Lightpaths (10 page)

“Ah,” Larkin said with a nod, “the Plato’s Cave problem. The Flatland problem. But that can only happen when there are no more adventurous souls, when the wilderness
within
, the final frontier inside each of our heads, becomes as conquered and domesticated as the wilderness
without
. Me, I prefer to keep seeing as much wilderness as I can in either direction.”

“But how can you see that here?” Jhana asked, curious almost despite herself.

“Because, for all its mountains and oceans and canyons and caves,” Larkin said, staring hard at her, “Earth’s in much the same condition as we are. ‘Generations have trod, have trod, have trod; And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil; And wears man smudge and shares man’s smell’, as the poet Hopkins put it. All of that world has been touched by our machinations, no matter how vast and desert it may look. In a sense, we’re a laboratory up here, where the same experiment that’s already going on down on Earth is being repeated—except we’re doing it in microcosm and under more controlled, more ‘scientific’ conditions. The wilderness
without
doesn’t factor in much, here. Only the wilderness
within
.”

Jhana didn’t know what to say to that. She drank more coffee and thought about it.

“Tell me, Ms. Meniskos,” Larkin began again, seemingly on another topic, “in your research, do you encounter living fossils much?”

“From time to time,” Jhana admitted, brushing a long lock of silky black hair into place behind her ear. “They do have some relevance to questions of genetic drift and population ecology.”

“That they do,” Larkin agreed, sipping at his coffee. “I’ve been fascinated with them for years. Darwin himself coined that term, you know. For the sole survivors, the creatures frozen in time. Survivors like the Shark Bay stromatolites, the ginkgos, the nautiloids, the horseshoe crabs—”

“
Lingula
clams, coelacanths, cycads, dragonflies,” Jhana said, willing to add to the list—for in truth she too had had a secret fascination with living fossils ever since childhood. “Scorpions, tuataras....”

“Yes,” Larkin said, smiling. “Such creatures have always struck me as undying memories, long-lived memes in the mind of Life. Do you know what a ‘meme’ is, Ms. Meniskos?”

“I’ve heard the word,” Jhana replied, feeling as if she were being quizzed about some arcane forty-year old term—one current when Larkin himself was her age. She decided to cover the awkwardness of the situation by getting another cup of coffee. “I can’t say that I really remember what it means, though.”

“A meme is an idea that takes on a life of its own,” Larkin said, “replicating itself through minds the way a gene replicates itself through bodies. Lots of our big ideas are memes. Paradise, Apocalypse, Utopia—those are memes. The idea of a worldsavior, a Christ or a Buddha—that’s a meme. Most of what Jung was talking about in terms of archetypal imagery and the collective unconscious—those are memes and constellations of memes too. At some deep level, the most successful memes seem to be fundamentally related to biology, to the experience of being born, growing up, living and dying as a biological being. So deeply related that they seem almost genetic.”

“I don’t quite get what you mean,” Jhana said, not really wanting to encourage Larkin in his rambling discourse yet doing so anyway, curious as to where this might be leading. “Generic maybe, but genetic? How?”

“Think of the idea ‘Be fruitful and multiply and have dominion over the earth’,” Larkin said, looking at her from under arched, quizzical eyebrows. “Most people would agree that’s been a successful meme, replicating itself through minds over several thousand years. But isn’t there a biologically-driven component—even a genetic program—involved in the success of that meme? Can a meme or a gene in fact become too successful? If conditions change but the gene doesn’t, what then?”

“The gene can be neutral, ‘dead weight’,” Jhana said, “or it can become deleterious.”

“Precisely. Harmful to the continued existence of the individual or even the species. Some memes, some ideas, are like that too. They may have been good ideas at one time, but conditions have changed. The Genesis Plan of ‘be fruitful, and multiply, and have dominion’ has become the Holocaust Plan: Consume the Earth until there is nothing left to consume. Consume ‘inferior’ species out of existence to make room for the ‘master’ species,
Homo sapiens sapiens
—much the way the Nazis attempted to consume ‘inferior’ races out of existence to create lebensraum for the ‘master’ race. Most species on Earth now go extinct not from hunting or trapping but from habitat destruction. Plant and animal habitat is destroyed to make way for human habitat. Species
lebensraum
.”

Jhana finished the last of her second cup of coffee, toying with the cup and with an idea.

“But that hasn’t been true of this habitat, this space colony,” Jhana said, shutting off the 3D realtime image of the Earth. “No life-supporting environment existed here prior to the construction of this colony.”

“True,” Larkin agreed. “No species died so that we might live here, in this beautiful—but not sublime—place. Even this colony, though, is just a part of another meme-constellation, the Exodus Plan. Mass-migration off Earth. Tetragrammaton is a star in that larger constellation, a part in that larger meme. It’s an idea still very much—”

Larkin’s time-cuff went off, ringing. He rose quickly from his chair.

“Nice talking to you, Jhana, but I’m afraid I must run back to my work. Duty calls.”

Jhana waved him good-bye. When he was fully out the door, she sighed with relief. His secret not-secret Plans, and that Tetragrammaton stuff—he was veering into that obsolete paranoid politics again. She was glad to have been saved by the bell.

* * * * * * *

So much to learn, so little time
, Marissa thought, looking out through a study of altriciality in humans and mole-rats she’d just finished scanning in overlay, looking beyond it to the Archive’s peaceful grounds.
If for no other reason, increased longevity would be a plus for lengthening and strengthening the human learning curve.

With a series of eye-blinks she scanned through an index of articles on mole-rat behaviors. Stopping at one that looked interesting, she called it up and began to read it on her overlays.

Excerpt from “Sex and Death: Gender-linked Intracolonial Aggression in the Naked Mole-Rat”

Though there is little aggression among males of
Heterocephalus glaber
, the violent fighting among the larger females in a colony has long been noted. Most often this violence occurs after the established queen and sole breeder for a colony has died. At this point, several of the previously sterile nonbreeding females grow suddenly larger, become sexually and reproductively active, and aggressively battle one another—often to the death—to replace the deceased breedqueen.

Marissa stopped. Reading about the mole-rat’s female-on-female aggression made her slightly queasy, largely because it reminded her of something she’d seen years before. Once, walking home from high school, she’d seen girl classmates fighting in a parking lot near school, three against two, pulling hair and punching each other viciously. Never having seen anything like it before, and having always been a thoroughly non-confrontational person herself, she’d stood there dumbfounded, becoming almost physically ill as she watched, until a security guard showed up and the group of three jumped in their white car and sped away, leaving their black-eyed and bloody-nosed opponents behind.

Years later when she’d told her roommate in college the story, her roommate had remarked that Marissa had bought too completely the patriarchal programming that “women should be passive and men should be aggressive”—and that Marissa’s sickly response denied women the right to fight if they wanted to, denied them the right to express their full range of emotions, including anger and aggression. Still, Marissa had wondered if “patriarchal programming” was enough to explain the very personal, very visceral response she’d suffered at the sight of seeing her classmates’ girl-fight.

There had been much in her childhood that had been equally sordid. “Squalor” and “filth” were terms too genteel and vague to describe the deeply personal organic funk that permeated all the places where she’d grown up. Ancient miasma compounded of damp rot and greenblack mold and mildew triumphant. The unquiet ghosts of stale cooking odors and dead men’s cigarettes and bad plumbing stenches, always hovering around the shotgun shack alleys, the spare-tire roofed trailer parks, the cheaply remuddled alumisided prefab rowhouses of her girlhood. The smell of too many people living in too small a space on too little money for too many years. A stink that lingered on your fingertips if you brought them too close to your nose, the persistent perfume of poverty unoriginal as sin and seemingly inescapable as death.

No, “mortality rates” and “overpopulation” and “poverty statistics” were not numerical abstractions, for her. They were as real as her life. The source of her optimism about the larger world came somehow from her success in overcoming the obstacles in her own life. Perhaps too, that was part of the appeal of the space habitat for her: so clean and new, full of sweet smells and peaceable people—so different from the world she’d had to move beyond.

Not wanting to think about it any more, she eye-blinked her overlays off, and took off her wraparounds. Looking in her bag, she found the copy of
The Story of Utopias
that Atsuko had given her. Paging through it, Marissa found that Chapter 12 had been most heavily highlighted and encrypted with marginalia by the previous user. She decided to follow these highlightings and marginalia particularly, thinking that she might learn something of the way the mind of Roger Cortland worked from the pattern of text he had chosen to emphasize.

Highlighted excerpt from Mumford’s
The Story of Utopias
:

While the classic utopias have so far been nearer to reality in that they have projected a whole community, living and working and mating and spanning the gamut of man’s activity, their projections have nevertheless been literally up in the air, since they did not usually arise out of any real environment or attempt to meet the conditions that this environment presented. This defect has been suggested by the very name of Utopia, for as Professor Patrick Geddes points out, Sir Thomas More was an inveterate punster, and Utopia is a mock name for either Outopia, which means noplace, or Eutopia—the good place.

Marissa almost smacked her palm against her forehead on reading the highlighted text. Of course! How could she have forgotten? The inherent duplicity of language! Too often she fell back into the habit of treating language as if it were some product, complete and stable and fixed—instead of a process inherently incomplete and in flux. She thought of Nietzsche’s admonition: We shall not have gotten rid of God so long as we still have faith in grammar.

Indeed. Roger the annotator had clearly been less trusting of the words, in his marginal notes disputing the reading of eu- as “good” and instead emphasizing its meaning as “true—as in eusocial, truly social,” like his beloved mole-rats.

Marissa thought of the static, locatable Word of institutional religion, as opposed to the divine Word of the mystics, the divine Ground that is a sphere with its “center everywhere, circumference nowhere.” Language was the same sort of thing—for what word could be the center of language, what word its circumference? She read on.

Highlighted excerpt from Mumford’s
The Story of Utopias
:

Our choice is not between eutopia and the world as it is, but between eutopia and nothing—or rather nothingness. Other civilizations have proved inimical to the good life and have failed and passed away; and there is nothing but our own will-to-eutopia to prevent us from following them.

Marissa saw that Roger, the “author of the marginalia,” had noted at this point in the text, “cf.: Buckminster Fuller’s equally questionable contention, choice facing humanity is between utopia and extinction.” Marissa wondered why Roger should find that idea of Fuller’s questionable, but, flipping pages, she scanned onward.

Highlighted excerpt from Mumford’s
The Story of Utopias
:

The problem of realizing the potential powers of the community—the fundamental problem of eutopian reconstruction—is not simply a matter of economics or eugenics or ethics.... Bacon looked for the happiness of mankind chiefly in the application of science and industry. But by now it is plain that if this alone were sufficient, we could all live in heaven tomorrow.... More, on the other hand, looked to social reform and religious ethics to transform society; and it is equally plain that if the souls of men could be transformed without altering their material and institutional activities, Christianity, Mohammedanism, and Buddhism might have created an earthly paradise almost any time this last two thousand years. The truth is...that these two conceptions are still at war with each other: idealism and science continue to function in separate compartments; and yet “the happiness of man on earth” depends upon their combination....

The marginalized Roger had starred ‘man on earth’ and written (as a mock-political correction) “Evil sexist earth chauvinist—should be ‘Humanity anywhere’!”

As she read further in the highlighted Mumford text, Marissa wondered how much of Roger’s bad-boy stance was in response to the fact that his mother Atsuko, in her works, often preached the idea of a “new science” and new scientists—embodying the very idealism Mumford wrote of and Roger, apparently, rejected. Scanning on, Marissa wondered if it was the fate of every generation to inevitably rebel against what their parents believed.

Highlighted excerpt from Mumford’s
The Story of Utopias
:

...So it follows that while science has given us the means of making over the world, the ends to which the world has been made over have had, essentially, nothing to do with science.... When science is not touched by a sense of values it works—as it fairly consistently has worked during the past century—toward a complete dehumanization of the social order. The plea that each of the sciences must be permitted to go its own way without control should be immediately rebutted by pointing out that they obviously need a little guidance when their applications in war and industry are so plainly disastrous.... Knowledge is a tool rather than a motor; and if we know the world without being able to react upon it, we are guilty of that aimless pragmatism which consists of devising all sorts of ingenious machines and being quite incapable of subordinating them to any coherent and attractive pattern.