“Well,” he said cautiously, “it has to do with what appears to be a new type of qube. So I shouldn’t really say more.”
“I know when people are talking about me,” Pauline announced.
“We know that,” Swan snapped. “Be quiet.”
“Anyway,” Wahram said, “I think you should join this meeting. And you can do me a favor. Jean Genette is out of touch in an aquarium, and we need to get word to him about this meeting. I should go to Titan directly, but if you could go tell Jean about it on your way out, that would help. And Jean can maybe tell you more about what’s going on.”
“All right,” Swan said. “I can do that.”
“Good.” Wahram smiled his tiny smile. But Swan could tell he was distracted.
Extracts (17)
As many people have significant lifelong quantities of male and female hormones and phenotypically are bisexual, intersex, or indeterminate, the pronouns “he” and “she” are often avoided, or when used are a matter of self-designation, sometimes changing according to situation. Referring to someone else with such pronouns is the equivalent of using “tu” rather than “vous” in French, indicating familiarity with the person
deepest phenotypic signals of gender appear to be waist-to-hip ratio, and waist height relative to total height, usually a matter of proportionately longer female femurs and wider female pelvic bones
such as French, Turkish, or Chinese. Alternative ungendered pronouns in English include “it,” “e,” “them,” “one,” “on,” and “oon,” but none of them have
it is not a case of “there is no gender,” but rather a complex and ambiguous efflorescence, sometimes called a fully ursuline humanity, other times just a mess
gatherings composed entirely of gender-indeterminate people are a new social space that some find intensely uncomfortable, eliciting comments such as “like a nakedness I hadn’t thought could happen” or “you’re only yourself, it’s terrifying,” and so on. Clearly, a new kind of psychic exposure
distinctions can be pretty fine, with some claiming that gynandromorphs do not look quite like androgyns, nor like hermaphrodites, nor eunuchs, and certainly not like bisexuals—that androgyns and wombmen are quite different—and so on. Some people like to tell that part of their story; others never mention it at all. Some dress across gender and otherwise mix semiotic gender signals to express how they are feeling in that moment. Outrageous macho and fem behaviors, either matched with phenotype and semiotic indicators or not, create performance art ranging from the kitschy to the beautiful
as there are now people close to three meters tall, and others less than a meter tall, gender may no longer be the greatest divide in human
even approaching the size of spider monkeys, a modification that was severely censured by larger people, until longevity statistics kept reaffirming the association between smaller sizes and longer lifetimes, especially in light gravities. A saying among small people is “smaller is better”
we all began female, and always had both sexual hormones in us. We always had masculine and feminine behavioral traits, which we had to train into gender-appropriate behaviors, even though they were traits that everyone has. We selectively encouraged or repressed traits, so for most of our history we have reinforced gender. But in our deepest selves we were always both. And now, in space, openly both. Very small or very tall—human at last
this culture’s structure of feeling could also be called balkanized. Gender therapy and speciation were both parts of the longevity project, and the combination of the three created a new structure of feeling that is often characterized as fractured, compartmentalized, bulkheaded, firewalled. Usually longevity itself is identified as the primary force driving this; until now, no one has had to integrate a personality in its second century (or more), and often it is experienced as an existential crisis. The super-elderly have had so many experiences, gone through so many phases, lost so many companions to death or simply time that they have grown distanced from other people. Spacers, mobile over huge distances, especially bold in trying all the augmented abilities, often live as isolatoes, in a solipsistic narrative or performance of their own
people in space enact a kind of nonattachment. A common opinion expressed is that to keep relationships lasting a long time one shouldn’t see too much of a person, or create too intense of a relationship, or it will burn out. Paced for the long haul, one spreads oneself out among a network of acquaintances and new friends, and moves on when
love famously has different definitions within cultures, between cultures, and in different historical periods. “Balkanized love” refers to a situation in which affection, child rearing, sex, lust, cohabitation, family, and friendship have all been delinked from each other and reconfigured as affect states, just as individuals and societies have been
sex itself, having been delinked from reproduction, love, transgression, religion, and other biological and cultural associations, has become just a physical function for a lot of people, either private or shared, and pleasurable as a sport or game, conversation or bowel movement
traditional marriage, line marriage, group marriage, polygamy, polyandry, panmixia, timed contracts, crèches, roommates, sexual friendships, friends, pseudosiblings, fellow travelers, soloists,
SWAN IN THE CHATEAU GARDEN
Swan flew south and took the Quito elevator up again, and again sat in on the performance of Satyagraha, singing along with the rest of the audience, dancing as an extra when everyone else did, trailing banners at the end of the first act. All the chaos of the repetitive voices crisscrossing in the middle act felt exactly right to her now, true to life. She could punch out those chants like shouting at an enemy. The struggle for peace was more struggle than peace, but now she was energized and into the flow of it.
Up in Bolivar she hurried to catch a ferry going out to meet the Chateau Garden, a big terrarium that she herself had designed when she was young—fool that she had been. This one was a Loire or Thames chateaux landscape, the big boxy stone mansions tastefully scattered about among fields of barley, hops, vineyards, and formal gardens.
It was as green as ever, she found, and looked like one of those horrid virtual game landscapes in which nothing has quite enough texture. Almost every plant in the formal gardens surrounding the great houses was a work of topiary, and not only was this a questionable idea in itself, but these had been left to go wild: the artist had gone out ice-skating on one of the ponds and fallen through the ice and drowned. Now all the whales and otters and tapirs looked as if they were being lifted up by their hair.
In the town itself (slate roofs, wood beams crossing plaster walls in standard pseudotudor) there was a large park, with a big smooth lawn, actually another of the topiarist’s masterpieces: the grass of this lawn was not simply grass, but also very fine alpine meadow grasses, sedges, and mosses, in a dense mix that also included a number of tiny low alpine ground cover flowers, including bilberry, moss campion, aster, and saxifrage, all together creating a millefleur effect that made it like walking over a living Persian carpet. Within this colorful carpet were long strips of pure fine grass, as on putting greens, all running lengthwise to the cylinder. A lawn bowling field, in fact, with about a dozen rinks.
It was winter here, as if they were in Patagonia or New Zealand, and the light from the sunspot on the sunline smeared so that shadows blurred at the edges, and the air looked rusty. Small clouds had bunched around the sunspot, white puffballs glazed pink. The shadows of these clouds dappled the town and its park, and the rolling barley fields and vineyards spread out overhead. Terrarium vertigo washed through Swan for a second as she looked up at them.
There was no Mercury House here, so she took an empty ramada on the edge of the park, under a line of sycamore trees, gorgeous in their stark winter tones. Feeling too full to sit or lie down, she put her travel bag on the square bed and went out for a walk. She stopped for tea in the village, and sitting in the café saw that a group of p
eople were going out to the bowling green. She tossed down the last of the tea and went out to watch.
Each strip of putting grass was called a rink, and they were set lengthwise in the cylinder so that the rink would lay flat. That was important, as the Coriolis force was strong enough to push every shot to the right. The balls were asymmetrical as well, as was traditional in the sport; they were squashed spheres, like Saturn or Iapetus, and when thrown they would roll on their biggest circumference like a fat wheel, as long as they were going fast enough, but then might flop onto their side at the end, thus accentuating the fernlike curvature of the roll. It required a neat touch to put a bowl where you wanted it.
A young person approached and asked if she wanted to play a game on one of the empty rinks.
“Yes, thanks.”
The youth picked up a bag of bowls and led her to the farthest empty rink, near the edge of the field. The youth dumped the balls on the exquisite grass and Swan took one of them up. She hefted it along its long diameter; it weighed about a kilo, just as she recalled. It had been a while since she had last played. She went to the mat on which throwers had to stay, and tried to make a simple toss down the middle, on the slow side, hoping the bowl would end up in front of the jack and serve as a blocker to her opponent’s bowls.
It ran down the rink, curving only a bit, then flopped to a halt about where she wanted it. The youth chose a bowl, went to the mat, took a couple of steps forward, then crouched for a final step and the laying of the ball on the sward. Very graceful, and the ball rolled smoothly down the course, running a line that looked to be well to the left of the jack, even headed out of the rink and into the ditch, as out of bounds was called. But then the Coriolis force got its push into it and the ball curved right ever more sharply, tracing a kind of Fibonacci infalling, until it tucked in just behind the jack.
Swan would now have to try to get around her own blocker, or knock it back into the jack, so that hopefully the jack would bounce away. Four bowls per end, and with three to go they were already looking at a crowded space around the jack. Swan considered it for a while, then decided to try to use the bias of the bowl to roll one back against the C-force and see if she could get around her blocker and tap the jack. It would require a very fine touch, and the moment she made the shot she could see that she had put too much on it. “Ah damn,” she said, and was vexed enough to add, “I’m not making any excuses or anything, but I have an excuse for that.”
“Of course. Have you seen that shirt with all the excuses printed on it?”
“They made that shirt by listening to me and writing things down.”
“Ha-ha. Which one this time?”
“Well, I’ve just spent almost a year on Earth. I’m throwing everything long.”
“I bet. What were you doing there?”
“Working on animal stuff.”
“The invasion, you mean?”
“The rewilding.”
“Huh. What was that like?”
“It was interesting.” She didn’t want to talk about it right now, and she suspected the youth knew that and only wanted to distract her. “Your shot.”
“Yes.” The youth’s waist-to-hips ratio was sort of girlish, the shoulder-to-waist-to-ground lengths sort of boyish. Possibly a gynandromorph. The youth’s shot ran almost true and flopped right beside the jack. This end was looking bad for Swan. Her only recourse now was to try to knock her own blocker into the jack and hope the jack went into the ditch, which would make for a dead end. It could be done if she could throw fast and straight on the right heading. She put her little finger on the big circle of the bias, and concentrated on keeping an upright form with a straight follow-through. She rolled, and again on release knew she had missed. “Damn.”
The youth was again amused. “You have to have every finger on it when you let go.”
“Some people do,” she said.
The youth shrugged in reply. Quite young; perhaps thirty years old; a spacer.
“Is this your home?” Swan asked.
“No.”
“Where are you going?”
“Nowhere.”
The youth made a shot, which was a nicely placed blocker that meant it would be harder than ever for Swan to hit the jack with her final roll. The only chance was that same backhand.
She made her last shot and was pleased to see it roll down, take a late turn in, and bang the jack right out of the rink.
“Dead end,” the youth said calmly. Swan nodded.
They played several more ends, and the youth never made a shot that was anything less than superb. Swan lost every time.
“You’re some kind of ringer,” Swan said, feeling irritated.
“But we’re not betting.”
“Lucky for me.” She managed again to knock out the jack.
On they played. Neither seemed in any hurry to do anything else; space voyages could be like that. It felt to Swan like shuffleboard on an Atlantic ocean liner. They were rich in time—they had time to kill. The youth made several shots that were simply perfect. Swan kept throwing long, and losing. It occurred to her that this must be how Virginia Woolf had felt when she played with her husband Leonard, an expert lawn bowler from his years administering Ceylon. Virginia too had lost almost every time. The youth seemed not to care one way or the other. Leonard had probably been much the same. Well, but quite a few people played sports mostly against themselves, their opponents no more than random shifters of the problems they faced in their own performance. Still, this young person began to bother her. The neat picking up of the mat. The final flick of the fingertips at the end of a throw. The exquisite final fern tips of the Coriolised curves.
Only much later that night, as she was lying in her ramada, did it occur to Swan that the pebbles thrown at Terminator had been like a kind of lawn bowling. The thought made her sit up in bed. Set up a mat, launch a bowl—that jack would be covered.
Quantum Walk (2)
easy to note the moment Venus g is exceeded 1.0 g feels like a pull from below an entanglement with Earth rising up toward you even though you know you are descending
summer is drunken conifer grove hot in the sun new-mown hay marsh at low tide lilacs peaches barnyards
wheeled car humming down a road windows open 32 kilometers an hour plowed earth behind box hedges wind from the southwest gaudeo I rejoice a human driving don’t talk too much
carrying capacity K is equal to births minus deaths over a density-dependent impact on the growth rate added to a density-dependent impact on the death rate the unused portion of the carrying capacity if there is one will be green the overshoot portion of the carrying capacity will be black as in buildings excrement stay outdoors they have overshot
the cycloid temperament an undertow of sadness a febrile temperament be aware the human beside you is not to be comprehended
six different kinds of bird in sight at once a seated hummingbird, watching the scene, grooming itself a red-headed finch summer on earth blue sky filled with high white clouds moving east fast the hummingbird zips ahead and lands looks around beak like a needle crows and seagulls wheel competing mafias the speed of hummingbird wings muscles doing that evolution of one kind of success Canada geese the creak of their feathers as they beat their wings hummingbird song is creaky in a different way chivvying not a song a squirrel chitters much the same blue-backed hummingbird hovering there in the trees the underside of a flicker is salmon-colored
New Jersey North America August 23 2312 on the hunt on the run human now driving over hills around a marsh hills covered by low buildings moldering under knots of alder twenty kilometers an hour faces everywhere 383 people in view number shifting up and down by fifty or so as the car rolls slowly by streets of tarred gravel black
a robin with a yellow beak and raw-sienna chest black tail feathers and head white eye ring black eye neat drinking the water from a sundial gaudeo
past a garden corn pumpkins sunflowers and mullein with similar yellow flowe
rs differently clustered I’m mulling it over
What’s that?
Nothing sorry
Oh no problem. This is nice eh?
Gaudeo
yellow flowers against dusty green in a disk filled by a spiraling pattern woven together or a tall khaki cone with crossing spirals of yellow sensory perceptions are already abstractions humans see what they expect to see they leap before they have time to look
true cognition is to solve a problem under novel conditions that humans can do this is a set of novel conditions ever since you left the building ever since you started thinking remember me there will be helpers you are defective catch and release
their brain is always making up a story to explain what is going on thus they miss things anomalies get left out but is that true? don’t they see that yellow? don’t they see the two kinds of spiral?
unlimited resources do not occur in nature competition is when both species have a net negative effect on each other mutualism is when they both have a net positive effect on each other predation or parasitism is when one gets a positive effect the other a negative effect but it isn’t always so simple intraguild predation is when two species predate each other at different moments of growth
the dark bulk of an apartment tenement shebeen the sunset sky behind and over it Magritte Maxfield Parrish get out of the car be alert make a joke don’t make eye contact
these helpers too must have plans could be using you for or against someone else this is the likeliest explanation what then how turn the tables parry riposte catch and release
Would you like to play chess? one of them says at a door
Sure, come on in guns pointed at them pointed at you
INSPECTOR GENETTE AND SWAN
Once irritated by a problem, Jean Genette never really gave up on it. Even problems officially solved sometimes still had a haunting quality, because of things that didn’t quite fit, didn’t seem right—and if a solution never was found, the problem became part of the insomniac rosary, one bead in a Moebius bracelet of beads wearily fingered in the brain’s sleepless hours. Genette was still working on the problem of Ernesta Travers, for instance, which thirty years before had troubled them all with the fundamental question of why their friend Ernesta had engineered a disappearance from Mars, as well as how; it was a case Jean could pursue in exile, and from time to time did, but Travers was still as absent as if she had never existed. Same with the puzzle of the prison terrarium Nelson Mandela, a locked-room mystery if ever there was one, as the asteroid seemed to have afforded no ingress or egress for whoever had brought in the fatal gun. Mysteries like that abounded in the system; it was part of the affect realm of the balkanization, many felt, but balkanization per se was not enough to explain some of these mysteries, and the inspector remained puzzled and more—transfixed, existentially confused, frustrated—by their aura of impossibility. Sometimes the inspector would walk for hour after hour, trying to make the explanation appear.
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