Better Angels (15 page)

Fed up with Todd’s downward spiral, Lydia had nearly screamed the entrapment analogy at her brother and his household entourage. When the groupies had tried to ignore her, she had forcefully pointed out to them that, for every herbivore that had become fatally mired at La Brea, an average of seven carnivores had gone down too—this despite a food chain where the herbivores probably had outnumbered the carnivores by as much as 200 to one.

She must have cut a ridiculous figure then, yelling paleo-ecology population stats at a bunch of drugged-out urban hipsters, but they’d gotten the message. Todd and a couple of his people had ushered her none too politely from the house. She hadn’t spoken with her brother since.

Until today. Her mother’s idea. Marie had come out from Boston to see her son and daughter and attempt to bring about some rapprochement between them. Despite the horrible timing, Lydia had reluctantly agreed.

After she had pulled her car into the port authority parking lot, Lydia went to the pre-arranged pier. Her mother was already waiting, looking trim and healthy in a short pastel sundress, shades, and a broad boater hat. Something was different about her, though. It took Lydia a moment to pin down exactly what it was.

“Mom!” she said suddenly. “You got your tats removed!”

“What?”

“Your tattoos,” Lydia said. “The Nike swoosh, the MacDonald’s arches, the pie-cut Mercedes-Benz circle—”

“Oh, those,” her mother said, smiling behind her sunglasses. “I had that done about nine months ago. Removed them all, after your father died.”

“Why?” Lydia asked. “When I asked you about them when I was a girl, you said they were ‘intended to be a protest against corporate ownership of our bodies’. I’ve always remembered that.”

“Yes, well,” her mother said, a bit awkwardly. “Your father liked them. Unfortunately, they eventually became just another form of advertisement for the corporations. I got tired of my body serving as a billboard, so once your father was gone, off they went.”

The ferry—actually a hydrofoil shuttle boat—arrived and took Lydia and her mother aboard, along with the eight or ten other people headed out to the
Libre
this morning. They were a quiet bunch, not making much eye contact. They sat in silence or talked quietly to those whom they’d come aboard with at the pier.

The hydrofoil moved out of port under a blue sky punctuated by an occasional fair weather cloud. Coming into the slight chop of the ocean waves, Lydia felt her stomach unsettle a tad and turned to her mother.

“Do you know how far off the coast this rehab liner is?” she asked.

“In international waters,” her mother replied, squinting against the sun. “I gather it’s about a forty-five minute trip.”

“I don’t see why they just can’t park it in the harbor,” Lydia said, shaking her head. “I mean, it’s not as if they’re cruising anywhere right now.”

“It’s because of the nature of the treatment,” her mother explained, looking out over the bow. “I read up on it. Their treatment of addiction has two main thrusts—physical and psychosocial. To break the physical part of the addiction cycle they use MediTox, which is a pretty standard receptor-site blocker and scrubber, a souped-up version of Narcan and other older, prescription detox agents. The big difference aboard the
Libre
, I gather, is that they also use Ibogara. That’s a designer ibogaine derivative, used to treat the psychological aspects of addiction. It’s sort of a ‘drug against drugs’.”

Lydia looked at her mother narrowly.

“Do you mean to say that this anti-drug drug has something to do with why they can’t do the treatment in-harbor?”

“Right,” her mother said, nodding. “That’s why they have to use a ship of Panamanian registry and do the treatment in international waters. Ibogara is a hallucinogen in its own right, like ibogaine and most of the other psychoactive extracts of the iboga plant. In most countries ibogaine and iboga derivatives are controlled substances—illegal—but not in Panama. It has recognized therapeutic uses there. As long as they do the treatments in international waters aboard a ship of Panamanian registry, no one can touch them.”

Lydia nodded, thoughtful.

“You seem to know a lot about it, Mom,” she said. At least, Lydia thought, it distracted her—kept her from obsessing on Dad’s death, still only a year in the past.

“I do my research,” her mother said with a shrug. “Just a mother’s concern for the health and well-being of her son. Oh, and they do cruise, eight months out of the year. They just leave their Ibogara supplies in a picket boat in international waters when the
Libre
sails into a port. Four months a year, they park off the Southern California coast.”

“An addict-rich environment,” Lydia said with a cynical grin, “with lots of rich addicts, too.”

“According to their brochures,” her mother continued, “one-third of the treatments are pro bono, reserved for ‘financial need’ people.”

Lydia looked down at the water.

“I guess they have to fill those third-class cabins somehow,” she said archly.

A moment later, their attention and that of their fellow passengers was distracted by dolphins racing along in the bow wave of the hydrofoil, leaping and surfing the wake in ways that humans could only dream of doing. Fascinated, they watched the dolphins pace and race them, until the shuttle hydrofoil slowed and dropped more fully into the water, the dolphins disappeared, and the shuttle boat rendezvoused with the
Libre de Drogas
.

Stepping from the shuttle onto a floating platform, then into a wire-cage elevator that ran up the side of the
Libre
, Lydia and her mother eventually made their way to a nurse-receptionist’s desk on the promenade deck. Checking an electronic “client locater” screen, the young male nurse was able to direct them to Todd Fabro’s location. Following the directions, they made their way unerringly to where Lydia’s pajama-clad brother, lounging in a deck chair and fiddling with the keyboard of a portable orchestra, was holding court for a small swarm of music- and even a couple of financial-press people.

“—but it got a lot of laughs in jail,” Todd said over the chuckles of the more eager media sycophants.

He fielded a question that Lydia, at the back of the small crowd, didn’t quite hear. Fame: Todd’s other addiction. Here he was again, the horse going down in the seep, surrounded by the flesh—or was it soul?—eaters. Yet he was obviously enjoying being consumed by them.

“No, not at all,” Todd said in answer to the unheard question. “In a lot of ways, people on the ‘inside’ are more real. More authentic. People on the ‘outside’ all seem fake—caricatures of themselves.”

What bullshit, Lydia thought. At just that moment Todd noticed them.

“I’m afraid we’ll have to end this interview, my good friends and pixel-stained wretches,” Todd said, “for I see my sister and mother have arrived to comfort me. Please, no pictures or interviews. They’re private people with good lawyers, so don’t even try.”

The media people said their goodbyes and tried to set up further interview dates, but Todd waved them off. When the members of the press were gone, Todd and Lydia’s mother bent to hug and kiss her son. Lydia stood somewhat aloof, arms crossed.

“Lot of attention for a dope dealer,” Lydia said. “That was the charge, wasn’t it?”

“Now, sister dear,” Todd said, still hugging their mother, “you know I’m not a dealer. Never have been. The jury agreed. First offense and all that. When I sell at all I just sell to my friends. Dealers are in it for big profits. I never was in it for profits—just a share of the product for my own use. A gentleman’s way to make being a junkie pay. One must have a sense of personal ethics.”

Lydia scowled but held her tongue.

“I just don’t understand what you ever saw in these drugs,” their mother said, frowning. “And needles—that I don’t understand at all.”

For once, Todd seemed to actually think before he answered.

“It’s not easy to explain, Mom,” he said. “There are really no words for it. Shooting up with supercaine was like stepping right into a blue sky out the door of a plane flying at three hundred miles per hour. Low-altitude, low-impact skydiving. Doing tauroin was like a total body orgasm. Left me feeling warm, sated, full—and absolutely disconnected from the ordinary world. Put the two together and it was like being a big happy rocket in slow-motion blastoff for deep space.”

Lydia shook her head.

“You still sound entirely too enamored of your vices,” she said. “Don’t they do any aversion therapy with you people?”

Todd laughed and played a quick run of notes on the keys of his portable orchestra.

“Old-style aversion therapy doesn’t work,” he said with a shrug. “Ibogara’s the big fixer-upper now. It’s supposed to allow you to deep-dive inside your head for a while. Then you develop your own aversions to addicted or habituated behaviors—at least that’s what the therapists say. They haven’t put me under Ibogara yet, but we’ll see. It just might work.”

Lydia walked to the ship’s rail. Looking at the Pacific Ocean several stories below them and surrounding them on all sides, she spoke to her brother without looking at him.

“You better hope it works,” she said. “You’re going to end up dead or human trash on the street if it doesn’t—despite all your money.”

When Todd spoke, Lydia could hear the smirk in his voice.

“Everyone ends up dead,” he said. “It takes a society and a lifetime to turn a newborn baby into ‘human trash’.”

“Don’t blame society!” Lydia said, making a sound of disgust.

“No—I don’t blame it, alone,” he said, walking to the rail and standing beside his sister. Their mother joined them, looking at the sea. A small group of dolphins played not far from the ship. “That’s why I included ‘lifetime.’ I’ve made a lifetime of choices, some good, some not so good. I accept responsibility for those. How about you, sis? You’ve always been so rational, so analytical. All you want is to understand the world. Problem is, the world keeps insisting that you live in it.”

Lydia stared into the sunlit surface of the sea watching the dark flashes of the dolphins some distance away.

“Doesn’t seem to me that you’ve come up with a better way than mine,” she said, sounding frustrated despite herself.

“I don’t claim to have,” Todd said. “I’ve made mistakes. Find me a beauty and I’ll act like a beast. I know. But there was this writer—Henry Besson, Beston, something like that. He said that both dolphins and humans are ‘prisoners of splendor and travail.’ Maybe there is no genuine splendor without travail.”

“That which does not kill us makes us stronger,” Lydia muttered grumpily. “The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom. What a load—”

Todd pretended not to have heard her.

“I look at those dolphins out there in the ocean,” he continued, “and I remember this documentary I once saw, about dolphins and porpoises in captivity. The director interviewed a spokesman for Sea World or Marine Land or something like that. The spokesman said the captive dolphins must be happy—they’re comfortable, they’re well-fed, they have offspring, they probably live longer lives than they would in the wild. And I wondered: Is that all there is to happiness? Being comfortable? Well-fed? Having kids? Living a long time?”

“That doesn’t sound so bad, you know,” their mother said.

“What about freedom?” Todd asked. “Maybe we’re too quick at learning how to love our prisons. Look at Jesus. He didn’t live a long time, or have kids. He probably wasn’t too comfortable or well-fed, either. But he dreamed the big dream. It’s your dreams that make you real.”

Lydia made a disgusted sound again.

“He accepted the pain of the world and was nailed by others to a cross,” she said forcefully. “He didn’t shoot himself up to escape the pain of the world. You’re not Him. He wasn’t a dolphin and neither are you. The comparison just doesn’t hold, Todd.”

Todd, Lydia, and their mother looked from one to the other. The thought seemed to occur to all of them simultaneously that this was going to be a very long afternoon if they continued in this vein. Todd shrugged and abruptly changed the subject, offering to give them a tour around the ship. With an inward sigh of relief, Lydia readily agreed, as did her mother.

Still, as they walked down the promenade deck, Todd banged a few notes on his keyboard and sang an irksome little ditty about dolphins and scientists that only seemed apropos of nothing.

Snippet of Turin Shroud, Splinter of True Cross,

Toxic Dolphin in a Research Net—

Burn them all, let Forensics sort them out.

From the laboratory to the crematory,

See the smoke rising from the holocaust of dreams.

For those who believe in fire, only ashes are truth.

Amen. Hallelujah.
Quod erat demonstrandum
.

Lydia, however, exhausted from her all-nighter at the Page Museum and the tar pits, found she was too tired to argue about it.

CHAPTER THREE

MUTUALLY ENFOLDED

The sweetness of light, Jacinta thought as she returned with a rush to body and memory. To many memories, all at once. She kept her eyes closed, trying to savor the memories, trying to recapture them, trying to hold onto them before they could be forgotten.

She remembered experiencing a pleasant sensation of floating upward, not unlike what she had sometimes felt just as she drifted off to sleep and the bed beneath her seemed to fall away. This time, however, there was no hard jerk of ordinary consciousness striking to reassert control. This time she just kept drifting, a full-blown out-of-body experience, such that she felt herself transformed to a lens of light, an externalized soul of light, while her body was stored, somehow, as a holographic memory inside that lens of light.

This time, too, time began to lose its usual thisness. Her lightsoul self, a thing made of light, became as free from temporality as any photon. Time dilated, opening Now outward toward Forever. Faintly she seemed to hear the distant sounds of the universe breaking up, digitizing, becoming discrete and widely separated and then sounding almost as if they were being played backwards.

She saw—although it was not seeing, in the usual sense—that a fog had arisen. Vaguely she thought of it, in terms of the physics she had learned in another world, as a type of Bose condensate. She seemed to have seen it before, however. It was the fog of memory, thick yet low, the Tule fog of the mind’s experiences in time—a fog easier to look straight up through to see a star shining down through lost years, than to see the streetlamp of the moment just passed.

Jacinta did in fact see a star. Fuzzily she tried to explain appearances to herself, thinking of the scene in Cartesian terms, fog thick along the horizontal axis and thin along the vertical. That just didn’t describe it, however, especially since the light or star was perched atop a great curving skybridge, like a diamond ring effect seen during a total eclipse of the sun. That was peculiar too, because the bridge—a great, slightly rainbow-shimmering catenary curve, looking from her perspective rather like the St. Louis Gateway Arch, only countless lightyears high—the bridge somehow was the sky. She was moving in and through that skybridge, the ultimate daredevil stunt loop.

Closed time-like curvature. The phrase sprung to her mind unbidden. Yes, Jacinta thought. That might be what she was experiencing: The shape of closed time, as a thing of fog condensed to a steel diamond rainbow.

But how—and why?

In Euclidean and Newtonian space such a catenary Möbius as this was impossible, but Jacinta already sensed that this spacetime she was moving through was something more subtle, relativistic, Einsteinian—and beyond. The time of her own life seemed to be spieling fastbackwards through her, as if her existence were being reviewed by some great Eye, heard by some great Ear, through a hyperdimensional recording running in reverse.

Particular events in her life, she realized, possessed their own unique gravity, curving and warping her memoryspace in ways she could not have foretold. Her memories ran like cords of fog through this suspended and suspending bridge/tunnel she moved through, and which also moved through her.

She had often heard that, near death, people’s lives supposedly passed before their eyes. This, however, was something much more. The great arch was neither really bridge nor tunnel nor even arch, but the edge of the lens of light her being had been externalized as—the furthest limit of her existence in time.

To Jacinta, remembering it now, the lens seemed like a meniscus connecting her to a universal mind, of which her own mind was one particular instance. The lens was the interface, the surface tension, between a mind out of time and a time out of mind—time the standing wave, the moving mirror, in which Eternity viewed itself.

The shape of uncertainty shapes certainty, a voice said into her head, from wherever it came, and she saw that it was true. The lens of herself was fractal, uncertain, incomplete, relative. The closer she looked for something, the further away what she was looking for retreated. The deeper she looked, the more surface detail appeared. All the depth was on the surface. A dynamic tension between the mutually enfolded opposite principles of comprehensiveness and coherence shaped her being at every moment.

Jacinta could not by any means completely understand it—yet she found inexplicable joy in that very point, an innocence that kept her eyelids wide open and her face dilated into memory’s smile, all the way back through the sky, until the fogbridge did its Möbius fillip and she found herself back in some kind of spacetime, eyes closed, trying to remember what she had arguably never experienced.

That vision of the lens of her being was wonderful and reassuring. Having experienced it, she was certain that what the ancients called the soul in fact contained the body—rather than vice versa. The idea that the body contained the soul, she now realized, was merely a very persistent illusion.

Still, the thought that someone, or something, had the power to take up that lens and see her life through it—that was much less pleasant to contemplate. Suspicion, fear, power, and violation all lived in that possibility: a roiling, serpentine cloud on the horizon of a bright new sky.

The dark-shining dragon leaps in each branching universe of the plenum tree, said a voice like Kekchi’s into her head. She couldn’t be sure it was the Wise One’s voice, or even where it was breaking through from, but she sensed it came in response to her concern about that dark cloud—and that there was some urgency to its speaking at all. Faring forward as wave and wave unwavering, future following in its wake or not to wake, it lives within and between the many masks of the one dream. In the long, sharp, and final bone of its tail, the invincible dragon carries the sword that is forever victorious.

Why do you speak to me in riddles? Jacinta asked in thought, eyes still closed, concentrating deeply. Her mind seemed to be operating at much greater than normal clarity, as if by some side-effect of her lensing experience. She wondered too whether her own thought processes might be bifurcating—whether she was somehow both questioner and answerer. What does it mean to say that this sword is “forever victorious”? Does it not mean whoever wields the sword always conquers? Does the dragon not wield the sword itself when it swings its tail? If the dragon is always invincible, then how is one to conquer it and obtain the weapon in its tail?

The only way to wield the dragon’s power for oneself, said the increasingly urgent answering voice in her head, is first to get the dragon to wield the sword in its tail against itself. Only then can both the sword be forever victorious and the dragon simultaneously invincible and slain. In swallowing its own tail, the dragon must invincibly conquer itself.

She thought on that paradox, soon seeing a way beyond it.

Unless, of course, it is by nature a sword-swallower....

She opened her eyes and found herself and her fellow tepuian travelers floating in a world stranger than dreams. They were surrounded by innumerable winged creatures—winged not like birds or airplanes, but like hovering, still flames, lambent and sensitive, in the coursing stream or field of some great invisible power. These creatures did not come and go but flashed into and out of and into existence again, quantum angels in panangelium or quantum demons in pandemonium.

Apart from their wings, however, there was little uniformity among them. They were of countless different species. Something else, however, held them together, a uniformity of purpose. Their flashing movements made her think of shoals of schooling fish, of flocks of starlings.

She felt as if she were inside an atom more complex than anything in the periodic table. Standing inside a great spherical golden tree, boundless in its rooting and branching, center everywhere/circumference nowhere, a tree of light aswarm with the activity of bees, fireflies, flashes of moving light. A vast Arc of information and Hive of possibility, an enormous ArcHive. The winged ones, she now knew, were the bees of that ArcHive.

They had made it. The buzz in her head, although not quite telepathy in her case, was yet enough to give her a sense that this place—which both was and was not a place—was also a congress, a vast repository of knowledge, a great hall of records streaming upon the winds, the Great Cooperation, the communion of all myconeuralized sentients everywhere in the galaxy and beyond, the great harmony of Mind. They were inside the Allesseh.

Jacinta suddenly realized that the Allesseh was the Great Co-operation—what made the Cooperation possible, and what was made possible by that harmony. The quantum angel/demons were the flashing infinite of that great Mind thinking. Looking further afield, she saw that she and the ghost people and all the creatures of the Cooperation here were literally inside the Allesseh’s mindspace—contained in it like thoughts, like the body contained within the soul. That mindspace, the dark eye and shining gate standing between time and eternity—that was the who and what that had read her life as easily as a morning headline.

She had so many questions, but before she could even begin to form them in her mind, she was overcome with a great wave of thought aimed at her by all the winged ones flashing into being in the great spherical shell around her and the other tepuians.

WELCOME! the thoughtwave said, WELCOME HOME!

At last she was overcome by the glory of the Communion: the full, empathic sharing the ghost people had for millennia described in their lives and myths, the immediate understanding by one mind of another—and more, a voluntary momentary merging of consciousness and intellect, memory and experience, as far beyond mere crude notions of telepathy as a starship was beyond a stone-headed spear.

Jacinta found herself privy to the experiences not just of the ghost people near her but also of all the stranger minds of all the thousands of species of myconeurally-connected sentients from throughout space. Merely skimming the surface of all those alien minds and their experiences in myriad alien flesh left her so dizzy, so overwhelmed and overloaded, that she was more afraid for her sanity at that moment than she had ever been.

Around her and around the ghost people there now rose up a paradisal garden, an Arcadia of lawns and flowering beds, with fine paths, classical temples, noble monuments, and the tamed nature of pastoral poetry extending into the distance. Gravity, and a world of whatever sort beneath her feet, helped to calm her mind. Looking around her, Jacinta thought that surely this Elizabethan dreamland must have been taken from Kekchi’s thoughts. Ever since Jacinta had helped the tepuians hook into the rest of Earth’s infosphere, the old Wise One had developed a fascination, even an obsession, with the world of Elizabethan England—particularly with Shakespeare, Spenser, and Sidney. The voice speaking to her of the dragon, she thought, was Spenserian enough to have fit that world.

“Thanks,” Jacinta said quietly to Kekchi. “Thanks for thinking that little parable into my head—before.”

When the Wise One looked at her questioningly, she related what she had been advised in regard to dragons and swords. Kekchi listened to her with a strange, quizzical expression.

“That wasn’t me,” the Wise One said laconically, then shrugged and walked away.

Paranoid child of a preterite people from a lost world that she was, Jacinta discovered that her uncertainties about the Allesseh and its Co-operation were not about to go away.

* * * * * * *

Cosmic Hubris

In finding out about KL 235, Paul had found out more about Tetragrammaton and Medusa Blue than he had anticipated. In the end his discoveries had taken him nearly three years of part-time research—a long journey, but not so long that he had grown used to the disturbing nature of what he had discovered.

And now this sudden call from Ka Vang himself. Might it have something to do with Vang’s companies and their involvement with the “Tunguska II” disaster that destroyed the Myrrhisticine Abbey outside Sedona? Did that point to Tetragrammaton as well? Might Cyndi Easter, as a result of the Sedona event, be finding a slightly more receptive audience for her ideas—perhaps even funding for the documentary she’d been working on interminably? If that happened, Vang and Tetragrammaton might well have a huge scandal, a veritable Worldgate, on their hands.

Paul didn’t feel particularly overawed, therefore, when the corporate limousines and jets brought him to a small harbor on the California coast (he wasn’t exactly sure where) and he stepped down the pier toward the slip where Vang’s yacht was docked. The blue and white boat itself was certainly impressive enough: a twin-hulled oceangoing speed yacht, some seventy feet from stem to stern, its engines already idling deeply.

Txiv Neeb, the power yacht was called. Paul knew enough about Dr. Vang now to also know that Txiv Neeb meant “shaman” or “flying sorcerer” in the Hmong language Vang had grown up, with so many decades earlier. Boarding the yacht, Paul thought with a smirk that old shaman Vang would have to work a good bit of magic to extricate himself from the troubles flaring up around his programs and corporations. Maybe the old master would have to resort somehow to those CIA-trained skills he’d acquired when that agency recruited him as a Hmong boy-soldier, nearly fifty years ago, for the Laotian theater of its Southeast Asian war.

“Hello, Paul,” Vang said, squinting, as he stepped up from the interior darkness of the yacht’s main cabin into the bright sunlight where his guest stood waiting. Vang was dressed in a blue fisherman’s cap and shirt, white shorts and white boat shoes. With a subtle nod Vang signaled to the steersman and crew of two, who set about casting off lines and guiding the ship out of its berth and into the harbor.

“I’ve taken the liberty of having a small lunch set for us in the bow,” he said as they walked forward. “I hope you don’t mind.”

Paul didn’t. When they reached the bow, Paul watched Vang as the small old man slipped off his boat shoes and, barefoot, began to sit down. Paul followed suit, but he left on the socks he was wearing. Soon the two men found themselves sitting cross-legged across from each other behind plates of cold fish, cold potato soup, and iced tea as the yacht moved slowly out of the harbor in the strong noontide sunlight.