Thinking

This talk gave me a lot to think about. By this point I had figured out that, while some of the details might not be exactly the same, the major organs in our bodies at least corresponded with those in humans and most mammals on Earth, with the exception of things related to the pairing. I had assumed until this talk that to become an adult I was going to undergo a metamorphosis where I grew another torso and a vulva, but now I learned I am going to get those parts by merging with a girl here. Almost certainly a normal one, since I’ve had no real chance of finding another ethertraveler. At least I had seven years to try to choose someone, with perhaps three years in which I could be asking potential partners.

There was no question I had to do it, and the person I merged with was going to know my secrets. I wasn’t going to live to adulthood without it. We weren’t supposed to reveal our Earthly origins publicly, but we were allowed to reveal them privately to limited numbers of people if needed to achieve our goal, and this clearly qualified. Though I could not guarantee that the combined me would still feel obligated to call home.

I could look for someone whose skills complemented mine with respect to building an ether communicator. But would I even know? The school here was divided into three levels, eight years of elementary, three years of middle school (where it appeared kids learned about pairing upon entering), and three years of post-pairing high school. I don’t think I’m going to get to the relevant classes before having to choose. So it probably meant doing well in school and seeking out a similarly strong partner. A free thinker, one with fantasies. One who would not shy away from an encounter with aliens. They had science fiction here, including stories of encounters with aliens from other worlds. As far as I could tell, they were just stories, just like Earth’s were always thought to be before ethertravel was discovered. It’s probably a natural result after people figure out there are other planets, and other stars which may also have planets, that they hypothesize some sort of people living there. But ethertravel was actually Earth’s first confirmed contact with aliens.

And we knew why. Actually sending living people far enough out in space to encounter alien beings was a monumental undertaking, and would have required multiple technological breakthroughs on top of the many Earth had already experienced, if we had not stumbled into a shortcut.

Probably the most important thing for me was finding a way out of this little farm town. They clearly had advanced technology here, how far advanced I couldn’t tell at this stage, but the people in this town only used limited amounts of it. We had electricity, television, and pocket-sized computers (or they would have been, if anybody had invented clothes to have pockets in). Trying to escape by being the leftover person who couldn’t be matched with a girl here was an extreme longshot. Was there a way I could arrange a pairing with a big-city kid? I asked Fred and Sylvia about that, thinking that the subject might only be discussed where kids of their age would know. And it turns out, yes!

The Program

Fred told me about a program that tried to make geniuses by pairing the smartest kids, even from different towns or neighborhoods. To get in, you had to do very well in school, and you had to pick an alternate partner to pair with if you didn’t make it, and that person also had to qualify. If you did, then you’d both go pair with the members of a similar couple elsewhere. So now I had my goal. To be among the best in my class, and somehow pick someone else who was also going to be among the best.

So I had a plan, to do the best in school. I would spend as much time in the library as I could get away with, learning more about this world from whatever material I could read, under the guise of studying, while I actually used my first-life knowledge to breeze past some of the math and (to a lesser degree) science subjects. And I could tell anybody else that I wanted to be the best, and pair with the brightest girl in school seven years from now, or say I wanted to get into that program, after I was old enough to have learned about it normally.

Fred and Polly had their pairing, and the combined Fred-Polly lived at Polly’s family’s place more than at ours because Polly was a last child. All her siblings had already paired and most had moved out, so there was more space over there. But they still came over here frequently.

When I was getting ready to go to the middle school, materials they sent out included a mention of the program, and parents to were asked to ensure their kids understood the essentials of pairing. There wasn’t a class in school that covered it specifically, but some class lessons would expect us to know about it. This meant I got a repeat of the lesson presented 4 years earlier, just for me.

I told my mother, “Go ahead and refresh me, but I am pretty sure I remember it. I had, after all, been wondering from as soon as I could think such thoughts how I was someday going to change from the four-legged or two-legged-and-two-armed body I have had all my life into the four-legged-and-two-armed body you have. My best guess was there was going to be some point in life when I was going to grow two more legs, and I’d been watching my brother and sisters for any sign of it. So I was watching it closely, even while studying.”

“It is sometimes hard to tell. Some kids are really intrigued by the idea their parents have two more limbs, and some don’t seem to care. Even the studious ones can turn out oblivious to something as major as that.”

She repeated the talk, with the same book. I asked a few questions to show my interest, but I knew the answers already.

“Are you interested in that program the flyer mentioned?”

“Maybe,” I hedged. “I’ve spent more time studying than actually looking for a partner, though I’ve noticed a few candidates. I have not asked anybody yet, understanding some of them might not yet know about pairing, though they should be getting it now. I do like the idea of the big city and advanced technology we don’t have here.”

There was an afterschool meeting for the program the second week of classes, and naturally I showed up. It turned out to be a pretty small group. There were four other boys and three girls there, with one boy and one girl I knew, and two other boys I thought I recognized from the classes I had only been in for a week. We all picked up packets of several pages of printed material as we came in.

A teacher explained, “To ensure the best opportunities for our students, we participate in an exchange program to allow some of our students to pair with bright students from larger cities near us, in particular to give them the chance to get into technology programs we don’t have here. But only the best can participate. We usually send one or two pairs of students from our school each year, and we only send the best to ensure they stay interested in participating with us. What they get out of it is more bright pairing partners and different outlooks on the world from what they might get from pairing with other big-city kids.”

She projected a slide on a screen, something very like the 20th century Earth technology where the slide was printed on a transparent film and light shone through it. The teacher continued her explanation.

“To qualify for the program, you need to keep up consistently good grades. In addition, there is a qualifying test. We choose who goes, and we’ll weight your grades more than the test, but if grades are similar, or there is a large difference in the test scores, it may be the test scores that determine who goes.”

Another slide had three columns of small text listing all manner of subjects.

“Each participating school provides a portion of the test questions, over every kind of subject but limited to those which students your age can reasonably learn. They may cover subjects not taught in school here, or not in the classes you choose to take, but in theory all the answers can be found in our library, somewhere. Your packet contains a list of subjects that have come up in the past which is longer than what you see on the screen now, as well as a list of specific books we keep multiple copies of which are recommended reading. Beyond that it is up to you.”

Another slide was blank except for a date almost three years off.

“You’ll take the test in the break before the last term in eleventh grade, so you’ll have almost all of middle school to prepare.”

She flipped to another slide, with silhouettes of a boy and a girl, the penis visible in the boy’s silhouette to make that clear, with an arrow pointing to the silhouette of one of the centaur-like adults. This looked almost exactly like the first picture in the book my mother had used (twice!) in teaching me about pairing, except the pictures had been reduced to silhouettes.

“One important requirement is that we send an equal number of boys and girls. This program is for pairing. Your parents all explained that to you before this school year started, I hope.”

All the students in the room indicated that they had received this education.

“If selected, each of you will be paired, in the merging sense, with a student of the opposite sex from another city, so we need equal gender numbers in the entire group. Because we don’t want you to get left out and paired with a random person if you end up not qualifying, we require that you pick partners and sign up in opposite-sex pairs. Both members of a pair will be selected, or both rejected, and if rejected, you’ll have this partner to fall back on for pairing, which we hope will still work out well for you. You’ll test separately, though, and both your individual grades will be considered in the decision.”

At no point did she say we would study together to help each other learn class material, but she also didn’t say we wouldn’t, and I took it to be a given that candidates would pair up early on and study together the entirety of middle school, both for standard classes and for the test.

“Now you don’t have to register today. In particular, since we have too many boys here, we couldn’t register all of you. You have all school year to find a partner. Registration will be open during the last two weeks of second term and all of third term. You and your partner must be present together to register. If you miss it, you can sign up during the same period next year, or the following year during the two weeks immediately before you would take the test. You may register with someone else who isn’t here today. Feel free to pick up extra packets to share this information about the program with others; everything I’m telling you today is in there. But we are going to give you a chance today to get to know each other a little better, since we know that the few of you here today are at least interested in the program, and some of you might select one another as partners.”

Her last slide was a bunch of generic pictures of written documents, paintings, sculptures, etc.

“We’re meeting in an art classroom today because it has materials available for you to express yourselves in many different ways. These materials are spread all around the edges of the room. You have 20 minutes [this was stated in local time units, approximately 20 minutes] to write, draw, sculpt, or otherwise express yourself in a way that might help the others here decide if you’re the right partner. Each of you will have a few minutes to share your writing or talk about your artwork for the rest of us when this is through. Go!”

Talk about putting us on the spot! I guess thinking fast was a useful skill. But what I was thinking was that if another ethertraveler landed in my town and was born at around the same time as a result of this planet being on the exploration program when I came, this moment was the best chance I had of finding one. I remembered the story from one of the first successful reports from the program, which was shared with all of us, where one ethertraveler had found another by hiding TERRA in Latin letters in a piece of art, and I chose to do the same.

I grabbed some blank paper and art supplies, and I drew a scene from science fiction, an alien and its spacecraft in a style commonly depicted here, along with a centaur adult from this world. I put five rows of little windows on the spaceship in black or yellow to suggest some of them were illuminated, and the illuminated ones spelled out TERRA in crude letters. They wouldn’t look like anything to the natives.

Pretty soon we were all sharing our work. My picture, which I had titled “Aim for the Stars,” included an inset in a top corner, explaining that one of the tiny stars at the top of my picture represented this world’s sun, with our planet and the other lifeless ones here circling it. My research had shown they did know or strongly believe the other planets in the system were lifeless. I actually got reactions from one girl and one boy from it. The girl’s was stronger, though. She’d shared with us a short science-fiction story about traveling to a world that sounded suspiciously like Earth with its unfurred people who walked on two legs their entire lives and didn’t merge. The boy had written something more academic about inventing machines.

After the last presentation, the teacher invited us to go talk with one another in private groups. The girl who had written the story came to me and whispered in my ear a description of what was undeniably ethertraveling, and I responded with my recollection of the original TERRA story. But I made sure we talked to the boy also; we met him together.

“Good job, you two. I love science fiction but I didn’t think to write or draw some. I don’t know if you’ll have the grades, but I know I missed out on one potential partner from this group.”

It didn’t seem like he knew anything about ethertraveling, and she confirmed he missed her attempts to locate ethertravelers from her prior school. He was just a science-fiction fan. My partner and I made plans to meet up the following weekend, the one day we didn’t have school.

As it turned out, she lived on the other side of town. There were two elementary schools, and she had gone to the other one, but at this level we were all in one school. But the town wasn’t very big, even with farm plots, and our four-legged running mode made the trip of 4 miles each way between our homes reasonable to do once a week if we wanted to.

Her Earth name was Cynthia, and that is the name I use in this report because, like mine, her name here is not readily rendered in English letters. I shared with her my name Tyler as well, and we basically agreed to help each other qualify. Even if we ended up pairing with non-ethertravelers, we’d have better resources to eventually build the ether communicator, and there’d be two of us to share the work. So throughout middle school we met frequently, often at the school, since the library was open on weekends even while the rest of the school was closed, perhaps specifically for us. Most of the students I saw there were those I met at the program meeting, or, as I came to know them, were program candidates who registered in the previous two years and would take the test before us.

My brother and sisters didn’t make their pairing choices until tenth or eleventh grade. In fact, Jenny, who was starting eleventh grade now, hadn’t chosen someone yet when I introduced Cynthia to the family. They understood, though, when I explained that we were trying out for the program. While the others had done fine in school, none of them had had the particular ambition to try this.

So I got to know Cynthia quite well, and we learned a lot about the state of technology on this world. It was surprisingly advanced, but somehow they’d never developed anything like the Internet, so little farm towns like this one lagged far behind. We also studied up on culture, such as what movies were popular, since we had no idea if we were really getting it all here, and really anything else we could learn about life in the big cities.

The intervening years passed quickly, and test day came. There were just six of us in the testing room, including five of the original group who had attended the meeting. I can’t say we got everything right, but Cynthia and I both felt we did well. I had to laugh at there being two farming questions on the test, stuff city kids probably wouldn’t know, which no doubt came from our town or another farm town participating in the program. Were those kids studying farming stuff in their libraries?

A few weeks later, we were contacted. Cynthia and I had been selected for the program. We finished the school year, and enjoyed the two-week break with all the other kids, with our two families throwing a small party. Most people wouldn’t start their transformation soon, so there was no rush. And since people didn’t wear clothes, there wasn’t a whole lot of packing to do for our trip, either.

The same day that other kids who hadn’t just finished eleventh grade went back to school, we traveled to Crystal City to meet up with the other program participants. There was a train station, with trains very much like Earth trains riding on fixed rails, which mostly saw use to carry our excess food to be sold in other towns and to bring other goods here, but once a day there was a passenger train, though it was a single car, which went to Crystal City and other places beyond.

They had allowed that day for travel, and provided a block of rooms for us at a hotel. Most of the people on the train were paired centaur-form people and the seating was made for their centaur forms, long narrow compartments on either side of a wide aisle and completely open to the aisle, with a low seat near the back of the compartment. But the conductor pointed out to us where each compartment had a second seat folded into the wall opposite the one fixed seat, so that the two of us could share a compartment. Obviously, it wasn’t unheard of for unpaired people to be on the train, and nobody questioned the two of us traveling together without an adult.

The city had local trains as well, and we changed trains once and then walked what was a pretty short distance for us, but within unfamiliar territory, to get to the hotel where the whole program meeting was going to happen. When we got there, there was a pretty obvious place to check in for the program, and they also provided us with rooms. Perhaps to limit culture shock, they provided me and Cynthia with a room on the ground floor, though we saw there were ramps and elevators to reach other floors. My siblings had all had dividers between our beds growing up, so we would sleep not seeing one another, but we were in a room with two beds and no divider between them. They clearly didn’t think it was weird to put a boy and a girl together, since we were expected to have gotten to know each other well and these unpaired forms weren’t sexually mature. And after all, we were here to choose partners for a pairing most of us would do within the next year. We were all soon going to get to know the organs of the other sex intimately, even before those organs were ready for sex.

The second day of the school term for other kids, we all met up. After a brief formal session in which we learned each person’s name and which city or town they were from, along with marking their locations on a map, there were several different icebreaker games and some informal time to mingle.

By dropping TERRA and other references, we eventually learned there were three other ethertravelers in the program, all girls, all from different places, two of them from big cities and one from another farming town, out of 14 total pairs. There were five farm towns in the program, one town sending two pairs and the rest one each. There were also three cities, two of which had sent three pairs each and the third city two. They were pretty much letting us make our own matches provided none of the small-town kids got left out and was forced to pair with another small-town kid, and that nobody was forced to pair with someone from their own city or town. Since we could only make one pair among our Terran group, it was decided I would pair with Linda, the big-city girl from the place with the best tech opportunities for our goal. Cynthia, and the other two girls (who were both men in their first lives named Dean and Stacy) could pick whoever they wanted, yielding four of us who might or might not mate in pairs later in life, but we’d all keep in touch, whatever happened. Nobody seemed worried their non-ethertraveling partners would steer them away from the idea.

The program ran for five days, at the end of it our pairings being decided, with the administrators not having to change anybody to meet the program requirements. We made arrangements for where we were going to live, in each case with the family of one of the members of the pair. Because we were making pairings across different cities, we weren’t going to be able to visit both families frequently. So the plan was we’d spend one week with the family we didn’t expect to live with all the time, and then switch over to the other family until our pairing. For the pairs which included a small-town kid, that was always the big city’s family, as that was where we expected to go to high school.

Living with Linda

So it was that Linda and I made our way back on the train to my family’s farm for a week. I’d had to make a concerted effort to remember the name of our station, and our town, was Lakeview (the equivalent words in their language, of course), because we rarely used the name in town. It was just “Town.” I knew the names of other towns better than my own!

She marveled at how simple the life was there. She knew from descriptions, but it was her first actual visit. But she got to meet all my family, including all my paired siblings. We were the only unpaired people there, and everybody wanted to tell us about how pairing was and no two of them agreed. They said it was great, it was uncomfortable, it was weird, it was exhilarating, and it was something we only did because we’d die otherwise.

Then I saw what her family’s home was like. It was nothing at all like the farm; she lived in a very modern high-rise building. But that wasn’t too surprising; I understood that the big cities had a generally higher technology level than the farms, which for the most part didn’t do multiple stories at all. Town Hall had a second floor which you could get up to via a long ramp or an elevator big enough for two adults to enter and turn around inside without having to back out, and I’d seen, but not used, similar constructions during the trip to the program group. At Linda’s building, elevators were the only choice. The only ramps were a sort of fire escape.

But it was more than that. I quickly realized that Linda’s city didn’t have a generation’s advance in technology compared to the farms. They had a century’s worth, if not more. Something was wrong, and at the first convenient opportunity, I asked Linda privately.

“Oh, of course. They could not have taught you about the automation famine. It would have violated the exclusion law.”

“Yeah, I never heard of any of that.”

“I can tell you, but you must swear not to reveal it to any of the rest of your family.”

“Linda, I’m going to be sharing a body and mind with you in... whenever we’re ready. Likely less than a year. I’m going to know your secret and I’m also going to know the reason I’m bound to keep the secret. And I’ve been keeping a much bigger secret from them all my life, the one we share as ethertravelers.”

I rendered that last word as space-travelers, which was the closest we could come in the language here and how our group of 5 had agreed to say it when we were speaking. It was also innocuous; if somebody overheard it, we could claim we were referring to science-fictional space travel in spacecraft like the one from my artwork. We could easily claim that it was the goal of our small group of friends to travel into space for real.

Making a gesture that the people here used when swearing oaths, or at least the version of it possible in kids’ bodies, I said, “I’ll keep your secrets. So I swear. Tell me the secrets.”

“When they tried to do mechanized farming, artificially produced food, and the like, people died. It look a long time before it happened. That sort of food was introduced gradually, a whole generation knew about it and had eaten it without problems. Sure, a person or two here or there died mysteriously, but they never tied it down to anything. It was when they increased the production of food this way, when it reached the point that somebody might eat only machine-made food, that people started dying in larger numbers. Two hundred mysterious deaths in one year, eight times as many as any previous year, which was enough to make people wonder. Twelve thousand the next year, and people knew it was a serious problem. They still didn’t know why. Seventeen million people died the next year, primarily in large cities. There was so much death in one city they had to close down parts of the city. There weren’t enough people to run things.”

“Oh God. Seventeen million.”

I should pause here to explain the number system. With four fingers (three fingers and a thumb) on juvenile hands and eight fingers on adult hands, they used a base-eight number system here. So what I translated as two hundred was three eight-eights, or 192, as an approximation of the death toll with basically the same meaning. The other numbers were similarly close round numbers in base eight.

Linda continued, “Kids and adults died equally. And while there were a lot fewer people living on farms, they’d had no such deaths on the non-mechanized farms and few in the areas still primarily fed from such farms, so they figured out it was something to do with the food supply. They rushed shipments of natural food to the areas mainly eating mechanized food, and the deaths slowed to nearly none. They tried to figure it out, but they never could. It didn’t affect animals. They could not test it on lab animals because the lab animals could live entirely on artificial food with no ill effects, for the normal duration of their lives.”

“They never pinpointed a cause?”

“The deaths were weird, and not all alike.”

She located a book on the subject and let me read. People suffered cascade heart attacks, where one heart stopped and then instead of feeling numb in the extremities as the other heart suffered under the load of trying to pump the whole adult body’s bloodstream, and being able to seek help, the second heart failed also. They suffered brain death, which is usually also not fatal to adults here, as either brain alone can control the whole body, but that cascaded as well and both brains died. They suffered multiple kidney failure. Double liver failure. Internal bleeding. Loss of lung function. Random organ failures over all systems, including ways that were very rare for people to die. People in the same family who ate the same food died in different ways. They had lots of corpses to study, and they could identify various nutrient deficiencies in one person or another but it was inconsistent. They had lots of survivors to study, who didn’t have the same nutrient deficiencies that killed their family members. They couldn’t very well ask a bunch of people to eat the machined food, condemning them to death, especially when they were so far from pinpointing a cause. The only conclusion they could agree on was that something about the machines poisons food in ways that causes a variety of different deaths in different people, and only in people.

“So they just stopped making that kind of food? Bet that caused problems.”

“Well, yeah. They had started using the machines to improve crop yield, and reduce the amount of manual labor that was needed, but it didn’t work. So they had to roll back all those plans. Shut down the machinery, pull up and burn crops that had been planted that way, and go back to older ways. You can use a tractor to till the soil, but then nothing more than a seed-sower that a man pushes along each row of crops one at a time. Similar style of reapers.”

“Yeah, I know. I lived that life. I saw my family do those chores, helped with them sometimes. There’s no actual hand-farming except weeding, but we use simple, hand-operated machines to perform all work dealing with crops, like you said.”

“At first, they had to send a bunch of city folks out to farm the land, and they hated it. But they found that there were people who hated technology, and by specifically recruiting people like that, and having retired farmers train them, it worked. They made enough food and the weird deaths stopped. But they were still terribly afraid it would happen again. The level of technology involved in our food production could never be allowed to increase. That meant the population could not increase, unless we increase the amount of farms.”

“Was there land for that?”

“There was. They had to do a lot to make it work, but they did. Some of the places where whole cities died, if the area was good for farming, they turned them into farmland. They concentrated the cities more, making these tall towers like the one we are in now, and put more farms on the outskirts. Every city has its own collection of farming towns. And they limited the size one city could be, which is why we have the other nearby cities here. The space between and around them allows enough farmland to feed all the people.”

“And tell me about the whole secrecy thing.”

“They were worried crafty farmers were going to redevelop mechanized farming and cause mini-famines among the people who ate their food. So the whole system is designed to make two classes of people, those who permanently live in the level of technology you grew up in on this world, and the unlimited technology of the cities. The exchange program lets the brilliant minds who might become inventors come to the cities and invent things safely, and in the process pair with city people who know the history and the reasons for it. They’ve slowly increased certain levels of technology in ways they think are safe. For instance, you’re one generation of television behind what we have, but the programs aired on that generation are governed by censors who ensure things farming people aren’t allowed to know don’t go out. You have powerful pocket computers but they are locked down to only run approved programs. And you can’t have the Internet. There simply wouldn’t be any way to control the information.”

“How close are you, really? How far is the technology here away from ethertravel?”

“The people here could have already built it if they were interested in that kind of thing. With four adults working on it, I say two years past college, tops, to call home. Perhaps as little as half a year.”

“Tell me about college here. In the farm towns, it’s just some mythical thing that happens in the cities.”

“Yeah. Farm people don’t need college, so they don’t get any, but it’s available here in the city. All your doctors are city-educated people sworn to maintain the secrecy, and they get Internet to do their jobs. Most other college people stay in the cities. But it’s a four-year boarding school covering every field you’d expect from your experiences in your first life.”

“So you think two years after we finish college we can call home. Two years of our pairing period, three years high school, four years college, and then the time to make the communicator, so about eleven years. And the first thing we tell them is stop sending people here.”

“Probably, yeah. The testing system should handle it. If six couples from one town ace the exam, we’ll bring them all to the city and find enough here to pair with them. But they’ll notice. They’ve got decades of getting about the same number of brainiacs getting in every year. One year with extras could be a fluke. Several big years in a row with three or five times as many as the norm, they’ll know something is wrong and worry some tech has leaked.”

“Right. That sort of situation was what I was thinking of. At least they can catch the people and not have a bunch of also-ran ethertravelers go into renegade farming tech and kill people. Is there some way we can put the towns on extra alert without revealing ethertravel to the whole world here?”

“Probably. We can brainstorm those ideas as a group and come up with plans. There are a few other privileged people in the towns. Learning the extent of the secrecy program was a required middle-school class for us. Mayors and certain town officials including the test administrators for the program are told the history of the automation famine and how the towns are being kept back on technology on purpose to avoid a repeat. The basic idea behind the test is that any farm kid who aces it gets in, regardless of grades, how many there are, or how their partner did. Usually it’s hard enough that nobody will. It’s a lot easier for city kids, though we have to study materials about your lifestyle to answer townie questions.”

“I recall thinking exactly that, that city kids weren’t going to know the farming answers unless they’d specifically studied them.”

“There’s a different attitude in the cities. The ones who want to join the program are the outcasts, the dreamers, those who don’t fit in, but not necessarily because they are super-bright. There’s a certain minimum in grades and then they take the top test scores, enough of them, after the towns report how many they are sending, to have a few more city kids than townies. If they really want it, they’ll study, including farming, and at least do better than the others, which is all they need.”