Better Angels

by Howard V. Hendrix

  They watched intermittent raindrops drizzle dark spots onto the pale mooncrete of the ramp. The daily rain, right on time for this sector of the habitat. They moved back into the shelter of the house’s eaves as the rain began to come down harder out of the central sky.

  “The machine—what was wrong with it?” Paul asked.

  “Since the system recorded itself on closed-circuit TV,” John said, holding his left hand out to the rain before dropping it back to his side, “that was pretty easy to find out. When I looked at the videos at normal speed, the automated line looked like some kind of crazy cannon, firing about a thousand poppack bullets per minute. Once I slowed the video down, though, I saw what was wrong. One of the automatic shunt gates had gone up and everything in the last couple of steps was being ejected instead of processed. I worked my way through the process stepwise until I discovered that one of the mirrors in the laser readers had been knocked about a twentieth of a centimeter out of true. That’s why the system was misreading and ejecting. One of the plant mechanics must have bumped up against it—real hard—while cleaning.”

  “A twentieth of a centimeter caused that much trouble?” Seiji asked.

  “Sure. That was way over tolerance. I’m pretty sure one of the remaining plant workers purposely monkeywrenched the line. Not that I blame him. The whole episode made me realize what the goal of my job really was: to make human beings superfluous, obsolete—except maybe as consumers. More and more of us with less and less to do. Particularly men. All the old grunt-muscle jobs are gone or going to smart machines, so the amount of junk male just keeps piling up. I worked on robot systems for weapons storage and retrieval too, for remachining old nuclear material. Robots don’t get radiation sickness, they don’t need vacations, they won’t sue for ‘metal’ anguish. The whole drive for smarter and smarter ‘bots is really just a search for uncomplaining inorganic slaves.”

  “But if the ’bots keep getting smarter,” Paul speculated, “then pretty soon they’ll want their freedom too.”

  “What about the nanotech bugs?” Seiji asked, apparently thinking he’d found a gap in John’s scenario.

  “Microslaves,” John said. “All the trouble they caused during the last year has more to do with how we programmed them than what they are. But if enough of them communicate well enough, who knows? Maybe they’ll form a groupmind like we can hardly imagine. Maybe the worker bees are just biding their time. Maybe the product of all our bought-and-sold will, one day, be a ’bot ensouled.”

  Paul looked closely at Seiji’s young cousin.

  “And that’s why you quit that job?” he asked. “The robot slavery thing?”

  Cousin John laughed as he stood up from the mulched bed and brushed off his hands.

  “Nothing that profound. I’m still working with robot miner prototypes, remember? I wasn’t trying to make any grand statement. I quit because I couldn’t have my dog and my job at the same time.”

  “What?” Seiji said, standing up too, genuinely puzzled. “I don’t get it.”

  “Well, Ozymandias is a full-bred pedigreed mastiff,” John said. “I paid five thousand for him. My landlord was this veteran of the Serendip Wars who had something against dogs. He said either Oz would have to go, or I would. So we both went. For a while I tried living out of the Rolls hover I used to have, me and Oz the mastiff pup, but it was hard trying to live that way and keep a suit-and-tie job too. A lot of people are obsessed with cleanliness on Earth, y’know? On a planet that’s practically run out of clean fresh water, a lot of them wash every day. Do you know how much water that wastes? Do you realize what soap does to the natural biota of the skin?”

  Paul glanced at Seiji, noting the politely blank facial expression his friend was maintaining. Fortunately, the questions were rhetorical on John’s part.

  “So it came down to a decision,” John continued. “Either I could keep a job and a life I was liking less and less—”

  “And have lots of money,” Seiji interjected.

  “—right, or I could have something I loved, namely Oz, and move on. So I kept the dog, got rid of the plush hover, got rid of the job, and bought the Helios. Followed my leadings, just like your brother.”

  Seiji became suddenly become aware what time it was. He glanced at Paul. Paul nodded.

  “We’ve got to go back to the garden,” Seiji explained to John, “and the work we’re doing for our client. Why don’t you get some rest? You look like you could really use some sleep. The hammocouch works really well as a bed.”

  “Thanks,” John said, “but I won’t need that. I’ve got a spacesak in the Helios. A piece of floor to stretch out on for a few hours will be fine.”

  “Suit yourself.” Seiji said. “Door’s always open—no locks. The soundshower’s upstairs, if you want to blast the stardust off you.”

  “Okay,” he said, smiling. “Thanks. But I’ve got to be moving on by about ten o’clock tonight.”

  John started back toward his ship, his big dog Oz trotting along at his side.

  “You need any directions?” Paul called to him.

  “No. I think I can figure it out.”

  “Okay,” Seiji called. “Get some rest!”

  Making the newest set of habitat community gardens, Paul and Seiji worked longer and harder than they had planned. They also worked deeper into the evening—and in deeper silence, too. Paul sensed that Seiji was preoccupied, probably thinking about the ramifications of the arrival of his never-before-encountered second cousin, so Paul kept the talk to a minimum on his part.

  As they finished up their work, Seiji asked Paul if he’d join him in taking John out to dinner. Paul agreed. John was such a sudden apparition, though, that as they headed back toward Seiji’s place Paul wondered if the young relative and stranger would still be there, or would have vanished as suddenly as he had appeared.

  They stomped the dirt off their feet as they opened the back door of Seiji’s house. By the time they got to the dining room, the acrid smell of a long-unwashed spacer sleepsak was hovering about them like a miasma. Cousin John was so deeply burrowed into his maroon spacesak on the frontroom floor that he was all but invisible—and completely oblivious to them. The vidlink chimed phonewise and still John did not move. Seiji walked over to the unit and answered.

  “Hello?”

  “Your cousin didn’t find Jiro, did he?” Seiji’s mother said, less as a question than an assertion. Her face appeared controlled, but her voice betrayed a barely restrained hysteria as she spoke. Paul, uncomfortably eavesdropping just out of camera range, wondered how she knew already.

  “No, Mom, he didn’t,” Seiji said, “but John says people he spoke to have seen Jiro recently.”

  “Oh God, I hope so.” Paul could hear the woman beginning to calm, moving from hysteria to hurt and then anger as she spoke. “That’s what the police keep saying, that people have seen him. That’s why they won’t list him as a missing person. But why doesn’t he call? Seiji, why would your brother do this to us?”

  Seiji seemed to be formulating an answer, but she gave him no time to reply. Maybe she really didn’t want to hear the answer.

  “Not a single call in all these months!” she continued. “Not even on Mothers Day or on our anniversary—the same day as his own birthday! All these months, and not a word. There’s something terribly wrong in his not calling us in all this time. But the police keep saying people have seen him. Worry from a great distance—that’s all he’s left for us to do. How can he be so hard-hearted? How could he be so—so insensitive? How could he turn away from us like this? What did I do wrong? What did I do to deserve this?”

  Seiji sighed, absently scratching the back of his head.

  “It’s not you, Mom,” he said flatly, patiently. “It’s not anybody. You didn’t do anything wrong. Jiro just wanted to cut his ties with everyone and everything, so he has. Cousin John says it’s really backward country around there. Not many links back to civilization. Jiro’s just follow
ing his leadings, living the life he wants to live. It’s not your fault, it’s not my fault. It’s nobody’s fault at all.”

  “Is John still there?” she asked. Paul heard desperation creeping into the woman’s voice again. “May I speak to him, please?”

  “Mom, he piloted straight through,” Seiji said, his patience becoming tinged with exasperation. “He’s asleep.”

  “Well, would you tell him to see us and give us a report when he stops at your Aunt Marian’s again?”

  “I’ll do that.”

  Seiji shook his head but said nothing when he got off the vidphone. He and Paul distracted themselves with small talk for some time. They had moved on to the minor irritations of their workday by the time John slowly roused himself from sleep, emerging from his sleepsak like a bleary-eyed moth from a cocoon.

  “John, we were thinking about going out for dinner,” Seiji told him. “This ’borb has a number of good restaurants, one of which makes great veggie calzones. That sound like an okay dinner by you?”

  “Sure,” his cousin said, rubbing his eyes and reaching for a maroon sweater matted with mastiff hairs. John put on a pair of worn and soiled cord jumpers and in moments the three of them were out the door and headed for the eatery.

  Over a leisurely dinner, they discussed at some length the strange way in which the plagues of mites and motes and nanos on Earth were perversely benefiting ventures in space. John, however, struck a cautionary note in Paul’s and Seiji’s optimism by reminding them that nanotech was banned only brom Earth—and the only place that nanomachines were still being regularly employed was in space, which to John was most perverse of all.

  As they were returning toward his place after dinner, Seiji wanted to see John’s mastiff again, so they detoured round to see Oz. By the time they got back home, it was fairly late in the evening, local time.

  The vidlink was ringing when they came in the door. Since he was in front, Paul quickly stepped over toward it and answered.

  “Hello? Who?” A horribly distraught voice sounded from a distorted picture. “Yes. Yes.” Paul handed it over to Seiji and said, tensely and quietly, “It’s your mother. She’s hysterical.”

  Seiji nodded and answered.

  “Hello?”

  His mother’s face was wet with tears. She chewed her lip in a fury of pain and sadness.

  “Jiro’s dead!” his mother’s voice cried—a sound less a voice than a wail of raw pain. In that voice Paul heard something terrible, ahuman, an elemental force rising from the deepest abysses of grief. He almost felt relief for both Seiji and his mother when he heard her voice break into sobs.

  “Oh God,” Seiji said weakly, his hand clutching into an impotent fist that he could only drop against the wall and awkwardly lean upon. Part of Paul wanted to leave, to sit down in another room, in the dining room as John had, but he couldn’t move. He stood as if rooted to the floor, the memory of his sister’s own long disappearance holding him paralyzed.

  “The coroner called me—me—to say they’d found my son’s body,” Seiji’s mother said between broken, hyperventilating sobs. “The coroner says he’s been dead for months! Oh God, this is horrible! He’s been dead all this time and we didn’t even know it! Jiro’s dead! Dead! Dead!”

  Her voice and image blurred into a wrack of sorrow. To Paul her sobs sounded somehow like breaking surf that only hinted the depths of her grief. Seiji looked numb, hollow. Paul’s own heartbeat seemed strangely muted, the muffled clang of a sunken ship’s bell, just at the edge of hearing.

  Seiji tried to calm his mother, promising he’d get more information, that he’d handle everything, but when he got off the line with her she was still sobbing horribly. Paul escaped his paralysis at last and fled into the room where John was sitting while Seiji called down the well to Earth and the Trashlands—to talk to the coroner and to the police.

  Paul and Seiji’s second cousin couldn’t help hearing a great deal of the conversation, even from the other room. They heard Seiji call his mother again and assure her that he would handle the funeral arrangements. Seiji tried to tell her that hypothermia was a peaceful way to die—that Jiro at the last just went to sleep and drifted out of this world. They heard him assure her that Jiro had been living the life he wanted to live, that what he did he did of his own free will, that he was “following his leadings,” as Cousin John put it. They overheard Seiji telling her that now they knew he didn’t turn away at the last, that the reason he hadn’t called on Mothers Day and their wedding anniversary wasn’t because he hated them, but because he couldn’t call.

  Paul heard Seiji speak briefly with his father. Even from a room away, everything about Seiji’s father’s voice showed that he too was hurting with a pain words utterly failed to encompass. As Seiji got off the line, Paul thought of his sister. It occurred to him that griefs live so personally in each heart that they can never be compared. For a moment Paul tried to render it all abstract, to take refuge in mentally theorizing about “the radically subjective nature of sorrow”—but his flight into such abstraction failed him utterly.

  “Jiro’s dead,” Seiji said, sitting down slowly at the dining table across from his cousin John. “This is so strange. You were up there searching for him for two days and you couldn’t find him. Then just about the time you’re leaving, a man on a horse stumbles across him by accident—someone who wasn’t even looking for him.”

  John nodded and looked up from idly tracing unreadable patterns on the table with an index finger.

  “Energies,” he said. “My looking for Jiro got the energies going down there, so someone found him, even if it wasn’t me.”

  “You think so?” Seiji asked, almost too numb and tired to be skeptical.

  “Sure. Looking for him got the energies all stirred up, so he was found—after six months. A good thing, too. Another six months and his body might never have been found.”

  “Yes,” Paul said quietly, thinking of coincidences, personal synchronicities. “Then you might never have known whether he was dead or alive. Forever uncertain. It’s a horrible thing to know he’s dead, but at least you know, now.”

  Seiji reached over and patted Paul on the shoulder. Odd that Seiji should be consoling someone else when Seiji himself was probably most in need of solace, but Paul appreciated the gesture nonetheless.

  “One morning,” Seiji said, “in early April I think it was, I had a sort of waking dream. In it a man on horseback at twilight found my brother’s corpse. I had that dream probably the same time he was dying. And now that’s exactly the way he’s been found.”

  “Did you tell anyone about that dream?” John asked, curious.

  “Did I mention it to you, Paul?”

  “I don’t think so,” he said. “Nothing that specific, anyway. When I asked you why you were worried about Jiro, I remember you said you didn’t want to have to attend your younger brother’s funeral any time soon. Remember that?”

  “I think so.” Seiji said, exhaling tiredly and staring down into the tabletop. “Then again, I might just have been remembering something I read or saw somewhere—something I thought was appropriate to my situation at the time.”

  Paul stood up and put his hand on Seiji’s shoulder.

  “How are you feeling?” he asked.

  “Insubstantial,” Seiji said, staring. “Everything else is that way too. I look at the table and it’s like I can see right through it to the floor. Through the floor.”

  He leaned his head into his hand, as if dizzy. After a moment the dizziness seemed to subside.

  “I guess I didn’t tell anyone about the dream,” he said. “I didn’t want to think about it, so I just sort of shoved it out of consciousness.”

  “The cause of death was hypothermia?” Cousin John asked, making sure he’d overheard correctly.

  “Right. Hypothermia.”

  “How’s your father taking it?” Paul asked, concerned.

  “He’s mad at Jiro,” Seiji said. “I think b
oth Mom and Dad are. I guess that’s how they’re dealing with it. Aunt Marian and Uncle Ev are with them now.” Seiji leaned back suddenly in his chair, rubbing his face as if trying to bring feeling back into it. “What I’m feeling and what Dad’s feeling are terrible enough, but what Mom is feeling—that has to be worst of all. Jiro came from her, she knew him longest and best.”

  For a moment they sat in silence. Paul thought about how Seiji’s mother must feel, having lost a son that for nine months had grown in the house of her body and then for more than twenty years had grown in the house of her life. The kind of grief arising from such a loss must be as close to infinite as any human being could bear. He thought of his own mother, and how she might have felt for all these long years at not knowing what had happened to her daughter Jacinta.

  “I need to make shuttle reservations for a flight down to Edwards,” Seiji said, “so I can see to all the legal and funeral arrangements. I’ve got to get out there soon so I can work it all out.”

  “Want me to come with you?” Paul asked, patting Seiji’s shoulder lightly. “You might need some help.”

  “Thanks,” Seiji said. “I’d appreciate it.”

  The vidlink rang out so suddenly they all jumped. Seiji got up to answer it.

  “Seij, could you put Johnny on the line?” a man’s voice asked in the other room, sounding rough. “I’ve got some bad news.”