Fur of Reason
It is tedious to tell you about the law, and it will comfort some and disappoint others, as laws do. It clarified categories for modified humans and removed the phrase posthuman from three documents that had used it like fancy wallpaper. It specified the competence standard that we had improvised on the chalkboard. It defined personhood as something you demonstrate by consent and refusal, not by hair or teeth. It did not, as the philosopher would have liked, attempt a positive definition of what a person is. It was not brave. It was useful.
If this sounds like the end of the story, it is because I am a scientist who likes to end things at a line, but you know as I do that stories end with circles.
When Vera turned twelve, the family standard became accord and the adult standard became usable. She said no to three things I thought she should do and yes to one thing I would have avoided. She joined a maintenance crew for a month at a habitat in Svalbard that kept its freezer doors warmer than our vault and its coffee worse. She came back with a vocabulary of swear words I had not taught her and a friend, Timo, whose ears turned the same delicate pink when they ran from cold to warmth. She did her schoolwork with excellence but without fervor, as if she were paying off a debt. She took long walks with her whiskers lifted the way some children listen to music.
At fifteen she shaved her forearms for exactly one summer and then refused to speak about it, which was her right.
At sixteen we argued one evening about Mars. There was a call for a second deployment of volunteers to Syrtis Minor for a new greenhouse.
“You are not a wrench,” I said.
She went. The Bureau sent me plastic cards to sign. The Director sent me a picture of a cup with a drip on it and the caption: Don’t tilt too much. Kofi sent me a list of hotels near the launch facility with notes like “beds that do not hate your spine.”
I went later, Mars was still red. The dome was mended with a seam you could only see if you tilted your head at the exact angle at which regret is visible. The air inside still tasted like agriculture.
Vera had a room with a window that faced a wall. She liked it because the wall reflected wind in a way she could read from her bed. She took me to see the bees, though they were not hers to show. She took me to the corridor where we had frozen braces onto frames, though the frames were now enclosed and warm. She introduced me to a woman who ran the water plant and who thanked me for my daughter not so much with words as by holding my hand for a moment in both of hers, which is a language older than Director’s chalk.
“Are you happy?” I asked, which is a rude question one is permitted to ask only if one has cleaned vomit in the night for the person to whom one asks it. “Yes,” she said, which is a rude answer in the sense that it obligates the asker to stop worrying. “Do you plan to stay?” I asked. “I plan to come and go,” she said. “I plan to take long walks and read pipes and whisper to wind. I plan to decide. I am very pleased by deciding.” “I thought you liked not deciding,” I said, remembering my old argument. “I like not hesitating when the house is on fire,” she said. “I adore deciding where to put the hydrants.” We stood then in the greenhouse and listened to bees. They are little engines. They are very good at their work. If there is a philosophy of bees, I do not know it, but they behave as if labor were a song.
“Do you think there will be more like me?” she asked. “Yes,” I said, because by then she knew my grant numbers and the rate at which the world imitates success. “But not many.” “Good,” she said. “It would be noisy.”
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