Lightpaths (35 page)

I won’t say I haven’t looked back—I have. But never with regret. Eventually all the nuclear test sites everywhere ceased operations, and that was an important step for the protection and restoration of the Earth. But even if the test sites were still operating, even if we’d failed in our larger project, for me my action would still have been right, still worthwhile, for my experience there taught me that the Earth itself—and all time and space—is a test site, a vale of soul-making....

Marissa commanded the screen off, got up, and left her residence. Deep in thought she passed through her garden, wondering about heavens and hells, paradises and test sites. She thought of distances, fences, boundaries, walls. She glanced up at the garden world arching in the sheltering sky above her. The space habitat was itself a world walled off both by distance and by metal, a world increasingly free of Earth—yet its settlers paradoxically felt themselves increasingly responsible for Earth and what went on there. For them, the ensphering walls of the space habitat were less a boundary than a sort of semi-permeable membrane through which light and ideas and sustenance might pass in both directions.

Walking to the nearest bulletcart station Marissa thought of how, since her arrival, she’d become more aware of the ERGs and the habitat’s various other missions to Earth. In some ways, this colony was so completely different from every other colony in human history. Undeniably, it did have something of the typical colony/Mother Country relationship: the space colony shipping energy down the well, getting back from the Mother Planet those finished products that couldn’t be manufactured locally. But that was about the extent of the similarity. No indigenous peoples had had to be “civilized”, “displaced” or eliminated here, no wilderness had to be exploited out of existence. Rather this was a place built and peopled for the first time, a seed or spore of the home world, an offspring that had in some ways come to maturity and moved away—but one still concerned for the welfare of its parent.

On the platform waiting for the bullet, Marissa shrugged back her hair and gazed once more toward the distant other side of the sphere, into the shadowed forests and fields and gardens beyond the glittering Line of the axial ridge, past the shimmering dragonflies of aircyclists, the tiny gnat-swarms of free-fall soccer players. Unbidden, the phrase “a land of dreams, so various, so beautiful, so new” rose into her mind, with force enough that she could not ignore it.

Yes, it was all of that—especially new. But would it at last prove only a world like that poet’s vision of nineteenth century Earth, a place having “really neither joy, nor love, nor light, nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain”? Would this world of light also be reduced to a darkling plain where ignorant armies once again clashed by night?

Despite the warmth of the air Marissa shivered. She wondered if this was what it meant to have a sense of this place, to care for and about it, to wonder who or what might betray its promise. Lights flashed and a bulletcart—one of the few that came to the surface here—sighed up before her. Marissa boarded and, returning underground, it sped her along.

Passing through the tunnel, she wondered at himself. On Earth she had always thought about this place in an abstract, detached, scholarly way, but now she seemed to have somehow become personally and emotionally involved with it and its fate. Had she changed that much since her arrival?

She got off at the station where Atsuko had said to meet her and, when Marissa arrived, Atsuko was waiting for her.

“H’lo, Maris,” Atsuko said, coming forward and giving her a quick hug. “The pavilion is up the ramp and a short walk to the left. It’s the same one where Lev and his group are going to be holding their concert later, but the colony council is using it first.”

At the bottom of the ramp Atsuko turned to her.

“I hope you don’t find the proceedings too boring. I figured that your fellowship research here should at least include some exposure to our local species of government—and today’s agenda looks a good deal more interesting than most.”

As they walked up the ramp Atsuko explained briefly that, for purposes of representation, the permanent residents in both the agricultural tori and the central sphere were grouped into “centuries,” or community districts of one hundred citizens each, corresponding roughly to settlement hamlets and neighborhoods. Each century had its own council of ten (whose membership rotated every year), and one council member from each century was chosen to represent the century in the meetings of the colony council. Any resident of the colony could attend the colony council meetings and voice his or her opinions on any issue, though only the century representatives could participate in the consensus decision-making process.

“We’re still experimenting with the system, of course,” Atsuko remarked as they came to the surface and approached a large, airy open-work building, below which stood a reflecting pool of considerable size. “I believe our colony council already has a few features you won’t find elsewhere, though. Besides having the usual staff ecologists we also have representatives specially designated as ‘Speaker for Animals’ or ‘Speaker For Trees’ or the like, whose job it is to be especially sensitive to the environmental impact of any action the council may be contemplating. I know it sounds strange, but it seems to work. The special Speakers take their responsibilities quite seriously, and since ours is government by consensus, it only takes one representative in disagreement to halt an action—so the special Speakers have considerable weight in the colony’s deliberations.”

They entered the light-filled space created by the high-domed modular building. Since weather in the habitat was so predictable, the pavilion—like all the public buildings in the central sphere—was built as much for symbolic and artistic expression as it was for shelter. Walking through it, Marissa felt as if she were strolling inside an architectural structure somewhere between a bright beach umbrella and the inside of hot air balloon’s inflated silk bulb. The effect was only heightened by the presence of large, temporary curtains—behind which, she gathered, Lev Korchnoi and Möbius Cadúceus had hidden their stage set.

The light-filled space was only very sparsely furnished: a low, portable-looking, semicircular dais facing outward toward rows of audience seating. Atsuko took her place among the council representatives, while Marissa joined the members of the audience.

What followed was indeed unlike any business or political meeting Marissa had ever seen. It began precisely on the hour, but not with the banging of gavels or any ritual more formal than people raising their right hands one by one throughout the pavilion as a sign for silence. Soon the bustling and crowd noise in the hall quieted down to nothing and, in the silence around her, Marissa noticed that many of her fellow audience members had assumed a prayerful or meditative attitude. Though their eyes were closed, something about their posture indicated that they were yet attentive to unseen things.

The council’s current Presiding Minister—an African-American woman who looked a great deal like the one Marissa had seen interviewed on that
Worldchangers
program—began to speak without standing up.

“Before entering on the business of the colony,” the Presiding Minister began ritually, “let us spend time in thoughtful meditation as is our custom, seeking in the silence to put away the voice of our individual egotism and short-sighted self-interest so that we might hear and be guided by that more subtle voice in which we live and move and which lives and moves in us. Let us seek in the silence to open our minds and fill our hearts with the light and love that fills the universe. May all our deliberations, decisions, and actions be guided by our desire to protect, preserve and renew all life, both here and on Earth.”

Marissa was less surprised by the scattered whispers of “Amen” and “Shanti” than she thought she’d be. As they sat there in an attentive, aware silence that stretched to five and then ten minutes, Marissa began to wonder if religious services in the space colony felt as political as this political meeting felt religious. She had not yet had a chance to find out, for though profoundly and personally interested in spiritual things, Marissa wasn’t, in the institutional sense, particularly religious herself. Whenever a proselytizer back on Earth had asked her about her religious convictions, her usual line was that she was “just your average Zen Born Again Catholic Quaker Pacifist Anarchist—with a strong interest in the Gita, the Talmud and the Koran.” That was usually good for confusing and frustrating the evangelizers, though somehow she doubted it would bother anyone here. Even on Earth some of the evangelizers had heard her self-description selectively, one remarking, on hearing it, “Oh, you’re a Christian then.”

At an unspoken signal the council meeting’s meditative quiet ended, but the effects of that thoughtful silence seemed to linger as the council took up the colony’s business. The first item on the council’s agenda was old business, a discussion of a petition by the Möbius Cadúceus Entertainment Cooperative requesting use of the Pavilion’s reflecting pool as part of their impending performance. Apparently—due to questions of possible environmental impact and specific requests for clarification from the Speaker For Animals—consensus had not been achieved among the council members during the previous discussions of the petition and the issue had been turned over to a committee for further research and recommendations. The staff ecologist and Speaker For Animals, representing the committee, stated that all questions of environmental impact had now been addressed to their satisfaction and they recommended approval of the petition. Lev Korchnoi also rose from the audience to announce again the time and place of the concert, to invite everyone to the performance, and even suggested that, if the council would like to appoint an official observer to see that no violations of environmental integrity occurred, Möbius Cadúceus would have no objections and would in fact welcome the interest. Atsuko volunteered her time as official observer. Surprisingly quickly, the council approved both Möbius Cadúceus’s petition and Atsuko Cortland’s appointment as council representative to the event.

Watching the proceedings, Marissa was left with a strong suspicion of where she’d probably find herself during the performance, but she barely had time to formulate that thought before the next speaker, a young black Frenchman representing the HOME consortium, stood to address the council on more business postponed from a previous meeting. The HOME representative informed the council and the audience that the prototype asteroid mining tug
Swallowtail
, designed by colony resident Brandi Easter, had been completed well ahead of schedule. With the council’s approval, the HOME consortium planned to make
Swallowtail
’s launch coincide with the opening of the two new habitats—and therefore part of the celebration that Möbius Cadúceus’s performance was already included in. After some good-natured complaining about “overloading the event” at this late date—and Lev Korchnoi’s humble assurance that Möbius Cadúceus would try to limit the number of its encores so that its performance didn’t too seriously overlap other presentations—the colony council gave its approval to the Swallowtail’s launch.

HOME’s young resident representative was about to sit down when the Presiding Minister rose and stopped him, something about her words and posture causing the atmosphere in the pavilion to grow rapidly graver.

“Mister Fanon, we may need your responses on our next agenda item,” she said, stopping him with her voice as she turned to address her fellow council members and the audience. “We are on the edge of great accomplishments and celebrations, as you’ve said and we’ve heard, but, as a number of you already know, we are also on the edge of grave danger. The Chinese ideogram for ‘crisis’ is made up of the characters for both ‘danger’ and ‘opportunity,’ which is indeed an apt description of our current condition.

“We have tried to base our culture here on a simple but metaphysically profound truth: There is no separate existence. ‘Things derive their being and nature by mutual dependence—they are nothing in themselves,’ as the sage Nagarjuna put it. We have emphasized reality-as-process and the liberating truth inherent in the world’s incompleteness and uncertainty. We have seen the way in which such a world view subverts the traditional paradigm of dogma and dominance. Events today, though, remind us of how inextricably our fate is tied up with Earth’s and give us more proof of our tentative truths than ever—and more challenges to them, as well.

“Relations between our colony and a number of nations and corporations of Earth have become strained of late. The source of the strain is this.”

Shades folded down over the outside of the building, dimming the light inside somewhat as trideo displays floated into the central space between audience and council. Marissa saw that the images in the ghostly display were views of the large X-shaped structures that she’d earlier heard Seiji and Lev and Lakshmi talking about.

“As nearly as our computing, power generation, and space engineering staffpeople can determine,” the Presiding Minister continued, “each of these objects is a new type of device for channeling large amounts of solar power into information functions—particularly memory storage, retrieval, and communications. Our friends on Earth, though, apparently believe with equal fervency that these structures are devices for channeling large amounts of solar power into pulse lasers of unprecedented efficiency and destructiveness.”

Marissa watched as the trideo display cycled from close-ups to wide-angle images of the structures, glinting like an enigmatic necklace (or noose) about the Earth.

“Several weeks ago, we began receiving diplomatic queries from various national and corporate entities,” said the Presiding Minister, “all of them asking more or less the same questions: what are these things and why are you building them? Our initial answers—’We don’t know’ and ‘We’re not building them’—must not have been satisfactory, for the queries have continued in increasing numbers and decreasing friendliness, growing less diplomatic until, now, they have become downright hostile and threatening.