Better Angels (2 page)

“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.