cousin who has mistaken her station in life. Alas, a tragedy. The young heir, on learning that he canât decently marry our heroine, volunteers for an orchidectomy and the girl slinks back to her commune, chastened but wiser.
What crap, Elam thought. In real life, the meeting would neverhappen; or if it did, there would be no question of a love affair. The aristocrat would fuck the prole and forget her name the next day. Certainly no such well-connected male would ever consent to an orchidectomy. Gelding was a way to keep the salarymen away from High Family daughters, no more and no less. Kachos like Degrandpre were proud of their scars, but that was only because they had been bred to a life of glorified servitude.
The proles, the great unconsulted Terrestrial masses, simply fucked or married as best they could. And increased their numbers, though the various unchecked infertility viruses helped keep the population within limits.
Elam had taken much of her schooling on Earth. She was not naive about the planet . . . unlike Tam Hayes, or even a D&P bottle baby like Zoe Fisher.
She turned to the window, which wasnât a window at all but a direct video feed from a cam on the outside of the multiplyinsulated shuttle. The continent fled westward beneath her. Isis looked heartbreakingly calm from this altitude. The snowcapped Copper Mountains had given way to broad alluvial plains, to prairie veined with sky-blue rivers. Clouds scrubbed the grasslands with shadow, and rivers broadened at last into swampy bays and salty inlets, the vast eastern littoral where seabirds wheeled in flocks large enough to be visible even from this altitude. All this more known than seen: mapped from orbit; glimpsed, if at all, from shuttle flights or through the eyes of long-range tractible remensors.
Untouched, all this, Elam thought. In a sense, no part of Isis had ever been touched, certainly not by naked human skin. The planet was full of life, but this was life older than Earthâs by a billion years, more evolved but also more primitive, preserved from change by the absence of great waves of extinction, room for all, for all genera and every survival strategy save the human, the sentient, the Terrestrial. Weâre such simple creatures, she thought; we canât tolerate these finely honed phytotoxins, the countless microscopic predators shaped by a billion years of involution. Nothing in the armory of the human immune system could recognize or repel the invisible Isian armies.
They lay siege to us, Elam mused. She thought of the bacterial colonies eroding the seals at Yambuku and of the algal films that might or might not have contributed to the deep-sea disaster. We donât recognize them, but I do believe they recognize us. We build our walls, our barriers, but life talks to life. Life talks to life; that was the rule.
The gray-blue continental shelf fell away behind the shuttle, and for a time there was only the ocean to see, cobalt-blue, wrinkled with white breakers; or the cloud tops, often turbulent, tropical storms winding up in the stark sunlight like watch springs coiled with lightning. In all the open sea there was no vessel or wake of a vessel, nothing human, not a nailed board or a bleached plastic bottle; nothing down there, she thought, but the alien krill, clumps of saltwater weed, wind-driven foam.
She thought of the barriers between Isian and Terrestrial life, and then of the long quarantine between Earth and the Kuiper Republics, the dark days when Earth had lost so much of her population to the plagues and the Republics became truly independent, almost by default. The Republics were an alliance of the most remote and hostile environments mankind had ever settledâKuiper bodies, asteroids, Oort mines, the Martian airfarms. The hydrogen/oxygen economies of the outer system had been severed from the smug water-wealth of Earth itself, humanity splitting like a parthenogenic cell, but the division was
What crap, Elam thought. In real life, the meeting would neverhappen; or if it did, there would be no question of a love affair. The aristocrat would fuck the prole and forget her name the next day. Certainly no such well-connected male would ever consent to an orchidectomy. Gelding was a way to keep the salarymen away from High Family daughters, no more and no less. Kachos like Degrandpre were proud of their scars, but that was only because they had been bred to a life of glorified servitude.
The proles, the great unconsulted Terrestrial masses, simply fucked or married as best they could. And increased their numbers, though the various unchecked infertility viruses helped keep the population within limits.
Elam had taken much of her schooling on Earth. She was not naive about the planet . . . unlike Tam Hayes, or even a D&P bottle baby like Zoe Fisher.
She turned to the window, which wasnât a window at all but a direct video feed from a cam on the outside of the multiplyinsulated shuttle. The continent fled westward beneath her. Isis looked heartbreakingly calm from this altitude. The snowcapped Copper Mountains had given way to broad alluvial plains, to prairie veined with sky-blue rivers. Clouds scrubbed the grasslands with shadow, and rivers broadened at last into swampy bays and salty inlets, the vast eastern littoral where seabirds wheeled in flocks large enough to be visible even from this altitude. All this more known than seen: mapped from orbit; glimpsed, if at all, from shuttle flights or through the eyes of long-range tractible remensors.
Untouched, all this, Elam thought. In a sense, no part of Isis had ever been touched, certainly not by naked human skin. The planet was full of life, but this was life older than Earthâs by a billion years, more evolved but also more primitive, preserved from change by the absence of great waves of extinction, room for all, for all genera and every survival strategy save the human, the sentient, the Terrestrial. Weâre such simple creatures, she thought; we canât tolerate these finely honed phytotoxins, the countless microscopic predators shaped by a billion years of involution. Nothing in the armory of the human immune system could recognize or repel the invisible Isian armies.
They lay siege to us, Elam mused. She thought of the bacterial colonies eroding the seals at Yambuku and of the algal films that might or might not have contributed to the deep-sea disaster. We donât recognize them, but I do believe they recognize us. We build our walls, our barriers, but life talks to life. Life talks to life; that was the rule.
The gray-blue continental shelf fell away behind the shuttle, and for a time there was only the ocean to see, cobalt-blue, wrinkled with white breakers; or the cloud tops, often turbulent, tropical storms winding up in the stark sunlight like watch springs coiled with lightning. In all the open sea there was no vessel or wake of a vessel, nothing human, not a nailed board or a bleached plastic bottle; nothing down there, she thought, but the alien krill, clumps of saltwater weed, wind-driven foam.
She thought of the barriers between Isian and Terrestrial life, and then of the long quarantine between Earth and the Kuiper Republics, the dark days when Earth had lost so much of her population to the plagues and the Republics became truly independent, almost by default. The Republics were an alliance of the most remote and hostile environments mankind had ever settledâKuiper bodies, asteroids, Oort mines, the Martian airfarms. The hydrogen/oxygen economies of the outer system had been severed from the smug water-wealth of Earth itself, humanity splitting like a parthenogenic cell, but the division was
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