Lightpaths

Copyright © 1997, 2011 by Howard V. Hendrix

Published by Wildside Press LLC

www.wildsidebooks.com

For Vincent John “Jay” Hendrix

(1961-1988)

Loneliness like empty
wind moaning through a universal blizzard of ashes and snow. Then, beneath the blatant eternal white noise, another sound, a latent voice: “No, never put it all together, I’m afraid. Never completed the circle....”

Roger Cortland woke with a start, static in his ears and monitor snow in his eyes. He often fell asleep on shuttle flights—nothing new in that—but something, some sort of accidental access wave, had apparently knocked his personal data display off-channel. Now his wearable cyberspace was refusing to return to proper functioning. Grumpily he shut the system down, then turned it back on again for reboot.

As his monitors began to cycle up on his glasses, he thought about the strange half-dream he’d just come out of. Amazing what the mind in twilight sleep could come up with, the hypnagogic imagination imposing meaning where surely there was none, turning the mere nothing of white noise into loneliness and winds and cosmic anguish.

The voice, though, the words—Roger recognized those. His Uncle Ed, his father’s brother, had spoken those words. Ed had been deep in his cups at the wake for Roger’s father. Otherwise he would not have said such a thing. Why had Roger thought of that—that suggestion of failure—now? True, things had not gone perfectly well on the recent trip to Earth, true, but the situation wasn’t
that
dismal.

The virtual overlays on his glasses had now cycled over into a shifting saver/wallpaper mode, displaying what appeared to be a bright and perhaps mildly psychedelic stereogram—but one which, when viewed with parallel-eye technique, turned out to actually represent a 3D-ified loop of Roger’s favorite clip from his favorite old movie, the gypsy girls fight scene out of
From Russia with Love
. Though that period of history was over before he was born, Roger was an ardent Cold War nostalgist who longed for the grandeur of empires and the spy-versus-spy intrigue of those bygone days.

Yet not even that scene or the romanticized past it was part of could lift him from the mild depression that had settled on his spirit with that strange half-dream. Rather glumly he stared through the overlay scene on his glasses, out the window, into the blue-black of space beyond.

“Beautiful, isn’t it?” said the young woman in the nearest lounge seat, apparently having noted his gaze. Roger had noticed her when they boarded: a tall, buxom woman with red-gold hair, dressed in a blue tunic and green tights.

“I suppose so,” Roger replied. “If you like emptiness.”

“’The void, full of compassionate attention,’ as Atsuko Cortland puts it,” said the young woman, nodding enthusiastically, bright eyes flashing. “‘Like all times and places, if we could but see it.’”

Roger commanded his suit off, adjusted his eyeglasses on his nose rather pointedly, and peered more deeply through the shuttle viewport.

“That’s not what I see, I’m afraid. Just an empty height, bright or dark depending on whether we’re turned toward the sun or away, in the Earth’s shadow or not. And hardly compassionate—hostile, rather. No matter what my dear mother says. Makes me thankful for the metal and polymer of these walls.” He tapped a cabin strut. “Thin as they may be.”

“Your mother?” the woman said, taken aback. “You’re—?”

“Roger Cortland,” he said, extending his hand. “And you are?”

“Marissa Correa,” she replied, shaking the proffered hand. “I’m a postdoc, up from Earth on a full-year fellowship—the one named after your mother. I’m also going to be working in your lab.”

“Ah,” Roger said with a nod. “I thought your name sounded familiar. I must have signed some forms, I think. If I’m not mistaken, though, the Atsuko Cortland Fellowship is usually given in the humanities or social sciences. I don’t quite see the connection to my research.”

“They’re not connected, exactly,” Marissa said with a wry smile. “I got the fellowship because of an avocation of mine—an interest in utopian fiction. I’m sure you know that the Orbital Complex has the world’s largest collection of utopian and dystopian materials—”

“No, I didn’t,” Roger said, thinking irritably that of course the Orbital Complex would have such a thing. He was not a particular fan of the social engineering the space habitat residents were attempting—his mother prominent among them. To his mind they were turning what should have been a straightforward scientific outpost into some kind of Fourierist theme park.

“Yes. First editions, manuscripts, notes to nineteenth- and twentieth-century texts. Micromedia and electrostorage of all sorts. A wonderful collection, from everything I’ve heard. But that’s mainly a sideline, not my vocation. In real life my research has been in the biochemistry of aging, senescence. I don’t know a whole lot yet about the mole rats you work with—except that they’re unusually long-lived. I want to test the idea that, living in protected burrows the way they do, their lowered mortality has, over evolutionary time, tended to also cause an incidental retardation of the onset of senescence, even a lengthening of their telomeres as compared to other related Bathyergids.”

“Good!” Roger said, genuinely enthusiastic, seeing for the first time the exotically beautiful grey-green of Marissa’s eyes. “That sounds like the kind of rigorous scientific work I can appreciate. Now I know why I approved your stint in my lab.”

“Thank you,” she replied, perhaps a bit too quietly. Roger, though, was already back in the virtual space before his eyes, seeking out an article for his research.

* * * * * * *

So, Marissa thought, this passenger she’d spoken to, this handsome pale young man with a trim beard, dark hair, and very expensive Japanese suit—this was Roger Cortland. For someone who had accomplished so much, he was younger than she’d expected, mid-to-late twenties at most. Her lab supervisor, the son of his even more famous mother, the woman who had awarded her the fellowship that was now taking her to the space habitat. She desperately wanted to make the right impression—couldn’t just let their conversation dangle off the way it had.

“Thin indeed, these walls—as you said,” she went on, when she thought she had Roger’s attention again. He grunted noncommittally, seeming to be only half-listening. “Whenever I was blowing soap bubbles, as a child, I used to wish and wish that I could blow a bubble big enough to enclose me, lift me off the ground and float me away in the summer sunlight, up and up, beyond winds, even beyond air, to some peaceful heavenly place.” Marissa smiled and sighed wistfully. “Being in this bubble of spacecraft rising toward Orbital Park—it’s my childhood dream come true.”

The bearded young man said nothing to that. From her lounge seat Marissa wondered if she’d said too much. Had he heard her? Did she sound like a flake? If he was no longer in the mood for talking, was she making him feel trapped—from being in close proximity to a voluble fellow passenger?

Embarrassed, Marissa turned away, seeking solace in the wonderment she had been feeling at this flight up Earth’s gravity well. For the crew and several of the more frequent commuters, this flight was, no doubt, ordinary and routine, but for Marissa it was described by neither of those words. For her the powerful g-forces of launch and the blood-draining breathtaking surge skyward possessed an undeniable glamour. The globe suspended in the viewports now was something alive, motion-filled yet motionless, a still point inside a turning universe, a turning universe inside a still point, harmonious and one the way a leaping cat, a living cell, and a smoothly toiling machine each and all are one, in the elegant union of their forms and functions.

From the high perspective of cislunar space Marissa saw that despite all the killing and dying and suffering that went on down there, the planet of her birth was manifestly built for life. In the viewport it shone brightly, a candle in heaven burning with a blue flame, a haloed orb of living fire and burning life aglow in a cathedral darkness vast beyond understanding.

She hoped that impression would stay with her always, but even in the moment of that hope Marissa saw the vision’s magical newness beginning to fade into postcard-from-space mundaneness. She had to look away, afraid that familiarity would corrupt her initial, near-mystical appreciation of the wholeness and holiness of that world outside the window. What cynicism had so shortened the half-life of the awe-inspiring in her that she could take even this sight for granted if she looked on it for more than a few moments? She shook her head and tried not to dwell on it.

Glancing about the cabin, Marissa saw just across the aisle a woman of about her own age, with long lustrous black hair, dressed in the sort of sharply tailored charcoal-grey jumpsuit that Marissa had always admired but wasn’t small or lean enough to look good in. She smiled, happy to catch the jumpsuited woman’s eye. If nothing else, she reflected, conversation could at least take her out of her own thoughts.

* * * * * * *

Jhana Meniskos had been trying to read when the conversation of two of her fellow passengers distracted her.

“Marissa Correa,” said a grey-eyed young woman, extending her hand toward Jhana once she’d caught her eye. Caught was the word, all right: Jhana felt transfixed by the penetrating, almost manic brightness of the other woman’s eyes, the absolute attention behind them. She shook the proffered hand and introduced herself.

“So,” the grey-eyed woman continued, “what takes you to Orbital Park?”

“The ‘ozone-safe’ single-stage shuttle,” Jhana deadpanned.

Marissa laughed lightly.

“I mean, what business?”

“I’m going to be studying rates of speciation in isolation at the Orbital Biodiversity Preserve,” Jhana said, using the Orbital Park’s official (and, for her, always preferred) designation. ‘Park’ was such a nebulous word, and when it was used in reference to the Orbital Complex one never knew whether the user meant the parklike confines of the Preserve, or the industrial-park manufacturing areas of the Complex. “I’m interested in determining adequate gene pool sizes for controlling genetic drift in various species. Yourself?”

“Oh, nothing so scientific—officially.” The ever-intent Ms. Correa then told Jhana about her interest in utopian literature—at some length.

“Really?” Jhana commented when Marissa had finished her spiel on her fellowship work. “I’m surprised I’ve never heard of the collection before.”

“Yes, well, it’s still in private hands,” Marissa said, glancing down at no place in particular, “and usually open only to residents and specialists, I’m afraid. The founders of the Complex own it, in trust for the entire facility. They’re very interested in ideas and speculations about creating better, more humane societies. I understand they’ve begun implementing some of these concepts in the culture they’re developing, making great progress too—”

The bearded and bespectacled young man Ms. Correa had been talking to earlier snorted and looked out through his virtual overlays at them. Ms. Correa glanced at him.

“You disagree, Mr. Cortland?”

“One person’s utopia is another person’s hell,” Cortland said brusquely as he turned back to his work. “All utopias are inherently authoritarian, precisely to the degree that they are under conscious human control.”

“That might still be open to debate,” Ms. Correa replied as pleasantly as could be, before returning her attention to Jhana.

“This must be quite an opportunity for you,” Jhana remarked, trying to compensate for Mr. Cortland’s bluntness. “A chance to see some of the ideals of utopianism being tested experimentally in an actual community.”

“Yes. What more could I ask?” Marissa said with an awkward smile, glancing down briefly before continuing. “Just listen to me! Here I am telling you everything about myself and my work and I haven’t even asked you what university you’re with!”

“I’m not with a university,” Jhana said politely. “I work for Tao-Ponto.”

Mr. Cortland—he of the meticulously trimmed beard and less meticulous manners—suddenly became more interested in the conversation.

“You’re with Tao-Ponto AG?” he asked.

“That’s right. I’m in the biologicals division.”

“You’re a geneticist?”

Jhana shook her head.

“Population ecology’s my specialty, actually. But I sometimes work with the genetics of population, as on this trip.”

Mr. Cortland nodded and, drawing a holographically embossed business chip from his vest pocket, stood up carefully (gravity being what it wasn’t) and leaned across Marissa to present it to Jhana.

“Roger Cortland,” said the pale young man in the expensive suit. “You must come see us at our lab sometime—very soon.”

Jhana took Cortland’s chipcard. Ms. Correa seemed struck by a sudden flash of inspiration and, pulling a notescreen and electro-pen from her pocket, quickly jotted notes that the little machine dutifully converted to readable typeface. Jhana wondered what she was scribbling, but at that moment the image and voice of a woman—the shuttle commander—came up on the overhead monitors, informing the passengers that they were approaching their rendezvous with the Orbital Complex.

* * * * * * *

Marissa knew that her notescreen was dinosaur technology by most standards, but she had never liked implants or even wearable cyberspace—they made her feel too much like a peripheral attached to a vast machine, and she got enough of that on the job. She stared at the scribble-made-italic-type of her notes.

UTOPIA—akin to K’s Absolute Paradox?

—eternal coming into time?

—testable in time?

—testable by humans?

***Is Utopia something for us to test—

or something by which we are tested?***

What an odd idea, Marissa thought. Almost as quickly as the inspiration came it seemed to fade. She sat puzzling a moment, her hand on her chin. Sighing, she put the notescreen aside and got up. With the odd shuffling/floating gait of someone unaccustomed to the fractional gravity of a rotating spacecraft, she walked forward, following Roger and Jhana toward the main lounge, to view shuttle’s approach to the orbital habitat. Behind her, the notescreen, shining in shades of grey on the arm of her seat, began to drift slowly from its resting place. Remembering the little machine, Marissa turned and rescued it, pinning it beneath a seat restraint.