Daughter of Elysium

by Joan Slonczewski

  After prayers came rei-gi. The Dark One forbade all instruments of death, but the defensive art of rei-gi helped ward off highwaymen and starving gold miners on the frontier. The main principle of rei-gi was to apply a small force, precisely timed, to deflect an attacker’s thrust and tumble him down.

  The house obligingly tucked their furniture into its walls, and Blackbear spread out the mat. The living room was just long enough for one good tumble over the shoulder, ending with a resounding thump of the foot. After the tumbles, over and over, they practiced throws and escapes. Hawktalon was already good enough to toss Blackbear overhead when he caught her from behind, the “Tumbling Rock” move, which gave its name to their home village. Even Sunflower could squiggle out from his mother’s arms when she held him up.

  Since rei-gi was designed especially for people carrying children, Blackbear and Raincloud practiced with a twenty-pound sack of beans strapped to the lower back. Hawktalon practiced, too, with a smaller sack. Then Raincloud sat Sunflower behind her hips, in a leather harness designed to protect his head. He laughed with delight as she sparred, unaware of the meticulous training required to keep him safe.

  At last Raincloud set out with Hawktalon to meet the mate of the Sub-Subguardian, her supervisor at the Nucleus. “Look, Mum,” exclaimed Hawktalon as she stepped out the door. “There’s Doggie!”

  “There’s Doggie!” echoed Sunflower, running outside in his bare feet.

  Sure enough, the runaway trainsweep was still there. It had waited all night outside. It was no longer moving, though.

  Raincloud frowned. “Didn’t you report it last night, dear?”

  “I told the ‘house’” said Blackbear, exasperated. “I hope its owner claims it today.”

  “I’m sure they will. At least its power has run down, so it’ll stay put.”

  “Excuse me, Citizen,” spoke the house; Blackbear gave a start. “This trainsweep has nearly exhausted its reserve. If it goes out completely, it will require costly retraining.”

  “It obviously needs retraining already,” Blackbear muttered.

  “Very well, Citizen, that can be arranged—”

  “Never mind,” he interrupted, shying at “costly.” “How do I…” His vocabulary failed.

  “Recharge it,” completed Raincloud.

  An extension cord snaked out of the house and connected to the trainsweep for half a minute. The little servo promptly woke up and jiggled toward them, to Sunflower’s delight. Blackbear felt as foolish as if he had just fed milk to a stray cat.

  “You’ll have to take it inside,” said Raincloud, “so it won’t follow us all the way to the Nucleus.”

  Hawktalon waved good-bye, walking alongside her mother—a significant concession, Blackbear noted.

  With a sigh, Blackbear shooed the trainsweep inside. As it turned out, the little servo kept the two-year-old’s attention while Blackbear spent an hour rearranging furniture and rediscovering packed clothing. He was anxious enough to get started at the Fertility Lab, but he had no idea when the Director would deign to see him. Whatever was her mate Alin to “report” about him? This Elysian social ritual was trying.

  “Good morning, Blackbear,” called Alin’s voice, apparently from the sitting room. “Are you there?”

  Disconcerted, Blackbear hurried over. There stood the “ghost” of Alin Anaeashon with his train of dead-leaf butterflies, in a column of light upon the holostage where the Valan minister had harangued them the day before.

  “I hope you slept well, your first night in Helicon? It will be my highest duty to introduce you today. Tulle wants to show you an exciting discovery in heart development.”

  “Thanks,” said Blackbear, collecting himself. This holostage must take incoming calls, like the visiphones in Founders City. “I am eager to get started—”

  “Come along, then,” said Alin, “and meet me at the swallowtail garden just outside Science Park.”

  Alin’s train made a graceful arc as he swept around, his sandals tapping quietly, their soles curved up in front of the toes. As he shrank away in the distance, the image of his surroundings remained in the column of light. There were tall trees, beautifully sculpted, and what seemed to be thousands of butterflies flitting about them. The sight caught Blackbear’s heart, despite his eagerness to get to work.

  A discovery in immortal heart development, that did sound exciting. He quickly packed Sunflower’s diaper bag, reminding himself it was about time for potty training. Then he carried the child out the door, managing to keep the trainsweep inside before the door closed. A sort of squeaking sound emanated from inside; servos squeaked like that, now and then.

  Blackbear navigated the street-tunnels between the concave facades, and then the vesicles of the transit reticulum. He could appreciate the “cellular” structure of the city, with its membranelike network of channels, culminating in the central Nucleus. The founders of Helicon, who had created the ageless Elysians, had been doctors from the planet Helix, come to learn molecular biology from the Sharer lifeshapers. The Heliconian Doctors, like their Sharer hosts, had shaped Elysium through biology; and yet, they went much farther. No Sharer could have dreamed of nanoplast.

  The avenue leading up to Science Park was wider and taller than the residential street. Upon the radiant skylight giant birds of paradise alternated with the blue shapes of heliconian butterflies. Below, the Elysians passed with their trains like flowing streamers. On a shop windowsill, a medical helicopter set down, bells ringing, and a couple of servos scrambled out. Blackbear wondered who was getting “treated” this time. No Elysian need call a doctor a day’s journey off across the mountain.

  A butterfly dipped before him, a large yellow swallowtail with black ribs and rows of blue and red spots. It hovered, then fluttered off ahead. As he walked, there came another, then another.

  On his shoulders, Sunflower tried to raise himself higher. “What that, Daddy?”

  “That’s a butterfly, Sunny.”

  “But-ter-fly,” Sunflower repeated carefully.

  Trees rose before him, right up to the sky-ceiling, covered with shimmering butterflies. The scent of blossoms, where the insects sipped nectar, was compelling. The little black-lined tails of the nearer ones seemed to wink at him. Closer, one could see the fat orange-stalked caterpillars devouring the leaves; the trees must require special care, to keep up their food supply.

  Beneath the trees, Elysians stood or sat upon crescent-shaped benches of nanoplast. A few conversed quietly, but most simply stared or meditated, seeming lost in thought, as they viewed the butterflies. “Butterfly viewing” was an Elysian custom, he recalled. They almost seemed to be praying. Did Elysians have any sense of worship? The Sharers worshiped their entire ocean as a Goddess. Clickers served the Dark One; but could She reach here, across the light years, Blackbear wondered uneasily.

  He caught sight of Alin at last, staring up at the trees. Alin wore a talar of pale green, bordered again with anaean leafwings. His train and trainsweeps were missing. At first he did not quite see Blackbear; then he looked up, as if emerging from a dream. “I still wonder, what it would have been like,” Alin said in a low voice. “I had a chance, you know, to visit Helix…”

  Blackbear blinked at him. The planet Helix had been destroyed, nine centuries before.

  Alin’s gaze sharpened. “Excuse me, Doctor Windclan. I trust you slept well, your first night in Helicon? Do you enjoy the garden? The swallowtails are my favorite, I must confess. In Helicon, of course, heliconians are favored. They’re the longest lived of the lepidoptera, and the original emblem of our people. ‘Elysian’ is an old misreading of ‘Helishon.’” He smiled apologetically. “Words interest me. I’m a logen, after all.”

  A logen was a sort of public philosopher. The logens, Raincloud said, were inspired by the “wordweavers” of The Web, a Sharer classic.

  Sunflower dug a foot into Blackbear’s chest. Wincing, Blackbear gave in and let the child down to toddle off.

/>   “Is your shonling registered, now?” Alin asked, his gaze following the child curiously.

  Blackbear nodded. “The house took care of it.” The house seemed to know everything, serving almost as a surrogate family. With a pang, he suddenly missed all his brothers and sisters again. It was more than he could bear; even the secret of immortality might not be worth a year of loneliness.

  “And you gave birth to him yourself.”

  “Not myself.” Blackbear chuckled. “The ‘goddess’ gives birth; the man nurtures.”

  “Of course, I’ve seen Tulle’s capuchins give birth. Tulle raises all sorts of rare creatures from dead worlds, in her preserve in Meryllion. Still, that would be something to give birth to a human child, however defective.”

  Blackbear frowned. His toddler was considered “defective” here because he would age and die. “Are Elysians never born defective?” he asked suddenly. “Does the embryo treatment ‘take’ every time?” Medicine was rarely perfect.

  “Ninety percent. The rest are unbalanced, somehow; they die of premature aging, within the first year. Much of Tulle’s research aims to reduce that. But the embryo treatment is amazingly efficient, when you think of it, all the thousand-odd genes to be modified within a single fertilized egg.”

  Ninety percent…One in ten infants died? The idea shook him. He must have seen that figure before, but somehow it had not sunk in.

  Alin eyed him quizzically, and Blackbear realized he had missed the Elysian’s last remark. “Excuse me?”

  “Just a suggestion. Every shon has a visitor’s program, to teach our children cultural diversity. They’d be delighted to accept yours for a year or two. Think of it: the best education in the Free Fold.”

  Blackbear thought of it, and he nearly passed out. Just to imagine Sunflower out of sight was impossible. “No thanks,” he forced himself to say. How could he ever explain to this perplexing immortal? Amongst the turbulent Caldera Hills, when any moment might be one’s last, it was a comfort to know that one’s last would always be spent in the arms of those one loved.

  “Won’t you tell me about yourself?” Alin gestured toward one of the half-moon-shaped benches, near the pavilion. A servo with a tray came out, bringing tea and delicacies shaped in extravagant forms of birds and ocean creatures. “Tulle will want to know all about you. Tell me, Blackbear, what do you do for excitement, on your world?”

  How long would Tulle’s mate keep him here, he wondered. “Excitement?” he muttered vaguely. “Three volcanoes overlook Tumbling Rock, one extinct, but one never knows. We have earthquakes, about once a month. We all run outside and try to guess how many houses will stay up.”

  “You’re an outdoorsman! You’ll get along with the L’liite student in Tulle’s lab; he actually lives outside, on a raft on the ocean,” Alin said with a slight shudder. “Tulle and I rarely leave the cities. It’s too much bother, with all the medics you have to take along.”

  A L’liite student—then he would not be the only foreigner in the lab, Blackbear thought with relief. L’li was the planet from whence the first Clickers had emigrated, two centuries ago, when Bronze Sky was terraformed and settled.

  “Your mate,” Alin added, “is she an outdoorsman, too?”

  Blackbear was trying to locate Sunflower, who was exploring beneath the next table. This garden had no children’s corner. “Raincloud serves the Dark Goddess at the Temple. She has borne two children. She is fluent in five languages,” he concluded with a touch of pride.

  “She’s the Urulite translator, yes?” Alin sipped his tea. “Urulite experts are scarce.”

  “Yes. The Prime Guardian recruited her, but now she’s only to work for a Sub-Subguardian.” The Prime Guardian chaired the Guard of Twelve, representing Elysium’s twelve cities.

  “You mean Sub-Subguardian Verid Anaeashon? Well, better a rising star than a setting one.”

  That was a thought. He would tell Raincloud her supervisor was called a “rising star.”

  Sunflower finally gave up trying to catch a butterfly and tiptoed back to his father. “Read book,” he clicked, his hands leaving damp marks on Blackbear’s shirt. “Read book now.”

  Alin watched curiously. “The child makes such delightful noises.”

  “That is our language,” Blackbear explained self-consciously. “Click-click is spoken only by our people.” Clickers had been a rural religious minority on L’li; they remained a minority on Bronze Sky.

  Sunflower climbed up his father’s leg and settled himself in his lap. “Book, now.”

  Alin leaned forward confidentially. “Now that we know each other better,” the logen said, “tell me something; I’ve always wanted to ask a ‘parent’ of children.”

  “Yes?”

  “What do you think of compassion?”

  His mouth fell open. “Compassion” was an Elysian word he vaguely recalled from the lexicon.

  “You know what The Web teaches, about compassion,” Alin went on. “Of course nowadays, different readers teach differently; but The Web itself speaks plainly, I think. Do you believe compassion is a virtue, or is it a form of selfishness, in fact the deadliest of all desires?”

  Blackbear had never read the Sharer classic, although of course Raincloud had. Maybe he had better, if these Elysians made such a deal of it. Why this riddle game—would they never let him get to work? Meanwhile, Sunflower was squirming insistently, and Blackbear caught a distinctive odor from his diaper. “Please excuse me.”

  He escaped to a nearby pavilion, where he changed the child’s diaper and, to make up for the lack of storybooks, recounted the folktale about the rabbit who longed for wings.

  When they emerged, a hovercraft had set down in the garden, and a couple of servo medics were attending someone. People had gathered round to look, talking excitedly. Alin stood at a more respectful distance. “He slipped and twisted an ankle,” Alin explained. “The medics want to do a scan on it, to make sure it’s okay. Only two legs to last a millennium.”

  “Or longer,” Blackbear graciously responded. “For the ‘immortals,’ who knows?”

  Alin’s look changed, and for a moment his face darkened. “The oldest of us has barely reached a thousand. Even ten thousand years would be just a speck of time.”

  Taken aback, Blackbear tried to frame an apology; but the Elysian had already regained his composure. “Let’s be going, shall we? Ordinarily, I entertain Tulle’s students for two days, but I know foreigners are always anxious to get started.” Alin stopped at the pavilion for his train of leaf-winged butterflies which he had left there with those of the other Elysians. His own four trainsweeps recognized him instantly, springing up and scurrying out behind him.

  They strode down the cavernous street-tunnel, coming at last to Science Park, the oldest laboratory in Elysium, the birthplace of immortality. A long, sloping ramp curved around, melding into the concave facade. Nowhere in Elysium had Blackbear seen a stairway; with good reason, he realized. Alin’s train swung neatly around the ramp as he ascended, kept in order by his trainsweeps.

  At the top of the ramp, a sheer face of marble stood before them. There was no sign of an entrance, save for an arch of illuminated inscription, whose sense Blackbear tried to puzzle out. Something like, Where learning is shared, the waters break through…Perhaps that was, the waterfall breaks through the cataract.

  Beneath the inscription a cleft formed in the “marble,” like an embryonic cell dividing in two. The cleft molded itself out into a doorway, a fancy one with fluted trim and an ornamental arch.

  “Door, Daddy, door.” Sunflower bounced happily on his shoulders. A magic doorway was no stranger for him than anything else in life.

  “Yes, a door,” said Blackbear. “But don’t fly down, now,” he warned the child.

  A column of warm air met his face, like a summer wind except for a faint medicinal odor. Elysian interiors were kept too warm for Blackbear’s taste. Alin removed his train for the servo arm which slithered unnervin
gly out from the wall. The walls of the hallway were plain, save for panels of blinking lights that made Sunflower stretch out a hand and cluck with interest.

  From the ceiling, positioned as if to greet all who entered, hung a holographic display. It showed an animal, like a transparent snake with its hollow gut tube visible, undulating sinusoidally. The image must be magnified, for only a microscopic organism would look so transparent. A worm, a nematode perhaps; he could just distinguish the individual cells of its intestine. The worm traced an S, over and over again.

  A female Elysian approached: at last, the Director, Tulle Meryllishon. More than five hundred years old, with the figure of an adolescent, her long blond hair hung straight as a waterfall to her shoulders, where a single clasp at her right held up her loose-fitting gown. The border of her talar flashed a pair of metalmarks, pink wings with metallic black edges.

  Up the talar scampered a live monkey, a capuchin with its hood of black fur. Reaching the Director’s shoulder, the capuchin twined its tail and blinked at Blackbear.

  Alin bowed to his mate. “My duty is fulfilled. Doctor Windclan meets our highest expectations.”

  “Yes, yes, thanks,” Tulle replied, bowing with a smile. “I shall call on your mate at the earliest opportunity, Blackbear.” She followed his gaze to the display of the magnified worm. “Do you recognize our friend up there? Caenorhabditis elegans, the first organism in which a gene for aging and fertility was discovered. This specimen was a mutant which lived twice as long as wild-type, but produced only a fifth as many eggs. The mutant gene was known on Torr, in the pre-interstellar era. Today, we know a thousand such genes—in humans. And yet…” She looked back over her shoulder.