Better Angels (28 page)

“There they are,” she said to Jiro. “Let’s extract them. Here, give me the tool bag.”

Jiro handed over the mesh bag. Lydia removed small garden trowels for herself and Jiro and moved over to the edge of the board nearest the partially exposed, oil-blackened bones.

“Grab a couple of those buckets from back there,” Lydia said, “and then we can start digging them out.”

Jiro walked unsteadily over the impromptu board walkways, then came back with two buckets. Lydia pointed out the bones to be removed and—stressing care and caution—showed Jiro how to go about digging and peeling away the matrix, untangling the bones from other bones so that they might eventually pull the skull and shoulder blade free of the surrounding amalgam.

“What you said before,” Jiro said, digging about the blackly-shining bones under their headlamps, then dumping asphalt excess into the buckets, “about wanting to preserve a scientific find from destruction by religious fanatics—is that why we’re here?”

Lydia thought about that a moment as she tried to work the shoulder blade loose a bit with a gentle wiggle. It wasn’t budging all that much yet.

“Actually,” she said finally, “I’m more interested in advancing my career through this find.”

“And the other explanations were just cover?” Jiro said, not entirely approvingly. “That’s pretty Machiavellian.”

Lydia shrugged.

“Machiavelli was a pragmatist,” Lydia said. “The system works for those who work it. That’s all he was saying. He was beyond parties. His highest politics was personal. We could learn a lot from him, these days.”

Jiro shook his head in disagreement, his light whipping around as the two of them found themselves momentarily digging in a darker space.

“To be ‘apolitical’,” he said, “is merely to tacitly support the status quo.”

“Not at all,” Lydia countered as she peeled away at the asphalt around the shoulder blade. “To be apolitical is to survive the status quo. If Dr. Elliot had learned that lesson, he might still be heading the Garbage Project, instead of suffering or dead in a spirit camp somewhere.”

The shoulder blade they were working on was beginning to work loose.

“I thought he was apolitical,” Jiro said, working to free the shoulder blade.

“Khalid Elliot was anti-political,” Lydia corrected as she worked. “Subversive by nature. Happily opposed to all political systems. That’s different.”

“But he was more religious than either of us,” Jiro said. “Yet he ends up in a spirit camp, while we’re still at the Project.”

“Watch that about not being religious,” she said. “You don’t want to get ‘spirited’ away, do you? See, that’s what being apolitical really means. Looking out for yourself above all else. Being aware enough of power systems to know they can cause you a lot of pain—so you keep a low profile.”

They worked the shoulder blade loose at last. It was still somewhat encrusted, and not all the asphalt had been cleaned from it by any means, but Lydia could tell already that this was not a typically shaped mammalian shoulder blade. Back in the old days she had seen dozens of those under her magnifying lamps in the Page Museum’s fish-bowl laboratory. None of those other shoulder blades had been human, but she was certain this one wasn’t human either. Too long, and seemingly reinforced along odd axes.

She put it aside. If they succeeded in smuggling it out of here, she would have plenty of time to examine it later on.

“Is that how you’ve survived the purges?” Jiro asked as they went to work removing the skull from the matrix of asphalt and bones surrounding it. “By keeping a low profile?”

“And by watching my back and backside, too,” Lydia said. “By doing my science in an objective, value-neutral fashion. ‘Politics is for the moment; an equation is for eternity,’ as Einstein himself once said.”

Jiro gave a slightly bemused grunt.

“Some of those who died in Hiroshima and Nagasaki,” he said, “might beg to differ with the great physicist’s assertion. The ephemeral ‘political’ use of the ‘eternal’ equation, E=mc
2
, turned a lot of those people into ashes and ghosts. Including my great-grandparents’ siblings. Makes you wonder if any human activity can ever be ‘objective’ or ‘value neutral.’”

The skull they were working on began to work loose, more quickly than they’d expected.

“Maybe not totally,” Lydia conceded, “but it’s still an ideal worth striving for.”

The skull, surprisingly in tact but for a couple of broken spaces and a missing lower jaw, came loose from the matrix of asphalt and bone. Holding the skull in his hand, Jiro, apparently unable to resist, gave a quiet rendition of “Alas, poor Yorick—I knew him, dear Lydia. A fellow of infinite jest.” Lydia laughed, then took the skull—again noting how “not quite right” in shape it was—and wrapped both it and the shoulder blade in pads from the mesh tool bag, before placing the carefully wrapped bones back in the meshwork.

“Let’s go,” she said, shouldering her bag of bones. “Put the muck-buckets back where you found them, then we’ll head up top.”

As they climbed the steps to the hatch, Lydia thought again of bones under goose-necked magnifying lamps. Of tabletops laid out with row after row of asphalt-fossilized ribs. Sliding trays of vertebrae. Dissecting pans with small fossilized bird skeletons. Petri dishes for seeds, pollens, innumerable varieties of microfossils. She thought of museum-goers—watching her and her colleagues at work in the lab through tall, fishbowl windows—before wandering on to have their photos taken in front of the Harlan’s Ground Sloth or the Antique Bison.

The world’s richest deposit of Ice Age fossils. For a while at least, that had been her life. Perhaps it would be again.

They turned off their headlamps and came back onto the surface. Lydia felt less hurried now. Although she strode purposefully toward the park’s streambed and the culvert that had allowed their covert operation, she did not run.

To the south and east was the Lake Pit with its life-sized fiberglass models of an Imperial Mammoth family, the trumpeting female trapped, her mate and offspring trumpeting helplessly from among the shore’s reeds and palm trees. Of course the tableau was incorrect. Of course the fossilized animals had actually died in shallow pools of tarry asphalt, the traps usually covered in dust and leaf-litter, not in deep watery lakes. Of course the reeds and palm trees about the lake had never been native to the site.

Yet, despite its scientific inaccuracy and because of its inherent drama, the mammoth tableau had been retained all these years.

Lydia had seen subtler dramas on the surface of the lake, not the least of which were the surrounding office towers reflected in the bubbling oily lake in the morning sun, their reflections suggesting an odd continuity between past and future. She thought of the murals and atrium garden of the Page Museum and wondered what had become of them.

As she and Jiro reached the dry streambed, Lydia realized she would not have time to find out. Not this trip. Maybe another. Climbing into the culvert once more, however, she wanted to whoop: We did it! But she remained silent, for they had not quite done it—yet.

CHAPTER FIVE

FEEDBACK LOOPS

Around Jacinta, the dancing and the drumming had begun. Soon would come the drugs and the dreaming. She wondered—not without some anxiety—what she’d gotten herself into by asking Kekchi and the ghost people to help her make more sense out of her experience of the timelines.

“I can sense the alternative times almost all the time,” she told Kekchi, in words rather than thoughts, during another timeless day in the Allesseh. They had discovered that the Allesseh—somehow always there, like the heaven of strange time it had ticked around them—could easily read minds thinking. It apparently had a much tougher time with minds dreaming, however—or with the shunting of thoughts into words, oddly enough. For her and Kekchi and those others among the ghost people who were still fluent enough in the childishness of language, speaking thoughts as words served as a sort of encrypted or protected communication.

“How do you see the lines in mindtime?” Kekchi asked.

“Always moving, just at the periphery of consciousness,” Jacinta said. “Just beyond the edges of this reality. Nearby timelines intersect the one we’re on, like parallel lines meeting in a strange sort of space. Then they glance off again. I can never tell exactly which line will undergo the formality of physically occurring.”

Kekchi listened, then looked away.

“Neither can we,” the Wise One said. “But you’re not as clear about how it works. It’s your background, I think. And maybe because you’ve come into mindtime here—in the strange time of the Allesseh.”

“My background?” Jacinta asked, puzzled.

Kekchi nodded.

“You know our Story of the Seven Ages,” the Wise One said, “but you have not lived in it. You have not danced it or dreamed it to the center of your heart. Because you were not born and raised among us, it will not be easy for you.”

Jacinta pondered that, head in hand, then looked up at Kekchi.

“If that’s what it takes to make sense of mindtime,” she said, “then I want to do that.”

With a shake of the head Kekchi looked away.

“Before you go to that place,” the Wise One said, “you had best be sure that’s where you really want to go.”

“Why?” Jacinta said, fingering one of the small bird skulls Talitha had woven into her dark blonde hair.

Kekchi gave her a piercing look, eyes shining like white agates rippled with blue and brown—the most obvious outward sign of the Wise One’s many years in symbiosis with the ghost people’s sacred mushroom.

“Are you willing to risk madness for the rest of your life,” the Wise One asked, “to reach the truth for only a brief moment?”

The words struck Jacinta with an almost physical force. It seemed to her that she had heard those words, or a variant of them, before, in her own head. Like a bullet arriving before the sound of the gun firing. Or like her old schizophrenia, when it sometimes seemed that she was aware of something before she perceived it.

Kekchi’s bullet glance did not turn away.

“Are you willing to sacrifice your self,” he asked again, “in order to obtain knowledge?”

Jacinta returned the Wise One’s gaze as forthrightly as she could.

“I am,” she said.

She absolutely believed it, at the time. Now, however, as the dancing and the drumming intensified around her, Jacinta was not so sure. Something particularly frenzied moved with the ghost people, in the circles and lines of their communal motion, in the men and women both younger and older dressed in loincloths, feathered anklets and plumed headbands, in the young children naked and dancing—all of them carried away by the foot-pounding and hand-clapping of the lines and circles, most of all by the shaking and shimmying and gyrating when an occasional dancer broke free, moving as if possessed.

Kekchi walked out of the liana-draped trees that surrounded the landscaped clearing. The Wise One crouched before Jacinta where she sat, cross-legged on the perfect grass, amid all the dancers trampling their rhythmic language into the green palimpsest of the perfect lawn. The right sleeve of the Wise One’s robe stood bunched up above the elbow. Kekchi looked particularly loose-fleshed and unusually emaciated, as if the old Wise One had been preparing for a spiritual ordeal through a deep fast of purification.

“Memory has always been our first way of traveling in time,” Kekchi said above the sound of pounding hands and feet, “and Mind our best guide through time. Call up in your mind that time when you and I and your brother came to our burial island, deep in the cave, before we left the world we knew.”

With Kekchi’s help, Jacinta called the remembered scene clearly into her mind once more—

The vast underground space of the Cathedral Room. The slow lake where the cave’s main stream broadened in its channel. The island in the slow lake, the burial ground of the ghost people, so crowded with the dead that it seemed made of bodies, of corpses preserved by the cave’s unchanging environment.

From the heads of the fresher corpses, the fresh fungus was growing—the strange stalks with caps like vertically stretched, convoluted brains, mushrooms thrusting up like alien phalluses from open mouths, from ears, from eye sockets. The larger specimens jutted up from the corpses’ abdomens, just below their rib cages. Fine masses of cottony white threads spread and knit over the surface of each corpse’s skin in a long slow cocooning.

While Paul beside her stood in shock at the sight, Kekchi reached down and ran a fine white-lined finger inside one of the brain mushroom’s convoluted pits. The fingertip the Wise One then poked at Paul was covered with a bright bluish dust.

“Spores,” Kekchi said, blowing the dust carefully from that fingertip, back onto the island. Reaching down, the Wise One snatched up a plug of the loose, white filamentous threads from where they grew, spilling off a body into the surrounding organic muck and humus of the island. “Spawn.”

“Vegetative phase mycelium,” Jacinta added, though her brother Paul apparently didn’t need the translation. Kekchi reached down a third time, plucking the convoluted ball-stalk fungus from a corpse’s eye socket.

“Vertical fruit of the horizontal tree,” Kekchi said reverently, thrusting at Paul’s face the fleshy thing, pitted and ridged, whitish in color overall but deepening to a brown-veined pale blue in the pit areas and crowned by a pale tannish fuzz on top.

“Oh my god,” Paul moaned as the fungus’s damp rich smell wafted into his nostrils, his face curling up in nauseated response.

“Ours too,” Kekchi said with a crooked smile, biting off a hunk of the thing, chewing and swallowing it, then belching the breath of death into Paul’s face. The wave of nausea surged up uncontrollably, dropping Paul to the mud on his hands and knees, projectile vomiting again and again, his guts heaving and twisting until there seemed no more to be wrung from him.

At last Paul sat back on his knees in the muck, wiping from his mouth and chin the mucus and filth and bitter bile he had brought up, smearing it heedlessly on his arms above his muck-caked hands.

“They’re mushroom cultists!” Paul blurted at her.

“Of course,” Jacinta said matter-of-factly, crouching down beside her brother, oblivious to the gastric apocalypse he’d just endured. “These mushrooms and particular quartz crystals are their major totems. They’ve been collecting fine Brazilian quartz of a particular ‘resonance’ for nearly a thousand years. Rite of passage for everyone in the tribe—the only time they leave the tepui for any lengthy period. By the time I arrived, they had several metric tons of the stuff stored here, waiting for the day they would sing their mountain to the stars. As for the fungus—well, it sort of collected the people.”

“Collected them?” Paul gazed past her to the corpse island around them. “Killed them, you mean.”

“Not at all,” Jacinta said, shaking her head at her brother, though her eyes were elsewhere, as always. “I’ve studied the fungus’s life-cycle, Paul. Collected dozens of spore prints, analyzed the spawn and the fruiting bodies—and talked to the people, too. For a long time they’ve been expecting someone who looks like me, so it was easy.

“The fruiting bodies, the ‘mushrooms,’ only appear like this after the individual dies. The sacred fungus is a myconeural symbiont. After someone ingests the fruiting body, the spores germinate and the spawn forms a sheath of fungal tissue around the nerve endings of the central nervous system. Some of the fungal cells penetrate between the nerves of the brain and brainstem, without damaging them.

“I did a radiological study of them up north, before I returned here. I used x-rays generated at a low enough voltage so that the soft tissues, which would otherwise be transparent, cast shadows instead. The densities of the mushroom flesh and human flesh are very nearly the same. The relationship is mutually beneficial: the fungal spawn obtains moisture, protection and nutrients even in adverse environments. The human hosts are assured a steady supply of the most potent informational substances imaginable—”

“See it clearly now, Jacinta?” Kekchi said, in the strange present and presence of the Allesseh.

Jacinta nodded, feeling herself swayed by the hypnotic rhythms of the drumming and dancing, feeling her body wanting to rise of its own accord, eyes closed or not.

“The mushrooms grow out of the ancestors,” Kekchi continued. “The living dream the world of the ancestors, the ancestors dream the world of the living. I told you the sacred mushroom waits until after we die to fruit, to grow from us. But it can also be called.”

Jacinta opened her eyes. Staring fixedly at the top of Kekchi’s elbow, she saw that the old wrinkled skin there had begun to roll and roil. In a moment, with surprisingly little blood, a Cordyceps mushroom erupted from the flesh atop Kekchi’s elbow, then grew steadily before Jacinta’s eyes. Jacinta wondered dreamily if that was why the Wise One had fasted. Was that how the mushroom symbiont was called? From rigorous fasting, in order to stress its environment?

“The strands of the sacred weave through us,” Kekchi said, moving in Jacinta’s direction the elbow with the mushroom growing from it. “We are in it as it is in us. When the undreamed dreamer became aware that it was dreaming, all things came into being. Waking and sleeping are two masks of one existence. The first dreamer dreams them both. Take this and eat it, Jacinta. Dance in sleep and call the dream.”

Jacinta reached out and plucked the mushroom from Kekchi’s elbow, again with almost no blood, wondering as she did so if she might already be dreaming, or if perhaps she had been dreaming all her life. With her eyes closed once more, she ate what she had plucked, deeply savoring it. When she had eaten, she rose to her feet and danced, slowly, smoothly, moving with a fluid grace she hardly knew she possessed, to her own beat, her own time, eyes still closed.

When the visions started to come, the first thing they showed her was the way she thought of her own mind. Trained as a scientist, Jacinta at first saw the image of her mind as a sort of viewing screen or intricate blow-glass mirror, reflecting upon her world, and herself, and herself in her world.

From her religious upbringing, however, arose another image: the soul as a surveillance camera or two-way mirror, like that in a police interrogation room, with God and angels or the Devil and demons as the good cops/bad cops, standing on the other side of the two-way mirror or sitting behind security monitors, observers whom she could rarely see or know (for certain) were there.

That image, however, shapeshifted into something more mystical: soul or mind as a mirror that was two ways both ways. The mind’s eye with which God looked into her was also the mind’s eye with which she looked into God. That mind was both the detached “retina” of the camera and the remote “mirror” of the viewing screen, reflecting what it showed and showing what it reflected.

That vision in turn became something she had glimpsed from her time among the ghost people and her study of the shaman as “bridge between the worlds”: The mind as not only a mirror, or an eye, or a camera, or a screen, but also a bridge, with two ends, as the mirror had two sides. A Golden Gate of arcing mirrors rose up behind her closed eyes. The bridge the mind made, she saw, allowed travel from the specific to the general, the world of the living to the world of the ancestors, the human being to the divine ground of all being, and allowed the Other in her own head to begin to speak.

Mind is a reflecting bridge, said the voice, connecting eternity to eternity across the ocean of time. How you cross it is who you are. To realize the divinity that is in you, you must be able to look back at yourself from the other side of the mirror, the other side of the screen, the other end of the bridge.

She saw mirrors, set so as to reflect in each other, and chains of cameras and monitors staring into each other. Place a mirror face to face with another mirror, or cameras and monitors staring into each other, she recalled, and feedback will slant and spiral the reflected image off toward infinity.

As if a wave had crested, however, the mostly bright and glorious images behind her eyes slowly began to shift and tumble. The reflecting Golden Gate in her mind seemed suddenly to have been brushed by a black hole’s event horizon, for the bridge bent and twisted into a maze of mirrors spiraling toward vanishing point, a brace of interwoven mirror-scaled snakes writhing away, dragging her consciousness helplessly along with them.

The singularity—which the dancing and drumming and mushroom-drug dreaming had unleashed—came and took her. Down into the quantum flux, down into dimensions smaller than the Planck length, energies higher than Planck energies, velocities independent of the speed of light. Phrases—holographic plenum, holographic reality, implicate order, frequency domain, higher dimensionality, entelechial level, noumenal system, spiritual realm—all flitted through her mind faster than she could think them and were gone.

She could not open her eyes. She felt herself sinking into the fabric of spacetime, her self, her ego dissolving and spreading out through the mesh and matrix of that fabric. Absolute bliss and absolute terror became one. Self-sacrifice and self-fulfillment became one.