"A Half-Built Garden"

[fiefoe]

For a first-contact sci-fi novel, Ruthanna Emrys spent much less time on the aliens (yep, Dyson sphere, space tunnel, those old hats) than on the post climate-change humans and how they organize themselves: watershed networks, gender performances (exhausting even to read about), co-parenting. The watershed/corporate/alien 3-way intrigue is rather amateurish, but perhaps that's actually how folks, even those with advanced technology, behave.

• The illumination curfew had kicked in, and stardust stretched across the old Maryland suburbs like a parade scarf. My mesh asked me if I wanted night vision, and I told it quietly to fuck off.
• I imagined telling Dori, years from now, that we could’ve met people from another planet, only we were trying to protect her. Or we could stay—and tell her that she met them... Some things are more important than keeping your kid safe.
• It’s an obscure science fiction movie from the 60s. Beyond the Clouds of Dust—this is the theme when the spaceship arrives. Carol and I stared at each other, and about thirty people posted in unison: IS IT FRIENDLY?
• “All species must leave their birth worlds, or give up their technological development, or die. You are very close.”
• Cytosine had been rocking a little—thinking? “Philosophy. And empirical observation. Species breed out into vacuum, or die amid their own poisons at the level of technology you have now.”
• where the promissory glow of dawn had given way to crisply bounded colors.
• Reassuring, solid things: I turned up the input on my lenses and saw supply chains leading to a neighbor’s flock, the herd of goats that kept our invasives in check, and a summary icon that, if I followed it, would show me every step of carbon-balanced tea importation from the Mekong watershed. The networks were familiar, too. Carol’s textile exchange and Dinar’s corporate gig-work watercooler and Athëo’s linguistic melting pot and the neighborhood’s hyperfirewalled energy grid scrolled over polished pine.
• “Are they going to make us? We’re just starting to get things right.” It was the refrain of our generation, particularly personal for Athëo. And what would my parents think, who’d helped place the first illicit sensors in the Potomac and barricaded factories to enforce the first crowdsourced decisions of the nascent Dandelion Revolution?
• I eased in, catching up on half-deserted policy decisions. Streambed restoration for the Paint Branch, a proposal for using a new algae species in water treatment, the carbon budget for importing tea and coffee. There were still a few people working on those threads, refining options and adding weight to their favorites; I wasn’t the only one who found this stuff soothing. A network in flow is like a walk in the woods for the mind.
• the request for a limited embassy was pulling ahead. The suggestion to set commons requirements had already hit threshold, and was being refined into an open task. Problem: US gov has to notice this eventually—predictions about what they’ll do? Other fossil states, too, if they’ve got the means.
• “All right.” She wrapped limbs around Diamond and Chlorophyll. I wondered how untrustworthy I’d made myself seem, doing something so gauche as leaving my kid at home. Sort of the equivalent of putting your hands behind your back when someone offered to shake.
• “The Chesapeake doesn’t claim specific territory,” I said. “We claim our actions. We take care of everything in the watershed, every place where the river acts.” What happened next would depend on how the Ringers themselves defined power. Were they more likely to recognize a government built on laws, on paper-and-pixel boundaries? Or a network defined by measurable flows of matter and energy and obligation? At least corporate reps hadn’t yet stuck their noses in to confuse the issue further.
• But air travel, like rail, had its own hyperfirewalled network, and wouldn’t casually open channels even today. Any reps en route would get here safely, but cut off from the threads that gave them authority, the webs of knowledge that let them ask the right questions and make the right decisions.
• Also, I was pretty sure Dinar had been waiting her entire life to host the first interspecies dinner party and hackathon on an hour’s notice.
• And second, beauty is worth preserving whether it’s alive or not. You ought to take a closer look before deciding that a bunch of—of space stations—are a good replacement for mountains and canyons and rivers. Or Saturn’s rings, or Jupiter’s thousand-year storms.
• Dandelion networks, though, were living things, as dependent on the flow of information as I was on breath and pulse. Cut off that flow and we devolved into sputtering, isolated neurons.
• We have too many examples of human cultures pushing others from their homes by force. The fact that they’d be exiling us with supposed charity instead of genocidal malice—I don’t think that would make much difference to the outcome.” “And the Native Americans and First Nations and Australian aboriginals, did any of them get to keep their land by acting white? They converted, changed how they dressed, even changed how they treated gender. Did we ever get anywhere by acting more Christian, or by trying to fit into the boxes they built for us? We survive by being stubborn about who we are, whatever else happens.”
• Today’s festival hovered in the misty gap between possibilities. We might be welcoming eagerly awaited neighbors. Or we might be defying disaster.
• But that’s always been the problem with corporations. They rarely came at anyone with weapons. They calibrated their threats to be deniable, invisible to those whose judgments mattered. And too many people had died still trying desperately to be rational, polite, forgiving.
• Even talking the situation over with one new person reminded me that problem-solving worked better collectively.
• And the algorithms that spoke for the needs of river and tree and air, and gave weight to the values that we strove to preserve in all our problem-solving—the ones that we should have been modifying to account for a completely unprecedented situation—couldn’t keep up with even their usual workload.
• When I think of a tree, I think of moving between the branches, and how whenever I reach out I find a new branch that takes me where I need to go. The universe is the same way. If you reach out, you’ll eventually grasp the next branch.
• “That’s what symbiosis is to us. When we outgrew our worlds, the plains and trees were the next branch for each other—we grasped, and swung, and found our new perch together.
• I basked in those little oases of cultural exchange. They couldn’t help being fraught, simply from the assumptions we brought along, but they were gentle in comparison with the more overt negotiations.
• You shouldn’t take from this that my parents are famous, or that there weren’t crowds of other people doing the same things they did. They came of age at the end of the era of big apes, and never tried to hold on to that kind of recognition. But they were among the hundreds of thousands who acted out of billions who couldn’t, or who didn’t want to, or who never heard about the movements until they were well underway. The whole Bet contributed their passion and time and overwhelming intensity to changing the world, at a time when the world was ready to change.
• I touched the raised lines of the dandelion puffball, reassuringly solid against my skin. Under a microscope, each seed stem would expand into the line of a river. The Potomac was in there, and the Nile, the Euphrates, the Amazon, dozens of others. The corporations might not see that subtle strength, but the brooch would still tell them, unmistakably, where I came from.
• For me, every shifting view was a collage of triumph and failure. I saw festering wounds dealt by old powers, but also green places like tattoos printed across scar tissue. Reclaimed prairie, patches pale with drought; I called up an enhanced view just in time to glimpse bison trampling the undergrowth. Great spans of ash and chestnut grew free from pestilence, but there were aspen forests bruised by a decade of moth blight.
• For the plains-folk, as far as I could tell, gender was a privilege that you won; for the tree-folk a birth assignment stricter than anything humans had ever enforced. Strange as Asterion’s way seemed to me, masking private selves with viciously enthusiastic role-playing, the Ringers must be even more bewildered.
• Scans suggested that it was all organic on a chemical level, but I had no idea whether the sources were animal or vegetable, if either. No one told me I’d need a DNA sampler. “I keep kosher.”
• “So what does it mean, playing female?” asked Kay. The same question Adrien had asked, and it made me even more uncomfortable this time. There was something about the intensity of corporate presentations that made me want to show less of myself. A dangerous instinct.
• “All I’m asking is that you respect our judgment. And that you accept that not every choice means the same thing for us as it does for you.”
• The creation of the aislands wasn’t as well-recorded as anyone would like. Not that it mattered much—they’d all been vampires of one sort or another. This one must have been more self-aware than most, to build a city that would thrive in the dark. Either that, or they’d expected the world to grow hot enough to make people nocturnal,
• After two days in an environment utterly and blatantly shaped by human whim, I apparently needed the confirmation that nature was still there, still doing her best to collaborate with her exhausting children.
• I winced at how clearly both Adrien and Brend were used to people reacting badly to unpolished enthusiasm. For me, after trying to second-guess everyone’s meanings upstairs, it was as much of a relief as the sea sound.
• Most of my body is erogenous under the right circumstances, except for the inside of my mouths, which I think is different from humans?” “Oh god,” I said. “You’ve watched all our porn, and we haven’t seen any of yours. That seems like an unfair advantage.”
• But for me—Earth is our symbiosis. We’ve screwed it up, badly, but we’re trying to fix it now, and we won’t do right by any new relationship if we leave it behind.”
• The storm wrapped us in a cozy domestic space where no outside demand could touch us. Even the network was relatively quiet, a steady stream of reports on preparations completed, water levels and patterns of flow compared to predictions.
• I tried not to show how much that worried me. Relationships were hard enough without having them stand in for the connection between two entire species. I wanted to work out these nascent connections—not just between me and Carol and Rhamnetin, but between our households—as ourselves, not as archetypes.
• “These people”—I jerked my head at Adrien—“convinced some of our tech team that the corporations were routing malware through the antenna. The team came to my aunt for help, she came to me, we went out in the damn storm to stop them from sabotaging your construction. Asterion caught the tech team, exactly like they planned in the first place, and reported them to you in order to drive a wedge between us. They set them up.”
• Cytosine’s gaze turned on Rhamnetin. “Explain this eccentricity.” I stumbled over the venom in that last word until I caught up with the Ringer metaphor: an eccentric orbit, unstable and about to crash.
• the Lower Mississippi unleashed a flood of threads: some begging for help replacing now-irrelevant storm preparations and resources overwhelmed by the flood, others demanding justice under the shared guidelines of the watersheds. “This has to count as unapproved geoengineering, right?” asked Mendez. Her usual confidence faltered;
• “I just thought, what if that’s what the malware does, long-term? Not break the networks, even if that was the first obvious effect. But now our decision processes have gone from not working to working strangely. Redbug was talking about cordyceps—it doesn’t only kill insects, it turns them into puppets. What if they’re turning our protocol into theirs, like the builder bots turn carbon into the Ringers’ antenna?” “Hell,” said Carol. “But then why push us to use a network we know is theirs?” “It’s a decoy,” I suggested. “They make us think they’re trying something obvious, so we can feel smug when we don’t fall into the trap.
• But I still wanted that kinesthetic sense of the watershed as a whole. It felt like a hike or a prayer, but deeper: knowing in my brain and belly and bones the rivers flowing silty with stormwater, every particle that washed from land into ocean, the health of the air that filled our lungs and the seagrass that held the bay in place. I wanted to work with the planet, to understand everything she told me. My mesh picked up on those desires, or my trend toward holistic processing,
• it was from an anime version of Romeo and Juliet—a version with a happy ending, which was promising. “There’s a lot of repetition in the soundtrack, but I think this is a bit from the middle, when they’re separated and trying to plan how they’ll get back together. And they’re urging each other to be patient, not jostle each other’s families while they work things out.”
• “They’ve been talking about it all night,” said Rhamnetin. “It’s a holiday about escaping to better places and asking questions. You’ll like it.
• when one last holdout subculture discovered what a bad idea it is to make unwilling workers build a habitat. Your own story says that there are places it’s impossible to be free—ours says there are places where it’s impossible to keep slaves.”
• Ringers were enough like us to react badly to contradiction—or to gloss it over entirely. The dandelion protocols had been designed to help us get past that hardwired resistance to being wrong, and they helped only in part. The Ringers, advanced in other directions, had no such thing. They saw the universe no more clearly than we, and it was going to get us all in trouble.
• “We bless the creator of the universe, all its branches, and thank Them for enabling us to reach this place and this season.” Definitely the wrong thing; if there were seasons here, the Ringers themselves bore sole responsibility. But it helped. I caught my breath as I imagined myself lighting candles instead of speechifying to several hundred worlds’ leaders.
• Cytosine swiveled her eyes toward my family. “My cross-brother, the questioner of the Solar Flare, believes the watersheds may be right about keeping their world habitable. I share your fears that he, and they, may be wrong. But there is no saving people without respect. What kind of symbiosis will we have, if we assume from the start that humans know nothing we can learn from?
• I worried, though. The Ringers’ matriarchy—a literal rule of mothers—carried uncomfortable echoes of the gender-based tyranny that had pervaded all of Earth’s previous powers. The remnants of those powers had mostly grown beyond it, as we had—the corporations thought even admitting one’s true gender in public was a step too close. But patriarchy was an unquiet ghost.
• “Why?” asked Tiffany, annoyed. “I broke it.” Tha tried to remind people of that as much as possible; if you were the boogeyman you might as well get some mileage out of it. “And now you’re working to fix it. Isn’t that what we’re all doing, as a species?” The sensor nerd waved, and left before Tiffany could comment on the dubious wisdom of this philosophical statement.