“The limitations of the philosophy of terraformation are obvious even within the solar system. Even if the present projects can be brought to a satisfactory conclusion, Mars and Venus will never be Earth-clones. Tyre couldbe terraformed, but nobody who lives there wants to do that now that they realize what it would cost. We cannot and should not attempt to expand into the universe by exterminating existing ecospheres and substituting copies of our own. It isn’t practical and it certainly isn’t right. The better option, from every point of view, is to adapt ourselves to the environments offered by other worlds. Yes, of course we should construct new life-bearing environments where none presently exist, within the home system as well as without, but we should be prepared to exercise our creativity to the limit in so doing. We need not and should not carry the imprint of Earthly evolution wherever we go.
“We could, of course, produce colonists for alien environments in Helier wombs, inventing at least one new species for every new world. That will undoubtedly be the initial pattern of our procedure as we become citizens of the galaxy and citizens of the universe. But we may also become more versatile as individuals, especially if we make the fullest possible use of the lessons in genomic engineering that we have learned on Tyre. Even if we are to design and produce populations of colonists narrowly and specifically designed to inhabit alien environments, it will be necessary to bridge the gaps that exist between those species and their differently adapted kin. The first generation of each specialist species will benefit considerably from being raised and educated by foster parents who can simulate their form, and subsequent generations will benefit from trade conducted through intermediaries who can do likewise.
“The future of posthumanity does not belong to individuals made in the image that natural selection foisted upon the children of Earth, nor even to individuals reformed in images appropriate to life in one or another very different environment; it belongs to individuals who have freed themselves from all such restraints. If you intend to live a very long time, and to see even a tiny fraction of what the universe has to offer, then you will be best served by the greatest versatility you can cultivate, in your flesh as well as in your mind.”
The second flaw in Davida’s argument, according to Alice, lay in Davida’s characterization of the problem of robotization. In Davida’s account, this was essentially a problem of physiology, to be solved in the same terms, but Alice saw it differently.
Yes, Alice conceded, robotization could indeed be opposed by maintaining the brain in a “juvenile” state, sustaining an elasticity that would otherwise be ground down by the routinization of useful mental pathways and the withering of potential alternatives — but that was only half the story. Robotization was also an experiential problem: a matter of the invariety of the environments in which an individual operated, and of the limited number of the tasks which an individual routinely attempted. Preserving the potential of the brain was only the beginning; resistance to robotization also required that individuals preserve their capacity for new experience.
This could only be fully achieved, Alice argued, by moving through an infinite series of different environments and by maintaining a wide repertoire of possible modes in which those environments could be experienced.
At this point, Alice briefly forsook the screen, on which images had appeared and disappeared all the while, in awful profusion and at a hectic pace. The time had come for her to do her own party piece.
I was ready for it, of course. I knew what the Queen of the Fays had done to Tam Lin while she hoped to prevent Janet of Carterhaugh from reclaiming his soul.
Alice had already told us that her talents as a shapeshifter were very limited, as yet. Although she was currently a virtual individual in a virtual environment, the rules laid down by la Reine des Neiges restricted her to a close mimicry of what was accomplishable in meatspace. Had she been capable of it, I hope she might have been sufficiently respectful of Earthly tradition to turn herself into a wolf, but the possibility was not there. The transformations she did display were paltry by comparison with the werewolves that had haunted hundreds of cheap VE melodramas in my day, but the remarkable fact was that they were done at all.
Alice could grow taller and she could shrink; she could change her face and the length of her limbs. She could alter her fingers and her toes. Some of the less appealing details of her self-modifications were obscured by the fact that her smartsuit changed as she did, remolding itself to her new form, but the miracle was that this was only a beginning.
I had no way of knowing how much energy was required to fuel these transformations, although Alice seemed drained and exhausted when her original form emerged again at the end of the sequence. Perhaps she could have done more had she had the opportunity to replenish herself, but her time was running out. She had to reactivate the screen in order to demonstrate the further ranges of this kind of possibility. Again she used it as a window, displaying exotic morphs achieved by humans, by Tyrian natives, and by some individuals who seemed to be hybrids.
The more adventurous forms included a huge bird with multicolored iridescent plumage and an awesome wingspan. There were several reptilian morphs, including a dragonlike lizard and a huge constrictor snake, whose scales were as brightly patterned as the avian form’s feathers. These were creatures that might have been plausible inhabitants of Earth — but the whole point of the show was to display plausible inhabitants of worlds less Earthlike than Tyre.
Like Alice herself, the models grew taller and shorter, but they also grew limbs of many different kinds, arranged in many different patterns. They became more fluid and they became more adamantine. They really did look like alien beings fit for life on alien worlds.
All in all, it was an impressive presentation. One had to be prepared to set aside doubts about the energy-economics of the process, but I was prepared to do that. One also had to shelve reservations about the ability of bodies to sustain and protect themselves during the transitional phases of what were, after all, fairly slow and carefully measured metamorphoses — but I was prepared to do that, too. I had no way of knowing whether doubts of those kinds had occurred to Adam Zimmerman, but his expression suggested that he definitely had doubts.
I wondered if he had caught on to the fact that all this was virtual experience. He was the only one of us who ought to have been gullible, but he might have seen enough thirty-third-century technology by now to be suspicious. Having been told that no one but a fool could be taken in by Child of Fortune’simaginary alien invasion, he might be wary of this experience too — for the wrong reasons. He might well be thinking that it was allfaked, including Alice’s demonstrations of what Tyrian biotechnology could do.
It could, of course, have been faked. In VE, everyone can be a werewolf; programming can easily support such illusions. I was certain, though, that the contest had to be fair, because it had to be seen to be fair by real experts. It wasn’t so much the relative modesty of the metamorphoses on display that persuaded me of the reality of Alice’s claims as the conviction that la Reine des Neiges had to play straight for the sake of her audience.
At the end of the day, I figured, la Reine had to be doing all of this for her own benefit. Her desire to avoid conflict had to be perfectly sincere, but she had to have more to gain from all this than the thanks of those AMIs who wanted peace. She had a pitch of her own to make, not merely to Adam Zimmerman and all the multitudinous posthumans who still had existential options open to them, but to her own kind. She had to let Davida and Alice make the best pitches they could, because she had to beat them fair and square if she were to beat them at all.