Spears of God

by Howard V. Hendrix

  Cameras in the room tracked each ring, allowing the wearers to select and manipulate apparently three-dimensional objects via natural hand gestures, even dragging objects by moving their fingers across the surface of the display-dome. His visitors took to the tech with alacrity.

  Upon hearing and seeing Pittman and Miskulin’s description of what these meteorite thefts were all apparently geared toward, and seeing the computer-generated “phoenix phenotype” reconstruction of Miskulin’s “metaphage” they’d brought with them and displayed on the dome, Jim found that he was not happy.

  “After all that happened during the Kwok-Cho affair,” he told them, by way of explanation, “I am not fond of things that can rise from their own ashes.”

  The blank looks they gave him forced him to explain. Trying, with the aid of the display-dome, to provide the background as concisely as he could, he explained the convoluted history of the particular living-fossil program Kwok had discovered. The running of that living-fossil program, however, had to await Jaron Kwok’s own hookup to the worldwide computershare. Simultaneous with the running of a simulated quantum-computing version of said program, Kwok unfortunately appeared to have spontaneously combusted, a holocaust that left only peculiar ashes behind.

  “Out of those supposed ashes, however,” Jim Brescoll said, blanking from the display-dome the graphics with which he’d underlined his tale, “a quantum binotech arose—one that became fully activated when exposed to the life’s blood and genetics of Ben Cho, Kwok’s phenotypically distinct but genotypically identical twin. And from that came Ben Cho’s Metaquantum Apotheosis, near-armageddon between the United States and China, the force-field blisterdomes of the so-called MAXXs. That’s why I’m not fond of anything playing the phoenix.”

  His office guests understood his aversion to phoenixes well enough, but he still had to explain to them how it was Cho had disappeared and the domes had arisen, almost simultaneously. That required another volumetric display program, one speculative enough to remind Jim of the NASA animations of his childhood, even as he showed it to his guests.

  The little three-dimensional movie he played for them showed how, upon Cho’s apotheosis, the Kwok-Cho binotech—the only traces remaining of its namesake originals—had apparently aerosolized into smart-dust and mote machines. Self-propelled, those smart-dust motes had converged toward the Sun Yat-sen Memorial Hall, the power station inside the California mountain, and several locations in the South American Tri-Border area.

  In those places the mote-machines had created the domes of impenetrable force. In accordance with the cover story agreed to among those in the know and in power, the name of Mutual Assured Quantum Cryptologic Security Stations, or MAXXs, had been given to the enigmatic domes. No one quite knew how the dust mechanisms had built the things, or how they managed to keep those fields powered up.

  Explanations ranged from solar energy to reversed flux patches in the earth’s magnetic field, created or exploited by the innumerable tiny machines.

  “For all we really understand what’s going on beneath them,” Brescoll told them, “those sites might just as well be marked ‘Here There Be Dragons.’ That applies to my knowledge, too, not least of all, even though I have the dubious distinction of being the only person known to have come out again after going inside one of those domes.”

  His guests asked him, then, to tell them the story of his experiences under the dome in California. He found it awkward to do so. Not just because he had no fancy volumetric graphics to help him, or because he had some difficulty remembering all of it, though much of it had come back to him while he was in the hospital. Not even because he hated reliving his life in voice-over narration. No, the main reason for the awkwardness was because it was just so damned weird.

  How to explain the way LeMoyne, Benson, and Markham had tranformed themselves? How to explain the way the three posthumans had literally played with his mind—even with the very Rip van Winkle bowling idea Dan Amaral had put in his head?

  With all the vividness of overwhelming flashback, their mindgame hit him again.

  One of them tosses a black ball toward white pins down an ordinary lane in an indoor alley, but the scene transforms, becomes a white bowling ball rolling down a desert bowling lane under blue sky toward pins like black monoliths arranged first in the World War II Memorial round but then morphing into the traditional wedge pin-set.

  Time after time the ball grows to the blazing white of desert sun. Each time it hits the pins, however, the white sunbright bowling ball shatters as if made out of glass or pottery—or, as if actually made of rubber or plastic, bounces off the monolithic pins, themselves steadfast and unmovable as the pillars of eternity.

  Those bizarre bowlers, laughing as they gamed him with their bowling variations, again and again. He shook his head. As he looked, LeMoyne, Benson, and Markham morphed into another group of two women and a man—Pittman, Yamada, and Miskulin, gazing at him expectantly.

  How to explain the way such bowling then spun about the “bowlers” to become parallel worldlines like images on a kaleidoscopic roulette wheel? Or the fact that one after another they blasted Jim into those alternate worldlines by pointing at him, in surreal pistol fashion, what looked like a chambered nautilus, but packed a hell of a kick?

  So strange was his experience with those three that he almost felt himself on surer ground telling his visitors about the alternate worldlines he had experienced, to which story he now gave his best effort.

  Fortunately, he got unexpected support in that telling. Hearing Jim relate his experience of a universe in which a damaged mirrorball ship of strange glowing angels sacrificed itself to crash meteoritically to earth, and other meteorites from it crashed in various pieces over time, again and again, Michael Miskulin, in particular, seemed quite pleased.

  “Like Paul and Jacinta said! A ship whose crashed, stone-dormant remains left behind—in a few marginal, shielded places—something like the original strain of the metaphage.”

  “We think moderately pure strains of that might have hung on at the great parietal art caves,” Susan Yamada added. “In Franco-Cantabria—the ceremonial centers of Altamira, Lascaux, Tito Bustillo, El Castillo, Cuevo del Juyo, and the rest.”

  “It was probably later, newer meteoritic falls,” Pittman suggested, “of more or less intact material, that have been stumbled upon by others in deserts, seas, forests, and icefields throughout the world.”

  “But we think that material remained most fully intact, for the longest duration, inside a cave, inside a tepui, where it invaded a humble fungus and became sacred to the people who, much later, ate it and ‘joined’ with it. My aunt’s notes on ‘full myconeural symbiosis,’ on ‘mindtime’ and ‘quartz of a particular lattice configuration’—all in preparation for that time when the people of the tepui would ‘sing their mountain to the stars’—it all fits.”

  “I don’t know if ‘it’ all ‘fits,’” Brescoll said, “but in one of the alternate timelines I experienced, the Caracamuni tepui slipped free of the earth and sidestepped through the fabric of the sky. Maybe it did go to the stars, there.”

  Miskulin seemed to find that strange idea profoundly vindicating.

  “Something else, too,” Jim said, a bit sheepish, wondering what his visitors might make of further talk of parallel universes. “One of the worldlines I encountered was warped by something extracted from the spore print Paul Larkin leaked to that world. Something called a supertryptamine. In one line, at least, it seemed to be involved in a madness pandemic that came close to wiping out all humanity.”

  “I’ve been someplace very much like there!” Pittman said. “Or at least to ‘some other there’ that also had these supertryptamines. During the attack on my lab I told you about. When I almost got killed, but the metaphage intervened, I guess. Brought me back from Death’s country, where I saw one of those supertryptamine worlds, too.”

  “Do you know how lucky you are?” Jim Brescoll asked. “Not
just that you survived and returned to health so quickly—almost miraculous on the face of it—but that this thing you were exposed to saved you, rather than killed you itself? Or turned you into some kind of monster?”

  “Monster?” Pittman asked, sounding nervous. “How?”

  Jim sympathized. Still, Darla Pittman presumably had that metaphage stuff—if that’s what it was—running around inside her even now. It didn’t appear to be contagious, but it might be best to plan for as many scenarios as possible.

  “Think about it, Doctor. You’ve been stitching together pieces of ancient dead meteoritic code material, hoping you can get it to reanimate. That sound like the work of any famous monster-maker to you?”

  “Frankenstein,” Pittman said levelly.

  “Exactly. What’s to say that this phoenix phenotype couldn’t just as easily have turned into a Frankenstein phenotype? You’re damned lucky.”

  “Maybe we ought to call the rocks from space we’ve been working with ‘Frankenstones,’” Miskulin joked.

  “Actually, that doesn’t sound like a bad name for the rock we pulled off that plateau,” Jim said.

  “It’s gone from the tepui, then?” Susan Yamada asked.

  Jim nodded. Sending CSS troops to drag that rock out of its cave, then helo it to an airport and cargo-plane it out of South America—that was about the only thing they’d done right since he came back from his Rip van Winkle time beneath the dome.

  “And I’m glad we’ve got it quarantined, too—just in case.”

  “How did you know to move on it?” Miskulin asked.

  “We knew its location from a soldier who was in the task force Retticker sent against the tepui.

  Apparently that officer was not happy with the way things went, down there, and he came to us. The possible futures I saw while I was under the California dome convinced me we needed to control the tepui stone, the spore print for the Mawari’s sacred fungus, and the surviving Mawari kids themselves.”

  “We’re far too late, in the case of the spore print,” Pittman said. “General Retticker got me a sample of it months ago—”

  “Presumably from the same spore print my uncle let Vang get his hands on,” Miskulin said quietly.

  “And as for the kids,” Yamada said, “the fact that they’ve already been abducted is the major reason we’re here talking to you right now.”

  “Those futures you say you saw,” Michael said, “what role did the kids have in them?”

  More secret information—all that Tetragrammaton stuff, Jim thought. Reluctantly he accessed the background material and brought it up on the display-dome, going into voice-over mode for them. Only with such background would he be able to explain to them the Tetragrammaton people and their projects and programs.

  He showed them the reality of exaptation and the latent talents the Tetra types thought might be hidden in childhood’s imaginary friends and fairy lands. The reason for all their secret work with inducing schizoidal, schizophrenic, multiple personality, and dissociative identity disorders—in order to “force,” like a hothouse bloom, the appearance of the next stage of human evolution: the exapted “split kids,” able to access capabilities latent in DNA for the great leap forward—their strange powers born from the inducing of inhuman trauma and deep suffering, in hopes of unleashing something superhuman from them.

  “I’m not sure how all that will fit in with Mawari, mushrooms, and meteorites,” Jim said, “but from all I can remember, I’m sure it will.”

  He saw Pittman and Yamada glance at each other, almost as if deciding which of them should speak first.

  “I think we might have an idea,” Pittman said, then launched, with occasional help from Miskulin and Yamada, into a description of the myconeural complex, the raphe nuclei, and most importantly the prolonged neoteny of the Mawari’s pineal glands—and the vastly reduced need for speech among that people from puberty onward, at least according to the Larkins’ notes.

  “If you’d wanted to traumatize those kids,” Susan Yamada said, “you probably couldn’t have planned it better.”

  “How so?” Jim asked.

  “Massacring all their people. Kicking them out into a world thousands of years into their technological future.”

  Jim steepled his fingers, inadvertently freeze-framing the display-dome, and pondered that.

  “But I don’t think this possible outcome was planned,” he said at last. “If you’re right, and the very ‘split kids’ that the Tetragrammaton crew were after are even now being somehow inadvertently realized, then it could be real trouble. It could have global repercussions. We were smart to treat their abduction as a matter of grave importance.”

  “But how could it have ‘global repercussions’?” Susan asked. “And if they’re so important, why haven’t you found them?”

  “This agency is doing everything it can to find them, I assure you,” Jim said. “Checkpoint watchlists with Customs services worldwide. Satellite tracking of ships and aircraft, monitoring of international telecommunication of every type.”

  “Datamining for anything in any medium that might apply to them,” Amaral put in. “A general bulletin to all humint—human intelligence—resources throughout the intelligence community. Throughout the world.”

  “But the world is a big place to disappear into,” Jim said.

  “We’ve been using the same methods,” Amaral added, “to try to pin down the location of someone you may have encountered, a meteoriticist named Avram Zaragosa. We know he popped up for the big conference in Dubai, and then later in Riyadh. We presume he’s somewhere in the Middle East even now. We just haven’t pinned down the exact location.”

  “But we will,” Jim said. “For him, and the children both.”

  “And the global repercussions you mentioned?” Miskulin asked.

  “I don’t know exactly how those repercussions might be felt,” Jim admitted. “We suspect George Otis might be involved with what has happened to the Mawari kids. Perhaps even more than Doctor Vang.

  And Otis is a global player with some rather idiosyncratic beliefs.”

  “Otis?” Susan Yamada said, revulsion in her voice.

  “Sanctimonious hypocrite and phony patriot,” Amaral said, a bit too fervently. “Doesn’t deny God or Country when it pays, but an undeniable dog to both when it suits.”

  “I don’t know about that,” Jim said, smiling awkwardly despite himself. “From our investigation, however, we’re fairly certain that at least some of the people who attacked Larkin’s compound were connected to Otis’s Military Executive Resource Corp.”

  “Why them?” Darla asked.

  “Paul Larkin’s security chief, Jarrod Takimoto, confirms that some of the attackers and their modus operandi echoed an earlier attempt on Larkin and the kids. Came in sterile, same body armor and gear, generally.”

  “Then why hasn’t someone been arrested for orchestrating the whole thing?” Susan asked.

  “Not enough solid evidence for arrests or indictments yet. The wheels of justice grind slowly, as always, but I’m sure the situation will reach that point. Part of the problem is that the previous attack was hushed up, on Larkin’s own orders. The first time it was foiled in an unknown fashion, but not this time. We don’t know why.”

  “More unknowns,” Miskulin said, shaking his head. “What do we know about the global picture, if there is one?”

  “What I think I know, from my time under the California dome, is that somehow religious sites throughout the world are involved in all of this, including the Black Stone of the Kaaba in Mecca.”

  “Paul showed us a video record of what the kids had been researching in the infosphere,” Susan said.

  “Sacred sites with archaeoastronomical alignments and ‘holy stones’ came up there, too.”

  Jim nodded.

  “Holy rocks from space, yes. When I manage to recall what happened under the dome, I seem to remember stars shooting across the sky, streaking toward what loo
ked rather like, well, missile launches.”

  “‘Don’t worry,’” Michael Miskulin said, “‘we’ll show the stars where to fall.’”

  “What?”

  “That’s what the kids said, to me and to Susan. Said it right inside our heads.”

  “And?”

  “And, in a recording Paul showed us, the kids were looking at star charts and astrogation data for the Apollos and the Atens. Those asteroids move in earth-crossing orbits….”

  Amaral looked from one to another of them, skepticism on his face.

  “Oh, come on now, you don’t really think—” he began, but Jim waved him to silence. Seeing where this might be headed, he placed a conference call to Wang and Lingenfelter.

  “Bree? Steve? Good to have you both on the line. I have a favor to ask. I’d like you to get in touch with our W Group people. Have them contact their NASA counterparts to check on current positions for earth-crossing asteroids—and more generally, to get their predictions on meteor shower activity over, say, the next six months.”

  “That’s more than one favor,” Bree Lingenfelter said with a laugh.

  “More like four or five,” Wang confirmed. Nonetheless they quickly agreed and got off the line.

  “W Group?” Susan asked.

  “Specialists in Global Issues and Weapons Systems. My biggest brain trust.”

  “How about yourself?” Michael asked. “Anything along those lines in what you saw under the dome—meteors, I mean?”

  “Not really,” Jim said, then thought again. “Wait…yes, there was something. The sound of thunder, followed by stones falling out of the sky.”

  “Didn’t meteorites used to be called ‘thunderstones’?” Susan asked.

  “Thunder can arise from a meteor’s explosive braking in the atmosphere, particularly at the extinction point,” Michael said.

  “Then the shattered remnants of the stone fall to earth at gravitational-field speed, rather than cosmic velocities,” Darla said, nodding.

  “But some of what I saw looked like big bolts of lightning,” Jim said, “and there were these light-show effects, like a big thunderstorm viewed from space.”