Lightpaths (39 page)

Seiji stared at her as if he didn’t know what to make of this revelation.

“Ship’s got a built-in downlink console,” he said quietly, looking as if he’d intended to say something else. “That’s it over there.”

When Jhana entered her code, however, she got an unexpected response.

“That’s odd,” she said aloud.

“What is?” Seiji asked.

“This console. When I enter my encryption code, it says ‘security code compromised—please try again.’ When I tried again, it said the same thing.”

“Here, let me try it.”

Seiji tried the code number—with the same results. He tried it several times more but made no progress.

“Oh, no,” Jhana said heavily. “I gave Roger my key number for communicating with Tao-Ponto. Maybe he’s gimmicked it somehow.”

The ship began docking maneuvers then, bringing the enigmatic X structures into view once more.

“I’m surprised somebody from Earth hasn’t missiled or lased them by now,” Jhana remarked, “since everyone seems to be so disturbed by their presence.”

“Uncertainty, probably,” Seiji said. “Lord knows they have the weapons to take them out—micronukes, electromagnetic pulse bombs, hypervelocity kinetic kill warheads. Lakshmi claims, though, that this distributed consciousness thing has infiltrated not only the VAJRA but everything that uses QUIPS—and that is just about everything. There’ve been some unexplained shutdowns on ships up from Earth that got too close to them. When we tried to take them apart ourselves, the space-habitat started toward self-destruct. Maybe no one knows what attempting to destroy them might trigger.”

Docking completed, the ship’s lock sighed open and they drifted into Lakshmi’s workshop.

“Lakshmi? Are you here?” Seiji called.

“Yes—and no,” said a laughing voice coming from the speakers attached to Lakshmi’s equipment.

In the middle of the room where robotic arms sighed together like a stand of metal bamboo in a breeze, Lakshmi floated in her hoverchair, her back to them. Drifting around until they were in front of her, Seiji and Jhana saw her smiling rapturously, her eyes remming at unbelievable speeds beneath her lightly-closed lids. A straight strand, the merest whisper of coherent light, traced from out the jumble of Seiji’s brother’s machines to impinge on Lakshmi’s forehead, where it pooled slightly, suffusing the skin with a roseate glow, a third eye of light, still and open above the jittering shutness of the lower two.

“Lakshmi, what’s going on?” Jhana asked worriedly.

“I’m in dreamtime, mindtime,” Lakshmi’s voice said, echoingly but pleasantly from the many machine speakers throughout the room. “Seiji, your brother Jiro’s done it! Direct mind/machine link, an information carrier wave that uses the structure of the brain itself as a transducer! The grand unification! And just in time, too. Come on, you two. You’re late, and you’re needed here.”

“But how do we get ‘there’?” Jhana asked, casting about.

“Just sit down or anchor yourself very still. You don’t want to look directly into the positioning beam, so close your eyes. Concentrate—the light will find you.”

Jhana glanced at Seiji. Both of them cocked eyebrows and shrugged in perplexity, but nonetheless quickly found chairs and strapped themselves in.

Jhana sat still, tried to concentrate on the entoptic flickerings on the backsides of her eyelids, growing impatient as time passed and nothing happened.

Then everything happened.

Facts, figures, data—raw, seemingly senseless and shapeless information—flooded at her at insane speeds as if she were straitjacketed into a rocket-sled bound for oblivion with her mental eyelids nailed open by screaming innocence and she couldn’t shut any of the torrent out, couldn’t turn away, must take everything as it came flying into her, until it felt her head would burst like a fevered balloon—

A sudden expansion: a valve opening in her head, or her brain shifting to a higher gear, or something far less describable. The torrent abruptly became less menacing, though still hardly pleasant. Now she felt merely engulfed in a luminous flood that thundered, a Victoria Falls of bright hot heavy light instead of water.

The more she grappled with the light, the more she tried to swim against it, the more she realized that it was filling her with a cascade of her own memories, all the data and details of her life burning through her consciousness at greater than flash-cut speed. She imagined herself swimming and burrowing upward into the flood of light, the flood of her life, and as she imagined it so it was. When she came to the top of that fall, her entire life stood gathered about her in vast panoramic memory, a living holographic tapestry, each part implicated in the whole and the whole implicated in each part, each memory containing within it all other memories which it implied, a finite but unbounded sphere of interconnections.

In the center of the sphere, floating in an axial shaft of sunlight that fell from eternity to eternity, stood a container both grail and beaker, its walls clear yet slightly opalescent. Inside it a suspension of innumerable particles danced and flashed like the sun splintered on ocean waves or moted on the dust of deep space. Reaching out with her mind toward it, she passed completely inside, became a particle dancing on the flux.

There was a pattern to the flux she danced in, a latent order and structure waiting to realize itself, waiting to shift into meaning like stereogram or hologram or fractal, waiting like consciousness hidden in chaos to crystallize about her if she would only allow herself to be that seed crystal.

That valve in her head—wherever her head was—seemed to open again and all around her the flux condensed, crystallized, shot out like an enchantment in infinite directions, rays and leaves and crystalline spikes precipitating out of the flux, a universe of seemingly formless information suddenly shot through with form rising grandly out of the random background.

Faster than she could ever dream it, a sudden channel opened between the worlds and she was abruptly aware of the presence of Seiji and Lakshmi in the alterior universe around her—and of someone or something else as well—
there
, the way air, gravity, or space-time is there.

Intuitively Jhana realized they were inside the mindspace of VAJRA and the D.C. itself, surrounded by the game of Building The Ruins being played on an incomprehensibly vast scale. The illusion of the virtual reality about her was so flawless that it made her question whether any reality she had ever known was really real—or if the reality she had taken for granted her whole life long was also only virtual.

Before her, the game’s CHAOS and LOGOS now manifested conflict in the forms of two great beasts locked in deadly struggle. The LOGOS was a vast bright-toothed spermaceti whale whose body glistened in the Deep, the lights of planets, stars and galaxies informing its flesh, while the CHAOS seemed a writhing gigantic squid formed of Coalsack nebulas’ worth of dust, detritus, debris—all dark matter coiling tenebrous tentacles about its celestial cetacean opponent, shaking the Deep with its own strange dark lightnings as the two Titans roiled the universe of mind.

What disturbed Jhana was that she and Seiji and Lakshmi were not on one “side” or the other—they were a part of both and neither, tooth
and
tentacle
and
Aloof Other observing the struggle.

* * * * * * *

Glancing at the crowd around him as the Möbius Cadúceus show began, Aleister wondered how the people of the colony—even Atsuko Cortland here beside him—could give themselves over so totally to celebration when the colony might at this moment be poised on the brink of disaster.

Yet here he was too, taking a break from the long arduous task of fending off what intelligence probes were still coming up from Earth. And here they all were too, mostly young people, gathered round a pavilion that had been collapsed to stage, round a reflecting pool and its shores transformed to playing area, as music came up and Lev Korchnoi sang of a village where “the men make weapons and the women make babies.” Aleister was close enough to the playing area to notice that the “villagers” dressed in the costumes and kept the customs of a hundred times and places of Earth’s history, but the main focus of the scene was bucolic, pastoral, except for a fabril smith at his forge, his pregnant wife beside him, town buildings from a variety of Earth’s cultures holojected in the background.

A blonde woman in a long diaphanous white robe and an elaborate bi-winged headdress appeared. To Aleister she seemed an important ritual figure—a novice nun or vestal virgin of some sort, most notable for her innocence and naivete. The program notes designated her only as Bliss, and she sang a panegyric to the people of the village and their contented way of life.

The smith, growing enamored of the young woman and her singing, looked upon her with growing desire until, forgetting his pregnant wife and consumed with lust for the vestal, he pursued her night and day, a flattering irritant around whose compliments and attentions even so pure a heart as Bliss’s began to build the black pearl of pride. Led by her fledgling pride and the cunning of the smith, she came into a wild forest where, overcome by his lust, the smith took her by force and raped her, threatening her with death of body and reputation if she should ever reveal what had happened between them.

Bliss sang no more. The life of the village tilted out of balance, and out of the reflecting pool Fear and Desire rose, unleashing upon the villagers the scourges of drought, famine, pestilence, violence. Walking among the beggared and crippled, through scene after scene of human suffering, Bliss smiled to reassure the grieving until she could stand the farce of it no longer. Finally she sang again, no simple innocent panegyrics now, but notes and chords woven round painful truths of bitter experience. She sang of contradictions between making weapons and making babies, of men making too many of the former and the women too many of the latter—but most of all she sang of acts of force and silence.

The smith, growing fearful that the villagers would divine the truth, appealed in swelling song to the people and priests and patriarchs to save the village by sacrificing Bliss. Her rebelliousness was already a strong mark against her, but her fate was sealed when it was discovered she was pregnant—that she was tainted, had broken her vows.

Clearly (the chorus of black-robed religious functionaries sang as they dragged her to the altar) her taint had brought all manner of misfortune upon the village. It was best to be rid of her, to purge the village of the sin of Bliss. Bound at last to the altar, she could only lie helplessly as a monstrous robotic arm reached out from the huge Fear machine and snatched her up, to carry her a captive over water toward its Arcadian temple island.

The tempo picked up here as the scope of the performance broadened. Aleister saw that, even after this second rapine, things got no better—in fact they got much much worse. Accompanied by pounding music like the raggedy-mad beating of a hyperstimulated heart, the machineries of Fear and Desire projected holotaped scenes of decadence, madness, carnage and mere anarchy over the whole world of the stage. Slave and serf and tenant farmer metamorphosed into coal miner and factory line drudge and paper pusher, transmogrified again into graveyardshift computerroom corpse, machine servicer, technopeasant databoys and glitchgirls. All suffered, and those sufferers who weren’t sobbing or screaming or crying or shouting drank or drugged themselves into sloppy-smiling oblivion. Grimy children from burning homes threw stones through the windows of mansions where the rich toasted their good fortune with priceless champagne in crystal goblets. Exploiters exploited those who, given the chance, would exploit in their own turn again and again and again, and over it all Möbius Cadúceus played and Lev sang.

Excerpted lyrics from Möbius Cadúceus song, “Fix”:

Everybody needs a fix! Everybody needs a fix!

Some call it love, some call it politics,

But everybody needs a fix!

Some call it God, some—nano-electronics

Some call it peace, some—defensive tactics

Some say Armageddon, some—Apocalypse

But everybody needs a fix!

Rather redundant stuff, Aleister thought, but by then the action had shifted again.

Klaxons sounded, air raid warnings grated across the staged night like vast diamond saws cutting upon the crystalline spheres of heaven. Across time and forest and plain and mountain and desert, by foot, ski, sled, horse, elephant, camel, cart, chariot, coach, car, trooptruck, jeep, and tank, they came, warriors with stone axes and spears and slings and arrows and bows and guns and rockets and lasers—Sumerian charioteers, Greek hoplites, Roman legionnaires, Vikings with two-headed Danish axes, Mongol bowmen, Saxon huscarls, French knights, Cromwellian footsoldiers, Musketeers, Samurais, Zulu assegaimen, GIs and Red Army infantry—to battle, all.

Excerpted Lyrics from Möbius Cadúceus song, “Butcher Paper”:

Winds of war are always blowin—

One power source that never fails

But ships of state, they can’t keep goin

Without those butcher paper sails

So we pay taxes yearly...

Listening to Korchnoi’s plaintive wail over the stage mayhem, Aleister thought that at least this lyric seemed to have a little more substance to it than the sometimes heavy-footed doggerel of the previous song.

Meanwhile, rafts and dugouts and canoes, galleys and galleons and dreadnoughts, nuclear submarines and hovercraft and hydrofoils, all were forcibly boarded, burned with Greek fire, cannon-struck, blasted by precise shell and torpedo, sunk by atomic shock-waves.

Keep the butcher paper handy

Let it soak up all the blood

Smoke cigars and drink your brandy

While men die and turn to mud...

In the timeless sky, stones, spears, burning oil, arrow volleys, catapult loads, cannonballs, shells, bombs, strafing aircraft, rockets, missiles, transatmospheric fighters, orbiting forts, suicide satellites all roared and flamed.