#effort monkey

The job was not done after the shower – Eswe was, as usual, so upset about the whole ordeal that Haswal had to twine her whole body around his and hold him still. Then his lower stomach had to be massaged to induce a bowel movement, because they were getting on the bus to visit her friend, and she did not want him to defecate in the bus and lash it around everywhere. Alwess had offered to come to her, but Haswal liked the chance to get out of the house.

Alwess was one of few friends who had kept in touch after Haswal's egg had hatched. All of Haswal's friends were childless. It was probably for the best – the government was making noises about putting a hard annual limit on new children. The world's one ocean was one hyper-engineered and strained fishery.

Haswal carried Eswe with the upper third of her body. Haswal's squeezing hadn't quite worked, so when she slithered off the bus, her neck was covered with a film of baby poop. They had to use Alwess's bath. As they were drying off, Alwess said, "Has it occurred to you that children are weirdly difficult?"

Haswal was frazzled and sarcastic. "It hasn't crossed my mind."

Alwess, unperturbed, brought out guest-plates of tartare and milk and continued, "Evolutionarily, it seems implausible that children be so hard. It completely incapacitates parents now. Yet, our species got here somehow. You don't think it's... suspicious?"

Haswal sighed. Eswe at least was happy, twined around her neck and flicking his tongue out at the flavored milk. "Suspicious? The world is the world."

"Hmm," said Alwess, and changed the topic. They caught up. Old friends were divorcing – Alwess had refitted her den – Haswal had made no progress on her symphony. The last was a sore point. Up until Eswe it had been shaping up to be her best. She had no time or energy to concentrate on it, but she hated to complain and drive away her only real friend. Then Alwess asked the same question she always did: "How are you feeling now about having had a child?"

The regularity of the questioning led Haswal to think Alwess herself was on the fence. Secretly she dreaded Alwess having a child too – Alwess would undoubtedly be too busy then to have a guest over, in this immaculate and clean-smelling house that was Haswal's main retreat from her own. "Same as ever," she said. "There are moments of joy – many of them. In between great deserts of despair. I glimpse in Eswe a wonderful person. But... he is a wonderful person who is suffering most of the time, and so in need of incomprehensible and resented interventions."

Then Alwess asked the followup question Haswal had always dreaded, but had never been voiced between them before. "Do you regret it?"

She had the answer ready. It was just hard to say. "No, in that I don't wake up thinking I wish I hadn't done this. Yes, in that if I could do it over again, I... I wouldn't make the egg. Not when there are twenty more years of this. Being alone, cleaning venom from the walls, untangling him ten times a day, fashioning new entertainment for him from limited materials."

"Haswal," said her friend, "I ask you one more time, does it not seem suspicious that children are so difficult?"

She was less annoyed now by the question. "Confusing, certainly. Compared to other animals. But those animals are not sapient."

"So you think the difficulty is inherent to sapience?"

"No," Haswal said slowly. "The sapience, or rather its concomitant novelty drive, might explain why they're so bored all the time – ow!" Eswe had tried to bite her. "But it doesn't explain why they can't sleep through the night without getting so tangled you need to wake them, or why their venom comes in so early, or why they lash their tails about after a bowel movement. It's a totally nonsensical instinct to be born with."

"Haswal, I'm about to say something absurd, but I swear it is true. The world is not the world. Children are indeed not supposed to be this hard. In the real world, rearing them only takes five years, not twenty. They can sleep a full night before requiring untangling. They lie still after defecation, or slither carefully away."

"In the real world? Then, what, is this a dream?"

"A dream you entered knowingly, along with many other people who wanted to be parents. Only a few of them will be permitted to, because the world's population cannot grow further given new wintering pods that extend lifespans."

"I heard those were starting to see real use!" Haswal exclaimed. "But I they seemed too good to be true – living three hundred years because cell damage is repaired during hibernation."

"It is more than three hundred. The dream was placed quite far in the past, before the pods became universal and reproductive restrictions were installed. The news articles and medical journals sprinkled around the dream say three hundred, because the dreamers would not believe it otherwise."

Haswal thought out loud. "So only a few people can have children. Everyone who wants them is put in this dream, because..." A wave of sadness rolled over her. "Because who gets to reproduce is determined by who still wants to, when children are more difficult to raise. Implausibly more difficult. And I haven't made the cut."

"No," said Alwess gently.

Haswal flexed her neck to heft her dream-child up higher and look at his face. "Oh, Eswe," she said sadly. And then: "Has he suffered for real? He has been mostly unhappy since the day he was born."

"Not a bit," Alwess assured her. "In this dream, only you and I are real. You have spent a year here now. I've only spent a few days' worth of time here, talking to you. We are friends in the real world, and I've been trained to support you through the transition once we're back."

Eswe wound sleepily around her. He had always been strangely easy when visiting Alwess. Haswal said, "Surely some... people... don't want to wake."

"Some. They are allowed to stay. The dream will ease up – that is, the child will become easier. But there is still no animating consciousness there, and eventually the parents get tired and ask to leave. Are you considering it?"

"Not seriously. But – you see – it's also unthinkable to leave him. Even knowing."

Alwess said, "When you agreed to enter this dream – this, you know, quite insane dream with a lot of consent forms – part of the terms were that your feelings for him would be magnetically excised. There's a machine around your head in the real world right now. It will start when you are ready."

"Oh," said Haswal. "Will it happen all at once?"

"The change is gradual across a few minutes. Would you like a few more days with him? Or would you like it to happen once you are out of the dream?"

Haswal thought.

She thought for a long time.

"I'm ready now," said Haswal, and watched and held her son with the utmost focus as he became a mere weight around her neck.

She set him down gently. Shadow child, vessel of false pain, a test she had failed by not having enough love in her. She marveled at the absence of feeling for his familiar coiled form. She knew she'd felt a yoked, anguished love for him – but she could not remember the feeling itself, only the words to describe it.

There were a hundred things she could say. She chose at random. "This was such a strange experience. I don't suppose I could write music about it."

"It's been mined to death, I'm afraid."

Haswal shook her head in amazement.

"Anything else you want to do before you wake up?"

Another long pause. "No. I've lost a year of my life in this dream. That's enough. End it."

"Don't worry about the year. You get ten thousand," Alwess assured her.

Ten thousand!

The world around them began to shimmer and lose detail.

Alwess said, as they waited, "I am sorry you cannot have children."

Haswal had shoved that thought away. She had to turn it over alone before she could talk to anyone else about it. She said, merely, "The obverse side of the lifespan. There is a tragedy and there is a joy. Both are too large to digest right now. I'll take them in chunks."

The room wavered and paled and somehow rotated so that Haswal was lying down. Alwess seemed to shift position closer and up, as if she were sitting next to – oh, of course Haswal had been in a bed for a long time. The whole time. But the biggest adjustment was the jumble of concerts and lovers and feuds and friends pouring back into her mind – many more centuries of memories than she'd thought a life could hold. She had – good god, her agonizingly stalled symphony was complete. She had completed it in her youth. It had made her moderately famous at the time. And she had done much more, and better, work since.

Oh, Eswe – oh, world of so few children –

At the birthing pole, the hooks come out and brace against the inside of the world. A pause. The Thceynling is moving on pure instinct through all this, and that instinct is saying that it’s safe to let go at the umbilical attachment. It obeys a little, and the world crowns.

The Thceynling convulses in a panic, one great contracting muscular ring. Its folds are bunched up around the crowning world, and the habitations right underneath are doused in artificial twilight.

Everything is new to the Thceynling, and it is terrified to push more. But it is also in pain. So with a great shudder that shakes the world, it flexes, three or four times. Its final heave extrudes the rest of the world, and they fall apart from each other. Daylight and starlight rush unobstructed into the Thceyn world.

The Thceynling ripples in space like a wreath of fine tissue paper blown out of the world, waves working through its body and tangling it a little in itself. If its hooks loosen now, it will fly away and be lost forever, as will the nutrients it took from the Thceyn world while becoming. Everyone hopes this will not happen. It is the means by which the Thceyn world becomes smaller and smaller, and will one day end. At first the surface was close to the world barrier. It was easier to poke through it to put out a zygote, which would then grow quickly from the nutrients that were readily available from the surface. But as the world lost mass and shrank down, the Thceyn people evolved flight to reach the shell. Nowadays they use aircars for convenience, and one day the aircars will be the only way, for the distance will be too great to cover with wings.

The hooks hold. Hurriedly the Thceynling squirms in through the entrance it has made for itself at the birthing pole, a fabricky mass of flexible muscle and organs. Each part that wiggles inside immediately starts coagulating, folding in on itself with instinctive neatness, matching its various organs up to nestle against each other in the correct order. This is a teaching opportunity: doctors bring out their protégées to the roofs and point out regularities and irregularities.

When it is done, it has eyes, layers of light-catching organs that filter out different frequencies and synthesize their findings into one picture. It can see the world now. It is not so sure about this. Its throat, now fully composed, lets out a bray of dismay.

The Thceynsire has swum out to the ocean under the birthing pole to receive its child. It has spread itself out into a thin, vast sheet, and is making an encouraging bioluminescent display on its welcoming fins. Come! The water is warm, and I will catch you.

The Thceynling squirms uncertainly. The surface of the world is dotted with lights and it has some vague sense of being watched. Some vague sense that any cowardice would be quite public. The briefer its hesitation the better. Besides, it does not like dangling all bunched up here like an overgrown chrysalis. The high-frequency parental lights, which demarcate the boundaries of the catching body in the water, are looking pretty good.

The rock’s radiation warmed a thick layer of fungal growth, which the kahaldans cultivated and ate. The boundaries of territories were clearly demarcated, but members moved freely through neighbors’ territory as long as they did so alone and brought their own food. The territory’s master would perch on the fungal hill she had cultivated, the six eyes set around her round golden head like black jewels flickering to see if either of these terms were violated. There was bound to be bloodshed of some form if the newcomer was foraging, or accompanied by a larger war band. Even if they were not, an owner might deliberately misunderstand, if they thought the traveler was easy meat.

Travel was therefore dangerous. And no kahaldan liked it for its own sake, or had anyone in particular to visit. Kahaldans were surrounded by neighbors they could often see and hear, and paid keen attention to the health and and visitors of those neighbors, but ultimately they were solitary creatures. Their greatest ambition was to have larger territories and taller hills, and be away from others. Very little drew them out of the privacy and safety of their homes – except for fission.

Hacheninath was fissioning. She found the process uncomfortable, and the upcoming social ordeal terrifying.

It was not bad from the other side of things. Whenever another kahaldan crossed her territory, they exchanged news about past fissions – who had not survived the aftermath, who had been accepted as a gene donor by the daughters – and more importantly, of upcoming fissions. Whenever she heard of a fission close enough to risk traveling to, she sprayed her territory aggressively with her scent and hurried off to join the party.

Since she had become Hacheninath she had attended around fifty fissions, and all but once had been rejected as a donor by the new kahaldan daughters. This made her sore, and wonder if her mother had accepted some bad gift into her lineage. But she never failed to attend an opportunity when she heard of one nearby – no kahaldan would turn down meat, or the possibility of adding to another’s lineage. On one of those fifty occasions, the witnessing party had examined the twinned and twitching daughters and slaughtered them. Hacheninath could not explain how this had come to be despite their initial goodwill towards the newly fissioned – only that the gathered party had converged quickly, after looking and smelling at each other, onto the consensus that it would be the daughters who would die.

Although the meat had been sweet, this memory naturally brought Hacheninath little joy. It tormented her in between the strange discomfort of fission itself, which took her aback. Although her memory reached back multiple generations, Hacheninath did not remember fission itself. It was precisely the nature of fission that made it hard to retain. As she divided physically, thoughts skittered across the surface of her consciousness that were increasingly not hers. Those thoughts were hard to remember them afterwards, like dreams. For as long as she could remember her thoughts had been like neatly interlocking stepping stones. Now there was discord, disagreement. Not the disagreement of two thoughts she was holding together in comparison but true disagreement of minds that could not share a skull.

Her scent was changing, too. From the left side of her body she sprayed one scent and from the right side another. They were competing even now; she was spent and quite ready to have this over with. Neighbors, smelling or hearing word of the fission, spread the word and congregated.

War bands had a natural shape. Kahaldans congregating to witness fission, therefore, had as close to the opposite shape as possible. Instead of approaching from multiple directions, the kahaldans coalesced into one line and ceremoniously approached the hill at the center of Hacheninath’s territory, carrying little gifts of herbed or mashed fungus. They used an inefficient walk, raising the leg joints unnecessarily high and kicking the feet out in elegant little flicks. Only at the end did they spread out in a ring, watching her convulsing, dividing form.

One part of her delighted, thrilled. Attention.

Another withdrew, felt fear. The newly fissioned could be slaughtered, too. She craved solitude, safety.

It took hours before Hacheninath was fully two. Both sides felt a wave of relief. No more alien emotion. No more clumsiness. No more internal competition for pheromone production, a competition that had driven the temperature of their body uncomfortably high for many hours now.

“What is your name?” their visitors asked.

He said, deciding: “Cheninathuuz.”

She said, deciding: “Cheninathis.”

They both started eating the gifts offered to them by each visitor, mindful to keep more than the accustomed number of legs plunged into the fungal ground while they were still weak from fission. In the area they lived, the direction of gravity was roughly parallel to the ground. A misstep, especially on a hilltop, could mean death before bodily halt.

As Cheninathuuz took each gift, the giver proclaimed her own name, made herself big and smelly, recited a poem in a booming voice, and spat into his mouth. For four of the would-be donors he peeled back his tongue for the inner tongue, a small moist nub that would disassemble the genetic material and take a little part of it into his own genome. The flavor of the spit on his inner tongue was a hundred times richer than any food. The fourth gift of the mouth had a note of bitterness that made him wary, suspect he had been too open. He did not expose his inner tongue after that.

Cheninathis felt pleasure and revulsion at once as she took the spit of each visitor: it was delicious but had an overly deep meaty flavor. An otherstench. She took only one gift of the mouth, to a little shiver of collective hostility.

Cheninathuuz wished she would take a few more. As irritating as he had found sharing a mind with her, he also did not want her to die. She was kin, almost-self. If she took a killing blow he did not think he could take it. He would have to bow in the other direction so that none of his lidless eyes would see it.

When all the gifts were consumed, both of daughters stood up. Things were now quite tense; the air was death-dense. No one moved, but all the kahaldans’ black eyes expanded and contracted rapidly, swiveling to examine each neighbor, reading and changing and transmitting intentions. Cheninathis, who had seen her sibling’s apprehension for her, felt enormous fear and also enormous aggression. Her young fed body thrilled brashly: if they came for her she would not be the only one to die.

The ripples of consensus swelled and coagulated into a wave: it would be Cheninathis or one of the smaller kahaldans at the periphery of the group, half of whose surface was mottled with an illness.

The single kahaldan whose gift of the mouth Cheninathis had accepted raised a limb to point at that mottled kahaldan, and charged.

The victim broke off, running downhill, daring to fling himself forth with gravity’s aid, at risk that he would never reestablish safe contact with the ground again. But the alternative to speed was certain death. The whole party swarmed after him, Cheninathis the most aggressive.

It was quick but bloody. Cheninathis took the head and popped it off as the swarm opposite her tore the legs from the main body. When the unclaimed torso dropped to the ground, a wave of stooped kahaldans scuttled in to dismantle it, knocking Cheninathis down the hill. She stabbed frantically at the ground to come to a safe halt, and just as frantically devoured the head before it could be taken from her by a kahaldan who had not managed to grab any piece.

It was not quite over. She sensed undispersed aggression in the air: there could still be another death. Cheninathuuz said, “Don’t give my lineage a bad name, sister. Take another gift.”

After a pause, Cheninathis approached the largest kahaldan whose gift of the mouth had not been accepted by either daughters, one whose demeanor sent alarm and dislike rippling across her skin. She lied, “Your offering was sweet, Tamachirzik, and your song elegant.” She opened her mouth, and the kahaldan spat. Half of her lineage would contain some of him now, forever. She did not favor him, and so this was bitter to accept.

After that there was little to discuss. Most of the visitors had eaten enough, and now that the latest large kahaldan had a stake in her lineage, the daughters had allies enough that they could not be eaten without a serious fight. Cheninathuuz returned to the top of the territory’s hill.

After looking at him for a few seconds, weighing the odds, Cheninathis followed the dead kahaldan’s scent to his territory and nestled on top of his strange-smelling hill, weary and pessimistic. Her new territory was small and she already had a reputation of weakness.

As far back as she could remember, she had lived a life of acceptable prosperity, rarely at risk of serious starvation. But of course her uncles and aunts who had ended up in this situation tended not to fission and leave memory. She hated being Cheninathis and missed being Hacheninath. Homesick for an old self as well as her actual home, she felt loathing envy for Cheninathuuz.

She awoke from a nightmare-infused sleep to tectonic thunder that rattled the whole world. Immediately after a world-breaking clap of noise, a powerful gust flung her from her hilltop into a valley. She grasped at the fungal bed in a panic to fix herself against the wind. Kahaldans had a powerful instinctive fear of falling away from the ground due to gravity. In her disorientation she did not recognize it was wind, not gravity, displacing her – nor that it was blowing her in the opposite direction from gravity. She did not understand, anyway, the concept of wind.

The same gust flung shards of rock across the landscape, but after some seconds the debris reversed course and fell back from when they had come. But where was that? Half-deafened, Cheninathis raised herself to look in that direction. Most of her neighbor’s territory had gone dark, and the falling rocks were disappearing into that darkness.

She could not make sense of the darkness: it was a pitch black that she had never seen before, having lived in a world where every square inch was colonized by luminous life. Cheninathis went to the edge of the blackness and found the ground had fallen away – into what? A hole in the world. She stayed perched there, staring into that hole, and when her vision finally adjusted saw the lit tumbles of fungus on miles of scree.

In a week the void had become fertile and bright with new fungal growth, and her fear vanished. She and her neighbors advanced into the black, flinging spores and eating the ground as they went. Cheninathis no longer hated being Cheninathis, now that she knew she would not starve.

In some time she felt herself starting to fission again. It had never been like this before. She had always been ringed by witnesses, stifled by their scent, their song. Now her fissioning place was blissfully devoid of kahaldan voices or movement. Instinctively she went to the peak of the closest hill, but it only served to show her how empty the land around her was. No neighbors would carry the news of her splitting, or congregate around her as she writhed. She felt two ways about it:

I’ll go further and further, feast endlessly.

It is time to double back. I don’t want to be so completely alone. I want a gift of the mouth.

Freedom, quiet! I don’t even need to build hills anymore. There are no neighbors to monitor.

Neighbors, rumor – I need them. It’s not safe to be out here. Who knows what’s happening in the rest of the world? How many fissions have we missed, how many opportunities?

But all the opportunity is here. Your thoughts are cowardly thoughts – it’s the influence of that kahaldan whose gift I had to take to avoid becoming the next victim. He must be in you but not me. I am glad to be rid of it!

The thoughts faded abruptly as a layer of bone grew between their fissioning skulls. They peeled away from each other and became panting, feverish, relieved wholes on springy new fungal growth. There were no gifts, so they tore tufts of the ground off to feed their new bodies.

They marveled at something that had changed about the world since their last fission: it was not necessary to keep any of their legs stuck in the ground to stay in place. Now, even if they lost their balance and tumbled sideways, they could easily catch themselves without accelerating into an indefinite fall.

One asked the other, “What is your name?”

He said, deciding: “Ninathispir. And you?”

She said, deciding: “Ninathisoch.”

She went ahead and he turned back. As she went, she began to improvise a song.

The worldquake had shattered a barrier between the air bubble that was the kahaldan homeland and another cell that seemed infinitely large in volume. Although most of it was bare of the fungus that was so eagerly colonizing it, there were patches of less competitive growth that nonetheless became increasingly delicious to the kahaldans who bred it for flavor. Mashing, heating, recombining, ruminating, fermenting this new flora became a great passion of the colonizing kahaldan wave.

Along with cuisine there was song. The custom of improvising song to convince another kahaldan to take genetic material had faded. Fissioning kahaldans went to the periphery of the fungal growth and divided alone. Not all kahaldans had the craving for secretive fission that Cheninathis had, but those who did overwhelmingly populated the new and boundless world. They had no need for the old rituals – the procession of gifts, the poetic recitation, the coercive genetic exchange, and the killings afterwards. But their penchant for song remained, and in fact had expanded now that they could spare mental capacity from tracking an expanding ring of territorial and genetic relationships.

Although kahaldans no longer had strict territory boundaries, they were able to congregate in larger numbers than ever. In the old small world, no kahaldan had actively wanted strangers on her territory – the visitor might eat from her land. Now a revel could gather in an empty patch of land, and once it was depleted of food, disperse to wander once more.

Cheninathis’s descendant Thisochimol discovered that, after three full generations of almost total solitude, the desire to see other kahaldans had assert itself. Where her brother followed the fungal coastline, she doubled back to find others.

Two things shocked her. First was that the total vocabulary of the kahaldans had grown. There was much to talk about now that they had invented games, contests of food, contests of song. She learned as quickly as she could to join in. Second was that the nature of the relationship between herself and others – all others – had changed. The conversations she had now were unlike speaking to a neighbor with whom one had to coexist no matter what, or to a fission witness pressing a gift of the mouth to her, or to a traveler scuttling through, trading gossip for safety. Now that she she spoke to her kind by choice, the speaker she became was different from anything she had ever been before.

In both forced association and isolation Thisochimol had been a cramped self without knowing it. Now she found her interiority, too, was an expanded field for her to explore. Thisochimol fell in and out of bands, alternating between solitude and revelry as she pleased.

When she fissioned, she went to the boundary of fungal growth to do so alone.

One daughter lost her grip on the thin fungal bed and fell up into the air to her death. Shaken, the surviving daughter wondered why the world went through phases across generations where losing your grip on the ground posed sometimes no danger, sometimes immediate danger, and sometimes partial danger that yanked you sideways across the ground. These changes were always gradual, but she had nightmares where they were abrupt, and she was flung into the sky without warning. She saw no reason why this could not happen. Cheninathis had been sleeping when the world had broken bigger, flinging her almost to her death.

Reluctant to name herself until asked by another kahaldan, she returned to the last settlement she’d been part of. She tracked down one of her favorite friends by scent and explained what had happened.

“Oh, how distressing that must have been,” exclaimed the friend, and composed a little dirge for the lost twin on the spot.

Relaxing, the survivor said, “I came to see you because I have not been named yet.”

Seeing her meaning immediately, the friend asked, “What is your name?”

She said, deciding: “Sochimolok.”

He nudged her leg joint gently with his. “Forget the death, Sochimolok, and look to the future. So many kahaldans will enjoy your song at the coming gathering.”

Her spirits were up now so she improvised at him:

Cheninathis flung herself into the dark for freedom. Sated, her descendant Sochimolok reversed course for glory.

Her friend was right. Five generations after the worldquake, almost when direct memory of the old world had faded from the minds of the living, Sochimolok stood at an amphitheater and recited her hour-long poem in front of an unprecedented crowd of almost a thousand.

Sochimolok was the last of her lineage to remember Hacheninath’s life, the life of that trapped and finite world. These fading memories she spun into myth. She sang of the dreamtime.

It would not be correct to call Sochimolok’s song a religious song, as the kahaldans were too imaginatively fractious to have a religion. The audience admired Sochimolok’s story, but much of the fun for them was criticizing and varying it. They did not take her tale as truth, or even consider it a kind of thing whose trueness or falseness mattered. They thought, with each line: if I take this to start, what kind of story can I tell with it? What kind of subversion… what alliteration… what analogy…

Here was Sochimolok’s song, in essence:

Once we came from a plenum of fungus. Infinite space! There were no quarrels. We lay nestled in food, in all directions. We ate and divided and ate and divided. There was no sickness, and we remembered all – to the very beginning, when there was nothing. Nothing tired of nothingness and fissioned into the plenum and the first, whose name was Ka. Ka divided into Kahal and Kasnir. Kahal divided into Kahalda and Kahalmi. Kasnir divided into Kasnirim and Kasniruuz. Then the first quarrel: Kahalda wished to spit into Kasniruuz's mouth. Kasniruuz permitted, but did not peel back the tongue, to make his children Kahalda's children too. Kahalda could have divided in peace. But she coveted more: She wanted Kasniruuz to carry her too into the future. Disagreement, which should be reserved for division, now took place across bodies, unnecessarily. Twin dragged in twin. Kahalda enlisted Kahalmi. Kasniruuz enlisted Kasnirim. Then the first deaths: Kahalmi killed Kasniruuz, and Kasnirim killed Kahalmi. Alone with his foe and the world's first cooling corpses, Kasnirim said: You and I, Kahalda, are all that are left of the first. You remember as well as I do what it is to be alone as Ka: The relief but also the loneliness. I would rather be alone now than to be with you. I will bury you in a nightmare, where you will live in the cramped and deathly way of your revealed preference. Reality begets correct action. Delusion begets incorrect action. Since you have behaved in a deluded way, I will make you a false world to fit your delusion: A sealed pit of hunger and murder. Go quarrel with yourself there for a dreamtime. Become hungry and forget what it was to be here, in the endlessly giving expanse, until my wrath expires, and you can awaken again. My name is Kahaldasochimolok. Many generations have passed, and we have awoken back into the plenum of fungus. We are no longer nightmare-stupid. We do not quarrel and we do not kill. Infinite space! We eat and divide and eat and divide. There is no sickness, and we remember all – to the very beginning, before the bad dream of that cramped and deathly world.

There were no awards, exactly, but it was common knowledge that Sochimolok had given the best performance. She stayed late basking in her glory. Her song was the concatenation of generations of improvisation and polishing.

There was one particular admirer who caught her attention after he improvised part of her own verse back at her in a clever way. His name was Piruchintel. The two of them wandered far, all the way to the border where fungal growth thinned. After hours of talking and singing they spat into each other’s mouths to express their appreciation of each other, although of course Sochimolok kept her inner tongue covered.

Piruchintel made a noise of strong pleasure and said, “You have a wonderful taste,” implying that he had taken her spit into his inner tongue.

Sochimolok guessed he was lying to curry favor. Like the majority of kahaldans, she had not admitted anyone else’s genetic material into her lineage since her ancestor entered the new world. But then she thought, why shouldn’t he take my gift of the mouth? I am the greatest poet in the world, as far as I know. What could be more important to be better at than poetry? What higher thing could a living being aspire to?

She said, “You are a good poet yourself. Have you developed your own cosmology to sing about?”

“All the good ideas are taken by the giants.” Piruchintel’s visible eyes flickered in a flirtatious pattern. “But the variation I’ve been working on is that the dispute between Kahalda and Kasniruuz was poetic and not reproductive in nature. Reproductive dispute, how base. I think that, before the dreamtime, we didn’t have reproductive disputes at all. Ka and immediate descendants must have lived as we did, thinking mostly of song.”

It was too dim to read each other’s eye movements now. Sochimolok was glad for this – she thought Piruchintel’s idea was foolish, but she also wanted to keep spitting into his mouth, especially if there was a chance he was actually taking it with his inner tongue. She did not want him to read her disdain.

Piruchintel continued, “I think we invented the gift of the mouth after we entered the dreamtime, not before. Why? To live in a tiny, enclosed world without strife, kahaldans had to have more stake in each other’s future, and willingly trade genetic material after they divided. Otherwise there would be endless bloodshed.”

Restless, they began to move again, further into the lake of darkness past the fungal layer, onto actual rock. Now they had to be especially careful not to fall up into the night. They wedged each foot into a small crevice and moved one limb at a time. Wandering here was foolish, but they were both healthy, adventurous, and high on proving themselves to each other.

“There was bloodshed anyway,” said Sochimolok. She shivered over the last murder she’d committed, generations ago, when she was newly Cheninathis – the crunch of the kahaldan’s head in her maw, reverberating in her own bones. This was reprehensible to her now. Once that brain matter had been a delicacy; now she quivered with horror. She liked that the memory would disappear entirely soon, after her next fission.

“True. The oldest ancestor I remember was in war bands with her twin and cousins. She killed at least eleven kahaldans before her war band was slaughtered and she fled into the unbounded world. It’s one reason I try to take genetic material from others. I want poetry, not war, in my lineage… Sochimolok, do you see that?”

“What?”

“Over there – it’s light.”

“Surely not,” Sochimolok said, but then she saw it too. It was a long, dispersed line of dim bioluminescence on the horizon, which had been invisible until their eyes adjusted to the pitch night of uncolonized rock.

“Did we get turned around?” Piruchintel wondered uneasily.

“Impossible,” said Sochimolok. “We’ve been climbing downhill all this time, and that’s lower than we are.”

“But we’re at the edge of the known world! We specifically chose to have the poets’ gathering here, at the furthest edge, because of the themes being celebrated.”

Sochimolok said, “Do you think some kahaldans decided to traverse all that distance on bare rock and set up a different colony – one the wave behind them would reach within a generation anyway – for novelty?”

Piruchintel sounded relieved. “That must be it. Perhaps it was just one kahaldan to start with – one who wanted to play at being Ka. Out alone in the darkness alone, who knows what kind of poetic inspiration she must have experienced? Perhaps they’ll come up with an epic to beat yours, Sochimolok.”

She appreciated his attempt to dispel the unease, but the strangeness of the horizon killed any answering levity in her. Silence settled between them as they stared at the distant gash of life, perched on the closing edge of the dreamtime.

Notes:

I've had the idea of sapient mitotic species for over a year, but it was in ideas limbo until I read @imperialauditor's tweet: "something I think a lot about is Robin Hanson's idea of The Dreamtime - that we live in a tiny gap between crushing Malthusianism (labor supply >> demand) in the past and in the future".

Jingyan, normally unshy about setting the direction on adventures outdoors or around the city, did not seem to know what to do with the tense little silences that settled over them sometimes. The silence came frequently after Lin Shu caught Jingyan looking at him with an odd, open look on his face.

Lin Shu looked, too, but he was better at not being caught. Jingyan had tells when he was about to look at you. He sort of geared up to do it with his shoulders. Lin Shu, on the other hand, constantly flicked his attention from place to place, eager for some new curiosity. So he had become accustomed to catching Jingyan looking at his face, or sometimes his neck or hands, and then (incriminatingly!) darting his gaze away at once instead of maintaining the smiling eye contact of one who believed it a most normal thing for a young man to do – look at his friend in affection.

And it was, of course. A normal thing to do.

On the night of his seventeenth birthday, Lin Shu drank a few cups of the fragrant, deceptively mellow rice wine that Prince Qi had gifted him in a snow-white ceramic jug with a jade stopper, and improvised a poem teasing Jingyan for offending so many people on one of his recent quests. Jingyan had wanted a harsher punishment for the owner of a large quarry ten li north of the capital, who had been bribing prison guards in exchange for prisoners for use in labor. Jingyan had not pleased the Ministry of Justice or the Ministry of Works by the strident asking. The matter implicated a number of prison guards who were not easy to replace. And addressing the matter thoroughly slowed down work in the quarry.

Lin Shu was not light on the real compliments that turned a verse that could have been a cruel jab into an act of loving friendship. His guests laughed at Jingyan but also liked him more for it – even the ones whose renovations had been slowed down as the nearest supply of new stone fluctuated. Jingyan himself was most satisfying to observe – alternatingly retreating into his garments, glowering in outrage, glowering with shyness, and scrunching his face up in mortified pleasure.

The poem, Prince Qi later told Lin Shu, was a better lesson for Jingyan on how the quarry conflict had played out than any lesson he himself had tried to impart. “Normal lectures hit his thick skull and decide to march around rather than chance the passage between his ears,” Prince Qi said. "Who knew the solution was to get our Xiaoshu drunk and improvise verse?" His compliment lit up Lin Shu like a sky lantern – in one tipsy, inspired flight of improvisation, he had made his friend blush so gorgeously and pleased the Crown Prince.

But Lin Xie had not been so delighted.

A few days after the birthday, he called his son into his study.

“Who are Prince Qi’s enemies at court?” he said, before the water for tea had even started to boil. He was an efficient man.

“The other adult princes who have any spark in them,” said Lin Shu immediately. “Prince Xian. Prince Yu, although he’s only a three pearl Prince. Maybe Prince Pei.”

“And?”

“…the emperor himself.”

“The emperor has an interesting relationship with Prince Qi. Xiao Jingyu is filial, righteous, and competent. And while His Majesty is genuinely proud of Prince Qi’s talents… he himself was once a competent son.” There was a taboo little silence, a look exchanged between father and son. A chain of such looks had taught Lin Shu the circumstances of the emperor’s ascendance, which were illegal to describe in the detail that Lin Xie could have. “And it is not a comfortable thing for an emperor to have his eldest son come into his own so strongly at a time when he himself is still in his prime.”

“Father,” Lin Shu said uncomfortably. He was having the very early prickles of knowing that this pertained to him, not seeing how, but already knowing it wouldn’t please him. His father wouldn’t bring up something so unpleasant if he didn’t want to discourage Lin Shu off something he really wanted to do, which…

…couldn’t be the campaign, so it had to be about –

…Jingyan, who gave him so many of those delicious, wide open looks –

…whom he had serenaded so eagerly on his birthday.

Lin Shu was normally eager to skip several steps ahead in a conversation with his father, who would sometimes go still, taken aback, and look at his son with warm astonished pride. But Lin Shu didn’t this time. He was sick with the leap he’d made. He internally rocked back into a kind of crouch, unwilling to help the conversation go there.

He had been thinking, for months, that he would find the perfect, gracious, risk-free opening, and then… after a conversation whose shape he could only vaguely foresee, he and Jingyan could find themselves a nice empty room in the Lin residence where he’d trail his mouth down the sun-gold valley in Jingyan’s back.

He hadn’t plotted how to arrive at that moment, but he had been sure that somehow, he would.

Lin Xie said, “Do you see –”

“You’re asking me to give up Jingyan.”

“Heaven forbid, my son,” Lin Xie said. “‘Give up Jingyan’ – I have no intention of separating you two. As long as you are sensible about it. Prince Qi’s position is more precarious than you think. He has made powerful enemies. Enemies who could make a protracted, messy scandal out of Prince Qi’s protegee sibling taking up with Marshal Lin’s son. They will air throughout all of Jinling that you, not fearing pregnancy, have done things that are only done in certain brothels. You could be interrogated in Yangju Palace itself as to who had the receiving role. It will drag on so bitterly that you’ll barely want to do anything with each other by the end of it.”

“He’s my best friend,” Lin Shu said, voice shaking. “I wouldn’t stop caring for him because other people make a fuss over something that so many men…”

“You’re young. You don’t know. The court isn’t in tumult. Because Prince Qi is so dominant, the competition is not so fierce right now. But that is not a stable fact about the world! There is plenty that is unsafe about Prince Qi’s position. And the moment it becomes unstable – Xiaoshu, you haven’t seen it. The factions whirl and clash and reform. Long-standing marriage contracts are canceled. Men are exiled for shockingly petty things if their enemies can convince the emperor that it would balance the court or remove a threat to him. Your servants are beset by offers to spy on you, or put poisons in your food. And sometimes, people die.”

Lin Shu was filial. If his father thought these truly were risks, he could not take them. So he had already lost.

But he also could not stop from arguing. “But everyone knows Prince Xian visited the brothels of the southern style, downriver.”

“It’s different when it’s the marshal’s son. You know it. And it would be even better if Jingyan had visited brothels, southern or not. He’s of an age where he could have been going, for many years. But he hasn’t. And the way he cares about you is more than… it is not entertainment to him. It is clear in the way he looks at you – which you encourage.”

Lin Shu, who could not deny it, flushed deeply.

Lin Xie continued, “Casual liaisons are forgivable. But a deep and physical entanglement between a prince and the Lin heir, in the household of the emperor’s most powerful, but disfavored, son? The emperor himself would love to chastise Prince Qi for encouraging misconduct, and drag out his humiliation. Jingyan would ride it out, as the emperor bears young Jingyan no ill will. But the emperor would enjoy… well, you tell me. What would he enjoy?”

“Damaging the ties between his powerful son and the most powerful marshal in Da Liang,” Lin Shu said dully. “And weakening both of them.”

In a gesture that was unusual these days, Lin Xie reached out and took his son by the hand. “You are young. I know this is close to first love for you. Recall that young men under its spell are notorious for foolishness. Are you going to do anything foolish?”

“No,” said Lin Shu, miserably but sincerely. His father let him flee shortly afterwards. The tea was never even poured.

Lin Shu stopped playing the delicious game of catching Jingyan in the act of looking that way at him. He did not improvise extended poems in Jingyan’s honor. Spring came and ripened into summer, and he moderated when he let himself go swimming if Jingyan was in the party. Jingyan’s shoulderblades, damp, were sometimes too much for Lin Shu.

Most painfully of all, when they were walking around a garden after a musical performance at Prince Qi’s favorite Julu Court, and Jingyan asked to walk to a isolated riverside pavilion fifteen minutes away to admire the moon, Lin Shu said – after a pause long enough that they both knew Lin Shu was answering the real question – that the walk was too far, and the moon, while beautiful, was not in the phase he liked it best in.

It felt cruelly blunt. But if he left Jingyan in suspense, Jingyan would try again. And Lin Shu couldn’t bear to say I don’t want you more than once.

He did not dare to look at Jingyan while answering. His voice shook audibly, in fact, as he spoke. He was so tempted to tell the truth. To blurt out that he wanted to, and it was just because of politics that they couldn’t. But that would have fed a fire between them for years, he sensed, one that could burn their houses. It was best extinguished before it strayed too far from the kiln. So he fed it ashes, and choked.

After a pause, Jingyan said, “You’re right, it is a long walk,” in a low, unsteady voice.

Lin Shu felt like a war horse had trampled his chest in. He wrapped an arm around Jingyan’s shoulders and drew him close. “But we’ll have another round, right, while listening to that… is that a trio? It sounds like the lady He Guiying is playing in lead.”

“Very distinctive,” Jingyan said. His shoulders were tense. He clearly did not want to be held, so Lin Shu let go. The trampled feeling in his chest, incredibly, got worse. It was as if their bodies now held a terrible charge and they could only hurt each other by touching.

“She has that particular style at the high notes of the zither.”

“Yes. The kind of trilly plucking.”

“So let’s go back in. They have chilled pear slices to go with the wine. It dissolves like ice in your mouth.”

Lin Shu found an excuse to go on an extended hunting trip with a lesser noble family for a week after that. He felt too raw. He pretended to go tracking and then sulked in the woods. On the fourth day there he managed to cry, by focusing grimly on the way it had felt to touch Jingyan and feel all that lovely, and loved, bone and muscle lock up against him. Once it started it went on for some time, and he thoroughly dampened the inside of his sleeve all over.

Crying that hard made him feel like something in him had broken, but in a way where the fracture had been set and could now heal properly. The next day he managed to muster up a real smile for his host, and play with the household’s children.

When he returned to Jinling, he and Jingyan kept riding and sparring and drinking and loving each other, but Jingyan completely stopped giving him the looks.

Faction politics remained tame, to Lin Shu’s eyes. Prince Qi maintained his station. The emperor softened, hardened, softened, hardened. Prince Xian continued to fuck men, and was not condemned, because he fucked women just as often and did none of it with heart. No one died of poison. No one of note was exiled. Lin Shu ached, and saw no danger his sacrifice protected him against.

My dad had assured Ms. Morgenstern she wouldn't have to do any childcare. This wasn't something she'd demanded, I came to understand, but something he'd extravagantly promised to make it more appealing to take me in. She never brought it up, but he did, after the third week. He brought it up in the form of, "I know we agreed I'd..."

I know I said I'd take him to school every morning and pick him up, I know I said I'd go grocery shopping two thirds of the time, I know I'm the one who should take him to the dentist, but –

But. Ms. Morgenstern's head always cocked neatly at that word. At first it looked like mild curiosity. And as the months went by, the tilt took on a distinct air of sarcasm, even though the expression never changed. My dad noticed, too. At the beginning, Ms. Morgenstern used to suggest alternatives: "Very well, I'll take him to the dentist, and you do the third grocery run as well." My dad would immediately accept. But then they would start chaining, because my dad would forget the make-up chores. She started suggesting more arduous chores to make up for his absence rather than a roughly equivalent one, and my dad would argue or bargain or deny.

I hearad him lose his temper five or six months in. "For god's sake!" he roared, and the roar brought me slinking over to the banisters at one in the morning to look at the shiny crowns of their heads bent fiercely towards each other. "Have you forgotten that I paid for this house the past two years? Doesn't that count for something?"

"Of course it counts for something, Andy," Ms. Morgenstern said in a slow, precise voice that sent a weird thrill up my spine. I had never heard her truly pissed off before, and it reminded me of documentary lions stalking forward on their big soft paws. "It's made a big difference in my life and I'm very grateful. But there's a point at which two years of housing and support in my education meets however many years of being the primary caretaker of a child you said would be just like a housemate to me, nothing more. We're not at that point yet, but I want to talk about what happens when it catches up –"

My dad was off again, shouting at her about being more of an accountant or debt collector than a girlfriend, almost drowning out the end of her sentence, "And what that's going to do to our relationship". I didn't want to hear any more. I oozed back into my room, feeling like pond scum that had grown legs and snuck into their house. It didn't help that I knew, just from hearing that argument, that Ms. Morgenstern was in the right. And it didn't help that I knew, from the past half-year of living in Casa Ruiz-Morgenstern, that she was the better parent. She was the one who kept showing up.

Ms. Morgenstern packed my school lunches without fail. Ms. Morgenstern had taken me shopping for clothes last month without being prompted when she noticed my clothes were too tight. Ms. Morgenstern filled out the paperwork for my school and doctor's visits and even some of the custody handover from my mom to my dad, when my dad left the forms piled up on the kitchen table. Ms. Morgenstern showed up – on time, cleanly dressed, not smelling like whiskey, not laughingly making excuses about a scheduling confusion, not laughingly teasing me about how much I needed chaffeuring and how nice it was going to be when I could drive.