Lightpaths (23 page)

“What things?” Jhana asked, finishing her tea.

“Oh, I don’t know,” Seiji said, glancing up at her. “Shorthand for getting beyond human stubbornness, narrow-mindedness. Shorthand for the ridiculous ‘language is everything’ idea, the notion that language and symbols can capture the whole of human experience, contain the alpha and omega of human consciousness. Shorthand for the incompleteness of any system or theory.”

“It meant all
that
?”

“Yeah,” Seiji said, smiling awkwardly. “In a mostly unspoken way, but yeah, it meant all that. It means more and more to me all the time. The future perfect imperative. It means constant striving, the unending opening of new paths, the refusal to take ‘Impossible!’ for an answer. Perfection as something always to be striven for, precisely because it can never be obtained. A constant challenging of the assumptions of knee-jerk traditions and mindless conformity. That’s what my brother was all about.”

Seiji toyed with his tea cup a moment, then set it aside.

“That’s what really appeals to me about the space habitats and the opening of this frontier, too. Each habitat can be different. I complained about the lack of anonymity here—probably a function of small population. But people can choose to make the population density of their worlds as crowded or as solitary as they wish. Eventually, given a multitude of worlds to choose from, settlers can decide what sort of political and social organization they want—they can experiment, or they can stick with what’s been tried. Different religious groups can choose to build their own worlds, if they wish. Personally I’d rather see more integration of human beings from diverse cultures, the way it is here, than some sort of neo-tribal fragmentation all over space, but that’ll have to be left up to each group to decide. In any case, there’d hopefully always be that ‘openness to diversity’ Atsuko Cortland and the other founders are always talking about.”

Jhana began gathering the tea things. Seiji helped her take them back into the house.

“Atsuko Cortland—she’s Roger Cortland’s mother?” Jhana asked as they soundwashed the dishes and put them away.

“Yeah. You’d hardly guess two such different people might be related, would you?”

“I don’t know. I’ve never met the mother.”

“I’ll have to introduce you to her,” Seiji said, then smiled. “That would
really
be diversity—a world for Roger Cortland, and another for his mother! If that could be done, there could be worlds for everyone. Even better, one world where they could
both
be happy.” He paused, stopping halfway to the shelf where his hand was taking a teacup. “Maybe even one where my brother could have been taken in, appreciated, understood. A world he wouldn’t have felt the need to leave at such a young age.”

That trapped feeling that Jhana had first felt upon hearing Seiji speak of his brother’s death returned—even more powerfully now than when he’d spoken of it at Arthur and Susan’s party, her first night here. That party seemed months or years ago, though it was in fact not long ago at all.

Looking at Seiji, Jhana realized the man was still somehow trying to work his way through a grief too deep for tears, a guilt too deep for forgiveness. She did not want to think about it, for it reminded her too much of her own grief, her own guilt. Yet somebody’s guilt would have to be faced before she could get on with asking him about those things which so intensely interested her employer—those paranoid plots and counterplots which seemed so trivial at the moment.

“Come on,” she said, taking him by the arm. “Let’s go walk down by the river. You can tell me about your brother as we go.”

They left the house and walked along paths among gardens and through woods, but said little until they came to the fern-banked path along the water’s edge. The stream reminded Jhana of mossy green tributaries that she had once seen flowing toward the Thames, in the part of that river near Oxford, where it was called the Isis.

“Let us cultivate our garden,” Seiji said suddenly, apropos of nothing and everything.

“What Voltaire has Candide say, as his final injunction,” Jhana said, recognizing the quote. “When we were walking past the gardens I was thinking of the same thing.”

“
Our
garden—not someone else’s,” Seiji said. “To mind our own cultivation, and not mind or exploit the cultivation of others.”

“Hard to do, sometimes,” Jhana said thoughtfully. Seiji nodded.

“After my brother started having his psychological problems, I very much wanted to be my brother’s keeper, to mind his business too, as much as I could. To do that, though, would have been to interfere in his freedom to live the life he wanted to live, even when I feared—even when I
knew
, deep down—that it was a life tending toward an early death. I couldn’t balance the costs. Couldn’t figure out how to reconcile respect for his freedom with compassion for his suffering.”

They had come to a small mooncrete footbridge that arched steeply over the water where the river—really not much more than a stream—broadened to a large, slow-flowing, mirror-smoothness that lifted a variety of water-lilies and lotuses toward the light it reflected. She and Seiji stopped and stood, leaning their elbows on the railing of the bridge, gazing down into the water’s mirroring stillness.

“Could you see your brother’s death coming?” Jhana asked quietly.

“He’d been having his troubles for years,” Seiji said with a small nod. “I can see that now, in retrospect, everything leading up to the end. In second grade the nuns found him walking around on the playground with his arms stretched out like Christ on the cross. We’re descended from a line of Hiroshima Catholics, so we were always in Catholic schools. Maybe the programming took too well. As a kid, Jiro got it into his head that sex was something ‘dirty’ and ‘evil’. He was always distressed by his own sexuality after that. In high school he was painfully shy. He didn’t date, but that was okay. He was a good deal younger than all the other kids, and he put all his energy into his studies anyway.”

As she listened to Seiji, Jhana was reminded, oddly, of Roger Cortland’s manner. She wondered briefly what his particular loss and grief might be.

“Jiro took his studies
extremely
seriously—and it paid off. Bachelor’s degree in Computer Media Studies while he was still in his teens, master’s when he was twenty. But as he got older I suppose he felt he was trapped. He didn’t date girls, but he wasn’t homosexual—maybe he was afraid to be—and he didn’t want to be a priest. He’d started trying to ‘dumb down’ in his late teens, first through heavy drinking then through drugs. Figured that if he killed enough brain cells he’d fit in better, I guess.” Seiji flicked a piece of dried leaf off the railing and into the stream. “That’s when he started doing high-powered hallucinogens like KL 235—’gate,’ as it was called. The intelligence services or somebody like that had spread it around, after it was synthesized from a rare tepui fungus. Ask Paul Larkin in your lab—he knows all about it.”

“He seems like a bit of a crank sometimes,” Jhana ventured.

“Oh, yeah,” Seiji said. “But he does know what he’s talking about when it comes to mindbending and the world of the shadowy. He’s been there. Get him going on it, and really listen to him, and you’ll be in his good books forever. We’ve got some of the original fungal strain they took KL from, growing up here now. Supposed to be part of the attempt to preserve ‘lost’ or ‘ghost’ biodiversity, but mainly it’s here because Larkin insisted.”

Above and below them, in the sky of air and the sky of water, the mirrored sun would be going out before too long—at least in this sector of the habitat. Jhana barely noticed. Something about what Seiji had said about Larkin, the shadow-world, and KL-235 began to make things come together.

“Anyway,” Seiji continued, looking over the water, “Jiro’s use of KL 235, instead of dumbing him down, got his brain completely revved up. He just started pumping information through his eyes and ears all the time, until it was like he went supernova. He was so bright back then, the year before his breakdown—it scared me. It’s hard for an older brother to admit, even to himself, that his younger brother is smarter than he is—but Jiro was, and I did. His brain was roaring full throttle. It was like his mind was analyzing and synthesizing at lightspeed everything he’d experienced, all the technology and history he’d studied, all the data he’d taken in. Just burning with everything he’d learned. I don’t know—maybe all the KL he’d taken had locked his mind into overdrive. I do know that talking to him in those days was like talking to God. In his presence I felt the urge to avert my eyes.”

Seiji let out a long, slow sigh. Beneath the water’s smooth surface, fish and frogs and salamanders moved.

“He couldn’t hold it together. No one could hold that level of fiery intensity for long. He must have hit some limit at last. He knew he was losing it. Everything came bubbling to the surface. Long-distance he told me that he didn’t want to hurt anybody, that he’d rather die than hurt anybody. When his moment of explosion and collapse came, I was working on the first satellite tests of the new large-scale photovoltaics up here. I wasn’t able to be there for him. Still, I like to think that last great flash of his mind blew off in this shock-wave of light, spreading forever away—some of it even flashing onto the solar sats, sparking across gaps.”

Jhana watched as the sun began to dim and redden in the engineers’ best imitation of sunset. Night sounds began to rise tentatively from the water, from the banks, from the forests.

“Did your brother die soon after that?”

Seiji smiled sadly.

“Not for almost another six years. My parents brought him back home until he seemed better again. He went back to work on his doctorate in Intelligent Systems at MIT. He’d already accomplished a lot. He’d developed some big new system protocols and he had money coming in from those patents, from all sorts of things. We thought he was okay again.”

Seiji shook his head and turned his back on the darkening sky, the darkening water.

“I really hoped it was true,” he said, bitterness rising in his voice, “but I never quite believed it. The laser sharpness his mind had, before—that was gone, somehow. Just this shell of paranoia and conspiracy and weirdness left behind. He began to think he was some sort of techno-shaman. Jiro was always interested in American Indians and in computers, all the way back to when he was a kid. I guess he kind of went back to that time, and those interests just coalesced. After his breakdown he swore off ‘gate’ and vowed only to do ‘naturals,’ but things kept getting weirder.”

Jhana turned her back on the water then too, turning around but still leaning on the mooncrete bridge railings.

“In what way?”

Seiji shoved his hands in his pockets and looked down at his feet.

“He started to disappear periodically,” Seiji said with a shrug. “Just dropped completely out of sight, out of touch. There’s no real word for it in English or Globish, but there is in German:
Aussteiger
, ‘someone who gets off the train.’ He got off the train, all right. He got as far from the tracks of our world as he could. He claimed he was fasting and purifying himself like a shaman, vision-questing, enduring long, lonely ordeals for spiritual purposes. All we could say for sure was that, whenever he disappeared, credit tracing showed he was also spending every penny of his available funds on exotic computer and imaging technologies, which would always disappear with him—usually into the outskirts of Balaam.”

Jhana stared down at the mooncrete beneath her feet. She knew something about the hinterlands of the Bay Area Los Angeles Aztlan Metroplex. Not a nice place. She looked up again as a girl with bright white hair, fully tech-dressed in wearable media, started across the bridge with half-dancing steps, singing
You wash, I’ll dry, we’ll never think to wonder why, till it fades, fades without warning: Our love like the moon in mid-morning.
In a moment she had danced obliviously past them and was gone.

“Could you have done anything about it?” Jhana asked, putting her hand lightly on Seiji’s elbow, wondering if his brother could have been any crazier than the space habitat’s wild children. “Have him listed as a missing person, maybe?”

“We tried,” Seiji said with a grimace. “Before he disappeared for the last time, he contacted my parents long-link. He told them they had nothing more to say to him and he had nothing more to say to them, so he wouldn’t be calling anymore. The days became weeks and—no word. We tried to get the police departments around Balaam to find him and bring him in, but they couldn’t do anything. Failing to keep in touch with your family isn’t a prosecutable offense, after all. Jiro was an adult, he had free will, he had broken no law, so the police couldn’t hold him against his will—even if it might have saved his life.” Seiji glanced over toward the parts of the habitat still in light. “As the weeks lengthened to months we couldn’t even have him listed as a missing person because the police always told us—mistakenly—that they had seen him, or someone who looked like him, recently. In fact he’d already been dead for months.”

“Tragic,” Jhana said quietly, holding onto his arm a bit more firmly, wanting to make contact.

“Yes,” Seiji said, his chin slumping toward his chest. “But also no. Sad as it was that the police couldn’t bring him in to save his life, I have to agree with that sort of law. At least it respected Jiro’s right to be wrong. It didn’t meddle with his freedom, not even ‘for his own good’.”

“Yes—now I see what you were getting at before,” Jhana said, standing up straight from where she’d been leaning against the bridge railing, letting go of Seiji’s arm a moment. “The conflict between freedom and compassion.”

Jhana followed Seiji’s glance up the path toward the townlet cluster of buildings ahead. Together they began to walk slowly toward them.

“Right,” Seiji said as gravel crunched under their footsteps. “If the police had taken Jiro into custody and held him—the compassionate thing to do, I suppose—there’s always the chance that we could have brought him home and had him ‘cured’ or ‘put right.’ But there’s an equal chance that he might well have ended up in some dehumanizing asylum for the rest of his life, clocked out on psychosocial control medications—or even worse, imprisoned. Knowing how much my brother valued his freedom, perhaps even freezing to death inside an abandoned refrigerator wasn’t the worst end he could have faced.”