Lightpaths

by Howard V. Hendrix

  “What ‘other matters’?” Lev said grumpily.

  “Oh, little things—like the fact that the majority of the dataflow between Earth and the Orbital Complex is no longer going through recognized channels.”

  “What?”

  “The thing in the ‘Boxes, Lev. The consciousness you said couldn’t be a consciousness. Whatever it is—let’s call it an intelligence—it’s out of the ‘Boxes, now. We couldn’t shut it down if we wanted to. It’s ‘distributed’ itself, largely through the Rats, but in other ways too. That ‘distributed consciousness’—excuse me, distributed intelligence—it’s behind the spread of this ‘Building the Ruins’ game. I’ve played it, Lev. Very strange. Even stranger is the fact that all the information from all those playings of that game is being sent up the well, along with one helluva lot of other data. Informationally speaking, the orbital complex has become a hot spot. At the current rate of dataflow, in a day or so we’ll be hotter than any single city on Earth—hotter than most countries, in fact.”

  Lev stared at her.

  “But where’s all that data going?”

  “Not to us,” Lakshmi said quietly. “Aleister and I aren’t sure, but we suspect those X-shaped satellites have something to do with information storage, among other things. They’ve been built by micromachines acting ‘autonomously’. But the distributed consciousness is deeply intermingled with the Vajra—”

  “And the Vajra coordinates with all the micromachines,” Lev said, chewing his lower lip nervously. “Aw Jeez. What have you told Atsuko Cortland about this?”

  “Just that we’ve located the source of the problem and are working to correct it.”

  “That’s true enough,” Lev said, trying to put a hopeful spin on things. “You got the thing in the ‘Boxes to stop glitching my shobots, at least.”

  “Right,” Lakshmi said quietly. “Or maybe it was just finished getting our attention that way. Something’s still building that weird spirit-animal sculpture in my workshop, you know.”

  “But otherwise the distributed whatever-it-is seems harmless enough, right?” Lev continued in his hopeful vein. “The only damage I can really think of that it’s done is sour our relations with Earth a bit, that’s all.”

  “That,” Lakshmi agreed, “and some of the micromachines have been raiding the mass drivers—for materials to build those X-satellites, is our guess. But there’s something else. Aleister’s found this extreme redundancy in the Rats, all repeating the same nonfunctional sequence of code. It’s a list of names.”

  Lakshmi shot the list to Lev’s personal data assistant and the list appeared on his wraparounds. Six names. Two he knew well enough by reputation—both Cortlands, Roger and Atsuko. Two he knew vaguely—Seiji Yamaguchi and Paul Larkin. One he knew not at all—Jhana Meniskos. And one he could never get to know—Jiro Yamaguchi.

  “Strange list, isn’t it?” Lakshmi said cryptically. “We don’t know how they tie into the Rats. None of them have ever been to Sedona, where the Real-time A-life Technopredators were developed. None of them ever had any connection with the Myrrhisticine Abbey and its network manager, the ex-phreaker Phelonious Manqué. Some weren’t even born when it happened.”

  “When what happened?” Lev asked, lost for a moment.

  “This,” Lakshmi said, shooting Lev’s PDA another feed. An old-style video image appeared on his wraparounds, amateurish, someone’s unsteady hand moving the view-finder. A red mesa or butte—Lev couldn’t remember which term fit—topped by a complex of Neo-Gothic buildings.

  “The Abbey,” Lakshmi said, following along. “Here it comes. Watch.”

  Above the abbey on the mesa a flash of light burst, but didn’t go away. Instead it quickly became a point of light, then a hole of darkness rimmed by light like the “diamond ring” stage of an eclipse. The light-rimmed hole grew rapidly, until it was clear that it wasn’t ringed by white light but rather by myriad rainbow fires dancing over its whole surface. What looked like points of light glowed inside it too. It blotted out the Abbey, then most of the mesa, then disappeared as quickly as it had come, leaving behind only a bowl of broken stone.

  “What the hell was that?”

  “We don’t really know,” Lakshmi said quietly. “Aleister’s still searching. Sensationalist media at the time called it the ‘black hole sun’ and ‘Tunguska II’. Scientific theories ranged from meteoritic impact, to anomalous seismic event, to the sudden appearance of a micro-singularity. Religionists claimed it was a ‘rapturing’—mainly because the Myrrhisticineans were apocalyptists.”

  “Looks like they got their wish,” Lev said cautiously. “Does it have anything to do with what’s going on up here?”

  “We don’t know that either. The Rats are the only connection. But the man who called himself Manqué didn’t survive. No one who was on that mesa that day has ever been heard from since. The only Myrrhisticineans who survived were those who were away from the abbey.”

  One of the band crew called Lev’s name. Apparently his advice was needed on some aspect of the construction.

  “Look, Laksh, I’ve got to go,” he said, already moving away. “But keep me in the loop on this—especially if anything else affecting Comm comes up.”

  Lakshmi watched him leave. He still bounded away, but his bounding wasn’t as light. Superman, with burden, she thought as her hoverchair turned slowly away.

  * * * * * * *

  Marissa had only stepped out of the lab a moment for coffee, but when she got back the ideological tug of war between Atsuko and Roger was well underway. She should have known better than to suggest that Atsuko meet her at the lab.

  “—and this work is hyperspecialized and reductionist in the extreme,” Atsuko was saying pointedly. “Working with these perfect little monsters from the id, these ‘naked mole-rats.’ “

  “I’m surprised at you, Mother,” Roger said sarcastically. “Isn’t it you who’s always preached the inherent worth and value of every species. Why else preserve biodiversity?”

  “But these creatures strain even my tolerance. Blind, hairless, incestuous, subterranean, shit-eating little beggars!”

  Marissa burst out laughing at the obvious distaste in Atsuko’s voice. Seeing who had laughed, Atsuko managed a slight smile.

  “Why are you laughing?” Atsuko asked. “I didn’t mean for it to come out as profanely as it did, but it’s all literally true, you know. They are blind. They are hairless, or virtually so. They spend their entire lives underground—’completely fossorial,’ as the scientific articles put it. The researchers may speak primly of ‘inbreeding’ and ‘consanguineous mating,’ but that’s just a nice way of saying incest. The young, the pups, when hungry ‘beg fecal matter from the adults,’ which the mole-rat experts term ‘coprophagy.’ They also engage in ‘autocoprophagy’—they roll their own, and then they eat it!”

  Marissa found herself laughing loudly and openly with Atsuko.

  “Undeniably,” Roger said at last, when his mother’s childish laughter had subsided, “but they’re as worthy of scientific research as anything else—”

  “No doubt. Maybe more worthy, than most things. All I’ll say is that Jennifer Jarvis, the ‘mother of naked mole rat research,’ must have possessed an incredibly detached scientific objectivity while she was working with them.”

  Marissa smiled again, leaning forward.

  “You seem to have learned more than a little bit about them yourself.”

  “Yes,” Atsuko said, her tone growing more serious. “A mother likes to know what her son is up to—even when the son and mother are as loving as Roger and I are. It helps me figure out certain things. Knowing, for instance, that Jarvis worked at the University of Cape Town, turning it into the world’s great center for the study of eusocial mammals—that helps explain why Roger spent several of his graduate school summers there. It also explains why he’s
working up here now.”

  “Not to be closer to my mother?” Roger put in, faux naive, hugging his mother with an almost painful ferocity.

  “Hardly,” Atsuko said, extricating herself from her son’s embrace. “The Preserve has the largest collection of wild-caught naked mole rats anywhere, and some of the best facilities available to biological researchers, as you well know. It’s not filial love that brings you here. It’s your own obsessions—though why you should be obsessed with those little monsters, I’ll never know.”

  A silence opened between them then. Marissa strove to fill the awkward emptiness.

  “Weren’t we going to the gym?” she said to Atsuko. “Then on to the Archives?”

  “That’s why I came here,” Atsuko said, none too obliquely. They bid Roger adieu, Marissa smiling knowingly over Atsuko’s head. Roger returned the knowing smile gratefully, thankful to have Marissa’s help in ushering his mother onward and out of the lab.

  Roger returned to reviewing the material his mole-rat imp had scavenged from all over the infosphere, but after about ten minutes he found he couldn’t concentrate. Maybe it was just a hang-over from his spacewalk with Marissa, but he found he kept thinking about his father.

  Evander Cortland had been a financial genius, Roger thought, staring down at the lab’s richly polished mooncrete floors. A brash, arrogant man, too. Roger could never figure why Atsuko had married him—they were so different. As a child, he remembered, the three of them had seemed the happy family, living all over Earth, playing the games of the international set for several years.

  Eventually that became aimless, pointless. The whole time that slow realization was coming, though, his father was becoming more and more successful. Ev’s speculations in leading-edge technologies paid off, his millions became billions. About that same time, his mother Atsuko started joining organizations like the Global Futures Fund, the Space Studies Institute, the Space Frontiers Foundation. What better way to fill the void of being A Successful Man’s Wife than joining organizations planning literally to fill the void through the colonization of space? His mother took up that vision as her crusade, and his father—who had connections everywhere in the high tech industries—took up Atsuko’s crusade as his own new vision. Together they had been instrumental in putting together the HOME consortium.

  Roger remembered, though, that as the lobbying and proposal-making dragged on and on, his father had become increasingly pragmatic about “the project” while his mother became increasingly idealistic. His father used to always address the vision in practical terms: Who would ‘ante up’? How could they generate enough corporate ‘will’ to open up the corporate ‘wallet’? His dad had never been very happy with the idealistic elements of the project—great for selling it to the public, sure, but the final reality for him was the bottom line. He wanted a money-maker, a cash cow in the sky that could be milked for a long time.

  As the space habitat became more and more of a reality, his mother began to spend more time with the people who were going to settle in it—the ‘nuts and flakes’ as his father took to calling them. His father had tried gamely to fit in with the new crowd. He even lived up in the habitat for a brief period while the central sphere was being constructed, but he found it far too restrictive. Roger could understand that: on Earth his father was a king, he could do anything he wanted, have anything he wanted. Here he had to play by the same peon rules as everyone else.

  That wasn’t his father’s way at all, something that became quite clear when—just to prove Ev Cortland didn’t have to play by anybody’s rules—he took to “swooping” some of the younger women colonists. Naturally his father found the swooping easy, and naturally his mother had become justifiably enraged, hurling invective about Evander’s “male-pride mid-life crisis” and how the “raft” of his conquests—all those women he’d bedded to “salve his ego and gratify his lust”—would sink the habitat project. In reality, though, the project had already gotten bigger than his father, bigger than his parents or their problems, bigger in fact than all the players put together. By then it had picked up so much momentum that it really couldn’t be stopped. It had a life of its own.

  His parents’ life together, though, was over. Three months before the space habitat was officially opened, they divorced. Roger had been just short of fifteen at the time. The space habitat he’d known only as something endlessly under construction, so he’d opted for good times on Earth with his father. His mother decided to move into the habitat. Roger hadn’t really felt the separation that much; even when they were supposedly still living together, his mother hadn’t been around that much for him anyway, toward the end.

  Roger remembered the rest of his teen-years as something of a blur. He’d continued to excel in school, entering Oxford at fifteen and taking his degree at seventeen. Graduate work in France and South Africa and at Tsukuba Science City outside Tokyo, before finally taking his doctorate at Stanford when he was twenty one. He hadn’t seen his father a lot, but Ev gave him lots of money and everything it could buy. Hovercycles, private jets, sports cars, hydrofoils, all manner of supertoys. For his eighteenth birthday Ev gave him the production rights to the first true supercomputer-on-a-chip, the prototype developed by one of his corporate subsidiaries. Roger was still making money from that.

  He had become his father’s son. What you can buy, what you’ve accomplished, is who you are—his father’s credo, which he had made his own. He was as revolted as his father ever was by the “idealistic” life of this habitat, the “voluntary simplicity” of the local “lifeways”. He’d even gone so far as to have a cosmetic surgeon reconstruct his face and eyes so he’d look less Asian, more Anglo like his father.

  He and both his parents had all been together for the last time at Roger’s Ph.D. graduation ceremony, his doctoral hooding. Three years ago, now. Then, a month later, it had all ended. The deep-sea diving “accident”. Though there’d never been real proof, persistent rumor said it wasn’t an accident, that it was the result of a conspiracy among his competitors. Roger had clung to that theory. The other option—that Evander Cortland, billionaire world-conqueror, empire-builder and eminently successful man, had in fact committed suicide—was a thought more chilling than the cold at the bottom of that deepest sea where his father had died.

  A thought cold enough to send Roger back to his research, in earnest, and with no more memories before his eyes.

  * * * * * * *

  While at the lab that morning, Jhana received a pair of v-mail messages. One was long-link and encrypted from Earth—Balance Tien-Jones thanking her for the information she’d forwarded concerning Dr. Cortland’s research and also reminding her of the rising tensions between Earth and the colony. The other message originated closer at hand—Seiji Yamaguchi accepting her invitation to lunch. He suggested they meet in one of the townlet shop-clusters near her lab, at a small cafe called “Chameleon on a Mirror.”

  When Jhana arrived at the gossamery, tent-like reflecting structure of the Chameleon, Seiji was already seated at a stone table beside a stream, waiting for her.

  “Hello, Ms. Meniskos. Good to see you again. If I remember right, the last time we met I was holding forth about God, the universe, and everything.”

  “Not quite everything,” Jhana said, smiling politely as she sat down, noting the glass panels set into the stone table’s top. “And please, call me Jhana.”

  “All right.”

  The owner, a black-haired and walrus-moustached man Seiji introduced as “Ehab Alama,” stopped at their table bearing a tray with water and spiced tea in glasses, and flatware wrapped in cloth serviettes. Seiji seemed to have some sort of business relationship with the man.

  “The sulfur shelf and oyster varieties were very good this week,” Ehab said. “Not as rich as the morels and truffles, of course, but the customers like them very much anyway. I’ve been using the sulfur shell in omelettes an
d as a substitute for chicken. The oyster mushroom, the Sajor Caju, is working wonderfully in seafood salads and the enokis and shiis are still a hit.”

  “Good, good!” Seiji said, pleased. “I’ve got a few others for you to try next week. I think I’ve got the shaggy mane’s deliquescing problem licked, and we can probably go to the pink-bottoms and portobellos instead of the button agaricus you’ve been using.”

  “Excellent. I look forward to cooking with them. Your menus are mounted in the tabletop,” he said, the latter primarily for Jhana’s benefit. “I’ll be back after you’ve ordered.”

  The man bustled away quickly to attend to the luncheon customers at other tables. Jhana pressed a small stud mounted in the table top and a menu appeared in the glass inset.

  “What was all that about?” Jhana asked, perusing the electronic menu.

  “Well, since raising beef cattle is far too land and water intensive for a space habitat, Ehab and I are conducting an experiment in what you might call ‘cuisine design’,” Seiji said, leaning back in his chair and counting creatures off on his fingers. “We have some pigs and goats and sheep, more rabbits, chickens, partridges, pheasants and other fowl out at the agricultural tori. Lots of trout, pike, eels, carp, catfish, scads of other fish in the watercourses here—but they all make their demands too. The cost of live protein, in time and labor, seems to grow dearer all the time. Their dung and manure are a partial payback, but mainly they’re a luxury item for our visitors and tourist trade. It’s astronomically expensive to ship foodstuffs up the well—though what we have an overabundance of we do sometimes ship down. Are you ready to order?”

  “Yes,” Jhana said, caught a bit off guard by the way he’d switched tracks so fast. “Are the kebabs good?”

  “Very. Ehab makes great kebabs. Good choice. I think I’ll have the same. Just speak or punch your order in—there—and they’ll make it up in the kitchen tent.” He took a sip of tea. “So anyway, as I was saying, there’s a need sometimes to stretch fish and fowl with other supplements, and provide substitutes for flesh in general. You can do an awful lot with textured vegetable proteins, but I’ve been working a different angle: the fungi.”