One of the more dramatic consequences of the shift was that children started to reach the level of adult competency at earlier ages. On Earth there had been a general consensus that adolescents could start to take on adult responsibilities and rights around the ages of sixteen to eighteen. They could vote, drive cars, fight for their country, sign contracts and consent to sexual relationships. This had also been the position of the first settlers. It was the second generation of the native born that had radically challenged that idea. They proved beyond argument that they were reaching the age of adult competency earlier with each new generation and that it was therefore clearly unethical to deny them full adult rights. In an act of rebellion that amounted to a protest movement, they pressured Congress to remove any age restriction and instead define full citizenship through a competency test that could be requested at any age: with the understanding that the aspiring citizen would only request becoming a full citizen when they were ready (conversely, disinterest was a good indicator of immaturity).
Another important shift was in pedagogic practice. On Earth children were corralled into age based classrooms and force fed information. But that was no longer necessary. It was understood that children were natural learners and that all they really needed was instruction in how to learn. They absorbed the basics of rhetoric and symbolic logic at an early age and after that pursued whatever it was that took their interest, knowing that should they require specialist expertise they were equipped to undertake the necessary study. It was therefore not unknown for a citizen to specialise in several disciplines over their lifetime, perhaps beginning as a mekanikos, then studying one of the aesthetic disciplines and finally ending up as a theraputae, athlete or any combination that suited their predilection and ambition.
Over time the age of full citizenship began to fall and now the average age was ten to twelve. Prax had decided to take full citizenship when he was eight and had wanted to get involved in debate over policy, whether at the Academy or the Congress.
And here he was at age twenty-five, having already sat in Congress for five years and attended the Academy for ten as a mathematician specialising in game theory. He had decided to take an extended sabbatical and formally enter the Spanda order to devote a few years to contemplation and the good life, and to indulge his hobby, architecture.
It was as he stood looking at the half finished dome that diamond white light of his guardian flashed to his left.
“Prax, you’ve been summoned to the capital, section two.”
“Oh really, that’s interesting. When?”
“If you could be there within two to three days.”
Prax nodded. “Affirmed.”
He looked over to where Cynthia was lifting a large slab of marble using levers, her young muscles and sinews taught with the strain as she grunted instructions to three male assistants. She was already a gifted stonemason and he had no issue with leaving her in charge for a few days. She may only be twelve years of age, but she had already earned citizenship and the respect of the crew; and she knew the plans intimately.
4
Biyu
Zhang Biyu pushed hard. This was the section she needed to master in the cross-country challenge. She wasn’t the fastest sprinter on the flat or the strongest swimmer, but she was the most agile on the ascents, descents and rock climbing sections. She was born with superb motor/spatial co-ordination, the culmination of generations of gymnasts and dancers. She knew exactly where her body was in relation to the obstacles around her, in this case rocks, many of them sharp. It also meant she understood her body; how far she could leap; how far she could reach; and how quickly she could climb. This is where others faltered. They missed a step, stumbled and lost precious microseconds.
Of course she was enhanced. In her case she had an improved cardio-vascular system for stamina and enhanced strength and speed. She had also decided to halt puberty so that she wouldn’t have to contend with breasts or menstruation. In her opinion, a girl’s body was the perfect form for an athlete: both beautiful and functional and when enhanced, as strong as any natural adult male (with no external genitalia to get in the way). She could still have children through IVF. Her follicles were still all active, although dying at the same rate as they do in all females.
She was a champion triathlete: a master at cross-country marathons, acrobatics and combined martial arts. She was small, but she was strong, fast and accurate.
She negotiated a recent rock fall, leaping from one rock to another with constant pace and precision, judging each step several moves ahead, her eyes constantly scanning for opportunities. The climb was getting steeper and more treacherous but she was faultless. At one point she had to leap a gap that would make others hesitate, using her hands to grab the edge of a rock and haul herself over. She had pushed a little too hard and slammed into it, grazing her knee and her stomach, costing her a second. This section was particularly hazardous because she was naked. All athletes performed naked. The skin was designed for cooling the system through perspiration. It needed to breathe. She had never understood why the athletes back on Earth wore constricting clothes. It was irrational. Anyone who understood how the body worked knew the ancient Greek athletes had been right.
She was now on the rock face, moving quickly from ledge to hand hold, using her legs to push and her arms to lift, using only one if necessary, her toughened fingers holding her full weight. In almost no time she was over the top and running across the ridge, leaping and vaulting over rocks, shrubbery and fallen weeping trees.
The descent was the hardest; it needed the greatest control to combat momentum. This is where people could really hurt themselves; and often did. But she was leaping confidently. Toward the bottom she made one giant leap, hit the ground with a tumble roll and recovered perfectly for the sprint across the flat. It was then she noticed she was a little more fatigued than usual.
“Hydration?” she asked.
“Below optimum,” her guardian replied.
Hydration was critical. She should have taken more water before she started but it was too late now. The river was two kilometres away. Good, she thought. A test of her will power.
“Time?”
“5.05 seconds ahead.”
“My stumble?”
“You lost .065 of a second.”
This made her angry and despite her dehydration she decided to pick up her pace, a fraction above her optimum.
She was feeling light headed when she dove into the river. She fought the urge to stop and drink. That would cost her time. Instead she settled into her stroke and only then did she allow herself to swallow small amounts in-between breaths. It was a tough swim. The river was flowing faster after rainfall. All the better she thought. She needed the upper body workout.
And then it was over. She hauled herself out of the river and collapsed on the bank to recover. “Time,” she gasped.
“An improvement of 6.04 seconds.”
“Damn” she said out loud. “The run?”
“An improvement of 3.07 seconds.”
She nodded. “Good, must have lost the rest in the swim. Heart rate?” It was a redundant question; she knew her own body.
“Normalised.”
Distant screeching drew her attention to the sky. A large flock of vivid vermillion howlers were twisting and turning in the sky. It was always a breathtaking sight.
She stood, released a small amount of yellow urine (which confirmed her dehydration), did a few stretches and then jogged slowly the rest of the way home. She had just reached her front door when her guardian flashed its light.
“Yes,”
“You have a section two request.”
“Damn, now?”
“No, in a day or two.”
“But the match.”
Her guardian remained silent. It knew it was a futile protest.
5
Akash
His fondest childhood memory was visiting the astronomical park of Jantar Mantar in Jaip
ur. He had a vivid image of his two sisters, Shanti and Jyoti, sitting on the steps of the gnomon of the laghu samrat yantra (small sun dial). He loved his sisters dearly but they would tease him about his obsession with mathematics and physics. As they played amongst the large astronomical sculptures they asked him to recite their dimensions and functions and would giggle that he took them seriously. They were gifted too; their talent was in Bharata sangita and natyam (Indian classical music and dance).
As they explored and climbed, his father, a computer scientist, proudly explained that it had been Bharatiya who had made the important early advances in mathematics and astronomy. He told them that it was Baudhayana who first described the famous theorem attributed to the Greek Pythagoras three hundred years later. That it had been Aryabhata who had codified the decimal number system - falsely called Arabic numerals in the West but correctly called Rakam al-Hind in Arabic - and Brahmagupta who had invented the modern concept of zero. He told them that the ancient astronomical text called the Surya Siddhanta had calculated both the solar and sidereal years to five decimal points, had accurately measured the diameter of Buddha (Mercury) and Mangal (Mars) and had estimated the current age of the cosmos to be over eight billion years. All at a time when Europe was in the Dark Ages and naively counted creation in terms of a mere few thousand years.
His mother lectured in Indian philosophy at Bangalore University. She constantly reminded them of the greatness of the Bharatiya Golden Age, filling their heads with tales of the Bharatiya philosophers who had travelled to Greece at the invitation of Alexander the Great and how they had influenced Greek philosophy; how the great Greek philosophers acted just like Bharatiya gurus lecturing the disciples sitting at their feet; how Pythagoras was a vegetarian who believed in reincarnation; and how the great emperor Ashoka sent Buddhist missionaries to the great cities of the West two hundred years before the birth of Jesus. She reminded them of the forgotten cultural exchange between Bharata and the Roman Empire, of the silks and spices that filled the Roman markets and the many Roman coins found along the spice coast.
But to him the most fascinating tale of all was the spread of Bharatiya culture into SE Asia where it was responsible for the magnificent ruins of Ankor Wat in Cambodia and the culture of far flung Bali.
His parents were not Arya (orthodox Hindus). They despised the caste system and the arrogance and corruption of the Brahmin priests. They were Shaivites, Tantrikas. His father was raised in the southern tradition of Shaiva Siddhanta. His mother was from Kashmir - the Himalayas – from a family of pandits with a long association with Kashmir Shaivism. They had met at a student conference in Mumbai and fallen in love and their parents gladly accepted the non-traditional ‘love-match’. They had a strong belief in a progressive, tolerant India proud of its unique culture.
During vacations they would travel the country and visit all the ancient sites, even the infamous temple complex at Khajuraho, with its explicit erotic statues; and the Shakti temple at Kamakhya in Assam, dedicated to the goddess’s yoni. As they walked around these temples it became a lesson about the place of the erotic in Bharatiya culture, a lesson that sex itself was an art. She explained that the Bharatiya had not always been so prudish, that it was the damned Arya in league with the Muslim and British Christian invaders who had turned away from Bharata’s proud past. Erotic pleasure was dharmic in Shaivism and the male and female sexual organs were symbols of cosmic creation. They were sacred, not shameful.
His home life was saturated in Indian culture; the sounds of his sisters practicing sangita; the sight of them dancing or practicing yoga; the fragrances of incense and of traditional cooking; the paintings on the walls and statues of deities in every room.
He especially relished the quiet times sitting on the floor of his mother’s study, pouring over old manuscripts written in Sanskrit. Every time he looked up his mother would sense his gaze, look over her glasses and smile. It was the only encouragement he treasured. He wasn’t fond of overt displays of affection, like those poured on him and his sisters by his relatives. His mother understood that the pleasure of learning was reward enough. Her smile was one of pure joy at his insatiable curiosity.
It was whilst he was sitting on the floor carefully leafing through delicate manuscripts that he first encountered a ninth century Kashmiri text called the Spanda Karika. It explained that the substance of the cosmos was vibration - spanda. He already knew that the leading cosmological theory was M-theory, which argued that the cosmos was ultimately constructed from vibrating strings (although they were not strings, just one-dimensional quanta thought to vibrate like the strings of a sitar). But the insights of the Kashmiri sages went even further. These medieval philosophers argued that the cosmos arose in a flash, presaging the big bang theory by a thousand years. They also argued that the constrictions of space (niyata) and time (kãla) were created after the first flash/vibration. Again this had a remarkable similarity to modern physics, which also believed that spacetime was created at the first instant of cosmic inflation. The Kashmiris also believed that the cosmos would return to its original state, thus predicting the big bounce theory (which depended on the amount of dark energy and matter as a brake on cosmic acceleration). But more importantly they did not believe that a deity created the cosmos, rather they believed that the original state was an undifferentiated field of pure potential. This undifferentiated field had many names: prakasha – uncreated light; anuttara, the unsurpassed; aham, the supreme self; but the term he preferred was shunyata, the void. He liked the fact that these words described abstractions that did not require the naïve concept of a creator deity. Instead the cosmos unfolded naturally (svatantrya), creating the ripples of spacetime known as quanta.
The problem of the void haunted him. He knew he was dealing with a paradox: nothing that was everything, timeless but eternal, inside and outside, infinite and infinitesimal, before, after and in-between, enfolded and unfolded, inanimate but alive; conscious and unconscious, alpha and omega.
He studied the Western philosophy of science and saw how much it had struggled under the conceptual constraints of Christian mechanistic dualism – a deity as watchmaker. Westerners liked to brag that it was they who had made the important discoveries, like discovering lands that were already inhabited and then stealing their ideas, claiming them as their own. His mother would laugh at such notions, pointing out the Western scientific revolution was only made possible through intellectual property theft and the wealth it had amassed through colonial exploitation; wealth that allowed the aristocracy to fund universities; wealth stolen from Bharata. Westerners struggled with the paradoxes of quantum mechanics because they were stuck in what his mother called a hermeneutic loop. The idea that an external and eternal god created things made them intellectually lazy and they refused to accept that something could come from nothing; that there was no beginning; that there was an atemporal phase that created time; and that all the mass, energy and space of the cosmos was once enfolded in a dimensionless zero point.
His grounding in Bharatiya philosophy freed him from the hermeneutic trap (although his mother cautioned him to be aware of his own). The cosmos arose out of the void in a perfectly natural process. The foundation of all matter and physical processes was quantum fluctuation, vibrating energy, and vibration was a matter of harmonics and number.
These ideas filled his imagination to the point that when he stood perfectly still he thought he could sense the cosmos vibrating. He imagined that he was inside a four-dimensional projection. At other times he wondered if he could somehow slip out of phase with the projection rate and exist between the images. What if reality was a trick created by a kind of persistence of vision; a kind of persistence of mind? He studied the theory of the holographic universe and Hawking’s work on black holes. If all quanta were information, then what made that information intelligible?
It would take him a few years to think things through but by the time he turned thirteen he had a doctorate in cosmol
ogy at Bangalore University, in particular the application of Hilbert space to M-theory. His thesis was widely praised but he realised only a handful of specialists really understood the implications. Most particle physicists and cosmologists were still looking at quanta, the pretty lights, not at the void - the paradoxical nothing/something from which space, time and quanta arose.
6
Nuku
Nuku packed the last of her samples into the temperature-controlled container. She had instructed her guardian to book a drone to pick it up on its weekly supply flight from the capital. She had contemplated booking a much larger hover and taking it with her - a section two request gave her the authority - but hovers were big, disruptive and difficult to land in the jungle, so she opted to walk out to the nearest monorail station, a day and half walk into the mountains.
“What do you think Julius? What should I pack?”
The golden faux monkey tilted its head and blinked its large compound eyes (when predators threatened it, it curled itself into a golden ball to make it look like the bitter golden globe fruit). It was one of the few species that looked like it might be amenable to domestication, although the Common was still divided on the whole issue of domesticated species, specifically pets. So at the moment faux monkeys were free to come and go as they pleased. The only thing keeping it here was the opportunistic potential for food.
She would miss her small tree house: a bed, a desk, a view through the canopy to the ocean, the intoxicating fragrances of the jungle. There was still so much to discover on this planet, so many new species and new solutions to the evolutionary impulse. This was a planet of plants, or rather, completely new plant-like kingdoms and phyla (they were still arguing over classification). The theory was that in its early stages, the peculiar history of the planet meant that the first complex forms were more plant-like than animal. The limited fossil material revealed the apparent absence of arthropods, replaced by a phylum of plants adapted to fill the same niche. The theory of parallel evolution still held. The needs of the niche determined the form and it had been plants that had started to perform the function of insects, animals, birds - of cooperation and competition. As they evolved and specialised, vegetable matter became woody bone, sinew and muscle and effectively became a kind of vegetable/meat flesh. The difference was that on this planet, some plants were far more evolved than on Earth and had developed the rudimentary senses of sight, hearing and touch.
Paradise Reclaimed Page 2
