Lightpaths (15 page)

She suspected that her sudden self- doubt had something to do with those “rumblings from Earth” Atsuko had mentioned. As Marissa moved slowly over the sand from the cold water to the thin tent, she was not comforted by such thoughts.

* * * * * * *

Since his coworker Jhana was to be gone for the rest of the day, Paul Larkin thought he’d indulge in a little media-surfing. A short ride on the “Planetary Fear Machine”—the plenum of all Earth’s infotainment and news broadcasts pumped into his lab’s best VR hallucinatorium—always made Paul feel that, despite living in the orbital boonies, he was still able to keep in touch with what was really going on down there.

Not that what was really going on was to be found openly talked about on the Fear Machine, Paul thought as he walked into the big VR room. He knew better than that. He tended to view the whole constellation of what got pumped out on the Earth’s nets as a sort of planetary ego, a reality principle consciously wailing against the void. He was actually more interested in the planetary id and superego, the unconscious parts of Earth’s noosphere—those parts of the planetary mind that, with luck, he could read traces of in all those conscious mediations, like a therapist interpreting dreams or slips of the tongue.

To help him see through the wash of surface data he had an entheogen, the mushroom
Cordyceps jacintae
he’d brought back from Caracamuni tepui so long ago—along with some pure KL 235 from the same mushroom species, recently extracted in his lab. He’d never been so gutsy as to let the mushroom take its full twelve years and form a mature myconeural symbiont with his central nervous system—the way the indigenous people of the tepui had. Still, he had a two months’ growth of the fungus in his head now and that, with a new ingestion and the pure extract, should be enough to trigger the chaos in his brain necessary to fully overcoming the constraints of the dorsal and median raphe nuclei, the “reducing valves” on brain activity.

Once those impediments were overcome, he could media-surf at greater than flash-cut speed, which would in turn serve as an information trigger for “going elsewhere”, entering that different structure of possibility where he could see the meaningful patterns slowly shifting behind the seemingly meaningless random scatter of world events, entertainments, spectacles, reportage. He always knew when he got to elsewhere, for he could see the patterns of the future already present in the present, could see them clicking into shape like a three-dimensional image rising out of stereogram dot-scatter.

His friend Seiji called it paranoia tripping, but Paul preferred to think of it as electronic shamanism, aerial voyaging to another realm. Strapping himself into the gimballed swivelstand and looking about him at the full 360º virtual surround, Paul remembered what work they’d gotten this fancy toy for: identifying, analyzing, and interpreting raw ecological imagery, creating an electronic forest to stand between the thing of dirt and cellulose and sunlight, and the thing of numbers and bytes and electrons. It had not been designed for the use he was now going to put it to, but he knew it would do that well, too.

He slowly chewed the
Cordyceps
fungus, washing it down with the KL extract mixed in papaya juice. He started pumping the material from Earth’s infotainment nets into the virtual space around him, still keeping manual control over the first thousand channels and the rate of switching. It would be a quarter of an hour before the entheogens kicked in and his mind opened out enough so that he could up his datafeed and go to automated switching.

He saw the usual news. Ongoing food riots in at least a dozen nations. Refugees pouring from one overcrowded camp to another due to wars civil and uncivil, unrests political and impolitic. Monsoons in the Bay of Bengal. Heavy storms over Europe and North America. Forest fires here, flash floods there, tornadoes and earthquakes thrown in for good measure. Sheepherders putting sunglasses on their flocks in Patagonia—the usual ritual, intended to prevent cataracts resulting from increased UV coming down out of the depleted ozone. Death of the last wild Florida manatee, in a speedboat encounter. More marine mammal beachings. Two corporate-sponsored resource wars in southern Asia....

His gaze lingered on a fundamentalist siege of an Ark/Zoo facility:

“Before this night is through,”
booms some folksy white-maned media holy-man,
“the Lord’s own wrath will raze this ark of Satan and lay low every evolutionist, ecoterrorist, and Gaia worshipper therein!”

Choruses of
“Amen! Amen!”
and a wave of applause breaks over the preacher, who smiles benevolently upon his people like a greeting-card grandfather upon his large, holiday-gathered happy family. The image cuts from the pastor’s words to his flock’s actions—a twilight overhead shot of thousands upon thousands of wrathful zealots wearing crosses and cartridge bandoliers, shooting and shouting and milling round a sandbagged perimeter defended by private security forces in riot armor. The nattering of small arms fire and the occasional whump of mortars can be heard in the background, where smoke also rises from shattered buildings.

Larkin grimaced. Nearly eight billion people on that rock down there, the one with the blown ozone layer and the cyclonic storms marching across its face, the one with the unhappy isles of seacoast cities huddled behind high dikes, castellated by walls and moated by oceans, the one with the continents of buff brown desert where once there had been globe-girdling forests—and all so many of them could still think of was being fruitful and multiplying, clinging all the more tenaciously and in all the greater numbers to the very fundamentalisms that exacerbated the situation.

Crazy—but crazier still if these attacks, now being allowed on the Arks and Zoos, came also to be allowed upon the Orbital Biodiversity Preserve itself. He knew that many of the religioids thought of the space habitat as a Techno-Babylon, an orbital abomination. Were these increasing attacks a sign of some growing betrayal? The Orbital Complex was merely a big investment, after all. Investment strategies could change, if costs got too high. What if some Terran baron got impatient to move stock and began to play the middle between the temporal lords of space and the increasing number of “spiritual” rulers on Earth? The habitat’s untrammeled Easter garden, its endless springtime world, its lake and marsh and meadow and forest and jungle in space, where ghost species were becoming enfleshed again, a resurrection of all those scattered bodies—this secret-garden world continued in existence only on the sufferance of some very powerful forces on Earth....

He was starting to see the faint gold traceries in his peripheral vision that indicated the entheogens he’d taken were beginning to take affect, though not yet at full strength. He scanned further:

“We find the addictive popularity of this ‘Building the Ruins’ game very disturbing,” said a Korean trideo industry spokeswoman. “We’ve already gotten many complaints about it from parents’ groups. We want to make clear that responsible Earthbound trideo companies bear no responsibility for the game or its manufacture. In violation of trade regulations it is being designed and updated by someone or some group in the HOME habitat and then flash-manufactured and network-marketed by questionable business groups here on Earth. Also disturbing is the fact that these addictive game-units are broadcasting back to space, presumably to enable the quick upgrades characteristic of this product and its users’ need for constant novelty—”

Larkin’s visual field became completely filled with entoptic shimmering, networks of light glowing like spiderwebs of molten gold. He felt himself transforming from a person into a place through which threads and lines of bright energy and information were flowing, creating structures of possibility that he examined not so much with his eyes as with his mind. Some part of him far away snapped the channel-switching mode over to automatic infosurf and removed the thousand-channel limit. Data fell into him at greater than flash-cut speed—not just open broadcasts and public information, but encrypted material, business and government and military. Stock transactions, diplomatic communiques, troop movements and transport preparations and readiness status. Tetragrammaton and Medusa Blue back-channels, intelligence webs operating behind “bought” governments and corporate fronts like Tao-Ponto and ParaLogics, all squawking about games and unidentified satellites and other strange matters. As much of the Earth’s infosphere as he could process was being crammed into his head, randomly and meaninglessly at first, but soon with meaning and pattern rising and growing out of it.

When, two hours later, he had completed his electronic shamanic flight to elsewhere, he knew that the pattern was an ominous one. The Forces behind the Plans were marshalling—Holocaust and Exodus, demons and angels, and something, some inevitable but surprising third thing that was both and neither of those oppositional powers. And the focus of that shape of time he’d encountered! It was as if the flat-looking starfield background of the universe had turned into a three-dimensional mountain made of stars—a mountain the peak of which was pointed precisely at the orbital habitat itself.

Switching off the virtual surround, Paul realized the machine was still jittering madly with images. But then, so was he.

* * * * * * *

Jhana returned to her residence in an agitated state. She knew that her employer, Tao-Ponto, would undoubtedly be interested in a pheromone perfume like that which Roger Cortland was working on. Dr. Tien-Jones would definitely consider it a “worthwhile project.” She felt equally sure, however, that neither Roger Cortland nor Tao-Ponto would be emphasizing its fertility-decreasing aspect in their hyping of it. If a perfume could be developed that contained a powerful human sexual attractant—and could also generate tremendous profits without causing immediate cancer in the wearers—she was sure everyone at TPAG would be all for it.

Yet something about the whole scenario still disturbed her—so much so that she felt the need to take her mind off her visit with Roger. She had viewed the instructional tape on the upkeep of her garden area and now decided that a little green therapy might do her some good. Locating a small pair of pruning clippers and some envelopes for seeds, she went out to trim the blown roses, then to remove and store the seeds from the poppies and columbines.

Working her way among the plants, Jhana got sweaty and dirty and itchy with plant cuttings and debris. Despite that, she still marveled at the way this artificial world worked and wondered why the world below and its people did not work as well. The gardens here flowed easily (if not effortlessly) into the designated “wild areas”, those special habitats for the endangered and threatened species of Earth that were being preserved in space. Looking about the Sphere now, with her feet on the “ground”—looking toward that diversity which, combined with height, had so overwhelmed her upon her arrival—instead of seeing something fearful she was now beginning to see a world that was beautiful in its complexity, despite its inside-out strangeness.

Some of the beauty was plainly visible: the multiplicity of environments, the streams that meandered down from the poles through marshes and ponds then onward to the river girding the Sphere’s equator, all flowing into and out of the small natural-looking reservoir called Echo Mirror Lake. Houses and other small buildings were set into the landscape/skyscape, usually in small tight clusters. In the case of single units like the Sanchez-Fukuda place, they were constructed in such a way that, instead of being imposed upon it like a city planner’s nightmare, the residences seemed to flow up out of the mazed landscape like a geomancer’s dream.

As she finished pruning the blown roses, Jhana thought how different the cities of Earth looked, viewed from low orbit or that unsure boundary where airspace ends and outerspace begins. Even before she came up here she’d flown over L.A. and Tokyo and Mexico City, seen computer-enhanced reconnaissance photos of cities around the world, and they’d always reminded her of one thing: a biochip vat-spill gone out of control, some malignant meta-tumor, half supercomputer microcircuitry and half fungal colony, spreading across a Petri-dish planet, an informational spawn-complex bedding out through mycelia of highways and railroads and sea-lanes and flight patterns, trade and exchange, lines of print and code, power lines and telephone wires, broadcast channels and fiber-optic cables and information winging out to satellites. When she’d flown over Earth’s cities after dark, or seen shots of them nightside from space, they had not reminded her of glittering diamonds but rather of great electronic fungal colonies glowing and burning like graveyard foxfire, luminescent pox on the face of the darkness.

Rubbing columbine seed pods mechanically between her fingers so that the black seeds fell into an envelope, she found herself far away, thinking how different her homeworld would look if this habitat were everted and spread upon the Earth, in place of the human habitations that were already there. Certainly an Earth so inhabited would be almost invisible from space, day or night—the presence of human settlement harder to detect because it would be shedding so much less light and heat into the surrounding environment.

Even as she looked at the Sphere’s cavernous interior now, she supposed that most of its real beauty—or at least its elegance and efficiency—was almost invisible here too. Despite her initial misgivings, she was beginning to develop a grudging respect for the place. Its virtues were that way: invisible, subterranean—not sensational or spectacular.

Nearly all of the habitat’s trashstream was fully recycled—so? Its soil in the farming, wild, and habitation areas was always given time to regenerate itself—who cares? All the gases of organic decomposition were utilized and all the possible pollutants of living or farming or manufacturing were eliminated at the source or fully reclaimed for other uses—eh, big deal. None of that was sexy, none of that would ever show up well in a tour-brochure-from-space description. Yet it was really what this place was about.