Spears of God

by Howard V. Hendrix

  They didn’t need the microphones or the night-vision optics to see and hear the explosion this time. On the graphic of landing and pier, a section of the pier disappeared. The night-vision and infrared cameras trained on the same section indicated the same thing, only more spectacularly.

  They watched as two of the boats that had been in pursuit stopped outside the underwater fence perimeter, while the third motored slowly to where the erstwhile peninsula of landing and pier had become island—its connection to the mainland quite severed—and upon which several figures now slowly raised their arms into the air above them.

  “The kids are awake,” Susan said quietly. Michael and Paul turned their gaze to the screen Susan had nodded toward. The kids had gotten out of their beds and were seated cross-legged in a rectangular pattern on the floor. They appeared to be unmoving, at the moment.

  “More trouble,” Paul said, swiveling in his chair and reluctantly donning a pair of blinks. “This time by land. Several figures approaching the boundary fences.” He shook his head sharply. “We should have gotten an earlier warning—visible, infrared, sound, something. They must be in some kind of background-matching camo. Dammit. Like they just rose right up out of the ground.”

  He tossed a glance over his shoulder.

  “Michael, Susan—get the kids and bring them here from the guesthouse.”

  Michael and Susan ran through the main house into the moonlit yard between it and the guesthouse. The place was eerily quiet at the moment, given the forces converging upon it. They pushed open the heavy oak door and proceeded toward the children’s sleeping area. They found the four of them still seated cross-legged on the floor in the moon-shadowed room.

  “Come on, kids,” Susan said. “We’ve got to get up and get going.”

  As Michael helped her lift the children to their feet, it struck him that there was something heavy and trancelike about their responses. They seemed to go only where he and Susan forcibly steered them, which meant that it was taking them much longer to get the kids out of the guesthouse than it should have.

  Too long. Gas and smoke canisters shot in through the windows. The heavy front door smashed open and troops in black exoskeletal suits swarmed inside, great dull insects in the moonlight. Michael felt himself darted—a quick jab of pain, then spreading lassitude and paralysis.

  As he sank to his knees, he saw the children, snatched from his and Susan’s hands, being quickly led away by the black-suited raiders. Yet the kids’ heads and eyes were all turned toward where he and Susan were both now falling to the floor—and the children were speaking without talking, putting a round-robin of words directly into his head.

  —Uncle Michael—Aunt Susan—Don’t worry—About us—We’ve seen—This path—Before—We want—To go—Where it—Goes—We’ll show—The stars—Where to fall—Don’t worry—Aunt Susan—Uncle Michael—

  The round of voices sounded tearful yet determined, as if they had made a difficult choice and now must live with it. Voices not his own, speaking so immediately in his head—disorienting. As if he weren’t disoriented enough already.

  He could not ponder the voices for long, however. Watching the children disappear out the door was the last thing Michael remembered before he heard a prodigious explosion from the far end of the house, where Paul had been. Then black and shining night overwhelmed him.

  INTERLUDE: VIEW FROM A DEATH

  As he lay dying from multiple gunshot and shrapnel wounds, Paul Larkin watched the children on a cracked but still functional room monitor. He saw them dragging their heels, moving only slowly to Susan and Michael’s urging, and he understood.

  The children must have seen something like this coming. If Susan and Michael had succeeded in bringing them here to him, they would be dead or dying alongside him now. They must have known, too, that they could not save him and still fulfill whatever destiny awaited them.

  He watched as the black-suited invaders put Susan and Michael out of commission. Seeing them drag the children away, he sighed, tasting blood in his mouth. Remembering his best guesses as to what had happened during the previous attack on him and the kids, he suspected that the kids could have prevented these people from taking them. Were they allowing themselves to be taken captive? Why?

  He would have to trust that the kids somehow knew what they were doing. It was too late for him.

  If they lived, Michael and Susan would discover it all, now. Everything he’d been hiding from them, about that previous attack. They and Jim Brescoll—and maybe the Pittman woman, too, if she proved trustworthy—would have all the information they needed to go on with their investigations. He had seen to that.

  That didn’t mean everyone need find out everything, though. All the surveillance, all his other private records—everything in this most secure room in the compound, this room soon to be thoroughly breached and compromised—could all still be destroyed. And would be.

  One of the previous owners, in a true nadir of paranoia, had equipped this security room and its adjoining safes with self-destruct devices. Those were code-cleared and ready to go, now. His hand was on the master switch for all of them.

  As the black tide of blood and fire raced toward him out of the night, Paul Larkin flipped the switch. An instant after black-suited interlopers broke into the room, the devices detonated. In the blast’s great light, Paul Larkin was granted a final revelation, a glimmer of the golden path the Mawari children had set out on, amid all the darker possible futures that might yet beset them.

  HOPES, FEARS, EXPECTATIONS

  To join Michael Miskulin and Susan Yamada at Paul Larkin’s compound on the Tahoe lakeshore, Darla Pittman had to wade through an unexpected concentration of security. The first level was mostly the usual police-tape—local law enforcement treating what had happened as a breakin, kidnapping, and possible murder. That, at any rate, was the extent of the story they were giving to those few media people who managed to get close enough to the scene to earn an explanation.

  The more she struggled to get through the security cocoon, however, the more layers Darla discovered it had: FBI counterterrorism special agents out of the Sacramento office, intelligence community operatives all the way from the East Coast. Larkin’s estate was swarming with more law enforcement muscle and brain than a congressional investigation. At several points Darla wondered if it would require an act of Congress to get her in to see the very people who had invited her here.

  The upside of all the security was that Darla was led by the head of Paul Larkin’s private security team, Jarrod Takimoto, across the compound and into the private guesthouse where Michael and Susan waited. The two of them rose to shake Darla’s hand before they resumed their seats, Michael gesturing for her to sit as well.

  “Tell me again, Mister Takimoto,” Susan Yamada said, before the security chief could duck out of the room. “You and your people weren’t on-site…because?”

  “Because we almost never were, Ms. Yamada. Mister Larkin always insisted we keep a low profile.

  Said he didn’t like leading a guarded life. Or at least not being reminded of it.”

  “That sounds like my uncle,” Michael said to Darla, shaking his head sadly. “He can be—he was—very stubborn and set in his ways at times. So now he’s dead, because he didn’t want a ‘guarded life.’”

  Michael turned from Darla to Takimoto.

  “Jarrod, any chance we might have a little privacy with our guest?”

  “I don’t see why not. The investigators seem to be finished with this area, for now. I’ll see to it you’re not disturbed.”

  Takimoto hastily departed. Michael and Susan began to fill Darla in on what had happened—particularly the attack in which the four Mawari kids had been abducted, and during which Paul Larkin had died.

  Darla saw that Susan and Michael were taking the loss of the children and the death of Paul Larkin very hard, at least judging by the proof of the liquor they were drinking this early in the day. She politely dec
lined Michael’s suggestion that she join them in a drink.

  Ever since she accepted their invitation to visit Tahoe, Darla had been thinking long and hard about her situation. As the conference receded into the past, the tensions stemming from her past relationship with Michael had also receded into the background, as more essential matters came to the fore. Listening to their story now, she hoped—and also feared—that she might be throwing in her lot with the right people now.

  “I know how important your uncle was,” Susan said, sounding puzzled and sad as she swirled the ice cubes in her glass. “I know how potentially important the Mawari kids are, too. But I’m having trouble understanding how they merit an investigation of this magnitude.”

  Darla took a deep breath.

  “I think I may know something about that—at least as far as the kids are concerned,” she began. “I think it has to do with what Michael said about a ‘metaphage.’ That turned out to be the keystone to my own hypotheses.”

  “What do you mean?” Susan asked.

  Darla brought up displays on her laptop for them. She recapped the old idea that the majority of DNA was junk because it didn’t obviously code for proteins—and then refuted that argument by showing them sites detailing how the discovery of Group II introns—and the little complex of catalytic RNAs and proteins known as the spliceosome—changed that old dogma. She then showed them Web pages on how other pieces of supposed genomic junk, transposons and other repetitive elements, had also eventually come to be considered “molecular-parasite immigrants,” which in turn had provided important capabilities for RNA-mediated genomic regulation and epigenetic inheritance. She finished by showing them reports on how Alu-element “junk” was particularly important in brain activity, and in laying the foundation for memory and higher-order cognition in primates.

  “But what’s all that got to do with the Mawari kids and their meteorite mushroom stone?” Susan asked.

  “What I found in that ‘sclerotium,’ as you called it, initially looked like space-junk DNA,” Darla began.

  “That’s pretty much what it looked like to us, from the few tests we ran,” Michael agreed.

  “But it’s not junk,” she said, showing them nano-and microsection images from her own research at Rocky Mountain. “As I told you in Montana, it looks more like the product of synthetic biology, but of a much higher order than anything we’ve achieved. Using what I found, I succeeded in growing a rudimentary version of Jacinta Larkin’s ‘myconeural complex.’ When I ran genetic and other biochemical assays on that mix of mycelium and neurons, all sorts of interesting things popped out. Here: new tryptamine chemicals, hormones, odd code sequences.”

  She showed the images on the laptop to Susan and Michael. AR glasses would have been easier, but Michael and Susan didn’t seem to have any about their persons, so she let it go.

  “The relationship between fungal and neural material seems to be mutually beneficial: the fungal spawn obtains moisture, protection, and nutrients even in adverse environments, and the human hosts are assured a steady supply of what seem to be very potent informational substances.”

  “Maybe those are what Jacinta meant by ‘adaptogens’ in her notes?” Michael suggested.

  Darla nodded.

  “When I took ‘junk’ sequences from my other meteoritic samples,” she continued, showing them an animation, “and allowed them to bind with the codons from the tepui stone, even more interesting things began to happen. Before my lab was raided, I think I managed to generate a more complete program than even the stone itself contained. I think I managed to get much closer to the full metaphage code, as you called it, Michael—though it’s still probably not the whole thing.”

  “But what does it code for?” Susan asked. “And what does it have to do with the kids?”

  Darla thought about that a moment, before calling up imagery from a site dealing with complexity theory and evolution, and then material from one of Michael’s own sites, with its little movie of comets and meteorites.

  “I think it’s a molecular design and repair system,” she said, “an extremely subtle regulatory architecture involved in the generation and shaping of higher levels of complexity across living systems generally. I think we’ve always only gotten fragments of it, despite the fact that its ‘codons’ were more stable and less prone to mutation than, say, ordinary DNA. Enough comes raining down from space over a billion years, though, and those fragments add up.”

  “With the ultimate possibility of creating something like a phoenix phenotype!” Michael said. “I’ve thought the same thing. Starting with hyperstable components, but also endowing them with the possibility of multiplicity reactivation. That would be a very good way to fight inevitable informational entropy.”

  “Can’t we just give all this abstract stuff a rest?” Susan asked, exasperated. “The kids are gone! Paul is dead! And all you want to talk about is ‘phoenix phenotypes’!”

  “Paul would have wanted us to pursue this. That’s the best way we can mourn him. He was my uncle, after all. You’ve seen the notes he left behind for us, in those e-mails. Jacinta’s research, too. Somewhere in all that is the thread that will lead us back to the kids and their place in the big picture. I’m sure that’ll prove Paul didn’t die for nothing. I’ve contacted Brescoll already. What more do you want me to do?”

  “Call in every favor we can, then call in some more,” Susan said. “Frankly I don’t see how dead viruses inside a single cell are in any way relevant to the ‘big picture.’”

  Darla felt awkward, listening to the couple argue their way through this.

  “Maybe it’ll help if we think ‘similarities across scale,’” she said. “If we think of earth as being like a huge single-celled organism, then the atmosphere is its cell membrane—semi-permeable, to skystones at least.

  Most of what’s outside stays outside, but what gets in can help shape things inside the ‘cell’ of the whole planet. Multiplicity reactivation, complementation, recombination of genetic elements—all would apply.”

  “The metaphage can rise again from its own meteoritic ashes,” Michael said. “The cell a metaphage infects is not so much what you see under a microscope as what you look at through a telescope!”

  “Even if we accept the idea that this thing ‘enviruses’ whole planets,” Susan insisted, “what’s the point?”

  Darla took a deep breath again. This was at the bleeding edge of her thoughts on the matter. She had no fancy graphics or Web-based imagery to back her up.

  “When life, mind, consciousness—whatever you want to call it—paints itself into a corner, the metaphage provides keys to open a door through the wall.”

  “Making a way out of no way,” Michael said. “An ender of dead ends, through all its subtle regulating and generating and shaping. I like that.”

  “But how?” Susan asked. “And why?”

  “I think the ‘how’ might be easier to answer,” Darla said. “Say the physicists are right. That we live in a vast ensemble of parallel universes, alternate timelines, alternate worldlines.”

  “Mindtime, as the tepui people called it,” Michael said. “All the ‘what if’ possibilities.”

  “Including a world where the children would still be here…and Paul would still be here? Or one where the tepui people were never massacred?”

  Darla noted the meaningful glances that passed between Susan and Michael as Susan said this, but only nodded, not fully sure of the context for those loaded looks.

  “In such an ensemble, odds are that, when mind or consciousness arises, it ends up being a dead end in most worlds, in most universes. Unless…”

  “Unless someone or something is stacking the deck in favor of mind and consciousness,” Michael said.

  “The Mawari myth of spore and spawn and their ‘seven ages’ that Paul mentioned, that he found in Jacinta’s work.”

  “I think someone closer to home here knows something about it, too,” Darla said. “Tha
t’s why they began stealing and collecting meteorites to begin with.”

  Michael nodded.

  “And why they’ve gone after your Mawari children, too,” she said. “They’re more unique than even you or Michael might have imagined, Susan.”

  “In what way?”

  On her laptop Darla brought up images from neuroanatomy, beginning with diagrams of the hemisected human brain.

  “I got the idea from what you and Michael suggested to me,” she said. “About the relationship between the myconeural complex, the raphe nuclei, and the enlarged pineal gland. Usually, the pineal begins to shrink about the time of puberty. Throughout the course of adulthood it fills up with calcium deposits, or ‘brain sand,’ as it’s called.”

  Susan laughed oddly at the phrase, but waved her on.

  “I think one of the things their full myconeural complex enabled the people on that tepui to do,” Darla continued, “was to become sexually mature—maybe just barely—yet retain the high pineal activity of childhood. It might be that the myconeural complex neotenized them.”

  “Neotenized?” Susan asked.

  “The retention of juvenile characteristics in the adults of a species, that’s one meaning of neoteny, anyway.

  It’s part of a constellation of ideas regarding changes in the rate and duration of growth that developmental biologists refer to as ‘heterochrony.’ Evolutionarily, humans have long had a tendency in the neotenous direction.”

  “Hm!” Paul said. “My aunt’s notes on the tepui people mentioned that they were very long-lived but also had a low reproductive rate.”

  “That would make sense,” Darla agreed. “That’d be the likely tradeoff. Puberty probably began later rather than earlier among them, too. I bet they were not only long-lived but also retained a childlike curiosity and openness to possibility, throughout adulthood, even into old age.”

  “What I’ve seen of Jacinta’s notes might be read as indicating that, too,” Susan agreed.