“Hmm,” Wahram said, considering it. Even to him the sight of the Terran sky was almost inconceivably odd. “It must look strange. They must have a sense of space, they’re migrating creatures, after all. They migrate in the terraria. So they must know this is different. From the inside of a cylinder to the outside of a sphere—no, if they feel that—” He shook his head.
“I think they seem more panicked than usual. More wild.”
“Maybe so. How are we ourselves going to get across?”
“We swim! No, not really. Our aerogels will work as rafts, we’ll float across. If we’re lucky!”
She led him down to the ford, where the scent of the caribou was strong, and strips of fur eddied in the shallows. The wind poured through him, and he could feel his lungs etched as cold shapes, pulsing and alive. “Come on,” she said, “we have to get out of here before the wolves get here to clean up on the poor dead babies.”
“All right, but show me how.”
“Your mattress is your raft, we each have one. It’s kind of like a coracle of aerogel, so it’s hard to see but you’ll float in it fine. If you tip over you have to hold on to it, or else swim fast.”
“I’ll hope not to tip over.”
“That’s for sure! This water is freezing. Here, take this branch to paddle. I think the thing to do is to walk out as far as you’re comfortable, then get in and let yourself be taken downstream, and paddle when you can for the far shore. We don’t need to be in any hurry, because the first curve of the river downstream will put us over near the other side anyway. And you’ll feel it when you’re over the shallows on the other side. Follow me, you’ll see.”
So he did; but he bounced on the water, and his raft felt too small, and the deepest part of the current swept him by Swan, who was laughing at him; then he paddled hard. She caught up with him, paddling in circles, and shouted to him, “Put your head under the water!”
“No!” he exclaimed indignantly, but she laughed and shouted back, “Put at least one ear under the water, you have to hear it! Listen to it underwater!”
And she leaned out from her coracle and ducked her head under for a few moments, then pulled out sputtering and laughing. “Try it!” she commanded. “You
have
to hear!”
So gingerly he leaned out and stuck his right ear under the
dancing surface of the water, holding his breath, and was astonished to find that he had immersed himself in a loud electric clicking utterly unlike anything he had heard before in his life. He pulled his ear out, heard the rush of the world, then stuck his whole head back in, holding his breath, and heard with both ears that electrifying clicking and clacking sound, which must have been the sound of stones rolling hard over the river bottom, thrown along by the rapid current.
He pulled out, blowing like a walrus. Swan was laughing at him and shaking her head like a dog. “How’s that for music!” she shouted. Then Wahram’s coracle scraped the shallows on the other side and he jumped out, but tripped and fell. He was just able to grab the little raft as he splashed and clambered to his feet, then sloshed up to dry land. Not elegant at all, but he was still alive, and his bodysuit kept him dry and warm—now
that
was the technological sublime. And they were on the far shore.
S
wan found a high point above the river and pitched their tent just before dark. The tent was a single big shell, transparent and bouncy on transparent tent poles. Their rafts would serve as their beds. They sat outside the door of the tent and Swan cooked them first a soup made from powder, then pasta with a pesto and Gorgonzola sauce. Finally chocolates for dessert, and a little flask of cognac.
It was still twilight when they were done, though the sun had set an hour before. The tent flapped in the wind, and the immense sluicing of the river over its rocks rumbled up out of the ground and filled the air. They had been going for eighteen hours straight, and when Swan said, “Time for bed,” Wahram nodded and yawned. The sleeping bags she pulled from their backpacks were also aerogels and resembled the mattress rafts, as well as their tent material, and for that matter the bubbles they had drifted down in—all aerogels, hard to see, light, squishy, warm. “But we’ll still
be cold unless we sleep together,” Swan said, crawling into his bag beside him and pulling both bags over them.
“Ah yes,” Wahram said. “I’m sure.”
In the semidarkness he could afford a smile. She kissed him, though, and caught him in the act.
“What,” she said.
“Nothing.”
She rolled onto him, and their combined weight caused his back to touch the ground under his mattress. It was a chill touch and he had to mention it. “We may have to stay side to side.”
“Hell no,” Swan said, and squiggled out of the bag. “Here, get up a second, let’s put my bag under the mattress. That should do it.”
It did. By then they were cold. She got the top of his bag over them properly and climbed onto him, shivering; and after a tight hug she shifted around and started kissing him again. Her mouth was warm. She was a good kisser, passionate and playful. Her penis, so much littler than his, was nevertheless poking his belly, feeling something like a belt buckle gone awry. He too was fully aroused, and getting happier by the second.
Now it was said that their particular combination of genders was the perfect match, a complete experience, “the double lock and key,” all possible pleasures at once; but Wahram had always found it rather complicated. As with most wombmen, his little vagina was located far enough down in his pubic hair that his own erection blocked access to it; the best way to engage there once he was aroused was for the one with the big vagina to slide down onto the big penis most of the way, then lean out but also back in, in a somewhat acrobatic move for both partners. Then with luck the little join could be made, and the double lock and key accomplished, after which the usual movements would work perfectly well, and some fancier back-and-forths also.
Swan turned out to be perfectly adept at the join, and after that she laughed and kissed him again. They warmed up pretty fast.
A round mound made of big irregular boulders, interleaved together small and large to make an almost smooth cone at Mercury’s north pole
Flat rocks laid in circles, one layer on the next, each layer bigger for a few layers, then the same for two or three, then smaller, slowly, up to a rounded point, so that it looked like a big pinecone of rock
One big boulder topped by gold, melting in the brightside crossing onto the rubble plain below it
Another boulder, encased in stainless steel, not melting
Another, rubbed with cinnarbar
Patterned gaps in the ground filled with liquid copper
Shards attached to a knobby headland so that it looked like a cactus
Silhouettes in silver, left on the ground through the brightside
Sand castles turned to glass by the brightside crossing
Twenty rocks on a rubble plain painted white and put back in place
A chest-high oval ring of drywall using flat stones, with fat rounded capstones on top, and a single gap for a door into the center
A rock shaped like South America, balanced on its Tierra del Fuego
Stainless steel wire snarled in broken orbits around a boulder
Almost cubical rocks in a single stack twenty rocks high
Elliptically rounded rocks stacked four and five high
Ten thousand pebbles arranged together on their ends in the shape of a whirlpool
Cliff sides carved to mirror smoothness and then etched by the Sanskrit lettering for
Om Mani Padme HumRock pile compass roses, Medicine Wheels, stone circles, henges, inuksuk
A conical hut like the end of a spaceship sticking up out of the plain
Inside the terraria, the possibilities blossomed:
Twigs twisted into circles. Leaves into cornucopia
Pink cherry blossoms filling a pool
Branches like bones assembled into a cradle
Red poppy petals wrapped around a boulder, boulder replaced among its gray mates
Ice henges. Igloo segments. Ice sheets broken and reassembled in sphere shapes
Long sticks woven into semicircular patterns in shallow smooth water
Leaf lines, shifting the leaves from red to orange to yellow to yellow-green to green
Earthworks in long sinuous lines
“History is a product of labor just like the work of art itself, and obeys analogous dynamics”
S
wan finished their trip on the tundra feeling better than she had for a long time. She loved her giant toad, her lump of clay, with his groaning slowness and quick little smile. Feeling that feeling in her made her able to think of Alex and Terminator and everything that had happened in a way she could tolerate; so her mood was a strange mix of pain and happiness. A fearful joy, yes. Certain wolf howls, of a kind she had often heard, including in the last month on the taiga, combined just such emotions, mourning and joy, and expressed her current mood quite precisely. She whisper-howled when she heard them out in the night, as she was with Wahram and the others at camp; she didn’t like to howl fully when other people were around. She howled inside. When Jacques Cartier had kidnapped some local chiefs for transport back to France, the night before the ships left, people had gathered on the shore and howled like wolves all night long.
One morning Wahram got a call and took it outside the dining tent, and when he came back in, he was looking thoughtful.
“Listen,” he said to Swan as they trudged out over the tundra, wind and sun at their backs. “I need to go back out to Saturn again. There’s a meeting been called of all the people who were helping Alex. They want it in person so they can keep it off the record.”
“And what’s it about?” Swan asked.
“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.
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