best-of-amenta

[best-of-amenta]

Epilogue: blackoutlandish

DRAMATIS PERSONAE:

Nisa Kefni, @blackoutlandish Shina Ayam, Nisa’s wife Tani Nanta, Shina’s husband

Nisa celebrates with everyone else, of course. And then, gradually, life goes on.

She’s sitting at the kitchen table one evening, reading through the process to apply for a swap to Miolee, trying to guess if she has a chance. Her co-spouse sits down next to her, and she leans into his shoulder.

“Miolee?” Tani asks.

“Yeah.”

“You know we both support you, but…” The silence hangs in the air for a moment. “I just don’t think I could handle permaspring.” And Shina has never really become comfortable with red hair, goes unsaid.

Nisa sighs, squeezes his hand. “And they probably have a lot more people trying to get to Miovay than are willing to live in the rainforest.” It’s a transparent rationalization, they both know it, but neither of them wants to say so.

“I’m sorry,” he says, squeezing back.

She closes the browser window, and wonders not for the first time if she’s selfish for considering trying to swap on her own and leave them behind, and if she’s a hypocrite for considering staying.

In 3433, when Nisa is seventeen, they have a baby, and Nisa sets the question aside. There really isn’t any question, when staying with her family means staying with her daughter. (It’s Shina’s egg, but the baby would still be hers even if she hadn’t been the one to carry it. She doesn’t let herself think about how she’d never have been able to have even this much, trying to save for a credit on her own.)

(She doesn’t let herself think about how she’s bringing her daughter into a society where she’ll have a caste.)

By the time her daughter is grown, she finds that she’s put down roots, settled down, settled in to a life where she’s no longer planning to move. She still wishes she could live on Miovay, but it no longer feels like a plan.

When she imagines moving to Miolee, it no longer feels like she would be going home.

She never does go to space, and she never returns to Miolee. She dies in 3456, in Tapa, at home.

#best of amenta

[best-of-amenta]

Epilogue:  Mayi

Mayi and Melkei welcomed their first child, a perpetually curious pink-haired girl they named after a missing grandparent, in the crush of the great immigration.  They weren’t the first to leave-conscientious mild springers in the tertiary sector, they took incentives to stay and help with the processing of new arrivals, repairing the sequelae of violence and neglect and teaching them the language(s) and culture of their new home.  She loved the rainforest.  But it was the last place on Amenta to be settled for a reason.  And eventually, the pain of being separated from her family became too much, and her child was missing departed friends, and it was time to join them. 

They all lived.  The only reason Mayi’s mother didn’t die on the job is because that would have been traumatizing for her students.  Her cousin once-removed and his siblings (all of them red-haired, adding to everyone’s confusion) mostly stayed in aquaculture,  and even more of them stayed in food.  The Oyand Shrimp grew into a tense and serious-minded young woman, who worked as a project manager for a major construction management company, while her brother continually struggled with the after-effects of trauma. 

Mayi lived a long life surrounded by family and community.  She worked in the government as a translator and wrote music for local games and community theatre productions and mentored younger artists in her free time. There were sorrows, of course, illnesses of body and mind, rivalries and dramas, and the hazards that came from living in a civilization with shallow roots (which the people of Miovay always thought they were the best prepared for), but in the end, she judged her life as having been rich and satisfying.  Her own kids grew up and worked in a selection of jobs that only made sense on Miovay, and married into families who had come from a half-dozen different countries, and had their own ups and downs and children.  

When Mayi was fifteen, a friend asked her to provide music for a short segment  for Learning Together, a locally produced educational show.  The segment, which involved the singer counting from one to ten in Miovay’s major languages while a kaleidoscope of fruit (count the fruit!) was cut into dancing pieces (count the pieces!) and assembled into fruit cups hopping along with the beat  (count the cups!) with syrup poured on top (count again!).  Of everything she ever wrote, it reached the biggest audience and was the best-remembered.  

She was cool with it.

#best of amenta

[best-of-amenta]

[Z, his husband, and the couple they’ve paired with raise four children together on Amenta. It’s not always easy and things don’t always turn out as planned — when there is a plan — but they are happier, on the whole, than any of them would have dreamed when they were young.

The spring when industrialbruise and artisanalclusterfuck turn 40, they throw themselves a party, a celebration of their lives nearing their ends, of the family they’ve found and grown, of things going right for them when they could have gone wrong.

They pack some very unusual bags, and let the people closest to them know before they leave for the rainforest that they don’t plan to come back. They get to really say their goodbyes.

Z finally experiences the terrible things — and his husband gets to do the terrible things — that they’ve been imagining all their lives.

Z dies happy. His husband dies in flames, holding him until the end.

They meet again, elsewhere.]

#best of amenta

[best-of-amenta]

Epilogue

Luehmani applies for the colony project.

She doesn’t get in.

They find her tumblr blog. On the one hand, her bugbear is reds– But she seriously considered killing them all, even if she decided against it. What if her bugbear changes? Can be trusted to follow orders, or will she at some point that now is the time for guns? Deciding against it doesn’t cut it. There are enough people applying that they feel no need to accept wannabe mass murderers.

…

Credits get cheaper. She finds a partner. They have three children.

She’s proud of them all. None of them are high fliers, no five star generals or top stick ball players, but they are good greys. She’s proud of them for learning how. She’s proud of herself for teaching them how.

…

She teaches them about the Biyani Crisis. Not to scare them, or to traumatise them, she says. So that they are informed. So that they are prepared.

She teaches them why they only have one grandfather. Who’s fault that is. (Who’s fault she thinks it is.) She teaches them that reds are evil. Untrustworthy. Dangerous.

In a cleaned world, she teaches her children to hate.

#best of amenta

[best-of-amenta]

Epilogue

Yvalta decontaminates, House by House, in fits and starts.

*** Nachen and her husband visit Ylanta in between shows.  She meets aunts and grandparents and one cousin she never knew she had.  It’s somewhat awkward.

*** One of the last holdouts gets new, young, progressive leadership very suddenly, after two conveniently timed heart attacks and one yachting accident claim the old guard.  The other two Houses dragging their feet on decontamination hurriedly reverse course.

*** Even in a national crisis, people still need to eat.  Her husband gets his first permission right on schedule, although her in-laws’ fishing fleet somehow winds up with an extra hand or two per boat who spend more time poking around the hold checking for stowaways than they do actually working. *** Myo Talking Spectaculars folds before Nachen can finish the first round of her contract, unable to reconfigure its policies to cope with the brain drain once other countries and planets start accepting immigrants.  Before it collapses, though, she traces a meteoric rise through the dance corps, only partially due to dancers above her in the hierarchy emigrating or switching careers, and the resume boost helps her lands a choice role in a touring company shortly afterward.

*** Butterfly and Reprise host a large and quietly teary potluck.  Two months later, they go on a camping trip and, after a tense couple of weeks, send a goodbye message from the DUS spaceport.

*** Nachen and her husband talk about emigrating some nights, after their daughter is in bed, but idly- there’s no urgent need for dancers on colony worlds, and you can’t (or at least really shouldn’t) put a fishing fleet on a spaceship.  They’d be starting over almost from scratch, and neither of them especially wants to take on a new contract for passage to some unknown quantity of a planet.

*** They get a second permission from her husband’s contract; it’s not renewed for a third.  They do, however, get another two children by special arrangement under her mother’s contract, once she’s too old to have her own.

*** Years of pushing her body to its limits start to catch up to Nachen; she has to start taking on fewer shows and waiting longer between them.  By seventeen she’s transitioned to teaching full-time, reasonably gracefully. She dabbles in choreography but never catches the public imagination enough to make a career out of it.  

*** When they’re twenty-five and past being troubled by permaspring and the political situation has shaken itself out, Nachen and her husband move offworld to join their oldest daughter, settled down after a short stint as a cosmonaut with two spouses and five children between them.  She takes an intensive physical therapy course before they leave- it’s an established colony but still too small to support a full-time dance teacher.

It’s a lovely world, all rolling plains and shallow seas, closely orbiting a red dwarf star.   Nachen puts together a solo performance almost as soon as they arrive, sends video home of low-gravity leaps in the eternal sunset- and a longer video for distribution on dance student forums, where she talks frankly about the work that went into setting up the shoot and how often she took breaks between cuts to pace herself. *** She teaches in Valtaz all her life, although her Oahkar gets much better and she eventually picks up some broken Anitami.  She includes little lessons on grey culture with her older students- the colony isn’t exactly casteless but it’s fairly flexible, and she worries sometimes about what they’re losing.  (She does cut out the Yvaltan history lessons once enough parents complain.  The universities can handle that one better than she can anyway.)

*** When Nachen is thirty-seven, she finds a nice young green to ghostwrite her memoirs.  He has a hard time understanding how anyone didn’t realize reds were people.

#best of amenta

[best-of-amenta]

Coda;

[“So, some of us in my neighborhood are planning a Splurge in a few months,” says the hearse driver, who Subtle - Infra, to his online friends and acquaintances - had not been totally sure was even ex-red until this very moment. Their eyes meet in the rear-view mirror, just for a moment, before the driver returns his attention to the road. “Not, like, a real big one? Not like a full-district one. But something. I know you got a kid, you should bring her.”

The third member of their crew, a girl half Subtle’s age who he knows is born-purple, busies herself steadying the full stretcher as the hearse takes a turn in the road. She very much has the attitude of someone who isn’t sure if she ought to be hearing the conversation, or if she wants to, or if she ought to want to.

The district where Subtle grew up was a Winter Splurge kind of district, but at this point the “when is splurge” debate isn’t something he finds he really cares that much about. Heck, biannual seems like a pretty good idea to him, at that. He grins. “Yeah, that sounds great. Just let me know when. We’ll bring a dish.”

Subtle’s daughter goes to Splurge halfway across the city. She goes to purple schools in her own neighborhood, where she does well - not exceptionally, but well.

When she is two, her parents tell her about her brother, the one who died of a fever a couple seasons older than she is now, the winter before he would have been cleaned.

When she is five and finishes training as a plumber - a cleanplumber, still trying to decide whether she ought to train as a rotation plumber, too - she gets accepted to emigrate to the Tapai colony world, and two seasons later she sponsors her parents’ applications as well. Subtle and his wife leave Amenta, and have their third child - second clean, second surviving - in the last spring they’re both fertile; their first grandchild is born the same year. Their son-in-law is born-clean.

It’s not possible to really keep current on news from another planet, most of the time, not the way it had been to keep tabs on other countries on Amenta. But Subtle eats up reports from Miovay; when he can, he buys goods imported from Miovay. Sometimes he fantasizes about growing his hair out, letting the purple dye fade. He never does.

Most of his great-grandkids have naturally purple hair.

He dies at the age of thirty-eight, and the rotation workers who collect him are a pair of born-purples he trained.]

#best of amenta

[best-of-amenta]

Simurika’s roommates apply to be part of the colonization project; they’re rejected from the first two rounds in favor of scientists and doctors, and they don’t bother to apply again. Simurika never applies at all. The Islands slowly empty; the year they turn eighteen, they manage to scrape together the money for a second child, Vakita.

Tsime changes his ideal career path from architecture to gymnastics to baking to architecture again. He goes sculpture track and packs his elective slots with math and physics courses. He tries to be a sculptor. He’s miserable. Simurika helps him fill out an application to swap into Miolee and doesn’t tell his parents about it until after it’s been approved. He’s genuinely planning to swap back as a yellow, but years go by without him ever finishing the paperwork to come home. He dyes his hair pale yellow, designs towering apartment buildings on Miovey, and trusts that no one there will be able to pick out a green Jakavi accent from a yellow one.

Vakita becomes a xenobiologist and lives on the Island of Jakav’s colony planet. Her parents are very proud of her.

Simurika watches university professors leaving for the stars, applies for theology positions, and hopes that someday someone will be desperate or foolish enough to accept him. That day never comes.

(You could swap here, writes Tsime from Miovey. Even theologians have a place in Miolee, and someone has to teach them.

I’m not an orange person, he writes back, and I could never pass the background check.

If we split up the castes like you want to, teaching isn’t far from what you’ve been doing.

Simurika winces when he reads that. He might not be a successful green, but he’s still green. I still couldn’t pass the background check.)

Libeki (Lugi, Simurika called her on his blog) waits for the fourth round of colonization before applying as a history professor. The planet is well-established by that point, with universities teaching the children of the first colonists. She and her husband have six children. She sends Simurika and his roommates updates with every ship.

Simurika watches all of them and cheers for them when they succeed and sometimes, he almost convinces himself he isn’t jealous.

Epilogue: Simurika

Keep reading

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[best-of-amenta]

The apartment was too quiet after Kem left. Rii tried music at first, but it just reminded them of Kem.

They got a bird. Then a few more. A lot of birds.

It gave them an excuse not to leave the country, or try to find someplace better. There were the birds to think of. The birds and all their cages and things would be difficult to move. So Rii had to stay right where they were in Oyand.

Within sight of what had once been the red district.

But eventually things would get better. Rather, Rii allowed them to get better. They never moved to Miolee, or even Niyau, but they did move back into a city, where they weren’t reminded of the past, where there were more different kinds of people, where people didn’t know them as the hyposensitive that was friends with reds.

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[best-of-amenta]

A lot of discourse about red-cleaning seems to assume that the only possible approaches for dealing with ex-reds are either integrating them into the rest of society. And of course it makes sense that countries are afraid to innovate when it carries the risk of being denied access to warp technology. But Jakav and Eleseo have tried a third approach whereby ex-reds are housed on a special island, separated from the rest of the country but still under its control - and at this point I think we can safely say that they have shown that this approach can also be successfully pulled off - indeed, Anitam has already deemed Jakav and Eleseo to be among the countries they are willing to give warp technology. So we ought to be taking this seriously as a third approach to red-cleaning.

When we consider the benefits of this approach, it stands out as a clear winner in every respect. The ex-reds don’t interbreed with born-cleans, so the dysgenic effect of mixing red genes into other castes does not occur. They are physically seperate, so there’s hypersensitives don’t need to risk interacting with ex-reds. At the same time, they remain under the control and supervision of born-clean governments, who can ensure their good behaviour and prevent them from scheming against society. The main criticism I’ve seen of the approach is that it requires significant areas of land to be put aside for ex-reds - but with successful red-cleaning now bringing access to vast amounts of land via the capacity to colonise planets this is no longer a concern except for governments that cannot even temporarily spare the land required, leaving the approach clearly superior to all alternatives.

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[best-of-amenta]

Hey, it's good to see you back. It's been a couple of years-- what's up in your neck of the woods? Wait, I know, you settled down and got five babies, right? You definitely deserve at least five.

Not quite five. Although me and my partner do have kids. That is the advantage of living in Voa - everyone who isn’t a disgrace gets at least two. Her performance in the war got her rewarded with a rare third so that is the absolute most anyone can have here. We are very fortunate. I hope you can be as fortunate and even more so with the new discoveries. I wonder how they will change us all. I used to be very scared of change when I was younger, It seemed it was always for the worse and maybe it was then. But recent events have shown me it is sometimes for the good.

#best of amenta

[best-of-amenta]

Amentans have found habitable planets. At 4:19 this morning, the first exploration mission returned to our world with news of five confirmed Amentan habitable biospheres, and an expectation of more to come. Amentan feet have walked upon extrasolar planets; Amentan breath has mixed with their air. It was the fulfillment of a dream Amentans have shared since we first looked to the stars. When asked to comment, explorer Thesha Pepalma said, “Our children, our children’s children: none of them will ever suffer empty springs again. The planets we have found… [click here to read the full article]

#best of amenta

[best-of-amenta]

@Thassem, you don't want to go to space?

I was voluntarily sterilized when I was six because I didn’t want to be tempted to unethically have children. It was the correct decision given the information I had when I made it.

#best of amenta

[best-of-amenta]

I, for one, am looking forward to living on a planet that has never known the moral corruption of Rivik.

I suppose a silver lining to this situation is that everyone whose moral compass points up their ass can go and remove themself to a different gravity well from the rest of us.

It’s better than you deserve, but at least we’ll be rid of you.

#best of amenta

[best-of-amenta]

ooc

It’s not fair.

“This applies retroactively.”

It wasn’t their fault! It was one mistake; it could have happened to anyone. Normal people don’t riot if the train is running late. Reds do that. It could have happened to anyone!

It’s not fair.

“This isn’t working out.”

Why did Rii have to be friends with them, anyway? They could have made friends with actual people! It’s their own fault if they’re ‘hurt’ when people badmouth the fucking trash. They shouldn’t have made friends that would riot as soon as things weren’t going their way.

It’s not fair.

“We miss our Kem-Kem.”

She’s eugenic. She knows that. She’s good at purple things. And green things. She’s just not the kind of purple her mother wants. But where else can she go? If she’d been born in Voa or somewhere like that, her mother wouldn’t have expected her to be perfect. A free baby in a stinking, dysgenic cesspool doesn’t have to live up to those expectations.

If she’d been born in Voa she’d be going to new planets.

She feels a twisting in her gut when she sees her url. Great. Another musical ruined by the garbage.

It’s not fair.

She’s standing in front of the apartment building. Her home-that-isn’t-a-home.

“Come on, Immi. Let’s go up.”

#best of amenta

[best-of-amenta]

[OOC: following this]

[Empty lay on the ground, trying fitfully to breathe through the mucus in their nose. Every time they cried, their body betrayed them like this.

It was messy. It was disgusting. (They couldn’t breathe.)

(Sometimes, they wondered whether they really could drown in their own fluids.)

This was horrible.

This wasn’t right.

They would never be able to convince anyone it was wrong.

Those stars, those beautiful, shining stars– In their mind’s eye, Empty pictured them, slowly being engulfed in dark, impenetrable sludge, each point of light winking out in turn.

Empty lay there for a few minutes more, slowly trying to breathe through the overwhelming sense of suffocation.

With immense effort, they pulled themselves up into their chair, in reach of the box of tissues on their desk. Their limbs were as heavy as lead.

And there, behind the tissues, was the bright, piercing glare of their screen, mockingly displaying the indicator for new posts in their feed. Hundreds of them. Without looking, Empty knew all of them would be joyful. Celebratory.

(Celebrating the worst thing that had ever happened.)

“Oh,” Empty exhaled.

There was nothing they could do to stop this.

Empty began to cry again.]

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[best-of-amenta]

Countries only get to go to space if they don't murder reds :D :D :D :D

what

fucking what

that can’t be true, you’re just trying to bait me because i’m hyper, i’m not going to let you ruin my day

#best of amenta

[best-of-amenta]

So. Anitam did a thing.

I hope we are alone in the universe. Given how much of it exists that we haven’t explored, I think it’s unlikely. But I hope.

Our ideas of what–who–could be waiting for us among the stars are, I think, too amentancentric. We envision societies that look like ours, but people have black hair or three eyes, or they believe that causing someone’s death makes one polluted.

Who’s to say that alien lifeforms and cultures resemble ours at all? Maybe there are sentient clouds of gas that don’t make pollution because they have no physical bodies, and therefore have no concept of it. Maybe there are aliens that communicate by changing color, and a certain shade of blue hair is considered a terrible insult.

Maybe the aliens have a vastly different idea of what pollution is. Maybe they’ll see us all as being hereditarily polluted and fence us in somewhere because we’ve all been in contact with, say, wheat and wheat byproducts.

We can barely recognize people from other castes as being fully-realized individuals. We barely treat those with non-normative pollution responses as people. How are we going to interact with people from other planets?

#best of amenta