Lightpaths

by Howard V. Hendrix

  “Do you think it was a genuine prescience?” Jhana asked. “Some sort of second sight?”

  Seiji swirled the dark amber of the beer remaining in his glass.

  “I don’t know—and I don’t want to know. I used to wonder it it was an authentic unveiling of hidden connections—or just seeing patterns that weren’t really there. Numinous mystical experience, or an episode of paranoid delusion? That way lies my brother’s madness,” he said, then downed the last of the local brew. “But I do know that if seeing that skysign triggered a jump of subconscious material into consciousness—in both of us—”

  “I thought altering other people’s consciousnesses without their informed consent was against the rules here,” Jhana reminded him.

  “It is,” Seiji said with a nod, finishing the last of his meal, “but this may be a grey area. Chemical tech versus physical tech—everybody’s harder on the chemicals, on ‘drugs’. The question is whether this trigger works the way KL does, say, or more like the way Ehab’s stereograms do. In either case we’ve got more reason than ever to talk to that expert friend of mine up in micro-gee.”

  “The one with your brother’s stuff?” Jhana asked, bewildered. She didn’t see the connection.

  “The same,” Seiji said with a nod, draining off the last of his beer. “Lakshmi Ngubo. She does a lot of the lighting design and holographics for Möbius Cadúceus, so she probably designed the skysign too. Would tomorrow be too soon for our visit?”

  Things were moving faster now than even Jhana could have predicted, but she was on for the duration of the ride, now.

  “No, tomorrow won’t be too soon,” she said slowly. “If tomorrow evening is all right with your friend, it’ll be fine for me.”

  Chapter Ten

  Passage embedded in RAT code:

  The mystic sacrifices Self for World, the egotist sacrifices World for Self. All the endtimers throughout time have always seen themselves as chosen and the rest of the world as damned to holocaust—sacrificing the world for themselves, always completely inverting what their particular Holy One was about.

  The egotism of the apocalyptist is also seen in a perverted abstract sensualism, which dares not look upon the image of a naked innocent child yet fantasizes about the tempting beauty of the Whore of Babylon. This objectifying ego is further seen, more subtly but more importantly, in the fact that millenialists and apocalyptists choose to see the apocalypse and the utopian paradise as something “out there” in the world, as the rending of the veil of this world through global catastrophe and endtime destruction, followed by a thousand years of the Perfect State—rather than choosing to face the apocalypse and the paradise within, happier far but far more difficult, the remaking/remembering/revealing in the individual soul, the “lifting of the veil of appearances” through the ecstasy of that vision which leads one to live in this world as if it were heaven, paradise, utopia.

  As the bulletcart rode silently along, Roger began to wonder if he was indeed pushing himself too hard—as Marissa had claimed. First there had been that odd blackout when he was airbiking, then the recurring flicker of angel wings in his peripheral vision, and now the dreams—strange dreams in which he was dressed in a monk’s habit and being given lectures in aerodynamics by angels.

  He would have discounted such sleeping visions completely were it not for their clarity, their lucidity—and the fact that, now, the dreams had given his monkish dream-self a habitation and a name. From what he could gather, in his night visitations he was a monk named Eilmer, a brother of the monastery at Malmesbury, who had lived approximately one thousand years ago....

  Two of the habitat’s oddly dressed and queerly coiffed youngsters boarded the bulletcart at a stop, singing along to their stereo plugs. Roger recognized the tune as vaguely reminiscent of the old standard “Take Me Out to the Ball Game,” but what lyrics he could pick out were unfamiliar indeed.

  Lyrics to Möbius Cadúceus song, “The Old Ball Game”:

  In the beginning

  Dad the Father’s Big Banger

  Waited just thirteen billion years

  To come to bat and no sooner was he up

  Than POP went the Thunderbolt into Soup

  (Our Holy Mother)

  Because Dad so loved the world

  We all made it to First

  And it’s Base Pairs, DNA, RBI—the Living Cell!

  Roger shut it out. No doubt more of that Möbius Cadúceus nonsense. He secretly blamed the band for his unwanted visions: he’d only had to endure his visions and visitations since he almost flew into their damned advertising apparition on his airbike, after all.

  But even if he were to try to take them to court—virtually unheard of among the unlitigious space habitants—what would the charge be? Negligently tapping into the collective unconscious—or at least his strand of it? Ridiculous!

  As he got off at his stop and headed toward his lab, he thought there must be some other explanation. He must have seen some holoflick or trideo documentary about this Eilmer of Malmesbury person, this “flying monk” of his dreams. The monk must be an historical person. He would check on it at the Archives as soon as he got a chance, but even at the moment it seemed reasonable that he had just forgotten the particulars of some obscure production, that was all. That would explain even last night’s twist in the dreams, the one without angels which nevertheless spoke most particularly to his condition. It flared up vividly in his mind as he recalled it.

  Databurst-triggered memory of The Pressure of Angels (self-synopsized):

  Eilmer, age seven or thereabouts, his POV, walking toward the heart of the village with his mother, wiry pale blonde Elfgiva. Sexburga, stout dark-haired wife of Caedwalla the ostler, sees them and begins to make foul slanderous remarks at Elfgiva, which Eilmer’s mother disdainfully tries to ignore. Sexburga, though, will not be ignored. Spitting, fuming, and ranting, Sexburga comes out onto the dusty rutted road and blocks their way. Only after the overbearing Sexburga has spat and struck at her several times does Elfgiva strike back, clinching with the stouter woman, both coming to furious blows, kicking and clawing, pulling at each other’s hair and tearing at each other’s garments until they are a tangled knot of rolling and flailing limbs from which grunts and curses and cries periodically erupt. In this state they tumble among Sexburga’s animals, sending her chickens flying and her cow ambling away in great mooing confusion—until a small crowd of townspeople stand watching beside Eilmer and two brawny young peasants pull the furious women apart....

  Opening the door to his lab, Roger thought of how many popular entertainments—how many historical fictions and westerns and spy thrillers and science fictions and fantasies—featured such gynomachian scenes. Ten Million B.C., Destry Rides Again, From Russia with Love, Genesis Two, The Big Time, A Specter Is Haunting Texas, The Farewell Gift, Free Fall Free-For-All, hundreds of others. He hardly needed to search for some dim vast archetype—some experience in a past life lurking in the collective unconscious—to explain the roots of his personal kink. He was sure this manifestation of it must all be from some low-budget low-brow entertainment he’d once seen as a child which, for some inexplicable reason, was resurfacing in his mind now.

  Commanding the power up on one of his simulators, he still could not shake the idea that Möbius Cadúceus’s skysign had triggered something in him. It might not be all bad, though, if the dream-image that had opened in his head turned out to be what he hoped it might be.

  Sitting down, he entered the simulator’s virtuality. Using force feedback to plot and move and orient molecular structures in virtual space, he caused a structure to gradually form in the space before him. Roger watched a molecule begin turning through primary, secondary, tertiary, and quaternary structuring, until it was unlike any he had ever seen before. He suddenly felt a strange hyperlucid sense he’d never previously experienced. The dizzying, glowing exhilara
tion of it was so powerful he wondered a moment if this was what had driven the medieval alchemists on and on in their search for gleaming islands in the soul.

  He sat back, shaking his head slightly to clear it. He knew gleaming islands in the solar system—the habitat, Earth itself. Nothing more. He looked once again at the molecular structure floating in space before his eyes. It was a structural analog of the mole rat pheromone, yes, but one with a distinctive elegant twist, a molecular Möbius strip, a lazy untangling infinity sign without inside or outside, beautifully simple overall despite its complexity at the fine-detail level. He would have thought such a form impossible until it had flashed into his half-awake mind this morning, right on the kicking heels of his dream.

  Roger smiled. Legend had it that Kekulé had discovered the structure of the carbon ring after dreaming of snakes rolling about like hoops, their tails in their mouths. If it could work for Kekulé with one hoop made of one snake, then why not for him—with a bent-hoop snake itself made of many such hoops?

  The thought occurred to him that this jump from rats to humans was all happening too easily, too quickly to be true, but he repressed it. He would check his new molecule’s structure against all the response tests, all the receptor sites, but he felt intuitively certain that this structure of elegant twistedness, this complexly beautiful image that seemed almost a model of his own mind and mirror of his consciousness—this was the complete structure of the human pheromone for which he’d been searching.

  The door to the lab opened and Marissa came in, logging into a Cybergene virtuality. No doubt still busily at work on her anti-senescence vector. A frown flickered over Roger’s face. Things had changed so rapidly between them. They had been getting along so well, particularly during their dance in space and immediately after, but now it was all somehow distant and prickly between them, especially since she had stumbled in upon his after-hours pornholo debauch. Lately, he was seeing the copper-haired woman and her large, pale-nippled breasts only in his dreams.

  Surely, though, his discovery this morning was momentous enough to serve as an occasion for the start of some rapprochement—

  “Marissa,” he called virtually, over his throat mike. “Log into my space, please. I want to show you something.”

  The young woman linked slowly, tentatively, until he could feel her staring into virtual space with him.

  “Well, what do you say? Intriguing structure, don’t you think?”

  Marissa nodded.

  “What is it?”

  Roger smiled broadly.

  “I’m willing to bet it’s the human pheromone I’ve been looking for. It’s a structural analog of the mole-rat pheromone, but a good deal more complex. Pump it through the synthesizer, would you? Then we’ll run tests on it to see how it binds to human vomeronasal and brain tissue. If my guess is right, then all we’ll need to do after that is find the right base and top note and we’ll have created the most important—and potentially most profitable—fragrance in human history.”

  Nodding and smiling a bit awkwardly, Marissa called up power on the synthesizer.

  “Okay,” she said evenly, “shoot the data over here.”

  Roger gave a series of command codes that shunted the structure and all its specifics into the synthesizer’s memory. Under Marissa’s watchful eyes the synthesizer chuckled and clucked to itself as it began assembling the actual compound from the virtual template that Roger had presented to it.

  As he listened to the mechanism doing its job, Roger was nonetheless a bit peeved. Certainly after all his work he had expected a more enthusiastic response from Marissa, and wondered why he hadn’t gotten it. Maybe she was just being cautious—waiting for the structure to prove out. Well, let her be cautious. He had no such need for concern. This was the structure he’d been looking for. Of that he was certain.

  * * * * * * *

  Passage embedded in RAT code:

  ...the tangled etymology of the word utopia. In the computerized catalogs the generally accepted etymology—ou (not) + topos (place)—leads one into a long and deep maze of “not places,” no places, nowheres, Big Rock Candy Mountains and the Land of Cockaigne, Schlaraffenland and Lubberland, the upside down worlds of festival and carnival and Saturnalia, an entire literature, oral tradition, folklore and popular culture of Nonsense going back at least as far as dusty comedies in the Attic Greek.

  But this search also leads to places grown out of No Place—to Essenes and Diggers and Shakers and scores of other faith-based communities, to Brook Farm and New Harmony and the Kaweah Colony, to Rancho Linda Vista and desert arcologies and Biospheres.

  “I’ve already contacted Atsuko Cortland and Seiji Yamaguchi,” Lakshmi said into Lev’s bleary-eyed virtuality. He’d been up late working on a stop-and-start blocking rehearsal and, though it was already late in the day in his sector, Lakshmi and Aleister’s joint conference call had been his alarm out of sleep, causing him to sit upright in bed and slap on his overlays—the posture he still remained in. “Seiji is bringing Jhana Meniskos with him. Roger Cortland and Paul Larkin haven’t returned my calls and probably won’t make it, but Atsuko is bringing Marissa Correa.”

  “The one that sent me the complaint,” Lev asked with a yawn, “about Roger Cortland’s encounter with the skysign?”

  “The same,” Lakshmi said with a nod. “She wasn’t affected by it, but he was. Interesting that his name was on the RAT list, but not hers....”

  “Whatever,” Lev said. “I’m not looking forward to explaining the skysign’s affect to her—or to Roger’s mother.”

  “To Seiji and Jhana, too,” Lakshmi said. “They said they’ve also apparently been affected by it to some degree. But you haven’t got it so bad. Think of everything I’ve got to explain to Seiji about what’s been going on with his brother’s stuff.”

  “Aleister can help you with that, can’t he?” Lev said, volunteering his friend—and perhaps hoping to get himself out of the planned meeting.

  “Afraid not, old boy,” Aleister said primly. “Lakshmi’s deputized me and assigned me a higher priority.”

  “What?” Lev asked, incredulous.

  “Seems our RATs and the distributed consciousness behind them have attracted the attention of Earth’s intelligence and information-gathering services—corporate, governmental, straight military, you name it,” Aleister said. “We’re weathering a rain of semi-autonomous information probes. Monitoring and diverting the little net-spies has become a full-time job in the last twenty four hours. You and Lakshmi are on your own.”

  “Anything more you can tell us about the RATS and our situation before we have to explain them to our guests later?” Lakshmi asked Aleister.

  “Only that the ALEPH program Manqué used in building the RATs is much more subtle and sophisticated than I thought,” Aleister said carefully. “I expected to find a fairly rudimentary virtual environment—one ‘species’ of cellular automata being bounced off another to ‘evolve’ something that’s supposedly new. What I’ve found instead is a piece of work with quite an appreciation for the subtlety of the actual evolutionary process—species coevolving with each other, entire communities coevolving. It makes very impressive use of the counterintuitive Paine work on predation—”

  “Which is?” Lev asked, peeved. “Come on, Al. We don’t all have your background on this.”

  “It’s the idea that predators in an ecosystem,” Aleister said, warming to his topic, “rather than reducing the number of species by their activities, actually increase the diversity of species by preventing any single species from gaining ascendancy.”

  “What’s that got to do with the Myrrhisticineans’ project?” Lakshmi asked, puzzled.

  “They were Teilhardists, remember?” Aleister asked rhetorically. “Well, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin was big into evolutionary theory. Complexity is the trick Life plays against Entropy, and Teilha
rd claimed that life at all stages manifests what he called the ‘law of complexification’. According to this law, everything in the cosmos—from subatomic particles to us to galaxies—everything has a conscious inner face that duplicates the material external face. Physical evolution and the evolution of consciousness increase in complexity together. The more complex and integrated an outward material system becomes, the more developed its psychic interior also becomes.”

  “Let me get this straight,” Lev asked, now finding himself almost awake enough to engage in rational discourse. “Self-conscious human thought evolved with, or because of, the intense integration and concentration of nerve-cell structures in the brain?”

  “Right—but when you think about it, never lose sight of the idea that individual mind is also always part of Universal Mind.”

  “But what’s this got to do with computing power and the ‘Rainbow Door’ and the rest?” Lakshmi asked.

  “Isn’t it obvious?” Lev said pedantically. “Think about it—the integrated complexity of a material system is mirrored by an inner psychical development. Complexity trends toward sentience. As a result of producing human beings capable of self-conscious thought and culture, the biosphere has spun off what Teilhard calls a ‘noosphere’, a ‘thinking layer’ produced by human activity. Since Teilhard’s time, though, the human activity of the noosphere has in its turn increasingly spun off an infosphere, the cyberspatial layer generated by the activity of increasingly complex machines.

  “The Myrrhisticineans saw themselves as extending Teilhard’s work,” Aleister continued, his little icon trying to keep pace with his gesturing. “If God did not exist, it would just be necessary for them to invent him, that’s all. According to Teilhard, a long coevolutionary convergence has been taking place, simultaneous movements toward both a single planetary consciousness and a psychical concentration. As things become more evolved they also become more involved. The noosphere—especially with the infosphere speeding things up—is becoming involuted into a Hyperpersonal Consciousness, which will be fully achieved at a point Teilhard called Omega. At Point Omega, matter and consciousness reach the terminal phase of their convergent evolution and become one. Absolutely indistinguishable. That’s what the Myrrhisticineans really meant by the Rainbow Door.”