The Golden Space (8 page)

“Camping.”

“Camping. I can’t imagine why.”

“I’m Josepha Ryba. This is Alf Heldstrom. Won’t you sit down?”

“Thank you. I’ll stand.” Nola Reann put her hands inside the pockets of the blue jacket she wore over her silver lifesuit.

“Most of the people who come here are biologists or psychologists,” Alf said. “We do, of course, get a cross-section of other types, too.”

“I’m a meteorologist. I’m in space most of the time.”

“What did you do before that?”

“I didn’t do anything before that. I’m only twenty.”

Josepha glanced at Alf, who seemed as surprised as she was. It was easy to forget that there were young people in the world. She tried to recall what it felt like to be twenty.

“Are you here to study the weather?” Alf asked, as Josepha attempted to decide if he was being courteous or sarcastic.

“No.” Nola swayed on her feet as she surveyed the village. Her dark eyes betrayed her uneasiness. She seemed oddly impatient. She had not lived long enough, Josepha supposed, to be anything else. “What are you trying to do here?” the young woman said suddenly.

“I beg your pardon?” Alf murmured.

“What are you trying to do here?”

“We’re trying,” Josepha answered calmly, “to raise our children.”

“Why these children? They’re not even normal. They’re alien and disgusting.”

“I
beg your pardon,”
Alf said harshly. “You have no right to say that. Do you know them? Have you seen them or talked to them?”

“I’ve seen them on the holo. That’s all I need to see. You don’t know what you’re doing.”

“You have no right to say that,” Josepha replied. “You have no right to come here and discuss our children in such a hostile way.”

Nola Reann stepped back. “Hostile! I’m not hostile. Your biologists are hostile, enemies of the human body and what it represents. They want to change it and mold it—it’s only dead matter to them. They want to change it because they hate it, which means they must hate themselves on some level.”

Josepha thought of Merripen. “Tell me,” Alf said, smiling slightly, “since you’re a meteorologist, how do you rationalize the implants I know you have, the ones that provide you with a direct link to the machines you need to do your work?”

Nola glared. “That’s not the same thing at all. Such devices merely amplify the potential of the human form and mind.” She waved her right hand in a gesture of dismissal.

“And your human form could not even be standing here in front of us without the aid of an exoskeleton,” Alf went on. Josepha squinted, noticing for the first time the slender silver wires on Nola’s hand and the metal support around her neck, partly concealed by her high-collared blue jacket. The woman, she realized, had spent her life either on the moon or in a low-gravity colony.

“Do you have any idea,” Alf was saying, “what people three hundred years ago might have thought of you?”

Nola smiled, once again hiding her hands in her pockets. “I’m still a human being. I think like you, I feel like you. Everything I use simply aids me in achieving my full potential. I don’t lack emotions or sexuality as your children do.” She turned her head and looked at Josepha with conviction. “Extended life has at last made it possible for us to become fully human. We can be everything a human being can be. There is no other point to life. These children insult us by saying that we cannot succeed as we are.”

“How strange,” Josepha said. “If I reasoned the way you do, I might conclude that extended life denied us our humanity by denying us death.” She forced out the words with difficulty. “Some people obviously do feel that way.”

“You mean murderers and suicides,” Nola said blatantly. “I quarrel only with the means they use. They anticipate death, that is all, reach for it prematurely instead of awaiting its eventual arrival. Of course, murder and suicide are at least human talents.”

“So is rationality,” Alf said.

“What is reason without the fuel of the emotions, the tension between the two that makes all achievement possible? A dead, soulless thing.” Nola lowered her voice. “Your biologists are trying to cloak their despair by creating these new beings. They’re not giving us a chance to succeed as we are.”

“Are you a meteorologist or a missionary?” Alf asked, raising an eyebrow. “Do you think the human body is sacrosanct? It’s only nature’s set of compromises. People have been trying to alter it in small ways, either for aesthetic or practical reasons, for centuries.”

“Not this drastically.” Nola paused, as if at a loss. “It’s a mistake.”

Josepha thought: There’s nothing more to say. We won’t even know if we were right or wrong for a long time.

Nola Reann turned and strode away quickly, without a farewell. Josepha moved closer to Alf. “She’s unusual, isn’t she?” she said softly. “Others aren’t like that.”

“Do you talk with many people elsewhere?”

She shook her head.

“She may be extreme, but she’s not all that unusual.”

“What will they do?”

He sighed. “I don’t know. There’s not really much they can do.”

Josepha looked up and gazed past the park. Behind the houses ahead, robot guards patrolled the grounds. There were more guards lately.

Teno and Ramli were playing with four other children in the living room. Josepha could hear them from her study: Teno’s inflections, Ramli’s slight drawl, Nenum’s murmur, Aleph’s rasp, Yoshi’s singsong, Linsay’s guttural throat noises. They had already passed their wilderness survival test, although it would hardly have mattered if they had not. Unobtrusive robots had been near them at all times. The village had held a celebration for the children when they returned, but the ceremony had meant more to the parents than to the young ones, who seemed content with success alone.

She did not mind the noise, although there was more of it than usual. She paid it little attention as she sat at her desk, watching the history syllabus roll by on her reader screen. If neither she nor Alf had anything further to add, they would put it into its final form, show it to a teacher, then program the computer.

She tried to concentrate, not wanting to think of Chane. He and Warner had gone to one of the lodges for the day. She felt a pang at the thought. Vladislav, still living with Warner, had taken up with Chen Li Hua some time ago. Warner had begun seeing Chane a while later.

Chane had not tried to deceive her and she had made no objections. Yet even after two months of this, Josepha still felt twinges. At least Warner and Vladislav knew how they felt about each other. Josepha knew only that she would be hurt if she lost Chane and that she missed him when he was not with her. But she did not know what he felt. Oddly enough, their lovemaking had improved. Jealousy was always a good aphrodisiac, but the price was too high.

She sighed. She and Chane had lived in isolation from each other since the very beginning. Except for the children and their upbringing, they shared very little of real substance. Their other obligations and pursuits had been carefully divided into equal portions, everything from rooms to housework to time alone to time with friends. There had been nothing strange about that; it seemed reasonable and practical.

But, looking back, she felt as if she had deceived herself. People grew closer, or changed, or grew apart; they were not capable of maintaining the same static arrangements day after day, year after year. Josepha, afraid to admit it to herself before, now knew that she was coming to love Chane.

She put her hands, palms down, on the reader’s flat surface. She did not want to be alone any more, surrounded by walls of sensible arrangements which protected only a solitary mind reflecting endlessly on itself and its own uniqueness. She had deluded herself by thinking that she could preserve those barriers in this village. The children had already penetrated them, binding her to the future and the past.

She recalled her pre-Transition life. It had not been that unusual in its isolation from family, demanding relationships, and any sense of continuity. The techniques guaranteeing personal immortality had preserved the individualistic society in which she had lived. Without that development, her fragmenting culture might well have been overrun by those who were unified and bound together in a common purpose. Only the attainment of the ancient dream of eternal life had been enough to save her culture and conquer the others as well. Small wonder, she thought, that Nola Reann and those like her felt threatened by the children, whose existence once more questioned everything.

The sound of a laugh startled her. She sat up and pushed the reader to one side. The laugh was hollow, devoid of merriment. She got up and walked softly out of the study, peering around the stairway into the living room.

The children were talking, lounging in various uncharacteristic attitudes around the room. Nenum stood slouching, hands on hips, looking quite pretty. A peculiar but familiar-sounding whine had crept in the child’s voice.

“I don’t
know
why,” Nenum was saying, tucking a short lock of reddish hair behind an ear. “I just feel depressed, you know, everything seems …” Josepha recognized the voice of Warner and the words of one of her common complaints.

Teno ambled over to Nenum. Her child’s face was contorted in an odd expression, eyes wide, mouth pulled down. “Don’t worry,” Teno said, putting a hand on Nenum’s shoulder. “Ah, you need to take a mood and you’ll feel better. Uh, sometimes I feel that way myself. It’ll go away.”

“Why don’t we have a party?” Aleph said, mimicking Gurit’s tones. “I haven’t tied one on in a while.”

“I have a headache,” Linsay growled, stomping fiercely around the room. Josepha recognized the tense but controlled voice of Edwin Joreme. “They get to me sometimes, they get to me.”

“Oh, Edwin,” Teno replied, “you don’t mean that, ah, I know you. You
dote
on Linsay.” Josepha heard herself, the pauses, the hesitation, the rising inflection at the end of sentences, and shrank back near the wall. Was that how she sounded, that silly mixture of melioration and insecurity? Was that how they all sounded? She wanted to tiptoe back to the study, but puzzlement and curiosity held her as she listened:

RAMLI
(firmly)
: Don’t worry, I just have to make two calls. I won’t be on long. Then we’ll go. Why get there early?

TENO: I know I shouldn’t, but, uh, I always feel so silly there. Li Hua’s so intelligent she always makes me feel ignorant.

ALEPH: You know what I think? We could do with some tough times again. Builds character. Everyone’s getting soft. If we had some hardships, a lot of people wouldn’t make it.

NENIM
(whining)
: I get depressed when I hear that. You’re a hard person.

YOSHI
(gruffly)
: The last time I was on Asgard, I noticed an interesting refinement in their holo transmissions.

LINSAY: Not
again.
Do we have to listen to that
again?

TENO: Now, don’t be so rude.

Josepha peered around the staircase once more, still hidden in the shadows. She felt like a spy. Ramli was sitting on the sofa slouched over, feet extended. Teno fluttered around the room nervously, looking very pretty and very insecure. Nenum lounged in the corner, gazing seductively at Ramli. Pained by the too-familiar scene, Josepha closed her eyes for a moment.

When she opened them, the children were themselves, seated on the floor, arms folded, murmuring softly. “I don’t understand it,” Teno said clearly.

“It’s the way they are,” Aleph replied. “You know that. They’re confused.”

“That’s not what I meant. They wanted us to be different from them, right?” Teno paused. “That means they wanted us to be better. So if they think we’re better, then why don’t they act more like us?”

“You know why,” Linsay said. “They can’t help it. Their bodies are different. They like feelings but they lie about them, too. They lie about sex the most.”

“Well, I don’t know why people like to think things that aren’t true. When I touch myself or Ramli does, it feels nice and that’s all, but they act as if it’s the most important thing in the world.”

“It must feel different to them,” Nenum muttered.

“But they made us so we’re different,” Teno said. “I don’t think they like themselves the way they are. And if they liked us, they’d try to be like us. They have minds, they can think. So if they aren’t like us, it has to be because they can’t help it and their feelings are stronger, or it’s because they don’t like the way we are either.”

“But they made us this way,” Ramli responded.

“We’re an experiment. Experiments don’t always work.”

Josepha crept back to her study, knowing she had eavesdropped too long. She paused at her desk, remembering the calmness in the young voices as well as the eerie precision with which they had imitated the adults. The voices had lacked both humor and contempt. They had only been trying to make sense of their parents’ behavior.

She wondered what else the children might be concluding about them.

Josepha shivered slightly in her light jumpsuit and jacket. Gurit Stern stood with her. The weather was cooler; before them, the lake rippled. The water was calmer near the shore; farther out, the wind was whipping up whitecaps.