Chapter Seven

“Laksh,” Lev Korchnoi said, linking in from a pod module in near-space, “sorry I’ve been so long getting back to you and your LogiBoxes up there, but have you ever noticed the way problems don’t come singly—they come in clusters? I mean, it’s not bad enough that we’re under all this time pressure with the Mob Cad show and we’re still getting glitches in the shobots. Now the team leader at my Communications day job has a bee up his butt about this space junk, so at this very minute I’m on my way to take a close-up look-see at the stuff—just to make sure Communications isn’t implicated. As if that weren’t enough already, I get a query from this woman, Marissa somebody, wondering if our skysign might have accidentally zapped her friend, Roger Cortland, because he had an ‘adverse reaction’ to it in its first public appearance!”

Lakshmi nodded gravely.

“I know exactly what you mean. I just got a message from the other Cortland, Atsuko herself. She’s current Council liaison to the trade-gods on Earth and they’re all upset about some trideo game thing the Vajra is supposedly involved in manufacturing. I’m going to have to stall her until I can figure out exactly what’s going on with the big spider I built for the habitat’s web. And that’s not the only problem. My workshop is now certifiably haunted.”

“What?” Lev asked, surprised even out of his self-pitying funk.

“You’ll see. Park your pod by my port after you’re done scouting around out there.”

“Will do. See you then.”

As he signed off, Lev saw that he was within range of one of the X-shaped pieces of space junk he’d been sent to investigate. Maneuvering the pod into position, he saw that the X—smooth, reddish-orange and flecked with black, like a multicolored fun-house mirror—was only about the size of his vehicle. He did a series of scans of the thing: all wavelengths, and at scales ranging from visible-light photography to electron-micrograph ultracloseups. He scanned it with gamma-ray lasers, low-energy collimated particle beams, scanning-tunneling x-ray microscopy, stereomicroscopy, electron and positron emission scopes. Milliwaldoes and microwaldoes attempted to tease samples out of it.

Despite all the mechanical ministrations, to Lev’s eyes the thing appeared inert—certainly it didn’t seem to be responding to his scans in any way. Its inertness, though, turned out to be an illusion of scale. At the submicroscopic level, the thing was bustling with activity, innumerable micromachines swarming over it, making it ‘grow’ like some strange mechanorganic flower.

The micromachine stuff wasn’t too surprising—a small percentage of nanoassemblers always glitched and made debris. This X-shaped flower, though—it looked far too purposeful to be random garbage. Some of what the micros were growing appeared to be solar exchange film—which was good, since that made it Power Utility’s problem. A lot of the X’s surface, though, looked like microlasers and photorefractives—something like the tech he and Lakshmi and Aleister had used to make the skysign shine, only much smaller and more sophisticated. That was bad, because that might make it Communications’ problem.

There was nothing Lev could do about what he was seeing except send on the data and his observations to his team leader in Comm. He wondered vaguely where the micromachines were getting the mass and materials to build and extend their constructions, but he didn’t have time to puzzle that out at the moment. He had done his job. He’d gotten the higher-ups the data; now it was up to them to do something with it. He kicked in the pod’s thrusters and headed toward Lakshmi’s shop out in micro-gee.

When he arrived, Lakshmi was waiting for him just past the air lock. No sooner was he inside than she quickly began to usher him into the bowels of her workshop. In her hoverchair she could move quite fast when she wanted to, and he had to hurry to keep up. Abruptly they stopped in the center of the shop.

“Where’s this ‘haunting’ you spoke of?” Lev asked. “All I see is the usual clutter of your stuff drifting around.”

“Look more closely,” Lakshmi said, causing a thin beam of light to arrow from her hoverchair and indicate a corner of the lab. Lev saw it now: robotic arms acting cooperatively, sorting through a pile of stuff. He walked closer to it, Lakshmi following slowly and silently.

The arms were building something, attaching pieces to an assemblage or mobile. He saw a mandala, a tantric ritual object, a small piece of what looked like African tribal art, a Catholic scapular medal, a rosary, and a lot of stuff that looked like straightforward junk and debris, all connected into a vaguely animal-like form by microthin optical wire. As he watched, the arms—which did move in a rather abnormal, “ghostly” fashion—opened up a leather pouch with a biohazard trefoil done in bead work and began extracting simple objects: feathers, dried flowers, bones, beads.

“Where’s it getting this stuff from?” Lev asked, walking around the construction.

“Some of the African and Asian stuff is mine,” Lakshmi said, “but the majority of it is stuff the arms have sorted out of Jiro Yamaguchi’s personal effects. I’ve tried to tell you about this before, but you haven’t been very willing to listen.”

“And you know why?” Lev said. “Because you’re going to tell me that there’s some sort of artificial consciousness running on Jiro Yamaguchi’s LogiBoxes—and that it’s what’s responsible for the problems we’ve been having lately. I don’t buy it. Since when has human malfunction become a computer function? Jeez, the way we scapegoat machine intelligences, you’d think they were secret manifestations of our own Ids, some kind of externalized subconscious—

“But what if the construct running on Jiro’s ‘Boxes is involved?” Lakshmi persisted. “What if, before he died, he was able to transfer something of himself into them?”

“What—computer-aided apotheosis?” Lev asked cynically. “I don’t believe in the ‘ghost in the machine’, Laksh. Mind is more than just electrified headmeat. You can’t just go beaming it from place to place like an old radio program—”

Lev was interrupted by a message coming over his PDA. He looked down and saw the plump visage of Aleister McBruce.

“Ah, I’m glad to see you’re there too, Lakshmi,” Aleister said. “This concerns you as well. I’ve pinned down what these odd self-replicating bugs are on Lev’s shobots. You’ve got Rats, Lev. RATs. Realtime Artificialife Technopredators. Funny thing is, they aren’t supposed to exist anymore. They were all supposedly destroyed with their creator, a guy who called himself Phelonious Manqué. At Sedona. Seems they’re not extinct after all—and the Vajra has a pretty good case of them. Check it out, Lakshmi. They’re stealthy and pretty unobtrusive at the moment, but they’re there.”

“Great,” Lakshmi said, calling up search protocols on her overlays, looking through them at Lev. “Are these ghosts allowable in your philosophy, Mr. Korchnoi?”

“Problems,” Lev said with a smile and a shrug. “They never come alone....”

“No,” Lakshmi said, busily scanning through her overlays. “They always come in clusters. Herds. Multitudes.”

* * * * * * *

Marissa had left a v-mail message for Roger, explaining that she was taking the morning off to look over a monument down by Echo Mirror Lake. The inscription, she had explained in her note, was relevant to her fellowship work for Atsuko. Really, though, she needed to decompress, spend some time away, and swimming in the little lake seemed a good way to do that. So she walked, her guilt draped over her left arm in the form of a bathing suit.

And she did feel guilty. Guilty about taking the time away from Roger, especially after the airbike incident. Perhaps it was guilt too that had made her fire off a query to the Möbius Cadúceus people about their skysign and its affect on Roger. It was definitely guilt that had her reading what Roger had highlighted in the Mumford text as she walked along a branching path amid a stand of foxtail pines. As she walked and read, she saw that the notes and highlighting began to become more fragmentary as they went on.

Highlighted excerpt from Mumford’s The Story of Utopias:

...a local synthesis of all specialist “knowledges”...common tissue of definite, verifiable, localized knowledge is what all our...utopias and reconstruction programs have lacked.... Regional survey is the bridge by which the specialist whose face is turned toward the library and the laboratory, and the active worker in the field, whose face is turned toward the city and region in which he lives, may come into contact; and out of this contact our plans and our eutopias may be founded on such a permanent foundation of facts as the scientist can build for us, while the sciences themselves will be cultivated with regard for the human values and standards, as embodied in the needs and the ideals of the local community... we must return to the real world, and face it, and survey it in its complicated totality. Our castles-in-air must have foundations in solid ground...

Marissa stopped awkwardly, flicking a pine cone off the path and back into the woods with the toe of her shoe, then went on with her reading.

Highlighted excerpt from Mumford’s The Story of Utopias:

There is no genuine logical basis...in the dissociation of science and art, of knowing and dreaming, of intellectual activities and emotional activities. The division between the two is simply one of convenience; for both these activities are simply different modes in which human beings create order out of the chaos in which they find themselves...cultivated few/mutilated many...plans for a new social order have been dull as mud because, in the first place, they have been abstract.... Where the critics of the utopian method were, I believe, wrong was in holding that the business of projecting prouder worlds was a futile...pastime.

Locating a tree-shaded bench, Marissa sat down, finding the bench cool, almost cold, beneath her. She glanced up at the world-sky arching through the firmament above, trees and streams and gardens and grasslands and small clusters of buildings. Castles in the air, she thought with a smile. Something, a spot among the branches of the foxtails, caught her eyes. Concentrating her gaze, she saw a dark flash move with incredible speed and agility along a bunch-needled branch. A pine marten, she realized. Nearly extinct in the wild on Earth, but they apparently had a good little colony of them going here. For a moment she became aware of the wonderful fresh smell of the trees around her, even as she returned to the book in her lap.

Highlighted excerpt from Mumford’s The Story of Utopias:

These anti-utopian critics overlooked the fact that one of the main factors that condition any future are the attitudes and beliefs which people have in relation to that future...as Dewey would say, in any judgment of practice one’s belief in a hypothesis is one of the things that affects its realization...

The importance of the will, then, in any realization of a better human social condition. Huxley and Callenbach had named the protagonists in their eutopian novels “Will”, she remembered. She wondered if there might be any significance to that. Intrigued, she rose from the bench and walked over the sandy path a while, listening to the silence, watching the light filter through the trees around her, smelling the pines’ perfume floating in the air. At last she turned back to her book and read further.

Highlighted excerpt from Mumford’s The Story of Utopias:

The first step...is to ignore all the fake utopias and social myths that have either proved so sterile or so disastrous during the last few centuries.... In turning away from obsolete and disastrous social myths I do not suggest that we give up the habit of making myths; for that habit, for good or bad, seems to be ingrained in the human psyche. The nearest we can get to rationality is not to efface our myths but to infuse them with right reason, and to alter them or exchange them for other myths when they appear to work badly.

Roger the annotator had heavily starred the section on myths and beside the phrase “right reason” had written “What does this term mean? Is reasoning ever unequivocally ‘right’?” Marissa was surprised to see that. Such notes seemed to her evidence more of Atsuko’s propensity to emphasize the uncertainty and incompleteness of thought and all systems thereof—rather than what she’d perceived to be Roger’s simple rebelliousness. Maybe Roger and his rebelliousness weren’t so simple after all.

Without breaking stride she snatched a pine cone off the trail and gazed at its complexity a moment, then turned back to the book as she walked.

Highlighted excerpt from Mumford’s The Story of Utopias:

Among the utopians...as land is a common possession, so is work a common function; and no one is let off from some sort of labor of body or mind because of any inherited privileges or dignities...the inhabitants of our eutopias will have a familiarity with their local environment and its resources, and a sense of historical continuity, which those who dwell within the paper world of Megalopolis...have completely lost.... We shall not attempt to legislate for all these communities at one stroke; for we shall respect William Blake’s dictum that one law for the lion and the ox is tyranny....

Among the stars and exclamation points surrounding these passages Roger had remarked “What of equality? Is equal justice only equal tyranny? Can we give the lion and the ox different worlds in which to live? Will solving this conflict only generate new ones?” Reading on, Marissa could appreciate the tenacity with which the annotator took the text to task rather than merely accepting Blake or Mumford as “authoritative.”

Marissa saw that she was coming out of the forest into a meadow-lined bowl. At the bottom of that grassy depression lay a small round body of mirror-smooth water, reflecting the tree-lined ridges that surrounded it on every side and, farther away, those parts of the other side of the Sphere that were also in light. In the meadow nearer at hand stood the small pedestal monument that she’d been looking for. She walked toward it, trying to finish up her reading as she went.

Highlighted excerpt from Mumford’s The Story of Utopias:

If the inhabitants of our eutopias will conduct their daily affairs in a possibly more limited environment than that of the great metropolitan centers, their mental environment will not be localized or nationalized.... The notion that no effective change can be brought about in society until millions of people have deliberated upon it and willed it is one of the rationalizations which are dear to the lazy and ineffectual...the foundations for eutopia can be laid, wherever we are, without further ado...when that which is perfect has come, that which is imperfect will pass away.

Following much asterisking and exclamation pointing, Roger, the anonymous reader-within-the-text, in response to the last statement, had noted, “The perfect is always coming, the imperfect is always passing away. The perfect can never be fully come, and the imperfect can never be fully passed away. If perfection means the end of change, then perfection is death. If nothing changes, everything dies. If everything changes, nothing dies.”

That clinched it for Marissa. The highlighter of the text, the taker of marginal notes upon it, he had to be the same person who had been bothered by the potential of her immortalizing vector—and a more complex person than he so often seemed.

Marissa closed her book and stood staring at the plaque set into the top of the pedestal. It was still new enough for its words to glint sharply in the late morning light:

THE POLITICS OF THOSE WHOSE GOAL IS BEYOND TIME ARE ALWAYS PACIFIC; IT IS THE IDOLATERS OF PAST AND FUTURE, OF REACTIONARY MEMORY AND UTOPIAN DREAM, WHO DO THE PERSECUTING AND MAKE THE WARS.

—from Aldous Huxley’s Perennial Philosophy

As she stood there puzzling and frowning over the pedestal and its inscription, someone took her by the arm—suddenly, familiarly.

“How goes the research?” Atsuko said, smiling at her.

Caught out, Marissa wondered for a moment Which research? Then she thought better of it and decided not to mention her work with Roger, as that seemed somehow always to involve her in the ideological tug-of-war between mother and son. Instead she rapidly tried to outline again her ideas of the normative world-as-it-ought-to-be and descriptive world-as-it-is, particularly the normative world as an hypostasis of the pure soul and the way that tied utopian fiction into the apocalyptic tradition, into teleology and ethics. Feeling like she was blathering on, she finished by pointing to the inscription on the plaque, telling Atsuko that she’d seen a reference to it in the Collection so she thought she’d come and take a look.

“I see. Tell me, Marissa,” Atsuko said, in a voice of mock-interrogation, “what exactly is the efficacy of a swimsuit to the reading of monumental inscriptions?”

Marissa glanced down at the swimsuit draped over her left arm and laughed.

“You’ve found me out. I thought I might like to take a noontime dip too. But I really was going to read the inscription first.”

“I don’t doubt it,” Atsuko said, coming up beside the monument and reading it. “I was headed to the lake myself. Seriously, though, your interests should make you quite the person for evaluating what we’re trying to do here. Have you begun to understand the nature of our experiment yet?”

“I thought I was starting to,” Marissa said with a sigh of frustration, “but every day I find something new that puzzles me all over again. I come to look at this inscription—and what do I find? The quote is under a diagram of the space habitat here, on a disc calibrated like a sundial—but there’s no gnomon, no style to cast a shadow on the dial. As a time piece it’s useless, a contradiction—just like placing that quote about a ‘goal beyond time’ being preferable to ‘Utopian dreams’ under the image of this habitat and all you people are trying to do here. Contradictory—or at least paradoxical.”

“Then you haven’t yet learned the experimental and tentative nature of our work,” Atsuko said, smiling enigmatically as she turned her toward the beach and beach tents nearby. Marissa allowed herself to be led. “We’re not interested in some product, some final stable state. Process and flux and a certain level of chaos are much more interesting. The chaos of science is the science of chaos, after all—even if I still do have to make my bed every morning.”

“But all those things take place within time!” Marissa said fervently as they stopped in front of a dressing tent. “Huxley talks about a goal beyond time.”

Atsuko’s eyes looked past the green near-distance of the meadow to the shining water beyond.

“The goal is necessarily outside time,” she agreed with a small nod, moving toward the other side of the tent. “We can never reach it—woe to us if we could. Think about it this way. Hawking once said that scientific progress consists in replacing one wrong theory with another theory that’s more subtly wrong. Maybe that’s what human history is about too.”

Marissa lifted the door flap on her side of the dressing tent as Atsuko entered the other side.

“Are you saying,” Marissa began incredulously as she undressed, “that all your projects here are to some degree doomed to failure?”

“Of course. Aren’t all projects?” She could hear Atsuko’s voice turned to her, and though she couldn’t see Atsuko she thought the older woman must again be smiling her enigmatic smile. “The universe is inherently a place of relativity, incompleteness, uncertainty, at least according to the physicists. No one perfect final anything anywhere in it. Who knows? They might be right.”

Staring at the ground between her feet, Marissa was for a minute distracted by the calling inside the tent of a frog she could not identify. Oddly, the creature seemed to have bright yellow legs. As she watched she thought it must undoubtedly be a concrete, living example of another of those threatened lines of life that the orbital habitat was trying to preserve.

“That’s all well and good on an abstract theoretical level, I suppose,” Marissa continued, pulling on her swimsuit top. “But if I knew that what I was doing must ultimately fail, then what would be the point of trying?”

Even as she said it, Marissa wondered if she might be letting show through too plainly her misgivings about her own double-headed research projects here. She stuffed her clothes into a hanging sack “locker” on the wall and stepped outside to wait for Atsuko to emerge.

“Well, it only fails to some degree,” Atsuko said plainly. Was there a hint of something maternal in her voice at that moment, or was Marissa only imagining it? “At the very least one can learn from failing—even if what one learns is only how to fail better next time. Realizing that is a form of enlightenment.”

“How’s that?” Marissa asked, gazing toward the lake which, to be honest, looked as if it might prove to be more than a little cold.

“Being able to say, ‘I don’t have the perfect final answer, I can’t have it’,” Atsuko said. “That it’s a presumption to assume I can get it. That it’s egotistical to think the little piece of the truth I’ve managed to get in my short span is more important than anyone else’s. Coming to that sort of realization is good for one’s humility, I think.”

So saying, Atsuko—dressed in a snug black one-piece—stepped lightly from the tent. Marissa noticed with surprise that Atsuko was in quite good shape. As a woman who had just entered the years of long striving against the ravages of time and gravity, Marissa appreciated the older woman’s effort.

Atsuko moved awkwardly in her stare for a moment, then smiled impishly.

“Speaking of humility,” she began, suddenly shifting to rhyme, “Doctor Correa, quite abstracted, how does your garden grow?”

“With oaths and yells that cursing swells,” Marissa rhymed in grimaced reply, “but learning as I go.”

Atsuko laughed and clapped her hands together as they moved toward the water’s edge. The laughter and applause of echoes bounced off the lake and around the bowl for several long moments before dying away.

Standing on the sandy edge of the water, Marissa noted the way the shore fell steeply away, only a short distance out, the lake clear and suddenly deeper to the water weeds on the bottom, among which supple trout swam, flexible green steel flashing in a flickering green shade. The water looked mountain-trout cold, too.

Atsuko abruptly dove in with an icy splash, resurfacing quickly with a great insuck of breath.

“Come on!” she called and waved as she swam off. “We’ve got the lake to ourselves! That won’t last long—dive in!”

Marissa sprang off from the shore. The chill water when she hit it slammed the air from her lungs and the thoughts from her head like a blow from a great ice fist. Her heart had stopped. It did not start beating again until she broke surface with a loud shouted whoop. Shivering as she tread water, she began to laugh.

“What’s so funny?” Atsuko shouted, splashing about some distance away.

“I was just thinking how absurd this all is!” she called, floating on her back, trying to catch some reflected sunlight on her chest and stomach in a difficult attempt to get warm. “I spent my whole life on a green and living world and I never learned to garden! I haven’t been swimming in a pure mountain stream or lake since I was an undergraduate! I had to come into space, into a completely artificial world, to get back in touch with what is natural—with the whole world of things we didn’t create, of creatures that aren’t us!”

Atsuko swam closer.

“That’s it,” she said, smiling even though her teeth were beginning to chatter. “That’s the fundamental absurdity of our situation here in this habitat. But absurdity’s built into progress too—into the attempt to fail better. Civilization is fundamentally absurd. Even the universe itself. The odds are at least as good that the universe shouldn’t exist as that it should, right? It’s absurd that the universe should exist, that we should be here to talk about its existence. But here we are.”

Marissa nodded, struck by a sudden thought.

“You know, I can’t help thinking—despite everything my research tells me—that maybe at the heart of this world-as-it-is lies the world-as-it-ought-to-be. If we could only see it, only remember how to stop eclipsing its light!”

Atsuko looked as if she suddenly wanted to reach out and take her shivering (but wonderfully perceptive) student in her arms and kiss her—and Marissa would have welcomed that gesture of approval from her mentor. Reluctantly, though, they held themselves back. The water they were swimming in was too deep and they were both afraid they might sink if they stopped swimming.

* * * * * * *

“I’m happy to see you again,” Roger Cortland said, opening the door to his lab. He’d been surprised to find Jhana Meniskos waiting for him in the hall outside his lab when he returned from lunch. “You say you’re interested in Heterocephalus glaber? What about the little buggers interests you?”

“As the most eusocial mammal,” Jhana said as they walked into the artificially-lit confines of the underground lab, “there’s been a great deal of genetic research done on them already. They’ve been DNA-fingerprinted for forty years. Wild and captive groups have been thoroughly charted, and their DNA prints demonstrate heavy inbreeding and a kin-selected colony structure.” Jhana gestured toward a glass-paned slab of soil and the squirming digging living things inside—creatures which seemed somehow out of place in the sparkling, orderly cleanliness of the lab. “Are these them? I’ve just read about them—never seen them alive.”

“That’s them, all right,” Roger said with a nod. “The ‘little grotesques,’ as my mother calls them. But you still haven’t said what you hope to learn from them—”

“What I want to know is how,” Jhana said, without turning her fascinated gaze from the bustle of the mole rat colony, “given their tendency to form isolated, heavily inbred colonies—how have they remained recognizably a single species, with a remarkably high genetic similarity even between distant colonies?”

“A good question,” Roger said, leaning lightly on the glass-walled rat colony. “But where does that tie into the sort of genetic drift research you’re engaged in?”

“Everywhere!” Jhana said, flashing him a quick, intense glance. “It opens up all the questions. Usually there’s a loss of diversity associated with heavy inbreeding within a highly limited gene pool. Have mole-rats successfully managed to avoid that? Is their burden of deleterious mutations lessened through unusually low mutation rates? Or is genetic variability itself purposely kept down?”

Jhana walked around to the other side of the glass structure, apparently trying to locate the mole-rat queen. Roger followed her slowly around.

“Answering those questions,” she continued, “finding mechanisms to insure species diversity, establishing firm numbers for adequate breeding populations—all of those things are of great importance, I would think, to projects like the Orbital Biodiversity Preserve. Not only for the animals but, over the long run, for humans isolated in space colonies, too.”

As she turned toward Roger again, he was once more struck by the fineness of her features, particularly her dark eyes, almost as dark as the black silk of her hair. He also noticed that, beneath her business-like blue-green lab coverall, she had the slim, wiry body of a former gymnast or ballerina. He glanced around, almost unconsciously reassuring himself that Marissa was not there. Certainly his redheaded coworker was attractive in a more voluptuous sort of way, he thought, but—compared to Jhana, here—she had something of the galumphing cow about her. An odd impression, because in fact they probably were fairly close in weight and height.

“How about you?” Jhana asked.

“What?” Roger said, suddenly shaking his head and standing up straight from the table he’d been leaning his tall frame against. “Excuse me. My mind wandered for a moment. What was your question?”

“How did you become interested in them?”

“Oh. Saw them in a zoo when I was about fifteen or sixteen, I guess. From the start I was fascinated by how the whole structure of naked mole-rat society is maintained. The only known mammal that possesses a colony structure truly similar to that of the social insects, all that sort of thing.”

To make his point, he began to gesture at the system of tunnels and chambers excavated from the soil inside the glass.

“Within each colony there are three castes, what I like to call ‘queen,’ ‘courtiers,’ and ‘peasants.’ The queen, the breeding female, is generally the largest in size and the most protected. Then come the non-workers and infrequent workers I call the courtiers, then finally the frequent workers, the peasants, which are generally the smallest in size and the most readily expendable. The peasants cooperate in burrowing, gathering nest material, and bringing food to the nesting chamber for the dominant female and the courtiers, there. Some specialists call that big chamber the ‘breedhall.’ The male and female courtiers defend the colony. Only the queen breeds, and always only with a courtier male.”

He crouched down and stared closely through the glass at his blind, squirming, grey-pink charges—shriveled sausages come to life.

“Individual nonbreeding mole rats are not irreversibly sterile, though,” he continued. “And still they have a self-regulating population. That’s what fascinated me when I was a teenager. If naked mole rats appreciate the long term significance of not breeding no better than most humans do, then why don’t they breed? Why does only the queen breed?” He absently traced the outline of the breedhall chamber with a fingertip on the glass. “The answer I learned in college was that once a particular female becomes dominant, she somehow behaviorally suppresses breeding by other females. The older version was that the suppression was achieved through the use of pheromones. Either way, the others in the colony have no choice in the matter.”

He came out of his crouch, his knees clicking audibly in the quiet of the lab as he straightened up.

“Unfortunately, no one succeeded in isolating the essential pheromone of a chemical suppression, so the Faulkes orthodoxy of behavioral and physical rather than pheromonal suppression stood.” He turned toward her and fixed her with a steady gaze. “‘Behavior’—so vague. I felt I might just as well have been learning that the queen suppressed breeding by magic. But all that’s changed now. I believe we’ve isolated and synthesized the long-sought pheromone here, in this lab. Field tests are proving it out. The Faulkes orthodoxy will be overthrown. I’ve already finished my paper on it for the Journal of Mammalogy.”

“Congratulations!” Jhana exclaimed, genuinely impressed. “That’s a monumental accomplishment!”

He dismissed her excitement with a wave of his hand.

“I’m already at work on something bigger, much bigger,” he intimated proudly, his eyes shining. “Quick—give me a list of the world’s problems.”

Jhana looked at him oddly. Seeing that he was absolutely serious, she shrugged her shoulders and began ticking off the usual litany on her fingers.

“Ecodisasters, mostly—global heat trap effects, phytoplankton mass extinctions, ozone depletion, losses of biodiversity, worldwide desertification and famine, storm systems of unprecedented severity and duration arising from the re-calibration of the planetary heat machinery—”

“Right, right,” Roger said, cutting her off. “Poverty and starvation when more food is being produced than ever before. Increased levels of violence as overcrowding generates conditions of behavioral sink. Pestilence and suffering and resource wars—all the age-old plagues, which we have the technological know-how to eliminate but can’t.”

Absently he ran a hand through his hair and turned his gaze toward the floor, as if trying to stare through it toward the occluded Earth below.

“All the signs indicate that catastrophic environmental effects induced by humans have become not only cumulative but also synergistic, multiplying and dominoing like mad,” he continued evenly, a heavenly judge calmly pronouncing the final doom. “We’ve very nearly exceeded the ecosphere’s capacity to regenerate itself—at least in a form that will support humans. And what lies at the root of all those problems, hm?”

Jhana, feeling like a prisoner in the dock, took time to think before she answered.

“I’ve heard different people say the basic problem is patriarchy, or transnational capitalism, or any world system based on growth and more growth,” she hedged—knowing how politically loaded Roger’s question was—before coming around to her real thoughts at last. “As a biologist, though, I suppose I’d have to say the root cause is population.”

“Exactly!” Roger said, affirming it forcefully with a finger pointed skyward. Jhana felt as if she’d just been given a reprieve from the general doom. “But no one wants to see that or really do anything about it. The essence of tragedy is willful blindness to certain facts or realities. Our situation is tragic because most of our world’s governments, religions, and economic systems have remained willfully blind to the increasing likelihood of human extinction. As a result, most of the world’s people remain ignorant of this likelihood.”

“Extinction?” Jhana looked at him as if he’d suddenly sprouted two new heads. “But there are over seven and a half billion human beings on that planet down there—despite every population control method tried. We’re hardly a ‘vanishing animal’.”

“Yes,” Roger said, pacing slowly, thoughtfully, back and forth. “In fact we’ve been too successful. We’re birthing ourselves to death. If you have eyes to see it, it’s clear that we’re caught in a classic boom/bust cycle. We’re quickly becoming the victims of our own success. The only thing that can keep us from finally going past the point of no return is a drastic decrease in human population.”

Jhana shook her head, turning her gaze back toward the busy mole-rats in their glass-walled slab of habitat.

“Now you’re the one talking magic,” she said at last. “Or lots of death and suffering and Malthusian mayhem.”

Roger spun suddenly on his heel.

“Not at all! I’m talking pheromones, human pheromones! Think about it, Ms. Meniskos: a subtle perfume containing a sexual attractant pheromone that acts on human fertility—the denser the concentration of people, the more powerfully the pheromone reduces fertility. A paradox, but there are precedents, you know. Examples of feedback systems by which other species self-regulate their numbers. Epideictic displays among birds, for instance. Think of the advantages. No government would have to force people to undergo vasectomies or tubal ligations. A form of population control, yes, but one not dependent on laws or political decisions or demographic shifts or levels of education. Purely and abstractly responsive to population density, and at the same time inseparably caught up in the whole essence of sexuality and sensuality. “

A paradox so perfect immediately caused objections to rush into Jhana’s mind.

“But it would be so—so unnatural!”

Roger Cortland looked at her with furrowed brow.

“My dear Jhana, we are at this moment living inside an artificial world hanging in space between the Earth and Moon—a habitat as contrived as that mole-rat slice-of-life you’re staring at. What could be more unnatural than that?”

She could only turn and stare at him, still turning over in her mind the potential pitfalls of his scheme. He took her silence for acquiescence and made his checkmate move.

“Even more importantly,” he said in a slightly hushed and paranoid manner, “if I can develop such a pheromone, might your employer be interested in it?”

* * * * * * *

Before Atsuko and Marissa had even finished their short chill swim and headed back to shore, they no longer had the beach and Echo Mirror Lake to themselves. A group of about half a dozen youngsters had appeared on the other side of the lake, naked, holojam box in tow, projecting trideos onto the lake’s surface and exploiting the basin’s echoing acoustics to noisy effect.

Excerpted lyrics from Möbius Cadúceus song, “Socrates”:

The old man urged his students then,

“Make good use of your reason.”

But the Athenian state

Called his teachings treason.

Still better to be Socrates than a happy pig.

Far better to be Socrates than a happy pig...

Over the noise Atsuko tried to explain that the lake shore was, by recently established consensus, divided roughly into sectors—mixed nude swimming area, same sex nude swimming (male only and female only areas), mixed swim-suited swimming, and all overlapping gradients of cladness and uncladness in between.

“I know it smacks of ‘the oversocialization of the Left’,” Marissa heard Atsuko say clearly as their neighbors across the lake finally turned the music down, the volume of it having apparently proven too much even for their young ears. “Or ‘the limits of segregation are the limits of toleration.’ But openness to diversity is always much needed here. Toleration of alternatives, combined with a respect for the individual’s right not to have his own beliefs infringed upon, so long as his beliefs and actions don’t infringe upon the rights of others. Always a challenging balance.”

“My right to swing my fist ends at your nose?” Marissa asked pleasantly as she lay on the beach, drying in the sunlight beside Atsuko, who nodded. “But how do you instill that tolerance?” Marissa continued. “The presence of those kids across the lake has gotten me to thinking—particularly about the way you educate and plan to educate your young people here.”

“What about it?” Atsuko asked, adjusting her wrap-around sunshades.

Marissa thought a moment. More words and music about hemlock and Socrates and happy pigs drifted over from the far shore, but the younger people seemed intent on some trideo game they’d projected upon the waves. The word VAJRA flashed over the water, followed by a symbol like a multi-faceted shining thunderbolt, then a City of Light appeared which, as nearly as Marissa could determine, was being besieged by the forces of darkness. She seemed to remember the word “vajra” from somewhere, though she couldn’t quite recall where. She shook her head and shrugged.

“Well, if everything is so situational and incomplete and uncertain as you say,” Marissa said, trying to put her thoughts into the right words, “then how can one possibly have an ethics?”

Atsuko smiled, beginning to make a game of the conversation.

“That’s easy. One can’t have an ethics—one is an ethics. That’s the problem: everybody treats ethics as a product rather than a process,” Atsuko paused, thinking it through. Across the lake the song sang about a trial and sentence of exile. “That’s the problem with ethics generally: so teleological, so oriented to a product external to life rather than inherent in the process of living itself. What I hope we’re teaching the children here is that, in a very real sense, the journey is the goal—the treasure, the pot of gold, lies not at the rainbow’s end but in the chasing of the rainbow. I hope we’re teaching the kids to find meaning in the search.”

“ ‘Persistent striving,’ as Kierkegaard calls it,” Marissa said with a nod. “Not striving for something, or to be somebody. Striving as an end in itself.”

“Right,” Atsuko said, flicking sand off her arm. “A product-oriented ethics, a teleological ethics, is no ethics at all. Any ethics you can have isn’t worth having.”

Sitting up on the sand, Marissa realized that the song of Socrates and the happy pigs was ending, though the game of the shining city floating on the waves still seemed to be going strong.

“But then what do you replace ethics with?” she asked.

Atsuko flicked the wraparounds up off her eyes and looked at Marissa carefully as she spoke.

“With nothing. With just being. Letting the stone roll away from the heart, allowing the moon to slide away so the sun can shine.”

“Very poetic,” Marissa said, “but how does one do that? Through showing compassion?”

Atsuko sat up, brushing sand lightly off her suit.

“Not just showing it. Being it. Living compassion. Existing in a lived recognition of the metaphysical unity behind and underlying and connecting all things.” Atsuko laughed lightly. “That sounds too mystical by half, but it’s the best way I can think of to put it—and it’s still a lot easier to talk about than it is to do.”

Marissa and Atsuko heard the young people across the lake whistling and shouting and clapping, saw them pointing toward the axis of the sky. Looking up, they saw the dual immense snakes of the Möbius Cadúceus skysign shimmering and writhing, self-consuming rainbow serpents—

“Good Heavens!” Atsuko exclaimed. “What’s that?”

“Beautiful, isn’t it?” Marissa said quietly over the continued shouts and whoops of the young people across the lake. “I saw it the other day. Roger passed out when he saw it—might’ve gotten hit by their projection lasers, I think. No real harm done though, apparently. It’s to publicize a performance by that band our young neighbors across the lake were listening to. They must be fans. See? There’s the skysign where their trideo game was. Or maybe that’s just a reflection?”

Atsuko turned from the image in the sky to its reflection in the lake’s smooth surface. If anything it seemed even more strange and exotic reflected on the water.

“I’m surprised you haven’t heard the publicity,” Marissa said, turning toward Atsuko.

“I haven’t heard much of anything, lately,” Atsuko said, “except rumblings from Earth, that is.”

Atsuko neither elaborated nor turned her gaze from the skysign, and Marissa didn’t press her. When at last the symbol had disappeared from sky and water, when at last even the echoes of the applause and the shouting had ceased, Atsuko turned to Marissa.

“Can there be so mundane, so profane an explanation for that symbol?” Atsuko asked, still lost and wondering at the sight of the image in the sky. “It makes me think of that line in Yeats’s Second Coming—‘a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi troubles my sight.’ And it is troubling, too. So archetypal—it makes my head explode with associations! Ancient and modern, past and future, time and timelessness—and all for what? Advertising a show!”

After the fiery eruption of her words, the look of disdain that subsided onto Atsuko’s face seemed so curmudgeonly and out of place that Marissa had to laugh. Atsuko suddenly realized why Marissa was laughing.

“Hah! Listen to me! We hardly need to drive the sacred and the profane any farther apart than they already are, do we? And here I am doing it!”

Atsuko moved off toward the changing tent then, her laughing final words echoing over the lake and deep inside Marissa. True, she cherished her theory about the world-as-it-ought-to-be and the world-as-it-is, but Marissa could never quite forget Hume’s law: No ought deducible from is. Abruptly she was swept by the fear that as long as she believed in her oughts and isses she was doomed to an Arnoldian limbo, wandering between two worlds, one dead, the other powerless to be born. Had she, albeit unconsciously, already consigned the Earth to the first category, the space habitats to the second? Why her personal fascination with utopian literature—with what had never been born from the womb of time? From what longing could such an obsession have arisen in her?

She suspected that her sudden self- doubt had something to do with those “rumblings from Earth” Atsuko had mentioned. As Marissa moved slowly over the sand from the cold water to the thin tent, she was not comforted by such thoughts.

* * * * * * *

Since his coworker Jhana was to be gone for the rest of the day, Paul Larkin thought he’d indulge in a little media-surfing. A short ride on the “Planetary Fear Machine”—the plenum of all Earth’s infotainment and news broadcasts pumped into his lab’s best VR hallucinatorium—always made Paul feel that, despite living in the orbital boonies, he was still able to keep in touch with what was really going on down there.

Not that what was really going on was to be found openly talked about on the Fear Machine, Paul thought as he walked into the big VR room. He knew better than that. He tended to view the whole constellation of what got pumped out on the Earth’s nets as a sort of planetary ego, a reality principle consciously wailing against the void. He was actually more interested in the planetary id and superego, the unconscious parts of Earth’s noosphere—those parts of the planetary mind that, with luck, he could read traces of in all those conscious mediations, like a therapist interpreting dreams or slips of the tongue.

To help him see through the wash of surface data he had an entheogen, the mushroom Cordyceps jacintae he’d brought back from Caracamuni tepui so long ago—along with some pure KL 235 from the same mushroom species, recently extracted in his lab. He’d never been so gutsy as to let the mushroom take its full twelve years and form a mature myconeural symbiont with his central nervous system—the way the indigenous people of the tepui had. Still, he had a two months’ growth of the fungus in his head now and that, with a new ingestion and the pure extract, should be enough to trigger the chaos in his brain necessary to fully overcoming the constraints of the dorsal and median raphe nuclei, the “reducing valves” on brain activity.

Once those impediments were overcome, he could media-surf at greater than flash-cut speed, which would in turn serve as an information trigger for “going elsewhere”, entering that different structure of possibility where he could see the meaningful patterns slowly shifting behind the seemingly meaningless random scatter of world events, entertainments, spectacles, reportage. He always knew when he got to elsewhere, for he could see the patterns of the future already present in the present, could see them clicking into shape like a three-dimensional image rising out of stereogram dot-scatter.

His friend Seiji called it paranoia tripping, but Paul preferred to think of it as electronic shamanism, aerial voyaging to another realm. Strapping himself into the gimballed swivelstand and looking about him at the full 360º virtual surround, Paul remembered what work they’d gotten this fancy toy for: identifying, analyzing, and interpreting raw ecological imagery, creating an electronic forest to stand between the thing of dirt and cellulose and sunlight, and the thing of numbers and bytes and electrons. It had not been designed for the use he was now going to put it to, but he knew it would do that well, too.

He slowly chewed the Cordyceps fungus, washing it down with the KL extract mixed in papaya juice. He started pumping the material from Earth’s infotainment nets into the virtual space around him, still keeping manual control over the first thousand channels and the rate of switching. It would be a quarter of an hour before the entheogens kicked in and his mind opened out enough so that he could up his datafeed and go to automated switching.

He saw the usual news. Ongoing food riots in at least a dozen nations. Refugees pouring from one overcrowded camp to another due to wars civil and uncivil, unrests political and impolitic. Monsoons in the Bay of Bengal. Heavy storms over Europe and North America. Forest fires here, flash floods there, tornadoes and earthquakes thrown in for good measure. Sheepherders putting sunglasses on their flocks in Patagonia—the usual ritual, intended to prevent cataracts resulting from increased UV coming down out of the depleted ozone. Death of the last wild Florida manatee, in a speedboat encounter. More marine mammal beachings. Two corporate-sponsored resource wars in southern Asia....

His gaze lingered on a fundamentalist siege of an Ark/Zoo facility:

“Before this night is through,” booms some folksy white-maned media holy-man, “the Lord’s own wrath will raze this ark of Satan and lay low every evolutionist, ecoterrorist, and Gaia worshipper therein!”

Choruses of “Amen! Amen!” and a wave of applause breaks over the preacher, who smiles benevolently upon his people like a greeting-card grandfather upon his large, holiday-gathered happy family. The image cuts from the pastor’s words to his flock’s actions—a twilight overhead shot of thousands upon thousands of wrathful zealots wearing crosses and cartridge bandoliers, shooting and shouting and milling round a sandbagged perimeter defended by private security forces in riot armor. The nattering of small arms fire and the occasional whump of mortars can be heard in the background, where smoke also rises from shattered buildings.

Larkin grimaced. Nearly eight billion people on that rock down there, the one with the blown ozone layer and the cyclonic storms marching across its face, the one with the unhappy isles of seacoast cities huddled behind high dikes, castellated by walls and moated by oceans, the one with the continents of buff brown desert where once there had been globe-girdling forests—and all so many of them could still think of was being fruitful and multiplying, clinging all the more tenaciously and in all the greater numbers to the very fundamentalisms that exacerbated the situation.

Crazy—but crazier still if these attacks, now being allowed on the Arks and Zoos, came also to be allowed upon the Orbital Biodiversity Preserve itself. He knew that many of the religioids thought of the space habitat as a Techno-Babylon, an orbital abomination. Were these increasing attacks a sign of some growing betrayal? The Orbital Complex was merely a big investment, after all. Investment strategies could change, if costs got too high. What if some Terran baron got impatient to move stock and began to play the middle between the temporal lords of space and the increasing number of “spiritual” rulers on Earth? The habitat’s untrammeled Easter garden, its endless springtime world, its lake and marsh and meadow and forest and jungle in space, where ghost species were becoming enfleshed again, a resurrection of all those scattered bodies—this secret-garden world continued in existence only on the sufferance of some very powerful forces on Earth....

He was starting to see the faint gold traceries in his peripheral vision that indicated the entheogens he’d taken were beginning to take affect, though not yet at full strength. He scanned further:

“We find the addictive popularity of this ‘Building the Ruins’ game very disturbing,” said a Korean trideo industry spokeswoman. “We’ve already gotten many complaints about it from parents’ groups. We want to make clear that responsible Earthbound trideo companies bear no responsibility for the game or its manufacture. In violation of trade regulations it is being designed and updated by someone or some group in the HOME habitat and then flash-manufactured and network-marketed by questionable business groups here on Earth. Also disturbing is the fact that these addictive game-units are broadcasting back to space, presumably to enable the quick upgrades characteristic of this product and its users’ need for constant novelty—”

Larkin’s visual field became completely filled with entoptic shimmering, networks of light glowing like spiderwebs of molten gold. He felt himself transforming from a person into a place through which threads and lines of bright energy and information were flowing, creating structures of possibility that he examined not so much with his eyes as with his mind. Some part of him far away snapped the channel-switching mode over to automatic infosurf and removed the thousand-channel limit. Data fell into him at greater than flash-cut speed—not just open broadcasts and public information, but encrypted material, business and government and military. Stock transactions, diplomatic communiques, troop movements and transport preparations and readiness status. Tetragrammaton and Medusa Blue back-channels, intelligence webs operating behind “bought” governments and corporate fronts like Tao-Ponto and ParaLogics, all squawking about games and unidentified satellites and other strange matters. As much of the Earth’s infosphere as he could process was being crammed into his head, randomly and meaninglessly at first, but soon with meaning and pattern rising and growing out of it.

When, two hours later, he had completed his electronic shamanic flight to elsewhere, he knew that the pattern was an ominous one. The Forces behind the Plans were marshalling—Holocaust and Exodus, demons and angels, and something, some inevitable but surprising third thing that was both and neither of those oppositional powers. And the focus of that shape of time he’d encountered! It was as if the flat-looking starfield background of the universe had turned into a three-dimensional mountain made of stars—a mountain the peak of which was pointed precisely at the orbital habitat itself.

Switching off the virtual surround, Paul realized the machine was still jittering madly with images. But then, so was he.

* * * * * * *

Jhana returned to her residence in an agitated state. She knew that her employer, Tao-Ponto, would undoubtedly be interested in a pheromone perfume like that which Roger Cortland was working on. Dr. Tien-Jones would definitely consider it a “worthwhile project.” She felt equally sure, however, that neither Roger Cortland nor Tao-Ponto would be emphasizing its fertility-decreasing aspect in their hyping of it. If a perfume could be developed that contained a powerful human sexual attractant—and could also generate tremendous profits without causing immediate cancer in the wearers—she was sure everyone at TPAG would be all for it.

Yet something about the whole scenario still disturbed her—so much so that she felt the need to take her mind off her visit with Roger. She had viewed the instructional tape on the upkeep of her garden area and now decided that a little green therapy might do her some good. Locating a small pair of pruning clippers and some envelopes for seeds, she went out to trim the blown roses, then to remove and store the seeds from the poppies and columbines.

Working her way among the plants, Jhana got sweaty and dirty and itchy with plant cuttings and debris. Despite that, she still marveled at the way this artificial world worked and wondered why the world below and its people did not work as well. The gardens here flowed easily (if not effortlessly) into the designated “wild areas”, those special habitats for the endangered and threatened species of Earth that were being preserved in space. Looking about the Sphere now, with her feet on the “ground”—looking toward that diversity which, combined with height, had so overwhelmed her upon her arrival—instead of seeing something fearful she was now beginning to see a world that was beautiful in its complexity, despite its inside-out strangeness.

Some of the beauty was plainly visible: the multiplicity of environments, the streams that meandered down from the poles through marshes and ponds then onward to the river girding the Sphere’s equator, all flowing into and out of the small natural-looking reservoir called Echo Mirror Lake. Houses and other small buildings were set into the landscape/skyscape, usually in small tight clusters. In the case of single units like the Sanchez-Fukuda place, they were constructed in such a way that, instead of being imposed upon it like a city planner’s nightmare, the residences seemed to flow up out of the mazed landscape like a geomancer’s dream.

As she finished pruning the blown roses, Jhana thought how different the cities of Earth looked, viewed from low orbit or that unsure boundary where airspace ends and outerspace begins. Even before she came up here she’d flown over L.A. and Tokyo and Mexico City, seen computer-enhanced reconnaissance photos of cities around the world, and they’d always reminded her of one thing: a biochip vat-spill gone out of control, some malignant meta-tumor, half supercomputer microcircuitry and half fungal colony, spreading across a Petri-dish planet, an informational spawn-complex bedding out through mycelia of highways and railroads and sea-lanes and flight patterns, trade and exchange, lines of print and code, power lines and telephone wires, broadcast channels and fiber-optic cables and information winging out to satellites. When she’d flown over Earth’s cities after dark, or seen shots of them nightside from space, they had not reminded her of glittering diamonds but rather of great electronic fungal colonies glowing and burning like graveyard foxfire, luminescent pox on the face of the darkness.

Rubbing columbine seed pods mechanically between her fingers so that the black seeds fell into an envelope, she found herself far away, thinking how different her homeworld would look if this habitat were everted and spread upon the Earth, in place of the human habitations that were already there. Certainly an Earth so inhabited would be almost invisible from space, day or night—the presence of human settlement harder to detect because it would be shedding so much less light and heat into the surrounding environment.

Even as she looked at the Sphere’s cavernous interior now, she supposed that most of its real beauty—or at least its elegance and efficiency—was almost invisible here too. Despite her initial misgivings, she was beginning to develop a grudging respect for the place. Its virtues were that way: invisible, subterranean—not sensational or spectacular.

Nearly all of the habitat’s trashstream was fully recycled—so? Its soil in the farming, wild, and habitation areas was always given time to regenerate itself—who cares? All the gases of organic decomposition were utilized and all the possible pollutants of living or farming or manufacturing were eliminated at the source or fully reclaimed for other uses—eh, big deal. None of that was sexy, none of that would ever show up well in a tour-brochure-from-space description. Yet it was really what this place was about.

When she’d heard, before she came up here, that the weather in the habitat was pretty much always perfect, Jhana had thought, My God, whatever do people find to talk about? Yet clearly they found plenty—as if, once the actual weather was no longer a topic of conversation, every other kind of weather—political weather, religious weather—could be. Not that that distanced them from dirt and wind and water, though. Working in the garden, it was becoming clearer to her that people here had to live in careful harmony with their environment because if they didn’t, they’d die. This place was a lifeboat compared to the luxury liner of Earth, but as a consequence of their stricter confines the passengers here seemed much less inclined to take their world for granted.

She thought about that passage in the Bible saying it was easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than a rich man to enter the Kingdom of Heaven. Here in this peaceable kingdom in the heavens, it seemed equally difficult to live luxuriously and wastefully—because everyone was always aware of the narrowness of the needle’s eye. Yet, despite the constraints, the lives of the settlers here were still rich, as rich as that of nearly anybody on Earth, though in less tangible ways. Crushing dried, ripe poppy capsules between her fingers for the tiny seeds that rained out of them and fell into her collecting envelope, Jhana thought that this sort of world, spread upon the Earth, might not be such a bad thing after all.

Standing in the midst of the garden she closed her eyes and inhaled the thick, sensual blend of scents around her. The action of this perfume, she thought, was very different from that of the perfume Roger Cortland proposed. She knew the scientific reason for all the green plants in the habitat was nominally that they pumped more oxygen into the air and encouraged an ion balance more favorable to human contentment. The scents and colors, though not much talked about in the technical reports, were a superfluous grace everyone appreciated.

The idea of scents, though, dragged her mind determinedly back to Roger’s work. Besides its sexual attractant powers, the “other” property of Roger’s proposed perfume, the secret one that no one would be talking about—would that be a superfluous grace too? Or something else?

Her eye caught Seiji Yamaguchi’s as he walked past on a garden path nearby, jaunty in an anachronistic pair of blue overalls. Jhana waved and he came toward her, the two of them making small talk about gardening and Seiji’s landscaping work with one of her neighbors, until he changed the subject.

“You seemed Deep In Thought when you first turned toward me,” he said after he’d joined Jhana in her garden. “Hope it wasn’t something I said or did.”

“Oh no, no,” she said, then stared a moment at him. “I don’t know if I should tell you about this...” she began, then went on to tell him about Roger’s proposed pheromone plan, spilling out the disturbing issues it raised for her, continuing as she did so to absently deadhead flowers and cut newer blooms to bring inside.

“If the settlers here have no choice but to live in harmony with their environment or die here,” she said, finishing up, “then does Roger’s scheme to reduce Earth’s population differ all that much from the space habitat designers’? And, if he can really develop what he’s working on, Roger’s plan will take effect much more quickly. In the short term it would be more efficient, too.”

Seiji frowned and shook his head.

“It’s not that simple though, you know,” Seiji said, taking an armful of her cut flowers, both of them thinking about it as they walked from the garden. “The main difference between the ‘constraints’, as you call them, associated with Roger’s plan and those associated with the hopes surrounding the space habitat come down fundamentally to an issue of choice.”

“I don’t see how,” Jhana said as they walked inside her residence.

“People make a conscious decision as to whether or not they want to live in a space habitat to begin with,” Seiji insisted as they began gathering vases and putting flowers in them. “We make an informed choice as to whether we want to put ourselves in such a restricted situation. We have a choice of worlds, more so than any previous generation of humanity. The system of space colonization will take longer to reduce the population burden on Earth than Roger’s plan would, true. Space habitats are more long-term, arguably more ‘wasteful’ of time that humanity and the Earth’s ecosphere can ill afford to waste. Yet, no matter whether it succeeds or fails, at least our long-range plan is a humanitarian means to a humane end.”

“And you don’t think Roger’s plan would be?” Jhana asked, filing away the packets of seeds she’d collected as Seiji puttered about, absentmindedly arranging the flowers.

“If people are kept uninformed about the pheromone perfume’s secondary effect, if they’re purposely kept ‘unconscious’ of it,” Seiji said, puzzling it through, “then the element of informed choice will be left out of the equation. Denying people that choice means denying them part of their role as autonomous adults, diminishing their humanity by diminishing the role of choice and will in their lives.”

“So Roger’s perfume proposal reeks of chemical authoritarianism,” Jhana said, unable to resist teasing him a little as she slightly rearranged his flower arranging. “Stinks of olfactory fascism, of leading people literally by the nose?”

“Now I didn’t say that,” Seiji said, holding his hands up before him. “Why would anyone want that? From everything I know about him, Roger Cortland just doesn’t seem the type of person who lusts for power in that sort of Big-Daddy-knows-best style. I wonder what’s driving his interest in this pheromone stuff?”

Seiji looked at his watch, then glanced around the room as if trying to remember something.

“Oh, I’ve got another appointment,” he said suddenly. “I must be going. Perhaps we could get together and continue this conversation again sometime soon?”

“Yes, I’d like that,” Jhana said, walking with him to the door. “Over lunch, maybe? Let’s keep in touch—I’d like to learn more about your work with the power satellites, too.”

Seiji agreed and they said their good-byes. Jhana watched him go, thinking that it didn’t require pheromones to make Seiji Yamaguchi attractive to her, in his kindly, distracted sort of way. He was in very good physical shape, probably from all his gardening work. She’d hate to think she was just using him as an information source.

Standing in the house’s living area, looking at the flower arrangements and smelling their perfume in the air, she pondered her next course of action. Should she—based on what she only suspected and could not prove, about a biochemical that hadn’t even been synthesized yet—should she keep Roger’s work hidden, neglect to pass it on to her superiors? She had promised Roger she’d pass word along. Should she go back on that promise for the sake of protecting strangers from some as-yet-obscure harm—or would withholding information make her a Big Mommy, guilty of denying people the possibility of choice? As bad as Roger and Tao-Ponto would be themselves, if they ever marketed the stuff and purposely neglected to inform the public of the pheromone’s secondary effect?

Abruptly, Jhana felt as if Roger had handed her the olfactory equivalent of atom bomb plans. The roles offered her now—spy, accomplice, whistle-blower—were none of them very comforting.

No, she couldn’t hide his proposal. Doing that would deny her TPAG superiors the possibility of informed choice—the very thing which, she had to agree with Seiji, was so wrong about Roger’s plans. If it was wrong for Roger to use such covert means for the supposedly lofty end he sought, then it would be equally wrong for her to use such means to accomplish her ends as well.

Checking the time in Balance’s zone on Earth, Jhana spoke Mr. Tien-Jones’s office number to her wallscreen. She did not feel good about doing her job in this way, but she did it. Getting only his answering computer on the line, she was obscurely relieved that she could leave the information as a message for him without having to actually converse with anyone about it.

* * * * * * *

Wondering if he had told Jhana too much and unsure of her reaction to his work, Roger was working late, determined more than ever to complete promptly the synthesis of the human pheromone that had become his obsession.

With the help of his information manager program or IMP (which he’d customized to look and act like an on-screen mole-rat), Roger had finger-walked through innumerable virtual libraries on Earth, scanning myriad relevant selections from the scientific literature relating to pheromones and sexuality. He had stumbled on the relationship of the olfactory sense to memory, to theta rhythm, to REM sleep and the rise of dreaming in mammals one hundred and forty million years ago—learning, in the process, a great deal more about dreaming itself, both as information reprocessing and as survival strategy.

“Everything in the literature fits the plan for the proposed pheromone,” he mused aloud to his mole-rat imp, “except for one thing: theta rhythm has not been demonstrated in higher primates in this context.”

“Yes,” the imp confirmed. “Available evidence suggests it disappeared when vision replaced olfaction as the dominant sense.”

“Okay,” Roger said, sending his imp on a new search. “Our pheromone will have to be a potent one, capable of re-awakening some of the olfactory sense’s underlying, ancient powers. Examine further the scientific literature on the deep relation of olfaction to sexual excitation—focusing particularly on this memory trigger issue.”

“Will do,” said the imp, tunneling away mole-ratwise into the infosphere.

Roger felt too tired to think and analyze further—but still much too fidgety with nervous energy to consider going to sleep. Wandering through the lab a bit aimlessly, he saw that Marissa was here late too, playing the girl with the DNA eyes on one of their CAMD facility’s Cybergene machines. As he stopped outside the door, he saw her unsuiting, clearly frustrated.

“How goes it?” he asked innocently—though he stared less innocently at the coppery waterfall of her thick hair as she removed her wraparounds.

“Not well,” Marissa said with a sigh. “Getting this immortalizing vector to even begin to function is turning out to be a lot more work than I suspected.”

“I was thinking of taking a little spacewalk to unwind,” Roger said nonchalantly. “Maybe you’d like to come along—if you’re at a good break point too, that is.”

“Are you kidding?” Marissa said. “Even if I were on the verge of a major discovery I’d take a break to do that.”

“Then follow me.”

Via ridgecart they made their way to the docking facilities and then to the pod bays. Boarding Roger’s small private craft, they donned a pair of his custom maneuvering suits as the little ship, travelling on autopilot, left the bays and the docking area, then slowed and stopped a hundred kilometers off the main traffic lanes leading to the habitat. Since they had to strip down to get into their opaque suits, Roger politely turned his head as, back to back, they dressed in the small pod. When he had checked over Marissa’s suit and they were safely at their destination, Roger ordered the hatch open and they drifted into the vast blue-black womb of the universe.

“This is fantastic!” Marissa said, nervous excitement in her voice. “Like being angels in heaven!”

“Ah, but if a heaven is to be safe for astronauts,” Roger said as he stepped from the air lock behind her, “it must be devoid of angels.”

“What?”

“Just think of all the trouble angels would have posed to the opening of the space frontier,” Roger said, mock-serious as he put her through some basic tandem maneuvering instructions. “Splatting on portholes. Getting sucked into scramjets. Fouling in the lines of lightsails. Getting blasted to pieces by mass-driver projectiles. Winged by spacejunk, to fall down the burning sky, helpless feathery meteors smashing into the Earth’s thick walls of air....”

“That,” Marissa said, “is a truly perverse image.”

Roger laughed.

“Maybe,” he said, “but not historically unprecedented. Think of dodos and passenger pigeons, or aborigines and American Indians, for that matter. If angels did exist, it would be necessary for us to exterminate them. Angel killers, like the stool-pigeoners and buffalo hunters of old, blasting away at huge flocks of the heavenly hosts, lasers splashing red on their pearly wings and flesh. Have to be sophisticated hunters too—‘What sport, eh? Back in the hypersaddle again, riding the range on the final frontier!’“

Roger cut in his suit’s maneuvering and attitude jets. In the thin, flexibly responsive gossamer armor of his livesuit, he did feel a bit like a conquistador surveying new worlds to conquer, though certainly he was not so bloody-minded as those angel-hunters he spoke of. He had to admit, though, that he did like to tweak Marissa’s sensibilities a wee bit. She moved more slowly behind him as he zipped along, but she was a fast learner and was quickly catching on to how the maneuvering suits worked.

Coming up above the space colony, he saw the bright mass of Earth, blue white big sister in the womb of night. He saw the anorexic moon further on, and the great fireball of the sun.

“There it is,” Roger said, always somewhat awestruck by the power of that fireball. “A hydrogen bomb exploding endlessly, eight and a half minutes away, far enough for terror to become beauty and death to become life.”

“Why, Roger,” Marissa said, “I’m surprised. I do believe there’s a poet trapped somewhere down in that soul of yours.”

“Stick with me, kid,” he said, imitating a twentieth-century film icon, “and you’ll never get bored.”

They pivoted slightly. Ringing Earth like a necklace, the solar power satellite stations floated in the void before them, glinting in the sunlight of an eternal day, sending vast streams of gigawattage invisibly to Earth in the form of microwaves, powering up the dawn of the so-called Solar Age. Arrays of metal-film reflectors stretched upon frameworks a kilometer square each, they were the space colonies’ reason for being—both this colony below and behind him now, and the two scheduled to open soon.

“See that?” he said, gazing carefully. “You can just make out one of the new colonies in the distance—donut-stack tori along the axis of a completed sphere, see? The other colony must be occluded by Earth and shadows, at the moment.”

“I’m just so impressed by what’s being done out here,” Marissa said following him as he moved from vista to vista, “especially by what your mother and the rest of the colony founders are doing.”

“Hm,” Roger grunted and he swung around toward the colony. “All this great tech, and still they want to waste their time on their ridiculous social engineering schemes.”

“What? Don’t you believe in the possibility of bettering ourselves?”

“My dear Marissa, I am certainly a firm believer in the revealed religion of Inevitable Technological Progress—more so than either of my parents. What else is there to believe in, in the long run?”

“Human beings, maybe?” Marissa ventured, suspecting what sort of response the idea would get.

“Nonsense! Too unpredictable!” Roger said firmly as they floated into better view of the long axis of the space habitat. “Just look at the ridiculous shams of politics and ‘political science’ and ‘sociology’. I have a good deal more faith in engineering specs than in the ‘nature’ of my fellow mortals. There’s a technological solution to every human problem, if only enough time and money were put into searching for that solution—and if it were allowed to be implemented.”

“I can’t believe you’re that naive a technological optimist!” Marissa said, even though, at that moment, she was also quite well aware of how dependent she was on the impressive piece of technology keeping her alive and functioning in this environment quite inimical to unprotected life. “You can’t eliminate the human factor—”

“That’s just the problem!” Roger said, truly exasperated as they drifted along in their sublime surroundings to which, for the moment, he was thoroughly oblivious. “Within a relatively short time, the need for satellite solar power stations will drop, because the stations already in place will be providing all the energy humanity needs. Eventually such energy wealth will help bring about the demographic shift that might lead population growth rate downward—but when? Once human numbers have hit ten billion? Fifteen? At some point along that trajectory, ecocatastrophe will kick in and take an enormous toll. Then, when humanity needs the space habitats most, where will they be? The government/corporate consortia will have already stopped building the habitats because our major product, the satellite solar power stations, the SSPS, will have already ceased to be profitable!”

“But I’ve been reading the works written by your mother and the other founders,” Marissa said, wishing she could reach out and grab him by the arm and say Wait a minute!—but settling for narrowcast argument instead. “They claim that the space habitats will become valuable in themselves—regardless of whether they turn out a profitable product like the SSPS. According to the founders, the construction of space habitats themselves will become a valued enterprise—”

“—‘and this will drive a momentum growth phase, during which habitat construction will, over time, outstrip human population growth, eventually reaching the point at which emigration to the space colonies will be so great that Earth’s human population will actually start to decline!’” Roger said, sententiously and sarcastically. “I’ve heard that song and dance before. I wish I could believe it, but I just don’t buy it.”

“Why not?” Marissa asked, maneuvering up in front of him. She really wanted to know, since she thought it was a hopeful scenario that might even work.

“Where will the demand for new habitats come from?” Roger asked, intent on demolishing what he perceived to be her illusions. “Before the majority of human beings will ever want to live in a floating botanical garden in space, things will have to have already gotten pretty damned lousy on Earth. And by then it will be too late.”

“Do you have a better suggestion?” Marissa asked, a bit peeved at what she could only think of as his technological arrogance.

“Yes, as a matter of fact, I do. Better to trust in solutions that take human decision-making out of the loop. Like my pheromone research. If my idea works, then human population can be made realistically resource-dependent. If humanity never fully breaks out into space, that will be all right—human numbers will be self-regulating and so will never push the Earth’s life support systems into ecocatastrophe.”

“And if the break-out into space begins to happen anyway?” Marissa prodded. Much about Roger’s whole scenario seemed downright dehumanizing, to her—even if it did seem to solve a lot of critical problems.

“That’ll be fine too,” Roger said happily. “A pheromone-shifted humanity will be more amenable to, and more easily spread by, the same process of colony fissioning or budding that’s seen in mole-rats.”

“You seem to have all the answers,” Marissa admitted as they jetted along through the silent void between the space colony and the nearest satellite solar power station. She tried to change the subject—hopefully not too awkwardly. “I don’t share your absolute faith in tech, but I must admit—these space suits we’re wearing, they’re quite impressive. I’ve never seen suits like them before.”

“That’s right,” Roger beamed. “Here we are, naked inside them, separated from the killing emptiness by only a few millimeters of transparent helmet and opaque, rubbery, slick material.”

“It feels so sheer,” Marissa enthused, believing what she was saying even if it did sound like an advertisement, “that I almost forget I’m in a suit. Like being naked to the universe.”

“But still fully protected, breathing clean fresh air,” Roger said. “It’s a livesuit, possessing a programmable active structure. Nothing like the bulky armor that protected fragile humans when we first came into space. This is all active nanoelectronics and nanomachinery. Microscopic motors and computers, combined with the suit’s three dimensional weave of diamond-based active fibers. Makes you quite capable of wrestling with angels or grasping the head of a pin. In sunlight the suit functions like a one-person ecosystem, absorbing light from outside and your own exhaled carbon dioxide from within the suit, to produce fresh oxygen from the two, almost like a plant. In case of emergency, it can break down other wastes into their constituent molecules and re-assemble them into foodstuffs.”

Marissa could have done without hearing that last yummy bit of technological goshwowery, but she was still undeniably impressed.

“Why haven’t I hear more about these supersuits?” Marissa said, executing a full somersault that she wouldn’t have thought she had the grace to complete so flawlessly.

“Because,” Roger said with a heavy exhale, as if the question had punched him unexpectedly in the solar plexus, “it was inside just such a prototype supersuit, as you called it, that my father died.”

Marissa abruptly stopped her somersault turning.

“He was walking at the bottom of the Marianas Trench,” Roger said. “Kilometers underwater in the Pacific. One of his companies had developed the livesuit. There was no reason for the suit to fail—even under such extreme conditions. I still don’t believe it was the technology that failed. It was people. Someone, somehow, programmed that suit to collapse, or at least to allow itself to collapse. The moment the suit failed, my father died.”

Roger began to move slowly back in the direction of the pod they’d come out in, now on a line with the space colony and its space docks. Marissa moved beside him, carefully matching his slow speed.

“My father had already given me a pair of the prototype suits as a birthday present,” Roger said. “I always try to wear one, without fear, whenever I’m out. Still, I can’t shake the memory associated with it. I guess his executives haven’t shaken it either. For them the livesuit is a deathsuit. They’ve never marketed it.”

He put himself into a slow 360º turn. Maneuvering alone in free space was as close as he ever came to a meditative state, but he’d had enough of contemplation for now, he thought, as he came face to face with Marissa.

“It gets to me too, sometimes,” he said quietly over the intercom. “No matter how much I trust the tech, no matter how often I come out here protected by it alone, I sometimes feel haunted in the suit, like I’m wearing my dead father’s clothes.”

Without so much as a word, Marissa came to him and hugged him—a strangely sensual embrace, in the livesuits. Roger did not attempt to free himself from that intimate contact. Slowly, as they turned together in space, their motion became a sad waltz among the heavens, a dance unutterably mournful, though their brows were wreathed with stars and planets stood at their feet.

Trying to dismiss the thought from his mind, Roger spun slowly out of their long embrace. Just as he was completing his turn, however, he thought he saw out of the corner of his eye a flutter of tremendous shimmering wings, all around the Earth. Snapping his gaze back toward it, he saw only the glint of some of the new mirroring structures, the X-shaped things he’d seen on the flight up, though now there were many more of them, rapidly abuilding near all the SSPS.

Returning his gaze to his return trajectory and taking Marissa by the hand, he wondered vaguely what purpose the new structures might serve. The thought left him as they re-boarded his small craft and he and Marissa began stripping out of the livesuits, face to face this time, not back to back.