Lightpaths (26 page)

At the sound of footsteps, Marissa came wide awake.

“Resting your eyes, Marissa?” Atsuko said, standing before her with an impudent smile.

“Just contemplating,” Marissa said, standing up a bit stiffly and walking beside her. “How did your presentation go?”

“My speech, you mean? Fine. All teachers in the audience—up from Earth for a conference. Remind me to tell you about it—on the way. I saw Seiji on the way back and he said he’s looking forward to meeting you. It turns out he and another of our visitors are also getting together with a mutual friend, Lakshmi Ngubo, this evening. She’ll be expecting us along. We’ve got to meet with Seiji and his friend in an hour, so we’d better hurry.”

* * * * * * *

Realizing that she was nearing Paul Larkin’s residence, Jhana slowed her pace. She had decided to test Seiji’s suggestion that Larkin was someone worth getting to know, and to that effect she had already spoken to Dr. Larkin in the lab to set up this appointment. The man had seemed somewhat curmudgeonly and non-committal, as was apparently always his way, so to strengthen her case Marissa had tried to familiarize herself with Larkin’s life and work.

Walking slowly beside a mossy fern-banked stream that flowed boisterously through the cool shade of a grove of young cedars, Jhana was not quite oblivious to the beauty of the little ghyll through which she was passing. She had run an extensive datasearch on Larkin and now was quite puzzled at the strangeness of Larkin’s history. She found herself thinking again of the flying mountain, Caracamuni tepui.

When, twenty-eight years ago, Larkin and his guide and native porters had returned from the tepui country of South America with their story and video recording of Caracamuni’s top quietly lifting off, de-coupling from the Earth, the geologists, seismologists, and volcanologists dismissed the ascent of the mountaintop as an “anomalous volcanic eruption” and wrote off the video as a hoax, trick photography, a cinematically contrived special effect. After such denunciations, Larkin’s claims inevitably fell into the disreputable limbo of the mass tabloids, the murky half-tone half-light of the faxoid cheapsheets, in whose pages the spectacle of the flying mountain was periodically resurrected. What made it all the more appealing to the faxoid editors over the years, as far as Jhana could tell, was Larkin’s own status as a serious senior scientist—an expert in the cryogenic preservation of threatened species and also someone making claims outside his field. Controversy, dissension and disagreement in the ranks of the scientific community could always be counted on to sell papers.

From all Jhana could glean from the public documents, such tabloid exposure had apparently not been good for Larkin’s career either, which seemed to go into eclipse for nearly a decade, during which time he had apparently left his first career in investigative journalism—that would explain his media obsession—and gone back to graduate school. He’d gotten a decent position shortly after completing his doctoral and postdoc work, but then interest in the flying mountain had ballooned up again. He’d refused to recant his previous statements on the issue and his career had derailed once more. He had been reduced to the status of “independent researcher” and had scrounged funding where he could—including from rather shady unofficial sources such as the various intelligence agencies, which at that time were transmogrifying from national security apparatuses to corporate espionage and intelligence brokers.

Moving from the cool of the cedar copse onto a sunny green hillock of steep maze-like gardens, Jhana made her way over and around the bright sinuous rills and streamlets that both knit together and unraveled the maze—a landscape she as yet largely did not see, for her eyes were on the cluster of airy, tent-like domes shining at the top of the small hill.

“What are you thinking about, Jhana?” a voice said, so suddenly that she almost thought it had come from within her own head. She turned about until she saw a gnomish white-haired man staring down at her and realized she’d been addressed by Paul Larkin.

“Actually, I was just thinking how you and your flying mountain came back into the lime-light almost by accident, Dr. Larkin,” Jhana said. “After KL 235 was derived from
Cordyceps jacintae
.”

“Yes,” the old man said, standing up from his cross-legged position on a stone garden bench, all his joints popping and snapping and clicking. “I see you’ve run your background check on me.”

“Tell me something about that,” Jhana said, perhaps faining greater interest than she really felt. Anything to get on the old guy’s good side. “You claimed that fungus grew only on Caracamuni tepui...”

“That’s right,” said Larkin, coming down through the gardens to join her on the path. “I obtained spore-prints of it before the mountaintop vanished, so I had sole access to the species.”

Walking together beneath the sheltering sky of the habitat, they set a leisurely pace along the maze of garden pathways leading to the domes.

“I read that you were working for the intelligence agencies when you developed the drug,” Jhana said. “Was it the flying mountain story that first got them interested in you?”

Larkin laughed, then fixed Jhana with a glittering eye.

“Be serious! The spyboys never gave much credence to that story at all! The effects of
Cordyceps jacintae
, now—those were verifiable enough to be of interest to them. And they knew about psychoactive fungi, of course. Seventy and eighty years ago the cloak-and-dagger lads were intimately involved in the dissemination of LSD, for instance—and that was derived from
Claviceps purpurea
, a wheat ergot fungus.
Cordyceps
and
Claviceps
are closely related, too, so they saw...possibilities. They didn’t care if I claimed to have gotten the fungus from Atlantean mermaids or little green men. It worked, and that was all that mattered.”

They stopped beside a spot so fragrant that Jhana took immediate note of it. An herb garden of some sort, she presumed.

“If I remember his call, he wanted some jasmine...” Larkin said, leaving the path and stooping among various flowering green plants. He stopped beside a small bed of white flowering shrubs labelled “J. grandiflorum.”

“Who’s ‘he’?” Jhana said, watching Larkin move like an old monk-herbalist about the gardens, plucking flower after flower.

“Roger Cortland,” Larkin replied, depositing his burden of flowers in the bags and sacks he took from his pockets and snapped open. “He wanted some ingredients for a perfume he’s making. Know him?”

“We’ve met,” Jhana said, thinking at the same time that Roger certainly hadn’t struck her as the
parfumeur
type.

“The lavender is a bit further along our way,” he said, rejoining her on the path. They walked along, wreathed in the florid scent of
Jasminum
.

“What were the effects of KL 235 that they were so interested in, exactly?” Jhana asked, continuing to endear herself to the older man.

“It circumvents the action of the DMN, the dorsal and median raphe nuclei in the brain,” Larkin said evenly. “The DMN function as a sort of ‘governor’ on the level of brain activity, keeping that level down to low percentages of total possible activity. The ketamine lysergate 235 I derived from
Cordyceps jacintae
allows prolonged brain activity at very high percentages of total possible activity.”

Jhana glanced thoughtfully at the gravel of the path, the jasmine scent still lingering about them like a morning melody heard in the mind all day.

“But why would the spyboys, as you called them, be interested in something that increases brain activity?” she asked. “For smarter spies?”

“Much more than that,” Larkin said, scanning the gardens about them. “At such high levels of brain activity, parapsychological phenomena appear in abundance: clairvoyance, second sight, mystic heat and cold, far-seeing, mindtime journeying. KL 235 vastly enhances those phenomena that improve understanding of the patterns of possibility backward and forward in space-time, and the intelligence collectors saw great potential in having such powers, despite the risks.

Larkin stopped short.

“Ah, here we are,” he said. “I wonder if he wants to use the flowers only? Hmm. They all contain the essential oils—flowers, stem and leaves. We’ll pick them all. He can sort them out if he wants to.”

“Is that ‘we’ rhetorical,” Jhana asked, “or may I help?”

“You’re welcome to,” Larkin said with a nod. Leaving the path, they climbed up among the plants of another elevated plot. He showed her how to pinch back several stems. In a very short time they were returning with an aromatic arm-load each of spiky-leaved, purple-flowered stalks.

“
Lavandula officinalis
,” Larkin said, handing his arm-load to Jhana for her to carry as he picked up his jasmine samples again. Jhana took the extra arm-load awkwardly, spilling a few stalks of the lavender and bending to pick them up.

“You mentioned risks with KL 235,” Jhana prompted as they walked along, now doubly wreathed in sweet scents.

“Unavoidable ones,” Larkin said with a nod. “Brain burn-out. The raphe nuclei do have a reason for existing, you know. They’re your body’s way of keeping the brakes on your brain. Some researchers have theorized that the brain inherently serves as a reducing valve, allowing into consciousness only a very small fraction of what’s out there. According to such theories we’re all prisoners of our brains. Through the barred windows of the prison-house we see only as much as we need for survival. For those of us who follow that line of argument, the dorsal and median raphe nuclei are the pins and tumblers in the lock on the jailhouse door—and KL 235 was the perfect way to pick the lock.”

Larkin smiled awkwardly as they made their way among the domes of a small settlement cluster.

“Myself, I now think the DMN serve a bigger purpose,” he said. “The brain normally can’t run full throttle for very long. If it does, it destroys itself. I can’t say for sure but my sister Jacinta could have. She was the ethnobotanist in the family, after all. She was the one in search of the hallucinogenic grail, not me.”

A small group of children ran rapidly and noisily past them. Jhana seemed to recall something from an old news-story she’d glanced at in her datasearch.

“Jacinta’s the one who disappeared when Caracamuni ascended?”

“That’s right,” he said as they entered one of the domes—apparently Larkin’s residence. “She’d already disappeared into the ‘field’, as the ethnobotanists so fondly describe it. I set out to find her, and I did, though not for long. That mountain didn’t go up uninhabited. ‘Forty-odd aboriginal astronauts and a drug-crazed ethnobotanist, all serving as humanity’s first personal ambassadors to the universe.’ That was how my story was described in the media at the time. Believe me, I know how crazy that sounds. Much easier to view it as just an odd volcanic explosion, just the disappearance of another obscure piece of rainforest real estate—lamentable, but God knows it was going on all the time back then.”

They walked through the living area and into the kitchen.

“Still, I saw what I saw. Here, let’s break that lavender into smaller bundles and tie them up so you won’t drop any more of it.”

Jhana emptied out her arm-load of lavender on a table as Larkin searched drawers for string. Finding it, they quickly sorted the lavender by size and wrapped it into three tidier bundles.

“What did you see, exactly?” Jhana asked as they were tying the last of the bundles—growing interested in Larkin’s strange story almost despite herself.

The older man fixed her again with that glittering eye of his.

“I still have the videotape we took, if you’d like to see it. Might help us both understand what Jacinta was up to.”

“I’d enjoy seeing it,” Jhana said, thinking that people up here seemed to hoard old videos and trideos the way others hoarded photos in family albums.

Leaving the bundles on the table, they adjourned to a viewing room with a video screen adorning one wall. The white-haired man popped a video mini-disc into a player.

“I’ll try to fast-forward through to the actual ascent sequence,” Larkin said, obscurely embarrassed. “I really should have edited this down after all these years, but I never could bring myself to destroy anything from that time.”

The video came on and Jhana saw an exterior shot of the Missouri Botanical Gardens—apparently the institution Jacinta had worked for—then a shot of a cluttered cubicle, a stationary cyclone of notebooks and reports, folders and pamphlets and monographs strewn everywhere. A satellite shot of Caracamuni tepui. Shot of bills and receipts, check stubs and requisition slips for an odd assortment of things—industrial autoclaves, portable solar and gas-powered electric generators, diamond saws, thousands of feet of power cables, fold-out satellite dishes and uplink antennas, language acquisition and translation programs, camcorders and optidisk player recorders, fifty microscreen TVs—

“She’d had all that stuff shipped to a little nothing town in the middle of the jungle,” Paul said. “So that’s where I went next.”

Shots of a jungle village’s mud street, scrawny dogs prowling about,
indígena
porters, a mestizo man with a smile like a facial slash, tipped back on a verandah chair, whittling a stick with a big blade....

“My guide,” Larkin said, “Juan Carillo Garza. Most of the others are Pemon Indians.”

Shots of canoeing and portaging up river and stream, past flights of blue and red macaws, past troops of monkeys shrieking green waves through the forest canopy, past the fluttering flashing blue of giant morpho butterflies. Shots of a bearer-line slogging through a wet green hell of venomous snakes, brittle scorpions, stinging ants, ever-present mosquitoes. Shots of a green tunnel of machete-hacked trail switch-backing endlessly, like a journey through the bowels of some immense ruminant animal.

“Took us three days before we finally got into the mountains proper,” Larkin said, still playing about with the fast-forward.

Shots taken above tree-line appeared at last, shots of the guide Garza pointing to a mountain on the horizon, a high mesa shaped roughly like a giant anvil, a sunlit plume of waterfall plunging from its top.