Better Angels (51 page)

“Is that what this stuff is?” Seiji asked, pointing at the layer of bluish dust that covered all the velvet-draped side walls and most of the floor of the colbox. Paul took up some of it and rubbed it between his fingers. “Dried ‘soap’?”

“No,” the coroner said. “There was no evidence of saponification. The body must have initially been freeze-dried, as it were. This box seems to have preserved the remains very well—quite cold, until recently. The Jebson kid admitted to opening up the box for the first time last week, just before the first rains of the season swept through. Claims the voices out here told him to. More likely he saw those holoshots your cousin posted. Crazy kid’s got one hell of an imagination. The deputies were glad to turn that boy back over to his folks.”

“Then what is this dusty stuff?” Seiji asked again.

“Fungal spores,” Paul said, staring at the dust on his fingers. “Of the Cordyceps jacintae mushroom.”

The coroner looked at Paul in startlement.

“We haven’t had time to identify the species yet,” the gravel-voiced man said, “but they’re mushroom spores. That’s right.”

“But this stuff is so thick,” Seiji said, staring at the dust layer. “How—?”

The coroner averted his glance.

“I want to see the body,” Seiji said suddenly, his voice cracking slightly.

“I had hoped to spare you that,” the coroner said, glancing first at Seiji, then at Paul. “We were able to ID without—”

“I insist,” Seiji said.

The coroner shrugged, then led them back to his vehicle. Once back in town, he led them into the town morgue, in the mortuary basement of the funeral home—one of a chain he also operated, throughout the county. The coroner was a funeral home director and practicing undertaker in this part of the county as well.

“Instant hypothermia is a peaceful way to die,” the coroner-undertaker assured them as he led them toward the wall of pullout slabs. He pulled open a long drawer with an opaquely-bagged body prone upon it. Paul had seen this sort of place in the media, but he was so unfamiliar with the service industry of death that he didn’t know the proper technical terms for the devices he saw around him, not even for the wall with its long drawers, like filing cabinets for corpses. He could only watch as the coroner-cum-mortician, now gloved, unzipped the bag and a thick mushroomy aroma filled the morgue.

Seiji gasped. Having half expected what lay in the opened body-bag before them, Paul did not find his breath taken away by the sight, although what he saw was still a good deal more than he had anticipated.

Not even on the corpse isle deep inside Caracamuni tepui had he seen any fruiting of the ghost people’s sacred fungus nearly so dense and massive as the one he saw before him now. The substance of Jiro’s body seemed to have been converted entirely into Cordyceps jacintae fruiting bodies. They covered the corpse so completely that it seemed less a body than a mass of mushrooms in the shape of a man. The mushrooms themselves seemed to have erupted from the body with explosive force, for there were scraps and shreds of clothing still caught up amid the mass of fungal fruiting bodies. A number of the mushroom stalks had broken off and settled in the bag, Paul noticed—probably from when the body was removed from the coldbox. Everywhere, too, was the bluish dust.

“The only place we were able to lift a print from was the tip of the smallest finger of the left hand,” the coroner explained to Paul. “We had to go all the way to the bone to get an unmixed human DNA sample.”

Seiji stared down at the body.

“Freeze-flush,” he said.

“Pardon?” the coroner asked.

“Many types of fungi are triggered into mass fruiting through a freeze followed by a flush of water,” Paul explained, since Seiji was not forthcoming. “Winter cold and dry followed by spring’s warmth and rains.”

“Oh,” the coroner said, calling up information on his portable data assistant. “I see.”

“Jiro’s body must have been flash frozen,” Seiji said distantly, “then flooded, when it rained.”

The coroner’s eyebrows rose in surprise at something he saw on his pda screen.

“Did you say
Cordyceps jacintae
?” the coroner asked Paul. “Gatehead mushrooms?”

“Yes,” Seiji said with an odd smile and a snort of a laugh, before Paul could reply. “My brother has become a controlled substance.”

Paul and the coroner glanced awkwardly at each other. Seiji looked at them both, over his brother’s body transubtantiated to the flesh of the tepuians’ sacred mushroom.

“You should probably take some samples for the biodiversity preserve at the habitat, Paul,” Seiji said. “I know you’ll regret it later, if you don’t do it now.” He turned to the coroner. “As for the funeral arrangements, cremate the body. Isn’t that what you do with controlled substances down here? Burn them?”

The coroner hesitated, then nodded. Paul slipped on gloves, scraped up spores and, with the coroner’s assistance, put them in small vials. Paul then bagged up mushrooms, the phrase “fruiting bodies from a fruiting body” rising perversely in his head as he did so. While they were thus occupied, Seiji was on the vidphone behind them, talking with the sheriff about the release of Jiro’s personal effects and the prospect of shipping them up the well to the orbital habitat. Next he spoke with the power company concerning the illegal utility charges Jiro had racked up. Since Seiji worked in solar satellite engineering at the habitat, however, the power company seemed inclined to quickly activate a forgiveness clause and forget the entire episode. Finally Seiji made shipping arrangements for Jiro’s effects and his gear in the Trashlands, deciding to have the big ParaLogics machines, the LogiBoxes, shipped up the well to the habitat. The coldbox and the spent nitrogen tanks he decided to leave behind on Earth.

Never soon enough, for Paul, they were finally done with all the necessary arrangements on Earth and were aboard the single-stage orbiter, on their way back to the orbital habitat. Now, as Seiji continued to sleep in the next seat over, Paul glanced out the porthole at the Earth hanging like a bright ornament against the blue-blackness of space. He was reminded again of that old familiar quote the Council Director had used: Earth is too small a basket for the human race to keep all its eggs in. Yet, out the porthole, the Earth itself looked like an egg: a fragile psychedelic Easter egg painted in moving and shifting blues and whites and greens and tans and ochers. The basket is an egg, he thought, and the egg is a basket.

Maneuvering rockets surged on as the orbiter prepared for docking with the orbital habitat. Seiji began to stir. By the time the orbiter had docked with the habitat, Seiji had come fully awake. Glancing over, Paul saw Seiji reserving a freight transfer pod, for the trip to Lakshmi Ngubo’s low-gravity residence and workshop, out among the industrial tori.

After they disembarked from the orbiter, Paul and Seiji made their way to the nearest available freight transfer pod. Both of them were impressed by the speed with which the materials Seiji had shipped up from Earth were now being transferred from orbiter to pod. More than half of Jiro’s gear was already loaded and ready to go by the time Seiji and Paul boarded the pod.

Although it was more involving for Paul and Seiji, since they were piloting, the run out to the industrial tori was uneventful compared to the round trip to and from Earth. When they had docked again and the airlock doors opened into Lakshmi Ngubo’s workshop, Paul and Seiji found a fortyish, dark-skinned woman with wavy black hair waiting for them, slumped in her hoverchair, her frail, atrophied body covered in a loose, flowing, earth-toned kaftan. Amid all her hoverchair’s attached robot arms and actuators, the woman seemed overwhelmed—until she noticed Paul and Seiji, smiled at them and pinned them with her bright, sharp gaze, as Seiji made introductions.

“So, Seiji,” she said, quickly moving beyond pleasantries. “What have you got for me?”

“Quite a number of things,” he said as he and Paul began unloading the pod, aided by the micro-gee environment and one of Lakshmi’s mobile waldo suites. Paul, no fan of micro-gee, was glad to have the distraction of the labor. “My brother Jiro’s personal effects. Legal records. Personal memorabilia. Police reports. Some odd junk Jiro collected that I can’t bring myself to throw away, though I probably should. Here’s something you might be interested in: three top-of-the-line LogiBoxes.”

Lakshmi’s eyes literally flashed when she saw them. She must be quite interested in such tech, Paul gathered.

“What do you want me to do with all this?” Lakshmi asked as they continued to unload freight into her workshop.

“Just store all the non-electronic stuff for me, if you would,” Seiji said.

“And the LogiBoxes?” Lakshmi asked.

“The Boxes were with Jiro when they found his body,” Seiji said. “Since his death was ruled an accident, the deputies and police down in Balaam made only perfunctory efforts at hacking into them. You and your friends can talk to machines better than anyone else I know, Laksh. You made the VAJRA system that runs the whole habitat, for heaven’s sake. See if you can’t get into the Boxes. Find out if they might have something to do with why my brother died the way he did.”

“I’ll warehouse the physical effects and to try to hack into the LogiBoxes,” she said, “as a favor to you. Umm, do you have any use for these Boxes? After I’m done hacking into them and transferring out all the information relevant to your brother, I mean?”

“No,” Seiji said. “I don’t believe so. Why?”

“I’d like to keep the Boxes,” she said. “I think I could put them to good use.”

Seiji smiled and shrugged.

“They’re all yours,” he said, “with my blessing. I wish you joy of them.”

Paul and Seiji said their farewells then and headed to the pod. Glancing back over his shoulder, Paul could see Lakshmi already at work on powering up the LogiBoxes, the robotic arms about her hoverchair a blur of activity. Seiji seemed to be right. If anyone could find out whether Jiro had left anything of his history in those Boxes, this woman could.

As they piloted the pod back toward the habitat’s central sphere, Paul was relieved at the thought of Lakshmi taking over responsibility for Jiro’s personal effects. Her bustling activity made him feel that he had honorably discharged his friend-of-the-family duties and had handed on the baton to an appropriate successor.

* * * * * * *

Cyberpomp

Back from death’s other kingdom, back from death’s dream kingdom, back from the undiscovered country where the dead were supposed to dream the world of the living as the living were supposed to dream the world of the dead, Jiro knew that he was dead when he woke up in his dreambody. He also knew he did not really believe in death anymore, for he had gone out and come back—only different, and differently.

Jiro in fact knew a great deal more than he had ever known, but he did not know who the Jiro was who knew it. This abrupt return, this quantum downshift from the world of higher dimensional light then to a mind of light now inside his reactivated ’Boxes—was it a transubstantiation? A reinstantiation? He could not say. All he could say was that the model of his mind that had been translated out of the coldbox existed now, as a wave of translation, a soliton or informational instanton, maintaining itself in these machines.

He had returned, a mind in rags and tattered wings, thought to be lost but not lost in thought. He had dreamed himself into the presence of the Big Dreamer. He had flown to the top of an unimaginably high mountain of light, toward the sun at its summit, a sun that was a flaming flower, multifoliate multidimensional rose of light, opening in spiral outward and outward forever and wherever, a blossom of uncountable universes and infinite years, a heart dark with excess of bright burning at the infinite flower’s center, the bright dark heart of the universal dreamer, the plenum dreamer.

Ever greater depths revealed themselves to him in that fathomless heart, out of which stars flowed, the hearts of galaxies flowed, unimaginably dense clusters of suns and of universes flowed, the plenum itself born of it, and he flew into it, faster and faster until he knew only flight and light, pure flight amid innumerable jewels of light moving through limitless space.

And he understood.

The Big Dream was a system, an intersection and interface, eternal and infinite, by which the Dreamer imprinted itself upon every pattern in all the universes and by which it was in turn impressed upon by every pattern in all the universes—a system absolutely comprehensive and absolutely coherent at one and the same time.

The jewels of light were the angels for which all human depictions, all the imitations and limitations of the Allesseh (yes, he knew of that false “bliss” and “co-operation” now, too well) were but faint echoes, distant dark mirrorings. The angels were creatures the Great Dreamer had dreamed before it became aware that it was dreaming. The light of the Dreamer was in them in particularly immaterial form, as they were pure creatures of the dream. That same light, however, shone also in all physical and material things as well.

He had seen the Dreamer’s imprint across all scales of the material universe. The Chinese dragon with the pearl under its chin was also the shaman’s dreamsnake with the quartz crystal at its head, was also the Serpent Mound and its Egg, was also the Gallic Druid’s magick egg produced by a snake, was also Neolithic cup-and-ring marks on rock outcrops in the British Isles, was also the lotus tree/cosmic serpent of the Djed Column, was also the white and bearded Aztec god Quetzalcoatl, was also Python and Typhon and Tiamat and Phaethon, was also a comet with glowing head and long tail, was also Han tomb paintings of comets, was also an echo of stars both good and evil—and perhaps a foreshock of other stars, both evil and good, yet to come.

In mazes and labyrinths and stone circles, in curled-up higher dimensional space represented by repetition in lower dimensions, in light as particle, in nuclei of atoms and nuclei of cells, in circuitry, in intestines, in hologram interference patterns, in vortices of tornado and hurricane and monsoon, in galactic arms spiralling inward from a galactic disc swimming in great waters, in spiralling strings collapsing into black holes of different internal space on the Final Day of Time, the dragon coiled inward toward coherence.