The bad news is,” John began, slouching deeper into the lounge seat, “I didn’t find your brother.”

  Seiji nodded slowly.

  “The good news is, I met lots of people who say they’ve seen him or someone who looks like him. Recently.”

  “Really?”

  “Yeah,” Seiji’s cousin said, smiling slightly, remembering. His words seemed almost to lilt with the fatigue of his journeys, as if he were sleeptalking. “The Trashlands are a strange space. The no-tek types don’t much like any prodding or prying from outside. The local sheriff was pretty uncooperative too, at first. Maybe my looks bothered him, I don’t know. I can understand it: I mean, here comes this guy claiming to be a second cousin, asking all these questions about some
other guy who’s missing.”

  Paul watched Drinan glance absently into his hands. He might as well have been staring off into deep space.

  “Finally, though,” Drinan continued, “the Sheriff gave me an old student holo ID of Jiro’s. One of the deputies found it in Jiro’s apartment after Jiro moved off into the Trashlands. I guess they opened the place up when your mother called to report him missing. I used the ID when I made these.”

  From his coverall pockets Drinan pulled two cheap hand-scanned holographic plaques. YAMAGUCHI Jiro Ansel PLEASE Contact Home or Seiji. They Are Concerned Enough To Send Me To Contact You. Your Cousin J.G. Drinan, said the first one. The other bore the holo and scan code from the student ID and the words HAVE YOU SEEN ME? Jiro Ansel Yamaguchi. If You HAVE...or KNOW him, Please Contact his brother SEIJI. Jiro was last seen in the CHERRY VALLEY-YUCAIPA AREA. We Are All Concerned...Cousin J. G. Drinan. Seiji’s home vidlink number was listed on the plaque.

  “I showed these around in places where I thought people might have seen him,” Drinan continued, slouching further toward horizontal with fatigue and the weight of his message. “TechNot camps, food ration shops, Trashland entry stations, any place he might have come in for supplies or aid. I posted the plaques on all the power and light poles between Cherry Valley and Yucaipa.”

  Paul and Seiji stared at the grainy reproduction of Seiji’s brother’s image on the plaque. The holo, showing a man with wide eyes staring like lost ghosts from the windows of a haunted face, deeply unsettled Paul. It made him think of dated snow-and-ashes photos of children missing for years. Of transients with an elderly Einstein’s face, dying of hypothermia on city streets. Of his own lost sister Jacinta. Of things he didn’t want to think about. He couldn’t even imagine what it might make Seiji think of.

  “But people did say they’d seen him?” Paul asked, looking up at Seiji’s cousin. Seiji had as yet been unable to tear his eyes from the holoplaque in his hands.

  “Yeah, or someone who looks like him,” Drinan said, laughing quietly and shaking his head. Seiji looked up at last. “A couple of places—when I went in and showed them the holo with your brother on it?—they looked at the image on the plaque, then at me, then at the holo again, then back at me, and they said, ‘This is your picture, isn’t it?’ I told them ‘No, it’s my cousin,’ and they said ‘Naw, it’s you! Sure looks like you.’”

  Drinan stared at his heavy spaceboots for a moment, collecting his thoughts from the floor. Paul was amazed that someone so obviously fatigued as Seiji’s cousin was could still keep on speaking, even if it was in a rather wild-eyed, beyond-tired fashion.

  “I went back to my ship, the Helios, and commanded the cabin to decouple from the rest of the ship and go to aircar mode. I overflew the Trashlands, up and down the canyons. A heavy rainstorm was underway so no one was. At one point I thought I saw someone wandering among the trash of the canyon floor. My infrared and motion sensors didn’t show anything, but I switched on my throat mike and the aircar’s loudspeakers.

  “I maneuvered my vehicle to where I thought I’d seen someone, but once there I didn’t see anybody. I kept calling out ‘Jiro! Jiro Yamaguchi! Jiro, are you there?’ as I moved up the canyon. Did it until I was hoarse, but it did no good.”

  Drinan turned and looked Seiji in the eye for a brief moment.

  “I can see why you and your folks are worried. I mean, I’m outside the mainstream too, like your brother. I’ve been living out of Helios these last few years, just me and my dog Oz rambling all over human space. Still, I guess that hasn’t been as far outside as your brother, in some ways.”

  Drinan’s gaze wandered very far away, very abruptly, as if there were now no walls around him, no space and no time.

  “When I was out there in all that nothing looking for your brother,” he said at last, “I felt like I was looking for myself. It was a strange feeling. The longer I was out there, the stronger it got.”

  Drinan shook his head, whacked his suit gauntlets against his thigh, and turned his glance toward Paul. The young spacer seemed quieter now, a messenger who has discharged his duties. He looked back toward Seiji again.

  “But I’ve always had my dog, anyway,” Drinan said. “And I’ve always kept in touch, always let somebody know where I was going. I guess that must be what worries you and your folks most—Jiro hasn’t kept in touch.”

  “Yes,” Seiji said, looking at his hands in his lap, then moving them to his knees, then exhaling sharply and standing up. “The uncertainty’s the worst part. But I’m glad that people say they’ve seen Jiro. At least that means he’s still alive. Now we just have to find him and figure a way to get him back to civilization.”

  Paul saw that Drinan had slouched onto one elbow, almost prone, on the lounge seat.

  “Look,” Seiji said, “you must be tired after all the traveling you’ve done. Why don’t you relax here a bit while we finish up with our research, then maybe we’ll get some lunch? Sound like an idea?”

  “Sounds good,” John said with a nod. “I am tired. What date and time is it?”

  “About fifteen minutes shy of 1200 hours, November 9,” Paul told him. “We’re synched to Greenwich Mean here in the habitat.”

  “Been on the jaunt eighteen, nineteen days, then,” he said with a crooked smile. “Can’t say for sure—time zones, y’know.”

  Paul smiled and he and Seiji turned back in the direction of the research stacks where they had been working. By the time they’d finished their research and returned to where Seiji’s second cousin was seated, the man’s eyes were closed. As Paul and Seiji approached, however, his eyelids flicked up as alert as if he had just wakened from a nightmare.

  “How’s it going?” Seiji asked, quietly.

  “Fine. Just resting my eyes.” Drinan smoothed out his face with his right hand and slowly stood up. As the three of them walked toward a ramp, each of the several young students they passed along the way darted furtive glances and surreptitious stares in their direction.

  “Wow,” John said, laughing a bit nervously when they reached the top landing of the ramp. “What is it with the kids here? You’d think they never saw a deep spacer before.”

  “Yeah,” Paul said with a smile as the three of them moved down a ramp-and-handhold corridor. “This is a pretty squeaky clean environment. Highest per capita population of anal-retentive overachievers in known space! You stick out like a sunflower in a cornfield.”

  “I guess so.”

  The transport corridor was cold and gray by haborb standards, one of the few areas that wasn’t Hawaiian warm and green.

  “Where are you docked?” Seiji asked his second cousin.

  “At the white port. It had the most spaces available.”

  “That’s Administration. We’ll take a ridge cart to the nearest station and cut through Admin sector.”

  They boarded a bulletcar which shot them upline and disgorged them near Admin. As they cut through that sector on their way toward the nearest docking bay, they got hard looks from the young Admin types fresh up from Earth in their corporate warrior wear—charcoal Nehru suits and piano-wire string ties.

  “Pretty chilly in there,” John said when they came out into the docking bay.

  Seiji nodded.

  “Always some tension between the high-frontier folk in the habitat,” he said, “and the corporate and governmental administrators who rotate up from Earth. A lot of them don’t quite get what we’re up to here.”

  Paul agreed silently. The cold, hard expressions on the faces of too many of the administrative types up from Earth made him think of fallen leaves rattling across hard winter lawns when he was a kid back on Earth.

  The mooncrete bays were stacked with all kinds of neat, conventional cislunar flyers. John’s ship—a large, micrometorite-scoured, battlewagon-gray Solar Harvester Travel-All, with multiple docking dents and taped-over busted landing lights—stood out like a derelict at a debutante ball.

  “It’s unlocke
d. What’s this?” John said, pulling a plastic kinneagram card from the edge of his front viewport. “A ticket.”

  “Habitat citizen-policing in action,” Seiji said. “I’ll handle it.”

  Paul noted the BEWARE OF DOG sign in one dirty viewport as they walked around to the crew-side hatch. He was startled by the sound of the hatch door squawking out its cranky metallic complaint as it opened. Cousin John must have popped the hatch remotely, he realized.

  “Don’t bother fixing the ticket,” John said as Paul and Seiji climbed inside. “Odds are I’ll never come through here again. This boat’s still registered in my brother’s name anyway. I bought it off him for more money than it’s worth. Let them go after him—he can afford it. He’s a millionaire.”

  Moving aside the clutter of newsfaxes and junk, Seiji and Paul helped Drinan haul out his meager luggage. The interior of the vehicle smelled of dog food and dog, dog, dog.

  “Hey, what breed of horse d’you have here, anyway?” Paul asked, ruffling the scruff behind the canine’s massive head.

  “Mastiff. Pure bred and pedigreed.”

  “So this is what a mastiff looks like!” Seiji said, genuinely pleased, as if the world were offering up an answer to a question he hadn’t formally asked yet. “I thought they only guarded the homes of Nepalese villagers or something. I’ve never seen one of them and I wondered what they looked like. Now I know.”

  Seiji’s second cousin glanced around at the maze of exits angling off the docking bays, then donned anachronistic dark glasses and, with both hands, telescoped out the red-tipped white cane that traditionally signified blindness. Paul stared at him.

  “This way I don’t get hassled about the dog,” Drinan explained. “Okay, where we going?”