Lightpaths (30 page)

“But some of those other stations,” Marissa remarked, “the ones already deployed—they’re shaped differently: squares, and rectangles too.”

“Older technologies,” Seiji said with a nod. “Solar panels, even collecting mirrors. Some of the first stations aren’t even large-scale photovoltaic, like all the newer ones. In those older sats sunlight is simply used to heat up a thermal-exchange fluid to spin a turbine. ‘Ancient plumbing’ is what some of my friends in Utility call it, but the old workhorses are still cranking out the gigawatts—light to heat, heat to electricity, electricity to microwaves, microwaves to Earth, then microwaves reconverted to electricity and heat and light.”

“Cycles and transformations,” Atsuko said. Seiji nodded as Lakshmi muttered commands to the ship, bringing it around for docking.

“What’s that there?” Marissa asked. “The thing that looks like a cross between a thimble and a badminton birdie, only giant-sized?”

“That?” Seiji asked, pointing, unsure from Marissa’s description just what it was the red-headed woman was looking at. “That’s a mass catcher.”

“A
what
?” Marissa asked, the look on her face that of someone who thought she might have just heard an off-color joke but wasn’t quite sure.

“I know, I know,” Seiji said, holding up his hands before him in mild embarrassment. “You should hear the comments whenever we get someone new on staff. But really, that’s what it does: it catches mass, payloads of lunar material launched by mass driver from the moon’s surface. That’s what most everything that isn’t complex organic is made from up here: lunar material.”

“And lately,” Lev Korchnoi put in, “some of the micromachines have been raiding the mass catcher for extra material. Seems some of our ‘spiders’ have bugs.”

Seiji stared at him.

“How do you know that?”

“My day job is in communications,” Lev said, smiling his crooked smile. “Word gets around.”

Jhana wasn’t paying them much attention, for she had found something else in the universe that was puzzling her.

“Seiji,” she said, getting his attention. “What about those X-shaped things? See? The ones that look sort of reddish? Some of them are near the solar stations, some aren’t—”

“I see them,” Seiji said, ill at ease. “Frankly, I can’t tell you what those are. The SSPS staff isn’t responsible for them. We think they’re just some space junk that the glitching micromachines are producing on their own—”

“Junk?” Lev interjected, cocking an eyebrow. “Pretty organized, for ‘junk.’ Come on, Seij. I’ve gone to check them out myself, for Communications. Surely you people in power production must know something about them.”

Seiji sighed, glancing around the cabin as the transfer ship began to dock.

“Well, we
do
have some idea what they are,” he said quietly, “but no idea at all of what they’re intended to do.”

“Then what
are
they, at least?” Jhana wanted to know.

“Combinatorial arrays of microscopic lasers embedded in photorefractive material,” Seiji said in a rush, as if he were glad to have it out in the open. “Linked to interspersed layers of solar exchange film. The film apparently functions as a power source and memory matrix, but we haven’t been able to fully figure out what the laser/photorefractive combination does yet.”

“We haven’t either,” said Lev, who had been nodding his head in agreement while Seiji was explaining. “But personally, from the electron micrograph close-ups I’ve seen, I think it’s some sort of communications device. Something like what we’ve been using to generate our skysign—only what’s being built out there is hyperminiaturized, multiplied by millions and billions of individual units—and makes what we’re using look like a stone-headed axe.”

“Whatever they are,” Atsuko put in, breaking a silence unusually long for her, “we had better find out quickly. Their unexplained presence is making a number of our corporate and national neighbors down the well
extremely
nervous.”

“They think it’s some kind of weapon, no doubt,” Lev said with a chagrined smile, then shook his head sadly. “The military mind surpasseth all understanding. Just because it’s on the ‘high ground’—boom! Sputnik effect! That thing over our head! Sword of Damocles! Star Wars! Ridiculous.”

“You don’t think it’s dangerous, then?” Jhana ventured.

“How should I know? But I’ll say this: from everything I’ve seen, it’s no space-based beam weapon. Photorefractive material doesn’t concentrate laser light—it disperses it in predictable patterns. And the lasers involved are tiny ones. You’re not going to burn up anybody’s home town with these things.”

“I tend to agree,” Seiji said with a nod. “The configuration’s all wrong for a beam weapon.”

“But that still doesn’t answer the big question,” Marissa said. “Who’s building it?”

“Not who,” Lev said with mock gravity. “What.”

“Enough speculation!” Lakshmi said loudly, commanding the ship’s air lock open. Floating around them as they unstrapped, she made her way into her workshop as the others followed close behind, again awkwardly trying to manage movement in near-zero gravity.

They found the workshop to be a thoroughly “smart” space—heavily voice-activated. In the low gravity, even large pieces of equipment hung grasped by what looked to be the frailest of robotic arms and voice-response waldos. Amidst all the cutting edge technology, however, there also stood something that looked very much like a loosely-made statue—or even a shrine.

Immediately drawn to it, Seiji went to take a closer look, Jhana following close behind him. Some of it was recognizable enough: an odd juxtaposition of tantric ritual objects, occasional Roman Catholic icons—but what seemed to catch Seiji’s interest most was one particular grouping of bits and pieces, all turning slowly about one another like some mobile held together by nearly invisible wires. A beaded leather pouch with an oddly familiar trefoil symbol hung at the center, surrounded by a nebula of cast off material: A pair of smudged white feathers looped together. A distorted metal asterisk of age-blackened barbed wire. A red rust-pitted toy gyroscope. A stub of dark green candle. A dirty silk cocoon. A fragile nearly translucent piece of snakeskin. A glinting computer macrochip. A tiny mechanical umbrella. A yellowish beaked skull, clearly a small bird’s. A desiccated dark brown thing pitted and convoluted like a dried and shrunken brain. Up close, it seemed a more or less random assemblage, a mobile of bits and pieces, but from a slightly greater distance it resembled some misshapen human being, or perhaps a four-footed mammal standing on its hind legs as if digging into air or space itself with its front paws.

“What’s this?” Jhana asked, pointing to the little dried-up object like a shriveled brain.

Seiji looked more carefully at the last item, until he finally recognized what it was.

“A dried morel,” he said. “A ‘sponge mushroom’ from which nearly all the moisture has long since been wrung out.”

Looking at a particular grouping of the bits and pieces—several of them drifting about a pouch that seemed as if it might almost once have held them—Jhana was struck by the idea that their juxtaposition made a strange forlorn sort of sense. The objects that seemed to have come from the pouch hung like a heart in the chest of the creature. Looking at Seiji, Jhana saw from his face that something about the little assemblage in its larger whole was tugging at him. Jhana had the distinct impression that he wanted to quickly but carefully place the objects back inside the pouch.

“I didn’t quite figure you for the ceremonial type,” Seiji said, turning toward Lakshmi, who was watching him carefully. “Where’d you get this stuff?”

“Only the tantric material is mine,” Lakshmi replied. “I thought you might recognize the other paraphernalia. It’s from your brother’s personal effects.”

Seiji stared at her, speechless.

“Since Lev and I hooked your brother’s equipment into Vajra,” Lakshmi continued blithely, “some odd things have happened. One of them is that several of the robot arms here began acting cooperatively to sort through your brother’s personal effects. I tried to stop them at first, but after a while I got curious and wondered what they might put together if I let them go about their business. That structure there, all connected by micro-thin optical wire—that’s apparently the finished product, though they still add pieces from time to time.”

Seiji still could say nothing, could only try to hang on in the absence of gravity as objects floated and bumped lightly against him.

“It’s a statue of a big R-A-T, if you ask me,” Lev said, then explained briefly what the RATs were. “It’s a joke, a parody—just like the bits of embedded code we find when we’re allowed to find them.”

“Not a joke—a mirror,” Lakshmi said. “I think those embedded passages are intended to remind us who we are, and what we’re about here.”

“It’s a fun-house mirror, then,” Lev insisted. Lakshmi spun her hoverchair quickly in Seiji’s direction.

“Do you know what your brother was working on?” she asked pointedly.

“No,” Seiji said, finding his voice at last.

“Neither do we,” Lev said, cutting Lakshmi off just as she was about to speak. “Not really. But we have suspicions—”

“Strong ones,” Lakshmi said, so forthrightly that Jhana wondered for a moment what the relationship might be between them, the tall young man, ghostly pale yet agile and energetic and never removing his wraparound shades—and the older, immobilized dark woman with the penetrating eyes and flowing robes. Jhana doubted she’d ever know.

“We can’t say for sure,” Lev continued carefully, “but your brother appears to have been in quest of what’s become something of a grail in the interface business—”

“Direct mind/machine linkage,” Lakshmi put in. “Interfaceless communication. Transparent relationship between matter and mind. No keyboards, no screens, no trideo display, no consoles, no cyberspatial or virtual reality constructs. A big paradigm shift. The grand unification of infomatics and telecommunications.”

“I don’t understand,” Atsuko remarked from among a thicket of reed-thin robot arms. “How can that be?”

“We don’t know if it
can
be, yet,” Lakshmi replied. “I’ve worked on the problem myself, though never full-time. The model that I’ve looked at—and the one you’re brother was also apparently working with, Seiji—is the idea of the transducer, a substance or device that converts input energy of one form into output energy of another form. There are lots of examples of them.” She began calling up images into holodisplay before them. “Piezoelectric crystals like quartz that convert mechanical stress into electrical energy or electrical energy into mechanical stress. Photoelectric cells that convert light into electricity—many others.”

“I know the principle quite well,” Seiji said with a nod. “Most of the solar power generation done up here is based on transducer effects of one sort or another.”

“But how does that apply to the ‘interfaceless communication’ you spoke of?” Marissa asked Lev.

“Simple—theoretically,” Lev said with a shrug. “Think of ‘mechanical stress’ and ‘electrical energy’ and ‘light’ not so much as different types of energy but as different patterns of information. Think of the brain itself as a transducer for converting energy, information patterns of one form, into information patterns of another form—its entire structure, at all levels of complexity, as the structure of a transducing substance or device. Then find the proper information pattern, the proper energetic ‘carrier wave,’ both medium and message as it were, and beam it at a human brain which will convert that carrier wave instantly into information useful for thought.”

“And vice-versa,” Lakshmi added. “The energy of thought acting in a transeunt fashion, producing effects outside the mind, in the machine it’s sending to, through the same sort of transducing process.” She sighed audibly. “Unfortunately, no one’s really made it work in either direction, so far as we know.”

“What’s the snag?” Seiji asked, quietly, as if from far away.

“The brain/mind problem,” Lakshmi said levelly. “No one has yet figured out how mind attaches to brain. If the strict materialists were right, if mind were simply brain, the transducer model would have already produced a viable technology. But it seems strict materialism is a good myth but a poor explanation. The epiphenomenalists, on the other hand, by saying that mind is just an epiphenomenon arising from the physical and phenomenal activity of the brain—they’re really just closet dualists. The uncloseted dualists seem to be right, at least to a degree: mind and brain do appear to be distinct entities that somehow manage to interface—that word again—in consciousness.”

“Only it’s an interfaceless interface,” Lev insisted, calling up holodisplays of his own. “Like a meniscus formed between oil and water, or the surface tension between water and air. In the first case, is the meniscus made of oil, or of water? Neither, and both. In the second case, is the surface tension made of water, or of air, or of the dynamic of forces balancing between
them
? Is consciousness merely material and local brain, or transcendent and ubiquitous Mind, or some dynamic between them? It’s a paradox, a snake swallowing its own tail, a Möbius Cadúceus.”

He ended with an irrepressible smile. Lakshmi shook her head slightly, as if at a wayward child.

“Which brings us back to why Jhana and Seiji are here,” she said, smiling slyly in her own turn. “Atsuko and Marissa—you should be interested in this too, in regard to Roger. Lev, did you ever think the skysign might be acting as a sort of transducer already—in a rudimentary sort of way?”

Lev was quiet for a moment. Lakshmi smiled more broadly, seeing she had caught him by surprise.

“I hadn’t really thought about that,” he said. “I guess we could accept it as a provisional hypothesis. But I thought these folks came up here to play the game—not try to figure out the skysign.”

The others nodded in agreement.

“Oh, very well,” Lakshmi said, commanding a trideo game unit to display in the midst of them. “Here goes.”

VAJRA

presents