But Thomas Aiken Is Dead - Part I (6 page)

The Interlokutor:

The Cadence has requested information regarding your infant.

Atia:

How could that possibly be of any use?

The Interlokutor:

It is believed that the incident has a great deal to do with your transgression and eccentricities.

Atia:

I’m not engaging in yet another moral debate about selfsense creation. Read my thesis in the Archenon library. I made it perfectly clear how I feel.

The Interlokutor:

I am familiar with your thesis. One section particularly interested me. “Reproduction is the essential character of a living system. It provides it a distinction from those things which are not alive. In shirking our reproductive ability we shirk the one quality left in cadential life which separates us from dead stones and mortar.” Is that truly what you believe?

Atia:

Why else would I have written it?

The Interlokutor:

A political display perhaps.

Atia:

I have even less interest in politics than I do in this investigation. You can have the Breacher look into my selfsense and check that if you feel inclined.

The Interlokutor:

I believe you can be trusted. Do you hold this belief because you bore the infant, or did you bear the infant and come to this belief?

Atia:

It is how I have felt for as long as I can remember.

The Interlokutor:

And so childbirth was an experiment?

Atia:

No.

The Interlokutor:

What then?

Atia:

A need fulfilled. Don’t think that this is another
eccentric ningen-ersatz
fixation. It isn’t. It took me au to find a denizen willing to help, and even then I had to bribe him at huge expense.

The Interlokutor:

Who was the artisan?

Atia:

Do you think I’m a simpleton? I doubt you could even find him if I told you his name anyway. He understood the need to reproduce in a way you’re incapable of doing. Most of the infants in the Cadence are his work. He’s prolific.

The Interlokutor:

Curious though, since the process is so simple. One would think any ningen-ersatz could learn his methods.

Atia:

The process is far from
simple.
He took a model of my selfsense and selected certain essential parts. He did not tell me which. I did not wish to know. Then he allowed for random mutation, as well as injecting selfsense material from some anonymous donor denizens and told me to return in a half-piat. I did as I was told. You can’t imagine the excitement. A
child
was coming into the world.
My
child.

The Interlokutor:

You knew that it was forbidden by Cadence decree, of course.

Atia:

What does that matter? By the time she was ready she would be a fully fledged selfsense in her own right. She would have to be allowed to live. I returned as the artisan had asked and by his side stood a ningen infant. I introduced myself as her mother and that is what she referred to me as for the rest of our relationship. I suppose the artisan had been careful to embed her with a sort of matriarchal craving. It matched my own craving for an infant.

The Interlokutor:

Naturally you were regarded as heretikal.

Atia:

Of course. Few of my friends, even ningen-ersatz, wished to associate with me when they heard the news, much less meet the infant. I did not care. A few, Tsun Uri for one, remained by my side. I hadn’t imagined child bearing would garner so much animosity.

The Interlokutor:

It is an abhorrent violation of Cadence decree.

Atia:

I was clear about not desiring a moral debate. If you wish to hear the facts, I will give them to you. But I won’t be evangelised at by a half-construct.

The Interlokutor:

As you wish.

Atia:

I think the infant liked the attention. I often left her in Tsun Uri’s company for education purposes. She was not as enamored with ningen-ersatz life as I expected. She didn’t like ningen mode eksist, for one thing. Instead she would often present as a galaxy or weather system.

The Interlokutor:

She asked of the other tiers then?

Atia:

Of course. She was extremely curious about the Cadence.

The Interlokutor:

And what did you tell her?

Atia:

That if she so wanted to she could journey elsewhere and experience other modes of eksist. I feared that she might find one she preferred to Orange Tier, but what could I do? This is one of the many nuances of ningen parenting; the folly of offspring.

The Interlokutor:

You think her desire to see the Cadence in full a kind of folly?

Atia:

I think any denizen who removes themselves from a ningen mode of eksist is carrying out a sort of folly. I would not exempt her from that judgement just by the virtue of being my daughter.

The Interlokutor:

And how much longer did you both retain a relationship?

Atia:

I do not know. Some time.

The Interlokutor:

You were the secondary horologist once. Surely your timekeeping is exemplary!

Atia:

That was a long while ago. I measure the passage of events by the contents of their happenings now, not piats, or seconds, or au. In that respect, with the infant, much time passed. Much happened. She had my essence but not my nature. She was her own woman, as Aiken would say.

The Interlokutor:

Did you educate her?

Atia:

Of course. I had asked the artisan to birth her tabula rasa, not precocious and knowing like those Cadence-generated monstrosity infants.

The Interlokutor:

Monstrosities?

Atia:

Born parentless. It must be extremely difficult for them.

The Interlokutor:

They are created by the Cadence with all the knowledge of the Cadence already pregnant in their minds. They’re not at a lack for information.

Atia:

I wasn’t talking of information or its lack. But to answer your question, yes, I educated her well, not just in ningen matters but cadential too. I told her of the other tiers and their strange qualities. I told her the minds that lived in them had little to do with anything we would understand on our tier, that they didn’t need for language or physical presence, or even each other as far as I could tell. I told her that beyond the Cadence was an entire biosphere still thriving, and our distant ancestors were still thriving too, though changed beyond recognition.

The Interlokutor:

And she cultivated an interest in Erde-Physical after that?

Atia:

No. Nor historiks. She only wanted to know more of the other tiers, always the other tiers. Of course my knowledge is limited. Orange Tier is full of those that have lived for long durations in the tiers above and migrated downwards, and so she sought them out. She returned regularly with stories she had collected. Mother, did you know that on Indigo Tier they share their selfsenses? No I did not, infant. Mother, did you know that on Violet Tier they are trying to fuse with matter itself? No infant. How curious. Mother did you know – and so on. I knew what was coming of course, though I was careful not to admit it to myself.

The Interlokutor:

Her exodus.

Atia:

Yes. She came to me after several au and stated quite calmly that she would be leaving with another denizen for Indigo Tier. Why Indigo Tier? I asked, but knew the answer already.

The Interlokutor:

Selfsense surgery.

Atia:

Of course. She intended to make herself free of the ningen-ersatz aspects of her eksist, to have them gauged. I pleaded that she reconsider. It did little good. She inherited my stubbornness in full. The most she would tell me of her motives was that the Cadence was an almost infinite expanse and that she felt a great desire to experience it. I regretted having the artisan implant with her with such a lust for discovery. Why though, I asked, must you remove you ningenity? But of course I knew the answer to this also. No ningen-ersatz can survive even for a piat on the upper tiers. They are too exotic, too alien. Space yawns wide open, time curls itself into a Meobius waltz. If she wished to experience the upper tiers she would have to have her selfsense modified and expanded. I was a Violet Tierer once. I remember those states of mind. But where I found only fear in the face of all that strangeness, I knew she would find intrigue and some form of long lasting contentment.

The Interlokutor:

Why not just force her to remain with you? Force is a vital aspect of the ningen parenting ritual, is it not?

Atia:

What would I win by that? She would only come to resent me. There was nothing to be done but allow it. She would return to me if she so wanted, if my regard for her was mutual.

The Interlokutor:

And did she?

Atia:

No.

Fran,

I’ve been beavering away like an Oxford scholar, trawling the net for anything I can find. There are a great many things I didn’t know about you. Highlights include: A correspondence the Tribune put online between yourself and a Ugandan general where you brutally attack him for neglecting his troops. There are old websites of yours still running too – a photo archive, a music podcast, and a blog about one of your old cats. I wonder how long all of that will stay up there. Long after we’re both gone, I suspect. We’re really just archiving our lives for our great grandchildren, aren’t we?