* * * * * * *
“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 analge
sic, 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.
So many species names were there, she realized as she looked at the lists in her virtuality. The living dead, the in vitro remnants, microforms haunting laboratories and gene banks. She tried to remember how long cryogenics facilities had been freezing germ plasm down to end-of-the-universe temperatures, tried to recall how many genome maps were stored in the infosphere’s memory banks. She couldn’t remember the exact numbers and dates but she knew that, in this Limbo roll-call before her eyes, science’s fantastic voyage was complete: life reduced to information, the leap of the gazelle on the veldt transformed to quanta hopping circuit gaps.
The final judgement on the threatened and endangered species of Earth had stood suspended for decades now. Suspended inanimation. Living death row. Theirs was a “virtual” reality as surely as this computer construct she looked into now. In one corner of the construct floated the Ark symbol of the Biodiversity Preserve—a creature-filled boat afloat on a sea of humanity. An odd symbol, she thought: the human flood keeps the Ark afloat, but isn’t that same flood what makes the Ark necessary in the first place? And when that people-sea grows stormy, what then?
She tried not to think about that. She was just here to do her job, to find some way of preserving against genetic drift the genetic material of these tenuous species, while still allowing for change, diversity, evolution. In itself it would not be an easy task; add to it Mr. Tien-Jones’s sub rosa requests, and her personal problems still in need of working out, and it would all make for a busy business-sabbatical indeed.
She might as well get going. Scanning through the virtual space of the computer memorial hovering before her eyes, she pulled up the genome map of a likely candidate—an obscure organism by the name of Heterocephalus glaber—which, judging by the log-in list, someone had been giving considerable attention to even within the last twenty four hours.
* * * * * * *
Despite being tired from the work she had already done in Roger’s lab, Marissa had made what she considered a breakthrough in her other researches, her fellowship research for Atsuko—and she had made it while grabbing a quick late afternoon nap.
It had first occurred to her almost in the form of a dream in that time between sleep and waking—just before her ear-plug alarm went off. Somehow she had seen her imaginings of the characters in Huxley’s novel Island falling onto the two pans of a balance, a set of scales—then not just the characters but entire worlds dropping onto that balance. One balance was the descriptive world, the world-as-it-is; the other was the normative world, the world-as-it-ought-to-be. The key to Island, she thought—and hopefully to hundreds of other utopian/dystopian texts—lay in a balancing, an almost ritualistic exchange of what she thought of as “hostage” characters: people held hostage by the circumstances of their birth and upbringing in one or the other of those worlds...
She was so caught up in her theorizing that she was completely unaware of the beauty of the early evening light around her as she walked toward the archives, planning to pad off among the stacks in search of a copy of More’s Utopia. Abruptly her thoughts were cut through by the persistent calling of a bird nearby. She turned and saw there not only a black and orange bird she could not identify but also a young couple, strangers walking hand in hand across the Archive grounds, and a group of men and women dressed in white, practicing what looked like tai chi or perhaps aikido.
Marissa smiled awkwardly to herself. Living in her head again. Here she was thinking about bookish utopias while this world lay before her, a world in which the inhabitants, her fellow inhabitants, were doing their best to realize the dream of a better, more humane society. Be here now, she thought, reminding himself of the old Buddhist admonition.
Always so hard to live in the moment—not in the past of memory or the future of expectation but just here, just now. Watching the young couple disappear from the Archive grounds, Marissa decided her analysis could be put on hold for a spell, given time to age and “season” while she tried to get back in touch with the rhythm of the life going on around her.
She strolled out across the evening-damp grounds and sat down on a stone bench, thinking of times of quiet like this on Earth, times she’d spent watching the moon in the afternoon, the ghost moon burned away by the harsh light of day. The melancholy of that remembered sight settled in her soul, making her pensive.
Images of her life back on Earth came to her, thoughts of course-loads and committee work and research and publications. She thought of her likely future, all the impedimenta of the hoped-for tenure track job, of becoming the “ladder faculty member” trying to keep moving upward or at least not falling down rungs of that all-important ladder. She’d thought about it many times already, until even academia—the only field of work she’d ever been able to tolerate, much less enjoy—began to seem to her what it had seemed to some of her professors: less a ladder than a vertical treadmill of constant turf-battling, grant-grubbing, conference-connecting, log-rolling and string-pulling.
&
nbsp; In her bleak times she nearly lost her faith in the almost unconscious mysticism of her callings as student and teacher. The essential myths of academe failed her and she felt little better off than the vast majority of Earth’s people, hating her job and her situation until she felt the full enduring ache of the long illness called life, knew the pain of having a poet’s heart trapped in a scholar’s hide, the agony of being a soul knotted and fastened to the dying animal of the body—morbid thoughts she was supposedly too young to have, but also thoughts that had somehow led her to study aging on the right hand and utopia on the left.
To hold onto Hope she’d have to let go of Fear. She knew that, intellectually, but the pain of being torn and pulled apart by the widening gap between those two worlds of “ought” and “is” was not lessened by such intellectual knowledge. So damnably difficult to let go, to make that leap from one to the other for herself.
Perhaps, she thought, it was difficult for the whole world, too. Earth’s people seemed overwhelmed by that space between the worlds, paralyzed by it or turning their backs on it, turning their backs even on hopes like this space colony, as if muttering, “Better the Hell we know than the Heaven we know not.”
She could talk about research grants, think about possible jobs and possible promotions, argue her need for material available only in the Archives or Roger’s lab, but those weren’t her real reasons for being here. She was here out of a yearning that this world, this place, would be everything and more than she could have hoped for.
Softly she closed her eyes, trying not to think of anything, trying not to reflect on things but rather to let them reflect on her. She longed to become like still water reflecting the moon, a bubble of silvery mercury hung between worlds, a mirror-mind floating at the surface of the past and the bottom of the future, a meniscus of Now, a liquid crescent-moon—
Marissa shook her head. She had never been as good at meditation as she would have liked, no matter how hard she practiced. Images only got in her way, and even the idea of blanking her mind was always just another image. Opening her eyes, she stared around her at the splendid colorful shining bubble she sat inside, and wondered. This world as it is—might it be the world as it ought to be?
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