Lightpaths

by Howard V. Hendrix

  When, two hours later, he had completed his electronic shamanic flight to elsewhere, he knew that the pattern was an ominous one. The Forces behind the Plans were marshalling—Holocaust and Exodus, demons and angels, and something, some inevitable but surprising third thing that was both and neither of those oppositional powers. And the focus of that shape of time he’d encountered! It was as if the flat-looking starfield background of the universe had turned into a three-dimensional mountain made of stars—a mountain the peak of which was pointed precisely at the orbital habitat itself.

  Switching off the virtual surround, Paul realized the machine was still jittering madly with images. But then, so was he.

  * * * * * * *

  Jhana returned to her residence in an agitated state. She knew that her employer, Tao-Ponto, would undoubtedly be interested in a pheromone perfume like that which Roger Cortland was working on. Dr. Tien-Jones would definitely consider it a “worthwhile project.” She felt equally sure, however, that neither Roger Cortland nor Tao-Ponto would be emphasizing its fertility-decreasing aspect in their hyping of it. If a perfume could be developed that contained a powerful human sexual attractant—and could also generate tremendous profits without causing immediate cancer in the wearers—she was sure everyone at TPAG would be all for it.

  Yet something about the whole scenario still disturbed her—so much so that she felt the need to take her mind off her visit with Roger. She had viewed the instructional tape on the upkeep of her garden area and now decided that a little green therapy might do her some good. Locating a small pair of pruning clippers and some envelopes for seeds, she went out to trim the blown roses, then to remove and store the seeds from the poppies and columbines.

  Working her way among the plants, Jhana got sweaty and dirty and itchy with plant cuttings and debris. Despite that, she still marveled at the way this artificial world worked and wondered why the world below and its people did not work as well. The gardens here flowed easily (if not effortlessly) into the designated “wild areas”, those special habitats for the endangered and threatened species of Earth that were being preserved in space. Looking about the Sphere now, with her feet on the “ground”—looking toward that diversity which, combined with height, had so overwhelmed her upon her arrival—instead of seeing something fearful she was now beginning to see a world that was beautiful in its complexity, despite its inside-out strangeness.

  Some of the beauty was plainly visible: the multiplicity of environments, the streams that meandered down from the poles through marshes and ponds then onward to the river girding the Sphere’s equator, all flowing into and out of the small natural-looking reservoir called Echo Mirror Lake. Houses and other small buildings were set into the landscape/skyscape, usually in small tight clusters. In the case of single units like the Sanchez-Fukuda place, they were constructed in such a way that, instead of being imposed upon it like a city planner’s nightmare, the residences seemed to flow up out of the mazed landscape like a geomancer’s dream.

  As she finished pruning the blown roses, Jhana thought how different the cities of Earth looked, viewed from low orbit or that unsure boundary where airspace ends and outerspace begins. Even before she came up here she’d flown over L.A. and Tokyo and Mexico City, seen computer-enhanced reconnaissance photos of cities around the world, and they’d always reminded her of one thing: a biochip vat-spill gone out of control, some malignant meta-tumor, half supercomputer microcircuitry and half fungal colony, spreading across a Petri-dish planet, an informational spawn-complex bedding out through mycelia of highways and railroads and sea-lanes and flight patterns, trade and exchange, lines of print and code, power lines and telephone wires, broadcast channels and fiber-optic cables and information winging out to satellites. When she’d flown over Earth’s cities after dark, or seen shots of them nightside from space, they had not reminded her of glittering diamonds but rather of great electronic fungal colonies glowing and burning like graveyard foxfire, luminescent pox on the face of the darkness.

  Rubbing columbine seed pods mechanically between her fingers so that the black seeds fell into an envelope, she found herself far away, thinking how different her homeworld would look if this habitat were everted and spread upon the Earth, in place of the human habitations that were already there. Certainly an Earth so inhabited would be almost invisible from space, day or night—the presence of human settlement harder to detect because it would be shedding so much less light and heat into the surrounding environment.

  Even as she looked at the Sphere’s cavernous interior now, she supposed that most of its real beauty—or at least its elegance and efficiency—was almost invisible here too. Despite her initial misgivings, she was beginning to develop a grudging respect for the place. Its virtues were that way: invisible, subterranean—not sensational or spectacular.

  Nearly all of the habitat’s trashstream was fully recycled—so? Its soil in the farming, wild, and habitation areas was always given time to regenerate itself—who cares? All the gases of organic decomposition were utilized and all the possible pollutants of living or farming or manufacturing were eliminated at the source or fully reclaimed for other uses—eh, big deal. None of that was sexy, none of that would ever show up well in a tour-brochure-from-space description. Yet it was really what this place was about.

  When she’d heard, before she came up here, that the weather in the habitat was pretty much always perfect, Jhana had thought, My God, whatever do people find to talk about? Yet clearly they found plenty—as if, once the actual weather was no longer a topic of conversation, every other kind of weather—political weather, religious weather—could be. Not that that distanced them from dirt and wind and water, though. Working in the garden, it was becoming clearer to her that people here had to live in careful harmony with their environment because if they didn’t, they’d die. This place was a lifeboat compared to the luxury liner of Earth, but as a consequence of their stricter confines the passengers here seemed much less inclined to take their world for granted.

  She thought about that passage in the Bible saying it was easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than a rich man to enter the Kingdom of Heaven. Here in this peaceable kingdom in the heavens, it seemed equally difficult to live luxuriously and wastefully—because everyone was always aware of the narrowness of the needle’s eye. Yet, despite the constraints, the lives of the settlers here were still rich, as rich as that of nearly anybody on Earth, though in less tangible ways. Crushing dried, ripe poppy capsules between her fingers for the tiny seeds that rained out of them and fell into her collecting envelope, Jhana thought that this sort of world, spread upon the Earth, might not be such a bad thing after all.

  Standing in the midst of the garden she closed her eyes and inhaled the thick, sensual blend of scents around her. The action of this perfume, she thought, was very different from that of the perfume Roger Cortland proposed. She knew the scientific reason for all the green plants in the habitat was nominally that they pumped more oxygen into the air and encouraged an ion balance more favorable to human contentment. The scents and colors, though not much talked about in the technical reports, were a superfluous grace everyone appreciated.

  The idea of scents, though, dragged her mind determinedly back to Roger’s work. Besides its sexual attractant powers, the “other” property of Roger’s proposed perfume, the secret one that no one would be talking about—would that be a superfluous grace too? Or something else?

  Her eye caught Seiji Yamaguchi’s as he walked past on a garden path nearby, jaunty in an anachronistic pair of blue overalls. Jhana waved and he came toward her, the two of them making small talk about gardening and Seiji’s landscaping work with one of her neighbors, until he changed the subject.

  “You seemed Deep In Thought when you first turned toward me,” he said after he’d joined Jhana in her garden. “Hope it wasn’t something I said or did.”

  “Oh no, no,�
�� she said, then stared a moment at him. “I don’t know if I should tell you about this...” she began, then went on to tell him about Roger’s proposed pheromone plan, spilling out the disturbing issues it raised for her, continuing as she did so to absently deadhead flowers and cut newer blooms to bring inside.

  “If the settlers here have no choice but to live in harmony with their environment or die here,” she said, finishing up, “then does Roger’s scheme to reduce Earth’s population differ all that much from the space habitat designers’? And, if he can really develop what he’s working on, Roger’s plan will take effect much more quickly. In the short term it would be more efficient, too.”

  Seiji frowned and shook his head.

  “It’s not that simple though, you know,” Seiji said, taking an armful of her cut flowers, both of them thinking about it as they walked from the garden. “The main difference between the ‘constraints’, as you call them, associated with Roger’s plan and those associated with the hopes surrounding the space habitat come down fundamentally to an issue of choice.”

  “I don’t see how,” Jhana said as they walked inside her residence.

  “People make a conscious decision as to whether or not they want to live in a space habitat to begin with,” Seiji insisted as they began gathering vases and putting flowers in them. “We make an informed choice as to whether we want to put ourselves in such a restricted situation. We have a choice of worlds, more so than any previous generation of humanity. The system of space colonization will take longer to reduce the population burden on Earth than Roger’s plan would, true. Space habitats are more long-term, arguably more ‘wasteful’ of time that humanity and the Earth’s ecosphere can ill afford to waste. Yet, no matter whether it succeeds or fails, at least our long-range plan is a humanitarian means to a humane end.”

  “And you don’t think Roger’s plan would be?” Jhana asked, filing away the packets of seeds she’d collected as Seiji puttered about, absentmindedly arranging the flowers.

  “If people are kept uninformed about the pheromone perfume’s secondary effect, if they’re purposely kept ‘unconscious’ of it,” Seiji said, puzzling it through, “then the element of informed choice will be left out of the equation. Denying people that choice means denying them part of their role as autonomous adults, diminishing their humanity by diminishing the role of choice and will in their lives.”

  “So Roger’s perfume proposal reeks of chemical authoritarianism,” Jhana said, unable to resist teasing him a little as she slightly rearranged his flower arranging. “Stinks of olfactory fascism, of leading people literally by the nose?”

  “Now I didn’t say that,” Seiji said, holding his hands up before him. “Why would anyone want that? From everything I know about him, Roger Cortland just doesn’t seem the type of person who lusts for power in that sort of Big-Daddy-knows-best style. I wonder what’s driving his interest in this pheromone stuff?”

  Seiji looked at his watch, then glanced around the room as if trying to remember something.

  “Oh, I’ve got another appointment,” he said suddenly. “I must be going. Perhaps we could get together and continue this conversation again sometime soon?”

  “Yes, I’d like that,” Jhana said, walking with him to the door. “Over lunch, maybe? Let’s keep in touch—I’d like to learn more about your work with the power satellites, too.”

  Seiji agreed and they said their good-byes. Jhana watched him go, thinking that it didn’t require pheromones to make Seiji Yamaguchi attractive to her, in his kindly, distracted sort of way. He was in very good physical shape, probably from all his gardening work. She’d hate to think she was just using him as an information source.

  Standing in the house’s living area, looking at the flower arrangements and smelling their perfume in the air, she pondered her next course of action. Should she—based on what she only suspected and could not prove, about a biochemical that hadn’t even been synthesized yet—should she keep Roger’s work hidden, neglect to pass it on to her superiors? She had promised Roger she’d pass word along. Should she go back on that promise for the sake of protecting strangers from some as-yet-obscure harm—or would withholding information make her a Big Mommy, guilty of denying people the possibility of choice? As bad as Roger and Tao-Ponto would be themselves, if they ever marketed the stuff and purposely neglected to inform the public of the pheromone’s secondary effect?

  Abruptly, Jhana felt as if Roger had handed her the olfactory equivalent of atom bomb plans. The roles offered her now—spy, accomplice, whistle-blower—were none of them very comforting.

  No, she couldn’t hide his proposal. Doing that would deny her TPAG superiors the possibility of informed choice—the very thing which, she had to agree with Seiji, was so wrong about Roger’s plans. If it was wrong for Roger to use such covert means for the supposedly lofty end he sought, then it would be equally wrong for her to use such means to accomplish her ends as well.

  Checking the time in Balance’s zone on Earth, Jhana spoke Mr. Tien-Jones’s office number to her wallscreen. She did not feel good about doing her job in this way, but she did it. Getting only his answering computer on the line, she was obscurely relieved that she could leave the information as a message for him without having to actually converse with anyone about it.

  * * * * * * *

  Wondering if he had told Jhana too much and unsure of her reaction to his work, Roger was working late, determined more than ever to complete promptly the synthesis of the human pheromone that had become his obsession.

  With the help of his information manager program or IMP (which he’d customized to look and act like an on-screen mole-rat), Roger had finger-walked through innumerable virtual libraries on Earth, scanning myriad relevant selections from the scientific literature relating to pheromones and sexuality. He had stumbled on the relationship of the olfactory sense to memory, to theta rhythm, to REM sleep and the rise of dreaming in mammals one hundred and forty million years ago—learning, in the process, a great deal more about dreaming itself, both as information reprocessing and as survival strategy.

  “Everything in the literature fits the plan for the proposed pheromone,” he mused aloud to his mole-rat imp, “except for one thing: theta rhythm has not been demonstrated in higher primates in this context.”

  “Yes,” the imp confirmed. “Available evidence suggests it disappeared when vision replaced olfaction as the dominant sense.”

  “Okay,” Roger said, sending his imp on a new search. “Our pheromone will have to be a potent one, capable of re-awakening some of the olfactory sense’s underlying, ancient powers. Examine further the scientific literature on the deep relation of olfaction to sexual excitation—focusing particularly on this memory trigger issue.”

  “Will do,” said the imp, tunneling away mole-ratwise into the infosphere.

  Roger felt too tired to think and analyze further—but still much too fidgety with nervous energy to consider going to sleep. Wandering through the lab a bit aimlessly, he saw that Marissa was here late too, playing the girl with the DNA eyes on one of their CAMD facility’s Cybergene machines. As he stopped outside the door, he saw her unsuiting, clearly frustrated.

  “How goes it?” he asked innocently—though he stared less innocently at the coppery waterfall of her thick hair as she removed her wraparounds.

  “Not well,” Marissa said with a sigh. “Getting this immortalizing vector to even begin to function is turning out to be a lot more work than I suspected.”

  “I was thinking of taking a little spacewalk to unwind,” Roger said nonchalantly. “Maybe you’d like to come along—if you’re at a good break point too, that is.”

  “Are you kidding?” Marissa said. “Even if I were on the verge of a major discovery I’d take a break to do that.”

  “Then follow me.”

  Via ridgecart they made their way to the docking facil
ities and then to the pod bays. Boarding Roger’s small private craft, they donned a pair of his custom maneuvering suits as the little ship, travelling on autopilot, left the bays and the docking area, then slowed and stopped a hundred kilometers off the main traffic lanes leading to the habitat. Since they had to strip down to get into their opaque suits, Roger politely turned his head as, back to back, they dressed in the small pod. When he had checked over Marissa’s suit and they were safely at their destination, Roger ordered the hatch open and they drifted into the vast blue-black womb of the universe.

  “This is fantastic!” Marissa said, nervous excitement in her voice. “Like being angels in heaven!”

  “Ah, but if a heaven is to be safe for astronauts,” Roger said as he stepped from the air lock behind her, “it must be devoid of angels.”

  “What?”

  “Just think of all the trouble angels would have posed to the opening of the space frontier,” Roger said, mock-serious as he put her through some basic tandem maneuvering instructions. “Splatting on portholes. Getting sucked into scramjets. Fouling in the lines of lightsails. Getting blasted to pieces by mass-driver projectiles. Winged by spacejunk, to fall down the burning sky, helpless feathery meteors smashing into the Earth’s thick walls of air....”

  “That,” Marissa said, “is a truly perverse image.”

  Roger laughed.

  “Maybe,” he said, “but not historically unprecedented. Think of dodos and passenger pigeons, or aborigines and American Indians, for that matter. If angels did exist, it would be necessary for us to exterminate them. Angel killers, like the stool-pigeoners and buffalo hunters of old, blasting away at huge flocks of the heavenly hosts, lasers splashing red on their pearly wings and flesh. Have to be sophisticated hunters too—‘What sport, eh? Back in the hypersaddle again, riding the range on the final frontier!’“