Better Angels (24 page)

“Stick a fork in me,” Elliot said to Paul as they jumped down stiffly from the window-barred buses that had brought them back to their Spiritual Revival Camp, “I’m done.”

As they walked across the grounds of the Camp, Paul marveled once again at the relative ease with which this involuntary community had been created out of the sagebrush scrubland. A few bulldozers and graders to scrape away all trace of vegetation to bare earth in a twenty acre square, some post hole diggers and penitent labor to put in the perimeter fences and wires, a score of prefab watch towers, solar powered perimeter lights, air and soil motion sensors, laser-break alarms, several rows of long tent barracks and dining halls and composting latrines and the big PrayerVision 3-D screens showing the most uplifting sermons by the greatest “moral thinkers” of the day and—voila! A camp for concentrating thought-criminals away from the righteous, an arena for breaking them of their wildness and returning them to the compliant, domesticated herd.

The evening meal was the usual stringy-protein, heavy starch and carbohydrate fare. A prolonged mass-repetition of grace led by Reverend Morals Officer Curtner served as appetizer, a constant low background roar of pre-recorded stadium sermonizing from all the screens sounded during the meal itself, followed by a dessert of canned inspirational music. The men had just been dismissed from dinner when a brace of guards sidled up to Paul on his left and right.

“Larkin?” said the taller, dark-complected guard. “Commander wants to see you in his office.”

Elliot gave Paul a worried look. Whether Elliot’s glance was out of concern for his new friend’s fate—or for his own, since that friend was so new and might be a spy or who knew what—Paul could not tell. Paul shrugged and followed the guards out of the dining hall tent, through the spotlit darkness of the camp, toward the command building—the only non-tent building in camp, besides the watchtowers and latrines.

Paul had been to the commander’s office often enough to have a good suspicion that it also functioned as an interrogation room. As the guards sat him down—hard—in a chair opposite the white-haired commander, he noticed again the two colonels, one balding and one bespectacled, whom he never saw in camp except in this room, except during these “discussions” with the commander.

Behind and to the right of where the bespectacled colonel leaned against a towering file cabinet, there also stood a closed door with mirrored glass. Paul had, on previous occasions, sensed the presence of invisible people in that other room, beyond the door—with such certainty that he had simply come to believe that the door’s window was in fact a two way mirror.

“In the days of the old, corrupt government,” the commander began, “you worked for Lilly-Park Pharmaceuticals—isn’t that right?”

Paul hesitated. “Old government” and “new government” were terms people had been tossing around loosely for the past ten years. In fact, before the infosphere crash and to a lesser extent since, there had been a series of new governments, which had quickly become old governments. Best to stick to the clearer, less rhetorical part of the question.

“Yes,” Paul said. “I once worked for Lilly-Park.”

“Your official title with them was ‘Biodiversity Preservation Specialist’,” said the balding colonel. “What exactly did such a job entail?”

“Preserving and propogating endangered species,” Paul said. “Cryopreservation. Tissue culturing of plants, cloning, in vivo and in vitro collection of germ plasm. Finding universal surrogate mothers for lab-created embryos of species already extinct in the wild. Analyzing endangered species for their production of potentially valuable medical or industrial materials. I worked primarily with plants and fungi. Ethnobotanical preservation, mostly.”

“Is that how Lilly-Park gained access to a viable strain of Cordyceps jacintae?” asked the bespectacled colonel.

“Only indirectly,” Paul said. He knew where this line of questioning was headed. “Through the professor who had been my dissertation director, I offered that particular fungus to an agent for venture capitalists. Through that agent I met with Dr. Ka Vang, who recruited me to work for an organization called Tetragrammaton. Tetragrammaton got me the biodiversity preservation job with Lilly-Park.”

“And biodiversity preservation was all you did for Tetragrammaton?” asked the commander.

“That’s right.”

“Did you ever work on a Tetragrammaton project called Medusa Blue?” asked the balding colonel.

“No,” Paul said simply.

“Did you ever work on projects specifically augmenting human paranormal or ‘psi’ powers?” asked the bespectacled colonel. “On ‘starbursts’? ‘Dream leakers’? ‘Dream shifters’? ‘Shield telepaths’? ‘Empath boosters’?”

“None of them,” Paul said when the list was done. He had been down this road, with these interrogators, before. “I was a biodiversity preservation specialist, as I’ve said.”

“You did, however, provide the initial spore print for reproduction of a viable strain of Cordyceps jacintae—isn’t that right?” asked the balding colonel.

“As far as I know, yes,” Paul said, glancing down at his hands in his lap, particularly at the non-removable electronic bracelet on his left hand that tracked his every move. He thought of the anklet version above his right foot, and the fact that if either of the two bracelets got more than eight feet away from the other, alarms would automatically sound.

“And the substance generally called KL 235 occurs nowhere else in nature except in that fungus?” the bespectacled colonel asked.

“I believe that’s true, yes,” Paul said.

“Did you develop delivery systems for KL 235 so that it might be given to pregnant women as a uterotonic?” asked the commander.

“I did not,” Paul said. It always got back to the uterotonic issue with these people. Paul wondered if the stories of headship re-education camps for uppity women might not be true after all.

“Do you know why it was given to pregnant women as a uterotonic?” asked the balding colonel. “Was it to encourage the development of psi talents in the children of those women? Or was it intended to have a calming or controlling effect on the women themselves?”

“I do not know why it was given as a uterotonic,” Paul said. “Since I have no direct knowledge of any psi power enhancement or female control program, I would be engaging in hearsay and speculation if I answered your last two questions.”

The commander rubbed his excessively clean-shaven chin.

“Then speculate, Dr. Larkin,” he said with a scowl. “Why do you believe that KL 235 was given as a uterotonic?”

Paul glanced from one to the other of his interrogators.

“Everything I learned about Tetragrammaton beyond my job description,” Paul began, “came from public sources, mostly from throughout the pre-Crash infosphere. As near as I can tell, the model for covert dispersion of KL 235 was based on earlier intelligence-community covert dispersals of potent psychoactive chemicals, particularly LSD and BZ. If you examine the history of LSD, you’ll find that chemical’s discoverer, the Swiss biochemist Albert Hoffman, was working on uterotonic chemicals when he discovered LSD.”

A quick series of stares and glances passed rapidly back and forth among the colonels and the commander. Apparently this possible explanation was not one that had occurred to them before.

“How can you be sure that those who were working on KL 235 in the early days were familiar with such a history,” asked the bespectacled colonel, “unless you were involved in that initial work yourself?”

“We’ve been over my involvement before,” Paul said, suddenly feeling very tired. “Your own records should show you that the initial extraction of KL 235—from a degraded specimen—predates my involvement with Tetragrammaton by decades.”

“But your sureness, your certainty—” the bespectacled colonel prodded.

“I’m not sure of my explanation,” Paul said, “but I believe it’s possible because of the name itself that they gave to the extract: KL 235. Ketamine Lysergate 235. Those who made the initial extract were most likely biochemists. They would have known that the substance they’d extracted, and later artificially synthesized, bears at most only a superficial resemblance to either ketamine or the lysergics in terms of its structure and effect. It’s in fact part of a class of supertryptamines.”

Paul glanced around at the officers. Apparently they still didn’t get it yet.

“The full name Hoffman gave to his unexpectedly hallucinogenic ‘uterotonic’ was LysergiSureDiethylamide-25,” Paul continued. “LSD 25. ‘Sure’ is German for ‘acid.’ 25 because it was the twenty-fifth sample in the test series. KL 235 is going the old master one better—or rather a couple hundred and ten better. The name is an inside joke, a sort of tongue-in-cheek code. It demonstrates the familiarity of those biochemists with the history of another, extremely potent psychoactive substance.”

The colonels and commander stared at each other again. They did not look convinced.

“Do you mean to say,” the commander asked, “that administering this stuff as a uterotonic was to some degree the result of an intentional misreading of history?”

“And that’s all it was?” the balding colonel asked incredulously.

“Initially, yes,” Paul said. “I believe it was a misreading, as the commander called it. I don’t think that was all it was, as it turned out. It seems to have become other things.”

“What other things?” asked the bespectacled colonel.

“Maybe some or all of those strange projects you talked about,” Paul said, thoughtful. “Psi-power enhancement. Starbursts. Shield telepaths. God only knows what all. I lost my job because I protested to Dr. Vang about it. Just because I’d given him the spore print for the great mushroom didn’t mean I was going to put up with being treated like a great mushroom forever myself.”

The commander laughed slightly, then stifled it. The colonels looked at him expectantly.

“They ‘keep me in the dark and feed me lots of shit,’” the commander explained. “Like a mushroom. An old saying.”

The colonels turned back to Paul, looking slightly embarrassed.

“How did Dr. Vang respond to your protest?” the balding colonel asked.

“You could ask him yourselves,” Paul suggested. The colonels and commanders ignored that idea and stared at him stonily until he continued. “Basically, Vang said that esoteric stuff was nothing but a sideshow. He denied responsibility for most of it. Not even on the main road to Tetragrammaton’s real goal.”

“Which would be what?” the commander asked.

“The next step in human evolution,” Paul said. “Tetragramm-aton he connected to the idea of the angel Metatron, who was supposed to be a better angel because he had once been human. Tetragrammaton is really about the transformation of human beings into better angels, through technologically-mediated transcendence. That was how he put it.”

That set them off. The colonels and the commander quickly went into huddled, whispered conference. Paul couldn’t catch most of it, but he thought he did hear one very strange statement—“Deathlessness in an electric body would be death to the soul.” From the commander.

Had he heard right? What did that mean, exactly? Paul turned the idea over again and again in his head while the colonels and commander continued in whispered conference. He had as yet made little more sense of what that statement might bode, however, when the other men in the room turned to him once more.

“Thank you, Larkin,” the commander said, thumbing a buzzer for the guards who had brought him in. “That will be all for now.”

The guards ushered him out of the room and back into the lonely, isolated night of the camp. Lock-down and lights-out had already been called. The perimeter fences were still lit but, with the sermonizing PrayerVision screens and holos off, it was dark enough to see the stars—for which he thanked God, with more fervor than a million exhortations to “Pray!” could ever draw from him.

As the guards marched him back to his barracks, Paul almost thought he saw a ripple amid the stars, like the kind Vang’s invisible dirigible had made on that night, so long ago. Or perhaps like that the tepui had made, when it disappeared with his sister Jacinta, still more years ago.

When he looked again, however, only the stars stood above him. No ripple waved the heavens. It must just have been a mirage, he thought. A hallucination risen from the overheated Earth. Or his own tired and overheated brain.

* * * * * * *

Stratification

“I don’t quite get it, Dr. Fabro,” Jiro said as he and Lydia finished suiting up in the early morning light, preparing for their trash dive. “I work with computer data. Sometimes it’s garbage, yeah, but not literally.”

“Think of this as raw information,” Lydia said. She zipped up the loud-orange plastic drysuit, breathable and disposable, and Jiro did the same. “Jiro, we’ve all seen how good you are at finding patterns in what looks to the rest of us like static and random electronic snow. I want to know what you see when you look at a slice through the rubbishscape. Kal Elliot originally suggested the idea. It just took me a while to come around to seeing its validity.”

The shadow of Kal being hauled off to a spirit camp for re-education passed over the conversation like the shadow of a hawk over a henyard. If it was Kal’s idea then that pretty much sealed it, Jiro thought. They were going to do this thing.

“You’re the boss,” Jiro said with a shrug.

“At least for the present,” Lydia said, lifting her arms to the sides of her head and tying her dark hair back tightly against her skull. The drysuit was form-fitting and, with Lydia posed that way, it outlined her breasts and waist in a strikingly seductive manner.

God but she’s a sexy woman, Jiro thought—as he’d thought so many times before in the three and a half years of summers and school breaks that he’d worked with Dr. Fabro. He’d never done anything about his feelings toward her, however. Never even asked her out on an official date. Of course not. She was his boss, and at least a dozen years older than he was. Her brother’s dolphin-Ibogara treatments had left Jiro mostly symptom-free since his days in Hawaii, but they still hadn’t cured his backwardness around women he to whom he felt attracted.