Better Angels (9 page)

Whatever god had sent it, however, had also taken it away. Blocked on the journalism and telecommunications side, he went back to school—specifically to graduate school in Biology. The events at the tepui had kept itching at the back of his skull, pushing at him. He’d hit the books very hard in response. He quickly became something of an expert in the cryopreservation of threatened species—a wide-open field during the first decade of the third millenium.

After completing his doctoral work at UC Santa Cruz, he did a postdoc at the Center for the Reproduction of Endangered Wildlife (CREW) at the Cincinnati Zoo Ark. He returned to California when he got a push-through appointment with the California State University system, a senior researcher position which was supposed to very soon result in a tenured professorship. Everything seemed to be falling into place for him at last—until the spectacle of the flying mountain reappeared in the fringe media.

In some chatgroup somewhere, he thought, an editor or producer must have remembered or rediscovered the tepui story. Then the diggers began to dig. They discovered Paul’s current status as a serious university scientist—one who had, unfortunately, also previously made claims outside his professional field. Interest in the flying mountain began to build again, even in the more mainstream outlets, as the media’s echo-chamber effect took hold of the old story and breathed new life into it.

All too soon he found himself besieged by phone, fax, email and street mail—with “requests” for interviews that too often sounded more like demands. When he had finally been cornered on campus by a particularly persistent young producer drumming for History’s Unexplained Mysteries, he refused to recant his previous statements on the tepui story.

His comments, travelling the globe in waves moving at the speed of media, soon also carried him into emergency “discussions” with his department chair, school dean, academic vice president and university president. They too all wanted to muzzle him, to prevent him from speaking further to anyone on this “embarassing” issue. He refused. Annoyed at Paul’s obstinate refusal to sacrifice his piece of the truth for the sake of the university’s reputation, the university president—a short but very fit man with a full head of silvered hair—called Paul a “boor.”

During his early days as a biology student, Paul had studied the territorial behavior of captive lowland gorilla groups in several California zoos and wild animal parks—particularly the behaviors of silverbacked alpha males. Dominant males had a nasty habit of flinging dung at human observers who looked at them too closely. Annoyed at being called a boor, Paul voiced an abrupt equation between the behavior of such silverbacked gorilla dung-flingers and silver-haired university presidents who engaged in ad hominem attacks.

The president had found the analogy neither particularly amusing nor particularly flattering.

The university’s chain of command very soon let him know, in no uncertain terms, that his career had derailed once more. The higher-ups promised him they would leave “no stone unturned” in seeing to it that he never got tenure at the university. They assured him that he would receive no positive recommendations once he was out on the job market again, either.

When the academic year ended soon thereafter, Paul found himself reduced to the status of independent researcher, scrambling for work and funding wherever he could find it. His friends, too, quickly drifted away—all but Professor Damon, as it had turned out. That series of blows had brought him to a personal nadir—to the dark night of the soul when he had hoped to get drunk and wander off to die in the desert.

Paul felt that Vang’s arrival in his invisible dirigible had quite literally saved his life. The Tetragrammaton consortium had gotten him a fine job with Lilly-Park as a biological researcher specializing in the preservation of pharmacologically valuable ethnobotanicals and zoologicals. This third career looked like the charm for the rest of his life—until Easter’s web-bomb hit his terminal this morning.

He didn’t want to believe it. Certainly Easter’s chronology and the popular nomenclature for this KL-235 drug were all wrong. He couldn’t see Lilly-Park getting involved in covert drug work like that, either. The company was health-obsessed and drug-persecuting in the extreme—hence the treadmill cardio-tests the employees endured every six months, the frequent random urine tests, the blood tests.

Those tests had initially irked Paul as an invasion of his bodily privacy, but since he had nothing to hide he felt he had nothing to fear. Lilly-Park, he was sure, could not be so duplicitous, so cynical and hypocritical as to persecute informed-consent drug use among its employees while simultaneously involving itself with Tetragrammaton in a scheme to foist powerful drugs onto an uninformed and unconsenting public, as Easter alleged Tetragrammaton had done.

Pounding through the final speed run on the treadmill and starting to pour sweat, Paul felt his thoughts gravitating once more to the Easter material. That woman. She also seemed to know a damned good bit about Vang’s interest in technologies for getting around the lightspeed limit, too.

Did he have something to hide? Something to fear? Perhaps his own fear of finding out something dark and deceitful about his gracious employers? Something that would make his continued employment with them ethically excruciating? No, he really, really didn’t want to know.

“Have a good run,” Egan Ortap said, leaving his treadmill, his diagnostic run apparently over. As he passed Paul, Ortap whacked him on the shoulder and smiled. “Don’t worry about that Easter junk. We’ll take care of it.”

Paul nodded distractedly as he held onto the read-console of the speeding treadmill. Despite the heat and exertion of his diagnostic run, something about Egan’s words and smile made Paul shiver. Too much friendly, make-those-trains-run-on-time efficiency to his banter. Ortap’s smile was likewise also too slick—bright and empty as the smiles of the used car dealers and hard shell preachers-turned-politicians who had taken over the country of Paul’s birth and jettisoned much of the old Constitution.

We’ll shoot down her bird, Ortap had said. Paul’s shiver deepened. How did Egan know Easter’s stickybomb had appeared in the form of a white bird icon? Had Paul mentioned that? He didn’t think so—but then how could Ortap have known that detail?

A tone sounded. The pitches of both speed and steepness on the treadmill began to decline. Paul felt himself relax, at least slightly. The company doctors must have decided they had gotten all the data they needed from him for their reports—for now. The motor continued to slow and the bed of the treadmill to lower, to his considerable relief.

Getting off the treadmill, Paul pondered Ortap’s words and his own future. Despite misgivings for his continued employment, he decided he would have to look up the actual structure of this KL 235. That was the only way he could be certain that Easter’s documentary was, in fact, a fiction.

* * * * * * *

Half Dome

Seiji and Jiro rose in darkness from the city of Ash and passed through forested gates with the dawn.

Beneath apple trees they left the world of the wheel, to pound up switchbacks with their heavy boots on.

They clean-pumped water from above the falls. They dropped salt sweat on sand paths as they plodded higher, loving the tall pine shade when they found it, suffering the taller sun when they could not avoid it.

They saw the snow on peaks all around. They read a metal thunderstorm warning sign that didn’t apply under a sky blue sky.

They lifted their knees up stiff stone steps, until they viewed the much-pictured monument’s seldom-seen other face, its cracked and weathered brow.

They pulled on gloves and hauled themselves up a giant’s spine—part bridge suspended by stanchioned and cabled steel, part ladder runged with dead trees’ bones—leading from earth to air over a tall frozen wave of stone.

They felt their muscles going cramped, their throats going dry, their heads going dizzy, their nerves going frayed, until at last they walked out onto the summit, between the two halves of heaven.

Not trusting their legs, they crawled on their bellies and looked over the edge into the abyss, long enough for the abyss to look back over the edge into them.

After some time, they had crawled and trusted and felt and hauled and pulled and viewed and lifted and read and seen and suffered and loved and plodded and dropped and pumped and pounded and left and passed and risen enough to rise again from the edge of Half Dome, to do it all once more on the way down—but not just yet.

“Tell me again why we did this,” Jiro said, sprawled out on the rock not far from the edge of the sundered dome, exhausted. Taking a gulp of water from his dromedary bag’s tube, Jiro noted vaguely that his brother, dressed in sunglasses and shorts and boots but no shirt, was starting to get a sunburn. Amazingly, they were the only people on top of the Dome—a result of the date being only the third week of May, and a weekday.

“Because the views from the top are fantastic,” Seiji said from nearby, where he too had temporarily become one with the rock out of sheer fatigue, mustering only enough energy to talk and occasionally suck water from the tube connected to his own dromedary bag. “Because it’s here. Because you came out to visit. Because it’s as high above the valley floor as the Grand Canyon is deep below its rim. Because after we’ve done it we can say we did it.”

Because because because because because, Jiro thought. Somewhere over the rainbow and the Wizard of Oz. But those weren’t the words he spoke.

“Ambitious,” Jiro said, shaking his head. “That’s you all over, big brother.”

“Something wrong with that?” Seiji said, sitting up slowly.

“I guess not,” Jiro said quietly. “I just wonder why you’d want to be, sometimes. You afraid maybe deep down you’re just like everybody else? Nobody special?”

“Hey!” Seiji said, starting into a crouch before the cramping in his legs halted him and he stretched them out before him once more. “Who’s supposed to be headshrinking whom, here? Ambitious? You should talk. You’re eighteen and just finished your bachelor’s degree. Two years younger than when I finished mine. Even if we were nobody special, we’d still be special nobodies.”

Sitting up, Jiro removed a small flatpipe from his pocket but said nothing.

“Special more because we’re happa, than happy,” Seiji continued, growing more serious. “Cultural amphibians. Not fully at home in either world. When we were little kids in Kobe, what they couldn’t read in our names they could see in our faces. In the Midwest, what they couldn’t read in our faces they could see in our names. Nippon dad, Anglo Mom. Caucasian hidden in our middle names—Jiro Ansel Yamaguchi. Seiji Robert Yamaguchi.”

“Survivors, though,” Jiro said, preoccupied with popping open a small cylinder, shaking out some marijuana into his palm, and cramming it into the bowl of his flatpipe. “Had to be. Family history. Long line of Hiroshima Catholics, all that.”

“Maybe that’s the reason I’m ‘ambitious’,” Seiji said, warily watching his brother work with his paraphenalia. “I want people to see me, not some category they can put me in. I don’t want to live other people’s scenarios for my life—not Mom’s or Dad’s or anyone else’s. Even if I never become anybody except who I am, that’s okay by me. Don’t you ever feel that way?”

“Just the opposite, lately,” Jiro said, lighting the pipe and inhaling deeply. He offered the pipe to Seiji, who waved it off. Jiro shrugged and exhaled. “I wouldn’t mind if somebody, some scientist or priest, came in and showed me the big blueprint. Gave me the stage directions. Tried to make me fit into the plan as best I can.”

“The best laid plans of mice and men,” Seiji said, shaking his head.

Jiro abruptly began to laugh.

“What’s so funny?”

“Don’t you remember?” Jiro asked. “I played Lenny in Of Mice and Men—”

“Oh, that,” Seiji said, leaning back on his hands. “Yeah, you did a great job. So did the guy who played George. Duet acting state champs, right?”

“Yeah.”

“Sorry I never got to see the whole play in production,” Seiji said, staring at the palm of his left hand. “I saw that duet acting thing on trideo, though. I was impressed. You did a damn good job. I’ve done a lot more acting than you, but I’ve never been on broadcast.”

Jiro took another drag on the pipe.

“Type casting,” Jiro said in a pinched voice, before exhaling. “Lenny the Manchild. That’s what I am—a Manchild.”

“What do you mean?” Seiji said, rising to his feet on wobbly legs. “Lenny was an idiot. You’re probably the most intelligent person I know, next to myself. There’s no resemblance.”

“You really don’t get it, do you?” Jiro said, staring at his brother through the smoke of his pipe, framed against the endless blue of the sky. “Look at me, Seiji. I’m a freak. Way back in second grade, the nuns—”

“—busted you for walking around on the playground with your arms stretched out like Christ on the cross,” Seiji said with a grimace. “Please, not that crap again. I’ve heard it too many times. So? You think that’s so weird? When I was in fourth grade—the night Mom was in the hospital and we were staying at Aunt Marcia’s—that night I couldn’t get to sleep, and sometime toward morning I thought I heard the voice of God calling me to be a priest!”

“For real?”

“No lie,” Seiji said, walking uneasily toward the edge of the dome once more. “Calling me to be a holy man in wizards’ robes at the altar. The nuns lorded it over us, but even they had to kowtow to the priests. The shadow magicians in the confession box—make your sins disappear, presto! The little window slides back, and there’s the shadow priest’s head saying, ‘In the Name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit—may I take your order please?’ And the Act of Contrition! I always had trouble remembering the Act of Contrition. Like parsley for the Last Supper, you know?”

Seiji laughed at his juxtaposition.

Jiro leaned back on his hands, his right leg crossed at the ankle over his left knee, the right still cramping slightly from their exertion climbing to and up the dome. His head, however, was bowed and serious.