Chapter 6
Paradigm

Bernard sat out on a park bench, still able to enjoy the sense of place despite the wonderful transformative abilities his own dwelling could provide. Behind him, a set of eight crystalline trees grew up at precise angles, forming an intricate and impenetrable set of reflections that dazzled the eye. The air was light and breezy, flowing evenly around the elegant windsail construct which was fasted to a triangular frame, comprising a smooth inverted saddle-like surface centered on the axis of the thin, flexible pole which supported it. He watched its graceful twisting in the wind as he considered the merit of Alice’s somewhat controversial assertion that humanity was indeed destined to fall back into the old ways.

There were many theories as to why and how history progressed as it did. Bernard remembered learning how Hegel had proposed his theory of historical development that went: thesis-antithesis-synthesis. Such an easy path seemed compelling in its simplicity, but it was complex and extremely difficult to quantify all that had come about in history via this method. In any case, his emphasis lay in the natural sciences; he felt always somewhat at odds with the plastic and subjective nature of history and the social sciences, despite their grounding in a fair degree of sound theories by this time. This understanding was of course shaped by the fact that the present context seemed to be much different from any that had transpired before, but even as a seeming counterexample to the cyclical development of ideas, there was no guarantee that there would not be a new thesis to replace the synthesis with which they had lived for so long. It was not a desirable state from his perspective, but it was neither up to him nor within his capacity to control the entire world; even if he found the cure to the drought of affective abilities in the latest generation, he would not make the ultimate decision as to whether or not it was right.

More important perhaps than how the current problem had arisen was why it had done so. There had been no evidence for a specific impetus or sociological event that could have any bearing on the genetic defect (for that was indeed what it was, at least from his perspective). Insofar as there was no means by which acquired characteristics could be passed down, it was as if humanity had undergone some sort of spontaneous collective mutation, or that all of their empathic abilities were being removed as though by some omniscient being. He scorned the decidedly unscientific thought that God had reached down and plucked the gene out of the nuclei; this did not satisfy any criteria for rigidity, and seemed an unduly cruel act to perform in any case.

There was also the issue that the activity of charismatin in the body was still poorly understood, despite all the advances that had hinged around its manipulation. When faced with the truth of the matter, Bernard had to admit that human beings had tampered with something that was beyond their comprehension, and that any of the consequences that they might have incurred could only be their own responsibility. He thought of the superaffectives, and how poorly that fiasco had turned out for the entire species until a stop was put to them.

He continued in this meditative state, eyes unfocused, until suddenly he became aware that there was something directly in front of his face. He was sure of it, for the region in front of him suddenly became impossible to make out, yet he had no way of ascertaining what was there, since it simply eluded his senses. Realizing that something was very wrong, he kept peering into the space before him, now with more anxiety, and reached out his hand to probe the air.

In an instant he felt that he grasped a hand, or something closely resembling it, and he suddenly smelled the coarse aroma of burning wood mixed with something unrecognizable yet acrid and disturbing. Alarms went off deep within his autonomic nervous system, and Bernard wanted very much to flee, but he gripped the hand more tightly so that its owner could not move away. Looking up to where the face ought to be, there was the thin smile of the porcelain mask that concealed all emotion and identity.

“Who are you?” he demanded unflinchingly.

“Since I am caught, there is no point in resisting. However, the question is not as simple as you suppose.”

“And why, pray tell, might that be?”

“I do not have a name, nor a particular affiliation with any group or notion that exists within your context.”

“Your answers have a way of leaving one almost completely unsatisfied. Why did you call upon me a few days past only to run when I answered the door?”

“Please don’t be angry,” the masked man said, seeming strangely resigned. “I cannot explain directly, or all at once. Will you permit me to make an effort as best I can?”

Still on edge, but having no better way to extract information from his unhelpful captive, Bernard acquiesced.

“It came to my attention that you were working on a project to preserve the abilities in human beings that you call psychic, or affective. I did not understand the detail, but I was made to understand that you deal in some way with entities invisible to the eye which exist within all of us, in order to try and make this happen.”

“Yes, this is more or less the case. But who told you? Were you sent?”

“Please, I must go slowly. I knew also that from time to time you looked out at the stars, though you saw them in a way that confused me. You have some knowledge of them, yes?”

“So far, you have only told me about myself. Where do you come in?”

The man paused. “I used to maintain a lighthouse, once. I lived alone on the shores of Hokkaido, atop a sheer cliff, spending each night in the darkness of the tiny circular room at the peak of the tower, lighting the kerosene in the lamp and keeping records in the log of my times of arrival and departure.”

“You claim you worked in a lighthouse? They haven’t been regularly used for over a century!”

“After so many years keeping track of the ceaseless hours, I do not think of time in the same way as you do. In any event, my life was simple and as regular as if it were driven by the clockwork which spun the lantern’s light about. It was after a number of arduous seasons, sweltering in summer and biding the frozen winter in my little house to the side, that I was finally noticed by the Maritime Society for performing this ritual with such regularity that no ships had ever become lost under my watch. For this, they granted me a medal, the one possession which I have retained from those days.”

From a pouch in the featureless black garment he wore, the man withdrew a slim silver medallion that hung on a chain, tenderly fingering its inscription in the precise, squared engraving of a handful of kanji characters and the drawing of an anchor that lay beneath before replacing it in his pocket. Just before it disappeared, the metal caught the light of the midday sun and appeared to luminesce, white-hot and blindingly bright as the photons poured over its surface and scattered along precise paths in the exact opposite direction from their angle of incidence.

“After I had received it, I returned to my lighthouse and intended to start my work again. Yet as soon as I touched the door leading to the spiral staircase, the entire structure trembled and collapsed. I watched the glass of the lamp from within the windows of the lamp room as it hurtled towards the water, like the eye of some gigantic crystalline being regarding its fate with equanimity. They struck the gnarled outcropping at the bottom, shattering into great shards from the force of impact, and it was as though my heart had burst asunder with them. The water was comparatively shallow, and the tips of a few broken pieces prodded their way above the surface, as if to commemorate the site of their demise. I stood still until night had fallen, and the moon provoked a glimmer from the dead fragments in a cruel imitation of their former radiance.”

The masked man sighed, and seemed reluctant to continue. Bernard had by this time long since released his hand, trusting in the man’s desire to relate the story to a now sympathetic ear. Collecting himself once again, he went on.

“Once I had been so devastated, there seemed no point in returning to work elsewhere. The construction of the edifice was so sound before, I concluded it must have been the work of spirits, and that to disregard such a warning would be a grave error. Therefore, I had no choice but to move on to other pursuits.”

“And what pursuits might those have been?”

“I wandered into the cities, not knowing what my place was any longer. One day, I watched a kabuki performance in a theater nearby. For reasons that I have never fully understood, I was enthralled by the drama that unfolded onstage. How intense and cathartic the performance seemed! Right after they were finished, I went to the director of the group and asked how I might become involved. So it was that I joined a Noh theater troupe, contrary to all expectation. They said I had the type of inner solemnity that lent itself to tragic roles very well. My memory, too, was well-suited to the task; I had always been preoccupied with the passage of time throughout history, so there was no difficulty at all in my adoption of the historical roles in the various productions. In fact, I hardly had to act, merely letting my natural inclinations overwhelm me as they so often did; the audiences reacted with fervor, nearly weeping at every performance.”

The man touched his mask gingerly. “That is all in the past now, yet I still bear the mark of those days, as you see. The troupe is long gone, but I wear the mask as a reminder to myself and also to hide my eyes, which have a darkness in them since the lighthouse fell, a shadow that makes men fear me.”

Bernard realized that he might have hit closer to the truth than he thought in his earlier guesses involving superaffective capacity. It seemed this man was possessed of the innate power of influence and the ability to inspire emotions, through the ostensible tragedy of his own life. He had certainly managed to make Bernard accept his story, although it was almost certainly not a conscious effort on his part. While affective transmissions could be misused or falsified to an extent, the possibility of lying without detection was very slim indeed, and if a conscious attempt was made at manipulation, the recipient would almost invariably become aware of the malicious intent and assume a defensive mental posture of sorts to keep from being swayed.

But if what the man had said was true, he would have to be at least 200 years old, if not much more. While estimated lifespans had increased significantly in the past decades, no one he had ever heard of had been alive for 200 years. Yet if the ring of truth he felt about the words were to be false, what then?

“When did you say you were born, again?”

“I did not say, for I do not know. It seems that I have lived a long time indeed, but perhaps it has only been a few moments. For me, it is impossible to distinguish the two with any accuracy, since certain moments within subjective awareness last much longer than their purportedly ’real’ counterparts, and this is the only standard against which I may judge.”

“Answer me this: how many winters have you seen?” Bernard asked.

“Enough to quell at last the embers of light in my eyes and force my mind into a state of perpetual indifference, in order to equate its value with that of all others.”

“And summers?”

“Enough to warm me for precious little time before I return to ice and dust. Please, do not make me think back to such specific events; it pains me now to reflect upon them.”

“You still have not told me what is that you sought at my door.”

“I...” the masked man trailed off, weakly. “I had hoped you could restore my ability to commune with others in the realm of positive feeling rather than be as eternally negative as I have been. I have been able to give and receive only sadness for so long, that I wish most of all to share once again in the simple human joys of which I have been deprived. I do not say that I need this, but rather that I desire it greatly, yearning for it as a plant yearns for sun, and without it I will be cursed to remain shadowed forever, unable even to show my face to another for fear that they will despise me and I will be left truly alone.”

“You should know that my techniques are only applicable in certain... well, I will see what I can do. Please, return with me to my home, that we may learn of the most useful treatment I can provide.”

“I thank you. You must forgive my earlier ungraciousness... with the passage of time, I have become like an apparition rather than a man, not understanding the human impulses as well as I once did.”

The pair went back to Bernard’s household, and he indicated to the computer that he wished an evaluation to be made of the man’s genome and a search for the charismatin alleles. As he had predicted, the man did indeed test positive for the presence of charismatin in the bloodstream. Yet his genes were peculiar, seeming functional yet still somehow damaged. He checked again, and it was revealed that his version of the gene occurred close to the olfactory receptor for kerosene. It was unusual to find such a smell to be affiliated with the charismatin; still, it proved no wonder, then, that he had spent such a long tenure in the lighthouse, for his sensitivity to the fuel’s scent was linked with a high concentration of the power within him, perhaps spreading its influence outward toward the ships’ captains and crews, guiding them safely away regardless of the presence or absence of light.

Nowadays, of course, kerosene was a commodity completely devoid of demand for the consumer, and was not stored with any regularity or in large quantities. It could be synthesized easily enough, but the problem lay in the fact that once charismatin depletion had started in a host, there was no way that simple exposure to the associated scent could replenish its supply. The two were not causally linked except in that people’s level of attraction to certain aromas often corresponded with the intensity of their affective abilities. Still, this too was an excellent illustration of the changes wrought by further development in the field of knowledge; the belief that the two were connected, first espoused during the early period of the discovery of charismatin, was gradually revealed as the naive superstition it was.

As he searched through the masked man’s DNA, the latter sitting at rapt attention and looking into the symbolic representation of his chromosomes as if it were some kind of crystal ball, he went off on a tangent in precisely the way that his mind was apt to do while working on a problem. The use of kerosene as a lamp fuel was a kind of technological status quo that was disrupted severely by the arrival of electrical lamps. The entire infrastructure of generators, power lines and transformers for AC current went into the provision of the power that lit one sole tungsten filament or thousands at once, and the clear liquid that needed to be constantly replenished suddenly seemed a poor substitute. There were of course the many other wonders that electricity had wrought, but in humanity’s haste for advancement, they had tossed aside the previous innovation with ease. Along with the kerosene lamp, if not before it, fell the market for whaling, as there was no longer a use for the blubber that came from the vast beasts, and this had particular meaning for the Japanese, who so relied on it for their livelihood. All this mirrored the tumultuous way in which history left behind its old ideas for new and supposedly better ones, and how this was the most unreliable method by far to improve one’s state of being.

While he examined the genomic model, Bernard turned up false positive after false positive in the search for an alternative gene that might fill the function of the masked man’s degraded charismatin. After a while, he stepped away from the hovering model, disheartened. The solution would not come to him as easily as that.

“I am sorry, it may take me a while before I am able to help you.”

“Do not concern yourself; I have no other place to go, nothing else to do. If you cannot find a way, then I will have nothing else to live for.”

This supremely depressed the scientist, even though just a few days before he had viewed this stranger with suspicion and distaste. He resolved to find a way as best he could to help the poor man. An idea came to him suddenly, and he hoped it might provide a bit of enjoyment at least until some more lasting provision could be made.

“Come outside with me. I would like to show you something.”

Bernard and the masked man stood outside, facing the wondrous quartz pyramid of the former’s dwelling.

“Would you like to see the lighthouse again?”

The man hesitated. “I do not know that it is wise...”

“Come. Simply turn around, visualize it and describe it as you see it.”

“There are a series of concentric circles made out of tightly packed white bricks that spiral up to the sky with astonishing regularity. A door is cut into the front, constructed from wood covered in beautiful red lacquer. As one looks up, the octagonal set of windows at the top is revealed, containing a large lamp surrounded by a lens nearly one foot in diameter; the panels of the lens are arranged in another octagon around the light. The top is capped with bronze metalwork, in an unadorned circular dome that nonetheless catches the eye and almost seems to shine its own light through its high reflectivity.”

“Turn about again.”

The masked man gasped. Before him, in place of the quartz pyramid, stood a replica of the lighthouse exactly as he remembered. The gash of an old wound being reopened tore across his body, producing a sharp pain that was felt not only by him, but by Bernard as well, who was instantly filled with remorse.

“What is wrong?!” Bernard cried.

“You have created the form without the substance... it would have been better if I had never seen this hollowed shell at all.”

Overwhelmed by the intensity of the emotion of longing, the two collapsed to their knees simultaneously, experiencing a bitter sting over the loss of an entire age into the sea of the forgotten past, Bernard even more than the other, who had already known this pain in his own time. The day faded into moonlight as the two remained transfixed by the sorrow of everything they had ever lost. E-mail: vokuro@adelphia.net