Better Angels by Howard V. Hendrix

fire.
    While Jacinta had been watching the awesome sight before her on the monitors, Kekchi and several of the other tepuians had quietlyjoined her. A tired but happy buzz began to pass among them, though they said no words. She looked questioningly at Kekchi.
    “Allesseh,” the Wise One explained. “At long last. All the high roads lead here. Open a portal, there you go, here you are.”
    They and the tepui surrounding them seemed to be falling toward the rainbow lens as it spun around its central, higher-albedo sphere. As they came closer, Jacinta began to discern a rough sphere of bright points outside the turning hoop, points flickering as they reflected the pale fire of the Allesseh itself. She thought they might be small moons or asteroids, until several of them detached from their loose spherical formation and moved purposefully toward the tepui.
    “Looks like we’ve been spotted,” Jacinta said, thinking aloud. “They’re sending a welcoming committee.”
    The ships—if that’s what they were—approached them with remarkable grace and fluidity, as if they were swimming through the sea of space. The craft were shaped like jellyfish and squid and mushrooms all at once. At the same time, they also looked like nothing she had ever seen.
    The ships’ forward sections, shaped rather like half-opened mushroom caps, were not static but instead pulsed rhythmically like jellyfish bells, or even jetted, like squid. Each ship’s gill-cap forward section carried, behind it, a stemlike middle section. This was followed in turn by tentacular masses, at once as complexly connected as mycelia, as free-floating as jellyfish tentacles, and as tactile, graceful, and controlled as octopus arms. Patterns of color rippled and played over the surface of the ships, more like the sensitive communication patterns of giant cephalopods than the rigorous flashing of aircraft lights or movie UFOs.
    For all their grace and fluidity, however, Jacinta could not escape the sense that what she was looking at were indeed purely machines, albeit mechanisms of a design exquisite almost beyond imagining. After much rippling and flashing among the welcoming party of ten or twelve craft, the largest of the ships darted forward and extended its arms in a probing caress of the sphere of force surrounding the tepui. Satisfied somehow, the ship became very purposeful and machine-like, diving rapidly downward. Behind it, wrapped in the strange ship’s limbs, the forcefield-ensphered tepui followed along—a bubble being dragged by a diving-bell spider down to its silken-roped underwater air chamber.
    The ship, with tepui in tow, plunged on—toward the great ring that bounded the lens of soft rainbow fire, toward the lens that rotated about the central sphere. Soon, Jacinta could make out details on the surface of the spin ring. Even this thin rotor-edge of the entire vast Allesseh was imposing enough, as if an immense coral reef and a superconducting supercollider had been mated with a night-lit city thousands of kilometers wide and several kilometers thick.
    Soaring over the lights of the spincityscape, however, Jacinta and the ghost people could appreciate its complexity for only a few moments. Ahead, near what Jacinta guessed was the axis of rotation for the enormous ring, a great blue door blossomed open to receive them.
    The squidship released them. The ensphered tepui fell as unerringly into the opening as a bee into a long-throated lily. The tepui and its inhabitants fell and fell, until the eye of a god melted them into light sweeter than any nectar, and they were gone.
    * * * * * * *
    The Secret Experiment of Sex
    “Egan!” Paul Larkin said, after the doctors and nurses had left, calling over to a blond man with short-cropped hair, a Van Dyck beard and faux eyeglasses. “You’re the liaison to Tetragrammaton for Lilly-Park, aren’t you?”
    The younger man on the treadmill three units over looked at him narrowly.
    “Not so loud,”