Hendrix - Lightpaths

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, Im 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 flightsnothing new in thatbut 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 hed 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 wordsRoger recognized those. His Uncle Ed, his fathers brother, had spoken those words. Ed had been deep in his cups at the wake for Rogers father. Otherwise he would not have said such a thing. Why had Roger thought of thatthat suggestion of failurenow? True, things had not gone perfectly well on the recent trip to Earth, true, but the situation wasnt 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 stereogrambut one which, when viewed with parallel-eye technique, turned out to actually represent a 3D-ified loop of Rogers 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, isnt 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.

Thats not what I see, Im afraid. Just an empty height, bright or dark depending on whether were turned toward the sun or away, in the Earths shadow or not. And hardly compassionatehostile, 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. Youre?

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

Marissa Correa, she replied, shaking the proffered hand. Im a postdoc, up from Earth on a full-year fellowshipthe one named after your mother. Im 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 Im not mistaken, though, the Atsuko Cortland Fellowship is usually given in the humanities or social sciences. I dont quite see the connection to my research.

Theyre not connected, exactly, Marissa said with a wry smile. I got the fellowship because of an avocation of minean interest in utopian fiction. Im sure you know that the Orbital Complex has the worlds largest collection of utopian and dystopian materials

No, I didnt, 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 attemptinghis 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 Ive heard. But thats mainly a sideline, not my vocation. In real life my research has been in the biochemistry of aging, senescence. I dont know a whole lot yet about the mole rats you work withexcept that theyre 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 Marissas 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 shed spoken to, this handsome pale young man with a trim beard, dark hair, and very expensive Japanese suitthis was Roger Cortland. For someone who had accomplished so much, he was younger than shed 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 impressioncouldnt just let their conversation dangle off the way it had.

Thin indeed, these wallsas you said, she went on, when she thought she had Rogers 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 Parkits my childhood dream come true.

The bearded young man said nothing to that. From her lounge seat Marissa wondered if shed 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 trappedfrom 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 Earths 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.