Father Frill cocked vir head to one side and narrowed vir eyes, searching the feed. “Hmm. Ve’s been fighting—your friend. Ve’s a little old for that. By that age, Vails should be learning to keep their fights on the practice mats.” Ve shook vir head. “That’s not good for ratings.”
The hairs on the backs of Fift’s necks stood up. “What would happen if they took Shria away? Away to where?”
Frill shrugged. “Well, the Midwives live at the Pole. If ve’s lucky, perhaps ve’d be trained there . . . as one of them . . .” Ve gestured vaguely. “It’s a great honor.”
Fift could see zir own faces over the feed. Ze looked horrified: one day ze’d come to class and Shria would be gone, taken from vir cohort, forbidden to talk to vir parents, off to the Pole to become a Midwife forever. How many more fights would it take? Could Umlish cause this all by zirself, with zir words? Fift struggled to compose zir expressions into mildness, like Grobbard’s.
The closed and skeptical look on Shria’s face softened as ve stared at Fift. Ve yanked the last of the mossy sticks from the pile (in zir other body, Fift yanked the log free from a knot of underbrush; there, ze could hear the sounds of the campsite through the trees. They were building the bonfire). Shria raised one of vir thick, curling eyebrows.
“You’d better plan on being the Older Sibling, though,” Umlish said, “because Shria doesn’t want any Younger Siblings. Ve was glad to get rid of that little baby—weren’t you, Shria?”
Shria blinked. Vir nostrils flared with a long indrawn breath. Vir eyes were still locked on Fift’s—drawing strength? Then ve turned to Umlish. “Don’t spit all your poison today, Umlish,” ve said. “You might run out, and then what are you going to do tomorrow?”
Umlish drew zirself up, scowling. “You sluiceblocking—”
“You used ‘sluiceblocking’ already,” Shria said. “See? You’re running out.”
“Let’s go back, Umlish,” Kimi said. “We don’t want to miss them lighting the fire . . .”
Fift cleared zir throat. Zir hearts were pulsing, unstaidishly fast.
“Don’t tell me what—” Umlish snapped.
“You could try ‘flowblocking,’” Fift said.
Shria’s eyes lit up. “That’s kind of the same thing, though,” ve said, chewing vir lip.
“Corpsemunching?” Fift said.
Shria giggled. “That’s good! What’s that from? Yes, call me a ‘corpsemunching sisterloser,’ Umlish.”
“‘Sisterloser!’” Fift’s eyes widened. “Wow!”
Shria grinned, a glimpse of white teeth between pale lavender lips. “You like that one?”
Fift dragged zir log into the clearing. Perjes and Tomlest ran up to take it from zir and toss it onto the pile.
Umlish’s face was a mask of anger.
Puson cleared zir throat.
“See there, Umlish?” Shria said, clapping zir on the shoulder. “You don’t need to worry. If you run out, we’ll help you.”
“Get your hands away from me!” Umlish cried. “You’re disgusting!” Ze turned and swept up the path, followed by Puson. Kimi, released from the agony of waiting, darted ahead towards the campsite, zir bodies caroming off each other, running a few bodylengths before remembering to slow down to a more sedate and proper pace.
Fathers Frill and Smistria had finished breakfast and wandered off. Father Grobbard was waiting, still, watching Fift with zir immovable serenity. It seemed like ze was waiting for something.
It was turning colder. When Umlish, Puson, and Kimi were gone, Shria exhaled, a brief exhausted sigh: it came out as a plume of white fog. Vir shoulders slumped.
They were lighting the fire. Brushing bits of bark from zir hands, Fift found a place on a rock, not too far and not too near, and settled onto it. The expedition director, a fussy two-hundred-year-old middleborn Staid, was anxiously directing the two Vails holding the lighted torch. Kimi rushed up the path, walking just slower than a run, eyes wide with expectation.
Alone on the path with Shria, Fift was at a loss. Were people watching them? There was a way to check audience numbers on the feed, they’d gone over it once in interface class . . .
After a moment, ze found it.
No one was watching them as they stood in the forest; no one at all. Not even Grobbard.
Grobbard raised an eyebrow. As if waiting for Fift to answer a question.
“Oh,” Fift said. “Yes, I—” Ze switched to sending. Ze shouldn’t speak aloud about the Long Conversation in the breakfast room, where zir Vail Fathers might hear and get annoyed. {Yes, Father Grobbard, I would be interested in studying the sixth and seventh odes of the first additional corpus. Thank you.}
Fift’s arms were getting tired from holding the pile of sticks. Ze took a step up the path, and Shria matched it. They headed back towards the campsite.
Shria watched the darkening sky, sunk in vir own thoughts. At the edge of the circle of firelight—red shadows dancing on the trunks, every body wreathed in a streamer of exhaled cloud as the children began to sing, ve looked at Fift once and sent: {Thanks.}
They dumped their kindling on the pile and Shria went off somewhere. Fift sat down with zirself, body against body, huddled up against the cold.
Interlude
Please answer the following questions to help us counsel you in possible new career opportunities.
What is your gender?
◉ STAID ◎ Vail
How many bodies do you have?
3
Are any of those bodies off-planet, undersea, in polar regions, or in long-term residency on the surface?
◎ yes ◉ NO
What is your birth order?
◎ elderborn ◎ middleborn ◎ latterborn
◉ WITHOUT BENEFIT OF SIBLING RELATIONSHIPS
What nation do you live in?
◉ FULLBELLY ◎ Hardwon ◎ Tearless ◎ Spoon
◎ the Manysmall ◎ other ◎ multinational
Are you currently undergoing an ontological collapse?
◉ NO ◎ yes, and in an Idyll ◎ yes, but awaiting a spot in an Idyll ◎ yes, but short-term/at-large
How many times have you undergone an ontological collapse?
◉ 0 ◎ 1–5 ◎ 6–20 ◎ 21+
Would you prefer to experience ontological collapse more frequently or less frequently?
◎ More Frequently ◎ Less Frequently
◉ CURRENT FREQUENCY IS FINE
Have adjudicators ever issued a ruling against you on fraud, theft, unreliability, unlicensed dueling, cowardice, sloth, or gender nonconformance?
◉ NO ◎ Yes ◎ Yes, but overturned on appeal
Which best describes your current economic status?
◎ Dejected/apathetic/peripheral
◎ Subservient/cheerful ◎ Defiant/engaged
◎ Satiated/joyful ◉ UNRESOLVED/UNCERTAIN
Are you a parent?
◉ NO ◎ yes, a Father ◎ yes, a Mother
◎ yes, both a Mother and a Father
On an average day, what is the peak audience viewing your actions?
◉ 0–99 ◎ 100–999 ◎ 1000–99,999 ◎ 100,000–9,999,999 ◎ 10,000,000–999,999,999
◎ 1,000,000,000–999,999,999,999
Would you prefer to be viewed by more or fewer people?
◎ More ◎ Fewer ◉ CURRENT AUDIENCE IS FINE
What is your cohort status?
◉ CHILD/STUDENT ◎ courtship/�
�seeker ◎ pair, triad, or quaternad proto-cohort ◎ semi-cohort ◎ full cohort ◎ large or mega-cohort ◎ fragment or dissolution
◎ not in, and not seeking, a cohort ◎ it’s complicated
How old are you?
15
Our apologies: this survey is designed for career-seekers between 100 and 800 years of age. Please employ a reputable childhood advisory [—SURVEY TERMINATED BY USER—]
3
“Fift,” Father Frill said, pulling vir battle gloves off, “I think you should consider unraveling.”
Fift was fifteen, and Father Arevio was showing zir how to score the vines in the supper garden, cutting long, shallow gashes along each to let the spice-gnats feed on the sap. Father Frill had just swept in: singlebodied, wearing a crimson leotard, covered in a sheen of sweat, vir coppery hair in disarray. Straight from sparring in the large mat room, in other words.
Father Smistria, following Frill at a leisurely pace—ve was sweaty too, and still wearing battle gloves—stopped to lean against the wall at the entrance of the supper garden. Ve crossed vir arms.
“In ancient times,” Frill said, “you would nearly be considered an adult by now, do you realize that?” Ve dropped vir gloves—Arevio frowned at this—and ran vir fingers through vir hair to untangle it. “We have this idea of First Childhood being some kind of peaceful oasis, but it’s not! It’s a stressful time! It was for me. Of course, it’s simpler for a staidchild, I suppose—but still. You seem glum. It might help if you just, well, lose it entirely. You know . . . collapse.”
Arevio meditatively flipped the short-bladed knife ve was holding, caught it by the hilt, then turned back to scoring the vines.
Glum? Fift thought. Ze seemed glum? Ze felt . . . how did ze feel?
Frozen. A chunk of ice tugged along in a stream. In the wake of Mother Pip.
In another body, ze sat next to Pip, looking through the porthole of a robot bat, wheeling through the space between the habitations. The rotating spoke-wheel of Foo, home to Fift and a million others, fell away behind them.
They were on their way to see a client.
Fift forced zirself not to fidget in zir seat.
Pip should have had a more worthy apprentice than a fifteen-year-old Only Child with no real triumphs to zir name. Fift should have been working for one of the one-stop-shop banker-historian/bookie/clown/logician booths at a walkaround market, or doing menial work of the most peripheral kind at some big institutional-memory conglomerate.
But Pip (who was the third of four siblings) bulldozed through such considerations. Zir clients admired zir habit of flaunting conventions; zir eccentricities worked to zir advantage.
Whether Fift could afford eccentricities . . . that was another question. The wrongness of zir position clung to zir like an itch.
Father Smistria snorted. “Glum? Glum? How should ze seem? Should ze be dancing and singing around the house?”
Frill ignored vem. “I unraveled several times as a young person,” ve said, “and I think it did me a great deal of good.”
“And you think,” said Father Smistria, stepping forward into the supper garden, tugging on vir beard, “that our fifteen-year-old staidchild checking into an Idyll would do our ratings a great deal of good?”
Frill flung out vir hands. “Irrational prejudice!” ve snapped. “The idea that unraveling is vailish! Unraveling isn’t vailish, it’s just human. It’s a basic human right. And in fact . . .”
Ve paused and turned vir head towards one wall of the garden. So did Smistria, and so did Arevio. It took Fift a moment to realize why: Father Miskisk had gotten up.
One night every month, Miskisk came to sleep in their apartment, as the birthing pledge required.
Over the house feed, Fift saw Miskisk stalk through the corridor. Vir shoulders were hunched, vir gait stiff and hurried. Ve hesitated at the door of the supper garden—Fift’s hand tightened on the vine ze was holding—but kept going.
Father Frill sighed.
In the bat, Mother Pip sent: {You have not adequately studied Pom Politigus’s career.}
{I studied the weave you gave me.} Fift sent. It had been slow going: Pom Politigus, proprietor of Stiffwaddle Somatic Fashions, the most prestigious body-design emporium in a billion cubic bodylengths, had been Mother Pip’s client for two hundred years.
{Fift, I can see perfectly well from the access trail which strands of the weave you’ve haphazardly blundered along. A banker-historian must know zir client intimately, more intimately than the client knows zirself. To study—to absorb—the life, the career, the public emotional history of the client, is the merest preliminary.}
Fift pressed zir nose against the porthole, as far as ze could get from zir Mother in the cramped space. They were almost at Stiffwaddle Somatic Fashions, which occupied the second of a cascade of angular translucent baubles, arranged in a glittering helical chain. The chain hung luxuriously in a great swathe of empty space that residents of Foo called “the below and beyond.”
Fift pulled the weave back up, fumbled through it again.
Pom’s emporium was large enough for hundreds of bodies to be serviced, remodeled, and remapped simultaneously by zir elite staff of two dozen. It was a middlebrow establishment in the wider scheme of things; but for ten million people in the immediately surrounding cubic volume, it was a marvel. Stylish and confident younger siblings from Foo would save up a year’s worth of daring for a chance to impress their friends with some minor bodily enhancement from Stiffwaddle. Certain of Fullbelly’s ultrarich—virtuoso logistics coordinators, major attention brokers, celebrity statistician-poets—dropped by weekly.
A low-level pattern-recognition agent called Fift’s attention to the apprentices at the bottom of the staff list. And there ve was: Shria Qualia Fnax of name registry Digger Chameleon 2, 3-bodied Vail, 15 years old, genital design specialist.
Shria! Fift’s heart gave a pulse. It had been months, maybe a year, since ze’d seen vem. There had been a time—years ago—when they’d seen each other every week: in class, or meeting somewhere around Foo. Sometimes ve’d come over to the Iraxis cohort’s apartment; a few times, Fift had gone over to Fnax cohort’s. Fift’s parents liked vem. In class, the ten-year-old Shria had been guarded and sullen, but in the supper garden with Frill and Squell and Arevio, sheltered from the broad world’s feed by Iraxis cohort’s privacy regime, ve’d been self-confident, alert, funny.
The last few years it had gotten harder. There were fewer things Vails and Staids their age could do together. Less of their homework overlapped as their curricula diverged. Fift was spending more time on the Long Conversation, and that wasn’t something ze could talk to Shria about. And Shria was doing Vail things now. Ve had a gang of Vails who sparred together and swaggered around the byways, trying to find quarrels legitimate enough to justify a real fight on the mats. And there were other things—sexual escapades—that Fift wasn’t supposed to know about. Even if Shria had wanted to tell zir, it wasn’t like there was anywhere ve could; their parents could still read their send logs, and hear them over the house feed.
{The career of the client, Fift.} Pip sent. {Not of the client’s youngest apprentice, no matter how impressive vir debut.}
Get out of my head! Fift thought, but didn’t send. Ze hurriedly flipped away from the staff list to browse the annual growth of Stiffwaddle Somatic Fashions’ audience and ratings. There was an ache in zir chest when ze thought of Shria.
&nb
sp; “Anyway,” Father Frill said, pacing across the garden, “unraveling can be so rewarding for those Staids who do allow themselves to collapse. I mean, part of the whole gift of a collapse is to let go of worrying about what other people think!”
Smistria snorted.
“Frill Evementis,” Father Arevio said, “could you pick up your gloves? They are lying on the gladblooms.”
They disembarked on the swaying lip of Politigus’s bauble. Fift admired the sparkling translucent blue of the surface beneath zir feet and concentrated on keeping zir balance as the bat shoved off; it would not do to stumble. When ze looked up, Shria was standing doublebodied in front of zir.
Ve’d grown. Ve was taller than Fift now, broad-shouldered, vir bright red hair styled back in looping curves, vir smokily translucent Stiffwaddle Somatic Fashions uniform stretched tight across a row of four small breasts.
Ve grinned. For an instant Fift had the startling sense that Shria was going to launch vemself onto zir in a ballistic embrace, right in front of Mother Pip. But they weren’t ten anymore. Instead, ve turned, saying nothing, and helped Pip from the robot bat.
Pom Politigus was crowded near the main entrance in six strikingly, unnervingly, stylishly heterogenous bodies. All the bodies had the same face, but there were two tall, curvaceous heavy-bosomed bodies (one ruddy, one sallow); two short, smooth, roundish midnight-blue bodies; a tawny, gaunt angular body; and a thick, well-muscled body with iridescent dark purple skin. Fift was amazed—Politgus’s proprioceptive integration must be brutal, not to mention zir self-concept. Indeed, most of Politigus was swaying slightly, zir hands poised, occasionally grabbing one of zir own shoulders for support.
The Unraveling Page 4
