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ONLY HUMAN
LAVIE TIDHAR
There are four Three-times-Three Sisters in the House of Mirth, and five in the House of Heaven and Hell, and two in the House of Shelter. Four plus five plus two Three-by-Threes, and they represent one faction of the city.
You may have heard tales of the city of Polyphemus Port, on Titan, that moon of raging storms. First city on that lunar landscape, second oldest foothold of the Outer System, or so it is said, though who can tell, with the profusion of habitats in those faraway places of the solar system? A dome covers the city, but Polyport spreads underground◦– vertical development they called it, the old architects. And its tunnels reach far into the distance, linking to other settlements, small desolate towns on that wind-swept world, where majestic Saturn rises in the murky skies.
There are two Five-times-Six Sisters in the House of Forgetting, and five Eight-by-Eights in the House of Domicile. We who are a ones, and will one day be zeros, we cannot hope to understand the way of the Sisterhoods of Polyphemus Port, on Titan.
Understanding, as Ogko once said, is forgiveness.
Shereen was a cleaner in the House of Mirth in the day, and in the evening in the House of Domicile. It was a good, steady job. On Polyport all jobs connect to trade, to cargo. A thousand cults across space arise and fall around cargo. In the islands of the solar system cargo achieves mythical overtones, the ebb and flow of commerce across the inner and outer systems, of wild hagiratech from Jettisoned, best-grade hydroponics marijuana and raw materials from the belt, argumentative robots from the Galilean Republics, pop culture from Mars, weapons from Earth, anything and everything. Polyphemus Port services the cluster of habitats that circle Saturn, and links to the Galilean Republics on the four major moons of Jupiter. It links the inner system with the wild outposts of Pluto◦– with Dragon’s World on Hydra and Jettisoned on Charon, and the small but persistent human settlements beyond Saturn, in the dark echoey space that lies in between Uranus and Neptune.
People are strange in the Outer System, and the few Others, too, who make their homes there. Some say the Others, those digital intelligences bred long ago by St. Cohen in Earth’s first, primitive Breeding Grounds, have relocated en masse to the cold moons of the outer system, installing new Cores away from human habitation, but whether it is true or not, who can tell? Whatever the truth of all this is, it suffices to say that all jobs on Polyport, directly or indirectly, are linked with the business and worship of cargo, and that some jobs are always in demand.
Shereen apprenticed as a cleaner in the landing port beyond the city, a vast dust-bowl plane where RLVs like busy methane-breathing bees rise and fall from the surface to orbit, there to meet the incoming and outgoing space-going vessels to ferry people and cargo back and forth. She was seconded to Customs Inspections slash Quarantine, scouring ships’ holds for unwanted passengers, the rodents and bacteria, fungus and von Neumann machines; from there she moved dome-side, abandoning her public sector job in favour of the private. She cleaned houses both above- and under-ground, until at last she settled on the dual work for the House of Mirth and the House of Domicile, a work associated, after all, with cargo and religion both.
It is said that Dragon, that enigmatic entity living on the moon Hydra, its body composed of millions of discarded battle dolls, had passed through Polyport on its way from Earth. If so, local historical documentation is nonexistent, and anecdotal evidence spurious. Nevertheless, an uncle of Shereen’s, a Guild-certified cleaner in his own right, used to tell the tale of Dragon’s arrival as though he had known it for truth.
In the story, Dragon’s Core, the hub of it, remained in orbit around Titan, carried as it were in a converted asteroid; and it trailed behind it kilometres-long lines of suspended second- and third-hand Vietnamese battle dolls, strung on wires; while Dragon manifested upon the streets of Polyport in a doll body of weathered humanoid form of little distinction. It was then, said Shereen’s uncle, that Dragon met the woman who had once been One-times-One, then One-times-Two, and was finally a Three-times-Three; but whose name had once been Haifa al-Sahara.
Did Dragon◦– who split itself across a million bodies◦– suggest to al-Sahara a similar possibility? Ask at the House of Mirth, or at the House of Forgetting, and you shall receive no answer. Yet whether it is felt the question too ridiculous to answer, or if, rather, there is a kernel of truth in it, the silence does not say.
Be that as it may. You can read more about the early history of the Houses in Sisters of Titan, by Hassan Sufjan, if you were so inclined or, of course, in Gidali’s classic novel, Three Times Three Is One (adapted by Phobos Studios into a lavish three-part production starring Sivan Shoshanim).
What’s important is that, at the time that Shereen was working at the Houses, trouble had been brewing for some time. And that, one day, a new novice came into service in the House of Mirth.
Or is that important? It was to Shereen, certainly, eventually. It was to the novice, too, whose name was Aliyah. How we assign importance depends on where we ourselves stand in the story. For Shereen, it was a moment of significance, the point in which light breaks through the transparent dome, and Saturn rises. Seeing Aliyah walk into the House of Mirth was like being thirsty, and then being given drink; like having been sick, and suddenly feeling better; and so on and so forth.
Aliyah came into the House of Mirth dressed in the modest jilaabah of the Sisters, in the plain black of the Noviates. Underneath it, Shereen knew, Aliyah would bear the scars and grafts of Noviatehood; while inside the filaments would be growing, burrowing under the skin and showing as fine blue lines under direct white light. Shereen was cleaning unobtrusively in the background. Robots could do some of the work, sure, but robots, or Others, were not welcome in the Houses of the Sisters. And humans were so much more… human. The Sisterhoods rejected the Way of Robot, and the ideal of Translation. They were, for whatever it’s worth, still human.
In a manner of speaking.
Underneath her head scarf, Shereen knew, Aliyah’s head would be shaven, misshaped by augmentation. Only her eyes could be seen, a startling, deep scarlet like the colour of the sky above the port. In her eyes were the storms of Titan. Perhaps it was then that Shereen fell in love. Or perhaps love is merely the illusion of body chemistry and brain software with deep-embedded evolutionary instincts. Though that hardly sounds very romantic.
The poet-traveller Bashō, who had visited Titan, once wrote:
Laf hemi wan samting
I no semak
Ol narafala samting
Which translates, from the Asteroid Pidgin, as: Love is one thing / that is not like / any other thing, and which is as unhelpful as Bash ever got.
Their eyes met across a crowded room…
Though it was not crowded, and that first time Aliyah barely saw Shereen, only perhaps as a reflection in a shiny surface. It is easy to unsee cleaners, they walk like shadows, they are unobtrusive by training.