Chapter Eight

As Lakshmi approached the backstage area where the members of Möbius Cadúceus were building their set, she eavesdropped on their comments back and forth through the close-comm Public Sphere. Such philosophical remarks bounced among them that they made her wonder a) if the cast and crew had been indulging in a bit of mind-alteration this early in the day and b) what had ever happened to that Hitchcockian era when actors (and, by extension, all performers) were “cattle.”

“—paranoid alienation is the basis of science and the scientific method,” said a woman whose voice Lakshmi didn’t recognize.

“But the knower must not only be alienated from, but also related to, the object of knowledge,” an unfamiliar male voice said. “If the knower weren’t related to it in some way, how could he or she know it at all?”

“Think about it this way,” said a voice Lakshmi definitely recognized as Lev Korchnoi’s. “Knowledge is recognizing that ‘I’, the subject, and the ‘Other’—it, the object, you—are not one. Wisdom lies in understanding that, despite appearances, I and the Other are one, is One.”

“Metaphysical unity of all beings?” said another female voice she didn’t recognize. “Then what’s the difference between wisdom and compassion, if it’s all just the shift from the ‘I-it’ to the ‘I-Thou’ relation?”

“True,” Lakshmi heard Lev agree, “but it’s more than that. Creatures with no epistemic space, no alienating self-awareness, could never know ‘I’ nor ‘it’ nor ‘thou.’ Alienated, self-aware humans know ‘I’ and ‘it’ quite well—just look at our obsession with personal or tribal power, dominion over the Earth and our fellow creatures, all that. Maybe we even know a bit about ‘Thou.’ Generally, though, we find it really hard to live inside the idea that I and it and Thou are actually One.”

“A cycle, then?” asked another unfamiliar voice. “From an unconscious unawareness of self or other, to a conscious awareness of self and other, to a superconscious awakening to the idea of the fundamental inseparability of all things?”

“Not so much a cycle as a spiral, I think,” Lev said slowly. “Or some sort of circle with a twist maybe—”

“Oh no,” groaned one of the women. “A Möbius strip again!”

“Whatever shape we try to cast the idea in,” Lev said, trying to regain control of the conversation, “it’s still pretty clear that, if wisdom equals knowledge plus compassion, then as a species we’re very knowledgeable but not very wise. Higher than the snakes but lower than the angels. That’s really what our performance is about, ultimately.”

Lakshmi, now within sight of the set builders, had been stopped by security.

“Pretty highfalutin talk,” Lakshmi called out to Lev, “for a guy in a fake soldier suit.”

“This is not a fake soldier suit,” Lev said, waving her in past security then executing a perfect spin off the high scaffolding where he’d been working, coming to rest in a gymnast’s landing. He walked on toward her as she hovered in.

“This armor was the very latest in stealth soldier haute couture, circa 2014,” Lev continued, in mock fashion-show host tones. “A Mitsui/GenDyn joint venture. Superdense kevlar lined in EMR absorbent material that also reduces both noise and infrared signature. It offers extensive musculature augmentation, stands impervious to all kinds of small arms fire and shrapnel, and is fully covered in computer-sensored chameleon cloth—camouflage adaptable to any level of light, any pattern in the surrounding environment, or programmable for special missions. The helmet is similarly top-of the line, equipped with fully integrated telecommunications and heads-up targeting electronics for the suit’s shockwave gauntlet. It also features a mechanically-activated C4 self-destruct capability, for those sticky social situations.”

Lakshmi heard some of the crew up in the scaffolding laughing and snickering, but ignored them for the moment. She watched as Lev did Superman leaps in his costume, and she tried to remember what he’d said about “musculature augmentation.”

“It looks real enough,” Lakshmi had to admit.

“It is,” Lev said, bounding about like a Wehrmacht gazelle. “Absolutely real. Genuine enhanced stealth battle armor.”

“But what’s it for?”

“What do you mean?” Lev asked, trying a roundhouse kick, and smiling in satisfaction when it lashed the air with inhuman force.

“First you do that heavy study in stage combat,” Lakshmi said, the edge of concern creeping into her voice, “and now this.”

“Authenticity,” Lev said, leaping a dozen feet straight into the air. “And added safety. All for the show. Besides, with the right programming, what I’m wearing will not only adapt to surrounding spatial patterns, but also temporal ones.”

“What?”

“I can program it to simulate battle costume from any period in history I choose—and that’s key to the performance.”

“Well, just don’t become too enamored of this machoboy stuff,” Lakshmi said. “There’s a world going on outside your Möbius Cadúceus performance, you know. And it’s getting stranger all the time. Aleister pulled some interesting stuff out of the Rats that you need to see.”

“Okay, okay, but first let me introduce you to the band,” Lev said, then turned to call up toward the others he’d left behind on the set construction. “Everybody! This is Lakshmi Ngubo, the person who, after much effort, finally completely debugged the shobot Guardians! Laksh, that guy on the fastener gun is our woodwinds maestro, Adewole Umoje. Those two, hanging flats there, are Mary Nakulita and Liselle Merukana, keyboard and string interfacers, respectively. The gentleman hanging lights is Liu Xang, brass master, and the woman under the spot-welding mask is my co-star—Eve to my Adam, Bliss to my Will—Cana LaJeunesse.”

Lakshmi and the band members waved and nodded to each other. When that was done, she and Lev moved off to a corner of the playing space, out of the worst of the construction noise.

“Since you dumped the LogiBox problems into your friend Aleister’s lap and ran off to work on your show, Lev dear,” Lakshmi said, her voice a level purr only slightly louder than the sound of her hoverchair, “we’ve made some progress. You’ll be glad to hear that your LogiBox installation is not responsible for the problems—”

“Hah! I knew it!”

“But there are other matters which might still concern someone with a day job in communications—or have you forgotten that part of your life?”

“What ‘other matters’?” Lev said grumpily.

“Oh, little things—like the fact that the majority of the dataflow between Earth and the Orbital Complex is no longer going through recognized channels.”

“What?”

“The thing in the ‘Boxes, Lev. The consciousness you said couldn’t be a consciousness. Whatever it is—let’s call it an intelligence—it’s out of the ‘Boxes, now. We couldn’t shut it down if we wanted to. It’s ‘distributed’ itself, largely through the Rats, but in other ways too. That ‘distributed consciousness’—excuse me, distributed intelligence—it’s behind the spread of this ‘Building the Ruins’ game. I’ve played it, Lev. Very strange. Even stranger is the fact that all the information from all those playings of that game is being sent up the well, along with one helluva lot of other data. Informationally speaking, the orbital complex has become a hot spot. At the current rate of dataflow, in a day or so we’ll be hotter than any single city on Earth—hotter than most countries, in fact.”

Lev stared at her.

“But where’s all that data going?”

“Not to us,” Lakshmi said quietly. “Aleister and I aren’t sure, but we suspect those X-shaped satellites have something to do with information storage, among other things. They’ve been built by micromachines acting ‘autonomously’. But the distributed consciousness is deeply intermingled with the Vajra—”

“And the Vajra coordinates with all the micromachines,” Lev said, chewing his lower lip nervously. “Aw Jeez. What have you told Atsuko Cortland about this?”

“Just that we’ve located the source of the problem and are working to correct it.”

“That’s true enough,” Lev said, trying to put a hopeful spin on things. “You got the thing in the ‘Boxes to stop glitching my shobots, at least.”

“Right,” Lakshmi said quietly. “Or maybe it was just finished getting our attention that way. Something’s still building that weird spirit-animal sculpture in my workshop, you know.”

“But otherwise the distributed whatever-it-is seems harmless enough, right?” Lev continued in his hopeful vein. “The only damage I can really think of that it’s done is sour our relations with Earth a bit, that’s all.”

“That,” Lakshmi agreed, “and some of the micromachines have been raiding the mass drivers—for materials to build those X-satellites, is our guess. But there’s something else. Aleister’s found this extreme redundancy in the Rats, all repeating the same nonfunctional sequence of code. It’s a list of names.”

Lakshmi shot the list to Lev’s personal data assistant and the list appeared on his wraparounds. Six names. Two he knew well enough by reputation—both Cortlands, Roger and Atsuko. Two he knew vaguely—Seiji Yamaguchi and Paul Larkin. One he knew not at all—Jhana Meniskos. And one he could never get to know—Jiro Yamaguchi.

“Strange list, isn’t it?” Lakshmi said cryptically. “We don’t know how they tie into the Rats. None of them have ever been to Sedona, where the Real-time A-life Technopredators were developed. None of them ever had any connection with the Myrrhisticine Abbey and its network manager, the ex-phreaker Phelonious Manqué. Some weren’t even born when it happened.”

“When what happened?” Lev asked, lost for a moment.

“This,” Lakshmi said, shooting Lev’s PDA another feed. An old-style video image appeared on his wraparounds, amateurish, someone’s unsteady hand moving the view-finder. A red mesa or butte—Lev couldn’t remember which term fit—topped by a complex of Neo-Gothic buildings.

“The Abbey,” Lakshmi said, following along. “Here it comes. Watch.”

Above the abbey on the mesa a flash of light burst, but didn’t go away. Instead it quickly became a point of light, then a hole of darkness rimmed by light like the “diamond ring” stage of an eclipse. The light-rimmed hole grew rapidly, until it was clear that it wasn’t ringed by white light but rather by myriad rainbow fires dancing over its whole surface. What looked like points of light glowed inside it too. It blotted out the Abbey, then most of the mesa, then disappeared as quickly as it had come, leaving behind only a bowl of broken stone.

“What the hell was that?”

“We don’t really know,” Lakshmi said quietly. “Aleister’s still searching. Sensationalist media at the time called it the ‘black hole sun’ and ‘Tunguska II’. Scientific theories ranged from meteoritic impact, to anomalous seismic event, to the sudden appearance of a micro-singularity. Religionists claimed it was a ‘rapturing’—mainly because the Myrrhisticineans were apocalyptists.”

“Looks like they got their wish,” Lev said cautiously. “Does it have anything to do with what’s going on up here?”

“We don’t know that either. The Rats are the only connection. But the man who called himself Manqué didn’t survive. No one who was on that mesa that day has ever been heard from since. The only Myrrhisticineans who survived were those who were away from the abbey.”

One of the band crew called Lev’s name. Apparently his advice was needed on some aspect of the construction.

“Look, Laksh, I’ve got to go,” he said, already moving away. “But keep me in the loop on this—especially if anything else affecting Comm comes up.”

Lakshmi watched him leave. He still bounded away, but his bounding wasn’t as light. Superman, with burden, she thought as her hoverchair turned slowly away.

* * * * * * *

Marissa had only stepped out of the lab a moment for coffee, but when she got back the ideological tug of war between Atsuko and Roger was well underway. She should have known better than to suggest that Atsuko meet her at the lab.

“—and this work is hyperspecialized and reductionist in the extreme,” Atsuko was saying pointedly. “Working with these perfect little monsters from the id, these ‘naked mole-rats.’ “

“I’m surprised at you, Mother,” Roger said sarcastically. “Isn’t it you who’s always preached the inherent worth and value of every species. Why else preserve biodiversity?”

“But these creatures strain even my tolerance. Blind, hairless, incestuous, subterranean, shit-eating little beggars!”

Marissa burst out laughing at the obvious distaste in Atsuko’s voice. Seeing who had laughed, Atsuko managed a slight smile.

“Why are you laughing?” Atsuko asked. “I didn’t mean for it to come out as profanely as it did, but it’s all literally true, you know. They are blind. They are hairless, or virtually so. They spend their entire lives underground—’completely fossorial,’ as the scientific articles put it. The researchers may speak primly of ‘inbreeding’ and ‘consanguineous mating,’ but that’s just a nice way of saying incest. The young, the pups, when hungry ‘beg fecal matter from the adults,’ which the mole-rat experts term ‘coprophagy.’ They also engage in ‘autocoprophagy’—they roll their own, and then they eat it!”

Marissa found herself laughing loudly and openly with Atsuko.

“Undeniably,” Roger said at last, when his mother’s childish laughter had subsided, “but they’re as worthy of scientific research as anything else—”

“No doubt. Maybe more worthy, than most things. All I’ll say is that Jennifer Jarvis, the ‘mother of naked mole rat research,’ must have possessed an incredibly detached scientific objectivity while she was working with them.”

Marissa smiled again, leaning forward.

“You seem to have learned more than a little bit about them yourself.”

“Yes,” Atsuko said, her tone growing more serious. “A mother likes to know what her son is up to—even when the son and mother are as loving as Roger and I are. It helps me figure out certain things. Knowing, for instance, that Jarvis worked at the University of Cape Town, turning it into the world’s great center for the study of eusocial mammals—that helps explain why Roger spent several of his graduate school summers there. It also explains why he’s working up here now.”

“Not to be closer to my mother?” Roger put in, faux naive, hugging his mother with an almost painful ferocity.

“Hardly,” Atsuko said, extricating herself from her son’s embrace. “The Preserve has the largest collection of wild-caught naked mole rats anywhere, and some of the best facilities available to biological researchers, as you well know. It’s not filial love that brings you here. It’s your own obsessions—though why you should be obsessed with those little monsters, I’ll never know.”

A silence opened between them then. Marissa strove to fill the awkward emptiness.

“Weren’t we going to the gym?” she said to Atsuko. “Then on to the Archives?”

“That’s why I came here,” Atsuko said, none too obliquely. They bid Roger adieu, Marissa smiling knowingly over Atsuko’s head. Roger returned the knowing smile gratefully, thankful to have Marissa’s help in ushering his mother onward and out of the lab.

Roger returned to reviewing the material his mole-rat imp had scavenged from all over the infosphere, but after about ten minutes he found he couldn’t concentrate. Maybe it was just a hang-over from his spacewalk with Marissa, but he found he kept thinking about his father.

Evander Cortland had been a financial genius, Roger thought, staring down at the lab’s richly polished mooncrete floors. A brash, arrogant man, too. Roger could never figure why Atsuko had married him—they were so different. As a child, he remembered, the three of them had seemed the happy family, living all over Earth, playing the games of the international set for several years.

Eventually that became aimless, pointless. The whole time that slow realization was coming, though, his father was becoming more and more successful. Ev’s speculations in leading-edge technologies paid off, his millions became billions. About that same time, his mother Atsuko started joining organizations like the Global Futures Fund, the Space Studies Institute, the Space Frontiers Foundation. What better way to fill the void of being A Successful Man’s Wife than joining organizations planning literally to fill the void through the colonization of space? His mother took up that vision as her crusade, and his father—who had connections everywhere in the high tech industries—took up Atsuko’s crusade as his own new vision. Together they had been instrumental in putting together the HOME consortium.

Roger remembered, though, that as the lobbying and proposal-making dragged on and on, his father had become increasingly pragmatic about “the project” while his mother became increasingly idealistic. His father used to always address the vision in practical terms: Who would ‘ante up’? How could they generate enough corporate ‘will’ to open up the corporate ‘wallet’? His dad had never been very happy with the idealistic elements of the project—great for selling it to the public, sure, but the final reality for him was the bottom line. He wanted a money-maker, a cash cow in the sky that could be milked for a long time.

As the space habitat became more and more of a reality, his mother began to spend more time with the people who were going to settle in it—the ‘nuts and flakes’ as his father took to calling them. His father had tried gamely to fit in with the new crowd. He even lived up in the habitat for a brief period while the central sphere was being constructed, but he found it far too restrictive. Roger could understand that: on Earth his father was a king, he could do anything he wanted, have anything he wanted. Here he had to play by the same peon rules as everyone else.

That wasn’t his father’s way at all, something that became quite clear when—just to prove Ev Cortland didn’t have to play by anybody’s rules—he took to “swooping” some of the younger women colonists. Naturally his father found the swooping easy, and naturally his mother had become justifiably enraged, hurling invective about Evander’s “male-pride mid-life crisis” and how the “raft” of his conquests—all those women he’d bedded to “salve his ego and gratify his lust”—would sink the habitat project. In reality, though, the project had already gotten bigger than his father, bigger than his parents or their problems, bigger in fact than all the players put together. By then it had picked up so much momentum that it really couldn’t be stopped. It had a life of its own.

His parents’ life together, though, was over. Three months before the space habitat was officially opened, they divorced. Roger had been just short of fifteen at the time. The space habitat he’d known only as something endlessly under construction, so he’d opted for good times on Earth with his father. His mother decided to move into the habitat. Roger hadn’t really felt the separation that much; even when they were supposedly still living together, his mother hadn’t been around that much for him anyway, toward the end.

Roger remembered the rest of his teen-years as something of a blur. He’d continued to excel in school, entering Oxford at fifteen and taking his degree at seventeen. Graduate work in France and South Africa and at Tsukuba Science City outside Tokyo, before finally taking his doctorate at Stanford when he was twenty one. He hadn’t seen his father a lot, but Ev gave him lots of money and everything it could buy. Hovercycles, private jets, sports cars, hydrofoils, all manner of supertoys. For his eighteenth birthday Ev gave him the production rights to the first true supercomputer-on-a-chip, the prototype developed by one of his corporate subsidiaries. Roger was still making money from that.

He had become his father’s son. What you can buy, what you’ve accomplished, is who you are—his father’s credo, which he had made his own. He was as revolted as his father ever was by the “idealistic” life of this habitat, the “voluntary simplicity” of the local “lifeways”. He’d even gone so far as to have a cosmetic surgeon reconstruct his face and eyes so he’d look less Asian, more Anglo like his father.

He and both his parents had all been together for the last time at Roger’s Ph.D. graduation ceremony, his doctoral hooding. Three years ago, now. Then, a month later, it had all ended. The deep-sea diving “accident”. Though there’d never been real proof, persistent rumor said it wasn’t an accident, that it was the result of a conspiracy among his competitors. Roger had clung to that theory. The other option—that Evander Cortland, billionaire world-conqueror, empire-builder and eminently successful man, had in fact committed suicide—was a thought more chilling than the cold at the bottom of that deepest sea where his father had died.

A thought cold enough to send Roger back to his research, in earnest, and with no more memories before his eyes.

* * * * * * *

While at the lab that morning, Jhana received a pair of v-mail messages. One was long-link and encrypted from Earth—Balance Tien-Jones thanking her for the information she’d forwarded concerning Dr. Cortland’s research and also reminding her of the rising tensions between Earth and the colony. The other message originated closer at hand—Seiji Yamaguchi accepting her invitation to lunch. He suggested they meet in one of the townlet shop-clusters near her lab, at a small cafe called “Chameleon on a Mirror.”

When Jhana arrived at the gossamery, tent-like reflecting structure of the Chameleon, Seiji was already seated at a stone table beside a stream, waiting for her.

“Hello, Ms. Meniskos. Good to see you again. If I remember right, the last time we met I was holding forth about God, the universe, and everything.”

“Not quite everything,” Jhana said, smiling politely as she sat down, noting the glass panels set into the stone table’s top. “And please, call me Jhana.”

“All right.”

The owner, a black-haired and walrus-moustached man Seiji introduced as “Ehab Alama,” stopped at their table bearing a tray with water and spiced tea in glasses, and flatware wrapped in cloth serviettes. Seiji seemed to have some sort of business relationship with the man.

“The sulfur shelf and oyster varieties were very good this week,” Ehab said. “Not as rich as the morels and truffles, of course, but the customers like them very much anyway. I’ve been using the sulfur shell in omelettes and as a substitute for chicken. The oyster mushroom, the Sajor Caju, is working wonderfully in seafood salads and the enokis and shiis are still a hit.”

“Good, good!” Seiji said, pleased. “I’ve got a few others for you to try next week. I think I’ve got the shaggy mane’s deliquescing problem licked, and we can probably go to the pink-bottoms and portobellos instead of the button agaricus you’ve been using.”

“Excellent. I look forward to cooking with them. Your menus are mounted in the tabletop,” he said, the latter primarily for Jhana’s benefit. “I’ll be back after you’ve ordered.”

The man bustled away quickly to attend to the luncheon customers at other tables. Jhana pressed a small stud mounted in the table top and a menu appeared in the glass inset.

“What was all that about?” Jhana asked, perusing the electronic menu.

“Well, since raising beef cattle is far too land and water intensive for a space habitat, Ehab and I are conducting an experiment in what you might call ‘cuisine design’,” Seiji said, leaning back in his chair and counting creatures off on his fingers. “We have some pigs and goats and sheep, more rabbits, chickens, partridges, pheasants and other fowl out at the agricultural tori. Lots of trout, pike, eels, carp, catfish, scads of other fish in the watercourses here—but they all make their demands too. The cost of live protein, in time and labor, seems to grow dearer all the time. Their dung and manure are a partial payback, but mainly they’re a luxury item for our visitors and tourist trade. It’s astronomically expensive to ship foodstuffs up the well—though what we have an overabundance of we do sometimes ship down. Are you ready to order?”

“Yes,” Jhana said, caught a bit off guard by the way he’d switched tracks so fast. “Are the kebabs good?”

“Very. Ehab makes great kebabs. Good choice. I think I’ll have the same. Just speak or punch your order in—there—and they’ll make it up in the kitchen tent.” He took a sip of tea. “So anyway, as I was saying, there’s a need sometimes to stretch fish and fowl with other supplements, and provide substitutes for flesh in general. You can do an awful lot with textured vegetable proteins, but I’ve been working a different angle: the fungi.”

“Mushrooms?”

“That’s right. Basidiomycetes and ascomycetes both. They’ve long been under-used, particularly in the West, where mycophobia is a centuries-old tradition. You’re from North America, right? Have you ever eaten a sulfur shelf?”

“No, I can’t say I have.”

“You don’t know what you’ve been missing! It’s a bright, yellow-orange, shelving fungus that grows on trees just about everywhere. You must have seen it. You probably passed by hundreds of them when you were a kid and never once thought of them as edible.”

Jhana looked at him oddly. It almost seemed as if the rather blandly patterned tent material of the Chameleon was assuming three dimensional shapes behind her luncheon companion. She shook her head to clear the impression away.

“To be honest, Seiji,” Jhana said slowly, “if I came upon a bright yellow-orange thing growing out of a tree stump, my first impulse would hardly be to stick it in my mouth. I suppose you’ve eaten them? What do they taste like?”

“Like chicken—”

“Oh no!” Jhana laughed. “Rattlesnake tastes like chicken. Frog-legs taste like chicken. Everything tastes like chicken—sometimes even chicken!”

“Okay, okay,” Seiji said, smiling wanly. “So I should have been more specific. But one of the popular names for it is chicken of the woods—not to be confused with Grifola frondosa, hen of the woods. But a sulfur shelf really does taste something like chicken that’s been crossed with a mild cheese and a firm tofu. It’s great in omelettes.”

“And it’s bright orange, you said?” Jhana asked, skeptically. “Right. Sure. Sounds just yummy. No thanks. I’ll stick with what’s safely sold in the stores, thank you.”

“Suit yourself,” Seiji said with a shrug. He was about to say more when a bright green chameleon fell from one of the trees to the terrace and scampered off in splay-footed fashion. Watching the chameleon, Jhana once again had the odd sensation that, beyond the scurrying creature, three-dimensional shapes were flashing out of the subtler patterns on the pavilion tent walls. Before she could ask Seiji about it, though, Ehab arrived with their kebabs on whitenoise-grey stoneware plates, which he placed before them.

“Now the mushrooms on this are more my speed,” Jhana said, pointing to the clearly recognizable button variety interspersed among what looked to be chunks of meat, sliced red and green peppers, whole miniature tomatoes, and pieces of pineapple and other fruit. It looked delicious and tasted even better.

“Do you like it?” Seiji asked after a time.

“Wonderful,” Jhana said. “The lamb is excellent, and this other meat, which I can’t quite place, is marvelous.”

“Tastes like a good steak cooked over a macadamia-nut fire, maybe?”

“Exactly! What is it?”

Seiji smiled a Cheshire cat grin that lingered and grew until she thought it would swallow his whole face.

“You don’t mean—”

Smile unwavering, Seiji nodded his head.

“Okay. I give up. What kind of mushroom is it?”

“A morel,” he said proudly. “One of the last important delicacy species to become mass-producible, if not mass marketable.”

She took another bite of the morel “meat.” Despite knowing what it was, she still found it delicious.

“Maybe you’re right,” she conceded reluctantly. “Maybe I have been missing something.”

Ehab came to refill their tea and water glasses. They drank and continued to eat, Seiji going on about still more obscure fungi: “lion’s manes” and “fairy rings” and “swordbelts”, “blewits” and “namekos”, “paddy straws” and “stropharia”. Jhana tried to pay attention but, throughout the meal, she kept getting fleeting glimpses of three-dimensional images emerging from the walls of the pavilion—geometric figures like stars and crosses and pyramids, rippling waves, peaks and valleys, but also animals, particularly lizards, birds and butterflies, a veritable hallucination of jungle camouflage. When a spiral vortex like the Milky Way suddenly appeared out of the white-noise pattern of her by-then-empty plate, she had to say something.

“Seiji, are any of the mushrooms we’ve been eating, uh, hallucinogenic?” she asked, a hint of nervousness just barely audible in her voice.

“Not at all,” he said dismissively, still finishing his meal. “One of the cardinal rules up here is that you’re not supposed to alter other people’s consciousnesses without their knowledge and permission. Why do you ask?”

“Because I’ve been seeing things,” Jhana said, cautiously but firmly, after making sure no other patrons were in easy earshot.

“What sorts of things?” Seiji inquired, almost managing to keep a straight face.

Jhana described the images she’d seen appearing and disappearing in the walls of the pavilion, in the furniture, even in the plates. She was sure she was seeing them, and she wanted to know why.

“Because this is the Chameleon, that’s why!” Seiji said, unable to keep from laughing. “Because Ehab is a devoted fan of stereograms and anamorphic devices. They were popular toys around the turn of the century. Almost every surface here is covered with particular patterns that are perceivable at more than one level. At the obvious, the ‘blatant’ level, they’re just pretty patterns or colorful random noise. Seen in the right way or from the right angle, though, a deeper, ‘latent’ level appears, three-dimensional figures and images emerging from the blatant background. You’re lucky. A lot of people can’t see the latent stuff unless they’ve been told to look for it—or they’ve been drinking heavily. I’ve always thought of the three-dimensionals here as a great visual joke, a prank on the unsuspecting, but don’t tell Ehab that. He’s very serious about it—his ‘art’.”

“I’ve heard of stereograms before,” Jhana said, “though I’ve never had much exposure to them outside of virtual reality constructs.”

“He generated most of this stuff on his computers,” Seiji said with a nod, “even claims he’s invented a new technique that combines anamorphics, color-field, random-dot, and wallpaper stereograms, God knows what all. For him, I think they’re a sort of visual koan—optical meditations reminding us that things aren’t always what they seem.”

Seiji’s explanation was reassuring. She was relieved to hear that the images were coming purely from that “mushroom” of brain inside her skull—unaltered by the chemical constituents of the shish kebab mushrooms that had been on her plate.

“This whole habitat is like that,” she said at last. “Everything more than it seems. Always what it is—and then something else, something more.”

“How do you mean?” Seiji asked.

“Why is it, for instance, that so many of you permanent residents up here wear so many different hats?” Jhana asked. “I mean, how do you know so much about mushrooms when you’re a landscape architect—and why are you a landscape architect when your academic training is in energy systems and you’re officially employed by the HOME consortium as a solar power engineer? I took the liberty of checking.”

Seiji smiled over his jawline-fringing Mennonite beard.

“Lots of us move beyond our specialties,” he replied, “both out of necessity and inclination. Not for wealth, certainly. We’ve pretty much succeeded in de-linking social status from material consumption. But even here, where most of us are dedicated to lives of voluntary simplicity in some form, there’s still more work than there are specialists to perform it. So we double or triple up. Take Ehab, for instance. He came up here for the initial engineering and construction of the habitat, then decided to stay on—as a restaurateur, among other things. All of us have to assume at least some responsibility for basic policing, educating, and paramedical training, and everyone has to spend some time in the agricultural rings. In my own case working out there showed me a ‘green thumb’ part of my nature that I really didn’t know was part of me. Working in the agricultural areas, I became interested in landscape architecture. From there I became fascinated with the role of decay and the breakdown of complex materials into simpler components in the soil, through the action of soil organisms, saprophytes—the fungi, particularly.”

“But how do you find the time and energy to do all of it?”

Seiji, having finished his main course at last too, lay down his knife and fork.

“Not everybody does. Your friend Roger Cortland, for instance—in the Public Sphere I’ve heard him rant on and on about how our required ‘green time’ is just a new version of the Cultural Revolution, with his mother as Madame Mao! To be honest, though, I look at it less as a lot of ‘hats’ than as a lot of opportunities. Most of the heavier grunt work is automated, so that saves both time and energy. Quite a number of us are single, too, and many who are married are voluntarily childless or are beyond childbearing years. You’d be surprised how much adult energy is freed up from the demands of child-rearing here—and how much that freed-up energy can accomplish for the betterment of the community and the individual.”

Jhana tapped her fork lightly against her plate, thinking.

“But those couples who are having children,” Jhana began, “don’t they feel that those who choose not to are being selfish?” She had often heard that argument on Earth.

Seiji laughed, lifting a chameleon off the tabletop, onto which it has just dropped.

“Were Medieval European nuns and priests, Tibetan Monks, and Siberian shamans considered selfish by their contemporaries for choosing not to have children? People in those cultures seemed to have accepted the fact that those who chose to be childless were following a different calling than those who chose to be parents. It’s only relatively recently in human history that having children has come to be thought of as something that all adult human beings somehow ‘ought’ to do. I know it’s a big issue down on Earth, but it’s really pretty much a non-issue here.”

“But how has that been accomplished?” Jhana asked, watching the charge for the meal flash up on the electronic menu. She inserted her credit needle and its ID chip into a slot to cover her part of the lunch, before Seiji could even think about paying for both of them. Apparently the inhabitants hadn’t yet gotten completely beyond currencies and credits, though she’d heard they were working on it.

“Many of us who are child-free also voluntarily serve as part of extended family networks,” Seiji continued, “supporting and helping the child-rearing couples with their needs. I’m doing a fair amount of that work next month. If you ask me, a child born here in the habitat is lucky.”

“How so?”

“Kids born here have a better shot overall. A lot of places on Earth, you’ve got a withered educational system side by side with an over-stuffed prison industry. Here, we’d rather educate sooner than incarcerate later—just the opposite of Earth. That boy or girl born here has dozens of ‘aunts’ and ‘uncles’ and ‘grandmas’ and ‘grandpas’, too. Parenting itself, like teaching, is becoming a more communal activity here, less of the psychological pressure of the mom/dad/kids nuclear family.”

Jhana still wasn’t convinced.

“What about the person who has no interest in having children and no interest in tending someone else’s little rug rats?” Jhana asked, watching as Seiji ‘chipped in for his part of the meal and gratuities. “Is that sort of ‘selfishness’ allowable?”

“Certainly,” Seiji said with a nod as he fished his creditchip expertly from the pay slot. “Considering how overpeopled things are down on Earth, you could argue that—by choosing not to have children, by deciding that the continued quality survival of human and other species is more important than the survival of his or her own particular genetic material—that non-reproducing person is in fact engaging in a more altruistic behavior than those people who choose to have children to begin with. But nobody really gets that self-righteous about it here. We’re working the middle way here, between the extremes.”

Getting up from their table, they waved and called good-bye to Ehab. Walking out of the cafe, Jhana filled Seiji in more fully on her recent work with Heterocephalus glaber. His mention of altruism had reminded her of the little beasts.

“—and your ‘extended family networks’ sound a lot like what’s called ‘alloparenting’ in mole-rats,” Jhana said, finishing up (without further mention of Roger Cortland’s work) as they approached the bullet cart station. “The nonbreeding animals in each colony demonstrate a high degree of sociobiologically-determined altruism, probably in response to environmental constraints—the aridity of the regions in which they live, the difficulty of tunneling through the hard-packed earth, the patchiness of their geophyte food sources.”

The two of them glided down an escalator into the center of the station, Seiji standing beside her, quiet, thoughtful.

“An interesting paradox,” Seiji said as they stepped off the escalator. “The harder life is, the more it encourages altruistic behavior, at least among mole-rats. You’d think it would be just the opposite. I wonder if it might be true not only for mice but also for men? I mean, look at us here in this space habitat. The mole-rats and us—we both live in deserts, only ours is the high desert of space. We both live in colonies. Our population, too, will spread by budding off colonies to a distance, the way you say mole-rats already do.”

He gazed briefly at the few other people in the station with them and then at Jhana. She thought she saw in his eyes a flash of something—fascination with his own theorizing? Or something deeper, something his theorizing was meant to camouflage?

“And in both cases environmental constraints encourage altruism,” he said, gesturing toward the whole of the sphere. “The difficulty of bringing things up the gravity well is our version of the difficulty of ‘tunneling.’ Our food reserves aren’t that tight, but we can’t take for granted an already-existing ecosphere, one that will provide us with food and crops and everything we need for survival. We have to work at it. Because we had to build our ecosphere ourselves, we know how fragile and interconnected it is.”

They sat down on a bench and awaited the arrival of the next bullet cart. In a bush nearby a bird gave a trilling call. High in the sky above them, children dove and swooped in flying suits. Higher still, it was night.

“But what about the future residents?” Jhana asked. “Eventually the builders and the building of this place will only be a legend—what’s to prevent future generations from taking it all for granted?”

Seiji stared down at his hands.

“I’ve thought about that some. I don’t have an answer. There’s no guarantee they won’t duplicate Earth’s whole overpopulation/ecocollapse scenario on a small scale right here. All I can hope is that they’ll still be so caught up in the process of keeping this place whole and alive that in some sense they’ll never be able to forget what it is we’re up to—because they’ll be living it every day. If we’re lucky, their ‘sense of place’ will continue to make this a place of sense.”

They both smiled at his turn of phrase. In the station, lights began to flash softly, indicating the impending arrival of the next bullet cart. That different sort of flash passed through Seiji’s eyes as he glanced at her again, but then he was looking away, burying it all in words once more.

“I guess that’s where we differ from the mole-rats. You said the breeding female of the colony suppresses the breeding of all other females of the colony—a top-down suppression, an enforced altruism. Turn that into a human society and it would be the equivalent of an authoritarian state based on the idea that the rights of the individual must always be subordinated to the social order. That’s the sort of stuff your friend Roger is always warning against in his Public Sphere diatribes. Yet you say it’s in fact what he’s actually working on, in his pheromone research. Strange.”

Jhana wondered about that “your friend Roger” phrase—particularly the subtle querying tone behind it. She wanted to respond, but she found Seiji looking at her, openly, frankly, his gaze not turning away this time as he spoke.

“Involuntary—that’s the big difference,” he said adamantly. “What we’re trying to do here is voluntary. It’s an altruism based on the idea that individual freedom and social responsibility are equal and inseparable, that it’s impossible to truly have either without the other. That one change, from voluntary to involuntary, would turn our dream here into a nightmare. It would guarantee our experiment’s success—and its failure.”

The bullet cart appeared. Seiji glanced away. Jhana rose from the stone bench, surprised that Seiji, upon hearing of the mole-rats’ eusociality, had so quickly returned to those problems of freedom and responsibility that had also troubled her. Even though she had mentioned nothing further of Roger Cortland and his plans, he seemed to hover near them, present even in his absence.

Jhana lingeringly shook hands good-bye as she parted from Seiji, wondering how Tao-Ponto would respond to the implications of Cortland’s work. Walking away from her lunch date, the thought of Tao-Ponto and her supervisor’s “need to know” reminded her that she would need to meet with Seiji again, to pick his brain about the strange satellites growing in nearby space.

“But I didn’t get to ask you about the Future Perfect Imperative!” Jhana said, turning around, calling behind her as she moved toward the bullet cart. She’d have to ask Seiji for a tour of the solar power facilities outside the habitat next time they got together—that is, if there would be a next time. “At the party Ekwefi said you could tell me that story.”

“I can,” he called, looking relieved that this parting might lead to another meeting. “I will. How about tomorrow evening?”

“Sounds great! I’ll give you a call.”

Waving, Jhana settled into her seat as the cart closed around her, separating her from Seiji. She sighed. Somehow her conversations with Seiji had become like the stereogram patterns in the Chameleon—blatantly about one thing, latently about something else, something deeper, something more. She was beginning to enjoy Seiji’s company entirely too much. The thought that she was merely playing him for information, that he was supposed to be nothing more than a source—she found that idea more distasteful than ever. She sighed a second time. This Mata Hari stuff just wasn’t her calling.

* * * * * * *

Hours later—late into the evening, in fact—Roger was at last finishing his overview of the materials his mole-rat imp had gathered for him. After going through so much of it, he was indeed far more hopeful for the success of his project. Evidence of the still powerful but usually latent power of olfaction in human sexuality was everywhere in the literature, and he dutifully squirreled away comments and notes. Having come at last to Krafft-Ebing’s Psychopathia Sexualis, published in 1900, he felt he had gone as far back as he needed to go. Krafft-Ebing’s work definitely marked a hinterland boundary of some sort, for the book often seemed less a work of science than a collection of anecdotes on aberrant sexuality.

From the electronic text of the old book, Roger excerpted relevant passages by cursor, or point-and-shot them into note-form before throwing them into a notepad memory file.

Excerpted notes and sections from Krafft-Ebing’s Psychopathia Sexualis:

Althaus—sense of smell important re: many species’ reproduction. Almost all species at time of rutting emit a specially distinct odour from their genitals.

Schiff—extirpated olfactory nerves in puppies. As animals grew up, male unable to distinguish the female.

Mantegazza—removed eyes of rabbits. Defect constituted no obstacle to procreation, proof of importance of olfactory sense in sexual life of animals.

Many animals (musk ox, civet cat, beaver) possess on their sexual organs important glands which secrete substances having a very strong odor.

Cloquet—calls attention to sensual pleasure excited by odour of flowers. Richelieu lived in atmosphere redolent of heaviest perfumes in order to excite his sexual functions.

Zippe—cites both a passage in Song of Solomon (‘And my hands dropped with myrrh, and my fingers with sweet-smelling myrrh, upon the handles of the lock’ ) and the esteem in which geographically disparate peoples hold pleasant perfumes for their relation to the sexual organs, as proof of olfaction/sexuality link.

Most, professor in Rostock—“I learned from a sensual young peasant that he had excited many a chaste girl sexually, and easily gained his end, by carrying his handkerchief in his axilla for a time, while dancing, and then wiping his partner’s perspiring face with it.”

Krafft-Ebing—“The case of Henry III shows that contact with a person’s perspiration may be the exciting cause of passionate love. At the betrothal feast of the King of Navarre and Margaret of Valois, [Henry] accidentally dried his face with a garment of Maria of Cleves, which was moist with her perspiration. Although she was the bride of the Prince of Conde, Henry conceived immediately such a passionate love for her that he could not resist it, and made her, as history shows, very unhappy. An analogous instance is related of Henry IV, whose passion for the beautiful Gabriel is said to have originated at the instant when, at a ball, he wiped his brow with her handkerchief.”

Jager—regards the sweat as important in the production of sexual effects, and as being especially seductive.

Ploss—holds that attempts to attract a person of the opposite sex by means of the perspiration may be discerned under many forms in popular psychology.

—love of certain libertines and sensual women for perfumes indicates a relation between the olfactory and the sexual senses.

—tribal custom among Philippine Island natives: when it becomes necessary for an engaged couple to separate, they exchange articles of wearing apparel as tokens of faithfulness. These objects carefully preserved, covered with kisses, and repeatedly smelled.

—histological conformity between nose, genitals, and nipples: all have erectile tissue.

Roger stopped his scanning, surprised to observe that his own tissue was demonstrating some erectility. Strange, for none of these descriptions should have aroused him that much. Contrary to the olfactory emphasis of his research, his personal kink was quite visual, as he was well aware.

He knew how politically incorrect his kink was—especially for the son of a noted peace and social justice activist. The “progressive” types his mother had hung out with for the last twenty years were hardly perfect human beings, though—as he himself had learned. For a brief while at Oxford, Roger had tried to devote himself to the sort of Leftward causes that his mother would approve of—almost as if, for just a time, some of that maternal programming had clicked in. That didn’t last long, though, especially when he found that his ideas, his very thoughts, were devalued or ignored because he had “too much testosterone from that Y chromosome” and “too little melanin” in the layers of his skin. It was the worst sort of biological essentialism—the very thing the rads inveighed against, yet were guilty of themselves.

Oh, he could use the trump card of his middle name and Asian blood, but then they’d use that too, not his talents or abilities, just the tokenism of his “positive” biological markers. That’s what it came down to, too often: being used, the faculty rads using the graduate rads using the undergrad rads, all in the name of undeniably enlightened and highly moral causes.

Even to get a date he had to wade through all the faulty logic, the faulty generalizations of the Sex Wars: Men who blamed women-in-general for their own specific failures with certain individual women. Women who blamed men-in-general for their own specific failures with certain individual men. At one extreme stood the Androciders and Xtatix, who felt testosterone was a toxic poison that threatened the survival prospects of the species and could only be eliminated through the all-female reproductive process of ovular merging—as a result of which process no more males would be born and humanity would be saved. At the other extreme were the Gynociders and cYclones, who felt that estrogen was a toxic poison that threatened the survival prospects of the species and could only be eliminated through the all-male reproductive process of cellular Y-cloning—as a result of which no more females would be born and humanity would be saved. A plague on both their houses, Roger thought. He was glad to be shed of the whole lot of them.

Thinking of all this reminded him of the holodisk he’d picked up on Earth but had yet to view because he’d been so busy since his return. He began checking drawers in his desk, seeming to recall that he had stashed the disk in here somewhere. Yes, here it was: Free Fall Free-For-All.

As he turned over the pornholo package in his hands, he thought Why not? I’ve put in a lot of hours tonight. No idea what time it is, but there’s no one about, and there’s a player in the conference room down the hall....

Getting up from his chair, crystal disk in hand, he padded out of the lab and down the corridor. In the dark of the conference room, the player’s control pad glowed dimly. Locking the door of the conference room behind him, he walked forward, slid the small disk into the player, physically thumbed Play and Projection Display, and waited for its contents to spring forth into the room in glorious “virtual three-dimensionality.”

After a nice exterior establishing shot of a space habitat, the scene cut immediately to an orgy in low gravity, a moaning squelching squishing grunting knot of happily tangled bodies making the beast with many backs—all in slightly off-color 3-D. The low-gravity simulation was just wrong enough to remind Roger that the film had not been shot on location in space but on the cheap in some Earthside studio.

Watching, Roger soon saw that the holo was yet another Earthbound fantasy about what life was really like in a space colony. The habitat culture’s greater respect for the rights of consenting adults was, as usual, exaggerated out of all proportion and translated into the accepted Earthside mythology of space colony life as an unending carnival of sexual license. Somewhere in the popular imagination space colony sexual freedom seemed to have gotten tangled up with the sensual heaven of Islam—and gone that heaven one better with the introduction of the much-overrated “zero-gee sex.”

As the performers in virtual space before him feigned sexual ecstasies unknown to mere mortals, Roger felt like laughing. Watching orgies—zero-gee or otherwise—was not his particular kink anyway. He was glad when the action moved on to Commandante Professor Florio’s attempt to extract tall, dark, and glandsome hero Brock Rio from out of the moansquish pile—in order to assign him an Important Mission and get the Plot underway.

Plot summary of Free Fall Free-For-All:

Professor Florio explains at great length to Brock Rio that Earth has long since become a howling wasteland. The human population boom there went bust centuries before. Under the successive scourges of a generalized ecocatastrophe—with some mid-scale nuclear and biological wars thrown in for good measure—mere anarchy was loosed upon the Motherworld and the habitat severed all connections with the home planet. Now, however, in the interests of Science and the Future of All Humanity, Professor Florio has become convinced that poison levels have fallen enough on Earth that it is worth the risk to send One Brave Individual down the gravity well to Earth’s surface, to make contact with the few humans who remain, learn about and report back on their culture, and (without coercion) bring back one of the natives for examination—all to determine just how heavy a mutation burden the survivors of Earth’s catastrophe might now be carrying.

Without hesitation, hero Brock, outstanding space-pilot/anthropologist/ ecologist/linguist/ athlete/cocksman, accepts the mission. Bidding his coquettish blonde most-frequent sex partner Gwen Blanc a long, passionate, crotch-grinding farewell, he’s off in his spaceship to visit Mother Earth in her decay.

All does not go as planned, however. Despite the fact that Professor Florio has programmed into ship’s memory the coordinates for that area on Earth’s surface which (according to satellite observation and computer analysis) is most likely to still be populated and least likely to be “genetically burdened,” Brock’s ship nonetheless malfunctions, crashing in the Poisoned Lands several hundred kilometers south of his destination.

Wounded and dazed, all communication gone between himself and his home, he struggles for survival against fierce mutant beasts and even fiercer mutated men and women whose particular genetic alterations seem mainly to have multiplied their erogenous zones, so that supernumerary lips and breasts and buttocks and penises and vaginas are very much on display. Captured and kept as a sex slave, Brock is worn down almost to death by the sensual needs of the over-endowed indigenes.

Escaping at last, he wanders in the desert until—falling unconscious and on the very brink of death—he is rescued by the leader of a komodo-dragon caravan that’s carting the remains of his ship northward. Regaining consciousness under the ministrations of beautiful dark caravan leader Morchella Esculenta, Brock quickly learns her language and explains to her about his ship and his own origin in the space habitat. Knowing of the space colony only through legends and superstitions, Morchella is at first skeptical, but gradually, as they travel toward her home in the city-state of Dodona, she comes to believe Brock’s story, even begins to fall in love with him. At the same time Brock is coming to truly appreciate her and her world—to enjoy living on the surface of a planet rather than in a hollow sphere in space. The broad bowl of the sky, the sense that this world, so damaged, is slowly renewing itself—all of this appeals to him. So too does the barbaric civility of Morchella’s ways.

As he watched, Roger could see the pattern forming up for the payoff on his kink. The “true love” developing between Brock and Morchella (remarkably chaste up to this point, for a porno) seemed in the best traditions of women’s romance fiction, but back home in the orbital habitat Gwen was waiting, the triangle was forming. Triangles were old news in the traditionally female matter of romance—only this time they were tricked out in the traditionally male garb of action-adventure science fiction.

Web powered, captioned plot summary of Free Fall Free-For-All, continued:

Brock and Morchella reach Dodona, where Brock learns that Morchella is in fact the adventure-loving daughter of the High Priestess. Brock proves that he is the Chosen One From The Sky by fulfilling the legendary test of sexual stamina (satisfying the sexual desires of all the temple virgins in a single night). He then further astounds the rulers of Dodona with his ability to read and translate the Sacred Book, Guaranty’s Myth’s Edge and Nation, a dream text covered in gaudy metallic-purple adorned with lavender knot-work.

Using materials gleaned from the Dodona Antiquarium, Brock the Chosen succeeds in restoring his transceiver to working order. Informing Professor Florio and the space colonists that he is still alive, he requests a rescue ship capable of carrying himself and (gazing approvingly toward Morchella) one other passenger.

Preparations are made and the ship from space arrives with Gwen Blanc piloting. Leaping from her craft and striding past the assembled dignitaries, Gwen plants a fervent kiss on Brock’s mouth. Brock awkwardly introduces Gwen and Morchella to each other. From the sudden shift in her body language and her increasingly pouty demeanor, it’s clear that Gwen has immediately suspicioned that Morchella is the Other Woman. The handshake that passes between the two women is strangely prolonged, almost as if they are testing each other’s strength.

As they return to the ship, Morchella and Gwen, in their ceremonial finest, walk ahead of Brock, very briskly and very straight-of-spine, almost as if participating in some strange foot race where each competitor not only has to reach the finish line first but also has to stand tallest while doing it.

The performers playing the dark woman and the blonde stood almost exactly the same height and looked to be about the same weight, Roger noticed, though Morchella was fuller in the shoulders and chest while Gwen was heavier around the hips and thighs. An even match, he thought, his arousal growing.

Plot summary of Free Fall Free-For-All, continued:

Brock takes the controls of the three-seater and pilots the craft off Earth and up the gravity well, trying to ignore the tension behind him, where the two women sit at opposite ends of the back cabin like fighters in their corners. From his expression it’s clear Brock expects them at any minute to hear a bell and leap at each other.

But they do not. The tension of the triangle continues to build and build as Brock spends more time with Morchella than Gwen will excuse, even in the name of Science. Finally one day, when the three of them are alone together in the padded confines of a low-gravity gymnasium, the tension explodes into action.

This was what Roger had been waiting for: Contrasting female bodies rushing together with an audible smack; enraged cursing and yelling; stinging slaps; red-faced fury; murder in the eyes; circling, wary, crouching stances; hands extending like claws, grabbing hair and scalp and yanking savagely; women kneeing and kicking each other; female fighters clinching in hostile embrace, breast against breast, snared in each other’s arms; solid head-locks; choke holds; muffled grunts; short shrieks; arm-locked upper bodies; half and full nelsons; leg lifts; hip throws; scissor holds; hand clenches; long raking scratches; strangle holds; popping, stinging blows; the tangled ball of intertwined arms and legs; straddles; pins; submissions—all the impedimenta of his kink without a name—half voyeur’s spectacle and half sadist’s pleasure at seeing others’ pain—being played out in the virtual reality before him.

Roger privately thought of himself as a scopogynomachiaphile—his own coinage for his nameless sexual obsession. He had been one for as long as he could remember, his kink like a dark twisted root anchored deep, irremovably, in the soil of his soul. He didn’t know where his kink came from—his mother arguing with his crazy aunt? a girl-fight seen in grade school?—but he did know it was making him come now.

Behind him a cardkey scrabbled in the lock of the door to the conference room. Putting himself quickly and sloppily back into his pants, Roger turned to see Marissa standing wide-eyed in the doorway. In the pornholo’s virtual reality, the fight played on, life-sized.

“Oh, sorry,” Marissa said, embarrassed, closing the door again quickly.

Roger sat, slumped and pondering. The new day must be beginning. He must have stayed in the lab all night. He felt numb somehow—too numb to get up and turn off the pornholo.

Plot summary of Free Fall Free-For-All concludes:

Morchella, Brock’s true love, defeats her blonde opponent. The habitat scientists determine that Morchella is not genetically burdened at all. When she opts to return to Earth, Brock decides to go with her—to monogamy and a settled life on an inside-out world. They ride off, not into the sunset but down the gravity well, new Adam and new Eve bent on re-establishing Heaven on Earth.

As the pornholo credits flashed up, Roger found himself still wondering how much of it Marissa had seen—how much of his secret kink she might even now be figuring out. Would she make the connection between it and his other obsessions—mole-rat society, the human pheromone project? The thought of it made him curse his own stupidity. Twice in twenty four hours, once intentionally with that Tao-Ponto woman Jhana and once accidentally with Marissa, he had let too much of himself show, let his plans and desires be nakedly exposed to others. Who knew how all these non-violencers up here—especially his mother—might react if they became aware of a particularly crucial “side-effect” of the pheromone he was trying to develop? Would they banish him? Send him into life-long exile, never to return?

He should be so lucky. What would be so bad about getting away from all these overpolite idealists, really? People who would hardly admit they belched or farted or did anything physical and human, much less admit of their own dark sides? If, amid all their public chatter in this Happy Isle In The Sky, the only truly private, individuating event was a guy watching a porno, then so be it. That said less about him than about the sad state of their so-called “diversity” here. He would be glad to be free of the tight constraints of their insufferable good manners, their intolerable tolerance.

Still, he would have to guard carefully against such thoughtless self-revelation in the future. He had jeopardized his project enough already.