Michael jumped up from his seat and began to pace a bit as he thought.
“That’s brilliant, Susan! That info you showed us before, about how some kinds of fungus were mistaken for meteorites? What if, at the tepui, it wasn’t a mistake? We’ve got to get more work done on our own chunk of the tepui stone!”
“Why the sudden push on that?”
“Because it might be the metaphage in sclerotium form. Part space rock and part dormancy stage! That would explain why the tepui stone doesn’t fully fit into any established category of meteorite—”
Susan scowled.
“I thought we were supposed to be finding out who massacred the people at the tepui. And working for Mister NSA. And possibly even working with Darla Pittman.”
Before Michael could say anything, Paul Larkin replied.
“Yes, you certainly seem to already be juggling a lot of balls in the air, but I suspect it really is all part of the same ball.”
As they left the room, Larkin tried to explain to Susan what he suspected. Exiting with them, Michael noticed that the Mawari children were still working busily in front of their screens—and that now all four of them were looking at something in the sky over the southern Atlantic, between Africa and South America, called Argus Point. Must be some kind of game after all, he thought. He still thought that, during their flight to Montana, and the entire time there with Susan and Darla.
CLIMBING SIDEWAYS
Darla Pittman was working late in the cabinet lab at Rocky Mountain. She needed time to think, and she found she often thought better alone. She also wanted to avoid running into Susan Yamada and Michael Miskulin yet again. They had been on-site for briefings the past week and more. Playing things close to the vest had already proven more taxing than she’d expected.
Following her hunch and bringing Miskulin and Yamada in on her project had almost seemed more trouble than it was worth, especially given the security questions it raised for her. Less risky candidates could readily be found. Still, her hunch and its risks were paying off.
Feigning ignorance of any connection between the materials in her possession and their source in a particular tepui—and making sure that Barry did the same—had been a pain. As a result, though, she’d learned from Yamada and Miskulin a great deal about what she was now sure was her stone’s provenance.
It was truly her stone, for she was the only one cleared to work directly with the tepui materials in any new experimental processes or procedures. She’d issued those security guidelines herself.
During the day she usually worked in the suit-lab facilities—at least partly to set an example for Barry and the rest of the laboratory staff. There was no one else in the lab to set an example for at this time of night, however. She happily stayed out of the awkward pressure suit and worked through the glove boxes, the Class III biosafety cabinets. Not having to fuss with the pressure suit also freed up more mental disk-space for thinking things through.
Normally she did some of her best thinking while rock climbing—time away from her busy schedule that she zealously guarded. This past week, however, she’d sacrificed some of that solitary time to take Michael and Susan with her and give them an introductory lesson in climbing on one of her favorite local rock-routes in the Sapphires.
Not just for the exercise, but for the privacy, too. Her rock-climbing routes tended to be remote and therefore not eavesdropped upon or otherwise surveilled. A good thing, in case the awkwardness of socializing with Michael and his current flame unexpectedly blew up in her face. An even better thing, if the mission she had in mind—serious and important enough to make her risk more than awkwardness—panned out as fully as she hoped.
Eyeing the rock face, she chose what she considered an easy route for her novice partners to follow—one with lots of cracks and holds, nubbins to tiptoe on and finger-cling to, even a line of protrusions, called “chickenheads,” big enough to grasp and dyno back and forth from, through the final chimney and stemspots. She figured the route she put together was only 5.6 or 5.7 in difficulty, so she climbed in gym shoes, leaving the sticky boots and electrostatic surface-bond tech to her less-experienced partners.
As she lead-climbed for them, Michael and Susan gave her a lot to think about, mostly unintentionally. As always, Darla found it relaxing to lose herself in solving the vertical, three-dimensional chess problem of the climb before her. She popped stoppers and nuts into cracks and wedged her camming “friends” and “protection” into spaces with an almost thoughtless ease. Michael and Susan were snap-linked onto her rope line and freed up, as they passed them, the anchor-pieces Darla had set ahead of them. The two novices talked almost incessantly, trying to cover up their nervousness at slipping and falling—and catching themselves from slipping and falling.
As her companions scrambled upward against gravity (while also trying to avoid looking down through the empty air to the treetops below them), Darla found it much easier to glean information from them than they did from her. In that other chess game—their conversation—she clearly had the advantage.
Darla smiled, remembering. She hadn’t thought of rock climbing as a form of interrogation, but it seemed to do that job well enough. Michael and Susan had occasionally caught themselves and switched back to speaking in more general terms, but by the time the three of them hauled up and carefully coiled their off-belayed ropes, Darla had heard their harrowing tale of the genocidal extinction of the tepui’s mushroom-cult inhabitants. Equally disturbing, in some ways, was their tale of Jacinta Larkin’s discoveries, her madness, and the connection of both to that lost tribe’s myths and supposedly mythical powers.
It had taken the whole of the length of the walk back to the car, but gradually Darla realized just how successful she had been. Michael was still competition to be wary of in the fame game, but Susan seemed convinced by the day’s climb that Darla had no immediate designs on “her man”—if that’s what Michael was. Hard to say. The two of them seemed to Darla less like lovers and more like longtime friends.
Call it a bonding experience, but for a while, too, it seemed as if the three of them were able to put aside all the agendas of those they secretly worked for—Michael and Susan, as well as herself—and just be who they were. Although none of them trusted either of the others totally, each of them trusted the other through at least a broad range of scientific objectivity.
On the walk back, that was where she’d scored most of all—in the science, the one area where they’d all felt comfortable enough to let their guards down more than a bit. Despite the sometimes circumspect nature of Susan and Michael’s hints, she’d learned that they believed the reason the tribe’s tepui stone might not fit into established meteorite categories was because it might be what Susan called a sclerotium, a mushroom stone—part meteoritic rock and part dormancy stage of what Michael was calling a “metaphage-fungus mutualism.”
Darla’s feigned ignorance and amazement at that idea verged on the genuine. Following up on what Susan and Michael’s ideas had suggested to her during their rock-climbing jaunt, she reexamined the plated and test tube versions of what she had already grown from the spores Retticker had provided.
Although the search for bacteroidal and nanobacteroidal components in her sample of the stone had proven largely a dead end, the search for “space-junk DNA” in the tepui stone and skystone samples from throughout the world had proven to be anything but inconclusive.
Chen’s description of “silica nanoparticles with organic components” had turned out to be more right than he could have guessed. Fullerenes were involved, too, as Miskulin had suggested. Metadiamond cages apparently surrounded silica nanoparticles laced with organics, which in turn encapsulated DNA. The electrical charges of the silica nanoparticles held and compacted the DNA, while the organic components made the normally rigid silica nanoparticles more flexible and capable of releasing the encapsulated biomolecules.
It seemed a mechanism almost tailor-made for vectoring prebio
tic and potential-genetic material, without the need for bacteria or even viruses. A mechanism also quite capable of setting up the entire “phoenix phenotype” and “metaphage” scenario Miskulin had suggested, in his roundabout way—including the transfer of that metaphage replication information to living cells.
Especially fungal ones.
On media combining cerebrospinal fluid, serum, and neuronal matrix, Darla had succeeded in growing and running genetic analyses on that meshwork of mycelium and neurons Jacinta Larkin had called “myconeural complex.” Some very interesting stretches of code appeared, especially those higher-order nucleotide sequences that looked like the products of synthetic biology and artificial-life research.
Self-binding space-junk nucleic acid from the tepui stone helped her sort and confirm which parts of those sequences might have been delivered by the stone itself. Allowing “junk” sequences from her other meteoritic samples to bind with the stone-derived code, she had now succeeded in quickly generating a more complete biochemical program than even the stone itself provided.
Looking at one such augmented myconeural colony on a petri dish in the glove box before her now, she saw that all her extractions and recombinations were simply the same thing Nature was always doing, only much faster and in a more directed fashion. Her efforts at accelerated evolution had already produced something new—something of which she was undeniably proud.
Qualms about the general’s ultimate motivations notwithstanding, she’d already reported her latest findings to Retticker. He was perhaps the only other person who might fully understand them. She had wanted to wow him, and had succeeded amply. The general was not only impressed but also very enthusiastic.
An alarm sounded. Startled, she dropped the petri dish she was holding—still in the glove box, fortunately. She swiveled her head about the lab to see where the alarm was coming from. Then she saw the readout.
Someone was coming in through the expedited airlock entry/exit system—the route no one ever utilized, the route to be used only in extreme emergency. But what was the emergency? Other than the small spill she’d just made in the biosafety cabinet, nothing seemed amiss. The alarm had begun to sound before the glove box accident happened, too.
She still had her hands in the glove box when intruders in what looked like armored black environment suits broke into the cabinet lab and raked her and the glove box with automatic weapons fire. Her face crashed against the crack-spidered lid of the box. As she began to pass out, she saw that the interior of the biosafety cabinet had been compromised in the worst way. Her own blood was mixing with the spattered myconeural matrix from the petri dish she’d been holding.
After that she saw nothing more, but she could still hear, in a disembodied sort of way. She thought she heard a male voice over a suit intercom say “She’s gone,” then felt someone carefully picking through the contents of the glove box. Other sounds—of the lab being ransacked?—grew fainter. At last the only thing she heard was her own voice in her head, telling her she was dying, telling her that someone—the people behind Miskulin and Yamada? or the general?—had betrayed her.
Then everything shifted.
She found herself on a pine-scented mountain ridge, looking down on a white ocean of cloud. Near the shoreline of that fog ocean, the tops of lower mountains and foothills protruded, islands in the sea of clouds. On all the nearby “islands” she saw the glint of what she somehow knew were the open-domed mansions and compounds of the healthy and wealthy, the Fog Makers who ruled this world.
She knew, without knowing how she knew, that the whiteness of that cloud-ocean concealed something much darker beneath. That deep mist, both manufactured and meteorological, was constantly monitored by Weather Control. Manipulating temperature inversions and domes of high pressure, Weather Control locked down ground-moisture in large long-lasting fog banks—as vapor reservoirs to fall back on, between the ever-briefer but more intense large-scale rain events. Inside this nearly perpetual toxic fog, the pocked and tumored masses of an impoverished humanity lived their empoisoned and imprisoned lives.
The poisoned poor, their every moment overseen and overheard by surveillance cameras and microphones, their every step noted by ubiquitous tiny spy-blimps, had even more reason than the wealthy to want to escape. To fire off rockets to other planets, or live in faux-medieval baronial splendor, as the healthy and wealthy did. To be anywhere but the here and now of their goggled and filter-masked daily lives in the undercloud. She knew too that, for the vast majority of the population, such dreams could remain only dreams.
The fog that confused and enthralled them was not only water vapor but also a bright electrochemical mist of words, images, and socialization drugs. The people beneath the white cloud-ocean feared cancer less than arrest or execution should they fail to work their mandatory overtime. Which was necessitated by the need to feed mandatory overconsumption. Which was necessitated by the need to spur mandatory economic growth. Which was itself necessarily overtaxed to pay for mandatory imperial overstretch.
Which was made necessary in turn by mandatory resource scarcity. Which was made necessary by mandatory overpopulation in order to overwhelm and subjugate neighboring nations. Which was, of necessity, promulgated through mandatory hyperattendance at family-worship services hammering home the bromide that “God is on our side.” Which was all made palatable with the help of mandatory overmedication and media saturation.
Such endless obsession with exponential growth kept the Fog Makers’ heads well above the same toxic clouds that were the foundation of their wealth. For now.
She knew how the pearly mist-clouds—bright by night, gray by day—had, for the vast majority of humanity, hidden the sun, moon, and stars behind a heavy veil. She knew about the billions who put in legally required viewing time in front of their control screens, mind-numbed by food and drink that by law were laced with requisite doses of Corzap U4X (sulprexasol) and its family of tweaked-supertryptamine behavior-modification pharmaceuticals.
She knew of the perils awaiting those who refused to wear their biometric-monitoring corporate association apparel, because she had long refused to don such a CAAP foghat. She knew about the hell that came of continuing to believe in the apocalypse that failed to happen, and continuing not to believe in the apocalypse that was already under way. She knew about the superdroughts, the spreading deserts, the endless border wars beyond the tenuously controlled climate zones of the foglands, drizzletowns, and mist cities. She had lived all of that.
“The rich on their hilltops may be living like kings,” sang a voice in her head, so distant it seemed to come from another world, “but even folks in the fog are saying the craziest things. Although scenarios of our case may not yet have reached worst, just remember: when the storm finally comes, it strikes the high places first….”
As Darla came back to a world of pain both more and less familiar, she raised her head from the lid of the glove box. She was in her lab again, yes, but the place was shattered and broken, a ruined remnant of its former order. She stared at her hands, where the smear of blood and myconeural complex was drying on her broken-fingered biocontainment gauntlets.
As security personnel in pressure suits poured in, she contemplated what she had just experienced. She thought of Albert Hoffman in his Sandoz lab, three quarters of a century earlier, spilling a previously unknown but extremely potent hallucinogen on his hands, and then enduring the unprecedented psychedelia of his bicycle ride home through the streets of Berne.
What she had just lived through, however, seemed less an altered state of consciousness than a slip sideways into an alternate universe—one significantly different from, yet somehow also frighteningly similar to, her own life in this world.
She continued to gaze at the drying smears on her hands while pressure-suited paramedics examined her.
Staring at her bloodstained fingers she realized, with growing awe and wonder, the most familiar yet unfamiliar sensation of all.
She was still alive, when by all odds she should not have been.
Almost dying was an experience life-changing enough that, as the paramedics ministered to her, she began to question what she had been doing that almost got her killed.
Maybe her supposed friends might not really be so friendly, after all. Maybe her supposed opponents might not in truth be her enemies. Maybe she’d found out things she wasn’t meant to know. Maybe, just maybe, being a firmly independent observer might be the best way to proceed, from now on.
SELF-HEALING
Once they were alone together in Darla Pittman’s private and guarded hospital room, Joe Retticker pulled up a chair beside her hospital bed. He felt glad of the chance to travel into the hinterlands of Montana, away from the Beltway, away from the ongoing crisis in the Middle East. He was more than a bit surprised at Darla’s first words to him.
“You caused this, General,” she said, sounding both angry and distraught. “You betrayed me.”
“I assure you I’ve done nothing of the kind. What makes you think I would?”
“You were the only one who knew the most current status of my research.”
“And for that I’d want to invade your lab and kill you? Think, Darla. What could I possibly gain from smashing up your lab and its work? How would I stand to benefit from destroying a project I helped set up myself—and from which I’ve already been getting results?”
“Maybe our work was moving too fast,” Darla said, “or not fast enough, or in the wrong direction.
Maybe the attack on the lab was intended to be just a theft, and I happened to be in the way. Or maybe it was a test.”
“That’s a lot of maybes, Darla. How would shooting up the lab and killing you constitute a ‘test’? What kind of results would I supposedly have been looking for, on that test?”
“I’m not sure, but my survival has provided a lot of data for your project, I’d bet.”
Spears of God Page 27