Lightpaths (2 page)

“Be it ever so humble: the Orbital Complex,” Roger was saying, playing tour guide, as she arrived in the main lounge.

“Our home away from home,” Marissa declared excitedly. Jhana sniffed slightly.

“It looks no place like home, as far as I can tell,” she said.

“Still, it’s permanent home to what—four thousand people?” Marissa argued. “It must have something going for it.”

“Its geometry isn’t nearly as straightforward as Earth’s,” Jhana said.

“Planetary chauvinist,” Roger commented with a laugh, but Jhana was serious.

“Just look at it, the shape of it,” Jhana pointed out, her esthetic sense much offended. “Like an antique ribbed transformer that swallowed a crystal ball and then was run through by a pole along its long axis.”

“Ugly maybe, but it works,” Roger said, slipping back into tour guide mode. “At the ends of that long ‘pole’ are some important functions. Clustered satellite communication arrays. Docking. Transport and industrial facilities.”

Marissa recognized a fair amount of the detail as it hove into view—particularly the large solar energy panels which, from the shuttle’s angle of approach, looked like a macroengineer’s dream of windmills. Girding the middle of the entire structure was a Ferris wheel of swiveled mirrors incorporated into a larger, darker ring.

“Even if it does apparently work,” Jhana said, pointing toward the Orbital Complex’s middle, “that looks altogether a Rube Goldberg contraption. What’s its function?”

“To let the good rays in and keep the bad rays out,” Roger responded confidently. “The mirrors are for gathering and focusing visible light. The dark ring provides shielding against solar flares and heavy primary nuclei.”

“And that?” Jhana asked, trying to stump Roger, directing his attention to an X-shaped object—small but enlarging and unfolding—that swept by their shuttle at surprisingly close range.

“I can’t really say,” Roger replied, puzzled. “Probably some new powersat prototype.”

Marissa, however, was keeping her eyes on the big picture. As the shuttle moved closer to docking—along reflecting sightlines near the “poles” of the ball—she could see into the Park enclosed by the central sphere, could see the blue of waters, the green of grasslands and forests, even the brown of tilled soil in the greenhouse tori to the ‘north’ and ‘south’ of the central sphere. On still closer approach she began to realize as well just how big the central sphere (let alone the whole Complex) really was: almost as if someone had taken a county from Earth and blown it into the interior of one of the big soap bubbles she’d wished for as a child.

* * * * * * *

As the shuttle moved into final docking position Jhana saw other craft already docked or in the process: floaters, mass-driver barges and liners, transatmospheric orbiters and tetherships—some national, but many bearing the corporate logos of the companies that had joined the High Orbital Manufacturing Enterprise, the consortium of nations and trans-nationals footing the bill for the continuing construction of zero-gee industrial parks, greenhouse tori, and the human communities and biodiversity preserves inside their High Orbital Manufactured Environments—HOMEs, of which the Orbital Complex was the first but would not long be the only one.

Oh, Jhana knew the broken-rhythm hype, all right.
Home, home on Lagrange/ Where vanishing creatures still play/Where seldom is seen an unprofitable dream/And the sats beam clean power all day....
She should know it: her employer, Tao-Ponto Aktiengesellschaft, was a major member of the consortium, and among the craft hovering about the space colony now she recognized TPAG’s streamlined glyph-heraldics emblazoned across the tailfin of a tethership.

From her rather skimpy training in preparation for this flight she knew a little about tetherships too—essentially high-altitude jets, as she recalled, with oddly angled attachments that enabled them to latch onto a skyhook dangled from a satellite platform, metal fish taking metal bait. She was glad the company tether had been all booked up, though. Even if the tetherships and mass-driver liners were cheaper and more efficient and less polluting, they were also, to Jhana’s mind, far less exciting than the old rocket-tailed shuttles.

They had to return briefly to strap down in their seats for the final moments of the flight, but disembarking began almost the moment the shuttle was securely docked. As Jhana gathered her luggage, she bade Marissa Correa farewell and they assured each other they’d no doubt meet again soon. She also agreed to meet Dr. Cortland at his lab as soon as she got settled in—and before a week had passed.

When Seiji Yamaguchi had come out to Lakshmi Ngubo’s low-gravity residence among the industrial tori, he had presented her with an odd storage and retrieval request. Yamaguchi had brought with him the personal effects of his deceased brother, Jiro. Among a lot of legal records, sentimental junk, and odd debris—all of which Seiji clearly could not bear to throw away—there had also been three top-of-the-line LogiBoxes, each containing stacked arrays of microsupercomputers, massively parallel processed—and each worth high six-figure debt in the major world currency of one’s choice.

“The Boxes were with Jiro when they found his body,” Seiji said. “Since his death was ruled an accident, the Balaam police made only perfunctory efforts at hacking into them. You and your friends can talk to machines better than anyone else I know, Laksh. See if you can’t get into them and find out if they might have something to do with why my brother died the way he did.”

As a favor to her friend, Lakshmi had agreed to warehouse the physical effects and to try to hack into the LogiBoxes. To be truthful, though, her motivation in regard to the black columnar Boxes was not fully altruistic: she hoped she might be able to hack into them, transfer out all the information relevant to Seiji’s brother, then keep the Boxes for her own use. They would be quite a prize.

But things hadn’t turned out that way. A week ago she and Lev Korchnoi had powered the boxes up and hooked them into the habitat’s network coordinating system, the Variform Autonomous Joint Reasoning Activity. Lakshmi’s own creation, the HOME had adopted it for coordinating all the machine intelligence activities associated with the functioning of the habitat. The coordinating system talked with everything, from the big expert AIs to the micromachines, the nanotech assemblers and mechanorganic cellular automata. But now she couldn’t run
it
—or at least a part of it.

Slumping in her hoverchair, amid all its robot arms and actuators, she pondered. In the bright metal of an arm she saw herself reflected, a dark-skinned woman with wavy black hair, fortyish, her wasted body covered in the loose, flowing, earth-toned clothing that was her personal style.

I’m really not up to this sort of puzzle-solving, she thought. But she had no choice. Somehow she’d caused the problem. It was her responsibility to work on solving it.

The foreign system running on the Boxes had taken three days to go through some long, elaborate boot-up procedure. Lakshmi thought that was odd enough in itself—even wondered for a while if in fact the entire Box system might be trapped in some sort of infinite loop—but she decided to let it run and see if it straightened itself out. It had, with a vengeance. At the end of the long boot-up, Lakshmi discovered that the system-construct running in the ‘Boxes had established links with her net coordinator at all scales. Every time she tried to hack into whatever it was that was running on the ‘Boxes, she was confronted and confounded by a seemingly nonsensical blocking message: LAW WHERE PROHIBITED BY VOID.

Otherwise, the construct running on the ‘Boxes hadn’t done much—though what it had done was more than enough. Now it seemed fairly quiescent, content merely to identify itself with the habitat’s coordinating system, sending heavily encrypted data-bursts back and forth along the laser connectors. That would probably have disturbed no one—except Lakshmi. She had designed the net coordinator as a sort of metapersonality. The habitat’s many systems and subsystems nominally functioned as semiautonomous psychoid processes within the superpsyche of the coordinator. Whatever was running on the ‘Boxes should be
submitting
to the coordinating system—not identifying with it.

Her reverie was rudely interrupted when several of her workshop’s robotic arms—down to milli- and micro-waldoes—began to swing into motion of their own accord. Lakshmi watched in startlement as the arms began reaching into and grabbing up items from the clutter throughout her workshop, but particularly out of the pile of Jiro Yamaguchi’s personal effects, as if searching for something. This was too weird, she thought. She needed to talk to somebody about it, and fast.

Lev Korchnoi—he had helped her hook up the ‘Boxes. Maybe he would have some explanation. Lakshmi called up the habitat’s Public Sphere, the “marketplace of ideas” virtual construct where Lev spent a lot of his time, particularly in the “anti-Platonics” group area, pontificating and soapboxing to all who might be interested about how rigid specialization was what made Plato’s Republic fascistic at base, how that was what led him to banish the polymorphous poets, how the city-state of this habitat must be the inverse of that, strongly anti-specialist if it hoped to preserve its participatory democracy, etc., etc., blahdeblahdeblah.

WELCOME TO THE PUBLIC SPHERE, said a portal caption as Lakshmi popped up into the center of that virtual locale. The greeting was immediately followed by a quote from the philosopher Rorty: “A peaceful public sphere characterized by conversation is a utopian idea, but it’s the best utopian idea we’ve got.” For Lakshmi, it was calming, comforting just to be back in this virtual space—so familiar, functioning so smoothly. Knowing too some of the flaming discussions that had occurred in the Sphere, Lakshmi had to smirk at the “peaceful conversation” of that Rorty quote.

She scanned the virtual sphere around her. Every “speaker” or “auditor” was, from his or her perspective, always standing at the center, while the personas of everyone else logged in floated through the virtual space roundabout—a sphere with center everywhere, circumference nowhere. Lev wasn’t currently logged in, but his personal system was on and monitoring. Lakshmi called up his persona-icon.

Transcript of L. Korchnoi statement, 10:04-10:10 GMT, 6.6.29.

No, you’ve got it backwards. What is counted as true is that which tends to perpetuate the reigning political power structure. Truth is politically constrained. The metaphysical is the political. Scientific materialism was developed by the middle and managerial classes as an ideological weapon for use against the tyranny of church and landed aristocracy. Think of all the great inventions and discoveries not as sudden bright ideas or revelations alone, but also as high points in a million-year-old revolutionary process, ideological weapons developed in the ongoing struggle against many forms of perceived tyranny. Think of the discovery of fire as a blow—

Typical Lev. Lakshmi had heard variants of this agitprop shtik more times than she cared to remember. She called up his personal number and sent him a message stating that she wanted to talk to him. He sent back, telling her to switch to holophone, which she did.

“Hey, Laksh,” said the albino-blond man in the viewer. “How’s the work coming on my skysign of soft advertisement? Hmm? The big Mob Cad show’s sooner than we think, you know.”

“Working on it, working on it. Look, Lev, something’s come up with those LogiBoxes we brought on-line last week.”

She told him about the way the system-construct on the ‘Boxes was preventing her from hacking into their operations, about the way whatever was running on the ‘Boxes was identifying and intermixing with the net coordinator.

“Is that all?” Lev said, nonplused. “You should be happy—at least it’s working. That’s more than I can say for my show robots. Even their bugs have bugs!”

“But there’s more to it than that,” Lakshmi pressed. “Just now several of my waldoes started doing things on their own. It’s like they’re trying to do some kind of project. Other things, too, over the last several days...”

“What things?”

“Well,” Lakshmi began, knowing she was into it now. “Over the last seventy-two hours there’s been an increased rate of malfunction and ‘defection’ among some of the nanotech assemblers and other mechanorganics, for instance.”

“Minor glitches,” Lev said in his flat American English, rubbing his square jaw.

“Then what about the appearance of those little X-shaped things drifting down the gravity well?” Lakshmi wanted to know. “You’ve heard about them?”

“Pieces of space junk, that’s all.”

“But they’re coming from the vicinity of the Orbital Complex.”

“So? Laksh, relax. You’re just being paranoid, seeing patterns that aren’t really there.”

“I hope you’re right,” she said with a small sigh, “but I have this gut feeling —”

“What? Feminine intuition, now?”

“Call it what you like. I think these isolated glitch events are somehow related to the construct that Seiji’s brother Jiro left in the LogiBoxes.”

“Aw come on, Laksh! That’s the most paranoid—excuse me,
intuitive
—idea yet. You’re making connections where there aren’t any.”

“Thank you for being so sympathetic, Lev.”

“Okay, sorry, sorry. Look, why don’t we get together in a couple days and see if we can’t figure out some way to make Jiro’s ‘Boxes behave? Okay? Maybe I could come out there, or maybe you could come down here and help me work out some of the bugs in my shobots, first.”

“Maybe. We’ll see.”

“Keep in touch, all right?” Lev said.

Lakshmi said goodbye mechanically. Severing the connection, she wondered how long she’d stay peeved at Lev for his obtuseness.

* * * * * * *

Cortland had certainly seemed in a hurry about something, Jhana thought in passing as, picking up a free locator from an automated information booth, she programmed it with the address of the residence she was seeking. Maybe, though, that was just the way Cortland interacted with people.

Floating along the fractional gravity “smartpath” indicated by her locator, she finally stepped onto the slidewalk that carried the new arrivals toward the transport tubes. As she waited on the transport platform, the locator advised her that something called Ridge Cart 17 was due to arrive in four minutes.

“Excuse me,” she said to a stranger who—judging by the ease with which he played the flooring against the low gravity—appeared to be a local. “I hate to sound stupid, but what’s a ‘ridge cart’?”

The Asian man with the bushy black Mennonite-style beard laughed.

“It’s ‘cartridge’ spelled dyslexically, sort of. Local humor. The tube transport carriages are very stripped down and fast—like riding inside a bullet. Also, if the direction of gravity is ‘down,’ then the tubes, since they’re at the lowest gravity, are the most ‘up.’ The tubes are ‘on top of the ridge,’ as it were, hence ‘ridge cart.’”

“Oh. Okay. But I
can
take number seventeen to this address?” She showed the black-bearded man the address flashing in her locator.

“Sure. No problem. Just follow your locator’s directions.”

“Thanks,” Jhana said doubtfully. No matter how good the technology of maps might get, she figured she’d still manage to find ways to get lost.

In the minute or so before Ridge Cart 17 arrived, she gazed around her, through the glass walls of the tube station and into the industrial facilities. It was a heavily automated realm, with very few people in view. She couldn’t quite make out what all the machines were doing, but she knew that some of their activity must involve micro-gravity production of metals and ceramics for the solar power satellite network—the biggest project underway here, from all that she’d heard.

Despite its metal-bending connotations the manufacturing zone was ghostly quiet. Whatever noise there might have been was completely drowned out at that moment by the abrupt arrival of a bodysuited, face-painted youth at the other end of the platform, a wild child drum-pummeling the guardrail and singing along to his stereo implants, chanting the same lyrics over and over like a happy lunatic:
Between what is and what ought to be lies the Ecstasy of Catastrophe! The Ecstasy of Catastrophe!

This was beginning to get on Jhana’s nerves a bit when, fortunately, the ridge cart arrived, rising up out of the floor with a sigh of air into vacuum. Jhana, the painted boy, and the Asian man with the Mennonite beard all strode quickly into the cart’s Spartan interior, which promptly resealed itself and dropped down into the evacuated tunnel of the tube. In seconds they were zipping through an airless space, propelled by invisible magnetic fields.

Inside the compartment the bearded Asian man sat quietly with his eyes closed, and even the painted youth had lowered his volume and varied his tune, now sharply whispering the words of a turn-of-the-century politirap classic even Jhana recognized:

Sitting in a hot tub staring at the stars,

It’s easy to imagine vacationing on Mars.

Sitting in the south ‘hood waiting for a bus,

It’s hard to imagine more than Them and Us.

More than Them and Us, more than Them and Us.

If you can’t trust Them and Us, who can you trust?

At least—she thought thankfully—at least he can carry a tune.

The ridge cart rose up to floor level and the doors popped open, revealing new passengers about to board. Behind them the living colors of crop-filled greenhouses curved away through the bright glare of mirror-bounced sunlight. The boy with the painted face tapped a pair of small disks above his ears, causing them to extrude a pair of bugeye sunshades over his eyes. With dancing/floating steps he exited the bulletcart, distractedly chanting,
Surface tension is my dimension, my dimension is surface tension!
as he flowed around the entering passengers, or as they flowed around him—it was hard to tell which, for the young man’s antics apparently didn’t seem odd or out of place to anyone but Jhana.

In seconds she and her fellow passengers were moving swiftly and silently through the tube again, bound for the central sphere, the heart of the space colony habitat. The ridge cart popped to the surface, the doors opened, Jhana stepped out onto the platform, and...

Vertigo. She stood inside a glass-walled observation sphere in midair, hundreds and hundreds of feet from the nearest “ground,” but of course the ground was crazy too, for she was in the center of a rotating glass bubble within the center of a much larger bubble that she knew was also rotating (but didn’t appear to be)—and when she looked up there were buildings and gardens and streams and ponds and forests and savannas growing on either bank of a sun-flecked river that hung above her like the Milky Way at night, yet this dayworld did not fall from the confused firmament but instead wrapped all the way around to right-side up and still inside out, houses and forests and boulders and grasslands and trees and the river wrapping all the way around like a snake swallowing its own tail without beginning or end and the contrived wilderness swallowing buildings in every direction and the glass latitude ahead shining with a light like the sun and children playing free-fall soccer and young people pedaling diaphanous- winged airbikes like creatures from a vision in a dreamworld—a dreamworld turned hysterical spherical mandala which she was trapped in the center of, inside a sphere of angels or demons the beating of whose wings roared in her ears, pulse pounding, hard sweating, white spittle, while in her head things unmoored, popped out of joint, detached from any known framework of the real—