"Did your parents ever consider making you a little girl?" asks his grandmother.
"Mother suggested it a couple of times, but Father forbade it." Or rather, decided it was unlawful , he recalls. "I had a very conservative upbringing in some ways."
"I wouldn't say that. When I was a little girl, that was all there was; none of these questions of self-selected identity. There was no escape, merely escapism. Didn't you ever have a problem knowing who you were?"
The starters arrive, diced melon on a silver salver. Sirhan waits patiently for his grandmama to chivvy the table into serving her. "The more people you are, the more you know who you are," says Sirhan. "You learn what it's like to be other people. Father thought that perhaps it isn't good for a man to know too much about what it's like to be a woman." And Grandfather disagreed, but you already know that , he adds for his own stream of consciousness.
"I couldn't agree more." Pamela smiles at him, an expression that might be that of a patronizing elder aunt if it wasn't for the alarming sharkishness of her expression – or is it playfulness? Sirhan covers his confusion by spooning chunks of melon into his mouth, forking temporary ghosts to peruse dusty etiquette manuals and warn him if he's about to commit some faux pas. "So, how did you enjoy your childhoods?"
"Enjoy isn't a word I would use," he replies as evenly as he can, laying down his spoon so he doesn't spill anything. As if childhood is something that ever ends , he thinks bitterly. Sirhan is considerably less than a gigasecond old and confidently expects to exist for at least a terasecond – if not in exactly this molecular configuration, then at least in some reasonably stable physical incarnation. And he has every intention of staying young for that entire vast span – even into the endless petaseconds that might follow, although by then, megayears hence, he speculates that issues of neoteny will no longer interest him. "It's not over yet. How about you? Are you enjoying your old age, Grandmama?"
Pamela almost flinches, but keeps iron control of her expression. The flush of blood in the capillaries of her cheeks, visible to Sirhan through the tiny infrared eyes he keeps afloat in the air above the table, gives her away. "I made some mistakes in my youth, but I'm enjoying it fine nowadays," she says lightly.
"It's your revenge, isn't it?" Sirhan asks, smiling and nodding as the table removes the entrees.
"Why, you little —" She stares at him rather than continuing. A very bleak stare it is, too. "What would you know about revenge?" she asks.
"I'm the family historian." Sirhan smiles humorlessly. "I lived from two to seventeen years several hundred times over before my eighteenth birthday. It was that reset switch, you know. I don't think Mother realized my primary stream of consciousness was journaling everything."
"That's monstrous." Pamela picks up her wineglass and takes a sip to cover her confusion. Sirhan has no such retreat – grape juice in a tumbler, unfermented, wets his tongue. "I'd never do something like that to any child of mine."
"So why won't you tell me about your childhood?" asks her grandson. "For the family history, of course."
"I'll —" She puts her glass down. "You intend to write one," she states.
"I'm thinking about it." Sirhan sits up. "An old-fashioned book covering three generations, living through interesting times," he suggests. "A work of postmodern history, the incoherent school at that – how do you document people who fork their identities at random, spend years dead before reappearing on the stage, and have arguments with their own relativistically preserved other copy? I could trace the history further, of course – if you tell me about your parents, although I am certain they aren't around to answer questions directly – but we reach the boring dumb matter slope back to the primeval soup surprisingly fast if we go there, don't we? So I thought that perhaps as a narrative hook I'd make the offstage viewpoint that of the family's robot cat. (Except the bloody thing's gone missing, hasn't it?) Anyway, with so much of human history occupying the untapped future, we historians have our work cut out recording the cursor of the present as it logs events. So I might as well start at home."
"You're set on immortalism." Pamela studies his face.
"Yes," he says idly. "Frankly, I can understand your wanting to grow old out of a desire for revenge, but pardon me for saying this, I have difficulty grasping your willingness to follow through with the procedure! Isn't it awfully painful?"
"Growing old is natural ," growls the old woman. "When you've lived long enough for all your ambitions to be in ruins, friendships broken, lovers forgotten or divorced acrimoniously, what's left to go on for? If you feel tired and old in spirit, you might as well be tired and old in body. Anyway, wanting to live forever is immoral. Think of all the resources you're taking up that younger people need! Even uploads face a finite data storage limit after a time. It's a monstrously egotistical statement, to say you intend to live forever. And if there's one thing I believe in, it's public service. Duty: the obligation to make way for the new. Duty and control."
Sirhan absorbs all this, nodding slowly to himself as the table serves up the main course – honey-glazed roast long pork with sautéed potatoes a la gratin and carrots Debussy – when there's a loud bump from overhead.
"What's that?" Pamela asks querulously.
"One moment." Sirhan's vision splits into a hazy kaleidoscope view of the museum hall as he forks ghosts to monitor each of the ubiquitous cameras. He frowns; something is moving on the balcony, between the Mercury capsule and a display of antique random-dot stereoisograms. "Oh dear. Something seems to be loose in the museum."
"Loose? What do you mean, loose?" An inhuman shriek splits the air above the table, followed by a crash from upstairs. Pamela stands up unsteadily, wiping her lips with her napkin. "Is it safe?"
"No, it isn't safe." Sirhan fumes. "It's disturbing my meal!" He looks up. A flash of orange fur shows over the balcony, then the Mercury capsule wobbles violently on the end of its guy wires. Two arms and a bundle of rubbery something covered in umber hair lurches out from the handrail and casually grabs hold of the priceless historical relic, then clambers inside and squats on top of the dummy wearing Al Sheperd's age-cracked space suit. "It's an ape ! City, I say, City! What's a monkey doing loose in my dinner party?"
"I am most deeply sorry, sir, but I don't know. Would sir care to identify the monkey in question?" replies City, which for reasons of privacy, has manifested itself as a bodiless voice.
There's a note of humor in City's tone that Sirhan takes deep exception to. "What do you mean? Can't you see it?" he demands, focusing on the errant primate, which is holed up in the Mercury capsule dangling from the ceiling, smacking its lips, rolling its eyes, and fingering the gasket around the capsule's open hatch. It hoots quietly to itself, then leans out of the open door and moons over the table, baring its buttocks. "Get back!" Sirhan calls to his grandmother, then he gestures at the air above the table, intending to tell the utility fog to congeal. Too late. The ape farts thunderously, then lets rip a stream of excrement across the dining table. Pamela's face is a picture of wrinkled disgust as she holds her napkin in front of her nose. "Dammit, solidify, will you!" Sirhan curses, but the ubiquitous misty pollen-grain-sized robots refuse to respond.