Lightpaths

by Howard V. Hendrix

  Despite the warmth of the air Marissa shivered. She wondered if this was what it meant to have a sense of this place, to care for and about it, to wonder who or what might betray its promise. Lights flashed and a bulletcart—one of the few that came to the surface here—sighed up before her. Marissa boarded and, returning underground, it sped her along.

  Passing through the tunnel, she wondered at himself. On Earth she had always thought about this place in an abstract, detached, scholarly way, but now she seemed to have somehow become personally and emotionally involved with it and its fate. Had she changed that much since her arrival?

  She got off at the station where Atsuko had said to meet her and, when Marissa arrived, Atsuko was waiting for her.

  “H’lo, Maris,” Atsuko said, coming forward and giving her a quick hug. “The pavilion is up the ramp and a short walk to the left. It’s the same one where Lev and his group are going to be holding their concert later, but the colony council is using it first.”

  At the bottom of the ramp Atsuko turned to her.

  “I hope you don’t find the proceedings too boring. I figured that your fellowship research here should at least include some exposure to our local species of government—and today’s agenda looks a good deal more interesting than most.”

  As they walked up the ramp Atsuko explained briefly that, for purposes of representation, the permanent residents in both the agricultural tori and the central sphere were grouped into “centuries,” or community districts of one hundred citizens each, corresponding roughly to settlement hamlets and neighborhoods. Each century had its own council of ten (whose membership rotated every year), and one council member from each century was chosen to represent the century in the meetings of the colony council. Any resident of the colony could attend the colony council meetings and voice his or her opinions on any issue, though only the century representatives could participate in the consensus decision-making process.

  “We’re still experimenting with the system, of course,” Atsuko remarked as they came to the surface and approached a large, airy open-work building, below which stood a reflecting pool of considerable size. “I believe our colony council already has a few features you won’t find elsewhere, though. Besides having the usual staff ecologists we also have representatives specially designated as ‘Speaker for Animals’ or ‘Speaker For Trees’ or the like, whose job it is to be especially sensitive to the environmental impact of any action the council may be contemplating. I know it sounds strange, but it seems to work. The special Speakers take their responsibilities quite seriously, and since ours is government by consensus, it only takes one representative in disagreement to halt an action—so the special Speakers have considerable weight in the colony’s deliberations.”

  They entered the light-filled space created by the high-domed modular building. Since weather in the habitat was so predictable, the pavilion—like all the public buildings in the central sphere—was built as much for symbolic and artistic expression as it was for shelter. Walking through it, Marissa felt as if she were strolling inside an architectural structure somewhere between a bright beach umbrella and the inside of hot air balloon’s inflated silk bulb. The effect was only heightened by the presence of large, temporary curtains—behind which, she gathered, Lev Korchnoi and Möbius Cadúceus had hidden their stage set.

  The light-filled space was only very sparsely furnished: a low, portable-looking, semicircular dais facing outward toward rows of audience seating. Atsuko took her place among the council representatives, while Marissa joined the members of the audience.

  What followed was indeed unlike any business or political meeting Marissa had ever seen. It began precisely on the hour, but not with the banging of gavels or any ritual more formal than people raising their right hands one by one throughout the pavilion as a sign for silence. Soon the bustling and crowd noise in the hall quieted down to nothing and, in the silence around her, Marissa noticed that many of her fellow audience members had assumed a prayerful or meditative attitude. Though their eyes were closed, something about their posture indicated that they were yet attentive to unseen things.

  The council’s current Presiding Minister—an African-American woman who looked a great deal like the one Marissa had seen interviewed on that Worldchangers program—began to speak without standing up.

  “Before entering on the business of the colony,” the Presiding Minister began ritually, “let us spend time in thoughtful meditation as is our custom, seeking in the silence to put away the voice of our individual egotism and short-sighted self-interest so that we might hear and be guided by that more subtle voice in which we live and move and which lives and moves in us. Let us seek in the silence to open our minds and fill our hearts with the light and love that fills the universe. May all our deliberations, decisions, and actions be guided by our desire to protect, preserve and renew all life, both here and on Earth.”

  Marissa was less surprised by the scattered whispers of “Amen” and “Shanti” than she thought she’d be. As they sat there in an attentive, aware silence that stretched to five and then ten minutes, Marissa began to wonder if religious services in the space colony felt as political as this political meeting felt religious. She had not yet had a chance to find out, for though profoundly and personally interested in spiritual things, Marissa wasn’t, in the institutional sense, particularly religious herself. Whenever a proselytizer back on Earth had asked her about her religious convictions, her usual line was that she was “just your average Zen Born Again Catholic Quaker Pacifist Anarchist—with a strong interest in the Gita, the Talmud and the Koran.” That was usually good for confusing and frustrating the evangelizers, though somehow she doubted it would bother anyone here. Even on Earth some of the evangelizers had heard her self-description selectively, one remarking, on hearing it, “Oh, you’re a Christian then.”

  At an unspoken signal the council meeting’s meditative quiet ended, but the effects of that thoughtful silence seemed to linger as the council took up the colony’s business. The first item on the council’s agenda was old business, a discussion of a petition by the Möbius Cadúceus Entertainment Cooperative requesting use of the Pavilion’s reflecting pool as part of their impending performance. Apparently—due to questions of possible environmental impact and specific requests for clarification from the Speaker For Animals—consensus had not been achieved among the council members during the previous discussions of the petition and the issue had been turned over to a committee for further research and recommendations. The staff ecologist and Speaker For Animals, representing the committee, stated that all questions of environmental impact had now been addressed to their satisfaction and they recommended approval of the petition. Lev Korchnoi also rose from the audience to announce again the time and place of the concert, to invite everyone to the performance, and even suggested that, if the council would like to appoint an official observer to see that no violations of environmental integrity occurred, Möbius Cadúceus would have no objections and would in fact welcome the interest. Atsuko volunteered her time as official observer. Surprisingly quickly, the council approved both Möbius Cadúceus’s petition and Atsuko Cortland’s appointment as council representative to the event.

  Watching the proceedings, Marissa was left with a strong suspicion of where she’d probably find herself during the performance, but she barely had time to formulate that thought before the next speaker, a young black Frenchman representing the HOME consortium, stood to address the council on more business postponed from a previous meeting. The HOME representative informed the council and the audience that the prototype asteroid mining tug Swallowtail, designed by colony resident Brandi Easter, had been completed well ahead of schedule. With the council’s approval, the HOME consortium planned to make Swallowtail’s launch coincide with the opening of the two new habitats—and therefore part of the celebration that Möbius Cadúceus’s performance was already included in.
After some good-natured complaining about “overloading the event” at this late date—and Lev Korchnoi’s humble assurance that Möbius Cadúceus would try to limit the number of its encores so that its performance didn’t too seriously overlap other presentations—the colony council gave its approval to the Swallowtail’s launch.

  HOME’s young resident representative was about to sit down when the Presiding Minister rose and stopped him, something about her words and posture causing the atmosphere in the pavilion to grow rapidly graver.

  “Mister Fanon, we may need your responses on our next agenda item,” she said, stopping him with her voice as she turned to address her fellow council members and the audience. “We are on the edge of great accomplishments and celebrations, as you’ve said and we’ve heard, but, as a number of you already know, we are also on the edge of grave danger. The Chinese ideogram for ‘crisis’ is made up of the characters for both ‘danger’ and ‘opportunity,’ which is indeed an apt description of our current condition.

  “We have tried to base our culture here on a simple but metaphysically profound truth: There is no separate existence. ‘Things derive their being and nature by mutual dependence—they are nothing in themselves,’ as the sage Nagarjuna put it. We have emphasized reality-as-process and the liberating truth inherent in the world’s incompleteness and uncertainty. We have seen the way in which such a world view subverts the traditional paradigm of dogma and dominance. Events today, though, remind us of how inextricably our fate is tied up with Earth’s and give us more proof of our tentative truths than ever—and more challenges to them, as well.

  “Relations between our colony and a number of nations and corporations of Earth have become strained of late. The source of the strain is this.”

  Shades folded down over the outside of the building, dimming the light inside somewhat as trideo displays floated into the central space between audience and council. Marissa saw that the images in the ghostly display were views of the large X-shaped structures that she’d earlier heard Seiji and Lev and Lakshmi talking about.

  “As nearly as our computing, power generation, and space engineering staffpeople can determine,” the Presiding Minister continued, “each of these objects is a new type of device for channeling large amounts of solar power into information functions—particularly memory storage, retrieval, and communications. Our friends on Earth, though, apparently believe with equal fervency that these structures are devices for channeling large amounts of solar power into pulse lasers of unprecedented efficiency and destructiveness.”

  Marissa watched as the trideo display cycled from close-ups to wide-angle images of the structures, glinting like an enigmatic necklace (or noose) about the Earth.

  “Several weeks ago, we began receiving diplomatic queries from various national and corporate entities,” said the Presiding Minister, “all of them asking more or less the same questions: what are these things and why are you building them? Our initial answers—’We don’t know’ and ‘We’re not building them’—must not have been satisfactory, for the queries have continued in increasing numbers and decreasing friendliness, growing less diplomatic until, now, they have become downright hostile and threatening.

  “As of just yesterday we were able to tell them that these structures are definitely concerned with information and not destruction, and that they are being built by micromachines apparently under the control of our colony’s machine-intelligence networking system, the Variform Autonomous Joint Reasoning Activity—without colony approval and over human objections and counter commands. These answers have also proven unsatisfactory to our inquisitors on Earth—at least partially because they are determined to see a weapon in these structures. They further claim that, since VAJRA is supposed to be under our control, we are responsible for the construction of those objects and the threat they supposedly present.”

  The presiding minister sighed wearily.

  “Twelve hours ago, the United Nations and Corporate Presidium issued statements demanding that we immediately dismantle the disputed structures—and, if we fail to do so, threatened trade sanctions and possible military action ranging from blockade to invasion and UN/CP occupation of the habitat. We have sought to comply, but as soon as work teams attempted to dismantle one of the structures today, VAJRA precipitated a series of ‘crises’ in our intelligent systems—particularly those support systems on which this habitat is most dependent for its continued survival.

  “Lakshmi Ngubo, the designer of VAJRA, along with the computing staff, is at this moment engaged in trying to correct the problem. The political situation, however, seems to be worsening very rapidly.”

  In the floating projections the X-shaped structures disappeared and were replaced by video and trideo images of blue-black, single-stage-to-orbit military shuttles, preparing for launch.

  “As you can see, we may soon be forcibly reminded of our connection with Earth. Four hours ago, what appears to be a combined multi-national, multi-corporate force of ten ships and four hundred astronaut-soldiers left the launching pads at Edwards, Tanegashima, Baikonur, Lop Nor, Guiana Bleu, and Windhoek. These spacecraft are currently in low Earth orbits but could hard-burn toward our position here at a moment’s notice. Those of you who follow Earth’s media know that in the last few hours they’ve begun making most warlike noises, speculating that a ‘colonial rebellion’ is underway—even though we’ve been at constant pains to deny such rumors.

  “To make matters even more critical, a number of HOME consortium members are among those corporations helping to loft this expeditionary force. Things seem to be strained up to their topmost height, so I think it’s appropriate that the council should hear from all the people of the community, residents and visitors, as to what our course of action should be now.”

  So saying, Clara Schulman, this quarter’s Presiding Minister, opened the floor up for questions and discussion as a buzz and murmur permeated the audience. As she listened to the flurry of bewildered queries and stark pronouncements that ensued, Marissa found that the shrillest of the speakers were the visitors, who like herself seemed much more concerned by these developments than the permanent residents. Odd, she thought, that those who might have been thought to have more at stake would turn out to be calmer and more prepared for this eventuality.

  The first several speakers all expressed bewilderment at finding themselves “hostages of our own machine,” as one of them put it. All urged that Lakshmi Ngubo correct the VAJRA difficulties as quickly as possible. Several questions were addressed to the resident HOME representative, Mr. Fanon, and—though these queries were surprisingly without rancor, given the situation—the interrogation left the young man dazed and confused. Apparently he was being kept as much in the dark about external affairs as any other resident—probably because he was a resident, and therefore a “security risk” to HOME’s member conglomerates.

  Discussion only really got going, however, when a visitor, a woman named Ekwefi Muwakil, suggested that the whole brouhaha, even the actions by the UN and the CP, really had almost nothing to do with the strange X-shaped objects.

  “Can’t you see it’s just a ploy?” she asked shrilly. “I wouldn’t be surprised if HOME’s corporate security were behind the VAJRA malfunction and the building of those things! It’s a set-up. Doesn’t it seem a little bit too coincidental to you that this should be happening just now, when the new habitats are about to take in their first settlers, when the opening up of the asteroid frontier for metals and carbon chondrites is about to make this habitat far more self-sufficient? Doesn’t it seem a little too pat that—just when it’s starting to look like these space habitats really might work—the nations and corporations have drummed up an excuse for taking over? It’s just as I suspected: if this new idea of space habitation proved out, the powers-that-be would co-opt it for themselves, like every other new idea. An executive escape-pod, a lifeboat for the power-elite while the Goo
d Ship Earth goes down—that was their plan all along! And I’m sure this four hundred member occupation force has always been a part of that plan!”

  Whether Ms. Muwakil was right or not in believing nations and corporations on Earth had some sort of long-range takeover plan, Marissa could by no means say. The converse possibility, though—that the habitat’s residents had already given some thought to contingency plans of their own—was clearly in evidence as she watched the discussion. Marissa listened carefully as consensus quickly developed around a proposed two-part plan of action.

  The first part, the filing of a formal protest against the UN/CP positioning of troops in space, was quickly adopted because it was in the colony council’s powers to issue such a protest. Preparations for a civilian-based NonViolent Direct Resistance (NVDR) defense—the second part of the plan—would, upon colony council approval, have to be taken by the colony council representatives back to their home community councils, and from there to the people in each community-century for approval and action. Such a process sounded slow to Marissa, but if consensus could be achieved as quickly at all levels as it had been in the colony council today, then there could be no doubt that the colony could operate democratically even in such a crisis as that which now faced the space habitat.

  “Having accomplished the work on the agenda,” the council’s Presiding Minister said at last, “let’s give another moment to silence, and through that silence round off the council’s proceedings. Let us find in the silence the strength, courage, and resolution we’ll need to act upon the decisions we’ve made today and see all our actions through to a peaceful and just conclusion.”

  Marissa closed her eyes in the silence this time, finding as she did so that falling into the quiet darkness was somehow as pleasant as floating in a sunlit pool of cool water. Whatever tensions the meeting may have generated in her now dissipated into the quiet darkness, fell away and were gone. When the sounds of conversations and scraping chairs and bustling activity told her that the quiet contemplative time was over, Marissa opened her eyes to look upon the world with renewed vigor and determination.