Lightpaths

by Howard V. Hendrix

  Rejoining Atsuko near the dais, Marissa found her mentor getting final reminders from Lev Korchnoi about curtain time for the Möbius Cadúceus show.

  “As soon as I got the go-ahead from the council,” Lev was saying, “I went ahead and called the crew to help me finish the final setup for the show. If you want to see some of that, follow me.”

  Atsuko and Marissa agreed and followed Lev out of the pavilion in the direction of the reflecting pool. The council’s discussions and the colony’s dire situation were, seemingly, past and forgotten but for Lev’s rather laconic statement that he hoped “this thing with Earth” didn’t blow up and ruin the concert and the other parts of the celebrations scheduled for that evening.

  “Here they are,” Lev said when they’d reached the edge of the reflecting pool, pointing toward two impressively large machine assemblages, one of which was already being lowered by crane into the waters of the pool. “My temple guardians.”

  “What are they?” Atsuko asked, noting groups of curious onlookers, Seiji Yamaguchi among them—already beginning to gather. “What do they do?”

  “Everything!” Lev said proudly, climbing with considerable agility into a cranny about a quarter of the way up the nearer mechanism, a towering crystalline megalith studded with weapons blisters and looming above them like a dumb god of hulking metal. “Each one’s a sort of self-consuming theatrical robot. My own computer-aided designs, you know—though the ideas are old. I’ve taken the monsters Scylla and Charybdis from the ancient Western myths and tried to blend them with the Shut-Mouthed Fear and Open-Mouthed Desire demons found at the entrance to some Buddhist shrines. The result is that this machine is my Rock of Fear, and that”—he pointed to the other mechanism, the squatter companion piece, just at the very moment the crane deposited it into the water with a loud splash—“that is my Whirlpool of Desire. Together they make up the difficult passage Our Hero must navigate.”

  Seeing the crane turning its attention toward the second machine, Lev climbed down from his Scylla and walked toward Atsuko and Marissa with the careful physical control of a natural athlete or veteran dancer.

  “Are they safe?” asked Seiji Yamaguchi, who had moved to the front of one small crowd of onlookers.

  “Completely,” Lev assured him, though Marissa quickly realized the tall pale man was speaking as much for Atsuko’s benefit as for Seiji’s. “All just bells and whistles and special effects. Even the ‘bombs’ will only be noise and a little smoke, sulfur, carbon dioxide and occasional methane—all well within environmental standards. Just stage combat and choreography and acrobatics. I doubt the shuttlecraft troopers down in low orbit can say as much.”

  Seiji’s datadisplay began to chime and show a message.

  “Gotta go,” Seiji said with a puzzled frown, taking his leave. “Lakshmi wants to see Jhana and me up at her workshop. Top priority. Any suggestions as to where Ms. Meniskos might be about this time of day?”

  “You might try Cryonics or Cryogenetics,” Atsuko remarked. “Paul Larkin’s lab.”

  “I was thinking of looking there myself,” Seiji said with a nod. “I keep trying to get Larkin to go up with me to Lakshmi’s place, but he refuses. Hates micro-gee, he says.” Seiji turned to shake Lev’s hand. “I hope the show goes well, Lev.”

  “Thanks. Say hello to Lakshmi for me.”

  “I will,” Seiji said, striding quickly away. In the reflecting pool, the crane was settling Lev’s Scylla mechanism into place.

  * * * * * * *

  Roger was over-tired and exhilarated to the edge of dizziness. He had worked diligently all morning and into the afternoon to at last produce a complete sample of his pheromonal perfume, and soon, very soon, he would test its effects. He had already cleared most of the furniture out of one of the lab lounges and put down thick mats. After attending some colony political function (God only knew why), Marissa was already in the lab, supposedly at the moment pumping out, under the most rigorous safety controls, her first prototype culture of that immortalizing viral vector she’d been working on. Jhana too was due soon. Visions of the two of them going at each other—voluptuous pale redhead versus wiry dark brunette—and of himself at last nobly stepping in to break them up (though not too quickly, not too soon) flickered in his head.

  The thought occurred to Roger, though, that if the perfume he’d developed worked as planned, stepping in between them might be dangerous. Conceding it best to be on the safe side, he headed over to his office desk and, opening the bottom drawer where it was buried beneath some papers, took out the one item from his weapon collection that he’d been able to smuggle up here: a Sig/Sauer Laserwire Dirk—mostly dark plastic, and at the moment broken down into three parts. He quickly re-assembled the short-range (one-third meter) beam weapon, clicked in its coiled snapwire and battery pack, and dropped the small, unprepossessing weapon into one of his white lab coat’s large pockets.

  Roger felt ready to take on the world now—ready to celebrate his impending Great Achievement. His hand strayed onto the small plastic bag of Cordyceps jacintae still sitting on his desk from when he’d returned to the lab after his jaunt to see Larkin. He had scanned enough of the literature Paul and Seiji had given him on the mushroom to be able to figure out the dosages for certain desired effects. A one gram piece of the mushroom, for instance, would open up the reducing valve of the dorsal and median raphe nuclei enough to allow heightened sensitivity to and awareness of visual and auditory stimuli, an increased libidinal and sensual response....

  He took a small specimen out of the bag and stared at it. Certainly the test he was about to run on his perfume, with Jhana and Marissa’s not-quite-fully-informed participation, would be something worth experiencing in a state of heightened sensory awareness—and worth remembering from that heightened state! If he didn’t like the effect and didn’t want the fungus colonizing his central nervous system, he could always have its spawn eliminated through fungicidal antibiotics later.

  Why not? he thought—and so thinking he popped a couple of the small mushrooms into his mouth and chewed them slowly, deliberately. Unaccustomed as he was to eating uncooked mushrooms, he nonetheless found them surprisingly tasty, possessing only the slightest trace of any bitter or alkaloidal tang.

  Now he was truly ready. A vision of a future—the future he was today creating—sprang into his head, unassisted by the mushroom and its various adaptogenic substances. He wouldn’t be feeling the effects of the mushroom for at least fifteen minutes. No, this vision was all his own.

  He saw a future where underground malls were all the rage—the first step toward a Sandman burrow, a human version of the naked mole-rat colony structure. He foresaw a shift in styles, more unisex overall, everyone’s nails all filed sharp like digging claws, their hair cropped close and tight. People who moved in unison, a part of the great “we,” the invincible “us,” a eusocial super-organism capable of surviving in areas where a single individual or a pair of such Sandfolk could not. A society whose queen ruled with an absoluteness and efficiency never before seen, whose courtiers unhesitatingly defended the status quo with gun and uniform and mind, whose workers were ever diligent and productive and content with their lot. A future where only the rich could afford Tombé in significant quantities—Tombé that would make men crane their necks and bend other women’s wills to the wearer’s own; Tombé that would ensure chemical control over those who had less or none of it, suppressing reproduction by them, guaranteeing an unconscious obedience, an almost instinctual subservience, from them; Tombé that would be deep power, such that the more Tombé one owned, the more power one would have. Soon only the rich would have children, not because the poor would have made a “free will choice not to have them” (as these cislunatic idealists up here might phrase it) but because Tombé would be something only the rich could afford. But most importantly, Tombé would eliminate all need for his own pathology of secrecy, perhaps
even the pathology of secrecy on which all human culture was built—

  Wings glittered in his peripheral vision and, startled, he reflexively drew his dirk, only to find that there was once again nothing to strike.

  Roger shook his head, smiling wryly. He was wrought up, strung on a wire tighter than the one in his laser. The mushroom was chipping through whatever brain-dam it was that kept the flow from the senses down to a trickle. Sensations were now beginning to flood into him at a rate he’d never known before. After this test proved out he would have to take a long nap, rest, re-charge. Taking the prototype bottle of Tombé from his desktop, uncapping it and wafting its wonderful musky-sweet scent under his nose once more, he felt reassured.

  Chapter Twelve

  Passage embedded in RAT code:

  The meat model of human consciousness holds that, somewhere out there, is the Sacred (Holy, Wholly) Cow of Unmediated Reality, Urreality, the universe as it is in itself. According to this model, the human sensory apparatus is the slaughterhouse, which cuts out those pieces it can use, the beef and beef by-products of experiential data. The Cow’s sacredness is killed so it can be understood. Next, the human perceptual apparatus functions as meat grinder, extruding the seemingly continuous “sausage” of sense-perception gestalt. Consciousness is the arbitrary cutting blade of time, the machine that cuts the gestalt sausage into digestible moment-to-moment slices. Self is the virtual construct, the master continuity program, the butcher or meat packer who neatly stacks the gestalt-sausage slices, makes them seem like they all cohere, even though they are different every split second. This model—though it has much to recommend it—not only offends vegetarians but is, in several of its steps, dead wrong. Nonetheless, it remains true that those who love personhood, like those who love the law or sausage, should never watch any of them being made.

  Jhana had a great deal on her mind as she half-ran to Roger Cortland’s lab. Events were moving too fast. She’d just received a message that Mr. Tien-Jones was part of a negotiating team ready to come to the space habitat immediately. But negotiating for what—the terms of surrender? Passing a sidewalk cafe, she’d just seen a news-flash indicating that corporate and national forces had moved shuttlecraft and troops into low orbit. She couldn’t say with absolute certainty, but she suspected the troop movement had all too much to do with some fear-pumped “Diamond Thunderbolt” connection the powers on Earth were making between VAJRA and the enigmatic X-shaped structures floating in space.

  She felt obscurely responsible for the way things were turning out. For whatever good it might do, just as soon as this thing with Cortland was done today she would have to contact Mr. Tien-Jones and stress the enormous misunderstanding of it all to him. He had to be informed that she absolutely did not believe the X-shaped structures were a weapons system of any sort or that Diamond Thunderbolt posed any threat to Earth, either. She had delayed too long in sending that message already.

  Her misgivings about Cortland’s work with his pheromone perfume continued unabated as she ran along. She would have preferred to have no more to do with it, but she reasoned it would be best to keep her Earthside employers happy with her work on at least that front. Strangely, too, Paul Larkin was friendlier than ever toward her, since he’d found out she was “helping Dr. Cortland with his research,” as he’d put it when she informed him that she had to leave the lab to meet with Roger. Larkin told her he’d be along shortly as well—to see how Roger’s work was going. The senior researcher seemed to have developed an interest in the younger man which Jhana could by no means explain.

  Entering Cortland’s lab, she found Roger standing and his assistant Marissa seated—both of them silent. Was it only her imagination, Jhana wondered, or had some estrangement taken place between the two of them? The red-haired woman seemed nervous and sulky somehow, while Cortland himself looked, up close, as if he hadn’t slept in days. When he saw her, however, his eyes lit up with an excited gleam.

  “Jhana! So glad you could make it for our little test. Right this way, please,” Roger said, stylus and electric clipboard in hand, turning to go. Marissa lagged behind. “Marissa?”

  Reluctantly the redheaded woman got up and followed as Roger led them to the locked door of a lounge. Unlocking the door, he let them into a room which—but for some thick mats on the floor, a permanent lab table, and two padded chairs—was entirely stripped of furnishings. Jhana noticed that Marissa’s eyebrows flashed up on seeing the room, but the woman said nothing. Roger locked the door behind them.

  “I hope this won’t take too long, Roger,” Jhana said as she sat down in one of the chairs. “I’ve got to get an important message to my employers about this military mess that’s going on.”

  “Yes, I heard something about that,” Roger said absently. “Well, don’t worry. The potential side effect I’m trying to investigate with this test would be almost instantaneous.”

  Jhana wondered about the term “side-effect”, but didn’t have time to ask because, with a flourish, Roger withdrew a vial filled with a faintly yellow-orange liquid from his pocket and placed it on the table between Jhana and Marissa.

  “Ta-Da!” Roger said, a bit too shrilly. “The fruit of my labors. Go ahead, put a little on. Jhana, you first—as our guest.”

  Jhana opened the vial and sniffed the scent arising from the pale amber fluid within. Finding the sweet, musky fragrance quite pleasant, she inhaled more deeply. Marissa and Roger watched her every move very carefully as she dabbed the amber liquid onto the pulse-points of her wrists and then behind her left ear. Sniffing at her right wrist, she realized that the scent had changed somehow—improved, just through contact with her skin.

  “It’s a wonderful scent,” Jhana said, placing the vial back on the table before her. “Responds to the wearer’s body chemistry?”

  “That’s right,” Roger said slowly, with a brief nod, as he lifted the vial and placed it in front of Marissa. The excited gleam in his eyes seemed to have brightened to an absolute dazzle.

  Jhana watched as Marissa hesitantly dabbed on the pale amber liquid, looking less like the happy coworker testing an innocent perfume than someone who feared she might be putting acid on her flesh. She too sniffed at the scent of the perfume on her skin, but it didn’t seem to reassure her that much.

  Electropenning notes, Roger sat down for a moment on the ledge of a large lab sink and watched them with an intensity that Jhana found disquieting. Shouldn’t he be taking blood samples, looking for a drop in estrogen levels or something? She turned and, with some effort, struck up a conversation with Marissa. As they talked, Marissa grew less nervous and reticent, while Roger conversely became more agitated, pacing then circling around them, checking his watch every few seconds or peering at them with eyes that seemed to burn in his head. Jhana began to wonder at the man’s odd behavior and wanted to be gone from him and his lab as quickly as possible.

  “Roger, how much longer is this going to take?” she asked impatiently.

  “A few more minutes,” he said thickly, breathing hard. “A few more minutes.”

  Roger’s unfocused agitation grew more and more disturbing. The few minutes came and went—and then some.

  “It’s not working!” he cried at last, his voice very nearly a shriek. Jhana and Marissa stared at him. “It’s not working, don’t you see?”

  “Yes, we do see that, Roger,” Marissa said uncertainly, yet in a voice remarkably placid, given the circumstances. “Please calm down. We have to face the facts. The Faulkes orthodoxy appears to be right, Roger. The mole-rat social hierarchy, the queen’s suppression of reproductive capacity in the rest of the colony’s females—it must be almost completely mediated by behavioral and physical factors, not chemical ones, not pheromones. The affect you’re looking for isn’t there.”

  “But the tests!” Roger roared. “What about the tests I ran?”

  “Inconclusive,” Marissa said q
uietly, patiently. “Impossible to fully separate out behavioral factors. I was afraid to confront you with it, after your previous funding request was denied and you became so obsessed with this pheromone project. You were in denial about your results and I said nothing. I was worried about what the let-down might do to you, afraid you might start acting like this. So I went along as long as I could. But you have to face the reality now, Roger: pheromonal social control is not what’s at work—in humans or in mole-rats.”

  “Better never to have known!” he cried, pulling at his hair distractedly, his eyes dancing wildly in his head as he paced. “No, no! I refuse to believe it! You’re lying, trying to deceive me! I’ll never give up this project—never!”

  Jhana could see Marissa’s patience snapping at last.

  “Fine, Roger. Go ahead. Waste your life in a twisted obsession. What ‘side-effect’ was it you hoped to test with Jhana and me today, hm? Whether your pheromone perfume would make us do what female mole-rats do? Oh yes, Roger: I know the brutal idiosyncracy of the mole-rat social structure. Before the naked mole-rat hierarchy is fully developed, females coming into estrus fight violently, frequently killing one another—”

  “Shut up! You shut up!” Roger yelled thickly, wagging his finger threateningly.

  “That idiosyncracy was what attracted you to them in the first place,” Marissa continued fiercely, ignoring his commands, “wasn’t it? Not their pheromones. I know your kink, Roger Cortland. I’ve known it ever since I stumbled in on you watching that porno. Since human women are in a sort of permanent low-level estrus, maybe you thought introducing your supposed pheromone would make them fight the way mole-rat females do, right? Was that your logic? Is that the side-effect you hoped for? Some crime-of-passion triangle scene? Jhana and I leaping at each other, red in tooth and claw, for your personal viewing pleasure?”