Making People

Arta comes to me on the Flex that winds around our Domo and makes everyone in this atmosphere lazy. I am old enough to remember when people walked. Danced. Ran.

'Welcome,' I tell Arta.

I long to reach out for her hand but touching is not permitted.

Anyway, I am tethered to this Life Chair as surely as a milking-goat might have been to a peg a light-year ago. We are not so different though, that goat and I. I am Mameal, The Archive. People milk me for my mind.

'Arta,' I say. 'How glad I am to see you.'

She hovers beside me with the restlessness of the young. Arta is thirteen-turns old. Today she is bursting with news.

'Our Collective has been granted a child. They will harvest my egg!'

For a long time now, population growth has been set at zero. This must be part of the New Regime. I think how wonderful it would be to clutch a baby. Then I remember; holding a child is no longer allowed.

'I will be admitted into the tank to see how it grows,' Marta tells me. 'Were you allowed to watch your egg grow, Mameal?'

'In my day it was very different,' I say.

I remember body-hair and fingertips. I look down at Arta's small, enclosed hands and imagine her smooth knuckles. She is safe inside her Coating. Exposed skin can be contaminated. Her face is covered by her caul.

'Then tell me how babies were made,' demands Arta. 'In your day, Mameal.'

I wonder if it is possible to explain romance, devotion and lust. I remember how I met Gerio when we were fourteen-turns old. We were connected by the next turn. By twenty I was hailed as a very fine breeder - three babies born and growing well by then. Gerio and I had rocked each and every one of them, before rocking was suddenly banned. And then singing was outlawed because the Powers said it was of no use to anyone. Finally, even babies became a luxury the planet couldn't afford. Arta has not seen a baby in her lifetime.

'Did they harvest your egg, Mameal?' she wonders.

'No,' I say, sharply. 'I tell you Arta, things were different. Ask me something else.' Behind the caul her face looks bewildered. She is a child, for all the changes to the world. 'Okay, ' she smiles wickedly. 'Tell me about the rain before it stopped.'

Even I cannot describe something as simple or as old as the weather.

I am sad because it.

I swim in my past instead of the rain.

I begin, in spite of myself, to unfold the story of how we used to make people.

'We began with eyes,' I tell her. 'Two sets of eyes.'

'Four eyes?' she asks. 'Four?'

'Two persons,' I say. 'A man and a women. Two sets of eyes.'

I remember Gerio's eyes of Titan blue.

'And lips,' I say quickly. 'We would put our lips together in a kiss.'

Arta looks at me as if I've said something disgraceful. A kiss? You'd touch flesh in a kiss?

I remember Gerio's big hands, holding me to him, his face flushed with desire. But passion was soon outlawed along with everything else and now love has been illegal for an Era.

'Mameal?' asks Arta because she can read minds when conversation gets too difficult. 'What is Love?'

Love is harder to explain than rain – but it's the same warm slippery mix that leaves you wanting more. I shut my eyes and dream of Gerio, as young and innocent as Arta. I see him in the time before the Fleeing, before we were confined. A slight breeze lifts his hair from his brow and drops it down again. His smile is golden like Arta's but free.

'Anyway,' says the girl, since I have not answered her question. 'We have been allotted a child and it will be grown from my egg. Tell me how this will happen.'

I give her more information than she will need about the cropping of eggs and spermatozoa by laser. Painless, I assure her, this modern method. A human brew, mixed in a Cube, under bright lights to the pulse of machines. Ultra-conditioning will remove anything as perilous as body contact.

I explain how a baby will be reaped at forty weeks.

But despite my words, Arta continues to read the images in my head. She shakes off the picture of Gerio and I making babies in the old-fashioned way. It's as foreign as raindrops on an umbrella. She shudders and gives up her mind-reading.

'Mameal!' she says. 'It's so much more preferable to make people this new way. It's much more scientific by laser.'

'And far less risky than by love.'

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