Beyond singularity, p.10
Beyond Singularity, page 10
She felt as though she might very well spend the rest of her life with her button nose pressed against the glass of a room where she should be, only she couldn't find the door.
Her Meta never told her exactly who her parents were. She only knew that some pair among the 60 or so in her Meta had given birth to her, genetically. Just which pair? She sometimes wondered. It was usually reassuring that the genetic parents often did not themselves recall—and sometimes, not reassuring at all.
But then, growing up was not supposed to be easy. A woman in her Meta once said to her, "It's the toughest work you'll ever do." For a long while Dawn had thought this an exaggeration. Now she was not so sure she could even do it.
The troubling question was, when was growing up over? Maybe never.
Supras were around as (unneeded) reminders that some people really were better than you. Worse, better in ways that were not even easy to put a finger on—a feature she had noted in adults, when she was just a kid. Even the Supra children of her age were daunting. They ignored her, of course.
The means of making a fresh person were so complex that old ideas like simple parenting, with strictly assignable designer DNA, were useless. The Meta loved her, brought her to the verge of first maturity, and so fell heir to the usual blame for the traumas everyone suffered just in getting that far.
Many women in her Meta mothered Dawn, as time came available and their interest allowed. Some years it would be smiling, big-breasted Andramana, and other years it would be lean, cool, analytical Iratain. Others, too—maybe half a dozen, each fine in their moments, then receding into the background as others came to the fore.
The Meta's men provided fathering, too, but here the usual Meta scheme went awry. She was supposed to gain from multiple fatherings, to see what men were like in general, and work on her attachment strategies in light of this. So much for theory.
By accident she learned that her genetic father had left the Meta for undisclosed reasons when she was three years old. She remembered some dim sensations of him—a dark musk, deeply resonant voice, and whiskers (an affectation, apparently quite ancient). That was all, but it was enough.
So, thinking it absolutely natural, she awaited his return. She dreamed about it—a weighty presence descending from the sky, usually, like angry thunderheads brimming with ribbed light. So she made herself wonderful for him, anticipating his grand return. Occasionally a new male would join the Meta, and she always wondered if maybe this new set of smells and sounds was her One True Father.
She could not be sure, of course, because the Meta kept fatherhood and motherhood secret. Not so much because it was hugely significant, though. Just policy. People would put too much weight on those old, simple connections, so best be done with them.
The Meta felt that such genetic details were totally beside the point. What mattered, truly, was the Meta and its work. Humans did not reproduce like animals, after all, anchored in primordial musk.
Dawn wasn't having any of this, though she never said so. Her gut feelings won out over all inherited wisdom. She simply kept making herself wonderful for him, sure he would show up. And of course, when he did, she would know.
Her true mother might be within an arm's reach at any moment, in the milling Meta culture, but that had no claim on her attention. Her mother's identity was a conventional puzzle, dulled by overuse. Father, now there was true singing mystery.
He grew daily in her imagination. She loved him, she worshipped him, she built whole stories around his exploits. Dad's Dangerous Days, Chapter 37.
By this time, no man who ever came into the Meta ever matched the specifications of Her Father, so she was quite sure that he had never returned. She sat dutifully through the ritual experiences of a Meta upbringing, honestly enjoying them but knowing deep down that they were preliminaries to the moment when she would really know, down deep—when her Father returned.
Somehow, as her years stacked up, this yearning never fastened upon her Mother. She did wonder still which of the women of the Meta might be her Mother, but the issue did not have heft, did not wrap itself in the shadowy shroud of the Father. Obviously. Though she sometimes wondered why this was so.
When she spoke about it with any of the adults in her Meta, they carefully reasoned with her and it all seemed straightened out, crystal clear until she left the room. Then she would run free again, down the hallways of her mind, banging on doors, ready with her Father Story to tell.
She had noticed early on that everyone had a story to tell, and not about Fathers. So she got one, too. She was just another Original, a genetic form roughly close to the variety that had started civilization off, so long ago that to express it took an exponential notation.
Her story was about the Father, of course, only cloaked in Meta language. Her life story did not quite seem to belong to her, though. She used it to get close to people, and she did care about them ... but relating ostensibly personal sub-stories about herself seemed to be like offering them for barter. In return for ... what? She was not sure.
So people—first from her Meta, then from allied Metas—came into her life, shaped it, and departed, their bags already packed. She wondered if everyone experienced life this way—that others came in, introduced themselves, exchanged confidences, and then milled around in her life until they found an exit. She valued them terribly at the time, but they left only smudged memories.
After a while she started dining out on the delightful details of people she knew, things they did. Other people were so much easier to talk about. She had sharpened her powers of observation, looking for her Father. The step from Watcher to Critic was easy, fun. People were the most complex things in the world, ready-made for stories. Exotica like the slow-walking croucher trees and skin-winged floater birds were fun, but in the end had no stories. The natural world didn't, usually. She suspected that civilization had been invented to make more stories.
And after a while, she came to feel that most others deserved her implied tribute: they really were more interesting than she was. Sometimes she felt like saying. to strangers, "Hello, and welcome to my anecdote."
The electric leer of artfully crafted memory guided her. People remembered each other because they recalled stories, for stories made the person. With the myriad ways to remember, from embedded inboards to external agent-selves, there were endless fertile ways to sort and filter and rewrite the stories that were other people's lives. At times, she soon noticed, people constructed stories that were missing parts, as if the business of being themselves did not hold their full attention. Shoddy work. She was much, much better at it.
She was intent upon the sliding scale that people showed her. Boys her age would ooze from arrogant to impressive in the span of a single sentence, and then back down that slope again—and she was never sure just why.
At times she was not quite certain who she was. When she was with the boys she knew growing up, she often thought that she was more alive for being with them. He thinks, therefore I am. Afterward, she would enjoy the feeling of having been with a boy and come through it all right, free of awful embarrassing moments, and most especially, without seeing in them The Father.
Instead, she had the odd feeling of being disconnected: This will be fun to remember. Not: This is fun now.
She had the usual sexual adventures. Kissing was sometimes like devouring the other person, savouring the sweet, swarthy head meat, no sauce. Bright grins, dark excesses. Even then, though, she came to feel that lust lacked, well, depth. Amid the mad moment, she would sometimes think, This reminds me of the time I felt déjà vu.
But if you couldn't learn from experience, what was left? She talked about this with one of the older women in her Meta, who said dryly, "The best definition of intelligence is the ability to learn not from your mistakes, but from others'." Dawn went away puzzled. She needed not advice, but a Road Map of Life.
So she resolved: until she knew where she stood, she would continue lying down. It certainly beat running away. That way she had tried, too: hard him, hesitant her.
There was no cure for such injuries. Dawn endured them because she assumed that, after the ordeals of adolescence were done, she would get her reward—the clear, smooth calm and blithe confidence that adults surely had. After all, they looked self-assured, didn't they? Especially the Supras, who were more than adults.
The few moments when she could tell an adult was uneasy, or awkward, or embarrassed, were excruciating. She made it a point to avoid the fallen adult after that happened; just spending time with them would bring the memory into foreground, risking even more of the same.
So she persisted in her faith, which was, of course, not a dry slate of dictates, but A Story: that, first thing of all, she would pass through schools, then find something she loved doing, meet men and mate with them (no genetic contracts implied, though), experience raptures and delights unknown to mere young people, survive those and learn from them, and then generally move with growing serenity through the ever-expanding world.
She did manage to finish school. That was as far as her Life Game Plan worked.
Adolescence cameon Dawn unannounced.
The various shades of humanity above Naturals had dispensed with such sudden advents and halts in the body's evolution. Nature's unwanted punctuations, they sniffed. They could orchestrate their tides and rhythms, like an artfully managed story. So she had little warning of the Natural progressions, especially the firm events of an Original such as she. Menstruation arrived with startling, well, frankness. She had senso'd about it, of course, but the sudden flow made her think of a wound, not a grand overture to heart-stopping romance.
When it first happened, she dipped her head as if in prayer to natural forces, knees knocked together to hold in the embarrassment. As if this were not a blossoming, but punishment for a transgression. She fell to her knees, hands linking fingers, head tilted up to a God she did not believe in. Whatever God made of this, He/She/It did not help. The dark hot leaden burn refused to go away.
There was a simple pharmaceutical cure for all this, of course, and one of the Meta women offered it. Dawn automatically rejected it without knowing why.
One Original frontier crossed, she awaited the Virginity Event. The Meta was easy-going about sex. With nearby other Metas it gave scrupulously clear classes and instructional aids. These were carefully not erotic, but in their clinical cheer also did not give any good reason to do The Thing at all. Abstraction prevailed.
At this time she invented her own, interior Theory of Virginity. In her model, virginity was not a single thing, abolished by a single act, but a continuum. She could give away parts of it. After all, wasn't she a many-sided person, even if a mere Natural?
With other Naturals she had tussled quite agreeably on lounging chairs and in cars, preferring the outdoors. But she had not dispensed any of the fractions in her V Inventory, as she termed it to her girl friends.
She had avoided the company of most young women in her Meta, who seemed more attached to the trappings of the world, most of them on their way to being trapped into an attachment, already ordained by the Meta. For Meta-reasons, of course: types Naturally attracted each other, as the conventional wisdom had it. But Dawn never got much of a buzz from the men of her supposed type. Nor from those in the nearby classes of human. She had an arranged meeting with a man of the Sigmas, once, which stood in her mind for the whole round-Dawn-square-men puzzle. Sigmas were usually nude, and as she bandied nonsense with this one, she could not help but notice that he had no apparent genitalia. There was nothing there at all, not even hair.
He saw her glance and said blandly, "It's inside."
"It?"
"The ancient apparatus had several parts, true, but ours is integrated into one shaft." He smiled, as if describing a mildly interesting toy. "The Original design was not elegant. And the danger!" His eyebrows shot up.
"I thought the, uh, older gadget had at least two uses." "Of course, but we do not excrete through ours."
"Uh, you ...,,
"Use the rear exit for both."
"And the machinery comes out to play only at recess?"
He laughed quite easily. She was blushing and wished she could stop it, but such control was not available to Originals. "Only as needed, to prevent damage. The shaft generates the semen as well."
She kept her eyes resolutely on his. "No need to have those messy add-ons dangling out in the air?"
"In you Originals that was a design feature to keep the semen cool. We simply adjust our blood flow, lowering the internal temperature in their vicinity."
She kept a purely dispassionate expression on her face, afraid to let her lips move for fear they would lapse into a deranged leer, an O of astonishment, or something even worse. Shouting, Show me your plumage! for example. Or Design feature? Seems more like a bug. But firmly fixing her face, she said instead, "Is it the same ... otherwise?"
For the first time he displayed a_ knowing grin. "Larger."
"Where have I heard that before?" Though in fact she hadn't.
"To give us an advantage."
"At?"
"Social and biological." His tone was bland but the grin stayed put.
"I'm just all a-twitter."
Absolutely flat: "You should be."
"You're too sure of yourself."
"And you, too unsure." With that he evaporated, turning away and into the spongelike crowd. She felt put down and also lucky, to not know what his next line was.
So it was with the other classes and orders of greaterthan-thou humans. They were almost jaunty in their arid certainty that their variation on the grand theme was the best, or at least better than the first. Their men plainly felt that she should be bowled over by the chance to enjoy their obliquely-referred-to talents, endowments, or superior wiring diagrams. Their women twisted luscious true-red mouths (no cosmetics!) in sour amusement, sure that she was an upstart tart who had wandered out of her rightful level.
Even if they were all scrupulously correct, and they did have pots of advanced abilities, charm was not one of them. The best aspect of their company was that at least it was not addictive.
For a ion time she was terribly aware that everyone knew.
They knew—that she, as an Original, was going through the primordial fever-pitch of oncoming sexual urges, and could do nothing about it. Helpless, swept down hormonal river.
Other times, she was proud of it. She wanted to shout in crowded rooms, "I'm following Nature! Watch!"—and then do nothing, just stand there brimming with primitive life.
She never did that, of course.
What she did was an intellectual version, in a way, of declaring her Naturalness. Her Originality. She sought out and took an underling position at the Library of Life. In the Vaults.
They deserved the capital letter—vast, forbidding underground repositories of human history. Though the continents continued to grind and shove away at each other, the Ancients (a collective noun covering more time than linear thinking coup encompass) had chosen below-ground burial for their legacies. An unconscious repetition 'of the habit of burying the dead, probably. Primitive.
And there, amid the claustro-corridors far from sunlight, she met Kurani.
He loomed large. Their first job was to unearth a slab that carried intricate data encoded in nuclear spins, a method Kurani termed "savage nouveaux." They trained bright beams upon the flinty surface and machines tracked across the slab, clicking, measuring, sucking up history.
As Kurani's shadcw passed before one of the spotlights she felt herself momentarily eclipsed, a chill stealing over her suddenly prickly skin. They had just opened a new Vault and technology hovered in the air like flies. These micro-readers would snap up any data-dust that escaped the slab. Amid the buzz he skated on rippling legs, the Supra carriage gliding smooth and sure. Level, hydraulic, supple.
"Are the indices notified?" he asked of the air.
Nobody seemed sure who was addressed, so she said, "Done already. Dates unclear—"
"A specialty scheme?"
"It seems so," she managed.
He orbited toward her, his size bringing full night to shroud her. "Why did so many of the Ancients think they should redate everything? That some birth or death or collapse of a civilization was so important."
She ventured, adding to his sentence, "That, of course, all human history would ever after be marked from that time."
"Exactly" His smile brought the sun back to her shadowed self.
"So what all those eras have in common is the automatic assumption that they are special."
"Our fault as well." He smiled slightly, turning his full-bore gaze upon her and it was like a second spotlight in the narrow Vault.
"You think time begins with you?" It was not a very bright comment but she had to say something, his eyes were not letting her slide away from them.
"When we meet people we can't see them because we are so busy looking at ourselves to be sure we look all right, in case this should be an important somebody we are just meeting."
To this avalanche of astonishing self-revelation (or was it, with the "we"?) she shot back, "Me too. I'm thinking that I really suddenly see this person, when what I'm seeing is me reflected in their eyes. Me, proving yet again that I am quick and fascinating and that I can."
—and then, of course, she saw that he had been speaking aloud what he read in her. Very Supra. But still he laughed, sunrise again. "So you almost envy people who are meeting you? Because they're getting the full you?"
She nodded furiously, not giving herself enough time to see that she was sledding downhill without a clue. And picking up speed. "I keep wanting to meet somebody who is completely on, the way I can be maybe five minutes in a year."
He turned just slightly, as if a shot had nearly winged him. "The way you are right now."
