Free Lightpaths by Howard V. Hendrix Page A

brothers and sisters for granted—not any of us. Up here we’re absolutely interdependent. A shell in space can’t afford to let people fall through the cracks because it can’t afford cracks to begin with. We must be the keepers of our garden, our brothers’ and sisters’ keepers, because it’s the garden and our brothers and sisters that keep us alive. That’s a feedback, a message even a hollow sphere in the sky can send back to Earth.”
    Someone coughed uneasily. Seiji grinned, swirling the wine in his nearly empty glass slowly, carefully, before making an awkward attempt at recovery.
    “I must be drunk, to be going on so! Excuse me for getting so personal.”
    The tension relaxed and people eased away. Jhana lingered, for reasons she could not at that moment fathom. So too did Ekwefi.
    “Sorry to have reminded you of your brother’s death,” Ekwefi said quietly.
    “Sorry I dragged his corpse out. Again.”
    “I have to know, though,” she said. “You’re not some simple-minded gung-ho technological optimist. Do you really think an artificial paradise can give people real hope?”
    Seiji stopped his careful centrifuging of the lees of his wine and stared thoughtfully into an indeterminate distance.
    “Yes. I have to. Humanity may be just another species, but it’s mine, it’s ours. I have to believe in the Future Perfect Imperative.”
    Ekwefi smiled and squeezed his hand, and in those actions Jhana thought she could read again a shared history that had ended and yet not ended.
    “You told me that story, Seij. No language in the world has a future perfect imperative.”
    “Then we’ll just—” he said, pausing to stand, “—we’ll just have to create a language that does.”
    Excusing himself, he crossed the courtyard and disappeared into the house, leaving Jhana and Ekwefi standing alone beside the table. As if at some unspoken signal, they both sat down. They exchanged introductions and a silence opened between them while they sat and nibbled the remains of what looked and tasted very much like the liver of a fat space-raised goose that had died for their dining pleasure. Even here in TVP land—where she’d heard that most everyone was one or another stripe of vegetarian—not everyone eschewed meat, apparently. Either that, or they’d developed the best substitutes for flesh and fowl she’d ever come across.
    “I didn’t mean to eavesdrop,” Jhana said, her curiosity getting the better of her accustomed reserve, “but you mentioned a story that Mister Yamaguchi told you. What was it about?”
    Ekwefi Muwakil looked at her through fatigue-veiled eyes.
    “Ask him yourself. He’ll tell just about anybody just about anything about his life.” Ekwefi smiled to herself, as if at some remembered mischief. “When we were all hot and heavy and involved, that extreme openness used to get on my nerves. Got me so angry once I said he suffered from ‘flatness of affect’, as the psychs call it.”
    “Does he?”
    “What? Oh, no. He’s probably one of the sanest people I ever met. Too sane. That’s why his brother’s madness and death still disturb him so much.”
    “Yes,” Jhana said, nodding. She had sensed a very personal affinity, a sympatico, for such grief in herself. “I picked up on that right away.”
    Ekwefi looked at her oddly, with a depth of penetration that was almost mocking, somehow.
    “Really? Are you disturbed too? Or are you like the rest of us—too disturbed to admit you’re disturbed?”
    Jhana shrugged her shoulders and the palms of her hands upward as if to say “Who can say?” But there remained something, well, disturbing about Ekwefi’s question, even after they’d said their good-byes. It would not leave her head but instead resonated there like a struck tuning fork, until she felt increasingly tired, wrung out, and longed for sleep so silent no alarm could ring her from it.

Chapter Five
    Roger Cortland opened the lab door angrily and entered.