Tarot Fic: The World
Nov. 4th, 2007 10:25 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
Requested by: (requested off LJ)
Fandom: C.J. Cherryh's Cyteen
Spoilers: Large chunks of the plot.
Lyric from: Elliott Smith, "Everything Reminds Me Of Her" -- And I've gotta hear the same sermon all the time now from you people
The walls of the living room were plasticized woolwood, the blue-grey of Cyteen's old ecosystem, which was dying now back to red rocks to be replaced by human and Sol-system green; but going too far outside the terraformed city-centers and Administrative Areas still meant breathing equipment and suits, plane flights still meant decontamination, because Cyteen's native life killed humans right back if it could, from the random path of immense platytheres and ankyloderms that could crush buildings and support systems to the impersonal breath of invisible spores that had already been killing Ariane Emory's predecessor before a thoroughly human murder finished the process.
Ariane pretended to study the paintings rather than the walls even after Florian handed her her vodka-and-orange and vanished to handle her meeting. Not now, she'd said, not today, and he'd read her mood in those four words and moved smoothly to pick up her notes and her briefings; he'd cover what he could, as always, and set aside the rest for her attention, and on his way to do that he'd tell Catlin the state she was in. They passed things that way, in meetings out of her sight. It was, she thought, an outright necessity for dealing with her. The two of them together could -- almost match her, in some things. There had never been many who could; there were fewer now. Catlin and Florian, the Warricks, not much else.
Her predecessor's generation was gone, that was one thing. The first Ariane Emory had been a hundred twenty when rejuv failure and cancer were trumped by a blow to the head and a liquid-nitrogen leak. Jane Strassen, Ari's own maman, the surrogate-mother who agreed to raise a child she'd known she'd have to abandon: Jane had been next; the Nyes after, Giraud from rejuv failure culminating in brain hemorrhage, Denys from -- from Florian and Catlin, when it came down to it. From his own craziness and desperation and fear. Victoria Strassen had simply grown thinner and thinner and not woken up one morning, her acerbic reactionary rants a relief to be rid of even as Ari regretted the loss of needed doses of humility. Yanni Schwartz's rejuv was holding up so far, but he could see the wall coming; Ari added up the years and came up with a number she didn't like. She needed him yet, dammit, needed him to hold down Administration for her, needed him to hold the Bureau seat; she needed a good ten years to have business tied up to take Admin, and she was too damned young to win the Bureau election on her own merits. The only viable candidate in the family would be Jordan Warrick, and that would drag the entire murder investigation back in front of the media again; nobody would win that election --
Nobody but the Nyes, and that wouldn't help; it would be only the dead senior Nyes' goals that would be met, and those were not Ari's. Even their younger selves wouldn't profit. Giraud-junior was thirty now, Denys-junior younger, and both were bright, but the painful paranoia and the obsessive brilliance that had held Reseune and Cyteen and Union together through her interregnum were both lacking. They needed the stresses of the War their predecessors had lived through to replicate their partnership, their separate and cooperative kinds of genius.
That boded poorly -- for the next generation.
The next iteration.
Ari refocused, from the blue-grey blur of the woolwood to the painting she stood in front of, the oldest record of the oldest star but Sol: Barnard's, where Alpha Station had been built and been lost, drawn by equally lost Argo's crew. Sketched in the pens the old spacers used to mark the charts, in the sublight days, when it was years from station to station and star to star. They'd worked in generations then, and been proud of it. Now spacers flew in weeks and months instead of years, their lives extended by jump's time-stretch and by Cyteen-born rejuv drugs, and the generations they counted were stationers'.
The only people who thought in generations now were the Family, were Reseune; because they worked in them, worked in lives, fifteen and twenty years for an experiment run; and Ari --
The experiments her predecessor had begun were in their fourth generation and their sixth; and one of them she might live to see the end of, and the other, she knew with a black certainty, she would not.
The influences that had let them replicate her predecessor's genius, her own special ability to extrapolate the mindsets and intersections of humanity at large, were dying. The Nye brilliance might be lost for good. The Strassens, the family that had made her second iteration able to use that ability without losing touch with the individual humanity ... their own spaceborne genius was gone, too, devolved into planetside women who fluttered and fussed and worried more about makeup than genetics.
There were the Warricks. There was that. Jordan Warrick, her wary and egotistic adversary-ally; Justin Warrick, more flexible, more tuned to the problems she worked on -- that pattern alternated generations. There was time yet for another Jordan, and thirty years or so after that, another Justin, tuned again to educate a third replicate of Ari herself. If they could find the right stresses -- without the Nyes there to bind her mind down and tie it in and force her to outthink them.
There was Petros Ivanov, who knew every detail of her biology, through two iterations ... too damned much about it. Petros had never been able to stand up to her before; he had never insisted --
Her hand tightened on the glass she held, and she wanted to throw it at the wall, but Barnard's Star looked back out at her and forestalled it. Mankind's first reach out to another star. The first real hope the human race had ever had, and the first whisper of the damnation it faced. Challenge and warning. And irreplaceable.
Three steps away, and she set the glass down untouched. Alcohol, for today, contraindicated. Florian hadn't known. That was something.
Catlin probably did.
"I'm fine," she snarled at Petros, shivering in the damned robe, in what seemed like the same Medical cubicle she'd been in every week since she was born. "I'm not seeing any significant degradation, there's the challenge to Yanni's seat coming up, and you know what those damned hormone shots used to do to me; I can't afford that, not now, not at my age --"
"Your predecessor went on rejuv at forty-eight," Petros answered, calm and unflappable and silver-haired. She'd suspected something when he'd stopped dyeing it. The weight of his age still bore down on her as if it were her own. "Three years earlier is reasonable, especially given the possibility of extending your functional period past your predecessor's limit --"
"That was from a damned native carcinogen and you know it!"
"-- and," Petros continued, long used to her outbursts, "given the average onset of menopause, sterility should not be a --"
"Who the hell are you and Wojkowski to decide on my --"
"-- and finally, if you put off the decision much longer, you'll need to consult with Dr. Dietrich instead."
Stef Dietrich?
That little self-absorbed troublemaker?
Then the cold set in, and Ari unfrouned her face muscle by muscle, till she could look evenly at Petros. "How long?" she asked.
"A year and a half, with luck," he answered. "But I intend to retire ... rather sooner. There are things I'd like to do, while I have the time."
"You bastard." The words were without heat; Ari reached for the sleeve of her robe and bared her arm for the gel-implant in wordless defeat. Justin had put up with it when he was thirty-six, she told herself, and after twenty-eight years of it he was still fast enough to keep up with her. It couldn't be that bad, except for that it chained her still more tightly to Medical, where she'd been bound all her life; except that it was a concession to the black wall at the end of every race, where she still tried to insist no concessions would be made; except that Petros had given her a puzzle for her eighth birthday, when he was still Dr. Ivanov and resented by a child who sulked over her weekly blood samples, and it couldn't possibly have been thirty-seven years since then, and he couldn't possibly be old enough for his body to be reaching the end of where rejuv drugs would help him, and doomed to senescence and senility and death in --
-- a year and a half, with luck.
Seventy-five years, with luck, for her.
People used to die in that much time. Live and breathe and spawn and die. On Gehenna, they still did; Gehenna, in its sixth generation now, and she needed four more generations to have any certainty of its society at all, to know which of her projections it matched. Four generations. Eighty years. She'd be a hundred twenty-five... and her predecessor had reached her limit at a hundred twenty.
It was the woolwood, she told herself. It was a breath of native air, when her predecessor was a child. Native things interacted badly with humans. Worse with rejuv -- which was derived from the same Cyteen ecology that killed humans, that humans were killing. Her predecessor's limits weren't hers. She had as good a chance of living to a hundred fifty as Victoria Strassen had, who had lived that and longer.
That might let her see what Gehenna had become.
Cyteen's generations were longer. Union's, held together by spacers and their time-stretched lives, longer still. And Union -- was her real work. And Justin's.
Once mankind had held all its hopes in a single world, and reached out only perilously to craft stations barely more than metal cans against the vacuum. Those stations made more stations, casting themselves further and further from Earth, finding other worlds to dwell on, other species to dwell beside. They moved out beyond all control. They moved out, and they became different.
The world no longer ended with the ocean, or with the stratosphere. It reached as far as humans breathed, and its borders grew wider; and Ari's gift, what made her irreplaceable and necessary, was to see the consequences of that widening, and to stand at the time and place those consequences could be touched, with the power to touch them. To change them. To give a chance that they would not, one day, all be at war one world and one station with another, as Cyteen and Union stood in what could not be called peace with Earth.
Her predecessor had seen that, and seen that she held the power but not the time. Ari-junior was her answer, her geneset and the influences on it replicated to resurrect her genius, to buy time with human lives.
Now Ari-junior faced the same problem. She always had. But Petros' oncoming death, and the steps that had to be taken to postpone Ari's own, and the massive hormone-flux that slammed into her with the onset of the rejuv drugs, knocked her irrational and on edge -- sent Florian to her meeting half because it had to be done and half because it was not safe to be a human near her just now --
She needed time, dammit.
And just as her predecessor had told her in the notes Ari-senior had left her, as Giraud-senior had told her in the year he'd held on through his own body failing, as Justin Warrick had understood when at thirty-six he'd been forced onto rejuv as a way for the Nyes to control him, as her maman must have known right up to the end: there was never enough time. Rejuv was a way of postponing the problem, at the cost of making it far more acute at the end.
A hundred twenty-five, she told the chart-pen painting, the red dwarf star five-sixths as old as the universe itself. A hundred thirty. That's not so many years, is it? Just long enough to let me understand Gehenna. Just long enough to let me process it with the years I have now, not hand it to a teenager and tell her good luck, that's it, everything depends on just your opinion.
Not that you'd care, would you? You don't even have a Station now.
Not that you cared when you did.
We're tiny things, aren't we. Billions on end of little crawling motes, making lacy chains connecting you and your people, confusing things, changing things, spilling outward. You look, and you grumble a little when a jump-ship comes near, and you swat it down out of jump and go on with whatever it is stars think about while they're burning. We don't even matter to you.
Hell, we barely matter to each other.
But we have so much you don't. You don't have birthday parties, or cousins, or children, not really. Not that you live to see. You don't have horses, or fish, or real Terra-orange, or any of the things we love enough to remake a whole world so we can have. You're older than we can imagine, and endlessly beautiful, but so is woolwood. We won't -- we can't -- leave the universe just to either of you.
We'll do what we have to to make sure of that. No matter what. No matter how much time we think we need.
Maybe her third iteration would be able to consider a child, one way or another. Maybe another iteration of Justin Warrick would concede to examining their genesets and looking for compatibility and potential. It would be nice to be able to expand the boundaries a little -- in a different way. To consign the rebirth of Ari Emory to a computer archive, to be hauled out if she were ever needed. To try to make something new.
To move out of this room and its blue-grey poison walls that she needed, as the first Ari had needed them, to keep in her mind what she fought for and at what price.
Things she'd like to do, someday, and never would herself.
She envied Petros Ivanov, suddenly, fiercely, bitterly; envied him that year and a half all of his own; and in the next thought she filled herself with shame for it, and wanted the contraindicated drink badly. Instead she took herself to a terminal, and sent Catlin and Florian a formal note that she'd started rejuv and so should they; and once that was done she bent herself, hard, to figuring what business she dared hand off unfinished. She needed ten years, or twenty, and damned if she was going to rely on luck for them. Like life, like minds, like planets that were safe to walk on and air that was safe to breathe: if they didn't have enough, they found a way to make it. Sometimes they failed, like with the Nyes. But they tried. Hope and warning, always linked, and irreplaceable.
Dammit, Yanni.
Dammit, Petros.
Dammit, Ari. Get back to work.
Fandom: C.J. Cherryh's Cyteen
Spoilers: Large chunks of the plot.
Lyric from: Elliott Smith, "Everything Reminds Me Of Her" -- And I've gotta hear the same sermon all the time now from you people
The walls of the living room were plasticized woolwood, the blue-grey of Cyteen's old ecosystem, which was dying now back to red rocks to be replaced by human and Sol-system green; but going too far outside the terraformed city-centers and Administrative Areas still meant breathing equipment and suits, plane flights still meant decontamination, because Cyteen's native life killed humans right back if it could, from the random path of immense platytheres and ankyloderms that could crush buildings and support systems to the impersonal breath of invisible spores that had already been killing Ariane Emory's predecessor before a thoroughly human murder finished the process.
Ariane pretended to study the paintings rather than the walls even after Florian handed her her vodka-and-orange and vanished to handle her meeting. Not now, she'd said, not today, and he'd read her mood in those four words and moved smoothly to pick up her notes and her briefings; he'd cover what he could, as always, and set aside the rest for her attention, and on his way to do that he'd tell Catlin the state she was in. They passed things that way, in meetings out of her sight. It was, she thought, an outright necessity for dealing with her. The two of them together could -- almost match her, in some things. There had never been many who could; there were fewer now. Catlin and Florian, the Warricks, not much else.
Her predecessor's generation was gone, that was one thing. The first Ariane Emory had been a hundred twenty when rejuv failure and cancer were trumped by a blow to the head and a liquid-nitrogen leak. Jane Strassen, Ari's own maman, the surrogate-mother who agreed to raise a child she'd known she'd have to abandon: Jane had been next; the Nyes after, Giraud from rejuv failure culminating in brain hemorrhage, Denys from -- from Florian and Catlin, when it came down to it. From his own craziness and desperation and fear. Victoria Strassen had simply grown thinner and thinner and not woken up one morning, her acerbic reactionary rants a relief to be rid of even as Ari regretted the loss of needed doses of humility. Yanni Schwartz's rejuv was holding up so far, but he could see the wall coming; Ari added up the years and came up with a number she didn't like. She needed him yet, dammit, needed him to hold down Administration for her, needed him to hold the Bureau seat; she needed a good ten years to have business tied up to take Admin, and she was too damned young to win the Bureau election on her own merits. The only viable candidate in the family would be Jordan Warrick, and that would drag the entire murder investigation back in front of the media again; nobody would win that election --
Nobody but the Nyes, and that wouldn't help; it would be only the dead senior Nyes' goals that would be met, and those were not Ari's. Even their younger selves wouldn't profit. Giraud-junior was thirty now, Denys-junior younger, and both were bright, but the painful paranoia and the obsessive brilliance that had held Reseune and Cyteen and Union together through her interregnum were both lacking. They needed the stresses of the War their predecessors had lived through to replicate their partnership, their separate and cooperative kinds of genius.
That boded poorly -- for the next generation.
The next iteration.
Ari refocused, from the blue-grey blur of the woolwood to the painting she stood in front of, the oldest record of the oldest star but Sol: Barnard's, where Alpha Station had been built and been lost, drawn by equally lost Argo's crew. Sketched in the pens the old spacers used to mark the charts, in the sublight days, when it was years from station to station and star to star. They'd worked in generations then, and been proud of it. Now spacers flew in weeks and months instead of years, their lives extended by jump's time-stretch and by Cyteen-born rejuv drugs, and the generations they counted were stationers'.
The only people who thought in generations now were the Family, were Reseune; because they worked in them, worked in lives, fifteen and twenty years for an experiment run; and Ari --
The experiments her predecessor had begun were in their fourth generation and their sixth; and one of them she might live to see the end of, and the other, she knew with a black certainty, she would not.
The influences that had let them replicate her predecessor's genius, her own special ability to extrapolate the mindsets and intersections of humanity at large, were dying. The Nye brilliance might be lost for good. The Strassens, the family that had made her second iteration able to use that ability without losing touch with the individual humanity ... their own spaceborne genius was gone, too, devolved into planetside women who fluttered and fussed and worried more about makeup than genetics.
There were the Warricks. There was that. Jordan Warrick, her wary and egotistic adversary-ally; Justin Warrick, more flexible, more tuned to the problems she worked on -- that pattern alternated generations. There was time yet for another Jordan, and thirty years or so after that, another Justin, tuned again to educate a third replicate of Ari herself. If they could find the right stresses -- without the Nyes there to bind her mind down and tie it in and force her to outthink them.
There was Petros Ivanov, who knew every detail of her biology, through two iterations ... too damned much about it. Petros had never been able to stand up to her before; he had never insisted --
Her hand tightened on the glass she held, and she wanted to throw it at the wall, but Barnard's Star looked back out at her and forestalled it. Mankind's first reach out to another star. The first real hope the human race had ever had, and the first whisper of the damnation it faced. Challenge and warning. And irreplaceable.
Three steps away, and she set the glass down untouched. Alcohol, for today, contraindicated. Florian hadn't known. That was something.
Catlin probably did.
"I'm fine," she snarled at Petros, shivering in the damned robe, in what seemed like the same Medical cubicle she'd been in every week since she was born. "I'm not seeing any significant degradation, there's the challenge to Yanni's seat coming up, and you know what those damned hormone shots used to do to me; I can't afford that, not now, not at my age --"
"Your predecessor went on rejuv at forty-eight," Petros answered, calm and unflappable and silver-haired. She'd suspected something when he'd stopped dyeing it. The weight of his age still bore down on her as if it were her own. "Three years earlier is reasonable, especially given the possibility of extending your functional period past your predecessor's limit --"
"That was from a damned native carcinogen and you know it!"
"-- and," Petros continued, long used to her outbursts, "given the average onset of menopause, sterility should not be a --"
"Who the hell are you and Wojkowski to decide on my --"
"-- and finally, if you put off the decision much longer, you'll need to consult with Dr. Dietrich instead."
Stef Dietrich?
That little self-absorbed troublemaker?
Then the cold set in, and Ari unfrouned her face muscle by muscle, till she could look evenly at Petros. "How long?" she asked.
"A year and a half, with luck," he answered. "But I intend to retire ... rather sooner. There are things I'd like to do, while I have the time."
"You bastard." The words were without heat; Ari reached for the sleeve of her robe and bared her arm for the gel-implant in wordless defeat. Justin had put up with it when he was thirty-six, she told herself, and after twenty-eight years of it he was still fast enough to keep up with her. It couldn't be that bad, except for that it chained her still more tightly to Medical, where she'd been bound all her life; except that it was a concession to the black wall at the end of every race, where she still tried to insist no concessions would be made; except that Petros had given her a puzzle for her eighth birthday, when he was still Dr. Ivanov and resented by a child who sulked over her weekly blood samples, and it couldn't possibly have been thirty-seven years since then, and he couldn't possibly be old enough for his body to be reaching the end of where rejuv drugs would help him, and doomed to senescence and senility and death in --
-- a year and a half, with luck.
Seventy-five years, with luck, for her.
People used to die in that much time. Live and breathe and spawn and die. On Gehenna, they still did; Gehenna, in its sixth generation now, and she needed four more generations to have any certainty of its society at all, to know which of her projections it matched. Four generations. Eighty years. She'd be a hundred twenty-five... and her predecessor had reached her limit at a hundred twenty.
It was the woolwood, she told herself. It was a breath of native air, when her predecessor was a child. Native things interacted badly with humans. Worse with rejuv -- which was derived from the same Cyteen ecology that killed humans, that humans were killing. Her predecessor's limits weren't hers. She had as good a chance of living to a hundred fifty as Victoria Strassen had, who had lived that and longer.
That might let her see what Gehenna had become.
Cyteen's generations were longer. Union's, held together by spacers and their time-stretched lives, longer still. And Union -- was her real work. And Justin's.
Once mankind had held all its hopes in a single world, and reached out only perilously to craft stations barely more than metal cans against the vacuum. Those stations made more stations, casting themselves further and further from Earth, finding other worlds to dwell on, other species to dwell beside. They moved out beyond all control. They moved out, and they became different.
The world no longer ended with the ocean, or with the stratosphere. It reached as far as humans breathed, and its borders grew wider; and Ari's gift, what made her irreplaceable and necessary, was to see the consequences of that widening, and to stand at the time and place those consequences could be touched, with the power to touch them. To change them. To give a chance that they would not, one day, all be at war one world and one station with another, as Cyteen and Union stood in what could not be called peace with Earth.
Her predecessor had seen that, and seen that she held the power but not the time. Ari-junior was her answer, her geneset and the influences on it replicated to resurrect her genius, to buy time with human lives.
Now Ari-junior faced the same problem. She always had. But Petros' oncoming death, and the steps that had to be taken to postpone Ari's own, and the massive hormone-flux that slammed into her with the onset of the rejuv drugs, knocked her irrational and on edge -- sent Florian to her meeting half because it had to be done and half because it was not safe to be a human near her just now --
She needed time, dammit.
And just as her predecessor had told her in the notes Ari-senior had left her, as Giraud-senior had told her in the year he'd held on through his own body failing, as Justin Warrick had understood when at thirty-six he'd been forced onto rejuv as a way for the Nyes to control him, as her maman must have known right up to the end: there was never enough time. Rejuv was a way of postponing the problem, at the cost of making it far more acute at the end.
A hundred twenty-five, she told the chart-pen painting, the red dwarf star five-sixths as old as the universe itself. A hundred thirty. That's not so many years, is it? Just long enough to let me understand Gehenna. Just long enough to let me process it with the years I have now, not hand it to a teenager and tell her good luck, that's it, everything depends on just your opinion.
Not that you'd care, would you? You don't even have a Station now.
Not that you cared when you did.
We're tiny things, aren't we. Billions on end of little crawling motes, making lacy chains connecting you and your people, confusing things, changing things, spilling outward. You look, and you grumble a little when a jump-ship comes near, and you swat it down out of jump and go on with whatever it is stars think about while they're burning. We don't even matter to you.
Hell, we barely matter to each other.
But we have so much you don't. You don't have birthday parties, or cousins, or children, not really. Not that you live to see. You don't have horses, or fish, or real Terra-orange, or any of the things we love enough to remake a whole world so we can have. You're older than we can imagine, and endlessly beautiful, but so is woolwood. We won't -- we can't -- leave the universe just to either of you.
We'll do what we have to to make sure of that. No matter what. No matter how much time we think we need.
Maybe her third iteration would be able to consider a child, one way or another. Maybe another iteration of Justin Warrick would concede to examining their genesets and looking for compatibility and potential. It would be nice to be able to expand the boundaries a little -- in a different way. To consign the rebirth of Ari Emory to a computer archive, to be hauled out if she were ever needed. To try to make something new.
To move out of this room and its blue-grey poison walls that she needed, as the first Ari had needed them, to keep in her mind what she fought for and at what price.
Things she'd like to do, someday, and never would herself.
She envied Petros Ivanov, suddenly, fiercely, bitterly; envied him that year and a half all of his own; and in the next thought she filled herself with shame for it, and wanted the contraindicated drink badly. Instead she took herself to a terminal, and sent Catlin and Florian a formal note that she'd started rejuv and so should they; and once that was done she bent herself, hard, to figuring what business she dared hand off unfinished. She needed ten years, or twenty, and damned if she was going to rely on luck for them. Like life, like minds, like planets that were safe to walk on and air that was safe to breathe: if they didn't have enough, they found a way to make it. Sometimes they failed, like with the Nyes. But they tried. Hope and warning, always linked, and irreplaceable.
Dammit, Yanni.
Dammit, Petros.
Dammit, Ari. Get back to work.