by Jerry
That’s how it was announced to Nathany. In fact, her mother took the trouble to tell her the news in person. (Her name was Erna and she generally appeared as a tall, slim blonde.) Geroge (that was Nathany’s father) became sick and then he became refractory, and only after that did he die. He didn’t die of the illness. How did he die? Did he have an accident because he had no cybes and was blind, deaf, and insensible? Did they let him go out without cybes? That would have been really bad! But Erna said no, they hadn’t let him go out. He’d been transferred to a special house for refractory adults.
And did they leave him by himself, then, with no cybes, and did he have an accident in the special house?
In Cybland you could assume whatever appearance you liked, but people still had trouble controlling their emotions sometimes. Nathany was an observant child, and she saw that Erna was becoming increasingly embarrassed. What had happened in the special house?
Finally, after a long pause, Erna told Nathany that Geroge had killed himself, that it was very sad, but there was no help for it and she must be a very good little girl and work well in SpecBlock D—it was one of the best in Cybland and she, Erna, had chosen it personally. Then she kissed Nathany and left.
Now Nathany had more questions that ever—why, how, and what if . . .? But whom could she ask?
“What happens when you have no cybes?” she asked Marta, her closest friend in SpecBlock D.
Marta shrugged. “You’re dead.”
“No, when you have no cybes but aren’t dead.”
Marta stared at her in amazement, and Nathany let the subject drop. She went and found Uri, her closest enemy in SpecBlock D. Marta was lots of fun, but fighting with Uri was far more interesting.
“What happens when you can’t use your cybes and are still alive?”
Uri eyed her, wary yet intrigued. At nearly eight years old, he wasn’t one to pass up a challenge. He thought a moment. “You disappear. You perceive no one, and no one perceives you. It’s like being dead. Only you’re alive.”
“But how do you know you’re alive?” said Nathany, forgetting in her puzzlement that her questions were meant to be riddles to which she clearly knew the answer.
Uri grinned triumphantly. “You don7 know!” He walked off, sure he’d scored—a sentiment vaguely shared by Nathany.
At this point Nathany decided to take a chance with a teacher. “Why do people sometimes reject their cybes?” she asked Pomelo.
“Why do you want to know?” was Pomelo’s comeback. Nathany had expected this. He was one of those adults who answer a question with a question. Some of them did it to give themselves time to make up an answer, others stalled because they didn’t want to answer at all. With Pomelo it was a kind of game. He usually had an answer, and merely wanted to be sure you did, too. It was irritating, but once you’d caught on you could get more out of him than other teachers. Even so, Nathany didn’t usually question him. His answers were very precise but almost incomprehensible unless you asked a whole lot more questions, and even then . . . Usually the children gave up before he did. Have you noticed that if there’s one thing more annoying than not getting an answer, it’s getting too many, none of which you can understand? But this was a special case, and Nathany was determined to try Pomelo. Something might come of it.
She explained that her father had become refractory and had died. Pomelo nodded approvingly; then, as was his wont, did his part of the deal and answered. “Sometimes, after an illness or an accident, the body changes inside and it can’t handle the cybes. It rejects them.”
“But why?”
“Because the cybes aren’t part of the body.”
As expected, dozens of questions sprang to Nathany’s mind. She knew the syn wasn’t really a part of the body, but never having seen her cybes, she assumed she’d been born with them, even if they were changed regularly. Sort of like baby teeth that fell out and were replaced, except that it happened every year.
“But what arc we like—without cybes, I mean. Not if we’re refractory, but . . . before . . .” She hesitated.
“Before the transplants,” said Pomelo, and she realized that this was exactly what she wanted to say. “Well, we’re born with organic eyes and ears, and we also can feel and taste and touch.”
“Like we can with cybes?”
“Not nearly as well. Not well at all. Not in the infrared or ultraviolet range, for example. Especially since, with no syn, you can’t have crossover perceptions.”
No syn at all. Not only no crossovers, but no transmitting or receiving. Was Uri right all along? You perceive no one and no one perceives you. But that couldn’t be right, because you’d have eyes and everything . . .
“Why are we born like that when cybes are so much better?”
Pomelo smiled. “Because Nature isn’t as good. That’s why our ancestors founded Cybland. To improve on Nature.”
Nathany’s mind buzzed with questions. She felt discouraged. Pomelo had tricked her again. Well, not tricked—Pomelo never did that. He answered, all right, but it was worse than no answer.
Pomelo surprised her, however, by standing up and picking out a modulo-book from his office shelves. He handed it to her. “You can keep it. But don’t tell anyone you have it.”
In this way Nathany acquired that delightful and frustrating thing, which can’t be shared with anyone: a secret.
The modulo-book talked about Cybland’s founding fathers. Here was another discovery: Cybland hadn’t always existed. There had been something before, somewhere else. And the ancestors had been different, without cybes, without a syn, without anything. “Subjected to the meager perceptions imposed by their poor natural senses,” said the modulo-book. Further on (and this was harder to understand), it said, “Subjected to the intolerable and constant violation of human free will by the universe through a limited sensorial apparatus.”
The modulo-book was actually way above Nathany’s head, precocious though she might be. What she gleaned was a confused idea about why Cybland was founded—“against reality’s violation of consciousness.” Reality was a word never used in cybland. She’d never encountered it before, at least. But in any case this thing perceived by natural senses must be pretty horrible, for poor Geroge to have died of it. To have made himself die.
Perhaps Pomelo thought that by giving Nathany a modulo-book and a secret, he’d discourage her once and for all. She’d be stymied by all the questions she couldn’t ask, and all the answers that she wouldn’t quite know what to do with. But he was wrong. He’d underestimated Nathany’s curiosity—a curiosity intrigued by paradox, and particularly by the fact that her ancestors had lived for hundreds and hundreds of years with their natural senses. The modulo-book even intimated that there were people left on Earth, lots of people, who lived without cybes. Maybe they were “slaves,” as the modulo-book said, but they were living slaves. If you could live without cybes, why did Geroge prefer to die?
Try as she might, Nathany could find no answer to this last why. So, following an approved technique, she turned it into “how.” She could do something with how. How did you live without cybes? What was it like?
She wasn’t really able to answer this question either, but she didn’t know it. In Cybland, you see, when a adult became refractory, he or she was “reconverted,” as they said—partly, anyway, and if physically feasible. Organic eyes and ears were retransplanted from an organ bank kept for just this sort of thing. Nothing could be done for the other senses, of course. Once the nerve endings were burned, they couldn’t grow again. But at least these people could see and hear. It was possible to live without cybes. But that doesn’t mean people wanted to. Refractory cases all ended up like Nathany’s father. But even if Nathany had been aware of all this, she still wouldn’t have genuinely understood why Geroge or the other refractories chose to die. It was something to do with their being too different, and the fact that normal Cyblanders didn’t want to have anything to do with them. Cyblanders thought it r
ather disgusting to be limited to two senses, you see. Deep down, they considered the refractory cases not quite human anymore. The only true human beings were those with cybes, who really dominated Nature—although “Nature” wasn’t a word often used. It had become rather obscene with time. Pomelo had used it in front of Nathany because he knew she wouldn’t understand.
But Nathany had no idea how deep her lack of comprehension was—a little girl who had all her cybes, who had never really been alone or different, even though she was precocious, and who didn’t even know that “Nature” was a dirty word. So she decided to try. To behave as if. As if she had no cybes, only “natural senses.”
She wasn’t quite sure how to go about it. The modulo-book didn’t say much except that natural senses were very limited. All she had to go on were Pomelo’s remarks. No perception of infrared or ultraviolet in the organic vision. It must be the same for hearing—upper and lower limits, no infra or ultra sounds. And no crossovers, no more visual sound (Nathany’s favorite P-mode, with a strong tactile element). All right. That night she hid in a corner where no one would disturb her experiments, and she reconfigured her cybes.
I’m not sure I can really describe to you what Nathany stopped perceiving, since I’ve never perceived it, and neither have you. And I can’t describe what Nathany began to perceive. If I were talking about us, I’d say “silence, the shadow of the night,” and we’d all know what I meant. But not her: these perceptions had never existed for her before. I’d say she perceived things less, because she no longer saw the infrared and ultraviolet ranges, or heard infrasounds and ultrasounds, and she’d reduced (a bit haphazardly) her senses of touch, taste, and smell. But I’m not sure less would mean for her what we mean by it. It wasn’t necessarily negative. It was new. She’d never done it, you see—perceive less. In Cybland you were always learning to perceive more, right from babyhood.
It was new and therefore interesting. Just to check, she reconfigured her cybes the usual way and everything was back to normal. It was fun to switch from one to the other, hip-hop, like a balloon being alternatively inflated and deflated.
At this stage she would have normally played with her syn to change her new perceptions, but she refrained. Natural senses could not be changed, unless with “drugs that had harmful long-term effects,” according to the modulo-book. She must go on perceiving without changing a thing—the SpecBlock inner courtyard, the flowering lindens, bright green beneath the electric lights. It was really strange, this immutability. It would soon become boring. Nathany understood why the founding fathers had wanted to “improve on Nature,” if that was all it was. Anyway, the net result of her experiment was that you could certainly live without cybes, even if she needed cybes to make the experiment. It wasn’t so dreadful. You weren’t dead, and you didn’t “perceive nothing,” as Uri had said. Even if some of your perceptions had vanished, you still had a few. Anyway, they hadn’t really vanished; they were still in her syn, because they came back when she reconfigured it.
What would happen if you removed more perceptions? If you not only turned down your cybes, but set them to zero?
What a strange idea. Even a little alarming. But irresistible for a curious little girl like Nathany. She didn’t turn off everything at once, however; only the cybe-eyes to begin with. No more linden, no more night. Or rather, another sort of blackness. But the water tinkling in the fountain was there, and that created a sort of space. It wasn’t the courtyard, but it was still a space. The linden flowers still gave off their perfume, and Nathany’s nightgown felt soft and fiannely against her shoulders and knees. In fact, Nathany’s body was still very much there—the taste of saliva in her mouth, the feel of her tongue against her teeth, of skin against skin as she sat cross-legged. And she could even sense the weight of her body, where up was, or down, and this made the ground exist, hard and cool through the nightgown beneath her buttocks. Lots of things still existed.
Reducing the cybe-smell and cybe-taste to zero didn’t have much effect. (The biggest change was losing her usual cross-perceptions—the smell of water, the taste of stone, the smell-taste of electricity.) No more flowers. No more saliva. With the cybe-ears at zero, no more fountain—and hey!, no more space at all, no more depth, anyway. Only an inside and an outside, because she could feel the pressure of her body on the ground, of her arms on her knees, her hand on her syn. In fact, Nathany’s body was more than ever there, and from it she could reconstruct all the rest: the hard surface beneath her buttocks was the floor of the courtyard where there were linden trees and a fountain, and the hard surface against her back was the wall of SpecBlock D, which was on Cybland which was on a planet which was in space.
There, in all logic, Nathany should have cancelled her cybe-touch. But she wasn’t only logical, nor only curious; she was also a little girl. And she had a growing feeling that she was in the process of doing something Bad-and-Forbidden. She waited a little before going to the next stage. Uri’s words sprang to mind: Like being dead, only you’re alive. It made no sense when he said it, but suddenly it almost seemed as though it might. And now her own question rose to the surface, sharp and clear: How do you know you’re alive? If you see nothing, hear, taste, feel, touch nothing?
What was left if you took away everything? Was anything left? If she cancelled the feeling of the ground beneath her buttocks and the wall against her back and her skin against her skin, would the ground and the wall and the courtyard and the SpecBlock D and the city and the planet still exist? Would her body exist? What was left once you took away everything?
And at last Nathany turned off her cybe-touch as well, because she was a little girl and curious, or because it was logical, or because it was definitely Bad-and-Forbidden, or because of Geroge, Erna, Uri, or Pomelo. Or because of all these elements at once. What do I know? In any case, she reconfigured her last cybe to zero.
What happened, then? You wish you knew, don’t you? So do I. But this is a journey you’ve never made, nor have I. Only Nathany could go beyond her cybes. Could she come back? It would be reasonable to say that a grownup came by, found her, switched her cybes back on. Reasonable, but boring. And that’s not really what we want to know, it it? We want to know what happened in the meantime.
So, what could happen? Nathany’s body didn’t exist in her mind any more—so where could her mind be? They say we go kind of crazy when we loose our anchors of flesh. But Nathany never really had any anchors. If she wanted her bedroom wallpaper to be green and yellow instead of blue when she woke up in the morning, then it was. If she wanted her broccoli to taste like chocolate cake, then she’d be eating chocolate cake. She never really knew a world where things are only what they are, and stay that way no matter what we want . . .
What did happen to Nathany, then? Can you tell me? She wasn’t ‘floating in the void.’ She couldn’t ‘float’ in anything—no more body, no more space. Was she still in the courtyard? Was there still a courtyard? Had there ever been a courtyard? Of course there was, you say. It was the courtyard of SpecBlock D, in Cybland, on a planet far away from here, and Nathany perceived it very well when her cybe-senses were on. But she also saw the infrasounds when she was in her favorite P-mode; she heard the perfume of the lindens. Perhaps she decided to perceive a courtyard with lindens, a SpecBlock with people in it, and a city around it, and a planet. She could, with her cybes and her syn, couldn’t she?
Well, there’s this, you say. There’s Nathany, with a syn and cybes, and everything flows from there, including the Block, Cybland, the planet. Anyway, we’re here listening to the story. We exist. And so from this . . .
But are you sure? Maybe someone just imagined the cybes and the syn controlling them, and you who are listening.
All right, there is someone, you say. Here’s what’s left when you take away everything: there is someone who is imagining, and therefore why not Nathany and all the rest, and us, and so on and so on?
Perhaps. I’ll think about it. It’s an inte
resting idea to follow up. But you, you should think about this: can you tell me what sound a tree makes when it falls in a forest where there’s no living thing to hear it? Can you describe to me the sound of a single hand clapping? Silence? Are you sure?
1991
THEY’RE MADE OUT OF MEAT
Terry Bisson
“They’re made out of meat.”
“Meat?”
“Meat. They’re made out of meat.”
“Meat?”
“There’s no doubt about it. We picked up several from different parts of the planet, took them aboard our recon vessels, and probed them all the way through. They’re completely meat.”
“That’s impossible. What about the radio signals? The messages to the stars?”
“They use the radio waves to talk, but the signals don’t come from them. The signals come from machines.”
“So who made the machines? That’s who we want to contact.”
“They made the machines. That’s what I’m trying to tell you. Meat made the machines.”
“That’s ridiculous. How can meat make a machine? You’re asking me to believe in sentient meat.”
“I’m not asking you, I’m telling you. These creatures are the only sentient race in that sector and they’re made out of meat.”
“Maybe they’re like the orfolei. You know, a carbon-based intelligence that goes through a meat stage.”