Lightpaths (43 page)

The ensphering light overcame him then. When he regained consciousness, he was in a medical transfer ship, Marissa Correa and Paul Larkin standing on either side of the gurney to which he was held by light straps. He handed Marissa the vial of her immortalizing vector, still in his shirt pocket. He had taken it, perhaps thinking that if he spread it to the world it might somehow bring his father back, retroactively cancel his death in cancelling all future death. Now, at last, he had reconciled himself to the truth.

“Jhana Meniskos’s code key!” Roger said suddenly. “I sent a message to her boss saying that she was being held hostage, that her code was compromised. We’ve got to correct that!”

“Don’t worry,” they said, looking down at him. “Already taken care of.”

* * * * * * *

Paradox. Paradise. Paraclete. The themes and concepts moved smoothly through Marissa’s mind. Nothing had changed—except that everything about her fellowship research had fallen into place. The goal of that research was already being achieved. The synthesis of knowledge and compassion, coming together effectively and humanely. All she need do was help it along in her own way, and she could do that anywhere.

And her other research, on the immortalizing vector? She had yet to test the sealed vial Roger had returned to her. She did not yet know whether what it contained would be effective or humane, but she and others would run the tests, make the choices, inform the world on their progress—if any. That too would fall into place.

Looking about the cabin of the large transfer ship carrying them to tour the new habitats, Marissa realized that, indeed,
everything
had fallen into place. Atsuko beside her gazing out the viewport thoughtfully, Jhana Meniskos across the aisle reading a critique of Guaranty’s work (an actual paper book) while Seiji snoozed, all the other people here that she’d become acquainted with back in the habitat—increasingly, they were a community, a world of their own.

The pieces of the larger human puzzle were becoming clearer to her as well. The X-shaped structures which Jhana and Lakshmi and Seiji insisted on calling “refractors” had disappeared completely in light, apparently taking with them the problems that had plagued the VAJRA. No trace of the RATs or the distributed consciousness or the metapersonality “Jiro” remained. All the colony’s visitors (herself included but Jhana Meniskos first and foremost) had met with the negotiators from Earth and had made a broadcast appeal to that world. They had made clear that they were not hostages and—since the refractors had proven to be self-consuming artifacts no more dangerous than staged fireworks celebrating the launch of the
Swallowtail
and the opening of the two new habitats—the presence of occupation forces in space was absolutely uncalled for. Strangely, out of all the permanent residents, Paul Larkin’s word seemed to carry special weight with the negotiating team, though Marissa could not quite fathom why.

Some tense hours had followed while the troopships took up final positions around the habitat, but by then the media had already picked up the fireworks theme and voices in favor of bringing the troops home began to rise throughout the world with surprising speed. The corporate and national forces at last returned to Earth without having boarded the habitat, recalled to base amid UN and CP calls for more clearly defined communication channels between the habitat and Earth—channels the colonists were only too willing to establish.

But other things were happening too, on the Earth and in the heavens. Citizens’ movements had already toppled or were in the process of toppling an unprecedented number of morally bankrupt governments throughout the world—the largest such movements since the Revolutions of 1989 but far more peaceful and widespread than those movements of forty years ago had ever been. A number of the nations involved had broken up, decentralized, and begun reforming along bioregional lines. From what Atsuko had been telling her, the colony and its residents had recently been receiving far more inquiries into alternative lifeways, diverse governmental forms, and species preservation plans than they had ever expected to get. Even the corporate powers had been finding themselves confronted with unified and increasingly powerful consumer and stockholder revolts against globally-unsound corporate policies. Among the first concessions granted by the corporations had been greater autonomy for the space habitat and all its colonists—though no such increased autonomy had been formally requested by the HOME (no matter how joyfully it was accepted).

It was as if a light had been shone into the darkness of human history, Marissa thought. The world itself seemed more numinous. Certainly on Earth there were still many places where hunger drove out thoughts of love and beauty and divinity, but that was changing, would change, had to change. All these recent external manifestations had to be the result of an epiphany, an apocalypse of the revealing rather than destroying type, an apocalypse
within individuals
that was underlying all the changes outside.

Marissa thought of the individuals she knew up here. Of Jhana and Seiji and Lakshmi and their strange tale of meeting the ghost in the machine, Seiji’s dead brother Jiro apotheosized in virtual space. Of that brother’s persistence in another form after death and his disappearance along with the refractors—and the threesome’s attempts to explain that persistence and disappearance to her, with all their talk of “Mind as fractional dimension between the four dimensions of the universe we know and the n-dimensions of the plenum of all possible universes we can only guess at”, and “part of Jiro’s mind-fractal lodged in the LogiBoxes”, of “Möbius knots” and “Omega points” and “cosmic loopholes”, of “the informational lacuna of Gödel’s incompleteness theorem and the Heisenberg uncertainty principle, combined with the physical lacuna of the black hole singularity, where the general theory of relativity predicts that the general theory of relativity itself breaks down.” Thinking about it made Marissa smile. She hoped they enjoyed their explanation—whatever all that jargon really meant.

She thought too of Lev Korchnoi’s assertion that something luminous and divine had been operating in the performance of
The Temple Guardians
, and the paradoxical result that Lev, with genuine (and previously uncharacteristic) humility, felt that he and the Möbius Cadúceus Entertainment Collective could not truthfully accept all the praise for the great success of their performance that night. She recalled as well Lakshmi’s initial worries that she would be inundated with complaints about the disappearance of the Building the Ruins game—and Lakshmi’s surprise when the complaints proved minimal, as if nearly all the players had outgrown that game at the same time.

But most of all Marissa thought of the changes in Roger and Atsuko. Roger, as soon as he was out of hospital, had sought her out, had sought Jhana out, had sought out all those people he had hurt, or threatened with his laser—to apologize profusely to all concerned. The weapon he had given up, had voluntarily put himself into therapy, and (perhaps most astonishingly of all) he and his mother were at last able to hold a civil, respectful, and even mutually loving conversation, without the rancor and gnawing tensions that had always underlain their words to each other before. Aside from his constant mechanical drafting of angels and his occasional propensity to use nouns as verbs—“the true Christian
Christs
, the true Buddhist
Buddhas
”—he seemed to be doing quite well and quite differently than he had been, before. What had attracted her to him had only grown since the change, and what had repelled her seemed to have disappeared.

Atsuko had loosened whatever grip she had on her son too, proving remarkably open even to such ideas as Roger’s decision to travel with Paul Larkin to some obscure South American headwater. In her time spent with Atsuko of late, Marissa had also noticed in her mentor a more profound sensitivity and intellectual acuteness that raised the tenor and importance of all their conversations remarkably. Perhaps these changes weren’t all one-sided either. Perhaps she had changed as well. Certainly part of it was the deepening respect they felt for each other, but there was also something else, more even than that.

She followed Atsuko’s gaze out the viewport. The longer Marissa stared at the universe out there, the more it seemed to shimmer and scintillate, the more it seemed alive, thoughtful, concerned—as she herself was.

“All times and place really
are
full of compassionate attention,” Marissa said quietly. “I used to just belief that, but now at last I have eyes to really see it.”

Atsuko turned toward her, nodding, her own eyes moist as she squeezed Marissa’s hand.

* * * * * * *

Jhana looked up from the old-style book in her hands, remembering something Marissa had said about electronic notes and comments from another flight, another time. There had been something about utopia not being something to test but rather something by which we are tested. Something about the eternal coming into time.

Thinking of Michael, Jhana wondered about tests and time and eternity. That image of Mike, sorrowful and forgiving, that she thought she saw in the virtual universe Jiro had created—was it real? Where had it come from? Something fabricated from her memories? Her hopes? Or was it true, what Jiro had said—that there is no death, only a change of worlds? That the body was just a machine? Was that an illusion as well? Was it all illusion?

She hoped never to be disillusioned of her belief in that necessary fiction. It was already helping her in many ways—not least of all helping her to forgive in her heart and mind Rick, for his betrayal of her, and of himself.

She glanced at Seiji sleeping beside her so peacefully, and wondered. Love, she thought. The most saving of all illusions, the most necessary of all fictions. She did not think it would happen to her again, that she could be so much in love that she was now, looking at Seiji this moment, willing to leave behind the world of her birth.

Deaths and births. This man had passed through her when they were in virtual space. Her ability to “think like a place” had proven a blessing as well as a curse. She had made possible the communication between this side and the other, but now that she had time to think about it, was that really something so new? She had performed an ancient function, for men were always passing through women, passing out of their mothers’ wombs at birth, into the womb of their Great Mother at death.☺

She glanced out the viewport, thinking thoughts she knew had been Marissa’s, though she didn’t know how she knew, or how she had shared another’s thoughts. They came unbidden into her head as she looked at her home world below and thoght of a sanctuary candle burning in the silent cathedral of space, and how its sublime beauty had become something she could no longer take for granted. In her eyes now, that beauty refused to fade or diminish.

She felt the worlds they could build in space might never be so beautiful as that first home. But perhaps it would be only after human beings had travelled the universe, when they had passed through everywhere, had seen and experienced all—perhaps only then could they hope to return to where they had begun and truly know their Mother for the first time.

Seiji stirred slightly beside her. Jhana thought she overheard one of her fellow passengers say something about “Bodhisattvas” and “a mountain of light descending.” What a curious phrase, that last. Certainly she had misheard. The conversation continued but, returning to her book, she vowed not to eavesdrop. If what they were talking about was important she would find out about it in due time. After all, who could say that mountains of light might not be descending quite often, from now on?

Lightpaths
, which Ace Books published in 1997, was the first novel-length child of my mind to find its place in the world. Looking back on it after all these years, I am amazed by its energy and its idealism. Both of those stem, to a large degree, from the circumstances under which I began work on the book—what chaoticians call “sensitive dependence on initial conditions.”

Determined to publish a novel, I had in the Summer of 1990 just resigned from the small liberal-arts college in the Midwest where I held a tenure-track professorship in English literature. With my wife Laurel, I relocated to central California. In a couple of months during the Fall of that year (while “the world was wending its way into the Persian Gulf War,” as I noted in the acknowledgments page to the 1997 edition of the novel), I speed-wrote the first version of
Lightpaths
.

The impetus for that effort came from my having learned of the existence of a well-funded writing contest, entries to which were to emphasize “positive visions of the future.” I believed in such visions. That is why
Lightpaths
is shaped by the tradition of utopian novels, and why the book is itself as close as I’ve yet come to writing a utopia.

That belief too was why, as I was writing the novel and teaching part-time, I was also busily protesting my country’s march to war. Even after half a dozen years of giving much of my free time and energy to peace and social justice work, I very much believed that any internal contradictions in the phrase “truth, justice, and the American way” could still be overcome with relative ease.

There was (as also noted in the 1997 acknowledgments) a more personal impetus for the writing as well: in 1990 my brother, Vincent John “Jay” Hendrix, had been dead for less than two years. An idealist with a beautiful soul, eventually Jay had been twisted by mental disorders to the point that, just short of his twenty-seventh birthday, he froze to death in the Laramie Mountains. Seiji Yamaguchi’s deceased brother in this novel, Jiro Ansel Yamaguchi, owes a lot to whom my brother was and how I tried to make sense of his life and death through the writing of this book.

Others to whom the book owes much for its ideas (if not its characters) include two friends of mine: philosopher D. Bruce Albert, for our discussions of the nature of consciousness, and landscaper Stuart Straw, for his knowledge of horticulture. Both are acknowledged in the 1997 edition, but continue to be worthy of acknowledgment here.

Despite the energy and idealism of both the author and the book, the novel was a long time coming into the world. With the completion of the contest version of the manuscript, I finally had something under my belt that I thought would be worth further effort. There was, however, much work still to be done, and much of the publishing labyrinth still to be navigated. Along the way I picked up an agent, who was fascinated by how “retro” the book felt.

I suppose that retro feel came not only from the book’s idealism and utopian emphasis, but also from what I referred to in the 1997 acknowledgments as the book’s “summing up of my debt to a century of science fiction writers who have shaped my thinking.” In the growth of the conflict between Earth and the orbital habitat, I can now see not-so-dimly the ghost of the conflicts between Earth and colonies which one finds in Clarke’s
Earthlight
, Nourse’s
Raiders from the Rings
, Heinlein’s
The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress
, and many more. The mystical elements in the novel also owe much to Clarke (and through him, to Olaf Stapledon), the ecological elements to Frank Herbert and George R. Stewart, and the lyrical elements to Ray Bradbury. Much of the sheer weirdness of the book is indebted to Alfred Bester, Theodore Sturgeon, and Fritz Leiber, particularly to the last for the characterization of Roger Cortland: for the great truth that villains do not generally see themselves as villainous but rather as rational and forward-thinking, even when one of Cortland’s primary motivations is what he calls his “scopogynomachiaphilia” (see also Leiber’s
A Spectre Is Haunting Texas
and
The Big Time
in this regard).

Finally, in January of 1996, I met with Ginjer Buchanan at Ace. I gave her the manuscript for
Lightpaths
and a proposal for my second novel,
Standing Wave
. Ginjer read the
Lightpaths
manuscript, and within a few short weeks had cut a contract for a two-book deal with me. I was very pleased.

Now, thirteen years after its initial publication and twenty years after I began work on it, I am pleased all over again to have this novel coming back into the world once more, thanks to The Borgo Press.

Howard V. Hendrix

November 2010

About the Author

Howard V. Hendrix
is the author of numerous poems, short stories, and essays, as well as half a dozen novels, several short fiction collections, and nonfiction books. He tries to live quietly with his wife and their animal companions in the Sierra Nevada Mountains.