Better Angels (27 page)

Mike awoke to find himself sitting bolt upright in his bed/cubicle, in the converted laboratory space that functioned as CMD’s impromptu dormitory. The dream had left him dazed. It was so vivid, however, that it also left him obsessed with the question of its reality.

He shook his head and rubbed his eyes. In the dim light from the bathroom, the mirror on the wall across from him showed him staring back at himself. The same man, crippled inside, who had been gurneyed into the hospital. Perhaps less wiry-muscled now, more bleary-eyed. Shorter hair, more winter in his beard. But still himself.

He wanted to dismiss the dream vision, make it go away, but it was too lucid, too detailed, too real. Too other. And yet, simultaneously, too much himself, as well. The mind in the mirror.

If those creatures he had met were real, Mike wondered, why had they taken the form they had—instead of just streaks of light, say? If they had taken other, more unfamiliar forms, would they have been so other, so unfamiliar, that he would have been unable to know them at all? Wasn’t the fact that he’d been given a shot at being the initial guinea pig for this new crystal memory material—wasn’t his entire recovery itself—a miracle? The simultaneous action of Chance and Necessity, as those in the Culture had put it?

He mentioned the dreams and voices enough the next day for the techs to be concerned and pass it on up the chain of command to Schwarzbrucke himself. By mid-afternoon Mike found himself sitting across from a company psychotherapist, Dr. Cynthia Marin, who nodded and asked slantwise questions and scribbled notes and shrugged back the long fall of her dark hair.

Mike told her in depth about his dream vision—or at least in as much depth as he felt comfortable talking with her about it. By the end of the session, however, Marin’s psychology-priestess demeanor had annoyed him enough that he cancelled his second appointment with her. He knew no one would complain, so long as his work for the company progressed steadily.

It did. Yet the dream vision persisted, or at least returned, again and again.

The denizens—citizens? Netizens?—of the Culture didn’t even wait for him to fall fully asleep the following evening before they made contact again. The second time Mike was ready. They’d been worried by what had happened during the prior contact, but his imperative response now reassured them. Something there was in their natures that responded positively to commands. They were more than happy to serve as his army of intelligent agents.

The command he had ready for them was simple but challenging.

Explore any and all links between the Mongrel Clones motorcycle gang and law enforcement personnel in southern Oregon and northern California.

The breaking-off and re-establishment of contact, the tentative beginnings of his greatest detective work—that was nearly two years ago, now. He had bided his time, and in that time had learned much about the men who had battered him—and about Dr. Richard Schwarzbrucke and Crystal Memory Dynamics, too.

Especially, though, he had learned about the “little people,” the “machine-elves,” the “reef angels,” the “underwater jungle monkeys,” as he had often and variously pictured them. Coordinated throughout the entirety of Earth’s infosphere, their Culture, hidden away in its Deep Background, could bring to bear computing, simulation, and predictive powers that made teraflop and petaflop speeds—the trillion and quadrillion floating operation points-per-second of the world’s fastest individual supercomputers—look like pebble scrapers and antler awls by comparison. The reef angels’ reality-simulating powers made chaos and nonlinear dynamics only a slightly subtler form of order. Butterfly effects could be exploited, dissipative structures created, steered, aimed....

“Well, Michael,” Dr. Schwarzbrucke said when he came again for Mike’s decision, showing Mike once more the cocooned and tentacle-faced form of his possible livesuited future. “To abandon the body, or not to abandon the body?”

That was the question, wasn’t it? Mike thought. Would what came out of that cocoon float like a butterfly and sting like a bee? Like a jellyfish? Like butterfly effects from innumerable floating operation points, stinging like incalculable swarms of bees?

Only one way to find out. Only livesuited could he gain the full involvement in the infosphere, in the Deep Background, that his testing, and his justice, would require.

Suit me up, he flashed Schwarzbrucke across the interface—a connecting space, he knew, that would soon grow to chasm, separating him from all other mortals.

* * * * * * *

Oil-Blackened Bones

Crawling on her belly through the drainage culvert under Ogden Avenue to the west of Hancock Park, Lydia had to remember not to nod or shake her head in response to anything Jiro might be saying. Any vigorous movement of her head sent the focus of her headlamp bouncing everywhere.

“Any plans for what we’re going to do if we get caught?” Jiro asked in a loud whisper from where he crawled along behind her.

“We won’t get caught,” Lydia said quickly,
sotto voce
. “Look at all the good luck we’ve had so far. My key still worked in the lock on the grate cover. We didn’t even have to use the bolt-cutters. Once we get to the other end, we come up on the floor of the park’s streambed—inside the perimeter fencing.”

The bouncing of the light from Jiro’s headlamp told Lydia that her partner in trespass had nodded his head. He coughed, too—from following along behind her, poor guy, in the dust kicked up by her passage along the leaf-littered and dry-silted bottom of the culvert. All rather uncomfortable, this crawling along underground in the heat of a late summer L.A. evening, along a concrete culvert, dressed in boots and work coveralls—the last not nearly as form-fitting as their trashdive drysuits had been, but very nearly as hot and sweaty.

She and Jiro had a strange bond, no doubt about that. In the months since he had saved her from her own carelessness at the Trashlands excavation, the two of them had grown both closer and further apart than they had been before that episode. Something had happened in that rescue, a boundary crossed that could not—and would not—be transgressed again. He was too shy to push the line, and she was too wary to give him any sign that he should.

Struggling on in the arduous belly-crawl along the drainage tunnel, Lydia thought that his shyness was unfortunate, actually. She had to admit that she found the lanky, absent-minded Jiro attractive in an odd sort of way. She had fantasized occasionally that he might have made an interesting last fling, now that she had found Mark.

But no. Jiro was just too shy and inward—still a big, socially awkward teenager, at some level. His place in her heart and mind had to be relegated to her darker, more secret and remote fantasy of two men fighting over her as she watched—a role for which Jiro, in particular, was manifestly unsuited. She could only be truly serious about a man who was more mature, more socially sophisticated, more outgoing, more goal-oriented and—yes, assertive and aggressive. Maybe a bit hot-headed. Hot-blooded and passionate, certainly.

A proper degree of sensitivity was a nice trait to possess, but if a man was too sensitive...she found that a nuisance. Their age difference, too, only exacerbated matters. Feeling no desire to play mommy to a man in his twenties, Lydia was secretly relieved that Jiro would soon be heading back to MIT to continue his doctoral work, not to return before winter break at the earliest.

Mark Hatton was all Lydia had been looking for: a mature, ambitious, successful, mustachioed blond-haired blue-eyed man of about her own years—as light and outward as Jiro was dark and inward. Given how well the two months’ dance of their courtship had gone so far, Lydia was certain that she would not have to wait forever for her relationship with Mark to crystallize into something permanent.

She had never mentioned Mark to Jiro (or anyone at the Project, for that matter). Aside from telling Mark the story of the trash pit rescue, Lydia had not breathed a word about Jiro to her new love, either. That story in itself had seemed to unaccountably annoy Mark. As a result, Lydia had found she was less likely than ever to mention the name of her co-worker to her lover again.

Yet here she was, with Jiro, doing with him something that was important to her—and which she was sure she could never have done with Mark, her prospective Mister Right. Lydia could just hear Mark deriding this small adventure as a “crazy escapade”, “frivolous”, and perhaps “dangerous”.

“I’m surprised this culvert is as big as it is,” Jiro stage-whispered behind her, interrupting her thoughts. “You’d think they wouldn’t need a drainpipe this size coming out of the park.”

“It’s to handle the runoff from the winter rains,” Lydia whispered back. “This area of the L.A. basin has been crisscrossed by streams and marshes for the last forty thousand years at least. And good for us, too. We wouldn’t be able to crawl through this pipe if it were much smaller.”

“Thank heaven for small favors,” Jiro said sarcastically. “But what should our strategy be, in case we get caught?”

Lydia sighed and paused in her belly-crawling.

“I presume you mean ‘caught’ by the authorities,” she whispered, grumpily, “and not ‘caught’ as in stuck in this culvert. In the highly unlikely event that we should encounter anybody once we come out on the surface again, we’ll just put a politically appropriate spin on what we’re up to.”

“Such as?” Jiro asked, half coughing and half speaking.

“Such as,” she explained patiently, “this: Realizing from my tenure at the Tar Pits the dangers posed by evil Darwinian stuff still here and—having undergone a profound religious conversion—I found myself bent on committing a little holy vandalism in order to prevent these Satanic materials from falling into the wrong hands or further corrupting the minds of the youth.”

Jiro gave a stifled laugh behind her.

“Nadarovich himself wouldn’t chastise you for such an undertaking, I’m sure,” he said, “although he might not agree with your methods.”

They crawled a few body-lengths more before Jiro blurted out another thought.

“What if we do manage to retrieve this skull and shoulder blade you mentioned?” he asked in a deep whisper. “What then?”

“As long as Nadarovich and his Elect are in control,” Lydia said, “then nothing. Why incriminate ourselves? When the CSA begins to break up, then, if the new government is more pro-science, we’ll say we trespassed here in order to preserve an important scientific finding from destruction at the hands of religious fanatics.”

They crawled a short distance further.

“Turn off your light,” Lydia said. “We’re pretty close to the end of the tunnel now.”

They turned off their lights and crawled in darkness for the last several body-lengths. The hole ahead, which had been darkness at the end of the tunnel when their headlamps had filled the tunnel with light, was now transformed as their eyes adjusted. The black hole now became their only source of light, weak as it was, errant photons leaking in from the ambient lights of the city beyond the end of the culvert, beyond the edge of the park.

Crawling the last lengths and emerging into the night at the bottom of the dry, walled streambed, Lydia and Jiro stood up inside Hancock Park, itself a dark space surrounded by the city’s streetlights and partly-lit office buildings. Only the County Museum of Art section of the park was not fenced off and closed to the public. The rest was still locked down as tightly as the day Lydia had left it. The two of them climbed up the short wall and out of the dry streambed, Lydia leading the way.

Once back on the level ground above, she headed northwest in a quick, crouching run, Jiro close at her heels. Making their way past the locked buildings of the old Pit 91 Viewing Station and the Observation Pit, they came to a knee-high “roof,” the cover that sealed Pit 129. Clambering onto that low roof, they at last located the hinged, locked access cover over the square hole in its top—an assembly that served as both trapdoor and escape hatch for Pit 129.

Lydia unlocked the access cover and they both climbed down the steep ladder-steps to the floor of the excavation pit. Not that it was really a “floor,” she thought, once they were inside and had turned their headlamps back on, so that she saw the pit’s interior again after all these years. The “floor” was actually a chaos of overlapping boards serving as walkways and gangplanks onto or scant inches above the sticky asphaltic matrix. The matrix itself was a gray, white, and black jumble, cracked and seamed like a view of river deltas from space, the scant black “rivers” here being fine seeps of groundwater mixed with asphalt. Old five-gallon sized asphalt muck-buckets—once white, now mostly black—stood on a wooden pallet near the northwest corner of the pit.

“Watch your step,” she warned Jiro in a low voice. Now that they were out of the echoing culvert, she no longer felt the need to whisper.

The walls about them were of heavy, end-bolted boards, braced at about middle height by a square of I-beam girders—a rectangle inset with a second, canted square of girders serving as angle braces. If the floor and lower half of the walls were studies in black and white monochrome, the girders and upper sections of the walls were an exercise in sepia tones: rust-reddened girders, faded redwood boards.

“Whew,” Jiro said, his headlamp’s light joggling as he wiped sweat from beneath the elastic band that fastened it to his head. “Mighty hot and stinky down here. Any reason we couldn’t do this in the winter?”

“Groundwater,” Lydia said simply. “Groundwater seep is lowest at this time of year. If we’re lucky we won’t have to turn on the water pump. It’s solar powered and quiet, but I’d prefer not to take the chance of it being heard—or not working at all, since presumably no one has run it for years.”

Their headlamps darted through the underground space as Lydia stepped quickly toward the southwest quadrant. There, framed by gangplank boards and weathered archaeological grid strings, were the tops of a strangely-shaped skull and elongated shoulder blade—almost completely high and dry, and just as she’d left them.