“Liquidated the estate.” Liquidated his inheritance.
“It will just cover passage to Polity and the work of researching your phenome at the Hall. After that, you'll barely have pocket change. It's the best inheritance I can give you.” Prashan thought of his father's diplomatic palace, his wealth, his library, his priceless works of art. To his chagrin, he thought also of Gayatri, half mother and half sister to him. “You're free to turn it down. You're free to do anything you want, my son. But you must decide now, because a car is waiting for you, and you have only just enough time to walk to it and ride to the tetherport before the shuttle leaves.”
As Prashan's numbness turned into paralysis, several things happened at once. From close behind him, Gayatri spoke in a tone of bitter contempt of which he had not thought her capable.
“I have no desire to become your whore, in case you were wondering.”
It was as though she had hit him. Then a man and a woman in white overalls were on the verandah. The woman was holding what looked like an enormous bolt cutter. Words came to him unbidden from memory. It is necessary to sever the spine just below the cervical vertebrae in order to prevent the parasite from using the host's central nervous system to protect itself.
“Bind it,” the woman breathed in disgust. “We have four minutes to execute this writ.”
Prashan's father quickly downed a glass of blue liquid held out to him by the manservant. Prashan later learned that the glass had contained a sedative designed to keep the gutworm from increasing his father's pain as a way of protecting itself. Prashan's father spoke one last time.
“I love you, son.”
As if from a great height, Prashan saw himself slowly turned and steered by the old manservant to the waiting car. A scream that might or might not have been his father's was clipped short by the shutting door. Then, still very far away, Prashan watched as the car drove off with him in it and disappeared on a winding road lined with eucalyptus and jacaranda trees.
* * * *
It was only later that Prashan had wondered what his father meant by “the situation of the Earth.” He was leaving it. How could it possibly matter?
The old Thurkmhen had just asked him a question. There was gentleness and compassion in the ancient one's amethyst eyes, but concern and bafflement as well.
“I'm sorry. What did you say?”
The old man looked down at the knees tucked under his chin as if they belonged to somebody else. “I was wondering if you noticed any of the other patrons in this part of the Hall.”
“You mean like the woman making the rug?”
“Yes, her for example. She has been coming here every day for over five years. And those persons wearing the black jelabas with yashmaks and face girdles?”
Prashan had wondered about them, but then there were all kinds inhabiting the research carrels.
“Yes?”
“Monks. They belong to an order devoted to the study of phenomology. Their goal is so totally to immerse themselves in their phenome that they cease to exist altogether as a particular manifestation and become the phenome itself. It's a peculiar kind of discipline, but a rewarding one—so I'm told. They claim to be freed from the prison of individuality and to have attained the full realization of the self.”
“That's interesting,” Prashan observed, trying not to show how uninterested and impatient he felt.
“My point is that they devote an entire lifetime to the activity to which you are proposing to commit an entire day, exclusive of time spent writing poetry.”
“You don't think I can do it in a day.” It wasn't a question. It was the last gasp of hope.
“Young man, I doubt that you or anyone else could master the research instruments in only one day. The novitiate of a phenomology monk is two years.”
Prashan sighed. He had originally had three months. If he had followed the course of action set out for him by his father, at the end of that time Prashan would have been penniless, homeless, and friendless in a world whose existence and strangeness he could not have imagined.
At first, Prashan assumed he had been plopped down in a large, unfamiliar city in southern Asia or perhaps Africa. Most people seemed cut out of the same oriental cloth—olive skin, dark eyes, slight figures. Many people spoke languages Prashan could not understand, but a significant number of them spoke a version of “Old Sanskrit.” By seeking out the parts of the city where this language dominated, Prashan found he could get by. He decided to focus his attention on securing food and shelter and deal with the problem of where he was later.
But the air smelled—felt—different. And the sky wasn't right. And it wasn't just the color—too much green in the blue—either. The sky wasn't round enough. It was as if the edges, when he could get up high enough to see over some of the buildings, had come unglued and floated up into the atmosphere. The horizon where the blue-green melted into a misty white was impossibly high, as if he were surrounded by distant mountains covered in clouds.
Worst of all was the bone aching heaviness that gripped him soon after arrival. Prashan had no idea what to do if he were ill; therefore, he wouldn't be. But something was very wrong.
Then one day he stopped in front of a shop window, looked inside, and saw a large globe. Instead of the blue and burnt sienna tones he would have expected, the sphere was white with odd patches of red and orange and blue, like a badly frosted cake. As Prashan pondered what the globe could possibly represent—seeing it as some kind of parodic allusion to a real globe—it came to him that it was simply a representation of the world on which he now stood. It was just “the world.”
Suddenly the very air felt alien in his lungs, and for several minutes he couldn't breathe without gagging.
The strange horizon was, he later learned, an optical illusion. Polity had nine times the surface area of Earth. It didn't curve enough within the range of vision to be perceptible. One just saw the empty distance at right angles to the sky. And Polity rotated more rapidly than Earth, rapidly enough to make the Politan day only slightly longer than twenty-four hours and to offset the increased gravity a good deal—but not entirely.
Hardly any cherished notion about the human race was true. Prashan learned many things and unlearned many others.
It was not the difference of the new world as much as its similarity that caused problems for him. Other people spoke his language, ate his food, practiced his rituals, shared his desires and fears, and they all did this with perfect indifference to him and his world. What for him was a mind-boggling experience—an encounter between his world and the brave new world before him—was so common, so mundane, so completely and totally understood and anticipated in advance by the society into which he had stumbled that—amazingly—no one paid any attention to him at all. They simply did not see him. Not one thing was left to him that was truly his own.
Surrounded by so much cultural energy and activity and galvanized by so much cultural shame, Prashan soon disowned in his heart his personal history, his planet, and the plan foisted upon him by his father. In a few months time, he began to wonder who the person was who he had been when he arrived. Prashan had a good, if modest, life in his little apartment on a shop-lined street in a large commercial district of the city that never ended. It was not so much that he preferred it to his life on Earth as that it had become so much more real to him that he regarded his original mission, if he thought of it at all, as a quaint childhood dream.
But there was another issue too: money. Prashan's father had liquidated Prashan's inheritance in order to finance the stint at the Great Library. Soon after arriving, Prashan had realized that his three months at the Hall—together with a sumptuous hotel/restaurant provision—would cost a fortune even by Polity standards. It would eat up all his resources, and his father had not planned for what would happen beyond that. To keep his promise would be to fritter away his own security. Almost immediately he began to think of ways to convert his luxury accommodations into something mo
re modest and lasting. Prashan decided to forego the visit to the Hall of Records and to concentrate instead on seeing what kind of life he could make for himself on Polity.
The old Thurkmhen rotated his head back and forth along the axis connecting his nose to Prashan's and muttered to himself with polite resignation.
“One day for a phenome analysis.”
Prashan looked up sharply. The woolgathering had to stop.
“What is a phenome, exactly?”
The old man seemed shocked for a moment and then almost immediately relieved to have the opportunity to explain something so basic to this lunatic with a timetable.
“Do you understand the concept of a genome?”
Prashan remembered studying the human genome project, which had been completed half a century ago.
“I think so. A genome is everything you need to know to understand how a species of organism is made.”
“Precisely. A phenome is everything you need to know to understand how a particular organism is made.”
“What's the difference?”
“Imagine a map that has each of the genome variables filled in: male, brown eyes, black hair, olive skin, left-handed, intelligent, introverted, et cetera, down to the last particular detail of the person you are. That is your phenome. Multiply the number of variables per gene into a total number of permutations—that is the total number of phenomes. They're all stored here.”
“Nature, but not nurture, right?”
“Nature, and enough histories of nature/nurture dialectic to establish definite patterns and expectations. Throughout the Reticulum and over the course of history there are and have been many people with exactly your phenome—your particular genetic makeup. Records of those people's lives are stored here. By studying those records, you can learn about those people. And in learning about those people, you can learn about yourself.”
“Like having a bunch of twins. Or clones.”
“Yes, except that most of these twins have already lived their lives and they have done so under an extremely wide range of circumstances. You can learn much from them. Perhaps too much.”
Prashan could see how he might personally gain from this experience, given enough time to carry out the process thoroughly. But what was the connection to Earth? The thought reminded him of the Taffonetta mosaics and the horrible thing he had learned earlier that morning.
* * * *
“If you look closely, you can see an image changing,” the guide had explained. “For example,” he continued, approaching one of the larger and more active disks, “notice how this long cloudbank is approaching the edge of this continent. And notice how the whole thing has rotated to bring these islands into view. They weren't there a moment ago. Isn't it beautiful?”
Prashan had to admit that it was. From any side angle, the mosaics appeared to be solid stone worked with amazing detail. Full on, the stone disappeared and only an image remained. When the viewer moved and the stone reappeared, it seemed to have changed right along with the image.
“There's a camera pointed at every planet in the Reticulum?” asked a tourist.
“Not a camera. A light pump. You're not seeing an image of the planet. You're seeing the planet itself. Or rather you're seeing actual light reflected by the planet, which is all you would see if you were there. You're looking through the network of connections that makes up the Reticulum itself.”
Prashan understood something of light-pump technology, or LPT. Not long after his decision to make a go of a life on Polity, at a moment when the fear of impending poverty was strong upon him, he had approached a worker he saw repairing some sort of apparatus in one of the planet-city's unbelievably lofty buildings and started asking questions. A few days later Prashan had convinced the worker's supervisor to take him on as an apprentice, with the stipulation that he would support himself for the duration. Prashan began to learn to service a variety of business and communications devices based on LPT.
LPT, Prashan soon found out, made possible the political unity of the consortium of human planets known as the Reticulum, of which Polity was the capital. LPT enabled Reticulum worlds to communicate across distances that made electromagnetic waves—even in a vacuum—seem to dither and dally. Prashan did not completely understand the physics of LPT and was not expected to, but he did know that it worked in the way fields do. Place a charged particle in an electrical field and the particle acquired voltage—instantly. In LPT the fields in question resulted from the quantum entanglement of particle arrays. Change the quantum state of the particles in one array, and those of the other mimicked the change instantaneously.
Entanglement fields were not fields in the traditional sense, because their ability to impart quantum-state changes was not limited by distance. But entanglement fields did act upon the electrical and magnetic fields that made up EM waves. As a result, LPT could jolly light along like nobody's business.
Hearing a tour guide describe how they were looking at actual light from Reticulum worlds, Prashan had been filled with an inexplicable but burning desire to see the mosaic for Earth. He had been looking for over an hour, and this was now the third tour group surrounding him.
“Excuse me,” Prashan gasped, exhausted from ascending and descending the staircase like an angel on Jacob's ladder, “can you tell me where a particular mosaic is located?”
The guide looked Prashan over with some reserve, and then smiled ingratiatingly.
“Of course, young man. Which mosaic would that be?”
Prashan tried to catch his breath and speak in a normal, calm voice.
“The one for Earth.”
“Uduth,” said the guide confidently as he consulted the bulletin board he held in his hand. “Uduth, Uduth, let me see.” Prashan waited. All eyes were on him. “Can you describe it?”
Good lord.
“Small,” he offered. “Much smaller than Polity. Seventy percent water and thirty percent land. Nitrogen/oxygen atmosphere. Blue sky. Frozen poles.”
“Land masses concentrated in one hemisphere or spread out evenly?”
“Evenly.”
“Highest peak?”
Prashan did some quick unit conversion. “Ummm, oh yes, 11,400 kshutri. Everest.”
The guide strode up the staircase with Prashan on his heels and the rest of his flock close behind. The guide approached a mosaic and announced his discovery to the group at large.
“Young man, the Reticulum name for Uduth is Splinth.”
Prashan pushed his way up to the indicated disk.
“That's not it,” he murmured.
“Pardon me?”
“That's not it.”
“Certainly it is.”
“No, it's not,” said Prashan much louder than he had intended.
“Well, then, young man, it would seem that Uduth is not a human world.” The guide consulted the card again. “Look, there it is in the corner. Splinth is the human world of record.”
After uttering these cryptic remarks, the guide moved on, taking his entourage with him. Prashan peered closely at the tiny world in the lower left corner of the Splinth mosaic. There it was—the globe he had grown up learning was all the world. It moved almost imperceptibly, like a small animal, trapped and barely alive.
Prashan sat down on the broad milky stair, put his head on his knees, and wept.
* * * *
Now Prashan stared at the old Thurkmhen in desperation.
“Please. Can you suggest any way to speed things up?”
The old man wrinkled his nose, grimaced, and flared his nostrils.
“There are ways, but ... Let me put it thus. Even the phenome monks cannot begin their studies until they have attained majority. It is important to have a well-developed self as a foundation even for the emptying out of the self. Do you understand? If you begin the process too young, it can be risky. It takes a strong psyche to withstand the experience of radical decentering. You see, these other lives are complete—they have achieved
their ends. A person who is in early adulthood has most likely not. And one who has not yet attained adulthood—well! Plus you must remember that not every life is as successful as another. Many of your avatars will have been extraordinary personalities. Confronting them can be daunting.”
“Are you saying that I won't enjoy the experience or that it could be dangerous?”
“Both are possible. And of course the more you speed up the process, the more potentially unpleasant and dangerous it becomes.”
Prashan tried to think of how he might deal with a research problem like this back home.
“Couldn't you just give me a handful of biographies of men with my phenotype and let me read them?”
“I could, Master Chakrapranesh. But consider: you have now half a day. How many biographies can you read in that time? They are long. A book that simply stated the facts of a person's life—when and where that person was born, what position of high office that person rose to, what diseases that person found a cure for, how that person died—would be very short and not very helpful. A good biography gives you a sense of the day-to-day life of a person, the flavor of his or her quotidian existence, and shows you the series of tiny, often false steps by which a person becomes the thing that we remember him or her for. It will not help you much to learn that your phenotype tends toward greatness if you do not have a sense of how that development occurs.”
“Perhaps I could read just one or two.”
“That leads to another problem. It may not be wise to focus only on those avatars of your phenotype that achieved greatness, assuming there to be such, especially for someone as young as yourself.”
“Why don't I stand to learn the most from the best examples?”
“Because only a small proportion of even the most promising phenotypes actually realize the greatness for which they have the potential. You know, I am sure, how hard it can be for a young man to have a very successful father. It can be intimidating, hard to live up to, frustrating constantly to have to measure yourself against.” Prashan thought ruefully of just how true for him those words had been. “If you study only those versions of yourself that attained extraordinary achievement, then you may be disappointed in your own life. If you have no knowledge of those avatars who led ordinary and perfectly content lives, then you may not have a model for the life you must yourself lead.”
Analog SFF, January-February 2008 Page 14
