Better Angels by Howard V. Hendrix Page B

aside, to the cardio monitor where his heartbeats were rendered in electronic stitchwork.
    “What’s her problem with Vang?” he asked.
    “You’ve got me there,” Ortap said, increasingly breathless. “Maybe ol’ Vang did her mother and dumped her, or something. Don’t worry about it. We’ll shoot down her bird. The people in power don’t cotton to infobombers, if you get my meaning.”
    Paul nodded. He was hardly a fan of the “new government” (now a couple of years old) and its privacy-invading ways, but this once it might actually be of help to him. He was also aware of Vang’s reputation as a womanizer, especially from his younger days.
    He would have liked to ask more about Vang and the new government, but Egan Ortap had turned away, clearly intent on keeping up with the pulse-pounding speeds and pitches his treadmill had now achieved.
    As he thought about what the liaison had said, Paul realized he wasn’t fully satisfied by Ortap’s explanations. True, a good deal of what Easter claimed in her documentary—among other things, that Tetragrammaton had “secretly administered experimental entheogens as ‘uterotonics’ to women in their first and second trimesters of pregnancy, in hopes that their babies might develop ‘unusual talents’“—sounded pretty conspiranoid and nutso. He didn’t have to stretch much to hear in those words some kind of warped reworking of that “Everybody’s life is a product of the secret experiment of sex” idea Ortap talked about. Yet, despite such lapses, the documentarist had mentioned the name of Vang’s own special project—Medusa Blue—and that was hardly common knowledge.
    Her Five Million Day War work-in-progress had interview footage with Vang himself—his usual spiel about human pattern-finding, schizophrenia, and consciousness. That certainly appeared to be genuine. Every time Paul had met and talked with Vang over the last couple of years, the man had gone on about overlap between natural and artificial information processing systems, especially about DNA as a Turing machine. In Easter’s interview with him, Vang’s conversation glided easily just about anywhere he ever wanted it to go, the same way it always did every time Paul had talked with the man personally.
    Word was that the “old man” was also heavily invested in—and sat on the boards of—numerous companies working on biological computing, especially “primordial soup” bioputers. When he gave Easter the interiew, Vang probably thought it would be good publicity for those interests and investments. Paul could think of no other reason why the billionaire would have consented to Easter’s questioning.
    A lot of the other people Easter had interviewed seemed to know a good deal about the relationships between psychoactive substances and neurotransmitters, too. With a sigh rendered ragged by his pounding along on the treadmill, Paul wished he’d learned more about neurophysiology. It was just too far outside his training and expertise.
    Then again, he had already managed to have three major careers—pretty good, for a man still in his forties. He remembered them all quite well—perhaps too well.
    Not very long after he had gone public with the tepui story, Paul’s station manager at KFSN Channel 30 had tried to get him to cease and desist on that front. His boss held a firm opinion that reporters were to report on the news—not be reported on as news themselves. Paul, however, had refused to be muzzled. When his contract ran out, he was “not rehired,” supposedly on the grounds that KFSN was a respectable news station and his flying mountaintop story was damaging to the credibility, respectability, and prestige of the station.
    Strangely, losing his job as a reporter had not hit him as hard as he first thought it would. As an undergraduate, with visions of becoming the next Eiseley or Sagan or Quammen, he had double-majored in Biology and Journalism, hoping someday to become a