Meru, page 2
“Oh.” She couldn’t hide the disappointment in her voice. “How could I have known that? I don’t have access to the genomic data in the Nivid, and without the knowledge base, I can’t check my designs against prior data.”
A green dot lit on an upper corner of the simulator. Hamsa pulled out the data cube and handed it back to Jayanthi. Her design had an approximately 92 percent chance of viability.
“Far too low for approval from a genetic review board,” Hamsa said.
“It’s not terrible, though. With more time and iterations, I could get it right. I’m capable of doing this successfully. I just need a chance—”
“No.” His voice was gentle. “I’m sorry, Jaya. I can’t ask TESC to allow a human to access that information. Have patience. Play the long game. We can only change so many things at a time, and my priority right now is to find a way for humans to safely leave Earth. I can’t risk the goodwill I’ve built to push for one of you—even if she’s my favorite—to work as a tarawan. The Nivid’s judicial construct has approved my proposed amendment and scheduled it for a vote eighteen months from now. That’s where my focus has to be.”
As monumental as a change to the compact would be, at that moment, she couldn’t muster enthusiasm for Hamsa’s goals, not while choking on her own.
“Your disappointment shines through, my dear, even without chromatophores,” he said. “I’m sorry. Perhaps I shouldn’t have indulged you for so long. I didn’t realize that it might cause lasting harm, but I can see the potential now. You’re an adult. You need to focus on living a good life. If you feel you can’t let go of your ambitions, if it’s causing you too much distress, we can get you treatment.”
She shook her head. She didn’t want gene therapy to change her behavior any more than she wanted it to cure her sickle cell disease.
“No one would blame you for it. Between your health and your cognitive capacity, the deck is stacked against your success. Your parents have allowed you to entertain more alloy-like values than a typical human, but unlike us, you have only one life to live. You could consider something else.”
Jayanthi tilted her head. “I’ve wanted to become a tarawan since I was fourteen years old. Do you really think I’m going to give up?”
Hamsa’s phores flickered with gentle amusement. “No, I don’t, but ambition has ruined many a determined human’s life. I’d hate to see that happen to yours.”
Jayanthi strode along the dirt path for her daily afternoon walk to visit Mina, her dearest friend, one of the few she’d made in her two decades of life.
A small, unfamiliar alloy sat not far from the trail, their legs and forearms tucked under their leathery bovine body. Long black lashes fringed their eyelids, and intricate phore patterns swirled across their back. Their mouth chewed in regular circles. They slow-blinked, and the alloy’s public information hovered over their head: Lolah, zie/zir, remade once; assigned to six varshas service for illegal accrual of personal property. This was not someone’s incarn. This alloy had undergone a full rebirth, with significant genetic alterations to reside on Earth, where zie would spend the next twenty years cropping invasive plant species.
New to the neighborhood.
“Hello, and welcome,” Jayanthi sent via emtalk.
The alloy opened zir dark eyes and swiveled a mostly human-looking face toward Jayanthi. After a blink, zie turned away and blocked the emchannel between them.
With a resigned mental shrug, Jayanthi continued on her walk. She had tried communicating with alloys ever since she’d learned to use emtalk. She’d had better luck when she was small. Most of them didn’t come to Earth service voluntarily, and they didn’t care to make friends with human beings. Just because she was the adopted daughter of alloys didn’t mean they saw her as one of them.
She arrived at Mina’s house covered in a fine sweat. Her legs trembled, informing her that she’d pushed her body too hard. It was easy to do. Regular blood exchanges kept her sickle cells in check, but too many years of pain had left her with poor strength. She leaned against a honeysuckle vine and sent it a silent apology for crushing its fragrant blossoms.
A brightly colored privacy curtain hung across the entryway. Above it, an intricately lettered sign read, WELCOME TO THE ANDAKA FAMILY HOME. The curtain parted to reveal Mina standing with arms akimbo. Her friend’s braids coiled on their head in a casually elegant bun. A tunic in dark orange draped Mina’s generous curves and complemented both their dark-brown skin and the lighter patches of vitiligo that dotted their neck and arms, so similar in appearance to alloy phores that Jayanthi had been envious of them as a child.
“Jaya, are you all right?” Mina said. Their brow crinkled with concern.
Jayanthi nodded and straightened. “I’m fine. I think the new treatment is helping. I walked the entire way without stopping.”
“You did what? Will you ever learn to take care of yourself?” Mina scolded. “Come in and sit down. I’ll get you some water.”
Jayanthi slipped off her sandals and stepped through the doorway into the front room of Mina’s family home. The pale stone floor felt smooth and cool under her feet. Green-tinted light filtered through the openings in the thick mud walls. Low-slung chairs framed in bamboo and hung with canvas sat tastefully around a hand-carved wood-and-glass table.
She sat in her usual spot. She’d used the chair for so many years that the fabric had stretched to her exact shape. Jayanthi had met Mina when they both were five years old, during a serendipitous collaboration between their parents. Hers had wanted to study local painters, and Mina’s were willing to oblige. Jayanthi’s unusual upbringing and ancient DNA made most families nervous. Aspiration and Avarice Disorder wasn’t contagious, but people worried anyway. Mina had already been diagnosed with genetic variations that made them prone to AAD, so their parents allowed their friendship to burgeon. When they were older, in school, the others saw Jayanthi drinking bhojya and using emtalk and shunned her even more.
Mina placed a bamboo tumbler into Jayanthi’s hands and sat next to her. Jayanthi took a sip and savored the gentle coolness of the water against her parched throat. Blood exchanges and drug therapies were helpful, but hydration was essential to keeping her symptoms at bay.
“So,” Mina prompted. “What happened with Hamsa? Did he look at your project?”
Jayanthi grimaced. “Yes.”
“It didn’t go well?”
“It was a disaster. First, the chance of viability was too low, and then it turns out that the hybrid approach I took basically led to the Directed Mutation Catastrophe.”
“Oh no.”
“I had no idea! It’s not like they cover specific genomes in history classes, and only tarawans have access to that part of the Nivid.”
“Then it’s not your fault.”
“That’s what I said, but he didn’t care. He wants to stay focused on politics and suggested that I give up. Settle down. Be a good little human.”
“If you keep on with that attitude, we’ll have to revoke your SHWA membership!”
As teenagers, she and Mina had found half a dozen other like-minded peers in other parts of the world—those who wanted a more alloy-like lifestyle, who had dreams beyond the average human’s, and who weren’t afraid to be different. They’d dubbed themselves the Society of Humans with Ambitions, embracing their atypical nature in ways that most people with AAD didn’t.
“Did you see that they’re opening Meru’s surface to research missions?” Mina asked.
“Stop trying to distract me.”
“It’s important!”
Jayanthi shrugged. “Why? Alloys and constructs will be allowed on the planet, not us.”
Mina raised their heavy eyebrows. “If Hamsa gets his amendment, humans could get to live on Meru, too.”
Centuries earlier, humanity had caused so much destruction to Earth and Mars that they’d willingly consigned themselves to one home. The alloys—their descendants—helped keep the planet healthy, and in exchange, they took resources, especially the rare elements that were difficult to obtain from asteroids. Hamsa’s proposal would rewrite the core of the compact for the first time in living memory.
“They finally discover a planet with similar metrics to ours—gravity, atmosphere, climate—and the alloys insist on keeping us from it. Hamsa’s amendment had better pass.” Mina pulled on a glove and flicked their fingers at the wallscreen. “Sahaya Amritsavar is pushing hard in favor of it. You should watch her speech.”
“I don’t know if that’s a good idea.”
“I thought you liked her?”
“No, I don’t mean the speech. I meant about putting humans on Meru.”
“But, Jaya, you said last week that you wished you could go there!”
“I do. It would be amazing, but I don’t know about everyone else. What if we mess it all up again? How would the compact apply? Are the alloys going to work on the surface and take resources from Meru like they do here? You know what Bantri and her faction want. A return to the so-called good old days of uncontrolled growth.” Jayanthi made a noise of disgust. “Have you looked at the stats for Meru’s atmosphere? The excess oxygen means no long-term human habitation without changes.”
“The cyanobacteria are the only life on the planet,” Mina said. “We could introduce aerobic bacteria to compete and make the atmosphere more breathable. We wouldn’t be impacting anything with a complex consciousness by doing that.”
“Sixth principle corollary,” Jayanthi countered. “An evolved life-form will adapt itself rather than harm other Beings in its environment.”
“Then we figure out how to ensure that our upcoming generations can live with higher oxygen.”
“Across an entire population? Impossible! People would have to carry made embryos rather than pass on their own genes. We’d need tarawans for that. And a lot more access to wombs. Even if the alloys supported it, I bet Bantri’s faction wouldn’t. They’d insist on humans reproducing the natural way.”
“I think you two are just as silly as Bantri and her faction,” said Anita. Mina’s elder sister stood at the entrance to the hallway, her arms across her chest. Paint smudged her fingers and covered her smock with a riot of colors. Even with her hair in an untidy pile atop her head, Anita looked like she’d stepped out of a portrait, every part of her body draped in graceful lines. “Life is perfect here. Why go to Meru or anywhere else?”
“Perfect for you, maybe,” Mina shot back. “Some of us have bigger goals than being kept by alloys.”
“We are not kept. We are supported, and we’re artists. Your ambition to be a Voice doesn’t have any moral high ground.”
“But sometimes it is literally higher,” Jayanthi said and grinned at her pun. On rare occasions, human Voices of Compassion served at an orbital station.
Mina laughed while Anita rolled her eyes.
“This is the great intellect the universe is missing?” Anita said. “You two barely deserve to be let out of the house, much less off the planet. You should appreciate what you have and settle down to a good human life. There’s so much you could do—garden, cook, make music, raise children. Our lives are luxuries. You should appreciate that more. Ambition and materialism lead to greed and exploitation.” She left Ratnam’s words hanging in the air and retreated down the hallway to her studio.
Mina repeated the quote in a singsong tone. “Prat.”
“She makes some valid points,” Jayanthi said.
Mina gave her a sour look, then tilted their chin at the screen across from them, which now showed a still frame of a woman sitting cross-legged on a wide, flattened slab of granite. “I pulled up a clip from Amritsavar’s speech, the best part. Watch it, and you’ll see what I mean.”
Dappled sunlight fell through the trees above the politician, highlighting the gold threads that embellished her deep-red blouse. “The confinement of humankind on the Earth must end with the establishment of beings on the surface of Meru. Since 187 AE, the Constructed Democracy of Sol has increased the restrictions on human development, and while the results are positive overall, these constraints have led to the complete inability of the vast majority of humankind to contribute to the general body of knowledge that is the Nivid.
“All forms of conscious life need a sense of purpose. Without this, they live in a state of perpetual existential crisis.” Amritsavar’s dark eyes shone with intensity. “In the immortal words of the Declaration of Conscious Beings, Life exists to gather and disseminate information. There is no greater reward than to make a discovery worthy of the Nivid. To deprive humanity of that is akin to depriving us of air. To restrict the discoveries on Meru to alloys and constructs is bigotry. For more than five centuries, we have stayed quietly on Earth, repairing the damage our ancestors inflicted on our home planet, accepting this as our due after the mistakes we made in our past. Now it’s time for a new era, one in which humankind has as much of a place in the universe as alloys and constructs.”
Mina flicked their glove and stopped the video. “Imagine exploring a planet for the first time. Setting foot where no one has gone before.”
“It would be incredible,” Jayanthi admitted. “Not as good as living in space like an alloy, but maybe second best. A newly discovered planet is a potential trove of information. You really think the alloys would give that up to us? I love Hamsa, and I fully support his proposal, but I can’t imagine how he’ll get it to pass.”
“Do you think your parents will vote for it?”
Jayanthi nodded. “He’s been their proxy voter for years.”
“Who’s representing the opposition?” Mina asked.
“Pushkara, as usual.”
The ancient alloy had witnessed the drafting of the compact, though he’d been a child at the time.
“Pushkara says out loud what everyone thinks,” Jayanthi said. “Meru would require some environmental engineering before humans could comfortably live there. He’s arguing that we’d disrupt the current growth and development of life on the planet, and that, of course, would violate the compact.” She thought-retrieved the news she’d seen earlier. “Popular sentiment in alloy polls skews in Pushkara’s favor. Humans are almost evenly split on the issue.”
“So it won’t pass?”
“Not a chance. I’ll vote for it, but even if every human on Earth voted that way, the alloys outnumber us by a factor of a thousand. Unless we win their majority, nothing will change.” Jayanthi pressed herself up from the chair. “I should head home before it gets too late. I want to be back in time for dinner with Hamsa.”
Mina’s expression turned glum.
Jayanthi squeezed an arm around her friend. “At least you’ll have a chance to see space as a Voice of Compassion. Even if by some miracle Hamsa’s proposal passes, the rest of us will have to wait decades to set foot on Meru.”
Jayanthi kept a slower pace on the return home. Her father had asked her to pick up some tomatoes and basil, so she routed herself through the more populous center of Vaksana. With forty thousand residents, it was one of the smaller city-states in the temperate zone of mid-Eurasia. She knew most of the people in her subsection.
Long shadows covered the communal garden complex that included her family’s plot. For all the technological marvels that people had developed, some things hadn’t changed. Plants still needed soil or nutrient solution, sunlight, and air to grow. Insects, however, had mostly disappeared within the city limits. In their place, dark, nonreflective insectoid constructs flew about and tended the vegetables. A watering construct the size of an average Labrador stepped on four delicate metal feet as it moved between the raised beds. A spout extended from its belly on one end, and a siphon lay folded against the other.
People dotted the rows between the bushes and conducted their own harvests. She could feel their gazes tickle the back of her neck as she bent to gather a fist-size Black Beauty. The dark-purple globe nearly filled her palm, and she placed it gently in her hemp satchel.
She didn’t bother to greet anyone. They all knew who and what she was, and they had never felt comfortable with her circumstances—a human child born to two alloys, given emtalk capabilities, and lacking a surname. Like the dusk that bathed the sky, she occupied a liminal space. Of Earth but not like other humans; of alloys but unsuited to life in space.
She strolled home along a wide dirt avenue lined with mango and papaya trees. The faint pink glow of sunset suffused the air. A juvenile lynx padded alongside her, staring curiously for a hundred meters before darting down a side path. Parakeets rustled and cried out in the leaves above. A sleek greyhound sniffed at her bag, then her hand. Finding nothing of interest, it resumed its seated position against a tree trunk and licked at the pulp of a fallen fruit.
Over many generations, tarawans had crafted genes to make human pheromones unpalatable to wildlife, human exhalations uninteresting to insects. Fauna were reintroduced well after the start of the Alloy Era. Many species still existed only in gene banks, and even more had been lost forever to the Anthropocene extinction. Jayanthi wished she could see a white rhinoceros or African elephant or monarch butterfly. Why had humans been so foolish and careless? At the peak of their power on Earth, their primary accomplishment was the eradication or exploitation of other forms of life. If the alloys did allow them to travel to Meru, would they treat that planet better, or was human nature too flawed?
Jayanthi turned right as she passed the granary construct.
“Good evening, Jayanthi,” Laghu rumbled from a speaker in the outer wall. He had a joke of a name, which meant small in Sanskrit, the latest trendy ancient language among alloys. The artificially constructed being was anything but. His dozen silos extended fifteen meters toward the sky, and his central mill spanned nearly one hundred meters per side.
“Evening,” she said. “How’s business?”
“Unprofitable,” he said.
They’d started this routine when she was twelve, the first time she’d walked home alone from Mina’s house. His reply had sent her into a fit of giggles, so she’d asked it every time, and he’d always answered the same way. Constructs didn’t work to turn profits.
