40
Tamara waited for Livio outside the meeting hall, watching the other participants drag themselves in. The proceedings weren’t due to start for another chime, but the sound of all the voices from within was already deafening.
Livio arrived, his arms and chest still bearing traces of white dust. “I’m sorry I’m late,” he said. “There was a job I had to finish.”
“You’re not late.” Tamara pointed to the clock.
“Late enough that we’ll be at the back of the audience.”
“That might be the safest place,” Tamara joked.
They made their way into the crowded hall. There was a schedule based on birth dates for the particular meetings people were supposed to attend, but it was not being enforced, and Tamara had chosen to break the rule on principle. If cos were allowed to hear this news together, why not co-steads?
There were no visible gaps anywhere in the hall, but the back ropes were the least densely packed so they forced their way onto one of them. As they settled into place Tamara felt self-conscious; she didn’t mind being squashed by the stranger on her right, but she’d never had Livio’s skin pressed against her like this.
With Tamaro, the significance of contact had come and gone. As children it had meant nothing when they touched, a pleasure as innocent as a shared joke, but when they reached fertility it became charged with danger, more thrilling and vertiginous day by day. As the compulsion grew, they started sleeping with the scythe between them, the blade a reminder when they woke in the night of exactly what it would mean to give in. And gradually, each accidental brush of skin on skin lost both its sweetness and its threat. The outcome it foretold remained a certainty, but it became second nature to think of it as indefinitely postponed.
With Livio, she didn’t know what to feel. She focused her attention on the man to her right, then tried to spread her indifference to him across her whole body.
Councilor Giusta opened the meeting with an appeal for anyone with information about Carlo or Macaria to come forward and speak with her at the end of the proceedings. Most of the audience listened in polite silence, but Tamara heard some amused exchanges in front of her; she didn’t catch every word, but the gist was that the Peerless was well rid of the traitors.
Amanda spoke next, describing the experiments that she and her colleagues had performed on a small group of arborines. Though she must have believed that the research was worth pursuing, she eschewed advocacy and confined herself to a dispassionate account of the team’s interventions into the animals’ reproductive cycle.
To Tamara, the lack of rhetoric only made her words more resonant: “The female we’d named Benigna survived the birth. After minor surgery she became mobile again, and took to feeding her daughter. Her co, who was not present at the birth, showed no interest in the child.” Survived the birth. Feeding her daughter. They sounded like phrases someone had brought back from a second Peerless, returning from its own eons-long journey orthogonal to the first.
Amanda was emphatic in dismissing the rumors that they’d created some kind of transmissible agent. “I expect that some of you here tonight must have volunteered to have influences recorded, or you might know someone who was sick at the time and took part in that project. We do believe that some influences spread as infrared light, passing from skin to skin—and it’s true that we were searching for a way to get instructions for biparity into an arborine’s body that way. But we never found an influence that was taken up by the arborines—and we certainly never assembled a new one with the aim of affecting people in any way.”
Tamara heard skeptical noises from the same group who’d found Giusta’s appeal so hilarious. She forced herself not to glare at the idiots; there was nothing to be gained by starting a brawl.
Giusta introduced Tosco as an expert whose perspective would balance Amanda’s partisan account.
“You will all have your personal views on the kind of society that these experiments seem to be offering us,” Tosco allowed. “And perhaps some people are attracted to this vision of an end to the famine, with women living through the birth of a child and going on to meet the fate of men. But we need to examine the consequences much more closely.
“In such a world, who would raise the children? Their mothers? Nature has never had reason to shape women’s temperament to that task. We’ve all heard moving stories of the tenacity of women caring for the children of solos and runaways: these courageous women raised many of our grandparents, whose own mothers had taken to the Peerless alone to escape the brutality of their cos. The excess of women among the first travelers was unprecedented, and we should be proud that we survived the disruption that followed. But we can’t build a safe, stable society on a state of perpetual emergency. Enduring a calamity is admirable; creating one by choice would be the height of folly.
“Now, you might have heard rumors that some prospect exists for the same kind of procedure to give rise to complete families, with a male co. As Amanda has already explained, no second births have yet been demonstrated, and no male births at all. But let’s suppose for the sake of argument that the research continued and it led to such a result.
“The experiments already tell us what the outcome would be. The male arborines showed no interest whatsoever in the children of their cos whose births were induced by the light players. A society of struggling women would be fragile enough—but mixing in an equal number of men, all robbed of their natural purpose, would be disastrous.”
“We’re not arborines,” Tamara muttered irritably. She turned to Livio. “And if the First Generation had such a rough time, surely that was due to the holin shortage? How can he compare your friends fissioning without warning into four children each with a deliberate choice to create a single child of your own?”
Livio didn’t answer, but a woman in front of them hummed at Tamara reprovingly.
Tosco proceeded to raise and dismiss a series of ever wilder possibilities. “Perhaps in the distant future, after generations of research, we could redesign our biology completely so that men and women could come together in the usual way, and the only difference in the outcome would be the woman’s survival and perfect control over the number of children. How could anyone object to that? I can’t—but I don’t believe it’s anything more than a fantasy. This work began as an honest search for a means to achieve biparity without the famine, so that women would be spared the difficult price they pay for population control. And that’s still a worthy target to aim for: a simple drug that will mimic the reproductive effects of starvation, in our daughters’ lifetimes—not the remote prospect of our great-great-grandchildren bending every law of biology to their will.”
Giusta invited questions from the audience.
“Even if this method as it stands has flaws,” a woman asked, “why is that a reason to abandon further research?”
“It’s a distraction,” Tosco replied.
“A distraction for whom? From what? Which urgent project is suffering such a lack of biologists that three people continuing this work for a few more years would be a tragedy?”
Tosco said, “It distracts us all. Our whole culture is damaged by false promises like this.”
“Our culture is damaged?” His interlocutor buzzed. “By a few experiments on arborines? Can you be more specific?”
“I’m sure everyone accepts that we live in a complex, delicately poised—”
The questioner cut him off. “Are you worried that women will start delaying childbirth?”
“That’s one possibility,” Tosco agreed. This brought a few angry shouts from the audience until Giusta gestured for silence. “I respect women’s autonomy absolutely,” Tosco declared. “The timing of childbirth is a personal choice. But that doesn’t mean we can ignore the problems that would follow if the average age began to rise. If the children aren’t born until their grandfather is dead, their father is left to raise them alone—”