Lightpaths (37 page)

Wings glittered in his peripheral vision and, startled, he reflexively drew his dirk, only to find that there was once again nothing to strike.

Roger shook his head, smiling wryly. He was wrought up, strung on a wire tighter than the one in his laser. The mushroom was chipping through whatever brain-dam it was that kept the flow from the senses down to a trickle. Sensations were now beginning to flood into him at a rate he’d never known before. After this test proved out he would have to take a long nap, rest, re-charge. Taking the prototype bottle of
Tombé
from his desktop, uncapping it and wafting its wonderful musky-sweet scent under his nose once more, he felt reassured.

Passage embedded in RAT code:

The meat model of human consciousness holds that, somewhere out there, is the Sacred (Holy, Wholly) Cow of Unmediated Reality, Urreality, the universe as it is in itself. According to this model, the human sensory apparatus is the slaughterhouse, which cuts out those pieces it can use, the beef and beef by-products of experiential data. The Cow’s sacredness is killed so it can be understood. Next, the human perceptual apparatus functions as meat grinder, extruding the seemingly continuous “sausage” of sense-perception gestalt. Consciousness is the arbitrary cutting blade of time, the machine that cuts the gestalt sausage into digestible moment-to-moment slices. Self is the virtual construct, the master continuity program, the butcher or meat packer who neatly stacks the gestalt-sausage slices, makes them seem like they all cohere, even though they are different every split second. This model—though it has much to recommend it—not only offends vegetarians but is, in several of its steps, dead wrong. Nonetheless, it remains true that those who love personhood, like those who love the law or sausage, should never watch any of them being made.

Jhana had a great deal on her mind as she half-ran to Roger Cortland’s lab. Events were moving too fast. She’d just received a message that Mr. Tien-Jones was part of a negotiating team ready to come to the space habitat immediately. But negotiating for what—the terms of surrender? Passing a sidewalk cafe, she’d just seen a news-flash indicating that corporate and national forces had moved shuttlecraft and troops into low orbit. She couldn’t say with absolute certainty, but she suspected the troop movement had all too much to do with some fear-pumped “Diamond Thunderbolt” connection the powers on Earth were making between VAJRA and the enigmatic X-shaped structures floating in space.

She felt obscurely responsible for the way things were turning out. For whatever good it might do, just as soon as this thing with Cortland was done today she would have to contact Mr. Tien-Jones and stress the enormous misunderstanding of it all to him. He had to be informed that she absolutely did not believe the X-shaped structures were a weapons system of any sort or that Diamond Thunderbolt posed any threat to Earth, either. She had delayed too long in sending that message already.

Her misgivings about Cortland’s work with his pheromone perfume continued unabated as she ran along. She would have preferred to have no more to do with it, but she reasoned it would be best to keep her Earthside employers happy with her work on at least that front. Strangely, too, Paul Larkin was friendlier than ever toward her, since he’d found out she was “helping Dr. Cortland with his research,” as he’d put it when she informed him that she had to leave the lab to meet with Roger. Larkin told her he’d be along shortly as well—to see how Roger’s work was going. The senior researcher seemed to have developed an interest in the younger man which Jhana could by no means explain.

Entering Cortland’s lab, she found Roger standing and his assistant Marissa seated—both of them silent. Was it only her imagination, Jhana wondered, or had some estrangement taken place between the two of them? The red-haired woman seemed nervous and sulky somehow, while Cortland himself looked, up close, as if he hadn’t slept in days. When he saw her, however, his eyes lit up with an excited gleam.

“Jhana! So glad you could make it for our little test. Right this way, please,” Roger said, stylus and electric clipboard in hand, turning to go. Marissa lagged behind. “Marissa?”

Reluctantly the redheaded woman got up and followed as Roger led them to the locked door of a lounge. Unlocking the door, he let them into a room which—but for some thick mats on the floor, a permanent lab table, and two padded chairs—was entirely stripped of furnishings. Jhana noticed that Marissa’s eyebrows flashed up on seeing the room, but the woman said nothing. Roger locked the door behind them.

“I hope this won’t take too long, Roger,” Jhana said as she sat down in one of the chairs. “I’ve got to get an important message to my employers about this military mess that’s going on.”

“Yes, I heard something about that,” Roger said absently. “Well, don’t worry. The potential side effect I’m trying to investigate with this test would be almost instantaneous.”

Jhana wondered about the term “side-effect”, but didn’t have time to ask because, with a flourish, Roger withdrew a vial filled with a faintly yellow-orange liquid from his pocket and placed it on the table between Jhana and Marissa.

“Ta-Da!” Roger said, a bit too shrilly. “The fruit of my labors. Go ahead, put a little on. Jhana, you first—as our guest.”

Jhana opened the vial and sniffed the scent arising from the pale amber fluid within. Finding the sweet, musky fragrance quite pleasant, she inhaled more deeply. Marissa and Roger watched her every move very carefully as she dabbed the amber liquid onto the pulse-points of her wrists and then behind her left ear. Sniffing at her right wrist, she realized that the scent had changed somehow—improved, just through contact with her skin.

“It’s a wonderful scent,” Jhana said, placing the vial back on the table before her. “Responds to the wearer’s body chemistry?”

“That’s right,” Roger said slowly, with a brief nod, as he lifted the vial and placed it in front of Marissa. The excited gleam in his eyes seemed to have brightened to an absolute dazzle.

Jhana watched as Marissa hesitantly dabbed on the pale amber liquid, looking less like the happy coworker testing an innocent perfume than someone who feared she might be putting acid on her flesh. She too sniffed at the scent of the perfume on her skin, but it didn’t seem to reassure her that much.

Electropenning notes, Roger sat down for a moment on the ledge of a large lab sink and watched them with an intensity that Jhana found disquieting. Shouldn’t he be taking blood samples, looking for a drop in estrogen levels or something? She turned and, with some effort, struck up a conversation with Marissa. As they talked, Marissa grew less nervous and reticent, while Roger conversely became more agitated, pacing then circling around them, checking his watch every few seconds or peering at them with eyes that seemed to burn in his head. Jhana began to wonder at the man’s odd behavior and wanted to be gone from him and his lab as quickly as possible.

“Roger, how much longer is this going to take?” she asked impatiently.

“A few more minutes,” he said thickly, breathing hard. “A few more minutes.”

Roger’s unfocused agitation grew more and more disturbing. The few minutes came and went—and then some.

“It’s not working!” he cried at last, his voice very nearly a shriek. Jhana and Marissa stared at him. “It’s not working, don’t you see?”

“Yes, we do see that, Roger,” Marissa said uncertainly, yet in a voice remarkably placid, given the circumstances. “Please calm down. We have to face the facts. The Faulkes orthodoxy appears to be right, Roger. The mole-rat social hierarchy, the queen’s suppression of reproductive capacity in the rest of the colony’s females—it must be almost completely mediated by behavioral and physical factors, not chemical ones, not pheromones. The affect you’re looking for isn’t there.”

“But the tests!” Roger roared. “What about the tests I ran?”

“Inconclusive,” Marissa said quietly, patiently. “Impossible to fully separate out behavioral factors. I was afraid to confront you with it, after your previous funding request was denied and you became so obsessed with this pheromone project. You were in denial about your results and I said nothing. I was worried about what the let-down might do to you, afraid you might start acting like this. So I went along as long as I could. But you have to face the reality now, Roger: pheromonal social control is not what’s at work—in humans or in mole-rats.”

“Better never to have known!” he cried, pulling at his hair distractedly, his eyes dancing wildly in his head as he paced. “No, no! I refuse to believe it! You’re lying, trying to deceive me! I’ll never give up this project—never!”

Jhana could see Marissa’s patience snapping at last.

“Fine, Roger. Go ahead. Waste your life in a twisted obsession. What ‘side-effect’ was it you hoped to test with Jhana and me today, hm? Whether your pheromone perfume would make us do what female mole-rats do? Oh yes, Roger: I know the brutal idiosyncracy of the mole-rat social structure. Before the naked mole-rat hierarchy is fully developed, females coming into estrus fight violently, frequently killing one another—”

“Shut up! You shut up!” Roger yelled thickly, wagging his finger threateningly.

“That idiosyncracy was what attracted you to them in the first place,” Marissa continued fiercely, ignoring his commands, “wasn’t it? Not their pheromones. I know your kink, Roger Cortland. I’ve known it ever since I stumbled in on you watching that porno. Since human women are in a sort of permanent low-level estrus, maybe you thought introducing your supposed pheromone would make them fight the way mole-rat females do, right? Was that your logic? Is that the side-effect you hoped for? Some crime-of-passion triangle scene? Jhana and I leaping at each other, red in tooth and claw, for your personal viewing pleasure?”

A stinging slap and then another exploded out of Roger, then the words “Cunt! Bloody whore!”—spoken with a depth of venom more stinging than slaps could ever be. Marissa’s chair toppled to the floor where she sat stunned, her nose trickling blood. Once past her shock at the act, Jhana rose swiftly to leap between Marissa and Roger, but Cortland—now thoroughly out of control—pulled a laser blade from his pocket, snapped its wireguide full length and shouted, “Back! Stay back! Don’t come any closer!”

Jhana stopped in her tracks, watching as the wild-eyed man, spittle flecking his lips and chin, backed stumbling toward the door. Once he spun and slashed a fiery arc over his shoulder—electric hum, ozone crackle, plaster exploding like a bomb on the wall behind him—at the same instant shouting something that Jhana thought sounded like “Damned angels! Leave me alone!”

Seeming to recover somewhat the little of his senses that remained, he unlocked the door behind him and slipped out. Jhana heard the sound of the door being locked from without, then two more crackling stabs disabling the automatic lock-overrides on their door—and then another set of crackling sounds down the hall. For a moment she thought she smelled the scent of burnt almonds in the air, but then it was gone. When she thought she’d heard Roger’s staggering footsteps moving far enough away down the corridor, Jhana stepped forward and tried to open the door. They were locked in tight.

Turning from the door, she stepped quickly toward Marissa, who was shakily trying to get to her feet. Jhana helped her up with one arm while with the other she righted the toppled chair, then sat the other woman in the chair. Drawing tissues and a handkerchief from her pocket, Jhana dabbed at Marissa’s bleeding nose.

“Are you okay?” Jhana asked. Marissa nodded her head tentatively. When Marissa took some of the tissues from Jhana’s hand and began dabbing at the blood herself and leaning her head back to slow the bleeding, Jhana felt better. Marissa at least seemed to be getting over the initial shock of what had happened.

“I expected him to be angry when I finally confronted him with the failure of his pheromone research,” Marissa said—almost apologetically—after a time, “but I never expected he’d respond this way. It’s just not normal—not even for Roger.”

“From the way he was acting he almost seemed drunk or on drugs,” Jhana remarked, pulling the other chair over closer to Marissa and sitting down.

Marissa shook her head, as vigorously as her nose bleed and her attempts to stop it would allow.

“That wouldn’t be like him. I haven’t known him that long, but I’ve never known him to indulge in anything that would alter his state of consciousness. That would be giving up too much control—and Roger loves control.”

Jhana shrugged.

“My friend Seiji says that sanity is a very tenuous thing. Maybe he’s right, in Roger’s case.”

“Seiji Yamaguchi?” Marissa asked. “He seems like a nice guy.”

Jhana nodded, getting up to throw the blood-soaked tissues down a recycling oubliette.

“How did you figure out what Roger was up to?” Jhana asked, curious. “I was bothered by some aspects of his work, but I never figured out his motivation, the way you did.”

Marissa pulled a sheaf of folded printouts from her pocket and handed them to Jhana, saying, “Turn to the sections I’ve highlighted.”

Jhana saw that they were texts of old articles—some going back to the early 1980s—with titles like “Eusociality in a Mammal: Cooperative Breeding in Naked Mole-Rat Colonies” by Jarvis and “Constraints of Pregnancy and Evolution of Sociality in Mole-Rats” by Burda. Turning to the highlighted sections, Jhana read passages like “Soon after four mixed colonies were established, two females in each colony came into estrus simultaneously and fought violently until one of the pair died” and “Aggression was observed toward unknown adult conspecifics of the same sex. Females were more aggressive to each other, and their fight was serious with fatal consequences, particularly if one of the females were in estrus or if both females had bred in the past already. Fight of males was ritualized and foreign males were more willingly accepted than foreign females....”

“I must have read background passages like these a dozen times in doing my research on their genetic stability,” Jhana said, looking up from the faxes, “but it never clicked for me.”

“Same here,” Marissa said with a nod. “It only fell into place when I accidentally stumbled upon Roger viewing a pornholo on one of our machines here—a porno that prominently featured women fighting. That was the key piece of the puzzle. With a little thought I was able to figure it out.”

“All of it?” Jhana asked.

“No, maybe not all of it,” Marissa said thoughtfully, “but most of it, I think. There’s a sort of dark logic to it. Investigating their longevity and slow maturation for my own work, I’ve gotten very familiar with mole-rats and what Roger might have wanted from them. I think he really believed he was breaking ground for the foundation of a perfect society, one in which all individual will would be sacrificed to the will of the colony. It even had a sort of feminist cover to it, too. Mole-rat society is female-centered, and the first important researcher of the species was a woman. Not only that but, if Roger’s plan had worked, women would have been more powerful than ever. That threw me off for a while, until I realized we would be less powerful than ever, too. Because everyone would have less freedom, even the queen. The highest goal of a woman would be to become a breeding machine. After the genetic lines of those who couldn’t afford his perfume died out—then and only then—Family would be everything, for everyone in Roger’s Sandman future would be closely related. Those whose breeding would be suppressed would solace themselves with the knowledge that, by caring for their closely related broodmates, they would ensure the survival and passing on of their own genetic characteristics, even though they themselves would not actually breed. Self-sacrifice would be the new and total watchword.”