Better Angels (41 page)

The scene returned to the authoritative talking-torso in the studio.

“From the opposite end of the spectrum,” the gray-headed alphamale anchor said, “we have this from Life Before Human.”

A woman—dressed in a forest-ranger green “Corporate Greed Wants You To Breed!” tee shirt and khaki pants, her face thickly painted in blues, ochers, and whites to resemble the Earth seen from space—stared into the camera.

“We have set in motion a great advance in our ecosphere’s evolution!” she said. “We have turned military war mite technology against itself in a ‘war of nerves’—re-engineering our own nervous, immune, and endocrine systems, re-introducing long-lost spirochete traits back to their old homes. Each of us will now become an ecology of mind, the individual cells of our psychosomatic networks breeding, rotating, swimming—yet linked, communicating, thoughtful. Each of us will become a mental network inseparably part of its environment—and one that will grow only as large as its environment will support. In breaking down all the barriers, sensitizing us to ourselves, to each other, to the entire planet, this great change will at last allow each and all of us to become truly conscious, truly human, and truly ecological! Welcome to the Next Step!”

Paul scanned on, dismayed at the thought of mindless brains oozing into the world, human psychosomal cells living in every nook and niche. What came next, however, was even more dismaying.

In shots from helicopters overhead and from hand-held cameras at street level, Paul and Seiji and Diana watched the last barriers of sanity going down in too many of the globe’s great cities. Madness and mayhem filled the streets, buildings blazed, gunfire sounded. Everywhere the air was filled with human shouts and screams, the sound of smashing metal, thudding stone, breaking glass. Most peculiar of all, however, were the mobs and hordes throwing themselves with lemming-like determination into fountains and lakes, mudflats and ponds, streams and rivers and brackish estuaries.

Why would people be trying to drown themselves en masse, Paul wondered, when almost none of them seemed to be on fire? What would cause such a horrifying mass hysteria?

As the three of them watched, however, the cause became increasingly clear. A wobbly hand-held image—of a young woman with short dark hair, falling onto her knees in a mudflat, then onto her side and back, face up in the first drops of a rainstorm—caught Paul’s attention as it must also have caught the camera operator’s. With a strange, horrid fascination, Paul watched as the camera’s focus moved in close, catching everything as the dark-haired young woman’s eyes glazed over, her eyeballs themselves jittering and REMming strangely as they sank backward and inward into her head. At the same time, from both her ears and both her nostrils, trickles of gray, red, and white dripped then flowed, out and down, becoming runnels, streams, floods of cells, steamingly and squirmingly alive, like mats of tubifex worms, spreading, moving off in loose, flattish masses across the wet mud.

“Good God!” Diana said. “This is horrible!”

Paul scanned on in silence, looking for more of the same, more proof of the madness sweeping Earth. Most of the news media kept a fairly discrete distance from the actual death-throes, but enough of the close-ups could be seen here and there throughout the infosphere to confirm that the young woman’s demise was not atypical. Among those victims who fell forward onto their hands and knees, the eyes of some burst open or popped out from the pressure behind them. Some spewed spirochetized cells from their mouths, while other victims burst apart all along their spinal columns, some with such force that their clothing shredded above their backbones.

Soon Paul, Diana, and Seiji had all seen quite enough to become sickened.

“The habitat has to move on this—and quickly,” Diana said, her eyes red.

“No doubt about it,” Seiji agreed, nodding. “But how?”

“I don’t know,” she said, standing up. “Find out more on the specifics of this plague, first off.”

“Yes,” Paul agreed, disconnecting himself from his virtuality electronics. “Determine who, if anybody, has arrived since this started on Earth. Check them for symptoms.”

“I include myself in that group,” Diana said in a quiet, level voice. “I fly up and down the gravity well often enough.”

“Quarantine all ships and passengers coming up from Earth, I think,” Seiji said. “Then offer to contribute whatever expertise we possess here in the habitat to help find a cure or vaccine or whatever it’ll take to stop this stuff.”

Paul walked over to where Diana and Seiji were standing.

“All good ideas,” he said, nodding. “Any suggestion where we might go with them next?”

“V-mail everyone we know in the infosphere?” Seiji asked, speculatively, his mind drawing a blank. Diana, however, brightened.

“Announce it in the Public Sphere area of the infosphere, yes,” she said, “but we should also go physically to the Performance Pavilion. That’s where the habitat council meets. It’s as close to a Roman forum as you can get, here.”

Quickly agreeing that was the best course of action, the three of them left Paul’s place and made their way to the nearest bullet tube platform. Several other residents had already gathered there, the Pavilion also their intended destination.

Paul was relieved to see the crowd when they arrived at the pavilion. There must have been a thousand people milling about, exchanging ideas, waiting for the colony council to begin emergency session. Amazing how quickly this small town in space could respond when real danger threatened, he thought. And real danger was threatening—not only the orbital habitat, but all humanity.

* * * * * * *

Into the World of Light

The man on horseback at sunset, Jiro thought. He’s there, and then he’s not.

Turning his gaze away from the ridge, Jiro shrugged. Maybe the vision of the man on horseback was from the future, one of those “handshakes across time” the transactional interpreters of quantum mechanics talked about. He knew a great deal about all of that now. About time’s sensitive dependence, not only on initial conditions but also on final conditions. He had been studying the theories with an obsessive diligence.

He had slept less and less during the course of the last year, so he would have more time for his researches. In the last forty days, he had not eaten at all and had slept nearly as little. That, and the modified angeltech he had swarming in his head, meant he saw strange things like the man on horseback almost all the time, now. Thank heavens it still appeared mainly in his peripheral vision.

Try new Reality Shaper by Sansdoze, he thought with a chuckle as he made his last trek through the Trashlands. He glanced up at the sunset sky and, in the periphery of what he saw, someone else’s mad visions appeared: a heaven woven of lead and brass, through which a rain of ghostly human bodies fell slantwise round and round. About him in eldritch fashion they began crawling and walking and falling, walking and falling, round and round. Naked and aware of their nakedness, he saw too many more of them coming all the time, joining the endless locker room posturing in this gridworld wrapped tight in territories, boundaries, radar fences, electric fences, barbed wire, barricades, walls—watchtowered by astronaut angel prison guardians in a celestial concentration camp.

More truthful hallucinations. He wondered vaguely where this stuff was coming from. Was the modified angeltech in his head picking it up from somewhere out in space? Was it coming from all those people who had been spirocheted by war mites? How many was that now? Eighty-five million so far? Thank God the stolen war mite strains were water- and contact-vectored, not airborne or particularly air mobile. And if they had been micropropulsioned, well, humanity would already be history—no matter which of the many claimants was responsible for stealing them. Thank God, too, that Lydia had never revealed the angel skull to the military or the media, as far as he knew. Unless, of course, the war mites had come from that artifact—and he was not responsible in anyway for all this suffering.

No—that was too easy an out. If I had never figured out how the damn things could be reanimated and programmed, Jiro thought, none of this might have happened. His involvement with that alien coevolution tech had weighed on him for months and months now, but the idea of his personal responsibility for the military’s Nanogeddon modifications of the tech—that thought had been crushingly heavy since the moment he first heard of the War Mite Plague.

He had hoped to visit the major medical and biomedical institutions closer to Los Angeles and personally offer his help, but no one could get within a thirty mile radius of downtown Los Angeles now. Everything was blocked off and quarantined—nothing but military and government vehicles moving in or out. As a fallback option, he had thrown himself into finding a solution to the war mite problem from his own records and those in the infosphere—yet another duty that turned sleep into a wasteful luxury.

He hoped it had paid off. Now, he thought he might have come up with one. Spray the plagued people and regions with an antidote enantioviroid tech, to reprogram the warmites and neutralize the spirochetizing effect. He had worked it out. The schematics for the enantioviroid insertion were all done. He only had to send them to everyone in the infosphere on his list. If anyone with the appropriate resources paid attention to his final message, it might help them all save themselves.

Here he was, headed for his white coldbox coffin where he planned to hook up the LogiBoxes, superconduct, and freeze the hell out of here, or die trying—and he was still thinking about saving the world when he might not even be able to save himself. Jiro wondered if this was all just grand-delusional again: Secret Savior with his anonymous antidote, changing history yet unknown to history. Maybe his hope that others would pay attention to his antidote design was another Cyberite fantasy—a psychological talking-cure or religious “Truth will set you free,” gone infospheric and telecommunicative. Still, it was all he could offer them, so offer it he would.

Around him countless ghostly barbed-wire bodies touched, tangled, snagged, involved their barbed wire with others, all running lines of force, lines of power, offensive and defensive lines over the fields of battle and game on this concentration planet, until everything was divided from everything else all the way back to the atoms, then the atoms divided, too.

“Hey, Wiz!” a boy shouted, running toward Jiro over a steaming mountain of rubbish and debris. “How you doing? Haven’t seen you out of the box lately.”

Jiro focused, tried to concentrate. He saw that it was one of the red-headed Jebson kids. He wasn’t sure whether the kid’s family was TechNot, NeoLudd, Refusenik, Zapaline, Pepenaro, Pure Finder, Resource Recycler, or any of half a dozen other lo- and no-tek tribes living hereabouts. Like all those groups, though, the Jebsons dwelt here quasi-communally, at the periphery of the throwaway information society that had created the Trashlands and similar sacrifice edge-zones outside cities all over Earth.

About the only unified article of faith the groups here all shared, Jiro supposed, was a belief that trash was a phony dead-end produced by a phony dead-end economy. Nature did not make trash, the Trashlanders agreed. It was cyclical and recycling rather than linear and non-sustainable. All the tribes tried to bend the end of the line back toward its beginning, to twist the linear into the cyclical. That respect for the cyclical resulted in the plethora of looping symbols—from tail-swallowing ancient Ouroboroi to triple-arrowed resource recycling triangles—with which they adorned all their arts and handicrafts.

“Hi, Jeff,” Jiro said, coughing, trying to bring his mind back from its wandering. “Been busy. Got to jump out of the box for good before the War Mites or the authorities get all of us.”

“How you going to do that, Wiz?” the boy asked.

Jiro glanced at the boy. In a past he barely remembered, Jiro had informed the Jebsons of the potentially fatal dangers of trying to live on Retcorp and Lambeg’s Buleem-O fake fat—a dumped truckload of which the Jebson family had discovered, and on which they had planned to survive the winter. Once he had convinced them, the Jebsons were grateful for the warning. The entire family had called him The Wizard ever since. Even if he was a blown-out human-computer infojunkie, a total webhead oracle who wasn’t desktop, who came out of hiding mainly at night, rising in darkness from a white coffin like a living-dead Vampire Christ—Jiro was still “good people,” as far as the Jebsons were concerned (even if he wasn’t “quite right”). They tried to look in on him and look after him, when they could, although that wasn’t very often. Jiro appreciated that, in his less anti-social moments. He had even “hired” them to help him haul his equipment out to the Trashlands when it arrived. They had looked at the high tech with disdain and tsk-tsked him the whole time.

“How?” Jiro asked, trying to focus again. “I’m going to step through the mirror in my dreambody, that’s how. Jiro in Quantumland. Step out of the Blatant Zone and into the Latent Zone. Meet the Dreaming God of the Guajiro Indians.”

“What?” the Jebson boy said, profound puzzlement on his face.

“I’m building a virtuality in the ‘Boxes,” Jiro said. “One that works like the imaginal realm between the material and the mental. Like the Huqalya of the Sufis. A virtuality out of which a Jiro real and sane can reappear. Conservation of possibility and information means this actual physical Jiro in front of you must die, but don’t worry. Like old Chief Seathl said, there is no death—only a change of worlds.”

Jeff Jebson shook his head and gave Jiro a crooked smile.

“Sounds pretty complicated,” the boy said, “but good luck anyway. And don’t talk about dying—you don’t look so good as it is. Take care of yourself, okay?”

Jiro waved as the boy darted back toward some of his playfellows. Walking past the encampments of the Jebsons and two other families, he was once again stunned by their laughter. For all their ideological veneer, weren’t they, in the eyes of the world, merely refugees living in a smoldering wasteland, people scavenging from womb to tomb, building their houses out of trash, living off trash? Yet that was all recycling to them. He wondered how they handled deaths and funerals, since cremation was incineration and burial was just expensive landfill—each too trash-like an ending by far. And yet there was still joy here, despite everything the world thought of them and the paradoxes in their own beliefs.