Spears of God

by Howard V. Hendrix

  “I hope you’re right, Susan,” Brescoll said, “but that’s still no excuse for sitting on our hands. I think several of us are going to be headed toward that same region of the world, and soon.”

  “One of your ‘underdome’ dreams, Director?” Susan asked.

  “Call it that, if you like. And I’ll hope your children’s crusade, if that’s what it is, turns out better than the previous ones did. In the meantime, I think I’ll have to inform the director of national intelligence about our discussions. I’ve been trying to avoid it, but Watson will want to know. Issues of global EMP blackout are a bigger matter than this agency alone was ever intended to handle.”

  NONRANDOM DISAPPEARANCES

  Joe Retticker had much to reflect on as he traveled through the starry desert night in the stealth airship Vang had loaned him.

  The craft had proven surprisingly appropriate to his mission. Flying at nearly twelve miles high for most of their journey, they’d come clear across the Atlantic, through the Mediterranean, over the Negev and the Hijaz, deep into the Empty Quarter—all without arousing any real interest from the air forces of any of the countries whose airspace they had passed through. The fact that the airship never had to actually land on the soft dunes, but could float endlessly above them, made it better adapted to this desert terrain than fixed-wing planes and helicopters would be.

  He supposed Vang already knew all that before sending them here, which intrigued Retticker all the more.

  A plump delta-wing lifting body, the stealth airship had stood for many days moored just far enough from the Wabar digs so that distance and its smartskin camouflage prevented it from being visible to those in the camp. Now it whispered along, low and slow and under radar, a silent hearse carrying the body of Major Marc Vasques to its final disposal in the desert.

  Vasques wasn’t dead yet, but Retticker was sure the major would soon be—and he regretted it.

  Vasques had been drugged soon after coming aboard the airship, and had been kept in that state ever since, at the suggestion of both Vang and Otis. Retticker’s resistance to dumping a good soldier in the desert to die, however, had only succeeded in prolonging the man’s drugged half-life.

  By allowing Levitch to use Vasques as an experimental subject, Retticker thought he had at last proved his loyalty to Otis and The Cause beyond all doubt. In truth, he had allowed it only because he thought that the major would at least be allowed to come out of his sedated state while undergoing that experiment.

  He had proven wrong on both counts. Otis always wanted more. The particular myconeural variant Vasques was injected with only existed because Otis was impatient with how long it took for the tepuians’ full myconeural complex to develop. The zealous Rapture-hastener didn’t want to wait twelve months, much less twelve years. He had set Levitch to work creating a version that would grow and mature much faster.

  The results had not been pleasant for Vasques, or for the general watching those results unfold. The variant Levitch had tweaked into being did grow faster, all right—cancerously fast. The turbocharged fungus quickly became a tumorous thing spreading first in Vasques’s brain, then throughout his spine and nervous system. The maddening pain the major suffered was apparently not dulled at all by the madness-inducing chemicals the hyped-up fungus pumped out. The pain and fungal chemistry worked in brutal combination, if anything. Nominally to protect those around him and himself, the techs had to sedate Vasques again and again—more heavily than ever.

  Retticker’s best efforts seemed only to have made things worse. Looking down at Vasques’s quiescent form now, Retticker was astonished that the man still lived. His body was horribly changed. A brecciated epidermis, rather like an elephantiasis of puffy broken cobblestones, covered perhaps eighty percent of his body surface. He didn’t look human anymore, yet somehow his vital signs persisted, albeit weakly.

  By transporting Vasques’s body into the desert, Retticker was obeying Vang’s earlier suggestion and Otis’s demand that he get rid of Vasques in the desert. Of course, obedience is time-dependent. He chose to carry out such earlier orders now to secretly spite Otis’s scientists and techs at the Wabar digs.

  They’d have biopsied Vasques to death and then, after he finally gave up the ghost, sliced and diced him to pieces in an overthorough autopsy, if Retticker had let them. Which he had not. Vasques deserved a better end than that. If all they’d wanted to do was kill him, it would have been more humane to just take him out and shoot him.

  Retticker supposed his belated obedience might queer things with Otis’s people, Levitch in particular.

  Fortunately, Levitch was busy with the Mawari kids. He had not injected them with the accelerated fungus, but he’d been zealous enough to expose one of them—the boy, Alii—to his “more complete” metaphage.

  Levitch couldn’t be bothered to spearhead a formal complaint against Retticker’s plans. So, under the strained pretense of “following orders,” Retticker managed to get Vasques out of there before Vang or Otis or anyone else could countermand. They might never fully trust him again, but so be it. At least, here in the desert night, Retticker felt he could offer a once-loyal soldier a more dignified ending than would have awaited him at the hands of obsessed researchers.

  The pilot of the stealth airship notified him that they were over the rock-strewn desert plain Retticker had chosen as the final resting place of Major Marc Vasques. From satellite and aerial imagery and from the stony appearance of the major’s condition, Retticker had determined that this site would be best. If it were noted at all, in the far vaster sand-sea of the Rub’ al-Khali, the major’s body seen from the air would at most look like a mere optical illusion, a curiously human-shaped stone shadow, a cluster of rocks in a larger field of the same.

  While Retticker directed them, two of the troops wheeled Vasques on a gurney down the invisible dirigible’s gangway. Once on the ground, they quickly realized that the fist-to head-sized rocks punctuating the desert sand presented an unpassable obstacle course to the wheeled gurney. Detaching drip lines, breathing tube, monitors, and catheter, they moved the comatose Vasques from the gurney and carried him via backboard over the rough footing.

  Setting the backboard down on the rocky substrate, they tossed the larger stones out of the way until they’d cleared a space on a patch of desert pavement where they could lay Vasques out at full length.

  Under the stars of a night still awaiting moonrise, Retticker and the men rose to stand at attention.

  “For what they most deeply believe,” Retticker said, “all give some, some give all. Marc Vasques has given all.”

  With no more ceremony than that, the three men saluted, then turned on their heels. As they walked back toward the ship, Retticker saw a meteor flash overhead, then another. Golden swords, quickly drawn from the starred black scabbard of the night, then just as swiftly sheathed again in that same scabbard.

  He wondered if these fiery streaks were part of the Perseid meteor shower he’d heard Fremdkunst mention.

  As the airship traveled the hundred plus miles back to the Wabar digs, Retticker sat thinking about what he’d just done. True, there was no doubt now that Vasques had betrayed the secret of the tepui operation—and much else as well—to the NSA. Nonetheless, Retticker understood his reasons for doing so. He’d felt such stirrings in his own conscience, and could respect them in others.

  He exhaled tiredly, puffing out his cheeks. Lines he’d encountered in a background report on Brescoll’s friend Dan Amaral rose into his mind. Lines from somewhere in Shakespeare, about being so far stepped in blood that going back would be as tedious as going forward.

  Too true. No going back for him now, as much as he sometimes wished he might.

  What he saw as they came in low toward the Wabar digs broke his reverie. Lights, moving on the desert—from vehicles bouncing over the uneven terrain. He had his pilot break radio silence so he could contact the camp.

  After being referred from one soldier
and tech to another, Levitch and Michelson themselves finally came on line.

  “They’re gone!” Levitch said. “The Mawari kids! It’s like they just stepped through the wall of the observation room when no one was looking!”

  “Calm yourself, Doctor. If they haven’t taken a vehicle, we’ll follow their footprints across the desert.”

  “But that’s just the problem, General,” Michelson said. “You have to be here to see this—and you have to see this before you can even begin to believe it.”

  “We’ll home in on your signal, and we’ll be there shortly.”

  In a few moments the gangway folded down onto the desert where Levitch and Michelson waited. After Retticker descended from the hovering airship, the two researchers led him around to the back side of one of the modulabs, then out into the desert, flashing their headlamps on the sand before them as they went.

  “It looks like they were just walking, at first,” Levitch said, pointing out their steps. “But then it changes, see?”

  “It’s as if they suddenly became denser,” Michelson said. “Like they began to wade down into the sand.

  Like it was quicksand, or water.”

  Retticker nodded. He could see the traces of the children’s progress preserved in the sand, far more than it would have been in quicksand or water: a labyrinth of ripples, persisting long after the stones that made them had vanished.

  “And this area right here,” Levitch said, “this seems to be where they went underground.”

  “If they did,” Retticker corrected. “Quite a puzzle, gentlemen, I must admit. But let’s not jump to hasty conclusions. They might have escaped by more normal means than this suggests.”

  “Such as?” Levitch asked.

  “Such as spirited away by collaborators, or cloaked against our detection in other ways. This could all be an elaborate ruse meant to confuse us.”

  “And if not?” Michelson asked.

  “Then if they’ve got bodies, we can still track them, even under the sand.”

  “How?”

  “Netsonde, Doctor Levitch. Side-scanning sonar. Ground-penetrating radar. Hell, even magnetometers might help, for all I know. Let’s talk with Fremdkunst. He’s been looking for rocks under the sand, right?

  He might well have what we need.”

  “There may be another wrinkle, General,” Michelson said. “They didn’t take any of the quantum telemorphic gear with them.”

  “I’d think that would be a good thing.”

  “Not necessarily. The fact that those kids have done all this without the QT gear suggests they don’t need such gear anymore.”

  “What do you mean?”

  Michelson and Levitch glanced at each other.

  “Doctor Levitch and I have been trying to puzzle this out since the kids’ disappearance. Our combined work may have resulted in an unexpected synergy in those kids.”

  “Taken together with their full myconeural complex, and the potential effects on it of the expanded metaphage I exposed them to,” Levitch said, “we think they may be able to alter the shape of the spacetime fabric at will.”

  Retticker wondered about the word exposed. A fine euphemism. Never mention experimental injections, by air-hypo, of an untested substance. No, never.

  “How?”

  “I think they’ve learned to use the telemorphic tools so well that they’ve fully incorporated the properties of those tools into their neuronal spaces,” Michelson said. “That would give them transparent access to pretty much the whole infosphere. More important, if they did in fact walk through the wall of the lab, and if they did in fact disappear into the sand, it’s possible they’re projecting or teleporting quantum information densities into that spacetime fabric around them, as a means of shaping it.”

  “Which means they’d be…doing what? Manipulating the sand psychokinetically?”

  “Telemorphically.”

  “Without the need of any mechanical assistance,” Levitch added.

  “Wonderful,” Retticker said. “I thought you injected only one of them.”

  “I did. Maybe Alii is doing this for the rest of them. Or maybe he has somehow infected them with the expanded metaphage. I’m not sure.”

  Retticker suddenly felt very tired.

  “I’m going to find Fremdkunst. The sooner we get those kids back under our control, the better.”

  As he walked away, he could not help thinking again of that pattern in the sand under the headlamps, and the image in his head of those kids wading into the desert there. As Vasques literally, and he himself indirectly, had waded into blood during that tepui massacre. And afterward.

  Blood and sand. Those children—if they remained like other children at all—still had bodies. Even if they had somehow managed the trick of flowing like water underground, through the sands of the Empty Quarter. If they were still flesh and blood, he would find them.

  INTERLUDE: MISTER SANDMAN, DREAM ME A DREAM

  Leaving Brescoll’s offices, walking with Brescoll, Miskulin, and Yamada, Darla Pittman passed out and collapsed to the floor in the corridor.

  She is leaving a laboratory, walking through a wall. She knows that, somewhere behind her, are the Wabar craters. She is sinking into the sand. She is moving through the desert, half walking, half swimming. Beneath the sand…

  —Hello, Doctor Pittman.

  —Isn’t this fun?

  —You worry about what we’ll do.

  —Don’t worry.

  She is sharing their experience, their point of view. Everything they are feeling, she is feeling. What the children mostly feel is exhilaration, as sand flows around body and body flows through sand, neither quite touching the other. Like astronauts in outerspace, like skydivers in airspace, they move through sandspace.

  Later, they come up out of the sand, rising like divers from water. They stand on the surface and walk across it, through a stony patch. They come to an odd-looking pile of rocks—long and low, with scraps of cloth on it. A man of sand and stone lies there, wearing the remains of a uniform, but he is mostly naked and still as a corpse.

  His skin a camouflage of landscape grown from his body, he doesn’t really look human anymore.

  —He has what we have, Doctor Darla.

  —Only different.

  —What you have.

  —Only different.

  —In him they made it faster.

  —Out of control.

  —He is dying.

  —We don’t want him to die.

  —Let’s try to stop it.

  THE DREAM-TELLING

  At Darla Pittman’s bedside in Crypto City’s main infirmary, James Brescoll was beginning to drift off to sleep himself when he felt his arm suddenly grabbed. Darla Pittman was wide-awake and bolt upright in bed.

  “Director, I know where the children are!” she said.

  Jim Brescoll stared at her. In earlier times he might have asked her how she knew this, but having himself undergone, under the dome, a strange unconsciousness or alternative consciousness, he was inclined to believe her. Especially since she had been exposed to the new and improved version of the metaphage, and had spent the last ten hours in unusually prolonged dream sleep, her lidded eyes REMming madly.

  “Where?”

  His latest reports from the field had narrowed down the most likely locations of the Mawari children to three places in the Middle East and south Asia: at the Big and Little Craters, south of Jerusalem and the Dead Sea in Israel, at the Wabar craters complex on the Arabian Peninsula, and the Chintamani stone in India. He was very curious to see if her pronouncement on their whereabouts matched his other sources, of which she could not yet be aware.

  “The Wabar craters,” Darla said. “Or they were, until a while ago. I was with them when they escaped the research camp there. They showed me what they were seeing.”

  “Wait, wait,” Brescoll said. “Let me bring your friends in on this.”

  Jim stepped into the hall outside Darl
a’s room. In the waiting area nearby he found Yamada and Miskulin, curled up or sprawled on the furniture, in various stages of sleep. He woke them, told them Darla was awake, explained to them what she was claiming.

  They followed him back into her room. When they got there, they found Darla had already gotten out of bed and was seated in the chair Jim had vacated moments earlier. She finished adjusting her hospital gown and told them what’d she’d experienced, as briefly as she could.

  “Do you know where they’re going? What direction they’re heading?” Jim asked.

  “I’m not exactly sure. Before I woke up, I remember they’d come out of the sand. Judging by where the sun was, I’d say they were headed west, maybe a little northwest.”

  She told them about the strange stone-encrusted man the kids were so concerned about, and the suggestion that, like her and like the kids, he, too, had been somehow touched by the metaphage.

  “Do you know who he might be?” Brescoll asked. “We need to find him.”

  “We’ve got to find those kids,” Susan said. “They might starve or die of thirst.”

  “They grew up on a tepui—a desert of too much rain,” Michael said, shaking his head. “Now they’re in a desert of too little.”

  “I wouldn’t want to bet on how well—or poorly—they might adapt,” Darla said. “If I saw what I think I saw, all bets are off.”

  Jim nodded, preoccupied. He agreed that the Mawari children had to be found, though for some reason he didn’t think they were in extremis just yet. He thought they just might know more about what they were doing than worried adults were willing to give them credit for.

  “You said they were headed west, or maybe slightly north of west,” he said. “Did you get any sense of their ultimate destination?”

  “I’m not sure. What lies in that direction if you keep going that way?”