Lightpaths

by Howard V. Hendrix

  “Mushrooms?”

  “That’s right. Basidiomycetes and ascomycetes both. They’ve long been under-used, particularly in the West, where mycophobia is a centuries-old tradition. You’re from North America, right? Have you ever eaten a sulfur shelf?”

  “No, I can’t say I have.”

  “You don’t know what you’ve been missing! It’s a bright, yellow-orange, shelving fungus that grows on trees just about everywhere. You must have seen it. You probably passed by hundreds of them when you were a kid and never once thought of them as edible.”

  Jhana looked at him oddly. It almost seemed as if the rather blandly patterned tent material of the Chameleon was assuming three dimensional shapes behind her luncheon companion. She shook her head to clear the impression away.

  “To be honest, Seiji,” Jhana said slowly, “if I came upon a bright yellow-orange thing growing out of a tree stump, my first impulse would hardly be to stick it in my mouth. I suppose you’ve eaten them? What do they taste like?”

  “Like chicken—”

  “Oh no!” Jhana laughed. “Rattlesnake tastes like chicken. Frog-legs taste like chicken. Everything tastes like chicken—sometimes even chicken!”

  “Okay, okay,” Seiji said, smiling wanly. “So I should have been more specific. But one of the popular names for it is chicken of the woods—not to be confused with Grifola frondosa, hen of the woods. But a sulfur shelf really does taste something like chicken that’s been crossed with a mild cheese and a firm tofu. It’s great in omelettes.”

  “And it’s bright orange, you said?” Jhana asked, skeptically. “Right. Sure. Sounds just yummy. No thanks. I’ll stick with what’s safely sold in the stores, thank you.”

  “Suit yourself,” Seiji said with a shrug. He was about to say more when a bright green chameleon fell from one of the trees to the terrace and scampered off in splay-footed fashion. Watching the chameleon, Jhana once again had the odd sensation that, beyond the scurrying creature, three-dimensional shapes were flashing out of the subtler patterns on the pavilion tent walls. Before she could ask Seiji about it, though, Ehab arrived with their kebabs on whitenoise-grey stoneware plates, which he placed before them.

  “Now the mushrooms on this are more my speed,” Jhana said, pointing to the clearly recognizable button variety interspersed among what looked to be chunks of meat, sliced red and green peppers, whole miniature tomatoes, and pieces of pineapple and other fruit. It looked delicious and tasted even better.

  “Do you like it?” Seiji asked after a time.

  “Wonderful,” Jhana said. “The lamb is excellent, and this other meat, which I can’t quite place, is marvelous.”

  “Tastes like a good steak cooked over a macadamia-nut fire, maybe?”

  “Exactly! What is it?”

  Seiji smiled a Cheshire cat grin that lingered and grew until she thought it would swallow his whole face.

  “You don’t mean—”

  Smile unwavering, Seiji nodded his head.

  “Okay. I give up. What kind of mushroom is it?”

  “A morel,” he said proudly. “One of the last important delicacy species to become mass-producible, if not mass marketable.”

  She took another bite of the morel “meat.” Despite knowing what it was, she still found it delicious.

  “Maybe you’re right,” she conceded reluctantly. “Maybe I have been missing something.”

  Ehab came to refill their tea and water glasses. They drank and continued to eat, Seiji going on about still more obscure fungi: “lion’s manes” and “fairy rings” and “swordbelts”, “blewits” and “namekos”, “paddy straws” and “stropharia”. Jhana tried to pay attention but, throughout the meal, she kept getting fleeting glimpses of three-dimensional images emerging from the walls of the pavilion—geometric figures like stars and crosses and pyramids, rippling waves, peaks and valleys, but also animals, particularly lizards, birds and butterflies, a veritable hallucination of jungle camouflage. When a spiral vortex like the Milky Way suddenly appeared out of the white-noise pattern of her by-then-empty plate, she had to say something.

  “Seiji, are any of the mushrooms we’ve been eating, uh, hallucinogenic?” she asked, a hint of nervousness just barely audible in her voice.

  “Not at all,” he said dismissively, still finishing his meal. “One of the cardinal rules up here is that you’re not supposed to alter other people’s consciousnesses without their knowledge and permission. Why do you ask?”

  “Because I’ve been seeing things,” Jhana said, cautiously but firmly, after making sure no other patrons were in easy earshot.

  “What sorts of things?” Seiji inquired, almost managing to keep a straight face.

  Jhana described the images she’d seen appearing and disappearing in the walls of the pavilion, in the furniture, even in the plates. She was sure she was seeing them, and she wanted to know why.

  “Because this is the Chameleon, that’s why!” Seiji said, unable to keep from laughing. “Because Ehab is a devoted fan of stereograms and anamorphic devices. They were popular toys around the turn of the century. Almost every surface here is covered with particular patterns that are perceivable at more than one level. At the obvious, the ‘blatant’ level, they’re just pretty patterns or colorful random noise. Seen in the right way or from the right angle, though, a deeper, ‘latent’ level appears, three-dimensional figures and images emerging from the blatant background. You’re lucky. A lot of people can’t see the latent stuff unless they’ve been told to look for it—or they’ve been drinking heavily. I’ve always thought of the three-dimensionals here as a great visual joke, a prank on the unsuspecting, but don’t tell Ehab that. He’s very serious about it—his ‘art’.”

  “I’ve heard of stereograms before,” Jhana said, “though I’ve never had much exposure to them outside of virtual reality constructs.”

  “He generated most of this stuff on his computers,” Seiji said with a nod, “even claims he’s invented a new technique that combines anamorphics, color-field, random-dot, and wallpaper stereograms, God knows what all. For him, I think they’re a sort of visual koan—optical meditations reminding us that things aren’t always what they seem.”

  Seiji’s explanation was reassuring. She was relieved to hear that the images were coming purely from that “mushroom” of brain inside her skull—unaltered by the chemical constituents of the shish kebab mushrooms that had been on her plate.

  “This whole habitat is like that,” she said at last. “Everything more than it seems. Always what it is—and then something else, something more.”

  “How do you mean?” Seiji asked.

  “Why is it, for instance, that so many of you permanent residents up here wear so many different hats?” Jhana asked. “I mean, how do you know so much about mushrooms when you’re a landscape architect—and why are you a landscape architect when your academic training is in energy systems and you’re officially employed by the HOME consortium as a solar power engineer? I took the liberty of checking.”

  Seiji smiled over his jawline-fringing Mennonite beard.

  “Lots of us move beyond our specialties,” he replied, “both out of necessity and inclination. Not for wealth, certainly. We’ve pretty much succeeded in de-linking social status from material consumption. But even here, where most of us are dedicated to lives of voluntary simplicity in some form, there’s still more work than there are specialists to perform it. So we double or triple up. Take Ehab, for instance. He came up here for the initial engineering and construction of the habitat, then decided to stay on—as a restaurateur, among other things. All of us have to assume at least some responsibility for basic policing, educating, and paramedical training, and everyone has to spend some time in the agricultural rings. In my own case working out there showed me a ‘green thumb’ part of my nature that I really didn’t know was part of me. Working i
n the agricultural areas, I became interested in landscape architecture. From there I became fascinated with the role of decay and the breakdown of complex materials into simpler components in the soil, through the action of soil organisms, saprophytes—the fungi, particularly.”

  “But how do you find the time and energy to do all of it?”

  Seiji, having finished his main course at last too, lay down his knife and fork.

  “Not everybody does. Your friend Roger Cortland, for instance—in the Public Sphere I’ve heard him rant on and on about how our required ‘green time’ is just a new version of the Cultural Revolution, with his mother as Madame Mao! To be honest, though, I look at it less as a lot of ‘hats’ than as a lot of opportunities. Most of the heavier grunt work is automated, so that saves both time and energy. Quite a number of us are single, too, and many who are married are voluntarily childless or are beyond childbearing years. You’d be surprised how much adult energy is freed up from the demands of child-rearing here—and how much that freed-up energy can accomplish for the betterment of the community and the individual.”

  Jhana tapped her fork lightly against her plate, thinking.

  “But those couples who are having children,” Jhana began, “don’t they feel that those who choose not to are being selfish?” She had often heard that argument on Earth.

  Seiji laughed, lifting a chameleon off the tabletop, onto which it has just dropped.

  “Were Medieval European nuns and priests, Tibetan Monks, and Siberian shamans considered selfish by their contemporaries for choosing not to have children? People in those cultures seemed to have accepted the fact that those who chose to be childless were following a different calling than those who chose to be parents. It’s only relatively recently in human history that having children has come to be thought of as something that all adult human beings somehow ‘ought’ to do. I know it’s a big issue down on Earth, but it’s really pretty much a non-issue here.”

  “But how has that been accomplished?” Jhana asked, watching the charge for the meal flash up on the electronic menu. She inserted her credit needle and its ID chip into a slot to cover her part of the lunch, before Seiji could even think about paying for both of them. Apparently the inhabitants hadn’t yet gotten completely beyond currencies and credits, though she’d heard they were working on it.

  “Many of us who are child-free also voluntarily serve as part of extended family networks,” Seiji continued, “supporting and helping the child-rearing couples with their needs. I’m doing a fair amount of that work next month. If you ask me, a child born here in the habitat is lucky.”

  “How so?”

  “Kids born here have a better shot overall. A lot of places on Earth, you’ve got a withered educational system side by side with an over-stuffed prison industry. Here, we’d rather educate sooner than incarcerate later—just the opposite of Earth. That boy or girl born here has dozens of ‘aunts’ and ‘uncles’ and ‘grandmas’ and ‘grandpas’, too. Parenting itself, like teaching, is becoming a more communal activity here, less of the psychological pressure of the mom/dad/kids nuclear family.”

  Jhana still wasn’t convinced.

  “What about the person who has no interest in having children and no interest in tending someone else’s little rug rats?” Jhana asked, watching as Seiji ‘chipped in for his part of the meal and gratuities. “Is that sort of ‘selfishness’ allowable?”

  “Certainly,” Seiji said with a nod as he fished his creditchip expertly from the pay slot. “Considering how overpeopled things are down on Earth, you could argue that—by choosing not to have children, by deciding that the continued quality survival of human and other species is more important than the survival of his or her own particular genetic material—that non-reproducing person is in fact engaging in a more altruistic behavior than those people who choose to have children to begin with. But nobody really gets that self-righteous about it here. We’re working the middle way here, between the extremes.”

  Getting up from their table, they waved and called good-bye to Ehab. Walking out of the cafe, Jhana filled Seiji in more fully on her recent work with Heterocephalus glaber. His mention of altruism had reminded her of the little beasts.

  “—and your ‘extended family networks’ sound a lot like what’s called ‘alloparenting’ in mole-rats,” Jhana said, finishing up (without further mention of Roger Cortland’s work) as they approached the bullet cart station. “The nonbreeding animals in each colony demonstrate a high degree of sociobiologically-determined altruism, probably in response to environmental constraints—the aridity of the regions in which they live, the difficulty of tunneling through the hard-packed earth, the patchiness of their geophyte food sources.”

  The two of them glided down an escalator into the center of the station, Seiji standing beside her, quiet, thoughtful.

  “An interesting paradox,” Seiji said as they stepped off the escalator. “The harder life is, the more it encourages altruistic behavior, at least among mole-rats. You’d think it would be just the opposite. I wonder if it might be true not only for mice but also for men? I mean, look at us here in this space habitat. The mole-rats and us—we both live in deserts, only ours is the high desert of space. We both live in colonies. Our population, too, will spread by budding off colonies to a distance, the way you say mole-rats already do.”

  He gazed briefly at the few other people in the station with them and then at Jhana. She thought she saw in his eyes a flash of something—fascination with his own theorizing? Or something deeper, something his theorizing was meant to camouflage?

  “And in both cases environmental constraints encourage altruism,” he said, gesturing toward the whole of the sphere. “The difficulty of bringing things up the gravity well is our version of the difficulty of ‘tunneling.’ Our food reserves aren’t that tight, but we can’t take for granted an already-existing ecosphere, one that will provide us with food and crops and everything we need for survival. We have to work at it. Because we had to build our ecosphere ourselves, we know how fragile and interconnected it is.”

  They sat down on a bench and awaited the arrival of the next bullet cart. In a bush nearby a bird gave a trilling call. High in the sky above them, children dove and swooped in flying suits. Higher still, it was night.

  “But what about the future residents?” Jhana asked. “Eventually the builders and the building of this place will only be a legend—what’s to prevent future generations from taking it all for granted?”

  Seiji stared down at his hands.

  “I’ve thought about that some. I don’t have an answer. There’s no guarantee they won’t duplicate Earth’s whole overpopulation/ecocollapse scenario on a small scale right here. All I can hope is that they’ll still be so caught up in the process of keeping this place whole and alive that in some sense they’ll never be able to forget what it is we’re up to—because they’ll be living it every day. If we’re lucky, their ‘sense of place’ will continue to make this a place of sense.”

  They both smiled at his turn of phrase. In the station, lights began to flash softly, indicating the impending arrival of the next bullet cart. That different sort of flash passed through Seiji’s eyes as he glanced at her again, but then he was looking away, burying it all in words once more.

  “I guess that’s where we differ from the mole-rats. You said the breeding female of the colony suppresses the breeding of all other females of the colony—a top-down suppression, an enforced altruism. Turn that into a human society and it would be the equivalent of an authoritarian state based on the idea that the rights of the individual must always be subordinated to the social order. That’s the sort of stuff your friend Roger is always warning against in his Public Sphere diatribes. Yet you say it’s in fact what he’s actually working on, in his pheromone research. Strange.”

  Jhana wondered about that “your friend Roger” phrase—p
articularly the subtle querying tone behind it. She wanted to respond, but she found Seiji looking at her, openly, frankly, his gaze not turning away this time as he spoke.

  “Involuntary—that’s the big difference,” he said adamantly. “What we’re trying to do here is voluntary. It’s an altruism based on the idea that individual freedom and social responsibility are equal and inseparable, that it’s impossible to truly have either without the other. That one change, from voluntary to involuntary, would turn our dream here into a nightmare. It would guarantee our experiment’s success—and its failure.”

  The bullet cart appeared. Seiji glanced away. Jhana rose from the stone bench, surprised that Seiji, upon hearing of the mole-rats’ eusociality, had so quickly returned to those problems of freedom and responsibility that had also troubled her. Even though she had mentioned nothing further of Roger Cortland and his plans, he seemed to hover near them, present even in his absence.

  Jhana lingeringly shook hands good-bye as she parted from Seiji, wondering how Tao-Ponto would respond to the implications of Cortland’s work. Walking away from her lunch date, the thought of Tao-Ponto and her supervisor’s “need to know” reminded her that she would need to meet with Seiji again, to pick his brain about the strange satellites growing in nearby space.

  “But I didn’t get to ask you about the Future Perfect Imperative!” Jhana said, turning around, calling behind her as she moved toward the bullet cart. She’d have to ask Seiji for a tour of the solar power facilities outside the habitat next time they got together—that is, if there would be a next time. “At the party Ekwefi said you could tell me that story.”

  “I can,” he called, looking relieved that this parting might lead to another meeting. “I will. How about tomorrow evening?”

  “Sounds great! I’ll give you a call.”