Lightpaths

by Howard V. Hendrix

  “Does the height bother you, Jhana?” Marissa asked. “I was feeling a little acrophobic myself, not long before you two arrived.”

  Jhana nodded as, along the tube, lights for their arriving cart began to flash.

  “Yes—vertigo. Not as bad as when I was here last, though.”

  “Not nearly!” Seiji said with a laugh. “We’d just met. Poor Jhana looked as if she’d seen a ghost—white-knuckle grip on the railing, her eyes big as satellite dishes—”

  “Now don’t exaggerate, Seiji,” Atsuko corrected. “I know the engineers have good reasons for keeping this observation sphere transparent, but really, seeing so much space all around must come as quite a shock to newcomers.”

  “The space was only part of it,” Jhana said quietly. “A lot of it was just the sheer strangeness of it, all the detail. You’ll laugh, but—I don’t know—I felt as if I’d been trapped inside a big, multi-dimensional mandala.”

  “What a wonderful image!” Atsuko said with a laugh as their bullet cart eased up before them. The older woman craned her head around at the large sphere and nodded as they boarded. “Interesting you should think of it that way.”

  “My mother was a Western devotee of Buddhism,” Jhana explained. “When religion came up at all in my upbringing, it was an amalgam of my father’s Greek Orthodoxy and my mother’s Neo-Tibetan Buddhism.”

  “Both of which are very iconic,” Atsuko said with a nod. “Yes, now that you mention it, I see what you mean about this place being like a big mandala.”

  “I guess I do too,” Seiji agreed as the doors of the cart sealed around the four of them and they shot away. “The Indians of the Pacific Northwest had a mandala called a ‘salmon circle’. It’s a symbol of the fact that, for millions of years, the salmon have circled—from hatching in fresh water, to life in the seas, to spawning and death in the same waters where they were born—cycling endlessly, generation after generation. My brother showed me a picture of that mandala once. It’s a haunting image. If you stare at it long enough, after a while it stops being just salmon. It begins to metamorphose on you: the humps of the fish start looking like serpents or dragons, the fins start transforming into wings, birds, angels. I saw rivers and forests and clouds in it too.”

  Marissa found herself warming to Seiji. If this young man was an incarnation of what Atsuko meant by the New Science, then Marissa was all for it.

  “That’s sounds like as good an image as any,” she put in, “for a living world inside a spinning sphere, in an orbit around the Earth, in an orbit around the sun. All those orbits would probably make quite a mandala too, if we could just see it!”

  Jhana looked up from her lap. She had idly popped on her personal data display for note-taking and, since she’d done nothing with that program, the machine had scanned up a news broadcast from Earth as a screen-saver.

  “You people better have a look at this,” Jhana said, interrupting. She forwarded the broadcast to her companion’s personal data units.

  “—today,” said an overdressed anchorwoman on all their screens. “Motions have been introduced simultaneously at the United Nations and the Corporate Presidium council to consider the implementation of trade sanctions or possible military action against the High Orbital Manufacturing Enterprise. The motions charge that, among other matters, the space habitat has violated product treaties and, more gravely, placed satellites illegally into Earth orbit for undisclosed reasons. The news of the satellites has prompted a ground-swell of public opinion in opposition to the space habitat’s actions.”

  They watched as the newscast switched from the anchorwoman to coverage of a street protest, then an interview with a protest organizer.

  “—trends in population and resources, it can go only one of two ways,” said a pale, head-shaved young woman dressed in solidarity street-rags and carrying a baby on her hip. “Either everybody’s piece of the pie has to be limited uniformly at a smaller and smaller size, or the pie has to be distributed more and more unequally. Follow that second one out and you end up with domed islands of plenty in dying seas of want. Garden bubble oases of the wealthy surrounded by toxic waste deserts of the poor. The flight of the rich to suburbs in space while Earth City crumbles. That’s exactly what’s going on with this latest move by the space habitat—they’re trying to set up shop on their own, free of any responsibility for the rest of us down here. Cosmic selfishness, that’s what it is!”

  Jhana snapped off the broadcast. The spin this was all being given on Earth, the way the space habitat was being misrepresented—it was even beginning to disgust her.

  “We knew this was coming, sooner or later,” Atsuko said. “I’d hoped my liaison work could stall it more than it has. All the more imperative that we see Lakshmi and get to the root cause of these satellite games—so we can learn to live with some new facts of life.”

  Seiji glanced around at his fellow passengers in the cart and smiled a sad, odd smile.

  “Human beings—we’re born for trouble, live in trouble, die in trouble, as my brother used to put it.”

  The ridge cart slowed and stopped among the agricultural tori and some flamboyantly dressed young people got on, moving to their own music, their own games. Out of the corner of her eye Jhana saw the word VAJRA flash up, and a symbol like a shimmering lightning strike, and a shining data-construct City under siege by dark forces. She turned away.

  “Not to change the subject, Seiji,” Atsuko put in, “but what kind of ag schedule are you on?”

  “A couple of month-long clusters,” Seiji said as the cart eased to a stop in the manufacturing zone. “September and October, why?”

  “I was thinking it might be nice to see if you could join our work group,” Atsuko said as they stood and the doors opened. “I think you’d fit in well, even though we’re mostly older—”

  Jhana was surprised that Seiji and Atsuko could take so blithely in stride the news of the latest threats from Earth. She had little time to contemplate that, though, for on the platform two people were waiting for them: a dark-complected woman of perhaps forty dressed in flowing clothing and seated in a hoverchair and, standing beside her, a tall lanky young man with albino-white hair, wearing wrap-around magenta sunshades and a black body suit.

  “Lakshmi!” Both Seiji and Atsuko called as they stepped forward to greet her. They did not attempt to shake her hand, and something about the way the woman’s body was positioned in the chair made Jhana suspect that Lakshmi was paralyzed over most of her body and had not opted for the usual cyborg fix.

  “Atsuko! Seiji! And you two must be Marissa Correa and Jhana Meniskos? I’m Lakshmi Ngubo. A pleasure to meet you both!”

  For all the apparent rigidity and frailty of her body, the woman spoke in full, deep, flowing tones that reminded Jhana of that courier, Losaba—the South African man who had delivered to her a private message from her employer. Lakshmi Ngubo—an Indo-African name?

  “I don’t know if you’re acquainted with my friend here,” Lakshmi said with a nod to the tall young man beside her. “Lev Korchnoi, the mind behind the music of Möbius Cadúceus.”

  “Not really,” Korchnoi said in his flat Midwestern American English as he shook hands with Jhana and Marissa. “Just a member of the band.”

  “False humility suits you so poorly, Lev,” Lakshmi said with a laugh as she spun her hover chair around with a whispered command and led them out of the ridge cart station. Only Lakshmi looked dignified as they moved along—the rest had to assume the loping gait characteristic of movement in low gravity. “Lev is here to talk with you, Jhana and Seiji, about your ‘responses’ to his group’s skysign. It seems there’ve been some other complaints.”

  “Not complaints,” Lev corrected as they proceeded down a corridor, glancing at Marissa. “More...bewilderments.”

  “You designed the skysign, then?” Marissa asked, addressing her question
to both Lev and Lakshmi.

  “Oh no,” Lakshmi said. “I was trying to design something for Lev’s upcoming concert when this glitch thing started developing on its own in my virtual space. I couldn’t get rid of it.”

  “That’s where I came in,” Lev said. “Lakshmi showed me her ‘glitch thing’ and I immediately concluded it was the perfect image for our performance of Temple Guardians—the show we’re doing to celebrate the opening of the two new habitats.”

  “Since I initially thought that image might be someone else’s intellectual property—and therefore copyrighted—I tried to dissuade him from it,” Lakshmi said as they made their way down a corridor marked TRANSSHIPMENT DOCKING. “To no avail.”

  “It wasn’t any one else’s property,” Lev said, almost petulantly, “and it was perfect: the twin snakes of the caduceus, bent round into a Möbius strip. What more could we want?”

  “How about a symbol that doesn’t cause subconscious material to suddenly appear in consciousness? Hm?” Lakshmi said pointedly. Lev tried to ignore the comment.

  “But if you didn’t create it,” Seiji asked as they moved—Lakshmi floating, everyone else loping—down a ramp, “then who did?”

  “We don’t know,” Lev said, tight-lipped. “Not exactly.”

  “Oh, come on, Lev,” Lakshmi said. “It has to be ‘something’ connected into Vajra.”

  “Vajra?” Atsuko asked.

  “Does Vajra have something to do with these new trideo games that have been popping up everywhere lately?” Seiji wondered.

  “Vajra has something to do with a lot of new things,” Lev said cryptically.

  “Wait a second,” Jhana interrupted. “What’s Vajra?”

  “V-A-J-R-A,” Lakshmi explained, hovering to a stop before a space dock’s gate area. “Variform Autonomous Joint Reasoning Activity. It’s a flexible-response system for networking all the machine intelligence activities associated with the functioning of HOME—everything, from the big AIs to the micromachines, the expert systems to the cellular automata.”

  Lev laughed.

  “Now who’s suiting up in the armor of false humility? Lakshmi designed the system. Vajra is the ‘mind electric’ of the space habitat. Or the mind of light, rather, since it’s all laser-connected and communicated.”

  “It’s a sort of ‘psyche’,” Lakshmi explained, though a bit reluctantly, as if explanation was inevitably a reduction, “that constellates quantum information packets in a way analogous to the way the brain coordinates the firing of neuronal groups in specific locations relating to particular functions.”

  “But I seem to recall the word ‘vajra’ from some completely different context,” Jhana said hesitantly. “A spiritual context.”

  Lakshmi gave her a surprised look.

  “You’re right. Not many people know about that. I took the name from The Tibetan Book of the Dead. In Indian mythology, the vajra is the jewel that destroys all weapons—a symbol of a power indestructible, pure, and supreme. ‘Vajra’ means both ‘diamond’ and ‘thunderbolt,’ or ‘diamond thunderbolt’, in Sanskrit, but I’ve always thought of it as being more like a boomerang of coherent, pure light.”

  “A weapon, then?” Jhana asked, surprised that she had taken so long to connect “diamond thunderbolt” with a myth system she had known since childhood. The different contexts—Tibetan Buddhism and the paranoia of Tao-Ponto’s weapons division—had kept her from making the link. Now, though, many puzzle pieces came clicking into place in her mind.

  “Oh no, no.” Lakshmi said, shaking her head—quick sharp shakes. “The vajra of the old myths can never be used frivolously, it always fulfills its function of destroying the enemy, and it always returns into your hand—but it isn’t a physical or outward weapon, any more than Blake’s concept of ‘mental fight’ is about a boxing match or Gandhi’s satyagraha, ‘truth force’, is about an armada of nuclear missiles. I’ve always thought of the vajra as a symbol of the indestructible power of Truth itself, a spiritual weapon destroying Error or Illusion, ‘the enemy’.”

  Lakshmi glanced down at the floor, rather embarrassed.

  “I admit that giving the system such a grand old mythological name was something of a flight of fancy,” she said, “but since the whole QUIP transfer technique was based on the bending and reflecting and return-cycling of light—the boomeranging of laser light from microscopic lasers—I thought such a name appropriate at the time.”

  “But I still don’t see what all this has to do with trideo games,” Seiji said in a puzzled voice, “or with what Jhana and I, and apparently some other people, have experienced.”

  Lakshmi spun away in her hover chair, commanding open the docking bay doors before her, revealing the interior of a transfer ship.

  “If you want to know the game,” Lakshmi said, floating into the ship’s interior, “then let’s play the game. My workshop’s only a quick drift away.”

  Atsuko, Seiji, Jhana, and Marissa filed in after her, Lev bringing up the rear, smiling crookedly.

  * * * * * * *

  Passage embedded in RAT code:

  This colony is already a unique community, a zoo and a natural history museum and a botanical garden, an open air concert hall and art gallery, an exercise in consensus decision-making, a commons, a bioregion composed of several subregions—all rolled up into one. A city-state in space. Yet none of the social engineering engaged in here is impossible on Earth. In most cases it’d be even easier there. It’s just that, in the habitat, there’s a sense of starting anew in a place that’s uncompromising in its demands on the resident’s time. The sense of community, the idea that every part is engaged in the support of the whole and the whole is fully engaged in the support of the parts, that this place is as much a part of the residents as the residents are a part of it—that idea is particularly strong here.

  When they had strapped in, the transfer ship eased free of the turning habitat, headed for the micro-gee manufacturing facilities situated at a non-spinning, hence “weightless”, end of the axis—“the still point of the turning world,” as Lakshmi described it, using a phrase Marissa also seemed particularly fond of.

  They drifted past shielded mirrors and collectors, past the habitat’s own solar power arrays, until, very nearly in free space, they saw crews supervising the finishing touches on the nearly completed disc of a satellite solar power station.

  “That’s one of the newest designs,” Seiji explained to Jhana. “Solar exchange film, it’s called. Its big advantage is that it can be assembled—’spun out’ is really the better term for it—completely by micromachines. Big webs of spider-silk organic steel and micro-lattices of silicon converting sunlight directly to electricity.”

  “If it’s being spun out completely by micromachines,” Jhana asked, “then why the construction crews?”

  “They help guide and supervise the process, keep an eye on it,” Seiji continued. “The brigades of micromachines, the ‘spiders’—they sometimes go off on their own tangents. But it’s worth the effort. That bulkier thing in the center—like the spider in the web, see it there?—that converts the electricity to microwaves that can be beamed down to the large antenna arrays on Earth. Clean energy that’s saved Earth’s atmosphere from additional coal-fired power plants, saved hundreds of rivers from hydropower dams, saved future generations from tending more nuclear wastes—”

  Jhana laughed.

  “One would never guess you worked for the local power authority,” she said, glancing further away into space, at the necklace of power stations ringing the distant blue-white ball of Earth.

  “But some of those other stations,” Marissa remarked, “the ones already deployed—they’re shaped differently: squares, and rectangles too.”

  “Older technologies,” Seiji said with a nod. “Solar panels, even collecting mirrors. Some of the first stations aren’t even large
-scale photovoltaic, like all the newer ones. In those older sats sunlight is simply used to heat up a thermal-exchange fluid to spin a turbine. ‘Ancient plumbing’ is what some of my friends in Utility call it, but the old workhorses are still cranking out the gigawatts—light to heat, heat to electricity, electricity to microwaves, microwaves to Earth, then microwaves reconverted to electricity and heat and light.”

  “Cycles and transformations,” Atsuko said. Seiji nodded as Lakshmi muttered commands to the ship, bringing it around for docking.

  “What’s that there?” Marissa asked. “The thing that looks like a cross between a thimble and a badminton birdie, only giant-sized?”

  “That?” Seiji asked, pointing, unsure from Marissa’s description just what it was the red-headed woman was looking at. “That’s a mass catcher.”

  “A what?” Marissa asked, the look on her face that of someone who thought she might have just heard an off-color joke but wasn’t quite sure.

  “I know, I know,” Seiji said, holding up his hands before him in mild embarrassment. “You should hear the comments whenever we get someone new on staff. But really, that’s what it does: it catches mass, payloads of lunar material launched by mass driver from the moon’s surface. That’s what most everything that isn’t complex organic is made from up here: lunar material.”

  “And lately,” Lev Korchnoi put in, “some of the micromachines have been raiding the mass catcher for extra material. Seems some of our ‘spiders’ have bugs.”

  Seiji stared at him.

  “How do you know that?”

  “My day job is in communications,” Lev said, smiling his crooked smile. “Word gets around.”