Lightpaths

by Howard V. Hendrix

  “Yes,” Roger said, pacing slowly, thoughtfully, back and forth. “In fact we’ve been too successful. We’re birthing ourselves to death. If you have eyes to see it, it’s clear that we’re caught in a classic boom/bust cycle. We’re quickly becoming the victims of our own success. The only thing that can keep us from finally going past the point of no return is a drastic decrease in human population.”

  Jhana shook her head, turning her gaze back toward the busy mole-rats in their glass-walled slab of habitat.

  “Now you’re the one talking magic,” she said at last. “Or lots of death and suffering and Malthusian mayhem.”

  Roger spun suddenly on his heel.

  “Not at all! I’m talking pheromones, human pheromones! Think about it, Ms. Meniskos: a subtle perfume containing a sexual attractant pheromone that acts on human fertility—the denser the concentration of people, the more powerfully the pheromone reduces fertility. A paradox, but there are precedents, you know. Examples of feedback systems by which other species self-regulate their numbers. Epideictic displays among birds, for instance. Think of the advantages. No government would have to force people to undergo vasectomies or tubal ligations. A form of population control, yes, but one not dependent on laws or political decisions or demographic shifts or levels of education. Purely and abstractly responsive to population density, and at the same time inseparably caught up in the whole essence of sexuality and sensuality. “

  A paradox so perfect immediately caused objections to rush into Jhana’s mind.

  “But it would be so—so unnatural!”

  Roger Cortland looked at her with furrowed brow.

  “My dear Jhana, we are at this moment living inside an artificial world hanging in space between the Earth and Moon—a habitat as contrived as that mole-rat slice-of-life you’re staring at. What could be more unnatural than that?”

  She could only turn and stare at him, still turning over in her mind the potential pitfalls of his scheme. He took her silence for acquiescence and made his checkmate move.

  “Even more importantly,” he said in a slightly hushed and paranoid manner, “if I can develop such a pheromone, might your employer be interested in it?”

  * * * * * * *

  Before Atsuko and Marissa had even finished their short chill swim and headed back to shore, they no longer had the beach and Echo Mirror Lake to themselves. A group of about half a dozen youngsters had appeared on the other side of the lake, naked, holojam box in tow, projecting trideos onto the lake’s surface and exploiting the basin’s echoing acoustics to noisy effect.

  Excerpted lyrics from Möbius Cadúceus song, “Socrates”:

  The old man urged his students then,

  “Make good use of your reason.”

  But the Athenian state

  Called his teachings treason.

  Still better to be Socrates than a happy pig.

  Far better to be Socrates than a happy pig...

  Over the noise Atsuko tried to explain that the lake shore was, by recently established consensus, divided roughly into sectors—mixed nude swimming area, same sex nude swimming (male only and female only areas), mixed swim-suited swimming, and all overlapping gradients of cladness and uncladness in between.

  “I know it smacks of ‘the oversocialization of the Left’,” Marissa heard Atsuko say clearly as their neighbors across the lake finally turned the music down, the volume of it having apparently proven too much even for their young ears. “Or ‘the limits of segregation are the limits of toleration.’ But openness to diversity is always much needed here. Toleration of alternatives, combined with a respect for the individual’s right not to have his own beliefs infringed upon, so long as his beliefs and actions don’t infringe upon the rights of others. Always a challenging balance.”

  “My right to swing my fist ends at your nose?” Marissa asked pleasantly as she lay on the beach, drying in the sunlight beside Atsuko, who nodded. “But how do you instill that tolerance?” Marissa continued. “The presence of those kids across the lake has gotten me to thinking—particularly about the way you educate and plan to educate your young people here.”

  “What about it?” Atsuko asked, adjusting her wrap-around sunshades.

  Marissa thought a moment. More words and music about hemlock and Socrates and happy pigs drifted over from the far shore, but the younger people seemed intent on some trideo game they’d projected upon the waves. The word VAJRA flashed over the water, followed by a symbol like a multi-faceted shining thunderbolt, then a City of Light appeared which, as nearly as Marissa could determine, was being besieged by the forces of darkness. She seemed to remember the word “vajra” from somewhere, though she couldn’t quite recall where. She shook her head and shrugged.

  “Well, if everything is so situational and incomplete and uncertain as you say,” Marissa said, trying to put her thoughts into the right words, “then how can one possibly have an ethics?”

  Atsuko smiled, beginning to make a game of the conversation.

  “That’s easy. One can’t have an ethics—one is an ethics. That’s the problem: everybody treats ethics as a product rather than a process,” Atsuko paused, thinking it through. Across the lake the song sang about a trial and sentence of exile. “That’s the problem with ethics generally: so teleological, so oriented to a product external to life rather than inherent in the process of living itself. What I hope we’re teaching the children here is that, in a very real sense, the journey is the goal—the treasure, the pot of gold, lies not at the rainbow’s end but in the chasing of the rainbow. I hope we’re teaching the kids to find meaning in the search.”

  “ ‘Persistent striving,’ as Kierkegaard calls it,” Marissa said with a nod. “Not striving for something, or to be somebody. Striving as an end in itself.”

  “Right,” Atsuko said, flicking sand off her arm. “A product-oriented ethics, a teleological ethics, is no ethics at all. Any ethics you can have isn’t worth having.”

  Sitting up on the sand, Marissa realized that the song of Socrates and the happy pigs was ending, though the game of the shining city floating on the waves still seemed to be going strong.

  “But then what do you replace ethics with?” she asked.

  Atsuko flicked the wraparounds up off her eyes and looked at Marissa carefully as she spoke.

  “With nothing. With just being. Letting the stone roll away from the heart, allowing the moon to slide away so the sun can shine.”

  “Very poetic,” Marissa said, “but how does one do that? Through showing compassion?”

  Atsuko sat up, brushing sand lightly off her suit.

  “Not just showing it. Being it. Living compassion. Existing in a lived recognition of the metaphysical unity behind and underlying and connecting all things.” Atsuko laughed lightly. “That sounds too mystical by half, but it’s the best way I can think of to put it—and it’s still a lot easier to talk about than it is to do.”

  Marissa and Atsuko heard the young people across the lake whistling and shouting and clapping, saw them pointing toward the axis of the sky. Looking up, they saw the dual immense snakes of the Möbius Cadúceus skysign shimmering and writhing, self-consuming rainbow serpents—

  “Good Heavens!” Atsuko exclaimed. “What’s that?”

  “Beautiful, isn’t it?” Marissa said quietly over the continued shouts and whoops of the young people across the lake. “I saw it the other day. Roger passed out when he saw it—might’ve gotten hit by their projection lasers, I think. No real harm done though, apparently. It’s to publicize a performance by that band our young neighbors across the lake were listening to. They must be fans. See? There’s the skysign where their trideo game was. Or maybe that’s just a reflection?”

  Atsuko turned from the image in the sky to its reflection in the lake’s smooth surface. If anything it seemed even more strange and exotic reflect
ed on the water.

  “I’m surprised you haven’t heard the publicity,” Marissa said, turning toward Atsuko.

  “I haven’t heard much of anything, lately,” Atsuko said, “except rumblings from Earth, that is.”

  Atsuko neither elaborated nor turned her gaze from the skysign, and Marissa didn’t press her. When at last the symbol had disappeared from sky and water, when at last even the echoes of the applause and the shouting had ceased, Atsuko turned to Marissa.

  “Can there be so mundane, so profane an explanation for that symbol?” Atsuko asked, still lost and wondering at the sight of the image in the sky. “It makes me think of that line in Yeats’s Second Coming—‘a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi troubles my sight.’ And it is troubling, too. So archetypal—it makes my head explode with associations! Ancient and modern, past and future, time and timelessness—and all for what? Advertising a show!”

  After the fiery eruption of her words, the look of disdain that subsided onto Atsuko’s face seemed so curmudgeonly and out of place that Marissa had to laugh. Atsuko suddenly realized why Marissa was laughing.

  “Hah! Listen to me! We hardly need to drive the sacred and the profane any farther apart than they already are, do we? And here I am doing it!”

  Atsuko moved off toward the changing tent then, her laughing final words echoing over the lake and deep inside Marissa. True, she cherished her theory about the world-as-it-ought-to-be and the world-as-it-is, but Marissa could never quite forget Hume’s law: No ought deducible from is. Abruptly she was swept by the fear that as long as she believed in her oughts and isses she was doomed to an Arnoldian limbo, wandering between two worlds, one dead, the other powerless to be born. Had she, albeit unconsciously, already consigned the Earth to the first category, the space habitats to the second? Why her personal fascination with utopian literature—with what had never been born from the womb of time? From what longing could such an obsession have arisen in her?

  She suspected that her sudden self- doubt had something to do with those “rumblings from Earth” Atsuko had mentioned. As Marissa moved slowly over the sand from the cold water to the thin tent, she was not comforted by such thoughts.

  * * * * * * *

  Since his coworker Jhana was to be gone for the rest of the day, Paul Larkin thought he’d indulge in a little media-surfing. A short ride on the “Planetary Fear Machine”—the plenum of all Earth’s infotainment and news broadcasts pumped into his lab’s best VR hallucinatorium—always made Paul feel that, despite living in the orbital boonies, he was still able to keep in touch with what was really going on down there.

  Not that what was really going on was to be found openly talked about on the Fear Machine, Paul thought as he walked into the big VR room. He knew better than that. He tended to view the whole constellation of what got pumped out on the Earth’s nets as a sort of planetary ego, a reality principle consciously wailing against the void. He was actually more interested in the planetary id and superego, the unconscious parts of Earth’s noosphere—those parts of the planetary mind that, with luck, he could read traces of in all those conscious mediations, like a therapist interpreting dreams or slips of the tongue.

  To help him see through the wash of surface data he had an entheogen, the mushroom Cordyceps jacintae he’d brought back from Caracamuni tepui so long ago—along with some pure KL 235 from the same mushroom species, recently extracted in his lab. He’d never been so gutsy as to let the mushroom take its full twelve years and form a mature myconeural symbiont with his central nervous system—the way the indigenous people of the tepui had. Still, he had a two months’ growth of the fungus in his head now and that, with a new ingestion and the pure extract, should be enough to trigger the chaos in his brain necessary to fully overcoming the constraints of the dorsal and median raphe nuclei, the “reducing valves” on brain activity.

  Once those impediments were overcome, he could media-surf at greater than flash-cut speed, which would in turn serve as an information trigger for “going elsewhere”, entering that different structure of possibility where he could see the meaningful patterns slowly shifting behind the seemingly meaningless random scatter of world events, entertainments, spectacles, reportage. He always knew when he got to elsewhere, for he could see the patterns of the future already present in the present, could see them clicking into shape like a three-dimensional image rising out of stereogram dot-scatter.

  His friend Seiji called it paranoia tripping, but Paul preferred to think of it as electronic shamanism, aerial voyaging to another realm. Strapping himself into the gimballed swivelstand and looking about him at the full 360º virtual surround, Paul remembered what work they’d gotten this fancy toy for: identifying, analyzing, and interpreting raw ecological imagery, creating an electronic forest to stand between the thing of dirt and cellulose and sunlight, and the thing of numbers and bytes and electrons. It had not been designed for the use he was now going to put it to, but he knew it would do that well, too.

  He slowly chewed the Cordyceps fungus, washing it down with the KL extract mixed in papaya juice. He started pumping the material from Earth’s infotainment nets into the virtual space around him, still keeping manual control over the first thousand channels and the rate of switching. It would be a quarter of an hour before the entheogens kicked in and his mind opened out enough so that he could up his datafeed and go to automated switching.

  He saw the usual news. Ongoing food riots in at least a dozen nations. Refugees pouring from one overcrowded camp to another due to wars civil and uncivil, unrests political and impolitic. Monsoons in the Bay of Bengal. Heavy storms over Europe and North America. Forest fires here, flash floods there, tornadoes and earthquakes thrown in for good measure. Sheepherders putting sunglasses on their flocks in Patagonia—the usual ritual, intended to prevent cataracts resulting from increased UV coming down out of the depleted ozone. Death of the last wild Florida manatee, in a speedboat encounter. More marine mammal beachings. Two corporate-sponsored resource wars in southern Asia....

  His gaze lingered on a fundamentalist siege of an Ark/Zoo facility:

  “Before this night is through,” booms some folksy white-maned media holy-man, “the Lord’s own wrath will raze this ark of Satan and lay low every evolutionist, ecoterrorist, and Gaia worshipper therein!”

  Choruses of “Amen! Amen!” and a wave of applause breaks over the preacher, who smiles benevolently upon his people like a greeting-card grandfather upon his large, holiday-gathered happy family. The image cuts from the pastor’s words to his flock’s actions—a twilight overhead shot of thousands upon thousands of wrathful zealots wearing crosses and cartridge bandoliers, shooting and shouting and milling round a sandbagged perimeter defended by private security forces in riot armor. The nattering of small arms fire and the occasional whump of mortars can be heard in the background, where smoke also rises from shattered buildings.

  Larkin grimaced. Nearly eight billion people on that rock down there, the one with the blown ozone layer and the cyclonic storms marching across its face, the one with the unhappy isles of seacoast cities huddled behind high dikes, castellated by walls and moated by oceans, the one with the continents of buff brown desert where once there had been globe-girdling forests—and all so many of them could still think of was being fruitful and multiplying, clinging all the more tenaciously and in all the greater numbers to the very fundamentalisms that exacerbated the situation.

  Crazy—but crazier still if these attacks, now being allowed on the Arks and Zoos, came also to be allowed upon the Orbital Biodiversity Preserve itself. He knew that many of the religioids thought of the space habitat as a Techno-Babylon, an orbital abomination. Were these increasing attacks a sign of some growing betrayal? The Orbital Complex was merely a big investment, after all. Investment strategies could change, if costs got too high. What if some Terran baron got impatient to move stock and began to play the middle between the t
emporal lords of space and the increasing number of “spiritual” rulers on Earth? The habitat’s untrammeled Easter garden, its endless springtime world, its lake and marsh and meadow and forest and jungle in space, where ghost species were becoming enfleshed again, a resurrection of all those scattered bodies—this secret-garden world continued in existence only on the sufferance of some very powerful forces on Earth....

  He was starting to see the faint gold traceries in his peripheral vision that indicated the entheogens he’d taken were beginning to take affect, though not yet at full strength. He scanned further:

  “We find the addictive popularity of this ‘Building the Ruins’ game very disturbing,” said a Korean trideo industry spokeswoman. “We’ve already gotten many complaints about it from parents’ groups. We want to make clear that responsible Earthbound trideo companies bear no responsibility for the game or its manufacture. In violation of trade regulations it is being designed and updated by someone or some group in the HOME habitat and then flash-manufactured and network-marketed by questionable business groups here on Earth. Also disturbing is the fact that these addictive game-units are broadcasting back to space, presumably to enable the quick upgrades characteristic of this product and its users’ need for constant novelty—”

  Larkin’s visual field became completely filled with entoptic shimmering, networks of light glowing like spiderwebs of molten gold. He felt himself transforming from a person into a place through which threads and lines of bright energy and information were flowing, creating structures of possibility that he examined not so much with his eyes as with his mind. Some part of him far away snapped the channel-switching mode over to automatic infosurf and removed the thousand-channel limit. Data fell into him at greater than flash-cut speed—not just open broadcasts and public information, but encrypted material, business and government and military. Stock transactions, diplomatic communiques, troop movements and transport preparations and readiness status. Tetragrammaton and Medusa Blue back-channels, intelligence webs operating behind “bought” governments and corporate fronts like Tao-Ponto and ParaLogics, all squawking about games and unidentified satellites and other strange matters. As much of the Earth’s infosphere as he could process was being crammed into his head, randomly and meaninglessly at first, but soon with meaning and pattern rising and growing out of it.