Lightpaths (22 page)

Yet Roger had been wrong about so much else. He privileged numbers and abstractions over life, but life had a weird way of working against simple numbers, and simpler laws of thermodynamics. Looking into the sphered garden of the habitat curving away from her into the surrounding distance, Marissa realized that Roger had, for one thing, crucially underestimated the inhabitants here—and the power of their ideas.

The greatest resource here wasn’t something that could be mined from the Moon or grown in the ag tori or caught in the sun’s rays. The greatest resource here was something human beings found in themselves. Sitting down in the grass and looking up, Marissa could feel that resource about her as tangibly as the light on her face and the air in her hair and the ground beneath her butt.
Hope is a resource
, she thought,
and the orbital habitat is richer in it than any place I’ve ever been
.

* * * * * * *

Running a brush through her hair as she waited for Seiji to arrive, Jhana tried to take stock of her day. At the lab, old Larkin, though not yet fully warmed to her presence, was at least not as oddly-disposed toward her as he had been. The DNA fingerprinting scans and their importance for her research into genetic drift were panning out even better than she’d hoped, too.

But all was not sweetness and light. Mr. Tien-Jones had sent another confidential missive. She glanced at it once more on the bathroom counter beside her.

TO: Jhana Meniskos, Ph. D.

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

RE: Projects

Tao-Ponto will be contacting Dr. Roger Cortland concerning his pheromone research. That lead is much appreciated, but we’re a bit perturbed that neither you nor any other of Tao-Ponto’s observers in the habitat have made any progress on Diamond Thunderbolt or its possible links to the structures currently being deployed in space near the satellite solar power stations. Discovering the nature of those structures has become all the more imperative because they have, only hours ago, emitted a very brief flash—indeterminate as to nature or content, but Weapons Division is calling it a ‘test firing.’ United Nations and Corporate Presidium have begun closed-door hearings. Please make investigation into nature of Diamond Thunderbolt and possible linkage to aforementioned structures your TOP PRIORITY.

Jhana stared at the message, her lips turned down in an expression of vague disgust. Was she supposed to be a scientist up here—or a spy? Whatever was going on, things seemed to be heating up. Ol’ T-J had dropped the cryptic wording of his earlier messages, at least.

Her front door buzzed. That would be Seiji. Dropping the missive into the recycling chute, she hoped he could shed some light on whatever it was Tao-Ponto was looking for.

“Good evening, Seiji,” she said, opening the door on the bearded man dressed in a blue sweater and white shorts. “Come in. I don’t know why I even bother to keep that door shut, since apparently nobody up here steals anything. Everybody knows everybody.”

“Our small-town size has its advantages, no doubt,” Seiji said as they walked through the living area toward a small glassed-in solarium, through the windows of which the flowers of the back garden could be seen blooming. “Disadvantages too, though. When I was growing up, I was more used to urban anonymity. Everybody knows your business, up here. Sometimes it feels like we’re living in a fishbowl—like privacy was something we left back on Earth.”

Jhana smiled and nodded. She had felt a little of the same thing.

“I imagine you could get to know almost everybody here in a few months’ time,” Jhana said as they passed through the solarium. “We’ll be taking tea on the patio in the back garden. So, you grew up mostly in large cities then?”

Reaching the umbrella-shaded cafe table on the patio, Seiji stood with his hand on a white metal chair.

“That’s right. In Japan, the States, England,” he said, looking down at the chair and tapping it briefly with his knuckles—as if to test its solidity. “Don’t get me wrong: I’m very much a booster of this place and its emphasis on communal values. Just not completely used to it, is all. I’m told that towns of similar size back on Earth have the same ‘fishbowl’ quality, but I doubt even they have as low a crime rate.”

“I see your point. Please, sit down,” Jhana said, gesturing toward the chair. “What’s to steal here? I mean, everybody has pretty much the same standard of living—no large disproportions in the distribution of wealth, as far as I can tell. Everyone seems well-educated and dedicated to what the community’s about—though the teenagers do seem a bit on the rebellious side.”

Pulling his chair out from the table and sitting down, Seiji laughed.

“What can you expect? They’re the first generation even partially raised in space. Right now, they’re big fish in our small, isolated pond. I’m on a committee that’s working with that, though. We’re developing a sort of initiation rite for them—a month spent in deep isolation, in space, working on the outside of this habitat or others as they’re built. All of us on the committee went through it, a couple months back. Really changes the way you see things, gives you a properly humble perspective on the universe. When the initiates come back, the whole community will gather to officially welcome them to full status as adult citizens of the habitat. It’s as close as we can get to the old idea of a vision quest or ordeal rite.”

“Isn’t that sort of exposure
outside
potentially dangerous?” Jhana asked.

“Certainly,” Seiji said. “My brother’s death itself probably had something to do with a failed personal initiation rite or quest. He was trying to do it alone, though—outside of any sort of social framework. The hazard of madness or death in the ordeal will still be real, but our initiates will at least be doing it within a social framework that’ll reduce their risk somewhat.”

“But what about death here?” Jhana asked suddenly, for reasons of her own. “I don’t mean that I think Earth’s going to invade and start killing people or something, but I was just wondering. Death’s part of the big cycle too, right? But I haven’t seen any graveyards up here.”

They fell silent for a moment as Death sat down to wait for tea with them.

“You’re right,” Seiji said slowly. “We’ve had very few deaths up here—almost a miracle in itself, when you consider the percentage of our population that’s older. But this is no Eden. We know death is waiting. There’s been some discussion—and remarkably little consensus on the issue. If you think population control is a tough nut to crack, just try talking about the recycling of human bodies. We can’t burn them—too polluting, even if we just pumped the ash and smoke into space. That would only make for more space junk and debris and a hazard to astrogation in the long run. In the colony itself we can’t afford to give over land area dedicated solely to graveyard space—and from an ecological standpoint the bodies shouldn’t be isolated, they or their ashes really should be put back into the cycle as quickly and completely as possible. Feed the tree, as it’s called. But how to do that in a way that the living will regard as respectful to the dead?”

“No one wants to think of their relatives being passed through something like a rendering plant, I suppose,” Jhana said, clearing her throat.

“You know it. Some of the bereaved may want to bury their dead at home, in the gardens or woods. Some may not want to be reminded, may not want to have the dead so close at hand. Those living in the central sphere may decide to bury their dead in the agricultural tori, those living in the tori may decide they want their dead buried in the gardens of the central sphere, some may even want their remains to be sent back down the well to Earth or fired into the sun for the ultimate cremation—as ecologically ‘wrong’ or prohibitively expensive as such death exports might be. As the colony moves out of its own adolescence we’ll have to give more thought to the elderly and the children, to the ancestors and the progeny, the long view of past and future. We’ll have to face it in a deep way, since continuing to deal with death only as an ‘inconvenience’ would ultimately make our work here hypocritical. It’s a difficult call, particularly because of our isolation up here.”

“But that isolation can be a plus, too, don’t you think?” Jhana said, sitting down across from him. “There’s the cohesiveness of a remote island settlement, here.”

“Exactly,” Seiji said. “If someone stole something here, everyone would know who the rightful owner is, and since we’re so far from Earth—the nearest market to ‘fence’ things in—it would be more trouble than it’s worth to try to smuggle stolen goods out. And the idea of ownership itself—”

They were distracted by the sound of a teapot whistling to full boil.

“Wait!” Jhana said. “Hold that thought while I go get our tea. I’ll be right back.”

While Jhana went inside to pour tea, Seiji glanced at the garden. When she returned with cups and saucers on a tray Jhana found her guest smiling.

“You’re been keeping your garden very well,” Seiji said approvingly.

“Oh, that’s easy,” said Jhana, placing the tea cups on the table and sitting down. “The garden’s designer did such a fine job that I have barely anything to do.”

“Thank you,” Seiji said in return, smiling, bowing his head slightly to the compliment. “What was I going on about when you left?”

“Private ownership.”

“Yes, that was it. That’s the root cause of theft,” Seiji asserted. “As long as you have private property there’ll be theft.”

“The root of all evil grows a popular bush,” Jhana commented.

“Sure does. Right now, we’re pretty much a decentralized society of free, uncoerced small owners, but in the long run I see this colony, at least, becoming more and more communal in terms of ownership.”

“Decentralized yet communal?”

“Yeah, if you can picture that. Most of the land area here in the sphere, the crop area in the tori, and the manufacturing at all gravities is already cooperatively controlled.”

“What about the use of credit chips and money?” Jhana asked.

“That’s increasingly just for the sake of the HOME consortium’s record-keeping,” Seiji assured her. “It’s only a matter of time.”

“Is that your ‘future perfect imperative’?” Jhana asked dryly, cocking her head at him.

“No, no,” Seiji said with a laugh. “That’s a different story. From the past.”

“Well?” Jhana could hardly believe the usually voluble Seiji was actually being reticent about something. “Go ahead.”

“I can do better than that,” Seiji said, fiddling with his personal data unit. “It happened fourteen years ago, when my brother Jiro and I were in high school, at a Latin School run by priests, in the US. We were the ‘studio audience’ classroom for a distance learning environment, so I thought the original situation might still be recorded somewhere. Looking for it gave me something to do when I was obsessing, after my brother’s death. Eventually, the diocese sent it to me. Ah, here it is.”

Seiji shot the old-format videotape to Jhana’s data unit and they watched it in the false 3D of sharespace. A man in the black garb and collar of a Roman Catholic priest appeared before a classroom full of students.

“That was our Latin teacher, Father Stargoba,” Seiji narrated. “An intense guy—former Golden Gloves bantamweight boxer.”

Jhana thought “intense” was putting it mildly. The priest’s face was twitching and his fists clenching as he scanned the classroom for someone to answer a question he’d just put to all of them. Jhana turned up the sound.

“Don’t any of you know?” Father Stargoba shouted. “Jiro Yamaguchi.
Scripsero
. Meaning, tense, mood!”

Jhana watched as Seiji’s brother Jiro swallowed hard. Stargoba’s sharp stare seemed to spike out from behind his steel-rimmed glasses and transfix Jiro in his desk like a butterfly on a mounting board. A vein in the priest’s forehead pulsed and a muscular tic flared along the man’s jaw, his face in close-up reddening angrily from the black of his priestly collar to the short iron brush of his close-cropped hair.

“Speak up!”

“
Scripsero
,” Seiji’s brother said, his voice quavering. “Meaning: I shall have written. Tense: future perfect. Mood: uh, imperative.”

“What?”
the priest yelled, exploding in a chalk-dust frenzy at the green blackboard. “There is no future perfect imperative! Only the indicative has all six tenses. The subjunctive has no future or future perfect, and the imperative has only the present and the future—no other tenses! The present, imperfect, and future are the tenses of incomplete or continued action, while the perfect, pluperfect, and future perfect are the tenses of
completed
action. Think, Yamaguchi! The imperative is the mood of command or entreaty. Why command or entreat for something that’s already done? It’s ridiculous!”

“But if it’s in the future it isn’t—”

“It’s in the
future perfect
, Yamaguchi!” Father Stargoba snapped. “The past future.
I shall have written
. From the vantage of a given point in the future the action talked about will already be completed, will already have been done or taken place. A future perfect imperative is impossible because it demands that an action be completed and continuing at the same time—a logical impossibility. You see that?”

“Yes,” Jiro said, nodding mutely. But even to Jhana, watching it on old video, it was clear that Seiji’s brother didn’t see that at all.

“Good,” Father Stargoba said, satisfied. “So tell us the mood of
scripsero
.”

“Indicative, Father,” Jiro said. But Jhana could almost hear the boy trying to keep the tone of resignation out of his voice.

“Good,” said Father Stargoba, his blood pressure apparently falling at last. “Let’s return to our translation.”

Seiji shut off the datafeed and took a long sip of his tea. His eyes seemed to be looking at something in another place and time.

“I was only able to finally get the tape of that class a couple months ago,” Seiji said. “After all these years, it’s still as bad as I remember. What happened in that class was no big deal to Stargoba, but it left a real mark on my brother. He wanted to know why the future perfect imperative should be any less possible than any of the other language phantoms we studied. Language, after all, was something people created, something we made real, something we could
change
. Logic too—same thing. For Jiro and me, the future perfect imperative became a sort of shorthand for a lot of things.”