Pascale's Wager: Homelands of Heaven

by Anthony Bartlett

  Palmiro had not been expecting this and the sudden appearance of the armed woman froze him with fear. He half put his hands in the air and stood rooted to the spot.

  “I said come over here and sit.”

  The woman was Asian in appearance, with a smooth, limpid face, and dark, fierce eyes. He vaguely remembered that he had spoken to her at Emmanuelle's after he first arrived in Heaven. Palmiro moved unsteadily to the chair, his heart clattering and his hands still half raised.

  “That's it, now sit down. I knew you'd come back eventually. All I had to do was camp out and wait. I frightened you, didn't I? Yes, you should be afraid, for I intend to kill you. But first I need some answers.”

  Palmiro stammered, “Why...why do you want to kill me?”

  The woman laughed derisively. “Well, let me think! Let's look around this Heaven of ours! Most of the gods are dead, their bodies litter the roads, rotting before our eyes. The colonies have stopped producing food. Those of us who are left hardly know how to survive, and anyway we know no decent reason to do so. And why, why has this happened? How did this happen? You tell me, sir! Only you can tell me!”

  Palmiro was still floundering. He had felt safe in the mansion and all his thoughts had been about Adorno and the complicity between himself and his master. Now this person was looking for answers from him. Of course this was everyone's attitude. He had begun the infection in the Font Eterno and they had sent the agents to the canyons to arrest him. The gods had just caught up with him in a place and manner he had not expected.

  “Please forgive me, I can't remember your name. Were you sent here by Anthropology?”

  “My partner was from Anthropology. I found him dead on the road. This is his gun. They are probably all dead anyway. I am from Technology. Except not with your genius scientist. We look after real machines, like the rocket you hijacked to come here.”

  “Oh, I remember you now. You're Hona. You were there after the Initiation and then you came to see me.”

  “Yes I was. I couldn't believe, even back then, that you were accepted, a criminal and infiltrator! When all this happened I knew at once it had to be you. Four hundred and fifty years and everything perfect. The only new thing? A couple of kids who thought they could change the rules. It had to be you. So, tell me how did you do it? And why did you do it? If you don't talk to me, I'll shoot you here and now and be done with it.”

  “My laboratory is across the garden. I will show you if you want. In there I developed an organic process that destroys the immortality enzyme, but I didn't think it would be infectious.”

  “You didn't think it would be infectious? What are you, a liar? Or stupid? Anything that disturbs the function of that enzyme could cause all sorts of unintended consequences, including mutations. You didn't think about that?”

  Almost for the first time in his life Palmiro felt actually stupid. He did not know what training Hona had received but what she just stated seemed like plain common sense. He felt forced to offer a lame defense.

  “I was working under Adorno. He approved my research, and its results.”

  “In which case he was part of the conspiracy too. I never ruled it out as you were his student. That's why I came to his study. I was sure either you or him would eventually show up. If I'd found him, I would have questioned him, too. But now, tell me, exactly how did you introduce the organism?”

  Palmiro was obliged to rehearse the drama at the Font Eterno, all the steps in the introduction of the anti-enzyme into Sarobindo's body and its catastrophic consequences.

  “Adorno, he knew this, what you were going to do?”

  “He did not know it in detail, but he obviously knew the organism would prove infectious. So the details of where I would introduce it did not matter, the outcome would be the same.”

  “But you say you did not think it would be infectious, so are you claiming your teacher misled you?”

  Here was the point at which he himself was stuck in his own conscience. Should he admit he had tacitly accepted all along Adorno's intentions and had simply not admitted them to himself? Or was this taking on too much blame?

  “I'm not sure, Hona. Like you say, I'm either a liar or stupid. I can't make up my mind which.”

  “Well that's refreshing to hear. Maybe you will have learned humility before I shoot you. But first you will clarify things. Tell me why you did it and then say why Adorno did it.”

  Palmiro said, “Hona, I want to answer your questions, I do. But I can't if you've got that thing pointed at my chest. I hardly know the answers. Being threatened doesn't help.”

  Hona's dark eyes burned, but after a pause she relented, lowering the gun onto a table and pointing it away from him, while still keeping it in her hand. “OK, if it helps you be truthful. But don't think I am going soft on you. I still intend to kill you. My partner died because of what you did. You have destroyed the fabric of Heaven and its technology is useless. You deserve to die.”

  “But not before I tell my story, right?”

  “Right. So tell it!”

  Palmiro tried to be brief yet faithful to all the reasons he'd had to develop the anti-enzyme. He told of his quest for truth in the Northern Homeland and how after he’d arrived in Heaven he’d felt its enormous injustice. When Adorno had chosen him as his student, it was a dream come true. But then Pascale had been arrested and Adorno began to direct his studies into the area of biology and his own famous discovery. By half-hints he’d indicated that it was the necessary pathway to getting Pascale released. He’d also introduced him to his own secret project and involved him in it. He had shown him something called the Hyperbrain and said it would bring a better immortality. This had flipped his research into finding a way to turn off the immortality enzyme, which is what eventually happened. At a certain point he had no longer been able to distinguish clearly between himself and his master's efforts. He had become a second Adorno, achieving something as great as his master, and perhaps even greater. He did it for all these reasons, all together, and he could not isolate one element from another, or after another.

  Hona, despite herself, was caught up in the story. Her hand relaxed on the gun and left it there on the table.

  “So what is this secret project? Show it me, it has got to be something dramatic.”

  “You are right, it is dramatic, but before I show you I have to tell you something dramatic of my own. Without it my story is not complete and you still will not understand.”

  “I'm all ears. Tell me!”

  “I'm not sure how much you have heard, but Pascale was killed by a mob. She was thrown into the Particle Accelerator at the Font Eterno.”

  “Yes, I did hear that. I thought it unfair she should be killed and you survive!”

  “I felt like that, too. At one point after she was captured I thought I should take my own life. Then something happened. Yesterday morning Pascale came to me. I saw her.”

  “What do you mean, you saw her?”

  “I don't know how else to say it. It happened before I knew she was dead, but I was in the canyons and she was a prisoner, so obviously there was no way she could have gotten there.”

  “You were dreaming. Hallucinating!”

  “Yes, I thought that, but it was so real, and it left me with a feeling I'd never known before. Everything was new, and I was in love, with her, and with everything else, too. Afterward, when I found out she had been killed, it still didn't change. It was like she really wasn't dead.”

  “That makes no sense at all. Are you saying she was thrown in the Particle Accelerator and then somehow she came out to the canyons and presented herself to you? She was reduced to electrons but then she wasn't dead?

  “I know it sounds ridiculous and I don't really expect you to believe me, but yes, that's about it. That was my experience. Because of that, everything that happened before cannot be the same. Because of Pascale, everything has shifted. I allowed myself to be controlled by Adorno, I did, but that would not happen now. I
am a different person. You might shoot me, but you would be shooting a different person from the one you hate.”

  Hona's hand went back to the gun, almost absent-mindedly. She picked it up. “You said you would show me Adorno's secret project. Shall we?” She got up from her chair but with the gun held down at her side.

  Palmiro stood up too. He asked, “Have you looked around? Do you know anything of the laboratories?” And he gestured over his shoulder.

  “I was back there a long time ago when Shuttle Maintenance needed some special work.”

  “There are a couple of big rooms which house the project. They have biometric locks. We might need your gun to blast a way in.”

  He led her through the corner door along the paneled corridor to the boot room. Opening the connecting door he took her along the white passageway with its storerooms and labs, continuing past them to the curve and the remaining distance to the observatory and its security entrance. As he walked in front of Hona he felt his heart beginning to race wildly, but this time for a different reason from the threat of being killed. How was it going to be with Adorno? How would he feel? Could he, in fact, make a clean break from him? Would the genius scientist even be here? Or was the irrevocable step already taken?

  The questions ran through his head and he couldn't be sure which one was disturbing him the most. They got to the observatory control room and could hear its low incessant hum. Palmiro placed his hand on the door; it yielded to his touch and somehow he was not surprised. They stepped inside and the hangar-like space with its monitors, cables, computers and huge central holograph screen spread out before them.

  “What in hell is this?” Hona cried.

  Palmiro told her about Adorno's four-hundred-year quest to map the stars of the universe and their patterns of radio frequency.

  “He was gathering a kind of symphony of the universe. He narrowed it down to just one galaxy, because he also had another, more specific purpose in mind.”

  “I'm sure you're going to tell me what that is.”

  “Yes. The information in this room has been relayed to computers in the next room, and I will take you to it. In there is a device which Adorno believes is able to download very large amounts of radio data to the human brain and then upload it back to the computers with the signature activity of the brain added.”

  He described the construction of the Hyperbrain and Adorno's intention to make himself its first test-pilot, with the goal of his personal frequency broadcast to harmonize forever with the stars.

  “Adorno is not happy with immortality? He wants a life among the stars?”

  “That's one way of saying it. But he also wants other Immortals to follow his lead.”

  “Ahh! So he sets you off to produce an infection to destroy the old kind of immortality, so those of us who are left will be convinced to use the new kind?”

  Palmiro could only nod in hapless agreement, “Yes, that was it. It's possible he's already experienced the new kind for himself.”

  He returned to the corridor with Hona following. The passage descended slightly as they continued to the next security door with its triple locking device. Once again it was open, giving to the pressure of Palmiro’s hand. It was obvious Adorno now wanted his secret research facility available to the public.

  As the door swung wide a wash of heat and a powerful electrical hum came up the stairs to meet them. Palmiro was reminded of the compressor halls of the Ice Camp and their constant blast of heated air, but here there was something else. There was the smell of hot electrical components and then another faintly sweet and sickly mixed in with it. They descended cautiously, taking the right-angled turn and continuing a dozen more steps until they stood on the floor of the underground room.

  The heat was oppressive and there was a dull quality to the air, a filmy miasma that at first made it hard to see precisely. Amid the general fug their peripheral attention was caught by the glimmering and flickering of hundreds of lights on the computers stacked along the walls, together with several screens showing green oscillations continuously bunching and stretching like centipedes. At the same moment their eyes were drawn relentlessly to the huge structure facing them from the middle of the room, the throne of an Aztec god with its glittering carapace above it. Palmiro's focus went directly to the chair and he recoiled immediately.

  His Heavenly mentor was fixed on the seat by straps, contorted and discolored like the victim of an execution. He would hardly have been recognized except the cadaverous frame and gaunt head could only belong to one man. Now under the white chiton the skin was purple and black and the limbs looked as if they been pulled into spasm and been unable to release. The head was pushed up under the helmet all the way to the bridge of the nose, hiding the hooded eyes. Threads of dried blood could be seen running down on the cheeks and also on the side of the neck from the ears. The lantern jaw was thrust out in rictus and the lips splayed back from the teeth, making his deformed appearance more hideous than ever. Above the face, in the dense spray of optic tubes shooting from the helmet, occasional lights and flashes were still occurring. The overall effect of the body, the helmet, the illuminated headdress and its monstrous crown of baffles was grotesque and terrifying beyond words. Palmiro gasped in fright as Hona let out an uncontrollable scream.

  “That, that...what is that?”

  Palmiro could hardly speak. What he was seeing did not look like the transport of a mind to the stars, rather an experience of extreme torture and cruelty. Now there would never be the chance to talk, only this ghastly image of death before his eyes. He felt an angry revulsion. Who was this wreck of a man with his pitiful body reduced now to an even more terrible parody? How had he so totally fascinated and dominated him, leading him down the road to become an agent of catastrophe? Yet, at exactly the same time, he felt a peculiar upwelling of compassion.

  Adorno had gambled everything for his vision, but his brilliance of mind had fooled him and brought him to a shocking and shameful end. And still, in the next instant, the other, obvious possibility struck him: perhaps this was not the end, perhaps what he was seeing was simply something that had happened to Adorno's body, something he had anticipated and risked for the greater victory. Perhaps, indeed, the gamble had paid off and Adorno's brain was even now uploaded to the computers and being broadcast to the stars!

  “That is...that is the Hyperbrain, and Adorno has put himself under it. He has done the Andromeda upload. Perhaps it worked. Perhaps those computers there are his new self and the information is right now being transmitted to the heavens...”

  “You mean you think all those flickering lights and screens, they're Adorno, and that body there, it's just dead meat?”

  “I don't know, Hona, I don't know. There's no way of telling.”

  “Well, I do know, and I can tell for certain. It's horrible, disgusting and wrong.” She was extremely agitated. She kept turning her back to the chair, not wanting to look at it, then looking at the computers around the room, gesturing at them.

  “What was this man doing, what was he thinking? I find you personally stupid and blameworthy, Palmiro. You were a willing dupe. But this, this here, this is evil. My life once was immortal, I was a goddess. I never thought I was greater than the space I occupied. I loved my partners, and I enjoyed the Doblepobles. But I was always happy to feel there was something bigger than me. I was happy I was part of it, and I never needed Sarobindo to show me. I always knew the stars above never belonged to us and never will. This man led you on and destroyed Heaven for the sake of a selfish, swollen dream. He has turned it all to hell because he wanted to be lord of the universe!”

  Palmiro was stung into defending himself. “Hona, I agree with you one hundred percent but you have to understand Adorno was a scientist and had already been responsible for the discovery of immortality. This, for him, was the next big step.”

  His defense only infuriated Hona. “In Heaven we'd done away with science. That was the whole point. We'd achieved Heav
en, you understand, Heaven! All the science was in the past and it was Heaven from here on! He and you changed all that, giving us genocide instead, and for what? For this?”

  She pointed with repugnance at the chair with its twisted cadaver, then adding, “And this?” as she gestured with her gun hand at the computers. “Are we supposed to bow down in front of these computers from now on?” She cocked the gun and aimed it at one of the wall stacks.

  “Hona, stop! What are you doing?”

  “I came here to shoot you, but this is better. This is the true source of our suffering.” Immediately she began to fire into the computers and their screens, aiming at the ones with the most flickering lights and working her way round the room until the magazine was empty. The noise of the gun was deafening in the confined space and the bullets smashed into the computer stacks causing sparks to fly, knocking out display lights and starting small fires. Palmiro could do nothing but cower from the sparks and the two or three ricochets which whined around the room.

  The effect on the fiber optic headdress was terrifying, making brilliant blue, pink and red flashes shoot through most of them, like the physical display of a huge, angry demon. Adorno's body, apparently so dead, suddenly twitched in several of its limbs, making it change position in the chair. Palmiro cried out in terror but Hona was too enraged to be moved. The already heavy air of the bunker was now thick with the acrid smoke from the gun and the fires, a couple of which were gaining strength.

  Hona shouted at Palmiro, “I've done what I came to do. Time to leave. You can stay if you wish.”

  She headed back up the steps leaving Palmiro to gaze at the tormented body of his master slowly wreathed in coils of smoke. There was nothing he could do. There were no sprinklers, he could see no fire-extinguishers, and anyway it did not matter. Adorno was dead and if the computers linked to the radio had time to transmit his personal star symphony, then Adorno had part of what he wanted, at least. If not, Palmiro had no wish to restore the experiment. He was no longer Adorno's disciple. Something else had come to shape his life, something much more vital to him than the scientist's far-fetched enterprise. For Hona he was a stupid man, and it was true, that was what he had been. But that was in the past, and now he needed Hona's help. He said a mental goodbye to his one-time master, and turned and ran up the stairs. Before he exited the door he found the control panel for the security locks and switched them all back to active. He pulled it tight shut and heard the bolts clunk into place. Then he raced up the corridor after the vengeful goddess.