“But these are your children!” Bob was loud now. He got up and walked in slow circles again.
“They are us.” I followed him around in circles. “They will be bound. They will be paired with those who know different things. If you had been one of us, before you died, we would share anakoinosis, so your knowledge would not be lost, and the memories of those after us increase. Only after our masters die are we free, and alone.”
Bob’s mouth hung open. He was trying hard to understand. It was the closest an aerokrat could get to anakoinosis.
“It must be a survival mechanism. You commingle to pass on all your knowledge. Your fur . .’.” He stopped and ran his hand over my bare skin. “It’s protein, right? The DNA must combine, they… I don’t know…” He looked up into the sky. “I cannot believe they decided against unfreezing anyone to study you all. We need the scientists down here!” A new thought caught him, and he whirled on me. “What happens to you when there are no new masters with new memories, when you share all?”
I spread my arms.
“Those are happy times,” I said. I remembered generations of pleasant times in the woods. Times when you knew, from all your prior foreparents’ memories, which trees could produce fruit every year. How many could gather in a copse and not go hungry. The feel of the sun on bare skin by the coast. Communal ana-koinosis of hundreds together. Stasis for thousands and thousands of generations, with no new ideas to be found.
“These are not happy times,” Bob said.
“These are learning times.” I pointed at the Hopper. “We must learn everything you can teach us. And then, when there is nothing more to learn, we can have happy times. We will be just like you.”
Bob shook his head.
“It won’t work like that. It won’t.”
“But it will. It always has. In memory, there were other threats. Great predatory animals, others of my kind who knew very different things who came from different parts of the land we lived on before you took us away. We incorporate them, become them, reflect them, remember them, their thoughts, and their essence. We will do the same to you.”
Bob walked away from me. I ran to catch up with his long strides.
“There is never stasis with humans.” His feet hit the ground hard. “We always change.”
“Then we will learn this, and…”
“Not as long as you consider us different, or masters of any knowledge. You will always be bound. And since we have longer lifespans than you, you will be bound forever.”
I could barely keep up with him.
“Well, yes. Eventually your young will need to become bound to us if they are to learn new things.”
Bob stopped.
“What?”
I smiled happily and said nothing.
“We can’t share memories with you,” Bob’s hands waved in the air. “Humans barely understand and agree with each other.”
“We will come to be just like each other. That is how things must work. We will become just like you, and once we are just like you, you will be just like us. We will do all the same things to each other.”
Bob looked down at the ground.
“Oh, god!” He rubbed his forehead. “You might just do that.”
He walked in silence back to his home, me right by his side. Inside he made liquids and drank them late into the night, while I watched.
He shook. It was not laughter, but something else. His eyes watered over.
When he thought I had fallen asleep he picked up a blanket and spread it over me.
“I think we fucked up real bad here, whiffet,” he said, his voice slurred and funny sounding. “And I don’t know how to stop this mess. I just don’t know how.”
My aerokrat became strange. He avoided me, refused to let me work, and he stayed out late. That went on for many nights.
It seemed like he was trying to induce anakoinosis in the other aerokratois in his own way, but not doing well.
He finally came home one night with bruised eyes and a bleeding Up* People gathered outside Bob’s hut, screaming and shouting at him.
Bob said some of his companions listened to him and were sympathetic. But there was the Great Repair to be thought of, and most ridiculed him for questioning the need to get everything fixed on his ship as soon as possible.
“They say we have to return to civilization, or our machines will eventually fail us and we’ll all die as savages here on this planet,” Bob says.
We sat at his small table.
“I’m really sorry.” Bob took a long drink of his liquid. “I think they’ve had enough of me challenging them. I tried to organize, but there are too many of them.”
I nodded like I understood, but in truth, I was not sure why Bob would try to break the entire process. It served learning well. It served anakoinosis.
But I didn’t say anything. I did not want to agitate him. I only wanted to learn from him, and pass that learning on to all my children.
Bob leaned close to me.
“The people outside, they’ve come to take me back.”
“Where?” I wanted to know.
Bob pointed up at the ceiling, indicating the sky above.
“The ship in the sky. There are places aboard it where I will be frozen again, so I can’t speak up anymore. They’re putting me back in storage with all the other passengers.”
New things to learn. I was excited.
“When do we leave?”
Bob looked at me strangely.
“You must do me a favor,” he told me. “I need you to run out of the door, and go toward the forest. I will follow you in a bit.”
“Okay.” I said.
“I think,” Bob stared at the door, “I think I may have found a way to do something good, something that might help you, something that might help all of us.”
When I opened the door, twenty loud aerokratois shouted at me. I walked toward them, scared of the yelhng. The nearest aerokratois kicked me. I was lifted up and beaten, tossed from hand to hand. In seconds, blood ran down my face. My newly regrown fur was torn out of my skin by* the angry aerokratois.
I barely crawled away from the mob into the grass, and as I collapsed I heard a loud explosion. Nothing was visibly damaged, but the aerokratois fell silent.
“He killed himself,” one of them shouted.
I learned something very new about the aerokratois.
Bob was the only aerokrat buried in the hill. His white cross was much larger than the other small crosses that covered the grounds.
I imitated the shaking and wet eyes ritual he had done before his death.
And I was alone, my own master.
On the second night of being alone, I tried to join in anakoinosis behind the same hill where Bob had watched us, but was refused.
“You have nothing new to give,” a trio of whiffets told me. “And maybe what you bring is bad.”
They even refused to let me work with them, and learn new things. Among the thousands there, none would look at me.
I fled away from the areas near the Hopper to go toward the forest.
At night I walked the roads, and during the day I found places to hide and sleep. The forest, when it came up, was welcome. For a whole month I disappeared into it.
There was food in berries and roots. Other animals sometimes came toward me, but I ran from them. They were dangerous and rough. They were not like the docile animals in the land we were taken from to bond with the aerokratois.
My fur soon became shaggy, matted, and long. My skin ached for anakoinosis.
A gang was working on the edge of a new road. They jumped when I came out from behind a tree. I had visions in my mind of being a master to other whiffets. I thought about being alone, and that maybe I could spread the memory to other whiffets. If they were like me, alone and their own masters, but with me, maybe I wouldn’t be so lonely.