Better Angels Read Online Free

in a bubble of force, its high waterfall plunging down only to spread out again in a broad swirl along the boundary’s edge. As the cave’s deep chamber stood ensphered in the stone bubble of its mountain, so too the mountain itself now stood ensphered in the bubble of force. From the mountain in its sphere a pale fire began to shine, increasing in intensity until—
    Looking through her own dreaming eyes again, Jacinta sensed that she was on her way to discovering an answer to Einstein’s great question. No time like the present—
    —in a brilliant burst of white light—
    —to find out—
    —the many fields of ensphering force dispersed—
    —the present is like—
    —the mountaintop disappeared—
    —No Time.
    —as silently and completely as a soap bubble bursting into a summer sky.
    * * * * * * *
    Unsteady Alteration in the Steady Constellations
    Paul Larkin had come to Death Valley to get drunk, wander off into the desert, and disappear. The idea of it, when he was sober, had shone in his head: elegant, simple, hard and bright as diamond. He had felt tired for too long, too tired to continue with the facade of his life. Best to put an end to it at his earliest possible convenience.
    He had awakened to an omen that very morning—or rather, from one. A vision in a dream, actually. Paul usually didn’t remember his dreams, but he woke up in the middle of this one, so he remembered it. In the dream he was sitting in an overstuffed armchair, talking pleasantly to two older people. Dreaming, he knew who they were, but when he woke he couldn’t quite remember. Maybe they were his parents.
    In the dream he was conversing in that pleasant living room when he happened to glance over his left shoulder. There, standing in the archway to the darkened room behind him, half in shadow and half in light, were his Uncle Tim, who had died recently, and his sister Jacinta, who had been gone, disappeared, ten years now. Someone else he knew was also there, but he couldn’t remember on waking who that person might be.
    He did, however, remember thinking in his dream, “Oh, these are the dead, standing behind me, watching and waiting.” That thought knocked him right back to consciousness. He was sure the dream had something to do with all that had happened to him recently—and with the prospect of the plan that had been forming in his mind for the past week.
    Sitting in his dusty, battered car, he took another sip from the bottle of Edradour—“Single Highland Malt Scotch Whisky from the smallest distillery in Scotland”—which his Uncle Tim had brought back as a gift for him, years before. Tasting the warm, peaty sting and sizzle of the scotch lingering in his mouth and throat, Paul turned his attention to a piece of paper sealed in a plastic sleeve, lying on the seat of his car.
    Breaking the seal on the plastic, he removed a carefully folded sheet of age-brittled white paper, upon which could be seen a dusty blue image like the photo-negative of a brain. It was the spore print he had first found in an envelope ten years earlier, buried deep in his backpack, after he emptied the pack on returning home from Caracamuni tepui.
    Whether the spore print had been secretly planted there while he was in the cave, or during that last long night on the tepui top—and by whom—Paul did not know. He only knew that for a decade he had never been able to bring himself to make public the print’s existence. Nor could he bring himself to destroy it, any more than he could destroy any of his information on Jacinta. Information, as she had been fond of saying, is everything. Even information held in the limbo of the lost.
    He had gone public with other matters from that time. Maybe too public. Ten years back, when he and his guide and native porters had returned from the tepui backcountry, they had told their story and shown their video recording of Caracamuni’s top lifting off, de-coupling from the Earth—to anyone who would