Lightpaths

by Howard V. Hendrix

  Abruptly the clouds parted and he saw in the twilight below a vast strange city sprawling like a dark mold on bread. Out of the sunset black fliers came in high and fast, raining down dark seeds that blossomed up in fire wherever they touched the ground until the city burned everywhere, the sun sank blood red in a sky of smoke.

  Greatly perplexed by what the angel had shown him, he/Eilmer had begged some sign whether his flying apparatus, when perfected, would bring more peace and good to the world or more evil and war upon it. Night fell around the angel, who said nothing but only gestured toward an area in the sky where a star trailed a banner of ghostly fire like the hair of angels or the writhing of bright Medusan snakes. Abruptly the angel vanished, leaving him to fall down the sky endlessly toward a world that kept rushing up at him but upon which he never seemed to land or impact.

  That last image would explain Eilmer’s trepidation at the appearance of Halley’s Comet, Roger realized—and, if he had, as a boy, perhaps read of Eilmer’s story or seen it somewhere, then the dream was easy enough to explain, for nothing in it was beyond the technology of Roger’s times or the experiences of his own life.

  But what of the final appearance of the angel, the final dream-within-a-dream? That vision seemed to have taken place during the aged Eilmer’s recuperation, after he collapsed upon seeing the comet in the sky again during 1066. The angel of his visions had appeared to him a final time and taken him into the starry heavens themselves. As they rose through the air, fliers of ten thousand kinds ravaged the Earth below, some blasting sprawling cities with bursts of pure hellfire, scorching the ground black for years and sending invisible horrible death even to people going innocently about their work and play far away.

  Angel and dreamer rose higher and higher, past strange fliers like pylons or obelisks, fliers with tiny wings or no wings at all, often without a soul aboard yet roaring swiftly skyward on pillars of fire by night and columns of cloud by day to place peculiar artifacts among the stars themselves or to wait for a chance to pounce with Satanic fury onto a world beautiful and shining like a holy sacrament, a world adream on a bed of stars—and turn that world’s dreams of life and beauty to nightmares of death and horror.

  At the distance of the moon the dreamer and the angel came to a stop, invisible there among the strangely clad men who themselves drifted like wingless faceless angels between orbed cities floating in space. Winged fliers of unimaginable design rode out of the world on winds until they flew so high the winds ran out and on tongues of fire they continued their journeys to the floating cities and the mines of the moon.

  At that point in the dream-within-a-dream the most disturbing thing always happened: Roger had the distinct impression that he was no longer looking out into a dreamed universe through Brother Eilmer’s eyes, but rather the eleventh-century monk was staring through Roger’s own eyes into the cislunar space of the twenty-first century. Time and space, past and future—all became one eternal mind-filled moment, all separation and distance and alienation lost.

  Would the far-flung settlements in the whispering darkness remain in true peace or burst into strange fire, pierced by beams of killing light or crushed like eggs by the pressure of Luciferine blasts? Would the soul-crushing tyranny of Endless War keep the stars, like a blanket of pure snow, always out of reach, beyond barbed wire? Or would that tyranny turn even heaven itself into just another vaster concentration camp of falling bodies? Planets and stars and galaxies trudging pointlessly round and round the prison yard of the universe, to the pointed witness of almost-angelic astronauts bringing their barbed wire with them wherever they might go? In Roger’s dreams the answers were unknown, all unknown, except to know that everything balanced upon a moment which was all moments and a decision which was all decisions.

  The angel always turned to him then, its eyes vast islands of stars adrift in vaster seas of darkness, eyes expanding to become the whole of the sky, all skies, the only sky, eyes taking in everything like the undertow of eternity, eyes flashing dark with excess of bright, piercing through and through the pall of Death’s black peace until unearthly light burst forth in a van of angels winging about a hollow sphere, circling latitudes of shimmering ethereal creatures, flocking around him, carrying him away—

  He always woke up then. Roger shook his head. What mad nonsense! What possible connection could these phantasms from the past—a monk most notable in his failure, angels extinct as rocs or moas or passenger pigeons—what could they possibly mean to him? He, after all, did not believe in angels. And he most definitely would not fail in his mole-rat project.

  Furiously he scanned through all the Archive’s doorways into the infosphere for some reference, any reference, to a film or documentary about Eilmer. He found flying cities, flying islands, even a clipping involving Paul Larkin and a flying mountain—the same Larkin he’d met up here. He could, however, find no more on the flying monk.

  Disgusted, he ended his searches and got up to leave. Walking out of the Archives, Roger was too busy to notice anything going on around him, too busy remembering an episode from his childhood, climbing with his father over a fence to fall into a field of untouched snow, a flat expanse of empty whiteness pure and sweet as a blank page, to lay his body down and write a winged figure into those cold pages ten thousand times, or until his body grew cold as a snow angel’s—

  Stepping outside, he saw that Möbius Cadúceus skysign hovering in the air—but much smaller this time, a trideo game projection floating above some teenagers on the lawn. Quickly he averted his eyes. To him the sign had become as ominous a portent as the appearance of Halley’s Comet had been for Eilmer so many centuries before, and he wished it would just go away.

  He decided he needed some good news. He would check his v-mail and faxes, then go see Larkin about the ingredients for the perfume.

  * * * * * * *

  Aleister McBruce’s other day job was in space engineering. Normally the job wasn’t much trouble, but when, in response to increasing pressure from Earth, the word came down that work teams were to go out and start dismantling the anomalous X-shaped satellites, Aleister was appointed a team leader. As he and his team went out to rendezvous with the first of the satellites to be dismantled, Aleister put in a call to Lakshmi, filling her in on the background.

  “I don’t know why the council doesn’t just wait,” Aleister said at last. “If the governments and corporate trans-nats are that upset about it, sooner or later one them is going to send in a hunter-killer satellite and take one of these X-sats right out. Then we can just gather up the pieces and examine them at our leisure.”

  “Maybe the powers on Earth can’t just ‘take out’ these satellites,” Lakshmi suggested. “We know that the entire infosphere has been thoroughly infiltrated by the Distributed Consciousness. Quantum information packeting is at the heart of how the infosphere currently works, and the D.C. pretty much monitors everything that’s moving through quips. It probably already out-spies, out-commands, out-controls, and out-communicates anything Earth’s got. Maybe their efforts against the D.C. have been as futile as ours. Maybe there’s no more action at a distance—the only way anyone can get close to those X-sats is to go out to them personally.”

  Aleister nodded.

  “That’s why I want to keep this communication line open to you, Lakshmi,” he said. “I know the Vajra runs just about everything on the habitat, and it’s now probably more or less part of the distributed consciousness. I just want you to keep an eye out for any sort of response when we start hacking away at this first X-sat, and we’re just about to do so. I’ll give you full visual feed from this end.”

  Lakshmi watched as Aleister and his crew suited up in maneuvering units and drifted out of their transfer ship’s air lock. As the work crew in near space got closer to the X-sat and turned on their laser cutting torches, Lakshmi called up full readouts on all habitat systems. Out in cislunar space Aleister did t
he honors, using his cutting torch to bite into one limb of the big X. At the instant of contact, alarms began to scream and flash on Lakshmi’s readouts.

  “Stop, Aleister!” she said over the line. “Cease, desist, quit!”

  “What happened?” Aleister asked over his suit mike.

  “The Vajra has begun crashing systems,” Lakshmi said, scanning her feeds. “In two minutes it will blow all bay doors, hatches, and air locks. Explosive decompression in most of the tori—including the one I’m sitting in. After that, I’d say it will probably shut off all power and environmental support, to get at the central sphere. It’s got us, Aleister. It can survive cold, dark, and airless a helluva lot better than we can.”

  Aleister shut off his laser torch and motioned for the rest of his team to do likewise.

  “Any suggestions?” he asked.

  “I’ve already sent a report to your shift leaders in engineering,” Lakshmi said. “I’m sure they’re aware of the situation and will be advising all your teams very soon.”

  No sooner said than done. Almost immediately Aleister received word from Gene Smith, his shift leader.

  “Tell your team its mission had been halted for now,” the wiry black man said. “You are all to return to the habitat at once.”

  “Hey, Generino,” Aleister said as he and his team headed back to the ship, “did I hear just a hint of nervousness in your voice? You, the calmest of all high-flying, land-on-your-feet cats?”

  “My day job is not supposed to be a place for this kind of excitement,” Gene said with a grimace. “If I want that action I can get it blowing sax or teaching people to airbike—either of which I’d rather be doing right now.”

  “I hear you,” Aleister said, smiling. “I think we’d all rather be someplace else, doing something else. In a minute we will be. Hopefully no harm done.”

  Once Aleister and his crew were back in the ship, he received a message from Lakshmi.

  “After all your cutting crews left the vicinity of their respective X-sats,” she said, “the Vajra brought all the threatened systems back up. No explanation. As if nothing at all had happened—except a sort of machine amnesia.”

  “The kraken has awakened,” Aleister quipped in rhyme, “and it doesn’t like being prodded, if I’m not mistaken.”

  * * * * * * *

  Passage embedded in RAT code:

  As Earth’s increasing paranoia about the anomalous X-shaped satellites clearly indicates, the most frightening feature of unreason is its failure to recognize itself.

  In his pocket Roger still had the faxes of interest and intent from Mr. Jones at Tao-Ponto, and he carried them almost as if they were talismans of improving luck. Certainly it was true that he hadn’t slept well in days and days and that everything came to him in a sort of fever lately, all moving so fast, making him feel a bit wobbly and overwrought. As long as things kept moving his way, though, why should he worry?

  Roger was so sure now that he’d be able to crack a deal with TPAG that he was already thinking of names for the perfume as he walked along in search of Paul Larkin’s home. His first thought was to call the new perfume “Dusk.” Searching his pocket MultiLangueª for the French of that, he found tombée de la nuit, “fall of night,” but above that phrase, on the same screen of the dictionary, he found tombé, “fallen.”

  Perfect! A perfume whose name meant Fallen. He could imagine the ads for it, especially on trideo. A scenario spun itself in his head as he walked along, and he quickly dictated it into his personal data systems.

  Transcript of possible advertisement for Tombé:

  Pounding, driving music. Two athletic-looking women appear, backlit in shadowy purples and yellows. Tight overhead spotlights make all the angles of their model faces stand out, make their close-cropped slicked-back hair shine like chrome. Their limbs oiled to a bright sheen, their torsos clad in purple or yellow one-piece swimsuits, they face off against each other. The music pounds. Sharp camera work and tight editing cut the women into fragmentary images—a leg kicking into yellow, a claw-like hand striking out at purple, tight lips around gritted teeth, a nail-filed fist clenching hair or digging into thigh. Over the prostrate body of her defeated foe the woman in purple slowly rises, breathless and flushed with triumph. In a corner of the screen flash the words “Tombé. Violently sexy.”

  Of course such a trideo advertisement couldn’t be released right at the beginning of the marketing campaign. The perfume wouldn’t yet have had time to work its magic, so there’d be too much noise about the ad being sexist or degrading to women. But just let Tombé get established and everything would change. In a few years’ time there’d be no complaints because the ad would be reflecting the new reality.

  Roger smiled when he thought about the pheromone’s other probable but undisclosable side-effect, the sideshow feature of the naked mole rat’s eusociality that had always been its main attraction for him. That secret collateral effect would be surest product-death to tell, yet who could implicate him in it once the product was established on the market? The initiator of serious mole-rat research had been a woman, after all; mole-rat eusociality was itself female-centered. They’d never figure out his real stake in the game.

  And, after the violence had settled down to a permanent background level (fully tolerable), Roger felt confident that the feministas and their allies would actually be thankful to him, their unrecognized benefactor, for having helped make possible the truly matriarchal society that was sure to develop once Tombé worked its way into the global culture—

  Wings fluttered disturbingly in his peripheral vision. He turned but there was nothing to be seen. That flutter, at the edges of his eyes and over his shoulders, was bothering him more and more of late. It made him want to shoot very small birds with a very large gun. Fortunately, he soon enough arrived at Paul Larkin’s home and found more important things to distract him.

  Roger learned from Larkin that the gnomish white-haired elder colonist had already not only gathered the jasmine and lavender and such for the perfume, but had already extracted sample essences from them. Roger could have kissed the old guy, who had just made his job that much easier. Though not a fan of old age, Roger thought that—if he lived that long, or if the work of people like Marissa didn’t make them all eternal youths first—then Larkin was the type of old man Roger himself would like to be: full of piss and vinegar and a crazy sparkle in the eye.

  When Roger mentioned that he’d come across a reference to Larkin in connection with a “flying mountain,” Larkin launched again into the ancient mariner’s tale that he eventually told everyone he spent any real time with—and which he had so recently told Jhana. Roger put up with the old man and his video and his story—at first because he owed the guy, but gradually because the story itself had begun to intrigue him. Unlike Jhana’s response, however, Roger wanted to see some of the mushrooms from which the infamous KL had been extracted. Larkin was more than willing to oblige, and they set off at a good pace toward the mycological facilities. He had intended to show them to Jhana when she’d stopped by, Larkin said, but there hadn’t been time. Showing them to Roger would give Larkin a sense that he had “completed the arc”, as he put it.

  When they arrived, they found Seiji already at work in the lab, tending a coldbox.

  “Roger Cortland here has expressed some interest in KL 235 and Cordyceps jacintae,” Larkin said, introducing Roger to Seiji. They shook hands, politely if somewhat stiffly. In the small community of the habitat, they had seen each other in passing and knew of each other by reputation, though they’d never been formally introduced or spoken at any great length.

  “Would you like to see some of the ‘vertical fruit of the horizontal tree’ itself?” Seiji asked Roger.

  “Pardon?”

  Larkin laughed.

  “That’s how the tepui people described their totemic mushroom. Seiji is
one of the growing number of people who’s heard my whole story. Remarkably patient of him.”

  “Not really,” Seiji said, examining the wording of a sign headed with the legend Pleurotus ostreatus (Oyster Mushroom). “My brother Jiro’s schizophrenia was to some degree precipitated by KL. I have a personal interest in the history and mythology of the fungus that chemical came from.”

  “More guilt to tear at my soul,” Larkin said, serious and mocking at once.

  They walked among the troughs and tubs and platforms of fungus, each with its accompanying descriptive sign. Passing trough after trough—veritable fields of fungus—Seiji finally stopped to examine a muddy flat of oak leaves and humus chilling in a glass-topped freezer box, explaining to them as he did so the complex freeze/flush cycle needed for bringing on the fruiting of morels. Seeming satisfied with the temperature setting on the coldbox, Seiji straightened up and they walked on.

  They continued at a good pace until Seiji stopped once more, this time to flake away dirt from a mounded surface and examine the truffle lurking beneath. Roger occupied himself reading some of the signs, which turned out to be brief overviews of each species—descriptions of physical characteristics of the cap, gills, stalk, veil, and spore print, along with descriptions of habitat, edibility, and some general comments.

  Apparently pleased by the progress in the truffle trough, Seiji stood up and they walked on, entering at last a small work space, the environment of which was rigorously controlled, containing as it did projects important to the habitat’s Biodiversity Preservation mandate—exotic fungi, in this case species endangered or threatened and thought to possess special characteristics.

  Abruptly they found themselves gazing down at a tabletop on which grew fresh fungus unlike anything Roger had ever seen or heard of before—club-like structures thrusting up from a drying grey-white mass, weird mushrooming reddish-brown ball-stalks like vertically stretched brains, blue dust in their pits and convolutions.