The Wounded World, a story of Mantra, Chapter 5

By Aladdin 

Edited by Christopher Leeson

The Wounded World

Originally written 2006

Revised and posted Jan. 21, 2019 

Chapter 5

THE ANGEL AND THE APE

When the stars threw down their spears
And watered heaven with their tears
Did he smile, his work to see;
Did he who made the lamb make thee? 

William Blake

After Penelope Lammars had gone off to nap, Evie and I watched The Miracle on 34^th Street for the next couple hours. I was restless, but would have nothing productive to do until I could link up with Barbara Freeman. Once Evie was properly cared for, I could start searching for the means to get back my personal reality. But maybe it would be easier to say than to do; I felt responsible for the Evie and Gus of this world. On top of that, I couldn't get Penny's perplexing condition out of my mind. What had driven her to drink?
 
By the time the movie had ended, it was time to rouse up my friend and take her and my daughter over to the Budget Inn. The traffic in that part of San Francisco was pretty bad, but we manged to get to the motel shortly before Barbara Freeman arrived. After very brief introductions and a few pleasant words, the still-tipsy Penny excused herself and retired to the car. Evie and I then assisted “Mom” to move into a room of her own. Whatever she thought of Pinnacle's sobriety, she didn't bring it up directly, but instead expressed relief that I'd already found a psychiatrist. 

Frankly, I think she would liked me to find one years sooner. The cover story I served her regarding Penny Lammars was that the two of us had been friends in college. I creatively claimed that she had worked with a clinic in the East for several years, and arrived a year before to set up a San Francisco private practice. As soon as I could, I excused myself and left Evie in the care of her grandmother, on the excuse that I was meeting with the doctor for dinner to begin discussions of my problem.

Once I rejoined Penelope, I took her back to her own place.

It was after seven by the time we got there. My overriding thought was to speak to Lauren. I used directory assistance to get her father's number. The phone rang only a couple times before someone picked up.

"Hello?"

"Hello, Mr. Sherwood? This is Eden Blake. May I speak to Lauren?"

"Oh, of course, Mrs. Blake. Lauren told me that you'd moved away from Canoga Park just yesterday. I guess nobody could blame you, after all that's happened. Hopefully we aren't going to lose you permanently."

"I hope not either. But I left town in too much of a rush to get everything done. I think Lauren could help me out, if she has the time."

"Maybe she can. Just a minute!"

I waited tensely. After a minute of quiet, Lauren's voice came on.

"M-- Eden?"

Embarrassing moment. Her stumble reminded me that the Lauren of this world now knew that I was -- or used to be -- Mantra. That meant that the relationship we'd had back home would be radically altered in this dimension.

“Where are you?” the girl asked.

"San Francisco. Lauren, we can't talk over a public line. But I've gotten into a kind of situation and you're one of the few people who can help out."

"Sure."

“Just a minute, Lauren.” I looked back at Pinnacle.

"Penny, I need to ask Lauren to call me back on a secure line. Can you recommend one?"

The melancholy blonde nodded. "My line is secure. I threw out all stops to make it NSA-proof.” She jotted down a number on a pad and handed the page to me. "Here, give her this."

I took the sheet.

"Lauren, I can't say too much just now. When can you get to a phone – a public phone, maybe -- without your dad becoming suspicious?"

"At about one tonight," she whispered.

"Will be you safe on the street at that hour?" I asked.

"Are you kidding?"


Silly me; she was the "new Mantra" after all, and as cocky as all hell.

"Sorry, this arrangement takes a little getting used to." I read her the number. "Oh, and I gave your dad the excuse that I needed you to run a couple of errands for me. If he asks about them, can you make up something?"

"I don't think he'll ask. He's so into that computer of his. But I'll fake things if I have to."

"Great. You're super."

"Funnnn-ny." 

We said goodbye.

Having hung up, I reflected that Lauren had sounded normal and levelheaded, not flipped out, like the first time that she had gotten powers. Be thankful for small favors.

#

I had remembered to bring evening clothes with me from the motel. By the time I'd dressed for dinner, Penny was likewise ready. I happened to know a little about San Francisco, and so confirmed that a café I knew of back home existed here, too. Arriving, we asked for a private spot and were escorted to a table for two behind some potted fronds.

As we settled in, I began the conversation. "It's unbelievable how much you look and talk like the Pinnacle I know."

"Wherever she is, I hope she doesn't have the same tiger on her back that I do."

“The common expression is 'monkey on one's back,'” I reminded her.

"I know. But I can't stomach the word monkey anymore."

“What's wrong with monkeys?”

She broke eye contact. "It's hard to talk about it, Lukasz. I've found out disgusting things."

“About monkeys?”

“About myself.”

“I don't understand where you're going, Pin. Nothing about you is disgusting. What do you know that I don't?"

She looked up, the candlelight dancing in her cerulean eyes. "You of all people should know what's wrong! It was right there in front of you!” Then she paused. “I mean, it was right in front of the other Mantra."

I frowned. "I'm here to listen. Let me have it.”

She laughed with a shrill edge. "I don't know where to start. I always try to cool, like another Mr. Spock. But I have emotions, and they're my greatest weakness. When they get involved, they switch off most of my intelligence."

"So I've noticed!"

"It's all I can do to keep from running and screaming, so don't expect too much from my behavior."

"I won't,” I promised.

Pinnacle's next words were non sequitur: "What's the world going to do, with no Mantra looking out for it?"


"The world will be all right," I advised her. "There's already a new Mantra. Or haven't you heard?"


She blinked. "No, but I did catch a few thoughts of your thoughts about a 'new Mantra' when you were dialing Lauren's home. Is that how you lost your powers? Did that girl steal them from you?”


I shook my head. "Not likely. I'm pretty sure that Lauren is a natural-born ultra in her own right. As for what happened to mess up my personal apple cart, I'm not sure. Evie said that I was injured in a fight."


“Is Lauren as powerful as you were?”


“That's the creepy thing. She was a powerhouse from the first day. It took that ridiculous armor of mine to pump me up enough to be able to give her a good fight. Even using it, she almost killed me.”


“Killed you? Can a child be trusted with that much magic?”


“She's sixteen. I have to keep my fingers crossed about what will happen to her. So does the rest of Los Angeles. But you have a problem, too. What is it?”


Pinnacle looked down before she began to speak. “Do you remember the first time we met?"


"Who could forget it? But what does that have to do with anything?"


She swallowed hard. "It has everything to do with everything. Remember, during our fight, how I used my mind to temporarily evolve into a woman of the far future?”


I certainly did. She had wanted to increase her mental capabilities to be able to defeat my magical defenses. "Yes, that was weird. It was like your entire body was just a manifestation of your concentrated thought."


"Well, it's not as simple as that. But, right now, think back to the moment when you used your magic to flip my switch and throw the evolutionary process into fast reverse. What did I look like then?"


"Ahh, well, you looked a lot like a...gorilla."


"Bingo!" 

"Is that what's upsetting you? No woman likes a bad hair day, but it lasted less than a minute."

She leaned closer but dropped her voice. "Don't you get it? Why should a Homo sapiens devolve into a -- great ape? You may come from the Dark Ages, Lu, but anyone who does so much as watch the Science Channel should know that humans didn't descend from gorillas."


I shrugged. "With everything else going on then, I didn't stop to over-analyze it. The impossible is an everyday experience for me. It comes from working for centuries with a super wizard."

"I didn't think a lot about it either -- thanks to NuWare's brain programming. The thing is, they had put mental blocks in place to keep me from thinking about certain things. Once I was out of their clutches, I began to realize what I'd been subjected to. Since then, I've been removing elements of their conditioning, one piece at a time, and have been kept busy it for months. It's been like picking boot-jacks out of one's jogging pants."


“What didn't NuWare want you to remember?”


Her lips became a thin line; I could hardly hear her whisper: "They didn't want me to find out that I'm not, and never have been, a human being."

#

Now that the ice was broken, Pinnacle wanted to tell everything. I just listened. She took me on a strange journey, full of twists and turns.


According to my friend, she had put herself on a slippery slope when she developed an interest in the latest scientific studies involving the human genome. The published reports had talked in a cagey way about anomalies, but danced around the details. Whenever Pinnacle sniffed scientific evasion, it made her react like a bloodhound. She began an independent analysis of the genome work, by hacking into the raw research data gathered by universities and private research laboratories. As expected, the unvarnished studies had confirmed that there were an appalling number of conflicting and confounding defects in the average human's genetic makeup. All the other mammals on Earth appeared to be better built than humankind, the defective beasts having been winnowed out of the gene pool through the law of the jungle. The modern human genome, on the other hand, held thousands of pieces of junk DNA, some of it so flawed that it commonly led to the death of newborns and drastically shortened life expectancy in adults. Others defects were responsible for lifelong illnesses that required all the ingenuity of modern medicine to alleviate.


Continuing to gather information independently, Pinnacle had gone back to the fossil record to study the strains of extinct hominids, and found that modern man stacked up very poorly among them. Man had fewer chromosomal pairs than other hominids, including the most advanced of them, Neanderthal. Also, about 98.8 percent of Homo sapiens' genetic makeup existed in the genome as odds and ends in storage, without any identifiable use at all. It didn't make any sense. How could the most intellectually advanced animal upon the Earth be built like a junk sculpture? Everywhere else, Nature displayed its amazing efficiency. What had made the evolution of the most advanced race of humans so careless? The accumulating data eventually made her doubt that evolution was responsible for what she was discovering. But if it hadn't been Nature that had pieced the the planet's dominant species together, who or what had done it?


Searching the available literature was amazingly unhelpful. Most scientists addressing the subject carried on as if the mysterious contractions didn't exist at all. She actually began to wonder if the cream of the scientific community was actually made up of a clique of frauds. They seemed afraid to go left because it would lead them to the unpalatable ideas found in science fiction. But if they went right, they would find themselves paralleling religious scripture. Their solution, the worst option of all, was to bury their heads in the sand. Their own ideas having been proven worthless, they seemingly preferred to say nothing than to have to admit they had been wrong from the start. When the rare rebel would express the idea that humanity must have come into being by means of a process of artificial genetic manipulation, the greatest names in the scientific field simply put their fingers into their ears and hummed.


"An honest study of DNA” Pinnacle said, “demonstrates that the modern human race descended from a very small population. But what was this small population? Had it a scanty remnant that had survived a world-wide catastrophe? Or had it come into being as little as 5000 years ago and Homo sapiens was descended from that small group? The population as tiny as that it could conceivably have been produced inside a genetics laboratory. If not that, it might have originated from something that was not hominid crossbreeding with earlier hominid species. If there had been crossbreeding, it had to be something strange and not wholly compatible with hominid DNA. Whatever the means of his origin, modern man seems to have been put together in a slipshod manner. So why had he not come into the world as sick, crippled idiot; his species shouldn't have lasted even a thousand years. Instead, this flawed creature had risen up in an impossibly short time to rule the world.

“If I were pressed, I would have to say that Man, unlike the animals, was created by impatient designers who had the narrow aim of enhancing his intelligence and his creative imagination, but cared very little about any other aspect of his being."

Able to expect nothing serious or sensible from the well-funded people who should be carrying out the work, Pinnacle said that she had begun a series of experiments of her own to reexamine the human genome. She had used her own blood for as a Homo sapiens standard. My enthusiastic friend was using it as a comparison against the DNA of the higher mammals and fossil hominids.

Unfortunately, she hit a brick wall almost at once. There was nothing to find in her own genetic makeup except anomalies. When she compared her blood to other human samples, the anomalies were still there. Pinnacle, without wanting to, had discovered a whole new mystery – the mystery of her own genetic makeup. Now, with some anxiety, she found herself trying to disprove a ghastly hypothesis -- that she was a freak, a freak even when compared to the freakish species that she had started out trying to study.


Pinnacle at last became trapped into asking herself, "What kind of creature am, and where did I come from?" She had already known that she had been an orphan with no living family connections. Although she had eidetic memory on every other topic, she inexplicably retained only sketchy impressions about her own younger years. This made her suspicious. Penny had known about black ops experimenting that had started in World War II, aimed at implanting false memories. It was a way to put positive attitudes into the minds of people who they intended to conquer. World intelligence agencies had been improving on the evil process since then. Now she had to wonder whether she herself had unknowingly been the subject in such an experiment. Every day it look more and more that her own past was, in fact, nothing like she had been led to believe.


To start filling in the blanks about herself, Penny searched the records of the schools and places of employment that figured in her past. These were mostly located in her NuWare resume -- a document that she couldn't even remember writing. Inquiry informed her that much of the information therein contained couldn't be verified or else was out-and-out fraudulent. When all was said and done, she had found no convincing evidence to prove that she had ever lived at all.


The implications of this obsessed her. As much as she fought against the idea, she had no choice but to accept that she was a woman with out a past. But why should this be? Who benefited? Driven to the wall, Pinnacle went so far as to get a court order to recover some genetic material from the graves of her long-deceased parents. Thorough testing proved that she was not related to them at all!


Delving further, Pinnacle discovered that the only known daughter that had been born to her purported parents had actually died in infancy, leaving nothing behind but a birth certificate. It turned out to be the very birth certificate found in her NuWare files, something utterly fraudulent. An old trick had been played on her. Someone had taken a dead infant's birth certificate and built a false identity for her. Then by implanting false memories, they had made her believe in a past that she had never lived. But if Penny was not the person she was supposed to be, who was she? Did she have any recorded existence at all prior to becoming part of the secretive world of NuWare?

Unable to make progress in any other direction, she had gone back to her genome research with a vengeance. Her genetic profile was a mess, but there had to be something in it to narrow down the possibilities of where her progenitors had come from. She checked and rechecked her DNA against the data. In the end, the mystery woman who called herself Penelope Lammars could no longer deny the thing that was staring her in the face. She wasn't human. She narrowed down the possible species until she was left with the best match -- that of a gorilla.


Gorillas and Homo sapiens shared ninety-eight percent of their genetic material, she explained, now visibly shaken. NuWare, Penny reasoned, must have altered the egg cell of an original gorilla with material borrowed from human donors and by using designer genes created in laboratories. In the end – probably by using a human surrogate mother -- they were able to bring to term something that looked like a human being. When that much of the mystery had become clear, Pinnacle had stopped working and started drinking.

Pinnacle gave a weary laugh. "You know, Lu, when I realized how I'd been put together I suddenly became horrified at the idea that I might perpetuate what I was by having children."


"Penny..." I began.


"Well, I won't ever have to do that!” she declared with determination. “I won't have children. I'll have a tubal ligation if I ever get tempted to. Whatever sort of thing I am, it has to die with me."


My companion now fell silent. Her tears were flowing copiously, her emotions seemed drained. I was sure that she wanted me to say something, something to make her feel better, but I could think of nothing to say except, “Why?"


She flared. "What do you mean, why? Don't you understand? I have no human dignity; I'm livestock. I have no rights, not even under the law. If I were killed, it wouldn't even be murder. NuWare has every right to take me back as if I were an escaped lab rat. They could do the same thing to any children I had, too. And what kind of children could this body produce? Would they look like monsters?"


I was afraid that Penny was losing it. I placed my hands over her balled fists. "I mean, why do such a terrible thing to yourself? If you didn't start out human, it doesn't mean that you're not human now. You origin might not be the usual kind, but you're incredible in every way. NuWare, even if it was only acting from selfish motives, did something good by bringing you into the world."


Pinnacle stood up angrily. "I was hoping that you, of all people, could understand. Don't patronize me! I can't bear it." She shoved her chair back and stomped toward the door. I rose, wanting to say something, wanting to call her back, but I didn't know what to say. How could mere words serve as an antidote for such anguish and despair?


Suddenly, all on her own, the young woman – for I still saw her as such -- turned back my way, her expression incredulous.


"Good God, Lu!”


“What?”

“You actually meant that."

# 

I thought Penny had come to the point where she could use a glass of wine, so I signaled the waiter and requested a bottle. It was soon brought over. "Wherever your body comes from," I told my companion while we sampled the savory liquor, "the spirit in you is human in every way. That's the most important part of a person; yours has to come from the same place that every other human spirit does."


She shifted uncomfortably. "It's nice of you to say so, Lukasz, but I've never been that much into religion."


"Good grief, Penny! Last winter you put my consciousness into the body of a clone! What did you think you were doing if you weren't proving the existence of the soul?"


She was silent for a moment, absently stirring her ice water with a swizzle stick, "Some scientists have theorized about the existence of life-entities,” she suddenly said. “What you call the 'soul' might be no more than a natural, bio-imprinted recording that allows for coherent thought and patterned behavior."


"You're playing with words."


"I just find it hard to believe in the ---" she trailed off.


"In what, the paranormal? That's a damned funny thing to say to Mantra, the Golden Sorceress."


She cleared her throat. "I can't help it. I'm hard-wired to be rational. If I can't see something under a microscope, if it doesn't produce a readable wave pattern on an oscilloscope, it just doesn't seem real."


"You modern people! You call ancient people backward, but we understood the world better than you of today do. We didn't have so many gadgets back then, but it was so plain to everyone that science and religion were only two sides of the same coin. The best minds of the Renaissance were both scientists and theologians at the same time. They'd be astonished to see the war waged between science and religion today. Medieval folks didn't know everything, but they knew that there was nothing that science and faith needed to fight about, because both disciplines were walking the same path to the same end. There recognized the laws of Nature, and it was as clear as could be that someone of amazing knowledge had written those laws.”


"So what are you trying to say, Lulu?"


I ignored the nickname. "I'm saying that you may be putting blinders on yourself just as much as the scientists you criticize. But that's not important for now. Buck up! Respect yourself. A person's worth isn't to be weighed out in his meat alone. Your body is whatever your body is, but your spirit is one of the highest order. You're brilliant, funny, brave, generous, and compassionate. You're devoted to your friends and...and..."


"And all of that could be said about a pet poodle," she broke in.


"Well, I wouldn't exactly call a poodle 'brilliant.'"


That got a laugh out of her, the first of the evening. "You're looking though the eyes of emotion, Lu, and want to see me as you'd like me to be. But I'm not human, not by any objective standard."


"Well, you're a pretty good approximation," I said with an inappropriate grin. "You're easy on the eyes and you're certainly human in spirit."


"If I'm so wonderful, would you like to marry me?"


"Now who's not being serious?"


"You're so old fashioned, Lukasz!"


I regarded her levelly. "I was born in the year 430 A.D. -- even before it was called 430 A.D. Who has a better right to be old fashioned?"


"Well, I grant that your life is your own. If you have to be so dug-in stubborn against the mere idea of expanding your horizons, I can help.”


“What do you mean?”


“I can get you a male body like I did before. It wouldn't be an improvement over the one you have now, but if it would make you feel better...."


I shook my head. "I appreciate the sentiment; that's something I've thought about a lot. I don't have an easy answer for it anymore.”


“What are you saying?”


“Originally I was forced into this body and I resented it. I was obsessed with getting out of it, as long as it didn't hurt Eden, the woman I had come to love. But when Eden was dying, she offered her life back to me as a gift of that love. She only asked one thing in return – that I protect the children. I didn't hate her life anymore, no more than I could have hated Eden herself. I had already come to see myself as a parent, and I couldn't possibly go back to my old life while the kids are still so young. They need parenting so much, and their father is only doing as little as he has to. And how could I expect the twp pf them to be all right if I suddenly showed up looking like the old Lukasz? What then? There would be the legal custody issue. Even if I could convince the courts that I was Eden Blake, what would that do to Evie and Gus?”


“Are you saying you'd rather live someone else's life instead of picking up with the one you had?”


“My old life was insane,” I told her, “but I grant you that I got used to it. It certainly had its appeal and I could reacquaint myself without much trouble. Even so, as the old song goes, “something's lost but something's gained.” What I've gained is some self-respect as Mantra. Mantra is a preserver, not a destroyer. And with Eden I gain something very important, too -- a family and a home. My old purpose, my old comrades, they're all gone. Even our old enemies are gone. My original purpose turned out to be a hoax that my wizard master Archimage had been perpetrated. When the hoax fell apart, it left an empty chasm inside me. Just to keep my sanity I need something new to fill it. One thing that seems to overcome the emptiness is the idea of watching Evie grow up. Gus needs an adult to be there for him, too, even if he won't admit it."


"You haven't said much about Gus so far," she reminded me.


I sighed. "It's painful. Everything that's happened to Gus on this planet seems incomprehensible."


"And none of this happened back in your own world, I take it."


"No. It was a perfectly normal summer for both the kids. As for me, well, nothing is ever normal."


"I actually heard about Gus's problem early last summer and I sent the local Eden an e-mail last June. I offered to examine Gus and see what could be done for him. You -- she -- said that that magic was probably the best option to try out first. I waited for an update, but by the time I checked back, she was away in Europe. It was my guess that Eden had gone abroad because seeking out the high-octane sorcerers over there, trying to find some arcane help for Gus."


"I don't know much about the Mantra in this world, Penny, but back in my dimension I had actually gone to Britain on an Aladdin mission.”


She scrunched her bow. "Is that it? Well, that's good. It's starting to look like our worlds were pretty much alike until very recently."


“I'm not so sure,” I said. “Did you ever hear of an ultra hero named Contrary?"


"Is he in the comic books?"


"No, she was -- is -- famous in my world. She's an original member of our UltraForce. By the way, was Hardcase ever associated with the U.F. here?"


“No, he wasn't.” She looked away thoughtfully. “From what you're saying, the division seems to go back a lot further than last spring.”


“I think so, it's hard to say how far it goes. Like, was Contrary even born into this reality? And if she's alive, did she become an ultra? And how many other people are missing? Was there an Adolf Hitler on your planet?”


“Unfortunately, yes," she began cautiously, "but I'm wondering if you're invested enough in the Gus of this world to be willing do something really extreme to help him?”


"Of course. I'm listening."


"Here's what. I have the know-how to clone bodies, even if I don't have all the necessary specialized equipment just yet. I wasn't an active partner in the NuWare cloning operation, but I learned a few things. And I've remained curious enough to tap into the company's research database last spring. I downloaded jillions of gigabytes of data onto high-capacity hard drives. What I'm trying to say is that if we grew a new body for Gus, I could transfer his -- soul -- into it, like I did for you."


I regarded her keenly. "Would that get rid of his magic and his disfigurement, too?"


"That's the hope, but at this point I need more information. Maybe his DNA has been truly mutated and a clone of it would only recreate Gus in the same condition he is now.”


“That wouldn't get us anywhere,” I said regretfully.


But her face was still animated by excitement. “Even in the worst case, we wouldn't be totally beaten. Isn't there a chance to recover a bit of his pre-mutation DNA lying around somewhere, maybe from a tissue sample taken from a past medical procedure?”


I shook my head. “He hasn't needed any serious medical attention since I've known him. As for what happened to him beyond two years ago, I would have to look into it.”


“Well, there's still another option. He's the spitting image of his father, isn't he? If Gus, Sr. contributed some cells, I could develop a little-boy version of him and incarnate Gus, Jr. into it."


"You could?"


"Everything about human cloning is illegal," Penny confided, "but governmental morality is a contradiction in terms. Politicians exist to take bribes. You already know how Aladdin and other black op outfits get anything they want, no matter how illegal. Companies like NuWare collect politicians and bureaucrats like postage stamps, too. I wouldn't have much protection and would be taking a big risk. But I've already gotten away with a lot.  What Big Brother doesn't know can't hurt us. If the transplant worked, I might also be able to wipe away young Gus's memories of the last few months. I've sure there's a lot of suffering that he'd be glad to forget."


I regarded the lady scientist. What she was offering to my family was absolutely incredible. If ever there existed an actual living angel such as I had told Evie about, Penny would have to be flying at the head of the flock.


"Please, Lukasz," the ultra said abashedly, "you'll make me blush."


I sat back and sighed. Mind readers! Love 'em or leave 'em.


TO BE CONTINUED....