Spears of God

by Howard V. Hendrix

  The strangeness even of those closer realities. The latent talent behind childhood’s baby talk of imaginary friends, behind stories of fairy lands. The sensitivity to leakage from universes next door, only hinted at in all the mad visions of demons and angels, all the schizoidal, schizophrenic, multiple personality, autistic or dissociative identity disorders, in all the symbol-capable but dysfunction-prone brains chronicled throughout history.

  A talent now to be exapted—by catastrophe. Split-kids pushed through a genetic and evolutionary arch of experience inside themselves, until they could access the quantum-computing capabilities latent in their own DNA. Until they could at last become tesseractors. Ravelers and knitters of the fabric of reality.

  Superpeople able to unlock all the doors of all the universes.

  And all it would cost would be the intentional inducing of deep suffering in them. Treating them as subhuman in hopes of making them superhuman. Again and again.

  The ambulance trek was shorter than he’d thought. He wondered distantly why they’d stopped.

  Kids. Children…

  The Mawari survivors. The mushroom cult and its mindtime. The stone from the tepui. The Black Stones.

  The meteorites pilfered from all over the planet. The prima materia to be tortured until it yielded answers.

  Maybe not giving the answer sought or expected.

  Fiery small stones burning out of the sky, streaking toward other streaks rising on columns of cloud by day, pillars of fire by night. Great bursts of forking lightning, and flashes above any clouds—seen from space. Claps of thunder and stones falling from the sky. Monuments and monoliths rising—or mushroom clouds roiling—into the air.

  The sound of a helicopter approaching. Doors of the ambulance opening. The gurney rising. Medical evacuation.

  “The Mawari kids,” Jim Brescoll said, reaching up suddenly and pulling Amaral, beside him in the ambulance, down to his face by the man’s good arm. “The spore print. Larkin has them. The tepui stone.

  We must secure them all!”

  He fell back on the gurney, remembering too late to ask Amaral whether he had located Zaragosa. Then he was troubled by memories no longer.

  THE SACRED AND THE SECRET

  Avram was winched into a helicopter and flown to Riyadh. There he was to collect samples from the forty-five-hundred-pound iron meteorite Bedouin tribesmen called the Hadida, and from the additional four-hundred-and-forty-pound fragment found by an ARAMCO oil man. Victor said he wangled these chips off the big blocks on “long-term loan” from King Sa’ud University. Yuri, too, had shown a considerable interest in the specimens. Avram suspected a good chunk of money probably changed hands in the course of getting those “loaned” chips released to the foreign researchers’ custody.

  He was glad for the chance to get away from the Wabar digs for a while. The “yome, sweet yome” life he shared with Yuri in the desert was cordial enough, but still cramped. Lately he found himself more and more distanced from the work, now that the scientists of the small and the very small—the biochemists, molecular geneticists, and nanotechnicians—had come into their own. The focus had shifted from local field collecting at Wabar to what those lab rats could extract from the various stones Victor Fremdkunst had collected from throughout the world.

  The digs continued, but more as a pretext for all of them being in the Empty Quarter than out of any urgent scientific need. Other than Vida, no one seemed to notice the increasing amount of time Avram was spending with Professor Ankawi—his tutor in conversational Arabic and Arabian culture, as well as all things relating to Islam.

  That tutoring had kept him from learning as much Farsi from Vida as he might have liked, but he had probably learned enough to get by. Arabic was likely to prove more important—so much so that Avram never troubled Ankawi with any mention of his interest in the language of what had been Persia, Islam’s other great ancient center of culture.

  Under such circumstances it was getting harder for him to maintain his facade of straightforward scientific researcher, with no ulterior motives for being in the region. Secretly, he felt like a fraud. He wasn’t a professional liar or actor or politician. Only by dint of tremendous mental effort had he been able to hold in all the words and thoughts of revenge for what happened to his daughter. Even that effort, in itself, might have cued the people around him (especially Vida) that something was askew with him.

  Helicoptering back to camp now, in sunset light over an endless monotony of scrub giving way to an endless monotony of dunes, he sighed. He was reminded of other flights, other sunsets, other challenges.

  Of something that had been itching at his mind ever since flying with her to the ECOL conference. And of a conversation he and Vida had had, while walking in the desert at sunset, a week ago now.

  “You once said that place in the Nevada desert, Black Rock City, might someday end up a pilgrimage site like Mecca,” he said to her. “What made you think that?”

  Vida looked away into the seemingly lifeless distance, gathering her thoughts.

  “A few things. The firestorm vortices, the way they whirled like flaming Sufi dervishes around the Burning Man’s pyre. The temporariness of the tent city in the desert, like the thousands of encampments in the Mina Valley during the Hajj. A ‘Black Rock’ figuring prominently in both—though in Nevada that was the name of the place where the festival happened.”

  “Just a coincidence, don’t you think?”

  “Probably. I guess it was mostly the way the thousands of people surged forward and began to circledance around the pyre after the Man collapsed. Counterclockwise—the same direction the pilgrims in the Great Mosque at Mecca orbit around the Kaaba. Seven circuits. Like the visible planets around the sun. But maybe that’s just another of your coincidences, too.”

  “You’ve been to Mecca?”

  “No. I’ve always wanted to go—and always wanted not to go, if you know what I mean.”

  “No, I don’t, actually.”

  Vida smiled.

  “I was raised in a secular manner, but my cultural background is Muslim. It’d be intriguing to see the Black Stone up close, maybe find out whether it is a meteorite or not. I don’t know whether that would make it more sacred, or less sacred, for me.”

  “That’s why you do—and don’t—want to go?”

  “Only part of it. All the hajjis, everyone I’ve ever met who has gone on pilgrimage to Mecca, they all say the Hajj was the climax of their religious lives. It changed their lives. That intrigues me, but I don’t know if I want my life changed that way. Not if it means I’d have to transform myself into a much more traditional Muslim woman.”

  They walked in silence for a moment before she finished her thought.

  “Your friend Professor Ankawi could probably tell you a lot more about the Hajj. You seem to have been picking his brain a good deal lately.”

  Avram shrugged.

  “The allure of the unknown. And the unknowable, most likely.”

  “Oh? Well, Ankawi’s a fairly mysterious fellow himself. I thought I overheard him say something in Farsi to one of the workers from the Gulf yesterday. Flawless Farsi. I wouldn’t mention our little language lessons to him. You might embarrass me.”

  Avram nodded, grinding the toe of his boot absently into the sand.

  “I haven’t, and I won’t. Didn’t wanting to seem a dilettante. Ankawi’s not the unknowable I would be interested in, anyway—Mecca would be.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “You know, the guarded checkpoints, the ‘Entry Prohibited to Non-Muslims,’ all of it.”

  “I don’t know if I agree even with that policy,” Vida said, glancing down. “I know the reasons for such exclusivity, of course.”

  “Yes?”

  “Mecca is the holiest city of Islam,” she said, staring off again. “The whole focus of Mecca is Islam.

  Those who don’t follow Islam have no reason to be in Mecca. No tourists, only pilgrims. No one but believe
rs, in a city and countryside consecrated to belief.”

  “Which probably makes the place feel all the holier,” Avram said. He had seen tourists even in Saint Peter’s Basilica in Rome, and on the Temple Mount in Jerusalem.

  “Yet there’s always that ‘no one but’ part to it,” Vida said. “That’s the rub. The whole interlock of sect, sacred, and secret.”

  Avram turned away from the setting sun and together they headed back toward camp.

  “Freedom of association to those on the inside means guilt by association to those on the outside,” he agreed. “Maybe if nothing was secret, nothing would be sacred.”

  Vida smiled in surprise at him.

  “The dream of science. Its heretical potential, too.”

  “That’s why the fundamentalists hate evolutionary theory,” Avram said. “It lets out of the bag that the process of evolution is older than belief in religion!”

  She laughed politely, but soon grew serious again.

  “More to it than that. More to it than even Victor’s ‘revealed, reveiled, reviled’ shell game. Have you ever had an experience that just couldn’t be scientifically explained, Avram? Or know someone who did?”

  Avram thought about it. With great difficulty he checked himself from mentioning the odd episodes that had followed his daughter’s death, but he still had to say something.

  “I know someone. A bachelor uncle, who was still living with my grandmother when she died. They were cleaning the awnings on the family house together when she turned to him and said, ‘Marco, I don’t feel well.’ Then she collapsed. He tried performing CPR on her, but it turned out she’d suffered a massive pulmonary embolism. He always maintained, afterward, that he felt his mother’s—my grandmother’s—spirit pass through his body as he held her dying in his arms.”

  “Did you believe him?”

  Considering his answer, Avram could not help but think again about Enide’s death. When he held his daughter’s severed leg in his arms, he had felt no spirit of his daughter, whole or partial, pass through him.

  Only smeared blood drying into his shirt.

  If a soul could be obliterated like the body it inhabited, then a soul certainly wasn’t what everyone said it was. Since his daughter’s death, he doubted such a thing existed at all. It was no more real than the phantom limb he’d thought he felt pressing into his chest afterward, or the invisible stickiness of blood that he could never find on his always clean shirts. None of that was real. Just his mind playing tricks on him.

  “No, I didn’t believe him. Marco may have thought he felt something, but I don’t think what he felt actually existed, objectively.”

  Vida nodded slowly as the desert faded toward night.

  “That’s what makes it a tough call. How can you say to someone that what he is sure he felt was actually not real? That he didn’t actually feel what he felt? Who would know better than the person involved?

  There’ll always be that reasonable doubt.”

  Together they watched the last sliver of the setting sun’s light flash, then slip below the horizon.

  “The larger the continent of knowledge, the longer the shoreline of mystery where it rises out of the sea of ignorance,” Vida said as the twilight deepened around them. “Something will always be sacred to us because it will still be secret to us, right? The allure of the unknown, as you said yourself.”

  Avram smiled sadly, remembering. The ghost—no, the memory—of his daughter and the way she died would always prevent any real intimacy, or even deeper friendship, from developing between him and Vida. In his waking life as well as dreams, the attraction between a bright and beautiful unmarried woman and a recently divorced man would always be there. The denial of that attraction, however, had turned their relationship, though friendly enough, into banter and joust, constant questioning, the perpetual need to be on guard.

  Wearying, to be so guarded in his responses all the time, but probably also a good thing, given his mission. It had served him well when Luis Martin surprised him in Riyadh today. He was just leaving the science building at King Sa’ud University, having picked up the meteorite samples for Fremdkunst and Semenov.

  “Hello, Avram. I hope you haven’t forgotten our work?”

  “Not at all,” Avram said as they walked together down the steps outside the building. “I’ve been studying very diligently with Professor Ankawi.”

  Avram noticed that Luis was wearing a more paramilitary, desert-camo version of his usual attire. With his sunglasses and preternaturally dark mustache he could have passed for a political strongman in many regions of the world. He had exchanged his usual panama hat, however, for a traditional red-and-white-checked kaffiyeh-cloth headdress, and so looked more appropriate to the Middle East than to his own actual roots. He was also carrying a case exactly like the one in which Avram himself was carrying the meteoritic samples.

  “Not too distracted by your attractive colleague, Vida Nasr?” Luis asked as they made their way onto and across an open, spacious quad. “Not spending too much time with her?”

  “No more than professional collegiality dictates,” Avram said, hoping he didn’t sound too wary. How it was possible for Luis to communicate a sly look from behind those sunglasses, Avram couldn’t figure.

  Something to do with arching the eyebrows, he supposed.

  “Glad to hear it! Pop-quiz time. Define tawaf.”

  “Means ‘turning.’ The rite of circumambulating the Kaaba in seven circuits during the Hajj—the annual pilgrimage required at least once in a lifetime of all Muslims of sound mind, maturity, and the financial stability to afford it. One of the five pillars of the faith.”

  “Very good. Define Kaaba.”

  “The four-story-high central shrine in the Great Mosque at Mecca. Also called the House of God, the Bayt Allah. Where the Black Stone is housed. The location toward which Muslims face when at prayer and around which they circle in tawaf during pilgrimage.”

  “Good. Haram.”

  “Sacred limit, sacred precinct, sanctuary with special laws of asylum. In Mecca it generally refers to the walled court of the Great Mosque or al-Haram al-Sharif. It can also mean the whole of Mecca and its surroundings within the boundaries of certain stone pillars.”

  “Very good,” Martin said as Avram led the way toward where his rental car was parked. “Ihram.”

  “Purification rites the Hajj or Umra pilgrim must complete before entering the sacred territory of Mecca.

  It also refers to the ritual clothing designating this purified status—the apparel of submission, the garments of the next life. For men it consists of two lengths of unstitched cotton cloth.”

  “Umra.”

  “The lesser pilgrimage to Mecca. It includes the circling of tawaf and the ‘racecourse’ of the sa’y, but not the sites on the Plain of Arafat. It doesn’t have to be done during Hajj season, either.”

  “Kiswa.”

  “Black ceremonial cloth trimmed in gold. An echo of the tent or sacred canopy under which the Black Stone was once carried. It covers the Kaaba and is replaced annually during Hajj.”

  “Mudayyina.”

  “Literally means ‘Those Devoted to Religion.’ The preferred name for the followers of Shaykh Muhammad ibn al-Wahabi, thus ‘Wahabis,’ the Western name for them. The Wahabite reinterpretation of the Hanbali teachings provided the theological underpinnings for the conquest and unification of the Arabian peninsula under the Sa’ud family. After whose patriarchate this university is named.”

  Avram rediscovered where his car was parked and turned down that aisle.

  “This game of twenty questions has been interesting, Luis, but we’re almost to my rental car, now.”

  “Twenty? I only count seven, so far. Just one more. Mutawwif.”

  “Someone who guides and advises pilgrims on how to properly perform the rites of Hajj. In a broader sense, someone who helps the would-be hajji navigate the labyrinth of the pilgrimage. I could use one, I think.”
>
  “Oh? Don’t you already have Professor Ankawi?”

  “Book learning is one thing,” Avram said. They both set down their briefcases beside the car. “I don’t think that’s going to get me through the checkpoints to Mecca during the Hajj, though, if that’s still my destination.”

  “It is,” Luis said coolly, leaning back against the car.

  “Then your question game is less and less a game for me. Every morning I feel like Sisyphus, only the rock’s getting heavier, or the hill’s getting steeper, or I’m getting more and more tired. I don’t know if I can push this rock where you want it to go.”

  “Then let me serve as a sort of mutawwif, if you like. First, I’m glad to see how well you’ve progressed under Ankawi. I’m also impressed that you appreciate the size of the task that’s facing you.”

  “Size? I think the term is ‘enormity.’”

  Luis Martin smiled but continued, undaunted.

  “You’re right that it will take more than all Ankawi can teach you. Time is short and things are heating up.

  You will need to be in the Great Mosque in Mecca on the day of 9 Dhul Hijja 1437. An important anniversary. Maybe I can be of some help with that.”

  Luis put his case into the trunk with Avram’s, glanced around, then opened it. Avram saw official-looking documents, money, and numerous travel items inside.

  “For Hajj you will cease to be Avram Zaragosa. You will be Ibrahim Fayez. Mister Fayez’s passport, valid for at least six months beyond the Hajj, has already been given to the Saudi authorities at the Jedda airport in preparation for your exit from the country, at which time they will return that passport to you.

  You and Mister Fayez bear a striking resemblance to each other and have the same up-to-date vaccinations. And here’s Mister Fayez’s return ticket to Buenos Aires, too.”