Better Angels

by Howard V. Hendrix

  The dog’s wagging tail thumped Paul hard across the leg.

  “Ouch!” Paul said with a startled laugh. “The wag of that dog’s tail is like someone whacking on you with a thick length of rope!”

  “Yeah,” John Drinan said. “He’s three years old and he weighs more than I do. C’mere, Oz. Up.”

  Rearing up on its hind legs and resting its front paws on John’s shoulders, the dog was a good head taller than its master—and its head dwarfed John’s own.

  “See all this?” John asked, grabbing two great fistfuls of loose neck-scruff. “They were bred for pack-hunting lions. When a lion tries to bite a mastiff in the throat, what it gets is scruff. Then the mastiff can use its own big jaws in return.”

  The dog dropped back to all fours and ambled a pace or two away.

  “They’re a very old, aristocratic breed,” John continued as they walked left, toward the part of the habitat that sheltered the neighborhood where Seiji lived. “That’s why I named him Ozymandias—Oz for short. Hey, you wouldn’t mind if we found someplace where there’s grass nearby, so Oz can do his thing?”

  “There are several along the way,” Seiji said, setting a brisker pace. “Follow us.”

  “Right.”

  As they walked the three of them talked about their jobs and what they had done before coming into space.

  “I did the infosystem thing for a while,” John said. “Robotic systems analyst.”

  “You’re not still doing that?” Seiji asked.

  “Not really. I don’t know how much my aunt or your mother told you—”

  “Not much,” Seiji said.

  “Lately, I’ve been riding herd on prototype robot miners. The production models are supposed to go out to the asteroids on the Swallowtail, the mass-driver tug they’re building up here. That’s what I was doing when my sister contacted me, to tell me my mother had taken ill. That’s why I started back toward Earth. On the way down, your Aunt Marian asked me to detour over to the Trashlands to look for your brother. I did it on my way back out, since I had to launch from Edwards anyway.”

  “My mother must have asked my aunt to get in touch you,” Seiji said nodding.

  “No problem,” John remarked, looking down. Paul saw that Oz had found a spot of grass suitable to his needs. “I got to spend some time with my mother. Looking for your brother was a good reason to move on before we could start arguing too much. I should be able to make another trip down to see Mom again in a couple weeks.”

  John called his dog over toward them.

  “When was the last time you talked to Jiro?” John asked.

  “Over vidlink,” Seiji said. “Almost a year ago now, I guess. Before he headed for his cave or wherever he is in the Trashlands. He sounded pretty much okay when I talked to him.”

  They walked in silence for a time, down a pathway and into Seiji’s home, leaving the dog to flop down behind them on the porch. As the three of them walked through the NeoVictorian parlor, John noted with approval the woodwork and moldings.

  “Nice detail work,” he said, smiling. “A carpenter notices these things.”

  In the front room Seiji took the claviform rocker and Paul took an overstuffed arm chair, leaving the hammocouch for Seiji’s second cousin to sprawl out on. John snatched off his knit cap and mussed up his longish hair with one hand. Absently or contemplatively scratching his beard, he stared down at Seiji’s makeshift but functional coffeetable. Sandwiched between the two glassteel plates of the table’s top was a posterboard reproduction of a sixteenth century painting celebrating the glorious reign of Elizabeth I. The Spanish Armada burned and sank endlessly in the background.

  “You said your brother sounded ‘okay’ when you last talked to him—”

  “Right,” Seiji said, picking up his chronometer from where he had left it on the coffee table. “Which implies there were times when he didn’t sound okay. He’s had some psychological problems. Including a nervous breakdown of sorts. Years ago now. When he was in graduate school. He’s a great student, or at least he was, before. But he’s his own sort of person. Like you. How was it that you put it, Paul? A sunflower in the cornfield.”

  Paul nodded, but said nothing. He was feeling a bit of a tagalong at this point, but Seiji’s newly-acquainted cousin was so unpretentious and unthreatening that Paul didn’t feel like he was intruding all that much.

  “Did he ever see anybody?” John asks. “A counselor, therapist—”

  “He did dolphin-Ibogara therapy at the Fabro clinic in Hawaii,” Seiji said, nodding. “Only once, before that. In our family, going to a mind-straightener means admitting there’s a problem, so it wasn’t a first option. No admission, no problem. That’s always been the unspoken code.”

  “Your brother did go, though?”

  “Yeah. He went to the campus counseling center and they assigned him to a psych who was about as sensitive as a box of rocks. Told Jiro he had no problem and should stop wasting the counseling center’s time. Jiro didn’t think much of ‘mental health professionals’ after that. He preferred self-medication.”

  “Drugs?”

  “Yeah, drugs.” Seiji began to rock back and forth in his chair, slowly, meditatively. “But it’d be too easy to blame his problems on just that. I mean, whatever Jiro does he does to excess. When there was alcohol it was alcohol, when there was headzap it was headzap, when there was KL it was KL.”

  Paul winced uncomfortably. John gave him a questioning look. Paul gave Seiji’s cousin the thumbnail version of his involvement in the history of that substance—his sister’s disappearance, the spore print in his pack, his involvement with Vang and Tetragrammaton. When he had finished, the look Drinan gave him was not the usual sad or thoughtful glance. It was a look of genuine awe.

  “You brought KL and Cordyshrooms to the world?” John asked, the awestruck expression still stuck on his face.

  “I’m afraid so,” Paul said. “When I think of all the lives it has devastated the way it has devastated Seiji’s brother, I’m not at all proud of the fact.”

  John Drinan shrugged and glanced away.

  “But I did all the stuff Jiro did,” John said. “Rite of passage.”

  That last phrase seemed to make Seiji uncomfortable, but when Seiji spoke he talked at Paul and said nothing about it.

  “I don’t think any one thing is solely responsible for Jiro’s problems,” Seiji said, trying to allay Paul’s guilt. “Not even KL. At most it just brought things up to the surface. Brought out in the open what was already there.”

  “And he hasn’t been the same since?” John asked. Seiji stopped his nervous rocking in the chair and turned his gaze fully on his cousin. To Paul, everything in the room seemed suddenly to stand out with an aggressive clarity—every piece of paint chipping from the moldings, every flaw in the lighting, every speck of dust on the floor and shelves.

  “The last several years after the Ibogara therapy, we thought Jiro was getting better,” Seiji said. “He went back to school full time, had research analyst jobs at the Trashlands and Rancho La Brea. He began writing a book on subsistence strategies of indigenous peoples—in his spare time! But something’s been gone for years. He got along, sure, but something’s gone. And now this happens. He calls my mother and tells her he’s dropped out of his postdoc and is leaving everything behind.” Seiji exhaled in exasperation. “Studying the Indians and TechNots wasn’t good enough—he has to live like one, too. Everything to excess, as usual.”

  Paul looked up from his hands in his lap.

  “But that’s your brother’s choice,” he said. “He’s an adult, he’s got free will. He’s made his decision to live that way, and we have to respect it.”

  Seiji nodded vigorously.

  “I do, believe me. Lots of people have entertained thoughts of dropping out the way Jiro has. Earth’s culture is pretty sick in a lot of ways—I know that. When I tell some of my less conventional friends what Jiro’s up to, most of them say ‘Wow! Great
! He’s really had the guts to do it? I’ve always wanted to do that, but I never had the guts.’ To them it’s a great adventure, but I keep wondering—is he out there because being out there is the only way he can stay sane, or is he out there because he’s already crazy? Is this his way of staying alive, or his way of committing slow suicide?”

  A silence opened into the room around them.

  “Reality’s not either/or—there’re always gray areas,” John Drinan said, glancing down into his hands. “But I’ve lived totally on my own a lot too. It can be done. If the mainstream is polluted, you don’t have to be crazy to want to live outside it. As far as we know, Jiro’s still alive, right? So he must want to live. In any case, it’s like Paul said. It’s his decision. He’s following his own leadings.”

  “Free will,” Seiji said with a sigh, then stood up. “Can’t institutionalize someone who’s not a danger to himself or others. But how do you really know when someone’s truly a danger to himself? Jiro’s taking risks, but so do lots of other people. Are they all insane? Which risks are acceptable? Which aren’t?” Seiji shook his head. “Uncertainty again.”

  John shrugged without looking up.

  “Maybe it’s uncertainty that makes free will possible,” he said.

  Paul stared at him carefully, surprised. Seiji stepped quickly to the coldbox to grab a couple of beers—a local concoction called HOMEbrew—then rejoined Paul and John. They drank in silence, grateful for the drink and grateful for the silence.

  None of them had finished their drinks when John stood, waiting, his knit cap on his head again. The beer, half finished, seemed already to have revived Seiji’s cousin a bit, though when he spoke Paul still heard a bit of the dreaming lilt in his words. The three of them walked out the door, beers in hand, across the verandah, to stand on the front ramp beneath the habitat’s sheltering sky.

  “That’s my green therapy,” Seiji said, pointing to the terraced, lawn-free front yard abloom with flowers above a thick blanket of mulch. “English country garden style, mostly, with a few details from Japanese landscaping. Shrubs and bulbs and perennials, mainly.”

  John walked alongside the garden, eyeing it carefully.

  “Compost mulch, isn’t it? Clone-oak timbers for the terracing? Untreated?”

  “That’s right.”

  “The gray shrubs—junipers?”

  “Right,” Seiji said. “I’m doing branch isolations on them, for a bonsai effect.”

  “That’ll look nice.”

  “You know gardening?” Paul asked.

  “Some,” John said with a slight shrug. “I used to work in landscaping biz for a while, down in Balaam.”

  Hands in pockets, Paul evened out a clump of mulch with the toe of one shoe.

  “Sounds like you’ve had quite a few jobs, cousin,” Seiji said. “Landscaper, carpenter, robotics engineer—”

  “—potter, chef,” John said, nodding as he sat down on a terracing timber, setting his beer down beside him. “Yep. Lots of jobs.”

  “And you’re how old now? Twenty-five?”

  “Right.” John picked around in the dirt, as if plucking unseen weeds. “But I moved out of the house when I was fifteen. My parents were both early wireheads, septal-area stim addicts. I’m the youngest of six kids. I saw what they did to my older brothers and sisters. I got tired of their bullshit, tired of watching them kill each other and themselves, so I took off. Highwiring finally got my father six years ago. He was a big holovid writer twenty, thirty years ago. Charlie Drinan. Maybe you’ve heard of him?”

  “Can’t say I have,” Paul said.

  “He wrote for Satellite Theatre and Starbored. Concepted game shows too—Macabre Mayhem, that sort of stuff.” John drank his beer and glanced across the promenade to where lawns and landscaping surround the partially buried Hellman Memorial Orbital Hospital. “Anyway, the wireheading’s what’s getting my mother now too, I guess. She’s off headzap, but her brain apparently got so used to the stuff it can’t live without it. She was in the hospital in Balaam because her brain is slowly devouring itself. Some kind of enzyme breakdown.”

  John switched his attention to a nearby bonsaied juniper, fingered its needles absently. The three of them fell silent for a moment. Paul watched as Seiji stood with one foot on the ground, the other on the lowest part of the ramp, then both feet on the ground, then one foot on the ramp again—steps in a small nervous dance. Paul looked over at John, following his gaze up into the the whole confused wraparound firmament of the haborb’s central sphere, the Midgard serpent of the town-and-country scenery, swallowing its own tail in an inside-out world, earth around sky instead of the more familiar sky around Earth.

  “So you’ve been on the road ten years?” Paul asked. “How’d you ever find time to become an expert in robotics? You pick it up in college?”

  “Naw,” John said, rearranging some more mulch. “Only mech language I learned in school was Traintext. I was an art major at a small liberal arts school. Marlborough College—ever hear of it?”

  Neither Paul nor Seiji had.

  “Well, I just showed the admissions people there my pottery,” John said, “and they let me in. Got me all these grants and scholarships. Not bad for a street rat. But I got bored. Didn’t see the point of being taught what I already knew.”

  “How’d you get into robotics, then?” Seiji asked, sitting down on the mooncrete ramp.

  Cousin John smiled slightly through his thin beard and looked away into a distance as much of time as of space.

  “That’s kind of embarrassing. I was living outside Hilo, doing the bathtub chemist routine, brewing up KL. One of my customers was a photonics wizard, an all-round Renaissance man. He had some advanced degree in biochemistry originally, I think it was. He’d discovered a deflatulent—you know what that is?”

  “Something that prevents farts?” Paul speculated.

  “Right,” John said, smiling again, mostly with his eyes. “No farty beans, no gassy decaffeinated coffee. He patented this deflatulent agent years ago and some big Swiss megacorp bought it up, so now he gets a cool ten mill a year just from that one idea.”

  “But he moved on to photonics and robotics?” Paul asked, trying to steer the conversation back on track.

  “Yeah,” John said. “And on to ’gate. A lot of my KL customers were techheads—codescriptors and robotjocks, mostly. Anyway, one day he says to me, ‘Johnny, you’re a smart guy. How’d you like a job that would give you lots of free time and a quarter mill starting salary?’ I said sure. When I asked him what it was, he said microbotics. I told him I knew next to nothing about that, but he said no problem, he’d train me on the systems he worked with. So that’s what we did. I moved into his house and he brought home this micromainframe with all these robot arms and actuators of every size—and a stack of operator-code media taller than I am, for me to scan. For three months I scanned and trained till I’d burned what I’d learned right into my mental circuitry. Then I put on the corporate battlesuit, interviewed and, with the help of my friend’s recommendation, I got the job. The company gave me a title and paraded these beautiful secretaries in front of me—all women, too, so they made at least that assumption about how I was wired—and they asked me to choose one.”

  John drank his beer a moment.

  “We ended up training people from all over inhabited space,” he continued. “I helped develop an automated system so that these Chinese moon miners could extract their product without risking their lives. Had some good times too. My friend and I would call in bogus business trips to each other’s secretaries so we could take the company’s transat jet down south for some surfing in Australia—under the pretense that we were working with a client.”

  Seiji smiled and flicked a flake of white paint off the ramp he was seated on. The paint chip spun into his garden.

  “A lot of the people I knew down in Hawaii who were plugged into infotech were plugged into drugs too,” Seiji said, then glanced meaningfully ove
r at Paul. “But the infotech people I knew called KL their work drug—not mushrooms of any sort.”

  John nodded and stared up at the aircyclists darting round the long bulletcart axis in the low-gee zone above, running through the middle of the habitat’s central sphere.

  “Sure,” he said. “Strange, since the one is extracted from the other.”

  “The KL extraction changes the effect,” Paul explained, all too familiar with the topic. “It removes the ‘gate from its natural matrix, decontextualizes it. In the fungus itself it’s found with a number of other psychoactive and neurosupportive substances.”

  John nodded, apparently impressed yet again with the company he was keeping.

  “When you’re on ‘gate,” he began, “all the gates are down, right? Everything’s right there. No gray areas in the gray matter. Everything’s either/or, just like in binary. Aching clarity. ‘Gate helps you think like a machine intelligence.”

  “Ah,” Paul said, with a heavenward-pointing index finger, “but do you really want to think like a machine intelligence?”

  John’s gaze turned back toward the flowers and mulch.

  “That’s the question, isn’t it? Everybody says consciousness is cyber, that virtual reality is where the map becomes the territory....”

  “So is paranoid schizophrenia,” Seiji said.

  Cousin John smiled and nodded.

  “Yeah. Maybe the virtuals are somehow replacing the original reality. Who knows? Working in machine intelligence and robotics isn’t all fun and games and the greater glory of humanity, anyway. When we came in to automate this old pineapple soda plant in Hilo, the plant employed four hundred and fifty people. Two weeks later, after we’d automated, it employed four—two plant mechanics and two plant supervisors, who supervised nothing, knew the mechanics of nothing. They just had their twenty years in and were given token positions as glorified janitors.”

  “Everyone else was fired?” Seiji asked.

  “We were told they were given other positions in the company,” John said, crumbling a clod of dirt in his hand and smoothing it back into the garden. “I really can’t say. The system we put in was almost completely self-sufficient—human beings just got in its way. It did everything: processed the pineapples, mixed the drink, filled the slurpacks, painted the slurpacks, sealed the slurpacks, even palletized them for pickup and distribution. One day I got this crazy frantic call from the dayshift plant supervisor. ‘Hey, we’ve got a problem down here,’ he says. ‘That automated line you put in two months ago—the damn thing’s gone crazy! It’s shooting unsealed poppacks all over the plant! Fast as bullets! It’s like a war zone down here! How do we turn the damn thing off?’ They couldn’t even figure where the on/off switch was. I had to tell them.”