Better Angels (59 page)

“To care is why we’re here. The image of the divine is imprinted in all things. The just person justices, the true angel angels. We do what we are. All humans are incarnate codes, words made flesh sharing fully in the same flesh message with all the best and all the worst of human beings throughout time—a message that is itself only a variant of the message shared by all living beings.”

“We share a great deal, Roger,” said the angel who looked vaguely like a Native American shaman. “I’m as guilty as you are. I forcibly shared my piece of the truth with the world, altered consciousnesses without permission for a brief instant. I imposed my will, in an attempt to assure their bliss. You suffered for that—you, who only intended the same, ultimately. Those who attempt that imposition chemically, though, always face the stiffer censure. Still, we’re much the same—both reminders that even the bright dreams of reason and life cannot ignore the grim nightmares of madness and death. Always we must strike a balance between the angel and the rat—complete the circle at least temporarily, so neither stands alone.”

The way the angel smiled at him—so gentle yet so knowing—disturbed Roger profoundly. The two angels were so alike, like twins born into different worlds or on different timelines—even more, the same person, but male here and female there, dead here and alive there, staying here and going there, Yamaguchi’s brother, Larkin’s sister, lost siblings from countless times and places fused and knotted.

“You’re still trying to cast everything into the past, Roger Cortland,” said the other, as if reading his mind, “but the question is not Who were the angels or Who was Divinity Incarnate? but rather Who is that and Who will be that?—fully, again and again. Who is and who will be willing to forget self for the sake of other? We cannot give up caring so long as there still remain any who are endarkened, unmindful. This universe, and the plenum of all universes, can embody right mindfulness only when all in it also do so.”

The van of angels surrounded him completely then and Roger had a final vision. It seemed he saw every mind in all the universes, each decision shedding photons but also generating a minuscule black hole, a subnano-singularity. On the other side of each of those tiny black holes, these bifurcation points, a nearly parallel universe branched off. The road not taken here was taken there.

Larkin’s sister here/Yamaguchi’s brother there angelic pair flickered through his head once again. Parallel lines could meet in the space of mind. Mind in fact seemed to be nothing less than these meetings, the membranous infinity of portals and gateways between universes, the entire plenum of universes, the compassionate void conserving possibility and information the way the universe he’d been born into conserved matter and energy. He seemed to stand inside a great spherical golden tree, boundless in its rooting and branching but also rooted and branching in him, truly 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, enormous plenum ArcHive, flashing infinite of Mind Thinking, or rather Dreamer Dreaming, toward which lightpaths and standing waves were bent upon returning, like angels bettered by having known the mirror-serpentry of life and death.

In that moment, Jiro and Roger Cortland and Mike Dalke shared in dream an experience they all three had had in life: A field of new snow. Charging out across it on impulse. Falling backwards down into it. Moving arms back and forth in flattened butterfly strokes. Jumping up and away to look down on the result: a white winged human shadow, a snow angel, a shadow of the past, a shadow of the present, a shadow of the future. The shadow of a dream, cast by eternity into time.

* * * * * * *

Go On—But Differently

Inside the cavern inside the tepui inside the cave of the deep night, the tepuians fell toward human space, where Jiro and Lydia no longer dwelt but their friends and families still remained. The tepuians saw their monitor screens come to life again with broadcasts from Earth, with images of near-Earth space, and they rushed to the surface of the tepui to see again with their own eyes the pearl of that world floating on the bosom of the night.

In that human space before them, Jacinta’s brother Paul still waited, decades of his life now gone, although not uneventfully. Life went on differently too for Jiro’s brother Seiji, having met (once, but sadly never again) his second cousin John, and having also met (and one day destined to marry) Jhana Meniskos—and knowing something, now, of his brother Jiro’s strange death and transformation.

Lydia Fabro’s brother Todd had discovered and signed to his new label a spectacularly rising musical group from the orbital habitat—Mšbius Cadœceus, the brainchild band of Lev Korchnoi, managed by Aleister McBruce, whose first album, Sonic Mirrors, was soon to be released. Having survived his brush with transcendence, Roger Cortland was perhaps better for that wear, reconciled to his mother Atsuko and to Marissa Correa, the woman he hoped would someday love him, despite all he had done. The only odd side-effects of Roger’s having been brushed by the wings of angels were his newly developed interest in doing drawings and mechanical draftings of those beings (particularly their wings) and his penchant for tautological theological axioms—“The true Christian Christs, the true Buddhist Buddhas.”

Afloat in his manatee livesuit beneath Retcorp and Lambeg’s Twin Towers Complex B in Cincinnati, Mike Dalke brooded over his defeat, gnawed and mouthed the further loss of netizens loyal to his cause, and wished all the while he had recorded everything, for he fully believed he had been left half-alive in the hell that comes of seeing truth too late. He remembered the Allesseh, however, and had begun looking into his brother Ray’s whereabouts and current occupation. He also began contemplating the construction of a Dreamland all his own.

Climbing out of the tepui cavern into starlight and earthlight, Jacinta Larkin thought about what she knew now. She understood the riddle of the Sclerotium’s two bodies, of Jiro’s two bodies—one particulate, fruiting and spore clustering; the other spreading through its lightpaths like a standing wave. Perhaps all human beings potentially possessed those forms—offspring and ideas, children of the loins and children of the mind.

She understood how the four letters IHVH, in naming a triune God, were echoed in the four letters A, C, T, G making up triplet proteins through DNA. She understood how the Dreamer dressed mind and matter for union with each other as the only fitting partners, and how the Dreamer’s single thought of All Love was enough to unite them.

Standing on the surface beside Kekchi, she looked down at a world which from this distance still looked like a clean, well-lighted planet. Looking upon it, she knew that it would go on, but differently. The past was no more inevitable than the future. She knew that the overabundance of human beings on that world only seemed to make persons disposable, the sheer glut on their numbers devaluing them as individuals—when in truth their value had never changed, their lives had never been disposable.

The tepui, ensphered in its field of force, fell through day and twilight into Earth’s nightside. She looked up at the stars, waiting for her eyes to adjust to their light. In the end the stars had not gone out on them; they had gone out to the stars.

She and Kekchi and the rest pointed when they saw a bright shooting star. One that persisted. For an instant Jacinta thought of sporeship accidents, galactic spiral arm dustlanes, the Chicxulub impact spawning the volcanic Deccan trap lava flows on the other side of the world and incidentally killing all the dinosaurs. She feared that somebody down there on Earth, thinking they were a doomsday impactor, might try to shoot the tepui out of the sky—

But no. For an instant Jacinta had fallen again into No Time, which was only like the present, not synonymous with it. Her fear did not last as long as the shooting star, which was no shooting star at all, they saw, but someone in a spacesuit on something like a very large surfboard—a fireboarder, an astrosurfer, swooping in to look them over, trailing a long tail of fire.

“Wave, Jacinta!” Kekchi said.

With the rest of the tepuians, she waved to the human shooting star—and to the universe, beyond it—as it sped past them. She could not say with certainty whether it was the universe or just the meteorrider trying to maintain balance on the big board, but a wave came back.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Howard V. Hendrix
’s first four novels appeared from Ace Books (now reprinted by the Borgo Press):
Lightpaths
(1997),
Standing Wave
(1998),
Better Angels
(1999), and
Empty Cities of the Full Moon
(2001). His fifth novel,
The Labyrinth Key
, appeared from Ballantine Del Rey in April 2004. A sixth novel,
Spears of God
, was published by Del Rey in December 2006.

His most widely available works of shorter science fiction can be found in his “double” short story collection,
Human in the Circuit/Depth of Perception
(Borgo Press, 2010),
Möbius Highway
(Scorpius Digital Books, 2001), the
Full Spectrum
original anthology series Vols. 1, 4, and 5 (Bantam Books), and in
The Outer Limits, Volume 1
(Prima).

He has also published numerous poems (one of which, “Bumbershoot,” won the 2010 Dwarf Stars Award from the Science Fiction Poetry Association), political essays (especially in
Boom: A Journal of California
, beginning in Summer 2012), book reviews, and works of literary criticism, including his book-length study of apocalyptic elements in English literature from Langland to Milton,
The Ecstasy of Catastrophe
(1990). An avid gardener, his book on landscape irrigation,
Reliable Rain
(co-authored with Stuart Straw), appeared in March 1998 from Taunton Press.

His degrees include a B.S. in Biology, and an M.A. and Ph.D. in English Literature. He and his wife Laurel teach at California State University, Fresno, and live near Shaver Lake, CA, where they enjoy backpacking and snowshoeing in the Sierra Nevada.