Dream Dance

Day 209 - Rejoicing the Dead Twin

Shell's pup has finally crested. The blister cracked several days ago but only today I was able to make out a tiny face peering over her shoulder. The infant looks very much like the adult parent -- like a sour old man in sunglasses -- but much smaller and without fur. This is a nice opportunity to watch developmental and parenting behaviors because I have sensors that track most of Shell's daily routines, which have not changed much during her pregnancy. I'm freeing up a rack of sensors if I need to move them, just in case.

Tanzen are members of the dorsofocillus genus, the only one known to bear live young. The offspring develop dorsally, outside the skeleton but underneath a tough covering that forms when special muscle tissue splits away from the back, toughens and fills with fluid. Thus the name which means literally "back blister" but which most of us prefer to call the "knapsack". When the infant is mature enough the Tanzen blister opens at the top and the juvenile lives in and out of it for several months, making the moniker especially appropriate.

Every Tanzen pup really represents two pregnancies. A dorsofocillus (or DF) live birth requires two inseminations by the same male -- one to seed the environment, the other to provide the embryo that will become the offspring. In effect all Tanzen are one of a pair of fraternal twins. The first twin becomes the placenta, forming the warm hollow where the second twin, the more fortunate twin, dwells during gestation. When the blister cracks the first twin dies, and expresses its sacrifice only though the genes it shares with its sibling.

As one could imagine, DF mating behaviors add an unexpected twist to the normal sexual arms race. Pregnancies from two unrelated males almost never succeed -- and for good reason. What advantage would it be for a male to go to the trouble of mating, only to help foster another male's genes? While this would be OK for the mother, there seems to be evidence of factors that actively shut down polygamate reproduction so this must come from the male side. At the same time males prefer to mate fast and get on to the next female, so they have a dilemma. I'm working on a paper with Wald about some lizard-like DF animals with behaviors that arise exactly as you would expect from the reproductive conflict of interest.

What may be more interesting is that these behaviors seem to be entirely missing from the Tanzen themselves. Reproductive urges in sexual species cannot be easily overcome. Even "thinking man" has its own perversions. Yet the Tanzen have a different way of handling it. I would very much like to understand how.

Day 203 - Trickling to the Stars

Why send only 56 people to explore a huge planet? I used to get that question a lot, mostly from kids who grew up in teeming cities and cut their teeth on Third-grade research projects in collaboration with peers all over the Sol system. For them a team as small as ours was almost unthinkable. The answer is easy: physics. Rare materials limit how many ships we can build, exponential energy costs and strength requirements limit how much mass they can carry, and temporal offsets limit how quickly we can reuse them. If our ship had disgorged us immediately and headed back to Earth it still would have returned 18 years after it left. Despite our common desire for exploration and desperate thirst for knowledge, travel to other stars is a feeble trickle.

Actually our crew is one of the largest so far, and it's not nearly enough. We can barely scratch the surface of an entire new world in the limited time we have. So we have to work smarter. All of us are cross-trained in a second specialty. In addition to ethology I'm also qualified in ecology -- specifically ecophysiology -- so I'm a kind of an honorary member of Shor's team, and I'm Mingrui's "opposite." That means that if anything were to happen to her I'd take over her responsibilities. As long as she remains as doggedly competent as she has always been I merely get to act as her sounding board from time to time.

My opposite is Evo. Evo nu-Volfmura is 24, making her the youngest member of the expedition. She's also an e3 prototype: e301.11ipn if that kind of thing impresses you. She must be ambitious to have made it this far and yet I find her .. unserious. A Ph.D. at 22 takes a lot of work, which I've never seen her capable of. She seems to think that every problem can be solved easily, as if all discovery was just a matter of figuring out the trick. If anything were to happen to me I despair what might become of my research program, not to mention the Tanzen.

Day 199 - 99 Hertz vs. Preferences, What Will You Believe?

The Crab world had been long suspicious. It used to be called A99Hz for the 99 Hertz radio anomaly discovered way back in the early years of radio astronomy. It took the development of the right kind of processing algorithms, but it was in radio frequencies that a primordial form of scanning interferometry first filtered out the noise and found a signal, not far from Earth, of a planet with a weird harmonic emission. 99 Hertz fluctuating on a 20.6 hour cycle -- the daily rotational period of the source planet.

Although the technology has changed, the human part of science has the same familiar outlines. One small bit of data generates a thousand hypotheses, each vehemently supported at the expense of others, and yet -- in some cases -- none of them right. The consensus at some point was "crystalline resonance," an idea that doesn't even make sense in retrospect and yet accepted because it didn't require "agency." It was really only the great science popularizer Drake Carrel who held fast to the idea that the anomaly was of technological origin. His carefully-argued case stands the test of time, and yet why was he not believed?

The sage says that "man is the measure of all things," and in matters of intelligence that is not just rhetoric. After all, before the discovery of Crabs what other yardstick did humans have but themselves? It was unimaginable that a technological species would have machines but no radio communication. You would be laughed off the stage if you argued that intelligent life might not be conscious. Unthinkable! And yet it was true.

When loop drive made interstellar exploration possible, naturally A99Hz was one of the first targets. When the probe fell into Cancera's inner system and found it teeming with orbital colonies and active spacecraft it panicked. It was programmed for 4 years of observation, and yet it seemed likely that it would not be able to perform the task without being discovered. The probe's A.I. found a novel solution: it split in two. The stardrive returned to the outer system and prepared for return, while the active core of the probe fell deeper into the system, finally coming to rest on Cancera's minor moon. So much of what we ended up knowing depended on that lucky bit of programming.

It's easy for us, knowing what we know now, to look back and laugh. But you have to put yourselves into the shoes of those smart but limited scientists, limited not only by lack of data but ultimately by their imaginations. If you had told them that they would find a planet with a globe-spanning network of electric cog railways running on four-phase alternating current at 99 Hertz, they would accept it. If you told them that the railway was invented and operated by a species no smarter than a cat they would probably push you away or punch you, depending on how persistent you were. It's easier to accept the truth when you are forced by the facts.

Day 194 - Entering the Temple of the Body

The day after I advanced to shortlist for the Sigma 957 expedition I met with coach ne-Voosen. Of all the correspondence I had received, his was the most pressing. Although I had some confidence in my qualifications, I still had to distinguish myself in a field dominated by candidates that enjoyed a privilege of birth -- they were all e2's. ne-Voosen offered his assistance and I would be a fool to reject it.

His office was in the school of medicine and his degree was in biomechanics, and yet as soon as I set foot in his tiny office it became clear we were from very different worlds. Since the days of Athens and Sparta the mental and physical realms have been at war. The denizens of thought relish argument and quiet contemplation, while the acolytes of the body grapple fiercely with their comrades and worship sweat and straining muscles. His cluttered space was filled with trophies and photos, gaudy souvenirs of conquests and victories that would have embarrassed any of my friends. My colleagues and I lived in our heads, while ne-Voosen and his ilk lived in a more physical reality.

His gamesmanship, however, was exactly right. No matter my talents, everyone else on the short list was so obviously better qualified physically that it would be easy to reject me. Even if the real reasons were petty or unfair, no one would give a second thought to why the e-zero stayed home and an e2 went to the stars. His suggestion was to do something to prove the entire premise wrong -- to accomplish something so audacious that even few enhanced people could manage it. Tipping the scales so far in my favor could make rejection difficult; exceptional performance in multiple fields was hard to ignore.

I talked about my swimming as a child which he waved off immediately. e2's and even e1's have a natural affinity for water, and their superior strength and oxygen transport cannot be beat by a mere human like myself. Stamina was the key, he said, and would I mind running 2 kilometers for him. So I did. Barely.

As I doubled-over gasping for breath he played back dynamic analysis studies of my gait at full scale in slow motion. My cheeks reddened from more than exertion as he pointed out the places where forces went laterally or into other inefficiencies. "You're losing a lot of energy fighting rebound and uncontrolled motion."

"You mean this," I said, grabbing both breasts and shaking them illustratively.

"Yes, that," he said matter-of-factly, "and in your hips and ass. You probably hate your thighs too, but they're all latent muscle. We can work with that." He smiled seriously. "Shall we do this?"

I sighed."Yes. And thank you."

"Don't thank me," he said. "Pretty soon you'll hate me."

Day 190 - My Backwards Brain

At age thirteen I started to cut myself. It began innocently enough -- I spent hour after hour cleaning up the dry skin around my fingernails with a hobby knife -- but it quickly became something much worse. Before I really knew what I was doing I had scabs on my ankles and forearms. When I was using the blade on myself it seemed like someone else was doing it to me, and I would stare at my cuts in mute horror and do my best to try to hide them.

My parents found out after a few months, and their horror was not so mute. All I remember was the crying which I think was me, and the yelling which I think was them. Or there might have been some the other way too. After long testing the specialist declared me PSS-negative. My parasympathetic serotonin system operates in the reverse of the normal manner: basically I cope better under stress. At some level I'm not happy unless I'm unhappy.

The cause was Ljungdahl Syndrome. My immune system had been attacking my own body for many years but had remained undetected because it had been isolated to glial cells in my central nervous system, and there are few outward symptoms in children. Not at least until puberty triggered my miss-wired PSS response.

I was sent to Hospital in Alberta where they killed my worthless immune system and fitted me with lymphatic biochips. I didn't realize how much of my own personality I had invested in being unenhanced until it was no longer true. Joining the ranks of the cyborgs in my limited way meant that I could no longer revel in my uniqueness, while at the same time everyone outwardly still saw me as different. Under drugs to suppress the self-mutilation impulse, I instead suffered a long dull depression.

In time I embraced it. My condition is part of me, part of what makes me who I am. Who am I? I'm the girl who's looking for trouble -- because under stress I'm grounded, and in hardship I'm strong.

Day 184 - The Drummer and the Long Dry Spell

I first met Aric several weeks into the Mars-Jupiter transit. From kickoff at Phobos to booster burn-out I was harnessed to my G-couch, unable to do much more than sip at the ship's bland nutrients and marinate in my own pungent effluvia. Finally we were free to move about, and after several days acclimating to zero-g so we could all stop smelling of puke, the captain invited us to a posh soiree in the lounge. Posh by space-travel standards, which means vaguely sick passengers in their underwear crowded into a small hemispherical deck. And we had a great time.

Minor K₅ (a quintet as one would imagine based on the graph-theory reference) played for most of the night. I've spent a lot of time doing the theatre circuit and I have to say even by Potsdam standards they were exceptional musicians. From their first-rate audio programming (the lounge felt like a concert hall) to their technical mastery of a huge range of virtual instruments it was easy to see why they were touring the outer planets. The farther you get from Earth the more you find that the people who have made it there really deserve to be there. They were shooting for Rook's Pawn or even Canterbury and I wish them well. Like most great synthesist bands they did far more than just cover the hits of the last millennium -- they wove together a compelling tale of suffering and reconciliation, of sin and redemption -- and we had concerts like that over the next months, but the first night was all party. Melodious jigs and reels, tinny Rock and Roll with its screeching electronics and cave man beats leavened with more refined late-period Raj with its rich layer upon layer of tempestuous complexity (with a bit of sinc to get everyone thinking), the few songs that weren't soaringly triumphant were dripping with pride at human accomplishment. Can't say the lift in mood wasn't welcome.

Aric was their primary percussionist. The live music, and several bulbs of the milky but potent rerun punch -- it all affected me. He would twitch and bounce in his harness, smacking sticks against his drum-pads, flicking his feet against tabs, and swinging his hands and elbows through a network of photosensors. All in harmony with the music, indeed creating the music. It was hypnotically erotic. Between sets I downed my bulb and pushed off towards him. And then I pushed myself on him.

Sometimes I feel like I'm being too forward, so I back off and then find out that I wasn't being forward enough. I was afraid that I was going to be disappointed again, so I was pleasantly surprised an hour and a half later to find myself tangled in sleep webbing, Aric bumping me like one of his instruments. I'm a bit fuzzy about it but I think there was a lot of drunken bumping going on that night.

We didn't spend a lot of time together. I had research to do and he had his music to practice which he did in bizarre twitchy silence so as not to bother anyone else. Sometimes we'd share audio and he'd play and I'd sing; he was quite a xylophonist and I was -- acceptable, I suppose. I enjoyed it and he seemed to tolerate it. But mostly we had sex. When we didn't feel like trying to be discreet in our thin-walled cubicles we'd reserve one of the exercise pods and spend a few hours in relative isolation. Aric was an energetic if somewhat unfocused lover. He did a lot of licking, nibbling and unspecific rubbing, and if he got himself off by vaguely humping my torso he was just as happy. On the plus side he was non-judgmental and would help me get myself off too; on the minus side I sometimes require a little more precision.

At some point I suggested that I needed him to give me direct attention. He sort of did a few times, and then he drifted elsewhere. After a couple of days when I was going to propose a particularly romantic tryst in the rowing pod, I found out he was bumping someone else -- the pathetic e2 girl who kept offering him her pudding at mealtime. Great, I thought, they were ideal for each other. Both empty-headed and confused, they'd probably forget what they were doing and screw empty hardsuits. And be just as happy.

That was the start of my current dry spell. Aric's rejection made me relive leaving Ke, and I spent the rest of the trip strapped in a running harness sweating away the pain. Hitting the couch again for deceleration was actually a relief. I have concerns about sleeping with colleagues, and everyone since then has been a colleague. At some point that may change -- we're here for eight years at least -- but I'm not in a hurry. I can get by alone for now.