Lightpaths

by Howard V. Hendrix

  A stinging slap and then another exploded out of Roger, then the words “Cunt! Bloody whore!”—spoken with a depth of venom more stinging than slaps could ever be. Marissa’s chair toppled to the floor where she sat stunned, her nose trickling blood. Once past her shock at the act, Jhana rose swiftly to leap between Marissa and Roger, but Cortland—now thoroughly out of control—pulled a laser blade from his pocket, snapped its wireguide full length and shouted, “Back! Stay back! Don’t come any closer!”

  Jhana stopped in her tracks, watching as the wild-eyed man, spittle flecking his lips and chin, backed stumbling toward the door. Once he spun and slashed a fiery arc over his shoulder—electric hum, ozone crackle, plaster exploding like a bomb on the wall behind him—at the same instant shouting something that Jhana thought sounded like “Damned angels! Leave me alone!”

  Seeming to recover somewhat the little of his senses that remained, he unlocked the door behind him and slipped out. Jhana heard the sound of the door being locked from without, then two more crackling stabs disabling the automatic lock-overrides on their door—and then another set of crackling sounds down the hall. For a moment she thought she smelled the scent of burnt almonds in the air, but then it was gone. When she thought she’d heard Roger’s staggering footsteps moving far enough away down the corridor, Jhana stepped forward and tried to open the door. They were locked in tight.

  Turning from the door, she stepped quickly toward Marissa, who was shakily trying to get to her feet. Jhana helped her up with one arm while with the other she righted the toppled chair, then sat the other woman in the chair. Drawing tissues and a handkerchief from her pocket, Jhana dabbed at Marissa’s bleeding nose.

  “Are you okay?” Jhana asked. Marissa nodded her head tentatively. When Marissa took some of the tissues from Jhana’s hand and began dabbing at the blood herself and leaning her head back to slow the bleeding, Jhana felt better. Marissa at least seemed to be getting over the initial shock of what had happened.

  “I expected him to be angry when I finally confronted him with the failure of his pheromone research,” Marissa said—almost apologetically—after a time, “but I never expected he’d respond this way. It’s just not normal—not even for Roger.”

  “From the way he was acting he almost seemed drunk or on drugs,” Jhana remarked, pulling the other chair over closer to Marissa and sitting down.

  Marissa shook her head, as vigorously as her nose bleed and her attempts to stop it would allow.

  “That wouldn’t be like him. I haven’t known him that long, but I’ve never known him to indulge in anything that would alter his state of consciousness. That would be giving up too much control—and Roger loves control.”

  Jhana shrugged.

  “My friend Seiji says that sanity is a very tenuous thing. Maybe he’s right, in Roger’s case.”

  “Seiji Yamaguchi?” Marissa asked. “He seems like a nice guy.”

  Jhana nodded, getting up to throw the blood-soaked tissues down a recycling oubliette.

  “How did you figure out what Roger was up to?” Jhana asked, curious. “I was bothered by some aspects of his work, but I never figured out his motivation, the way you did.”

  Marissa pulled a sheaf of folded printouts from her pocket and handed them to Jhana, saying, “Turn to the sections I’ve highlighted.”

  Jhana saw that they were texts of old articles—some going back to the early 1980s—with titles like “Eusociality in a Mammal: Cooperative Breeding in Naked Mole-Rat Colonies” by Jarvis and “Constraints of Pregnancy and Evolution of Sociality in Mole-Rats” by Burda. Turning to the highlighted sections, Jhana read passages like “Soon after four mixed colonies were established, two females in each colony came into estrus simultaneously and fought violently until one of the pair died” and “Aggression was observed toward unknown adult conspecifics of the same sex. Females were more aggressive to each other, and their fight was serious with fatal consequences, particularly if one of the females were in estrus or if both females had bred in the past already. Fight of males was ritualized and foreign males were more willingly accepted than foreign females....”

  “I must have read background passages like these a dozen times in doing my research on their genetic stability,” Jhana said, looking up from the faxes, “but it never clicked for me.”

  “Same here,” Marissa said with a nod. “It only fell into place when I accidentally stumbled upon Roger viewing a pornholo on one of our machines here—a porno that prominently featured women fighting. That was the key piece of the puzzle. With a little thought I was able to figure it out.”

  “All of it?” Jhana asked.

  “No, maybe not all of it,” Marissa said thoughtfully, “but most of it, I think. There’s a sort of dark logic to it. Investigating their longevity and slow maturation for my own work, I’ve gotten very familiar with mole-rats and what Roger might have wanted from them. I think he really believed he was breaking ground for the foundation of a perfect society, one in which all individual will would be sacrificed to the will of the colony. It even had a sort of feminist cover to it, too. Mole-rat society is female-centered, and the first important researcher of the species was a woman. Not only that but, if Roger’s plan had worked, women would have been more powerful than ever. That threw me off for a while, until I realized we would be less powerful than ever, too. Because everyone would have less freedom, even the queen. The highest goal of a woman would be to become a breeding machine. After the genetic lines of those who couldn’t afford his perfume died out—then and only then—Family would be everything, for everyone in Roger’s Sandman future would be closely related. Those whose breeding would be suppressed would solace themselves with the knowledge that, by caring for their closely related broodmates, they would ensure the survival and passing on of their own genetic characteristics, even though they themselves would not actually breed. Self-sacrifice would be the new and total watchword.”

  Sighing, Marissa got up. Her nose-bleed had stopped completely at last, so she walked toward the recycling oubliette to dispose of the bloody tissues she was still holding.

  “But this big family would not be all kindness and gentility,” she said, dropping the last of the blood-saturated tissues down the oubliette. “If Roger’s Tombé, as he called it, had worked as planned, when it hit the market it would have increased astronomically the level of woman-on-woman violence. Woman would be put at the figurehead-top of the social pyramid, as breeder, while simultaneously sisterhood was destroyed. That’s what his pheromone perfume would have led to, if it had worked. He’d have bottled up all humanity like insects inside his amber fragrance. A perfect, unchanging world. All we’d have to do is forget our humanity, turn away from the responsibility of freedom, sacrifice the reality of our individuality to some meta-illusion called Society.”

  Jhana cleared her throat and stood up beside Marissa.

  “Freedom, yes. We should probably try to get free of this room somehow, don’t you think?”

  “More than ever,” Marissa said with a nod. “It just occurred to me that it might be my lab cubicle’s door he zapped open before he left. He may have taken something of mine—something I don’t want to get out.”

  Together Jhana and Marissa began tugging and banging on the door, pounding on the walls, and shouting to anyone who might be there to hear.

  * * * * * * *

  Roger could not figure out what was happening to him. When he looked about himself, he didn’t see his environs the way a person would see a place, but more like the way the place would see itself. He had ceased to be Subject and had instead become a Moving Context, a diffused local consciousness through which people and events were passing.

  With only a moment’s focused concentration on any object, he could lift the veil of appearances and see instantly in that object’s history the eternal interconnectedness of all flashing and dying temporal things, cou
ld see the Big Picture, the deeper order overlain by the random-dot surface of time, could experience the subtle joy of living in a universe like a Great Thought ever unfolding, even his life merely a word in the language of that undying Thought—

  And in the next instant the interconnectedness of all the words in that language was too subtle, something to be ignored, denied—and all about him was only the history of grief the universe composed everywhere, every word inflected with suffering, aspirated with anguish, pronounced with pain, until he could not see the purpose of any of it or what the beating, beating, beating Mind had intended—

  His head pounded with the ghosts of pain and memory that filled even so new a world as this habitat. He felt it all—from a child’s tear to the memory of the father and son work-team accidentally entombed in the building of the habitat. He was more naked and vulnerable than he’d ever been, his very soul exposed fully and completely to the world, everything flowing straight into him without passing through even the thinnest wisp of filter. He wanted out, away into empty unpeopled unhistoried space. That thought alone provided solace and a goal.

  Inundated with the overflowing intensity of his senses, the pain of mere existence was a burden which he staggered under as he sought out a bullet cart station. In a pathside cafe a trideo broadcaster spoke of the armada of shuttlecraft and troops now positioned in low orbit for a potential boarding of the space habitat. Frustratingly Roger’s ears seemed to no longer be working, for as he listened the newsanchor’s voice began to digitize, break up into little packets of sound separated by dilating time, until Roger could not bridge the gaps between the packets to make any sense or meaning. Still, he smiled despite himself. If he had failed in his project, well so be it—at least it appeared that the work of these idealists up here was going to fail too. Disaster loves company—but how to ensure that it came about, that it all went down with him?

  He came to a bullet cart boarding platform, deep in thoughts that would not hold together, in moods that swung faster than he could hold on to them. Everything around him shone with an aching clarity, a piercing naked light as if he saw beyond every surface into inmost depths, toward sharp bright and dark shapes below. A world of particulate light, of shimmering mote-like scintilla danced around him in the air itself. Again, he feared he was going quite mad.

  Brighter flashings flickered and a bullet cart appeared, surging up before him. The other people on the platform—a woman with a little boy, and an old man—eased up toward him as the cart’s doors sighed open.

  “I want this cart to myself!” Roger yelled, brandishing his short, humming laser, his voice breaking up in his head even as he spoke. The woman and old man froze, instinctively raising their empty, open hands to shoulder height.

  “Mommy,” said the little boy, “is he one of the soldiers from Earth?”

  Roger did not wait to hear the mother’s response to the boy’s disintegrating words, but stumbled to a seat in the cart as it re-sealed itself and surged off. Among the glittering shards of his thoughts a backup plan began to form, one he could accomplish on his way out of here. In a pocket, next to the vial of Marissa’s prototype vector-virus culture, he found Jhana Meniskos’s encryption code key number: 105366.

  Yes, he thought, a message to Tao-Ponto, to her boss and his bosses, providing good reason to suspect that the colony rebellion was real, that Jhana herself was in jeopardy—that might help seal the final fate of this habitat here...

  Arriving at the Sphere’s central observation platform, he left the cart and approached a telecommunications console near the snack bar. Looking away, into the vertiginous distance, he saw the whole sphere come alive with naked pipes, circuitry, fiber-optic tubes all swarming with mole-rats moving endlessly through them. He tried to ignore all of it. Calling up a downlink line to Earth, he entered Jhana’s keycode and typed in a top priority message:

  TO: Balance Tien-Jones, Ph.D. TPAG Dir. R/D (Bio)

  FROM: Jhana Meniskos, Ph. D.

  RE: Current Status

  Have evidence X-shaped structures are weapons systems of unprecedented destructive capability. Urge immediate action. Fear non-residents will soon be taken hostage by resident colonists. Security of encryption code likely to be compromised. Ignore all future messages, this code.

  It took him some time to complete the message—and almost more concentration than he was capable of mustering in his current state—but when it was at last finished he broke into a sly lopsided smile and sent the message on its way. Walking with a loping gait, he made his way to a (blessedly empty) ridge cart and sat back on one of its benches. The ridge cart sealed itself and hurried him along toward the storage locker in the industrial sector of the axis—where his livesuits hung, beside his pod, beside an air lock, beside a gateway into unbounded space.

  A glittering angel crossed its arms on the bench-seat opposite him, but before Roger could flick on his laser or even blink, it was gone. Too suddenly for explanation, Roger hung his head and wept.

  Drying his eyes as he got off at his stop, he made his slow, woozy way to his storage locker. He would skip the pod—just dive straight out, free of all such encumbrances. Taking out his livesuit as he stripped dizzily to his underwear, he was careful to transfer from shirt to suit both Jhana’s code-key number and the vial of Marissa’s prototype immortalizing vector. Why he needed them, he did not know—one he had already used and rendered useless, the other might or might not be of use to the living, though it would certainly not bring back the dead. Yet still he held onto them like talismans of lost hope.

  Getting clumsily into the suit, he wondered if hell meant always seeing angels and never believing in their reality. If such angels could bring only torment, how did they differ from demons? Suited up at last, he made his unsteady way to the air lock. After he entered, the hatch door slammed behind him, its clang going on forever like a gong sounding from eternity to eternity. Before him the air lock doors began to dilate, the exit of a womb opening onto space in a second birth.

  Drifting out, he saw the Earth itself, still alive in the middle way, wandering between the killing heat of the planet of Love and Desire, the killing cold of the planet of War and Fear, while all around stood the void, its dark brightness terrifying like the eyes of the angel in his dreams.

  * * * * * * *

  With Paul Larkin and Seiji ramming shoulders against the outside of the door and Marissa and Jhana pulling and tugging on it from the inside, they finally dislodged the door from its jamb and Paul and Seiji came tumbling into the lab lounge. Getting up from the floor and dusting themselves off, Seiji explained that he had gone to Larkin’s lab looking for Jhana and that together he and Paul had come looking for her and Roger.

  Succinctly as they could, Marissa and Jhana described to them Roger’s abreaction episode, his slapping Marissa around, his threatening them with a laser blade. As the four of them walked out of the lab lounge and down the corridor, the men’s faces grew graver and graver.

  “Do you think the mushrooms we gave him are involved?” Larkin asked Seiji, who nodded dolefully.

  “What mushrooms?” Jhana asked.

  As they came to the surface Paul and Seiji told them briefly about Cordyceps jacintae and how Roger Cortland came to have samples of it in his possession.

  “He must have had an adverse reaction to them,” Seiji summed up.

  “Really? What makes you think that?” asked Marissa sardonically. “The point is, we’ve got a crazy running around with a lethal weapon—so what do we do about it?”

  “He won’t be too hard to find,” Larkin speculated. “All permanent residents are responsible for the policing of the community and, in an emergency, have the power to deputize visitors willing to be so deputized. Would you be willing to help me locate him, Marissa?”

  “Sure,” Marissa said, shrugging and shaking her head. “I don’t know if he’ll be willing to come with us pe
aceably, but it’s worth a try.”

  “Jhana and I have a prior commitment,” Seiji said quickly. “Lakshmi Ngubo called me to say that something seems to be breaking with the VAJRA stalemate. She wants us to work with her on it, immediately, so I think we should head out there.”

  Wishing each other luck, the four of them shook hands in parting and went their separate ways. Already late, Jhana and Seiji hurried to catch a bulletcart to the axis, passing one group of citizens after another practicing “going limp” or doing what looked to be some purely defensive form of aikido—discussing strange terms like “restoring the attacker to harmony” and “ahimsa” and “dynamic compassion” and “truth force.” Jhana turned questioning eyes to Seiji.

  “Civilian defense groups,” he said as they hurried along. “Particularly effective for unarmed resistance to armed occupation forces. All defense of the colony is civilian-based—one of the responsibilities of citizenship. No permanently specialized police or military forces.”

  “Seems like a good idea,” Jhana said as they came to the bulletcart platform. “I wonder why more use hasn’t been made of it on Earth?”

  “Too threatening to the status quo,” Seiji said as they boarded a cart. “In any society with major disparities in wealth, training the citizenry in techniques of cultural critique and effective non-violent mass resistance would make the populace much harder to manage—less docile and manipulable.”

  “But I thought you said it was most effective against occupation forces,” Jhana remarked as they sped along.

  “True,” Seiji said with a nod, “but the same techniques that are effective against an invader’s occupation forces are also effective against a society’s internal occupation forces.”