Lightpaths (28 page)

Entering the brighter confines of Seiji Yamaguchi’s mushroom workspace, Larkin shook his head savagely. When he spoke again there was deep bitterness in his voice.

“I told them what would happen. I told them not to let it get loose, but the intelligence commandos, the corporate money-men—those bastards just wouldn’t listen. They didn’t give a damn. The worst was Medusa Blue and Tetragrammaton, with that grail of theirs, the ‘information density singularity’.”

Jhana saw Seiji over in a corner of the workspace but, surrounded by a group of children to whom he was apparently explicating the joys of mushroom cultivation, he hadn’t noticed her and Paul Larkin yet. She was hoping Seiji would save her from more of Larkin’s endless conspiracy theorizing, but help did not look to be forthcoming from that quarter.

“After the disaster at Sedona,” Larkin went on, “the Tetragrammaton people shifted their efforts out of pure machine approaches and into mind/machine linkages. They’re going to find their trans-light portal if they have to kill a million people to do it. They’re still around, you know. Look at the Board of Directors of your company, Jhana. Dr. Ka Vang serves there. He’s on a lot of interlocking directorates, but the one that’s not listed is his deep connection to the worldwide intelligence apparatus—all the way back to his childhood, when the CIA recruited him as a Hmong boy-soldier, over sixty years ago.”

“How do you know so much about all this shadowy stuff?” Jhana asked, but what she was really thinking was, If you know all this is true, then how come you’re still alive to talk about it? She’d heard Tien-Jones mention Vang—and someone even more loosely associated with Tao-Ponto, a Mr. Egan Ortap.

“I was a fellow-traveler for a lot of years,” Larkin said with a shrug. “Their creature. Quite involved with Medusa Blue. Maybe I still am, in a way. What better cover for a conspirator or spy than the role of conspiracy theorist, hm?” A very meaningful glance passed between them. “You’ll just have to trust me on this one.”

“Wait, you’re confusing me,” Jhana said. “What’s this Medusa Blue thing got to do with Tetragrammaton?”

“Medusa Blue was a psi-power enhancement project within Tetragrammaton,” Larkin explained as patiently as he could. “It was intended to facilitate computer-aided apotheosis, the translation of human consciousness into a machine matrix. You see, the human mind possesses the right kind of chaos to complement the kind of information density only computers and AIs can put together. Put together the right combination and Boom! A mathematical model of a gateway so complete it is a gateway. The virtual and the real coincide. The Big Payoff: much-faster-than-light travel to anywhere in space-time.”

“And how does all this tie into KL and your work?” Jhana asked, hoping to finally unsnarl the mess of information he was throwing at her.

“Medusa Blue involved using university hospitals and certain medical centers as fronts for giving selected women treatments with KL 235—as a ‘uterotonic’,” Larkin said. “Pumping KL to the womb during embryonic development—to encourage the development of paranormal talents useful to effecting that big mind/machine link in the sky.”

“They gave the stuff to pregnant women without their consent?” Jhana asked, disturbed by the memory of certain patterns in her own family. “But that’s crazy.”

“Of course it’s crazy,” Larkin agreed. “Just like doping soldiers up on BZ without their knowledge or consent was crazy. Just like dropping LSD on your own unsuspecting citizenry was crazy. Just like nuking your own citizens was crazy. But in the name of international insecurity all those things have happened—and lots more besides. Governments and corporations doing to their unknowing and unconsenting citizens and employees things which, if the citizens and employees later did them to themselves with their own knowledge and consent, would have gotten said citizens put in jail or fired.”

“And KL followed the same pattern?”

“Sure,” Larkin said with a nod. “By the time it was made illegal worldwide, the pharmaceutical combines had already made their profits. They couldn’t lose. If ‘gate’ turned heavy users into paranoids and long-period schizophrenics who spent all their time consuming knowledge and information so they could create and flesh out their own personal conspiracy-worlds—well, so what? Who cared if it increased the number of schizophrenics and catatonics? No big deal—the companies that pumped out KL were the same ones that made the pharmaceuticals for treating schizophrenia and catatonia.”

Seiji and his crew of kids had walked into an adjoining room of the lab. Following, they found Seiji and the kids examining a trough of moistened straw and hay, from which oyster mushrooms were fruiting in great profusion. Seiji glanced over as they came in.

“Paul! Jhana! I thought I heard your voices over there,” Seiji said, coming forward to shake hands. “What are you two up to?”

“I was just bending Jhana’s ear here about the usual unusual—Tetragrammaton, KL, the creation of long-period schizophrenics...,” Larkin said.

“Ah. As in my brother’s case,” Seiji said with a small nod, looking away. Jhana saw Larkin wince.

“My karma—you see, Jhana?” Larkin said. “To find that so many of my friends’ loved ones have been damaged or destroyed by something I helped bring into the world. My only relief is to tell my tale like some damned ancient mariner, again and again. Expiation never comes for good and all.”

“I’ll help you work off your debt faster, if you’d like,” Seiji said, half-seriously. “Take care of these kids for a while, okay? Jhana and I have an appointment to meet some people—”

“And we’re already late,” Jhana put in.

Larkin agreed, appreciative of the time Jhana and he had spent conversing—or her listening, rather. They parted—with a hug from Larkin! Who’d have thought?—and Jhana and Seiji darted off to their agreed rendezvous.

* * * * * * *

“I’m worried about Roger,” Marissa told Atsuko as they climbed aboard a cart headed to the ridge axis where they were to meet Seiji and Jhana. When Atsuko looked at her questioningly, the words began to pour out of Marissa: about Roger’s mood swings, about her worries concerning the threat his pheromone posed to human freedom if it somehow managed to work—about a great deal, though not everything she might have told Atsuko, for some of it was still too private.

“The strange part is,” Marissa finished, “he must know that the odds are against his pheromone working—if it even is a pheromone that he’s designed. That’s the scary thing—the denial, the delusion, the fact that he’s not looking at his experimental results in a balanced or objective way.”

“Yes,” Atsuko said with a deep sigh. “When does dedication to one’s work become obsession? Whichever it is, his ‘thing’ for those mole-rats seems to be getting out of control.”

“If it doesn’t work,” Marissa suggested hopefully, “then there’s really no harm done—”

“Except to his psyche, his self-esteem,” Atsuko said, another long breath escaping her. “Roger, Roger—now he’s someone who could have benefited from the educational system we’re developing up here. It’s just like I was telling those teachers from Earth.”

“How’s that?”

“Because Roger’s been warped by what passes for education on Earth. Too often it’s a system that emphasizes division and domination while de-emphasizing similarity and mutuality,” Atsuko said, gazing toward the top of the cart. “Who knows what sort of power fantasies Roger may entertain? We had enough difficulty convincing him that we wouldn’t bend the rules so he could bring his gun collection with him! Even the most devout gun enthusiast should have second thoughts about projectile weapons in a space habitat, but not Roger. Nurture more than nature’s the cause, I think. Earth’s educational system itself is an example—not only what it teaches but how it teaches. It’s a dysfunctional family, a factory model. A warped cultural hologram.”

The bullet cart deposited them on the central platform, the sphere within the sphere. There were several people passing to and fro, but none of them were Jhana and Seiji, so they waited, gripping handrails as the sphere around them spun gravity into space and they made their way out to its circumference.

“Look at our little world here,” Atsuko said, “and then remember Earth. Take the warped cultural hologram, the factory model, one step further. Think of the entire human race as one big conglomerate, Consolidated Humanity, and the Earth as one enormous factory. Matter and energy are the raw materials, the ‘unformed children’ in the system. ‘Mother’ Nature’s plants and animals are the factory workers on the food-chain assembly line. But what’s Big Daddy management trying to produce—what’s Consolidated Humanity’s product?”

Atsuko paused, following with some interest a free-fall soccer game going on not far from the sphere—but also obviously waiting for an answer.

“Consolidated Humanity produces people,” Marissa said, catching on. “Very successfully. Far more than the market or the planet can bear.”

“Right. Mother Nature is the abused wife of
Man
kind.”

Marissa cocked an eyebrow at Atsuko in disagreement.

“But certainly the idea of dominion, of power over others, isn’t an exclusively male concept—” she interjected.

“No,” Atsuko agreed, but with a sly smile. “It’s just that males have made such a study and art and religion of it. What we’re trying to teach our young people here is that the natural world is not just a factory for helping humanity turn out more human beings. We help them see that the relationships between mother, father and child, between other living things, non-living things and humanity, are circular and interdependent rather than linear and hierarchial.”

“Food webs rather than food chains?” Marissa ventured. “Flows rather than pyramids?”

“Right. Human beings embedded in their environments rather than somehow standing above them as lords and masters or below them as hapless victims of hurricanes or monsoons or other ‘acts of God’.”

Marissa turned and gazed out the side of the observation sphere, toward the other side of the much larger and seemingly motionless sphere in which the world of the space habitat was enclosed. Yes, everything seemed to move in circles and ellipses and rings here. The watercourses, the forests, the savannas, even the homes and buildings, now that she thought about it, seemed to be losing right angles, softening toward variants of domes and hogans.

For a time they were silent as Atsuko watched the soccer game and Marissa watched a group of young people get off a bullet cart and stand talking around the noise of a portable holojector playing a music trideo. In virtual space a young male lead singer with extremely white-blond hair was cavorting and singing. Marissa listened to the song despite herself.

Excerpted lyric from Möbius Cadúceus song, “Jesus of Oz”:

Every day machines become more like people

Who become more like machines every day

And I know this for real and true

Because because because because because

Last night on the elevator of dreams

When I got off on the ground floor

An unrecognizable artificially intelligent friend of mine

Stabbed me to death with a screwdriver through the heart

Because because because because because

It wanted to calculate the escape velocity of my soul

But its numbers were off so it programmed me

For resurrection and tonight it will kill me again

Kill me a little better this time which we call Progress

Because because because because because

Of all the wonderful things it does

For people becoming more like machines

Becoming more like people every day...

Even their songs run in circles up here, Marissa thought, turning back toward Atsuko and the soccer game.

“Certainly, though, you haven’t remade humanity here, haven’t overcome all our perennial problems—”

Atsuko laughed.

“Not at all! We’re still very much imperfect people in an imperfect world. Or at least we’re incomplete, both our world and us—and probably always will be. From the human standpoint, though, reality to some degree consists of what we think it is, so if we change the way we think we also change the reality we live in and the way we live in it.”

The flash of lights along the tube indicated another bullet cart was arriving. It stopped and opened and a Mennonite-bearded man and a dark-haired, dark-eyed woman stepped out.

Seiji and Jhana came forward and introductions were made all around, Seiji apologizing profusely for their lateness—his fault, he insisted, because he’d gotten caught up in demonstrating some of the finer points of mushroomery to a squad of children in his family support network. Marissa and Jhana remembered each other from the flight up the well, and Jhana was quite aware of Atsuko’s relationship to Roger Cortland. As they made their way to the tube where their bullet cart would soon be arriving, Marissa noticed that Jhana was gazing around the platform, looking rather tense.

“Does the height bother you, Jhana?” Marissa asked. “I was feeling a little acrophobic myself, not long before you two arrived.”

Jhana nodded as, along the tube, lights for their arriving cart began to flash.

“Yes—vertigo. Not as bad as when I was here last, though.”

“Not nearly!” Seiji said with a laugh. “We’d just met. Poor Jhana looked as if she’d seen a ghost—white-knuckle grip on the railing, her eyes big as satellite dishes—”

“Now don’t exaggerate, Seiji,” Atsuko corrected. “I know the engineers have good reasons for keeping this observation sphere transparent, but really, seeing so much space all around must come as quite a shock to newcomers.”

“The space was only part of it,” Jhana said quietly. “A lot of it was just the sheer strangeness of it, all the detail. You’ll laugh, but—I don’t know—I felt as if I’d been trapped inside a big, multi-dimensional mandala.”

“What a wonderful image!” Atsuko said with a laugh as their bullet cart eased up before them. The older woman craned her head around at the large sphere and nodded as they boarded. “Interesting you should think of it that way.”