To Yulia Limorenko The white nights of the North started giving way to the dawns the color of carnation pink. A glider was driving smoothly above the grasslands of Siberia and the rivers where the ice had broken up; from this glider, one could see where at the Taymyr Peninsula, cloudberries began bearing and hear that in the purple twilight around the town of Khandyga, reindeer does were mooing mournfully. Beyond the towns of Pevek and Tiksi, the long curtain of Aurora Borealis hid the stars, the light of which diminished next to those waves of color; and geese and loons were calling to one another above the lagoon of Getl'angen.
This season, just like every year before, everyone -- the professors, the graduates, the mentors, and the parents -- couldn't talk about anything except one subject. This subject was on the mind of every person on the coast, in the boreal forest, on the grassland plains, aboard the ships and in the outer stations; it made them tremble in anticipation, made them collect their strength, train their willpower, gather the information, exchange their experiences. It made them try and process the unknowable, to understand the functioning of the enormous system that transcended generations, transcended the organic and the inorganic that was as complex and incredible as their world itself.
And the receivers were revolving slowly, and the Large Reflector was shining under the hands of the cleaning bots...
#
Toskhol[
1] lay on the margin of the brook that was pushing its way through the floor slabs which were hiding the sewers of the Verkhoyansk school; which were, in turn, hidden beneath lichen and snowdrops. The shrink wrap preserved just enough heat for him to chill and to meditate. The sakiva branches, dressed in downy fuzz, bathed in the clear water; one of the sakiva shoots got carried away in the stream and washed up on Toskhol's palm. As this glossy stalk with its delicate buds touched the human's hand with shyness, it also conveyed to him part of its prana, and it turned for a single moment for a whole universe concentrated at the tips of the human receiver's receptors. Toskhol saw the juices flowing underneath the varnished bark of the sakiva tree, and smelled the intoxicating fragrance of the tar that was seeping from the cracks in the bark. He learned who and when cultivated this particular hybrid variety, why its genotype was different from that of the others, when this three-forked trunk was planted (specially that it would be comfortable to sit upon) and even read the mental note: 'Igor and Chimuka arranged a date under this tree tomorrow night. Please, find another place to rest at that time, if at all possible'.
#
Owu nang kadobraho:
You ask me what the Immersion is and why it makes me so anxious. Funny, really -- it is much the same kind of immersion you and I undertook last year. The humans have managed to engineer a robot capable of withstanding the pressure of the subsurface ocean on your home moon. But we haven't yet created a space suit for your species, and they remain incapable of leaving Enceladus; so you have to satisfy yourself with short and irregular second hand samples of information about the outside world. There is some unfairness and one-sidedness about it that contradicts the Law on Freedom of Information. I've yet to understand why your thinkers refuse to attempt transferring the conscience matrix into an artificial body; I hope you could provide some convincing arguments in defense of this point of view.
My true body remained in space, under the protection of the station, while my mind was in the replica of a manta ray, a terrestrial oceanic animal, made of paragraphene. As I swam next to you through the alternating cold and active zones of the ocean, I too was fighting the rising turbulence; I too was trying to reach the trench where the atrophied Immobiles slumber. Similar to the corals in our southern seas, they're remnants of whole tribes and clans, turned after their termination into some sort of teaching machines, or oracles, or libraries... Or am I mistaken, and those magnificent artifacts of your civilization are mainly intended for a psychological transformation of an individual and then, an entire swarm? We have a long way to go until the full understanding... I perceived and discovered your world with my own senses, although through the lens of an artificial body. How I wish that you had the same opportunity to understand and sense my world!
I got carried off topic on a tangent by my memories -- though, perhaps, it was my intuition leading me on to a different approach to the same topic. It seems that the Immobiles serve the same purpose as the Stream, for we have no relics of the past except material objects and recordings. Maybe, somewhere on a subconscious level we've always been trying to achieve the oneness of all that have ever lived, the direct communication of the historical evidence and the possibility of viewing history from different points of view while remaining our own selves. Such is the purpose of the Trial!
Maybe, I say, for I don't think anyone knows for sure what the Stream has become during the last century and a half. It began as a simulation for psychohistorical processes; then it branched out, like Yggdrasil from Old Norse myths, and grew through the past and the future, through the noosphere and the technosphere of Earth and the other inhabited planets. Only cyber-physiologists and neurolinguists might be able to encompass it with their systems of equations. My training will continue for the next terrestrial decade or two; right now I'm only beginning to approach grasping the whole picture.
As you stand in the Stream, it conveys to you a part of the matrix that belonged to someone who used to live here before you, in ancient times; a part of their psychological structure and memories. This experience becomes a part of you, forever, and your soul in turn gives the material for the World Tree. I couldn't say what patterns govern this process -- if, indeed, there are such patterns. Some say that the other's personality chooses someone different from them or someone who complements them; therefore, we get that which we lack. I personally think this process is a lot more subtle and sophisticated; the laws that it follows cannot be simple and mechanical, unlike with artificial living and self-sustaining systems.
At any rate, another person chooses you, and you will never be the same again.
I know that mammy has been in the shoes of an ardipithecus of African savannah millions years ago, and the other mother has been transformed into a mercenary during one of the European wars. Father never speaks of his experience.
But I will tell you!
Aswami gerondio keht Toskhol #
On the day of the Trial the sakiva started to blossom. Two hummings were hovering next to one of the buds, flapping their small wings rapidly. Looking at their aura, Toskhol could see that one of them was alive, but the other created by Alya, an eighth-grader, and her mentor.
Toskhol and his father stood on the very threshold, and father had his arms around the son's shoulders. When the boy's mother was away on a diplomatic mission for three years, father and son lived together; even so, the mother would sing him a lullaby through the visor every evening. Now she was holding Toskhol's left hand, and Warsi Silverface of Cepheus, who would take care of the boy while both his parents were away building a base on Enceladus and who taught him the art of performing in a light show and the frequency language, was holding his right hand.
The heavy door opened, and they entered.
#
I have kept my promise, oh my friend from the nest-that-is-hidden-in-the-flat-rock in the lower rookery of Verinhato.
I have been inside the body of a man from the twentieth and the twenty-first centuries of European Christian calendar and have seen everything through his own eyes.
He spent all his life in a country named Russia without ever leaving it. His life coincided with a period of degradation, counter-revolution and social upheaval. The few got fabulously rich at the expense of the rest of their society, but for those such as my guest life became a desperate necessity to work for those select few in order to ensure their own physical survival.
Luck wasn't on his side from the start. After he married his high school sweetheart, they had a child with a chromosomal disorder. Back then people could perform neither genetic analysis nor medical treatment of anomalies. So his daughter became a so-called "cripple", a burden and a dependent.
Even his own parents demanded that he abandon his helpless child and commit her to a specialized institution, but the children in those institutions weren't treated very well and often died early. His wife died under peculiar circumstances; she might have committed suicide due to the pressures of the society and her own depression. He was left alone and had to pay a woman next door to babysit his daughter. To get money, he had to resort to selling all sorts of knick-knacks outside, no matter the weather, even when it was freezing -- and he had no necessary clothing or equipment!
Can you imagine existing like this for years, when being able to purchase anything at all was something to celebrate?! His family was suffocating on the margins of an unfair society, fending for themselves, left with no help and no attention from their contemporaries. He used to study at the university and write poetry -- now he became merely a cog in the great machine that worked to the benefit of the bankers and the capitalists.
Finally he managed to find a job at the factory where people produced details for machines of one kind with the help of machines of another kind. The machinery was primitive, still in its conception stage; again surplus value was created by hard, drudging physical labor at the expense of the workers' health. He tried to establish a union, to inspire in his coworkers a desire to fight for better working conditions and at least a living wage, but he failed. Do you understand? He didn't achieve anything, anything at all in his life! This job he also lost -- he just got fired one day, and the security threw him out. He began complaining, but the owner hired some crooks, and they beat him up. One day he ingested some alcohol, fell asleep right on the pavement, and never woke up. People were walking by, and no one paid any attention to him or helped him.
And now I'm thinking: did he know he was a hero? Did he know it's thanks to him and the others like him, who never gave up even in the darkest of times, that our life expectancy now is two hundred years, and we can use radiant energy or go down as deep as magma?
He used to dream of buying a telescope -- to watch the stars with his daughter, but her medicine was more important. His name was Victor, and his daughter's -- Lyubov. It means Love. THE END
