Spears of God

by Howard V. Hendrix

  Vida looked off into the middle distance. The engines of the jet throttled back as they fell through the night.

  “Picture forty thousand nomads who have driven to the desert in cars, trucks, and RVs. Or flown onto the playa in private planes. They park, pitch their tents, build domes and shade pyramids and other temporary structures. Hundreds and hundreds of little camp-neighborhoods pop up, each one its own temporary little world in the temporary city. Within the city and across the playa, they travel mainly on bicycles and by foot, during the day. At night, art cars depicting everything from UFOs and dragons to pirate ships and riverboats—and decorated with twinkle lights and lightwire and neon—cruise all over the dry lake bed. At the center of the city is the giant effigy Man lit up in blue or yellow neon. Are you visualizing that?”

  “I think so.”

  “Okay, now picture that the city these technomads and artists create only appears on the desert for a week or so, then disappears for the rest of the year. The city, the people, their bicycles, their art installations, their fires—they all vanish like a mirage. During the rainy season the playa remembers again that it was once a lake and floods, erasing the tire tracks and almost all other traces of the spectacle.”

  Avram tried to wrap his mind around it in a way that made the oddness of it seem more familiar.

  “Brigadoon at Black Rock,” he said at last.

  Vida nodded, her eyes glinting as she smiled at his description.

  “Right. Exactly like a giant Etch-a-Sketch, erased first by fire and then by water. The first time I saw them burn the Man, the fire generated multiple firestorm vortices—tornadoes of flame that circled all the way around the pyre more than once before the whole installation collapsed and a crowd of tens of thousands of people surged forward to dance in a great counterclockwise circle around the burning remains.”

  Avram whistled softly through his teeth.

  “That’s an incredible image. Crazed spectacle, indeed.”

  “Very surreal. It made me think, though.”

  “About what?”

  “About how cities began, or maybe how they’ll end. Like I wasn’t seeing just the event itself, but maybe an aftershock of something from the distant past, or a foreshock of something from the distant future.”

  Avram shifted in his seat again, and glanced at her narrowly.

  “What was your role in all this?”

  “The first time, I was a volunteer firefighter stationed about halfway back toward Center Camp. That far back, I didn’t get caught up in the crowd surge. I did get to see the embers and firebrands of the Burn drifting about a hundred feet over my head, though. Against the band of the Milky Way in the desert sky, the flying embers looked like constellations of slow-motion falling stars. I’ll never forget that.”

  Through Avram’s mind flashed the memory of a shooting star streaking behind a horizon lined in pines, over ten thousand feet up in the mountains, during a Perseid meteor shower years before. At the time he’d thought of the idea from the Kabbalah that, at the beginning of the world, the vessels intended to channel the celestial light shattered with the force of that light, such that some of their sparking shards fell to earth and became trapped in the material world.

  According to the great Kabbalist Isaac Luria, the job of human beings was tikkun: to embody the process of celestial repair by leading a holy life, thus raising the sparks out of their entrapment in matter so that they might be restored to divinity.

  Avram didn’t believe anymore that such a restoration was possible. He stopped believing when his daughter died.

  “I’m confused. You were a firefighter for an event whose centerpiece was a ritual inferno?”

  Vida smiled awkwardly.

  “Like being an air-traffic controller for kamikaze pilots, I know. I’d just started my senior year at UCLA.

  My boyfriend was an anthro major and volunteer firefighter. That’s how I ended up staying at the Black Rock City Volunteer Fire Department Fire Camp. I was helping him put out unauthorized blazes set by freelance pyros, and any spot fires from the Burn’s flying embers.”

  “Put them out? Why?”

  “You wouldn’t want the city catching fire, or unprotected burns on the playa, either. The second time I went—the last time—I was there as a civilian, just enjoying the freedom of the city.”

  “You never went again?”

  “Couldn’t. The event was on government land, Bureau of Land Management property. A Bible-thumping Texas billionaire by the name of George Otis got himself put in control of BLM, mainly so he could help his cronies exploit mineral and mining rights. Otis considered the whole festival inspired by Satan. One of the first things he did was get the event banned on public health, safety, and environmental grounds.”

  “That seems plausible enough,” Avram said, his voice trailing off as he saw the look on Vida’s face.

  “But it wasn’t! The reasons for the shutdown were all a sham. The playa’s a giant gypsum deposit five hundred feet deep. Impervious to most things you could throw at it. And the surface areas under all the big burns were lined with fire-resistant material—year after year—to prevent the heat from vitrifying even a small section of the desert underneath it. Any part of it you turned into glass would be a pain to remove and restore.”

  She gave a quick, sharp shake of her head, without breaking eye contact with him.

  “No, what was anathema to Otis was the idea that adults are not six-year-olds. That they should be allowed to think as they wish and play as they please, so long as all their play and work is done by mutual consent. That radical notion was the real reason for the shutdown.”

  “Freedom is dangerous,” Avram said, “and must be carefully watched.”

  “If not destroyed outright in the name of safety,” Vida said, nodding. “I’ve heard rumors the festival might be coming back, though. Who’s to say that, given world enough and time, Black Rock Desert might not become a new center of pilgrimage? Like the Vatican, or the Temple Mount, or even Mecca?”

  Avram was startled to hear her mention that last pilgrimage destination, but just then their plane banked sharply, covering his startlement. Thinking of how his mission forced him to keep the fire of his revenge alive, yet at the same time banked down, he understood how the giant effigy Man might feel, waiting to flare into a final blaze.

  An enormous structure loomed above the city before them, an immense, tapering pile of slender, softly glowing cylinders like a dream tower painted by a science-fiction illustrator. Its appearance stunned Avram, but Vida took it in stride.

  “Wow! That’s a helluva skyscraper!”

  “That’s the Burj Dubai. I think it might still be the tallest building in the world. I’m not sure.”

  “Burj? Isn’t that where our conference is being held?”

  “No. Another Burj. Our conference hotel is the Burj Al Arab. It’s the one that looks like the lateen sail of an Arabian dhow. There, see it? Not quite so new or so tall, though it was once the tallest hotel in the world. Most buildings in Dubai were once the tallest or the most luxurious in some category or other. The buildings themselves are not as ephemeral as their original claims to fame, is all.”

  “You sound like you know the place well.”

  “I’ve been here a few times. I have family here.”

  “Really? I thought you were Egyptian.”

  “My family is originally from Iran. My parents were both born there. They and their relatives were scattered in the Iranian diaspora, after the mullahs came to power. Some of my cousins ended up here.

  Our parents and aunts and uncles taught all of us how to speak Farsi, in addition to Arabic. Maintaining tradition, you know. I can teach you a bit of that language, if you’d like.”

  “Yes, I’d like that.” Might come in handy, too, he thought.

  Their jet touched down. Amid the hurry of deplaning and meeting the limo that would transport them to the hotel, they had little time for further personal revelati
ons or meditations. Their pace didn’t slacken until they had arrived in the marble-and-gold ambience of the Burj Al Arab’s lobby, where Avram saw a discreet sign welcoming conferees to this year’s meeting of ECOL, the Exobiology Conference on the Origins of Life.

  They made their way between hotel registration and conference registration, through an identifiably academic crowd in casual-professional drag. The men tended to be balding, bearded, and bespectacled, and the women looked to have spent more time in the laboratory and the library than the spa or the salon. Avram thought that the more tanned and lean among them were either recently returned from sabbaticals or from research in the field.

  “There’s Yuri, talking to Darla Pittman,” Vida pointed out. “I think he got to ride in with the boss. He’s actually giving a paper, and not just attending, like us.”

  “I read the abstract in the preprogram,” Avram said. “Heat shock proteins, hidden mutations, evolutionary capacitors, the meteorite falls at Wadi Bani Khaled, Nejd, and Wabar—all that. He told me not to worry about attending his presentation, since we’d already heard it informally on the dig.”

  “About half a dozen times!” Vida said with a smirk. “Considerate of him. Victor isn’t giving a presentation, as far as I know.”

  “Not according to the latest update, no,” Avram said as he perused the conference schedule in the program book. “There are several presentations about the ongoing spate of meteorite thefts and proposed security protocols for protecting collections. I’m sure he won’t be very far away from that discussion, whether he’s physically present or not.”

  Vida flashed him a wry smile, but then was distracted by something.

  “Look, Michael Miskulin’s here. With his latest flame, too, the ethnobotanist, what’s her name.”

  “Yamada,” Avram said as he looked back to the list of speakers, guests, and attendees. “Strange…”

  “What is?”

  “The astrobiologists and exobiologists here are from all over the world,” Avram explained. “I haven’t attended all that many conferences, yet I know many of them personally and nearly all of them from their published work.”

  Vida shrugged back her dark hair, and thought about that.

  “We’re not a big community, when you come down to it. Almost everybody knows almost everybody.”

  Avram contemplated the idea of a small town’s worth of people with the same professional obsession, scattered all over the planet. Everyone he knew in that community seemed supercompetent in their fields, most of them surprisingly young and very bright. Yet as he looked about him, he also wondered why so many of them—so many of us—were so screwed up, socially. Unmarried or divorced because they were unable to maintain more settled and domestic relationships. More comfortable looking at mediating screens than unmediated faces. In some ways this conference—and others he’d attended—was like a meeting of Academic Asperger’s Anonymous, but without the obvious therapeutic function.

  And with agendas—besides the official ones listed in the program. Who was working—and/or sleeping—with whom? Whose star was on the rise? Whose career was cold and dead as a distant planet?

  Victor Fremdkunst waved them over and introduced them to one of the conference’s keynote speakers, Dr. Monica Grady of the British Natural History Museum. As they chatted, Avram quicky realized that Fremdkunst was playing bad-boy outsider to Grady’s doyenne of meteoritic studies.

  So it went throughout the evening reception, people meeting and greeting, bobbing and weaving, noshing and kvetching and catching up on each other’s work, a social gathering of bright people who tended to fail unpredictably in social gatherings, before awkwardly retiring to their rooms, there to continue partying in small groups, and a few just to sleep.

  The following morning Avram overslept enough that he was twenty minutes late to the initial Welcome and Introduction. Because he knew he would not see Vida, or Yuri, or Victor except in passing as he made his way to a full schedule of panels, he and Vida planned to get together for brunch before the conference got into the full, multitracked swing of its panels and presentations.

  Avram sat down to brunch on a terrace overlooking Jumeirah Beach, its main hotel, and the Wild Wadi Water Park. As he waited for Vida, he perused the conference schedule on his AR glasses, blinking on items he thought might be interesting.

  Discussions about the genomics of extremophile organisms found in solfataras, hot springs, and hydrothermal vents. Lecture presentations on Arctic sea ice and Antarctic Lake Vostok—buried under miles of ice for hundreds of millennia—as analogs for the intra-ice biological niches of Jupiter’s moon Europa. Panels on relative likelihoods of microbial contamination of Earth by meteorite-borne extraterrestrial life, versus microbial contamination of meteorites by terrestrial life.

  Looking away from the conference schedule, Avram soon became more interested in watching and chatting with a friendly South African falconer in slouch hat and safari togs. The man paced the grounds before him, working his bird up and down the great lateen-sail face of the Burj Al Arab, his falcon eliminating any pigeons or other nesters it encountered.

  Avram hadn’t been watching the falcon and the falconer long before Vida sat down at his table and Avram returned to the varied presentations and keynote speeches on the schedule.

  “See anything particularly noteworthy?” he asked, noting that Vida was engaged in the same winnowing process.

  “The stuff on cryptoendolithic communities of fungi and photosynthetic microbes, hidden in layers beneath the quartz surfaces of stones in the Dry Valleys of Antarctica,” Vida said, looking over the marked items on her own conference specs. “That looks like solid science, though not particularly new. Same with the panels on extraterrestrial volatiles and microbes making it onto habitable planets: impact delivery of organics to Earth, Mars, and Europa; microbial survival in solar system space; the usual. This one here, though—arguing that Earth’s oil reserves are much older ‘fossil’ fuels than is generally accepted—I hear that’s going to be controversial.”

  “‘Oil from Heaven.’ Interesting title. Why that one?”

  “Word is the presenter plans to argue that the world’s oil reserves were not the result of plant and animal remains being altered by geological heat and pressure. He claims they’re the product of kerogenous substances initially brought to Earth through billions of years of meteoritic impacts. Maybe some of the geologists will come to blows with him, if we’re lucky. How about you?”

  “Nothing so exciting as that. I thought I’d end my day early with Miskulin’s talk, ‘Of Lemmings and Life Codes,’ before I get woozy with conference overload. Miskulin ought to be plenty controversial enough.”

  “I wanted to see that, but it’s the same time slot as the one on oil,” Vida said, puzzling it out. “You’ll have to give me a full report. Hey, what about this one—Miller’s lecture on those star-spear things?”

  Avram blink-scanned through the schedule until he found the listing of a presentation by American anthropologist Karl Miller. Judging from the title and synopsis, Miller would be arguing that the Aztec gods Tlaloc, Huitzilopochtli, and Quetzalcoatl were related to the meteoritic star-spear entities called Nuhu by the Mixtecs.

  “The Nuhus?”

  “That one.”

  “No, I’m afraid I can’t make that one. Same time as the one on microbial contamination.”

  “I’ll check the Nuhus out, if you’ll take notes on the Miskulin presentation for me.”

  “It’s a deal. I—”

  He was interrupted by the sudden stoop of the janitorial falcon. At something over two hundred miles per hour the raptor easily took out a pigeon a couple of meters from them—close enough that they clearly heard the crack of impact. The falconer could not help smiling slightly at their startlement, even as he apologized.

  “Like a feathered shooting star, that bird,” Avram said, shaking his head.

  “More like a feathered cruise missile,” Vida corrected, frowni
ng slightly. “One of my Dubai cousins is something of an aficionado, when it comes to falconry. If you want to see why it’s such a big thing here, I’m sure he could set up a hunting trip for us, if you’d like.”

  “Yes, I’d really enjoy seeing that.”

  “What’s your schedule later this afternoon?”

  “Not much, other than the Miskulin talk.”

  “Good. That’s over pretty early in the day. Maybe my cousin can set something up.”

  “Now, I wouldn’t want to impose on his hospitality…”

  Vida laughed.

  “I doubt he’d consider it imposing. He’ll grab at any excuse that lets him get out into the desert with his birds, especially during bustard season. Be back here at two-thirty or thereabouts. The odds are good my cousin Umar will be waiting here with me by then.”

  Avram agreed to rendezvous with Vida on the terrace at the specified time. She left ahead of him while he finished his coffee. Gathering his papers and stuffing them into his small briefcase, Avram startled as the falcon landed on his shoulder. As he watched, the bird stood on one sharp-taloned foot and extended the other leg toward him. Wrapped around that leg was a small scroll.

  Avram looked beyond the bird to the falconer, who touched his slouch hat in recognition, then motioned that he should take the scroll off the bird’s leg and read it. A bit perplexed, Avram did so.

  My Dear Doctor Zaragosa—

  Events are beginning to break in Jerusalem, about which you shall soon hear. How they sift out may affect our timetable. We will, however, have an in-country meeting together before too very long. In the meantime, you might want to sit in on Dr. Miskulin’s presentation today.

  Persevere—

  Luis

  PS: I thought you might appreciate this method of communication.

  The falconer whistled off his bird and turned away. Avram watched it go, then looked about for Luis or anyone who might be watching him for his “employers.” He saw no one who might fit that description.