Better Angels (3 page)

He did, however, remember thinking in his dream, “Oh, these are the dead, standing behind me, watching and waiting.” That thought knocked him right back to consciousness. He was sure the dream had something to do with all that had happened to him recently—and with the prospect of the plan that had been forming in his mind for the past week.

Sitting in his dusty, battered car, he took another sip from the bottle of Edradour—“Single Highland Malt Scotch Whisky from the smallest distillery in Scotland”—which his Uncle Tim had brought back as a gift for him, years before. Tasting the warm, peaty sting and sizzle of the scotch lingering in his mouth and throat, Paul turned his attention to a piece of paper sealed in a plastic sleeve, lying on the seat of his car.

Breaking the seal on the plastic, he removed a carefully folded sheet of age-brittled white paper, upon which could be seen a dusty blue image like the photo-negative of a brain. It was the spore print he had first found in an envelope ten years earlier, buried deep in his backpack, after he emptied the pack on returning home from Caracamuni tepui.

Whether the spore print had been secretly planted there while he was in the cave, or during that last long night on the tepui top—and by whom—Paul did not know. He only knew that for a decade he had never been able to bring himself to make public the print’s existence. Nor could he bring himself to destroy it, any more than he could destroy any of his information on Jacinta. Information, as she had been fond of saying, is everything. Even information held in the limbo of the lost.

He had gone public with other matters from that time. Maybe too public. Ten years back, when he and his guide and native porters had returned from the tepui backcountry, they had told their story and shown their video recording of Caracamuni’s top lifting off, de-coupling from the Earth—to anyone who would listen, anyone who would watch.

Despite the fantastic nature of their story, or maybe because of it, no one really seemed to care. Another obscure piece of remote Amazonian real estate had disappeared—so what? That stuff was going up in smoke all the time back then. The kinder seismologists and vulcanologists interpreted their tale of the ascent of Caracamuni as an “anomalous volcanic eruption” and filed it away for future reference. Those less kind had interpreted Larkin’s short tape of the tepui rising as a video hoax, nothing more.

Fash’s anthropologists and archeologists, initially intrigued by what Jacinta claimed to have found on and in Caracamuni, cancelled their expedition. The controversy over the arrival date for human beings in the New World—to which Jacinta had contributed—continued unabated. The idea that a pocket of living-fossil Homo sapiens neandertalensis had survived into the present day on an isolated tepui in South America was dismissed out of hand. Those organizations that had granted or loaned Jacinta funds and equipment hassled Paul and his parents for a time but eventually wrote off both Jacinta and her failed expedition under something called a “forgiveness clause.”

After Paul’s brief emergency leave from KFSN—to take care of “family matters”—had ended, his employers expected to go on with his life as if nothing had happened.

Nothing but flying mountains. Nothing but mushrooms from space. Nothing but incredibly ancient indigenes and failed white goddesses gone native. Nothing but “forty-odd aboriginal astronauts and a crazed ethnobotanist as humanity’s first personal ambassadors to the universe.”

Taking another sip of the Edradour, he held the square of paper lightly, contemplatively, a relaxed arm’s length away. Symbol for him of all the events he had endured at Caracamuni tepui, the square of paper stood as well for all the pain and trouble those events and their telling had caused him since. Through the smoky haze of the scotch, he tried to remember who had first mentioned that “forty odd aboriginal astronauts . . .” et cetera phrase—had it been him? The media? The media quoting him, when he was still part of the media? Before the “trashy controversy” over his Caracamuni tape had cost him his first career as a broadcast journalist?

Now, the “flying mountaintop” story had cost him a second career, the one he had built laboriously built for himself over the past decade. The old sensational story had reappeared in the media and, in his refusal to disavow it, Paul had completely unraveled his career in Biology—all within the last four months. He didn’t want to think about it, but his mind kept going there, like a tongue to the empty socket of a pulled wisdom tooth.

Paul stared hard again at the spore print. His last card, the strange ace in the hole he had never wanted to play. He had played it, at last, but what good had it done him?

Two months back, desperate at being reduced to the status of “independent researcher,” Paul got in touch with Professor Phil Damon, who had headed his dissertation committee. Damon had been reluctant to help a tainted former student but he had, mercifully enough, listened to the story of the spore print and the bizarre fungus it might grow. Damon agreed to examine the spore print and have some of it plated out and grown.

Taking another smoky sip of the Edradour and examining the spore print now, Paul could see the blank area in the upper left hand corner. Almost six weeks ago, Damon and a mycologist colleague, in a chamber under a ventilation hood, had scraped spores from that corner of the paper, then shaken them onto a series of Petri dishes filled with various growth media, before handing the print back to him.

Three weeks into his testing of the fungus, Damon had called and quite unexpectedly announced that he had set up a meeting between Paul and Athena Griego, a “venture capital agent.” Griego claimed to represent a number of investors and pharmaceutical firms that might be interested in further research on the fungus.

Ms. Griego had turned out to be a very high-powered and intense woman in her early forties, small of frame but with the sort of preternaturally high-riding and large spherical breasts that suggested structural augmentation. During the meeting she had struck Paul as shady somehow, a wheeler-dealer, an operator. Griego had promised to get back to him in a week, but he had heard nothing since. Some sort of response was very much overdue. The agent, for all her signifiers of power and augmentation, had apparently turned out to be much talk and no action.

Yeah, he thought as he re-folded and re-sleeved the spore print, whatever string of good luck I might once have had, I ran it all out a long time ago. Taking up the bottle and getting out of the car, he wondered why: Why had he been so obstinate? Why couldn’t he have just kept his mouth shut about the tepui and what had happened there—from the very beginning? Why had he thought it so important for the world to know?

Maybe I’m just self-destructive, he thought. Maybe I’m doomed to crash every merry-go-round I make for myself, just as soon as I get it spinning up to speed.

As he staggered away from the car, Paul knew his stubbornness had to be more than just that. To bury the truth of what he’d seen at Caracamuni would be to bury the memory of his sister, to bring her disappearance closer to the death he feared that disappearance had already become. To turn ten years’ absence and “might as well be dead” into quite dead indeed. He didn’t want to bury Jacinta when she—or at least some part of her—might still be alive somewhere.

In his study at home, Paul had a desk drawer filled with memories, all carefully filed away. The specific details of his sister Jacinta’s life and death receded and faded and vanished, yet the emotions surrounding those memories grew always nearer and more powerful. He could not resolve the paradox of that, so he tried to live in it.

Through the sparse brush he staggered his way toward a sandy scarp he had seen while driving into the desert valley earlier in the evening. Looking about him at night and desolation, Paul realized that he had not done very well trying at living in paradox. Instead, he had tried to fill the empty space of Jacinta’s disappearance with work and study and research.

In the drawer at home with his memories of his sister there were also clippings and notes about quartz: fused from silicon and oxygen, the two most common elements to be found in the crust of Earth and Earthlike planets; harder than steel, fashioned into weapons for the past fifty thousand years; beloved by ancient Sumerians and Egyptians, Bedouins and crusaders, Oriental craftsmen, electronics manufacturers, shamans and witches, alchemists and New Age spiritualists. He read the notes and sometimes wondered about the source of humanity’s long romance with that rock.

Though it was certainly not his field, he had for the sake of Jacinta’s memory read with a certain dislocated interest the speculations that the indigenous Tasmanians, extinguished a few hundred years ago, had a Mousterian toolkit—and physiological features too that would later be described in terms of
neandertalensis
and
soloensis
.

In memory of Jacinta he also kept any notes and clippings he found about living fossils, the small groups of plants and animals that are the last living representatives of ancient categories of life, time-frozen creatures still resembling relatives that lived tens or hundreds of millions of years ago, even billions of years ago. Such creatures seemed to him undying memories in the mind of Life.

He stared again at the plastic sleeve and the folded paper that contained the spore print. Why had he guarded so closely the existence of this living fossil, if it was that? Why had he been so reluctant to release the spore print to the world, when he’d been so eager to show the videotape of Caracamuni? The spore print, if the ghost people’s mushroom could be grown from it successfully, would present at least the proof of a species never before known to science—although that alone, of course, did not require that anyone believe the whole strange story of the milieu from which the mushroom had come.

What else would the release of that spore print bring, though? He wondered, for the ten thousandth time, what his obsession with the print and the fungus it produced was really all about. Organic alien technology? Or a mask for his own fears of the death and decay of a loved one?

He thought about that. Was Jacinta’s disappearance—the singularity at the heart of the black hole of his obsession—pulling all his research and all his life inescapably down into its deadly gravity? Or was it only his own fear of mortality and meaninglessness, death as event horizon, from whose bourne no further signal escapes?

He tripped on a stone and fell. With drunkard’s luck he somehow managed to avoid landing on anything sharp. He was glad he hadn’t plunged face first into a jumping cholla or something equally nasty.

Looking and feeling about himself in the moonlight, he found he had landed in sand, amid the crisping remains of the ephemerals that had flowered that Spring. He grunted and took another swig of the Edradour, carefully putting the plastic-sleeved spore print sheet into his vest pocket. He felt remarkably clear-headed in his thoughts, despite what the scotch seemed to be doing to his physical coordination.

He pondered that mind-body split, then picked up a seed capsule from one of the blown flowers and rubbed it between his thumb and forefinger. The desert ephemerals had bloomed in great profusion all through the Spring, the result of the long rains. Jacinta had always loved the desert blooms, especially during El Niño years. The past winter’s rains had been the result of the fourth big southern oscillation since she disappeared. The El Niños were coming more frequently and lasting longer, or the climate had gone into a permanent El Niño cycle, as some claimed. Greenhouse warming making the weather more chaotic, extreme, unpredictable. Or something.

Looking at the intricate seed capsule in the light of the rising full moon, it seemed to him that the natural world possessed an old dreaming wisdom, deeper and more subtle than human knowledge. We’re arrogant upstarts, he thought, to believe our few thousand years of technology, our few hundreds of years of science, could be wiser than the wisdom embedded in the systems this planet has dreamed up on its own, over billions of years.

Wilderness is the great unconsciousness where the world dreams, he thought—setting off an inebriated cascade of ideas. Conscious creatures desperately need that. If we don’t dream we don’t learn. Evolution is life’s long unconscious learning. To wipe out species is to end learning. We’ve been burning the classrooms and killing the students for a long time.

Falling back full length on the sandy patch he’d stumbled into, Paul stared up at the night sky and drank down the last of the Edradour. The warm sizzle of the scotch trickled slowly through his body, moment after moment. A sandy-haired man trying to sink into the sand—that’s what I am, Paul thought with a smile.

The world is a given, he speculated to himself. Even death. All science and engineering have been reverse-engineering, when you think about it. Just trying to figure out how it’s all put together, how it all works. Maybe the goal of the mind is to engineer an escape from the mortal technology of the body. The way the nervous system and the immune system are hooked up together in the same network...maybe consciousness itself is a sort of super immune system, trying to develop immunity to mortality. Maybe in the end death does not conquer consciousness; consciousness conquers death.

“I must be drunker than I thought,” he said with a laugh, “to be thinking things like this.”

Thinking of Jacinta, however, he grew more somber. Tonight was the tenth anniversary of her disappearance. It was probably all too reasonable to conclude that she must be dead, by now.

At the thought of her death, however, Paul was never able to cry—at least not while he was awake. He had never cried for her, yet, whenever he thought deeply of her, he somehow always found himself on the verge of tears. He told himself it was all too deep for tears, yet he feared the tears might be too deep for him—that, once he allowed himself to cry, he’d never be able to stop, that it would break down the dam he’d built in his soul and overwhelm his small sanity in the flood of his grief.

Since Jacinta’s disappearance, he had “gone on” with his life, but differently. His destiny had gone awry, like a Jesus who wakes up to find he’s thirty-four and has somehow missed the crucifixion. Jacinta would understand about messiahs gone awry, he thought.