Lightpaths (7 page)

So many species names were there, she realized as she looked at the lists in her virtuality. The living dead, the in vitro remnants, microforms haunting laboratories and gene banks. She tried to remember how long cryogenics facilities had been freezing germ plasm down to end-of-the-universe temperatures, tried to recall how many genome maps were stored in the infosphere’s memory banks. She couldn’t remember the exact numbers and dates but she knew that, in this Limbo roll-call before her eyes, science’s fantastic voyage was complete: life reduced to information, the leap of the gazelle on the veldt transformed to quanta hopping circuit gaps.

The final judgement on the threatened and endangered species of Earth had stood suspended for decades now. Suspended
in
animation. Living death row. Theirs was a “virtual” reality as surely as this computer construct she looked into now. In one corner of the construct floated the Ark symbol of the Biodiversity Preserve—a creature-filled boat afloat on a sea of humanity. An odd symbol, she thought: the human flood keeps the Ark afloat, but isn’t that same flood what makes the Ark necessary in the first place? And when that people-sea grows stormy, what then?

She tried not to think about that. She was just here to do her job, to find some way of preserving against genetic drift the genetic material of these tenuous species, while still allowing for change, diversity, evolution. In itself it would not be an easy task; add to it Mr. Tien-Jones’s
sub rosa
requests, and her personal problems still in need of working out, and it would all make for a busy business-sabbatical indeed.

She might as well get going. Scanning through the virtual space of the computer memorial hovering before her eyes, she pulled up the genome map of a likely candidate—an obscure organism by the name of
Heterocephalus glaber
—which, judging by the log-in list, someone had been giving considerable attention to even within the last twenty four hours.

* * * * * * *

Despite being tired from the work she had already done in Roger’s lab, Marissa had made what she considered a breakthrough in her other researches, her fellowship research for Atsuko—and she had made it while grabbing a quick late afternoon nap.

It had first occurred to her almost in the form of a dream in that time between sleep and waking—just before her ear-plug alarm went off. Somehow she had seen her imaginings of the characters in Huxley’s novel
Island
falling onto the two pans of a balance, a set of scales—then not just the characters but entire worlds dropping onto that balance. One balance was the descriptive world, the world-as-it-is; the other was the normative world, the world-as-it-ought-to-be. The key to
Island
, she thought—and hopefully to hundreds of other utopian/dystopian texts—lay in a balancing, an almost ritualistic exchange of what she thought of as “hostage” characters: people held hostage by the circumstances of their birth and upbringing in one or the other of those worlds...

She was so caught up in her theorizing that she was completely unaware of the beauty of the early evening light around her as she walked toward the archives, planning to pad off among the stacks in search of a copy of More’s
Utopia
. Abruptly her thoughts were cut through by the persistent calling of a bird nearby. She turned and saw there not only a black and orange bird she could not identify but also a young couple, strangers walking hand in hand across the Archive grounds, and a group of men and women dressed in white, practicing what looked like tai chi or perhaps aikido.

Marissa smiled awkwardly to herself. Living in her head again. Here she was thinking about bookish utopias while this world lay before her, a world in which the inhabitants, her fellow inhabitants, were doing their best to realize the dream of a better, more humane society.
Be here now
, she thought, reminding himself of the old Buddhist admonition.

Always so hard to live in the moment—not in the past of memory or the future of expectation but just here, just now. Watching the young couple disappear from the Archive grounds, Marissa decided her analysis could be put on hold for a spell, given time to age and “season” while she tried to get back in touch with the rhythm of the life going on around her.

She strolled out across the evening-damp grounds and sat down on a stone bench, thinking of times of quiet like this on Earth, times she’d spent watching the moon in the afternoon, the ghost moon burned away by the harsh light of day. The melancholy of that remembered sight settled in her soul, making her pensive.

Images of her life back on Earth came to her, thoughts of course-loads and committee work and research and publications. She thought of her likely future, all the impedimenta of the hoped-for tenure track job, of becoming the “ladder faculty member” trying to keep moving upward or at least not falling down rungs of that all-important ladder. She’d thought about it many times already, until even academia—the only field of work she’d ever been able to tolerate, much less enjoy—began to seem to her what it had seemed to some of her professors: less a ladder than a vertical treadmill of constant turf-battling, grant-grubbing, conference-connecting, log-rolling and string-pulling.

In her bleak times she nearly lost her faith in the almost unconscious mysticism of her callings as student and teacher. The essential myths of academe failed her and she felt little better off than the vast majority of Earth’s people, hating her job and her situation until she felt the full enduring ache of the long illness called life, knew the pain of having a poet’s heart trapped in a scholar’s hide, the agony of being a soul knotted and fastened to the dying animal of the body—morbid thoughts she was supposedly too young to have, but also thoughts that had somehow led her to study aging on the right hand and utopia on the left.

To hold onto Hope she’d have to let go of Fear. She knew that, intellectually, but the pain of being torn and pulled apart by the widening gap between those two worlds of “ought” and “is” was not lessened by such intellectual knowledge. So damnably difficult to let go, to make that leap from one to the other for herself.

Perhaps, she thought, it was difficult for the whole world, too. Earth’s people seemed overwhelmed by that space between the worlds, paralyzed by it or turning their backs on it, turning their backs even on hopes like this space colony, as if muttering, “Better the Hell we know than the Heaven we know not.”

She could talk about research grants, think about possible jobs and possible promotions, argue her need for material available only in the Archives or Roger’s lab, but those weren’t her real reasons for being here. She was here out of a yearning that this world, this place, would be everything and more than she could have hoped for.

Softly she closed her eyes, trying not to think of anything, trying not to reflect on things but rather to let them reflect on her. She longed to become like still water reflecting the moon, a bubble of silvery mercury hung between worlds, a mirror-mind floating at the surface of the past and the bottom of the future, a meniscus of Now, a liquid crescent-moon—

Marissa shook her head. She had never been as good at meditation as she would have liked, no matter how hard she practiced. Images only got in her way, and even the idea of blanking her mind was always just another image. Opening her eyes, she stared around her at the splendid colorful shining bubble she sat inside, and wondered. This world as it is—might it be the world as it ought to be?

Sighing, she opened her backpack and took out the Mumford text Atsuko Cortland had given her—the copy Roger had read and decorated with his marginalia. No time for the blues, Marissa thought. She had work to do. The thought that she would be reading Roger’s private notes made the task more interesting, perhaps even made her heart beat a little faster. Certainly he was handsome and brilliant in his own quirky way, but she was growing fonder of him than even those features would merit. She tried to tell herself that it was because they seemed to complement each other well: laser-like Roger with his sharp but narrow focus, and herself, more like a flashlight, illuminating a broader range, a polymath, a Renaissance woman....

* * * * * * *

Atsuko Cortland was hot. Toweling off the perspiration she’d raised on her body during the aikido class, she wondered for the hundredth time if these refresher courses in civilian-based defense—required of all habitat citizens—were really all that necessary. The non-violent direct resistance (NVDR) program was, even down to its acronym, based on the premise that someday the habitat citizenry might have to face an invader—an eventuality Atsuko considered highly unlikely.

In the colony council she had initially opposed the NVDR program, fearing that the training might well bring on the invasion it was, hypothetically, supposed to resist. Even after it was made clear to her that the sort of defense arts that were to be taught would be thoroughly “local” and had no real offensive component—that they were only a small part of a much larger overall program intended not so much to directly oppose an invader as to make it difficult for the occupying force to maintain its hold on the colony—even after all that, she still had qualms. Once the council came to consensus in support of NVDR, though—and it became as close to “law” as was to be found up here—Atsuko had dutifully joined in the trainings. They were good exercise at the very least.

Slipping back into her street clothes, the datasleeve of her blouse began to ping softly, announcing that she had an incoming message. Dressed, she took a quick look at herself in the dressing room mirror, then swept out of the building beneath the Archive playfields, still trying to determine whether she wanted to deal with “the world” just yet. Finding herself in a fairly private situation as she strode along over the fields, she decided to take the message as she walked.

“Message recorded for Atsuko Cortland, from Global Trade Authority,” her Personal Data Assistant said quietly. Atsuko grimaced. She knew she should never have agreed to accept the post of Colony Council liaison to the GTA—an organization which she always thought of privately as the Global Trade Autocracy. Descendant of the GATTs and G7s and WTOs of the last century, the international trade-coordinating body had grown into quite the behemoth. She should have known better than to “liaise”. She had, after all, formulated one of the primary laws of political life in the habitat, the Principal of Reciprocity: Those who accept the responsibility also must accept the power, and those who accept the power must also accept the responsibility. Serving as GTA liaison meant having more power and more responsibility than she really wanted just now.

“Abstract and condense it for me, please,” she told the PDA, thinking once again of what her husband (ex and late) had told her—how that acronym had meant something quite a bit different when he was a teenager. She sighed inwardly for a moment, remembering a long-ago snatch of warm human contact, then returned to the present, thinking that any number of acronyms had meant different things at different times. CD had meant everything from Certificate of Deposit to Compact Disc to Civil Disobedience. Maybe it should also mean Context Dependent.

While she was thinking her PDA was busily working. For a pocket artificial intelligence it was fairly smart and soon had GTA’s undoubtedly long bureaucratic text distilled to its most relevant points.

“How many key points?” Atsuko asked.

“Two.”

“Give them to me one at a time,” she said, not breaking her stride as she continued her usual post-aikido cool-down walk all the way to her residence.

“First, the GTA is concerned by the unauthorized design, manufacture, and distribution of a trideo game called ‘Building the Ruins’,” the PDA said levelly. “It is being made by a number of micromachine flash manufactories in several countries. GTA has traced the original design, manufacture, sales, and distribution structure to the orbital habitat, specifically to the Variform Autonomous Joint Reasoning Activity, the net coordinating intelligence. The individual trideo game units are capable of two-way communication with the habitat VAJRA. Said coordinating intelligence appears to send upgrades to the trideo software on a regular basis. GTA wishes to remind the Colony Council that the manufacture, sale and distribution of this product violates numerous trade agreements. GTA demands that the High Orbital Manufacturing Enterprise cease and desist from further production of this item.”

Atsuko frowned. This was strange news indeed. She’d have to contact whoever was currently in charge of the habitat’s net coordinator and get some background on this before she took it to the Council.

“What’s the other key point?” she asked the PDA.

“Second, the GTA requests information concerning the reasons for deployment of several small satellites of previously unknown description. These objects originate in the vicinity of the orbital habitat and are currently headed toward Earth orbit. The GTA wishes to remind the Colony Council that the orbital habitat has no contract or authorization for the production and deployment of these satellites. Their unauthorized deployment is a serious breach of international and interorbital law.”

Atsuko walked in thoughtful silence for longer than she would have expected. The unauthorized trideos were bad enough, but these satellites or whatever they were—those could actually be a much more significant problem. She had lived on Earth long enough and learned enough history to know that there were many people down there—particularly those of a military bent—who considered space the ultimate high ground. Hadn’t that been a big part of the motor that drove the first space race to the moon? These people would not do well with the prospect of unidentified satellites deploying to Earth orbit from the habitat. She needed to talk to someone in powersat production, and soon.

“Hope it’s just the usual space junk,” she said, aloud but to herself. Looking around, she realized that she was already in her yard. Glancing up at the other side of the ensphered world of the habitat arcing far above her, she wondered with a shudder if the scenario underlying the NVDR program might not be so far-fetched after all.