Lightpaths (25 page)

“What’s that got to do with the Myrrhisticineans’ project?” Lakshmi asked, puzzled.

“They were Teilhardists, remember?” Aleister asked rhetorically. “Well, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin was big into evolutionary theory. Complexity is the trick Life plays against Entropy, and Teilhard claimed that life at all stages manifests what he called the ‘law of complexification’. According to this law, everything in the cosmos—from subatomic particles to us to galaxies—everything has a conscious inner face that duplicates the material external face. Physical evolution and the evolution of consciousness increase in complexity together. The more complex and integrated an outward material system becomes, the more developed its psychic interior also becomes.”

“Let me get this straight,” Lev asked, now finding himself almost awake enough to engage in rational discourse. “Self-conscious human thought evolved with, or because of, the intense integration and concentration of nerve-cell structures in the brain?”

“Right—but when you think about it, never lose sight of the idea that individual mind is also always part of Universal Mind.”

“But what’s this got to do with computing power and the ‘Rainbow Door’ and the rest?” Lakshmi asked.

“Isn’t it obvious?” Lev said pedantically. “Think about it—the integrated complexity of a material system is mirrored by an inner psychical development. Complexity trends toward sentience. As a result of producing human beings capable of self-conscious thought and culture, the biosphere has spun off what Teilhard calls a ‘noosphere’, a ‘thinking layer’ produced by human activity. Since Teilhard’s time, though, the human activity of the noosphere has in its turn increasingly spun off an
infosphere
, the cyberspatial layer generated by the activity of increasingly complex machines.

“The Myrrhisticineans saw themselves as extending Teilhard’s work,” Aleister continued, his little icon trying to keep pace with his gesturing. “If God did not exist, it would just be necessary for them to invent him, that’s all. According to Teilhard, a long coevolutionary convergence has been taking place, simultaneous movements toward both a single planetary consciousness and a psychical concentration. As things become more evolved they also become more involved. The noosphere—especially with the infosphere speeding things up—is becoming involuted into a Hyperpersonal Consciousness, which will be fully achieved at a point Teilhard called Omega. At Point Omega, matter and consciousness reach the terminal phase of their convergent evolution and become one. Absolutely indistinguishable. That’s what the Myrrhisticineans really meant by the Rainbow Door.”

“And the ‘distributed consciousness’ you and Laksh have been on about,” Lev said, “you think it’s this Hyperpersonal Omega thing?”

“Who can say?” Aleister asked with a shrug. “It might be a step on the way. Point Omega’s meant a lot of things to a lot of people. To the Myrrhies it was the Rainbow Door, but to some of the info-industry types who pumped money into their Abbey, it seems to have meant something quite different. Two of the Abbey’s big donors, Doctor Ka Vang of ParaLogics and Jem Kerris of Kerrismatix, both authored papers extending Friedkin’s hypothesis of an ‘information-based cosmos’, where matter and energy are alternate states of information. Kerris proposed something called an ‘information density singularity’ and Vang at one point claimed to be developing a ‘simulated quantum information density structure’—a trans-luminal portal.”

“So the thing that blitzed the Abbey maybe wasn’t a Rainbow Door,” Lev ventured, “but a kind of black hole sun, like the tabloids claimed?”

“Maybe,” Aleister said, “but that seems too passive and material to me. Teilhard talks of a hyperconsciousness, after all. Maybe it was a Rainbow Door, or a Trans-luminal Portal—or maybe it was the maw of a technological superpredator.”

“What?”
Lev and Lakshmi both said at once.

“Who says the hyperpersonal consciousness has to be divine rather than demonic?” Aleister speculated. “What if Manqué the apocalyptist got impatient? What if he decided that human history is proof of the Paine hypothesis gone wrong: a single species—us—has gained ascendancy and has been steadily reducing the biodiversity of the ecosphere around it. Our development of culture and other technologies have made it unlikely any successful natural predator will develop against us. Through warfare and the creation of the rich as a permanent vampire class we’ve tried to prey on ourselves, but that hasn’t worked because no species can really limit its numbers through self-predation.”

“Oh, I get it,” Lev said, shifting gradually but increasingly into Bela Lugosi mad-scientist parody. “So maybe Manqué figured he’d help create a predator so advanced that it could successfully prey on human beings, no matter how impressive our technology. An angel of death, a hungry god. Mystical union, oneness, Omega—what else but to be devoured by the rough beast, the great demon, the terrible beauty slouching toward Sedona to be born....”

Lev and Lakshmi laughed, but Aleister merely smiled.

“Laugh if you want, but it is one possible scenario for what might have happened at the Abbey outside Sedona,” Aleister said. “This ‘distributed’ or ‘hyper’ consciousness, if that’s what it is that’s growing in the infosphere now—it may have to undergo a spiritual battle between its angelic and demonic sides, just like any other self-aware consciousness. You could argue that that ‘Building the Ruins’ game already provides evidence of such a battle.”

Lakshmi became abruptly silent, which surprised Lev.

“I haven’t played that game yet, myself,” he said.

“You might want to,” Aleister suggested, “before you meet with your guests. You might also want to look at more of the information encrypted in the RAT code. That’s what’s helped direct me in my speculations. Look, I’ve got to get back to spy-catching duty. I’ll touch base tomorrow.”

Aleister disappeared from their shared space. Lakshmi turned to Lev.

“You will join us for our meeting, then?” she asked pointedly.

“I promise,” Lev said. “I’ll even come up early and sample this game Aleister seems to think is so important. Good enough?”

“Good enough.”

* * * * * * *

“Fools!” Roger said, storming through the lab. “Idiots!”

Marissa said nothing, just tried to keep doing her work, focusing on some final simulation runs of her anti-senescence vector, but that didn’t stop Roger. He seemed to need to hear himself rant and rave.

“Those fossils—those mossbacks at the
Journal of Mammalogy
—they rejected my article! ‘Fails to provide proof of pheromonal/chemical suppression of mole rat reproduction adequate for overturning established behavioral suppression model’—that’s what one of their peer reviewers wrote. He even had the gall to write ‘See Faulkes
et al
., in
The Biology of the Naked Mole-Rat
, Sherman, Jarvis and Alexander, Princeton 1991’—as if I were some upstart graduate student! Faulkes and the old boy network! Don’t they know my ‘unorthodoxy’ predates their orthodoxy? The pheromonal suppression model was first proposed by Jarvis herself! It was the reigning paradigm for the first decade of mole rat studies—and never disproved!”

Marissa finished her test runs on the Cybergene machine. She turned on, then abruptly shut off, her nucleic synthesis equipment, got up, and left—looking disgusted. Roger stared after her, rage and frustration contending in his face.

Where was the sympathetic Marissa he had known before she’d surprised him that early morning? Did she know too much already? What had she really seen? Enough to make the connection?

No time to worry now. To Hell with her. Re-submit the article—to
Nature
, perhaps? No, maybe no need. He had enough results on his new compound. Now he needed to synthesize it, to begin situational testing....

Using one of his father’s old corporate encryption codes, Roger moved through his virtual reality’s data construct until he gained access to memory-stored perfumery guides—the secret but surprisingly unprotected hoard of his father’s perfume company subsidiaries. Poring over pane after pane of text, detailing perfumes and extracts and eau de toilettes, concretes and absolutes, early odors and late fragrances, notes and harmonies, tenacities and predominants, tops and hearts and cores and bases and auras and sillages—he got a sense of what he might need. Yes, jasmine picked at dawn or perhaps lavender as a top-note, civet as fixative and bottom—

He scanned through the lists of the botanical and zoological holdings of the habitat. He expected to find jasmine and lavender, and he did. According to the registry of holdings, several gardens contained plantings of one or the other or both. Interestingly, he recognized at least one name among the garden lists—Larkin, Paul. Roger scanned for Larkin’s home and work addresses and was surprised and pleased to see that the man was director of the lab to which Jhana Meniskos had been assigned. He thought of the slim, dark-haired, dark-eyed woman—then of Marissa too, the coppery wave of her hair flowing out behind her as she’d left just now. Better and better.

He scanned for sources of civet and—was this providential, or what?—found that Larkin’s lab was also doing work with endangered mammals of the family Viverridae. Civet cats.

Doctor Paul Larkin was clearly the man to see. Roger would have to pay him a visit as soon as possible. Then, when he’d mixed up his perfume to the guides’ specifications, Roger would stage for Marissa and for Jhana—but most of all for himself—a private situational test....

Perhaps because he’d been keeping such odd hours of late, or perhaps because he’d been pushing so hard and, now that he’d apparently succeeded (despite this most recent rejection note), his body had decided it was time for him to rest. Whatever the cause, he now found himself slipping off into a light, nervous sleep.

* * * * * * *

Passage embedded in RAT code:

Think of the discovery of fire as a blow against the cold and the dark and the raw. Think of the discovery of agriculture as a blow against the tyrannical vicissitudes of hunting and gathering. Think of the invention of writing as a rebellion against oblivion, against the endless brute days of the peasant farm laborer, the bloody brutal ends of the warrior. Think of the invention of the scientific method as a blow against the bureaucratic priests and their Holy Writing—the managerial class’s revolutionary idea that reading from the Book of Nature could be just as valuable as reading from the Book of Scripture. Think of the development of space travel as a rebellion against gravity, against the tyrannical linking of human destiny to a single planet. Think of the development of virtuality as a blow against the tyranny of the meat body over the mind. The only tyrant left now is death. Space travel is really about species immortality, all the work against senescence is really about individual immortality—blows against death’s tyranny, ideological weapons all—

Disturbed by Roger’s rapid mood swings—extreme elation over his hypothetical pheromone, all too quickly changing to extreme anger and bitterness over the rejection of his article— Marissa left the lab, early and in a rush, and proceeded to the grounds around the Archives, where she was to rendezvous with Atsuko after the latter’s speaking engagement.

Realizing she had been spending entirely too much time on her anti-senescence vector and wanting to convince Atsuko that she was deserving of her fellowship in utopian studies, Marissa turned on her overlays and PDA and began to comb through her notes again as she walked steadily along. A bibliographer or librarian had cross-referenced both Aldous Huxley’s dystopian novel
Brave New World
and his final utopian novel
Island
to a series of books by someone named R. Gordon Wasson. Intrigued, she followed up the lead, only to discover that the Wasson books were mostly about the ritual use of sacred mushrooms in priestly and shamanic contexts.

Doing this side-alley research soon proved to be something other than the complete waste she thought it would be, however, because she gradually came to realize both of Huxley’s books were indeed characterized by the presence of an ingested psychoactive substance unique to each text.
Brave New World
’s ‘soma’ and
Island
’s ‘moksha’ could each be profitably read as a microcosmic embodiment of the macrocosm of the novel in which each was found. All that was dystopian in the
Brave New World
could be found in kernel form in the nature of soma. All that was truly Utopian in the
Island
of Pala could likewise be found in concrete form in the mushroom called moksha. The consciousness-altering substance ingested in each novel was an ‘artificial paradise’ inside an artificial paradise, an island within the island of the ideal society that each novel presented.

As she examined the texts further, she saw that the “drug” in each was, to some degree, the holiest of holies—but, more importantly, it was also central to the way Huxley examined that relationship between individual freedom and social responsibility that was also so very important to the inhabitants here. In
Brave New World
and
Island
, how each society treated its drug and its drug users was the crucial litmus test for how that society treated its citizens and their freedom of choice, their autonomy as individuals.

Marissa had reached the Archive grounds now. She was so busy researching that she noted her location only enough to find a bench and sit down—without thinking about it really, doing it all in that mental state she called “autopilot.” Along her continuing train of thought, Marissa realized it was only a short step to Huxley’s letters, essays, non-fiction books, and his other novels. Scanning back through the entire corpus of Huxley’s writings, she saw they could be examined for the light they shed on the attitudes of twentieth century Western societies toward drugs, drug usage, and particularly the ongoing tension in those cultures between individual freedom and social responsibility.

Her eyes looked through and past her overlays as her mind began to wander. She thought suddenly that her utopian studies had as much to do with life as with literature. She wanted to see what the literature said about how human beings might create a society both just and merciful, that fulfilled the needs of the body without denying the freedoms of the mind, the soul. A truly humane society that prospered but did not thoughtlessly exploit—either its own citizens or the environment in which they were embedded. One that recognized the alleviation of suffering as its highest goal, but was neither paternalistic nor authoritarian in its pursuit of that goal. Ultimately, she supposed, she was less interested in literature and literary criticism as a tool for making better books and more interested in it as a tool for making better people.