Spears of God by Howard V Hendrix

Author:Howard V Hendrix [Hendrix, Howard V]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780345495488
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

“Where did the kids get that stuff?” Susan asked, a palpable excitement in her voice that Michael felt just as strongly. The adults were seated at the far end of the room, having cleared the children’s work and play things from a sofa, love seat, and rocking chair.

“Like I said, the imagery is either computer-generated or culled from material available on the Web. As for where the narrative originated, your guess is almost as good as mine.”

“Almost?” Michael asked. Paul Larkin nodded.

“I have access to my sister’s notes, after all. According to Jacinta, the ghost people of the tepui claimed that the spawn of the mushroom they found in that cave ‘remembered’ how it got there. In the time-before-time, their ‘mushroom stone’ brought the spawn, or so they claimed. Their myths claimed the stone came ‘from the sky.’”

“This is very strange,” Michael said, rocking slowly in the chair. “Still, it’s just possible that their myths may be telling us something. I mean, Caracamuni plateau is shield rock, one point eight billion years old, so it’s certainly old enough to qualify for being around since ‘the time before time.’ A puzzle, though, nonetheless.”

“What about it, in particular?” Paul asked from the sofa. Susan sat forward in the love seat suddenly, popped a pair of blinks over her eyes, flipped down the throat mike and began fiddling with her handheld PDA. She panned and tilted her head around for the best signal from the nearest wireless connection port.

“I always thought the dispersal of life-code materials would be essentially random,” Michael said.

“Unguided at all stages, like evolution itself. If what those four kids put together echoes the truth, then that changes things.”

“How so?”

“That thing that looked like some kind of winged viral starship,” Michael said. “What do the kids say it is?”

“A ‘contact ship from a sixth-age civilization’ is the best I can squeeze out of them,” Paul said. “If Jacinta was right about their cosmogony, I think that’s the stage where what we might call ‘interstellar travel’ first pops up.”

“So this ship or whatever it is apparently gets into trouble, right? Out beyond the edge of what I’m thinking must be our solar system—out beyond the Oort cloud. Then the crew appear to sacrifice themselves amid what seems to be the Oort cloud. Then again near what I’d be willing to bet are the Kuiper and asteroid belts. Then finally on a world that looks like it might someday harbor intelligent life—one that has me racking my brains trying to remember what Gondwanaland and Pangaea were supposed to look like.

“The kids’ movie doesn’t suggest anything about what happened to the ship remnants in the belts or the cloud, but it sure seems like a plan for vectoring in something on comets and shooting stars.”

“That’s way too guided and directed for my taste,” Susan said, continuing to scan through the infosphere on her blinks but not so preoccupied that she’d let that statement go unchallenged.

“If that’s the reality, though, then I’ll have to change my hypotheses accordingly,” Michael said.

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