Abruptly Roger found himself out of the tunnel between worlds. Around him a universe opened, an anvil-shaped mountain floating in the void before him. Of course! Only in the cavern inside Caracamuni tepui did the pure strain survive. Larkin had said that, according to the inhabitants, the spawn of the mushroom they found in that cave inside the tepui ‘remembered’ how it got there—ten, maybe hundreds of millions of years before—and their myths claimed it came “from the sky”—
A pair of angels were rising to meet him. His laser-blade was dead, but he didn’t feel much like slashing them anyway, not anymore. Instead he just watched them coming. Now that he saw them more closely, he noticed that the wings were more shining than feathery, the white of reflection and glow—and that they seemed vastly intricate, on the smallest of scales, but also absolutely functional. His own livesuit was cumbersome and clunky by comparison, and it occurred to him that their functions—life support? locomotion?—might not be so divergent: the angelic glow might be force-field, the wings energy collectors. Yet still they looked more theological than technological.
—mysterious ways, he heard one of the angels say (though he saw no lips move), the one whose “feathered” headdress and wings looked less like something out of the Bible than out of a Western. Not so different after all. Maybe the soul is also a tool, a vajra thrown by the divine hand, to which it also returns.
The other nodded, then turned her flashing eyes and floating hair to face Roger. He had seen eyes like those before, but only in his most perplexing dreams.
You’ll have to go back, Roger Tsugio Cortland, she said in his mind.
“Why?” Roger asked, speaking it and feeling inadequate somehow—like someone sounding out words in a world full of silent readers. “Because I slashed at you?”
The angel stared fixedly at him, reminding Roger of someone from Larkin’s video.
Why did you strike at us? Why did you want to persecute us?
“Because you’re history. From the past. We don’t need you anymore.”
The angel smiled.
We’re not from your past. We’re from your future. You need us more than ever—more than in all the millions of years angels have watched you.
A van of angels, bright and glinting, joined the pair and began to ensphere Roger and move him back toward the gap in the fabric of space-time through which he’d come.
“Please—one more thing,” Roger pleaded. The pair of angels gazed at him with their eyes shining like eternity. “I’ve got to know: Why do you care what happens to us?”
The somehow familiar angel smiled again.
To care is why we’re here. The image of the divine is imprinted in all things. The just person justices, the true angel angels. We do what we are. All humans are incarnate codes, words made flesh sharing fully in the same flesh message with all the best and all the worst of human beings throughout time—a message that is itself only a variant of the message shared by all living beings.
We share a great deal, Roger, said the angel who looked vaguely like a Native American shaman. I’m as guilty as you are. I forcibly shared my piece of the truth with the world, altered consciousnesses without permission for a brief instant. I imposed my will, in an attempt to assure their bliss. You suffered for that—you, who only intended the same, ultimately. Those who attempt that imposition chemically, though, always face the stiffer censure. Still, we’re much the same—both reminders that even the bright dreams of reason and life cannot ignore the grim nightmares of madness and death. Always we must strike a balance between the angel and the rat—complete the circle at least temporarily, so neither stands alone.
The way the angel smiled at him—so gentle yet so knowing—disturbed Roger profoundly. The two angels were so alike, like twins born into different worlds or on different timelines—even more, the same person, but male here and female there, dead here and alive there, staying here and going there.
You’re still trying to cast everything into the past, Roger Cortland, said the other, as if reading his mind, but the question is not Who were the angels or Who was Divinity Incarnate? but rather Who is that and Who will be that?—fully, again and again. Who is and who will be willing to forget self for the sake of other? We cannot give up caring so long as there still remain any who are endarkened, unmindful. This universe, and the plenum of all universes, can embody right mindfulness only when all in it also do so.
The van of angels surrounded him completely then and Roger had a final vision. It seemed he saw every mind in all the universes, each decision shedding photons but also generating a minuscule black hole, a subnano-singularity. On the other side of each of those tiny black holes, a nearly parallel universe branched off. The road not taken here was taken there. As he watched, Roger saw that the total number of universes in the cosmos was essentially infinite, but with this peculiarity: from within any given universe, only that particular universe was “real”—all the infinitude of others was at best only “virtual”. This appeared to be true for each and every one of the universes—but not, he noticed, for each and every inhabitant of all the universes. Larkin’s sister here/brother there angelic pair flickered through his head once again. Parallel lines could meet in the space of mind, and mind in fact seemed to be nothing less than these meetings, the membranous infinity of portals and gateways between universes, the entire plenum of universes, the compassionate void conserving possibility and information the way the universe he’d been born into conserved matter and energy. He seemed to stand inside a great spherical golden tree, boundless in its rooting and branching but also rooted and branching in him, truly center everywhere/circumference nowhere, a tree of light aswarm with the activity of bees, fireflies, flashes of moving light, a vast Arc of information and Hive of possibility, enormous plenum ArcHive, flashing infinite of Mind Thinking—
The ensphering light overcame him then. When he regained consciousness, he was in a medical transfer ship, Marissa Correa and Paul Larkin standing on either side of the gurney to which he was held by light straps. He handed Marissa the vial of her immortalizing vector, still in his shirt pocket. He had taken it, perhaps thinking that if he spread it to the world it might somehow bring his father back, retroactively cancel his death in cancelling all future death. Now, at last, he had reconciled himself to the truth.
“Jhana Meniskos’s code key!” Roger said suddenly. “I sent a message to her boss saying that she was being held hostage, that her code was compromised. We’ve got to correct that!”
“Don’t worry,” they said, looking down at him. “Already taken care of.”
* * * * * * *
Paradox. Paradise. Paraclete. The themes and concepts moved smoothly through Marissa’s mind. Nothing had changed—except that everything about her fellowship research had fallen into place. The goal of that research was already being achieved. The synthesis of knowledge and compassion, coming together effectively and humanely. All she need do was help it along in her own way, and she could do that anywhere.
And her other research, on the immortalizing vector? She had yet to test the sealed vial Roger had returned to her. She did not yet know whether what it contained would be effective or humane, but she and others would run the tests, make the choices, inform the world on their progress—if any. That too would fall into place.
Looking about the cabin of the large transfer ship carrying them to tour the new habitats, Marissa realized that, indeed, everything had fallen into place. Atsuko beside her gazing out the viewport thoughtfully, Jhana Meniskos across the aisle reading a critique of Guaranty’s work (an actual paper book) while Seiji snoozed, all the other people here that she’d become acquainted with back in the habitat—increasingly, they were a community, a world of their own.
The pieces of the larger human puzzle were becoming clearer to her as well. The X-shaped structures which Jhana and Lakshmi and Seiji insisted on calling “refractors” had disa
ppeared completely in light, apparently taking with them the problems that had plagued the VAJRA. No trace of the RATs or the distributed consciousness or the metapersonality “Jiro” remained. All the colony’s visitors (herself included but Jhana Meniskos first and foremost) had met with the negotiators from Earth and had made a broadcast appeal to that world. They had made clear that they were not hostages and—since the refractors had proven to be self-consuming artifacts no more dangerous than staged fireworks celebrating the launch of the Swallowtail and the opening of the two new habitats—the presence of occupation forces in space was absolutely uncalled for. Strangely, out of all the permanent residents, Paul Larkin’s word seemed to carry special weight with the negotiating team, though Marissa could not quite fathom why.
Some tense hours had followed while the troopships took up final positions around the habitat, but by then the media had already picked up the fireworks theme and voices in favor of bringing the troops home began to rise throughout the world with surprising speed. The corporate and national forces at last returned to Earth without having boarded the habitat, recalled to base amid UN and CP calls for more clearly defined communication channels between the habitat and Earth—channels the colonists were only too willing to establish.
But other things were happening too, on the Earth and in the heavens. Citizens’ movements had already toppled or were in the process of toppling an unprecedented number of morally bankrupt governments throughout the world—the largest such movements since the Revolutions of 1989 but far more peaceful and widespread than those movements of forty years ago had ever been. A number of the nations involved had broken up, decentralized, and begun reforming along bioregional lines. From what Atsuko had been telling her, the colony and its residents had recently been receiving far more inquiries into alternative lifeways, diverse governmental forms, and species preservation plans than they had ever expected to get. Even the corporate powers had been finding themselves confronted with unified and increasingly powerful consumer and stockholder revolts against globally-unsound corporate policies. Among the first concessions granted by the corporations had been greater autonomy for the space habitat and all its colonists—though no such increased autonomy had been formally requested by the HOME (no matter how joyfully it was accepted).
It was as if a light had been shone into the darkness of human history, Marissa thought. The world itself seemed more numinous. Certainly on Earth there were still many places where hunger drove out thoughts of love and beauty and divinity, but that was changing, would change, had to change. All these recent external manifestations had to be the result of an epiphany, an apocalypse of the revealing rather than destroying type, an apocalypse within individuals that was underlying all the changes outside.
Marissa thought of the individuals she knew up here. Of Jhana and Seiji and Lakshmi and their strange tale of meeting the ghost in the machine, Seiji’s dead brother Jiro apotheosized in virtual space. Of that brother’s persistence in another form after death and his disappearance along with the refractors—and the threesome’s attempts to explain that persistence and disappearance to her, with all their talk of “Mind as fractional dimension between the four dimensions of the universe we know and the n-dimensions of the plenum of all possible universes we can only guess at”, and “part of Jiro’s mind-fractal lodged in the LogiBoxes”, of “Möbius knots” and “Omega points” and “cosmic loopholes”, of “the informational lacuna of Gödel’s incompleteness theorem and the Heisenberg uncertainty principle, combined with the physical lacuna of the black hole singularity, where the general theory of relativity predicts that the general theory of relativity itself breaks down.” Thinking about it made Marissa smile. She hoped they enjoyed their explanation—whatever all that jargon really meant.
She thought too of Lev Korchnoi’s assertion that something luminous and divine had been operating in the performance of The Temple Guardians, and the paradoxical result that Lev, with genuine (and previously uncharacteristic) humility, felt that he and the Möbius Cadúceus Entertainment Collective could not truthfully accept all the praise for the great success of their performance that night. She recalled as well Lakshmi’s initial worries that she would be inundated with complaints about the disappearance of the Building the Ruins game—and Lakshmi’s surprise when the complaints proved minimal, as if nearly all the players had outgrown that game at the same time.
But most of all Marissa thought of the changes in Roger and Atsuko. Roger, as soon as he was out of hospital, had sought her out, had sought Jhana out, had sought out all those people he had hurt, or threatened with his laser—to apologize profusely to all concerned. The weapon he had given up, had voluntarily put himself into therapy, and (perhaps most astonishingly of all) he and his mother were at last able to hold a civil, respectful, and even mutually loving conversation, without the rancor and gnawing tensions that had always underlain their words to each other before. Aside from his constant mechanical drafting of angels and his occasional propensity to use nouns as verbs—“the true Christian Christs, the true Buddhist Buddhas”—he seemed to be doing quite well and quite differently than he had been, before. What had attracted her to him had only grown since the change, and what had repelled her seemed to have disappeared.
Atsuko had loosened whatever grip she had on her son too, proving remarkably open even to such ideas as Roger’s decision to travel with Paul Larkin to some obscure South American headwater. In her time spent with Atsuko of late, Marissa had also noticed in her mentor a more profound sensitivity and intellectual acuteness that raised the tenor and importance of all their conversations remarkably. Perhaps these changes weren’t all one-sided either. Perhaps she had changed as well. Certainly part of it was the deepening respect they felt for each other, but there was also something else, more even than that.
She followed Atsuko’s gaze out the viewport. The longer Marissa stared at the universe out there, the more it seemed to shimmer and scintillate, the more it seemed alive, thoughtful, concerned—as she herself was.
“All times and place really are full of compassionate attention,” Marissa said quietly. “I used to just belief that, but now at last I have eyes to really see it.”
Atsuko turned toward her, nodding, her own eyes moist as she squeezed Marissa’s hand.
* * * * * * *
Jhana looked up from the old-style book in her hands, remembering something Marissa had said about electronic notes and comments from another flight, another time. There had been something about utopia not being something to test but rather something by which we are tested. Something about the eternal coming into time.
Thinking of Michael, Jhana wondered about tests and time and eternity. That image of Mike, sorrowful and forgiving, that she thought she saw in the virtual universe Jiro had created—was it real? Where had it come from? Something fabricated from her memories? Her hopes? Or was it true, what Jiro had said—that there is no death, only a change of worlds? That the body was just a machine? Was that an illusion as well? Was it all illusion?
She hoped never to be disillusioned of her belief in that necessary fiction. It was already helping her in many ways—not least of all helping her to forgive in her heart and mind Rick, for his betrayal of her, and of himself.
She glanced at Seiji sleeping beside her so peacefully, and wondered. Love, she thought. The most saving of all illusions, the most necessary of all fictions. She did not think it would happen to her again, that she could be so much in love that she was now, looking at Seiji this moment, willing to leave behind the world of her birth.
Deaths and births. This man had passed through her when they were in virtual space. Her ability to “think like a place” had proven a blessing as well as a curse. She had made possible the communication between this side and the other, but now that she had time to think about it, was that really something so new? She had performed an ancient function, for men were always passing through women, pa
ssing out of their mothers’ wombs at birth, into the womb of their Great Mother at death.☺
She glanced out the viewport, thinking thoughts she knew had been Marissa’s, though she didn’t know how she knew, or how she had shared another’s thoughts. They came unbidden into her head as she looked at her home world below and thoght of a sanctuary candle burning in the silent cathedral of space, and how its sublime beauty had become something she could no longer take for granted. In her eyes now, that beauty refused to fade or diminish.
She felt the worlds they could build in space might never be so beautiful as that first home. But perhaps it would be only after human beings had travelled the universe, when they had passed through everywhere, had seen and experienced all—perhaps only then could they hope to return to where they had begun and truly know their Mother for the first time.
Seiji stirred slightly beside her. Jhana thought she overheard one of her fellow passengers say something about “Bodhisattvas” and “a mountain of light descending.” What a curious phrase, that last. Certainly she had misheard. The conversation continued but, returning to her book, she vowed not to eavesdrop. If what they were talking about was important she would find out about it in due time. After all, who could say that mountains of light might not be descending quite often, from now on?
Afterword
Lightpaths, which Ace Books published in 1997, was the first novel-length child of my mind to find its place in the world. Looking back on it after all these years, I am amazed by its energy and its idealism. Both of those stem, to a large degree, from the circumstances under which I began work on the book—what chaoticians call “sensitive dependence on initial conditions.”
Determined to publish a novel, I had in the Summer of 1990 just resigned from the small liberal-arts college in the Midwest where I held a tenure-track professorship in English literature. With my wife Laurel, I relocated to central California. In a couple of months during the Fall of that year (while “the world was wending its way into the Persian Gulf War,” as I noted in the acknowledgments page to the 1997 edition of the novel), I speed-wrote the first version of Lightpaths.
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