Lightpaths by Howard V. Hendrix Read Free Book Online

THUNDERBOLT. WORTHWHILE PROJECTS. Both were scribbled in her own hand, above an encryption keycode number: 105366.
    Yessir, yessir, yessir, she thought. Heading for the shower now, remembering restless sleep and restless waking, her aching head spun with the difficulty of distinguishing dreams from memories, hopes from fears, reality from nightmare.
    * * * * * * *
    “Here, let me take one of your bags,” Atsuko Cortland said, closing her facsimile copy of Lewis Mumford’s The Story of Utopias . Rising to grab a large bag and direct Marissa to her lodgings, Atsuko gazed at Marissa with a glance the younger woman could not interpret. “So you met my son.”
    “Yes! Met him—and now you! I’ve read all your books! And it’s all happened so quickly! Amazing!”
    “Oh, not really,” Atsuko responded, striding quickly away into the greenery of the Archive grounds, where they had agreed to meet. “Even including visiting scholars and professionals, we’re just a small town, population-wise. And I’m afraid I wasn’t here just to meet you. I do help manage our archives.”
    Marissa nodded. She almost had to run to keep up with the swift pace her escort set through the thickets of bananas and lianas, ginger plants and bird of paradise flowers. She was more than willing to sweat a bit, though, having been so lucky as to meet one of the famed Founders so soon after arriving in the habitat.
    “Tell me, what did Roger think of your research project?”
    “He liked my side project with mole-rats just fine,” Marissa said, winded, “but he didn’t much like the topic of my fellowship research. Said something about utopias being inherently authoritarian.”
    Atsuko smiled sadly and shook her head as they toiled up a small but surprisingly steep hill.
    “He still can’t get it out of his head that we’re trying to create some sort of utopia here.”
    “You’re not?”
    “Most definitely not,” she said thoughtfully. “We’ve looked at a lot of social engineering documents, certainly. But what we are is an experimental station in the fullest sense—an ongoing experiment on many levels.”
    Absently slipping her Mumford into her large shoulder bag, Atsuko sat down on the mooncrete bench they had come to at the top of the small hill.
    “We make no claim to having any sort of ‘whole’ or ‘final’ truth. Personally, if you asked them, I think most people here would tell you they believe in the truth of incompleteness and the incompleteness of truth.”
    Marissa, glad of the chance to rest, sat down on the bench beside her. Now that she had a moment to take Atsuko Cortland in, she saw that the older woman’s long black hair was streaked in a number of places with grey and white.
    “But certainly there are some basic principles you follow here?”
    “Of course,” Atsuko said. “Societies inevitably generate structures, more open or more restrictive as the case may be—but always something. On that spectrum of structures, though, we’re on the opposite end from most utopian proposals and actual communes. From my research into the subject—and maybe from yours too, Ms. Correa—it seems clear that most so-called utopian communities have rigid social structures and highly restricted technologies. They’re essentially monocultures, like wheat fields or cornfields or vineyards or orange groves—spaces of land planted entirely in a single crop.
    “Our case here is just the opposite: we have looser social controls than most communities on Earth. We actively encourage each other to explore the new social potentials made possible by our developing technology and novel situation. Look around you. See all the different species? Over fifty thousand of them here inside the sphere, many endangered. Hear the birds, the insects? Take a deep breath. Smell the flowers, the green scent in the air? It’s brave and it’s new and it’s a world, but it’s not a brave new world.”
    Marissa nodded quickly, reminded of how