Lightpaths

by Howard V. Hendrix

  Jhana smiled and nodded. She had felt a little of the same thing.

  “I imagine you could get to know almost everybody here in a few months’ time,” Jhana said as they passed through the solarium. “We’ll be taking tea on the patio in the back garden. So, you grew up mostly in large cities then?”

  Reaching the umbrella-shaded cafe table on the patio, Seiji stood with his hand on a white metal chair.

  “That’s right. In Japan, the States, England,” he said, looking down at the chair and tapping it briefly with his knuckles—as if to test its solidity. “Don’t get me wrong: I’m very much a booster of this place and its emphasis on communal values. Just not completely used to it, is all. I’m told that towns of similar size back on Earth have the same ‘fishbowl’ quality, but I doubt even they have as low a crime rate.”

  “I see your point. Please, sit down,” Jhana said, gesturing toward the chair. “What’s to steal here? I mean, everybody has pretty much the same standard of living—no large disproportions in the distribution of wealth, as far as I can tell. Everyone seems well-educated and dedicated to what the community’s about—though the teenagers do seem a bit on the rebellious side.”

  Pulling his chair out from the table and sitting down, Seiji laughed.

  “What can you expect? They’re the first generation even partially raised in space. Right now, they’re big fish in our small, isolated pond. I’m on a committee that’s working with that, though. We’re developing a sort of initiation rite for them—a month spent in deep isolation, in space, working on the outside of this habitat or others as they’re built. All of us on the committee went through it, a couple months back. Really changes the way you see things, gives you a properly humble perspective on the universe. When the initiates come back, the whole community will gather to officially welcome them to full status as adult citizens of the habitat. It’s as close as we can get to the old idea of a vision quest or ordeal rite.”

  “Isn’t that sort of exposure outside potentially dangerous?” Jhana asked.

  “Certainly,” Seiji said. “My brother’s death itself probably had something to do with a failed personal initiation rite or quest. He was trying to do it alone, though—outside of any sort of social framework. The hazard of madness or death in the ordeal will still be real, but our initiates will at least be doing it within a social framework that’ll reduce their risk somewhat.”

  “But what about death here?” Jhana asked suddenly, for reasons of her own. “I don’t mean that I think Earth’s going to invade and start killing people or something, but I was just wondering. Death’s part of the big cycle too, right? But I haven’t seen any graveyards up here.”

  They fell silent for a moment as Death sat down to wait for tea with them.

  “You’re right,” Seiji said slowly. “We’ve had very few deaths up here—almost a miracle in itself, when you consider the percentage of our population that’s older. But this is no Eden. We know death is waiting. There’s been some discussion—and remarkably little consensus on the issue. If you think population control is a tough nut to crack, just try talking about the recycling of human bodies. We can’t burn them—too polluting, even if we just pumped the ash and smoke into space. That would only make for more space junk and debris and a hazard to astrogation in the long run. In the colony itself we can’t afford to give over land area dedicated solely to graveyard space—and from an ecological standpoint the bodies shouldn’t be isolated, they or their ashes really should be put back into the cycle as quickly and completely as possible. Feed the tree, as it’s called. But how to do that in a way that the living will regard as respectful to the dead?”

  “No one wants to think of their relatives being passed through something like a rendering plant, I suppose,” Jhana said, clearing her throat.

  “You know it. Some of the bereaved may want to bury their dead at home, in the gardens or woods. Some may not want to be reminded, may not want to have the dead so close at hand. Those living in the central sphere may decide to bury their dead in the agricultural tori, those living in the tori may decide they want their dead buried in the gardens of the central sphere, some may even want their remains to be sent back down the well to Earth or fired into the sun for the ultimate cremation—as ecologically ‘wrong’ or prohibitively expensive as such death exports might be. As the colony moves out of its own adolescence we’ll have to give more thought to the elderly and the children, to the ancestors and the progeny, the long view of past and future. We’ll have to face it in a deep way, since continuing to deal with death only as an ‘inconvenience’ would ultimately make our work here hypocritical. It’s a difficult call, particularly because of our isolation up here.”

  “But that isolation can be a plus, too, don’t you think?” Jhana said, sitting down across from him. “There’s the cohesiveness of a remote island settlement, here.”

  “Exactly,” Seiji said. “If someone stole something here, everyone would know who the rightful owner is, and since we’re so far from Earth—the nearest market to ‘fence’ things in—it would be more trouble than it’s worth to try to smuggle stolen goods out. And the idea of ownership itself—”

  They were distracted by the sound of a teapot whistling to full boil.

  “Wait!” Jhana said. “Hold that thought while I go get our tea. I’ll be right back.”

  While Jhana went inside to pour tea, Seiji glanced at the garden. When she returned with cups and saucers on a tray Jhana found her guest smiling.

  “You’re been keeping your garden very well,” Seiji said approvingly.

  “Oh, that’s easy,” said Jhana, placing the tea cups on the table and sitting down. “The garden’s designer did such a fine job that I have barely anything to do.”

  “Thank you,” Seiji said in return, smiling, bowing his head slightly to the compliment. “What was I going on about when you left?”

  “Private ownership.”

  “Yes, that was it. That’s the root cause of theft,” Seiji asserted. “As long as you have private property there’ll be theft.”

  “The root of all evil grows a popular bush,” Jhana commented.

  “Sure does. Right now, we’re pretty much a decentralized society of free, uncoerced small owners, but in the long run I see this colony, at least, becoming more and more communal in terms of ownership.”

  “Decentralized yet communal?”

  “Yeah, if you can picture that. Most of the land area here in the sphere, the crop area in the tori, and the manufacturing at all gravities is already cooperatively controlled.”

  “What about the use of credit chips and money?” Jhana asked.

  “That’s increasingly just for the sake of the HOME consortium’s record-keeping,” Seiji assured her. “It’s only a matter of time.”

  “Is that your ‘future perfect imperative’?” Jhana asked dryly, cocking her head at him.

  “No, no,” Seiji said with a laugh. “That’s a different story. From the past.”

  “Well?” Jhana could hardly believe the usually voluble Seiji was actually being reticent about something. “Go ahead.”

  “I can do better than that,” Seiji said, fiddling with his personal data unit. “It happened fourteen years ago, when my brother Jiro and I were in high school, at a Latin School run by priests, in the US. We were the ‘studio audience’ classroom for a distance learning environment, so I thought the original situation might still be recorded somewhere. Looking for it gave me something to do when I was obsessing, after my brother’s death. Eventually, the diocese sent it to me. Ah, here it is.”

  Seiji shot the old-format videotape to Jhana’s data unit and they watched it in the false 3D of sharespace. A man in the black garb and collar of a Roman Catholic priest appeared before a classroom full of students.

  “That was our Latin teacher, Father Stargoba,” Seiji narrated. “An intens
e guy—former Golden Gloves bantamweight boxer.”

  Jhana thought “intense” was putting it mildly. The priest’s face was twitching and his fists clenching as he scanned the classroom for someone to answer a question he’d just put to all of them. Jhana turned up the sound.

  “Don’t any of you know?” Father Stargoba shouted. “Jiro Yamaguchi. Scripsero. Meaning, tense, mood!”

  Jhana watched as Seiji’s brother Jiro swallowed hard. Stargoba’s sharp stare seemed to spike out from behind his steel-rimmed glasses and transfix Jiro in his desk like a butterfly on a mounting board. A vein in the priest’s forehead pulsed and a muscular tic flared along the man’s jaw, his face in close-up reddening angrily from the black of his priestly collar to the short iron brush of his close-cropped hair.

  “Speak up!”

  “Scripsero,” Seiji’s brother said, his voice quavering. “Meaning: I shall have written. Tense: future perfect. Mood: uh, imperative.”

  “What?” the priest yelled, exploding in a chalk-dust frenzy at the green blackboard. “There is no future perfect imperative! Only the indicative has all six tenses. The subjunctive has no future or future perfect, and the imperative has only the present and the future—no other tenses! The present, imperfect, and future are the tenses of incomplete or continued action, while the perfect, pluperfect, and future perfect are the tenses of completed action. Think, Yamaguchi! The imperative is the mood of command or entreaty. Why command or entreat for something that’s already done? It’s ridiculous!”

  “But if it’s in the future it isn’t—”

  “It’s in the future perfect, Yamaguchi!” Father Stargoba snapped. “The past future. I shall have written. From the vantage of a given point in the future the action talked about will already be completed, will already have been done or taken place. A future perfect imperative is impossible because it demands that an action be completed and continuing at the same time—a logical impossibility. You see that?”

  “Yes,” Jiro said, nodding mutely. But even to Jhana, watching it on old video, it was clear that Seiji’s brother didn’t see that at all.

  “Good,” Father Stargoba said, satisfied. “So tell us the mood of scripsero.”

  “Indicative, Father,” Jiro said. But Jhana could almost hear the boy trying to keep the tone of resignation out of his voice.

  “Good,” said Father Stargoba, his blood pressure apparently falling at last. “Let’s return to our translation.”

  Seiji shut off the datafeed and took a long sip of his tea. His eyes seemed to be looking at something in another place and time.

  “I was only able to finally get the tape of that class a couple months ago,” Seiji said. “After all these years, it’s still as bad as I remember. What happened in that class was no big deal to Stargoba, but it left a real mark on my brother. He wanted to know why the future perfect imperative should be any less possible than any of the other language phantoms we studied. Language, after all, was something people created, something we made real, something we could change. Logic too—same thing. For Jiro and me, the future perfect imperative became a sort of shorthand for a lot of things.”

  “What things?” Jhana asked, finishing her tea.

  “Oh, I don’t know,” Seiji said, glancing up at her. “Shorthand for getting beyond human stubbornness, narrow-mindedness. Shorthand for the ridiculous ‘language is everything’ idea, the notion that language and symbols can capture the whole of human experience, contain the alpha and omega of human consciousness. Shorthand for the incompleteness of any system or theory.”

  “It meant all that?”

  “Yeah,” Seiji said, smiling awkwardly. “In a mostly unspoken way, but yeah, it meant all that. It means more and more to me all the time. The future perfect imperative. It means constant striving, the unending opening of new paths, the refusal to take ‘Impossible!’ for an answer. Perfection as something always to be striven for, precisely because it can never be obtained. A constant challenging of the assumptions of knee-jerk traditions and mindless conformity. That’s what my brother was all about.”

  Seiji toyed with his tea cup a moment, then set it aside.

  “That’s what really appeals to me about the space habitats and the opening of this frontier, too. Each habitat can be different. I complained about the lack of anonymity here—probably a function of small population. But people can choose to make the population density of their worlds as crowded or as solitary as they wish. Eventually, given a multitude of worlds to choose from, settlers can decide what sort of political and social organization they want—they can experiment, or they can stick with what’s been tried. Different religious groups can choose to build their own worlds, if they wish. Personally I’d rather see more integration of human beings from diverse cultures, the way it is here, than some sort of neo-tribal fragmentation all over space, but that’ll have to be left up to each group to decide. In any case, there’d hopefully always be that ‘openness to diversity’ Atsuko Cortland and the other founders are always talking about.”

  Jhana began gathering the tea things. Seiji helped her take them back into the house.

  “Atsuko Cortland—she’s Roger Cortland’s mother?” Jhana asked as they soundwashed the dishes and put them away.

  “Yeah. You’d hardly guess two such different people might be related, would you?”

  “I don’t know. I’ve never met the mother.”

  “I’ll have to introduce you to her,” Seiji said, then smiled. “That would really be diversity—a world for Roger Cortland, and another for his mother! If that could be done, there could be worlds for everyone. Even better, one world where they could both be happy.” He paused, stopping halfway to the shelf where his hand was taking a teacup. “Maybe even one where my brother could have been taken in, appreciated, understood. A world he wouldn’t have felt the need to leave at such a young age.”

  That trapped feeling that Jhana had first felt upon hearing Seiji speak of his brother’s death returned—even more powerfully now than when he’d spoken of it at Arthur and Susan’s party, her first night here. That party seemed months or years ago, though it was in fact not long ago at all.

  Looking at Seiji, Jhana realized the man was still somehow trying to work his way through a grief too deep for tears, a guilt too deep for forgiveness. She did not want to think about it, for it reminded her too much of her own grief, her own guilt. Yet somebody’s guilt would have to be faced before she could get on with asking him about those things which so intensely interested her employer—those paranoid plots and counterplots which seemed so trivial at the moment.

  “Come on,” she said, taking him by the arm. “Let’s go walk down by the river. You can tell me about your brother as we go.”

  They left the house and walked along paths among gardens and through woods, but said little until they came to the fern-banked path along the water’s edge. The stream reminded Jhana of mossy green tributaries that she had once seen flowing toward the Thames, in the part of that river near Oxford, where it was called the Isis.

  “Let us cultivate our garden,” Seiji said suddenly, apropos of nothing and everything.

  “What Voltaire has Candide say, as his final injunction,” Jhana said, recognizing the quote. “When we were walking past the gardens I was thinking of the same thing.”

  “Our garden—not someone else’s,” Seiji said. “To mind our own cultivation, and not mind or exploit the cultivation of others.”

  “Hard to do, sometimes,” Jhana said thoughtfully. Seiji nodded.

  “After my brother started having his psychological problems, I very much wanted to be my brother’s keeper, to mind his business too, as much as I could. To do that, though, would have been to interfere in his freedom to live the life he wanted to live, even when I feared—even when I knew, deep down—that it was a life tending toward an early death. I couldn’t balance the cos
ts. Couldn’t figure out how to reconcile respect for his freedom with compassion for his suffering.”

  They had come to a small mooncrete footbridge that arched steeply over the water where the river—really not much more than a stream—broadened to a large, slow-flowing, mirror-smoothness that lifted a variety of water-lilies and lotuses toward the light it reflected. She and Seiji stopped and stood, leaning their elbows on the railing of the bridge, gazing down into the water’s mirroring stillness.

  “Could you see your brother’s death coming?” Jhana asked quietly.

  “He’d been having his troubles for years,” Seiji said with a small nod. “I can see that now, in retrospect, everything leading up to the end. In second grade the nuns found him walking around on the playground with his arms stretched out like Christ on the cross. We’re descended from a line of Hiroshima Catholics, so we were always in Catholic schools. Maybe the programming took too well. As a kid, Jiro got it into his head that sex was something ‘dirty’ and ‘evil’. He was always distressed by his own sexuality after that. In high school he was painfully shy. He didn’t date, but that was okay. He was a good deal younger than all the other kids, and he put all his energy into his studies anyway.”

  As she listened to Seiji, Jhana was reminded, oddly, of Roger Cortland’s manner. She wondered briefly what his particular loss and grief might be.

  “Jiro took his studies extremely seriously—and it paid off. Bachelor’s degree in Computer Media Studies while he was still in his teens, master’s when he was twenty. But as he got older I suppose he felt he was trapped. He didn’t date girls, but he wasn’t homosexual—maybe he was afraid to be—and he didn’t want to be a priest. He’d started trying to ‘dumb down’ in his late teens, first through heavy drinking then through drugs. Figured that if he killed enough brain cells he’d fit in better, I guess.” Seiji flicked a piece of dried leaf off the railing and into the stream. “That’s when he started doing high-powered hallucinogens like KL 235—’gate,’ as it was called. The intelligence services or somebody like that had spread it around, after it was synthesized from a rare tepui fungus. Ask Paul Larkin in your lab—he knows all about it.”