Lightpaths

by Howard V. Hendrix

  Marissa closed her book and stood staring at the plaque set into the top of the pedestal. It was still new enough for its words to glint sharply in the late morning light:

  THE POLITICS OF THOSE WHOSE GOAL IS BEYOND TIME ARE ALWAYS PACIFIC; IT IS THE IDOLATERS OF PAST AND FUTURE, OF REACTIONARY MEMORY AND UTOPIAN DREAM, WHO DO THE PERSECUTING AND MAKE THE WARS.

  —from Aldous Huxley’s Perennial Philosophy

  As she stood there puzzling and frowning over the pedestal and its inscription, someone took her by the arm—suddenly, familiarly.

  “How goes the research?” Atsuko said, smiling at her.

  Caught out, Marissa wondered for a moment Which research? Then she thought better of it and decided not to mention her work with Roger, as that seemed somehow always to involve her in the ideological tug-of-war between mother and son. Instead she rapidly tried to outline again her ideas of the normative world-as-it-ought-to-be and descriptive world-as-it-is, particularly the normative world as an hypostasis of the pure soul and the way that tied utopian fiction into the apocalyptic tradition, into teleology and ethics. Feeling like she was blathering on, she finished by pointing to the inscription on the plaque, telling Atsuko that she’d seen a reference to it in the Collection so she thought she’d come and take a look.

  “I see. Tell me, Marissa,” Atsuko said, in a voice of mock-interrogation, “what exactly is the efficacy of a swimsuit to the reading of monumental inscriptions?”

  Marissa glanced down at the swimsuit draped over her left arm and laughed.

  “You’ve found me out. I thought I might like to take a noontime dip too. But I really was going to read the inscription first.”

  “I don’t doubt it,” Atsuko said, coming up beside the monument and reading it. “I was headed to the lake myself. Seriously, though, your interests should make you quite the person for evaluating what we’re trying to do here. Have you begun to understand the nature of our experiment yet?”

  “I thought I was starting to,” Marissa said with a sigh of frustration, “but every day I find something new that puzzles me all over again. I come to look at this inscription—and what do I find? The quote is under a diagram of the space habitat here, on a disc calibrated like a sundial—but there’s no gnomon, no style to cast a shadow on the dial. As a time piece it’s useless, a contradiction—just like placing that quote about a ‘goal beyond time’ being preferable to ‘Utopian dreams’ under the image of this habitat and all you people are trying to do here. Contradictory—or at least paradoxical.”

  “Then you haven’t yet learned the experimental and tentative nature of our work,” Atsuko said, smiling enigmatically as she turned her toward the beach and beach tents nearby. Marissa allowed herself to be led. “We’re not interested in some product, some final stable state. Process and flux and a certain level of chaos are much more interesting. The chaos of science is the science of chaos, after all—even if I still do have to make my bed every morning.”

  “But all those things take place within time!” Marissa said fervently as they stopped in front of a dressing tent. “Huxley talks about a goal beyond time.”

  Atsuko’s eyes looked past the green near-distance of the meadow to the shining water beyond.

  “The goal is necessarily outside time,” she agreed with a small nod, moving toward the other side of the tent. “We can never reach it—woe to us if we could. Think about it this way. Hawking once said that scientific progress consists in replacing one wrong theory with another theory that’s more subtly wrong. Maybe that’s what human history is about too.”

  Marissa lifted the door flap on her side of the dressing tent as Atsuko entered the other side.

  “Are you saying,” Marissa began incredulously as she undressed, “that all your projects here are to some degree doomed to failure?”

  “Of course. Aren’t all projects?” She could hear Atsuko’s voice turned to her, and though she couldn’t see Atsuko she thought the older woman must again be smiling her enigmatic smile. “The universe is inherently a place of relativity, incompleteness, uncertainty, at least according to the physicists. No one perfect final anything anywhere in it. Who knows? They might be right.”

  Staring at the ground between her feet, Marissa was for a minute distracted by the calling inside the tent of a frog she could not identify. Oddly, the creature seemed to have bright yellow legs. As she watched she thought it must undoubtedly be a concrete, living example of another of those threatened lines of life that the orbital habitat was trying to preserve.

  “That’s all well and good on an abstract theoretical level, I suppose,” Marissa continued, pulling on her swimsuit top. “But if I knew that what I was doing must ultimately fail, then what would be the point of trying?”

  Even as she said it, Marissa wondered if she might be letting show through too plainly her misgivings about her own double-headed research projects here. She stuffed her clothes into a hanging sack “locker” on the wall and stepped outside to wait for Atsuko to emerge.

  “Well, it only fails to some degree,” Atsuko said plainly. Was there a hint of something maternal in her voice at that moment, or was Marissa only imagining it? “At the very least one can learn from failing—even if what one learns is only how to fail better next time. Realizing that is a form of enlightenment.”

  “How’s that?” Marissa asked, gazing toward the lake which, to be honest, looked as if it might prove to be more than a little cold.

  “Being able to say, ‘I don’t have the perfect final answer, I can’t have it’,” Atsuko said. “That it’s a presumption to assume I can get it. That it’s egotistical to think the little piece of the truth I’ve managed to get in my short span is more important than anyone else’s. Coming to that sort of realization is good for one’s humility, I think.”

  So saying, Atsuko—dressed in a snug black one-piece—stepped lightly from the tent. Marissa noticed with surprise that Atsuko was in quite good shape. As a woman who had just entered the years of long striving against the ravages of time and gravity, Marissa appreciated the older woman’s effort.

  Atsuko moved awkwardly in her stare for a moment, then smiled impishly.

  “Speaking of humility,” she began, suddenly shifting to rhyme, “Doctor Correa, quite abstracted, how does your garden grow?”

  “With oaths and yells that cursing swells,” Marissa rhymed in grimaced reply, “but learning as I go.”

  Atsuko laughed and clapped her hands together as they moved toward the water’s edge. The laughter and applause of echoes bounced off the lake and around the bowl for several long moments before dying away.

  Standing on the sandy edge of the water, Marissa noted the way the shore fell steeply away, only a short distance out, the lake clear and suddenly deeper to the water weeds on the bottom, among which supple trout swam, flexible green steel flashing in a flickering green shade. The water looked mountain-trout cold, too.

  Atsuko abruptly dove in with an icy splash, resurfacing quickly with a great insuck of breath.

  “Come on!” she called and waved as she swam off. “We’ve got the lake to ourselves! That won’t last long—dive in!”

  Marissa sprang off from the shore. The chill water when she hit it slammed the air from her lungs and the thoughts from her head like a blow from a great ice fist. Her heart had stopped. It did not start beating again until she broke surface with a loud shouted whoop. Shivering as she tread water, she began to laugh.

  “What’s so funny?” Atsuko shouted, splashing about some distance away.

  “I was just thinking how absurd this all is!” she called, floating on her back, trying to catch some reflected sunlight on her chest and stomach in a difficult attempt to get warm. “I spent my whole life on a green and living world and I never learned to garden! I haven’t been swimming in a pure mountain stream or lake since I was an undergraduate! I had to come into
space, into a completely artificial world, to get back in touch with what is natural—with the whole world of things we didn’t create, of creatures that aren’t us!”

  Atsuko swam closer.

  “That’s it,” she said, smiling even though her teeth were beginning to chatter. “That’s the fundamental absurdity of our situation here in this habitat. But absurdity’s built into progress too—into the attempt to fail better. Civilization is fundamentally absurd. Even the universe itself. The odds are at least as good that the universe shouldn’t exist as that it should, right? It’s absurd that the universe should exist, that we should be here to talk about its existence. But here we are.”

  Marissa nodded, struck by a sudden thought.

  “You know, I can’t help thinking—despite everything my research tells me—that maybe at the heart of this world-as-it-is lies the world-as-it-ought-to-be. If we could only see it, only remember how to stop eclipsing its light!”

  Atsuko looked as if she suddenly wanted to reach out and take her shivering (but wonderfully perceptive) student in her arms and kiss her—and Marissa would have welcomed that gesture of approval from her mentor. Reluctantly, though, they held themselves back. The water they were swimming in was too deep and they were both afraid they might sink if they stopped swimming.

  * * * * * * *

  “I’m happy to see you again,” Roger Cortland said, opening the door to his lab. He’d been surprised to find Jhana Meniskos waiting for him in the hall outside his lab when he returned from lunch. “You say you’re interested in Heterocephalus glaber? What about the little buggers interests you?”

  “As the most eusocial mammal,” Jhana said as they walked into the artificially-lit confines of the underground lab, “there’s been a great deal of genetic research done on them already. They’ve been DNA-fingerprinted for forty years. Wild and captive groups have been thoroughly charted, and their DNA prints demonstrate heavy inbreeding and a kin-selected colony structure.” Jhana gestured toward a glass-paned slab of soil and the squirming digging living things inside—creatures which seemed somehow out of place in the sparkling, orderly cleanliness of the lab. “Are these them? I’ve just read about them—never seen them alive.”

  “That’s them, all right,” Roger said with a nod. “The ‘little grotesques,’ as my mother calls them. But you still haven’t said what you hope to learn from them—”

  “What I want to know is how,” Jhana said, without turning her fascinated gaze from the bustle of the mole rat colony, “given their tendency to form isolated, heavily inbred colonies—how have they remained recognizably a single species, with a remarkably high genetic similarity even between distant colonies?”

  “A good question,” Roger said, leaning lightly on the glass-walled rat colony. “But where does that tie into the sort of genetic drift research you’re engaged in?”

  “Everywhere!” Jhana said, flashing him a quick, intense glance. “It opens up all the questions. Usually there’s a loss of diversity associated with heavy inbreeding within a highly limited gene pool. Have mole-rats successfully managed to avoid that? Is their burden of deleterious mutations lessened through unusually low mutation rates? Or is genetic variability itself purposely kept down?”

  Jhana walked around to the other side of the glass structure, apparently trying to locate the mole-rat queen. Roger followed her slowly around.

  “Answering those questions,” she continued, “finding mechanisms to insure species diversity, establishing firm numbers for adequate breeding populations—all of those things are of great importance, I would think, to projects like the Orbital Biodiversity Preserve. Not only for the animals but, over the long run, for humans isolated in space colonies, too.”

  As she turned toward Roger again, he was once more struck by the fineness of her features, particularly her dark eyes, almost as dark as the black silk of her hair. He also noticed that, beneath her business-like blue-green lab coverall, she had the slim, wiry body of a former gymnast or ballerina. He glanced around, almost unconsciously reassuring himself that Marissa was not there. Certainly his redheaded coworker was attractive in a more voluptuous sort of way, he thought, but—compared to Jhana, here—she had something of the galumphing cow about her. An odd impression, because in fact they probably were fairly close in weight and height.

  “How about you?” Jhana asked.

  “What?” Roger said, suddenly shaking his head and standing up straight from the table he’d been leaning his tall frame against. “Excuse me. My mind wandered for a moment. What was your question?”

  “How did you become interested in them?”

  “Oh. Saw them in a zoo when I was about fifteen or sixteen, I guess. From the start I was fascinated by how the whole structure of naked mole-rat society is maintained. The only known mammal that possesses a colony structure truly similar to that of the social insects, all that sort of thing.”

  To make his point, he began to gesture at the system of tunnels and chambers excavated from the soil inside the glass.

  “Within each colony there are three castes, what I like to call ‘queen,’ ‘courtiers,’ and ‘peasants.’ The queen, the breeding female, is generally the largest in size and the most protected. Then come the non-workers and infrequent workers I call the courtiers, then finally the frequent workers, the peasants, which are generally the smallest in size and the most readily expendable. The peasants cooperate in burrowing, gathering nest material, and bringing food to the nesting chamber for the dominant female and the courtiers, there. Some specialists call that big chamber the ‘breedhall.’ The male and female courtiers defend the colony. Only the queen breeds, and always only with a courtier male.”

  He crouched down and stared closely through the glass at his blind, squirming, grey-pink charges—shriveled sausages come to life.

  “Individual nonbreeding mole rats are not irreversibly sterile, though,” he continued. “And still they have a self-regulating population. That’s what fascinated me when I was a teenager. If naked mole rats appreciate the long term significance of not breeding no better than most humans do, then why don’t they breed? Why does only the queen breed?” He absently traced the outline of the breedhall chamber with a fingertip on the glass. “The answer I learned in college was that once a particular female becomes dominant, she somehow behaviorally suppresses breeding by other females. The older version was that the suppression was achieved through the use of pheromones. Either way, the others in the colony have no choice in the matter.”

  He came out of his crouch, his knees clicking audibly in the quiet of the lab as he straightened up.

  “Unfortunately, no one succeeded in isolating the essential pheromone of a chemical suppression, so the Faulkes orthodoxy of behavioral and physical rather than pheromonal suppression stood.” He turned toward her and fixed her with a steady gaze. “‘Behavior’—so vague. I felt I might just as well have been learning that the queen suppressed breeding by magic. But all that’s changed now. I believe we’ve isolated and synthesized the long-sought pheromone here, in this lab. Field tests are proving it out. The Faulkes orthodoxy will be overthrown. I’ve already finished my paper on it for the Journal of Mammalogy.”

  “Congratulations!” Jhana exclaimed, genuinely impressed. “That’s a monumental accomplishment!”

  He dismissed her excitement with a wave of his hand.

  “I’m already at work on something bigger, much bigger,” he intimated proudly, his eyes shining. “Quick—give me a list of the world’s problems.”

  Jhana looked at him oddly. Seeing that he was absolutely serious, she shrugged her shoulders and began ticking off the usual litany on her fingers.

  “Ecodisasters, mostly—global heat trap effects, phytoplankton mass extinctions, ozone depletion, losses of biodiversity, worldwide desertification and famine, storm systems of unprecedented severity and duration arising from the re-cal
ibration of the planetary heat machinery—”

  “Right, right,” Roger said, cutting her off. “Poverty and starvation when more food is being produced than ever before. Increased levels of violence as overcrowding generates conditions of behavioral sink. Pestilence and suffering and resource wars—all the age-old plagues, which we have the technological know-how to eliminate but can’t.”

  Absently he ran a hand through his hair and turned his gaze toward the floor, as if trying to stare through it toward the occluded Earth below.

  “All the signs indicate that catastrophic environmental effects induced by humans have become not only cumulative but also synergistic, multiplying and dominoing like mad,” he continued evenly, a heavenly judge calmly pronouncing the final doom. “We’ve very nearly exceeded the ecosphere’s capacity to regenerate itself—at least in a form that will support humans. And what lies at the root of all those problems, hm?”

  Jhana, feeling like a prisoner in the dock, took time to think before she answered.

  “I’ve heard different people say the basic problem is patriarchy, or transnational capitalism, or any world system based on growth and more growth,” she hedged—knowing how politically loaded Roger’s question was—before coming around to her real thoughts at last. “As a biologist, though, I suppose I’d have to say the root cause is population.”

  “Exactly!” Roger said, affirming it forcefully with a finger pointed skyward. Jhana felt as if she’d just been given a reprieve from the general doom. “But no one wants to see that or really do anything about it. The essence of tragedy is willful blindness to certain facts or realities. Our situation is tragic because most of our world’s governments, religions, and economic systems have remained willfully blind to the increasing likelihood of human extinction. As a result, most of the world’s people remain ignorant of this likelihood.”

  “Extinction?” Jhana looked at him as if he’d suddenly sprouted two new heads. “But there are over seven and a half billion human beings on that planet down there—despite every population control method tried. We’re hardly a ‘vanishing animal’.”