Lightpaths

by Howard V. Hendrix

  That was the spooky part: much of the “source laughter” on the tracks had been recorded fifty or sixty years ago, and many of those laughing were now dead, gone to ashes or worm’s meat. When she laughed along with the tracks, she was laughing with the dead in one big happy haunted human comedy.

  What a morbid thought! She must still be overwrought from the trip—she could tell, for though she was bone-tired she could not bring herself to lie back upon the bed and close her eyes.

  “I’m not in the mood for comedy right now,” she told the house, presuming it was smart. “Another channel. Something straightforward. Factual. Boring.”

  “—of Samosata,” a female narrator’s voice intoned from the wall screen, “or Edward Everett Hale’s story ‘The Brick Moon,’ published in 1869. But thoughtful consideration of the colonization of space—as opposed to the colonizing of planetary surfaces—probably only began with the work of Konstantin Tsiolkowsky in the first years of the twentieth century, and the work of Robert Goddard and J. D. Bernal somewhat later. Throughout the war-torn middle of the century, only the image of the ‘space station’ lingered—and usually only in boys’ books and science fiction. Even during the 1960s, the decade that saw humanity’s first landing on the moon, the space colony idea was largely forgotten.

  “Oddly enough, it was during the late 1970s that the space colony concept began to be given serious and practical consideration, at precisely the time when the American manned space program seemed a spent force, exhausted by the successful moon-landing effort of the previous decade. That the concept of the ‘humanization of space’ could germinate and begin to grow even in such an inauspicious season was largely the work of one man, a Princeton physics professor named Gerard K. O’Neill—”

  Great, Jhana thought, leaning back on her elbows on the bed. A documentary on the history of the space colony. Tourist propaganda. If that couldn’t put her to sleep, nothing could.

  During the “long, rocky road to realization of the colony” she found herself slipping in and out of troubled, restless, dream-filled sleep. From the screen, history played on.

  “Through the economy-shattering militarizations and failed spaceborne defense proposals of the eighties the L-5 Society—”

  Her lover Mike’s shining hovercycle bent and twisted and smashed under the glittering sun, his blood on the asphalt all the way to the curb, dyeing all the world, all the sun blood red, everything blood red and dying...

  “—end of the Cold War and—”

  Shivering in the sun with the shock of guilt, responsibility, sorrow...

  “—fall of the hypermilitarized superpowers to the status of praetorian guards shielding the planet’s billion or so ‘haves’ from its four- and then five-billion ‘have nots’—”

  Christmas. After church Mike in his new Air Force uniform presents her with the ring, asks her to marry him. Damsel in distress at this request from knight in shining armor but Yes, she says yes...

  “—the resource conflicts and redistribution wars at the century’s end, often masked as ethnic or neotribal clashes—”

  Mike, black and flashy and ambitious. Training to be a transatmospheric fighter pilot. His father dead years before in an Indo-Pak skirmish when Mike was ten. His parents’ marriage remembered by him and rewritten by his mother as a state of perfect bliss with never an argument. A standard Jhana is expected to meet and match...

  “—seeds of the new in the demise of the old. As early as 1990 the first man-made Biosphere was tested privately in Arizona, and a decade and a half later came the return to the moon, not by any nation, but in the form of the Space Studies Institute probe, Lunar Prospector—”

  Always ministering to Mike. Are you enjoying the party, dear? Finding enough people to talk to? Wherever they went....

  “—ecopoiesis in space, interrelations of biogeochemical cycles, mechanisms of biochemical adaptation, ecosystem stability—”

  Sure, I can wait till you finish your graduate work, Jhana. But I think we should have at least three kids, don’t you? And it’s best for them that you leave work for at least a year when each one is born...

  “—the sustainability realignment with its emphasis on spaceborne solar power stations and the development of prototype nanotechnology replicators—”

  Always Mike’s satellite. The reflected glamor of the pilot’s girl. Another pampered and polished decoration on the sleeve of his uniform. Barely conscious of her situation until she meets Rick, quiet blond student coworker, who knows of her engagement to the “flyboy,” loves her in patient quiet defiance of it....

  “—the ‘break out’ of investment capital into space after the turn of the century, particularly after the War Mite Disaster with its one hundred and twenty-five million dead from escaped military nanotech—”

  Last year of undergraduate studies, with Mike training far away, Rick close at hand. Seeing each other more, her feeling for Rick deepening despite her pledge to Pilot Mike. Love! Love. Love? Rick wants her to be who she wants to be, follow her own choices and career, but is that what she wants? He respects her more than true-knight-of-romance Mike does. But no. Despite Rick’s corporate job success fresh out of school, he’s bland, a pale shadow, not as flashy as Superpilot, must be lacking ambition. How can she respect a man who truly respects her...

  “—to the banning of ‘large-scale nanotech’ from Earth’s surface. Nonetheless the War Mite infestation, the ‘Nanogeddon,’ spurred the nations and transnationals to the cooperative effort that has resulted in the creation of the High Orbital Manufacturing Enterprise—”

  Jhana and Mike and Rick, a ballet of distance and time, not smooth but jerkily tugging, silent-movie spacewalk- awkward. That she loves Rick is proof of the incompleteness of her love for Mike. And the funding cuts coming too, the ones that will sack Mike out of the service, out of the work he’s prepared for all his life....

  “—deep recognition that ‘Earth was too small a basket for the human race to keep all its eggs in’ was all that was needed to overcome the so-called Westfahl objections. Construction on the first colony began within a century of Tsiolkowsky’s inklings and imaginings—”

  Mike’s sudden backhand exploding across her face as he breaks into tears. How can you do this to me? I don’t want the fucking ring back! We were perfect together! You’re the only person I’ll ever love! I can’t live without you and now you tell me you don’t want to live with me. Why are you doing this to me? Turning me into nothing—into shit! Throwing me over for some blond Aryan creep. That’s it, isn’t it? The old race thing. Good enough to defend this country but not good enough to marry one of its light-skinned daughters...

  “—a cosmocentric theory of intrinsic values coupled with the triumphal march of human settlement on the new frontier—”

  No no no she sobs from the floor, but he isn’t listening, has already slammed the door. Almond cookies burning in the oven. She hears the hovercycle choke and roar away. Then, faintly the banshee screech of monster lifttruck airbrakes slamming down, the dull hollow crunch of death’s metal jaws clamping shut.

  “No!” She sat bolt upright in bed.

  “—living proof of the truth of the words of Robert Goddard: ‘The dream of yesterday is the hope of today and the reality of tomorrow.’”

  Jhana stared dumbly at the wallscreen, at the ending credits of the program whose phrases had slipped and slithered, blind worms and confused snakes of language, through her half-dreamed memories. She rose from the bed and, still half asleep, began slinging her hangered garments onto hooks in the closet. A folded note fluttered to the floor from a pocket, the same note that had fluttered out earlier, like a living thing, some bird not wanting to be caged.

  DIAMOND THUNDERBOLT. WORTHWHILE PROJECTS. Both were scribbled in her own hand, above an encryption keycode number: 105366.

  Yessir, yessir, yessir, she thought. Heading for
the shower now, remembering restless sleep and restless waking, her aching head spun with the difficulty of distinguishing dreams from memories, hopes from fears, reality from nightmare.

  * * * * * * *

  “Here, let me take one of your bags,” Atsuko Cortland said, closing her facsimile copy of Lewis Mumford’s The Story of Utopias. Rising to grab a large bag and direct Marissa to her lodgings, Atsuko gazed at Marissa with a glance the younger woman could not interpret. “So you met my son.”

  “Yes! Met him—and now you! I’ve read all your books! And it’s all happened so quickly! Amazing!”

  “Oh, not really,” Atsuko responded, striding quickly away into the greenery of the Archive grounds, where they had agreed to meet. “Even including visiting scholars and professionals, we’re just a small town, population-wise. And I’m afraid I wasn’t here just to meet you. I do help manage our archives.”

  Marissa nodded. She almost had to run to keep up with the swift pace her escort set through the thickets of bananas and lianas, ginger plants and bird of paradise flowers. She was more than willing to sweat a bit, though, having been so lucky as to meet one of the famed Founders so soon after arriving in the habitat.

  “Tell me, what did Roger think of your research project?”

  “He liked my side project with mole-rats just fine,” Marissa said, winded, “but he didn’t much like the topic of my fellowship research. Said something about utopias being inherently authoritarian.”

  Atsuko smiled sadly and shook her head as they toiled up a small but surprisingly steep hill.

  “He still can’t get it out of his head that we’re trying to create some sort of utopia here.”

  “You’re not?”

  “Most definitely not,” she said thoughtfully. “We’ve looked at a lot of social engineering documents, certainly. But what we are is an experimental station in the fullest sense—an ongoing experiment on many levels.”

  Absently slipping her Mumford into her large shoulder bag, Atsuko sat down on the mooncrete bench they had come to at the top of the small hill.

  “We make no claim to having any sort of ‘whole’ or ‘final’ truth. Personally, if you asked them, I think most people here would tell you they believe in the truth of incompleteness and the incompleteness of truth.”

  Marissa, glad of the chance to rest, sat down on the bench beside her. Now that she had a moment to take Atsuko Cortland in, she saw that the older woman’s long black hair was streaked in a number of places with grey and white.

  “But certainly there are some basic principles you follow here?”

  “Of course,” Atsuko said. “Societies inevitably generate structures, more open or more restrictive as the case may be—but always something. On that spectrum of structures, though, we’re on the opposite end from most utopian proposals and actual communes. From my research into the subject—and maybe from yours too, Ms. Correa—it seems clear that most so-called utopian communities have rigid social structures and highly restricted technologies. They’re essentially monocultures, like wheat fields or cornfields or vineyards or orange groves—spaces of land planted entirely in a single crop.

  “Our case here is just the opposite: we have looser social controls than most communities on Earth. We actively encourage each other to explore the new social potentials made possible by our developing technology and novel situation. Look around you. See all the different species? Over fifty thousand of them here inside the sphere, many endangered. Hear the birds, the insects? Take a deep breath. Smell the flowers, the green scent in the air? It’s brave and it’s new and it’s a world, but it’s not a brave new world.”

  Marissa nodded quickly, reminded of how Atsuko’s son Roger had described naked mole rats as not really naked or moles or rats. Maybe it was a family way of speaking....

  “All our strength and all our sweetness rolled up into one ball,” the spry grey-haired woman said, standing and striding onward all too soon for Marissa’s tired muscles. “We’ve taken for our biological model not the monoculture but the natural community—a thing of diversity, like a rainforest, or chaparral, or savanna, or desert. We have functioning examples of all of those biomes here.” She reached into her shoulderbag and pulled out some fruit. “Would you like an apple, Ms. Correa?”

  “Certainly,” Marissa replied, gazing round at the lush greenery of the jungle landscape they were passing through on their way to her temporary residence. “Just so long as I have your assurance that this is not Eden—and you’re not Eve.”

  Atsuko laughed lightly, a sound like distant windchimes.

  “Rest assured. Everything you see around you has been achieved by the sweat of our brows—and that’s the only way it can be maintained. There have to be gardeners, even for a hanging garden in the sky.”

  She handed the apple to Marissa, who took it and ate it, juggling her luggage hand to hand as they walked.

  “Adam and Eve, you know,” Atsuko said as they walked. “Before the Fall they must have had the ‘bliss of bees or wristwatch calculators’, as my friend Cyndi Easter once put it.”

  Marissa almost laughed.

  “I’m sure there are theologians who would disagree strongly with that idea,” Marissa said with a smile, trying to keep pace.

  “Cyndi was a filmmaker,” Atsuko said with a shrug.

  “I don’t quite follow how you come to that conclusion—”

  “Straightforwardly,” Atsuko said, in the sort of mentorly tone Marissa knew all too well from graduate school. “In their prelapsarian condition, Adam and Eve were supposedly fully one with God, one with all the universe—and therefore could ‘know’ nothing in the way that fallen human beings like ourselves ‘know’ things.”

  Atsuko had stopped to look at a particularly beautiful flower blooming in a pathside garden—fortunately for Marissa, who was having trouble keeping up in more ways than one.

  “I still don’t quite get your meaning,” she said, winded once more.

  “The philosophers complexify it a bit,” Atsuko said, setting a blessedly slower pace at last, “but it’s a simple idea, really. To view something as an object of knowledge, to know it, is to see it as something distinct from oneself. Our ‘first parents,’ however, because they were fully one with divinity and all creation, could view nothing as separate from themselves and therefore could not know anything. Adam and Eve lacked the alienation inherent in the process of knowing—what philosophers call an ‘epistemological space’. Without that distance they could only be; they could never know. We are doomed to knowing, as well as being, so all our paradises can only be artificial.”

  “Including this one?”

  “Especially this one.”

  Atsuko turned down the pebbled walk toward a garden apartment. Marissa realized with a start that they had reached their destination. The door to the small but well-appointed residence stood open, waiting for her. She entered and, peering about, nodded approvingly. Returning to the door, she found Atsuko standing in the midst of a garden that seemed to combine the best of the English and Japanese landscape styles. Atsuko was watching the twitching, lingering flight of dragonflies there—wings like shivered jewels upon the wind, bodies like blue neon.

  Marissa’s gaze strayed beyond her mentor to the meadows and forests, the streams and houses rising beyond, up and up and around, above the thin wisps of cloud floating in the mirrored sunshine that filled the habitat sphere with a light like late morning on Earth. Occasionally she saw the glint and glimmer of wings high above—airbikes flashing in the sun. Hanging gardens, with dragonflies.

  “Artificial or not,” she said at last, her gaze returning to Atsuko and the dragonflies hovering over the small pond in ‘Marissa’s’ garden, “there’s a beauty—a joy—to this oasis in space that can’t be denied.”

  “True,” Atsuko replied with a small nod. “But also an undeniable sorrow.”
<
br />   “How’s that?”

  Atsuko eyes swept in a long slow melancholy arc around her.

  “Oh, not so much in itself as in its implications. For there to be an oasis there has to be a desert. We find it easier to build expensive imitation Earths than to voluntarily limit our own selfishness on the world we come from.”

  For Marissa that word, selfishness, seemed haunted by the ghosts of other words left unspoken—more specific terms like “habitat destruction” and “extinction”. Though Roger and his mother didn’t seem to agree on the solution, Marissa sensed that at least they agreed on the problem. Before she could mention that to Atsuko, though, the older woman had shrugged her shoulders, seeming in that act to also throw off the depression that had settled upon her momentarily.

  “But it’s a truism that technological change always proceeds faster than cultural or spiritual change, I suppose.”

  “Ah, the spiritual!” Marissa said, her eyes lighting up. “I would most definitely like to talk about that!”

  Atsuko smiled and waved her off.

  “Another time, my dear Marissa. I really must be getting back to the main archives. Walk about and familiarize yourself with our Home here. Oh, and you might want to read this—” Atsuko said, reaching into her bag and pulling out the Mumford book. “Sorry it’s marked up, but I loaned it to Roger once—and he likes to keep up a running commentary in the margins.”

  “That’s all right,” Marissa said politely. “It’ll be interesting to see what his responses to it were.”

  “Yes,” Atsuko said, somewhat distractedly. “When we see each other again we’ll have more to talk about. If you feel the need to lock your door for privacy, it’s keyed to your retinal scan.” She gestured slightly toward the plants and small pond on either side of the walk. “Keeping up the garden, by the way, is your responsibility while you’re staying here.”