Spears of God

by Howard V. Hendrix

  He should have known something was up when they switched the target from South America to Jerusalem. The South American operation didn’t require an on-site meteoriticist, they said. That was the first betrayal.

  But the Jerusalem target—far more dangerous, but potentially far more important. Avigdor knew Darla Pittman’s work very well. Even he, however, was not so audacious as to think that it might be possible to snatch a sample of such an ancient sacred stone and subject it to scientific investigation.

  That was the glory they had offered him. He had been unable to resist.

  How he wished he had resisted, now, even as he offered no resistance to the police officers marching him toward whatever destiny awaited him in IDF custody. Ahead, the hallway opened onto what looked like a loading zone. From beyond the doors there came a low sound, a distant roaring.

  His heavily armed police escort pushed open the great doors and the roar rose to deafening crescendo.

  Camera flashes lit up the air around him, so powerfully that for a moment he was blinded. As his eyes adjusted, he saw media everywhere. Ahead of him, at the end of the concrete ramp, waited an armored IDF van.

  Is this the attention I desired? Avigdor wondered grimly.

  He felt himself struck painfully, sharply, by a force so powerful it turned him halfway around. Before his eyes a man rose up, with curly black hair, white shirt, dark pants, camera, and photo-ID press credentials hanging on lanyards about his neck.

  The man appeared to have leapt up onto the ramp from the crowd beyond. He had a gun in his hand, and he was firing.

  Avigdor felt himself struck in the side, then in the chest, then in the chest again, before he fell to the ground.

  Now he heard sounds—of shots, and perhaps of struggle nearby. Soon he could not tell whether the sky above him was night or day, but he knew he was dying. Only one thought filled his mind as the whole of the universe shrunk down toward a squirming red line, then a crimson point.

  Is this the attention I deserved?

  STONE CODE

  Darla was many hours into a long, sleepless Bangalore-Beijing-Seattle flight back to the States, watching on the airline seatback screen the endless coverage of the tit-for-tat monument attacks in Jerusalem.

  “It’s easy to dismiss those responsible for the counterattack on the Western Wall of the Second Temple as the usual suspects: jihadists and intifadists,” said the talking head with the requisite news anchor mane of silver hair, switching to full commentator mode. “Those responsible for the initial attack on the Dome of the Rock, however, are not so easily handled.

  “They now seem to have been a diverse group. Members of the racist Kach movement founded by Meir Kahane. Displaced settlement hilltoppers. Flannel-wearing, M-16-toting radical Jewish nationalists. The money to fund the attack, however, appears to have come from radical-right Christian Zionists in the United States. Some of those groups counter that it was actually the Palestinian Arabs who launched the initial attack on the Dome, in order to exploit Arab furor for a war against Israel.

  “Like their hard-core Israeli fellow travelers, the American Christian Zionists believe—as do Muslim jihadists too, oddly enough—that a global war between Muslim and Jew is a necessary prelude to the unfolding of their particular end-time scenarios—”

  A special bulletin interrupted the program she’d been watching. Indeed, she soon saw, special bulletins were interrupting the programming on all the news channels, as she flicked among them.

  “—lone survivor of the attack on the Dome of the Rock—”

  “—meteoriticist Avigdor Fox has been killed—”

  “—being transferred from Jerusalem police to Israeli Defense Force custody—”

  “—assailant Ismail Hijazi—”

  “—Arab Palestinian born and raised in Israel—”

  “—used forged press credentials—”

  “—access to the transfer for a photo opportunity—”

  “—reportedly distraught over the attack on the Muslim shrine—”

  “—shot the meteoriticist not with a camera but with a nine-millimeter—”

  Darla wondered if her jet-lagged mind might be dreaming or hallucinating all of this. Once past the initial hallucinatory feel of the news, she was for a moment perversely relieved. Both her name and her theory about Jacob’s stone pillow were now much less likely to be blazoned across the media in connection with the Dome attack than they would have been, had Avigdor Fox lived to stand trial.

  Then, almost immediately, she felt guilty for having felt relieved.

  Watching the ongoing churn of special reports and bulletins, however, she began to wonder if this latest turn of events was what it seemed to be at face value, or whether it might conceal a larger aspect. She didn’t doubt that Avigdor Fox had been shot dead, but the fact that he had been killed before he could talk struck her as just too convenient—and not just for her and her reputation, either.

  A dead man’s secrets would be forever beyond the reach of both judge and torturer. If Hijazi killed Fox, Fox wouldn’t have the opportunity to break under pressure. Fox was the one person who could tell the world who might really be behind this whole mess, and now he was dead—how very handy.

  Such reasoning, however, inevitably turned her to the “who” question: Who might Fox have ratted out?

  What were they working on? And why were they doing so?

  Darla wondered if the answer to that much bigger “why” would ever see the light of day. Like the truth of so many other geopolitical incidents in which powerful interests had converged and contended, it was far more likely the truth of this episode would also disappear beyond some impenetrable far curtain, some event horizon of history.

  She wished she could be content to live inside the black memory-hole, like nearly everyone else, but she was beginning to suspect that she and her own work might already be somehow involved in that larger convergence of historical forces. She wondered which might be the largest possible Russian doll here, the one containing all the others in a long series of dolls-within-dolls…

  How much did the general know about all this?

  She thought she knew the extent of his involvements in her research on the mysterious tepui stone. She thought none of his interest went beyond the supersoldier program, but now she wasn’t so sure.

  She knew that, among other things, he was looking for some super-protective, subtly reactive material capable of shielding the wearer not only from ballistic and stabbing weapons, but also from blast, shock, and heat effects—perhaps even the whole range of nuclear, biological, and chemical agents. Certainly that had piqued her own interest—that, and perhaps other, more obscure forms of troop augmentation.

  Was that all he was after? Or were his efforts connected to something larger? Perhaps to those ongoing thefts from meteorite collections? Reluctantly, Darla began to consider the possibility that she might herself be the recipient of stolen goods.

  She glanced again at the news as it continued to churn away. Might the general perhaps be connected somehow even to the assault in Jerusalem?

  She turned off the news. The jet hurtled between the star-spangled ocean of night far above and the wave-crested Pacific far below. Darla saw no shooting stars out the window, though they were very much on her mind. Turning from the window, she looked about the cabin of the jet, where most of her fellow passengers were sleeping, including her lightly snoring postdoc research assistant, Barry Levitch.

  Shards of stone falling ablaze from heaven. What was their true relevance to human history, to all the events that had contributed to the ranks of humanity now obliviously sleeping in neat rows around her?

  She had long believed those otherworldly shards were broken vessels, and that those vessels sometimes contained substances or properties that affected everything from terrestrial chemistry to mental states in individual human minds. She heard nothing at the conference to dispel that belief.

  She had no doubt, for instance,
that Miller’s meteoritic Nuhus—spears of the gods or spears of God, whichever—had exerted a psychoactive influence on those who came in contact with them. It was just too much like the stories about the Central Asian Chintamani Stone and its powers. Even if the action of such stones had been purely magnetic—à la Michael Persinger’s “divinity inducing” rotating magnetic fields—she was sure the stones’ effects were more than just to point north.

  DARPA, she knew, had been experimenting for years with TMS, transcranial magnetic stimulation, as a performance enhancer for military personnel exhausted by those protracted field operations that deprived troops of sleep for days or weeks on end. Given how many hours straight she’d been awake, she could probably use a pulse of TMS herself right now.

  In the next occupied seat over, beyond the empty seat beside her, Barry turned in his sleep. She envied him. She always had trouble sleeping on flights, no matter how long her travels kept her in the air.

  She thought back on the conference, and then on that whole geopolitical chain of Russian dolls Avigdor Fox’s death triggered in her mind. She couldn’t help but remember that Russian fellow Yuri Semenov’s presentation, too. He had talked about physiological effects of electromagnetism connected to meteoroids and meteorites, effects that were a lot bigger than just magnetic stones pointing north, or tweaking a few neural networks inside a shaman’s head to make a new lightbulb flash on there.

  In his concluding remarks Semenov speculated that the tremendous burst in species diversity at the beginning of the Paleozoic—the “Cambrian explosion”—might somehow have been precipitated by a literal explosion. He suggested that burst might have resulted from yet another great skystone impacting the earth. No impact crater had been identified as of yet, however, and Semenov did not propose a specific mechanism for that explosion of diversity.

  If Darla was right, smaller sacred skystones opened up minds for a potent change in perceptions and the generation of new ideas. If Semenov was right, the wrath-of-God impactors opened up genomes for a potent change in trait expression and the generation of new species.

  Yet none of that exactly fit what she’d seen with the tepui stone. Or fit the larger issue of the meteorite thefts worldwide, either. Up to the present she had not pressed General Retticker on the provenance of the tepui stone and the tribe that had worshipped it. About all he had offered, besides the occasional cryptic note, was a warning to her, before she left for the conference, not to mention the stone specifically in her conversations and interviews. She was particularly not to mention it to Yamada and Miskulin.

  She hadn’t done so during her interviews with them. Still, she would be more than willing to tolerate having both of them on her team, if it meant she could find out something General Retticker himself didn’t particularly want her to know.

  Learning more about the stone’s original setting was not something on which she had planned to spend much time. So much of experimental science was, after all, about examining the object independent of its context. Now, though, she realized she might need to take that context into account.

  She knew a good deal about the context of the sacred stones of the Old World, but she didn’t know all that much about the context of meteorite worship in the New World. She would have to play things very close to the vest, but hiring Yamada in some sort of consultant capacity might help her puzzle out the larger background of the thing.

  She would have to be careful. For someone like Semenov, she supposed there would be little purpose in gathering such shards, since he saw meteoroids and meteorites as essentially solid projectiles. If the tepui stone was in fact only one of many stolen meteorites, however—and if those stones were being gathered in order to piece together some greater puzzle, some great mosaic—then whoever might be trying to piece together that larger whole must be after something more than ballistic information.

  Those mosaic-makers and puzzle-solvers also seemed willing to countenance anything to achieve their “big picture” goal, including murder and, it seemed now, even the risk of global religious war. Reassembly on such a scale and at such a cost had to be for some deeper reason. But what?

  All that effort only made sense if the fragments still contained some other information, in much the same way that a vessel once filled with oil, even after it has shattered, still retains some drops of the original liquid adhering to its shards.

  What if the catastrophic rocks from space not only freed up the expression of mutations and variations by overwhelming the chaperone capacities of heat shock proteins—as Yuri Semenov contended—but also injected nonterrestrial exotics into those opened genomes while their guards were down? Gathering stones together then made a definite sort of sense, if someone was in fact trying to piece back together genetically coded material that had been broken into fragments, or otherwise corrupted by passage through vastnesses of time and space.

  Such ideas brought her perilously close to Michael Miskulin’s notions that the life-code did not originate on earth but in space—and that, unfortunately for everyone, life on this planet had gotten a corrupt copy.

  Barry woke up and looked at her as he rubbed sleep from his eyes.

  “You look deeper in thought than I was in sleep,” he said. “Mind if I ask what’s on your mind?”

  “I was thinking about Miskulin’s idea,” she said, glancing down. “That life on earth started from some incomplete copy of the cosmic life-code, floating around out in space.”

  “What about it?” Barry asked, stifling a yawn.

  “Microbes from space might have helped in the initial genesis of terrestrial life,” she began, “but I don’t really see how they might be all that implicated in anything that happened later.”

  “Single-celled critters were the dominant life-forms on the planet for three quarters of the history of life on earth,” Barry agreed sleepily. “From four billion to one billion years ago, the single cell was pretty much the whole story.”

  “Right. Just adding more single-celled bacteria to the mix probably wouldn’t have changed things much, until the Cambrian explosion hit and multicellular organisms evolved. Even if the exotic bacteria did come from space. It was almost all microscopic life.”

  “Yep. The planet’d look a lot different without the plants, animals, and fungi we can actually see.”

  Barry’s mention of the fungi reminded her of Retticker’s note on the meteorite cultists of the tepui, and her own research on the tepui stone. Looking about her, at the plane full of sleeping passengers, she wondered how freely she could speak of her work. She decided to take the chance.

  “Yet the prebiotic and potential-genetic material we’re working with in Montana seems to be hopelessly redundant and meaningless,” she said, almost to herself. “I don’t see how an injection of such junk could have affected the evolution of multicellular life, much less the minds of modern humans.”

  “What if it’s not junk?” Barry asked.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Everybody used to think the majority of DNA was junk because it didn’t obviously code for proteins.

  They thought the introns were just segments of meaningless DNA that sat between the genes that coded for proteins. Then they found out that the Group Two introns could insert themselves into host genomes and later splice themselves out once they’d been expressed as RNA.”

  Darla saw what he was getting at, especially in conjunction with the spliceosome, an odd little complex of catalytic RNAs and proteins.

  “Peculiarly parasitic bits of RNA and DNA,” she said, thinking it through. “Introns in general, working with the spliceosome, could proliferate, mutate, and evolve. Over time the intron ‘junk’ developed RNA-mediated genetic functions that evolved independently and in parallel to proteins.”

  Barry sat up straighter in his seat, realizing what their conversation might be tumbling them to.

  “Parasitic nucleic acids and spliceosomes sound like the sorts of things that might well have come in from
space…” he began.

  Darla, however, was already thinking several steps ahead of him.

  “In much the same way that parallel processing works in the brain, the successful injection of such components into the single-cell world could have resulted in the development of new RNA-based genetic operating systems and regulatory networks—”

  “—communicating regulatory information in parallel to protein-based systems and networks,” Barry said, nodding eagerly.

  Darla, however, was still far ahead of him. Semenov hadn’t seen the mechanism, she realized. Having examined the tepui stone, though, Darla thought she could now see the outlines of the system through which the machinery of life on earth interacted with the vaster machinery of the heavens.

  “There’s some basis for believing the nucleus is itself a molecular-parasite immigrant,” she said.

  “Something like a large and persistent DNA virus that made a permanent home within prokaryotes, allowing them to become eukaryotes.”

  “Couple that with the development of a new RNA-based control architecture, which could have resulted in a tremendous burst of new molecular evolution—”

  “—and together they’d likely be enough for the Cambrian explosion’s blast of diversity.”

  “Bingo! I think you’re on to something, Doc!”

  It didn’t stop there, though. Now that she thought about it, the affects of newer architectures for both generating and controlling organismal complexity kept popping up. Large-scale changes might be related in time to the great impactors punctuating the overall equilibrium of evolution, yes, but smaller-scale changes might also be related to smaller meteoritic events.

  “Genetic objects such as transposons and other repetitive elements are also considered molecular-parasite ‘immigrants,’” Barry said. “They supposedly colonized the genomes of various species in waves, at different times during evolutionary history. They used to be thought of as genomic junk, too.”

  Darla nodded.

  “And now they’ve turned out to play a key role in genomic regulation and epigenetic inheritance.”