Lightpaths (27 page)

“Caracamuni tepui,” Paul Larkin said quietly. “The geologists estimated that the shield rock of Caracamuni plateau was approximately 1.8 billion years old. That jibed to some degree with parts of the inhabitants’ mythology.”

More shots of the pack line hiking up switch-backs, the green tunnel replaced by a constant low ceiling of leaden clouds. The backbone of a ridge. The tepui itself, a place of stone black with eternal rains, blotched with fog and algae and fungus. A dense stone forest of balance rocks and pinnacles, columns and arches, the sort of city that time and water dream from stone.

“A labyrinth of stone clouds,” Larkin said. “Everything rounded, no right angles anywhere. Ancient strata broken by lopsided eggs of sky, interrupted by oblongs of rain. Forty square kilometers of it. My sister was out there somewhere. Garza and his men refused to go further. Old taboos about the ‘ghost people’ who were supposed to inhabit the tepui.”

More shots of the top of Caracamuni tepui, an island of stone floating among the clouds, raindesert island above rainforest sea. Dark water-soft contours of ancient stone: geological ruins, nightmare temples, alien cathedrals dribbled like children’s slurry sand castles onto an anvil-top high in the sky. Mostly barren, Jhana noticed, but here and their dotted with pocket Edens, swampy rockgarden-sized oases. Shot of a sun setting behind bars of clouds, smearing slanting light on ancient stones.

“That sunset filled me with melancholy,” Larkin said quietly, remembering. “Almost as if I were seeing a universal twilight of men and gods, of worlds and time.”

Amid shots of a new day, a young woman,
indígena
girl really, disappearing in and out of fog and cloud like an apparition, naked but for a loincloth patterned with masterfully intricate serpent-knot designs, drawing Larkin and his camera on, stopping only where the stony maze broke off and a cloud-filled gorge came into view below. Further along the edge a sunburnt woman stood, clad in tattered shirt and shorts and gym shoes, sun-bleached hair under straw sun hat, clipboard in hand on the brink of the abyss, adjusting the angle onto heaven of a satellite dish.

“Jacinta,” Larkin said hoarsely to Jhana, clearing his throat.

The camera followed Jacinta and the
indígena
girl walking down into the cloud-mist obscuring the gorge. The antenna line following along the footpath, then losing itself in thickening undergrowth. Shots of tree canopy through the mist, ever denser cloudforest growth, dripping innumerable varieties of lianas and orchids and epiphytes. Shots of the bottom of the steep gorge, slippery downed trees ranging across a torrent plummeting to waterfall beyond.

The camera panned up a branching canyon trail, jungle thinning, mist clearing. Foot-trampled pathways converging on an earthen slope beneath a high cliffside. Power lines and cables snaking out of the forest on both sides of the gorge, purposeful vines of black, grey and red growing into a half dozen holes in the cliff.

“You’ll see in a minute that those holes are part of the entrance to a cave,” Larkin explained as the camera followed a line toward a cliff hole. Above, heads then torsos then entire bodies of
indígenas
appeared, largely unadorned but for occasional intricate loincloths and, incongruously, headsets.

“The ‘ghost people’,” Larkin explained. “The theory was that they were a very small Pemon group which, until my sister’s arrival, had been isolated up there for a long, long time. According to the Pemon, the ghost people’s ancestors supposedly broke some ancient taboo and were considered ‘already dead’ by their tribe. A small group of them—refugees, outcasts—settled the tepui ‘at least a thousand years ago’. My sister’s work there, though, suggested that they had been there many, many thousands of years, that they were in fact far older than the Pemon—and they weren’t completely isolated either.”

The shots that appeared now, inside the cave, were dimmer and much more confusing. Jhana saw movement down a slantwise tunnel, past rock honeycombed with innumerable small side chambers.

“Even after my sister’s arrival,” Larkin explained, “the Pemon porters would carry all the gear she’d shipped only as far as the edge of the tepui. The inhabitants had to carry it the rest of the way.”

Jhana watched as tantalizing glimpses of what was going on in the side chambers flashed past: several
indígena
children watching what appeared to be a Chinese tv documentary, a young loincloth-clad man watching an American news broadcast about an Indian monsoon, a young woman checking an enormous crystal column for flaws as it flowed out of a high pressure extrusion autoclave, loinclothed boy and oldster seated before computer terminals and scanning at unbelievable speeds through what looked like extremely complex mathematical equations, a half dozen operators of various ages scanning through what might be star charts or astrogation data—

Then Jacinta (and Paul behind the camera) were out of the chambered stone, the tunnel opening into an enormous underground space like a nether sky where shadowy light glimmered off crystalline rock. A brief shot of an old man or woman dressed in a full loose robe of the same intricate knot-weave as the loincloths, a longhaired gaptoothed brighteyed elder of indeterminate gender—

Then abruptly the camera was shooting from outside the cave again, out of the gorge, off the tepui, back with the guide and bearers in sunset light. Larkin slowed the playback. The camera, pointed at Caracamuni tepui from the far end of the ridge below it, was shaking violently. The forests between it and the tepui seemed to toss like waves in a storm.

A great ring of dust formed about halfway up Caracamuni’s height and the tepui itself appeared to be growing taller. As its top continued to rise, though, Jhana saw that it was not growing but separating, top half from bottom half, at the ring of thinning dust. Soon the top half had risen free from the dusty billows and a space of clear sky intervened between the sundered halves of the ancient mountain.

Rising smoothly as a mushroom in the night, drifting away like a ship slipping from harbor toward open sea, open sky, the mountaintop ascended. Clear of the Earth’s curved sunset shadow, the sun shone full upon it again. Strangely, its waterfall did not disappear in a long mist to Earth. Jhana puzzled over the image of the waterfall moving like a downward smoke, only to pool crescentwise at some unseen boundary—until she saw the way the light bent around the mountain, refracting in a great sphere like the shimmer of heat-waves from asphalt, from desert and mirage, from the boundary of a soap bubble like those her fellow passenger Marissa had talked about, what now seemed ages ago.

If Jhana could believe what the video was showing her, then she could only conclude that Caracamuni was ascending in a bubble of force, its high waterfall plunging down only to spread out again in a broad swirl along the boundary’s edge. She looked more closely and saw that, from the sphered mountain itself, a pale fire like inverted alpenglow had begun to shine, increasing in intensity until, in a brilliant burst of white light, the mountain disappeared, as silently and completely as a soap bubble bursting in a summer sky.

Jhana and Larkin stared at the screen for a time.

“A tremendous blast like thunder swept over us after that,” Larkin said. “And then it was over. But it’s not really over. Not with KL 235 out there. And lately, someone or something has been accessing the copies of this tape in the public archives. A lot.”

“Isn’t there something missing?” Jhana asked. “Why’d you stop recording after that old shaman or witch or whoever it was appeared? And what does all that have to do with KL 235?”

“Everything,” Larkin said with a sigh, standing abruptly. “Come along with me to the lab. Mr. Cortland still needs musk from civet cats, so I’m headed that way anyway. If Mr. Yamaguchi is on duty, I’ve got something to show you in the mycology labs on the way.”

Leaving Roger Cortland’s bundles of lavender and bags of jasmine flowers behind, they left Larkin’s residence, striking off along a path that ran among the hilltop domes.

“The ‘old person’ of the tribe, Kekchi, refused to allow me to keep shooting what I was seeing,” Larkin said as they walked, “so I’m still trying to piece it together out of memory. Jacinta tried to explain the situation to me, but I wouldn’t listen. I thought she’d just hooked up with a lot of backwoods mushroom cultists. I couldn’t wrap my mind around it.”

“What did she try to explain?” Jhana asked as they stepped over rocks and crossed a small stream.

“My sister claimed the ghost people had been living in symbiotic relation to
Cordyceps jacintae
, their ‘sacred mushroom,’ for millennia,” Larkin remarked as they passed sidewalk cafes and a small park. “Jacinta called it a ‘myconeural symbiont’ because after someone ingests the fruiting body, the spores germinate and the spawn forms a sheath of fungal tissue around the nerve endings of the central nervous system, penetrating even between the nerves of the brain and brain stem, even to the dorsal and median raphe nuclei, without damaging them.”

“You mean they have fungus living in their heads?” Jhana asked, her face wrinkling in disgust.

“Exactly,” Larkin said with a nod, glancing away toward park fields where children played—watched by adults who might or might not be their parents. “I found the idea of such a fungal infestation disgusting too. But the relationship is mutually beneficial: the fungal spawn obtains moisture, protection, and nutrients even in adverse environments, and the human hosts are assured a steady supply of the most potent ‘informational substances’, as Jacinta called them.”

“KL 235,” Jhana said, watching children create a species mandala out of stones and leaves and organic debris while adults captioned it with the words Not King nor Steward, But Friend.

“No, that was my mistake,” Larkin said with a grimace. “One of the ghost people apparently planted several of Jacinta’s mushroom spore prints in my backpack when I was on the tepui. All unknowing, I carried them off with me before the mountaintop ascended. When I got back home and found the prints in my pack, I couldn’t see fit to make public their existence—not after what had happened. But, as I said, I couldn’t bring myself to destroy anything associated with that time—not even the spore-prints of the very things I held responsible for my sister’s disappearance.”

A shadow passed lightly over them from an airbike pedaling high in the sky above. Jhana saw a sign hung on a tree announcing a co-op consensus meeting for that evening, and a highly-wrought poster announcing the Möbius Cadúceus concert the following evening—skysign and all. Jhana’s glance turned back toward Larkin.

“But KL 235 did eventually hit the market,” Jhana remarked. “So your attitude about going public must have changed.”

Larkin nodded glumly as they walked.

“The flying mountain story had ruined my career. I was desperate for a score, something to re-establish my name. I had sole possession of the fungus that Jacinta and the tepui
indígenas
had discovered, so finally I decided to play it as my trump card. I’m not a mycologist and not the world’s best biochemist either, but I was able to pitch the idea of working with the fungus to a friend of mine with connections in government and corporate security.”

Passing at a quick pace through clusters of domes and hogans and small cooperatively-maintained parks, they came upon a sign that read MYCOLOGY and a ramp descending into the ground. At least they were headed toward Seiji’s workplace, or one of them, where she might meet him and save some time.

“The cloak and dagger folks wanted in on the game,” Larkin said, starting down the ramp, “and they anted up cash for a staff. I was in business. I grew a batch of the fungus and they began testing it—I didn’t want to know where, how, or on whom. My most grievous error. They liked what they saw and the funding just flowed in.”

As they came to the bottom of the ramp Jhana saw a long corridor leading away, dimly lit by bioluminescent strips and the light spilling from an occasional open door. She hoped they would be stopping soon: she and Seiji had appointments to keep, and she didn’t have all day....

“The only problem was, we estimated the development of full myconeural symbiosis would take about twelve years, just as Jacinta had told me it did among the tepui people. That was far too slow for the professionals putting up money for my research. Twelve years was so much time that the fungus could easily be detected and eliminated by antibiotics—and ingestion of mushrooms was too bulky and unwieldy to begin with. My ‘investors’ wanted something fast, discrete, potent: the twelve year effect, but in about twelve minutes. The word came down that we were to isolate the particular chemical that produced such-and-such effects. I obeyed, we obeyed. Isolation was our unpardonable sin.”

“How’s that?” Jhana asked as they walked along in the corridor’s half-light, the punky, funky smells of rich humus and decay wafting toward them more richly whenever they passed an open door.

“Brain burn-out, of course. A generation of infojunkies, datazombies. Those were the products of my problem child, once the damned agencies and corporations made sure it escaped from the labs into the grey markets and the streets. From Jacinta’s work with the
indígenas
of the tepui it was clear that, unlike straight KL’s more limited affects, the myconeural complex did much more than just circumvent the DMN and prompt high-level brain functioning. The mushroom complex produces many other substances—neurotransmitter analogs and psychoneuronal interlocks we haven’t begun to fathom, even now. Twelve years seems a long time to wait, but at the end of that time the fully myconeuralized
indígenas
were at constant high-level brain activity without burnout or any apparent ill effects. They even claimed that human hosts with full myconeural complements become natural telepaths with each other, though we haven’t been able to test that.”

Larkin took special note of light spilling from a doorway ahead.

“Looks like we’re in luck—Seiji appears to be waiting for us,” Larkin remarked, before returning to his previous discourse. “Anyway, not only had we removed KL from the myconeural complex, but we’d already dislocated the mushroom from its proper environmental and cultural context. In the name of international insecurity first and then for the sake of corporate profit, KL was given to people and taken by people who had no framework for understanding its effects. The indígenas of Caracamuni tepui had an entire millenia-years-old mythological and cultural framework to plug their sacred mushroom into, while the street kid or college student doing pure crystalline ‘gate’ in a back alley or a dorm room had nothing to fall back on but tenuous personal myths and explanations or, at best, vague ideas about the sort of mind-set and environmental situation appropriate to taking KL.”