Was this what it was like to be an aerokrat? I wondered.
A cool wind blew over us and rustled the falling leaves on the ground.
I held my hands out.
“Do not be alarmed.”
“Who are you?” they wished to know. I showed them my tattoo and told them I had lived near the Hopper.
“Such thick fur!” they said. They gathered around me. “We have not had time for anakoinosis for a while. We have worked so long and hard.”
I stroked their arms.
“Then let us,” I said. “All of our fur is thick.”
They, found me strange, but relaxed enough to let me into the group. Our egg was thick when it formed on the ground by our feet.
“We’ll give it to our aerokratois,” they insisted afterward.
The road was getting hotter as the sun rose higher into the sky.
“No,” I told them. “I will take this one.”
They were shocked.
“You are too similar.”
“I know.”
They watched, quiet, as I took our egg with me deep into the forest.
When my child hatched several weeks later, he stood up, full with pieces of my own knowledge and the knowledge of the road crews and the knowledge of all their foreparents.
He didn’t bond with me. Just like I had been free since Bob killed himself, my own child was somewhat free. I could see that he was a bit confused, and that he had much on his mind. Just as I did.
We stood with each other for a long while.
“We should go find other road crews,” my child finally said. “If we both have anakoinosis with others, then others can be their own masters with us.”
I was happy he felt the same way I did, and did not feel so alone.
My child told me where the nearest work camps where, and we split company to spread our new revelation.
It was a rainy day when I found the work camp.
The sun remained almost invisible behind the clouds, but it occasionally broke out to illuminate the rows of tents behind the barbed wire. Several aerokratois walked around the edges of the camp, giving orders to the multitudes of whiffets bonded to them.
I stopped. I was about to return to being ruled by the aerokratois in there. Maybe it was better to stay in the wilderness, taking eggs from work gangs. It would be better to remain free, and spread my memories, than return to a work camp.
The memories of my foreparents bonded to aerokratois overwhelmed me, telling me to return to the camp. The memories of foreparents who where their own masters remained distant.
It was comforting to think about returning to a workgang, and being told what to do, and when to do it.
Would I ever be my own master again?
The desire for anakoinosis tugged at me, and with a strange feeling in my stomach I walked to the edge of the camp. At the gates I stood in the mud and the aerokratois let me in.
My fur was thick with dirt.
The aerokratois were such exciting creatures. They brought these new concepts, new behaviors, and many other things we never could have come up with. I had so many things to learn from them yet. It was good that I was returning, I reassured myself.
There were many whiffets in the camp behind the sharp wires.
I hugged the first one to reach his arms out to me behind one of the tents. I touched his cheeks to mine and shared my memories of my foreparents, my life, and Bob’s strange gift to me.
I wondered if there would ever be stasis again, now that I was trapped inside the camp, working for the aerokratois again. I hoped my child spread some of the very new thoughts Bob gave me.
Those memories would never die, but live on. My fur fell to the muddy ground as I gave new memories to another.
The next morning I was awakened by an aerokrat with red hair. He handed me a pick.
“We’ll be breaking rock, today, whiffet,” he grinned. I was slow to stand up, so he yanked me to my feet with a shout, hurting my arms.
As I walked out into the sun, blinking, I knew, deep within me, that the longer we worked for the aerokratois, the sooner we would become just like them.
Then both would have true anakoinosis.
THRESHOLD
by Terry McGarry
THE SOUTHEASTERN VERANATHOR Center for Neurosuppression has been grown in the shape of a tree. It is not a tree—it is ordinary plant tissue designed to mimic the form of a broadly spreading warmwood. In older, more affluent parts of Verana-thor Island, homes are grown over generations from genuine hardwood stock, the earliest chambers burrowing farther from daylight year by year, the out-erwood hardening and darkening into an impenetrable encrustation of bark. Here along the sunny coast of the island state, professional accommodations are grown cheap and quick from production-grade cellulose, and the walkway I stand on winds among anonymous clusters of the simplest, most common designs: bulbous mushrooms, cylindrical stalks.
Why couldn’t one of those have been the place? Why must my destination stand out so sorely? This faux tree is a profound aesthetic deception: the intricacy of leafless branchings suggests the fractal density of the neurons they destroy here, while the gracious spread of boughs supersedes the technical with the hortitectural, making you forget that what goes on inside is illegal in every other nation on the planet.
This is the only place in the world where it is legal to evict ghosts from your own mind. This is the only place in the world where it is legal to reject immortality.
My name is Nethon. The community knows me as Tollisdela Nethon Arimthora, vocational ceramicist. Nethon is my selfname, Arim was my bearer, and Tollis was my quickener. It’s best to be clear on that, since naming conventions differ so widely and change over time. I don’t know where this record will ultimately end up, or who will read it. I’m not even sure why I’m making it. Procrastinating, I suppose. Enjoying the feel of my claws scoring the tablet putty. Enjoying being me, just me, alone with myself. Trying to decide if that feeling is worth committing murder for. Trying to decide whether or not it is murder.
I thought I’d know, by the time I got here. All that long way, loping past windfarms and moss refineries on four sore feet, I thought that when I stood in front of this entryway the decision would bubble up from inside me—truth and right chiming like a clear bell, calm and certain. But I’m more terrified now than I was when I set out from home.
And more lonely, in this shell of mortal flesh. It is a pleasant shell. Arim, who did not know Tollis personally and wants no part of this decision, has a muscular build and a beautiful glossy chestnut coat, pale shadow striping in the underparts, fur so thick as to afford barely a glimpse of dermal ossicle. Here in Veranathor, boasting is socially unacceptable—but you can praise the physical attributes of your bearer or the cleverness of your quickener, and it’s considered to amount to the same thing. That’s fine where my bearer and I are concerned, since we’re genetically identical. But until I reach puberty, I am me, not my quickener, or all the quickeners that came before mine.
I think I might do anything to stay that way.
I can’t let them strip my self from me. I can’t let them take over. They might outnumber me hundreds, even thousands to one. There’s no telling how many generations Tollis carried. They can impose their interests, their pursuits on me, shoulder my learning and my passions to the side. I am a talented ceramicist—not the best or brightest who ever lived, at least according to those who were around at the acknowledged height of the ceramic arts, but consistently original and pleasing. And I love my work. It is unique to me, imbued with my personality and no one else’s.