Lightpaths Read online

  “But I, er, I’ve done very little gardening,” said Marissa, genuinely bewildered.

  “There’s an instructional program in the house memory. Certainly a young woman of learning can learn.”

  Smiling enigmatically, Atsuko turned and walked away. Marissa went inside, thoughtful. Calling up the instruction program, she hoped and very nearly prayed that she would prove a quick study.

  Excerpt from Keeping the Green Fuse Lit: Gardening for a New World (transcript).

  Human civilization begins with agriculture, but horticulture is older than agriculture, older than civilization. Like cattle (which were first domesticated for ritual sacrifice, and only later raised for meat and milk and hides) plants too were kept for ritual and sacramental purposes long before they were grown as food crops. That has been the human pattern—from profound to profane, mysterious to mundane. Our relationship with plants has been typical of our relationship with the entire natural matrix out of which we arose and of which we are still a part: first we feared our world, then we fought it into submission, then we took it for granted. Only lately have we learned that we must also foster it and nurture it. Nowhere have we learned this more powerfully than here....

  Marissa watched, intrigued. She wondered whether the supposed greater antiquity of horticulture than agriculture might be anthropologically incorrect but, she thought wryly to herself, Adam and Eve had been gardeners, not farmers, right?

  * * * * * * *

  “Dammit!” Lev Korchnoi cursed as a swivel arm on one of his show robots froze up in mid-arc. “Another glitch!”

  “What now?” Aleister McBruce said telepresently. A lifelong denizen of the virtual deep, Aleister did just about everything telepresently. If Lev hadn’t met him in person, hadn’t seen his bald head and graying beard and fleshly bulk, he would have doubted there was really a person to meet.

  “Something ate a chunk of my code,” Lev said, having pulled down the relevant code-object for examination, “and shat out a bunch of garbage. A virus—a damn virus!”

  “Temper, Lev dear, temper!” Aleister said with a chuckle. “Self-replicating software, if you please—‘virus’ is a pejorative term. Shoot me the garbage and I’ll run it through an interpreter and see if anything pops out.”

  Lev shot the chunk of junk code to Aleister. Waiting, Lev felt the urge to twiddle his thumbs but, remembering he was wearing force feedback gloves, thought better of it.

  “Got something here,” Aleister said at last.

  “Let me see.”

  Aleister dutifully shot a 3-D thing like a spiral staircase to Lev’s virtual overlays. Where it should have had stairs, though, it had keywords instead. TETRAGRAMMATON, Lev read. MEDUSA BLUE. WORLDGATE. APOTHEOSIS. UTEROTONIC. ENTHEOGEN. TRIMESTER. RATS. SEDONA. SKY HOLE. SCHIZOS. BALANCE. COMBINATION. ANGELS.

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” Lev asked, but at that moment the foreign construct fell apart—leaving behind what Lev suspected might be a reinstatement of the original code.

  “Not to mean,” Aleister said, laughing, “but to be, or not to be. It does, and then it was. A self-consuming artifact, like your—”

  “Performance robots,” Lev said, getting but not appreciating the joke. “Who do you think our little jokester is? I mean, the source code was all object-driven stuff taken from the net coordinator, the Vajra. That’s always clean. It was sent as quantized information packets, and quips can’t be virused like that.”

  “Ask Lakshmi,” Aleister said with a shrug. “She’s the Vajra goddess. If you find any more of these self-replicating software forms, though, send them to me. I haven’t run across this species before.”

  “If I’m unlucky enough to be plagued with them again,” Lev said, “I’ll be happy to let you play epidemiologist to your heart’s content.”

  Aleister disappeared, leaving Lev to hope that Lakshmi would see fit to stop by soon and work this through with him.

  Chapter Four

  Jhana thought her host family’s house was one of the most comfortable-looking places she’d ever seen. Computer- redesigned for more efficient use of space, the Spanish villa-cum-courtyard overlooked levels of gardens punctuated by pocket meadows, small streams and copses of trees.

  As she jangled the antique front door bell, Jhana heard the sounds of twelve tone classical music, Tibetan overtone singing, and many voices in spirited conversation. Sarah and Arthur answered the door together, a couple perhaps twenty years older than herself, smiling a bit uncomprehendingly at her. Once Jhana had identified herself, her hosts led her toward a sunny atrium living room, plaguing her with enquiries about and sympathy for her trip up the gravity well, while she complimented them profusely on the beauty of their home.

  “Thanks,” said Arthur Fukuda with an ‘Aw shucks tweren’t nothin’ shrug. “It’s all just mooncrete, you know—luna cotta tiles on the roof, the ‘stucco’ on the walls, the slabmix beneath this Corsican mint—everything.”

  Jhana looked down. She’d thought she smelled mint. She was standing on it.

  “What an interesting idea,” she exclaimed. “A living rug!”

  “Yep,” Arthur said proudly. “Photosynthetic floorcover, gene-engineered for resistance to foot traffic, and for thriving on lower light and water levels. It was my friend Seiji’s idea. He’s the local garden wizard.”

  “The only thing the house really lacks,” said Sarah as they walked down steps into the main living area, “is wood. The trees we have here are a bit too young and valuable yet to be turned into lumber, and the tank- grown stuff never looks right to me. Another thing I miss from the old world.”

  “Hardships are a part of frontier life,” Arthur said with a wry smile as he motioned them into chairs, a light scent of mint still hovering in the air from the crush of their footsteps. “Sarah and I have discussed it quite a bit. We gain and we lose.”

  “Do you miss anything?” Jhana asked him.

  “Me? Oh, certainly.” Fukuda ran a hand through his grey hair then absently picked up a bottle of wine. “We’re a rather small and isolated community as yet. For all their overcrowding and craziness, Earth’s cities still have a certain loony energy I miss sometimes. Individually, the people up here are at least as intelligent and energetic as the best you’ll find anywhere, but you have to have a certain critical mass for Earth’s sort of urban energy. We don’t.”

  He poured them a red wine made from grapes grown “locally” in the greenhouse tori.

  “I miss a good mature wine now and then too,” Arthur went on. “What we can’t mine on the moon or grow in the greenhouses we have to ship up the well from Earth—and that’s prohibitively expensive. Bulk luxury items like wines are absolutely last on the priority list.”

  “Everything’s so new up here,” Sarah explained, “including the vineyards and viticulture. All our wines are, alas, quite young yet.”

  “But they’ll mature,” Arthur said fervently, “like everything else.”

  Jhana sipped some of the wine, well aware that her hosts were watching for her reaction—even if they were politely gazing elsewhere, pretending disinterest.

  “It seems fine to me,” she said after a thoughtful pause—to her hosts’ obvious relief. Perhaps the wine was a bit shy in terms of crispness, a bit too long-lingering on the palate, but certainly passable.

  A silence opened in the conversation. Sarah Sanchez stared past the guests partying in the courtyard, over the gardens and up the curve of the world to where the reflected sun was dimming, bringing night to the third of the habitat her home stood in.

  “The sun sinking into the Pacific—I miss that.” Sarah said over her wine, fading light glinting in her long dark hair, making in her wine glass a soft-edged ruby, slowly dimming, like the thermograph of a failing heart. “High orbit is a world of light, and in a world of light you can do a lot with mirrors—but not everything. Don’t get
me wrong: the engineers have done a good job. The promotional videos promised ‘Hawaiian’ climate here, and since we used to live on the islands I think we can say they’ve matched the climate pretty well. But they just can’t match those Pacific sunsets.”

  From the large bowl-shaped lounger in which he’d taken a seat, Arthur nodded.

  “The stars too, strangely enough,” he said, swirling the wine in his glass meditatively. “I remember sleeping under the stars way out in the sticks one summer when I was kid and we were vacationing in Manitoba. The moon wasn’t going to rise until late. When my eyes adjusted to the dark, I saw the sky was different that night. All the stars were golden, the Milky Way was a thick river of gold flowing across the heavens. Each star seemed bright and close and warm. Some of them were red gold, some blue and, I swear, with some of them I wasn’t seeing points but actual discs of light. “

  Jhana looked up from studying the patterns the Corsican mint grew in, on the floor.

  “And you’ve never seen another sky like that? Not even up here?”

  “Nope,” Fukuda said, shaking his head slightly. “I’ve seen stars big and beautiful and colorful and clear—and in greater numbers than ever before, no doubt about that. But when falling stars shot through that sky that particular night, they weren’t the usual pale streaks—they were great golden sword slashes. Some of them calved and split fire, and I could hear them popping and breaking and burning.” He looked away, wistful. “Maybe I only thought I heard that—but I know I’ve never seen that gold again, anytime or anywhere else. Maybe it was something in the Earth’s atmosphere that night that made the stars shine golden. Maybe it was something in my eyes, or my memory, or my imagination—”

  “Dear,” Sarah interjected, “how many times have you already told that story in the Public Sphere? Come now, we don’t want to monopolize our guest with stories of the ‘old country.’ Let’s introduce her to the rest of the party, shall we?”

  Arthur laughed and they stood. Walking through an archway they came into the courtyard where all the noise had been coming from.

  “Everyone!” Sarah Sanchez called as they walked toward the center of the darkling courtyard. Not everyone but at least five or ten heads turned toward her from the music and the food, and that was good enough for the party’s hostess. “This is Jhana Meniskos, one of the visiting ecologists in Arthur’s lab! She just arrived earlier today, so let’s make her feel at home!”

  Scattered shouts of welcome and the thin patter of applause greeted this announcement. Shaking Jhana’s hand, Arthur and Sarah took their leave, with apologies for having to return to the kitchen for more hors d’oeuvres. In the gardens beyond the courtyard, a maze of pathway lights came up slowly, then soft lights around the periphery of the courtyard itself. Jhana moved through the knots of people gathered round the food and drink tables.

  “All drama is essentially family conflict,” proclaimed a flush-faced young man—in doublet, hose, codpiece, cape and multi-neoned hair—to a group of more or less interested listeners round a wine table. “Just depends on how broadly you define family—even up to the family of humanity, or the family of all living things. Now, if conflict is what arises in any situation that’s less than perfect, well, we know no family situation’s perfect, so conflict is unlimited, drama goes on and on—”

  Her wine glass full, Jhana moved on. She’d met enough drama-jocks in high school and college to recognize the type. She had no interest in listening to the flamboyant artiste holding forth to his admirers. From her correspondence with her hosts, Jhana seemed to recall that Sarah was involved in the arts in some way. The drama-jock must be one of her friends.

  Walking past musicians oblivious to everything save their performance, Jhana made her way toward tables laden with plates and goat cheeses and crispbreads and canapes and sushi and melon.

  “The right mythologizes, the left explains,” said a heavyset man, bald, bearded and bespectacled, to the lanky younger man in wraparound shades beside him. “How can you possibly expect to move people in a more progressive direction through myths or stories or performances, Lev? The idea that ‘it’s just a story’ always prevents them from recognizing the link between the simulation and consensus reality. No connection, no critique. The medium distorts the message.”

  “Not necessarily!” replied tall pale Mister Shades forcefully, round a wad of sushi. “Granted, the myth or story format is inherently conservative, self-satisfying, flattering the audience by affirming values the audience already holds. But self-consuming works exist too, dialectical works that purge the audience by scrutinizing and disturbing the audience’s values. The wall between myth and explanation isn’t all that complete—to some degree, myths are explanations, explanations are myths. In Möbius Cadúceus’s performances, we can create myths and stories that are self-satisfying in form but self-consuming in function, ‘virus programs,’ as it were, telling the truth but telling it slant—”

  Having placed on her plate samples of whatever looked most appetizing, Jhana drifted quickly away through the music. More of Sarah’s friends, she presumed. The younger man smelled vaguely of machine lubricant. Artsy types, she thought, shaking her head. She’d never understand them.

  Walking and eating, she moved out of the courtyard, down steps toward the quiet of the gardens beyond. A man and woman, oblivious to her presence, flowed up the steps past her.

  “—and two large solar panels, like wings,” said the woman. “The mass driver between the panels has two long drive tubes extending out aft, beyond the panels. All completely automated. Because of the tug’s shape I call my design ‘The Swallowtail’.”

  “Sounds like the perfect vehicle for mining the asteroids,” her companion said, nodding sagely yet enthusiastically.

  “Or at least the Apollo Amors. I’m hoping the HOME consortium and the colony council will approve a test run of the prototype within the next few weeks.”

  When the twosome had passed, Jhana at last had time to herself in the garden. As she walked the mazelike paths she heard frogs croaking and insects buzzing and chittering, various birds making their evening calls, dragonflies whirring softly, someone intermittently humming and whistling a short distance away. Further off, the band was playing a worldbeat salsa mix, but she had to strain to hear it. The water of the stream and the leaves of the bushes and trees seemed to soak the music up like a green anechoic chamber.

  Eschewing the benches she saw here and there along the path, she sat down at last on a large flat rock to finish off the canapes remaining on her plate. She could still see most of the garden around her fairly well, for though it was “night” in this sector of the colony, it wasn’t nearly as dark as a clear moonless night on Earth. The ambient overflow of the reflected light shining on the “daylight” sectors made the light level in the garden unusual, a bit brighter than a full moon night yet a bit darker than a long midsummer twilight she’d once seen, in the Sierras back on Earth. She found it a very pleasant and restful light, one which softened colors without reducing them to shades of grey.

  Sitting there, she felt her breathing slowing as she relaxed. In front of her stood flowers, high pink and low yellow in the thin liquid light, a scent of wild onion and honey and musky perfume in the air. Becoming ever more fully aware of the world around her, she noticed the leaves, how intricate and subtle and complex they were in their myriad variations. Among them, insects sang their tiny chitin calliope songs, while a small stream chuckled stones slowly to sand. So wonderful—just to relax, in a place that did not demand guilt or forgiveness, success or failure.

  “Beautiful,” she said, her eyes half-closed.

  “I like to see people appreciate my garden.”

  Jhana’s eyes flew open and her head swiveled in the direction of the words. Before her stood the man with the Mennonite beard, examining day-lilies.

  “Yours? I thought it was Arthur and Sarah’s.”


  The man picked one of the blown lilies and slowly ate it.

  “Oh, it’s theirs, all right. They maintain it. But I designed the grounds. Turned the moon dirt into soil by adding natural nitrate sources, trace metals and minerals, the right mix of soil bacteria, fungi, nematodes, worms, you name it. Put in all the bulbs and perennials—or drew up the ground plans for Arthur and Sarah to do it, anyway. Designed and helped install the micro-irrigation system, and the water recycling lagoon—there, with the meandering stream and catchment ponds. I designed it free-lance for my friends, but I still have a paternal interest of sorts.”

  The man stepped forward slowly, extending his hand. “Seiji Yamaguchi. I work in ecodesign and solar power utilization.”

  Jhana stood, brushing her clothes lightly.

  “Jhana Meniskos,” she said, not bothering to parade her specialist credentials. Yamaguchi frowned slightly, but Jhana, unable to determine any reason for that change in expression, went on. “Haven’t we already met? On the ridgecart earlier?”

  “That’s right,” he nodded. “Are you feeling less anxious now?”

  “I was, until you popped up and startled me.”

  Yamaguchi smiled, slightly abashed.

  “Touché. Sorry to interrupt, but I was curious. When you said ‘Beautiful,’ I presumed you meant the garden.”

  “You presumed correctly.”

  “What about it struck you that way, particularly?”

  “I don’t know. Everything. The colors—” she said, pointing. Yamaguchi nodded. “And the smells.”

  Yamaguchi walked to the flowers she’d pointed to.

  “These pink ones are varieties of Allium, flowering onions,” he said, plucking a few of the blown flower heads, almost in a sort of reflexive grooming action. “These yellow blossoms are Oenothera missouriensis, evening blooming Missouri primrose—sweet scented.”