Lightpaths (9 page)

“Since it’s so expensive to ship anything in bulk up the well from Earth, most all our plant material arrives in the form of seeds or clonal tissue cultures—all quarantined and scrupulously inspected. Pest control again. No messing with pesticides or fungicides or herbicides anywhere near the growing areas.”

As they walked along, Atsuko’s eyes strayed up through the transparent roofing to what looked like a great fluorescent light bar hanging in the sky.

“What about lighting?”

“Oh, that’s all controllable too. We can control levels of light intensity, photoperiod, day/night cycles, you name it—just by using screens on the lightpaths.”

“Lightpaths?” Atsuko asked, feigning ignorance. “Like the lightbar above us? Is it some kind of new technology?”

The wiry woman in coveralls looked at her strangely.

“New technology? I don’t think so. New use of an old idea, maybe. The purpose of lightpaths is to bring light into darkness. That’s one thing we have a lot of out there—light. This habitat is in high circular orbit, above the Earth’s radiation belts and below the moon, so eclipses are very infrequent. We have virtually unlimited sunlight. The lightpaths are paths of reflected sunlight. All the light in the agricultural tori is sunlight reflected from the mirrored surface of the space colony’s central axis—what you’re calling a ‘lightbar’. The light inside the big central habitation sphere is reflected sunlight too, only instead of the lightpaths bouncing off the central axis they bounce off the mirrored surfaces around the sphere itself and come in through the light zones or glass latitudes near the ‘poles’ of the sphere.”

Atsuko nodded, as if beginning to understand. A pungent odor assailed her nostrils. Onions?

“Yes, I read something about all this before,” Atsuko/Karen said, “but I still don’t quite understand. Excuse my weakness in science, or in visualizing this, but how can you let light in without letting in everything else the experts talk about—dangerous radiations like solar flares and heavy nuclei and cosmic rays?”

Ms. Petrunkevitch was at the moment stooping and looking at rice plants growing in an experimental hydroponic polyculture, apparently evaluating the kind of yield the crop was producing. She stood and turned to Atsuko with her right index finger upraised.

“The key thing is that it’s
reflected
light,” Lexi said enthusiastically. “We have so much radiation shielding above, below, and around this habitat that if it weren’t for the way the mirrors are placed and their lightpaths directed, this whole place would be dark as the inside of a cave. But that’s just the point: the mirrors reflect the good part of the electromagnetic spectrum—mostly the visible range—down to us here and in the sphere, but not the bad part, the dangerous part. That part is absorbed or deflected by the radiation shielding.”

“I see,” Atsuko said with a nod. That idea of letting only the ‘good part’ in both pleased and puzzled her. Was that what they were doing in terms of the HOME culture as a whole? She hoped not, for cultural homogeneity of that sort, though it might make things easier in the short run, might lead to fatal rigidity in time. Better to cope with the reality of the darkness—or the “bad light”—rather than try to screen it out.

Atsuko’s gaze lingered on a tight patch of structures that looked to be more than just agricultural outbuildings.

“Are those homes?” she asked, faux naively. “I thought everybody lived in the central sphere.”

“Most people do,” Lex said. “But some—about a sixth of the colony, I guess—find living in the greenhouses lighter, airier.”

Lexi paused, bending down to examine the green tops of a field planted in various tubers and underground starch-storers. The one Atsuko recognized was labelled POTATOES in several languages.

“That combination of shielding and mirror and lightpath I just told you about makes it possible for us to work and even live in these greenhouse agricultural tori, safely. No unexpected frosts or droughts or deluges. Because of the conditions here we can make good and increasing use of techniques like green manuring, biodynamics, polyculture cropping, extensive permaculture.”

Lexi gazed around until she spotted an example of what she was trying to explain.

“That area there, for instance, the one that looks like a field gone wild? That’s based on Native American milpa polyculture, corn and beans and squash all growing together. The high-growing corn plants shelter the more delicate beans, and the squash vines grow from mound to mound among and between the corn and bean plants. The squash provides good, moisture-preserving cover for the soil, while the beans in turn fix nitrogen in the soil and aid in the growth of the corn and squash.”

Spreading her arms out to encompass the plantings around her, Lexi turned to her with a smile in which there flickered more than a little pride.

“Our fields are a mosaic of monocultural and polycultural strategies. We do multiple planting in some places, seeding one or more crops shortly before the previous crop has been harvested. We can pull off a phenomenal number of crops per twelve month cycle. Even without the use of gene-engineered self-nitrifying cereal crops, these ag lands and hydroponic plots around us here would already be, on average, productive enough to support over two hundred people per hectare.”

Listening to the sound of a rooster crowing somewhere nearby, Atsuko was reminded that she really should spend more time boning up on agricultural practices—but she clearly remembered the implications of that level of productivity.

“Amazing! But that would mean you could support the entire colony’s population, permanent and transient, on only twenty hectares—”

“—and we have a good deal more than twenty hectares under cultivation,” Lexi said with a nod, still stopping to look at this plant or that as they walked along. “Yes, I know. All our granaries, silos, storage facilities—they’re all full. I know it sounds a bit like carrying coals to Newcastle, but recently we’ve begun sending fully laden grain barges down the gravity well to Earth, as humanitarian aid to help alleviate famines and starvation shortages.”

“Really?” Atsuko stared at her, as if genuinely surprised. “But I hadn’t heard of that!”

“No, you wouldn’t have,” Lexi said, as if confiding a secret. “It’s being done very quietly through several international philanthropic organizations.”

“But why hasn’t it been publicized?” Atsuko wanted to know, playing her role to the hilt. “The HOME consortium should be shouting such good public relations to every satellite dish and rooftop antenna on the planet!”

Lexi smiled awkwardly, pushing a recalcitrant lock of grey-blonde hair back from her brow. As she spoke, however, the expression on her face grew gradually more serious.

“You’d think that, wouldn’t you? But it’s not the case. I’m afraid there are some rather powerful groups on Earth opposed to our philanthropy, even if it is for a good cause. The major grain and food agricorps don’t want us upsetting the market, even though what we’re sending down is only a tiny fraction of Earth’s production.”

Lexi paused, crunching a piece of clotted dirt to dust under the toe of her boot. She snapped a stalk off a slender grass stalk and twirled it between her fingers a moment before clamping her teeth round the butt of it.

“And then there are those powerful people who, if they knew of it, would feel what we’re doing is not a good cause—that it’s counterproductive. They’d say what they’ve said before in similar circumstances: why feed people who are only going to breed more people who will also need to be fed? By alleviating the suffering of the living, we are only creating more suffering, greater numbers of the suffering among those, as yet unborn, whom we will one day be unable to feed. Even up here there are some who say that we should be ‘an island of plenty in a sea of want,’ hoarding what we have, letting all those born into less fortunate times and places starve and die.”

Lexi turned suddenly toward her, the grass stalk dangling from between her lips. Was her face flushed from emotion, or was it just “color” from healthy work?

“They’ve got a point,” Atsuko said. “Quality of human life versus quantity of human life....”

“Yes,” she said, sighing abruptly and turning away. “But I wonder sometimes if their argument is so altruistic—or if it might not be motivated at some level by the selfishness of race or place, greed or creed.”

Lexi began walking quickly along a looping route that, Atsuko could see, was taking them back toward the plaza where she had met the ag worker.

“But we can’t just let them starve,” Lexi continued, impassioned, as they strode quickly down the path. “Not if we still have compassion. Not if we really believe that through human reason we can learn to control the growth of our own population. Not if we really believe we can break out into space, that we can build enough homes in the sky to save the homeworld back home. Not if we still believe in ourselves.”

After Lexi subsided, there was only the sound of their footsteps on the path for many minutes. No word passed between them until they stepped at last back onto the small plaza near the transit station.

“Thank you very much for the tour—and the conversation, Ms. Petrunkevitch,” Atsuko told her, shaking Lexi’s hand as she prepared to take her leave. “It gives me hope that we might someday find a way of doing with human nature what you people have managed to do with the radiation of space—to let shine all that is good in it, and absorb and deflect all that is bad.”

Smiling, Lexi finished shaking hands with her, then thoughtfully removed the slender stalk of grass from between her teeth, staring at it as she held it in her hand.

“You’ll have to ask other people about that one,” she said, thrusting the grass stalk firmly between her teeth once more. “Where I pull a weed, I try to plant a seed, but pulling up darkness from the human soul is a bit out of my league.” She thrust her hands in her pockets and turned her eyes toward the ground. “I’m just a part-time farmer in the sky. Besides, we have no weeds up here—only plants growing sometimes where we don’t want them to be. Maybe the same is true on Earth. Nice meeting you, Ms. Ohnuki. I hope you enjoy your stay with us.”

Atsuko would have loved to say more—to have told Lexi how pleased she was with her answers, even to have revealed her true identity—but at that moment her bulletcart pulled in, so she could only wave and run, flying into the cart that would take her back up to the ridge, into the zero-gee corridor sheathed in light, and away.

* * * * * * *

Jhana sat in her Extinction House virtuality, looking at the data as she already had, time and again. She watched the graphs rise and fall as the computers ran the numbers through Schliessen-Schwann and Hardy-Weinberg transforms, through chaos screeners, through de-complexification equations, the works. Still the problems raised by
Heterocephalus glaber
remained. What constituted an effective population size among naked mole-rats? Average colony size was what? About seventy? Yet there were records of colonies of four hundred individuals. How big a threat was genetic drift to their viability? Their strategy of consanguineous mating was so complete that members of a colony were essentially clones—sharing more genetic material than lab mice that had been inbred for sixty generations. That incestuous mating strategy was a great help toward making mole-rats eusocial, but how did it fit in with population expansion through colony fissioning?

Trying to make sense of it all, concentrating so acutely on it hour after hour—it gave her a headache. Commanding her virtuality off, she got up and left her cubicle. At first she thought she’d just stretch her legs, but soon enough she found those legs carrying her toward the lab lounge and coffee. When she got there, she was glad to find the lounge empty so she might remain alone with her thoughts.

On one of the lounge’s trideo units she called up an image of Earth viewed from the habitat, real time and 3-D. She sat staring at it for quite a while, trying to make sense of it, and herself, and where she was now.

The lounge didn’t remain empty long enough for her to come up with all the answers, though. She’d barely finished her first shot of caffeine when the gnomish Paul Larkin, dressed in yet another variant of his usual denim prole-wear, came in and poured himself a cup, intent on striking up a conversation—or at least intent on hearing himself talk.

“Feeling a little homesick, Ms. Meniskos?” Larkin asked, sitting down across the table from her and the 3Dified Earth floating between them.

“Yeah, I guess I must be,” she admitted. “I’ve been sitting here comparing the space habitat to my memories of Earth.”

“To the habitat’s disadvantage—am I right?”

“You are,” she said, nodding in agreement. “This place, it has no rugged mountains or deep canyons, or broad oceans—”

“No hidden mysterious spaces of caves underground,” Larkin interjected. “No vistas of unlimited stars overhead, no sense of Earth’s impersonal vastnesses of land and sky. None of the crazy riskiness of walking on the outside of a body spinning in space. I know the feeling well.”

“Does it bother you sometimes?” Jhana asked.

“Sure,” Larkin said. “Here everything is thoroughly inside. Safe, like the womb. A totally humanized space, artificial, created and maintained absolutely by human beings. A clean, well-lighted cave among the stars, a hollow earth, with gardens. Pastoral, bucolic, even beautiful—but I doubt it could ever be sublime. For that you need something that isn’t human, something wild and unconquered. In wilderness lies the preservation of the world, as Thoreau said. I used to wonder what he meant by that, until I came here.”

Jhana stared at him a moment. He really
had
done some thinking about this—that was obvious.

“Don’t you think there might be a danger in that?” she asked, swirling her coffee a bit.

“What do you mean?”

“I don’t know,” she said, though actually she did know. “It’s just that, in my work, I have to think about isolation and genetic drift a lot. If these habitats are successful, what happens when generation after generation has lived in them? What if the residents eventually don’t want to leave the womb anymore? What if they think it really
is
crazy to walk around on the outside of a body spinning in space—like Earth?”