Lightpaths (24 page)

The lights of the buildings had begun to glimmer on Seiji’s face when Jhana turned to him.

“Is that how he died?”

“Yeah. In a cloud of liquid nitrogen. In the middle of the smoldering trashlands, surrounded by all this expensive high-tech electronics he left behind, sitting there like so much junk. The coroner ruled the death an accident, instant hypothermia. He told me it must have been a very peaceful way to go. The police suspected suicide. The case remains uncertain, still unresolved.”

They walked toward the noise of Corazon del Cielo, a small glass-domed eatery, agreeing on it without even needing to speak of it.

“What was he doing with enough liquid nitrogen to freeze himself to death?” Jhana asked, opening the door to the very dry and warm restaurant, full of noise and hothouse desert flowers.

“Who knows?” Seiji said as they looked for a table. “What was he doing with all that expensive state-of-the-art gear—still all plugged in and running, his pirate microwave hookup still draining power off the solarsat grid? That was how they discovered his body, you know: the power company sent a man
on horseback
through the trashlands to find who was at the other end of the downlink line.”

“But what was he working on?” Jhana asked as they sat down beneath the glassed-in sky.

“Who knows? Maybe he was trying to commune with the Great Spirit. Maybe he was contacting the spirits of the dead or trying to pull off some techno-shaman stunt. The local people in the trashland didn’t know what to make of a guy who came out only at night from a white coldbox coffin. They were mostly TechNots and Neo-Luddites around there—a very superstitious bunch when it came to anything involving technology. Some of them said his soul had been stolen by one or another of his machines, that Jiro’s ghost had even talked to them before the power was cut off. The power company rep didn’t see or hear anything. What the locals probably came across was just some automatic program running its course.”

A middle-aged woman named Herria Bidegaray, a bit heavyset and graying, appeared with water glasses and a familiar hug for Seiji. Jhana discovered from the menu display that this place took its name from the Mayan Popul Vuh and was some sort of combination Basque restaurant/desert biodiversity conservatory. Seiji, of course, was engaged in an experiment in “cuisine design” with this restaurateur too and it was only after some quick business-like flinging about of various common and Latin names of fleshy fungi that the waitress/owner bustled happily away.

“What happened to your brother’s machines?” Jhana asked, taking up again the strand of Seiji’s conversation after the owner had moved on.

“Most of Jiro’s devices were just expensive black boxes to me,” Seiji said glancing at the menu. “The locals might as well have been telling me about voodoo spirits living in tin cans. Still, I had all Jiro’s gear and personal effects shipped up the well. Cost a fortune, but I guess it’s a memorial of sorts. Haven’t looked at any of it in months, not once since it came up. I could show it to you, if you want to see it. I’ve got it stored with a friend, Lakshmi Ngubo. She’s got a workshop up in micro-gee, not far from one of the solarsat manufactories—that’s where I work my ‘real’ job. I could show you those, and introduce you to Lakshmi, if you’d like.”

Bingo
, Jhana thought.
And I didn’t even have to ask for a tour.

“Yes,” she said, appearing to concentrate more carefully on the menu. “I’d be honored.”

“I must warn you—it’s not that impressive,” Seiji said, glancing over the menu selections. “Jiro has been pretty much reduced to text: police reports, bills, receipts, notes, that sort of thing. A few wallet holographs. Lines of print and other hard-copy codes. Personal effects, bits and pieces of junk. A lot of it’s probably useless and trivial, but I can’t bring myself to get rid of any of that information. It’s pretty much all I have left of him. Too much has been lost already, you know? It’s like when a star collapses and a black hole forms: a lot of information about the star inevitably gets lost.”

Jhana looked up from perusing the menu, thinking about what Seiji hadn’t said—what he’d left out.

“What about the information he might have stored on computer media—in the electronics you said was found near his body?”

Seiji pressed a menu selection and ordered a glass of “HOMEBREW,” the local beer. Jhana decided to stick with water and pressed in her menu selection too.

“That’s still just a little too painful for me to deal with yet,” Seiji said, looking away from her as their meals and drinks promptly arrived. “Sure, I want to know if there’s anything important there, but I don’t want to face it cold. I’ve turned those machines and their memories over to Lakshmi, along with all his effects. She’s an expert. I haven’t heard from her in a while, but I know she’s been seeing what can be salvaged, what might be worthwhile. She’s always very thorough.”

He took a sip of beer and stared directly at her.

“I don’t know what sort of grief and guilt you may have known,” he said. “Sorry to have burdened you with mine.”

“I guess none of us can really know another’s grief,” Jhana said sympathetically, between bites. “Griefs are incomparable, absolutely individual. We can only know our own.”

“Yeah, I do know mine,” Seiji said, twirling his beer glass slightly between his palms. “I’ve learned names for the condition my brother suffered from—long-term paranoid schizophrenia, Messiah complex, depressive disorder, psychosexual dysfunction arising from ‘incomplete gender identification.’ I can quote chapter and verse of the scientific theories: Imbalances of neurotransmitters in the brain, a misreading in the genetic code that caused him to misread reality, some flaw in the DNA mirror that funhoused his mind’s reflections. I take comfort in the theories and the labels like I’m supposed to, but in the end none of it has meant squat. I lived with it, with
him
. I know.”

They ate, hungrily and in silence, for a long moment.

“What was it like?”

Seiji leaned back in his chair and looked up through the restaurant dome’s transparent surface. Gradually Jhana began to look up too, trying to follow his gaze to whatever it was his eyes were looking at.

“Do you remember where you had your anxiety attack, the first day we met? At the ridge cart station up there, hanging at the center of everything?”

“Yes,” Jhana said, not wanting to remember, the smell of burnt almonds even now drifting through her mind. She was disturbed at the sudden swerve of the conversation into her personal life. “What about it?”

“Being up there, hanging at the center of a completely artificial sphere, completely enclosed by that sphere—that’s what Jiro’s paranoid schizophrenia was like,” Seiji said, gesturing overhead again. “Think about the middle of this sphere, Jhana—but instead of the sphere having a shell of static surfaces like this one does, think of the shell as being like those on the new habitats, the ones that are almost finished, the ones with active surfaces where micromachines are always swarming and flowing in the layers of that surface, nanotech assemblers and replicators always vigilantly repairing and maintaining that surface, always keeping the outside from getting in and the inside from getting out. If you can picture a deluded psyche functioning like that—impenetrable to argument or logic, always flowing quickly in to fill any dent reason might make in its surface—then you can understand my brother’s paranoid world as well as I ever could.”

They had both begun to turn their eyes back to finishing the meals on their plates when the bent snake circle of the Möbius Cadúceus skysign rainbowed into space above them.

Jhana found herself plunged into darkness, running through a hellish underground world of red and black, from room to room of nightmare, auditoriums or theatrical spaces without audiences, dark spaces of empty seats facing thick blood-red curtains where actors rehearsed themes of gory tragedy, gouged-out eyes raining gobbets of black blind blood, in one room a blind Othello/Michael turning his mutilated blood-daubed corpse toward her and bellowing “Racist whore!” until she ran screaming into another space—only to find Roger Cortland looming, leering and gigantic, as a powerful scent filled her head, turned her hands to digging claws, her naked flesh to fierce hard inhuman muscle—

Abruptly she was back in the Corazon del Cielo, staring through the transparent dome at the point in the sky from which the oddly twisted dual serpentine ring had just disappeared.

“What was
that
?”

Seiji looked at her oddly, but she didn’t care. She was profoundly shaken. That sense of losing herself, of becoming a conduit or vessel of sensations, had passed through her again unexpectedly. She was sweating and trembling slightly. Her appetite seemed to have vanished utterly.

“Promotion for that band, Möbius Cadúceus. I gather they’ve got some big show coming up. Interesting symbol. You mean you haven’t seen it before?”

“If I have, I must not have paid it any real attention,” she said, trying to focus on her environs, to re-orient herself. “But the strangest thing just happened. One second I was looking at it and the next I was in some full-blown waking dream.”

“What kind of dream?” Seiji said, growing suddenly more interested.

“Oh, I don’t know,” she said. Seiji looked at her expectantly, but she didn’t want to tell him exactly what she’d seen—that would bring up too much that was personal, vulnerable. “Dark and fragmented stuff. Lots of guilt—and grief.”

Seiji stared at her for a moment longer before he spoke.

“I don’t know how to tell you this,” he said uneasily, “but the first time I saw it it triggered associations in me too. You might say guilt underlies them, as well.”

“What sort of associations?” Jhana asked, becoming curious—and glad that they weren’t talking specifically about her anymore.

“A man on horseback at sunset,” Seiji said, working on finishing his meal. “One morning, just at the shadow of a dream, I woke with the image in my mind of Jiro’s corpse being found by a man on horseback at sunset in the trashlands. Six months later, that was exactly how and when Jiro’s long-dead body was found. I sometimes torment myself with the thought that they were simultaneous—that image of skewed time-line flashing into my mind where I lay warm in bed, even at the exact instant Jiro was freezing to death in a trashland down the well.”

“Do you think it was a genuine prescience?” Jhana asked. “Some sort of second sight?”

Seiji swirled the dark amber of the beer remaining in his glass.

“I don’t know—and I don’t want to know. I used to wonder it it was an authentic unveiling of hidden connections—or just seeing patterns that weren’t really there. Numinous mystical experience, or an episode of paranoid delusion? That way lies my brother’s madness,” he said, then downed the last of the local brew. “But I do know that if seeing that skysign triggered a jump of subconscious material into consciousness—in both of us—”

“I thought altering other people’s consciousnesses without their informed consent was against the rules here,” Jhana reminded him.

“It is,” Seiji said with a nod, finishing the last of his meal, “but this may be a grey area. Chemical tech versus physical tech—everybody’s harder on the chemicals, on ‘drugs’. The question is whether this trigger works the way KL does, say, or more like the way Ehab’s stereograms do. In either case we’ve got more reason than ever to talk to that expert friend of mine up in micro-gee.”

“The one with your brother’s stuff?” Jhana asked, bewildered. She didn’t see the connection.

“The same,” Seiji said with a nod, draining off the last of his beer. “Lakshmi Ngubo. She does a lot of the lighting design and holographics for Möbius Cadúceus, so she probably designed the skysign too. Would tomorrow be too soon for our visit?”

Things were moving faster now than even Jhana could have predicted, but she was on for the duration of the ride, now.

“No, tomorrow won’t be too soon,” she said slowly. “If tomorrow evening is all right with your friend, it’ll be fine for me.”

Passage embedded in RAT code:

The mystic sacrifices Self for World, the egotist sacrifices World for Self. All the endtimers throughout time have always seen themselves as chosen and the rest of the world as damned to holocaust—sacrificing the world for themselves, always completely inverting what their particular Holy One was about.

The egotism of the apocalyptist is also seen in a perverted abstract sensualism, which dares not look upon the image of a naked innocent child yet fantasizes about the tempting beauty of the Whore of Babylon. This objectifying ego is further seen, more subtly but more importantly, in the fact that millenialists and apocalyptists choose to see the apocalypse and the utopian paradise as something “out there” in the world, as the rending of the veil of this world through global catastrophe and endtime destruction, followed by a thousand years of the Perfect State—rather than choosing to face the apocalypse and the paradise within, happier far but far more difficult, the remaking/remembering/revealing in the individual soul, the “lifting of the veil of appearances” through the ecstasy of that vision which leads one to live in this world as if it were heaven, paradise, utopia.

As the bulletcart rode silently along, Roger began to wonder if he was indeed pushing himself too hard—as Marissa had claimed. First there had been that odd blackout when he was airbiking, then the recurring flicker of angel wings in his peripheral vision, and now the dreams—strange dreams in which he was dressed in a monk’s habit and being given lectures in aerodynamics by angels.

He would have discounted such sleeping visions completely were it not for their clarity, their lucidity—and the fact that, now, the dreams had given his monkish dream-self a habitation and a name. From what he could gather, in his night visitations he was a monk named Eilmer, a brother of the monastery at Malmesbury, who had lived approximately one thousand years ago....

Two of the habitat’s oddly dressed and queerly coiffed youngsters boarded the bulletcart at a stop, singing along to their stereo plugs. Roger recognized the tune as vaguely reminiscent of the old standard “Take Me Out to the Ball Game,” but what lyrics he could pick out were unfamiliar indeed.

Lyrics to Möbius Cadúceus song, “The Old Ball Game”:

In the beginning

Dad the Father’s Big Banger

Waited just thirteen billion years

To come to bat and no sooner was he up

Than POP went the Thunderbolt into Soup

(Our Holy Mother)

Because Dad so loved the world

We all made it to First

And it’s Base Pairs, DNA, RBI—the Living Cell!

Roger shut it out. No doubt more of that Möbius Cadúceus nonsense. He secretly blamed the band for his unwanted visions: he’d only had to endure his visions and visitations since he almost flew into their damned advertising apparition on his airbike, after all.

But even if he were to try to take them to court—virtually unheard of among the unlitigious space habitants—what would the charge be? Negligently tapping into the collective unconscious—or at least his strand of it? Ridiculous!

As he got off at his stop and headed toward his lab, he thought there must be some other explanation. He must have seen some holoflick or trideo documentary about this Eilmer of Malmesbury person, this “flying monk” of his dreams. The monk must be an historical person. He would check on it at the Archives as soon as he got a chance, but even at the moment it seemed reasonable that he had just forgotten the particulars of some obscure production, that was all. That would explain even last night’s twist in the dreams, the one without angels which nevertheless spoke most particularly to his condition. It flared up vividly in his mind as he recalled it.

Databurst-triggered memory of
The Pressure of Angels
(self-synopsized):

Eilmer, age seven or thereabouts, his POV, walking toward the heart of the village with his mother, wiry pale blonde Elfgiva. Sexburga, stout dark-haired wife of Caedwalla the ostler, sees them and begins to make foul slanderous remarks at Elfgiva, which Eilmer’s mother disdainfully tries to ignore. Sexburga, though, will not be ignored. Spitting, fuming, and ranting, Sexburga comes out onto the dusty rutted road and blocks their way. Only after the overbearing Sexburga has spat and struck at her several times does Elfgiva strike back, clinching with the stouter woman, both coming to furious blows, kicking and clawing, pulling at each other’s hair and tearing at each other’s garments until they are a tangled knot of rolling and flailing limbs from which grunts and curses and cries periodically erupt. In this state they tumble among Sexburga’s animals, sending her chickens flying and her cow ambling away in great mooing confusion—until a small crowd of townspeople stand watching beside Eilmer and two brawny young peasants pull the furious women apart....

Opening the door to his lab, Roger thought of how many popular entertainments—how many historical fictions and westerns and spy thrillers and science fictions and fantasies—featured such gynomachian scenes.
Ten Million B.C
.,
Destry Rides Again
,
From Russia with Love
,
Genesis Two
,
The Big Time
,
A Specter Is Haunting Texas
,
The Farewell Gift
,
Free Fall Free-For-All
, hundreds of others. He hardly needed to search for some dim vast archetype—some experience in a past life lurking in the collective unconscious—to explain the roots of his personal kink. He was sure this manifestation of it must all be from some low-budget low-brow entertainment he’d once seen as a child which, for some inexplicable reason, was resurfacing in his mind now.

Commanding the power up on one of his simulators, he still could not shake the idea that Möbius Cadúceus’s skysign had triggered something in him. It might not be all bad, though, if the dream-image that had opened in his head turned out to be what he hoped it might be.

Sitting down, he entered the simulator’s virtuality. Using force feedback to plot and move and orient molecular structures in virtual space, he caused a structure to gradually form in the space before him. Roger watched a molecule begin turning through primary, secondary, tertiary, and quaternary structuring, until it was unlike any he had ever seen before. He suddenly felt a strange hyperlucid sense he’d never previously experienced. The dizzying, glowing exhilaration of it was so powerful he wondered a moment if this was what had driven the medieval alchemists on and on in their search for gleaming islands in the soul.

He sat back, shaking his head slightly to clear it. He knew gleaming islands in the solar system—the habitat, Earth itself. Nothing more. He looked once again at the molecular structure floating in space before his eyes. It was a structural analog of the mole rat pheromone, yes, but one with a distinctive elegant twist, a molecular Möbius strip, a lazy untangling infinity sign without inside or outside, beautifully simple overall despite its complexity at the fine-detail level. He would have thought such a form impossible until it had flashed into his half-awake mind this morning, right on the kicking heels of his dream.

Roger smiled. Legend had it that Kekulé had discovered the structure of the carbon ring after dreaming of snakes rolling about like hoops, their tails in their mouths. If it could work for Kekulé with one hoop made of one snake, then why not for him—with a bent-hoop snake itself made of many such hoops?

The thought occurred to him that this jump from rats to humans was all happening too easily, too quickly to be true, but he repressed it. He would check his new molecule’s structure against all the response tests, all the receptor sites, but he felt intuitively certain that this structure of elegant twistedness, this complexly beautiful image that seemed almost a model of his own mind and mirror of his consciousness—this was the complete structure of the human pheromone for which he’d been searching.

The door to the lab opened and Marissa came in, logging into a Cybergene virtuality. No doubt still busily at work on her anti-senescence vector. A frown flickered over Roger’s face. Things had changed so rapidly between them. They had been getting along so well, particularly during their dance in space and immediately after, but now it was all somehow distant and prickly between them, especially since she had stumbled in upon his after-hours pornholo debauch. Lately, he was seeing the copper-haired woman and her large, pale-nippled breasts only in his dreams.

Surely, though, his discovery this morning was momentous enough to serve as an occasion for the start of some rapprochement—

“Marissa,” he called virtually, over his throat mike. “Log into my space, please. I want to show you something.”

The young woman linked slowly, tentatively, until he could feel her staring into virtual space with him.

“Well, what do you say? Intriguing structure, don’t you think?”

Marissa nodded.

“What is it?”

Roger smiled broadly.

“I’m willing to bet it’s the human pheromone I’ve been looking for. It’s a structural analog of the mole-rat pheromone, but a good deal more complex. Pump it through the synthesizer, would you? Then we’ll run tests on it to see how it binds to human vomeronasal and brain tissue. If my guess is right, then all we’ll need to do after that is find the right base and top note and we’ll have created the most important—and potentially most profitable—fragrance in human history.”

Nodding and smiling a bit awkwardly, Marissa called up power on the synthesizer.

“Okay,” she said evenly, “shoot the data over here.”

Roger gave a series of command codes that shunted the structure and all its specifics into the synthesizer’s memory. Under Marissa’s watchful eyes the synthesizer chuckled and clucked to itself as it began assembling the actual compound from the virtual template that Roger had presented to it.

As he listened to the mechanism doing its job, Roger was nonetheless a bit peeved. Certainly after all his work he had expected a more enthusiastic response from Marissa, and wondered why he hadn’t gotten it. Maybe she was just being cautious—waiting for the structure to prove out. Well, let her be cautious. He had no such need for concern. This was the structure he’d been looking for. Of that he was certain.

* * * * * * *

Passage embedded in RAT code:

...the tangled etymology of the word
utopia
. In the computerized catalogs the generally accepted etymology—
ou
(not) +
topos
(place)—leads one into a long and deep maze of “not places,” no places, nowheres, Big Rock Candy Mountains and the Land of Cockaigne, Schlaraffenland and Lubberland, the upside down worlds of festival and carnival and Saturnalia, an entire literature, oral tradition, folklore and popular culture of Nonsense going back at least as far as dusty comedies in the Attic Greek.

But this search also leads to places grown out of No Place—to Essenes and Diggers and Shakers and scores of other faith-based communities, to Brook Farm and New Harmony and the Kaweah Colony, to Rancho Linda Vista and desert arcologies and Biospheres.

“I’ve already contacted Atsuko Cortland and Seiji Yamaguchi,” Lakshmi said into Lev’s bleary-eyed virtuality. He’d been up late working on a stop-and-start blocking rehearsal and, though it was already late in the day in his sector, Lakshmi and Aleister’s joint conference call had been his alarm out of sleep, causing him to sit upright in bed and slap on his overlays—the posture he still remained in. “Seiji is bringing Jhana Meniskos with him. Roger Cortland and Paul Larkin haven’t returned my calls and probably won’t make it, but Atsuko is bringing Marissa Correa.”

“The one that sent me the complaint,” Lev asked with a yawn, “about Roger Cortland’s encounter with the skysign?”

“The same,” Lakshmi said with a nod. “She wasn’t affected by it, but he was. Interesting that his name was on the RAT list, but not hers....”

“Whatever,” Lev said. “I’m not looking forward to explaining the skysign’s affect to her—or to Roger’s mother.”

“To Seiji and Jhana, too,” Lakshmi said. “They said they’ve also apparently been affected by it to some degree. But you haven’t got it so bad. Think of everything I’ve got to explain to Seiji about what’s been going on with his brother’s stuff.”

“Aleister can help you with that, can’t he?” Lev said, volunteering his friend—and perhaps hoping to get himself out of the planned meeting.

“Afraid not, old boy,” Aleister said primly. “Lakshmi’s deputized me and assigned me a higher priority.”

“What?” Lev asked, incredulous.

“Seems our RATs and the distributed consciousness behind them have attracted the attention of Earth’s intelligence and information-gathering services—corporate, governmental, straight military, you name it,” Aleister said. “We’re weathering a rain of semi-autonomous information probes. Monitoring and diverting the little net-spies has become a full-time job in the last twenty four hours. You and Lakshmi are on your own.”

“Anything more you can tell us about the RATS and our situation before we have to explain them to our guests later?” Lakshmi asked Aleister.

“Only that the ALEPH program Manqué used in building the RATs is much more subtle and sophisticated than I thought,” Aleister said carefully. “I expected to find a fairly rudimentary virtual environment—one ‘species’ of cellular automata being bounced off another to ‘evolve’ something that’s supposedly new. What I’ve found instead is a piece of work with quite an appreciation for the subtlety of the actual evolutionary process—species coevolving with each other, entire communities coevolving. It makes very impressive use of the counterintuitive Paine work on predation—”

“Which is?” Lev asked, peeved. “Come on, Al. We don’t all have your background on this.”

“It’s the idea that predators in an ecosystem,” Aleister said, warming to his topic, “rather than reducing the number of species by their activities, actually
increase
the diversity of species by preventing any single species from gaining ascendancy.”