Bob stopped.
“What?”
I smiled happily and said nothing.
“We can’t share memories with you,” Bob’s hands waved in the air. “Humans barely understand and agree with each other.”
“We will come to be just like each other. That is how things must work. We will become just like you, and once we are just like you, you will be just like us. We will do all the same things to each other.”
Bob looked down at the ground.
“Oh, god!” He rubbed his forehead. “You might just do that.”
He walked in silence back to his home, me right by his side. Inside he made liquids and drank them late into the night, while I watched.
He shook. It was not laughter, but something else. His eyes watered over.
When he thought I had fallen asleep he picked up a blanket and spread it over me.
“I think we fucked up real bad here, whiffet,” he said, his voice slurred and funny sounding. “And I don’t know how to stop this mess. I just don’t know how.”
My aerokrat became strange. He avoided me, refused to let me work, and he stayed out late. That went on for many nights.
It seemed like he was trying to induce anakoinosis in the other aerokratois in his own way, but not doing well.
He finally came home one night with bruised eyes and a bleeding Up* People gathered outside Bob’s hut, screaming and shouting at him.
Bob said some of his companions listened to him and were sympathetic. But there was the Great Repair to be thought of, and most ridiculed him for questioning the need to get everything fixed on his ship as soon as possible.
“They say we have to return to civilization, or our machines will eventually fail us and we’ll all die as savages here on this planet,” Bob says.
We sat at his small table.
“I’m really sorry.” Bob took a long drink of his liquid. “I think they’ve had enough of me challenging them. I tried to organize, but there are too many of them.”
I nodded like I understood, but in truth, I was not sure why Bob would try to break the entire process. It served learning well. It served anakoinosis.
But I didn’t say anything. I did not want to agitate him. I only wanted to learn from him, and pass that learning on to all my children.
Bob leaned close to me.
“The people outside, they’ve come to take me back.”
“Where?” I wanted to know.
Bob pointed up at the ceiling, indicating the sky above.
“The ship in the sky. There are places aboard it where I will be frozen again, so I can’t speak up anymore. They’re putting me back in storage with all the other passengers.”
New things to learn. I was excited.
“When do we leave?”
Bob looked at me strangely.
“You must do me a favor,” he told me. “I need you to run out of the door, and go toward the forest. I will follow you in a bit.”
“Okay.” I said.
“I think,” Bob stared at the door, “I think I may have found a way to do something good, something that might help you, something that might help all of us.”
When I opened the door, twenty loud aerokratois shouted at me. I walked toward them, scared of the yelhng. The nearest aerokratois kicked me. I was lifted up and beaten, tossed from hand to hand. In seconds, blood ran down my face. My newly regrown fur was torn out of my skin by* the angry aerokratois.
I barely crawled away from the mob into the grass, and as I collapsed I heard a loud explosion. Nothing was visibly damaged, but the aerokratois fell silent.
“He killed himself,” one of them shouted.
I learned something very new about the aerokratois.
Bob was the only aerokrat buried in the hill. His white cross was much larger than the other small crosses that covered the grounds.
I imitated the shaking and wet eyes ritual he had done before his death.
And I was alone, my own master.
On the second night of being alone, I tried to join in anakoinosis behind the same hill where Bob had watched us, but was refused.
“You have nothing new to give,” a trio of whiffets told me. “And maybe what you bring is bad.”
They even refused to let me work with them, and learn new things. Among the thousands there, none would look at me.
I fled away from the areas near the Hopper to go toward the forest.
At night I walked the roads, and during the day I found places to hide and sleep. The forest, when it came up, was welcome. For a whole month I disappeared into it.
There was food in berries and roots. Other animals sometimes came toward me, but I ran from them. They were dangerous and rough. They were not like the docile animals in the land we were taken from to bond with the aerokratois.
My fur soon became shaggy, matted, and long. My skin ached for anakoinosis.
A gang was working on the edge of a new road. They jumped when I came out from behind a tree. I had visions in my mind of being a master to other whiffets. I thought about being alone, and that maybe I could spread the memory to other whiffets. If they were like me, alone and their own masters, but with me, maybe I wouldn’t be so lonely.
Was this what it was like to be an aerokrat? I wondered.
A cool wind blew over us and rustled the falling leaves on the ground.
I held my hands out.
“Do not be alarmed.”
“Who are you?” they wished to know. I showed them my tattoo and told them I had lived near the Hopper.
“Such thick fur!” they said. They gathered around me. “We have not had time for anakoinosis for a while. We have worked so long and hard.”
I stroked their arms.
“Then let us,” I said. “All of our fur is thick.”
They, found me strange, but relaxed enough to let me into the group. Our egg was thick when it formed on the ground by our feet.
“We’ll give it to our aerokratois,” they insisted afterward.
The road was getting hotter as the sun rose higher into the sky.
“No,” I told them. “I will take this one.”
They were shocked.
“You are too similar.”
“I know.”
They watched, quiet, as I took our egg with me deep into the forest.
* * *
When my child hatched several weeks later, he stood up, full with pieces of my own knowledge and the knowledge of the road crews and the knowledge of all their foreparents.
He didn’t bond with me. Just like I had been free since Bob killed himself, my own child was somewhat free. I could see that he was a bit confused, and that he had much on his mind. Just as I did.
We stood with each other for a long while.
“We should go find other road crews,” my child finally said. “If we both have anakoinosis with others, then others can be their own masters with us.”
I was happy he felt the same way I did, and did not feel so alone.
My child told me where the nearest work camps where, and we split company to spread our new revelation.
It was a rainy day when I found the work camp.
The sun remained almost invisible behind the clouds, but it occasionally broke out to illuminate the rows of tents behind the barbed wire. Several aerokratois walked around the edges of the camp, giving orders to the multitudes of whiffets bonded to them.
I stopped. I was about to return to being ruled by the aerokratois in there. Maybe it was better to stay in the wilderness, taking eggs from work gangs. It would be better to remain free, and spread my memories, than return to a work camp.
The memories of my foreparents bonded to aerokratois overwhelmed me, telling me to return to the camp. The memories of foreparents who where their own masters remained distant.
It was comforting to think about returning to a workgang, and being told what to do, and when to do it.
Would I ever be my own master again?
The desire for anakoinosis tugged at me, and with a strange feeling in my stomach I walked to the edge of the camp. At the gates I stood in the mud and the aerokratois let me in.
My fur was thick with dirt.
The aerokratois were such exciting creatures. They brought these new concepts, new behaviors, and many other things we never could have come up with. I had so many things to learn from them yet. It was good that I was returning, I reassured myself.
There were many whiffets in the camp behind the sharp wires.
I hugged the first one to reach his arms out to me behind one of the tents. I touched his cheeks to mine and shared my memories of my foreparents, my life, and Bob’s strange gift to me.
I wondered if there would ever be stasis again, now that I was trapped inside the camp, working for the aerokratois again. I hoped my child spread some of the very new thoughts Bob gave me.
Those memories would never die, but live on. My fur fell to the muddy ground as I gave new memories to another.
The next morning I was awakened by an aerokrat with red hair. He handed me a pick.
“We’ll be breaking rock, today, whiffet,” he grinned. I was slow to stand up, so he yanked me to my feet with a shout, hurting my arms.
As I walked out into the sun, blinking, I knew, deep within me, that the longer we worked for the aerokratois, the sooner we would become just like them.
Then both would have true anakoinosis.
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THRESHOLD by Terry McGarry
T
HE SOUTHEASTERN VERANATHOR Center for Neurosuppression has been grown in the shape of a tree. It is not a tree—it is ordinary plant tissue designed to mimic the form of a broadly spreading warmwood. In older, more affluent parts of Verana-thor Island, homes are grown over generations from genuine hardwood stock, the earliest chambers burrowing farther from daylight year by year, the out-erwood hardening and darkening into an impenetrable encrustation of bark. Here along the sunny coast of the island state, professional accommodations are grown cheap and quick from production-grade cellulose, and the walkway I stand on winds among anonymous clusters of the simplest, most common designs: bulbous mushrooms, cylindrical stalks.
Why couldn’t one of those have been the place? Why must my destination stand out so sorely? This faux tree is a profound aesthetic deception: the intricacy of leafless branchings suggests the fractal density of the neurons they destroy here, while the gracious spread of boughs supersedes the technical with the hortitectural, making you forget that what goes on inside is illegal in every other nation on the planet.
This is the only place in the world where it is legal to evict ghosts from your own mind. This is the only place in the world where it is legal to reject immortality.
My name is Nethon. The community knows me as Tollisdela Nethon Arimthora, vocational ceramicist. Nethon is my selfname, Arim was my bearer, and Tollis was my quickener. It’s best to be clear on that, since naming conventions differ so widely and change over time. I don’t know where this record will ultimately end up, or who will read it. I’m not even sure why I’m making it. Procrastinating, I suppose. Enjoying the feel of my claws scoring the tablet putty. Enjoying being me, just me, alone with myself. Trying to decide if that feeling is worth committing murder for. Trying to decide whether or not it is murder.
I thought I’d know, by the time I got here. All that long way, loping past windfarms and moss refineries on four sore feet, I thought that when I stood in front of this entryway the decision would bubble up from inside me—truth and right chiming like a clear bell, calm and certain. But I’m more terrified now than I was when I set out from home.
And more lonely, in this shell of mortal flesh. It is a pleasant shell. Arim, who did not know Tollis personally and wants no part of this decision, has a muscular build and a beautiful glossy chestnut coat, pale shadow striping in the underparts, fur so thick as to afford barely a glimpse of dermal ossicle. Here in Ver-anathor, boasting is socially unacceptable—but you can praise the physical attributes of your bearer or the cleverness of your quickener, and it’s considered to amount to the same thing. That’s fine where my bearer and I are concerned, since we’re genetically identical. But until I reach puberty, I am me, not my quickener, or all the quickeners that came before mine.
I think I might do anything to stay that way.
I can’t let them strip my self from me. I can’t let them take over. They might outnumber me hundreds, even thousands to one. There’s no telling how many generations Tollis carried. They can impose their interests, their pursuits on me, shoulder my learning and my passions to the side. I am a talented ceramicist—not the best or brightest who ever lived, at least according to those who were around at the acknowledged height of the ceramic arts, but consistently original and pleasing. And I love my work. It is unique to me, imbued with my personality and no one else’s.
And yet . . . can I be sure of that? Can I be sure that I’m not somehow being directed by the ghosts I carry, that my work is not somehow improved by then-presence? Can I take sole credit for anything I’ve ever done?
“Oh, their personalities are in there,” my friend Melen says. “It’s just all subconscious. You’re not aware of it. You’re not aware of them. But they’re in there, those souls. In you. They may be dormant but they’re not comatose. Glaciers look dead and frozen, but they expand, contract, make forays and retreats— they breathe and move and behave. They influence you whether you know it or not.”
If Melen is right, it means that I have a microcommunity of ancient minds nesting under the floorboards in my head. A haunting of ancient minds, whispering to me in my sleep, influencing me, prompting me.
The thought of that blanks my sight white with rage.
Melen cannot be right. Melen is only a bearer, a fleshgiver, and knows nothing of quickening. The en-grammatic neuroencoding perpetrated on me by my quickener is inert, nonfunctioning, until my maturing body secretes the neurohormones that can stimulate the designated receptors. Children do not produce those hormones. I do not yet produce those hormones in sufficient quantity to wake Tollis’ ghosts. Until I step off the cliff of puberty, the pathways of the past are closed to me—and I am safe from them.
But I’m nearing the cliff. I can hear the winds whistling up out of the abyss. I have begun to have bad dreams. Dreams of places I have never seen, feelings I have never felt. Alien emotions, alien sensations, alien attitudes. There are monsters in me and they are shifting, stirring. I perceive them in brief bursts of firing synapses in the small hours, like looming shadows silhouetted by sudden glare, the eye-searing shock of lightning in the coal deeps of night.
They will wake. They will engulf me. They will submerge me. I will drown in them. Drown in ancestors.
Unless I get them first.
I want to blame it all on Tollis, but that would be unfair. Tollis was a victim, and can’t be faulted for the cruelty of others—or for possessing the memory of that cruelty. Tollis had no choice in what happened, and no choice about whether to remember it or not.
But I do.
The trouble with freedom of choice is that at some point you have to exercise it. Once I make this choice, there will be no going back. And I don’t have enough information to be sure I’m choosing correctly.
I have only external knowledge of Tollis: a lightleaf imprint of Tollis’ bearer, found in Tollis’ carryall and passed on to me by Arim (why carry an imprint of your bearer when you can just look in the mirror? yet people do); news stories I researched myself; and Arim’s verbal description of the stranger on the trolley platform. I know of Tollis’ trauma only through hearsay. The one who was Tollis, a dark, coarse-coated native of some mountainous northern land, with ice-shard eyes, a ready grin, and a burred accent, died when I was quickened. There is no one I can ask, “How many lives did you carry? How many did you pass on to me? Will you live quietly inside me once you’re freed, or will you enslave me to your foreign desires?” I have asked prepubesc
ent and postpubes-cent quickener friends to describe their experience, and nothing they have said convinces me that they remain entirely themselves and have not become puppets of their forebears.
The news stories of Tollis tell little of the quickener
and focus predominantly on the horror. Quickener, bearer, one offspring, two parents, and two visiting siblings attacked in their Veranathor home, beaten and tortured, all but one killed. The details are gory and I don’t like to think about them. If I receive Tollis’ memories, I will have to live with that experience for the rest of my life, and it didn’t even happen to me.
For all I know, Tollis might have wanted to end it all that day. Who can say for sure that Tollis, standing on that transit platform, didn’t plan to jump under the trolley’s wheels, or ride it to an observation tower for a fifty-length dive? But there was Arim, full of me, standing beside Tollis on that station platform, and there was I, overeager then as now, tearing free of the pouch prematurely. Arim had no idea I was coming. Tollis simply happened to be the only quickener there. Stimulated past resistance by the pheromones and bloodscent, by Arim’s cries and mine, Tollis, willing or unwilling, slid my small body from the fleshgiver’s blood-slick claws and did what millennia of biological evolution compelled:
Quickened me. Electrochemically stimulated my brain to think, forging pathways that in other species’ young would take weeks to years of experience to form, forcing myelinization to flash-pave those pathways against erosion. My cardiopulmonary, sensory, and nervous systems, allowed to develop in safety within my fleshgiver’s pouch, were fully prepared for use; with the exception of the armor plating that would later form in my skin, physically I was already a fully functional miniature replica of Arim; but until Tollis quickened me, I lacked motor skills, coordination, spatial perception, tactical and strategic comprehension. Tollis bequeathed to me a full set of survival skills—enough, in the primitive, predator-rich environment that bred us eons ago, to keep me alive long enough to reproduce.
And then Tollis passed on life and spirit, memory and identity as well. Quickening me past bearing. Quickening me into a quickener.
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