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scarcely have told male from female.
Not that it mattered in a functional way: male or female, all of these people
were dormant. Breathing and warm to the touch, but comatose.
Oar stood in the midst of those unmoving bodies, waiting for me to say
something. I botched it. "Are they... what happened... is this some... so,
Oar,these are your ancestors."
"Yes," she said. "Not all aredirect ancestors; but they have lived in my home
from the beginning."
"And, uhh... what do they do here?"
"They lie on the floor, Festina. They do not want to do anything else."
"But they could get up if they wanted to?"
"When the other Explorers came," she said, "my mother and sister got up. They
were curious to meet strangers, even though the Explorers were so ugly. After
a day, my mother grew bored and came back here that is her, lying over there."
She gestured in the direction of a glass wall. At least five women lay in that
neighborhood, all of them twins to Oar. If one was truly Oar's mother, she
showed no sign of being older than Oar herself... nor did any of the women
show evidence of motherhood. Glass stomachs must not get stretch marks; glass
breasts must be immune to the demands of nursing. And gravity.
"What about your sister?" I asked. "Did she eventually get bored too?"
"I am sure she is very bored now," Oar answered haughtily. "She is bored and
sad and stupid."
"Oh?"
"She went away with the fucking Explorers. They took her and not me."
Oar loosed a furious kick at the body closest to her a man who skidded across
the floor with the force of the impact. He opened his eyes to glare at Oar,
said a few unknown words in a grumbling voice, then shifted back to his former
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location.
Oar immediately kicked him again. "Do not call me names, old man!" she
snapped.
He glared at her once more, but said nothing. He didn't try to move this
time, but settled where he was, folding his hands across his chest and closing
his eyes. I wondered if he would shift back to his original place after Oar
left.
"They all have tired brains," Oar told me. "They are old and tired andrude,"
she added, raising her voice pointedly. "They have nothing else they want to
do, so they lie here."
"Don't they eat or drink?"
Oar shook her head. "They absorb water from the air... and absorb the light
too. My sister said the light in this building is nutritious good enough
anyway for people who do nothing. I do not understand how light can be
nutritious, but my sister claimed it was true."
Having lived with solar energy all my life, I had no trouble appreciating how
light could "feed" an organism; but clear glass was not a good
photo-collector. It's better to be opaque to the light you're trying to
absorb... and then it occurred to me, these bodies were opaque to most
nonvisible wavelengths. A quick Bumbler check confirmed it the deceptively
muted light inside this building was laced with enough UV to bake potatoes. I
shuddered to think what other radiation might be flooding the air... say,
microwaves and X-rays.
"Let's go outside," I told Oar briskly. "You've probably never heard the word
'melanoma'... but I have."
The Surrender
The light outside was not so lethal the Bumbler certified it fell within
human safety limits. Obviously, the tower containing Oar's ancestors was
shielded to keep all that juicy radiation inside... which only made sense. If
you devoted so much wattage to feed solar-powered people, you didn't want
energy spilling uselessly through the walls. Whatever the tower was made of,
it certainly wasn't ordinary glass; it held in everything but visible light,
making a high-band hothouse for photosynthesizing deadbeats.
"They really just lie in there all day?" I asked.
"Most have not moved in centuries. That is what my mother said her own mother
claimed. As long as I have lived, only my mother and sister have moved."
"But now your mother is dormant and your sister left with Jelca?"
"Yes. I have been alone the last three years."
I felt the urge to touch her pat her shoulder, give her a hug, pass on
comfort somehow. But I didn't; I didn't know the right thing to do.
"It's hard being alone," I finally said. "It's a wonder you haven't laid down
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with the others."
"I do sometimes," she told me. "Sometimes I go into the tower to be with
people. Once in a while... once in a while, I see if I can lie with a man and
get him to give me his juices; but it never works and I just get sad."
She spoke in a halting voice. I didn't know how to answer. Finally I said,
"You can't die, can you? Your species can't die."
"We are not such things as die," she whispered. "We do not get damaged. We do
not grow old and sick like animals. If you had left me in the lake, Festina, I
would have lived and lived... under the water, too weak to move, but still
alive.
"Our bodies live forever," she continued, "but our brains slow down after a
time. When people's brains grow tired and there is nothing else they want to
do, they just lie down. It is called the Surrender. Some people surrender
outside in the grass, on the sand, or in the water but most come home to this
tower. It is pretty and comfortable here; and the light gives enough strength
that you can always move if you want to. My mother said that was good: she
felt she could get up any time she had a reason. She just couldn't think of a
reason."
I couldn't meet Oar's gaze. "I'm proud of you," I said, finding it hard to
force the words out.
"Why are you proud of me, Festina?"
"Because you aren't in there with everyone else." I grabbed her arm to pull
her away from the building... or rather to touch her in the only way I could
justify. "Come on you were showing me the sights. Let's keep going."
And we did.
By the Fountain
We stood in the central square of the village, directly in front of the glass
fountains that chattered in the middle of the plaza. Oar walked up to one,
spreading her arms and watching her skin mist up in the humid air. The look
she gave me, back over her shoulder, suggested she considered such behavior
daring.
"My mother called thisThe Fountain of Tomorrow" Oar said. "The other isThe
Fountain of Yesterday." She paused. "They look very much the same, do they
not?"
"Too much." I wondered if that was the fountain-builder's point. "Oar," I
asked, "what do you do all day?"
"Why do you ask, Festina?"
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