1. The Ruffian
In the eleventh millennium, at the far end of human history and evolution, the treehouses of Lune stood tall along the bank of the River Temz.
Each tree had been grown for an individual family, with its limbs interlaced to make sturdy floors, their leaves overlapped and sealed with a mastic exuded from the undersides to create weathertight chambers. By rewriting the seed’s genetic code, an owner could specify the number of levels and rooms, the placement of doors and windows, and other internal features. In ancient times, a twenty-meter-tall tree of the genus or Quercus or Ulmus might take four to six weeks to germinate and then grow at the rate of no more than thirty-five centimeters per year. But the biotechnologists of Lune had found that, with proper genetic manipulation, plus adequate water and nourishment, the growth rate could be accelerated fifty or sixty times. Still, a year or more was a long time to grow a house—even for humans who had genetically slowed their own growth rates and so extended their lifespans, such as the inhabitants of Lune.
So when Coel Rydin, who was only in his twenty-second year and had just reached technical maturity, was walking along the strand and saw two older and larger boys cutting a two-centimeter-wide ring around the trunk of the Pensah family’s home tree, he became enraged.
“Stop that!” he called. “You’re killing it! That tree will fall.”
“Shut your mouth,” Jarod Willbee said. “Only freaks live here.”
“Yah, freak lover!” said Ponson Omsbee. “You’re a freak yourself.”
Rydin knew exactly whom the two boys meant: Dorya Pensah. She was half a dozen years younger than any of them, a child still not sexually mature, and yet she seemed to exert a strange influence on everyone around her. It was her eyes, of course: golden yellow, lovely and almond shaped, with a delicately folded lid that was very rare for her phenotype. A geneticist might be fascinated by those eyes. Young bucks like Willbee and Omsbee instead pretended to be disgusted.
But whatever their motivation, they had no cause to destroy a work of genetic art and put the family out in the cold, dependent on the good will of the community, for the year it would take to grow them a new home. Something had to be done before these two boys and their plasma scalpel completed girdling the trunk.
“Stop it, I said,” Rydin repeated. And then he put a hand on Willbee’s shoulder.
Willbee shrugged him off and kept digging at the bark and layers underneath.
Rydin renewed and tightened his grip, pulling Willbee away from the tree.
Willbee spun around with the flame low and pointed at Rydin’s stomach.
“Do it!” Omsbee hissed.
Rydin slapped the scalpel away.
It spun off to lie sputtering in the grass.
And that was the start of the boys’ actual fight.
The fists that these untrained juveniles could make were small and inexpertly formed: thumb tucked inside fingers, joints sticking out at odd angles. But Willbee’s first blow hurt terribly when it landed alongside Coel Rydin’s left eye.
In response, Rydin made the best fist he could and landed it on the point of the Willbee’s jaw. And that hurt terribly, too, bruising his knuckles—even if it did cause the other to step back and shake his head.
After that, they were trading feeble punches to the face and body. A lucky blow from Rydin caught Willbee in the larynx, and he backed away gurgling and clutching at his throat.
Ponson Omsbee dropped his head and charged, meaning to grapple with Rydin and bring him down that way. Rydin used his clenched fists to club the boy across his shoulders and then brought a knee up into his face. Omsbee let go, fell back, and sat down hard on the grass.
Even though that was the end of the fight, a Proctor came up and touched Rydin’s left arm with his electromagnetic stun stick, which gave off a soft buzz, and Rydin collapsed in a nerveless heap. In about a minute, when he regained feeling, the short, sharp spears of the genetically maintained grass blades were going to start hurting where they pricked at his neck, cheek, and exposed eyeball.
Rydin’s face was turned away from his opponents, but he could tell when a second Proctor—or maybe the first one, with fast reflexes—had stunned Willbee. Rydin heard the buzz and then the thump-whump as the other boy’s body hit the ground somewhere behind Rydin’s awkwardly turned head.
Presumably, because he was already on the ground, Omsbee was not going to be stung. But Rydin was in no position to see for himself.
———
The tribunal was held near the river in a grove of technically natural trees. “Natural” was a relative term in Lune: the species had been selected, and its genetics only minimally enhanced, to provide overhead shade from the ever-changing patterns of their leaves moving in the wind. The species was also designed to provide sweet fruits without pith or seeds, which were induced to sprout, ripen, and fall year round for the pleasure of passersby. Other than that, the riverside trees served no structural or agricultural purpose.
The tribunal consisted of ten citizens randomly selected from the dozens going about their business on the Strand at the moment the meeting was called to order. The only official with any stated authority was Elder Anton Pagonis. He was a minor member of the Council of Loving Parents, which constituted the civil government of the village of Lune. Five elders with the proper dispositions and clean genotypes were all the control required by a community of five thousand human souls, plus an uncounted number of Silicate intelligences. Of course, the secretive and powerful Troupe des Jongleurs was another matter entirely.
“Our purpose today,” Pagonis began, “is to discover why Coel Rydin, formerly a youth who has now obtained his majority, persists in attacking his fellow citizens without provocation.”
By the standards of Lune, the chronological age of twenty years—representing the convergence of hormonal, emotional, and intellectual maturity, as defined by the Revised Human Genome version 4.61—was considered to be the age of discretion. It was the time when childish foibles were supposed to magically disappear and a new adult perspective govern in all of life’s dimensions. Apparently, at two years and three months past his twentieth natal day, Rydin seemed to be failing at this, and the Council had been forced to take notice.
“But it was not without provocation,” Rydin protested. “They were damaging a perfectly good house, cutting a circle around—”
“Be silent, Mir Rydin,” Pagonis said. “You do not help your case by trying to justify your violence. The actions of the other parties will be evaluated and adjudicated in their own time and place. If actual damage were being done, the Proctors would have intervened in time—or assessed the amount of loss and awarded compensation. We have rules for personal interaction that exclude violent reprisals among citizens.”
The Elder sighed. “You have a long life ahead of you, Mir Rydin. You must not spend it brawling among your cohort. By repaying violence with violence, you only increased the level of violence. This is not the way of loving kindness.”
He turned to Rydin’s mother. “Has the boy not been properly taught?”
Genaya Rydin cleared her throat. “We have taught him to value truth and loyalty, your honor. He may have … misunderstood us in the finer details and placed these values … above that of absolute kindness.”
“Perhaps,” Pagonis said with a smile that was more a recognition of her clever argument than agreement with it. “Many parents opt to remove the aggressive genes from their male embryos. Apparently, you chose otherwise. So be it.” He turned to the Silicate intelligence which had been assigned to participate in this mostly human proceeding. “Does the boy have a clean genotype?”
The machine’s six-legged carrier performed a small dip by flexing its knees, a sign that it acknowledged the question. Then the lenses of its eyestalks dilated out of focus, signifying that it was accessing non-visual information from one of the Silicates’ wide-field databases—this one recording the biotelemetry sensors of Lune’s human citizens. “We find no major mutations or dysfunctions. He has mildly elevated levels of acetylcholine, a modulator of neurologic pathways and neuromuscular junctions. This is probably due to a recessive in one copy of his genes for producing acetylcholinesterase, the enzyme that hydrolyzes this neurotransmitter. The result could be a heightened response to sensory stimuli and alteration of the neocortex’s basic neurological functions for attention, plasticity, arousal, and reward.”
“Would you say this dysfunction would lead to poor impulse control and inappropriate decision making?” the Elder asked.
“That would be a phenotypic evaluation,” the machine replied. “We were not tasked with administering psychological tests.”
“I understand,” Pagonis said. “And yet the phenotype is the product of the genotype.”
“Not accounting for environmental, social, and epigenetic effects … yes.”
“Our concern is whether this tendency can be overcome by further education and training,” the Elder said to the tribunal at large. “Or if it requires more direct means of repair.”
Rydin understood the man’s meaning: gene surgery, chromosomal suppression, or neural excision. They intended to open his brain and make him into a different person—to think differently, feel differently, respond differently—if he couldn’t resist the impulse to interfere with a pair of vandals who thought the child of a misfit family looked different.
The assembled members of the tribunal had been sitting quietly, some gazing out over the river, some covertly checking the screens of their wrist communicators, others simply enjoying a respite under the trees from their daily business. They were about as attentive to the proceedings as any collection of busy adults could be with what was, in truth, a fistfight among rambunctious youths. The obvious exception was Genaya Rydin, who looked scared for her son. Rydin was scared, too—but not enough for him to let bullies like Jarod Willbee and Ponson Omsbee terrorize the neighborhood.
One member of the tribunal, however, was staring at Rydin. The woman’s face showed signs of hard and rough usage—an anomaly in an age where anyone could obtain genetic therapies to preserve muscle tone and skin elasticity right up to the point of corporeal dissolution. This woman had a gauntness about the eyes and creases around the mouth that, in centuries past, would have made her “old.” And if her modified body type had still been able to grow that vestigial primate adaptation called “hair,” hers would have been thin and gray—if not pure white. But for all that, Rydin did not sense any weakness about her. Instead, she radiated an enduring strength. Something in the way she was staring at him suggested she knew how to throw a punch and had absorbed a few herself over the years.
Now the old woman stood and raised two fingers.
The Elder turned to recognize her. “Mira Streng?”
“We will take the boy in his present condition.”
Genaya Rydin put her hand to her mouth. “No!”
Rydin turned to his mother. “I don’t understand.”
Elder Pagonis bowed his head briefly. Then he looked up and scanned the other members of the tribunal. “Does this body support Mira Streng’s offer? To accept this young man in his wild state, without further genetic or neurological modification?”
The other adults evidently knew who this Streng woman was and what she represented. And they were now ready to go back about their routine business. Rydin’s future was turned over to her through a simple majority of murmurs and nods without any voiced dissent.
“Very well,” Pagonis said. “Coel Rydin, you are hereby released into Mira Streng’s custody.”
“Excuse me, mir,” Rydin began, “but who—?”
The old woman was grinning. “You just joined the Troupe des Jongleurs,”
“Jongleur … juggler. That much I understand. But what is it that you do?”
“We juggle the laws of physics to manipulate space and time. Because you are a misfit in any age, we’ll send you out of this time entirely—to someplace where your aggressive tendencies will do the most good.”
Rydin turned to Genaya, who appeared to be still in shock. “Mother?”
“It’s best you go along, Coel. The Council knows what’s good for you.”
“He’s no longer the Council’s business,” the Streng woman replied dryly.