The Ophiuchi Hotline

3

Song of the Rings, by Clancy-Daniel-Mitre. A collection of early human-symb collaborative poetry.

Circa 240-300 O.E. Open read-rating.

Of all the things received over the Ophiuchi Hotline, none is more wonderful than the symb. In the early part of the third century, symbs were seen as the salvation of the human race. Futurists saw the day when each human would be paired with a symb partner and forever free of reliance on airlocks, hydroponic farming, and recycled water. Each human would be a tiny model of lost Earth, free to roam the solar system at will.

It's easy to see what inspired the optimism. The symmetry of the concept is overwhelming. Each human-symb pair is a closed ecology, requiring only sunlight and a small amount of solid matter to function. The vegetable symb gathers sunlight in space, using it to convert human waste and carbon dioxide into food and oxygen. At the same time it protects the fragile human from vacuum and the extremes of heat and cold. The symb's body extends into the lungs and through the alimentary canal. Each side feeds the other.

What we didn't bargain for is the mind of the symb. Since it has no brain, a symb is nothing but a lump of artificial organic matter until it comes in contact with a human. But upon permeating the nervous system of its host it is born as a thinking being. It shares the human brain. The early experimenters learned that, once in, the symb was there to stay. Since that time relatively few have opted to surrender their mental privacy in exchange for Utopia in the Rings.

But out of the disappointment we have been given a precious gift. Ring society is not human society. We live in rooms and corridors; they have all of space. We each have the right to be the mother of one child in our lifetimes; they breed like bacteria. We are islands; they are paired minds. It is a relationship that is difficult to imagine.

Somewhere in that magical junction of two dissimilar minds a tension is created. Sparks are struck, sparks of dazzling creativity. All Ringers are poets. Poetry is a normal by-product of living. To those of us without the courage to pair, who wait for the infrequent contacts of Ringers with human society, their songs are beyond price.

Parameter floated over a golden desert that no horizon could contain. She faced the sun, which was a small but very bright disc just to anti-spinward of Saturn. Saturn itself was a dark hole in space, edged by a razored crescent with the sun set in it like a precious stone.

She saw none of this. She perceived the sun as a pressure and a wind, and Saturn as a cold, deep well that pulled.

The sunrise had been delicious. She could still taste the flavors of it flowing through the wafer-thin part of her body that had opened to receive it. She was a sunflower.

Sunflower mode was a lazy, vegetable time. Parameter had Solstice, her symb, disconnect the visual centers of her brain so she could savor the simple pleasures of being a plant. Her arms were spread wide to the light and her feet were planted firmly in the fertile soil that was her symb. It was a good time.

Seen from the outside, Parameter was the center of a hundred-meter filmy parasol, slightly parabolic. She was a spider sitting in the middle of a frozen section of soap bubble, but the section was shot through with veins, like the inner surface of an eyeball. Fluids pumped through the veins, some milky, some deep red, others purplish-brown. From a point near Parameter's navel a thin stalk extended, with a fist-sized nodule at the end of it. The nodule was at the focus of the parabola and received the small percentage of sunlight that was reflected from the sunflower. It was hot there, a steamy center for Parameter to revolve around. In the nodule and in the capillaries of the sunflower, chemical reactions were going on.

Activity in her brain was damped down to almost nothing, interrupted only by the passing peaks of Solstice, who never went completely to sleep.

"Parameter." It was not a voice, even when Parameter was more fully conscious. It was words forming in her head, like thoughts, but they were not her own thoughts.

"(Recognition; slight reproach; receptivity)"

"Come on. Wake up."

"What is it?" Coming awake was effortless.

"Are you ready for vision now?"

"Sure. Why not?"

Solstice, functioning as a switchboard in the back of the cerebrum, closed the contacts that would allow Parameter's visual cortex to communicate with her forebrain: She saw.

"What a lovely morning."

"Yeah. Very nice. Wait till you see the morning papers. You won't be so happy."

"Can it wait? Why ruin it?" Parameter felt no sense of urgency. It had been a century since she felt rushed.

"Sure. Let me know when you're up to it."

Parameter communicated wry amusement to her symb. (Picture of herself buckling on sword, dagger, donning brass helmet and picking up embossed shield.) Solstice responded. (Picture of Parameter climbing a staircase, gazing at the stars, failing to see she was reaching for a top step that wasn't there.)

Parameter stretched, causing the filmy parasol to undulate slowly. She made tight fists of all four hands—she had no feet, having surgically replaced them with oversized hands at the time of her pairing—then spread twenty fingers. One hand caught her attention. It was pale, but was turning pinker as she watched. She had the coloring of an albino; the skin under her nails was amber, turning quickly to orange. Solstice was packing up, pumping liquids around, getting ready to move.

Nothing she saw was real. Her eyes were protected behind the opaque substance of Solstice; no light had fallen on her retinas in over seven years. Had she looked at the sun with her eyes, as she seemed to be doing, cells would have been destroyed. What she saw was the product of nerve impulses sent to different areas of her brain by Solstice's sensory receptors. But it looked to her as though she were floating naked in space, feeling the raw sunlight on her body. The illusion was complete.

"Okay. What's up?"

"This is up. I monitored this broadcast two minutes ago. It came from the Janus transmitter, channel nineteen. Where do you want it?"

"I don't care. Anywhere."

A three-dimensional image built up between Parameter and the dark semicircle of Saturn. It looked as real as anything else she could see. The view was the interior of a room. It could have been any room, but the woman sitting in it was someone Parameter knew. The voice-over explained that Lilo, the convicted Enemy of Humanity, had been put to death. It gave the time, the place, and a brief summary of her crimes. As the commentary moved on to a lecture about the evils of genetic experimentation, Solstice tuned it out without Parameter needing to ask for it.

"We knew it would happen," Parameter pointed out, wondering why the news did not affect her more.

"So did she."

"Okay. Where is she now?"

Her view shifted. Saturn appeared to rotate beneath her until she saw the Rings from the top. She seemed to be hovering over the north polar region.

At the bottom of the Ring, near where the shadow of Saturn cut across it, a small green arrow blinked on and off.

"That's us," Solstice said. Further around the curve of the Ring, about sixty degrees to spinward, a dark red arrow appeared. Its color told her the mass of the rock in question. It was on the edge of Ring Alpha, the outermost of the rings, where perturbations would not have been severe over five years.

Solstice caused the picture to zoom in. There was Lilo's life capsule as Parameter had last seen it, retrieved by Solstice from areas in their common brain that Parameter could never reach without hypnosis.

It was a rock—slightly larger than average, but in all a quite ordinary rock. Inside it was a nuclear generator, a computer, a modest rocket engine, a life-support system—and Lilo. Or someone who could become Lilo; a clone who, when Lilo's recorded memories were played into her, would become the Lilo of five years ago.

"Has it really been five years?"

"And sixty days and three hours, Old Earth Corrected Time."

"Doesn't seem like that." She studied the two arrows again. It was a long distance.

"One hundred forty-one thousand eight hundred and ninety-five kilometers, as the rock rolls," Solstice supplied.

"Well, we made a promise, didn't we?'"

"I was waiting for you to say it."

It was six years ago they had first met her. Lilo had set up her private research station on Janus, hoping that the status of that satellite as the interface between human and pair society would mean less vigilance, looser enforcement of the genetic statutes. Parameter/Solstice had met her there on one of their infrequent visits, and they had immediately liked her. That was rare for them. Humans and pairs do not generally mix.

They had hung around her small lab while they were on Janus, and when they were ready to leave they had suggested she move her entire operation into the Rings. Lilo had not been willing to go that far, but had approached them with the idea of setting up a robot station on the edge of the Rings. She was worried about getting caught. They had agreed to supervise the awakening of the clone if she ever needed it.

Now the long journey was ahead of them. It was impossible to hurry. Though they could reach speeds of fifty kilometers per hour in their travels, they had to stop to feed each day. It would take them nearly a year to reach Lilo.

"Well, every trip starts with one push," Solstice said. "Let's go."