“He seems like a bit of a crank sometimes,” Jhana ventured.
“Oh, yeah,” Seiji said. “But he does know what he’s talking about when it comes to mindbending and the world of the shadowy. He’s been there. Get him going on it, and really listen to him, and you’ll be in his good books forever. We’ve got some of the original fungal strain they took KL from, growing up here now. Supposed to be part of the attempt to preserve ‘lost’ or ‘ghost’ biodiversity, but mainly it’s here because Larkin insisted.”
Above and below them, in the sky of air and the sky of water, the mirrored sun would be going out before too long—at least in this sector of the habitat. Jhana barely noticed. Something about what Seiji had said about Larkin, the shadow-world, and KL-235 began to make things come together.
“Anyway,” Seiji continued, looking over the water, “Jiro’s use of KL 235, instead of dumbing him down, got his brain completely revved up. He just started pumping information through his eyes and ears all the time, until it was like he went supernova. He was so bright back then, the year before his breakdown—it scared me. It’s hard for an older brother to admit, even to himself, that his younger brother is smarter than he is—but Jiro was, and I did. His brain was roaring full throttle. It was like his mind was analyzing and synthesizing at lightspeed everything he’d experienced, all the technology and history he’d studied, all the data he’d taken in. Just burning with everything he’d learned. I don’t know—maybe all the KL he’d taken had locked his mind into overdrive. I do know that talking to him in those days was like talking to God. In his presence I felt the urge to avert my eyes.”
Seiji let out a long, slow sigh. Beneath the water’s smooth surface, fish and frogs and salamanders moved.
“He couldn’t hold it together. No one could hold that level of fiery intensity for long. He must have hit some limit at last. He knew he was losing it. Everything came bubbling to the surface. Long-distance he told me that he didn’t want to hurt anybody, that he’d rather die than hurt anybody. When his moment of explosion and collapse came, I was working on the first satellite tests of the new large-scale photovoltaics up here. I wasn’t able to be there for him. Still, I like to think that last great flash of his mind blew off in this shock-wave of light, spreading forever away—some of it even flashing onto the solar sats, sparking across gaps.”
Jhana watched as the sun began to dim and redden in the engineers’ best imitation of sunset. Night sounds began to rise tentatively from the water, from the banks, from the forests.
“Did your brother die soon after that?”
Seiji smiled sadly.
“Not for almost another six years. My parents brought him back home until he seemed better again. He went back to work on his doctorate in Intelligent Systems at MIT. He’d already accomplished a lot. He’d developed some big new system protocols and he had money coming in from those patents, from all sorts of things. We thought he was okay again.”
Seiji shook his head and turned his back on the darkening sky, the darkening water.
“I really hoped it was true,” he said, bitterness rising in his voice, “but I never quite believed it. The laser sharpness his mind had, before—that was gone, somehow. Just this shell of paranoia and conspiracy and weirdness left behind. He began to think he was some sort of techno-shaman. Jiro was always interested in American Indians and in computers, all the way back to when he was a kid. I guess he kind of went back to that time, and those interests just coalesced. After his breakdown he swore off ‘gate’ and vowed only to do ‘naturals,’ but things kept getting weirder.”
Jhana turned her back on the water then too, turning around but still leaning on the mooncrete bridge railings.
“In what way?”
Seiji shoved his hands in his pockets and looked down at his feet.
“He started to disappear periodically,” Seiji said with a shrug. “Just dropped completely out of sight, out of touch. There’s no real word for it in English or Globish, but there is in German: Aussteiger, ‘someone who gets off the train.’ He got off the train, all right. He got as far from the tracks of our world as he could. He claimed he was fasting and purifying himself like a shaman, vision-questing, enduring long, lonely ordeals for spiritual purposes. All we could say for sure was that, whenever he disappeared, credit tracing showed he was also spending every penny of his available funds on exotic computer and imaging technologies, which would always disappear with him—usually into the outskirts of Balaam.”
Jhana stared down at the mooncrete beneath her feet. She knew something about the hinterlands of the Bay Area Los Angeles Aztlan Metroplex. Not a nice place. She looked up again as a girl with bright white hair, fully tech-dressed in wearable media, started across the bridge with half-dancing steps, singing You wash, I’ll dry, we’ll never think to wonder why, till it fades, fades without warning: Our love like the moon in mid-morning. In a moment she had danced obliviously past them and was gone.
“Could you have done anything about it?” Jhana asked, putting her hand lightly on Seiji’s elbow, wondering if his brother could have been any crazier than the space habitat’s wild children. “Have him listed as a missing person, maybe?”
“We tried,” Seiji said with a grimace. “Before he disappeared for the last time, he contacted my parents long-link. He told them they had nothing more to say to him and he had nothing more to say to them, so he wouldn’t be calling anymore. The days became weeks and—no word. We tried to get the police departments around Balaam to find him and bring him in, but they couldn’t do anything. Failing to keep in touch with your family isn’t a prosecutable offense, after all. Jiro was an adult, he had free will, he had broken no law, so the police couldn’t hold him against his will—even if it might have saved his life.” Seiji glanced over toward the parts of the habitat still in light. “As the weeks lengthened to months we couldn’t even have him listed as a missing person because the police always told us—mistakenly—that they had seen him, or someone who looked like him, recently. In fact he’d already been dead for months.”
“Tragic,” Jhana said quietly, holding onto his arm a bit more firmly, wanting to make contact.
“Yes,” Seiji said, his chin slumping toward his chest. “But also no. Sad as it was that the police couldn’t bring him in to save his life, I have to agree with that sort of law. At least it respected Jiro’s right to be wrong. It didn’t meddle with his freedom, not even ‘for his own good’.”
“Yes—now I see what you were getting at before,” Jhana said, standing up straight from where she’d been leaning against the bridge railing, letting go of Seiji’s arm a moment. “The conflict between freedom and compassion.”
Jhana followed Seiji’s glance up the path toward the townlet cluster of buildings ahead. Together they began to walk slowly toward them.
“Right,” Seiji said as gravel crunched under their footsteps. “If the police had taken Jiro into custody and held him—the compassionate thing to do, I suppose—there’s always the chance that we could have brought him home and had him ‘cured’ or ‘put right.’ But there’s an equal chance that he might well have ended up in some dehumanizing asylum for the rest of his life, clocked out on psychosocial control medications—or even worse, imprisoned. Knowing how much my brother valued his freedom, perhaps even freezing to death inside an abandoned refrigerator wasn’t the worst end he could have faced.”
The lights of the buildings had begun to glimmer on Seiji’s face when Jhana turned to him.
“Is that how he died?”
“Yeah. In a cloud of liquid nitrogen. In the middle of the smoldering trashlands, surrounded by all this expensive high-tech electronics he left behind, sitting there like so much junk. The coroner ruled the death an accident, instant hypothermia. He told me it must have been a very peaceful way to go. The police suspected suicide. The case remains uncertain, still unresolved.”
&nbs
p; They walked toward the noise of Corazon del Cielo, a small glass-domed eatery, agreeing on it without even needing to speak of it.
“What was he doing with enough liquid nitrogen to freeze himself to death?” Jhana asked, opening the door to the very dry and warm restaurant, full of noise and hothouse desert flowers.
“Who knows?” Seiji said as they looked for a table. “What was he doing with all that expensive state-of-the-art gear—still all plugged in and running, his pirate microwave hookup still draining power off the solarsat grid? That was how they discovered his body, you know: the power company sent a man on horseback through the trashlands to find who was at the other end of the downlink line.”
“But what was he working on?” Jhana asked as they sat down beneath the glassed-in sky.
“Who knows? Maybe he was trying to commune with the Great Spirit. Maybe he was contacting the spirits of the dead or trying to pull off some techno-shaman stunt. The local people in the trashland didn’t know what to make of a guy who came out only at night from a white coldbox coffin. They were mostly TechNots and Neo-Luddites around there—a very superstitious bunch when it came to anything involving technology. Some of them said his soul had been stolen by one or another of his machines, that Jiro’s ghost had even talked to them before the power was cut off. The power company rep didn’t see or hear anything. What the locals probably came across was just some automatic program running its course.”
A middle-aged woman named Herria Bidegaray, a bit heavyset and graying, appeared with water glasses and a familiar hug for Seiji. Jhana discovered from the menu display that this place took its name from the Mayan Popul Vuh and was some sort of combination Basque restaurant/desert biodiversity conservatory. Seiji, of course, was engaged in an experiment in “cuisine design” with this restaurateur too and it was only after some quick business-like flinging about of various common and Latin names of fleshy fungi that the waitress/owner bustled happily away.
“What happened to your brother’s machines?” Jhana asked, taking up again the strand of Seiji’s conversation after the owner had moved on.
“Most of Jiro’s devices were just expensive black boxes to me,” Seiji said glancing at the menu. “The locals might as well have been telling me about voodoo spirits living in tin cans. Still, I had all Jiro’s gear and personal effects shipped up the well. Cost a fortune, but I guess it’s a memorial of sorts. Haven’t looked at any of it in months, not once since it came up. I could show it to you, if you want to see it. I’ve got it stored with a friend, Lakshmi Ngubo. She’s got a workshop up in micro-gee, not far from one of the solarsat manufactories—that’s where I work my ‘real’ job. I could show you those, and introduce you to Lakshmi, if you’d like.”
Bingo, Jhana thought. And I didn’t even have to ask for a tour.
“Yes,” she said, appearing to concentrate more carefully on the menu. “I’d be honored.”
“I must warn you—it’s not that impressive,” Seiji said, glancing over the menu selections. “Jiro has been pretty much reduced to text: police reports, bills, receipts, notes, that sort of thing. A few wallet holographs. Lines of print and other hard-copy codes. Personal effects, bits and pieces of junk. A lot of it’s probably useless and trivial, but I can’t bring myself to get rid of any of that information. It’s pretty much all I have left of him. Too much has been lost already, you know? It’s like when a star collapses and a black hole forms: a lot of information about the star inevitably gets lost.”
Jhana looked up from perusing the menu, thinking about what Seiji hadn’t said—what he’d left out.
“What about the information he might have stored on computer media—in the electronics you said was found near his body?”
Seiji pressed a menu selection and ordered a glass of “HOMEBREW,” the local beer. Jhana decided to stick with water and pressed in her menu selection too.
“That’s still just a little too painful for me to deal with yet,” Seiji said, looking away from her as their meals and drinks promptly arrived. “Sure, I want to know if there’s anything important there, but I don’t want to face it cold. I’ve turned those machines and their memories over to Lakshmi, along with all his effects. She’s an expert. I haven’t heard from her in a while, but I know she’s been seeing what can be salvaged, what might be worthwhile. She’s always very thorough.”
He took a sip of beer and stared directly at her.
“I don’t know what sort of grief and guilt you may have known,” he said. “Sorry to have burdened you with mine.”
“I guess none of us can really know another’s grief,” Jhana said sympathetically, between bites. “Griefs are incomparable, absolutely individual. We can only know our own.”
“Yeah, I do know mine,” Seiji said, twirling his beer glass slightly between his palms. “I’ve learned names for the condition my brother suffered from—long-term paranoid schizophrenia, Messiah complex, depressive disorder, psychosexual dysfunction arising from ‘incomplete gender identification.’ I can quote chapter and verse of the scientific theories: Imbalances of neurotransmitters in the brain, a misreading in the genetic code that caused him to misread reality, some flaw in the DNA mirror that funhoused his mind’s reflections. I take comfort in the theories and the labels like I’m supposed to, but in the end none of it has meant squat. I lived with it, with him. I know.”
They ate, hungrily and in silence, for a long moment.
“What was it like?”
Seiji leaned back in his chair and looked up through the restaurant dome’s transparent surface. Gradually Jhana began to look up too, trying to follow his gaze to whatever it was his eyes were looking at.
“Do you remember where you had your anxiety attack, the first day we met? At the ridge cart station up there, hanging at the center of everything?”
“Yes,” Jhana said, not wanting to remember, the smell of burnt almonds even now drifting through her mind. She was disturbed at the sudden swerve of the conversation into her personal life. “What about it?”
“Being up there, hanging at the center of a completely artificial sphere, completely enclosed by that sphere—that’s what Jiro’s paranoid schizophrenia was like,” Seiji said, gesturing overhead again. “Think about the middle of this sphere, Jhana—but instead of the sphere having a shell of static surfaces like this one does, think of the shell as being like those on the new habitats, the ones that are almost finished, the ones with active surfaces where micromachines are always swarming and flowing in the layers of that surface, nanotech assemblers and replicators always vigilantly repairing and maintaining that surface, always keeping the outside from getting in and the inside from getting out. If you can picture a deluded psyche functioning like that—impenetrable to argument or logic, always flowing quickly in to fill any dent reason might make in its surface—then you can understand my brother’s paranoid world as well as I ever could.”
They had both begun to turn their eyes back to finishing the meals on their plates when the bent snake circle of the Möbius Cadúceus skysign rainbowed into space above them.
Jhana found herself plunged into darkness, running through a hellish underground world of red and black, from room to room of nightmare, auditoriums or theatrical spaces without audiences, dark spaces of empty seats facing thick blood-red curtains where actors rehearsed themes of gory tragedy, gouged-out eyes raining gobbets of black blind blood, in one room a blind Othello/Michael turning his mutilated blood-daubed corpse toward her and bellowing “Racist whore!” until she ran screaming into another space—only to find Roger Cortland looming, leering and gigantic, as a powerful scent filled her head, turned her hands to digging claws, her naked flesh to fierce hard inhuman muscle—
Abruptly she was back in the Corazon del Cielo, staring through the transparent dome at the point in the sky from which the oddly twisted dual serpentine ring had just disappeared.
“Wh
at was that?”
Seiji looked at her oddly, but she didn’t care. She was profoundly shaken. That sense of losing herself, of becoming a conduit or vessel of sensations, had passed through her again unexpectedly. She was sweating and trembling slightly. Her appetite seemed to have vanished utterly.
“Promotion for that band, Möbius Cadúceus. I gather they’ve got some big show coming up. Interesting symbol. You mean you haven’t seen it before?”
“If I have, I must not have paid it any real attention,” she said, trying to focus on her environs, to re-orient herself. “But the strangest thing just happened. One second I was looking at it and the next I was in some full-blown waking dream.”
“What kind of dream?” Seiji said, growing suddenly more interested.
“Oh, I don’t know,” she said. Seiji looked at her expectantly, but she didn’t want to tell him exactly what she’d seen—that would bring up too much that was personal, vulnerable. “Dark and fragmented stuff. Lots of guilt—and grief.”
Seiji stared at her for a moment longer before he spoke.
“I don’t know how to tell you this,” he said uneasily, “but the first time I saw it it triggered associations in me too. You might say guilt underlies them, as well.”
“What sort of associations?” Jhana asked, becoming curious—and glad that they weren’t talking specifically about her anymore.
“A man on horseback at sunset,” Seiji said, working on finishing his meal. “One morning, just at the shadow of a dream, I woke with the image in my mind of Jiro’s corpse being found by a man on horseback at sunset in the trashlands. Six months later, that was exactly how and when Jiro’s long-dead body was found. I sometimes torment myself with the thought that they were simultaneous—that image of skewed time-line flashing into my mind where I lay warm in bed, even at the exact instant Jiro was freezing to death in a trashland down the well.”
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