Читать книгу Better Angels - Howard V. Hendrix - Страница 5

CHAPTER ONE

LIKE THE PRESENT

Waves of light rippled the starry darkness. Jacinta had an eerie sense of being underwater in a moonlit pool, of looking up at the mercury-shimmering underside of the sky just at the moment a piece of that sky broke loose—precisely at the instant a mirror-bright stone fell through the hole in heaven it had made.

The hole promptly filled itself in, the sky unfunhoused itself, the universe unwarped back to mirror smoothness. The mercury droplet of broken sky kept falling, however, intact and growing larger. At the same time it moved more slowly, the way a stone falls more slowly through water than through air.

Strange as what she was looking at undeniably was, even stranger was the fact that she was seeing it at all. Or was she? The ghost people around her, with whom Jacinta now clasped hands and tried to chantsong along, claimed awesome powers for their singing—including the capability of their songs to create in physical space the images and objects about which they sang.

Extremely powerful auditory hallucinations? Or something more?

Stranger still, however, was the fact that she was really seeing what she was looking at, knowing in depth exactly what was being shown her without knowing how she knew. The big “mercury” droplet’s splashing against some obstacle—that was the Allessan contact ship’s bubble of force bursting in the Great Accident, the Error, the Miscalculation.

The Accident revealed (and Jacinta saw, inside the bubble) a mirror sphere made of innumerable smaller pieces, a dance hall mirrorball hurtling through space. All human civilization, religion, controlled fire, the first chipped-pebble stone tool, not to mention the lost age of disco that had danced Jacinta’s childhood—all stood many millions of years into the future and after the fact of what she was looking at.

As she observed more closely, she saw that the smaller mirrors of the mirrorball were actually not squares at all but myriad, shining, overlapping wings. In the forms those wings were attached to some might see angelic beings of pure intuition, others demons of unalloyed malevolence, still others aliens—a space-cantina bestiary of creatures dressed in light-powered livesuits, moving with starling-flock simultaneity.

Seeing the irreparable damage the Accident had done to those crewmembers who were the ship they sailed, Jacinta recalled the ghost people’s stories that each individual of all that crew’s many species were always and forever in direct mental communication with all the others. She wondered what sort of alien pain and otherworldly grief they might have felt at the deaths of so many of their shipmates.

‘Direct mental communication’—is that what’s happening to me? Jacinta asked herself as she listened to the ghost people singing. Is what I’m experiencing not a hallucination but the beginnings of that telepathy, that fullness of empathy the ghost people claim their totemic mushroom bestows upon them? When I introduced TV to them, they said television and global communication did not surprise them. They claim the natural world is always broadcasting cloudforest television into their heads. Are they serious?

Or is this all simply madness?

A shiver ran through her. The tribe—no, they weren’t really a tribe, since they had no chief, but what were they, then? “Hunting-gathering group?” “Tepuians?” “Ghost people,” as their neighbors had referred to them, with superstitious awe in their voices? Despite all the time she had spent with them, despite her ethnobotanical training, despite the readiness with which they (whatever the correct term) had welcomed her from the first, at this moment, among these isolated, mushroom-worshipping, hunting-gathering, insect-eating, dark-skinned, black haired, almond-eyed people dressed in purple and black loin clothes and robes woven in snaking double-helical patterns, Jacinta felt distinctly culture-shocked.

She hated that phrase, “almond-eyed.” What did that make her—blueberry-eyed? Honey blonde? Some other type of food?

Around her the ghost people’s strange song continued, telling of the damaged ship made of wild angels. The song sounded quite mad indeed, particularly as it went on to narrate how and why the ship was sent from the heart of the galaxy—or rather, Jacinta knew, from the Allesseh, hanging 3,000 light years above the galaxy’s center. According to old Kekchi, the ghost people’s mindtime-traveling “Wise One,” the Allesseh was already known to earthly astronomers—but only very indirectly, for they knew the Allesseh not in itself but only by the vast antimatter fountain associated with it. Earthly scientists had never quite managed to satisfactorily explain the existence of that fountain.

Jacinta was following the chantsong with only a part of her mind. Distracted, she found herself thinking of her brother Paul instead, her only and last visitor from the supposedly civilized world—with whom she had not parted on the most pleasant of terms....

“So that’s what all this is about, then?” Paul had said, smacking his forehead with the palm of his left hand as he rose shakily to his feet. “These people have been collecting rocks for millennia because mushrooms ‘told’ them to? And you believe that? How long have you been eating this druggie fungus of theirs? It’s pushing you over the edgeless edge, sis. We’ve got to get you out of here, get this crap out of your system—”

“No, Paul.” Jacinta shook her head and slowly rose from her squatting position to stand upright. “My mission here is too important to be absorbed into anyone else’s—even yours. The work is not yet finished so the ghost people can leave.”

“What work?”

“Singing the mountain to the stars,” she explained. “The quartz they’ve collected is not something you shape into a crude tool—it’s something you worship as a totem. Their very existence here is proof of the fisherfolk hypothesis, of neanderthalensis in the New World. That’s why Fash got so hot to bring a major expedition here once he found out about them. That’s why we have to hurry—before the rest of the world finds them and destroys their uniqueness.”

Jacinta reached toward her brother, but then hesitated, drew back.

“Think of it, Paul,” she said, trying to explain. “These people and their culture are one of the last outposts of a lost empire of wood and song. They’re a thread that, on this different continent, in this cave, found its way back to the source of the world songweb. Synergy and coevolution. For them, every sound has a form. They can read the musical notation of time’s signature. According to their myths, Song, shaped information, makes the world. Once we have sung and thought critical information densities into these quartz collecting columns, they will translate and amplify it so we can dissociate ourselves from the gravitational bed of local spacetime. Then we can join in the Allesseh, the great Cooperation, the telepathic harmony of all myconeuralized creatures throughout the galaxy—”

“Wrong!” Paul shouted, shaking his sandy-haired head in disgust. “A crazy ethnobotanist and forty-odd half-naked aborigines as humanity’s first ambassadors to the galaxy? Do you have any idea how insane that sounds?”

With the expanded empathy the ghost people’s prized fungus had already granted her, Jacinta saw the swelling rage igniting deep inside Paul’s skull, saw a vision of an icy bright pinpoint exploding outward like a cold Big Bang, a blizzard of invisible light radiating out of Paul’s temples, a crown of white thorns working its way to his forehead from the inside to finally storm outward in all directions, away and away. Paul paced heavily and furiously in the mud, the terrible anger rising through him, seemingly bringing with it all the memories of all Jacinta’s strange times past.

“I thought you were acting crazy,” he yelled, “when you said you were getting secret personal messages from TV programs! I thought you were acting crazy when you said you were under surveillance by a secret network of shadowy operatives! I thought you were acting crazy when you were convinced They were monitoring your thoughts through some guy trained as a ‘telepathic receiver’ living in an apartment down the hall! I thought you were acting crazy before, but this—this is the craziest of all!”

In full fury her short, wiry-muscled brother ran about on the death island, kicking fiercely at the phallus-brain shapes of the ghost people’s totemic mushroom where it grew by the dozen, rising out of the corpsebeds of the ghost people’s deceased members. Again and again Paul kicked, desecrating corpse after corpse. The fungal fruiting bodies split apart against his muddy, boot-clad feet, tender new flesh defiled.

When, breathless, Paul at last stopped his sacrilege, Jacinta was already plopped down in the mire, rubbing tears from her eyes.

“You’ll never understand, will you?” she moaned. “Yeah, you’re right—out there I am crazy, a freak! Always trapped between what I am and what I’m supposed to be! Always letting people down! No more! This is my world now, these are my people. It’s better here! Paul, please, get beyond your demons! Don’t you see? We were meant to be telepaths, part of the Great Cooperation, but we went wrong, we were overlooked, we developed consciousness and intellect, but not the fullness of empathy we misunderstand as telepathy. All human history is a result of a mistake, an accident.”

She turned to him, almost pleading. “The contact ships missed us, every one. We became a preterite planet, but now we have a chance to gain our rightful inheritance, our place in the bliss of the Cooperation! Stay with us! Come with us!”

“Where?” Paul asked, winded, seeming suddenly tired but still unwilling to concede a single point. “Where are you taking them? Where are they taking you? I don’t get it, Jacs. If you really think these ghost people prove your theories right, then why are you trying to help them escape the scrutiny of your colleagues? If you’re really trying to preserve their culture from our civilization, then why’d you bring all that high-tech gear up here for them to mess with? Industrial autoclaves. Diamond saws. Generators. Power cables. Foldout satellite dishes. Uplink antennas. Language acquisition and translation programs. Cameras and optidisk player recorders. Fifty microscreen TV sets—fifty!”

Jacinta, still shocked and numbed by her brother’s profanation of the ghost people’s funerary isle, said nothing. Her brother in his ranting barely noticed.

“I saw what was going on in all those small side chambers on the way down here,” he said. “Don’t think I didn’t. All those alcoves with power lines and cables snaking into them. In one room naked tepui kids were watching a Chinese television documentary on Han dynasty artifacts—real-time computer translated into French! In another I saw a young ‘indigene’ watching an American news broadcast about an Indian monsoon. In another your friend Talitha was checking an enormous crystal column for flaws as it came out of an extrusion autoclave! Someone else was carving up quartz bricks with a diamond saw right next door. I saw tepui kids randomly sampling music—madrigals and rap, Tibetan temple gongs and rock ’n’ roll, Sufi chants and Europop and worldbeat. Do you want me to ignore the evidence of my own eyes? Doesn’t that exposure alter their ‘lifeways’?”

Jacinta’s numbness and shock, however, still had not lifted enough to allow her the energy to reply.

“That wasn’t the strangest, either,” her brother continued. “A boy and an oldster, both in loincloths, sitting in front of computer terminals, running through complex mathematical equations! Then what looked like star charts and astrogation data zipping across screens in front of half dozen operators of various ages. Think, Jacinta! Doesn’t all that already change the ways of these people beyond recovery?”

At last Jacinta started to rouse herself from her numbness, but her brother in his ranting noticed not at all.

“Why should I want to stay here, Jacinta?” he concluded. “Why should I want to end up a flipped out fungus-head—excuse me, ‘myconeural symbiont’—with a parasite mushroom growing inside my skull? Like these throwbacks? Is that the kind of life you want?”

“They’re happy!” Jacinta shouted, turning reddened eyes on Paul—eyes that would not break contact, would not flicker away this time, no matter how much he might have wished it. “We are happy! What kind of life would I have out there in your ‘real’ world? In and out of institutions all my life, dosed up on ‘meds,’ watched over by high-school dropout ‘psychiatric aides’ in case I ‘go off’—giving them the chance to execute a well-planned ‘take down’ so they can strap me into a floor-bolted cot in the ‘time out’ room? Out there, even freedom is my jail—a prison as big as the world! No thanks. Not while there’s even a chance of real freedom, and the stars.”

They both felt like crying. It was all wrong, all so wrong.

“Jacs, we’ve never institutionalized you,” Paul said, a quaver in his voice. “All I want to do is take you home.”

“This is my home,” Jacinta said, turning away.

“What about Mom and Dad?” he asked. “What about Professor Manikam and your career?”

“Tell them I quit school,” she said without turning around. “Tell them I quit work. Tell them I disappeared into the backcountry. Tell them I went native, stopped communicating, fell beyond reach. Tell mom and dad they only gave us everything so we would owe everything to them.”

“What about me then, you ingrate?” Paul shouted, his sorrow turning once more to anger. “I came all the way down here after you! What about me, huh? What would your mushroom people do if I grabbed one of these long bones from their graveyard here, clubbed you over the head with it, and took you out of here in a fireman’s carry? Have they foreseen that future? Would they try to stop me?”

“Probably not,” Jacinta said with a deep sigh, turning slightly toward him, glancing over her shoulder. “But I would. I’ll fight you to the last breath. I won’t let you sentence me to a life in prison—not even if it’s ‘for my own good.’ Not even if I should be ‘grateful’ to you for doing it. Leave me here, or you better leave me alone.”

In the flash of determination in her eyes as she turned away, Paul must have seen something too strong for him to challenge. He turned away too, then. After a moment, Jacinta turned and watched him go, plodding away through the shallow water, squelching back tiredly through the plain of muck, flashlight flickering before him in the hollow emptiness of the cave. She watched as Paul came onto solid ground again and kept walking, never looking back.

“We must leave soon,” the old psychopomp Kekchi said to Jacinta. The words echoed through the tall darkness of the cave almost too plainly—some weird acoustical effect. “Things don’t have to be perfect. They just have to be done.”

Now, hours later, things were getting done, but her brother was gone. Around her, Kekchi and all the ghost people still sang, their cosmogonic chantsong conjuring up that time many millions of years in the past, soon after the contact ship had run into troubles caused by what Jacinta dimly understood as galactic dust lanes, unanticipated dark stars. A distant time when the surviving crew had determined to make a “spore crash” on a world which looked as if it might someday harbor intelligent life.

The ghost people’s chantsong epic showed Jacinta again the winged crew’s fears and hopes: Could life on this world before them—hit with extinction pulses roughly every thirty-three million revolutions around its primary, devastations brought on by the interaction of dust lanes and dark stars and cometary collisions—could life there survive long enough to develop intelligence? Given that the ghost people’s song told how most of the crew who were also their ship burned up in the spore crash attempt, those long-ago otherworlders appeared to have answered that question in hope rather than in fear. And not in vain: the spores that the Allesseh had designed, earlier versions of which had been falling between the stars for tens of millions of years previously, were this time successfully planted on the Earth, at last thickly enough to spawn and fruit, to spore again and again in hope of finding a proper host.

Glancing about her now, at the tepuians singing amid the great ring of quartz columns, on the floor of this underground space she had named the Cathedral Room, Jacinta realized that the program embedded within those spores was moving toward its long-awaited fulfillment. The floating quartz columns—pillars in an airy cathedral, flying buttresses to nowhere holding up a dark subterranean sky—had now begun to pulse rapidly with spiky haloes of light.

Jacinta felt herself and all the ghost people floating up into the air together in a ring of their own, a ring of living beings within the ring of columns flashing sunset glow about them, iridescent blues and salmon pinks. Sensitive flames—tiny lambent fractal universes—trembled over all their heads, holy fire flickering in time to the beat of a song of painful beauty and seductive lassitude, a music impelled by a visionary tension between urgency and dream. The song of the mushroom’s long wait for a partner of sufficient neurological complexity. The song of the endless killing wait, the devastating lingering through what Jacinta understood (dimly, through the myth-language of science) as unexpected levels of incident radiation, accelerated mutation rates, speeded-up speciation.

Around her the ghost people’s epic chantsong proclaimed that, throughout the world, even the spore-crash strain became denatured into fungi of ten thousand forms. The pure Allessan form survived at last only here, in the great cave-riddled marble intrusion inside Caracamuni tepui—the place where, thousands of years before Jacinta came to them, the ghost people had first found their sacred mushroom, eaten it, joined with it. Caracamuni was where they achieved the full myconeural symbiosis that allowed them to travel in mindtime, along the myriad branching parallel lines of their possible destinies.

The lines showed them their mission, generation after generation—even predicting Jacinta’s arrival and the role she would come to play in helping the ghost people sing their mountain to the stars. Inside this tepui a refugee people had settled for good. Why should they continue to travel through all the world, when their sacred mushroom showed them that all the world could travel through them? They had come home to go home for all humanity—to the home humans had never known and that had never known them.

Swept away in the otherworldly music of it, Jacinta sensed that the song was very close to completing itself now—conjuring at last a picture quite the opposite of the wild angelic contact ship’s arrival. Not an appearing in this universe but, this time, a disappearing out of it: the hole opening, the sky rippling and bending and funhousing with wave upon wave of light, a bubble bursting into heaven.

Awkwardly, distantly, Jacinta tried to translate what she was seeing into the varieties of theoretical faster-than-light travel methods she’d once encountered, in physics courses during her undergraduate days. Was what she was witnessing the creation of both sides of the particle/antiparticle pair in Bell’s Nonlocality Theorem? An Einstein bridge? Or some sort of super holographic wave function, disappearing here to reappear there?

Is the universe friendly, or not? That question—Einstein’s answer to a reporter’s query as to what was the most important question the great physicist could imagine—rose unbidden in Jacinta’s mind. In the closing of the ghost people’s chantsong, was she now looking at the future, instead of the past?

Around her the ghost people sang the long coda of what had been so long embedded in the genes of their particular cultural obsession: The code hidden in their totemic mushroom, the key for opening the transluminal door, the ticket-to-ride on the galactic rapid transit system. Fully aware at last that she would soon be leaving the world of her birth behind her, Jacinta felt herself reaching out toward her brother one last time.

Thinking made it so. She found herself looking out at the world through her brother’s eyes—and saw that time was passing much more rapidly in Paul’s world than in hers. With him she stumbled and careened up the long slantwise cave tunnel behind his flashlight’s madly bobbing beam, feet tangling in power cables leading to chambers where screens bled information from space into space. With him she tripped and fell and surged to his feet again, until brightness shone from around a corner and Paul found himself plunging headlong into evening light....

Snatching up his backpack and gear from where he’d left them at the entrance, Paul saw the sky above him shimmering—iridescent blues, salmon pinks. Panting hard, he hastily averted his eyes, focusing his attention on flat cloudforest green of the tepui’s deep central cleft, afraid to look into the tall strange chalice of that sky.

In the waning light Paul forded the flood that thundered away to falls at the southeastern end of the gorge. Making his way upward through the cleft now, through the drowned world of tepui cloudforest twilight, he surged at last onto the plateau’s barren, storm-swept top like a swimmer breaking surface after a long dive. Wandering only a short exhausted way through the maze, he shed his gear and radioed in to the local guide Garza and his men. Something in his voice must have confirmed the locals in their traditional fears and superstitions of Caracamuni, for their words seemed smug, condescending.

Collapsing beneath a ledge, Paul did not know whether he slept or not. The air around him thundered and the earth shook, and through it all he thought he heard the ghost people, singing and singing in the very rocks.

The next morning the hollow labyrinth on the tepui’s crown seemed a maze of inverted cave tunnels, or a brain and all its convolutions turned inside out by some topology-transforming supercomputer. After several hours of numbed walking, Paul strode free of the maze.

His guide Garza and his men, when Paul joined them, were full of horrified tales of apparitions and earth tremors and streams of lightning leaping up from the highest stones. They were overjoyed at Paul’s return—and the immediate prospect of their leaving. Their descent from the tepui’s top was swift, passing him in a blur. The weather co-operated, rains falling only lightly for a few hours, so that by mid-afternoon the men had descended the bulk of the tepui’s height. By evening they were on the lower ridge, making camp for the night, looking back at that mysterious height from which they had so recently descended.

Somehow, Jacinta realized, she and Paul were now in different timeflows, different relativistic frames of reference. A bifurcation had occurred, a cusp reached which made her think backward to the contact ship disaster and forward to a meeting with what had sent that ship so long ago. Despite the forking in time’s paths, however, her peculiar deep empathy with her brother persisted, even as it became more a strain to maintain it. In Paul’s frame—

—the sun had just set when it happened. The earth shook with such violence that the men were knocked from their feet and the forests below them seemed to toss like waves in a storm. The tremors calmed for a moment and, looking wildly around, Paul saw it: a great ring of dust about halfway up Caracamuni’s height. The tremors gradually stopped and from where he lay sprawled on the ground, Paul saw something that made him instinctively grab up his videocam and frame the scene in his viewfinder.

Caracamuni appeared to be growing taller. As its top continued to rise, though, he saw that it was not growing but separating, top half from bottom half, at that ring of thinning dust. In moments the top half had risen free and a space of clear sky intervened between the sundered halves of the ancient mountain.

Caracamuni was decoupling from the earth, rising smoothly as a mushroom in the night. Garza stood beside Paul, seeing it too, crossing himself and murmuring prayers he probably hadn’t said since he was a boy. After a time, seeing that framed in the viewfinder it looked like trick photography, cinematic special effect, Paul continued taping its ascent only out of habit, mostly watching it unframed, with his own eyes.

Jacinta too now sensed a shift in the ghost people’s singing. It had become less urgent and more dreamlike. In the waking dream the chantsong now induced, she saw Caracamuni tepui as the ghost people had always known it, skirted so persistently by clouds that it had long seemed an island of stone floating among them, one of that misty billowing company grown solid, wreathed in drifting fog and drizzle. Crowned by a forest of rainblack stones, the nutrients of Caracamuni’s soils had been ceaselessly pounded out of its top by incessant storms, until it truly embodied the paradox of a raindesert island above a rainforest sea. Caracamuni tepui had stood haunted and holy for eons, sanctified by isolation, until more than half the species on its top came to be found nowhere else on earth.

Now, at last, it was becoming the actual floating island its isolated inhabitants had long dreamed it would become. Now it was about to become more remote than ever. No part of all its uniqueness—none of its strange bromeliads and sundews and fungi—would be found any longer upon the Earth.

Dreamily, Jacinta remembered reading once that angels and photons, both traveling at the speed of light, sensed no passage of time, no time at all, an Eternal Now, from their point of view. What she was experiencing was not quite that, however—not yet. Remembering those long ago physics courses, she thought it was more like another type of bifurcation, the two spacetime frames surrounding an imploding star when it reached critical circumference. To those looking down from “normal” spacetime onto the star’s implosion, the implosion stopped and froze forever at the critical circumference, at the event horizon. But for observers on the star itself (if there could ever be such creatures) the implosion continued on and on, far beyond critical, all the way down to singularity’s infinite density and zero volume.

Jacinta vaguely wondered which side of what kind of singularity she would soon be standing on.

The anvil-shaped top of the mountain called Caracamuni was beyond the highest clouds when the sound hit the men in a great wave that drove Garza’s Pem”n assistants to bury their clenched faces against the bosom of the earth. It was a fearful, prodigiously powerful sound—

—but one which Jacinta had heard before, more softly. It was the song of thought strengthened by stone uncountable times.

Is the universe friendly, or not? Jacinta asked herself that question again, making it her own, trying to keep mental contact with Paul until the latest possible instant. Looking through her brother’s eyes at the mountaintop disappearing into the sky before him, Jacinta hoped her escape hatch would not prove to be a trap door.

The sun shone full upon the ascending mountaintop, now clear of earth’s curve, where the men lay in deep twilight below. Caracamuni was ascending in a bubble of force, its high waterfall plunging down only to spread out again in a broad swirl along the boundary’s edge. As the cave’s deep chamber stood ensphered in the stone bubble of its mountain, so too the mountain itself now stood ensphered in the bubble of force. From the mountain in its sphere a pale fire began to shine, increasing in intensity until—

Looking through her own dreaming eyes again, Jacinta sensed that she was on her way to discovering an answer to Einstein’s great question. No time like the present—

—in a brilliant burst of white light—

—to find out—

—the many fields of ensphering force dispersed—

—the present is like—

—the mountaintop disappeared—

—No Time.

—as silently and completely as a soap bubble bursting into a summer sky.

* * * * * * *

Unsteady Alteration in the Steady Constellations

Paul Larkin had come to Death Valley to get drunk, wander off into the desert, and disappear. The idea of it, when he was sober, had shone in his head: elegant, simple, hard and bright as diamond. He had felt tired for too long, too tired to continue with the facade of his life. Best to put an end to it at his earliest possible convenience.

He had awakened to an omen that very morning—or rather, from one. A vision in a dream, actually. Paul usually didn’t remember his dreams, but he woke up in the middle of this one, so he remembered it. In the dream he was sitting in an overstuffed armchair, talking pleasantly to two older people. Dreaming, he knew who they were, but when he woke he couldn’t quite remember. Maybe they were his parents.

In the dream he was conversing in that pleasant living room when he happened to glance over his left shoulder. There, standing in the archway to the darkened room behind him, half in shadow and half in light, were his Uncle Tim, who had died recently, and his sister Jacinta, who had been gone, disappeared, ten years now. Someone else he knew was also there, but he couldn’t remember on waking who that person might be.

He did, however, remember thinking in his dream, “Oh, these are the dead, standing behind me, watching and waiting.” That thought knocked him right back to consciousness. He was sure the dream had something to do with all that had happened to him recently—and with the prospect of the plan that had been forming in his mind for the past week.

Sitting in his dusty, battered car, he took another sip from the bottle of Edradour—“Single Highland Malt Scotch Whisky from the smallest distillery in Scotland”—which his Uncle Tim had brought back as a gift for him, years before. Tasting the warm, peaty sting and sizzle of the scotch lingering in his mouth and throat, Paul turned his attention to a piece of paper sealed in a plastic sleeve, lying on the seat of his car.

Breaking the seal on the plastic, he removed a carefully folded sheet of age-brittled white paper, upon which could be seen a dusty blue image like the photo-negative of a brain. It was the spore print he had first found in an envelope ten years earlier, buried deep in his backpack, after he emptied the pack on returning home from Caracamuni tepui.

Whether the spore print had been secretly planted there while he was in the cave, or during that last long night on the tepui top—and by whom—Paul did not know. He only knew that for a decade he had never been able to bring himself to make public the print’s existence. Nor could he bring himself to destroy it, any more than he could destroy any of his information on Jacinta. Information, as she had been fond of saying, is everything. Even information held in the limbo of the lost.

He had gone public with other matters from that time. Maybe too public. Ten years back, when he and his guide and native porters had returned from the tepui backcountry, they had told their story and shown their video recording of Caracamuni’s top lifting off, de-coupling from the Earth—to anyone who would listen, anyone who would watch.

Despite the fantastic nature of their story, or maybe because of it, no one really seemed to care. Another obscure piece of remote Amazonian real estate had disappeared—so what? That stuff was going up in smoke all the time back then. The kinder seismologists and vulcanologists interpreted their tale of the ascent of Caracamuni as an “anomalous volcanic eruption” and filed it away for future reference. Those less kind had interpreted Larkin’s short tape of the tepui rising as a video hoax, nothing more.

Fash’s anthropologists and archeologists, initially intrigued by what Jacinta claimed to have found on and in Caracamuni, cancelled their expedition. The controversy over the arrival date for human beings in the New World—to which Jacinta had contributed—continued unabated. The idea that a pocket of living-fossil Homo sapiens neandertalensis had survived into the present day on an isolated tepui in South America was dismissed out of hand. Those organizations that had granted or loaned Jacinta funds and equipment hassled Paul and his parents for a time but eventually wrote off both Jacinta and her failed expedition under something called a “forgiveness clause.”

After Paul’s brief emergency leave from KFSN—to take care of “family matters”—had ended, his employers expected to go on with his life as if nothing had happened.

Nothing but flying mountains. Nothing but mushrooms from space. Nothing but incredibly ancient indigenes and failed white goddesses gone native. Nothing but “forty-odd aboriginal astronauts and a crazed ethnobotanist as humanity’s first personal ambassadors to the universe.”

Taking another sip of the Edradour, he held the square of paper lightly, contemplatively, a relaxed arm’s length away. Symbol for him of all the events he had endured at Caracamuni tepui, the square of paper stood as well for all the pain and trouble those events and their telling had caused him since. Through the smoky haze of the scotch, he tried to remember who had first mentioned that “forty odd aboriginal astronauts . . .” et cetera phrase—had it been him? The media? The media quoting him, when he was still part of the media? Before the “trashy controversy” over his Caracamuni tape had cost him his first career as a broadcast journalist?

Now, the “flying mountaintop” story had cost him a second career, the one he had built laboriously built for himself over the past decade. The old sensational story had reappeared in the media and, in his refusal to disavow it, Paul had completely unraveled his career in Biology—all within the last four months. He didn’t want to think about it, but his mind kept going there, like a tongue to the empty socket of a pulled wisdom tooth.

Paul stared hard again at the spore print. His last card, the strange ace in the hole he had never wanted to play. He had played it, at last, but what good had it done him?

Two months back, desperate at being reduced to the status of “independent researcher,” Paul got in touch with Professor Phil Damon, who had headed his dissertation committee. Damon had been reluctant to help a tainted former student but he had, mercifully enough, listened to the story of the spore print and the bizarre fungus it might grow. Damon agreed to examine the spore print and have some of it plated out and grown.

Taking another smoky sip of the Edradour and examining the spore print now, Paul could see the blank area in the upper left hand corner. Almost six weeks ago, Damon and a mycologist colleague, in a chamber under a ventilation hood, had scraped spores from that corner of the paper, then shaken them onto a series of Petri dishes filled with various growth media, before handing the print back to him.

Three weeks into his testing of the fungus, Damon had called and quite unexpectedly announced that he had set up a meeting between Paul and Athena Griego, a “venture capital agent.” Griego claimed to represent a number of investors and pharmaceutical firms that might be interested in further research on the fungus.

Ms. Griego had turned out to be a very high-powered and intense woman in her early forties, small of frame but with the sort of preternaturally high-riding and large spherical breasts that suggested structural augmentation. During the meeting she had struck Paul as shady somehow, a wheeler-dealer, an operator. Griego had promised to get back to him in a week, but he had heard nothing since. Some sort of response was very much overdue. The agent, for all her signifiers of power and augmentation, had apparently turned out to be much talk and no action.

Yeah, he thought as he re-folded and re-sleeved the spore print, whatever string of good luck I might once have had, I ran it all out a long time ago. Taking up the bottle and getting out of the car, he wondered why: Why had he been so obstinate? Why couldn’t he have just kept his mouth shut about the tepui and what had happened there—from the very beginning? Why had he thought it so important for the world to know?

Maybe I’m just self-destructive, he thought. Maybe I’m doomed to crash every merry-go-round I make for myself, just as soon as I get it spinning up to speed.

As he staggered away from the car, Paul knew his stubbornness had to be more than just that. To bury the truth of what he’d seen at Caracamuni would be to bury the memory of his sister, to bring her disappearance closer to the death he feared that disappearance had already become. To turn ten years’ absence and “might as well be dead” into quite dead indeed. He didn’t want to bury Jacinta when she—or at least some part of her—might still be alive somewhere.

In his study at home, Paul had a desk drawer filled with memories, all carefully filed away. The specific details of his sister Jacinta’s life and death receded and faded and vanished, yet the emotions surrounding those memories grew always nearer and more powerful. He could not resolve the paradox of that, so he tried to live in it.

Through the sparse brush he staggered his way toward a sandy scarp he had seen while driving into the desert valley earlier in the evening. Looking about him at night and desolation, Paul realized that he had not done very well trying at living in paradox. Instead, he had tried to fill the empty space of Jacinta’s disappearance with work and study and research.

In the drawer at home with his memories of his sister there were also clippings and notes about quartz: fused from silicon and oxygen, the two most common elements to be found in the crust of Earth and Earthlike planets; harder than steel, fashioned into weapons for the past fifty thousand years; beloved by ancient Sumerians and Egyptians, Bedouins and crusaders, Oriental craftsmen, electronics manufacturers, shamans and witches, alchemists and New Age spiritualists. He read the notes and sometimes wondered about the source of humanity’s long romance with that rock.

Though it was certainly not his field, he had for the sake of Jacinta’s memory read with a certain dislocated interest the speculations that the indigenous Tasmanians, extinguished a few hundred years ago, had a Mousterian toolkit—and physiological features too that would later be described in terms of neandertalensis and soloensis.

In memory of Jacinta he also kept any notes and clippings he found about living fossils, the small groups of plants and animals that are the last living representatives of ancient categories of life, time-frozen creatures still resembling relatives that lived tens or hundreds of millions of years ago, even billions of years ago. Such creatures seemed to him undying memories in the mind of Life.

He stared again at the plastic sleeve and the folded paper that contained the spore print. Why had he guarded so closely the existence of this living fossil, if it was that? Why had he been so reluctant to release the spore print to the world, when he’d been so eager to show the videotape of Caracamuni? The spore print, if the ghost people’s mushroom could be grown from it successfully, would present at least the proof of a species never before known to science—although that alone, of course, did not require that anyone believe the whole strange story of the milieu from which the mushroom had come.

What else would the release of that spore print bring, though? He wondered, for the ten thousandth time, what his obsession with the print and the fungus it produced was really all about. Organic alien technology? Or a mask for his own fears of the death and decay of a loved one?

He thought about that. Was Jacinta’s disappearance—the singularity at the heart of the black hole of his obsession—pulling all his research and all his life inescapably down into its deadly gravity? Or was it only his own fear of mortality and meaninglessness, death as event horizon, from whose bourne no further signal escapes?

He tripped on a stone and fell. With drunkard’s luck he somehow managed to avoid landing on anything sharp. He was glad he hadn’t plunged face first into a jumping cholla or something equally nasty.

Looking and feeling about himself in the moonlight, he found he had landed in sand, amid the crisping remains of the ephemerals that had flowered that Spring. He grunted and took another swig of the Edradour, carefully putting the plastic-sleeved spore print sheet into his vest pocket. He felt remarkably clear-headed in his thoughts, despite what the scotch seemed to be doing to his physical coordination.

He pondered that mind-body split, then picked up a seed capsule from one of the blown flowers and rubbed it between his thumb and forefinger. The desert ephemerals had bloomed in great profusion all through the Spring, the result of the long rains. Jacinta had always loved the desert blooms, especially during El Niño years. The past winter’s rains had been the result of the fourth big southern oscillation since she disappeared. The El Niños were coming more frequently and lasting longer, or the climate had gone into a permanent El Niño cycle, as some claimed. Greenhouse warming making the weather more chaotic, extreme, unpredictable. Or something.

Looking at the intricate seed capsule in the light of the rising full moon, it seemed to him that the natural world possessed an old dreaming wisdom, deeper and more subtle than human knowledge. We’re arrogant upstarts, he thought, to believe our few thousand years of technology, our few hundreds of years of science, could be wiser than the wisdom embedded in the systems this planet has dreamed up on its own, over billions of years.

Wilderness is the great unconsciousness where the world dreams, he thought—setting off an inebriated cascade of ideas. Conscious creatures desperately need that. If we don’t dream we don’t learn. Evolution is life’s long unconscious learning. To wipe out species is to end learning. We’ve been burning the classrooms and killing the students for a long time.

Falling back full length on the sandy patch he’d stumbled into, Paul stared up at the night sky and drank down the last of the Edradour. The warm sizzle of the scotch trickled slowly through his body, moment after moment. A sandy-haired man trying to sink into the sand—that’s what I am, Paul thought with a smile.

The world is a given, he speculated to himself. Even death. All science and engineering have been reverse-engineering, when you think about it. Just trying to figure out how it’s all put together, how it all works. Maybe the goal of the mind is to engineer an escape from the mortal technology of the body. The way the nervous system and the immune system are hooked up together in the same network...maybe consciousness itself is a sort of super immune system, trying to develop immunity to mortality. Maybe in the end death does not conquer consciousness; consciousness conquers death.

“I must be drunker than I thought,” he said with a laugh, “to be thinking things like this.”

Thinking of Jacinta, however, he grew more somber. Tonight was the tenth anniversary of her disappearance. It was probably all too reasonable to conclude that she must be dead, by now.

At the thought of her death, however, Paul was never able to cry—at least not while he was awake. He had never cried for her, yet, whenever he thought deeply of her, he somehow always found himself on the verge of tears. He told himself it was all too deep for tears, yet he feared the tears might be too deep for him—that, once he allowed himself to cry, he’d never be able to stop, that it would break down the dam he’d built in his soul and overwhelm his small sanity in the flood of his grief.

Since Jacinta’s disappearance, he had “gone on” with his life, but differently. His destiny had gone awry, like a Jesus who wakes up to find he’s thirty-four and has somehow missed the crucifixion. Jacinta would understand about messiahs gone awry, he thought.

Paul didn’t know if there was quite enough of himself left over to cover up the hole in the universe Jacinta’s going had left behind. He had returned to the area near Caracamuni three years back, hoping to find a spot in space and time for mourning his loss, but the mountain he knew was gone, vanished. Space and time couldn’t fill the void.

He felt so full of emptiness. He did not know if he went on rushing into nothing, or if nothing went on rushing into him. He did know, however, that the only things that stood against the dark tide were his memories, bright shadows cast inside the stone bubble of his skull, soft-tissued fossils that refused to die.

He looked at the empty bottle and wished it were a loaded gun.

A nearby unsteady alteration in the steady constellations caught his eye and he glanced toward it. As he stared, he saw a shifting—like the bending of light in water, a rippling piece of the night sky—coming toward him. Constellations are hallucinations turned into explanations by tradition and education, he thought with a giddy drunken flourish.

But no. He stood up slowly, watching more carefully whatever it was that was approaching. His heart pounded and he thought irrationally of Jacinta returning.

The shifting piece of the sky was almost on top of him before it stopped, a droning whisper of engines whirring in the moonlight close above him. A bright light flashed onto the ground near him, then probed toward him.

Aw Jeez, Paul thought, I’m not drunk enough to be abducted by aliens.

Something like a cross between a gangplank and a jetway extended downward into the cone of light, toward him. Amazed, he lost his grip on the empty Edradour bottle. It slipped from his hands and fell to the sand.

“Hello, Dr. Larkin!” said an amplified voice. “Please come aboard!”

Paul reached up and touched a safety rail, just to make sure this was all real. At least it felt real. He began to step upward into whatever kind of craft it was that was hovering above him.

Two thirds of the way up the incline, the pluperfectly perky Ms. Griego, the venture capital agent, stood waiting on a step, beaming a smile of considerable wattage at him, above a midnight blue dress of a cut and style that might well have suited a stewardess aboard a low-altitude, high-speed, deep-penetration bomber of the 1960s.

“Congrats, Paul!” Athena Griego said, shaking his hand vigorously and practically hauling him up the last third of the incline. “Dr. Vang is so interested in your fungus’s possibilities he’s come to speak with you himself!”

Paul was bedazzled by more than just the sudden brightness of the light. The craft he had boarded seemed solid enough, yet also airy and diaphanous, as if the Great Airship of 1887 and the flying saucers of the second half of the twentieth century had met and mated, to produce this craft as their offspring.

“What is this thing?” Paul asked, bewildered as his eyes kept trying to readjust to the light. He stepped into what looked like a cabin in a spacious yacht, all dark wood inlaid with mother of pearl. “And who is Dr. Vang?”

“That would be me,” said a small Asian man in a very neat suit, coming forward to shake Paul’s hand. The man looked to be in his sixties. “I suppose the most important thing for you to know about who I am is that I have money to invest in research on your fungus.”

Ms. Griego ushered them toward an off-white sofa and wheat-colored chairs where a cup of coffee was already waiting for him. Paul glanced around. In the center of the room was an elliptically-shaped wet bar. Literally wet, for the mirror-backed pedestal that supported the bar also encased what looked to be a salt-water aquarium: a living coral reef with anemones and sea fans, crabs and shrimp, eels and other fish less extreme in shape but more extreme in hue—blues and yellows and greens and reds so vivid and radiant Paul was tempted to look for their power packs.

“And this...?” he asked, gesturing to indicate the cabin and the larger structure within which it was embedded.

“My mobile ‘home sweet home’,” Vang said with a small smile, sipping at his coffee. “My ghost ship, if you like.”

“Ghost ship?” Paul asked, sipping his coffee too, initially out of politeness if nothing else. Good coffee, though. Very good.

“I like my privacy,” Vang said, with a seemingly disinterested shrug. His voice, however, could not hide a certain pride as he went on to describe the features of his flying home. “Several of my companies were involved in building it. Technically, it’s a stealth airship. An ‘invisiblimp,’ if you like, though it’s more accurate to call it an invisible dirigible, since it has an airframe. The wind-duction system that propels it also gives it superquiet hovering capability. Its engines leave virtually no infrared signature. Its structure both absorbs and bounces radar away tangentially. Engineers at ParaLogics and Crystal Memory jointly developed a chameleon-cloth smartskin for it—protective coloration, fast-reactive camouflage. In a cloudy sky it’s a cloud, in a blue sky it’s a piece of blue sky. On a moonless night like tonight, it’s obsidian, a soft-edged arrowhead flecked with stars.”

Vang smiled at his turn of phrase, but Paul was looking into the space above the other man’s head.

“Built for you?” Paul asked, taking it all in. “Or for something a bit more covert?”

“If I answered that, I’d have to kill you,” Vang said with a little laugh. “One could speculate, however, that—unlike satellites, which pass high and fast over any particular point of interest—a ship like this might be able to go in low and slow, to linger longer over whatever one might be interested in....”

“How did you get one?” Paul asked, as he continued to take in the features of Vang’s private airship.

“Alas, for all its stealthy virtues,” Vang continued, “it was detectable by certain oversight committees, even hidden deep in the black budget. The politics of project funding shot it down before it ever went into production. I bought back the prototype.”

Paul sipped more of his coffee, puzzled. He had heard of ParaLogics—high tera- and even peta-flops machines, if he recalled right. Vang’s name was also obscurely familiar.

“But if your work is in aerodynamics and computing,” Paul asked, “I don’t quite understand your interest in the fungus I brought back from Caracamuni.”

Vang nodded thoughtfully.

“Are computing and mycology really that far apart?” Vang asked rhetorically. “Think about it. In my lifetime alone I have seen the Age of Code dawning. The instructions for organic life were deciphered with the cracking of the DNA code and the mapping of genomes. The instructions for artificial life were enciphered with the encoding of languages for digital and biological computing. Mushroom mycelial networks are a good analog for parallel processing. Together the biotech and infotech revolutions are transforming Earth into Codeworld. Which it always already was, of course. My associates and I are multidisciplinary enough to see the overlap.”

Paul’s eyes strayed toward the colorful fish swimming about the reef in the wet bar, but his mind was focused on Vang’s words.

“Associates?” he asked. “You’re not just representing yourself and your companies, then?”

Ms. Griego smiled her floodlight smile.

“Dr. Vang represents a consortium with a variety of interests,” she replied, glancing at Vang for confirmation.

“To what purpose?” Paul asked.

Ms. Griego looked briefly flummoxed. Vang broke in, freeing Athena Griego to depart from them and go on about some undisclosed business out of sight.

“Allow me to tell you a little story that may or may not be true,” Vang said, looking up at him. Paul shrugged and Vang continued. “When I’ve finished, consider me an unofficial source who will deny ever having told you the story I’m about to tell you. Let’s say that, once upon a time, there was something called the Cold War—a period when each side mirrored the horror of the other, both invoking doctrines of Mutual Assured Destruction. Let’s say that, during that Cold War, there were various intelligence agencies, whose work too, on whichever side, tended to mirror the work of their opposite numbers. Let’s say that, in their looking-glass world, groups on opposite sides of the mirror began making secret contacts with each other. All right so far?”

“I follow you,” Paul said. “Go on.”

“Let’s say further,” Vang continued, “that the motive for these contacts was a shared fear. At the time, these opposite numbers—very intelligent and foresighted people, mind you—were afraid one or another of the various powers would sooner or later start a war that would result in the planet being nuked to uninhabitable status. Let’s say further that, as a result of their meetings, they started working on what they called ‘depth survival.’”

“Which was?” Paul asked, staring into his coffee cup.

“An attempt to see to it that some remnant of human population and civilization would be preserved,” Vang explained, “even through the very worst of their worst-case scenarios.”

Depth survival. Paul thought of the old rumors of vast secret underground bases and covert subterranean cities—apocryphal tales which had flourished in the loonier reaches of Cold and post-Cold War paranoia. He quickly brushed the visions away with a mental sweep of the hand, however.

“But the Cold War ended,” Paul said, puzzled. “Where were your deep survival programs then?”

“Let’s say the security apparats’ mirror-horror world really did end, as you suggest,” Vang continued, quietly. “The Cold War and older Soviet-style socialism both collapsed, despite occasional atavisms. Biblical Armageddon and Socialist Utopia both disappeared from the radar screen. Where were the deep survivors’ reasons to keep on keeping on?”

Paul nodded but said nothing.

“Let’s say that, at that time,” Vang said, “the security organizations these deep survival programs were embedded in were themselves struggling to survive. Let’s say those organizations were metamorphosing from national security apparatuses into corporate espionage and international intelligence brokers.”

“Which they have increasingly become,” Paul said, pondering it.

“Perhaps,” Vang said without inflection. “Let’s say the end of the Cold War period forced those participating in the depth survival programs to take a very long view of the human future. From the perspective of their looking-glass world, when the mirror shatters, the shatters also mirror.”

“How’s that?” Paul asked.

Vang glanced thoughtfully around the cabin.

“Let’s say their think-tank experts looked around,” Vang said, “and saw that human beings were simultaneously becoming obsolete and a glut on the market. Let’s say they recognized—popular media fantasies notwithstanding—that, for a global civilization once past the threat of total spasm nuclear war, the more likely and immediate dangers are not killer asteroids or alien invasions but the daily ongoing destruction of habitat occasioned by human population growth and humanity’s own expanding powers.”

“The death of a thousand small cuts,” Paul said. “The frog in the pot under which the flame is being slowly turned up—too slowly for it to notice.”

“Exactly,” Vang said, pleased. “As far as planetary carrying capacity was concerned, let’s say the depth planners’ most reasonable projections placed global human populations deep into an ecocatastrophic overshoot phase fifty years from their time zero.”

“That’s glut—and maybe gluttony,” Paul said, with a nod, “but I don’t see the obsolescence.”

Vang smiled again.

“Even glut means obsolescence,” he continued. “For creatures like ourselves that can build artificial brains and alter DNA, ‘Be fruitful and multiply’ is an obsolete biological imperative.”

Ooh boy, Paul thought. Such ideas weren’t likely to make Vang popular in the Vatican, or Salt Lake City either, for that matter.

“But you mean the other types of obsolescence the planners might have contemplated, I suppose,” Vang continued. “Might they have asked themselves too whether, particularly since the nineteenth century, industrial mechanisms had already increasingly obviated the need for human muscle? In the twentieth century, didn’t informational mechanisms begin making many capabilities of the human mind superfluous as well?”

“I see your point,” Paul said, not considering the idea quite so philosophically as Vang had.

“Let’s say, then, their experts were forced to reconsider their scenarios,” Vang continued. “The older, deeper questions they asked themselves had been something like: Are we and our organizations good? Are humans good? The new questions might well have been different: not only what were they and their organizations good for, but what are humans good for?”

“I presume they came up with an answer,” Paul said, after a downing a strong slug of coffee.

“In their own way,” Vang said slowly, looking at the aquarium in the wet bar as if contemplating the possibilities hidden in its waters. “Maybe their own fears of the death and meaninglessness of their organizations got tangled up with their search. Let’s give them the benefit of the doubt, and say what they finally came to was the idea that human consciousness was our unique contribution—and our best hope for avoiding the doom of becoming the reef of our own shipwreck.”

“Reef?” Paul asked, then shook his head. “I don’t quite follow you.”

By way of answer, Vang got up and walked toward the wet bar, with its enclosed coral reef. On impulse, Paul got up and literally followed him, taking his cup of coffee in hand.

“Do you know how a coral reef grows, Dr. Larkin?”

Paul crouched down and looked at the miniature reef in Vang’s bar.

“Coral polyps,” Paul said. “Soft-bodied creatures, coelenterates—kind of like jellyfish, only they settle down and secrete stony skeletons around themselves. The old skeletons are what most of the reef is made of.”

“Exactly,” Vang said, pleased in an almost teacherly manner, “except that the polyps are actually excreting the calcium that goes to make up the stone of the reef. Like most marine organisms, they have to dispose of excess calcium, so why not use it for building? They’re not the last animal to turn a waste product into a resource, either. Not by a long shot.”

Although he could have done without the lecture on a fine point of invertebrate biology, Paul nodded.

“We humans,” Dr. Vang continued, “when we hunted and gathered, used to be rather like the jellyfish, nomadically drifting about the world. Eventually, however, we settled down and begin to secrete cities and civilizations around ourselves. Think of the ‘reef’ as the growth of human populations throughout history, along with our ‘excretions,’ all our trash and toxins, all the buried cities beneath and just outside our cities. The reef is the conversion of what is ‘not us’ into us and our products. The reef is that something reaching toward the light, as the past it is built upon sinks slowly deeper into darkness. The ‘ship’ is the full set of possible human scientific and technological capabilities. The ‘ocean’ is the medium of spacetime.”

Paul stared at the colorful reef in the tank, not yet catching Vang’s meaning.

“But what does it mean to say we will become the ‘reef of our own shipwreck’?” he asked, still trying to puzzle out that saying’s weird non-dual duality.

“What if we don’t learn to turn all our rubbish into resources?” Vang said. “What if our reproductions and toxic productions outpace our capacity for invention? What if our biology and our technology converge in a mutually destructive fashion? What if we persist in our deep denial of the paradoxical fact that our very success as a species is the single greatest threat to our future survival as a species?”

Suddenly Paul got what Vang was driving at. Watching the pleasant play of fish round and about stone, he suddenly saw the underwater scene more darkly, as if an unseen cloud had passed across the face of an unseen sun.

“Then the ship will crack up on the reef,” he said quietly, “spewing toxins that will kill the reef in turn. A pretty grim scenario.”

“Potentially, yes,” Vang said. “The two best alternatives to it would seem to be either learning to control the rate of the reef’s growth or, failing that, leaping out of the ocean entirely, toward that ‘light’ beyond space and time that we’ve always been growing toward. That’s where your fungus comes in.”

Paul stood up—still a bit wobbly, despite the coffee—trying to imagine coral polyps leaping from the ocean and flying like pulsing jellyfish toward the sun. He looked at Vang.

“Sounds like you’re talking about either something for controlling population growth or for travelling faster than light,” Paul said with a small smile. “I really have no idea how that fungus I brought back could help with either one.”

“You don’t?” Vang said, as if he didn’t quite believe Paul. The older man walked into the ellipse of the bar. “My associates and I do. We have several ideas—and we are willing to pay you quite lucratively for the right to investigate those possibilities.”

Vang gestured at a thinscreen document which had at that moment appeared in the top of the bar. Paul scanned the document, which read his eyes as he read it, so that it obligingly went to the next page each time he finished the previous one. The document, he saw, was a contract between Paul Larkin and something called the Tetragrammaton Consortium. The contract made Paul both a consultant and senior research scientist with Tetragrammaton, in addition to paying him quite handsomely for the right to patent any materials extracted from the Cordyceps fungus he had brought back with him from Caracamuni tepui. The amounts of money involved were extravagant beyond his most avaricious dreams.

When he had finished reading the document, he straightened up, stunned.

“Does the contract not meet with your approval?” Dr. Vang asked, concerned.

“Wha—?” Paul asked, disoriented. “No, it’s fine. Generous.”

“Good, good!” Dr. Vang said. “But then, what’s the problem?”

“I’m not sure,” Paul said. “It’s just that this is all happening so fast, like some kind of anti-James Bond scenario.”

Vang smiled broadly, pleasantly surprised by the Bond comparison. Maybe it brought up some kind of memory from the old man’s childhood, Paul thought.

“How exactly do you mean?” Vang asked eagerly.

“Instead of the billionaire telling Bond how he intends to destroy the world and kill Bond—” Paul began.

“Here I am, another billionaire, telling you how I intend to save the world,” Vang said, nodding enthusiastically.

—and give me a reason to go on living, Paul thought, though he did not say it.

“Right,” Paul said. “I guess what we’ve talked about smacks of the same sort of great man’s conspiracy theory of history, for me anyway. I’ve never believed in such theories. People just can’t plan that thoroughly, or keep secrets that long.”

Vang smiled slyly, but then covered it with a shrug.

“The greatest conspiracy is the one that says there are no conspiracies,” Vang said, handing him a phone. “Think of this as a conspiracy for good, if you like. We have taken the liberty of running the contract past your lawyer, particularly in regard to the clauses on intellectual property rights. We have her on the line. Here—”

Vang handed him the phone. Paul talked to Sarah Campbell, his legal advisor in the all-too-recent debacle with his former university employer. She very much approved of the contract and spoke forcefully in favor of it. Paul handed the phone back to Vang, who nodded and gave it to Athena Griego, who appeared again in her B-58 Hustler stewardess’s dress, seemingly out of nowhere.

“Ms. Griego is our agent and witness in this matter,” Vang continued, handing Paul an electronic stylus. “If you feel confident enough of the document to sign, please do.”

Without another thought and with only a glance at the fish in the aquarium, Paul signed. Vang smiled broadly and shook his hand again.

“Welcome aboard indeed, Dr. Larkin. Happy to have you with us. My ghost ship is at your disposal. We will send someone for your car. Where would you like to go?”

“West,” Paul said, lost in thought. “Oh, and I left an empty bottle of Scotch on the sand when you stopped for me. If someone might pick that up—”

Vang nodded. The sound of the invisible dirigible’s engines rose slightly as it pivoted on its axis. The spore print, folded in paper enfolded in plastic, hung lightly over Paul’s heart inside his vest pocket, invisible with Paul inside the belly of Vang’s stealthy machine, heading west at a tenth of the speed of sound, rising into night above the Sierra Nevadas.

* * * * * * *

Weird-Wired

Jiro sat bolt upright. He knew that he was dead, but his mouth still worked.

“!begursprocketbombonanacatl?” he mouthed. He was trying to say how, if you try to throw your arms around the world, they’ll nail you to a cross and say it was a workplace accident because you were employed as a carpenter. “?losangelatintinnabiledictu!” He thought he was saying how, if you try to communicate your uncomfortable piece of the truth, they’ll assassinate you for it for your own peace of mind.

“Jeez, Jiro!” Seiji said angrily from his bed in the dark bedroom they shared. “You’re talking in your sleep again! Wake up, for God’s sake!”

“Wha—?”

“You were talking in your sleep,” Seiji said again. “Go back to sleep.”

Silence. Then Jiro blurting, “Was not!” before he fell horizontal again. He felt his eyelids closing, but now he fought against sleep, trying to make sense of his night visions.

He had dreamed of a religion of flowers, not a religion of blood. A religion of bees, not a religion of ashes.

He’d better not tell anyone about it, he thought. He still remembered how, back in second grade, he had scandalized the nuns at Guardian Angels School when they found him wandering around on the school playground with his arms stretched out like a soaring bird, like an eagle dancer, like Christ on the cross. The nuns were supposed to be brides of Christ, but apparently they preferred their spouse safely gone from the flesh—and they’d carefully punished Jiro for his imitation reincarnation of their groom.

Maybe he really was “weird-wired,” as the neighborhood kids in every neighborhood he’d ever lived in had so often suggested in their not-so-subtle ways. Always their had been the strange mismatches, the overlaps, and double exposures in his picture of the world. The nights of sitting suddenly bolt-upright in bed, spewing streams of seemingly incoherent speaking-in-tongues gibberish, were bad and never infrequent enough—it drove his brother Seiji crazy—but that was nowhere near the beginning of his problems.

Even as a small child he had not just seen and talked with imaginary friends but had experienced flashes of entire alternate realities, leakage from parallel worlds and other people’s dreams. He had never been able to put together what his parents told him with what the world told him, either. For as long as he could remember, whenever any reference to sex came up on the TV, in movies or holos, his mother always shut it away from her boys. Surely there must be something dirty and evil there, for his mother to always react so, but he had never been able to figure out precisely what it was.

Jiro remembered a greenhouse summer evening six or seven years back, when he’d been tagging after Seiji and a neighbor kid, Rudy, as usual. When Seiji began to talk with Rudy about girls, Jiro had run home shouting and crying, “Mom! Mom! Seiji and Rudy are talking about sex!” After that, Seiji had looked at him with a mixture of fear and disgust.

He was shy and backward and awkward. In the one-size-fits-all world, Jiro just didn’t fit in. He didn’t like seeing his own face in the mirror. Something about the widow’s peak in his dark, wavy hair, the wide-open innocence (always too soft and too lost) that his brown eyes imparted to his too-round face—all boyish to the point of femininity. He was good-looking for a boy, but too girlish to look like a man.

In two years, when he finished his undergraduate degree in Computer Media Studies, he would be eighteen—a precociousness that hadn’t much helped. The mismatch was worst when it came to girls and dating and all the indecipherable rites of twenty-first century courtship. He pedestalized the girls from afar, unable to approach them. In his mind they were pure as bright shining light—brilliance that he would never dare darken with the shadow of his lust.

Jiro took refuge in books and the net and the life of the mind. In his research and reading he had found a term for his condition: “socially maladroit.” Ever since he entered his teens, he had withdrawn more, cocooned himself. Socially, he had gone into cybernation, but that was okay. More and more people his age were doing that. All the experts said they would grow out of it.

This was a world worth withdrawing from, what with the rise of the churchstaters and all. He glanced at one of Seiji’s obnoxious glow-in-the-dark holoposters, which showed a montage of humanity’s wars, murders, mayhem, fanaticism, famine, plagues and pollution, all being watched by wide-eyed, antennaed young aliens, the cautionary caption reading PROFESSIONALLY TRAINED STUNT SPECIES! DO NOT TRY THIS ON HOME PLANET.

That about said it. The more arcane and the further away from mundane existence he got, the better. For years Jiro had been fascinated by birds, and from them he came to be intrigued by eagle dancers—then generally fascinated by Native Americans, by indigenous peoples of the New World and their lifeways. The walls of his side of the room were covered with full color holos of birds of prey, crowded with external memory media about New World indigenes. He had participated in online debates about the first arrival of humans in the New World, the old controversies surrounding Indian gaming, the reality or hoax of the South American tepui that had lifted off a decade and more ago—all manner of things distant enough to distract him from his daily life.

With his brother Seiji he had tried to talk about his problems, but he’d never gotten very far. There seemed always to be a wall of enforced normalcy between them—a glass fishbowl wall, which made a certain sense, since Seiji had been intrigued by tropical fresh and saltwater fish and by fishbowl-helmeted astronauts for as long as Jiro could remember. To Seiji’s aquarist-astronaut way of thinking, any problem the Yamaguchi brothers could admit to having was the product of their being happa—half Nipponese, half Anglo—in what was still largely a Caucasian-dominated culture. Add to that being raised male with a docile daddy and domineering mommy and that could explain a multitude of problems, at least according to Seiji.

If Jiro felt that the world leaked dreams, that he dreamed in other people’s heads and other people dreamed in his head—that was simply paranoia,by his brother’s reckoning. Seiji was particularly big on the once-repudiated but now revived theories of “schizophrenogenic mothers” and “marital skew.”

“It’s no surprise we’re mentally bent,” Seiji said. “Home environment plays an etiological role in the development of schizophrenia—especially when a father has yielded to a dominant mother, so that the father doesn’t provide a strong masculine role model for the male child.”

Jiro suspected his older brother was parroting what he had heard in his Intro to Psychology course. That was too simple an answer, however—especially when the renewed popularity of such “Blame Mom” theories was really more about keeping women in their place than anything else. Jiro soon stopped looking for answers in that psychosocial direction. Someday he might get desperate enough to seek them there again, but he hoped not.

He searched through print and screen and the whole infosphere for answers—from science and religion, theology and technology. He suspected that his experience of this leakage of dreams between minds was an effect of something much deeper—of something he could only describe to himself as a unity in the universe, profound and undeniable, always there, no matter how hard it might be to pin down.

That was not what he found in his research, however. From his searching it seemed to him that, over the past century and more, bleeding-edge theology had been pushing toward a religion without transcendence, and bleeding-edge technology had been pushing toward a transcendence without religion.

He flirted with the idea of joining the Cyberite sect for a while. Their great myth was a messianic faith in the power of media—the idea that, if a correct-thinking band of rebel do-gooders could just take control of all global media for a few minutes and in those few minutes broadcast The Truth to the entire planet, all humanity’s problems would be solved. Jiro quickly came to suspect, however, that the Cyberite myth failed to take into account the fact that most people—when hit with too much confusing or uncomfortable or abrupt truth—quickly fall back on their established prejudices to do their thinking for them.

The more traditional religions weren’t much different. Media, Gospel, Logos: what was the difference, really? For all the traditionalists’ talk of original sin, it seemed to Jiro that sin was never very original. Mostly, it seemed to be copied from parents and friends and neighbors and the whole social world, as far as he could tell. He searched the infosphere for a sustainable religion—one whose first law was not “Make more disciples!”—but he was damned if he could find one.

All the traditional systems seemed to reduce human life to a chain-letter sent by God or Global Operations Director or DNA. In one form or another, the missive prophesied that, if he followed the genetic generic rules and kept the Message going (Procreate! Propagate the faith! Expand market share!), Good Things would happen to him, his stock would split and rise in value, he would go to heaven. But woe to him if he ever broke the chain of double-helical commandments—Bad Fortune would befall him, his stock would crash, he would go to hell.

So much of theology was so full of tautologies, it seemed to Jiro, but even that was to be expected. The world’s religions, in their various ways and paths to The Truth, had about them the false eternity and infinity of an endless march along a Mšbius strip, and Mšbius strips always made a one-sided argument. Purely materialist science wasn’t the way through either. An event horizon of perpetual approximation, a reference-frame illusion clothing a star’s collapse down to the unknowable nowhere and nowhen of naked singularity, the reductive scientific approach seemed to him at best a black hole promising to someday explode with The Answer—though its fuse, unfortunately, was calculated to be far longer than the lifetime of the universe.

Still, he hoped that, buried within the dogmas of religion and the theories of science, he would find some strong hint of the sustainable and sustaining faith of which he dreamed. His search had so far proved fruitless—and profoundly frustrating. Tomorrow, he thought sleepily, he would post something about his search in the infosphere. If others tried to flame him for possessing a moral compass askew from their own versions of the due and true directions, well, it wouldn’t be the end of the world. Thinking about what he would post, Jiro grew slowly more content and settled in his heart.

The end of the world, he thought sleepily. So many ways in which the world can end. So few in which it can keep on going—only differently. If there was to be a close to the Great Day of the world, Jiro planned to stay past The End to watch the credits scroll up the sky. In the meantime, he could still believe in a religion not of blood but of flowers, a world that did not assassinate and crucify but lovingly embraced all the many pieces of truth it contained—even if such a wonderland could as yet be realized only in his dreams.

* * * * * * *

Bowling with Death

Driving out of Wyoming, Mike Dalke’s car scared loose a swift-running mob of pronghorn antelope from beside the road. They were beautiful, running beside the car, pacing it with a grace no construct of metal and polymer could ever hope to match. Tears came to his eyes. He had never seen them like this before. He feared he would never see them again.

He could never go back home again, certainly. Not given the way he had left.

Mom had been enraged, irrational, ranting about how her boy’s mind must have been seduced by the secular humanist conspirators—the poisonous alphabet soup of ACLU, NAACP, NOW, etc., with Hollywood producers and even Unitarianism thrown in for good measure. Dad watched quietly out of his usual prescription-tranquilizer evening funk.

“What do you mean you’re moving out?” his mother shrilled.

Mike put down his rucksack and faced the blonde fury of his mother moving to physically block his path.

“Just what I said, Mom. I’m moving to the west coast. I’ve transferred from Christian Heritage University to California State University at Humboldt. I want to do my graduate work there.”

“Well you can just ‘untransfer’ yourself right now, genius!” she spat. “You’re always thinking of yourself—what you want to do. Think of your parents and what we want you to do, for once!”

“I never stop thinking of that,” he said with a weary sigh. “No more. I’m going to live my own life now. You can’t live it for me, and I won’t let you.”

“Your own life! Your own life!” Mom mocked, suddenly brandishing an eight-inch-long kitchen knife before her. “I’ve given my whole life for you boys! Waited on you hand and foot! And this is the kind of gratitude you show me? Oh no—no son of mine is going to move out until he finishes college or gets married!”

She jabbed toward Mike with the broad meat-slicer’s blade.

“Honey!” Dad cried, startled, but Mike was already moving, deflecting and taking his mother’s cutting hand, using her own momentum against her the way the Christian Martial Arts teacher at CHU had showed him. He brought his fist up and slugged his own mother hard on the jaw before he really knew what he was doing. The blade skittered across the floor. She crumbled against one wall and burst into tears.

Dad put a restraining hand on his shoulder. Mike shrugged it off.

“You only waited on us hand and foot to bind us hand and foot to you,” Mike said bitterly, bending down to pick up his rucksack as his mother sobbed and maoned against the wall. Behind him, his younger brother Ray was witness to it all, but Mike had been too angry to say anything to him, too angry for farewells.

He regretted that now. Who knew what kind of tweak seeing such things might put on his younger brother’s head? But Mike had to get out. Living at home had been like living underwater. Each day he felt his airflow being cut off a little bit more. Soon he would have woken up dead and not even noticed.

No, there was no going back. Not since his car had broken down east of Wendover, Utah. Not since he’d had no choice but to sell it to the Salvia div-chewing mechanic/tow truck operator who had hauled him and his vehicle into town. Not since he’d stuck out his thumb in the late-afternoon light and gotten picked up by an ancient four wheel drive station wagon hauling a rental trailer.

At the other end of the station wagon’s bench seat now sat a heavy-set guy with steel-rimmed specks and long gray hair down to the middle of his back (but was, nonetheless, also scrupulously clean shaven). The driver, which he was, had recently become an ex-Information Technology administrator from the university in Bozeman. Mike didn’t catch his full name—Brewster, Schuster, something like that—but the gray-haired man in plaid shirt and brown pants and blue gimme cap was clearly trying to forget his own woes through permanently altering his state of consciousness.

“I took it with what grace I could,” said the defrocked administrator, passing Mike a burning flat-pipe of marijuana somewhere between Elko and Winnemucca. The gray haired man suddenly laughed. “The university bureaucracy is a real hippo hierarchy.”

“How’s that?” Mike asked, curious despite himself, absently scratching the brownish-blonde goatee he’d begun growing not long before he left home and which was still at the itchy (or at least unfamiliar) stage.

“Hippopotami range themselves in a river current according to status,” the older man explained. “The highest ranking individual takes a position alone and furthest upstream, facing upstream. The rest of the hippos fall into tiers and denser numbers downstream, though they’re facing upstream too. Each hippo has a short, flat, paddle-like tail which it spins like a propeller when it defecates. That breaks up its dung into a cloud of fragments.”

Mike laughed at the image, but didn’t quite get it.

“How’s that fit a university bureaucracy?” he asked.

The man with the long gray hair inhaled deeply from the pipe and held the smoke a moment before answering in a constrained, smoke-conserving voice.

“The lower the rank of a hippo the more dung comes hurtling at it from upstream,” he said, exhaling at last. “When the hippo shit hits the propeller, the consequences flow downstream.”

They laughed at that. Mike guessed it was pretty much true of hierarchies everywhere.

“How about you?” the man with the long gray hair asked, uncapping a bottle of vodka. “What’s made you a gentleman of the highway?”

Mike told the older man more of his own story than he had initially intended to: his troubles at home, his father’s psychological problems, his decision to transfer to a different college out of state and away from home—as well as the crisis that decision had precipitated. The gray-haired man remained quiet until they were well west of Winnemucca.

“Here,” the driver said at last, breaking up a capsule and tapping its contents into the vodka. He swirled the bottle. “I put a little KL in this. Good for what ails you. It’ll help you forget about the latest explosion in your nuclear family.”

Mike didn’t know what “KL” was, but he took a healthy swallow of the vodka. It had an unexpectedly bitter, alkaline taste.

“That phrase, ‘nuclear family,’ is more descriptive than you might think,” the older man continued. “If you head just about due south of here you eventually cross into what used to be the Nevada Nuclear Weapons Test Site. E = mc2 and all that. In most ancient creation myths, ‘energy’ is male, and ‘matter’ is female. Yang and yin. Bright and dark. Even the words: ‘energy’ is from Greek roots meaning ‘at work,’ and the Latin root of ‘matter’ is mater—mother.”

“Yeah?” Mike said, not making the connection. “So?”

“So Einstein’s mass-energy equivalency is a real gender-bender,” the driver said. “Energy, the male principle, is equivalent to mass, or female matter, times the constant of the unbreakable law, the speed of light, squared. Maleness is femaleness raised by the Law times itself.”

“And the Test Site?” Mike asked, wondering what he’d gotten himself into, hitching a ride with this guy.

“The detonation of the first nuclear device—at Trinity site in Los Alamos, not Nevada—that was a supreme yang moment,” said the older man. “Manipulate enough female matter in the right way and you can produce a blast of male energy. All the Nevada nuclear blasts were little boys emulating the Fat Man, our own little Test Site imitations of the primal wank, the Father-spurt of the Big Bang.”

The driver gave him a sly, sideways glance. Mike laughed.

“I don’t think you can gender-blenderize it quite that much,” Mike said, trying to be serious.

“Why not?” the driver asked. “Humans sexualize everything, especially since Freud. Do you think it was just a coincidence that when human beings first set foot on the Moon—a heavenly body associated in most cultures with goddesses and femaleness—all the original explorers were male and the program was named after Apollo, a sun god? The Apollo astronauts were white-garbed priests of the Sun God, arriving in burning chariots to claim dominion over the female Moon. Yang over yin, see?”

Weird stuff, Mike thought, but what he said was, “One person’s technology is another person’s symbol, I guess.”

“Exactly,” the driver said, nodding. “When I lived in San Francisco, there were these big round-topped concrete pillars that were put in place as barriers to traffic flow, near parks and such. South Asian immigrants began garlanding these traffic piers with flowers and pouring offerings of milk over the tops of the damn things. Know why?”

“Not a clue,” Mike said. Whatever it was the driver had put in that vodka, it had begun to make him feel woozy, disoriented.

“For those immigrant folks, the traffic piers were lingam symbols and became impromptu shrines,” the driver said. “Or just look at the cross. For the Romans crucifixion was a capital punishment technology. The Christians made it a sign of martyrdom and resurrection, the central symbol of faith. Kind of like worshipping an electric chair or lethal injection table.”

In the rock-of-ages Rocky Mountain states where Mike had been living most of his life, such thoughts were heresy—things that good people just didn’t say. Although he had rejected the rigid faith of his parents and their neighbors, Mike still found the driver’s analogy rather repugnant.

The driver seemed to sense something of his passenger’s distaste. For whatever reason, he fell quiet. Very soon, however, Mike was too preoccupied with the things going on in his head to notice the driver’s silence. The colors of the sunset clouds to the west were alive, breathing and pulsing and writhing. Ahead, buildings got up from their foundations and walked into the highway, then quickly scurried back to their rightful places before Mike and the driver could run head-on into them. The driver seemed not to notice.

“Hey,” Mike said at last, “what did you say that stuff was you put in the vodka?”

“KL,” said the driver, smiling. “Ketamine lysergate 235. Also known as ‘gate.’ Either name is just as good. The latter name is slang and the former’s probably a code name of some sort. The chemistry of it is most likely some weird tryptamine derivative—nothing to do with either LSD or ketalar, if you ask me.”

“Natural?” Mike asked, thoughts lava-bubbling in his head. “Or designer?”

“Extracted from a mushroom,” the driver said. “Strange history, though. Gate, the chemical, has been in circulation for a decade and more that I know of, yet the mushroom it supposedly comes from has only started showing up fairly recently. You’d figure it’d be just the opposite. Why do you ask?”

“Because,” Mike said, taking a deep (and deeply worried) breath, “I’m either hallucinating—or losing my mind.”

The driver chuckled.

“Most likely it’s the former,” the gray-haired man said, not quite reassuringly enough. “Be careful, though. Keep your set and setting in mind. I suggest you seek out someplace you find familiar and comfortable. You’re about an hour into it, so figure three more to go.”

Mike looked at the driver carefully.

“Why?” he asked nervously. “Are you going someplace?”

The driver frowned momentarily.

“I assumed we would be splitting up in Reno,” the gray-headed man said. “I’ll be heading south down 395 toward San Bernardino, and you’ll be heading north toward Humboldt. Reno seems the logical place to part company.”

Mike nodded. The old man was probably right. That, however, didn’t make him feel any less uneasy about being dropped off, alone, in an unfamiliar city, and in an altered state of consciousness.

Night fell and deepened. The driver told Mike his theory about KL’s provenance, how the chemical extract might have come into circulation before the natural source did: “Maybe they—whoever they are—originally got a small sample from a medicine man somewhere in the jungle,” the driver speculated, “but then couldn’t find the true source for a while.”

After that, however, the driver didn’t have much more to say. His thoughts seemed to be elsewhere. Not far from the I-80 and Nevada 395 interchange, the driver exited and pulled over to let him out. Mike hefted up his rucksack from the back seat of the station wagon and reached into his back pocket for his wallet.

“No, no,” the driver said, turning off his engine. “You don’t owe me anything. I appreciated the company. You might want to spend a little time in Reno, though. Come down from the KL a bit before you go back on the road. A few hours, anyway.”

“Okay,” Mike said, shouldering his gear. “Thanks. Have a safe drive.”

The gray headed man nodded and touched the bill of his cap in salute.

“Right,” he said, switching the engine and lights back on. “See yourself a new now.” The driver must have noticed Mike’s quizzical expression, for he explained—or thought he did. “Envision a better present. The future may be too late.”

Mike smiled and nodded. The driver pulled his vehicle and trailer back onto the road, headed down Nevada 395. Mike turned and walked down the street. No other cars or people were about. Here off the highway, the place seemed eerily quiet, deserted. An empty city with all its lights still on.

The emptiness touched a deep chord in Mike. He remembered the insomnia he’d suffered through as a little kid, crying night after night because he couldn’t sleep, crying because he feared he was the only creature left awake in all the universe. That was a terrible and frightening burden, to be so awake and so alone, in haunted solitary freefall down the well of night, the fall growing worse the longer it went on. The loneliness had seemed to rush faster and faster upon him, until he feared he would overshoot the lost world of sleep completely, never rendezvous with it again, just crash and burn on the desolate surface of some dark star of eternal wakefulness.

Shaking the memory out of his head, Mike walked past discount stores and strip malls, thinking about the driver with his talk of nuclear bombs and astronauts, symbolic technologies and technological symbols. He thought of the gray-haired man driving through the night, into and through towns of people he would never know.

Mike stared up into the night sky, looking for those few bright stars and secret satellites that might shine down on him, despite Reno’s star-killing fog of ambient light. Up there somewhere was the old international space station, hanging above the earth for as long as he could remember. Up there, too, construction was underway on the first of the new orbital habitats. He wondered which would be lonelier—looking down on empty cities with all their lights still on after some great depopulating disaster, or looking down and knowing that the cities were filled with billions of people you could never really know.

From a certain height tragedy ceases to be tragic, Mike thought, remembering it only as a quote from some philosopher or other. Maybe that numbing loftiness was the greatest tragedy of all—the tragedy of gods and vast, impersonal, technorational societies. Maybe that was why people were trying to build little communities out there in space, human-made planetoids to shrink the world back down to human scale, so ordinary people wouldn’t feel quite so much like ants under a wanton boy-god’s burning glass—test subjects in a daily scientific experiment indistinguishable from mere cruelty.

Returning his gaze to the street, Mike noticed that he was quite a distance from any major casinos. The nearest buzzing place was Reno Lanes, a bowling alley a block ahead, toward which he quickly made his way.

Once inside, Mike couldn’t tell whether the place was retro or just hadn’t been remodeled since the 1950s. Garish neon and tacky furniture pummeled his senses from every angle. He seemed to have walked into somebody’s dream-vision of funky atomic futurism. The space before him was carpeted in star-spangled black, with blue and lime lines weaving back and forth in a pattern as haplessly meandering as a drunkard’s walk home. Metallic orange-and-avocado cutouts of hyperBohrian planetary-orbital atoms, giant children’s balls-and-jacks, huge asterisks without accompanying footnotes—all stood bolted onto the silvery papered walls. The starscape ceiling was chandeliered with tailfinned rockets and ringed planets. Muzak from another dimension played over hidden speakers.

Taking a seat in a pucker-upholstered booth, Mike soon realized that the music coming over the speakers was thoroughly unrecognizable, weirdly distorted, reverbed, misdigitized. As he glanced at the menu, he wondered whether the KL was causing him to experience auditory hallucinations, or the bowling alley’s speaker system was monumentally screwed up, or both. Whatever the cause, it was a very discomfiting experience.

A woman, garbed and made up like a waitress in Ming the Merciless’s favorite Marsside cafe, asked Mike what he would have. The exhaustion in the thin, overworked woman’s voice was faintly reassuring—an anchor of reality in the surreal world ballooning all around him. He ordered a shake and fries. When she turned toward the kitchen and left, he was sorry to see her go.

There was only one person bowling, someone dressed in what, at this distance, looked like an orange prison jumpsuit. Even a solitary bowler’s game was more than noise enough for Mike in his current state, however. The dopplershifting of the ball rolling down the lane began to say strange things to him—the mouthed and muttered echoes, in some benighted crowd, of unseen actors speaking from a hidden stage, talking of mind viruses and science fiction religions and human fertility cults, telling him that the stars are gods and we are their ashen tears.

Are alien abductions the Zeus rapes of our time? the dopplershifting asked him. Are humans the consciousness of the planet who kill the planet they are conscious of? Is a nervous breakdown like hitting the Reset or Restart button on the psyche?

Is the gravediggers’ dirtpile the positive of the gravehole in the ground, or is the gravehole in the ground the positive of the dirtpile, viewed from the other side?

His food came, blessedly breaking him out of the hastening downspiral of his thoughts. Mike ate, trying to concentrate on nothing but what he was eating. That activity, at least, was enough to fill his senses and his mind while the experience lasted.

He had just finished eating, laid out his money for the bill, and leaned back to relax and digest, arms outstretched atop the curved back of the booth, when someone tapped him on the shoulder.

“Hey,” said a pale, hippo-corpulent man dressed in orange prison coveralls, “want to bowl a few frames? Knock ’em dead?”

Mike stared up at the man. His complexion was the color of bloated meat maggots. His eyes, behind his steel-rimmed spectacles, were the yellow-brown of grub worms’ heads. His visage squirmed under long, wild, muddy gray-white hair that seemed as unhealthfully alive as a nest of poisonous snakes. The man and his appearance struck paralyzing fear into Mike’s heart, so much so that he could only nod mutely in response to the bowler’s request.

The pale, bloated bowler watched diligently as Mike traded his street shoes for bowling shoes, then signed for Mike to follow him. Walking along past the empty lanes, Mike could not help noticing that the pins were in fact people frozen in the same rigid, repeated stance. The bowling balls in the returns, too, were human skulls.

Once they reached the lane on which the bloated bowler had been warming up, the game began. They bowled frame after frame. Mike felt terrible as he bowled each skull down the alley and sent the rigor-stiff pin-people flying—especially when he glimpsed the ghoulish, robo-zombie pinsetters working behind the scenes, then the reaper’s scythe coming down and clearing the pins at the end of each frame—but he bowled his absolute best nonetheless, sensing that quite literally everything was at stake.

His pale, bloated opponent grew more and more furious as Mike maintained a slim lead into the final frames. At last the corpulent competitor could bear it no longer. In fit of rage the bloated, maggot-skinned man snatched off his glasses, ripped off his own head, stuck his middle and ring fingers into his eye sockets and his thumb into the mouth, then gave the ball of his head a carefully aimed and mighty heave.

The flop-haired ball roared down the lane, shaking the whole building as it went—or rather, the world was shaken by the thunder not of one ball moving down one lane, but of infinite and innumerable bowling balls moving down infinite and innumerable lanes. The instant all those myriad balls struck their ten-times- myriad pins, a mighty blast obliterated everything, the explosion hurling Mike cruciform into the air, sending him flying until his left shoulder caught on something.

“Hey,” said someone, shaking his shoulder. “Sir. Sir!”

Mike woke to see, bent toward him, the waitress and a balding man in a dandruff-speckled suit with a tag that said KARL, MANAGER. Karl was shaking his shoulder and talking. “We’re glad you liked our food and feel so comfortable here, but if you want to go on sleeping you’re gonna have to find a hotel. Okay?”

“Yeah,” Mike said, rubbing his eyes and mouth, looking around. The bowling alley was empty, except for the three of them. No one was bowling. “Okay.”

Getting his gear together, he glanced at his watch and saw that he’d been asleep for nearly two hours. Getting up to leave, he noticed that the bowling alley now looked far more tawdry than surreal. Mike thought he must be coming down from the KL the driver had given him—a realization that brought him much relief, but also a little regret.

He had trusted to the kindness of strangers and it had gotten him a night out bowling with Death. Are we having an adventure in moving yet? Mike asked himself with a smirk. He’d had enough adventure for one trip, and enough trip for one adventure. Before he walked out of Reno Lanes, he asked the waitress for directions to the nearest bus station. She was only too happy to provide them.

* * * * * * *

A Shadow on Her Present

Catching Marty blissfully slow-convulsing on some perverse mix of alphanumeric chemicals—“delta nine and 5-MeO DMT,” as his trip-sitting derelict buddy Rick explained—had scared and infuriated Lydia at first. Now, however, with Mary okay and Rick ushered out of the apartment, Marty’s secret drug escapade and Lydia’s own unexpected return from a weekend out of town had combined to provide her with a pretext for something she should have done weeks before.

“I’ll do whatever you want me to do,” Marty said, pleading with her.

“I don’t want you to do whatever I want you to do!” Lydia said, shaking her curly dark hair vigorously about her head, letting him hear the frustration rising in her voice.

She looked at Marty and saw his eyes filling and reddening to a very different color than his full head of red hair. Oh God, he was starting to cry on her. Obviously, their sleeping together for the last month and a half had meant considerably more to him than it had to her.

“Look, Marty,” she said, taking him into her arms to comfort him and also so she wouldn’t have to see the tears that were beginning to trickle down his face. “I’ve really enjoyed the time we’ve had together, but your drugging out and hanging around with Rick just confirms what I’ve been thinking for a couple of weeks now. Your life’s just too chaotic. I’m afraid it could never work. I need stability in my life right now. We can’t keep going on this way. I hope we can still be friends, but we just aren’t compatible in the long run. You can see that too, can’t you?”

He blubbered something that sounded affirmative. She gave a slight sigh of relief. This might turn out to be easier than she’d expected. She hugged Marty and comforted him for a while longer, thinking that she would never have gotten involved with a man nearly half a dozen years her junior—a second year graduate student in comparative literature, at that—if she hadn’t been on the rebound from breaking up with Tarik.

Not that breaking up with Tarik had been a bad thing. Lydia had lived with him for nine years, after all. It had been because of Tarik that she’d moved to California from the East Coast in the first place. He’d wanted to pursue his ambitions as a folk-punk musician and she had been his overweight and insecure “biggest fan.” Not long after their arrival, she and Tarik had survived and bonded more deeply together amid the devastation wrought by the Great Los Angeles Earthquake, the so-called Niner Quake.

Both of them had seen the madness of bright-shining angels and UFOs at that time—and had been deeply relieved to learn that, the statements of UFO or angel believers notwithstanding, those sightings were most likely not supernatural but natural, side-effects of the earthquake’s sudden tectonic stress relief. The slippage of all those miles and depths of granite, with its embedded quartz, had piezoelectrically generated high-amplitude electromagnetic disturbances. The concomitant electromagnetic energy bursts had affected the interpretative cortex in the temporal lobes of hundreds of thousands of individuals—Lydia and Tarik among them—causing them to see lights and angels in the sky.

Even that strange bonding had worn off eventually, however. Living through the Great Quake and its aftermath had changed her. Her own dormant ambitions had reawakened. Within weeks of the quake, she took up running. She lost forty pounds in six months. She kept running and kept the weight off. She enrolled in a joint graduate program in biochemistry and paleontology, working toward a doctoral specialization in paleogenetics. Her presentations and articles on her work with DNA samples, taken from the Harlan’s ground sloth remains at Rancho La Brea, had made a big splash at Page Museum conferences and in the online journals. Her future seemed assured.

Tarik’s career, meanwhile, had gone absolutely nowhere. His folk-punk ethic made both the idea of working a day job and the idea of achieving financial success as a performer equally distasteful to him. The fact that Lydia’s own brother, Todd, was a success in the music industry only made things worse. To Tarik, Todd Fabro was “that pop sellout” and he bristled at any offer of help from that quarter. Tarik was determined to be an artiste endlessly perfecting his art for his art’s sake—while Lydia supported both of them.

Once she’d finally decided that living with him was worse than being alone, Lydia made up her mind that they should dissolve their household and—over Tarik’s truculent and petulant objections—they had. Freed of Tarik, however, she found that she did not much like being alone. She didn’t like it at all.

Temporarily homeless, Lydia found herself living on her friend Kathryn’s living room futon. Above and beyond that, her research was threatened. The recently elected “New Commonweal” majority in Congress, along with the NC governor in Sacramento, had begun to shut off funding for any further research at Rancho La Brea, on the grounds that the tar pits research was “Darwinian” and therefore inherently “anti-Biblical.”

As far as Lydia could tell, the New Commonweal interpretation of the separation of church and state held that, if government moneys could not be used to promote religion, neither could they be used to attack religion. On coming to power, the new churchstaters slashed funding for any research they interpreted as supporting an evolutionary viewpoint. Lydia only hoped she could finish up the last of her doctoral research before the New Commonweal people took over the government altogether and prohibited outright any and all further research at the tar pits.

In the midst of all this personal and political turmoil, she had met Marty, tall and muscular and handsome, as well as charmingly innocent and naive in ways Tarik had never been. Marty was Kathryn’s office mate in Comp Lit, which was how Lydia had met him. He was single, quite unattached, a big happy overgrown boy. She had gathered him to her with astonishing swiftness and ease, and he had served as an anodyne to her loneliness—at least for a time.

Now, however, she sat hugging and rocking the big (and, at the moment, unhappy) young man in her arms on the edge of the bed, wondering how she could have stayed involved with him as long as she had. True, for a while he had been a good hedge against Tarik, who had kept showing up at odd times for odd reasons. Lydia had fantasized more than once that they would fight over her, but it had never happened. Now that Tarik had at last moved back east, it was less likely to occur than ever.

Even as she attempted to soften the blow of her dumping him, Lydia knew that she did not need Marty any longer. He was in fact turning into something of a burden and embarassment. Tomorrow she was scheduled to move in with two of her fellow female doctoral candidates, so she would no longer need to be living with Marty in order to have a place to stay. Her soon-to-be-roommates, too, had already let Lydia know that in the mate-selection races they thought she could do much better for herself than her current boytoy.

Now, with the recent slight thawing in attitudes from Washington and Sacramento, the tar pits and the Page Museum did not seem quite so likely to close down before she finished her doctoral research, either. Things had begun looking up for her. Gazing at the mirror opposite the bed, Lydia Fabro saw the gray that had already begun to shimmer in her dark curls, here, too soon after her thirtieth birthday. Time to start tinting and highlighting that right out, she thought. That would take care of that. She didn’t need to sleep with a young master’s candidate to boost her self-confidence any longer—and she’d be damned if she were going to support Marty through graduate school the way she’d already supported Tarik for years.

One more night, she thought. Maybe a farewell fuck for the sake of friendship and old times, but come morning she’d be done and Marty would no longer be a shadow on her present—only a memory from a quickly receding past, a fantasy of secret recklessness for that foreseeable future in which she had begun to grow a bit bored with the stable and responsible Mister Right she fully believed she would eventually marry.

Before Lydia had even finished comforting Marty, she was already living in that future, he was already in the past.