Chapter Nine
“The RATs have changed again,” Aleister said, appearing with Lakshmi in Lev’s virtual overlays. Korchnoi was in virtual space already, doing research in military history for Mob Cad’s upcoming performance, which he and the band had now agreed to officially title The Temple Guardians—more to meet publicity deadlines than anything else.
“How so?” he asked.
“Here,” Lakshmi said. “We’ll shoot you an extract.”
Passage embedded in RAT code:
Paradise always has been hollow. The word ‘paradise’ itself is from the Avestan pairi-daeza, ‘the wall around.’ That’s the paradox of paradise: paradise is the wall around, the boundary. In that sense the inside-out world of the orbital habitat is the perfect paradise, a world that’s all wall around, a spherical wrap-around wall world.
“Seems pretty harmless,” Lev said with a shrug, perusing a Sumerian war chariot in another part of his virtual space.
“Try this one,” Aleister suggested, shooting another marquee of three-dimensional words into Lev’s virtual space.
Passage embedded in RAT code:
A Spanish philosopher once claimed that human consciousness is a disease. Maybe Earth would be better off if humanity quarantined itself. Maybe the only way Earth can be a Paradise again is if humanity walls itself out of that world.
“Sort of like quirky fortune cookies,” Lev said, scanning a diagram of Greek hoplite armor. “Interesting, though I can’t say much for fortune-cookie philosophy.”
“Better not speak too soon, Lev,” Lakshmi warned. “There are hundreds or even thousands of these encysted or embedded bits of text. A lot of them are coming out of the Public Sphere. As near we can tell, all are being taken from already extant sources—including your song lyrics.”
“Well,” Lev remarked, moving around information on Roman short swords, “even cybertoothed rats can show good taste, I suppose.”
“The Rats don’t show much of anything,” Lakshmi said. “Their autonomy is pretty limited. Aleister’s found out more about their history. They’re just being used.”
Lev could sense that Lakshmi was going to start talking about the “distributed consciousness” again, so he decided to head her off.
“So, Aleister,” Lev asked the man he knew was lurking somewhere behind the webspider icon with the pudgy face, “what have you found out about the RATs and where they came from?”
“The Abbey where they were developed was a pretty interesting place,” Aleister said. “Turn of the century New Agers who believed in ‘mental singularities’, portals in the sky, a gradual, Gnostic version of the end of the world. The ‘Rainbow Door’ opening into the ‘World of Light’ on the ‘Day of Doom’—that’s what they talk about in their literature. What I don’t get is why a lot of high-powered information-industry types listed themselves as Myrrhisticineans and donated scads of money to the Abbey.”
“What about this guy Manqué,” Lev asked, examining diagrams of pikes and halberds in another section of his virtuality, “the one who created the RATs?”
“According to the surviving members—the ones who were off the mesa the day it was destroyed—Manqué was something of a heretic. While the Myrrhisticineans generally were gradualists, Manqué was an apocalyptist. He believed the Earth itself could be the rainbow door in the vault of heaven—that any day could be doomsday, every day a Judgement Day. He was in favor of a ‘technological push’ to open the door so they could walk into the world of light right now.”
“And that was tolerated by the rest of the brethren and sistren?” Lev asked, scanning specifications of blunderbusses and early musketry.
“Certainly,” Aleister replied. “I’ve scanned some Myrrhisticinean texts. The ex-nun who founded the group, Alicia Gonsalves, had an interesting hodgepodge of influences - mystical scientists like Arthur C. Clarke and scientific priests like Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, for instance. She believed humanity’s role on Earth was to create the conditions for the manifestation of the divine. The role of the Myrrhisticineans in particular was to midwife the birth of a technology so advanced as to be indistinguishable from divinity.”
“But what’s that got to do with the Rats?” Lev asked, pausing from his overview of the evolution of small arms and light gunnery.
“I’m not sure yet,” Aleister admitted, “but I do know that the Myrrhies were particularly big into a Teilhardian notion of evolution. Not long before the disaster happened, a team from Kerrismatix installed an ALEPH, an Artificial Life Evolution Programming Heuristic, on the Abbey’s ParaLogics systems. Manqué was the Abbey’s network manager, its web spider, so he had to be involved. Given what I can figure from the RATs I’ve decrypted, he developed them using the ALEPH’s predation subheuristic—”
“But the RATs aren’t what they used to be,” Lakshmi put in impatiently. “Manqué developed them as a joke: A-life with nasty habits. From the survivors’ reports, we know that Manqué released them in the Abbey net, where they took to devouring a user’s mannequin, the old-style virtual body in electronic space—while the user just happened to be inhabiting said mannequin.”
“That must have made him popular with the locals,” Lev said with a smirk.
“Hardly,” Lakshmi continued. “Even the serene brothers and sisters of the Abbey didn’t much take to being virtually ‘eaten alive’.”
“They sent a bunch of messages flaming down to Manqué,” Aleister put in. “Eventually—all dolled up in a Pied Piper of Hamelin mannequin, according to the reports—Manqué piped away and the RATs followed him through the Abbey virtuality, until they were all drowned in a buffer ‘river’.”
“Then ours aren’t the same RATs?” Lev asked, looking over from a display on cavalry charges.
“There’s a lot of evidence in the actual code that says ours are highly related to his,” Aleister said firmly, glancing toward Lakshmi, as if they’d had this discussion before.
“But our RATs do behave very differently,” Lakshmi demurred. “We’re only finding the ones that want to be found—with messages something wants to communicate. I’ve gotten a bunch of inquiries from industry friends on Earth. All the new information being beamed into cislunar space has not escaped their attention. Those trideo game things were the initial vector, but it’s spread. Sudden shifts in machine memory-usage suggest, to my contacts at least, that stealthy forms of self-replicating software—the RATs—have thoroughly infiltrated almost all of Earth’s infosphere. Now, though, it seems they’re less Rats than Retrievers, fetching and sampling quantum information packets, then returning the quips almost instantly to the infostream.”
“And now you’re going to tell me,” Lev said, unable to dodge the inevitable any longer, “that the master those retrievers are fetching for is your ‘distributed consciousness’.”
“That’s right,” Aleister said, intervening. “There’s just too much evidence for it, Lev. I think Manqué’s work didn’t end with the RATs. I think he was working toward that ‘technology indistinguishable from divinity’—but something went wrong and the Sedona disaster, the Abbey event, happened. Someone saved the Black Box from the wreckage, though—or beamed Manqué’s work off-site and stored it before the disaster. I think our ‘distributed consciousness’ found where that work was stored.”
“And how did it do that?” Lev asked, frustrated at the particular electro-metaphysical turn the conversation was taking—and by the fact that it had now fully taken him away from his military research for the Mob Cad performance.
“The same way it’s monitoring everything we’re saying and doing right now,” Aleister said, very quietly.
“Aw, come on!” Lev exploded. “Net stands for ‘no easy transcendance’, remember? What are you saying? That this thing’s omniscient, like God or Santa Claus?”
“Not omniscient,” Lakshmi said thoughtfully, “but it does have a really big data base. And a vast array of sensors, too.”
“Not omnipresent either,” Aleister added, “but it’s got lots of remotes, peripherals, and actuators, if it needs them. Body electric—and a big strong one at that. You ought to come and see the latest progress on what it’s building at Lakshmi’s place—in its spare time.”
“I will, I will,” Lev said, “just as soon as I have some spare time. I just hope your god-in-a-box waits till my show is over before it comes down out of the stage machinery.”
“We hope so too,” Lakshmi said with a smile, but then quickly grew more serious. “Look, Lev, this is getting too big for just us to handle. We’ve got to bring more people in on this. I was thinking of contacting some of the encrypted names, the ones it sent us. Seiji Yamaguchi and Atsuko Cortland in particular. That okay with you?”
“Lakshmi, I’m surprised,” Lev said, feigning astonishment. “Of course it’s okay. Since when have you ever needed my permission to do anything?”
“Since we all got stuck in this together,” she said. “I know you’re busy, but we’ll keep sending you the messages we pull out of the RAT code, and the sources for them when we can find them. See if you can make any sense of it, notice any patterns.”
“I’ll do my best—in my spare time,” Lev said, signing off and returning to his research in military history for the band’s performance. Somehow, though, after everything Aleister and Lakshmi had just told him, all this history of the ways in which humans had mauled, mutilated, and murdered one another—it all seemed childish and petty now, toylike, just variants of pop-guns and firecrackers and sharp sticks.
* * * * * * *
What Marissa had seen Roger up to that early morning had bothered her deeply—less in itself than from the way it fit into a disturbing larger pattern. Not wanting to think about it, she shrugged back her long reddish hair as she goggled in and suited up for the CAMD virtuality, diving deep into her work once again.
Her anti-senescence project was progressing slowly, even though she had largely left behind the mole-rat part of it and was concentrating almost exclusively on human possibilities. Despite this shift, though, ordinary nonviolent mortality in humans was proving to be the result of an almost unbelievably complex synergy of factors. Death seemed never to be the simple result of one thing. Certainly, looking at telomeres and cell division alone had long since been proven to be too simplistic a methodology, so she was stuck with a broad spectrum approach.
She’d had to examine patterns of mutation and evolution at many scales—not only the vector virus’s, but the potential human host’s too. Even when she thought she had those possibilities covered, Marissa still had to spend more time working through genespace, finding intron and pseudogene locations where her viral vector could safely splice in manufactured coding—for telomerases and a variety of telomere stabilizers that didn’t induce cancer, as well as extra engineered copies of so-called Methuselah genes, particularly DNA sequences for making free-radical absorbers like superoxide dismutase.
Despite its frustrations, Marissa had to admit that her work in virtuality had a hypnotic effect. It took her mind far away from the real. When she was tweaking molecules and twisting fate in the CAMD room, time had no meaning to her, so thoroughly was she caught up in her own world. In that timeless realm she truly felt she was more than just a researcher developing a viral vector against senescence—important as that work was. She was more than just a genetic cryptographer cracking and rewriting the code. Most of all, she wasn’t any longer the poor kid who had struggled up from the hardpan and broken glass of the fringes and trailer parks; she was a powerful woman riding the coiling serpents of the DNA molecule, a high-born lady astride the double dragon, holding in her hand the dragon’s secretly hoarded pearl of great price, the talismanic object that could cure the serpent-wound by which mortality had come into the world.
Did she want that, though? Certainly the theory of clonal selection, evolution on a somatic scale, even directed selection on that same scale—all suggested her anti-senescence project could be accomplished. But should it? Clicking out of virtuality, removing her goggle overlays and gloves and shutting down the holo display at last, she thought that, whatever she might be feeling about Roger at the moment, he was probably right about the danger of releasing an incurable Immortality Plague on Earth. Unlimited life extension without corresponding limits to birthrate would lead straight to a vastly accelerated boom/bust cycle in human population, an inevitable carrying-capacity disaster and, paradoxically, the very possible extinction of the human species as a whole—by violence and starvation, though not by disease or “natural causes”.
Sad, she thought as she walked out of the lab and down the corridor. Especially since the absolute increase in the population growth rate had peaked fifty years ago. True, the human population was still growing, but at a “decreasing rate of increase”, as one of her undergraduate biology profs had put it. He’d been full of phrases like that. To him, cancerous growths were “cells with an ego problem”—and humanity was a “species with an ego problem” especially when it completely eliminated other species out of ignorance or for its own selfish concerns.
Leaving the desert preserve building and coming out into the late afternoon light, Marissa thought of the Tennyson passage that had been carved in stone over one of the entryways to the old Life Sciences building on her undergraduate campus: “Nature, so careful of the type, so careless of the single life.” But that favorite biology professor had said the problem with people was just the opposite: “Humanity, so careful of the single life, so careless of the type.” All those individuals wanting the genetic immortality of children for themselves, until the planet as a whole was being driven toward ecological collapse by the sheer weight of human numbers and their demands. Victims of our own success. Crazy.
Marissa’s vectoring of cancer-derived immortalizing factors into human beings seemed hardly likely to make the species saner, or cure it of its egotism. No, Roger was right. She would have to be very careful, so very careful in her research, the closer it came to fruition.
Yet Roger had been wrong about so much else. He privileged numbers and abstractions over life, but life had a weird way of working against simple numbers, and simpler laws of thermodynamics. Looking into the sphered garden of the habitat curving away from her into the surrounding distance, Marissa realized that Roger had, for one thing, crucially underestimated the inhabitants here—and the power of their ideas.
The greatest resource here wasn’t something that could be mined from the Moon or grown in the ag tori or caught in the sun’s rays. The greatest resource here was something human beings found in themselves. Sitting down in the grass and looking up, Marissa could feel that resource about her as tangibly as the light on her face and the air in her hair and the ground beneath her butt. Hope is a resource, she thought, and the orbital habitat is richer in it than any place I’ve ever been.
* * * * * * *
Running a brush through her hair as she waited for Seiji to arrive, Jhana tried to take stock of her day. At the lab, old Larkin, though not yet fully warmed to her presence, was at least not as oddly-disposed toward her as he had been. The DNA fingerprinting scans and their importance for her research into genetic drift were panning out even better than she’d hoped, too.
But all was not sweetness and light. Mr. Tien-Jones had sent another confidential missive. She glanced at it once more on the bathroom counter beside her.
TO: Jhana Meniskos, Ph. D.
FROM: Balance Tien-Jones, Ph.D. TPAG Dir. R/D (Bio)
RE: Projects
Tao-Ponto will be contacting Dr. Roger Cortland concerning his pheromone research. That lead is much appreciated, but we’re a bit perturbed that neither you nor any other of Tao-Ponto’s observers in the habitat have made any progress on Diamond Thunderbolt or its possible links to the structures currently being deployed in space near the satellite solar power stations. Discovering the nature of those structures has become all the more imperative because they have, only hours ago, emitted a very brief flash—indeterminate as to nature or content, but Weapons Division is calling it a ‘test firing.’ United Nations and Corporate Presidium have begun closed-door hearings. Please make investigation into nature of Diamond Thunderbolt and possible linkage to aforementioned structures your TOP PRIORITY.
Jhana stared at the message, her lips turned down in an expression of vague disgust. Was she supposed to be a scientist up here—or a spy? Whatever was going on, things seemed to be heating up. Ol’ T-J had dropped the cryptic wording of his earlier messages, at least.
Her front door buzzed. That would be Seiji. Dropping the missive into the recycling chute, she hoped he could shed some light on whatever it was Tao-Ponto was looking for.
“Good evening, Seiji,” she said, opening the door on the bearded man dressed in a blue sweater and white shorts. “Come in. I don’t know why I even bother to keep that door shut, since apparently nobody up here steals anything. Everybody knows everybody.”
“Our small-town size has its advantages, no doubt,” Seiji said as they walked through the living area toward a small glassed-in solarium, through the windows of which the flowers of the back garden could be seen blooming. “Disadvantages too, though. When I was growing up, I was more used to urban anonymity. Everybody knows your business, up here. Sometimes it feels like we’re living in a fishbowl—like privacy was something we left back on Earth.”
Jhana smiled and nodded. She had felt a little of the same thing.
“I imagine you could get to know almost everybody here in a few months’ time,” Jhana said as they passed through the solarium. “We’ll be taking tea on the patio in the back garden. So, you grew up mostly in large cities then?”
Reaching the umbrella-shaded cafe table on the patio, Seiji stood with his hand on a white metal chair.
“That’s right. In Japan, the States, England,” he said, looking down at the chair and tapping it briefly with his knuckles—as if to test its solidity. “Don’t get me wrong: I’m very much a booster of this place and its emphasis on communal values. Just not completely used to it, is all. I’m told that towns of similar size back on Earth have the same ‘fishbowl’ quality, but I doubt even they have as low a crime rate.”
“I see your point. Please, sit down,” Jhana said, gesturing toward the chair. “What’s to steal here? I mean, everybody has pretty much the same standard of living—no large disproportions in the distribution of wealth, as far as I can tell. Everyone seems well-educated and dedicated to what the community’s about—though the teenagers do seem a bit on the rebellious side.”
Pulling his chair out from the table and sitting down, Seiji laughed.
“What can you expect? They’re the first generation even partially raised in space. Right now, they’re big fish in our small, isolated pond. I’m on a committee that’s working with that, though. We’re developing a sort of initiation rite for them—a month spent in deep isolation, in space, working on the outside of this habitat or others as they’re built. All of us on the committee went through it, a couple months back. Really changes the way you see things, gives you a properly humble perspective on the universe. When the initiates come back, the whole community will gather to officially welcome them to full status as adult citizens of the habitat. It’s as close as we can get to the old idea of a vision quest or ordeal rite.”
“Isn’t that sort of exposure outside potentially dangerous?” Jhana asked.
“Certainly,” Seiji said. “My brother’s death itself probably had something to do with a failed personal initiation rite or quest. He was trying to do it alone, though—outside of any sort of social framework. The hazard of madness or death in the ordeal will still be real, but our initiates will at least be doing it within a social framework that’ll reduce their risk somewhat.”
“But what about death here?” Jhana asked suddenly, for reasons of her own. “I don’t mean that I think Earth’s going to invade and start killing people or something, but I was just wondering. Death’s part of the big cycle too, right? But I haven’t seen any graveyards up here.”
They fell silent for a moment as Death sat down to wait for tea with them.
“You’re right,” Seiji said slowly. “We’ve had very few deaths up here—almost a miracle in itself, when you consider the percentage of our population that’s older. But this is no Eden. We know death is waiting. There’s been some discussion—and remarkably little consensus on the issue. If you think population control is a tough nut to crack, just try talking about the recycling of human bodies. We can’t burn them—too polluting, even if we just pumped the ash and smoke into space. That would only make for more space junk and debris and a hazard to astrogation in the long run. In the colony itself we can’t afford to give over land area dedicated solely to graveyard space—and from an ecological standpoint the bodies shouldn’t be isolated, they or their ashes really should be put back into the cycle as quickly and completely as possible. Feed the tree, as it’s called. But how to do that in a way that the living will regard as respectful to the dead?”
“No one wants to think of their relatives being passed through something like a rendering plant, I suppose,” Jhana said, clearing her throat.
“You know it. Some of the bereaved may want to bury their dead at home, in the gardens or woods. Some may not want to be reminded, may not want to have the dead so close at hand. Those living in the central sphere may decide to bury their dead in the agricultural tori, those living in the tori may decide they want their dead buried in the gardens of the central sphere, some may even want their remains to be sent back down the well to Earth or fired into the sun for the ultimate cremation—as ecologically ‘wrong’ or prohibitively expensive as such death exports might be. As the colony moves out of its own adolescence we’ll have to give more thought to the elderly and the children, to the ancestors and the progeny, the long view of past and future. We’ll have to face it in a deep way, since continuing to deal with death only as an ‘inconvenience’ would ultimately make our work here hypocritical. It’s a difficult call, particularly because of our isolation up here.”
“But that isolation can be a plus, too, don’t you think?” Jhana said, sitting down across from him. “There’s the cohesiveness of a remote island settlement, here.”
“Exactly,” Seiji said. “If someone stole something here, everyone would know who the rightful owner is, and since we’re so far from Earth—the nearest market to ‘fence’ things in—it would be more trouble than it’s worth to try to smuggle stolen goods out. And the idea of ownership itself—”
They were distracted by the sound of a teapot whistling to full boil.
“Wait!” Jhana said. “Hold that thought while I go get our tea. I’ll be right back.”
While Jhana went inside to pour tea, Seiji glanced at the garden. When she returned with cups and saucers on a tray Jhana found her guest smiling.
“You’re been keeping your garden very well,” Seiji said approvingly.
“Oh, that’s easy,” said Jhana, placing the tea cups on the table and sitting down. “The garden’s designer did such a fine job that I have barely anything to do.”
“Thank you,” Seiji said in return, smiling, bowing his head slightly to the compliment. “What was I going on about when you left?”
“Private ownership.”
“Yes, that was it. That’s the root cause of theft,” Seiji asserted. “As long as you have private property there’ll be theft.”
“The root of all evil grows a popular bush,” Jhana commented.
“Sure does. Right now, we’re pretty much a decentralized society of free, uncoerced small owners, but in the long run I see this colony, at least, becoming more and more communal in terms of ownership.”
“Decentralized yet communal?”
“Yeah, if you can picture that. Most of the land area here in the sphere, the crop area in the tori, and the manufacturing at all gravities is already cooperatively controlled.”
“What about the use of credit chips and money?” Jhana asked.
“That’s increasingly just for the sake of the HOME consortium’s record-keeping,” Seiji assured her. “It’s only a matter of time.”
“Is that your ‘future perfect imperative’?” Jhana asked dryly, cocking her head at him.
“No, no,” Seiji said with a laugh. “That’s a different story. From the past.”
“Well?” Jhana could hardly believe the usually voluble Seiji was actually being reticent about something. “Go ahead.”
“I can do better than that,” Seiji said, fiddling with his personal data unit. “It happened fourteen years ago, when my brother Jiro and I were in high school, at a Latin School run by priests, in the US. We were the ‘studio audience’ classroom for a distance learning environment, so I thought the original situation might still be recorded somewhere. Looking for it gave me something to do when I was obsessing, after my brother’s death. Eventually, the diocese sent it to me. Ah, here it is.”
Seiji shot the old-format videotape to Jhana’s data unit and they watched it in the false 3D of sharespace. A man in the black garb and collar of a Roman Catholic priest appeared before a classroom full of students.
“That was our Latin teacher, Father Stargoba,” Seiji narrated. “An intense guy—former Golden Gloves bantamweight boxer.”
Jhana thought “intense” was putting it mildly. The priest’s face was twitching and his fists clenching as he scanned the classroom for someone to answer a question he’d just put to all of them. Jhana turned up the sound.
“Don’t any of you know?” Father Stargoba shouted. “Jiro Yamaguchi. Scripsero. Meaning, tense, mood!”
Jhana watched as Seiji’s brother Jiro swallowed hard. Stargoba’s sharp stare seemed to spike out from behind his steel-rimmed glasses and transfix Jiro in his desk like a butterfly on a mounting board. A vein in the priest’s forehead pulsed and a muscular tic flared along the man’s jaw, his face in close-up reddening angrily from the black of his priestly collar to the short iron brush of his close-cropped hair.
“Speak up!”
“Scripsero,” Seiji’s brother said, his voice quavering. “Meaning: I shall have written. Tense: future perfect. Mood: uh, imperative.”
“What?” the priest yelled, exploding in a chalk-dust frenzy at the green blackboard. “There is no future perfect imperative! Only the indicative has all six tenses. The subjunctive has no future or future perfect, and the imperative has only the present and the future—no other tenses! The present, imperfect, and future are the tenses of incomplete or continued action, while the perfect, pluperfect, and future perfect are the tenses of completed action. Think, Yamaguchi! The imperative is the mood of command or entreaty. Why command or entreat for something that’s already done? It’s ridiculous!”
“But if it’s in the future it isn’t—”
“It’s in the future perfect, Yamaguchi!” Father Stargoba snapped. “The past future. I shall have written. From the vantage of a given point in the future the action talked about will already be completed, will already have been done or taken place. A future perfect imperative is impossible because it demands that an action be completed and continuing at the same time—a logical impossibility. You see that?”
“Yes,” Jiro said, nodding mutely. But even to Jhana, watching it on old video, it was clear that Seiji’s brother didn’t see that at all.
“Good,” Father Stargoba said, satisfied. “So tell us the mood of scripsero.”
“Indicative, Father,” Jiro said. But Jhana could almost hear the boy trying to keep the tone of resignation out of his voice.
“Good,” said Father Stargoba, his blood pressure apparently falling at last. “Let’s return to our translation.”
Seiji shut off the datafeed and took a long sip of his tea. His eyes seemed to be looking at something in another place and time.
“I was only able to finally get the tape of that class a couple months ago,” Seiji said. “After all these years, it’s still as bad as I remember. What happened in that class was no big deal to Stargoba, but it left a real mark on my brother. He wanted to know why the future perfect imperative should be any less possible than any of the other language phantoms we studied. Language, after all, was something people created, something we made real, something we could change. Logic too—same thing. For Jiro and me, the future perfect imperative became a sort of shorthand for a lot of things.”
“What things?” Jhana asked, finishing her tea.
“Oh, I don’t know,” Seiji said, glancing up at her. “Shorthand for getting beyond human stubbornness, narrow-mindedness. Shorthand for the ridiculous ‘language is everything’ idea, the notion that language and symbols can capture the whole of human experience, contain the alpha and omega of human consciousness. Shorthand for the incompleteness of any system or theory.”
“It meant all that?”
“Yeah,” Seiji said, smiling awkwardly. “In a mostly unspoken way, but yeah, it meant all that. It means more and more to me all the time. The future perfect imperative. It means constant striving, the unending opening of new paths, the refusal to take ‘Impossible!’ for an answer. Perfection as something always to be striven for, precisely because it can never be obtained. A constant challenging of the assumptions of knee-jerk traditions and mindless conformity. That’s what my brother was all about.”
Seiji toyed with his tea cup a moment, then set it aside.
“That’s what really appeals to me about the space habitats and the opening of this frontier, too. Each habitat can be different. I complained about the lack of anonymity here—probably a function of small population. But people can choose to make the population density of their worlds as crowded or as solitary as they wish. Eventually, given a multitude of worlds to choose from, settlers can decide what sort of political and social organization they want—they can experiment, or they can stick with what’s been tried. Different religious groups can choose to build their own worlds, if they wish. Personally I’d rather see more integration of human beings from diverse cultures, the way it is here, than some sort of neo-tribal fragmentation all over space, but that’ll have to be left up to each group to decide. In any case, there’d hopefully always be that ‘openness to diversity’ Atsuko Cortland and the other founders are always talking about.”
Jhana began gathering the tea things. Seiji helped her take them back into the house.
“Atsuko Cortland—she’s Roger Cortland’s mother?” Jhana asked as they soundwashed the dishes and put them away.
“Yeah. You’d hardly guess two such different people might be related, would you?”
“I don’t know. I’ve never met the mother.”
“I’ll have to introduce you to her,” Seiji said, then smiled. “That would really be diversity—a world for Roger Cortland, and another for his mother! If that could be done, there could be worlds for everyone. Even better, one world where they could both be happy.” He paused, stopping halfway to the shelf where his hand was taking a teacup. “Maybe even one where my brother could have been taken in, appreciated, understood. A world he wouldn’t have felt the need to leave at such a young age.”
That trapped feeling that Jhana had first felt upon hearing Seiji speak of his brother’s death returned—even more powerfully now than when he’d spoken of it at Arthur and Susan’s party, her first night here. That party seemed months or years ago, though it was in fact not long ago at all.
Looking at Seiji, Jhana realized the man was still somehow trying to work his way through a grief too deep for tears, a guilt too deep for forgiveness. She did not want to think about it, for it reminded her too much of her own grief, her own guilt. Yet somebody’s guilt would have to be faced before she could get on with asking him about those things which so intensely interested her employer—those paranoid plots and counterplots which seemed so trivial at the moment.
“Come on,” she said, taking him by the arm. “Let’s go walk down by the river. You can tell me about your brother as we go.”
They left the house and walked along paths among gardens and through woods, but said little until they came to the fern-banked path along the water’s edge. The stream reminded Jhana of mossy green tributaries that she had once seen flowing toward the Thames, in the part of that river near Oxford, where it was called the Isis.
“Let us cultivate our garden,” Seiji said suddenly, apropos of nothing and everything.
“What Voltaire has Candide say, as his final injunction,” Jhana said, recognizing the quote. “When we were walking past the gardens I was thinking of the same thing.”
“Our garden—not someone else’s,” Seiji said. “To mind our own cultivation, and not mind or exploit the cultivation of others.”
“Hard to do, sometimes,” Jhana said thoughtfully. Seiji nodded.
“After my brother started having his psychological problems, I very much wanted to be my brother’s keeper, to mind his business too, as much as I could. To do that, though, would have been to interfere in his freedom to live the life he wanted to live, even when I feared—even when I knew, deep down—that it was a life tending toward an early death. I couldn’t balance the costs. Couldn’t figure out how to reconcile respect for his freedom with compassion for his suffering.”
They had come to a small mooncrete footbridge that arched steeply over the water where the river—really not much more than a stream—broadened to a large, slow-flowing, mirror-smoothness that lifted a variety of water-lilies and lotuses toward the light it reflected. She and Seiji stopped and stood, leaning their elbows on the railing of the bridge, gazing down into the water’s mirroring stillness.
“Could you see your brother’s death coming?” Jhana asked quietly.
“He’d been having his troubles for years,” Seiji said with a small nod. “I can see that now, in retrospect, everything leading up to the end. In second grade the nuns found him walking around on the playground with his arms stretched out like Christ on the cross. We’re descended from a line of Hiroshima Catholics, so we were always in Catholic schools. Maybe the programming took too well. As a kid, Jiro got it into his head that sex was something ‘dirty’ and ‘evil’. He was always distressed by his own sexuality after that. In high school he was painfully shy. He didn’t date, but that was okay. He was a good deal younger than all the other kids, and he put all his energy into his studies anyway.”
As she listened to Seiji, Jhana was reminded, oddly, of Roger Cortland’s manner. She wondered briefly what his particular loss and grief might be.
“Jiro took his studies extremely seriously—and it paid off. Bachelor’s degree in Computer Media Studies while he was still in his teens, master’s when he was twenty. But as he got older I suppose he felt he was trapped. He didn’t date girls, but he wasn’t homosexual—maybe he was afraid to be—and he didn’t want to be a priest. He’d started trying to ‘dumb down’ in his late teens, first through heavy drinking then through drugs. Figured that if he killed enough brain cells he’d fit in better, I guess.” Seiji flicked a piece of dried leaf off the railing and into the stream. “That’s when he started doing high-powered hallucinogens like KL 235—’gate,’ as it was called. The intelligence services or somebody like that had spread it around, after it was synthesized from a rare tepui fungus. Ask Paul Larkin in your lab—he knows all about it.”
“He seems like a bit of a crank sometimes,” Jhana ventured.
“Oh, yeah,” Seiji said. “But he does know what he’s talking about when it comes to mindbending and the world of the shadowy. He’s been there. Get him going on it, and really listen to him, and you’ll be in his good books forever. We’ve got some of the original fungal strain they took KL from, growing up here now. Supposed to be part of the attempt to preserve ‘lost’ or ‘ghost’ biodiversity, but mainly it’s here because Larkin insisted.”
Above and below them, in the sky of air and the sky of water, the mirrored sun would be going out before too long—at least in this sector of the habitat. Jhana barely noticed. Something about what Seiji had said about Larkin, the shadow-world, and KL-235 began to make things come together.
“Anyway,” Seiji continued, looking over the water, “Jiro’s use of KL 235, instead of dumbing him down, got his brain completely revved up. He just started pumping information through his eyes and ears all the time, until it was like he went supernova. He was so bright back then, the year before his breakdown—it scared me. It’s hard for an older brother to admit, even to himself, that his younger brother is smarter than he is—but Jiro was, and I did. His brain was roaring full throttle. It was like his mind was analyzing and synthesizing at lightspeed everything he’d experienced, all the technology and history he’d studied, all the data he’d taken in. Just burning with everything he’d learned. I don’t know—maybe all the KL he’d taken had locked his mind into overdrive. I do know that talking to him in those days was like talking to God. In his presence I felt the urge to avert my eyes.”
Seiji let out a long, slow sigh. Beneath the water’s smooth surface, fish and frogs and salamanders moved.
“He couldn’t hold it together. No one could hold that level of fiery intensity for long. He must have hit some limit at last. He knew he was losing it. Everything came bubbling to the surface. Long-distance he told me that he didn’t want to hurt anybody, that he’d rather die than hurt anybody. When his moment of explosion and collapse came, I was working on the first satellite tests of the new large-scale photovoltaics up here. I wasn’t able to be there for him. Still, I like to think that last great flash of his mind blew off in this shock-wave of light, spreading forever away—some of it even flashing onto the solar sats, sparking across gaps.”
Jhana watched as the sun began to dim and redden in the engineers’ best imitation of sunset. Night sounds began to rise tentatively from the water, from the banks, from the forests.
“Did your brother die soon after that?”
Seiji smiled sadly.
“Not for almost another six years. My parents brought him back home until he seemed better again. He went back to work on his doctorate in Intelligent Systems at MIT. He’d already accomplished a lot. He’d developed some big new system protocols and he had money coming in from those patents, from all sorts of things. We thought he was okay again.”
Seiji shook his head and turned his back on the darkening sky, the darkening water.
“I really hoped it was true,” he said, bitterness rising in his voice, “but I never quite believed it. The laser sharpness his mind had, before—that was gone, somehow. Just this shell of paranoia and conspiracy and weirdness left behind. He began to think he was some sort of techno-shaman. Jiro was always interested in American Indians and in computers, all the way back to when he was a kid. I guess he kind of went back to that time, and those interests just coalesced. After his breakdown he swore off ‘gate’ and vowed only to do ‘naturals,’ but things kept getting weirder.”
Jhana turned her back on the water then too, turning around but still leaning on the mooncrete bridge railings.
“In what way?”
Seiji shoved his hands in his pockets and looked down at his feet.
“He started to disappear periodically,” Seiji said with a shrug. “Just dropped completely out of sight, out of touch. There’s no real word for it in English or Globish, but there is in German: Aussteiger, ‘someone who gets off the train.’ He got off the train, all right. He got as far from the tracks of our world as he could. He claimed he was fasting and purifying himself like a shaman, vision-questing, enduring long, lonely ordeals for spiritual purposes. All we could say for sure was that, whenever he disappeared, credit tracing showed he was also spending every penny of his available funds on exotic computer and imaging technologies, which would always disappear with him—usually into the outskirts of Balaam.”
Jhana stared down at the mooncrete beneath her feet. She knew something about the hinterlands of the Bay Area Los Angeles Aztlan Metroplex. Not a nice place. She looked up again as a girl with bright white hair, fully tech-dressed in wearable media, started across the bridge with half-dancing steps, singing You wash, I’ll dry, we’ll never think to wonder why, till it fades, fades without warning: Our love like the moon in mid-morning. In a moment she had danced obliviously past them and was gone.
“Could you have done anything about it?” Jhana asked, putting her hand lightly on Seiji’s elbow, wondering if his brother could have been any crazier than the space habitat’s wild children. “Have him listed as a missing person, maybe?”
“We tried,” Seiji said with a grimace. “Before he disappeared for the last time, he contacted my parents long-link. He told them they had nothing more to say to him and he had nothing more to say to them, so he wouldn’t be calling anymore. The days became weeks and—no word. We tried to get the police departments around Balaam to find him and bring him in, but they couldn’t do anything. Failing to keep in touch with your family isn’t a prosecutable offense, after all. Jiro was an adult, he had free will, he had broken no law, so the police couldn’t hold him against his will—even if it might have saved his life.” Seiji glanced over toward the parts of the habitat still in light. “As the weeks lengthened to months we couldn’t even have him listed as a missing person because the police always told us—mistakenly—that they had seen him, or someone who looked like him, recently. In fact he’d already been dead for months.”
“Tragic,” Jhana said quietly, holding onto his arm a bit more firmly, wanting to make contact.
“Yes,” Seiji said, his chin slumping toward his chest. “But also no. Sad as it was that the police couldn’t bring him in to save his life, I have to agree with that sort of law. At least it respected Jiro’s right to be wrong. It didn’t meddle with his freedom, not even ‘for his own good’.”
“Yes—now I see what you were getting at before,” Jhana said, standing up straight from where she’d been leaning against the bridge railing, letting go of Seiji’s arm a moment. “The conflict between freedom and compassion.”
Jhana followed Seiji’s glance up the path toward the townlet cluster of buildings ahead. Together they began to walk slowly toward them.
“Right,” Seiji said as gravel crunched under their footsteps. “If the police had taken Jiro into custody and held him—the compassionate thing to do, I suppose—there’s always the chance that we could have brought him home and had him ‘cured’ or ‘put right.’ But there’s an equal chance that he might well have ended up in some dehumanizing asylum for the rest of his life, clocked out on psychosocial control medications—or even worse, imprisoned. Knowing how much my brother valued his freedom, perhaps even freezing to death inside an abandoned refrigerator wasn’t the worst end he could have faced.”
The lights of the buildings had begun to glimmer on Seiji’s face when Jhana turned to him.
“Is that how he died?”
“Yeah. In a cloud of liquid nitrogen. In the middle of the smoldering trashlands, surrounded by all this expensive high-tech electronics he left behind, sitting there like so much junk. The coroner ruled the death an accident, instant hypothermia. He told me it must have been a very peaceful way to go. The police suspected suicide. The case remains uncertain, still unresolved.”
They walked toward the noise of Corazon del Cielo, a small glass-domed eatery, agreeing on it without even needing to speak of it.
“What was he doing with enough liquid nitrogen to freeze himself to death?” Jhana asked, opening the door to the very dry and warm restaurant, full of noise and hothouse desert flowers.
“Who knows?” Seiji said as they looked for a table. “What was he doing with all that expensive state-of-the-art gear—still all plugged in and running, his pirate microwave hookup still draining power off the solarsat grid? That was how they discovered his body, you know: the power company sent a man on horseback through the trashlands to find who was at the other end of the downlink line.”
“But what was he working on?” Jhana asked as they sat down beneath the glassed-in sky.
“Who knows? Maybe he was trying to commune with the Great Spirit. Maybe he was contacting the spirits of the dead or trying to pull off some techno-shaman stunt. The local people in the trashland didn’t know what to make of a guy who came out only at night from a white coldbox coffin. They were mostly TechNots and Neo-Luddites around there—a very superstitious bunch when it came to anything involving technology. Some of them said his soul had been stolen by one or another of his machines, that Jiro’s ghost had even talked to them before the power was cut off. The power company rep didn’t see or hear anything. What the locals probably came across was just some automatic program running its course.”
A middle-aged woman named Herria Bidegaray, a bit heavyset and graying, appeared with water glasses and a familiar hug for Seiji. Jhana discovered from the menu display that this place took its name from the Mayan Popul Vuh and was some sort of combination Basque restaurant/desert biodiversity conservatory. Seiji, of course, was engaged in an experiment in “cuisine design” with this restaurateur too and it was only after some quick business-like flinging about of various common and Latin names of fleshy fungi that the waitress/owner bustled happily away.
“What happened to your brother’s machines?” Jhana asked, taking up again the strand of Seiji’s conversation after the owner had moved on.
“Most of Jiro’s devices were just expensive black boxes to me,” Seiji said glancing at the menu. “The locals might as well have been telling me about voodoo spirits living in tin cans. Still, I had all Jiro’s gear and personal effects shipped up the well. Cost a fortune, but I guess it’s a memorial of sorts. Haven’t looked at any of it in months, not once since it came up. I could show it to you, if you want to see it. I’ve got it stored with a friend, Lakshmi Ngubo. She’s got a workshop up in micro-gee, not far from one of the solarsat manufactories—that’s where I work my ‘real’ job. I could show you those, and introduce you to Lakshmi, if you’d like.”
Bingo, Jhana thought. And I didn’t even have to ask for a tour.
“Yes,” she said, appearing to concentrate more carefully on the menu. “I’d be honored.”
“I must warn you—it’s not that impressive,” Seiji said, glancing over the menu selections. “Jiro has been pretty much reduced to text: police reports, bills, receipts, notes, that sort of thing. A few wallet holographs. Lines of print and other hard-copy codes. Personal effects, bits and pieces of junk. A lot of it’s probably useless and trivial, but I can’t bring myself to get rid of any of that information. It’s pretty much all I have left of him. Too much has been lost already, you know? It’s like when a star collapses and a black hole forms: a lot of information about the star inevitably gets lost.”
Jhana looked up from perusing the menu, thinking about what Seiji hadn’t said—what he’d left out.
“What about the information he might have stored on computer media—in the electronics you said was found near his body?”
Seiji pressed a menu selection and ordered a glass of “HOMEBREW,” the local beer. Jhana decided to stick with water and pressed in her menu selection too.
“That’s still just a little too painful for me to deal with yet,” Seiji said, looking away from her as their meals and drinks promptly arrived. “Sure, I want to know if there’s anything important there, but I don’t want to face it cold. I’ve turned those machines and their memories over to Lakshmi, along with all his effects. She’s an expert. I haven’t heard from her in a while, but I know she’s been seeing what can be salvaged, what might be worthwhile. She’s always very thorough.”
He took a sip of beer and stared directly at her.
“I don’t know what sort of grief and guilt you may have known,” he said. “Sorry to have burdened you with mine.”
“I guess none of us can really know another’s grief,” Jhana said sympathetically, between bites. “Griefs are incomparable, absolutely individual. We can only know our own.”
“Yeah, I do know mine,” Seiji said, twirling his beer glass slightly between his palms. “I’ve learned names for the condition my brother suffered from—long-term paranoid schizophrenia, Messiah complex, depressive disorder, psychosexual dysfunction arising from ‘incomplete gender identification.’ I can quote chapter and verse of the scientific theories: Imbalances of neurotransmitters in the brain, a misreading in the genetic code that caused him to misread reality, some flaw in the DNA mirror that funhoused his mind’s reflections. I take comfort in the theories and the labels like I’m supposed to, but in the end none of it has meant squat. I lived with it, with him. I know.”
They ate, hungrily and in silence, for a long moment.
“What was it like?”
Seiji leaned back in his chair and looked up through the restaurant dome’s transparent surface. Gradually Jhana began to look up too, trying to follow his gaze to whatever it was his eyes were looking at.
“Do you remember where you had your anxiety attack, the first day we met? At the ridge cart station up there, hanging at the center of everything?”
“Yes,” Jhana said, not wanting to remember, the smell of burnt almonds even now drifting through her mind. She was disturbed at the sudden swerve of the conversation into her personal life. “What about it?”
“Being up there, hanging at the center of a completely artificial sphere, completely enclosed by that sphere—that’s what Jiro’s paranoid schizophrenia was like,” Seiji said, gesturing overhead again. “Think about the middle of this sphere, Jhana—but instead of the sphere having a shell of static surfaces like this one does, think of the shell as being like those on the new habitats, the ones that are almost finished, the ones with active surfaces where micromachines are always swarming and flowing in the layers of that surface, nanotech assemblers and replicators always vigilantly repairing and maintaining that surface, always keeping the outside from getting in and the inside from getting out. If you can picture a deluded psyche functioning like that—impenetrable to argument or logic, always flowing quickly in to fill any dent reason might make in its surface—then you can understand my brother’s paranoid world as well as I ever could.”
They had both begun to turn their eyes back to finishing the meals on their plates when the bent snake circle of the Möbius Cadúceus skysign rainbowed into space above them.
Jhana found herself plunged into darkness, running through a hellish underground world of red and black, from room to room of nightmare, auditoriums or theatrical spaces without audiences, dark spaces of empty seats facing thick blood-red curtains where actors rehearsed themes of gory tragedy, gouged-out eyes raining gobbets of black blind blood, in one room a blind Othello/Michael turning his mutilated blood-daubed corpse toward her and bellowing “Racist whore!” until she ran screaming into another space—only to find Roger Cortland looming, leering and gigantic, as a powerful scent filled her head, turned her hands to digging claws, her naked flesh to fierce hard inhuman muscle—
Abruptly she was back in the Corazon del Cielo, staring through the transparent dome at the point in the sky from which the oddly twisted dual serpentine ring had just disappeared.
“What was that?”
Seiji looked at her oddly, but she didn’t care. She was profoundly shaken. That sense of losing herself, of becoming a conduit or vessel of sensations, had passed through her again unexpectedly. She was sweating and trembling slightly. Her appetite seemed to have vanished utterly.
“Promotion for that band, Möbius Cadúceus. I gather they’ve got some big show coming up. Interesting symbol. You mean you haven’t seen it before?”
“If I have, I must not have paid it any real attention,” she said, trying to focus on her environs, to re-orient herself. “But the strangest thing just happened. One second I was looking at it and the next I was in some full-blown waking dream.”
“What kind of dream?” Seiji said, growing suddenly more interested.
“Oh, I don’t know,” she said. Seiji looked at her expectantly, but she didn’t want to tell him exactly what she’d seen—that would bring up too much that was personal, vulnerable. “Dark and fragmented stuff. Lots of guilt—and grief.”
Seiji stared at her for a moment longer before he spoke.
“I don’t know how to tell you this,” he said uneasily, “but the first time I saw it it triggered associations in me too. You might say guilt underlies them, as well.”
“What sort of associations?” Jhana asked, becoming curious—and glad that they weren’t talking specifically about her anymore.
“A man on horseback at sunset,” Seiji said, working on finishing his meal. “One morning, just at the shadow of a dream, I woke with the image in my mind of Jiro’s corpse being found by a man on horseback at sunset in the trashlands. Six months later, that was exactly how and when Jiro’s long-dead body was found. I sometimes torment myself with the thought that they were simultaneous—that image of skewed time-line flashing into my mind where I lay warm in bed, even at the exact instant Jiro was freezing to death in a trashland down the well.”
“Do you think it was a genuine prescience?” Jhana asked. “Some sort of second sight?”
Seiji swirled the dark amber of the beer remaining in his glass.
“I don’t know—and I don’t want to know. I used to wonder it it was an authentic unveiling of hidden connections—or just seeing patterns that weren’t really there. Numinous mystical experience, or an episode of paranoid delusion? That way lies my brother’s madness,” he said, then downed the last of the local brew. “But I do know that if seeing that skysign triggered a jump of subconscious material into consciousness—in both of us—”
“I thought altering other people’s consciousnesses without their informed consent was against the rules here,” Jhana reminded him.
“It is,” Seiji said with a nod, finishing the last of his meal, “but this may be a grey area. Chemical tech versus physical tech—everybody’s harder on the chemicals, on ‘drugs’. The question is whether this trigger works the way KL does, say, or more like the way Ehab’s stereograms do. In either case we’ve got more reason than ever to talk to that expert friend of mine up in micro-gee.”
“The one with your brother’s stuff?” Jhana asked, bewildered. She didn’t see the connection.
“The same,” Seiji said with a nod, draining off the last of his beer. “Lakshmi Ngubo. She does a lot of the lighting design and holographics for Möbius Cadúceus, so she probably designed the skysign too. Would tomorrow be too soon for our visit?”
Things were moving faster now than even Jhana could have predicted, but she was on for the duration of the ride, now.
“No, tomorrow won’t be too soon,” she said slowly. “If tomorrow evening is all right with your friend, it’ll be fine for me.”