Lightpaths (14 page)

He crouched down and stared closely through the glass at his blind, squirming, grey-pink charges—shriveled sausages come to life.

“Individual nonbreeding mole rats are not irreversibly sterile, though,” he continued. “And still they have a self-regulating population. That’s what fascinated me when I was a teenager. If naked mole rats appreciate the long term significance of
not
breeding no better than most humans do, then why don’t they breed? Why does only the queen breed?” He absently traced the outline of the breedhall chamber with a fingertip on the glass. “The answer I learned in college was that once a particular female becomes dominant, she somehow
behaviorally
suppresses breeding by other females. The older version was that the suppression was achieved through the use of pheromones. Either way, the others in the colony have no choice in the matter.”

He came out of his crouch, his knees clicking audibly in the quiet of the lab as he straightened up.

“Unfortunately, no one succeeded in isolating the essential pheromone of a chemical suppression, so the Faulkes orthodoxy of behavioral and physical rather than pheromonal suppression stood.” He turned toward her and fixed her with a steady gaze. “‘Behavior’—so vague. I felt I might just as well have been learning that the queen suppressed breeding by magic. But all that’s changed now. I believe we’ve isolated and synthesized the long-sought pheromone here, in this lab. Field tests are proving it out. The Faulkes orthodoxy will be overthrown. I’ve already finished my paper on it for the
Journal of Mammalogy
.”

“Congratulations!” Jhana exclaimed, genuinely impressed. “That’s a monumental accomplishment!”

He dismissed her excitement with a wave of his hand.

“I’m already at work on something bigger,
much
bigger,” he intimated proudly, his eyes shining. “Quick—give me a list of the world’s problems.”

Jhana looked at him oddly. Seeing that he was absolutely serious, she shrugged her shoulders and began ticking off the usual litany on her fingers.

“Ecodisasters, mostly—global heat trap effects, phytoplankton mass extinctions, ozone depletion, losses of biodiversity, worldwide desertification and famine, storm systems of unprecedented severity and duration arising from the re-calibration of the planetary heat machinery—”

“Right, right,” Roger said, cutting her off. “Poverty and starvation when more food is being produced than ever before. Increased levels of violence as overcrowding generates conditions of behavioral sink. Pestilence and suffering and resource wars—all the age-old plagues, which we have the technological know-how to eliminate but can’t.”

Absently he ran a hand through his hair and turned his gaze toward the floor, as if trying to stare through it toward the occluded Earth below.

“All the signs indicate that catastrophic environmental effects induced by humans have become not only cumulative but also synergistic, multiplying and dominoing like mad,” he continued evenly, a heavenly judge calmly pronouncing the final doom. “We’ve very nearly exceeded the ecosphere’s capacity to regenerate itself—at least in a form that will support humans. And what lies at the root of all those problems, hm?”

Jhana, feeling like a prisoner in the dock, took time to think before she answered.

“I’ve heard different people say the basic problem is patriarchy, or transnational capitalism, or any world system based on growth and more growth,” she hedged—knowing how politically loaded Roger’s question was—before coming around to her real thoughts at last. “As a biologist, though, I suppose I’d have to say the root cause is population.”

“Exactly!” Roger said, affirming it forcefully with a finger pointed skyward. Jhana felt as if she’d just been given a reprieve from the general doom. “But no one wants to see that or really do anything about it. The essence of tragedy is willful blindness to certain facts or realities. Our situation is tragic because most of our world’s governments, religions, and economic systems have remained willfully blind to the increasing likelihood of
human extinction
. As a result, most of the world’s people remain ignorant of this likelihood.”

“Extinction?” Jhana looked at him as if he’d suddenly sprouted two new heads. “But there are over seven and a half billion human beings on that planet down there—despite every population control method tried. We’re hardly a ‘vanishing animal’.”

“Yes,” Roger said, pacing slowly, thoughtfully, back and forth. “In fact we’ve been too successful. We’re birthing ourselves to death. If you have eyes to see it, it’s clear that we’re caught in a classic boom/bust cycle. We’re quickly becoming the victims of our own success. The only thing that can keep us from finally going past the point of no return is a drastic decrease in human population.”

Jhana shook her head, turning her gaze back toward the busy mole-rats in their glass-walled slab of habitat.

“Now you’re the one talking magic,” she said at last. “Or lots of death and suffering and Malthusian mayhem.”

Roger spun suddenly on his heel.

“Not at all! I’m talking pheromones, human pheromones! Think about it, Ms. Meniskos: a subtle perfume containing a sexual attractant pheromone that acts on human fertility—the denser the concentration of people, the more powerfully the pheromone reduces fertility. A paradox, but there are precedents, you know. Examples of feedback systems by which other species self-regulate their numbers. Epideictic displays among birds, for instance. Think of the advantages. No government would have to force people to undergo vasectomies or tubal ligations. A form of population control, yes, but one not dependent on laws or political decisions or demographic shifts or levels of education. Purely and abstractly responsive to population density, and at the same time inseparably caught up in the whole essence of sexuality and sensuality. “

A paradox so perfect immediately caused objections to rush into Jhana’s mind.

“But it would be so—so unnatural!”

Roger Cortland looked at her with furrowed brow.

“My dear Jhana, we are at this moment living inside an artificial world hanging in space between the Earth and Moon—a habitat as contrived as that mole-rat slice-of-life you’re staring at. What could be more unnatural than that?”

She could only turn and stare at him, still turning over in her mind the potential pitfalls of his scheme. He took her silence for acquiescence and made his checkmate move.

“Even more importantly,” he said in a slightly hushed and paranoid manner, “if I can develop such a pheromone, might your employer be interested in it?”

* * * * * * *

Before Atsuko and Marissa had even finished their short chill swim and headed back to shore, they no longer had the beach and Echo Mirror Lake to themselves. A group of about half a dozen youngsters had appeared on the other side of the lake, naked, holojam box in tow, projecting trideos onto the lake’s surface and exploiting the basin’s echoing acoustics to noisy effect.

Excerpted lyrics from Möbius Cadúceus song, “Socrates”:

The old man urged his students then,

“Make good use of your reason.”

But the Athenian state

Called his teachings treason.

Still better to be Socrates than a happy pig.

Far better to be Socrates than a happy pig...

Over the noise Atsuko tried to explain that the lake shore was, by recently established consensus, divided roughly into sectors—mixed nude swimming area, same sex nude swimming (male only and female only areas), mixed swim-suited swimming, and all overlapping gradients of cladness and uncladness in between.

“I know it smacks of ‘the oversocialization of the Left’,” Marissa heard Atsuko say clearly as their neighbors across the lake finally turned the music down, the volume of it having apparently proven too much even for their young ears. “Or ‘the limits of segregation are the limits of toleration.’ But openness to diversity is always much needed here. Toleration of alternatives, combined with a respect for the individual’s right not to have his own beliefs infringed upon, so long as his beliefs and actions don’t infringe upon the rights of others. Always a challenging balance.”

“My right to swing my fist ends at your nose?” Marissa asked pleasantly as she lay on the beach, drying in the sunlight beside Atsuko, who nodded. “But how do you instill that tolerance?” Marissa continued. “The presence of those kids across the lake has gotten me to thinking—particularly about the way you educate and plan to educate your young people here.”

“What about it?” Atsuko asked, adjusting her wrap-around sunshades.

Marissa thought a moment. More words and music about hemlock and Socrates and happy pigs drifted over from the far shore, but the younger people seemed intent on some trideo game they’d projected upon the waves. The word VAJRA flashed over the water, followed by a symbol like a multi-faceted shining thunderbolt, then a City of Light appeared which, as nearly as Marissa could determine, was being besieged by the forces of darkness. She seemed to remember the word “vajra” from somewhere, though she couldn’t quite recall where. She shook her head and shrugged.

“Well, if everything is so situational and incomplete and uncertain as you say,” Marissa said, trying to put her thoughts into the right words, “then how can one possibly have an ethics?”

Atsuko smiled, beginning to make a game of the conversation.

“That’s easy. One can’t have an ethics—one is an ethics. That’s the problem: everybody treats ethics as a product rather than a process,” Atsuko paused, thinking it through. Across the lake the song sang about a trial and sentence of exile. “That’s the problem with ethics generally: so teleological, so oriented to a product external to life rather than inherent in the process of living itself. What I hope we’re teaching the children here is that, in a very real sense, the journey is the goal—the treasure, the pot of gold, lies not at the rainbow’s end but in the chasing of the rainbow. I hope we’re teaching the kids to find meaning in the search.”

“ ‘Persistent striving,’ as Kierkegaard calls it,” Marissa said with a nod. “Not striving for something, or to be somebody. Striving as an end in itself.”

“Right,” Atsuko said, flicking sand off her arm. “A product-oriented ethics, a teleological ethics, is no ethics at all. Any ethics you can have isn’t worth having.”

Sitting up on the sand, Marissa realized that the song of Socrates and the happy pigs was ending, though the game of the shining city floating on the waves still seemed to be going strong.

“But then what do you replace ethics with?” she asked.

Atsuko flicked the wraparounds up off her eyes and looked at Marissa carefully as she spoke.

“With nothing. With just being. Letting the stone roll away from the heart, allowing the moon to slide away so the sun can shine.”

“Very poetic,” Marissa said, “but how does one do that? Through showing compassion?”

Atsuko sat up, brushing sand lightly off her suit.

“Not just showing it. Being it. Living compassion. Existing in a lived recognition of the metaphysical unity behind and underlying and connecting all things.” Atsuko laughed lightly. “That sounds too mystical by half, but it’s the best way I can think of to put it—and it’s still a lot easier to talk about than it is to do.”

Marissa and Atsuko heard the young people across the lake whistling and shouting and clapping, saw them pointing toward the axis of the sky. Looking up, they saw the dual immense snakes of the Möbius Cadúceus skysign shimmering and writhing, self-consuming rainbow serpents—

“Good Heavens!” Atsuko exclaimed. “What’s
that
?”

“Beautiful, isn’t it?” Marissa said quietly over the continued shouts and whoops of the young people across the lake. “I saw it the other day. Roger passed out when he saw it—might’ve gotten hit by their projection lasers, I think. No real harm done though, apparently. It’s to publicize a performance by that band our young neighbors across the lake were listening to. They must be fans. See? There’s the skysign where their trideo game was. Or maybe that’s just a reflection?”

Atsuko turned from the image in the sky to its reflection in the lake’s smooth surface. If anything it seemed even more strange and exotic reflected on the water.

“I’m surprised you haven’t heard the publicity,” Marissa said, turning toward Atsuko.

“I haven’t heard much of anything, lately,” Atsuko said, “except rumblings from Earth, that is.”

Atsuko neither elaborated nor turned her gaze from the skysign, and Marissa didn’t press her. When at last the symbol had disappeared from sky and water, when at last even the echoes of the applause and the shouting had ceased, Atsuko turned to Marissa.

“Can there be so mundane, so
profane
an explanation for that symbol?” Atsuko asked, still lost and wondering at the sight of the image in the sky. “It makes me think of that line in Yeats’s
Second Coming
—‘a vast image out of
Spiritus Mundi
troubles my sight.’ And it is troubling, too. So archetypal—it makes my head explode with associations! Ancient and modern, past and future, time and timelessness—and all for what? Advertising a show!”

After the fiery eruption of her words, the look of disdain that subsided onto Atsuko’s face seemed so curmudgeonly and out of place that Marissa had to laugh. Atsuko suddenly realized why Marissa was laughing.

“Hah! Listen to me! We hardly need to drive the sacred and the profane any farther apart than they already are, do we? And here I am doing it!”

Atsuko moved off toward the changing tent then, her laughing final words echoing over the lake and deep inside Marissa. True, she cherished her theory about the world-as-it-ought-to-be and the world-as-it-is, but Marissa could never quite forget Hume’s law: No
ought
deducible from
is
. Abruptly she was swept by the fear that as long as she believed in her
oughts
and
isses
she was doomed to an Arnoldian limbo, wandering between two worlds, one dead, the other powerless to be born. Had she, albeit unconsciously, already consigned the Earth to the first category, the space habitats to the second? Why her personal fascination with utopian literature—with what had never been born from the womb of time? From what longing could such an obsession have arisen in her?