Better Angels (17 page)

“Consciousness theory is theology of mind,” Paul said with a shrug. “A consciousness not embodied in human flesh, however, probably wouldn’t be a human consciousness.”

Vang made a spluttering, half-laughing sound.

“You dualists!” he said. “You’re all the same. You want it both ways. You say human beings are not mechanisms, then you turn around and say the mechanism of the body is what makes us human!”

Vang sipped at his coffee. Paul watched as they came in closer to land. They were definitely headed back toward the harbor, he realized.

“And why shouldn’t consciousness theory be theology of mind?” Vang began again, looking into his coffee cup. “Science and religion, at their best, are complementary. Science is the cup, faith is the coffee, the self is the drinker. Buddha woke up and smelled the coffee.”

Paul smiled at the pun, but Vang was already gesturing at the bay around them.

“Look at the waves on the sea around us, Paul,” he said. “The wave rising out of the ocean is time rising out of eternity, becoming rising out of being, evolution rising out of creation. The wave rises out of the ocean and descends into the ocean, again and again, without beginning and without end.”

Appreciating the heat of the sun, the cool of the spray, the vigor of the wind and the strength of the boat, for a time they lapsed into silence.

“Do you know what Tetragrammaton means?” Vang asked at last.

“The four letters of the Name of God,” Paul said. “Either IHVH, or JHWH, or JHVH, depending on which tradition you follow. Yod Heh Vav Heh. Jehovah, Yahweh. The Endword. The ‘Word To Shake The Foundations of the World.’ The ‘Word That Ends The World.’ The final incantation which, spoken and performed correctly, destroys the universe. In the beginning was the Logos, in the End will be the Tetragrammaton.”

“Ah,” Vang said, “but do you know the tradition of the Lesser Tetragrammaton, the Archangel Metatron?”

“No,” Paul said, discerning the jetty at the harbor’s mouth in the middle distance. “I can’t say I have.”

“An enormous being of brilliant white light,” Vang said, gesturing broadly. “Highest of the heavenly hierarchs. Prince of the Divine Face. Angel of the Covenant. King of the Angels. Supreme angel of death and teacher of prematurely dead children in paradise. Charged with the sustenance of the world. The writer of truth, the scribe who records all that happens in heaven. Youngest and greatest of the angels, because Metatron once lived as the human patriarch Enoch, but was transformed into an angel rather than created as one. That’s the ultimate goal of the Tetragrammaton program, Paul. Angels travel at only the speed of light. FTL travel, virtualized humans, ensouled robots, conscious starships: they’re all about the transformation of human beings into better angels—through technological transcendence.”

Building better angels? The idea struck Paul as arrogant in the extreme. Megalomaniacal. Yet Vang had voiced it so calmly. It made Paul desperately want to shake that calm, cosmic hubris out of the older man.

“Then why have you gone about it in such a hellish fashion?”

Vang looked at him narrowly.

“What do you mean?”

“I’ve checked the structure for KL 235,” Paul said, trying to keep his anger and rage from betraying itself in his voice but not quite succeeding to the end. “It’s one of the supertryptamines we’ve isolated from Cordyceps jacintae. How it came to be in circulation thirty years before I turned that fungus over to you I don’t know, but as early as 1982 Medusa Blue began using certain university hospitals and medical centers as fronts for giving selected women treatments with KL 235—as a ‘uterotonic’. Not exactly informed consent. People on the Medusa Blue payroll pumped KL to those women and their wombs during the embryonic development of their children. They turned thousands of women into long-period schizophrenics. Warped their lives, bent their kids, destroyed their families. All for the sake of building ‘better angels’, as you put it. Was it worth it, Dr. Vang?”

Vang looked away. He pressed a stud on the railing, then tapped a few more keys before he spoke. A 3-D virtual, showing a black plaque inscribed with a golden timeline, sprang into space near them in the bow.

“As I mentioned earlier,” Vang said dryly, “I am an inheritor of the world of Tetragrammaton and Medusa Blue—not an initial creator. I have a debt to the old intelligence agencies, which I willingly pay. They had their own reasons for doing what they did initially. It was the Cold War, after all.

“This timeline answers some of your questions. The history of the supertryptamine codenamed KL 235 begins here, in 1978. Dr. María López-Renjillián, an ethnobotanist, obtained a much-degraded sample from an Ecuadorian curandero.” Vang glanced at his speechless guest. “You didn’t really think the ghost people of Caracamuni were hermetically isolated from history, do you? They must have left their tepui from time to time. How do you think they got all that Brazilian quartz for the collecting columns, the ‘information drivers’ you mentioned in your report, hmm? Dr. López-Renjillián’s find was apparently a result of that limited commerce.”

Vang pointed further along the timeline.

“The only supertryptamine extracted from the initial sample was the now much-discussed KL. During the early 1980s, when the synthetic became covertly available, there was considerable secret interest in it, initially as a battlefield hallucinogen. When that didn’t work, emphasis shifted to its affect on paranormal abilities, so-called ‘psi’ powers. That’s when the uterotonic exposures began.”

Vang turned away from the virtual timeline and gazed at the harbor mouth as they approached it.

“The rest you know,” he said. “In the 1990s there was a considerable upsurge in funding for ethnobotanical field research. Much of it was supposedly to find and catalog medically useful substances before the indigenous cultures that possessed them disappeared, along with their rainforest environments. A considerable portion of that funding, however, also had its ultimate source in the intelligence communities. Not least of their concerns was the locating of the fungus from which KL had come. Your sister Jacinta accomplished that pinpointing in ‘02, though Cordyceps jacintae did not become available to Tetragrammaton and Medusa Blue until you turned it over to us in 2012.”

Vang watched distractedly as his big boat turned into the channel beside the jetty.

“Medusa Blue, without a doubt, did a lot of very questionable things,” he said. “In utero exposures. Surreptitious injections. Much was learned, but perhaps it could have been learned in other ways. Even you must have noticed, however, that the other supertryptamines we’ve isolated from Cordyceps jacintae—part of what you described as the ‘myconeural complex’, in your report—have not escaped into the world via Medusa Blue or Tetragrammaton. Those days of covert chemical campaigns are over, now.”

Paul shook his head vigorously.

“Only formally,” he said. “The newer supertryptamines, even the mushroom itself, has gotten out. You must have seen my memos on the subject, to anyone who would listen at Lilly-Park. I told them not to let it get loose, but the intelligence commandos and the corporate money-men Tetragrammaton is joined at the hip with—do you think they listen? You know better than that.”

Vang said nothing, just switched off the timeline and watched his boat move slowly down the harbor channel.

“Not only have we dislocated the mushroom from its environmental and cultural context,” Paul said, “but in the name of international insecurity first and now corporate profit, people are still being exposed to the supertryptamines who have no framework at all for understanding their effects. The indígenas of Caracamuni tepui had an entire ancient mythological and cultural framework to plug their sacred mushroom into. Street kids or college students doing ‘gate’ in a back alley or a dorm room—what have they got to fall back on? Vague ideas about the sort of mind-set and ambience appropriate to taking KL.”

Paul shook his head in sad frustration.

“We’ve created thousands of long-period schizophrenics,” Paul said as the boat turned toward its berth. “Paranoid infojunkies who spend all their time grubbing information to patch together their private conspiracy-worlds. Blown catatonics staring endlessly at their own mental wallpaper—”

“Old news,” Vang said dismissively. “The supertryptamines are becoming illegal worldwide. There are pharmaceuticals available for treating schizophrenia and catatonia, at all events.”

“Every generation believes it has found the cure for schizophrenia,” Paul replied sourly. “How convenient. In letting the supertryptamines escape into the streets, we’ve given a whole crop of people a new world of symptoms they will have to medicate to alleviate. The pharmaceutical combines that pumped out the supertryptamines while they were still legal are the same ones that will pump out the ‘cure’ once the supertryptamines become fully illegal. Profit-taking at both ends.”

As the boat eased into its slip, Vang turned toward Paul, a hard look on his face.

“You seem intent on seeing me as some sort of thalidomide-LSD-BZ Mengele,” the older man said, subdued anger in his voice. “A demonic embodiment of all sorts of ills for which I don’t even bear responsibility. So be it. Dr. Larkin, we can delineate links between genetics and environment and the function and dysfunctions of the human mind until the Final Judgment. You asked me before, was it worth it? I’ll tell you something: If I had been in charge during the worst excesses of Tetragrammaton and Medusa Blue, I would do it all over again. Our mission is that important.”

Paul looked at Vang in disbelief as the crew made fast the yacht’s mooring lines.

“You’re going to create your world of faster-than-light angels,” Paul said, “even if you have to kill a million people to do it.”

“Ten million!” Vang said. “A hundred million! The long term survival of the human species is at stake. Earth is too small a basket for humanity to keep all its eggs in, but if we have to break a few eggs to save the rest, we’ll do it—and gladly. Mark my words, things are going to get very dark, very soon. Even the completion of the first stage of the orbital habitat is just a minor ray of light in a darkness that is much more encompassing. We’re at a catastrophic cusp in human history.”

“For Tetragrammaton, you mean,” Paul said. “You’ve got a Worldgate-sized scandal on your hands. There’s no way you can cover it up.”

Vang laughed and began walking his lunch guest toward the stern.

“We won’t have to!” the older man said with manic assurance. “Tetragrammaton’s woes will very soon be back page news. Much bigger things are about to break. The worst, most atavistic forces will come into their own before it’s over.”

“What?” Paul asked, genuinely taken aback.

“The current US constitutional crises over separation of church, state, and government funding of science,” Vang said, “over the US government sharing military command structures with international agencies and organizations—that’s just the beginning. Within a month or two, as soon as conditions are right, there will be a massive attack on the infosphere. Too much freedom there, you see. Has to be quashed.”

“That can’t be done,” Paul said. “The infosphere is involved with just about everything.”

“Precisely,” Vang said with a nod. “The breakdown will undoubtedly be indirectly responsible for many deaths, but it will be blamed on a terrorist electromagnetic pulse bomb, or a particularly strong solar storm, something like that. The majority of the global infostructure will go down for a while, and then it will come up only selectively. Digital counterrevolution. Covert apocalyptic aggression. Out of the ashes of the old American order will rise a new theocratic regime bent on ‘cleaning up’ American society, fully believing they can establish their ‘rule and reign’ for a thousand years. It’ll make the original New Commonwealers—for all their ‘dominion theology’ and ‘Christian Reconstructionism’—look enlightened by comparison. You had better beware, for your own sake.”

Vang stopped with Paul at the ramp leading from the yacht down onto the dock.

“I think that’s all we need to discuss, for now,” Vang said, too breezily. “Let’s see, though: I forgot something. What could it be? Oh, yes, that’s it. I forgot to kill you!”

Vang laughed heartily, pleased perhaps by the symmetry—apparently closing Paul’s relationship to Tetragrammaton with a Bond reference, just as that relationship had initially been opened with a similar reference.

Paul found the joke an eerily uncomfortable one, nonetheless.

“Just kidding, Dr. Larkin,” Vang said with a broad smile. “I mean you no harm. You won’t be in the Tetragrammaton Consortium’s employ after today, so we can’t protect you from what’s coming. I still need you, however, perhaps more than I know. Just as you need me. You’ll keep getting your royalty payments for turning over the tepui fungus to us. We may even meet again in the future. Until then, I bid you farewell.”

A strong armed chauffeur appeared from nowhere to escort Paul down the ramp and dock, toward the waiting limousine. When, halfway down the dock, Paul glanced back over his shoulder toward the good ship Txiv Neeb, Dr. Vang was still smiling and waving.

* * * * * * *

Experimental Treatment

Not a disturbed sense of self, Jiro thought, but a disturbed self doing the sensing. Words apparitioning as visual and spatial presences, colored and imaged, mobile and alive. Inner experience occurring in a different sequence from external reality—

“So you’re ready to dance with the dolphins?” Todd Fabro says. The rock-god shaman with the new cure, as Seiji describes it. Shipboard MediTox, then priming on Ibogara for the dolphin ultrasonic therapy.

Jiro sees his mother rushing toward him through the Honolulu air terminal, an eager blur of Nordic blonde smotherliness, while his father follows more slowly behind.

Going home again is always also returning to the scene of the crime.

Jiro spends more and more time “doing the dead man’s sink,” particularly when there are dolphin pods about. Primed by Fabro’s treatment staff, he plops overboard in full dive gear and swims down among the dolphins, while Seiji watches worriedly from one of the Treatment Center’s small boats at the surface.