Lightpaths

by Howard V. Hendrix

  “And the ‘distributed consciousness’ you and Laksh have been on about,” Lev said, “you think it’s this Hyperpersonal Omega thing?”

  “Who can say?” Aleister asked with a shrug. “It might be a step on the way. Point Omega’s meant a lot of things to a lot of people. To the Myrrhies it was the Rainbow Door, but to some of the info-industry types who pumped money into their Abbey, it seems to have meant something quite different. Two of the Abbey’s big donors, Doctor Ka Vang of ParaLogics and Jem Kerris of Kerrismatix, both authored papers extending Friedkin’s hypothesis of an ‘information-based cosmos’, where matter and energy are alternate states of information. Kerris proposed something called an ‘information density singularity’ and Vang at one point claimed to be developing a ‘simulated quantum information density structure’—a trans-luminal portal.”

  “So the thing that blitzed the Abbey maybe wasn’t a Rainbow Door,” Lev ventured, “but a kind of black hole sun, like the tabloids claimed?”

  “Maybe,” Aleister said, “but that seems too passive and material to me. Teilhard talks of a hyperconsciousness, after all. Maybe it was a Rainbow Door, or a Trans-luminal Portal—or maybe it was the maw of a technological superpredator.”

  “What?” Lev and Lakshmi both said at once.

  “Who says the hyperpersonal consciousness has to be divine rather than demonic?” Aleister speculated. “What if Manqué the apocalyptist got impatient? What if he decided that human history is proof of the Paine hypothesis gone wrong: a single species—us—has gained ascendancy and has been steadily reducing the biodiversity of the ecosphere around it. Our development of culture and other technologies have made it unlikely any successful natural predator will develop against us. Through warfare and the creation of the rich as a permanent vampire class we’ve tried to prey on ourselves, but that hasn’t worked because no species can really limit its numbers through self-predation.”

  “Oh, I get it,” Lev said, shifting gradually but increasingly into Bela Lugosi mad-scientist parody. “So maybe Manqué figured he’d help create a predator so advanced that it could successfully prey on human beings, no matter how impressive our technology. An angel of death, a hungry god. Mystical union, oneness, Omega—what else but to be devoured by the rough beast, the great demon, the terrible beauty slouching toward Sedona to be born....”

  Lev and Lakshmi laughed, but Aleister merely smiled.

  “Laugh if you want, but it is one possible scenario for what might have happened at the Abbey outside Sedona,” Aleister said. “This ‘distributed’ or ‘hyper’ consciousness, if that’s what it is that’s growing in the infosphere now—it may have to undergo a spiritual battle between its angelic and demonic sides, just like any other self-aware consciousness. You could argue that that ‘Building the Ruins’ game already provides evidence of such a battle.”

  Lakshmi became abruptly silent, which surprised Lev.

  “I haven’t played that game yet, myself,” he said.

  “You might want to,” Aleister suggested, “before you meet with your guests. You might also want to look at more of the information encrypted in the RAT code. That’s what’s helped direct me in my speculations. Look, I’ve got to get back to spy-catching duty. I’ll touch base tomorrow.”

  Aleister disappeared from their shared space. Lakshmi turned to Lev.

  “You will join us for our meeting, then?” she asked pointedly.

  “I promise,” Lev said. “I’ll even come up early and sample this game Aleister seems to think is so important. Good enough?”

  “Good enough.”

  * * * * * * *

  “Fools!” Roger said, storming through the lab. “Idiots!”

  Marissa said nothing, just tried to keep doing her work, focusing on some final simulation runs of her anti-senescence vector, but that didn’t stop Roger. He seemed to need to hear himself rant and rave.

  “Those fossils—those mossbacks at the Journal of Mammalogy—they rejected my article! ‘Fails to provide proof of pheromonal/chemical suppression of mole rat reproduction adequate for overturning established behavioral suppression model’—that’s what one of their peer reviewers wrote. He even had the gall to write ‘See Faulkes et al., in The Biology of the Naked Mole-Rat, Sherman, Jarvis and Alexander, Princeton 1991’—as if I were some upstart graduate student! Faulkes and the old boy network! Don’t they know my ‘unorthodoxy’ predates their orthodoxy? The pheromonal suppression model was first proposed by Jarvis herself! It was the reigning paradigm for the first decade of mole rat studies—and never disproved!”

  Marissa finished her test runs on the Cybergene machine. She turned on, then abruptly shut off, her nucleic synthesis equipment, got up, and left—looking disgusted. Roger stared after her, rage and frustration contending in his face.

  Where was the sympathetic Marissa he had known before she’d surprised him that early morning? Did she know too much already? What had she really seen? Enough to make the connection?

  No time to worry now. To Hell with her. Re-submit the article—to Nature, perhaps? No, maybe no need. He had enough results on his new compound. Now he needed to synthesize it, to begin situational testing....

  Using one of his father’s old corporate encryption codes, Roger moved through his virtual reality’s data construct until he gained access to memory-stored perfumery guides—the secret but surprisingly unprotected hoard of his father’s perfume company subsidiaries. Poring over pane after pane of text, detailing perfumes and extracts and eau de toilettes, concretes and absolutes, early odors and late fragrances, notes and harmonies, tenacities and predominants, tops and hearts and cores and bases and auras and sillages—he got a sense of what he might need. Yes, jasmine picked at dawn or perhaps lavender as a top-note, civet as fixative and bottom—

  He scanned through the lists of the botanical and zoological holdings of the habitat. He expected to find jasmine and lavender, and he did. According to the registry of holdings, several gardens contained plantings of one or the other or both. Interestingly, he recognized at least one name among the garden lists—Larkin, Paul. Roger scanned for Larkin’s home and work addresses and was surprised and pleased to see that the man was director of the lab to which Jhana Meniskos had been assigned. He thought of the slim, dark-haired, dark-eyed woman—then of Marissa too, the coppery wave of her hair flowing out behind her as she’d left just now. Better and better.

  He scanned for sources of civet and—was this providential, or what?—found that Larkin’s lab was also doing work with endangered mammals of the family Viverridae. Civet cats.

  Doctor Paul Larkin was clearly the man to see. Roger would have to pay him a visit as soon as possible. Then, when he’d mixed up his perfume to the guides’ specifications, Roger would stage for Marissa and for Jhana—but most of all for himself—a private situational test....

  Perhaps because he’d been keeping such odd hours of late, or perhaps because he’d been pushing so hard and, now that he’d apparently succeeded (despite this most recent rejection note), his body had decided it was time for him to rest. Whatever the cause, he now found himself slipping off into a light, nervous sleep.

  * * * * * * *

  Passage embedded in RAT code:

  Think of the discovery of fire as a blow against the cold and the dark and the raw. Think of the discovery of agriculture as a blow against the tyrannical vicissitudes of hunting and gathering. Think of the invention of writing as a rebellion against oblivion, against the endless brute days of the peasant farm laborer, the bloody brutal ends of the warrior. Think of the invention of the scientific method as a blow against the bureaucratic priests and their Holy Writing—the managerial class’s revolutionary idea that reading from the Book of Nature could be just as valuable as reading from the Book of Scripture. Think of the development of space travel as a rebellion against gravity, against the tyrannical linking of human destiny
to a single planet. Think of the development of virtuality as a blow against the tyranny of the meat body over the mind. The only tyrant left now is death. Space travel is really about species immortality, all the work against senescence is really about individual immortality—blows against death’s tyranny, ideological weapons all—

  Disturbed by Roger’s rapid mood swings—extreme elation over his hypothetical pheromone, all too quickly changing to extreme anger and bitterness over the rejection of his article— Marissa left the lab, early and in a rush, and proceeded to the grounds around the Archives, where she was to rendezvous with Atsuko after the latter’s speaking engagement.

  Realizing she had been spending entirely too much time on her anti-senescence vector and wanting to convince Atsuko that she was deserving of her fellowship in utopian studies, Marissa turned on her overlays and PDA and began to comb through her notes again as she walked steadily along. A bibliographer or librarian had cross-referenced both Aldous Huxley’s dystopian novel Brave New World and his final utopian novel Island to a series of books by someone named R. Gordon Wasson. Intrigued, she followed up the lead, only to discover that the Wasson books were mostly about the ritual use of sacred mushrooms in priestly and shamanic contexts.

  Doing this side-alley research soon proved to be something other than the complete waste she thought it would be, however, because she gradually came to realize both of Huxley’s books were indeed characterized by the presence of an ingested psychoactive substance unique to each text. Brave New World’s ‘soma’ and Island’s ‘moksha’ could each be profitably read as a microcosmic embodiment of the macrocosm of the novel in which each was found. All that was dystopian in the Brave New World could be found in kernel form in the nature of soma. All that was truly Utopian in the Island of Pala could likewise be found in concrete form in the mushroom called moksha. The consciousness-altering substance ingested in each novel was an ‘artificial paradise’ inside an artificial paradise, an island within the island of the ideal society that each novel presented.

  As she examined the texts further, she saw that the “drug” in each was, to some degree, the holiest of holies—but, more importantly, it was also central to the way Huxley examined that relationship between individual freedom and social responsibility that was also so very important to the inhabitants here. In Brave New World and Island, how each society treated its drug and its drug users was the crucial litmus test for how that society treated its citizens and their freedom of choice, their autonomy as individuals.

  Marissa had reached the Archive grounds now. She was so busy researching that she noted her location only enough to find a bench and sit down—without thinking about it really, doing it all in that mental state she called “autopilot.” Along her continuing train of thought, Marissa realized it was only a short step to Huxley’s letters, essays, non-fiction books, and his other novels. Scanning back through the entire corpus of Huxley’s writings, she saw they could be examined for the light they shed on the attitudes of twentieth century Western societies toward drugs, drug usage, and particularly the ongoing tension in those cultures between individual freedom and social responsibility.

  Her eyes looked through and past her overlays as her mind began to wander. She thought suddenly that her utopian studies had as much to do with life as with literature. She wanted to see what the literature said about how human beings might create a society both just and merciful, that fulfilled the needs of the body without denying the freedoms of the mind, the soul. A truly humane society that prospered but did not thoughtlessly exploit—either its own citizens or the environment in which they were embedded. One that recognized the alleviation of suffering as its highest goal, but was neither paternalistic nor authoritarian in its pursuit of that goal. Ultimately, she supposed, she was less interested in literature and literary criticism as a tool for making better books and more interested in it as a tool for making better people.

  At the sound of footsteps, Marissa came wide awake.

  “Resting your eyes, Marissa?” Atsuko said, standing before her with an impudent smile.

  “Just contemplating,” Marissa said, standing up a bit stiffly and walking beside her. “How did your presentation go?”

  “My speech, you mean? Fine. All teachers in the audience—up from Earth for a conference. Remind me to tell you about it—on the way. I saw Seiji on the way back and he said he’s looking forward to meeting you. It turns out he and another of our visitors are also getting together with a mutual friend, Lakshmi Ngubo, this evening. She’ll be expecting us along. We’ve got to meet with Seiji and his friend in an hour, so we’d better hurry.”

  * * * * * * *

  Realizing that she was nearing Paul Larkin’s residence, Jhana slowed her pace. She had decided to test Seiji’s suggestion that Larkin was someone worth getting to know, and to that effect she had already spoken to Dr. Larkin in the lab to set up this appointment. The man had seemed somewhat curmudgeonly and non-committal, as was apparently always his way, so to strengthen her case Marissa had tried to familiarize herself with Larkin’s life and work.

  Walking slowly beside a mossy fern-banked stream that flowed boisterously through the cool shade of a grove of young cedars, Jhana was not quite oblivious to the beauty of the little ghyll through which she was passing. She had run an extensive datasearch on Larkin and now was quite puzzled at the strangeness of Larkin’s history. She found herself thinking again of the flying mountain, Caracamuni tepui.

  When, twenty-eight years ago, Larkin and his guide and native porters had returned from the tepui country of South America with their story and video recording of Caracamuni’s top quietly lifting off, de-coupling from the Earth, the geologists, seismologists, and volcanologists dismissed the ascent of the mountaintop as an “anomalous volcanic eruption” and wrote off the video as a hoax, trick photography, a cinematically contrived special effect. After such denunciations, Larkin’s claims inevitably fell into the disreputable limbo of the mass tabloids, the murky half-tone half-light of the faxoid cheapsheets, in whose pages the spectacle of the flying mountain was periodically resurrected. What made it all the more appealing to the faxoid editors over the years, as far as Jhana could tell, was Larkin’s own status as a serious senior scientist—an expert in the cryogenic preservation of threatened species and also someone making claims outside his field. Controversy, dissension and disagreement in the ranks of the scientific community could always be counted on to sell papers.

  From all Jhana could glean from the public documents, such tabloid exposure had apparently not been good for Larkin’s career either, which seemed to go into eclipse for nearly a decade, during which time he had apparently left his first career in investigative journalism—that would explain his media obsession—and gone back to graduate school. He’d gotten a decent position shortly after completing his doctoral and postdoc work, but then interest in the flying mountain had ballooned up again. He’d refused to recant his previous statements on the issue and his career had derailed once more. He had been reduced to the status of “independent researcher” and had scrounged funding where he could—including from rather shady unofficial sources such as the various intelligence agencies, which at that time were transmogrifying from national security apparatuses to corporate espionage and intelligence brokers.

  Moving from the cool of the cedar copse onto a sunny green hillock of steep maze-like gardens, Jhana made her way over and around the bright sinuous rills and streamlets that both knit together and unraveled the maze—a landscape she as yet largely did not see, for her eyes were on the cluster of airy, tent-like domes shining at the top of the small hill.

  “What are you thinking about, Jhana?” a voice said, so suddenly that she almost thought it had come from within her own head. She turned about until she saw a gnomish white-haired man staring down at her and realized she’d been addressed by Paul Larkin.

  “Actually, I was just thinking how you
and your flying mountain came back into the lime-light almost by accident, Dr. Larkin,” Jhana said. “After KL 235 was derived from Cordyceps jacintae.”

  “Yes,” the old man said, standing up from his cross-legged position on a stone garden bench, all his joints popping and snapping and clicking. “I see you’ve run your background check on me.”

  “Tell me something about that,” Jhana said, perhaps faining greater interest than she really felt. Anything to get on the old guy’s good side. “You claimed that fungus grew only on Caracamuni tepui...”

  “That’s right,” said Larkin, coming down through the gardens to join her on the path. “I obtained spore-prints of it before the mountaintop vanished, so I had sole access to the species.”

  Walking together beneath the sheltering sky of the habitat, they set a leisurely pace along the maze of garden pathways leading to the domes.

  “I read that you were working for the intelligence agencies when you developed the drug,” Jhana said. “Was it the flying mountain story that first got them interested in you?”

  Larkin laughed, then fixed Jhana with a glittering eye.

  “Be serious! The spyboys never gave much credence to that story at all! The effects of Cordyceps jacintae, now—those were verifiable enough to be of interest to them. And they knew about psychoactive fungi, of course. Seventy and eighty years ago the cloak-and-dagger lads were intimately involved in the dissemination of LSD, for instance—and that was derived from Claviceps purpurea, a wheat ergot fungus. Cordyceps and Claviceps are closely related, too, so they saw...possibilities. They didn’t care if I claimed to have gotten the fungus from Atlantean mermaids or little green men. It worked, and that was all that mattered.”