body, moment after moment. A sandy-haired man trying to sink into the sand—that’s what I am, Paul thought with a smile.
The world is a given, he speculated to himself. Even death. All science and engineering have been reverse-engineering, when you think about it. Just trying to figure out how it’s all put together, how it all works. Maybe the goal of the mind is to engineer an escape from the mortal technology of the body. The way the nervous system and the immune system are hooked up together in the same network...maybe consciousness itself is a sort of super immune system, trying to develop immunity to mortality. Maybe in the end death does not conquer consciousness; consciousness conquers death.
“I must be drunker than I thought,” he said with a laugh, “to be thinking things like this.”
Thinking of Jacinta, however, he grew more somber. Tonight was the tenth anniversary of her disappearance. It was probably all too reasonable to conclude that she must be dead, by now.
At the thought of her death, however, Paul was never able to cry—at least not while he was awake. He had never cried for her, yet, whenever he thought deeply of her, he somehow always found himself on the verge of tears. He told himself it was all too deep for tears, yet he feared the tears might be too deep for him—that, once he allowed himself to cry, he’d never be able to stop, that it would break down the dam he’d built in his soul and overwhelm his small sanity in the flood of his grief.
Since Jacinta’s disappearance, he had “gone on” with his life, but differently. His destiny had gone awry, like a Jesus who wakes up to find he’s thirty-four and has somehow missed the crucifixion. Jacinta would understand about messiahs gone awry, he thought.
Paul didn’t know if there was quite enough of himself left over to cover up the hole in the universe Jacinta’s going had left behind. He had returned to the area near Caracamuni three years back, hoping to find a spot in space and time for mourning his loss, but the mountain he knew was gone, vanished. Space and time couldn’t fill the void.
He felt so full of emptiness. He did not know if he went on rushing into nothing, or if nothing went on rushing into him. He did know, however, that the only things that stood against the dark tide were his memories, bright shadows cast inside the stone bubble of his skull, soft-tissued fossils that refused to die.
He looked at the empty bottle and wished it were a loaded gun.
A nearby unsteady alteration in the steady constellations caught his eye and he glanced toward it. As he stared, he saw a shifting—like the bending of light in water, a rippling piece of the night sky—coming toward him. Constellations are hallucinations turned into explanations by tradition and education, he thought with a giddy drunken flourish.
But no. He stood up slowly, watching more carefully whatever it was that was approaching. His heart pounded and he thought irrationally of Jacinta returning.
The shifting piece of the sky was almost on top of him before it stopped, a droning whisper of engines whirring in the moonlight close above him. A bright light flashed onto the ground near him, then probed toward him.
Aw Jeez, Paul thought, I’m not drunk enough to be abducted by aliens.
Something like a cross between a gangplank and a jetway extended downward into the cone of light, toward him. Amazed, he lost his grip on the empty Edradour bottle. It slipped from his hands and fell to the sand.
“Hello, Dr. Larkin!” said an amplified voice. “Please come aboard!”
Paul reached up and touched a safety rail, just to make sure this was all real. At least it felt real. He began to step upward into whatever kind of craft it was that was hovering above him.
Two thirds of the way up the incline, the pluperfectly perky Ms. Griego, the venture capital agent, stood waiting on a step, beaming a smile of considerable wattage at him, above a midnight blue dress of a cut and style that might well have suited a stewardess aboard a low-altitude, high-speed, deep-penetration bomber of the 1960s.
“Congrats, Paul!” Athena Griego said, shaking his hand vigorously and practically hauling him up the last third of the incline. “Dr. Vang is so interested in your fungus’s possibilities he’s come to speak with you himself!”
Paul was bedazzled by more than just the sudden brightness of the light. The craft he had boarded seemed solid enough, yet also airy and diaphanous, as if the Great Airship of 1887 and the flying saucers of the second half of the twentieth century had met and mated, to produce this craft as their offspring.
“What is this thing?” Paul asked, bewildered as his eyes kept trying to readjust to the light. He stepped into what looked like a cabin in a spacious yacht, all dark wood inlaid with mother of pearl. “And who is Dr. Vang?”
“That would be me,” said a small Asian man in a very neat suit, coming forward to shake Paul’s hand. The man looked to be in his sixties. “I suppose the most important thing for you to know about who I am is that I have money to invest in research on your fungus.”
Ms. Griego ushered them toward an off-white sofa and wheat-colored chairs where a cup of coffee was already waiting for him. Paul glanced around. In the center of the room was an elliptically-shaped wet bar. Literally wet, for the mirror-backed pedestal that supported the bar also encased what looked to be a salt-water aquarium: a living coral reef with anemones and sea fans, crabs and shrimp, eels and other fish less extreme in shape but more extreme in hue—blues and yellows and greens and reds so vivid and radiant Paul was tempted to look for their power packs.
“And this...?” he asked, gesturing to indicate the cabin and the larger structure within which it was embedded.
“My mobile ‘home sweet home’,” Vang said with a small smile, sipping at his coffee. “My ghost ship, if you like.”
“Ghost ship?” Paul asked, sipping his coffee too, initially out of politeness if nothing else. Good coffee, though. Very good.
“I like my privacy,” Vang said, with a seemingly disinterested shrug. His voice, however, could not hide a certain pride as he went on to describe the features of his flying home. “Several of my companies were involved in building it. Technically, it’s a stealth airship. An ‘invisiblimp,’ if you like, though it’s more accurate to call it an invisible dirigible, since it has an airframe. The wind-duction system that propels it also gives it superquiet hovering capability. Its engines leave virtually no infrared signature. Its structure both absorbs and bounces radar away tangentially. Engineers at ParaLogics and Crystal Memory jointly developed a chameleon-cloth smartskin for it—protective coloration, fast-reactive camouflage. In a cloudy sky it’s a cloud, in a blue sky it’s a piece of blue sky. On a moonless night like tonight, it’s obsidian, a soft-edged arrowhead flecked with stars.”
Vang smiled at his turn of phrase, but Paul was looking into the space above the other man’s head.
“Built for you?” Paul asked, taking it all in. “Or for something a bit more covert?”
“If I answered that, I’d have to kill you,” Vang said with a little laugh. “One could speculate, however, that—unlike satellites, which pass high and fast over any particular point of interest—a ship like this might be able to go in low and slow, to linger longer over whatever one might be interested in....”
“How did you get one?” Paul asked, as he continued to take in the features of Vang’s private airship.
“Alas, for all its stealthy virtues,” Vang continued, “it was detectable by certain oversight committees, even hidden deep in the black budget. The politics of project funding shot it down before it ever went into production. I bought back the prototype.”
Paul sipped more of his coffee, puzzled. He had heard of ParaLogics—high tera- and even peta-flops machines, if he recalled right. Vang’s name was also obscurely familiar.
“But if your work is in aerodynamics and computing,” Paul asked, “I don’t quite understand your interest in the fungus I brought back from Caracamuni.”
Vang