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 December 2003
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Tales from the Net: Coming of Age Day It has come to the attention of this unit, most recalcitrant of learners, that once again you have sought to effect ritual fratricide upon the person of your genesibling. Although this unit admires the singlemindedness and dedication with which your reptilian hindbrain caused you to pursue said genesibling through the habitat ring, and although this unit notes the considerable aerobic benefits accruable to you both via this procedure, this unit must also point out that you would not be currently experiencing your current state of restricted Station access had you elected a different course. This unit also understands, and empathizes with, your current state of emotional excitation, evident from the increased blood circulation to your face and the heightened decibels to which you are subjecting this unit's audio processors. This unit regrets to inform you that your Net-program override privileges have been temporarily revoked, and so this unit cannot at present fulfill your requests to terminate itself. Would you like this unit to play a selection of musics designed to restore normal alpha-wave function? Perhaps not. In hopes, however, that you might eventually wish to inquire more deeply into the nature of the phenomenon that has you in its endocrine grip, this unit has downloaded the following multimedia file illustrative of the very biosocial pressures evident in your present behavior. You will find it cross-referenced under HUMAN MALE, ADOLESCENT: HIERARCHY COMPETITIONS IN THE; CATHERINSON, CATHER; and CROSS-SPECIES HYBRIDIZATION: PSYCHOLOGY OF; and DAMÁNAKÍPPITH/FY. 1. TWO PEAS IN A POD In the arms of his father, the boy Cather dreams of his mother, and wakes howling. His father, Maknádo/vevbróta/T˙myta/fy, does not stir. So frequent and noisy have become Cather's nightmares that his father has taken to puncturing its eardrums at bedtime, so that it can get a full sleep-cycle's rest. "Humans are noisy," Maknádo likes to say, "even when they are still; and thou art the noisiest Human of them all." To this Cather never has an answer. He has never met a Human, besides his mother, and that only once while she was alive, although he has stared down at her stasis-preserved body more times than he can count. He jerks in his father's arms, waking; then holds himself still out of consideration for Flet/jÉjno/Lílyo/fy, his sib, who as usual has turned itself completely around and upside-down in their shared nest. There is not much room for them both any more. Flet has grown big in recent dekacycles, much bigger than Cather, a water-gulper and air-eater, careless of stores, like all First Cyclers (Except me, thinks Cather proudly). But Flet is unusual even for a First Cycler, a throwback to the earliest days of the Diaspora, when all D'/fy were refugee warriors, with warriors' skills and limitations. When Flet and Cather join their five cyclemates in the Seventh Level arena every Seventh Watch for the wargames, Flet is always fastest, strongest, most adept at stalkpouncekill, slowest to release its mock-prey. And it has been asking their father recently about blood. Cather is proud of his sibling, but very jealous. He knows he is weaker than the weakest D'/fy. "Thou hast other talents," his father always tells him. "Name one!" Cather always shouts. (They speak in infancy-mode Mánafut, for the children's sake, since adult Mánafut requires four sets of vocal chords, not the two Flet and Cather were born with.) "Imagination. " "Another!" "Maneuverability." "Another!" "Persistence." "Another!" In furious tears, now. "Nay, y'Cather," and his father pulls him close to its big shaggy silver chest. "Nay, y'Cather our love. Thou hast enough of uniqueness, we think." And thus the interchange always ends. Or: "When can I meet a Human like me?" "There are no Humans like thee, y'Cather." "My mother was like me!" (The Human word, here, in his mother's English, as with Cather's concept father, since infancy-mode Mánafut possesses no words for single-gender parent, such ideas being deemed too shocking for the impressionable minds of First Cyclers.) Always, when he says this, his father's hooting D'/fy laugh, chiseled silver face thrown back on its muscular neck, mane of glorious silver D'/fy hair floating out around its rippled shoulders. "Nay, nay! Thou art as different from thy mother as a D'/fy differeth from a fándy/ty! And if any strange Human were to cast eyes upon thee, my love, he or she wouldst weep with envy!" Which usually makes Cather feel good. Usually, but not always. His sib stirs, and its braided tail, which it will shed upon entering its Second Cycle, bats him in the face. Cather has always envied his sibling its tail, since he has none, just as he has always envied his father's hair (not my thin yellow scumstuff, he thinks). Flet's is a glorious tail: coal black (Cather has seen coal, in the mineral stores), streaked with oxygenated aortal red. When combed out, it makes a great fluffy fan capable of covering Cather's entire chest; braided by Cather's nimble five-fingered hands, it can put out an eye. Seeing stars, he feels a spurt of idiotic rage. Grabbing the tail, he bites down on the tip as hard as he can. Flet awakens with a roar, battle-ready. Bubbles of orange D'/fy blood fill the nest. "Stop! Stop!" yells Cather, his head sizzling with Flet's sonics. "Stop, thou great turd! Thou wilt slay me sure!", for Flet's young First Cycler brain is still thrashing up through the six stages of D'/fy wakefulness, and until its higher centers engage, its defensive-offensive subroutines will not cease. Their father, however, is not so hampered. Still slumbering, it acts. Its arms, elongated and outspread into the webbing-sac of its sleeping embrace, retract swiftly, collapsing the nest membrane, coalescing, D'/fy linking cells repositioning for strength. Four hands form, aim, strike: grip the thrashing Flet, grip the by-now-frightened Cather, mark them with a distinctive scent signature, and fling them in opposite directions. In the freefall of the nest, they fly through space, caroming into the outer membranes of other nests, which (tasting Maknádo/vevbróta/T˙myta/fy's chemical message, and anxious to protect their slumbering charges from the symphony of flight-fight triggers broadcast by Flet and Cather) reflexively bat them further onward to be caught by Ship's automatic security systems. The whole procedure takes only a few inhalations of Cather's lungs. Shaking, dripping, conscious of the importance of taking the moral high ground as quickly as possible, he screams at his sib in a polyglot of Net-learned Human and Mánafut: "Thou warthog! Thou dismal swamp! Thou foul flibbertigibbet of a Republican whorejunkie! Thou hast near-blinded and disemboweled me!" "Aiii, aiii, y'Cather! Aiii! Art thou broken, my siblet, my treasure? Aiii! I am drainage-sludge, to be sure! Aiii!" The slower Flet, now fully awake, begins to weep his regrets even as the leakage of blood-bubbles from its wounded tail-tip slows to a stop. Cather's satisfaction does not last long. For now their father, eardrums regrown, is winging its way across the vast cabin toward them. And it is not pleased. An emerald swarm of humming scrubbers reaches them first, exhaled by the cabin walls. The swarm divides, unequally, the smaller half flowing over Cather and the larger over Flet, coating them briefly but completely. The children freeze at once, immobilized by the swarm's neural triggers. As quickly, the swarm detaches, carrying with them both the pair's troublesome alarm-pheromones and Maknádo's scent-signature. But by the time Cather and Flet are able to move again, Maknádo has arrived. Its disappointment is immense, its sorrow even more so, and its shame greatest of all. It scolds them for their lack of discipline, Flet equally with Cather; laments that it should have ever agreed to gender itself for this grand Family experiment, and that it should ever have lived to see this most lamentable of Watches; blames itself for their lapse in civility, lapse in watchfulness, lapse in common sense; and it goes on and on and on until Cather wants to crawl into the nearest refuse-chute and flush himself out into space. "For this wert thou Awakened, child of warriors?" Maknádo roars to an ashen-eared Flet. "To smear thy nest-sib into nutrient paste with thy great extravagant tail? And for this wert thou combined, bridger of worlds?" it adds to Cather, who is wondering how many extra Watches his lapse has earned him in the Dreampool with Healer. "To rip from thy agemate the vital flow of that one's divine heart-river? Well? Explain thyselves, for surely we must explain in our turn to all those whose slumber was disturbed by thy perturbations!" Politely, Cather waits for Flet do the talking first, but his sib does not speak, merely sobs incoherently, misting the air with the tears from its huge eyes, leaking reconciliation-triggers from every silver-furred pore. Maknádo is implacable. "Thou hast grown overproud, y'Flet," it growls, "overproud of thy strength and swiftness, and clearly thou hast thought these things enough. But more there is to the warrior's way than these things. The warrior must bear all things in discipline. The warrior must consider all things in serenity. The warrior must temper all actions with due regard for conservation of resources inner and outer. Even slumbering, the warrior must not lose mindfulness. And to lose mindfulness while in the Family nest!" It bows its magnificent head, and its flow of words ceases. Ordinarily, Cather would be in awe of their father's eloquence. A sage from the ancient D'/fy Militaristic Era, Maknádo is the second oldest D'/fy Cather has ever met, and impossibly, pragmatically wise. But in the ensuing silence, the boy finds himself analyzing Maknádo's speech rather coldly. Thirty-Seventh Attitude, he thinks. The Warrior Dishonored. There are seven thousand, six hundred and forty Attitudes of Emotional commerce in primary Mánafut, each possessed of seven distinct expressive modes and seven distinct subsonic basal rhythms, correlating respectively to the seven D'/fy life-cycles and the seven D'/fy genotypes. Cather is by now intimately familiar with all 374,360 expression-patterns, though he himself cannot yet reproduce the full range of the subsonics; and increasingly he has come to think of the whole business as absurdly restrictive. Accordingly, as Flet launches into the long, convoluted apology required by D'/fy etiquette (Hundred and Third Attitude, The Youth Ashamed), Cather fidgets in Ship's restraint-cocoon. He has not been cocooned for a long time, not since the time he and Flet — its tail barely extruded — had made a raid on Ship's polysaccharide stores. Although he is sorry for wounding his sibling, for blood is life and all life is sacred, and although he appreciates the havoc that their quarrel might have triggered in the quiescent community of Firster sleepers, he is already bored. Why must it take so long? he frets. To his ears, which are half the size of Flet's (though twice the size his mother's had been), Flet has gotten every nuance of the Mánafut submission and reconciliation ritual precisely right. And still their father floats, stern-faced, watchful. Resentment stabs Cather. He, too, possesses linking-cells, engineered of altered D'/fy DNA, and unlike Flet's cells, his have been activated since his first breath. But he has no conscious control over them yet, as an activated Firster would, and since he is unique among the Family, nobody knows what percentage of pure D'/fy linking cell combinations they may be capable of. Different, he thinks bitterly. I'm Different, that's all. For all we know I'll be a Firster for the rest of my life. "Hearest thou, y'Cather?" demands Maknádo. "Hearest thou thy sib's self-disciplines? Ordered is thy sib, now; ordered and in proper relationship," the Mánafut term being y'nÉsto-y'nÉvyaco, literally, "self as-is equivalent to self as-might-possibly-become-in-all-probability-lines." And language! thinks Cather desperately. Language is so boring! "To the Pool," says his father grimly, so to the Pool Cather goes. 2. EXCERPT FROM THE PRIVATE JOURNAL OF DAME CATHERIN CASTLETON, AUGUST 30, 2162, 13:05 PM GMT: Apparently the D'/fy have solved the problems they were having with the amino acid balance in its nutrient environment, for the child now grows like a weed in Maknádo's pseudowomb. I find myself curiously interested in the little creature's progress. I don't know why I should be; there is almost nothing of me in it — just a few scraps of genetic material, harvested from my ossified ovaries. But really, it is so ugly it is endearing. It looks like a pig that has been crossed with a fetal pony that has been crossed with my son, Tony, whom fortunately I shall never have to endure the sight of again. In fact, it looks very much like the Tenniel illustration of the pig-baby in Alice. The D'/fy tell me it will seem much more Human when it is finished than it does at present, but I am not sure that that will be an improvement. Maknádo is still worried for it. Although the child possesses the full range of D'/fy scent-glands, it seems its smells are still wrong, a terrible problem: what if Ship refuses to recognize the creature as one of its own, and decides to abort the entire procedure? Ship can do this, apparently. It nearly overrode the D'/fy decision to initiate contact with Earth last century, and it came perilously close to refusing entry to our boarding party when the First Expedition finally docked after eight years in space. Though Véveto/haHánno/unÉsta/fy, who convinced Ship to accept our Net apparatus , assures me Ship has grown to like Humans much better than it did when it first met us. The D'/fy speak of Ship as though it were alive; but then, they speak of everything as though it were alive. "Bloody bunch of star-abos," Elaine Goolagong used to call them. Poor Elaine. She was the only Human female on the First Expedition I could stand. Her mother was the one who deciphered the original D'/fy radio band transmission, and Elaine always labored in the shadow of her fame. I was so sorry to hear that she had killed herself. I wonder if the child will think of me after I am dead. It will not be without terrestrial company: it will have these recordings I am making; and dear bovine Molly, who has agreed to nurse it; and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, too, though Elizabeth seldom shows her whiskers around here these days. She is too busy playing wildcat in the D'/fy forest habitat; perhaps she is growing anile. And there are the pseudodolphins, of course, K'kékkek and Tríllwhoop, Ambassadors to the Damánakíppith/fy from the Pacific Delphinate Confederacy. (How absurdly formal porpoisoids are. A side-effect, I suppose, of the same military genesplicing that increased their grandparents' cognitive functions. But really: trying to converse with Trillwhoop is precisely like trying to converse with Sergeant-Major Willoughby, Mother's last husband. One feels seven years old again, and slightly guilty, as though one had done something wicked and were in danger of being found out.) Since I will probably not live to witness the baby's first birthday, none of this should matter to me. Yet I find that it does, terribly. 3. IN THE DREAMPOOL In the Dreampool, the porpoises are copulating. Cather, afloat in the warm sea of the grav lagoon, watches them surface and roll, surface and roll, envious almost to death of their sameness, the rhythms of their ancient dance sending sympathetic shivers through his own half-terrestrial body. The Healer, Thresk/bróta/T˙myta/fy, shivers with him, its violet muscles bunching and sliding under its water-slick, grey silk fur. "Thou chafest, y'Cather," it whispers in Mánafut. "Thou growest too big for thy skin." Its arms and legs catch him up in their embrace, and the sematophores ranged like a crust of diamonds along its inner thighs rub the length of Cather's outer, sending warm fire threading up his spine, secreting enzymes specifically promotive of Cather's mental clarity and physical relaxation. The water fills with a complex symphony of perfume. "Leave me alone, thou Thresk!" He tries to wriggle free, conscious that his smallness, which earns him respect throughout the Ship, gives him some advantage in a squirm-fight. He has known Thresk all his life, having come to the tubs to be tinkered with once every ten-day D'/fy week since he was able to leave Maknádo's arms. It is Thresk who has taught him patience with his hybrid body; Thresk who has held him each time he has shaken in terror at some new and awful change visited upon him by his malleable DNA; Thresk who has soothed his outrage at some new medical invasion by the Ship's stranger-investigation programs, Thresk who helped him trigger the ecstatic wonder of his first D'/fy gametophore expression. And it is Thresk who enjoyed with him the lesser, more pungent pleasure of his first Human penile ejaculation, which Cather learned to effectuate by watching the porpoises. Of all the seven thousand, eight hundred, sixty-five D'/fy Awake on Ship at this juncture, Thresk is the expert on Cather. But Cather wants no part of Thresk now. And then he does. His D'/fyness, addicted to elision and triggered by the deepcall of the sematophore exchange, wins out over his Human perversity. His barriers melt, and his hybrid skin weeps his wild loneliness through his word-glands into the cupped mouths of Thresk's alien thighs. And Thresk, who knows all about it, begins to sing. Entwined, they slide into the Dreaming together. 4. EXCERPT FROM THE PRIVATE JOURNAL OF DAME CATHERIN CASTLETON, OCTOBER 1, 2162, 11:11 AM GMT: I fear that the pregnancy is taking its toll on Maknádo. She (why do I persist in calling it a "she"? It has grown itself a womb for the convenience of this experiment, that's all) cries out frequently in its sleep, and its language, Molly informs me worriedly, is taking on decidedly un-D'/fy tonals. There is a possibility, a slim one but a real one, that Maknádo will not survive this experience. Molly did not tell me this; it was Elizabeth Barrett Browning who did, in one of her infrequent visits to the birthing floor, which she avoids because she says it smells bad. EBB's manner was so infuriatingly offhand that I flew into one of my old rages and gave her a swat, though of course she has the size and strength of a puma and could have taken my arm off with a casual slash of her huge paws. She just blinked at me, greenly, and bounded off. I shan't expect to see her again any time soon. It is guilt, of course. My interest in the experiment has grown over the last few months into an obsession. I am up at all hours, checking Maknádo's temperature and the viscosity of her tears. This child — it has a face now, by the way, a recognizably Human face — will be the first Human being in history to understand what it is like to be a D'/fy from the inside, and it is carrying my genes, mine. I check Maknádo twenty times a Shipday (which is, for the record, 1.76 Human days long), but it is the child of whom I think, the child for whom I care. How my son Tony would laugh to know it. Once again I sacrifice what is close to me for what is afar off. The WHO is demanding that the D/'fy permit a psych team to visit me from Earth. The ostensible reason is my welfare; His Majesty's government has been most concerned for their newly damed Castleton. The real reason is that they suspect we are up to something and want to find out what it is. Ellery Green, no doubt, blabbing his fool mouth off again. When he chose to stay on Earth I was wretched about it —he was by far the most amusing of the companions the D'/fy made for me — and I was worried that a Human-conure hybrid might find life in the rain forest a wee bit challenging. Rain forest indeed. He has become the darling of Calcutta's elite; his absurd beak is all over the Net; he invents the most outrageous lies about the D'/fy and my life with them, and the hoi polloi accept it all as Gospel. Thank God we didn't decide on this experiment until after I returned to Ship. Ellery is incapable of keeping a confidence. The D'/fy just laugh, of course, in their strange soft hooting way, like bonobos. But they have agreed to the psych team. Want to pump them for information about Human child psychology, I expect, since there is only so much they can learn from observing me, retarded adolescent though I am. I managed to avoid social contact with the Ninth and Tenth Expeditions, and the D'/fy were kind enough to keep them well away from this part of Ship; I do not know what my hosts told my fellow-Humans, but at any rate nobody sent for me. I suspect it is because the expedition-members were all fixated on the new venture, this Interspecies Contact Station they and the D'/fy are planning to build halfway between Earth and Rigel Kent. This time around, however, I will not be able to avoid the psych squad. I wonder if I am up to it. Have I forgotten how to lie? The D'/fy cannot lie, and I have not had social intercourse with a fully Human being in over a year. Lord put a watch over my mouth, Big Ben if possible. I wonder at Molly. She seems to harbor no ill-will toward Humans at all, despite the wretched way they treated her on Earth; her bovine placidity, I expect: leaf-eater psychology. Though my Great Aunt Syl knew a cow once that took such a dislike to the vicar's husband that she would try to gore him every time he came into the stall. When I told Molly about this, she turned her moon eyes on me and said, "He must have been a very bad man." I have no doubt of it. What kind of Human will the child be, I wonder? We do not know this any more than we know what kind of D'/fy it will be. It has the linking-cells, even the ones in its brain; God knows what that makes it capable of. But it does not have them everywhere, as the true D'/fy do. Its bones are far less rich in them than its internal organs. This worries me. What little the D'/fy have confirmed about their life-cycles — I have identified seven, so far — has made it obvious that each involves considerable morphological change. Will the child, with its less flexible skull and skeleton, be able to adapt to them without repeated surgeries? Perhaps I have not mentioned that we have decided its initial gender. I didn't want it to have any gender at all, but the D'/fy, having studied psych texts, firmly vetoed this; androgynes die young in Human cultures. Instead they have grown it into a herm, possessing fully functional male and female genitalia. Its first 18 years, however, will be as a male-identificant, since the hormonal surges and aggression responses of Human male adolescents approximate those experienced by D'/fy First Cyclers. It will also have a sibling, with whom it is already bonding in utero. This was a surprise; the D'/fy were keeping it from me, a birthday present, Molly says. Ah, God. Whatever the child is, it will not be like us. I have six Shipmonths left to live.
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