Adam Roberts - Stone(2002)

by Anonymous Author

  The rationale behind all this was always hazy to me; I think it reflected the exaggerated respect in which sex was held by my people. Or an exaggerated disrespect, a feeling that sexuality interfered unhealthily with education and the proper, childish business of living. I don't know.

  In common with almost all t'T cultures, nanotechnology existed throughout the body of every citizen, but was not permitted into the fore-brain. To protect and enhance the body was a means of augmenting quality of life; but to enter the higher brain was to interfere with consciousness, and that was not allowed. There are, dear stone of mine, some t'T cultures that do permit dotTech into the brain – rewiring synapses, making more efficient connections, preserving faculties at full efficiency. Such people have always seemed very happy to me, and declare that the dotTech has not affected their essential selves. But how could they know if it had? How could 'they' be sure that their 'they' was real? Perhaps they were actually unhappy, but the dotTech refused to allow them to realise the fact? There was no place for the miniature machines in our brains; they stopped outside the meninges membrane.

  The natural year on Terne lasted 240 days; or actually a little longer, but the calendar specified 240 so as to fit more neatly with the 360-day standard year. Every three years we would have a three-day holiday, a free few days, to bring everything back into alignment with the solar rotation.

  During childhood, a third of the 240-day year was devoted to schooling. Most of the rest was given over to camp. Play; socialising; games. Music! Dear stone – I had forgotten the music! Near-endless practising on instruments you hated, learning the finger-patterns that blocked the vibration of the three vibrating rods on a conscree – a hideous instrument out of which nothing could be gleaned but a tooth-buzzing drone except with the most assiduous practice. Did I choose to learn the conscree? Was it chosen for me? I can no longer remember. But I remember the tower, where I slept; I remember bruising my fingers with hour after blank hour of practice. East Head Air. Feir Tune. Shaikvak Tune. Yesterday. Help-Me Polka. My fingers form patterns just thinking about it.

  The tower was the dormitory, part of the camp. I lived most of the year in it, surrounded by other superannuated children all practicing their various instruments, playing games, honing chess skills, reading and studying. Sport was important, but I avoided team sports in favour of individual rock-face sprinting. There were no natural rock-faces on Terne, but several artificial cliffs had been constructed, and I used to race other children up these. Sometimes I won.

  I was a solitary child, I suppose, but that wasn't necessarily out of the ordinary. Most children were sociable, but there were others like me who preferred to read or study by themselves. I spent many years reading philosophy. Ancient philosophers such as Nitzcha, Hamsun, Agleston, Lung-tzu, bari-jan – few people read them any more. The attempts made by humanity to understand the world before dotTech: irrelevant today. But I found a strange charm in them, the obsession with ethical behaviour in pre-utopian society. It was like reading about how human beings would trek for months to move from place to place before the invention of flight; how they used to assemble and set alight by friction a carefully arranged set up of tinder before the invention of electricity. Fables from a barbarian age.

  I was, I suppose, a normal child. When I was at school and living with my five parents, I felt and acted as normally as any. I really believe that. I suppose there must have been something wrong, some peculiar balanced arrangement of neurones, fragile as a frost-flower, that predisposed me to be a killer; a single flaw in a world of perfect human beings. But I was genuinely not aware of it. I lived twenty-three years upon that world before it emerged.

  Since I was born in the default biological setting of girl, I spent my first period of change as a boy; twelve years. The change itself did not bother me. I remember it; over a period of days I sprouted a pale three-pronged item of genitalia. This fascinated me for a day or two, then bored me (the thing I noticed most about it was how it tended to get in the way). The other changes were more subtle, but also had their effect. I went to camp. I played at sport, read, ate, slept. I created art – something valued highly upon our world. But I created art in the manner of children – depthless drawing that was all technique and no insight; flashy writing that lacked the perspectivising elan provided by the openness of adult living.

  Although I didn't realise it at the time, I think now that the point of camp was not the sport; not the careful and steady conditioning that helped mould the perfect material of nano-enhanced humanity into Utopian citizens. All that went on, of course; but there was something else. Each camp contained perhaps six hundred children, chronologically old but still biologically immature. Friendships between these beings were supremely important. In fact, dear stone, 'friendship' hardly does justice to the dynamic. Call them rather alliances, that slid and coalesced, fixed and melted, with the transience and beauty of some complex interference pattern formed by two rotating grids. A certain amount of this was powered by a form of pre-pubescent sexuality; a deliberate attempt to copy adult behaviour, kissing, intimate rubbing. My own awkward experiments in this direction were undone, mostly, by my refusal to enter into the discourse of love. This was the logic of the childish affairs that bloomed up and broke away in a matter of days. It was a courtly sort of thing, in which the genuine intensity of sexual release – denied us by our physiologies – was replaced with the mock-intensity of grand words, swooning passion, more and more elaborate declarations of being in love. But I realised at an early age – before I was twenty, even – that this juvenile fetish was nothing more than imitation. Being in love, the very phrase still sends shivers of revulsion through my mind – as if love is something you are instead of something you do. But perhaps that is the point; children, wrapped all around with structures to order and shape their lives, come to believe that love is such a structure, something that surrounds and supports them. Adults, however, are alone before their infinity of possibilities and choices. We should replace the phrase being in love with the phrase doing love. What are you doing today? Today I'm doing love.

  I think it could catch on.

  So although I took part in these elaborate ritualised childhood games – the writing of poems and musical pieces, the gifts, the surprising of your love-object as if by ambush – I found myself more and more disaffected by it, withdrawing away. In the emotional economy of the camps, though, this only made me more appealing to a certain sort of individual. Mysteriousness, secrecy, fitted one of the models of love that was current. This is where I begin, actually; where the true me first made an appearance. Let me tell you what I mean.

  I was spending one summer at camp; I was in my early twenties, the first or second year of living once again as a girl. I had been through the whole twelve-year cycle as a boy, and now I was a girl again. The camp we were at was called Pedit-al-le-soers, in the continent of Dubller – a crinkle-coastlined promontory that stretched a thousand kilometres out from the main northern continent of Ast-la-Cox. There were many camps located on Dubller, to take advantage of the many natural bays and lagoons, so that land-based pastimes could be varied with seaside ones.

  The camp of Pedit-al-le-soers was on the northern coastline of the landmass, and looked out over the enormous polar ocean. In the depths of those purple waters lived the largest of Terne's naturally occurring lifeforms, great worm-fish called by most people Sea Dragons. These grey-skinned monsters could grow to hundreds of metres in length, and were as wide across their bodies as a full-grown person. Let me tell you about the worm-fish; I spent a year of school studying the lifeforms of my homeworld and I remember a lot about them.

  The first thing to say about them is that they are neither worms nor fish, but a sophisticated vegetable – evolved almost to mimic animal protein and metabolism. A worm-fish lacks a central nervous system, and presents a dull and featureless stretch of grey skin on the outside, such that it really does resemble a giant snake, except along the dorsal portion, whi
ch sometimes shows dark-purple mottling, residua of the native form of chlorophyll. But the worm-fish does not rely upon sunlight for energy; it is a devourer. At both ends are orifices, either of which can be used for eating or excreting but which tend to specialise in the habitual direction of travel – the creatures would swim in the same direction for thousands of kilometres, and the 'front' orifice would become more and more mouth-like, while the 'rear' one would take on the functions of an anus more exclusively. But this was not fixed; the beast might give a mighty shake, thrash in the water, and start swimming 'backwards' as it were, whereupon the rear orifice would start to become mouth. There were various theories as to why the creature had evolved this form of ambiguous anatomy.

  Another curious feature of the worm-fish is that it has not specialised its sense organs. Instead of 'eyes' it is sensitive to light all over its body, somehow (in the absence of any 'brain') managing to assemble this sense-data into a three-dimensional model of the world around it.

  These creatures were very numerous in the northern waters of Terne when I was a child, and tended to stay in the deeper ocean where their favourite prey – smaller fish and vegetable-shrimps – were mostly to be found. But if the competition for food were too great, or the populations of smaller fish declined for any reason, then these great monsters would swim close to the coast. They preferred meat, but if there were nothing else then they would graze the compacted masses of Drüd that formed our coastlines.

  Their size meant that they avoided the narrower creeks and fjords in which children such as myself would swim and play. But west from the main bay of the camp the landmass rose and presented cliffs that stood ten or twelve metres high, from which it was possible to stare out over the turbulent red-purple waters. This was lonely country, no habitation for thirty kilometres until you reached another fjord and another camp; and for that reason it was a popular walk for the more withdrawn children. I took a book or piece of art-fabric up there many times.

  Let me describe the landscape to you precisely, dear stone, because it is important for what followed. For much of this cliff-walk the ground was solid, made up of the same compacted Drüd out of which all the landmasses on Terne were made. But Sea Dragons would graze the base of these cliffs, pushing their blunt mouths up against the Drüd and chewing it away. This resulted in an overhang, in some places a very pronounced one; the layer of Drüd might be gnawed away to a few centimetres thickness, and this thin crust might roof-over a great booming cavern in which purple waves slopped and echoed. I remember finding one such overhang, and lying with my upper torso entirely over the lip, head down and entranced by the upside-down vista of the cavern below.

  There was a boy at camp who decided he was 'being in love' with me. My solitariness entranced him; my evasiveness fuelled his passion past the usual week-or-so during which these early romances would bud and droop. He followed me around with unusual persistence. His poems to me were actually quite good.

  There were always adults around the camp, of course; although these individuals had little impact on the life we children lived. Neither were they consistent; they came and went as the fancy took them. Some weeks there would be one individual keeping an eye on us, some weeks another; for a month it would be the same individual, then three would change places in as many days. But there would always be some adult or other. I would see them standing, arms crossed, smiling in a smug manner at the ritualised love-making all about them. They seemed particularly entranced with this boy - his name was Ari-shend-roba-le-patilta-gunarzon.

  Dear stone, he has a special place in my memory.

  His hopeless passion for me went pretty much unnoticed in the first week; but as he persisted others began to remark upon it. I saw the adults smiling indulgently as he traipsed after me.

  I hated it. I hated him. I hated what he+I represented to the adults, watching so indulgently. It only occurred to me that this word hate described my emotion after several weeks of feeling it. At the beginning I think I actually lacked the vocabulary to describe what my feelings were. But then, with a sudden insight, I understood. This was what hatred was; that same hatred that appeared in the antique texts and philosophy. And, once named, the emotion changed. Its manifestation changed. I no longer fretted and rushed and woke in the night. I discovered a calmness that helped me very much.

  Nonetheless, it did not occur to me at this point that I should kill him. As with many of life's insights, what seems so obvious after the fact was in fact obscure through the actual days.

  'Do you want to come watch Sea Dragons?' he asked, one afternoon. 'Pallia-nat-le-ster-alcest (or somebody; I can't remember exactly whose name he mentioned) has just come back with her inamorata, and they say that there are three of them dancing in the waters a kilometre away.'

  It was in my mind to turn down this ridiculous offer – dancing indeed, the sentimental absurdity of the way romance-talk infected everything! – and I turned to face Ari to do so. But as I was speaking, whilst in fact I thought I was pettishly refusing him, I found myself saying words that were quite other. 'Alright, let's go see.'

  I was amazed at myself; I remained amazed at myself all through the walk to the vantage point, during which time Ari-shend-roba-le-patilta-gunarzon took my hand, and gabbled blithely. I had made him happy by agreeing to go with him, I realised, and my punishment was that I had to listen to him chatter on. 'My first name is a name from an old mythic poem,' he told me, as if I were interested. 'Patilta is an interesting name, it's a family name, you know the name Matilta of course, but Patilta is a gender-specific version of it, a male version of it. It goes back a long way.' And on, and on.

  When we arrived at the vantage point, Ari-shend-roba-lepatilta-gunarzon became extremely excited by the sight of the great worm-fish roiling and splashing through the red ocean. Two of them were gripping and sliding together a hundred metres or so out to sea. Perhaps they were fighting, or trying to devour one another, or perhaps they were mating. It is very difficult to tell, except by the outcome. If they are mating, then the 'male' beast (they shift gender seasonally) concludes the session of struggling and frothing up the water by injecting a plume of pollen down the 'female's' throat. If they are fighting they are most likely two females, and the fight concludes with one or other fleeing the scene. If they are hungry enough, they will try to eat one another.

  We stood for a while watching the slow-motion grappling of the two beasts, Ari-shend-roba-le-patilta-gunarzon rapt by the sight. 'How big they are!' he said. 'Look how they slide off one another! Their skin looks almost like soft plastic in this light! More silver than grey!'

  I noticed a third worm-fish coiling and snaking through the pink water directly beneath us. It was clear that it was grazing on the Drüd, and was contributing to hollowing out the overhang on which we now stood.

  It did not occur to me straight away to try and pitch Ari to the Sea Dragons. The ones out to sea were clearly caught up in themselves; but if he were to fall then the one below would in all likelihood eat him up very quickly. But this thought did not occur to me immediately. I stood beside him, watching the two more distant beasts swarm over and over one another, like hand washing hand; then I crouched down and looked over the ledge to see the third beast circling and circling in the wide cavern he and his fellows had carved out with their grazing mouths. Then I went and lay on my back a couple of metres further inland and started reading from the screen I had brought with me.

  It was something dull. How might my life have been different if it had been something exciting? Impossible to say. I might have become absorbed in it, forgotten about Ari until it was time to go home. Nothing might have happened. The trajectory through space not taken, dear stone; the quantum shadow. Maybe I would never have developed the way I have developed. I might have been a quite different person.

  But because my book was dull, I rolled on to my front and stared at the ground. It was made, as I have said several times, of compacted Drüd. I found myself tracing with my ey
e the tangled patterns made by the embedded and compressed stalks, the leaves and roots of this plant. The process of impaction seemed to have knotted the individual plants into a series of broader ropes, all in turn twisted together and cemented with dense purple-black matter. I dug about one of these tangled chains of dead plant with my finger nails. It was easy to displace the dirtlike matter packed around it and uncover the trunk of this root.

  I looked up to check what Ari-shend-roba-le-patiltagunarzon was doing; his attention was still wholly taken by the Sea Dragons. He was singing to himself; a traditional tune, but with new words of his own composition. My hatred for him was focused once again by the song. He had his back to me.

  Then – perhaps this is where everything started to cohere in my mind - I was struck by the way that raising my eye from the Drüd immediately beneath me to look at Ari had traced out a path in the ground. That path was real. It was the direction that the tangled trunk of intertwined Drüd remains led. This strand, around which I now had my hand (having grubbed around until I was underneath it), materially connected he and I. Connection.