Chapter Four

Jhana thought her host family’s house was one of the most comfortable-looking places she’d ever seen. Computer- redesigned for more efficient use of space, the Spanish villa-cum-courtyard overlooked levels of gardens punctuated by pocket meadows, small streams and copses of trees.

As she jangled the antique front door bell, Jhana heard the sounds of twelve tone classical music, Tibetan overtone singing, and many voices in spirited conversation. Sarah and Arthur answered the door together, a couple perhaps twenty years older than herself, smiling a bit uncomprehendingly at her. Once Jhana had identified herself, her hosts led her toward a sunny atrium living room, plaguing her with enquiries about and sympathy for her trip up the gravity well, while she complimented them profusely on the beauty of their home.

“Thanks,” said Arthur Fukuda with an ‘Aw shucks tweren’t nothin’ shrug. “It’s all just mooncrete, you know—luna cotta tiles on the roof, the ‘stucco’ on the walls, the slabmix beneath this Corsican mint—everything.”

Jhana looked down. She’d thought she smelled mint. She was standing on it.

“What an interesting idea,” she exclaimed. “A living rug!”

“Yep,” Arthur said proudly. “Photosynthetic floorcover, gene-engineered for resistance to foot traffic, and for thriving on lower light and water levels. It was my friend Seiji’s idea. He’s the local garden wizard.”

“The only thing the house really lacks,” said Sarah as they walked down steps into the main living area, “is wood. The trees we have here are a bit too young and valuable yet to be turned into lumber, and the tank- grown stuff never looks right to me. Another thing I miss from the old world.”

“Hardships are a part of frontier life,” Arthur said with a wry smile as he motioned them into chairs, a light scent of mint still hovering in the air from the crush of their footsteps. “Sarah and I have discussed it quite a bit. We gain and we lose.”

“Do you miss anything?” Jhana asked him.

“Me? Oh, certainly.” Fukuda ran a hand through his grey hair then absently picked up a bottle of wine. “We’re a rather small and isolated community as yet. For all their overcrowding and craziness, Earth’s cities still have a certain loony energy I miss sometimes. Individually, the people up here are at least as intelligent and energetic as the best you’ll find anywhere, but you have to have a certain critical mass for Earth’s sort of urban energy. We don’t.”

He poured them a red wine made from grapes grown “locally” in the greenhouse tori.

“I miss a good mature wine now and then too,” Arthur went on. “What we can’t mine on the moon or grow in the greenhouses we have to ship up the well from Earth—and that’s prohibitively expensive. Bulk luxury items like wines are absolutely last on the priority list.”

“Everything’s so new up here,” Sarah explained, “including the vineyards and viticulture. All our wines are, alas, quite young yet.”

“But they’ll mature,” Arthur said fervently, “like everything else.”

Jhana sipped some of the wine, well aware that her hosts were watching for her reaction—even if they were politely gazing elsewhere, pretending disinterest.

“It seems fine to me,” she said after a thoughtful pause—to her hosts’ obvious relief. Perhaps the wine was a bit shy in terms of crispness, a bit too long-lingering on the palate, but certainly passable.

A silence opened in the conversation. Sarah Sanchez stared past the guests partying in the courtyard, over the gardens and up the curve of the world to where the reflected sun was dimming, bringing night to the third of the habitat her home stood in.

“The sun sinking into the Pacific—I miss that.” Sarah said over her wine, fading light glinting in her long dark hair, making in her wine glass a soft-edged ruby, slowly dimming, like the thermograph of a failing heart. “High orbit is a world of light, and in a world of light you can do a lot with mirrors—but not everything. Don’t get me wrong: the engineers have done a good job. The promotional videos promised ‘Hawaiian’ climate here, and since we used to live on the islands I think we can say they’ve matched the climate pretty well. But they just can’t match those Pacific sunsets.”

From the large bowl-shaped lounger in which he’d taken a seat, Arthur nodded.

“The stars too, strangely enough,” he said, swirling the wine in his glass meditatively. “I remember sleeping under the stars way out in the sticks one summer when I was kid and we were vacationing in Manitoba. The moon wasn’t going to rise until late. When my eyes adjusted to the dark, I saw the sky was different that night. All the stars were golden, the Milky Way was a thick river of gold flowing across the heavens. Each star seemed bright and close and warm. Some of them were red gold, some blue and, I swear, with some of them I wasn’t seeing points but actual discs of light. “

Jhana looked up from studying the patterns the Corsican mint grew in, on the floor.

“And you’ve never seen another sky like that? Not even up here?”

“Nope,” Fukuda said, shaking his head slightly. “I’ve seen stars big and beautiful and colorful and clear—and in greater numbers than ever before, no doubt about that. But when falling stars shot through that sky that particular night, they weren’t the usual pale streaks—they were great golden sword slashes. Some of them calved and split fire, and I could hear them popping and breaking and burning.” He looked away, wistful. “Maybe I only thought I heard that—but I know I’ve never seen that gold again, anytime or anywhere else. Maybe it was something in the Earth’s atmosphere that night that made the stars shine golden. Maybe it was something in my eyes, or my memory, or my imagination—”

“Dear,” Sarah interjected, “how many times have you already told that story in the Public Sphere? Come now, we don’t want to monopolize our guest with stories of the ‘old country.’ Let’s introduce her to the rest of the party, shall we?”

Arthur laughed and they stood. Walking through an archway they came into the courtyard where all the noise had been coming from.

“Everyone!” Sarah Sanchez called as they walked toward the center of the darkling courtyard. Not everyone but at least five or ten heads turned toward her from the music and the food, and that was good enough for the party’s hostess. “This is Jhana Meniskos, one of the visiting ecologists in Arthur’s lab! She just arrived earlier today, so let’s make her feel at home!”

Scattered shouts of welcome and the thin patter of applause greeted this announcement. Shaking Jhana’s hand, Arthur and Sarah took their leave, with apologies for having to return to the kitchen for more hors d’oeuvres. In the gardens beyond the courtyard, a maze of pathway lights came up slowly, then soft lights around the periphery of the courtyard itself. Jhana moved through the knots of people gathered round the food and drink tables.

“All drama is essentially family conflict,” proclaimed a flush-faced young man—in doublet, hose, codpiece, cape and multi-neoned hair—to a group of more or less interested listeners round a wine table. “Just depends on how broadly you define family—even up to the family of humanity, or the family of all living things. Now, if conflict is what arises in any situation that’s less than perfect, well, we know no family situation’s perfect, so conflict is unlimited, drama goes on and on—”

Her wine glass full, Jhana moved on. She’d met enough drama-jocks in high school and college to recognize the type. She had no interest in listening to the flamboyant artiste holding forth to his admirers. From her correspondence with her hosts, Jhana seemed to recall that Sarah was involved in the arts in some way. The drama-jock must be one of her friends.

Walking past musicians oblivious to everything save their performance, Jhana made her way toward tables laden with plates and goat cheeses and crispbreads and canapes and sushi and melon.

“The right mythologizes, the left explains,” said a heavyset man, bald, bearded and bespectacled, to the lanky younger man in wraparound shades beside him. “How can you possibly expect to move people in a more progressive direction through myths or stories or performances, Lev? The idea that ‘it’s just a story’ always prevents them from recognizing the link between the simulation and consensus reality. No connection, no critique. The medium distorts the message.”

“Not necessarily!” replied tall pale Mister Shades forcefully, round a wad of sushi. “Granted, the myth or story format is inherently conservative, self-satisfying, flattering the audience by affirming values the audience already holds. But self-consuming works exist too, dialectical works that purge the audience by scrutinizing and disturbing the audience’s values. The wall between myth and explanation isn’t all that complete—to some degree, myths are explanations, explanations are myths. In Möbius Cadúceus’s performances, we can create myths and stories that are self-satisfying in form but self-consuming in function, ‘virus programs,’ as it were, telling the truth but telling it slant—”

Having placed on her plate samples of whatever looked most appetizing, Jhana drifted quickly away through the music. More of Sarah’s friends, she presumed. The younger man smelled vaguely of machine lubricant. Artsy types, she thought, shaking her head. She’d never understand them.

Walking and eating, she moved out of the courtyard, down steps toward the quiet of the gardens beyond. A man and woman, oblivious to her presence, flowed up the steps past her.

“—and two large solar panels, like wings,” said the woman. “The mass driver between the panels has two long drive tubes extending out aft, beyond the panels. All completely automated. Because of the tug’s shape I call my design ‘The Swallowtail’.”

“Sounds like the perfect vehicle for mining the asteroids,” her companion said, nodding sagely yet enthusiastically.

“Or at least the Apollo Amors. I’m hoping the HOME consortium and the colony council will approve a test run of the prototype within the next few weeks.”

When the twosome had passed, Jhana at last had time to herself in the garden. As she walked the mazelike paths she heard frogs croaking and insects buzzing and chittering, various birds making their evening calls, dragonflies whirring softly, someone intermittently humming and whistling a short distance away. Further off, the band was playing a worldbeat salsa mix, but she had to strain to hear it. The water of the stream and the leaves of the bushes and trees seemed to soak the music up like a green anechoic chamber.

Eschewing the benches she saw here and there along the path, she sat down at last on a large flat rock to finish off the canapes remaining on her plate. She could still see most of the garden around her fairly well, for though it was “night” in this sector of the colony, it wasn’t nearly as dark as a clear moonless night on Earth. The ambient overflow of the reflected light shining on the “daylight” sectors made the light level in the garden unusual, a bit brighter than a full moon night yet a bit darker than a long midsummer twilight she’d once seen, in the Sierras back on Earth. She found it a very pleasant and restful light, one which softened colors without reducing them to shades of grey.

Sitting there, she felt her breathing slowing as she relaxed. In front of her stood flowers, high pink and low yellow in the thin liquid light, a scent of wild onion and honey and musky perfume in the air. Becoming ever more fully aware of the world around her, she noticed the leaves, how intricate and subtle and complex they were in their myriad variations. Among them, insects sang their tiny chitin calliope songs, while a small stream chuckled stones slowly to sand. So wonderful—just to relax, in a place that did not demand guilt or forgiveness, success or failure.

“Beautiful,” she said, her eyes half-closed.

“I like to see people appreciate my garden.”

Jhana’s eyes flew open and her head swiveled in the direction of the words. Before her stood the man with the Mennonite beard, examining day-lilies.

“Yours? I thought it was Arthur and Sarah’s.”

The man picked one of the blown lilies and slowly ate it.

“Oh, it’s theirs, all right. They maintain it. But I designed the grounds. Turned the moon dirt into soil by adding natural nitrate sources, trace metals and minerals, the right mix of soil bacteria, fungi, nematodes, worms, you name it. Put in all the bulbs and perennials—or drew up the ground plans for Arthur and Sarah to do it, anyway. Designed and helped install the micro-irrigation system, and the water recycling lagoon—there, with the meandering stream and catchment ponds. I designed it free-lance for my friends, but I still have a paternal interest of sorts.”

The man stepped forward slowly, extending his hand. “Seiji Yamaguchi. I work in ecodesign and solar power utilization.”

Jhana stood, brushing her clothes lightly.

“Jhana Meniskos,” she said, not bothering to parade her specialist credentials. Yamaguchi frowned slightly, but Jhana, unable to determine any reason for that change in expression, went on. “Haven’t we already met? On the ridgecart earlier?”

“That’s right,” he nodded. “Are you feeling less anxious now?”

“I was, until you popped up and startled me.”

Yamaguchi smiled, slightly abashed.

“Touché. Sorry to interrupt, but I was curious. When you said ‘Beautiful,’ I presumed you meant the garden.”

“You presumed correctly.”

“What about it struck you that way, particularly?”

“I don’t know. Everything. The colors—” she said, pointing. Yamaguchi nodded. “And the smells.”

Yamaguchi walked to the flowers she’d pointed to.

“These pink ones are varieties of Allium, flowering onions,” he said, plucking a few of the blown flower heads, almost in a sort of reflexive grooming action. “These yellow blossoms are Oenothera missouriensis, evening blooming Missouri primrose—sweet scented.”

“And the flower you were eating? A lily?”

“A daylily, actually. Hemerocallis. These scarlet and white ones over here are Lilium, Asiatic true lilies, a musky-scented variety.”

“And that blue flower there?”

“Platycodon,” Yamaguchi said, kneading soil in the palm of one hand, then brushing it from both. “Japanese balloon flower. But what else did you find attractive in the design?”

“Something about the leaves,” Jhana said, looking about her, almost feeling as if she were being quizzed by a benevolent, very enthusiastic teacher. “Different shapes, patterns. And the way all the plants go together, in levels, from the low plants and bushes and flowers up to the bigger bushes and the fruit trees. The way it all blends, you can’t tell where the gardener leaves off and nature begins.”

Yamaguchi, smiling happily, bowed slightly.

“Thank you. You’ve just given me the finest compliment I could possibly hope for. That’s exactly the aim of my design, that blend. The paradox of contrived naturalness—just like this whole habitat.” They began to walk forward slowly. “You named the first two elements right off—color and scent, particularly the way the colors and scents play off against each other. The third item—the shapes of the leaves, the look and feel of them, the heights and shapes of the various plants, the way their levels interact visually—that I call texture. The poet Shiki describes it in an old haiku: ‘Roses: / The flowers are easy to paint, / The leaves difficult.’ You’ve got a good eye, picking out the texture factor—much subtler than I was, in interrupting your appreciation of it. Again, my apologies.”

“That’s okay,” Jhana said with a wan smile. “But if you feel the need to atone, you could do me a favor.”

“Name it.”

“Since you’re the designer of this garden maze, maybe you would be so kind as to show me the quickest way back to the courtyard from here?”

“No problem. Follow me.”

Jhana smiled politely as Seiji, who did seem to know the garden quite well, led her unerringly through all its multi-hued, multi-scented, multi-textured complexity.

From another path she heard someone twanging an amplified reverb guitar and a woman’s voice singing The global Brain has gone insane and now seeks suicide to end its pain—all to a jaunty Gilbert-and-Sullivanesque tune. The song had been a morbid little hit in some avant-garde quarters a few years back. Approaching Seiji and Jhana on their own path came two men with maniacally bright eyes, dangling conversations over an abyss only they seemed to appreciate.

“A day is a mushroom on the mycelium of time, maaaan—”

“Yeah! And the mycelium of time grows in the night soil of eternity! I cog it.”

“‘Eternity. It’s as real as shit.’”

“So true, so true. The Huxter never wrote truer words.”

Jhana stared questioningly at Seiji, who flashed an embarrassed grin and glanced down at the path passing under their feet.

“A couple of our amateur mycologists, I’d guess. Some of the coprophilic fungi in the waste degradation system possess, um, hallucinogenic properties. They seem to have discovered that.”

“You mean they’re eating magic mushrooms from around the sewer lagoon?”

Seiji nodded. Jhana shook her head in disbelief.

“We have no controlled substances here,” Seiji said with a shrug. “Our only requirement is that anyone who plans on indulging in the use of any mind-altering substance be thoroughly informed as to the nature and effects of that substance—and that the user assumes full responsibility for usage, in no way imposing that usage on other members of the community without their stated agreement. Informed consent, improved quality of life, ordinary politeness—you’d be surprised how far they’ve gone toward transforming substance abuse into a non-problem here.”

They began climbing a flight of steps leading to the opposite side of the courtyard from which she’d first descended to the gardens. She was aware of the musicians playing again, but they were further away and not nearly as loud as they had been earlier.

“—ecocatastrophic overcrowding of Earth and the suffering of all the billions we’ve left down there,” said a black woman to the listeners gathered round the paté de foie gras as Jhana and Seiji came up to the table. Jhana wondered briefly if the paté could be real, here in Textured Vegetable Protein land. More likely paté de faux gras, here. “Ozone burnout, heattrap atmosphere, the Big Red Tide, cyclonic ‘dissipative structures’, rising sea levels, increased police-state totalitarianism, religious extremism—my sister’s usual catalog of eco-lapse and doomed humanity. I told her I was only going to be up here for a year and the year was almost up, but she kept coming at me from all those thousands of miles away. So I shrugged and told her, ‘Hey, where do you get off thinking humanity is so important? We’re just another species, one that’ll go extinct like any other.’ That shut her up.”

“It usually does,” Jhana muttered, remembering her own conversations with Chicken Littlers of various stripes. But Seiji, who seemed to know something of the situation, would have none of it.

“Not a good answer, Ekwefi,” he said, spreading the apparent paté on a cracker as he sat down at the table. “Your sister was right: as a species we face enormous problems that must be dealt with—continually. Easy biologist’s cynicism is no answer at all.”

The woman Ekwefi, still standing, gave him a condescending glance.

“Oh? And how would you have responded, O Wise Seij? Hm?”

“First off,” Seiji said, taking a bit more paté and filling a glass with wine, “I would have agreed with her that ‘too many people and too much per capita consumption’ are indeed the root problems. We can’t do much without a curb on our growth and greed rates as a species. Then I’d tell her that up here we’re trying to build enough artificial paradises up here so we can eventually alleviate Earth’s population burden somewhat through emigration. Two more space habitats even larger than this one are scheduled to open within the month—and they’ll be coming faster, now that we can use micromachine assemblers and replicators to make active surfaces.”

He paused to take a sip of wine—quickly, continuing before the woman had a chance to jump in again.

“There might even someday be enough space habitats, to absorb Earth’s annual human population increase,” he continued, “if that increase slows enough. A bit further down the line, Mars will be ecopoesed and there’ll be enough habitable area in space so that we can begin actually reducing Earth’s population, eventually to well below the one billion mark, where it belongs. Once that has happened we can start the reconditioning process, let the Mother World start healing herself, reverting to whatever new natural state ol’ Gaia can come up with—”

Someone had brought over another bottle of wine from one of the other tables and Seiji refilled his glass, barely pausing in his discourse. Jhana had the distinct sense that Seiji knew the woman well, and that they’d also had this conversation before.

“—and during the whole restoration process we’ll be reintroducing all the species currently being preserved live, or cryogenically, or in the genome banks in the zoos and arks and our own biodiversity park. Once Earth is at last restored, it’ll be a holiday world, a vacation planet where human beings are primarily just tourists, grown children occasionally visiting their mother.”

Ekwefi threw back her head and laughed.

“That’s the rosiest scenario I’ve heard in a long time. You know what my sister Denene would say to that? She’d say databits and freeze-dried remnants do not a species make—the animal and its context are fundamentally connected and to truly recreate an animal you have to recreate its entire environment—”

“And she’d be right,” Seiji agreed quickly.

“She’d also say this place is a college campus in the sky and we do too much ivory tower theorizing. She’d say we have too much faith in technological progress. She’d start talking about how we’re a rich and privileged elite in the ultimate Big House on the highest hill. She’d say all HOME’s claims of ‘multi-ethnicity’ are bull. She’d launch off about Master Race in Outer Space types fleeing to an orbital suburb of Earth City, a lifeboat for the powerful, another technofascist nonsolution to human problems—”

Ekwefi took a quick sip of wine, her index finger held up to indicate that she was not done with her say yet and did not want to be interrupted.

“—and I don’t know if maybe she doesn’t have a point after all. I mean, doesn’t it seem sort of odd that all of us up here who are so dedicated to peace and social justice and world-saving are at the same time so isolated from the world we’re trying to change? A plot to wall off activists and dissidents and idealists in a big isolated holding pen couldn’t have done a better job of getting all of us up here! To the people living in the trashlands down there, an elitist paradise in space must look pretty hollow.”

Ekwefi took a long pull on her wine. Frowning deeply, Seiji brushed crumbs from his left pant leg while the people around him waited for a response, spectators at a conversational tennis match waiting for the serve to be returned. He put his wine glass down and stared straight at Ekwefi with a frankness that made Jhana suspect they had once been intimate—and not so long ago.

“Ekwefi, your sister’s still alive. Be glad of it. You know damn well I’ve seen the sacrifice zones outside the cities back on Earth, the areas you call the trashlands. I’ve seen the cities of people living in steaming mountains of rubbish and filth and debris, scavenging from womb to tomb in the garbage. I’ve seen them building their houses of trash, feeding off trash, finally becoming just more trash to be body-bagged and incinerated when they die. That was how my brother was lost. A refugee living in a smoldering wasteland. In an ancient abandoned refrigerator he’d hulled clean and rigged to lock from inside. Coming out only at night, rising in darkness from a white coffin, convinced he had already died or forgotten how to live. One of the living dead, a vampire, a very sallow, failed, shivering Christ.”

A tension, a trapped feeling began to surround Jhana. Sensing it also in the body language of the other people within range of Seiji’s voice, she wondered if they too were feeling as if the political had suddenly become personal, too personal, as if they’d accidentally walked in on someone else’s very private and particular nightmare.

“You know I think about all of this a lot, Ekwefi,” Seiji continued in a somewhat different tone. “About how stupid and abstract it seems, trying to save the world when I couldn’t even save my own brother. But I have to because I’m still alive. Up here we can’t take our brothers and sisters for granted—not any of us. Up here we’re absolutely interdependent. A shell in space can’t afford to let people fall through the cracks because it can’t afford cracks to begin with. We must be the keepers of our garden, our brothers’ and sisters’ keepers, because it’s the garden and our brothers and sisters that keep us alive. That’s a feedback, a message even a hollow sphere in the sky can send back to Earth.”

Someone coughed uneasily. Seiji grinned, swirling the wine in his nearly empty glass slowly, carefully, before making an awkward attempt at recovery.

“I must be drunk, to be going on so! Excuse me for getting so personal.”

The tension relaxed and people eased away. Jhana lingered, for reasons she could not at that moment fathom. So too did Ekwefi.

“Sorry to have reminded you of your brother’s death,” Ekwefi said quietly.

“Sorry I dragged his corpse out. Again.”

“I have to know, though,” she said. “You’re not some simple-minded gung-ho technological optimist. Do you really think an artificial paradise can give people real hope?”

Seiji stopped his careful centrifuging of the lees of his wine and stared thoughtfully into an indeterminate distance.

“Yes. I have to. Humanity may be just another species, but it’s mine, it’s ours. I have to believe in the Future Perfect Imperative.”

Ekwefi smiled and squeezed his hand, and in those actions Jhana thought she could read again a shared history that had ended and yet not ended.

“You told me that story, Seij. No language in the world has a future perfect imperative.”

“Then we’ll just—” he said, pausing to stand, “—we’ll just have to create a language that does.”

Excusing himself, he crossed the courtyard and disappeared into the house, leaving Jhana and Ekwefi standing alone beside the table. As if at some unspoken signal, they both sat down. They exchanged introductions and a silence opened between them while they sat and nibbled the remains of what looked and tasted very much like the liver of a fat space-raised goose that had died for their dining pleasure. Even here in TVP land—where she’d heard that most everyone was one or another stripe of vegetarian—not everyone eschewed meat, apparently. Either that, or they’d developed the best substitutes for flesh and fowl she’d ever come across.

“I didn’t mean to eavesdrop,” Jhana said, her curiosity getting the better of her accustomed reserve, “but you mentioned a story that Mister Yamaguchi told you. What was it about?”

Ekwefi Muwakil looked at her through fatigue-veiled eyes.

“Ask him yourself. He’ll tell just about anybody just about anything about his life.” Ekwefi smiled to herself, as if at some remembered mischief. “When we were all hot and heavy and involved, that extreme openness used to get on my nerves. Got me so angry once I said he suffered from ‘flatness of affect’, as the psychs call it.”

“Does he?”

“What? Oh, no. He’s probably one of the sanest people I ever met. Too sane. That’s why his brother’s madness and death still disturb him so much.”

“Yes,” Jhana said, nodding. She had sensed a very personal affinity, a sympatico, for such grief in herself. “I picked up on that right away.”

Ekwefi looked at her oddly, with a depth of penetration that was almost mocking, somehow.

“Really? Are you disturbed too? Or are you like the rest of us—too disturbed to admit you’re disturbed?”

Jhana shrugged her shoulders and the palms of her hands upward as if to say “Who can say?” But there remained something, well, disturbing about Ekwefi’s question, even after they’d said their good-byes. It would not leave her head but instead resonated there like a struck tuning fork, until she felt increasingly tired, wrung out, and longed for sleep so silent no alarm could ring her from it.