Lightpaths (12 page)

“No, I don’t think so,” he said uncertainly. He didn’t know what to think, but he could not shake from his thoughts the idea that he had somehow, for a moment, gazed upon an event a thousand years old—through the eyes of the monk who had lived through it.

Compared to that, lasers and high technology seemed a most mundane magic.

* * * * * * *

Jhana too had glimpsed the Möbius Cadúceus skysign, but she was so exhausted from working around the living fossil Larkin all day that she’d barely noticed it. About the only thing she’d accomplished the rest of the day was learning that the local expert on mole-rats was Roger Cortland, the man she’d met on the flight up from Earth. That wasn’t much to show for all the hours she’d put in.

On arriving home she immediately prepared for bed, still feeling time-lagged as she dressed for sleep. As she fell asleep she thought dreamily of what an arbitrary, localized thing the human telling of time was—merely the sequence of light and shadow on a small planet a certain distance from its star. When was high noon on the sun? Always? Never? When was midnight for someone floating halfway between Earth and Moon, or among unshadowed, uneclipsed Lagrange points? Arbitrary, she thought as she tumbled over the edge of sleep, all so arbitrary....

Mike and Rick fighting naked before her, dark and light, black and white tangle of armholds and leglocks and pummeling fists and blood streaming from noses and lips and herself caught up in the ineluctable grasp of time-transcending dreamvision, powerless to break free, becoming less a person than a place, less the object of battle than the battlefield itself, suddenly flooded with people in the dress of a million times and places running to and fro over the shoreless ocean of time, screaming sobbing crying shouting people. Sirens wailing and singing, singing and wailing over vast darkling plain where Mike and Rick transmogrify into stormwaves of men smashing against each other in ever vaster oceans of blood, where ships and sailors explode and sink and drown and projectiles and jets and starfighters boil madly in the heavens raining ever more hellish destruction upon the burning earth until all the land is fiery charnel quagmire and the sea and sky endless firmaments of blood.

A bubble of froth afloat upon the seas of blood and fire, powerlessly she watches machineries of construction and destruction proliferate bloom and die and proliferate again in ever larger numbers, building destroying rebuilding redestroying, until it is impossible for her to tell the building from the destroying, humanity devouring everything and always already itself on a disposable planet, a womb to be callously forgotten just as soon as the umbilical cord can be cleanly cut, but she is that world, that womb, that woman on a deathmound bed of skulls and bones and skeletons big as forever under skies redolent of blood and fire, being taken against her will again and again by a man with burning wounds for eyes, a man alternately light and dark, making fevered sickmonkey love with her under blood sheets, where pain and pleasure, love and death, always and never fuse into—

Screaming, Jhana woke to the buzzing of her front door. Coming out of the nightmare, she threw her robe about her, walked out of the bedroom and through the living area to the front door. The wall screen flashed 6:01, 6:01 as she walked past.

“Jhana Meniskos?”

“Yes?” she said groggily, staring at the thinly moustached, brown-uniformed young man at her door.

“Sorry to have called on you at this early hour,” said the tall thin man with some embarrassment. His uniform tag said LOSABA and he spoke in the rich tones of a black South African. Jhana vaguely recognized his uniform as being that of the Intersatellite Courier Service. “But we received this very high priority private message from your employer and we felt we should relay it to you as soon as possible. If you’ll just look into this retinoscope here—”

The uniformed young man handed her the computer clipboard and she gazed into the scope, wondering if the bloodshot condition of her eyes would affect its readout. But no, a bell-like tone sounded and the courier nodded, handing her a sealed packet with a datawire inside. He bid Jhana a pleasant if somewhat hasty good-bye and she turned back into the house, closing the door behind her.

Without opening the packet or pulling the datawire from it, Jhana walked dazedly back through the living area, back to the bedroom. Returning to the scene of the dream, she sat down at the edge of the bed, wondering if she needed to see a therapist. It would be so easy to write it all off as just a dream—except for the fact that, for most of her life, she hadn’t been bothered by her dreams, had seldom remembered them because she hadn’t thought them worth remembering. But these new dreams lately—they were so different, so strange and vivid. That sense of being hardly aware of herself—feeling herself only a place in which sensations and feelings were held for a moment as they poured through from nowhere to nowhere—that was so unprecedented she desperately wanted to make sense of it, of everything so disturbing in these night visitations.

Had she—deep down, in ways she’d never admitted to herself—really wanted to see Mike and Rick fight over her? Had she wanted to enjoy the spectacle of it? Their pain and struggle for her pleasure and entertainment? She had never thought there could be that much of the voyeur and the sadist in her. She hoped there wasn’t.

It had, in any case, not worked out that way. Mike was dead in an accident, or a suicide, accidental suicide or suicidal accident—whatever—for which she undeniably felt guilt. And yet, despite that guilt, when she had gone to Rick for condolences that evening after the funeral, they had not only comforted each other—they had also made love, furious love, as if on top of Mike’s grave, upon his so very newly interred coffin. Why? Was it guilt over Mike’s death that had driven her to that—or the desire to be revenged upon him, sexual vengeance for his denying her the fulfillment of some fantasy from which her conscious thoughts and words recoiled?

And to what avail? The dead felt no vengeance, and the living could gain from it only a most guilty pleasure. Rick—Rick who had grown tired of waiting for her to make up her mind about Mike—he had already begun seeing another woman, the woman he would eventually throw Jhana over for and marry, but not before Jhana herself had first learned how it felt to be one of two satellites circling one body.

Disgusted by her memories she tore open the packet, snapped flat the wire, and inserted it into a reader.

TO: Jhana Meniskos, Ph. D.

FROM: Balance Tien-Jones, Ph.D. TPAG Dir. R/D (Bio)

RE: Worthwhile Projects

Stresses and tensions between here and there are increasing. Strongly suggest you look into mirror projects, SSPS. May prove valuable as diamonds or ephemeral as lightning.

That was cryptic enough. Delivered by security courier, no less. Unwilling to trust the message to the habitat’s wide-open, non-encrypted broad and narrowcast channels.

Jhana found herself less and less in the mood for cloak and dagger games, but she supposed she’d better play along. Her job might depend on it.

Diamonds and lightning could pretty obviously be combined into a reference to that supposed secret weapons project, Diamond Thunderbolt. No doubt the professional paranoids of the Weapons Division were bothered by something to do with mirrors and the satellite solar power stations.

Dressing for the day, she thought again of the tides of blood that had flowed through her dream and devoutly hoped all that sort of thing was coming to an end. We have been sick monkeys for such a long time, she thought. Still, there were increasing signs of health. Except in the entertainment media there were no orbital forts or starfighters like the ones in her nightmare, and even the transatmospheric fighter program had been phased out—much to Mike’s grief. Life and reality were at least going a good deal better than her fearful nightmare. The world’s sickness, though chronic and sometimes even acute, had not yet proven fatal.

Checking herself over one last time in the bathroom mirror, she hoped that Diamond Thunderbolt would prove to be only a fiction of overwrought hyperparanoid minds desperate for the excuses of Fear and Money to prime the slowing machinery of death and destruction. Still, though, it would probably be best to keep her superiors happy by at least going out to the solar power satellites and taking a look around. Undoubtedly Tao-Ponto and the other consortium members had “unofficial observers” much more experienced than herself already snooping about, but she would do her part—if only to keep them off her back.

How, though? Under what pretext? Who might provide her with a legitimate entry to that realm? Leaving the house for her new day, she racked her memory over that until she suddenly recalled the first night party and Seiji Yamaguchi. Hadn’t he claimed to be connected with the solar power utilities somehow?

She’d have to look him up—but not before she got back in touch with Roger Cortland. How odd that the man she’d met on the shuttle coming out had some considerable connection with her real work, in the form of his own research into that threatened species with the unappealing common name of “naked mole-rats.”

Her official observations as a scientist came first—the unofficial observing could wait a bit.

“Laksh,” Lev Korchnoi said, linking in from a pod module in near-space, “sorry I’ve been so long getting back to you and your LogiBoxes up there, but have you ever noticed the way problems don’t come singly—they come in clusters? I mean, it’s not bad enough that we’re under all this time pressure with the Mob Cad show and we’re still getting glitches in the shobots. Now the team leader at my Communications day job has a bee up his butt about this space junk, so at this very minute I’m on my way to take a close-up look-see at the stuff—just to make sure Communications isn’t implicated. As if that weren’t enough already, I get a query from this woman, Marissa somebody, wondering if our skysign might have accidentally zapped her friend, Roger
Cortland
, because he had an ‘adverse reaction’ to it in its first public appearance!”

Lakshmi nodded gravely.

“I know exactly what you mean. I just got a message from the other Cortland, Atsuko herself. She’s current Council liaison to the trade-gods on Earth and they’re all upset about some trideo game thing the Vajra is supposedly involved in manufacturing. I’m going to have to stall her until I can figure out exactly what’s going on with the big spider I built for the habitat’s web. And that’s not the only problem. My workshop is now certifiably haunted.”

“What?” Lev asked, surprised even out of his self-pitying funk.

“You’ll see. Park your pod by my port after you’re done scouting around out there.”

“Will do. See you then.”

As he signed off, Lev saw that he was within range of one of the X-shaped pieces of space junk he’d been sent to investigate. Maneuvering the pod into position, he saw that the X—smooth, reddish-orange and flecked with black, like a multicolored fun-house mirror—was only about the size of his vehicle. He did a series of scans of the thing: all wavelengths, and at scales ranging from visible-light photography to electron-micrograph ultracloseups. He scanned it with gamma-ray lasers, low-energy collimated particle beams, scanning-tunneling x-ray microscopy, stereomicroscopy, electron and positron emission scopes. Milliwaldoes and microwaldoes attempted to tease samples out of it.

Despite all the mechanical ministrations, to Lev’s eyes the thing appeared inert—certainly it didn’t seem to be responding to his scans in any way. Its inertness, though, turned out to be an illusion of scale. At the submicroscopic level, the thing was bustling with activity, innumerable micromachines swarming over it, making it ‘grow’ like some strange mechanorganic flower.

The micromachine stuff wasn’t too surprising—a small percentage of nanoassemblers always glitched and made debris. This X-shaped flower, though—it looked far too purposeful to be random garbage. Some of what the micros were growing appeared to be solar exchange film—which was good, since that made it Power Utility’s problem. A lot of the X’s surface, though, looked like microlasers and photorefractives—something like the tech he and Lakshmi and Aleister had used to make the skysign shine, only much smaller and more sophisticated. That was bad, because that might make it Communications’ problem.

There was nothing Lev could do about what he was seeing except send on the data and his observations to his team leader in Comm. He wondered vaguely where the micromachines were getting the mass and materials to build and extend their constructions, but he didn’t have time to puzzle that out at the moment. He had done his job. He’d gotten the higher-ups the data; now it was up to them to do something with it. He kicked in the pod’s thrusters and headed toward Lakshmi’s shop out in micro-gee.

When he arrived, Lakshmi was waiting for him just past the air lock. No sooner was he inside than she quickly began to usher him into the bowels of her workshop. In her hoverchair she could move quite fast when she wanted to, and he had to hurry to keep up. Abruptly they stopped in the center of the shop.

“Where’s this ‘haunting’ you spoke of?” Lev asked. “All I see is the usual clutter of your stuff drifting around.”

“Look more closely,” Lakshmi said, causing a thin beam of light to arrow from her hoverchair and indicate a corner of the lab. Lev saw it now: robotic arms acting cooperatively, sorting through a pile of stuff. He walked closer to it, Lakshmi following slowly and silently.

The arms were building something, attaching pieces to an assemblage or mobile. He saw a mandala, a tantric ritual object, a small piece of what looked like African tribal art, a Catholic scapular medal, a rosary, and a lot of stuff that looked like straightforward junk and debris, all connected into a vaguely animal-like form by microthin optical wire. As he watched, the arms—which did move in a rather abnormal, “ghostly” fashion—opened up a leather pouch with a biohazard trefoil done in bead work and began extracting simple objects: feathers, dried flowers, bones, beads.

“Where’s it getting this stuff from?” Lev asked, walking around the construction.

“Some of the African and Asian stuff is mine,” Lakshmi said, “but the majority of it is stuff the arms have sorted out of Jiro Yamaguchi’s personal effects. I’ve tried to tell you about this before, but you haven’t been very willing to listen.”

“And you know why?” Lev said. “Because you’re going to tell me that there’s some sort of artificial consciousness running on Jiro Yamaguchi’s LogiBoxes—and that it’s what’s responsible for the problems we’ve been having lately. I don’t buy it. Since when has human malfunction become a computer function? Jeez, the way we scapegoat machine intelligences, you’d think they were secret manifestations of our own Ids, some kind of externalized subconscious—

“But what if the construct running on Jiro’s ‘Boxes is involved?” Lakshmi persisted. “What if, before he died, he was able to transfer something of himself into them?”

“What—computer-aided apotheosis?” Lev asked cynically. “I don’t believe in the ‘ghost in the machine’, Laksh. Mind is more than just electrified headmeat. You can’t just go beaming it from place to place like an old radio program—”

Lev was interrupted by a message coming over his PDA. He looked down and saw the plump visage of Aleister McBruce.

“Ah, I’m glad to see you’re there too, Lakshmi,” Aleister said. “This concerns you as well. I’ve pinned down what these odd self-replicating bugs are on Lev’s shobots. You’ve got Rats, Lev. RATs. Realtime Artificialife Technopredators. Funny thing is, they aren’t supposed to exist anymore. They were all supposedly destroyed with their creator, a guy who called himself Phelonious Manqué. At Sedona. Seems they’re not extinct after all—and the Vajra has a pretty good case of them. Check it out, Lakshmi. They’re stealthy and pretty unobtrusive at the moment, but they’re there.”

“Great,” Lakshmi said, calling up search protocols on her overlays, looking through them at Lev. “Are these ghosts allowable in your philosophy, Mr. Korchnoi?”

“Problems,” Lev said with a smile and a shrug. “They never come alone....”

“No,” Lakshmi said, busily scanning through her overlays. “They always come in clusters. Herds. Multitudes.”

* * * * * * *

Marissa had left a v-mail message for Roger, explaining that she was taking the morning off to look over a monument down by Echo Mirror Lake. The inscription, she had explained in her note, was relevant to her fellowship work for Atsuko. Really, though, she needed to decompress, spend some time away, and swimming in the little lake seemed a good way to do that. So she walked, her guilt draped over her left arm in the form of a bathing suit.

And she did feel guilty. Guilty about taking the time away from Roger, especially after the airbike incident. Perhaps it was guilt too that had made her fire off a query to the Möbius Cadúceus people about their skysign and its affect on Roger. It was definitely guilt that had her reading what Roger had highlighted in the Mumford text as she walked along a branching path amid a stand of foxtail pines. As she walked and read, she saw that the notes and highlighting began to become more fragmentary as they went on.

Highlighted excerpt from Mumford’s
The Story of Utopias
:

...a local synthesis of all specialist “knowledges”...common tissue of definite, verifiable, localized knowledge is what all our...utopias and reconstruction programs have lacked.... Regional survey is the bridge by which the specialist whose face is turned toward the library and the laboratory, and the active worker in the field, whose face is turned toward the city and region in which he lives, may come into contact; and out of this contact our plans and our eutopias may be founded on such a permanent foundation of facts as the scientist can build for us, while the sciences themselves will be cultivated with regard for the human values and standards, as embodied in the needs and the ideals of the local community... we must return to the real world, and face it, and survey it in its complicated totality. Our castles-in-air must have foundations in solid ground...

Marissa stopped awkwardly, flicking a pine cone off the path and back into the woods with the toe of her shoe, then went on with her reading.

Highlighted excerpt from Mumford’s
The Story of Utopias
:

There is no genuine logical basis...in the dissociation of science and art, of knowing and dreaming, of intellectual activities and emotional activities. The division between the two is simply one of convenience; for both these activities are simply different modes in which human beings create order out of the chaos in which they find themselves...cultivated few/mutilated many...plans for a new social order have been dull as mud because, in the first place, they have been abstract.... Where the critics of the utopian method were, I believe, wrong was in holding that the business of projecting prouder worlds was a futile...pastime.

Locating a tree-shaded bench, Marissa sat down, finding the bench cool, almost cold, beneath her. She glanced up at the world-sky arching through the firmament above, trees and streams and gardens and grasslands and small clusters of buildings. Castles in the air, she thought with a smile. Something, a spot among the branches of the foxtails, caught her eyes. Concentrating her gaze, she saw a dark flash move with incredible speed and agility along a bunch-needled branch. A pine marten, she realized. Nearly extinct in the wild on Earth, but they apparently had a good little colony of them going here. For a moment she became aware of the wonderful fresh smell of the trees around her, even as she returned to the book in her lap.

Highlighted excerpt from Mumford’s The Story of Utopias:

These anti-utopian critics overlooked the fact that one of the main factors that condition any future are the attitudes and beliefs which people have in relation to that future...as Dewey would say, in any judgment of practice one’s belief in a hypothesis is one of the things that affects its realization...

The importance of the will, then, in any realization of a better human social condition. Huxley and Callenbach had named the protagonists in their eutopian novels “Will”, she remembered. She wondered if there might be any significance to that. Intrigued, she rose from the bench and walked over the sandy path a while, listening to the silence, watching the light filter through the trees around her, smelling the pines’ perfume floating in the air. At last she turned back to her book and read further.

Highlighted excerpt from Mumford’s
The Story of Utopias
:

The first step...is to ignore all the fake utopias and social myths that have either proved so sterile or so disastrous during the last few centuries.... In turning away from obsolete and disastrous social myths I do not suggest that we give up the habit of making myths; for that habit, for good or bad, seems to be ingrained in the human psyche. The nearest we can get to rationality is not to efface our myths but to infuse them with right reason, and to alter them or exchange them for other myths when they appear to work badly.

Roger the annotator had heavily starred the section on myths and beside the phrase “right reason” had written “What does this term mean? Is reasoning ever unequivocally ‘right’?” Marissa was surprised to see that. Such notes seemed to her evidence more of Atsuko’s propensity to emphasize the uncertainty and incompleteness of thought and all systems thereof—rather than what she’d perceived to be Roger’s simple rebelliousness. Maybe Roger and his rebelliousness weren’t so simple after all.

Without breaking stride she snatched a pine cone off the trail and gazed at its complexity a moment, then turned back to the book as she walked.

Highlighted excerpt from Mumford’s
The Story of Utopias
:

Among the utopians...as land is a common possession, so is work a common function; and no one is let off from some sort of labor of body or mind because of any inherited privileges or dignities...the inhabitants of our eutopias will have a familiarity with their local environment and its resources, and a sense of historical continuity, which those who dwell within the paper world of Megalopolis...have completely lost.... We shall not attempt to legislate for all these communities at one stroke; for we shall respect William Blake’s dictum that one law for the lion and the ox is tyranny....

Among the stars and exclamation points surrounding these passages Roger had remarked “What of equality? Is equal justice only equal tyranny? Can we give the lion and the ox different worlds in which to live? Will solving this conflict only generate new ones?” Reading on, Marissa could appreciate the tenacity with which the annotator took the text to task rather than merely accepting Blake or Mumford as “authoritative.”

Marissa saw that she was coming out of the forest into a meadow-lined bowl. At the bottom of that grassy depression lay a small round body of mirror-smooth water, reflecting the tree-lined ridges that surrounded it on every side and, farther away, those parts of the other side of the Sphere that were also in light. In the meadow nearer at hand stood the small pedestal monument that she’d been looking for. She walked toward it, trying to finish up her reading as she went.

Highlighted excerpt from Mumford’s
The Story of Utopias
:

If the inhabitants of our eutopias will conduct their daily affairs in a possibly more limited environment than that of the great metropolitan centers, their mental environment will not be localized or nationalized.... The notion that no effective change can be brought about in society until millions of people have deliberated upon it and willed it is one of the rationalizations which are dear to the lazy and ineffectual...the foundations for eutopia can be laid, wherever we are, without further ado...when that which is perfect has come, that which is imperfect will pass away.