said. “It’s just that this is all happening so fast, like some kind of anti-James Bond scenario.”
Vang smiled broadly, pleasantly surprised by the Bond comparison. Maybe it brought up some kind of memory from the old man’s childhood, Paul thought.
“How exactly do you mean?” Vang asked eagerly.
“Instead of the billionaire telling Bond how he intends to destroy the world and kill Bond—” Paul began.
“Here I am, another billionaire, telling you how I intend to save the world,” Vang said, nodding enthusiastically.
—and give me a reason to go on living, Paul thought, though he did not say it.
“Right,” Paul said. “I guess what we’ve talked about smacks of the same sort of great man’s conspiracy theory of history, for me anyway. I’ve never believed in such theories. People just can’t plan that thoroughly, or keep secrets that long.”
Vang smiled slyly, but then covered it with a shrug.
“The greatest conspiracy is the one that says there are no conspiracies,” Vang said, handing him a phone. “Think of this as a conspiracy for good, if you like. We have taken the liberty of running the contract past your lawyer, particularly in regard to the clauses on intellectual property rights. We have her on the line. Here—”
Vang handed him the phone. Paul talked to Sarah Campbell, his legal advisor in the all-too-recent debacle with his former university employer. She very much approved of the contract and spoke forcefully in favor of it. Paul handed the phone back to Vang, who nodded and gave it to Athena Griego, who appeared again in her B-58 Hustler stewardess’s dress, seemingly out of nowhere.
“Ms. Griego is our agent and witness in this matter,” Vang continued, handing Paul an electronic stylus. “If you feel confident enough of the document to sign, please do.”
Without another thought and with only a glance at the fish in the aquarium, Paul signed. Vang smiled broadly and shook his hand again.
“Welcome aboard indeed, Dr. Larkin. Happy to have you with us. My ghost ship is at your disposal. We will send someone for your car. Where would you like to go?”
“West,” Paul said, lost in thought. “Oh, and I left an empty bottle of Scotch on the sand when you stopped for me. If someone might pick that up—”
Vang nodded. The sound of the invisible dirigible’s engines rose slightly as it pivoted on its axis. The spore print, folded in paper enfolded in plastic, hung lightly over Paul’s heart inside his vest pocket, invisible with Paul inside the belly of Vang’s stealthy machine, heading west at a tenth of the speed of sound, rising into night above the Sierra Nevadas.
* * * * * * *
Weird-Wired
Jiro sat bolt upright. He knew that he was dead, but his mouth still worked.
“!begursprocketbombonanacatl?” he mouthed. He was trying to say how, if you try to throw your arms around the world, they’ll nail you to a cross and say it was a workplace accident because you were employed as a carpenter. “?losangelatintinnabiledictu!” He thought he was saying how, if you try to communicate your uncomfortable piece of the truth, they’ll assassinate you for it for your own peace of mind.
“Jeez, Jiro!” Seiji said angrily from his bed in the dark bedroom they shared. “You’re talking in your sleep again! Wake up, for God’s sake!”
“Wha—?”
“You were talking in your sleep,” Seiji said again. “Go back to sleep.”
Silence. Then Jiro blurting, “Was not!” before he fell horizontal again. He felt his eyelids closing, but now he fought against sleep, trying to make sense of his night visions.
He had dreamed of a religion of flowers, not a religion of blood. A religion of bees, not a religion of ashes.
He’d better not tell anyone about it, he thought. He still remembered how, back in second grade, he had scandalized the nuns at Guardian Angels School when they found him wandering around on the school playground with his arms stretched out like a soaring bird, like an eagle dancer, like Christ on the cross. The nuns were supposed to be brides of Christ, but apparently they preferred their spouse safely gone from the flesh—and they’d carefully punished Jiro for his imitation reincarnation of their groom.
Maybe he really was “weird-wired,” as the neighborhood kids in every neighborhood he’d ever lived in had so often suggested in their not-so-subtle ways. Always their had been the strange mismatches, the overlaps, and double exposures in his picture of the world. The nights of sitting suddenly bolt-upright in bed, spewing streams of seemingly incoherent speaking-in-tongues gibberish, were bad and never infrequent enough—it drove his brother Seiji crazy—but that was nowhere near the beginning of his problems.
Even as a small child he had not just seen and talked with imaginary friends but had experienced flashes of entire alternate realities, leakage from parallel worlds and other people’s dreams. He had never been able to put together what his parents told him with what the world told him, either. For as long as he could remember, whenever any reference to sex came up on the TV, in movies or holos, his mother always shut it away from her boys. Surely there must be something dirty and evil there, for his mother to always react so, but he had never been able to figure out precisely what it was.
Jiro remembered a greenhouse summer evening six or seven years back, when he’d been tagging after Seiji and a neighbor kid, Rudy, as usual. When Seiji began to talk with Rudy about girls, Jiro had run home shouting and crying, “Mom! Mom! Seiji and Rudy are talking about sex!” After that, Seiji had looked at him with a mixture of fear and disgust.
He was shy and backward and awkward. In the one-size-fits-all world, Jiro just didn’t fit in. He didn’t like seeing his own face in the mirror. Something about the widow’s peak in his dark, wavy hair, the wide-open innocence (always too soft and too lost) that his brown eyes imparted to his too-round face—all boyish to the point of femininity. He was good-looking for a boy, but too girlish to look like a man.
In two years, when he finished his undergraduate degree in Computer Media Studies, he would be eighteen—a precociousness that hadn’t much helped. The mismatch was worst when it came to girls and dating and all the indecipherable rites of twenty-first century courtship. He pedestalized the girls from afar, unable to approach them. In his mind they were pure as bright shining light—brilliance that he would never dare darken with the shadow of his lust.
Jiro took refuge in books and the net and the life of the mind. In his research and reading he had found a term for his condition: “socially maladroit.” Ever since he entered his teens, he had withdrawn more, cocooned himself. Socially, he had gone into cybernation, but that was okay. More and more people his age were doing that. All the experts said they would grow out of it.
This was a world worth withdrawing from, what with the rise of the churchstaters and all. He glanced at one of Seiji’s obnoxious glow-in-the-dark holoposters, which showed a montage of humanity’s wars, murders, mayhem, fanaticism, famine, plagues and pollution, all being watched by wide-eyed, antennaed young aliens, the cautionary caption reading PROFESSIONALLY TRAINED STUNT SPECIES! DO NOT TRY THIS ON HOME PLANET.
That about said it. The more arcane and the further away from mundane existence he got, the better. For years Jiro had been fascinated
