Kyeo is running his hand up and down Sarham's back, as though counting scars he can't feel, and then there is something, in the room, something enormous, and he sees his own face and Sarham's mirrored in an incoming oval and then -
- they aren't sitting on Kyeo's bed in Crane Mountain any more.
Sad backflip.
" - Anyway," says the taller one, "that's part of why it's so important that we let people look how they want to, here, since some people care so much about it. But there are some things that people have a social responsibility to keep or take on even if they don't want to."
"Right. Since children get a mix of traits plus some randomness from how their parents were when they had them, and not how they started out, we as a population can change very rapidly. This is almost exclusively a good thing, but if everybody takes something new and exciting, then we've probably lost whatever it replaced forever, unless it pops up randomly again. And that could include some things that were useful or even very important! Different countries have very different ideas and methods for handling this, and, well - I'll just say that ours is definitely the best one."
"If it's impolite to talk about I suppose I won't insist, though I'm curious."
"It's not impolite. Some places just don't have any at all, which is obviously fine for them and terrible for humanity - "
"'Citrelianity', wouldn't it be, if other humans can't lièv? It's not bad for them."
" - Sure, it's terrible for citrelianity. Other places make it so that nearly all their citizens don't have any, but if you break the law or make certain people angry then you have to have lots and it's really horrible. Plus you have to have so much - I know we said 'prosociality' was close enough, but you can be prosocial without being inclined to follow the law, and you can be inclined to follow the law without being constantly terrified at the thought of breaking it."
"Also, um, since you don't know - there's no way to force people to copy things, which is obviously very good in general, but it's pretty terrible for this, because you have to threaten them or their loved ones with all sorts of horrible things in order to get them to take those on."
"It's a rotating system. You couldn't pull it off anywhere less organized; it takes a ridiculous amount of coordination. But everyone gets a selection they're supposed to have for a certain time span, and it's set up so you alternate between minor things and the more debilitating ones, so nobody suffers too much for too long."
"It's also a lot safer than the ones where they pile everything onto a few people? Like, if something happens to them, that's that and we're all out of luck. There's a lot more redundancy with our system. - Plus you can swap, if you mind something less than other people do! It's just a little paperwork. I've kept the hyperactivity since the first time I was old enough to get assigned things; all my friends are used to it already."
"Um, well like Sairai has really bad eyesight - for a while we had some people keep aging, but that one's kind of a lot and we can always get it back eventually, even if takes a couple decades - there are some where you're a lot more inclined to be sad or scared or angry - some where your senses have the right amount of acuity but they don't, uh, feel? right? Some where even if you're prosocial you sort of go about it wrong . . ."
"They - I've only ever had the hearing one but sometimes stuff that was not objectively very loud felt like it was, and there were specific things that did that more than others, and sometimes they were just annoying but sometimes they hurt or made it hard to concentrate on anything else."
"I guess we don't especially have to worry about this since we can't copy things anyway."
"There is that. - It's really sad that there are whole worlds of people who can't either - but if we could reach them, and it turns out that it's definitely not contagious, and you have all the same stuff that we keep around, then - we wouldn't have to do this anymore, would we. That would make such a huge difference."
"And the technology, too, there being people who know much more about it than we do."
"Well yeah. Just - we have fiction about people with more technology, so I already knew to be excited about that? And not this."
"Is it not - hard to maintain relationships when people change suddenly all the time - not just how they look but personality traits -"
"It keeps things interesting, I guess? People almost never change enough to die - um, I'm sorry, that was a very insensitive thing to say to people whose actual bodies will actually die, but. . . . People keep the important parts of themselves the same, mostly; everything else is just - on top. Around here at least."
"It's - unkind. To remind people of terrible things that are very relevant to them. And - there are sometimes reasons to be unkind, but . . . " They trail off.
'Sairai', apparently, attempts to close the gap. "Is it more that you don't think it's rude to talk casually about painful things, or that you don't regard death as particularly painful."
"If someone specific who I knew had just died it would be cruel to mention that, but in the abstract it's not particularly painful. I suppose it would be a bit morbid if it came up all the time."
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