Fift nervously examined zir own emotional balance. As usual it was a volatile, unresolved mess, even more so than a sixteen-year-old child’s should be. When ze focused on Shria’s mischievous smile, though, zir balance strengthened, burrowing from a periphery of uncertain despair towards a center of excitement and wonder. They had Tickets. Shria was holding zir hand, they were together, and they had Tickets.
“We have Tickets,” Shria said to the sluice operator.
Here was the kernel of the thing, the moment on which the whole world’s economy rested: Who would supplant whom? Whose desires would prevail? Thesid’s eyes narrowed.
Ve was tasked with maintaining the energy balance of this region, so ve didn’t want to let two vagabond kids on vir sluice. But energy balances were humdrum and boring in the eyes of the world, and the Cirque was exciting and electrifying. If Thesid turned them away, some people would commend vem as a responsible guardian; others would condemn vem as a spoilsport arrogant enough to put zir humble sluice above the Clown’s great work of art and the innocent enthusiasm of two children invited to it.
No doubt Thesid’s agents were arguing the point back and forth, tallying the ratings, making bets on the best course.
But Thesid did this all day. Even an apprentice banker-historian could sense that the sluice operator didn’t pay much attention to vir agents’ reports and tallies: ve went with vir gut.
Ve narrowed vir eyes and stared at Fift and Shria, as if to see if they would flinch, or plead, or bluster. Fift squeezed Shria’s hand, and the two of them beamed. And Thesid grunted—whether in grudging approval, or simply resignation, Fift couldn’t tell—and let them through.
The mangareme fluffies were delicious. They sipped them, swinging in seating harnesses at a table in the middle of the pavilion.
“Where else are you?” Fift asked.
“Hanging out with Bluey and Vvonda at the South Foo spring-buckle—they are totally jealous of us. I’m doublebodied there. You?”
Fift’s heart pulsed. Was Shria still . . . carried along in Vvonda’s wake? “Sleeping and studying.”
“You’re pretty much always lonebodied, aren’t you?”
Ze flushed and looked down at zir fluffy and the red-and-white-flecked table. It seemed like an impolite thing to say. Of course, zir Vail Fathers said things like that all the time, stupid tactless observations of things everyone could see, and no one ought to mention. But Shria didn’t always act that way.
Now, for instance, ve seemed to get that ve had intruded. Ve scanned the faces around the pavilion. “Hey!” ve said, grabbing zir arm so that their seating harnesses swung together. “Look!”
“Is it the Cirque?” ze asked.
“No. Or I don’t know, who knows? But it’s that alien.”
“What?” Fift dragged a foot, slowing the swinging of zir harness, and sat up straighter to see.
“You know, the old Staid over there.” Ve pointed at a stout, round-shouldered, heavy-bosomed person in a white suit. Ze looked no older than Father Grobbard. “Do a lookup. Thavé. Zir name is Thavé.”
That was all that lookup gave for the Staid across the Pavilion: Thavé. A single name, and some obscure pointers. “What name registry?” Fift said, trying to figure out how to navigate the pointers.
“You have to look in general info, as if ze were a country or something. Ze predates name registries.”
“Wow.” Fift found the entry. Ze’d been expecting a bare minimum: identity, publicly disclosed locations, wealth, profession. But looking up Thavé was like looking up some ancient monument: scholarly articles; illustrated profiles from quaint lifestyle magazines of three hundred years ago; incomprehensible thousand-year-old political cartoons; annotated analyses of scholarly articles; dramatizations and satires of events ten thousand years in the past for stage, viz, immersive, voice-play, circus, and hoaxgame; bibliographies of annotated analyses of scholarly articles; schoolchildren’s essays; manifestoes, denunciations, tributes, satires, jokebooks, songbooks, recipes; parodies of bibliographies of annotated analyses of scholarly articles. Thavé was, apparently, half a million years old; and wasn’t that—Fift tried to remember—older than the world?
“Ze’s twelve-bodied,” Shria said, “with six public locations. Can you imagine having twelve? It makes my head hurt.”
“Let’s go talk to zir,” Fift said.
“What? Really?” Shria sounded horrified or excited; Fift couldn’t tell which. “Are you serious?”
“Sure.” Ze stood up. Ze felt a little fear prickling zir scalp, but weren’t they rich today? Didn’t they have Tickets? “Maybe ze’s part of the show.”
“Oh, maybe!” Shria said. “Hey, maybe it’s not really zir!”
“What?” Fift frowned. “But we did a lookup.”
“This is the Cirque, remember?”
“You think they can mess with lookup? Shria . . .”
Shria shrugged. “Who knows?”
Fift slid out of zir harness and onto the ground. Ze bowed to zir mangareme fluffy; it dipped once in acknowledgement and flew back to the kitchen. “Let’s go.”
“Okay . . .” Shria took zir arm. “Kumru! I never knew you were so brave, Fift.”
“What’s brave about it? Ze doesn’t eat people.”
Thavé was sitting at a table alone, zir white hat in the harness beside zir. Ze was spinning a globe of tea with one hand, occasionally sipping from it, and reading a long, folded black-and-white paper. No one around them was paying any attention to zir. Ze looked up, unsmiling, as they approached. Fift’s step faltered for a moment, but ze kept going.
Thavé took zir hat out of the harness and put it on the table.
“Hi,” Shria said.
“Hey,” Thavé said. “Sit down.”
They sat.
“Are you really . . .” Shria said.
Thavé smiled. “The alien? Yeah.” Ze chuckled. Zir eyes flicked to Fift, then to Shria, doing a lookup. “You’re a bit far from home, I think? Looks like you’re having a good day.”
“Yeah,” Shria said. Ve glanced at Fift as if to say, Should we tell zir? Fift nodded. “We have Tickets.”
“To the Cirque?” Thavé said. “Me too.” Ze patted zir pocket.
“Oh,” Shria said.
Fift looked intently at the alien. It felt like ze should ask something important. It was a once-in-a-lifetime chance, meeting someone from somewhere . . . else. But it was confusing. What should ze ask? Are you really half a million years old? (That seemed improbable; how could anyone live that long? But it said so right on the lookup entry: Thavé’s bodies were ordinary, grown recently, but Thavé zirself was a creation of some lost Far Technology that no one . . . not even Thavé . . . understood anymore.) What’s it like being an alien? What could Thavé say to that? Dumb questions. There were some standard phrases, traditional expressions of politeness towards an older Staid, but they felt wrong. Was Thavé even really a Staid? Ze was older than Staid and Vail, right? Ze could ask that: Are you really a Staid? But that would be shockingly rude, maybe not the best way to start a conversation with an alien.
“What do you think of us?” Shria said.
“Of the two of you?” Thavé asked.
“No. Of all of us.” Ve gestured around and above the pavilion, towards Fullbelly, the surface, the world. “I mean, you’re pretty much the only one who has something to compare us to.”
“What a good question. You know, I’ve been here twenty thousand years. I’ve kind of gotten used to it.” Ze pursed zir lips.
Ze looked so ordinary, Fift thought. It was as if Fift saw the scene doublebodied: one body’s eyes seeing an ordinary, rumpled, middle-aged Staid; the other seeing some strange cold alien thing with secret, incomprehensible meanings, plans, and intentions.
“It’s been a long time,” Thavé said, “since I . . . compared you to anything.”
“Really?” said Shria. “It seems like you would do that all the time.”
Thavé sc
ratched zir head. “Well, just in one sense: I think about your survival. I spend a lot of time comparing you to other places, worlds that survived a long time, or a short time. More than I should, actually, because I don’t think it helps. But in terms of, I don’t know, the food, the clothes, the genders, the language? Twenty thousand years is a long time. I’m part of your society now. I mostly compare you to your grandparents. Like, I think, ‘I miss threedee, will that come back?’”
“You think about our survival?” Fift said.
“Yes,” Thavé said. “That’s sort of my job. I’m a survival consultant.”
“And how is our survival doing?” Shria said.
Thavé looked at vem quickly. For a moment, ze looked nervously down at zir food. Ze was eating some odd purple strips that Fift had never seen before. Ze stabbed one with a set of eating tines. “Well,” ze said. “In one sense, fine. There’s a lot of homeostasis. You’ve been mostly at peace for a long time. Your economy has decent turnover. Economic class is bound to birth order, which is hardly egalitarian, but at least it’s moderately anti-accumulative. And the system is very efficient at resolving conflict.” Ze put the purple strip in zir mouth and chewed. “You’re good environmental stewards—you’re not running the planet into the ground. Population pressure is low because the resource costs of birthing are growing at about the same rate as life expectancy. I’m not sure how long that can last, but so far you’ve been pretty remarkable at finding new ways to make it more complicated to have a baby, without much help from me.”
Fift couldn’t follow all of this, but ze flagged it to go over later. It sounded like the world was doing fine, but Thavé still looked uneasy. “So what’s the other sense?”
“Well,” said Thavé. “You’re a monoculture. All your shatterballs are in one scoop.” Ze chewed some more, then swallowed. “Which is my fault as much as anyone’s.”
“Really?” Shria asked.
“In a way. You see, there are two main schools of cultural survival management. One encourages many distinct dynamic cultures: conflicts, expansion, booms and busts. You know: populations grow, get rich, develop dense tech. Sooner or later factions chafe against each other or their own internal tensions, and then there’s a big, cathartic war, or a plague that knocks them back down to sparse tech, sparse population.” Ze inspected zir fork. “The first school . . . thinks it’s best not to interfere with this cycle. Like letting forest fires happen naturally to clear out undergrowth? That’s the original, lost sense of ‘wildfire’ in your language, by the way: ‘fire that protects the wilds,’ that keeps the forest healthy. And this school was dominant from, oh, about 350,000 years ago up until 200,000 years ago.”
“It doesn’t sound like so much fun for the culture being managed,” Shria said.
“Well, maybe not to you,” Thavé said. “But you might be surprised. Those cultures are exciting. The sky’s the limit! Rags to riches! To the stars!” Ze waved zir eating tines. “Live free or die! Remember, much of the cycle is upswing. Most people’s lives involve getting richer. You just don’t want to be the generation that rolls triple-nulls.” Ze stabbed another purple strip. “If you brought someone from one of those cultures here, they’d die of boredom. They wouldn’t understand why you’re not spending your time building star-ships.”
“Building what?” Fift said.
“Star-ships. To go terraform other planets.”
Fift did a lookup on ‘terraform,’ but the entry didn’t make much sense. Sort of like digging Fullbelly? “I don’t get it.”
Thavé pinched the bridge of zir nose. “You know, you’d build some enormous vehicle, or a bunch of small ones, and you’d—well, for instance, you could take it to some other planet circling some other star, and engineer that planet so that you can live on it—or in it—and then you live there.”
“What?” Shria said. “But other planets don’t usually have air.”
“Right,” Thavé said. “You’d have to build air.”
“And what about bodylag?” Fift said. “There’s no way you could compensate for that. Your bodies would—I mean, you couldn’t keep them in communication, so . . . they’d . . .” A chill went through zir. One of zir bodies was still asleep, but the third climbed out of the study-pit and started to pace the hallway, wrapping and unwrapping a length of cloth from zir robe. “You’d just fall apart,” that body said, alone in the silent hall.
“You’d have to take all your bodies with you, or not go,” Thavé said.
Shria looked sidelong at Fift. {What in the abandoned void . . . ?} “Let me . . . let me get this straight,” ve said. “You’d have to put some impossible amount of resources into building machines that could push you . . .” Ve frowned, clearly calling on vir agents for calculation. “Push huge masses to . . . other stars.”
Thavé nodded.
“Which are . . . really far away. So it would take . . . lifetimes. And then when you finally got there, they’d be bare rocks or have poisonous atmospheres. No nutrient flow—not even any nutrients in the whole place! Right?”
Thavé raised zir eyebrows in agreement.
“And it would take centuries of work—at least!—to totally . . . deface them into looking sort of like a planet you could live on.”
“At least,” Thavé said.
“And meanwhile you’d be living in a vehicle,” Fift murmured.
“Well, someone would be,” Thavé said.
“And even if you spent huge energies,” Shria said, “you’d just be sending some tiny, tiny part of the people in the world . . . and the rest would have to deal with all the waste and disorganization these ‘star-trips’ created. And the people who did go would be so far away that they couldn’t even talk to their friends and parents anymore, or even see each other over the feed. And everyone would be poorer, because they’d be missing what the others would have given them!” Ve spread vir hands. “And then, after all that expense and heartbreak, you’d have a . . . a world that was . . . pretty much like what you already had in the first place! If you were incredibly lucky! Is that . . . is that what you’re saying?”
Thavé nodded. “Pretty much.”
“What?!” Shria exploded.
“Except you’d have two of them.”
Shria looked at Fift. “That is the most broken idea I’ve ever heard.”
Fift shrugged. In the hallway, ze tugged and tugged and tugged on the length of cloth. Should they be taunting the alien like this? Ze wondered what kind of conversation ze and Thavé would be having without Shria. Ze couldn’t imagine zirself telling the alien zir idea was broken.
“But of course,” said Thavé, “that is how you all got here in the first place.”
There was a long pause.
“It is?” Shria said.
“Yeah,” Fift said quietly. Ze was hazy on the details, but it sounded right. Before the Age of Roads and Doors. What was it . . . ? “‘On beetly wings soft-kissed by unseen light, / and shimmering with seen . . .’?”
Thavé smiled. “Did you think you were born out of the womb of this planet’s soil?”
Shria frowned. “I guess I never thought about it.”
“They used to say every culture in the Dispersal of Humanity had a central creation story. Yet another theory to toss into the compost-sluice of history.” Thavé leaned back from the table, swinging gently.
“Do you have to go?” Fift asked. “Or can you finish what you were saying, about the two schools of thought?”
“Oh? Right.” Ze put a hand against the table to stop the swing. “So the problem with the Cyclic-Expansionist school is, pretty soon you have a whole bunch of these expanding, collapsing societies, and they run into each other, and you get a lot of offensive weaponry, including these very exclusionist, binary ideologies—you know, ‘all X must die,’ says Y, and ‘all Y must die,’ says X. So you get these cascading cross-cultural cycles of destruction, and sooner or later that sends the whole pattern into an escalating instability that�
�s no longer manageable. You get to a density of technology where it takes a few hundred years to terraform a planet and only a few days to blow it up, and you can’t manage those swings anymore. Pretty soon you’ve got events that don’t just cull—they extinguish, and you can’t stop them.”
Ze was talking very calmly, but ze wasn’t looking at them anymore. Ze was looking at zir eating tines. It occurred to Fift that this wasn’t theory for Thavé. Ze slid zir hand across the table toward the other Staid. Thavé looked down at it sharply, blinked once, and took it.
“I’m sorry,” Fift said. Shria looked from one of them to the other and pressed vir lips shut.
“Yes. Well.” With the other hand, Thavé put zir tines down, took a cloth out of zir pocket, and mopped zir brow. Ze didn’t let go of Fift’s hand. “It was a difficult time. Or times. Hm.” Ze cleared zir throat. “In any event. The other school of thought, the Gardenist school . . . well, you’re living it. Firewall off each society via the disinclination to travel that you, Shria, summarized so eloquently. Get them stable, get them using resources wisely, get them out of the habit of large-scale war. Some people used to call it ‘tropical gathering’ as opposed to ‘temperate farming’: Keep a constant amount that’s always growing, instead of needing to till and sow and harvest.”
“So what’s wrong with that?” Shria said. “Isn’t that the right way?”
Thavé looked at the table for a while. Zir hand was warm and a little moist in Fift’s. “Firstly, you have a lot fewer sites than you would if you were doing it the Cyclic-Expansionist way, because your populations don’t do much exploring or expanding. So that makes you anxious. And second, well . . .” Ze sighed. “When you’re farming cultures, you know where they are in the cycle, at least as long as they don’t hit the catastrophic overlapping-culture scenario. If you’re managing them reasonably well, you know if it’s a safe time, a growing time, or if the cull is coming. And you’ve set it up so that most of the cultures will survive that cull. There will be a blaze of glory and destruction, lots for the poets to sing about next time around (the poetry in these places often runs to tragedy, not statistics). And then it’s time to rebuild.”
The Unraveling Page 8
