Lightpaths

by Howard V. Hendrix

  They stopped beside a spot so fragrant that Jhana took immediate note of it. An herb garden of some sort, she presumed.

  “If I remember his call, he wanted some jasmine...” Larkin said, leaving the path and stooping among various flowering green plants. He stopped beside a small bed of white flowering shrubs labelled “J. grandiflorum.”

  “Who’s ‘he’?” Jhana said, watching Larkin move like an old monk-herbalist about the gardens, plucking flower after flower.

  “Roger Cortland,” Larkin replied, depositing his burden of flowers in the bags and sacks he took from his pockets and snapped open. “He wanted some ingredients for a perfume he’s making. Know him?”

  “We’ve met,” Jhana said, thinking at the same time that Roger certainly hadn’t struck her as the parfumeur type.

  “The lavender is a bit further along our way,” he said, rejoining her on the path. They walked along, wreathed in the florid scent of Jasminum.

  “What were the effects of KL 235 that they were so interested in, exactly?” Jhana asked, continuing to endear herself to the older man.

  “It circumvents the action of the DMN, the dorsal and median raphe nuclei in the brain,” Larkin said evenly. “The DMN function as a sort of ‘governor’ on the level of brain activity, keeping that level down to low percentages of total possible activity. The ketamine lysergate 235 I derived from Cordyceps jacintae allows prolonged brain activity at very high percentages of total possible activity.”

  Jhana glanced thoughtfully at the gravel of the path, the jasmine scent still lingering about them like a morning melody heard in the mind all day.

  “But why would the spyboys, as you called them, be interested in something that increases brain activity?” she asked. “For smarter spies?”

  “Much more than that,” Larkin said, scanning the gardens about them. “At such high levels of brain activity, parapsychological phenomena appear in abundance: clairvoyance, second sight, mystic heat and cold, far-seeing, mindtime journeying. KL 235 vastly enhances those phenomena that improve understanding of the patterns of possibility backward and forward in space-time, and the intelligence collectors saw great potential in having such powers, despite the risks.

  Larkin stopped short.

  “Ah, here we are,” he said. “I wonder if he wants to use the flowers only? Hmm. They all contain the essential oils—flowers, stem and leaves. We’ll pick them all. He can sort them out if he wants to.”

  “Is that ‘we’ rhetorical,” Jhana asked, “or may I help?”

  “You’re welcome to,” Larkin said with a nod. Leaving the path, they climbed up among the plants of another elevated plot. He showed her how to pinch back several stems. In a very short time they were returning with an aromatic arm-load each of spiky-leaved, purple-flowered stalks.

  “Lavandula officinalis,” Larkin said, handing his arm-load to Jhana for her to carry as he picked up his jasmine samples again. Jhana took the extra arm-load awkwardly, spilling a few stalks of the lavender and bending to pick them up.

  “You mentioned risks with KL 235,” Jhana prompted as they walked along, now doubly wreathed in sweet scents.

  “Unavoidable ones,” Larkin said with a nod. “Brain burn-out. The raphe nuclei do have a reason for existing, you know. They’re your body’s way of keeping the brakes on your brain. Some researchers have theorized that the brain inherently serves as a reducing valve, allowing into consciousness only a very small fraction of what’s out there. According to such theories we’re all prisoners of our brains. Through the barred windows of the prison-house we see only as much as we need for survival. For those of us who follow that line of argument, the dorsal and median raphe nuclei are the pins and tumblers in the lock on the jailhouse door—and KL 235 was the perfect way to pick the lock.”

  Larkin smiled awkwardly as they made their way among the domes of a small settlement cluster.

  “Myself, I now think the DMN serve a bigger purpose,” he said. “The brain normally can’t run full throttle for very long. If it does, it destroys itself. I can’t say for sure but my sister Jacinta could have. She was the ethnobotanist in the family, after all. She was the one in search of the hallucinogenic grail, not me.”

  A small group of children ran rapidly and noisily past them. Jhana seemed to recall something from an old news-story she’d glanced at in her datasearch.

  “Jacinta’s the one who disappeared when Caracamuni ascended?”

  “That’s right,” he said as they entered one of the domes—apparently Larkin’s residence. “She’d already disappeared into the ‘field’, as the ethnobotanists so fondly describe it. I set out to find her, and I did, though not for long. That mountain didn’t go up uninhabited. ‘Forty-odd aboriginal astronauts and a drug-crazed ethnobotanist, all serving as humanity’s first personal ambassadors to the universe.’ That was how my story was described in the media at the time. Believe me, I know how crazy that sounds. Much easier to view it as just an odd volcanic explosion, just the disappearance of another obscure piece of rainforest real estate—lamentable, but God knows it was going on all the time back then.”

  They walked through the living area and into the kitchen.

  “Still, I saw what I saw. Here, let’s break that lavender into smaller bundles and tie them up so you won’t drop any more of it.”

  Jhana emptied out her arm-load of lavender on a table as Larkin searched drawers for string. Finding it, they quickly sorted the lavender by size and wrapped it into three tidier bundles.

  “What did you see, exactly?” Jhana asked as they were tying the last of the bundles—growing interested in Larkin’s strange story almost despite herself.

  The older man fixed her again with that glittering eye of his.

  “I still have the videotape we took, if you’d like to see it. Might help us both understand what Jacinta was up to.”

  “I’d enjoy seeing it,” Jhana said, thinking that people up here seemed to hoard old videos and trideos the way others hoarded photos in family albums.

  Leaving the bundles on the table, they adjourned to a viewing room with a video screen adorning one wall. The white-haired man popped a video mini-disc into a player.

  “I’ll try to fast-forward through to the actual ascent sequence,” Larkin said, obscurely embarrassed. “I really should have edited this down after all these years, but I never could bring myself to destroy anything from that time.”

  The video came on and Jhana saw an exterior shot of the Missouri Botanical Gardens—apparently the institution Jacinta had worked for—then a shot of a cluttered cubicle, a stationary cyclone of notebooks and reports, folders and pamphlets and monographs strewn everywhere. A satellite shot of Caracamuni tepui. Shot of bills and receipts, check stubs and requisition slips for an odd assortment of things—industrial autoclaves, portable solar and gas-powered electric generators, diamond saws, thousands of feet of power cables, fold-out satellite dishes and uplink antennas, language acquisition and translation programs, camcorders and optidisk player recorders, fifty microscreen TVs—

  “She’d had all that stuff shipped to a little nothing town in the middle of the jungle,” Paul said. “So that’s where I went next.”

  Shots of a jungle village’s mud street, scrawny dogs prowling about, indígena porters, a mestizo man with a smile like a facial slash, tipped back on a verandah chair, whittling a stick with a big blade....

  “My guide,” Larkin said, “Juan Carillo Garza. Most of the others are Pemon Indians.”

  Shots of canoeing and portaging up river and stream, past flights of blue and red macaws, past troops of monkeys shrieking green waves through the forest canopy, past the fluttering flashing blue of giant morpho butterflies. Shots of a bearer-line slogging through a wet green hell of venomous snakes, brittle scorpions, stinging ants, ever-present mosquitoes. Shots of a green tunnel of machete-hacked trail switch-bac
king endlessly, like a journey through the bowels of some immense ruminant animal.

  “Took us three days before we finally got into the mountains proper,” Larkin said, still playing about with the fast-forward.

  Shots taken above tree-line appeared at last, shots of the guide Garza pointing to a mountain on the horizon, a high mesa shaped roughly like a giant anvil, a sunlit plume of waterfall plunging from its top.

  “Caracamuni tepui,” Paul Larkin said quietly. “The geologists estimated that the shield rock of Caracamuni plateau was approximately 1.8 billion years old. That jibed to some degree with parts of the inhabitants’ mythology.”

  More shots of the pack line hiking up switch-backs, the green tunnel replaced by a constant low ceiling of leaden clouds. The backbone of a ridge. The tepui itself, a place of stone black with eternal rains, blotched with fog and algae and fungus. A dense stone forest of balance rocks and pinnacles, columns and arches, the sort of city that time and water dream from stone.

  “A labyrinth of stone clouds,” Larkin said. “Everything rounded, no right angles anywhere. Ancient strata broken by lopsided eggs of sky, interrupted by oblongs of rain. Forty square kilometers of it. My sister was out there somewhere. Garza and his men refused to go further. Old taboos about the ‘ghost people’ who were supposed to inhabit the tepui.”

  More shots of the top of Caracamuni tepui, an island of stone floating among the clouds, raindesert island above rainforest sea. Dark water-soft contours of ancient stone: geological ruins, nightmare temples, alien cathedrals dribbled like children’s slurry sand castles onto an anvil-top high in the sky. Mostly barren, Jhana noticed, but here and their dotted with pocket Edens, swampy rockgarden-sized oases. Shot of a sun setting behind bars of clouds, smearing slanting light on ancient stones.

  “That sunset filled me with melancholy,” Larkin said quietly, remembering. “Almost as if I were seeing a universal twilight of men and gods, of worlds and time.”

  Amid shots of a new day, a young woman, indígena girl really, disappearing in and out of fog and cloud like an apparition, naked but for a loincloth patterned with masterfully intricate serpent-knot designs, drawing Larkin and his camera on, stopping only where the stony maze broke off and a cloud-filled gorge came into view below. Further along the edge a sunburnt woman stood, clad in tattered shirt and shorts and gym shoes, sun-bleached hair under straw sun hat, clipboard in hand on the brink of the abyss, adjusting the angle onto heaven of a satellite dish.

  “Jacinta,” Larkin said hoarsely to Jhana, clearing his throat.

  The camera followed Jacinta and the indígena girl walking down into the cloud-mist obscuring the gorge. The antenna line following along the footpath, then losing itself in thickening undergrowth. Shots of tree canopy through the mist, ever denser cloudforest growth, dripping innumerable varieties of lianas and orchids and epiphytes. Shots of the bottom of the steep gorge, slippery downed trees ranging across a torrent plummeting to waterfall beyond.

  The camera panned up a branching canyon trail, jungle thinning, mist clearing. Foot-trampled pathways converging on an earthen slope beneath a high cliffside. Power lines and cables snaking out of the forest on both sides of the gorge, purposeful vines of black, grey and red growing into a half dozen holes in the cliff.

  “You’ll see in a minute that those holes are part of the entrance to a cave,” Larkin explained as the camera followed a line toward a cliff hole. Above, heads then torsos then entire bodies of indígenas appeared, largely unadorned but for occasional intricate loincloths and, incongruously, headsets.

  “The ‘ghost people’,” Larkin explained. “The theory was that they were a very small Pemon group which, until my sister’s arrival, had been isolated up there for a long, long time. According to the Pemon, the ghost people’s ancestors supposedly broke some ancient taboo and were considered ‘already dead’ by their tribe. A small group of them—refugees, outcasts—settled the tepui ‘at least a thousand years ago’. My sister’s work there, though, suggested that they had been there many, many thousands of years, that they were in fact far older than the Pemon—and they weren’t completely isolated either.”

  The shots that appeared now, inside the cave, were dimmer and much more confusing. Jhana saw movement down a slantwise tunnel, past rock honeycombed with innumerable small side chambers.

  “Even after my sister’s arrival,” Larkin explained, “the Pemon porters would carry all the gear she’d shipped only as far as the edge of the tepui. The inhabitants had to carry it the rest of the way.”

  Jhana watched as tantalizing glimpses of what was going on in the side chambers flashed past: several indígena children watching what appeared to be a Chinese tv documentary, a young loincloth-clad man watching an American news broadcast about an Indian monsoon, a young woman checking an enormous crystal column for flaws as it flowed out of a high pressure extrusion autoclave, loinclothed boy and oldster seated before computer terminals and scanning at unbelievable speeds through what looked like extremely complex mathematical equations, a half dozen operators of various ages scanning through what might be star charts or astrogation data—

  Then Jacinta (and Paul behind the camera) were out of the chambered stone, the tunnel opening into an enormous underground space like a nether sky where shadowy light glimmered off crystalline rock. A brief shot of an old man or woman dressed in a full loose robe of the same intricate knot-weave as the loincloths, a longhaired gaptoothed brighteyed elder of indeterminate gender—

  Then abruptly the camera was shooting from outside the cave again, out of the gorge, off the tepui, back with the guide and bearers in sunset light. Larkin slowed the playback. The camera, pointed at Caracamuni tepui from the far end of the ridge below it, was shaking violently. The forests between it and the tepui seemed to toss like waves in a storm.

  A great ring of dust formed about halfway up Caracamuni’s height and the tepui itself appeared to be growing taller. As its top continued to rise, though, Jhana saw that it was not growing but separating, top half from bottom half, at the ring of thinning dust. Soon the top half had risen free from the dusty billows and a space of clear sky intervened between the sundered halves of the ancient mountain.

  Rising smoothly as a mushroom in the night, drifting away like a ship slipping from harbor toward open sea, open sky, the mountaintop ascended. Clear of the Earth’s curved sunset shadow, the sun shone full upon it again. Strangely, its waterfall did not disappear in a long mist to Earth. Jhana puzzled over the image of the waterfall moving like a downward smoke, only to pool crescentwise at some unseen boundary—until she saw the way the light bent around the mountain, refracting in a great sphere like the shimmer of heat-waves from asphalt, from desert and mirage, from the boundary of a soap bubble like those her fellow passenger Marissa had talked about, what now seemed ages ago.

  If Jhana could believe what the video was showing her, then she could only conclude that Caracamuni was ascending in a bubble of force, its high waterfall plunging down only to spread out again in a broad swirl along the boundary’s edge. She looked more closely and saw that, from the sphered mountain itself, a pale fire like inverted alpenglow had begun to shine, increasing in intensity until, in a brilliant burst of white light, the mountain disappeared, as silently and completely as a soap bubble bursting in a summer sky.

  Jhana and Larkin stared at the screen for a time.

  “A tremendous blast like thunder swept over us after that,” Larkin said. “And then it was over. But it’s not really over. Not with KL 235 out there. And lately, someone or something has been accessing the copies of this tape in the public archives. A lot.”

  “Isn’t there something missing?” Jhana asked. “Why’d you stop recording after that old shaman or witch or whoever it was appeared? And what does all that have to do with KL 235?”

  “Everything,” Larkin said with a sigh, standing abruptly. “Come along with me to t
he lab. Mr. Cortland still needs musk from civet cats, so I’m headed that way anyway. If Mr. Yamaguchi is on duty, I’ve got something to show you in the mycology labs on the way.”

  Leaving Roger Cortland’s bundles of lavender and bags of jasmine flowers behind, they left Larkin’s residence, striking off along a path that ran among the hilltop domes.

  “The ‘old person’ of the tribe, Kekchi, refused to allow me to keep shooting what I was seeing,” Larkin said as they walked, “so I’m still trying to piece it together out of memory. Jacinta tried to explain the situation to me, but I wouldn’t listen. I thought she’d just hooked up with a lot of backwoods mushroom cultists. I couldn’t wrap my mind around it.”

  “What did she try to explain?” Jhana asked as they stepped over rocks and crossed a small stream.

  “My sister claimed the ghost people had been living in symbiotic relation to Cordyceps jacintae, their ‘sacred mushroom,’ for millennia,” Larkin remarked as they passed sidewalk cafes and a small park. “Jacinta called it a ‘myconeural symbiont’ because after someone ingests the fruiting body, the spores germinate and the spawn forms a sheath of fungal tissue around the nerve endings of the central nervous system, penetrating even between the nerves of the brain and brain stem, even to the dorsal and median raphe nuclei, without damaging them.”

  “You mean they have fungus living in their heads?” Jhana asked, her face wrinkling in disgust.

  “Exactly,” Larkin said with a nod, glancing away toward park fields where children played—watched by adults who might or might not be their parents. “I found the idea of such a fungal infestation disgusting too. But the relationship is mutually beneficial: the fungal spawn obtains moisture, protection, and nutrients even in adverse environments, and the human hosts are assured a steady supply of the most potent ‘informational substances’, as Jacinta called them.”