“All right, Japril,” I said. “I hear what you’re saying. With a population as large as a world can have and a disaster of Cultural Fugue proportions, ‘survival’ becomes a kind of fuzzy phenomenon; it’s not the hard-edged fact of local fires, floods, and hurricanes. Go on and tell me about my relations to—” I laughed. “You know, I’d started to say ‘my’ survivor.”
“Our survivor,” Japril said ruefully, “presented a host of medical problems, once we lifted that bruised and ruptured half-corpse off the steaming silt and sand and slag that was, now, much too much of Rhyonon.
“When we got a full diagnosis of the blindness, we thought we had hit the major medical hurdle.” (Something General Info has returned to us: one or two people can see a whole project through from start to finish, even if various stages in it demand three or four or fifty fields of extensive specialized knowledge. That the Web is the most constant utilizer of the newest facets of GI should be no surprise. They invented it.) “The whole front orbital surface, of both whites and corneas, was corroded—thanks to that fluorine. And inside, the retinas had been perforated in half a hundred places and the humors generally congealed as solid as boiled albumin—which can be dealt with. But the interior eyeball lining had become granulated and would clearly become a suppurating hive of problems in no time, even if all the works were restored. You can’t deal with that. Which meant the eyes themselves had to be replaced. Ynn suggested a Rhyonon-manufactured optical prosthesis might be best. There were actually some around, since we were only a moon away. Marta hit up GI for some quick courses in optical surgery and wired them in … Under dim light, Marq, the new eyes look like black-backed globes of clear glass. In ordinary light, they are your usual, faintly veined white with irises of a green substantially more vivid than the true irises originally were. In bright light they turn a disquieting silver. You know—” Japril frowned—“there’s an odd thing about the sociology of prosthetic devices. When a culture first develops the technology to counterfeit a human function, the counterfeit is usually awkward and jarring. But when the culture reaches a technological stage beyond that, the prostheses are made to look as much like the original organ as possible. Now when a stage beyond that is reached, suddenly the prostheses are consciously constructed to call attention to themselves in aesthetically interesting ways. In fact, limited technological stages can be meaningfully described as exhibiting just such variations as I’ve—”
“Japril,” I said, “you are telling me, in your own inimitable way, Rhyonon’s culture had reached a level two stages beyond that needed to create a functional optical prosthesis. But we only have a limited amount of conference time. You haven’t told me—”
“We set the survivor’s waking for an hour after our own the next day. Rest is still the best cure for that kind of bodily trauma: new leg, new eyes. We came into the rotunda of the rescue station here, wondering if the pale blue walls and the wall window, beyond which sprawled only lunar schist and craters, were really conducive to the best revival. Had we done certain neurological tests? Certainly. Had we done others? Well, now … we’d done enough to determine that we had no major deficiencies to deal with. There were signs of the most minor prenatal brain damage that may have been due to potassium starvation in the bearing parent. But neural paths had been established by normal growth to compensate. We had neither a genius nor an idiot on our hands. That we knew. How did we go about telling someone in the huge range we humans have generally set out for ourselves as normal that their world is … gone?
“A hundred lights, each a different color, died in the froth of glycerine that washed about that human-shaped bath. Tubes drained off the puce and fuchsia biles that, in a sort of antidigestive process, had, by their chemical actions, healed; had, by their tidal actions, exercised. Molecular gradients were read across sheets of tissue; neural charges were positioned down to the synapse and detonated.
“The right arm twitched.
“For a moment the left hand’s knuckles were four bubbly islands in the trough’s syrup. A knee flexed from thick liquid.
“Then, dripping, the survivor sat.
“You understand, Marq, I had never seen such a waking, but GI had given me the recalls to call on of seventeen experts who’d each watched this process many times—watched the coughing, the shaking head, the neural twitches as the nerves came on again, the unsteady motor orientation of an old nervous system taking over a radically reprocessed body, the ten-to-twenty minutes’ limping to accommodate the inevitable discrepancies in neural firing times of the nerves in the new leg, the two-to-five hours of increased blinking to acclimate to the just-connected optic nerve.
“The survivor sat, to the waist, in foam.
“The survivor coughed.
“The survivor raised both hands and, with two thick and awkward forefingers, rubbed away the juices from each lid in a single downward motion. The tub began to tip, and Ynn automatically stepped forward to give a hand, that, clearly, as our healed creature stepped forward among the railings and handholds now, was not needed.
“There was no stagger at all.
“The eyes—bright green under our lights—were wide. With all that lubricating syrup, physiologically there is no need to blink for a full three minutes. Still almost any human waking from such a bathing blinks. A lot.
“The survivor didn’t; but rather looked about. Marta made a gesture with her hand beside her face that showed she was empathizing with the queasiness we knew was being felt but, did not show. With a supporting ring in each large hand—so very tall—the survivor stood, for all the world (the world …? which world?) like someone waiting. No questions, no curious glances, no self-orienting looks; naked thighs streamed, and the drain gurgled behind wide heels.
“I said softly to Ynn: ‘Perhaps that brain damage …?’
“Ynn said sharply: ‘Who are you? Tell us your name. We want to help you,’ in the most common of Rhyonon’s six languages. We knew that twenty-four percent of Rhyonon’s population was—or had been—bilingual, with the most common language either the first or second tongue of that quarter.
“The survivor was looking somewhere between Marta and me … not with any particular intensity. Still, because that face so clearly wasn’t paying attention to what Ynn was saying, it made me want to look over my shoulder to see what those eyes were seeing, even though I knew it was only blue plastifoam.
“Ynn said: ‘Who are you? Tell us your name. We want to help you,’ in the second most common of Rhyonon’s six languages.
“The survivor said: ‘Korga the Porter … Rat …’
“The last was a term I didn’t know, though by now I’d been programmed with four advanced courses in Rhyonon linguistic patterns—enough to locate that accent as a pidgin version of the speech associated with the urban equatorial slums. Though just which slum, I couldn’t tell.
“The survivor still didn’t look at us.
“There was something about … the height, the roughness of the body, the stubble darkening the male jaw, the unexpectedly steady gaze of those eyes we had just given—”
“For a moment, Japril—” I laughed—”I thought you were going to tell me my relation to this character was that I happened to be her perfect look-alike, or perhaps among six thousand worlds’ population, we happen to have turned out genotypal twins. And male, you say. I’d just assumed—”
“Rough, black hair,” Japril went on, “sun-darkened skin … from what we know of Rhyonon’s demographics and colonizations records, chances are almost thirty percent of the ancestry was white. The face, Marq, was uneven and pitted—”
“Sounds like the scars of a very rare disease called acne,” I volunteered. “When I was ten, I encountered a population where it was rife. On that moon, in fact, both the males and the females considered it a mark of great distinction—” which was not quite accurate. “I’ve always agreed.”
Japril’s smile said more things than I could read in it. “There was something ab
out that face—though I only thought about how to express it later. Consider a mask of terra cotta. Now take a jeweler’s hammer, strike it from behind, then, before the first cracks appear on the surface, catch a picture from the front. There was that about the face, Marq. The survivor stepped forward, now, unsteadily. The disorientation we expected from fear, from displacement, from remembered terror at whatever had happened a world, two eyes, and a leg ago was just not there. Those eyes now looked at Ynn, at Marta, at me.
“Over seven feet tall: two heads taller than me and almost as tall as Ynn; and the distinctions among those long, long muscles were different from the ones a woman’s take on in a gymnasium program to bring out the body’s lines.
“I’ve seen worlds where women’s physical labor was a prime commodity. The physicality was much more like that than such a—”
“And I’ve seen women from labor-intensive geosectors on low technology, or unevenly dispersed technology, worlds, Japril. You make this survivor very vivid to me.”
“Do I? To me, it all was a bit horrifying. There was a solidness, a dullness, an unresponsiveness that lay out on the ceramic flesh, still glazed with our oils, like an underfinish keeping the surface glaze from exploding. Though I knew I was watching a human, I kept trying to decide what genus, what species—”
“Japril,” I said, laughing, “I know some Sygn priests who’d call you a blasphemer.”
“When a world is destroyed—a whole world, Marq—there are so many fuzzy-edged phenomena that to speak of the event at all is to broach blasphemy. I watched, Marq. And what I sensed, Marta saw. She said something to Ynn, who glanced at me, then looked back. What can be talked of clearly, General Info can teach you in under three-tenths of a second.” (That’s the time for neural firing throughout a cubic-third-of-a-centimeter of brain material, case you’re interested—the amount of time required to memorize with GI, say, the Oneirokritika by heart.) “The rest one must mumble about, either loudly or quietly as is one’s temperament. Marta began to make quiet mumbles—as do most spiders from any often worlds I can mention in her home Web-sector—punctuated with the likes of … severe disorientation … sociopathology … no clearly damaged … while Ynn said in her high, sharp voice:
“‘Well, of course, Japril, after all the trauma suffered, there have to be, almost predictably, some unpredictable results. We found that slight brain damage, supposedly compensated for. But that isn’t normal neural material for a normal neural reaction to waking with no world on a strange moon. Our charge’s world has been destroyed. None of us knows that world by anything but report. The truth is, in subjective terms, we don’t know how strange this place is. We may be dealing with neurological or psychological upset, any combination of the two, and at any level of resolution.’
“And Marta shook her head, whispering: ‘… remapping of neuronal deployment …’
“After several hand signals, indicating hope and despair in her own religion, Ynn depressed a small pedal:
“… and the survivor’s eyes closed.
“The knees bent.
“The metal floor tipped back to topple the figure into the tub, while the drains reversed to become gargling tributaries. As the body bobbed about, we went through a dozen access catalogues, had a dozen GI programs erased from our minds, and took on some thirty more between us. And we remapped the survivor.”
2.
“FOR THE NEXT THREE days we remapped.
“We viewed through diverse screens and measured with sundry meters each neuronal center and margin, plumbed and monitored and analyzed the chemical context in which each synapse drowned; our computers recorded the ionic dance along a billion nerve sheaths. Our simulators produced conglomerate vector templates in four dimensions and thirteen colors at half-a-dozen different depths of focus.
“But it was only what GI so quaintly calls a ‘footnote’ to an auxiliary program Marta had added almost as an afterthought that finally guided us to the answer: ‘Something very odd has been done, Japril—probably done a long time ago, too. What’s more, if it is the synapse-jamming the footnote says it is, on most worlds it’s illegal!’ We gazed, regazed, reprobed, and reread among the synaptic net-patterns’ possibilities of meaning. (They unpack, like any text, not always with what has been packed into them.) Then we turned to the Web’s Basic Galactic Information map of data-deployment to see if we could locate the proper data-node that would explain the particular biotechnic operation all our researches seemed to indicate.
“The particular method for taking the living brain and doing the kind of synapse-jamming that had apparently been done—perhaps some twenty standard years ago—to Korga the Porter, Rat, was first invented on a world in the seventy-eighth cluster some four centuries ago, and then again, in the forty-third and forty-eighth clusters simultaneously and independently (as far as we can tell) about two hundred and eighty years back—just prior to the time of Vondramach Okk, as a matter of fact.”
“Should I say something?”
“It’s relevant,” said Japril. “You’ll see why in a moment. The information had spread slowly from its first source, hindered by law and the civil outrage that can accompany any human discovery women find destructive; it had spread quickly from the latter two sources, camouflaged by a far more liberal attitude toward research when not simply hidden in the information glut that has been the hallmark of more recent times—the glut that is the reason, purpose, and responsibility of the Web. The three data-flows converged on the worlds of the fortieth sector some fifty years ago.
“Such data convergences on the worlds of a single star system from so many directions frequently make an information-stable node that is very hard to control. If the information is highly destructive, frequently when the Web thinks it is under control, it simply pops up under another name in the same place—or right next door. The particular synapse-jamming procedure that we had on our hands in Korga, once we recognized it and traced its diachronic trajectory through the fortieth cluster’s general episteme, had proved particularly tenacious. And because Rhyonon was a world out of the main data channels that are central to the Web, not much energy had been expended on it. The synapse-jamming technique first surfaced on a moon of Rhyonon’s cousin world, Jesper, here in the Tyon-omega system, as a medical method for dealing with certain social intractables. It was squelched by the Web as inhumane and was finally superseded, on that moon, by a program of drug therapy that was easier, cheaper, more efficient for its purposes, and—for that particular moon—ecologically sounder.
“It reemerged on Rhyonon itself as a rite in a political movement that had begun gaining wide adherence several hundred years ago. Then there was a political shift—from Yellow to Gray, which may or may not have had something to do with the early conflicts between the Sygn and the Family—and immediately it resurfaced as part of the practice of an extremely violent art form: for some twenty-five years during Rhyonon’s second century many of the artists in various geosectors of Rhyonon’s southern hemisphere, when the emotional stringencies of their craft became too great, would voluntarily subject themselves to this form of mental suicide—during which time the practice gained great social prestige.
“The Web launches, as you probably know, a very different land of campaign against an aesthetic institution from the sort it launches against a medical one—some say the former is no campaign at all. We try to contour an alternative aesthetic stream away from conceptualization and toward representation. Periods of high-resolution representative art, in whatever field, seem to be local phenomena on any world at all. They never last. But the swing, when we tried it on Rhyonon, was enough, according to our records, to make us think we’d won.
“Again, you must remember that Rhyonon was, as are most of the worlds in the fortieth sector, a terribly unimportant world in the Web’s scheme of things. It was uncommitted in a conflict that had already taken over nine percent of the six thousand two hundred worlds. It had no General Info system, and its approach to
offworld information in general was unsympathetic to say the least.
“The synapse-jamming technique came back once more, this time as a gesture of public philanthropy. The destitute of Rhyonon’s most impoverished social classes, about thirty standard years back, had apparently been allowed—by inter-geosector law—government-subsidized access to this most sophisticated technique of ‘Radical Anxiety Termination,’ as the Institute administering it was known.”
I nodded. “If museums are open to the public, then we must make available as well all the strategies the artist uses to contour the particular problems of her life. I’ve encountered the syndrome before.”
“It’s not a privileged one,” Japril said, which I just assumed was her spidery way of telling me that, in her presumably multilensed eye, some industrial diplomat’s odd datum was not privileged either. “So now we had a good statistical context within which to read the signs we had been presented with. Given what we now knew of Rhyonon, her language deployment, and Korga’s accent, we had established a good statistical probability that our survivor, though found at the pole, was from the sociopathic dregs of one of Rhyonon’s equatorial slums. At some time in the past Korga had apparently been offered, by a benevolent society, a chance at what had been up till recently, on his world, the ave atque vale of artists and priests: the chance to have the paths in the brain through which worry forces us to grow closed over forever and detours about those troublesome crossroads left permanently open.”
I raised my chin, which is a sign to continue in the language spoken in the west of Japril’s home world (I wondered if she remembered telling me) and, in many languages of many others, communicates negation and/or doubt.
She said: “The rest of the statistical range—much smaller—includes the possibilities of artist, religious thinker, philosopher, or even an industrial entrepreneur who, after having amassed a fortune but never having bothered to correct her accent (such corrections were apparently done in urban equatorial Rhyonon), suddenly opted for the Termination treatment.”