Spears of God

by Howard V. Hendrix

  “Some of these effects might have been products of other things the myconeural complex produces or allows for,” Darla said, bringing up more anatomy-class images, but these were of various amphibians and reptiles and birds rather than humans. “The pineal is a very ancient organ. All vertebrates have pineal structures. Sometimes they appear much more like an actual eye on the top of the head. In many organisms, the pineal is also biomagnetically sensitive, orienting the migrating bird or animal in relation to the earth’s magnetic field. There might be a lot more involved than just the fact that the tepui people probably had little or no calcification of the pineal glands, even into old age.”

  “All well and good,” Susan said, “but how is that relevant to what happened to the people on the tepui?”

  “Everywhere on earth, not just at Caracamuni tepui,” she said, bringing up images of chemical compounds, “the pineal produces many of the same tryptamines that are often also found in fungi, including dimethyltryptamine, or DMT—”

  “Which is strongly psychoactive,” Susan said. “All right. I think I see what you’re suggesting. A deep connection between those fungi and the ubiquity and antiquity of pineal structures, right?”

  “Exactly.”

  “And if that’s the case, then some of what the tepui mushroom-stone gave these people, via the myconeural complex,” Susan said, “includes indole molecules that look like very complex new tryptamines.”

  “Yes. Active in new ways and at lower concentrations. Supertryptamines, if you like.”

  Darla looked at them for response to that strange word, but saw nothing out of the ordinary. Then again, only she knew that she’d first encountered the term supertryptamines during the very strange trip of her near-death experience.

  “And the raphe nuclei,” Michael said, thinking aloud. “Might the myconeural complex have altered their function? To allow consistent high-level brain activity involving these supertryptamines? Without burnout or ill effects? At the same time allowing for any number of so-called psychic or paranormal mental phenomena? Including ‘forays sideways’ into mindtime, as my aunt put it?”

  “Wait, wait,” Darla began. “I’m not as good at shotgunning answers as you are at shotgunning questions, but yes, I think that’s plausible—”

  Susan, however, was shaking her head, vigorously negative.

  “If the tepui people had all these miraculous powers,” she said, “then why didn’t they accomplish more?

  Hell, why couldn’t they save themselves from the soldiers who destroyed them?”

  They all grew quiet at that.

  “My guess is, even on the tepui,” Darla said, “the deeper potential connection, which the ancient fungal-pineal link only suggests, that potential wasn’t fully realized. Even there on Caracamuni, the metaphage code was incomplete.”

  “If what Jacinta said about mindtime is right,” Michael added, “then maybe, even though the Mawari were able to make ‘forays’ into worlds ‘sideways’ to ours, they still couldn’t alter the courses of those worlds, or our own. What they saw in those universes-next-door was probably confusing even to them.”

  “I’m sure it was,” Darla agreed.

  “Wait a minute,” Susan said. “How do you know? You seem to know a lot more about all this than we’ve told you.”

  Darla took a deep breath. Time to bite the bullet.

  “I know,” she said, closing her laptop, “because I’ve been working for the people who massacred the Mawari. I know, because a chunk of their sacred meteorite ended up in my lab. I know, because I’ve given my employers at least part of what they were after—supertryptamines, and self-healing, for supersoldiers.”

  “You bitch!” Susan said, leaping to her feet, her hands curling into claws. “Paul was right! We should never have trusted you. I should fucking kill you!”

  Michael stood up quickly, just in case Susan decided to make good on her threat. What Darla said next, however, stopped them both.

  “You’ll have to take a number,” she said. “Once my employers figure out I’ve left Rocky Mountain for good, once they learn I’ve brought my work to you, I have no doubt my employers’ employers will make me a high-profile target for assassination.”

  “Why?” Susan asked, still standing. “Why would you work with us, in good faith?”

  “Because those Mawari kids are important. More important even than supertryptamines and supersoldiers. Those four children are the only people on earth possessing that full myconeural complex, with all its effects on the pineal and the raphe nuclei and neurochemistry generally.”

  “Stories and legends suggest that other people throughout the world and throughout history have probably been able to see the universes ‘next door,’” Michael suggested.

  “True, but those children are part of a more select group. They may well be the only ones on the planet right now who, exposed to the entirety of the metaphage pattern, not only might see universes-next-door, but also change and shape them—and our own—as well.”

  “The ways out of no way,” Michael said, “may just be sideways….”

  Susan frowned, still very much unconvinced, but slowly began sitting down at last.

  “I admit Alii, Aubrey, Ebu, and Ka-dalun have unusual abilities,” she said, “but how can you be so sure there are universes-next-door? That these sideways worlds even exist?”

  Darla looked from one to the other of them.

  “Because I’ve been to one,” she said.

  Darla explained what happened when the intruders at the lab shot her and she fell into the biosafety cabinet through which she’d been examining her latest work. As concisely as she could, she tried to describe the paranoid parallel earth she’d side-slipped into—what she remembered as Fogworld, with its post-ecodisaster drizzletowns and mist cities, awash in mind-killing nanotoxins and cruder poisons.

  “That’s a frightening description,” Susan admitted when Darla had finished, “but did you ever think it might just be a very vivid hallucination? You do have a reputation for being fascinated with altered states of consciousness—and by your own admission, you were in the midst of a near-death experience.”

  Darla nodded. She might have been more offended by the comment than even by Susan’s earlier threat to kill her, had she not at some level already been expecting such questions.

  “I wondered about that myself, right after it happened. You’re right—I do know what an altered state feels like, and this didn’t feel like that. It was less an experience of ‘near death’ or ‘out of body’ than a moment living another life on another worldline. It was absolutely real.”

  Susan still looked skeptical.

  “If it wasn’t just a near-death experience, then what brought it on?”

  Darla stood up, went around to the back of her chair, and leaned on it as she thought about her answer.

  “I think I was only able to side-slip into another world because I’d been exposed to the myconeural material I was working with in the lab—material with as much or more of the metaphage code as that found in the tepui stone itself, when it first fused with its earthly fungal vector.

  “You know what I find really amazing in what you’ve told me about the Mawari people? It took my almost dying, while simultaneously taking in more of the metaphage than they probably ever did, and still I only got a glimpse of the ‘mindtime’ they were apparently able to access at almost any moment.”

  Susan seemed a bit swayed by this, less skeptical and more curious.

  “Can you prove that metaphage stuff actually changed you, and didn’t just alter your mind?”

  Known by the scars, she thought. And she had some. She’d been expecting the demand for a demonstration of not only mental but also physical tranformation, too. She’d not only been thinking a great deal, but also testing herself—lesser experiments, before now, but all offering hints and at last positive proof that her self-healing abilities were still with her.

  “I’ll prove it now,” Da
rla said, standing up straight. “I think I can prove it has already given me something more than what even the Mawari already had. Michael, would you be so kind as to get me a sharp knife?”

  Michael looked surprised and glanced at Susan, but then nodded and disappeared. In a moment he returned with a large kitchen blade.

  “Thank you,” Darla said, taking the blade into her right hand. She hoped this worked. In an instant she slashed a broad and gaping cut into her left arm, almost down to the bone.

  “My God—”

  “Darla!”

  “What are you doing?”

  The pain made her gasp—so much she had to fight passing out. She managed to stay conscious. She turned her bleeding arm toward them.

  “Watch.”

  As they did, they saw, as she did, what she had hoped and expected would happen. The blood flow stopped and the gaping wound almost instantly began to close and heal. Within perhaps five minutes it had been reduced to nothing more than a thin scar.

  “There you have it, Susan.”

  “But…but how?”

  “A result of my exposure to that more complete myconeural I was trying to make in the lab—that’s my guess, anyway. I’ve been thinking a lot about what happened to me, and how it happened. I think there may be precedents.”

  “For that?”

  “Yes. Think of the Nuhus, the meteoritic Mesoamerican ‘spears of god.’ Or the meteoritic grail of Parzival.”

  “Or the Spear of Longinus,” Michael said, “which both wounds and heals. They were all said to heal and nourish and enrich.”

  “And all of them were said to ‘speak,’ or ‘grant visions,’” Darla continued, “like Jacob’s dream-pillow stone, or the Black Stone of the Kaaba, or sacred skystones and hierophanic rocks from all over the world. Stones that transformed consciousness. That provided telepathic guidance and other psychic abilities traditionally associated with the pineal as the ‘eye of the mind.’”

  “The alchemical ‘black stone’ that transforms—transmutes—the alchemist!” Michael said. “Who knows what those kids might accomplish if exposed to the same stuff you were!”

  “Precisely—”

  “At least the rest of their people might not be dead, if they’d had that self-healing ability to begin with,” Susan said. Michael looked up from the floor.

  “Before the kids were taken away,” he said awkwardly, “they left a message with us. Spoke it right inside our heads—Susan’s and mine.”

  “What was the message?”

  “They told us not to worry. They said they already knew the path they were to follow. Which sounds to me like they had already foreseen it. Like they already knew it, from being in mindtime.”

  “Something else, too,” Susan said. “They repeated that we shouldn’t worry, because they would ‘show the stars where to fall.’”

  “I don’t know how,” Michael said, “but they just might be able to do that, if all we’ve been saying about them is true.”

  Darla shook her head.

  “Then we’d better be damn careful with them.”

  “Why?” Susan asked her. “They’ve been more sinned against than sinning, for heaven’s sake.”

  “Exactly. They’re endangered, but did you ever think they’re also very dangerous, at least potentially?”

  “We’ve been in close quarters with them, Darla,” Susan said. “We know them. Only Paul knew them better.”

  “They seem innocent and loving enough to me,” Michael agreed.

  “Maybe, but they have been sinned against, as Susan said. Their entire families—everyone they’d ever known—were massacred by people from an advanced technological society. Now Paul Larkin, the person they knew best in such a society—perhaps the only one they trusted—is dead. Their love or even respect for people from such societies might not extend much beyond the two of you.”

  Susan snorted indignantly but said nothing.

  “I’m just saying you should consider it. With all they’ve seen and been through, isn’t it at least possible those kids might not be above avenging what happened to them and their people? Avenging it in a big way? Especially if they have the means, and the motive, and the opportunity?”

  She looked hard at Susan and Michael. Even Susan had subsided, apparently considering the implications.

  “I don’t want to sound alarmist, but that vengeance could be terrible. Maybe people besides ourselves have realized that, too. Maybe that’s the reason for the magnitude of this investigation surrounding their disappearance, Susan.”

  Susan stared at Michael.

  “Jim Brescoll,” she said.

  Darla saw Michael nod—almost reluctantly, it seemed to her.

  “You mentioned that name before. Who’s Jim Brescoll?”

  “Mister NSA,” Susan said. “He helped get us tangled up in all this. It’s time he helped untangle things. We need to meet with him, ASAP. No excuses. Maybe he should attend your uncle’s memorial service, Michael. There’s a chance he can help us—and protect you, Darla, if you do become a target. Even if he couldn’t help Paul and the children.”

  THE EGG IN THE SNAKE OF NIGHT

  Joe Retticker turned off the road before Shanksville and headed toward his farm in the Pennsylvania hill country. As he drove he thought back to when he’d originally purchased this property—over a decade ago, during the mini-land-boom occasioned by the patriotism of those who remembered the most often forgotten of the 9/11/01 sites, and what had happened here.

  He couldn’t fault local real estate interests for cashing in, he supposed. At least such land purchases around this memorial site required a little more effort than so much of the other patriotic profit-taking of the time. He remembered the magnet-sticker “ribbons” slapped on vehicles everywhere in those days, common as Hakenkreuzes in Hitler’s Deutschland.

  Heretical and insubordinate to think such thoughts, no doubt, but with their public professions of faith and gaudy shows of patriotism, people like George Otis had always rather irked him. They’d used the fundamentalist religious hijackings of that long-ago September day to hijack the entire country. Otis, with the corpse of his terrorist-martyred nephew to drag (metaphorically, at least) into every political fray, had proved adept at positioning himself and his ilk as the new crew on the flight deck. They seemed always to be counseling their fellow citizen-passengers to trust them, to raise no ruckus, as they redirected the nation toward a previously unscheduled destination.

  Stopping between the farmhouse and the barn, Retticker exhaled. He sometimes thought freedom from fear was the great idol to which his fellow countrymen would gladly sacrifice all other freedoms, no matter how hard-won. Maybe he would, too, if it came to that. Maybe it already had. Maybe he already had.

  He opened the door, stepping out of the car and into the humidity, cricket noise, and frog sounds of an early summer night. He checked his watch, then walked toward the field from which, Doctor Vang’s message had indicated, he would be picked up five minutes from now.

  Walking through the night-damp grass, Retticker supposed he had more reason than ever to be annoyed with Otis. More personal reasons, too. The chasm between the path he was following and the course Otis was following had become too large to ignore. So large, in fact, that Vang himself had called for this summit.

  Retticker had to admit he’d always been rather impressed with Doctor Vang, even though they’d never met in the flesh. That man was a true survivor. After serving as a CIA soldier and outlasting the collapse of the American-backed governments in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia, Vang had escaped from the Cambodian killing fields and, with other Hmong, emigrated to California. Overcoming profound culture shock, Vang had gone on to create such companies as the specialty supercomputer firm ParaLogics.

  With Crystal Memory Dynamics (another Vang spinoff), PL jointly developed chameleon-cloth “smartskin,” among other products. Retticker knew that stuff, which—as the next level of stealth technology—had turned out to have
all sorts of applications in the spy biz.

  Since semi-retiring from his firms, Vang had headed up Tetragrammaton. Although he had taken a major hit in that capacity during the Kwok-Cho debacle, Vang was still very much a force to be reckoned with.

  Despite everything, Retticker had not for a moment counted the man out.

  Hearing no sound of an approaching helicopter or ground vehicle yet, he checked his watch. He was at the right place at the right time. Where was his transport?

  Scanning the heavens more carefully, he almost didn’t notice the change. The distortion of the constellations in the night sky was subtle, but it was there. A piece of the sky was rippling toward him, reminding him oddly of something he’d seen as a boy: the peristaltic movement of an egg through the body of the black snake that had swallowed that egg moments earlier.

  Retticker didn’t hear the droning whisper of engines until the craft was directly above him. The “egg” of night sky burst in spotlight onto him, but only long enough for him to find the handrail of a gangway as it lowered toward him. Even as Retticker was still climbing into the belly of the stealth airship hovering above him, that same gangway began to close.

  Fantastic! An uninformed observer, watching him climb a stairway of light into otherwise uninterrupted night, might have been excused for thinking of angelic visions or alien abductions. Retticker knew better.

  It was not his particular bailiwick, but he’d heard scuttlebutt, over the years, that several of Vang’s companies were involved in building an invisiblimp or two. Or, more accurately, “prototype invisible dirigibles,” since the things indeed had an airframe, as Retticker now saw.

  From its superquiet hovering capability on approach, he suspected it was propelled by a wind-duction system. Solar electric engines, too—virtually no infrared signature. The way the craft had blended so perfectly into the night sky suggested the protective coloration and fast-reactive camouflage of smartskin—lightweight, body-armor-grade polyethylene fibers, incorporating vast numbers of computerized pixel-nodes.

  Probably several thousand square meters’ worth of interwoven photovoltaic film on the upper exterior, too, to power the electric chameleon skin of the camouflage system, along with the engines. True stealth would mean its structure probably both absorbed and bounced radar away tangentially, if the rumors he had heard about this airship were true.