Lightpaths (3 page)

What am I doing here?
she thought faintly, severely disoriented.
What is this place—Subway? Metro? Mall? Airport concourse?

Try to look around without falling into the sky. A folded note fluttered to the ground from her pocket. She bent quickly to pick it up, trying not to look wherever down might be.

DIAMOND THUNDERBOLT, read one line. WORTHWHILE PROJECTS said another. The circumstance of the note-taking flashed into Jhana’s head as clearly as if her boss, the eminent Balance Tien-Jones, were standing in the hanging vastness with her.

“Certainly after what you’ve been through this year you deserve some sabbatical time away from the company,” Dr. Tien-Jones says with a slight nod, taking off his glasses and polishing them scrupulously. “But while you’re doing research at the space habitat we expect you nonetheless to serve as a sort of unofficial observer for Tao-Ponto....”

Look around, not down. Everybody with shopping bags and briefcases and baggage, refugees all, men and women permanently in transition, endless clangor of voices—

“As you know,” Tien-Jones continues, leaning forward over his desk and staring at her with myopic directness, “our firm has a considerable investment in the Orbital Complex. Though the homesteaders up there have been allowed a good deal of freedom, we do prefer to see the habitat operating in accordance with sound corporate principles....”

Around her always everywhere the unfathomable echoing depths of angelic public address systems speaking in a language she almost knows, announcing closeout sales or departing/arriving trains or jet flights or something—

“Over the last two days we’ve begun to hear rumors of something called Diamond Thunderbolt,” Dr. Tien-Jones says, squinting at his upheld glasses one last time. “No one seems to know exactly what it is, but it might well cause some stresses, shall we say, in the relationship between Earth and the colonists. From that name—and from a certain trideo game that’s started to appear on Earth over the last day or so—the scenarists in our military products division believe that Diamond Thunderbolt may be some sort of space-borne weapons project intended to allow the settlers to break away from Earthly control....”

She can’t tell which is now and which remembered, which blatant and which latent as the words cascade over her, distorting and echoplexing toward the demonic, taking with them on fallen angel wings little pieces of her acceptable mask of sanity—

“I hope that is not the case,” says her boss, sighing and putting his glasses back on his nose. “All the companies involved have been so careful not to give anyone here on Earth cause for offense. Consider how thoroughly we’ve worked out the multiethnic composition of the settlement community—trying our best not to leave any major group feeling left out. And certainly we don’t want anyone down here to feel threatened by anyone up there....”

She feels herself becoming less a person than a place being traveled through by all these travelers—

“Everyone who has applied for permanent residency in the space habitat has been carefully screened and tested for their dedication to nonviolent methods of conflict resolution,” the bespectacled Tien-Jones says, leaning back in his chair, staring at the star-tiled ceiling of his office suite as if it weren’t there, as if his executive X-ray vision were seeing clear to the space habitat turning in cislunar space, even through and beyond that. “The High Orbital Manufacturing Enterprise has not done this out of any love it might feel for idealists but rather as a precaution against precisely the sort of military adventurism now being bruited about. To maximize production efficiency and keep down administrative costs, we’ve been screening for bright, dedicated, peaceful, hard-working types....”

She is sore afraid these travelers might see her naked face, feel the ticking time-bomb pressure in her head—

“That bunch of Gandhians and Quakers and Buddhists and Peace Churchers and psiXtians up there,” Mr. Tien-Jones says, smiling and waving a dismissive hand toward her, “they should be the last people in the world or off it to be building some sort of secret weapon. Look into it, though, won’t you? ‘Perfect paranoia is perfect awareness,’ as the old saying goes.”

Her head is about to go off in skull-splitting mind-shattering brain-scattering blood-fountaining display right on the esplanade avenue concourse platform—

“Oh, and Ms. Meniskos,” Tien-Jones says without looking up from his large marble-topped desk, “if, while you’re there, you come across any worthwhile projects of particular interest to Tao-Ponto, be sure at your earliest convenience to inform me of them directly. I’ve provided an encryption keycode so you can contact me quickly over a secured channel, if necessary.”

All those around her, what will they think of her explosion? Will they be horrified? Will they applaud?

“Hey,” said the man with the Mennonite-style beard, coming up beside her where she stood, white-knuckled grip on the railing, breathing hard. He waved his hand before her eyes. “Are you okay? You don’t look so good.”

She focused on him, trying not to see the mandala world beyond, trying to control her breathing, her pulse, bring everything back under control. Slowly the self that had exploded out of her head and seemed to fill the whole bubble of space around her began to filter back into her skull. She nodded mutely. A moment more and she turned away from him, staring fixedly at her hands upon the railing.

“Anxiety attack,” she said quickly, her back to him. “The height, the low gravity, the culture shock from all—this, I guess. Training didn’t quite prepare me for it. I’m okay now.”

The man with the Mennonite beard nodded sympathetically.

“I remember my first days up here. Sensory overload. If it starts getting to you again and you need someone to talk you through it, don’t hesitate to give me a call. Name’s Seiji Yamaguchi. I’m listed.”

“I will.”

Taking Jhana at her word—even though she had yet to look up from her hands on the rail—Seiji Yamaguchi turned and went on his way. She was thinking, thinking that it was more than sensory overload or vertigo or an anxiety attack that had done this to her. She smelled burnt almonds in the air—a scent she had read was characteristic of cyanide, but which she had known personally only once before: almond cookies burning in the oven on the terrible night that her lover Mike died.

No, it was more even than that, more than just some olfactory trigger that had done this to her.

It was memory.

* * * * * * *

After disembarking from the shuttle, Roger had briefly watched his new postdoc, Marissa, wandering about confused, then offered to show her down to his lab, where she too would soon be working—at least some of the time, anyway.

Roger and Marissa took the low road to the research station in the desert biome. The subsurface maglevs tended to be less crowded than the ridgecart tubes and were just as fast to the lab, even if neither were private enough for Roger’s taste—especially now, when he was still wound tight from the uncertainty of the way things had gone on Earth.

Behind him a girl with a shaved head and painted face was whispering the chant of some Möbius Cadúceus pop tune playing on her implants. Glancing over his shoulder, Cortland saw that the girl, her eyes masked in wraparound VR shades, was also playing some sort of portable trideo game—VAJRA presents BUILDING THE RUINS!—in which (as nearly as he could tell from his furtive glances) nightmare fighters and assorted waves of chaos dove at a cybernetic City of God, a heliacal-bright Heavenly Kingdom that even Roger had to admit was beautiful, in a fractally complex sort of way. The girl, thoroughly caught up in her game and her music, paid Roger and Marissa no heed and just kept playing and chanting. Roger caught the refrain—
All my depth is on the surface, all the surface is in my depths! Surface tension is my dimension, my dimension is surface tension!
—before he turned away, shaking his head, mercifully able to screen it out, drop the lead shutters of his mind and bring up the internal security monitors to play on the backs of his closed eyelids.

Marissa seemed tired too, certainly not as loquacious as on the flight up the gravity well, so Roger remained in his shutdown quasi-meditative state until the car arrived at their stop. Exiting with Marissa in tow and in impolitic haste, he made his way automatically up the ramp, then along another level to the entrance of the Desert Biome Research Station, beneath the Preserve.

By the time they reached his lab, Roger had threaded them through a considerable maze of passageways and corridors. That was only appropriate, he thought, given the complex burrowing of the creatures he studied—and the increasingly labyrinthine character of his own research.

The retinoscope scanned his eyes and let him in, and together they programmed the security system to accept Marissa’s retina scan too. As this was a Sun Day—the only day of the week that all three HOME zones overlapped on a similar daylight schedule—they could expect to have the place to themselves.

Once the sensors clicked on the lights, they saw there in front of them the subjects of Roger’s research. Inside the main chamber, between the thick glass panes, naked (or at least very nearly hairless) grey-pink things squirmed and writhed and slept, or ran from chamber to surface along the tunnels they had excavated, or in groups dug still more tunnels.

“They’re so ugly they’re cute!” Marissa exclaimed, watching this bustling slice of underground life. “It reminds me of ant farms I saw as a kid.”

“They’re the mammal with a social structure most like the eusocial insects,” Roger explained, nodding, pleased with her response.

“Except for their size and those big yellow incisors,” Marissa commented, walking around to the other side of the glass enclosure for a better angle, “they could almost pass for newborn mice—blind and naked. Or, maybe, newborn humans!”

Roger walked around to where she was standing.

“You’d be surprised how many altricial characteristics they share with humans,” he said. “You know what they remind me of? Newborn mutant sausages!”

Marissa laughed. The grey-pink mole rats were indeed sausage-colored, and about the size and shape of uncooked links—only these links had legs and eyes and teeth and a brief comma of tail.

“What got you interested in them?”

“The best laid plans of mice and men,” Roger muttered, then cleared his throat. “Seems to me they present ways to solve so many of our problems as a species—not just another weak half-measure like this utopian space colony up here. I’ve gambled a lot on these critters. Even returned here, because the project seemed so perfect.”

“Perfect?” Marissa asked, a bit confused by Roger’s elliptical way of speaking. “How?”

“Perfect for providing a real and ultimate solution,” Roger went on, glancing thoughtfully at his creatures, making sure that they had not suffered during his absence on Earth. “A solution that will take conscious decision-making right out of the picture. An organic social construct—not authoritarian because not conscious.”

“But a solution for what?” Marissa asked, trying to keep the exasperation out of her voice as she too watched the esoteric creatures going about their lives behind glass, seemingly unaware of any human presence.

“The answer to overpopulation, of course,” Roger said, “and with it an answer to habitat destruction and mass extinction, loss of biodiversity, resource depletion, the whole bundle.”

“That’s a lot of answers.”

“Yes, but I’m sure they’ll provide it all. Naked mole rats, Ethiopian sand puppies. NMRs, ESPs, as I like to call them.” He crouched down, looking directly into the mole-rat colony’s main chamber. “They’re misnamed, you know. They’re not rats, they’re not moles, and they’re not really naked.
Heterocephalus glaber
. Smooth other-headed ones. Hairless, different-headed creatures. The perfect gene source for creating transgenic, less problematic humans.”

“Transgenic?” Marissa asked, at least as fascinated as she was repulsed by the idea.

“Human genetic stock engineered to produce people capable of surviving fossorially,” Roger said, still carefully observing his charges. “Without free water, without technology. Lower metabolic rates, slower growth rates, the ability to self-regulate population, everything. ‘Sandmen’ as a survival hedge against global heating and ecodisaster. Or even creatures capable of surviving the rigors of life on a distant planet.”

“These things can provide genes for all that?”

“And more,” Roger said, nodding and smiling. “Naked mole rats are native to the desert country of the African Horn, lands that regularly experience surface temperatures as high as any on Earth. Yet the extensive communal burrows of mole-rat colonies always remain within a few comfortable degrees of their own optimum body temperature. Their environmental and behavioral control of temperature is so good they’ve evolved away from warm-bloodedness. As close to ectothermic as a mammal gets. Their burrowing activities even foster the spread of the geophytes they subsist on—a nice feedback loop—and their population is self-regulating.”

“But a lot of that sounds behavioral—” Marissa ventured, cautiously, not wanting to offend her new supervisor.

“True, true,” Roger admitted, “but struck off a genetic template. If you want straight genetics, well then, their genes contain code for hemoglobin with an extremely high affinity for oxygen—an evolutionary response to living in sealed burrows heavy with carbon dioxide, but one that also might be handy for Diggers living on a world in the process of being terraformed—like Mars, say.”

Reaching up and swiveling in a hovering magnifier, he began pointing to attributes of the little creatures as he spoke of them.

“In the desert, you see, their lack of tear ducts and sweat glands, combined with the moist underground-tuber diet they subsist on—that has pretty much eliminated their need for free water. Their lack of body hair facilitates rapid heat transfer with their burrow microclimate. Their short conical digging claws, their tendency to form collaborative digging chains—all these adaptations make them perfectly suited to existence in a harsh environment that’s challenging even for humans with the best tools.”