Better Angels Read Online Free PDF Page B

thing?” Paul asked, bewildered as his eyes kept trying to readjust to the light. He stepped into what looked like a cabin in a spacious yacht, all dark wood inlaid with mother of pearl. “And who is Dr. Vang?”
    “That would be me,” said a small Asian man in a very neat suit, coming forward to shake Paul’s hand. The man looked to be in his sixties. “I suppose the most important thing for you to know about who I am is that I have money to invest in research on your fungus.”
    Ms. Griego ushered them toward an off-white sofa and wheat-colored chairs where a cup of coffee was already waiting for him. Paul glanced around. In the center of the room was an elliptically-shaped wet bar. Literally wet, for the mirror-backed pedestal that supported the bar also encased what looked to be a salt-water aquarium: a living coral reef with anemones and sea fans, crabs and shrimp, eels and other fish less extreme in shape but more extreme in hue—blues and yellows and greens and reds so vivid and radiant Paul was tempted to look for their power packs.
    “And this...?” he asked, gesturing to indicate the cabin and the larger structure within which it was embedded.
    “My mobile ‘home sweet home’,” Vang said with a small smile, sipping at his coffee. “My ghost ship, if you like.”
    “Ghost ship?” Paul asked, sipping his coffee too, initially out of politeness if nothing else. Good coffee, though. Very good.
    “I like my privacy,” Vang said, with a seemingly disinterested shrug. His voice, however, could not hide a certain pride as he went on to describe the features of his flying home. “Several of my companies were involved in building it. Technically, it’s a stealth airship. An ‘invisiblimp,’ if you like, though it’s more accurate to call it an invisible dirigible, since it has an airframe. The wind-duction system that propels it also gives it superquiet hovering capability. Its engines leave virtually no infrared signature. Its structure both absorbs and bounces radar away tangentially. Engineers at ParaLogics and Crystal Memory jointly developed a chameleon-cloth smartskin for it—protective coloration, fast-reactive camouflage. In a cloudy sky it’s a cloud, in a blue sky it’s a piece of blue sky. On a moonless night like tonight, it’s obsidian, a soft-edged arrowhead flecked with stars.”
    Vang smiled at his turn of phrase, but Paul was looking into the space above the other man’s head.
    “Built for you?” Paul asked, taking it all in. “Or for something a bit more covert?”
    “If I answered that, I’d have to kill you,” Vang said with a little laugh. “One could speculate, however, that—unlike satellites, which pass high and fast over any particular point of interest—a ship like this might be able to go in low and slow, to linger longer over whatever one might be interested in....”
    “How did you get one?” Paul asked, as he continued to take in the features of Vang’s private airship.
    “Alas, for all its stealthy virtues,” Vang continued, “it was detectable by certain oversight committees, even hidden deep in the black budget. The politics of project funding shot it down before it ever went into production. I bought back the prototype.”
    Paul sipped more of his coffee, puzzled. He had heard of ParaLogics—high tera- and even peta-flops machines, if he recalled right. Vang’s name was also obscurely familiar.
    “But if your work is in aerodynamics and computing,” Paul asked, “I don’t quite understand your interest in the fungus I brought back from Caracamuni.”
    Vang nodded thoughtfully.
    “Are computing and mycology really that far apart?” Vang asked rhetorically. “Think about it. In my lifetime alone I have seen the Age of Code dawning. The instructions for organic life were deciphered with the cracking of the DNA code and the mapping of genomes. The instructions for artificial life were enciphered with the encoding of languages for digital and