Fur of Reason

No Hat Zone

I cannot tell you how the story ends because it did not. I can tell you that I am not the hero of it, which should be obvious. People write to me sometimes to ask whether I think adding animal traits to a human is crossing a line. I reply that the line was never at hair. The line is at consent. We have crossed lines before, and we will cross more. Survival is a crime you commit against entropy by conspiring with everything in you that can make structure out of cold.

Vera wrote me a letter last week. She writes letters more often than calls because she likes the sound of paper. She included, as always, a small bag of grit that had been somewhere the wind had been. In the letter she told me that a power junction had failed between two modules at dawn and that she had walked there with two others and that the fix had been obvious only after a long conversation with a machine that had been telling the wrong truth for months.

She ended the letter with a sentence that made me sit down.

“I am not fur,” she wrote. “I am a person who uses fur to do work that humans want to do. There are days when I think we built a coat. There are days when I think we built a mirror. Today I think we built a language.”

I wrote back that evening and told her that language is a coat we wrap around thought to keep it warm as it steps into cold rooms. I told her that if she were a mirror, it was one that did not merely reflect but corrected for dim light and glare. I told her that she would be tired of my metaphors, and that when she came home I would have a new hat just foolish enough to please her.

And then I went to the cryo-vault, which hums even when there is no crisis, and I stood very still and I let the dry air touch my face, and I thought about how neat it is to be alive in a century where a mother can say yes to a child who asks to be a person.

Later, when the Director retired and Kofi did not, when the Bureau changed its name to something marginally worse and its letterhead to something marginally better, when Vera came for a week and left again, there was another question from a student at a talk I was giving: “Do you think we should make more like her?”

I said, which is my habit now, “Make is a big word. Should is a bigger one. Let us begin with can, continue with why, and end with who decides.”

“Who decides?” the student asked, because clever students always make you say aloud the thing you hope they will say.

“The person,” I said. “Always the person. Even if she has fur.”

The student smiled in the careful way of the young. The audience laughed because they were grateful for the release of a joke. After, as I was cleaning chalk from my hands, a woman who had been quiet in the back row came to me and said: “My daughter hates hats. I will text you about whiskers.”

“Text Director,” I said reflexively, then corrected myself, “Text me. We have better hats now. We learned.”

And because the air was conditioned tediously to twelve specifications that someone had fought for in a subcommittee ten years earlier, I felt, for just a moment, the ghost of a draft. It touched my cheek as if to remind me of a room where frost wrote its own rules, and a child who read them aloud.

The Whiskers Forward

Years pass without drama if you do your work. That is not a line that sells books, but it is a way to live. The law grows a little more specific each year. The colony at Syrtis grows two more greenhouses. The Bureau grows a small office whose name is Consent and a larger one whose name is Audit. The language grows teeth where it needs teeth and hands where it needs to carry things. I grow old enough to prefer rooms where the vents do not sing.

Vera grows as people do. She has, at thirty, the settled movements of someone who knows where her limbs end and where the wind begins. She returns for a season and teaches a workshop to technicians on reading drafts. She includes a lesson on how to ask a room if it will be kind and how to interpret the answer. She owns three hats and tolerates two. She still shaves her arms a single summer every decade and refuses to explain why except to grin and say, “Experiments require controls.”

kofi-vera

When she visits she and Kofi argue for hours about cricket and cryonics and whether engineers or philosophers contribute more to civilization’s survival. The answer changes depending on who has cooked dinner. When the Director dies, as we all do, we read her will and find that she has left her chalkboard to Vera. It is a ridiculous and perfect bequest.

Sometimes people want a twist. They want the kind of ending where the clone reveals that she has cloned herself or that she prefers the company of polar bears. They ask for scandal because scandal absolves them of the small, durable work of adjusting a thermostat. I disappoint them. I tell them about a girl who read the wind and a door that opened because ice melted where it had to.

If there is a twist, it is only this: that the problem I set out to solve was not cold. It was fear. Fear spends five minutes debating. Vera does not. She will stand with her head up, whiskers forward, and say yes or no, and either way she will move. It is that movement, and not the coat she wears, that has saved more flakes than I can tally.

When the planet is old and our domes are as embarrassing as our first boats, someone will ask for a name to give a day when the air changed and men did not freeze. Let them name it for the person who said yes and for the ones who learned to ask. Let them say that in the year when we first wrote the law correctly, in a room that smelled like chalk, a child told us she was a person and we believed her.

And if they want a symbol on a banner, let it not be a fox or a bear. Let it be a door with a thin, melting line and a small human hand pointing exactly where to warm it.

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