Lightpaths

by Howard V. Hendrix

  Marissa was stunned from her reverie by the appearance of Roger Cortland proceeding up the sun-dappled path toward her. She stood from the bench, the blood rushing to her head slightly.

  “Roger—this is a surprise!”

  “Yes. Working on utopia again? I suppose you’ve found a good deal more fiction on it in there,” Roger said with a slightly disdainful gesture toward the Archives buildings, “than factual realizations of it out here.”

  “Oh, I don’t know,” Marissa said, weighing her words. “My research today has just reminded me that utopia means not only ‘no place’ but also ‘good place.’ This place seems like a good place, to me.”

  Roger laughed somewhat sourly.

  “No place is a good place,” he said, starting toward the nearest entrance, “but you have a good afternoon anyway.”

  After a few steps, Roger called back to Marissa just as she was sitting down again on the bench.

  “Is my mother inside, do you know?”

  “No, I’m afraid not.”

  “Ah.”

  Watching a shattered rainbow of butterflies drift among the flowers of the Archive gardens, Marissa could detect neither pain nor pleasure in Roger’s “Ah.” Still, there was something about his presence here that she just couldn’t pin down. Maybe it would be best not to pin it down, but rather to just let it be, let it drift along like these butterflies. Marissa thought lazily of that Chinese philosopher—who was it? Lao-Tse?—who said that one day he fell asleep and dreamed he was a butterfly. The dream was so vivid and real, however, that on waking he was much perplexed as to whether he was a man who had dreamed he was a butterfly, or a butterfly who was dreaming he was a man. Thinking of such things, her eyes following the easy flitting of the butterflies from bud to bud, Marissa herself almost began to drift off.

  “Watching butterflies isn’t much of a pastime,” Roger said when he came out of the Archive, an optical disk in hand. “How’d you like to be one?”

  “What?” Marissa asked, wondering if she were really awake and hearing things right.

  “Be a butterfly,” Roger said, “or at least fly like one.”

  “Oh—sure, I guess.”

  “Then come with me,” he said, crooking out his right arm for her to take. “I’ll show you.”

  Taking the proffered arm gently but firmly, she walked with him to a ridgecart station where they caught a bullet for the low-gee zones. Even before they entered the ridgecart, though, she was already as light on her feet as if someone had cut off all local gravity. Phrases—dancing on air, swept away—floated into her head, demonstrated their inadequacy, and quickly disappeared.

  Such light-footed romance did not prove eternal, however. It didn’t last very long at all, in fact.

  “So many damned old people,” Roger complained sotto voce to her as they waited in line for a couple of the safety-chuted airbicycles the locals called paraflyers. “Why don’t they just stay back on Earth?”

  “Because living in low gravity increases their longevity,” Marissa said placidly, but with a tactful look-out to make sure no one was in easy earshot. “If they were still back on Earth they’d probably be dead by now.”

  “And good riddance to them too,” he said seriously, his impatience growing. “Look at these grayheads—the airbike instructor must be explaining everything to them at least half a dozen times!”

  Marissa grimaced.

  “Roger, come on. We’re all going to be old someday, if we live that long. And those who are already old won’t be taking up space much longer. No reason we can’t be courteous. Show a little understanding, a little compassion—”

  The elderly couple took off gingerly from the low-gravity platform, pedaling their human-powered two seater airbike slowly up toward the zero-gee axis.

  “Compassion is one commodity I will not waste on the incompetent and unqualified,” Roger said firmly as they stepped up to the instructor. “Compassion, compassion, compassion. That’s something else I’ve noticed since I came back from Earth: everybody up here parrots that word too damn much.”

  Roger pushed off, pedaling down into a speed-building dive and swooping back up in a roll around the nonagenarians as they pedaled their paraflyer in slow, steady fashion toward the vista complex at the center of the sphere. Still back on the platform, Marissa shook her head in bafflement at Roger’s behavior, then pushed off as well.

  She could not hope to keep up with him as he as he did rolls and Immelmanns and falling leaf stalls, the hollow world spinning and twisting and turning about him, axis and vista complex standing more tightly nearby, thickets and young forests and veldts and streams and gardens and houses further away, above and below and around.

  He swooped back down toward Marissa, slightly above and to the left of her as they pedaled in a more gentle arc near the habitat’s axis corridor, giving a wide berth to parasuited young people playing three-fall soccer there.

  “Maris, I was just thinking,” Roger began, smiling impishly, “that maybe it’s good those old people want to live up here in low grav. I mean, they’re too weak to bug us down in higher grav, right? They’ve voluntarily had themselves committed to a low-gravity prison!”

  Marissa just shook her head.

  “And that idea gave me another,” Roger continued as they pedaled, knowing he was getting to her. “When we start having crimes and criminals up here we can confine the criminals in very low or even micro gravity. After a couple of months their bodily systems will have atrophied to such an extent that they’ll be unable to escape to higher gravity without risking death. A prison without walls, without even the need for guards or electronic monitoring systems. Rehabilitation will finally mean something, because it will have to be literal. They’ll have to have physical rehabilitation just so they won’t die when they attempt to rejoin the mainstream of society in normal gravity. Of course, that would still leave them able to prey on the old people, but maybe that’d be a way of killing two old birds with one stone-cold convict—”

  “Roger Tsugio Cortland,” Marissa said, staring at his slyly smiling face in disbelief, “you have a special genius for the perverse and morbid.”

  “I also have a genius,” Roger said with a laugh, “for knowing how to push your buttons!”

  Marissa put her paraflyer into a slow looping spiral.

  “Maybe. But you’ve forgotten one thing, Roger dear. Everyone has pretty much equal access to the necessities of life and to what few luxuries the habitat can afford. You have no crime and no criminals here.”

  “But we will!” Roger said, banking away steeply to the right, toward the night sector of the sphere. “Even if I have to become the first one myself!”

  “You’ve spent too much time on Earth!” Marissa called after him.

  Pedaling furiously, he was almost already out of earshot. Marissa picked up her pace, trying to catch him.

  * * * * * * *

  In the sphere’s unsettling region of artificial twilight, Roger did a small swift series of loops and rolls, daylight and green life and business as usual above, twinkling lamps and houselights below—

  “Wha—?” Roger gasped in shock. Into the air before him, quick and bright as linked thunderbolts, had leapt two immense writhing snakes banded in shimmering reds and greens and yellows and blues, snakes intertwined like those on the insignia of the medical profession, yinyang snakes of light swallowing their own tails, a snake circle but one that inverted with a subtle twist like something out of Escher, a single-sided snake Möbius strip, a serpentine infinity sign, relaxing, opening toward O....

  He was far away, flinging himself from a tower, into the wind. Below him monks and novices and clusters of townspeople stood with their mouths open in awe. Soaring like bird or angel, he rose above winter-grey earth just turning green again, the westering sun bright on his backside, the cold wind rushing through his hai
r. In a glance he could see clear from the Cotswold Hills to the meandering headwaters of the River Thames. Above him stretched only the endless dome of heaven pocked with a few broken clouds, while below stood his monastic brethren, their tonsured heads turned skyward, gawking their necks up at him, looking foolish and innocent as the yardful of chickens he’d seen in the rain earlier that day.

  He felt like a great and mighty hawk in the sky above them until, a furlong from the tower, the wind seemed to grow violent and the air to whorl as he struggled more and more desperately to control his gliding air vessel. No matter how he fought to correct the motion of his flight in the wind his vessel’s fractiousness worsened until he was wobbling and bouncing wildly, finally spiralling headlong for the rain-softened earth—

  Roger landed with a thump. In grassland, in light. As his orange parachute drifted to the ground he unstrapped himself slowly. Expecting to a certainty that he should be wearing a bloodied coarse monk’s robe over shattered legs—and astonished that he was not, that his legs were not—he stood slowly, stunned that he was once again inside the habitat, no longer living on the outside of a world turning through a different space and time. The blue dome of heaven had disappeared, replaced by the wraparound sky-county of the habitat’s interior.

  Staring at that inside-out sky, he slowly remembered himself and began to gaze about purposefully, looking for something, a shimmering slithering intertwined something, a thing with neither outside nor inside. But it too was nowhere to be seen.

  He had almost finished the embarrassing task of folding up the flyer’s chute by the time Marissa and a paraflight instructor arrived on the scene.

  “Roger, are you all right?”

  “Yeah,” he said with a terse nod. “Must have blacked out or something. I don’t remember.”

  “The chute deployed automatically when you went past the half-grav mark—just like it’s supposed to do,” said the thin young black man with the G. SMITH, CHIEF INSTRUCTOR badge, who now began breaking down and folding up the airbike itself into a portable size and shape. “You’re lucky it did, or you wouldn’t be here to not remember it.”

  “You’ve been working too hard,” Marissa said to Roger, as much for the chief instructor’s benefit as for Roger’s own. “That must be what’s behind it. You’re usually a natural with human powered vehicles, right?”

  Roger said nothing. The instructor, having reduced the flyer to backpack size, slipped his arms through a pair of straps and, bidding them adieu, walked away over the windy greengold grass of the veldt, headed for the nearest cart station. Marissa and Roger followed after him, somewhat more slowly.

  “Marissa,” Roger said tentatively as they approached the small station, “you didn’t happen to see anything strange before I blacked out, did you?”

  “Strange? In what way?”

  Roger averted his eyes.

  “Like a pair of snakes intertwined in a twisted circle in the air.”

  “Oh, that!” she said, smiling in relief. “That’s just a skysign for that band that’s so popular, that performance troupe—Möbius Cadúceus, I think they’re called. I saw an announcement about it in the local media earlier this afternoon. They’ve got a concert coming up sometime soon.”

  “But the tangled snakes in the air—” he said, a quaver of remembered horror still in his voice.

  “That’s their symbol, their logo. I think they use one of those big new projection holos to make it appear in the sky like that.” She looked at him suddenly as they boarded a bulletcart. “Hey, you did fly awfully close to it—you don’t think you might have gotten zapped by one of their lasers, do you?”

  “No, I don’t think so,” he said uncertainly. He didn’t know what to think, but he could not shake from his thoughts the idea that he had somehow, for a moment, gazed upon an event a thousand years old—through the eyes of the monk who had lived through it.

  Compared to that, lasers and high technology seemed a most mundane magic.

  * * * * * * *

  Jhana too had glimpsed the Möbius Cadúceus skysign, but she was so exhausted from working around the living fossil Larkin all day that she’d barely noticed it. About the only thing she’d accomplished the rest of the day was learning that the local expert on mole-rats was Roger Cortland, the man she’d met on the flight up from Earth. That wasn’t much to show for all the hours she’d put in.

  On arriving home she immediately prepared for bed, still feeling time-lagged as she dressed for sleep. As she fell asleep she thought dreamily of what an arbitrary, localized thing the human telling of time was—merely the sequence of light and shadow on a small planet a certain distance from its star. When was high noon on the sun? Always? Never? When was midnight for someone floating halfway between Earth and Moon, or among unshadowed, uneclipsed Lagrange points? Arbitrary, she thought as she tumbled over the edge of sleep, all so arbitrary....

  Mike and Rick fighting naked before her, dark and light, black and white tangle of armholds and leglocks and pummeling fists and blood streaming from noses and lips and herself caught up in the ineluctable grasp of time-transcending dreamvision, powerless to break free, becoming less a person than a place, less the object of battle than the battlefield itself, suddenly flooded with people in the dress of a million times and places running to and fro over the shoreless ocean of time, screaming sobbing crying shouting people. Sirens wailing and singing, singing and wailing over vast darkling plain where Mike and Rick transmogrify into stormwaves of men smashing against each other in ever vaster oceans of blood, where ships and sailors explode and sink and drown and projectiles and jets and starfighters boil madly in the heavens raining ever more hellish destruction upon the burning earth until all the land is fiery charnel quagmire and the sea and sky endless firmaments of blood.

  A bubble of froth afloat upon the seas of blood and fire, powerlessly she watches machineries of construction and destruction proliferate bloom and die and proliferate again in ever larger numbers, building destroying rebuilding redestroying, until it is impossible for her to tell the building from the destroying, humanity devouring everything and always already itself on a disposable planet, a womb to be callously forgotten just as soon as the umbilical cord can be cleanly cut, but she is that world, that womb, that woman on a deathmound bed of skulls and bones and skeletons big as forever under skies redolent of blood and fire, being taken against her will again and again by a man with burning wounds for eyes, a man alternately light and dark, making fevered sickmonkey love with her under blood sheets, where pain and pleasure, love and death, always and never fuse into—

  Screaming, Jhana woke to the buzzing of her front door. Coming out of the nightmare, she threw her robe about her, walked out of the bedroom and through the living area to the front door. The wall screen flashed 6:01, 6:01 as she walked past.

  “Jhana Meniskos?”

  “Yes?” she said groggily, staring at the thinly moustached, brown-uniformed young man at her door.

  “Sorry to have called on you at this early hour,” said the tall thin man with some embarrassment. His uniform tag said LOSABA and he spoke in the rich tones of a black South African. Jhana vaguely recognized his uniform as being that of the Intersatellite Courier Service. “But we received this very high priority private message from your employer and we felt we should relay it to you as soon as possible. If you’ll just look into this retinoscope here—”

  The uniformed young man handed her the computer clipboard and she gazed into the scope, wondering if the bloodshot condition of her eyes would affect its readout. But no, a bell-like tone sounded and the courier nodded, handing her a sealed packet with a datawire inside. He bid Jhana a pleasant if somewhat hasty good-bye and she turned back into the house, closing the door behind her.

  Without opening the packet or pulling the datawire from it, Jhana walked dazedly back through the living area, back to the bedroom. Returning to
the scene of the dream, she sat down at the edge of the bed, wondering if she needed to see a therapist. It would be so easy to write it all off as just a dream—except for the fact that, for most of her life, she hadn’t been bothered by her dreams, had seldom remembered them because she hadn’t thought them worth remembering. But these new dreams lately—they were so different, so strange and vivid. That sense of being hardly aware of herself—feeling herself only a place in which sensations and feelings were held for a moment as they poured through from nowhere to nowhere—that was so unprecedented she desperately wanted to make sense of it, of everything so disturbing in these night visitations.

  Had she—deep down, in ways she’d never admitted to herself—really wanted to see Mike and Rick fight over her? Had she wanted to enjoy the spectacle of it? Their pain and struggle for her pleasure and entertainment? She had never thought there could be that much of the voyeur and the sadist in her. She hoped there wasn’t.

  It had, in any case, not worked out that way. Mike was dead in an accident, or a suicide, accidental suicide or suicidal accident—whatever—for which she undeniably felt guilt. And yet, despite that guilt, when she had gone to Rick for condolences that evening after the funeral, they had not only comforted each other—they had also made love, furious love, as if on top of Mike’s grave, upon his so very newly interred coffin. Why? Was it guilt over Mike’s death that had driven her to that—or the desire to be revenged upon him, sexual vengeance for his denying her the fulfillment of some fantasy from which her conscious thoughts and words recoiled?

  And to what avail? The dead felt no vengeance, and the living could gain from it only a most guilty pleasure. Rick—Rick who had grown tired of waiting for her to make up her mind about Mike—he had already begun seeing another woman, the woman he would eventually throw Jhana over for and marry, but not before Jhana herself had first learned how it felt to be one of two satellites circling one body.