Spears of God

by Howard V. Hendrix

  “Why did you want to do that?” asked Susan. “Destroy them, I mean?”

  “I figured the fungus grown from such spore prints would be hallucinogenic,” Paul said. “I know it may seem inexplicably severe, but I blamed Jacinta’s descent into madness on such jungle hallucinogens—even if I didn’t much believe her ‘tepui people’ stories.”

  He gave a long sigh.

  “I didn’t destroy them, as you can see. After she died, I couldn’t bring myself to get rid of them, any more than I could destroy anything of Jacinta’s stuff. All these years, and I’ve never been able to bring myself to set fire to it, or make public that spore print’s existence, either.”

  “Why not?”

  Paul paused thoughtfully before he answered.

  “Jacinta didn’t have all her mental access covers bolted down—that was more than obvious. Not just the Jung transmigration and odd gender stuff, either. She actually believed that a schizophrenic white girl and some forty or fifty tribal people were going to fly a mountain into the sky and become humanity’s first ambassadors to the stars.”

  Paul took the spore print back from Susan, then continued.

  “I’ve never been able to determine if my particular madness was to have believed her too little, or believed her too much.”

  “You’re among the first to see those spore prints,” Paul revealed as they settled back into the comfort of the living room. The children had taken up their places on the floor again.

  “But not the first?” Michael asked.

  “No, I’m afraid not.”

  “You didn’t try to grow the spores out yourself?” Susan asked. “Or hire someone else to do it?”

  “Not until recently,” Paul Larkin said. “You mentioned my career change, from journalism into the sciences. I’m still something of an independent researcher. Money funds both independence and research equally well, I suppose.

  “About two months ago I got in touch with Phil Damon, the professor who headed my dissertation committee when I was still in school. I was trained in the biological sciences, you know—even if that wasn’t where I made my money. Damon’s emeritus now, but he agreed to examine the spore print and have some of it plated out and grown by a colleague. I provided him with enough cash to ensure that it would be done properly—and quietly.”

  Larkin swirled the scotch in his glass, then took a sip.

  “I gave this spore print envelope’s twin to Damon and a mycologist colleague, to scrape spores from it to their hearts’ content. I don’t know that much about the specifics of what they were doing—it was all done in a chamber under a ventilation hood.”

  “Probably shook the spores onto a series of petri dishes filled with various growth media,” Susan said, nodding. “Do you know what they plated out?”

  “ Something must have grown. I’m sure of that, now. Three weeks into his testing of the fungus, Damon called. I wasn’t all too happy with what he had to say. He’d set up a meeting for me with a woman named Athena Griego, a venture capital agent. Despite my misgivings, I met with her. She said she represented a number of investors and pharamaceutical firms that might be interested in further research on the fungus.

  She struck me as a wheeler-dealer, an operator, you know? A bit on the shady side. Eventually, though, she did manage to set up a meeting with Doctor Vang, of ParaLogics.”

  Michael whistled softly.

  “Vang’s a heavy hitter.”

  “Yes. Lots of money, and even more clout.”

  “He’s mostly interested in cognitive enhancement drugs from what I’ve heard,” Susan said. “That’s why he’s funded some very interesting ethnobotanical research, too.”

  “I gather he’s had some setbacks recently,” Michael said. Paul shrugged noncommittally.

  “Maybe so, but he’s still playing some sort of very high-level game, as near as I can tell. He and his people wanted the rights to experiment with the fungus. They paid handsomely for them. That money’s come in very handy, lately. Your expedition was not without expense….”

  “But how much did you tell them in exchange for the cash, Uncle Paul?”

  Paul shifted uncomfortably in his comfy chair.

  “They wanted to know everything they could learn about its origins. I tried to keep a tight lid on it, only giving them enough to string them along, but after what you’ve told me about the tepui massacre, I’m afraid I may have told too much.”

  “Why were you even talking to them at all?” Michael asked. “And where do you think you slipped up?”

  He sighed deeply.

  “A number of organizations granted or loaned money and equipment to Jacinta, all those years ago. I returned as much of it as I could, but the folks who hadn’t gotten paid came after me and your grandparents for a while, Michael. After her suicide, the suppliers and creditors finally wrote off both Jacinta and her failed expedition, under something called a forgiveness clause.

  “She left a paper trail, though. Vang’s people must have done some nosing around, and followed it through.”

  “Wait a minute,” Susan said. “Are you actually suggesting that a respected businessman like Vang was behind the massacre of those poor people in the tepui?”

  “Directly responsible? No. Not likely. He’s too clever for that. I wouldn’t doubt, though, that he has connections to corporate moneymen who have their own connections. Those connections might lead to military and intelligence contractors—what used to be called mercenaries and spies. Maybe even connections into the military itself.”

  “Who the hell would do all this just to get at a meteorite?” Susan asked, shaking her head.

  “I don’t know that someone like Vang is the answer to that question,” Paul replied, “but even if he is, that still doesn’t tell us why he’d take such drastic steps. What might someone expect to find that would lead them to countenance wholesale murder?”

  “That’s the more important question,” Michael said. “Not who, but why. Why would someone do all this just to get at a meteorite?”

  “You’ll have to find that out for yourselves,” Larkin said, gulping down the last of his scotch. “My job now is to look after these children. The only survivors.”

  “It’s not like we’re asking you to do it forever,” Susan said.

  Michael winced, wondering if he really heard the irritability and defensiveness he thought he heard in her voice. Children and marital commitment had been the no-man’s-land between them for many months. He wondered if the situation with the Mawari children, the meteorite, and the massacre at the tepui were also all overlaid on that now, too.

  “True, but as long as I have them we might as well make the best of all the assets I have on hand,” Larkin said, putting an ancient cassette tape into a player and turning it on.

  At the sound of the chantsong coming from the player, the hyperalert children, up to that point silent as stones but for a certain nervous energy, began to whisper in monotones that still managed to sound excited. Soon the song had so enraptured the Mawari children that they were swaying and pounding the floor in time to it.

  “What’s that sound? That…song?” Michael asked, raising his voice over the noise of the children.

  “It’s a recording Jacinta made,” Paul said, seeming strangely jubilant at the children’s reactions. “I gather from her notes that it’s a sort of ‘nursery rhyme meets cosmogony.’ Her translation is here somewhere.”

  Larkin scanned through several more pages from one of his sister’s notebooks, and pulled loose a page for them to read. Mike and Susan read the words of the cosmogonic nursery rhyme’s translation: In the cave of night, the seed of light

  bursts open in the dark.

  Out of the dark it grows the stars.

  The seeds which stars plant grow into worlds.

  The seeds which worlds plant grow into life.

  The seeds which life plants grow into minds.

  The seeds which minds plant grow into songs

&nb
sp; Of the All One who sleeps on the bed of forever

  Whose mind is the cave of night

  Whose dream is the seed of light.

  “What’s it supposed to mean?” Michael asked, studying the translation.

  “I’m not certain,” Paul replied, glancing at the children. He turned off the recording and the children grew quiescent again, almost as if he’d flipped a switch. “Jacinta claimed it was a children’s version of their great myth, the ‘seven ages of the Universe.’”

  “Since the Mawari were—are—mushroom totemists, these ‘seeds’ in caves might more accurately be translated as ‘spores,’” Susan suggested. “And the ‘growing into’ stuff sounds less appropriate to seeds and more appropriate to what mushroom spawn, the ‘bed’ of mycelium, does.”

  “Mushroom totemists, yes. Jacinta claimed the ghost people had a phrase in their language. She translates in her notes as ‘A day is a mushroom on the spawn of time.’”

  “Pretty complex ideas, even in that ‘nursery rhyme,’” Michael said. “Parts of it could pass for physics, or biology, or theology.”

  “Or all of the above,” Susan said, nodding.

  “They seem to have been pretty complex people,” Paul said, looking for and then finding a passage in another of his sister’s notebooks. “Unusually long-lived, but also unusually low birth rates and fertility.”

  “Be fruitful—don’t multiply,” Michael said with a smirk.

  “A good approach, if you’re living on an isolated tepui,” Susan said. “Sustainable in a marginal environment. But Michael tends to forget that our whole world isn’t necessarily a marginal environment.

  And I wish you wouldn’t keep speaking of these people in the past tense. They aren’t extinct—at least not yet.”

  “Sorry,” Paul said. Covering his embarrassment, he pointed to another passage. They both leaned in to see.

  “Jacinta says here that, among the Mawari, language is for children, for only children have need of it.

  Speech as a mode of communication begins to sharply decline among them with the onset of puberty.”

  “These are already pretty uncommunicative,” Michael said.

  “What did you expect? They don’t know our language!” Susan said, frustrated. “And who knows what sort of shock they might still be in, given what they’ve seen?”

  “I know, but even their body language and focus are different. Not much eye-to-eye gaze, or facial expression. Clumsy bodies, narrowly focused brains. Kind of like mild Asperger’s or high-function autistics.”

  “There you go again, getting all clinical, Doctor. Are you talking about them, or us? Jeez, I know you’re not big on kids, but even you must have been one once.”

  Michael glanced away, turning his gaze toward the floor. Them, or us? He could just as easily ask her the same question, though in the different context of children and marriage. He opposed the former, and she opposed the latter. He decided not to go there.

  “I admit they’re preteens from a completely different culture. Our armchair diagnoses—”

  “Oh, for heaven’s sake. They’re not just some kind of living-fossil specimens. They’re human beings who have seen every person they’ve ever known brutally murdered! We should be jumping for joy to see any hint that they still have any normal emotions, after what they’ve had to live through.”

  Paul cleared his throat and smiled awkwardly.

  “I was very happy to see their response to the chant,” he said. “Maybe, though, their lack of affect—and how we might deal with that—maybe it isn’t only a response to trauma.”

  “No? What, then?”

  “Maybe it also has something to do with what Jacinta’s notes call ‘full myconeural symbiosis.’ She says adolescent and adult ghost people possessed that.”

  Susan shook her head.

  “What I saw on that tepui didn’t look like symbiosis to me. Those mushrooms sticking out of their bodies…it was horrific.”

  “She says in her notes that the fruiting bodies, the ‘mushrooms,’ only appear after the person dies. The ‘sacred fungus’ is a myconeural symbiont. They claimed it lit up ‘a star inside the head’ that allowed them to communicate mind to mind.”

  “I can see why you thought your sister was crazy,” Susan said. “Telepathy is way out there in mystic woo-woo land.”

  “I don’t know if I reject it as flatly as you do anymore,” Paul said, “but she does make some rather extraordinary claims in her notes and comments, it’s true.”

  “Such as?”

  “She claimed the tepui people ‘beamed’ her. Planted thoughts in her head that didn’t quite feel like her own. Said it was like someone else dreaming inside your head. You two haven’t experienced anything like that while you’ve been in the presence of these children, have you?”

  An awkward and uneasy glance passed between Michael and Susan again. Something about what Paul was saying seemed somehow familiar, though Michael couldn’t quite put his finger on it. Then he remembered the dream of rain people in the stony maze, and later the dream of blood and death and fire underground, in the cave inside the tepui. Remembered waking up drenched in sweat—and that sweat turning chill when he learned Susan had just had the same dream.

  He half turned toward Susan.

  “No,” Susan said firmly. “The ethnobotanical literature is full of shamans who claim to have such powers.

  That may be where Jacinta got the idea. But almost all those shamans were intoxicated or otherwise ‘altered’ at the time of their telepathic experiences, so their testimony is highly subjective at best.”

  “I thought the descriptions of her tepui experiences were rooted mainly in her own paranoid delusions, too,” Paul said. “Voices in the head, and all that. I studied these notebooks, thinking they were the diary of her descent into the depths of schizophrenia, nothing more. I’m not so sure any longer.”

  “Why not?” Susan asked, perhaps a bit more pointedly than even she intended.

  “Jacinta’s most bizarre claims were linked to the existence of these ghost people and what they held to be true,” Paul said, thinking it through as he passed a notebook to Michael. “But you see, they did—do—exist, after all. So maybe even something as strange as this ‘mindtime’ thing she writes about here—what she calls ‘forays into sideways’—maybe there’s some truth to it. Or maybe I want it to be true, at least.”

  “‘Mindtime’?”

  “Seeing or living along alternate timelines, it sounds like,” Michael said, looking over the notes. “All the ‘what if’ stuff of parallel universes.”

  “I’m sure almost every person who’s lost a loved one wishes there were some place, some other universe where things turned out differently,” Susan suggested.

  “Yes,” Paul said. “Maybe that’s all it is. But I still hope it might be more than that.”

  Michael looked down. There had been no particularly upbraiding or admonishing tone to anything his uncle or even Susan had just said, yet he couldn’t help thinking about the Mawari kids’ lost loved ones and feeling obscurely guilty. Jacinta was his aunt and Paul his uncle. He felt a certain family responsibility for what had happened, as much as he would have preferred not to.

  “Michael,” Paul said, struck by a thought, “do you know of any precedent for mushrooms coming in from outer space?”

  “Just listen to yourselves…” Susan interjected, smiling grimly.

  “No confirmable precedent, no,” Michael said, considering it seriously despite Susan’s comment.

  “According to some researchers, though, Earth was overrun by fungus around the times of both the Permian-Triassic mass extinction, two hundred and fifty million years ago, and the Cretaceous-Tertiary extinction, sixty-five million years ago.”

  “How did they determine that?” Susan asked.

  “The increased presence of alpha-aminoisobutyric acid, or Aib—an amino acid not found in the proteins of modern organisms, but found in a number of fungi a
nd carbonaceous meteorites.”

  Paul Larkin laughed.

  “Professor Yamada, there’s more in heaven and earth than is dreamt of in your ethnobotanists’ philosophies. Or even their hallucinations.”

  “Maybe,” Susan said, sounding very much unconvinced. “But you are sure these kids will be safe here? I mean, I saw gates and cameras and fences on the way in, but no guards. I hope you’re not relying on some sort of ‘metaphysical’ protection scheme for them.”

  “No need for that,” Paul said with a smile. “I keep a security team on retainer, but that’s mainly for when I leave the grounds. I have no need for lots of guards here.”

  “And that’s because…?”

  “The gentleman who originally built this little lakeside estate was connected to the Vegas mob, so he had good reasons for being security-conscious. One of its later owners was a Bay Area electronic-surveillance mogul who was obsessed with the Godfather films and quirky enough to make Howard Hughes look like a regular Joe. Yet another was a rather corrupt Chinese diplomat with an extensive art and movie-poster collection. All of them added their bits to the security system. That history was a big selling point for me when I bought it.”

  “Really? Why?”

  “Oh, chalk it up to a love of privacy. Or a family history of paranoia—whichever you prefer. But the fact is that this old place has security protections at all sorts of levels, from brick and mortar to motion sensor software. Any would-be trespassers or other prying eyes have a surprise or two in store for them. Those children will be safe here. Don’t worry about that.”

  Larkin began putting away the notebooks and hardcopy collections.

  “If there’s even a remote chance I had something to do with the atrocity on that tepui, then I have a debt to pay, so let me pay it. And along those lines, if you two don’t object, I’d like to keep you on my payroll to find out why those people were massacred—for what, if not for the meteorite, and by whom, if not by someone connected to Vang. I still think you should start with him.

  “At least I can use some of that dirty money to find the responsible party—or parties,” he continued. “The holidays are almost upon us. Indulge an old man. Consider my bankrolling your investigation, and my taking care of these children, as my early Christmas presents to you, and to them.”