Lightpaths (18 page)

“Not to be closer to my mother?” Roger put in,
faux naive
, hugging his mother with an almost painful ferocity.

“Hardly,” Atsuko said, extricating herself from her son’s embrace. “The Preserve has the largest collection of wild-caught naked mole rats anywhere, and some of the best facilities available to biological researchers, as you well know. It’s not filial love that brings you here. It’s your own obsessions—though why you should be obsessed with those little monsters, I’ll never know.”

A silence opened between them then. Marissa strove to fill the awkward emptiness.

“Weren’t we going to the gym?” she said to Atsuko. “Then on to the Archives?”

“That’s why I came here,” Atsuko said, none too obliquely. They bid Roger adieu, Marissa smiling knowingly over Atsuko’s head. Roger returned the knowing smile gratefully, thankful to have Marissa’s help in ushering his mother onward and out of the lab.

Roger returned to reviewing the material his mole-rat imp had scavenged from all over the infosphere, but after about ten minutes he found he couldn’t concentrate. Maybe it was just a hang-over from his spacewalk with Marissa, but he found he kept thinking about his father.

Evander Cortland had been a financial genius, Roger thought, staring down at the lab’s richly polished mooncrete floors. A brash, arrogant man, too. Roger could never figure why Atsuko had married him—they were so different. As a child, he remembered, the three of them had seemed the happy family, living all over Earth, playing the games of the international set for several years.

Eventually that became aimless, pointless. The whole time that slow realization was coming, though, his father was becoming more and more successful. Ev’s speculations in leading-edge technologies paid off, his millions became billions. About that same time, his mother Atsuko started joining organizations like the Global Futures Fund, the Space Studies Institute, the Space Frontiers Foundation. What better way to fill the void of being A Successful Man’s Wife than joining organizations planning literally to fill the void through the colonization of space? His mother took up that vision as her crusade, and his father—who had connections everywhere in the high tech industries—took up Atsuko’s crusade as his own new vision. Together they had been instrumental in putting together the HOME consortium.

Roger remembered, though, that as the lobbying and proposal-making dragged on and on, his father had become increasingly pragmatic about “the project” while his mother became increasingly idealistic. His father used to always address the vision in practical terms: Who would ‘ante up’? How could they generate enough corporate ‘will’ to open up the corporate ‘wallet’? His dad had never been very happy with the idealistic elements of the project—great for selling it to the public, sure, but the final reality for him was the bottom line. He wanted a money-maker, a cash cow in the sky that could be milked for a long time.

As the space habitat became more and more of a reality, his mother began to spend more time with the people who were going to settle in it—the ‘nuts and flakes’ as his father took to calling them. His father had tried gamely to fit in with the new crowd. He even lived up in the habitat for a brief period while the central sphere was being constructed, but he found it far too restrictive. Roger could understand that: on Earth his father was a king, he could do anything he wanted, have anything he wanted. Here he had to play by the same peon rules as everyone else.

That wasn’t his father’s way at all, something that became quite clear when—just to prove Ev Cortland didn’t have to play by anybody’s rules—he took to “swooping” some of the younger women colonists. Naturally his father found the swooping easy, and naturally his mother had become justifiably enraged, hurling invective about Evander’s “male-pride mid-life crisis” and how the “raft” of his conquests—all those women he’d bedded to “salve his ego and gratify his lust”—would sink the habitat project. In reality, though, the project had already gotten bigger than his father, bigger than his parents or their problems, bigger in fact than all the players put together. By then it had picked up so much momentum that it really couldn’t be stopped. It had a life of its own.

His parents’ life together, though, was over. Three months before the space habitat was officially opened, they divorced. Roger had been just short of fifteen at the time. The space habitat he’d known only as something endlessly under construction, so he’d opted for good times on Earth with his father. His mother decided to move into the habitat. Roger hadn’t really felt the separation that much; even when they were supposedly still living together, his mother hadn’t been around that much for him anyway, toward the end.

Roger remembered the rest of his teen-years as something of a blur. He’d continued to excel in school, entering Oxford at fifteen and taking his degree at seventeen. Graduate work in France and South Africa and at Tsukuba Science City outside Tokyo, before finally taking his doctorate at Stanford when he was twenty one. He hadn’t seen his father a lot, but Ev gave him lots of money and everything it could buy. Hovercycles, private jets, sports cars, hydrofoils, all manner of supertoys. For his eighteenth birthday Ev gave him the production rights to the first true supercomputer-on-a-chip, the prototype developed by one of his corporate subsidiaries. Roger was still making money from that.

He had become his father’s son. What you can buy, what you’ve accomplished, is who you are—his father’s credo, which he had made his own. He was as revolted as his father ever was by the “idealistic” life of this habitat, the “voluntary simplicity” of the local “lifeways”. He’d even gone so far as to have a cosmetic surgeon reconstruct his face and eyes so he’d look less Asian, more Anglo like his father.

He and both his parents had all been together for the last time at Roger’s Ph.D. graduation ceremony, his doctoral hooding. Three years ago, now. Then, a month later, it had all ended. The deep-sea diving “accident”. Though there’d never been real proof, persistent rumor said it
wasn’t
an accident, that it was the result of a conspiracy among his competitors. Roger had clung to that theory. The other option—that Evander Cortland, billionaire world-conqueror, empire-builder and eminently successful man, had in fact committed suicide—was a thought more chilling than the cold at the bottom of that deepest sea where his father had died.

A thought cold enough to send Roger back to his research, in earnest, and with no more memories before his eyes.

* * * * * * *

While at the lab that morning, Jhana received a pair of v-mail messages. One was long-link and encrypted from Earth—Balance Tien-Jones thanking her for the information she’d forwarded concerning Dr. Cortland’s research and also reminding her of the rising tensions between Earth and the colony. The other message originated closer at hand—Seiji Yamaguchi accepting her invitation to lunch. He suggested they meet in one of the townlet shop-clusters near her lab, at a small cafe called “Chameleon on a Mirror.”

When Jhana arrived at the gossamery, tent-like reflecting structure of the Chameleon, Seiji was already seated at a stone table beside a stream, waiting for her.

“Hello, Ms. Meniskos. Good to see you again. If I remember right, the last time we met I was holding forth about God, the universe, and everything.”

“Not quite everything,” Jhana said, smiling politely as she sat down, noting the glass panels set into the stone table’s top. “And please, call me Jhana.”

“All right.”

The owner, a black-haired and walrus-moustached man Seiji introduced as “Ehab Alama,” stopped at their table bearing a tray with water and spiced tea in glasses, and flatware wrapped in cloth serviettes. Seiji seemed to have some sort of business relationship with the man.

“The sulfur shelf and oyster varieties were very good this week,” Ehab said. “Not as rich as the morels and truffles, of course, but the customers like them very much anyway. I’ve been using the sulfur shell in omelettes and as a substitute for chicken. The oyster mushroom, the Sajor Caju, is working wonderfully in seafood salads and the enokis and shiis are still a hit.”

“Good, good!” Seiji said, pleased. “I’ve got a few others for you to try next week. I think I’ve got the shaggy mane’s deliquescing problem licked, and we can probably go to the pink-bottoms and portobellos instead of the button agaricus you’ve been using.”

“Excellent. I look forward to cooking with them. Your menus are mounted in the tabletop,” he said, the latter primarily for Jhana’s benefit. “I’ll be back after you’ve ordered.”

The man bustled away quickly to attend to the luncheon customers at other tables. Jhana pressed a small stud mounted in the table top and a menu appeared in the glass inset.

“What was all that about?” Jhana asked, perusing the electronic menu.

“Well, since raising beef cattle is far too land and water intensive for a space habitat, Ehab and I are conducting an experiment in what you might call ‘cuisine design’,” Seiji said, leaning back in his chair and counting creatures off on his fingers. “We have some pigs and goats and sheep, more rabbits, chickens, partridges, pheasants and other fowl out at the agricultural tori. Lots of trout, pike, eels, carp, catfish, scads of other fish in the watercourses here—but they all make their demands too. The cost of live protein, in time and labor, seems to grow dearer all the time. Their dung and manure are a partial payback, but mainly they’re a luxury item for our visitors and tourist trade. It’s astronomically expensive to ship foodstuffs up the well—though what we have an overabundance of we do sometimes ship
down
. Are you ready to order?”

“Yes,” Jhana said, caught a bit off guard by the way he’d switched tracks so fast. “Are the kebabs good?”

“Very. Ehab makes great kebabs. Good choice. I think I’ll have the same. Just speak or punch your order in—there—and they’ll make it up in the kitchen tent.” He took a sip of tea. “So anyway, as I was saying, there’s a need sometimes to stretch fish and fowl with other supplements, and provide substitutes for flesh in general. You can do an awful lot with textured vegetable proteins, but I’ve been working a different angle: the fungi.”

“Mushrooms?”

“That’s right. Basidiomycetes and ascomycetes both. They’ve long been under-used, particularly in the West, where mycophobia is a centuries-old tradition. You’re from North America, right? Have you ever eaten a sulfur shelf?”

“No, I can’t say I have.”

“You don’t know what you’ve been missing! It’s a bright, yellow-orange, shelving fungus that grows on trees just about everywhere. You must have seen it. You probably passed by hundreds of them when you were a kid and never once thought of them as edible.”

Jhana looked at him oddly. It almost seemed as if the rather blandly patterned tent material of the Chameleon was assuming three dimensional shapes behind her luncheon companion. She shook her head to clear the impression away.

“To be honest, Seiji,” Jhana said slowly, “if I came upon a bright yellow-orange thing growing out of a tree stump, my first impulse would hardly be to stick it in my mouth. I suppose you’ve eaten them? What do they taste like?”

“Like chicken—”

“Oh no!” Jhana laughed. “Rattlesnake tastes like chicken. Frog-legs taste like chicken.
Everything
tastes like chicken—sometimes even chicken!”

“Okay, okay,” Seiji said, smiling wanly. “So I should have been more specific. But one of the popular names for it
is
chicken of the woods—not to be confused with
Grifola frondosa
, hen of the woods. But a sulfur shelf really
does
taste something like chicken that’s been crossed with a mild cheese and a firm tofu. It’s great in omelettes.”

“And it’s bright orange, you said?” Jhana asked, skeptically. “Right. Sure. Sounds just yummy. No thanks. I’ll stick with what’s safely sold in the stores, thank you.”

“Suit yourself,” Seiji said with a shrug. He was about to say more when a bright green chameleon fell from one of the trees to the terrace and scampered off in splay-footed fashion. Watching the chameleon, Jhana once again had the odd sensation that, beyond the scurrying creature, three-dimensional shapes were flashing out of the subtler patterns on the pavilion tent walls. Before she could ask Seiji about it, though, Ehab arrived with their kebabs on whitenoise-grey stoneware plates, which he placed before them.

“Now the mushrooms on this are more my speed,” Jhana said, pointing to the clearly recognizable button variety interspersed among what looked to be chunks of meat, sliced red and green peppers, whole miniature tomatoes, and pieces of pineapple and other fruit. It looked delicious and tasted even better.

“Do you like it?” Seiji asked after a time.

“Wonderful,” Jhana said. “The lamb is excellent, and this other meat, which I can’t quite place, is marvelous.”

“Tastes like a good steak cooked over a macadamia-nut fire, maybe?”

“Exactly! What is it?”

Seiji smiled a Cheshire cat grin that lingered and grew until she thought it would swallow his whole face.

“You don’t mean—”

Smile unwavering, Seiji nodded his head.

“Okay. I give up. What kind of mushroom is it?”

“A morel,” he said proudly. “One of the last important delicacy species to become mass-producible, if not mass marketable.”

She took another bite of the morel “meat.” Despite knowing what it was, she still found it delicious.

“Maybe you’re right,” she conceded reluctantly. “Maybe I have been missing something.”

Ehab came to refill their tea and water glasses. They drank and continued to eat, Seiji going on about still more obscure fungi: “lion’s manes” and “fairy rings” and “swordbelts”, “blewits” and “namekos”, “paddy straws” and “stropharia”. Jhana tried to pay attention but, throughout the meal, she kept getting fleeting glimpses of three-dimensional images emerging from the walls of the pavilion—geometric figures like stars and crosses and pyramids, rippling waves, peaks and valleys, but also animals, particularly lizards, birds and butterflies, a veritable hallucination of jungle camouflage. When a spiral vortex like the Milky Way suddenly appeared out of the white-noise pattern of her by-then-empty plate, she had to say something.