Better Angels

by Howard V. Hendrix

  Seiji turned the line over to his cousin and came back into the dining room. The look on Seiji’s face made Paul suspect that Seiji might have already guessed what the bad news might be. Paul gave him a questioning look.

  “It’s my Uncle Ev,” Seiji said. “My mother’s sister’s husband. He’s John’s mother’s brother.”

  Paul nodded, wondering at how complex even fairly close relations could get. Then the sounds from the other room caught his attention.

  “What?” John asked, too loudly. “When?”

  They heard John break abruptly into tears. For a moment Seiji looked as if he envied his cousin that release. The news of his own brother’s death had not made him cry, no matter how desperately he might have wanted to. Paul could sympathize with that, having suffered so long from the same dry-eyed affliction. As John talked and cried on, Paul and Seiji moved off into the front room, out of hearing of the vidlink at last.

  “My mother,” John said after he got off-line and rejoined them, looking wide-eyed and shocked, his voice still straining to choke back his grief. “She died in the hospital about an hour ago.”

  “John, I’m sorry,” Seiji said, slowly. “When I think that looking for my brother kept you from spending more time with your mother, this last time, I’m even more sorry.”

  John shook his head.

  “Don’t think about it,” John said. He seemed to be thinking his words into place, trying to process everything. “It was my decision to go look for him.”

  The silence of sad agreement fell down upon their numbness like a blanket of snow.

  “Two deaths announced in this household in less than an hour,” Seiji said at last, shaking his head in disbelief. “It’s like an improbable nightmare, only it’s really happened.”

  Paul thought there was another house where the same improbable pairing of death announcements had also happened: At Seiji’s parents’ place. Seiji’s parents had learned they had lost a son, and those who had come to comfort them, Seiji’s aunt and uncle, had in turn needed comforting, when Seiji’s uncle learned that he had lost a sister. Paul said nothing about that, however. Too much death and sorrow already.

  Seiji was looking directly at his cousin.

  “It’s a good thing we only have to meet for the first time once,” he said.

  “Yeah,” John said, with just a hint of a sad smile, the same expression found on Seiji’s and Paul’s faces. “The energies have been working overtime tonight.”

  And they actually laughed then, sadly, in the house where Death has been announced twice, Strange, Paul thought. Amid all the pain and death of the evening the three of them sat there smiling and laughing quietly. At what? At their own bewilderment? In guilty relief at still being alive?

  Suddenly John shushed them.

  “Listen!” he said intently. “Hear it? Energies—all around us.”

  In the silence Paul actually did hear something, though what it might have been he couldn’t say.

  “What time is it?” John asked.

  “22:05,” Seiji said.

  “I’ve got to be on my way,” his cousin said, standing up. “Got to report to work. Got to explain all this, then head back down the well again.”

  John sidled away and bent down to pick up his spacer’s sleepsak, then shrugged on the last of his clothes. The three of them walked through the house and out in silence, following John to the docking bay where Helios and Oz waited.

  When they came to his ship they stood there awkwardly, the three of them casting distorted shadows in the halflight spilling from the rest of the docking facilities.

  “Now that we’ve met, cousin,” Seiji told him, “don’t be a stranger.”

  “I won’t.”

  “You’re always welcome here in the habitat,” Paul added.

  “Thanks.”

  The awkwardness continues for a moment more, until the three of them embraced as one, becoming human geometry, a figure whose three sides leaned on each other for support.

  “What do we do now?” John asked Seiji when the hug had ended.

  “We go on.”

  “I suppose you’re right,” John said, nodding, glancing thoughtfully down at the blasted mooncrete floor of the docking bay. He looked up and clasp their hands in farewell handshake.

  Grabbing up his sleepsak from the docking bay’s floor, John disappeared into his ship. Paul and Seiji retreated to the clear plasteel walls of the observation deck, to watch John’s departure from there.

  After a minute or two they could hear the Helios roaring into disgruntled life. As it hovered out of the bay and slipped toward the space locks, they waved. Paul saw his own reflection waving in the transparent walls of the observation deck. For a moment it seemed as if the stars and the ship with the man and the mastiff on board were all passing through him, as if he were a starry country of dreams still very much awake and watching bright red ship’s running lights disappear in the distance.

  He and Seiji turned away then, leaving visions and optical illusions and apparitions behind, wondering if they would ever see John Drinan again. The hard business of death and personal effects still lay ahead.

  Remembering it now, Paul found that, in contrast to the sharpness of his memories of John’s visit, the trip to and experiences on Earth, although far more recent, were also far more a blur, as if he, the “friend of the family,” had been observing them from a distance more of mind than of space.

  After traveling down the gravity well to Earth, Paul and Seiji had landed at Edwards. In a rented hover they flew through Cajon Pass and over Balaam’s Inland Empire sprawl to Yucaipa and Beaumont, where they met with local law enforcement, utility officials, and eventually the coroner.

  From the sheriff’s deputies and the utility people Seiji and Paul learned more of the specifics surrounding the discovery of Jiro’s body. The man on horseback at twilight was a utility company worker. His supervisors had been investigating a spike in “transit loss” recorded in microwave reception records from many months back. Investigation of the spike had in turn led to the discovery of a small but persistent power deflection from the grid’s local beamdown node. Tracing the deflection to its origin, power company analysts discovered that the drain was most likely coming out of the NoTech zone in the Trashlands, which made them more than a bit curious.

  The power company worker who found Jiro’s body had been sent in to eyeball the actual source of the drain. The utility had sent him in on horseback because, in rare previous runs into the Trashlands, the power company had found that such a mode of transportation was not only quite efficient in the steep and shifting rubbishscape, but was also less offensive to the TechNot true believers who lived thereabouts.

  When the power company horseman reported his unexpected discovery to the local authorities, the sheriff sent people and machines to survey and cordon off the scene, write reports, and take the remains to the crime lab in Beaumont. Jiro’s datawire—containing his aircar license, an old student ID, and three hundred and fifty-six New Dollars—has been found on the body. The deputies lifted a single print and, with the coroner’s help, did a DNA match on the remains. The body had been positively identified as Jiro’s.

  Talking to the deputies, Seiji and Paul learned much more history than they might have wanted to know. A couple weeks before his estimated time of death, Jiro had been arrested for being drunk and disorderly—his first, last, and only arrest. At the time he had a blood alcohol content so high he should have already been dead or in deep coma.

  Earlier still—soon after Seiji and his parents first tried to report Jiro missing, in fact—the police had interviewed Jiro’s landlord. The property owner said that Jiro was having some major problems at that time. One day, as he walked past Jiro’s apartment, the landlord claimed he heard what sounded like two people having a brutal argument. He listened more closely and realized that Jiro was both voices, both sides of the argument—that he was screaming at himself. The landlord also reported that, j
ust before Jiro quit the premises, Jiro accidentally set fire to part of his apartment. Jiro put out the blaze, reported it to the landlord, paid for the damage, paid off the remainder of his rent, and just walked away from his rooms and everything with which he had furnished them.

  “If I’d known any of this before,” Seiji said to Paul on hearing the deputies’ reports, “I’d have caught a shuttle down in a heartbeat and gotten him out of here.”

  Seeing Seiji’s expression—sad, dismayed, and guilty at once—Paul had suggested that they go out to the Trashlands, to the view the location where Jiro’s body had been found. The sheriff’s deputies, short-staffed and too busy, didn’t have time to guide them to the spot where Jiro’s body was found, though they did promise Seiji that he’d be able to pick up Jiro’s personal effects at the county jail property rooms in Banning, once the sheriff okayed it. The deputies also referred Paul and Seiji back to the coroner—a gray-haired, gravel-voiced man with extremely dry hands—who kindly agreed to take them out to the site.

  Leaving Beaumont with the coroner, they proceeded by obscure landmarks into the great Southern California wasteland. Seiji and Paul and the coroner got lost again and again, until finally they approached the small complex of the coldbox and its ramshackle support buildings. The coldbox itself, the LogiBoxes, and the liquid nitrogen works were all still in place, too big to be carted off with the rest of Jiro’s personal effects and still waiting on Seiji’s decision as to their fate.

  “The squatters hereabouts are mostly TechNots and Neo-Luddites,” the coroner said as he lifted up the crime-scene tape and began showing Paul and Seiji around the site, “so they tend to demonize the tech out here. Blame it for your brother’s death, I suppose. Leastways Bill Lanier, the power company rep, says they told him Jiro’s soul was ‘stolen’ by one of these machines. One of the Jebson kids claimed your brother’s ghost talked to him, too—before the power was cut off. Bill didn’t see or hear anything. He says the TechNots were probably just misinterpreting a perimeter security program, responding automatically to their presence.”

  Having shown them the LogiBoxes and nitrogen tanks, the coroner approached the coldbox.

  “We found your brother in here,” he said pulling open the long, door-like lid of the horizontal coldbox. A funky, moldy smell wafted out. Inside, Paul saw, was the reversed shadow of a man, light surrounded by dark, like the flash-image shadows of people vaporized at Hiroshima when the first atomic bomb devastated that city. The thick bluish dust that gave the light shadow its dark aura had been slightly smeared in a number of places, distorting the image, but not so much as to erase the fact that the light shadow was clearly the outline of a human form.

  “We had to disturb the site a little bit to remove the remains and the personal effects,” the coroner said. “The body held together surprisingly well in the removal. Usually you leave a body exposed to the elements for six months, even in cold places like mountains or tundra, and the fat in the flesh saponifies, runs like soap into the ground. Out in a mountain meadow, once you haul away the remains after a summer in the sun, all you have left is soap and shadows—saponified flesh and the impression the body left on the grass and ground.”

  “Is that what this stuff is?” Seiji asked, pointing at the layer of bluish dust that covered all the velvet-draped side walls and most of the floor of the colbox. Paul took up some of it and rubbed it between his fingers. “Dried ‘soap’?”

  “No,” the coroner said. “There was no evidence of saponification. The body must have initially been freeze-dried, as it were. This box seems to have preserved the remains very well—quite cold, until recently. The Jebson kid admitted to opening up the box for the first time last week, just before the first rains of the season swept through. Claims the voices out here told him to. More likely he saw those holoshots your cousin posted. Crazy kid’s got one hell of an imagination. The deputies were glad to turn that boy back over to his folks.”

  “Then what is this dusty stuff?” Seiji asked again.

  “Fungal spores,” Paul said, staring at the dust on his fingers. “Of the Cordyceps jacintae mushroom.”

  The coroner looked at Paul in startlement.

  “We haven’t had time to identify the species yet,” the gravel-voiced man said, “but they’re mushroom spores. That’s right.”

  “But this stuff is so thick,” Seiji said, staring at the dust layer. “How—?”

  The coroner averted his glance.

  “I want to see the body,” Seiji said suddenly, his voice cracking slightly.

  “I had hoped to spare you that,” the coroner said, glancing first at Seiji, then at Paul. “We were able to ID without—”

  “I insist,” Seiji said.

  The coroner shrugged, then led them back to his vehicle. Once back in town, he led them into the town morgue, in the mortuary basement of the funeral home—one of a chain he also operated, throughout the county. The coroner was a funeral home director and practicing undertaker in this part of the county as well.

  “Instant hypothermia is a peaceful way to die,” the coroner-undertaker assured them as he led them toward the wall of pullout slabs. He pulled open a long drawer with an opaquely-bagged body prone upon it. Paul had seen this sort of place in the media, but he was so unfamiliar with the service industry of death that he didn’t know the proper technical terms for the devices he saw around him, not even for the wall with its long drawers, like filing cabinets for corpses. He could only watch as the coroner-cum-mortician, now gloved, unzipped the bag and a thick mushroomy aroma filled the morgue.

  Seiji gasped. Having half expected what lay in the opened body-bag before them, Paul did not find his breath taken away by the sight, although what he saw was still a good deal more than he had anticipated.

  Not even on the corpse isle deep inside Caracamuni tepui had he seen any fruiting of the ghost people’s sacred fungus nearly so dense and massive as the one he saw before him now. The substance of Jiro’s body seemed to have been converted entirely into Cordyceps jacintae fruiting bodies. They covered the corpse so completely that it seemed less a body than a mass of mushrooms in the shape of a man. The mushrooms themselves seemed to have erupted from the body with explosive force, for there were scraps and shreds of clothing still caught up amid the mass of fungal fruiting bodies. A number of the mushroom stalks had broken off and settled in the bag, Paul noticed—probably from when the body was removed from the coldbox. Everywhere, too, was the bluish dust.

  “The only place we were able to lift a print from was the tip of the smallest finger of the left hand,” the coroner explained to Paul. “We had to go all the way to the bone to get an unmixed human DNA sample.”

  Seiji stared down at the body.

  “Freeze-flush,” he said.

  “Pardon?” the coroner asked.

  “Many types of fungi are triggered into mass fruiting through a freeze followed by a flush of water,” Paul explained, since Seiji was not forthcoming. “Winter cold and dry followed by spring’s warmth and rains.”

  “Oh,” the coroner said, calling up information on his portable data assistant. “I see.”

  “Jiro’s body must have been flash frozen,” Seiji said distantly, “then flooded, when it rained.”

  The coroner’s eyebrows rose in surprise at something he saw on his pda screen.

  “Did you say Cordyceps jacintae?” the coroner asked Paul. “Gatehead mushrooms?”

  “Yes,” Seiji said with an odd smile and a snort of a laugh, before Paul could reply. “My brother has become a controlled substance.”

  Paul and the coroner glanced awkwardly at each other. Seiji looked at them both, over his brother’s body transubtantiated to the flesh of the tepuians’ sacred mushroom.

  “You should probably take some samples for the biodiversity preserve at the habitat, Paul,” Seiji said. “I know you’ll regret it later, if you don’t do it now.” He turned to the coroner. “As for the funeral arrangements, cremate the body.
Isn’t that what you do with controlled substances down here? Burn them?”

  The coroner hesitated, then nodded. Paul slipped on gloves, scraped up spores and, with the coroner’s assistance, put them in small vials. Paul then bagged up mushrooms, the phrase “fruiting bodies from a fruiting body” rising perversely in his head as he did so. While they were thus occupied, Seiji was on the vidphone behind them, talking with the sheriff about the release of Jiro’s personal effects and the prospect of shipping them up the well to the orbital habitat. Next he spoke with the power company concerning the illegal utility charges Jiro had racked up. Since Seiji worked in solar satellite engineering at the habitat, however, the power company seemed inclined to quickly activate a forgiveness clause and forget the entire episode. Finally Seiji made shipping arrangements for Jiro’s effects and his gear in the Trashlands, deciding to have the big ParaLogics machines, the LogiBoxes, shipped up the well to the habitat. The coldbox and the spent nitrogen tanks he decided to leave behind on Earth.

  Never soon enough, for Paul, they were finally done with all the necessary arrangements on Earth and were aboard the single-stage orbiter, on their way back to the orbital habitat. Now, as Seiji continued to sleep in the next seat over, Paul glanced out the porthole at the Earth hanging like a bright ornament against the blue-blackness of space. He was reminded again of that old familiar quote the Council Director had used: Earth is too small a basket for the human race to keep all its eggs in. Yet, out the porthole, the Earth itself looked like an egg: a fragile psychedelic Easter egg painted in moving and shifting blues and whites and greens and tans and ochers. The basket is an egg, he thought, and the egg is a basket.

  Maneuvering rockets surged on as the orbiter prepared for docking with the orbital habitat. Seiji began to stir. By the time the orbiter had docked with the habitat, Seiji had come fully awake. Glancing over, Paul saw Seiji reserving a freight transfer pod, for the trip to Lakshmi Ngubo’s low-gravity residence and workshop, out among the industrial tori.

  After they disembarked from the orbiter, Paul and Seiji made their way to the nearest available freight transfer pod. Both of them were impressed by the speed with which the materials Seiji had shipped up from Earth were now being transferred from orbiter to pod. More than half of Jiro’s gear was already loaded and ready to go by the time Seiji and Paul boarded the pod.