Better Angels. Howard V. Hendrix
BORGO PRESS BOOKS BY HOWARD V. HENDRIX
Better Angels: A Science Fiction Novel
Bright with Excessive Dark: Further Collected Stories
Dark with Excessive Bright: Further Collected Stories
Empty Cities of the Full Moon: A Science Fiction Novel
Human in the Circuit: Collected Stories
Lightpaths: A Science Fiction Novel
Perception of Depth: Collected Stories
Standing Wave: A Science Fiction Novel
COPYRIGHT INFORMATION
Copyright © 1999, 2012 by Howard V. Hendrix
Published by Wildside Press LLC
www.wildsidebooks.com
DEDICATION
To those who have kept faith,
my sincere thanks.
CHAPTER ONE
LIKE THE PRESENT
Waves of light rippled the starry darkness. Jacinta had an eerie sense of being underwater in a moonlit pool, of looking up at the mercury-shimmering underside of the sky just at the moment a piece of that sky broke loose—precisely at the instant a mirror-bright stone fell through the hole in heaven it had made.
The hole promptly filled itself in, the sky unfunhoused itself, the universe unwarped back to mirror smoothness. The mercury droplet of broken sky kept falling, however, intact and growing larger. At the same time it moved more slowly, the way a stone falls more slowly through water than through air.
Strange as what she was looking at undeniably was, even stranger was the fact that she was seeing it at all. Or was she? The ghost people around her, with whom Jacinta now clasped hands and tried to chantsong along, claimed awesome powers for their singing—including the capability of their songs to create in physical space the images and objects about which they sang.
Extremely powerful auditory hallucinations? Or something more?
Stranger still, however, was the fact that she was really seeing what she was looking at, knowing in depth exactly what was being shown her without knowing how she knew. The big “mercury” droplet’s splashing against some obstacle—that was the Allessan contact ship’s bubble of force bursting in the Great Accident, the Error, the Miscalculation.
The Accident revealed (and Jacinta saw, inside the bubble) a mirror sphere made of innumerable smaller pieces, a dance hall mirrorball hurtling through space. All human civilization, religion, controlled fire, the first chipped-pebble stone tool, not to mention the lost age of disco that had danced Jacinta’s childhood—all stood many millions of years into the future and after the fact of what she was looking at.
As she observed more closely, she saw that the smaller mirrors of the mirrorball were actually not squares at all but myriad, shining, overlapping wings. In the forms those wings were attached to some might see angelic beings of pure intuition, others demons of unalloyed malevolence, still others aliens—a space-cantina bestiary of creatures dressed in light-powered livesuits, moving with starling-flock simultaneity.
Seeing the irreparable damage the Accident had done to those crewmembers who were the ship they sailed, Jacinta recalled the ghost people’s stories that each individual of all that crew’s many species were always and forever in direct mental communication with all the others. She wondered what sort of alien pain and otherworldly grief they might have felt at the deaths of so many of their shipmates.
‘Direct mental communication’—is that what’s happening to me? Jacinta asked herself as she listened to the ghost people singing. Is what I’m experiencing not a hallucination but the beginnings of that telepathy, that fullness of empathy the ghost people claim their totemic mushroom bestows upon them? When I introduced TV to them, they said television and global communication did not surprise them. They claim the natural world is always broadcasting cloudforest television into their heads. Are they serious?
Or is this all simply madness?
A shiver ran through her. The tribe—no, they weren’t really a tribe, since they had no chief, but what were they, then? “Hunting-gathering group?” “Tepuians?” “Ghost people,” as their neighbors had referred to them, with superstitious awe in their voices? Despite all the time she had spent with them, despite her ethnobotanical training, despite the readiness with which they (whatever the correct term) had welcomed her from the first, at this moment, among these isolated, mushroom-worshipping, hunting-gathering, insect-eating, dark-skinned, black haired, almond-eyed people dressed in purple and black loin clothes and robes woven in snaking double-helical patterns, Jacinta felt distinctly culture-shocked.
She hated that phrase, “almond-eyed.” What did that make her—blueberry-eyed? Honey blonde? Some other type of food?
Around her the ghost people’s strange song continued, telling of the damaged ship made of wild angels. The song sounded quite mad indeed, particularly as it went on to narrate how and why the ship was sent from the heart of the galaxy—or rather, Jacinta knew, from the Allesseh, hanging 3,000 light years above the galaxy’s center. According to old Kekchi, the ghost people’s mindtime-traveling “Wise One,” the Allesseh was already known to earthly astronomers—but only very indirectly, for they knew the Allesseh not in itself but only by the vast antimatter fountain associated with it. Earthly scientists had never quite managed to satisfactorily explain the existence of that fountain.
Jacinta was following the chantsong with only a part of her mind. Distracted, she found herself thinking of her brother Paul instead, her only and last visitor from the supposedly civilized world—with whom she had not parted on the most pleasant of terms....
“So that’s what all this is about, then?” Paul had said, smacking his forehead with the palm of his left hand as he rose shakily to his feet. “These people have been collecting rocks for millennia because mushrooms ‘told’ them to? And you believe that? How long have you been eating this druggie fungus of theirs? It’s pushing you over the edgeless edge, sis. We’ve got to get you out of here, get this crap out of your system—”
“No, Paul.” Jacinta shook her head and slowly rose from her squatting position to stand upright. “My mission here is too important to be absorbed into anyone else’s—even yours. The work is not yet finished so the ghost people can leave.”
“What work?”
“Singing the mountain to the stars,” she explained. “The quartz they’ve collected is not something you shape into a crude tool—it’s something you worship as a totem. Their very existence here is proof of the fisherfolk hypothesis, of neanderthalensis in the New World. That’s why Fash got so hot to bring a major expedition here once he found out about them. That’s why we have to hurry—before the rest of the world finds them and destroys their uniqueness.”
Jacinta reached toward her brother, but then hesitated, drew back.
“Think of it, Paul,” she said, trying to explain. “These people and their culture are one of the last outposts of a lost empire of wood and song. They’re a thread that, on this different continent, in this cave, found its way back to the source of the world songweb. Synergy and coevolution. For them, every sound has a form. They can read the musical notation of time’s signature. According to their myths, Song, shaped information, makes the world. Once we have sung and thought critical information densities into these quartz collecting columns, they will translate and amplify it so we can dissociate ourselves from the gravitational bed of local spacetime. Then we can join in the Allesseh, the great Cooperation, the telepathic harmony of all myconeuralized creatures throughout the galaxy—”
“Wrong!” Paul shouted, shaking his sandy-haired head in disgust. “A crazy ethnobotanist and forty-odd half-naked aborigines as humanity’s first ambassadors to the galaxy? Do you have any idea how insane that sounds?”
With the expanded empathy the ghost people’s prized fungus had already granted her, Jacinta saw the swelling rage igniting