Lightpaths (6 page)

“Something about the leaves,” Jhana said, looking about her, almost feeling as if she were being quizzed by a benevolent, very enthusiastic teacher. “Different shapes, patterns. And the way all the plants go together, in levels, from the low plants and bushes and flowers up to the bigger bushes and the fruit trees. The way it all blends, you can’t tell where the gardener leaves off and nature begins.”

Yamaguchi, smiling happily, bowed slightly.

“Thank you. You’ve just given me the finest compliment I could possibly hope for. That’s exactly the aim of my design, that blend. The paradox of contrived naturalness—just like this whole habitat.” They began to walk forward slowly. “You named the first two elements right off—color and scent, particularly the way the colors and scents play off against each other. The third item—the shapes of the leaves, the look and feel of them, the heights and shapes of the various plants, the way their levels interact visually—that I call texture. The poet Shiki describes it in an old haiku: ‘Roses: / The flowers are easy to paint, / The leaves difficult.’ You’ve got a good eye, picking out the texture factor—much subtler than I was, in interrupting your appreciation of it. Again, my apologies.”

“That’s okay,” Jhana said with a wan smile. “But if you feel the need to atone, you could do me a favor.”

“Name it.”

“Since you’re the designer of this garden maze, maybe you would be so kind as to show me the quickest way back to the courtyard from here?”

“No problem. Follow me.”

Jhana smiled politely as Seiji, who did seem to know the garden quite well, led her unerringly through all its multi-hued, multi-scented, multi-textured complexity.

From another path she heard someone twanging an amplified reverb guitar and a woman’s voice singing
The global Brain has gone insane and now seeks suicide to end its pain
—all to a jaunty Gilbert-and-Sullivanesque tune. The song had been a morbid little hit in some avant-garde quarters a few years back. Approaching Seiji and Jhana on their own path came two men with maniacally bright eyes, dangling conversations over an abyss only they seemed to appreciate.

“A day is a mushroom on the mycelium of time, maaaan—”

“Yeah! And the mycelium of time grows in the night soil of eternity! I cog it.”

“‘Eternity. It’s as real as shit.’”

“So true, so true. The Huxter never wrote truer words.”

Jhana stared questioningly at Seiji, who flashed an embarrassed grin and glanced down at the path passing under their feet.

“A couple of our amateur mycologists, I’d guess. Some of the coprophilic fungi in the waste degradation system possess, um, hallucinogenic properties. They seem to have discovered that.”

“You mean they’re eating magic mushrooms from around the sewer lagoon?”

Seiji nodded. Jhana shook her head in disbelief.

“We have no controlled substances here,” Seiji said with a shrug. “Our only requirement is that anyone who plans on indulging in the use of any mind-altering substance be thoroughly informed as to the nature and effects of that substance—and that the user assumes full responsibility for usage, in no way imposing that usage on other members of the community without their stated agreement. Informed consent, improved quality of life, ordinary politeness—you’d be surprised how far they’ve gone toward transforming substance abuse into a non-problem here.”

They began climbing a flight of steps leading to the opposite side of the courtyard from which she’d first descended to the gardens. She was aware of the musicians playing again, but they were further away and not nearly as loud as they had been earlier.

“—ecocatastrophic overcrowding of Earth and the suffering of all the billions we’ve left down there,” said a black woman to the listeners gathered round the paté de foie gras as Jhana and Seiji came up to the table. Jhana wondered briefly if the paté could be real, here in Textured Vegetable Protein land. More likely paté de faux gras, here. “Ozone burnout, heattrap atmosphere, the Big Red Tide, cyclonic ‘dissipative structures’, rising sea levels, increased police-state totalitarianism, religious extremism—my sister’s usual catalog of eco-lapse and doomed humanity. I told her I was only going to be up here for a year and the year was almost up, but she kept coming at me from all those thousands of miles away. So I shrugged and told her, ‘Hey, where do you get off thinking humanity is so important? We’re just another species, one that’ll go extinct like any other.’ That shut her up.”

“It usually does,” Jhana muttered, remembering her own conversations with Chicken Littlers of various stripes. But Seiji, who seemed to know something of the situation, would have none of it.

“Not a good answer, Ekwefi,” he said, spreading the apparent paté on a cracker as he sat down at the table. “Your sister was right: as a species we face enormous problems that must be dealt with—continually. Easy biologist’s cynicism is no answer at all.”

The woman Ekwefi, still standing, gave him a condescending glance.

“Oh? And how would you have responded, O Wise Seij? Hm?”

“First off,” Seiji said, taking a bit more paté and filling a glass with wine, “I would have agreed with her that ‘too many people and too much per capita consumption’ are indeed the root problems. We can’t do much without a curb on our growth and greed rates as a species. Then I’d tell her that up here we’re trying to build enough artificial paradises up here so we can eventually alleviate Earth’s population burden somewhat through emigration. Two more space habitats even larger than this one are scheduled to open within the month—and they’ll be coming faster, now that we can use micromachine assemblers and replicators to make active surfaces.”

He paused to take a sip of wine—quickly, continuing before the woman had a chance to jump in again.

“There might even someday be enough space habitats, to absorb Earth’s annual human population increase,” he continued, “if that increase slows enough. A bit further down the line, Mars will be ecopoesed and there’ll be enough habitable area in space so that we can begin actually reducing Earth’s population, eventually to well below the one billion mark, where it belongs. Once that has happened we can start the reconditioning process, let the Mother World start healing herself, reverting to whatever new natural state ol’ Gaia can come up with—”

Someone had brought over another bottle of wine from one of the other tables and Seiji refilled his glass, barely pausing in his discourse. Jhana had the distinct sense that Seiji knew the woman well, and that they’d also had this conversation before.

“—and during the whole restoration process we’ll be reintroducing all the species currently being preserved live, or cryogenically, or in the genome banks in the zoos and arks and our own biodiversity park. Once Earth is at last restored, it’ll be a holiday world, a vacation planet where human beings are primarily just tourists, grown children occasionally visiting their mother.”

Ekwefi threw back her head and laughed.

“That’s the rosiest scenario I’ve heard in a long time. You know what my sister Denene would say to that? She’d say databits and freeze-dried remnants do not a species make—the animal and its context are fundamentally connected and to truly recreate an animal you have to recreate its entire environment—”

“And she’d be right,” Seiji agreed quickly.

“She’d also say this place is a college campus in the sky and we do too much ivory tower theorizing. She’d say we have too much faith in technological progress. She’d start talking about how we’re a rich and privileged elite in the ultimate Big House on the highest hill. She’d say all HOME’s claims of ‘multi-ethnicity’ are bull. She’d launch off about Master Race in Outer Space types fleeing to an orbital suburb of Earth City, a lifeboat for the powerful, another technofascist nonsolution to human problems—”

Ekwefi took a quick sip of wine, her index finger held up to indicate that she was not done with her say yet and did not want to be interrupted.

“—and I don’t know if maybe she doesn’t have a point after all. I mean, doesn’t it seem sort of odd that all of us up here who are so dedicated to peace and social justice and world-saving are at the same time so isolated from the world we’re trying to change? A plot to wall off activists and dissidents and idealists in a big isolated holding pen couldn’t have done a better job of getting all of us up here! To the people living in the trashlands down there, an elitist paradise in space must look pretty hollow.”

Ekwefi took a long pull on her wine. Frowning deeply, Seiji brushed crumbs from his left pant leg while the people around him waited for a response, spectators at a conversational tennis match waiting for the serve to be returned. He put his wine glass down and stared straight at Ekwefi with a frankness that made Jhana suspect they had once been intimate—and not so long ago.

“Ekwefi, your sister’s still alive. Be glad of it. You know damn well I’ve seen the sacrifice zones outside the cities back on Earth, the areas you call the trashlands. I’ve seen the cities of people living in steaming mountains of rubbish and filth and debris, scavenging from womb to tomb in the garbage. I’ve seen them building their houses of trash, feeding off trash, finally becoming just more trash to be body-bagged and incinerated when they die. That was how my brother was lost. A refugee living in a smoldering wasteland. In an ancient abandoned refrigerator he’d hulled clean and rigged to lock from inside. Coming out only at night, rising in darkness from a white coffin, convinced he had already died or forgotten how to live. One of the living dead, a vampire, a very sallow, failed, shivering Christ.”

A tension, a trapped feeling began to surround Jhana. Sensing it also in the body language of the other people within range of Seiji’s voice, she wondered if they too were feeling as if the political had suddenly become personal, too personal, as if they’d accidentally walked in on someone else’s very private and particular nightmare.

“You know I think about all of this a lot, Ekwefi,” Seiji continued in a somewhat different tone. “About how stupid and abstract it seems, trying to save the world when I couldn’t even save my own brother. But I have to because I’m still alive. Up here we can’t take our brothers and sisters for granted—not any of us. Up here we’re absolutely interdependent. A shell in space can’t afford to let people fall through the cracks because it can’t afford cracks to begin with. We must be the keepers of our garden, our brothers’ and sisters’ keepers, because it’s the garden and our brothers and sisters that keep us alive. That’s a feedback, a message even a hollow sphere in the sky can send back to Earth.”

Someone coughed uneasily. Seiji grinned, swirling the wine in his nearly empty glass slowly, carefully, before making an awkward attempt at recovery.

“I must be drunk, to be going on so! Excuse me for getting so personal.”

The tension relaxed and people eased away. Jhana lingered, for reasons she could not at that moment fathom. So too did Ekwefi.

“Sorry to have reminded you of your brother’s death,” Ekwefi said quietly.

“Sorry I dragged his corpse out. Again.”

“I have to know, though,” she said. “You’re not some simple-minded gung-ho technological optimist. Do you really think an artificial paradise can give people real hope?”

Seiji stopped his careful centrifuging of the lees of his wine and stared thoughtfully into an indeterminate distance.

“Yes. I have to. Humanity may be just another species, but it’s mine, it’s ours. I have to believe in the Future Perfect Imperative.”

Ekwefi smiled and squeezed his hand, and in those actions Jhana thought she could read again a shared history that had ended and yet not ended.

“You told me that story, Seij. No language in the world has a future perfect imperative.”

“Then we’ll just—” he said, pausing to stand, “—we’ll just have to create a language that does.”

Excusing himself, he crossed the courtyard and disappeared into the house, leaving Jhana and Ekwefi standing alone beside the table. As if at some unspoken signal, they both sat down. They exchanged introductions and a silence opened between them while they sat and nibbled the remains of what looked and tasted very much like the liver of a fat space-raised goose that had died for their dining pleasure. Even here in TVP land—where she’d heard that most everyone was one or another stripe of vegetarian—not everyone eschewed meat, apparently. Either that, or they’d developed the best substitutes for flesh and fowl she’d ever come across.

“I didn’t mean to eavesdrop,” Jhana said, her curiosity getting the better of her accustomed reserve, “but you mentioned a story that Mister Yamaguchi told you. What was it about?”

Ekwefi Muwakil looked at her through fatigue-veiled eyes.

“Ask him yourself. He’ll tell just about anybody just about anything about his life.” Ekwefi smiled to herself, as if at some remembered mischief. “When we were all hot and heavy and involved, that extreme openness used to get on my nerves. Got me so angry once I said he suffered from ‘flatness of affect’, as the psychs call it.”

“Does he?”

“What? Oh, no. He’s probably one of the sanest people I ever met. Too sane. That’s why his brother’s madness and death still disturb him so much.”

“Yes,” Jhana said, nodding. She had sensed a very personal affinity, a sympatico, for such grief in herself. “I picked up on that right away.”

Ekwefi looked at her oddly, with a depth of penetration that was almost mocking, somehow.

“Really? Are you disturbed too? Or are you like the rest of us—too disturbed to admit you’re disturbed?”

Jhana shrugged her shoulders and the palms of her hands upward as if to say “Who can say?” But there remained something, well,
disturbing
about Ekwefi’s question, even after they’d said their good-byes. It would not leave her head but instead resonated there like a struck tuning fork, until she felt increasingly tired, wrung out, and longed for sleep so silent no alarm could ring her from it.

Roger Cortland opened the lab door angrily and entered. Marissa gave him a startled look, which he returned. He hadn’t expected to find anyone in yet, least of all his newly-arrived postdoc.

“Roger! You’re up early!” she said. He noticed that she was dressed casually—no lab coat. Obviously she hadn’t expected to see him here yet. “My internal clock is all off from the trip up the well, so I thought I’d get to work. Did you hear back on your funding requests?”

Cortland groaned.

“Yeah. Just got the news. One mention of ‘transgenic humans’ seems to have practically sent them diving under the conference table. I’d heard there were a bunch of forward-thinking psiXtians among the directors. You’d think they, of all people, would understand—living in those solar-powered underground homes in the desert, walking around in hemp robes and rope sandals preaching ‘light-livelihood’ and ‘minimal impact economy’. But I might as well have been talking to a bunch of medieval clerics.”

“None of the Digger scenarios appealed to them?” she asked with concern, moving closer, checking temperatures on a telomerase reaction she was running.

“Diggers, sandmen—it didn’t matter what I called them. Settling new planetary surfaces was too blue-sky for them, apparently.” Roger began to pace distractedly around the glass panes of the rat colony. He shook his head savagely without breaking his pacing. “They didn’t buy it. Acted like they doubted the results would really be human. And you know what was worse? The whole time I was on Earth I could almost hear them thinking, ‘Why would we need to settle planet surfaces, anyway? His own mother and the rest—haven’t they proven the space colony concept is workable? We have a lot invested in that already, don’t we?’ Damn but it’s frustrating to be the offspring of somebody everyone else thinks is a genius!”

“Hey,” Marissa said, putting her hands on the shoulders of this man who looked ready suddenly to kill or to cry. She began to massage out the balled-up tension around his shoulder blades. “Relax a little. Your face is clenched like a fist. Here.”

She took his head in her hands and with the tips of her fingers began to smooth the furrows from his forehead and temples. Roger resisted her ministrations at first but slowly yielded to them. He felt the tightbloodmetal spring in him unwinding a turn, two turns. Eyes closed, he stopped spinning on his thoughts and slowly calmed, becoming aware of the sounds in the room, the quiet hum of machinery, the scrabbling of mole-rat claws, the warmth of Marissa’s fingers on his face, the scent of her perfume—all making him feel so relaxed, even drowsy.

The scent of her perfume...

“Of course!” He fairly leapt from beneath Marissa’s fingers. “Why didn’t I think of it before!”

Marissa stared at him, an obscure disappointment rising in her features as she slowly pushed a dark-rooted red curl back from her forehead.

“Think of what?”

“Pheromones! Your perfume made me think of it! There’s a chemical key to mole-rat social organization, not just a physical or behavioral one—no matter what those who follow Faulkes’ behavioral/physical explanation say!”

“Wonderful,” Marissa said, with evident sarcasm. But Roger Cortland was already off in the world of his head, calling up articles on
Heterocephalus glaber
via a soft keyboard on the arm of his lab coat.

* * * * * * *

“Lev, are you sure these things are safe?” Lakshmi asked hesitantly, staring up at the two machine assemblages towering toward the warehouse-like ceiling of Industrial Torus 2.

“Absolutely—or they will be, at least,” replied the lanky figure safety-belted into a cranny about a third of the way up the “Scylla,” as he called the particular mechanism he was working on. “I’d stake my life on it.”

“You may just be doing that,” Lakshmi said with a wry smile.

“Nonsense!” Korchnoi gave a small wave of dismissal as he began to rappel gracefully down the side of the mechanism. “It’ll be completely safe, once you’ve helped me work out some of the programming glitches. All just theatre, remember? Bells and whistles and special effects.”

Lakshmi watched as the thin albino-blond man slipped out of his climber’s harness and walked toward her with the fluid movements of a veteran dancer. The man undeniably had a certain style, a
sprezzatura
about him. Maybe too much.

“But the advance press release says these things”—Lakshmi’s eyes gestured toward the towering performance robots—“will be throwing missiles and bullets and bombs at you.”

Korchnoi sighed as he plucked his work gloves from his fingers.

“I make it a point never to read my own hype,” he said calmly, taking off a pair of wire-rimmed welder’s specs and carefully cleaning them with the shining silk handkerchief that had appeared almost magically from the pocket of his stained and spattered work coveralls. “The PR is true, but only to a certain degree. Stage fireworks, remember? Yes, missiles and such will be firing—do you know how much hassle I had to go through to get permission for that?—but everything’ll be soft-nosed and programmed to miss me, if we get rid of the glitches in time. As for the bombs, they’ll only be smoke and carbon dioxide, maybe a hint of carbon dioxide and methane. Just machine flatulence.”

The lanky man gave Lakshmi one of his shyly crooked smiles then—the same winning smile she’d seen in all the media.

“Oh my,” Lakshmi said, falling into mock fannish adoration, “what an unbearable honor it is for little old me to be working with the eccentric and enigmatic Lev Korchnoi himself, the habitat’s most renowned performance artist and robotheatre impresario, the mind behind Möbius Cadúceus—”

“All right, all right,” he said, laughing. “Put a cork in the schmooze. How about that new skysign symbol you were going to develop for the band? Have you got anything yet?”

“I’ve got something, all right,” Lakshmi said, nodding as she subvocalized commands to her hoverchair’s holojector. Immediately a beautifully complex form sprang into the air before them, a thing of self-consuming rainbow serpents—and much more.

“Wow! This is great!” Lev said, totally enthralled by what he was looking at. “Möbius Cadúceus was just a clever name, a vague idea in my head, but this—this turns it into something. What is it?”

“You tell me,” Lakshmi said evenly.

“It’s like the two ancient snakes that intertwined themselves about the staff of Asklepios,” Lev replied, walking around the hovering twisted halo of the thing, “but at the same time it suggests—I don’t know, a model of the interlocked base-pairs of the DNA double helix. It’s like a complex serpent-knot from the
Book of Kells
, or an illustration of the topology of three-space manifolds—both, and neither, at the same time.”

Lev shook his head, trying to break the form’s spell.

“It’s hypnotic!”

“Yeah,” Lakshmi deadpanned. “You might say that.”

“What’s it supposed to be?” Korchnoi asked.

“I don’t know,” Lakshmi said, pausing, deeply thoughtful. “It’s sort of a Rorschach tesseract—it’s what you make of it. Maybe it’s an ancient pair of tail-swallowing Ouroboroi. Or a new symbol for the infinite recycling of universes, taken from a cosmology yet to be invented. Who can say?”

“Come on, Laksh, you can, can’t you? I mean, you created it, right?”

“No, I did not.”

“What?”

“I made some tentative steps, trying to combine the idea of the Möbius strip and the medical symbol, the caduceus, but I wasn’t getting anywhere. I left it running and went to get some coffee. When I came back, that thing had appeared in my virtuality. Full blown.”

“How?”

“I’m not sure. Something came out of the net coordinator, the VAJRA, and constructed it for me.”

“You been feeding the brownies and the little people lately?” Lev asked, giving her a quizzical look.

“Hardly. I tried tracing the intrusion back to its point of origin. I think it came out of the LogiBoxes Seiji Yamaguchi gave me—the ones his brother Jiro owned.”

“Not that Jiro stuff again,” Lev said, grimacing. “Okay, okay. I can see this is all just an elaborate ruse to get me up to your place to troubleshoot the installation job I wish I’d never done on those damn ‘Boxes. Look, help me debug some of my robot programming first, and transfer this ‘skysign of unknown origin’ into the big holojectors, then I’ll get up to your place as soon as I can, all right?”

Lev turned away then, muttering. Lakshmi smiled to herself. Lev might grump about it, but at least he was someone knowledgeable about machine intelligences who could confirm or deny some strange possibilities she was beginning to suspect.

* * * * * * *

Jhana was disturbed by her first meeting with her immediate supervisor in Fukuda’s lab, a diminutive, cantankerous, white-haired senior scientist named Larkin, who eschewed lab coat and smock, preferring instead the politically self-conscious prole-drag of denim workshirt and jeans.

“So Tao-Ponto’s your tribe of cash-flow hunter-gatherers, eh?” he said, staring at her quizzically as she followed him through the Genetics Lab. “They still big into Tetragrammaton and Medusa Blue?”

“I’m afraid I’ve never heard of that, sir,” she said, trying to be polite.

“Yeah,” he said, looking at her appraisingly. “You are pretty young. I don’t suppose they’d want to talk about it to their employees, either—black mark and all. A potential Worldgate—scandals and conspiracies always used to be called ‘gates’ back then—but they covered it up good. Only place you could probably even find a reference to it would be something like an old copy of
Covert Action Information Bulletin
, some source like that. See, Tetragrammaton’s the big long-range survival plan. A living fossil from the Cold War days, when the shadow governments—the CIAs and KGBs and Mossads and MI-5s—played such a big role in running the planet. Before they went to work for the big corporations. Your corporate hierarchies are even worse, you ask me. They were the ones let the black hole sun thing happen at Sedona.”

He stopped and sneezed. Jhana hadn’t a clue as to what had set Larkin off on his diatribe—he was a biologist and cryonicist, after all, not a political scientist. Maybe he was some sort of obsolete politico? She tried to remember her history. Didn’t the old Right fear Big Government, and the old Left fear Big Corporations? Larkin seemed to be paranoid about both.

“Been spending too much time in the coldboxes,” he said, mopping at his nose with a frayed and faded handkerchief, then striding purposefully onward. “But I guess we shouldn’t bite the hand that feeds us. It’s only on the governments’ and corporates’ sufferance that we have our little cislunar Dreamland here to begin with. The Consortium keeps our biodiversity preservation projects funded—at least enough to get by—so I guess I shouldn’t complain too loudly, now should I?”

The short man turned a corner, Jhana following close behind, despite Larkin’s rapid pace.

“Good PR for the money and power types—’We prevent extinction. See how much we love Nature from the bottom line of our hearts?’ Good business too. Never know when these Orbital gene reserves might provide something valuable: another potent Amazonian analgesic, spidersilk organic steel, transgene micromachines. Ah, the profit motive. Greed works, in a limited sort of way.”

Larkin asked her to step forward and look through a retinoscope peephole beside a door. Its scan completed, the door unlocked and opened automatically, revealing a tidy, empty cubicle beyond.

“Your work station,” Larkin said blandly. “Your access code for the genome library has already been authorized. The library database has genome maps for all endangered species preserved here, as well as subdirectories of sex-linked, maternal organelle-linked, and parentally-imprinted genetic traits. You can interact with the system via keyboard and screen or through a virtual reality construct. If you have any questions, give me a call.”

Larkin left the cubicle, closing the door behind him. Jhana sat down at her workstation, placing on her head a connection circlet, about the size and look of wraparound sunglasses. The tiny embedded jacks and electrodes of the computer’s diadem whispered tingling pins-and-needles of static electricity across her skull. Adjusting her throat mike and dual view screens—one for each eye’s field of vision—she popped in her personal virtuality construct based on the Martha Shrine in what was now the Cincinnati Ark.

When she was a little girl, her parents had taken her to the Cincinnati Zoo to see the monument to Martha, the last passenger pigeon. The bird had once lived there at the Zoo, her every heartbeat tolling like a feathery bell until, on a morning when World War I raged far away, her keeper found her (and her species with her) dead at the bottom of her cage. Over ninety years later Jhana’s parents had showed their precocious girl-child the monument the zookeepers had built to Martha’s memory: a stone pagoda shrine, more appropriate to Nagasaki than to Cincinnati. It was there she’d first realized what extinction meant

Now she pumped HOME’s database through her own virtuality, her memorial to a memorial. As images and gene maps of frozen ghost species hovered before her in virtual space now, she thought of other ghosts, true ghosts in that long-ago shrine. Out front had stood the life-sized statue of Martha, in bronze more lasting than life, and colder—too cold to thaw, a death from which there had as yet been no technological resurrection. Inside, on three walls of the shrine, she remembered displays depicting the extinction of the once unbelievably numerous passenger pigeons. The last wall had been covered with descriptions of extinctions ongoing throughout the world—a display out of date before it went up. All of that she had incorporated into her personal virtuality, her House of Extinctions.

Jhana’s parents had been old enough to remember the times before the zoos became arks, old enough to remember when most of the animals caged in the zoos still roamed free somewhere in the world. During her parents’ lifetimes, though, the zoos had increasingly become home to animals that existed only in captivity. More and more the zoological gardens became museums, stuffed creature mausoleums, graveyard monuments to the Great Extinctions: Madagascar, Australasia, Amazonia, the great globe itself.