Spears of God

by Howard V. Hendrix

  “If Vang’s right,” Vida said, looking out across the courtyard as twilight began to settle over it, “there’s a question much deeper even than those: What might the alien children of such a next generation be like?”

  “Yes. Would they have more persistently childlike minds, in longer-lived bodies? Or would they be somehow permanently stunted? Would they be more imaginative and creative, or merely more frivolous?

  Less libidinal or inclined to reproduce, like the tepuians…or more reckless?”

  “Or, if they barely ever attain to sexual maturity,” Vida said, nodding, “perhaps even less capable of reproducing at all. A generation beyond generation. In a way, it’s a logical extension of humanity’s long evolutionary trend toward the retention of juvenile characteristics into adulthood.”

  “The very meaning of neoteny, or so I’m told.”

  “No, not the meaning,” Vida said. “A meaning. There’s another meaning of neoteny, a more disturbing one: the attainment of sexual maturity by an organism still in its larval stage.”

  “Why should that be more disturbing?”

  Vida looked away, across the darkening hilltop grounds.

  “What if the latter definition is the one that has actually applied to all humanity, throughout all its history?

  What if we, Homo sapiens sapiens, have not been so wise or thoughtful as we have always thought ourselves to be? What if we have instead been, all along, a species of creature able to sexually reproduce without actually becoming truly adult, truly mature?”

  Reminded of the odd cocooned transformation Ben Cho had undergone at the end of his mortal days, Jim shivered. Had Miskulin and even the Instrumentality been right, in some sense? Had some piece of genetic programming essential for humanity’s true maturity been lost out there among the stars? Were the darknesses of human history, all the wrongness in the human species, indeed the proof that the human creature lacked an all-important puzzle piece? The piece that might allow human beings to at last become truly adult creatures, mature and wise?

  Was it that missing puzzle piece that had been restored to Ebu and Ka-dalun, to Aubrey and Alii—and to Jaron Kwok and Ben Cho—in different ways?

  “Attaining maturity—that would be progress in our evolution,” Jim said quietly.

  “Call it that, but it might be very painful for those of us who are already supposedly mature,” Vida said.

  “What if the next generation with their Peter Pan pineals—Miskulin called them that, in his presentation—what if they exhibit not just the usual alienness of adolescence but something far different?”

  “Like what?”

  “Like what if their relationship to the preceding generation is less like children to parents, and more like birds to dinosaurs?”

  The sight of Wang and Lingenfelter waving to him from the nearest entrance to Castel Gandolfo distracted Jim. He waved back to them absently. Judging by the crowd streaming out at that door, the day’s last session had just ended, but Jim had been almost too preoccupied with Vida to notice.

  He was surprised to see Vida waving more vigorously to them now than he had himself, but then he saw that Michael Miskulin, Susan Yamada, Darla Pittman, and Dan Amaral had spotted him and Vida, too.

  They looked like they might make their leisurely way over to them, once they’d extricated themselves from the exiting crowd.

  “Yes,” Jim said absently. “Birds. With their biomagnetically sensitive pineals orienting them to the earth’s magnetic field.”

  “I caught Steve Wang and Bree Lingenfelter’s presentation, too,” she said with a smile and a nod. “About how the Mawari kids managed to navigate underground, and all that.”

  “Also how they managed to use the looped-hole of that reversed flux patch,” Jim said, “to lasso the EMP of that meteoroid—the one that should have shut down the world when it crashed into the South Atlantic Anomaly.”

  “And instead ‘channeled that pulse into and through the earth for their own uses,’” Vida said with a quizzical smile, “‘levitating the Kaaba and Temple Mount into the sky!’ I don’t think that’s the whole story. That’s what my presentation is going to be about.”

  “Oh?”

  “I was originally thinking of presenting on the particular oil-of-heaven I was exposed to, but I think Darla would do a better job with that. I was so impressed with her presentation I passed my notes on to her today. Wang and Lingenfelter’s explanation, though, doesn’t take the gravitics sufficiently into account.”

  “Why do you think that?”

  “We already know those kids, once they’d been exposed to the full metaphage, were manipulating spacetime curvature, right? What Miskulin and Yamada were saying today about the myth system of the Mawari plugs right into what I’m going to be talking about. Spawn, threads, strings—it’s just what I saw when those two kids were standing beside the Hajar al-Aswad, at the corner of the Kaaba.”

  “And that ties into ‘spacetime curvature’ somehow?”

  “All superstrings are open-ended and trapped in a given dimension, except the graviton. As a closed loop, it passes unhindered across the membranes separating each dimension. I think what they tapped into in the Black Stone was gravitonically linked to higher dimensions, across the plenum of all possible universes. And back. Which is why the graviton loop appears closed, and why the Black Stone appealed to those kids so much. If you want to know more, stick around for my presentation.”

  Hearing Vida beginning to make connections between the Mawari kids and parallel universes, Jim’s heart skipped a beat. He thought of strange angels, and wondered about Markham, Benson, and LeMoyne.

  Kwok and Cho, too. And perhaps all the other bodhisattvas and strange guardian angels out there at the end of all time.

  Darla, Susan, Michael, and Dan joined them. They were getting to be quite a little mob. Jim listened as Vida talked with them about what she and Jim had been discussing earlier. About Aubrey, Ebu, Ka-dalun, and Alii, about parents and children, about descendants far different from their forebears. He noticed that, in the conversation, the child Darla did not speak about was the one she was carrying—the one fathered by Marc Vasques, to whom she was now engaged to be married. Jim had a particular interest in that child, given his mother’s and father’s backgrounds. Perhaps that was something else the Mawari children had left behind.

  “Kids are always aliens,” Michael said. “But then, so is everybody.”

  “How’s that?” Jim asked.

  “We’ve always been at least part alien, because part of what we are comes from the stars. Homegrown life from nonlife, sure, but also life from elsewhere—back to the very beginning.”

  “Maybe so,” Susan said, squeezing Michael’s hand, “but at least the Mawari kids didn’t forget their adoptive parents!”

  True, Jim thought. When the shooting stars fell like ripe figs from a tree shaken by high wind, it wasn’t only stars shown where to fall in order to take out missiles. Or even just kerogen meteors and carbon-sequestering dust motes.

  Miskulin and Yamada, traveling to the site of an abandoned benitoite mine Larkin had owned, found that a particular type of meteorite had cratered there—a pallasite made up almost entirely of peridot. And even Jim himself had received a gift from the children, if he could call it that.

  In a strange dream, they told him not to forget that, if you bang your heart against the mountain long and hard enough, sometimes it’s the mountain that breaks.

  He thought of a burning mountain, older than earth, falling across the sky.

  It had happened before.

  Suddenly he realized why he’d felt that sense of déjà vu.

  Yes, Jim thought. Back to the very beginning. Back to the primordial earth, born out of gravitationally fused skystones. If the cornerstone of here came from elsewhere, then native to the sky is not alien to the earth.

  Back to Eden. Back to a humanity sufficient to have stood but free to fall. Like the stars now coming out above him, as nig
ht also fell. Like the universe in which those stars were embedded. All the stars, in all the universes.

  In a plenum of infinite possible worlds, every day is doomsday somewhere, but no day is doomsday everywhere. Timeless ends in endless times.

  He felt a hand on his arm.

  “You look preoccupied, Jim,” Darla said. “Everything all right?”

  “Everything’s fine. Just thinking.”

  “About what?”

  “About how the stone the builders reject sometimes becomes the cornerstone,” he said, craning his neck to look into the deepening twilight as it filled slowly with stars. “About how the data thought to be insignificant sometimes turns out to be pivotal. About science and religion, and the wonder that’s cornerstone to both.”

  A shooting star slashed overhead. He and his friends pointed.

  “Make a wish!” Darla said, but Jim did not ask for anything. He was just thankful that showing the stars where to fall was not his responsibility.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  HOWARD V. HENDRIX has held a variety of jobs ranging from hospital phlebotomist to fish hatchery manager to university professor and administrator. His current university teaching is bolstered by an academic pedigree that includes a B.S. in biology from Xavier University (1980) and an M.A. and Ph.D. in English literature, both earned from the University of California, Riverside, in 1982 and 1987, respectively. Hendrix is the author of several novels and shorter science fiction and experimental pieces.

  His repertoire also includes numerous political essays and works of literary criticism in addition to a book on landscape irrigation, Reliable Rain, which he coauthored with Stuart Straw. Mr. Hendrix is an avid gardener. He and his wife, Laurel, live near Shaver Lake, California, where they are members of the Pine Ridge Volunteer Fire Department. They enjoy backpacking and snowshoeing in the Sierras, and training in Brazilian jujitsu.