Spears of God

by Howard V. Hendrix

  FIVE

  SCISSORS, PAPER, ROCK

  Michael was glad of the noise the helicopter made while shuttling them to his uncle’s compound beside Lake Tahoe. It provided an excuse for him and Susan not to have to talk to each other. They had in fact not talked to each other during most of the transcontinental flight back from the ECOL conference, without any particular excuse. Susan had seemed pensive, and he was loathe to break into her thoughts.

  Departing the helicopter after it settled on the helipad, they found Paul Larkin waiting to greet them, and tell them about the several long-distance “information exchanges” he’d had with Brescoll.

  Watching his uncle talk about that, Michael felt that Paul seemed older, his face more drawn, as if something had knocked the wind out of him—something from which he was only now recovering. Paul mentioned no health problems, however, and Michael felt it would be impolite to ask. Besides, the man was like a cat—he could lose one life and seemingly still have the energy of eight more to draw upon.

  “How are the kids doing?” Susan asked, breaking her silence at last as they moved out of the propwash.

  “Extraordinarily well. They have names now, you know. Gave them to themselves.”

  “They’re speaking?” Michael asked. “English, even?”

  “Long since,” Larkin said, nodding. He led them down a garden path, away from the cold winds of the helipad. “More than a dozen languages, between the four of them. I thought we were going to be studying those kids, but I think it’s more accurate to say they’re studying us.”

  They passed between terraced landscape beds just beginning to pop with overly optimistic spring bulbs.

  Mainly crocuses, Michael noticed, of about a hundred different colors.

  “Who’s ‘us’?” Susan asked.

  “All of us. Everybody outside their tepui. Humanity. The whole crazy contemporary world.”

  “How’re they managing to do that?”

  “Came from my following a hunch that maybe my sister’s crazy ideas about them actually might have some validity. Apparently they do.”

  As they walked toward the guesthouse Larkin had set aside for the children, he tried to explain.

  “I still doubt the Mawari would have ever been able to ‘sing their mountain to the stars,’ but I suspected Jacinta must have had some reason for spending all that money trying to get all that telemedia and computing equipment up to the top of that damn tepui, all those years ago.”

  “The equipment we saw?”

  “And much, much more. The portable solar and gasoline-fueled electric generators, the thousands of feet of power cables—that must have been intended mainly to power the equipment. The way I figure it, the foldout satellite dishes and uplink antennas were supposed to plug the tribe into the worldwide infosphere—leapfrog them from Paleolithic to Postindustrial.”

  He slowed, glancing at the early flowers, bulbs forced by the January thaw.

  “No need for most of that gear here,” he continued. “My compound is online and on the grid. The key thing has been to get these remnant ghost people as much access to as much of the world’s distributed information as possible. To that end I’ve set up the best computing and telemedia facility I could for them.”

  “But why that?”

  “I owed it to Jacinta,” Paul said as they approached the guesthouse. “Back then, I stopped her from completing that project, or fulfilling that prophecy, whichever way you want to look at it. Over the past couple of months, I gave the kids a little initial training on the machines, but pretty soon they didn’t need my help anymore. They took to that tech like they were born to it. Their learning curve has been incredible. So far they still share my distaste for those AR glasses, but I don’t know how long that will last.”

  “Any evidence of Asperger’s-ish stuff, like I suggested?” Michael asked.

  “I guess you could say they’re superfocused. Fascinations with certain things—the physics of games like marbles, or the dynamics of soap bubbles and snow globes, for instance. Not much interested in social interaction or social cues. I think they find games and ideas a good deal more interesting than people. Or that they’re more interested in people in the abstract than in concrete examples.”

  “The waves on the ocean of history,” Michael suggested, “rather than the droplets.”

  “Right, but if they’re savants of some type, then they’re prodigious savants. Not narrow. They’ve immersed themselves completely in the whole infosphere of our contemporary world. Deep, in many fields, I’ll say that for them.”

  Larkin opened the heavy oak door in the stone wall of the guesthouse and they walked inside.

  “What have they been doing with what they’ve learned?” Susan asked.

  “All kinds of things. That’s why I don’t think Asperger’s or high-function autism describes them. They went through a phase where they wanted to know everything about us—you, Michael, me. They particularly enjoyed the old story of our benitoite mine adventure, Michael.”

  Michael shook his head and smiled, but said nothing.

  “After that, they went through an intense gaming phase, then an intense language-learning phase—particularly impressive, since their own language seemed so simple. After that they compulsively watched movies in all sorts of languages, particularly superhero and martial arts films, as I recall. Since then, they seem to be mainly devouring facts and absorbing experiences—at least those you can render digitally and zap around the world.”

  “Have they gotten any exercise at all?” Susan asked. “Any time outdoors, in the fresh air?”

  “I’ve taken them hiking on the Tahoe Rim Trail and a bunch of other trails in the Desolation Wilderness,” Paul said. “Lots of day hikes—around Emerald Bay, along the Tahoe shore, jaunts to Fallen Leaf Lake and the Echo Lakes. Even a couple of overnighters.”

  “And what about security when you’ve been on these hikes?”

  Paul gave Susan a long awkward smile Michael couldn’t quite fathom.

  “Oh, you can count on that! I’ve also hired a private tutor in the martial arts, to give them a dose of reality in those disciplines, since they seemed so fond of the screen’s fantasy versions.”

  The three of them approached a voice-activated wallscreen computer. Paul accessed it through his voiceprint.

  “They know I keep a record of what they’re accessing. Here, I’ll show you some excerpts.”

  The screen lit up, showing one of the girls blowing a soap bubble while also intently watching a French television documentary on Han dynasty artifacts. Another of the girls did the same while watching an American news broadcast about an Indian monsoon. The boy absently flipped a snow globe, saying the word Rosebud while sampling musical forms from various times and places: madrigals and hip-hop, Tibetan temple gongs and rock ‘n’ roll, Sufi chants and technopop and worldbeat. The last of the girls gave her full attention to a poetry jam performance in which a pistol-packing poet in a rising voice pronounced “I was born a gun You loaded me with words Why the surprise when I SHOUT?”—and fired off the gun just at the end of that last word, so that “shout” also became “shoot.”

  In a later sequence, having apparently gotten beyond their fascination with bubbles and globes, all four sat before screens showing sacred and pilgrimage sites from around the world—Machu Picchu, Teotihuacan, Cahokia Mound, Newgrange, Stonehenge, Notre Dame, Saint Peter’s Basilica, Delphi, the Great Pyramid, Jerusalem, Mecca, the Ganges, the Potala Palace, Angkor Wat, and many more which were less immediately recognizable.

  Then they scanned screens running what looked like extremely complex mathematical equations—at unbelievable speeds—somehow able to manipulate the elegant flow of that process, while apparently never communicating with one another at all. In yet another sequence, what looked to be star charts and astrogation data darted across screens in front of the children.

  “Wait!” Michael said. “Pause it there. Yes. Right there. I thought so. Do you kn
ow what those are?”

  “What?” Susan asked.

  “Those are orbits. For the Apollo and Aten asteroids. Rocks from space on Earth-crossing trajectories.”

  Paul smiled.

  “That would fit the pattern. They’ve spent one helluva lot of time checking out meteorites, meteors, asteroids—lots of other stuff involving space, too.”

  “Such as?”

  “I sent some of it off to an astronomer friend of mine, Michael. She said that several of the ancient sacred sites they focused on have astronomical alignments. The deep-space info was mainly regions of the sky, first between the constellations of the two Dippers, and then specifically Eridanus and Cancer. I have no idea what it means.”

  Susan gave him a piercing look.

  “Did you ask them?”

  “Of course—and the discussion immediately degenerated into snippets of their usual ‘cave of night/seed of light’ myth-talk. When I pushed them, they tried to explain it to me in terms of a fungal life cycle: spore and spawn and some kind of mushroom-stone thing. Incredibly frustrating. I’ve tried, believe me. I even had them do a project for me.”

  “On what?”

  “I asked them to dramatize that genesis story of theirs—animate it with computer graphics, cull images from the infosphere, collage it together.”

  “And?”

  “I’ve seen their little movie. It makes some sense when I see it, but less when they try to explain what it means.”

  “Could we view it?” Michael asked.

  “I don’t see why not. I’m sure they’ll be happy to show it to you.”

  Paul led Michael and Susan into what had once been the living room of the guesthouse but was now a combination media lounge, computer center, and children’s playroom. When the adults entered, the four kids looked up from their flat screens and leapt to their feet, smiling.

  Michael knew they were preadolescents, between ten and twelve years of age, but they struck him as also much older now. The way they greeted “Uncle Michael” and “Aunt Susan”—and quite formally said how glad they were to see both of them again— that bespoke not only rapid language acquisition but also an adult sophistication far beyond their years.

  He wondered how much of this his uncle might have pre-scripted. He was soon sure, however, that that sense of premature maturity was not something Paul could have imposed on them, especially when the next moment one of them, shyly as any ten-year-old, was informing Michael and Susan that they had names now.

  “Oh? And what are you calling yourselves?” he asked.

  “I’m Ka-dalun,” said the shortest girl, with the briefest flash of an impish smile. Now that he was looking at her, Michael thought she might be the youngest. Awkwardly, she reached out her hand for Michael and Susan to shake.

  “Alii De Danaan,” said the boy, also shaking hands in the same formal but awkward fashion.

  “Ebu Gogo,” said the middle girl.

  “Aubrey Menehune,” said the tallest girl. After Aubrey formally greeted them, all four children went back to whatever they were working on or playing at via their screens. Michael couldn’t quite figure out what that something was, or whether they were all doing the same thing, but whatever it was it involved lots of flashing, frenetic activity on the monitors, and a spot in what looked like the South Atlantic, judging from the map display on one of the girls’ screens.

  The oddness of the children was unsettling. They struck him not as inhuman so much as extrahuman, like child geniuses or prodigies. He supposed their history of massacre and ten-thousand-year leap forward might have made them mature early, though certainly not completely. Such a background was all too likely to leave some gaps and blank spots in their socialization.

  “Fascinating names, no?” Paul said, turning to his adult companions.

  “Fascinating names, yes,” Susan said. “All refer to myths and folktales about lost peoples, if I’m not mistaken.”

  “Absolutely correct. All are ‘fairies’ or ‘little people’ who have disappeared from around the world—as named by the cultures that displaced them.”

  Susan nodded eagerly.

  “Some anthropologists think such stories are a sort of ‘survivor guilt.’ Collective memories of later metalworking invaders who drove their stone-tool-wielding predecessors to extinction. At least that’s the theory.”

  “Or even the collective memory of us anatomically modern humans wiping out our Erectus and Neanderthal predecessors,” Michael said, watching the preoccupied children. “Their interest in such things…it makes a certain sense, you know?”

  “Why would it even surprise you?” Susan asked.

  “Why do you say that?”

  “Is this interest in lost little people out of their guilt from having survived when the rest of their tribe is dead? Or is it to remind us of our tribe’s guilt for having killed them?”

  Michael’s only answer was to shrug his shoulders and lift his empty hands. Why she still continued to blame him for somehow causing what had happened to the tepuians—just because he was a meteoriticist, and just because his scientific search had led him to that place—was beyond him. His uncle was nominally more responsible, yet Paul was never as much the target of Susan’s ire as he was. No use arguing with her, in any case.

  “Maybe when the machines rule the world after we’re gone,” Paul mused, breaking their stalemate, “they’ll think of us the same way we think of the fairy folk.”

  “If they think of us at all,” Susan said. “I’d prefer not to believe in any such ‘machinifest destiny.’”

  Larkin smiled. He turned from them and addressed the boy, who answered without looking up from his screen.

  “Alii?”

  “Yes?”

  “Would you be so kind as to show Michael and Susan the movie you and the girls made about your people and the stars?”

  “Yeah!” said Alii, breaking away from the screen for a moment. He popped their movie into the slot of a projection-screen laptop and let the movie play against the nearest wall. Michael soon saw that it was anime, intercut with stock film footage.

  Something spherical appears, against a background of stars. Flashcut to the hollow, spherical, flagellated colony of the protozoan volvox. Zoom in on the sphere’s surface, covered with more complex features, somehow machinic and organic at the same time, ancient stone beneath overlapping finely machined wings of moths, or butterflies, angels—or demons.

  Zoom out. Miragelike shimmer of force about the sphere. Glinting, lambent brightness of myriad wings beating against the bright wind from a star almost near enough to be called a sun. Flashcut to great masses of monarch butterflies, balls and bunches of them gathered in a eucalyptus grove near the California coast, opening and closing their wings in the winter sun of a cold morning.

  Zoom out. Passing between the Scylla of a red giant star and the Charybdis of a newly formed black hole, the peaceful journey of the winged stone ship morphs into a tale of shipwreck—the craft ripped into, by forces powerful and invisible.

  Zoom in. Many of the winged things upon its surface crumple and die in the accident, gaping holes break into the hollow stone beneath their wings. Crippled, the ship falls toward the sun.

  Zoom out and pan. Carried by the strange angels, sections of the sphere break apart and go into orbit around the sun—first farther out in a wilderness of floating ice islands, then among the rubble of an aborted planet.

  The remainder of the broken sphere continues to fall sunward, toward an Earth that’s all right, and all wrong—continents misshapen and in the wrong places.

  Zoom in. What’s left of the still-living ship calves and breaks up. Tattered wings carrying stones through sunlight wind catch fire as they plunge into atmosphere—angels burning across the sky, petaling away like blowtorched roses and melting into the surface of their burdens, leaving only the stones to strike the unfamiliar Earth as meteorites.

  Flashcut to fungus fruiting in incredible profusion around crate
rs. Clocks with millennium hands spin in a corner of the screen. Millions of years pass. Other graphs in the bottom of the projection show incident radiation and corresponding mutation rates.

  Time-lapsed imagery proliferates, as does what grows from crash sites throughout the world: the same something, changing, evolving, denaturing, until it is no longer the same something at all, but thousands and thousands of species ever more distantly related. Only in a few shielded biomes—caves, particularly—does anything like the original strain survive.

  Long zoom in from satellite space to anvil-shaped mountain floating among clouds. Caracamuni tepui. A charred skystone in a cavern room. A child’s-eye view of lost parents, lost people, lost world: all golden, wonderful, larger than life, a tribe happy in their own skins and wearing little else, all sitting on their shins in a great circle around a skyburned stone, singing and reaching with their arms toward it, arms and upper bodies swaying in tune as if the stone in the center were a lighthouse and the people themselves were the ocean drawn up in waves by the passage of its invisible beam.

  A shattered skull, a smashed fungus, both spattered with a red more vivid than paint or ochre. Then darkness.

  “Thanks for letting us see the movie,” Paul said quietly. Alii, Aubrey, Ebu, and Ka-dalun each nodded stiffly, and the latter two smiled shyly. They quickly returned to their computers, to whatever work or play so obsessed them in the infosphere.

  “Where did the kids get that stuff?” Susan asked, a palpable excitement in her voice that Michael felt just as strongly. The adults were seated at the far end of the room, having cleared the children’s work and play things from a sofa, love seat, and rocking chair.

  “Like I said, the imagery is either computer-generated or culled from material available on the Web. As for where the narrative originated, your guess is almost as good as mine.”

  “Almost?” Michael asked. Paul Larkin nodded.

  “I have access to my sister’s notes, after all. According to Jacinta, the ghost people of the tepui claimed that the spawn of the mushroom they found in that cave ‘remembered’ how it got there. In the time-before-time, their ‘mushroom stone’ brought the spawn, or so they claimed. Their myths claimed the stone came ‘from the sky.’”