The Vaurca Dialogues

The Vaurca Dialogues: Discussions on their Past, Present and Future in their own Words

by Dr. Karolina Skoda

Featuring Za'Akaix'Zishik Zo'Ra and Za'Akaix'Tlexa Zo'Ra

Author's Note

It should go without saying that the most important event of the 50s, and perhaps of the whole 25th century, was the discovery of the Vaurca. Alone among the aliens species of the galaxy, the Vaurca represent a genuine counterpart to Humanity - a sustained, self-sufficient, powerful civiliation, a binary star to enter orbit with the Sol Alliance. Humanity's relationship with the Vaurca, and in particular the Zo'Ra hive, will certainly be the defining factor of the rest of the century and perhaps beyond.

At present, the single biggest obstacle to Vaurca studies is the lack of primary sources. While I am indebted to my colleagues in the College of Xenoanthropology of the University of New Gibson for their tireless labors to create a comprehensive Sol-Vaurca lexicon, we are still a long way off from being able to learn Vaurca the way we might learn Russian or Arabic. But documents only go so far. In the pursuit of knowledge, I decided to go back to what anthropologists might call 'the old ways.' Inspired by 20th-century voyages among the Dogon people of West Africa, and mindful of the proverbs I learned in my childhood, I decided that the best way to gain understanding of the Vaurca was to simply ask for it - to meet with them on their own terms, ask good questions, and listen carefully to what they have to say.

After all, as my mother said - "to open a door, knock."

Introduction

The Vaurca in human space generally fall into two categories - those who came purposefully from Sedantis or elsewhere as visitors, and those who are essentially trapped here against their will. The latter are naturally cagey and secretive; they are acutely aware of their status as unwanted interlopers. The former, armed with the knowledge that they can at least theoretically go home whenever they're ready, feel naturally more secure and more eager to discuss what they know.

The two Vaurca with whom I spoke were firmly in the latter category. Without getting into the fine class distinctions present in their society (which I will elucidate later), it's enough at this present time to say that both of them are well-respected people, holding relatively high positions of trust, and are perhaps at the apex intersection of having the ability to visit Humanity and having the leisure to do so - even higher-ranking Vaurca would be too busy in their home hives to have the liberty to drop their ordinary lives and spent a year, a decade, or a century outside the Hive.

My initial contact was with Za'Akaix'Zishik, who later prompted Za'Akaix'Tlexa to join in these conversations. The contrast between these two "fellows" - their preferred term in English - renders a wonderful range of information and opinion. Zishik, despite having spent most of his* life in the Virtual Realm, has a truly remarkable grasp on the theoretical and ideological underpinnings of Vaurca society. Tlexa, on the other hand, despite being the younger of the two by a significant margin, has considerable experience as a politican, an administrator, and a military leader. Their two life-stories serve to paint a more complete picture of their people as a whole.

*The use of the male pronoun to describe the neuter - or more appropriately sexless - Vaurca was at Zishik's deliberate insistence. "Inasmuch as male terminology is the default in your language, we would use the default. To use "she" as a matter of policy would imply some female nature, the veracity of which we reject; to use "he" and "she" interchangably might imply some higher significance to it; to use some concocted gender-neutral "xe" or "ze" would imply an active rejection of something rather than the passive lack of it."

Part 1: The three castes, featuring Zishik

Our first meeting took place in Zishik's home, a modest but tasteful apartment on New Gibson. Zishik was a great connosseur of hardwood furniture, and we sat on teakwood chairs around a really magnificent mahogany coffee-table. As he explained from the first, the only thing he did in his home was entertain; he preserved, and refrained from showing me, only very small quarters for his sleeping, eating, and grooming. He did not drink coffee himself, but was remarkably expert at using an espresso machine that must have cost 4,000 credits.

"The Vaurca," he began, "are the only species - unless you count the true synthetics - who have actually surpassed the material world. We - and I mean "all the people" - are first and foremost residents of the Virtual Realm, descending only to the Material Realm as a matter of necessity, curiosity, or both. This is the first and foremost thing to understand about us."

"What do you mean," I asked, "when you say that you have surpassed the material world?"

"The secret is contained in our names, which are trefold. At this moment, I am named Za'Akaix'Zishik - appended with the surname 'Zo'Ra' if you will, though we seldom do so among ourselves - and my name contains three pieces of information. First, the name signifies that I am Zishik, which means it is me and myself and is the personal given name I was given at birth, even though it's actually a number. Second, the name signifies that I have a Za-body, a Type-B body - which is to say that my body deviates from the normal baseline. And third and finally, it signifies that I am actually in residence in the body.

"The vast majority of Vaurca are Viax, the Bound, because the vast majority of Vaurca prefer to spend the vast majority of their time in the Virtual, far away from the troubles of flesh. Imagine the Virtual Realm as an infinitely large hotel, with an infinitely large parking lot outside for vehicles. The people, the sentient living souls, can travel back and forth between the hotel itself - the Virtual Realm - and their vehicles - their bodies, by which they access the Material World.

"Bound and Unbound are a present status, rather than an inherent state of being. Presently, I am 'Unbound' - my essential consciousness resides within a material body. When I return to the Hive, I will return myself to the Virtual, and this body - this Za-body - will become Bound again, and become public property. Because I can go easily between the body and the Virtual - between the Virtual and a body, any body available to me - I say that we have surpassed the material world."

"So," I asked, "is that why I hear such bad names about the Bound?"

"It must be. The primary reason to become Unbound, to leave our majestic virtual palaces, is to interact with the Bound. Picture an elegant Petersburg aristocrat, in War and Peace times, forced to descend from his salons and entertainments to issue directives to his muzhiki about what to plant, when to sow, when to reap, and how to distribute it. Can you imagine the disgust he must feel, walking amidst dirt and hay and manure? And yet more importantly, he knows that without his dirty, lowly serfs, his opulent lifestyle is impossible. It is naturally horrifying, to think that we luminous beings are dependant on low and hideous forms. We, who do not have souls but are souls, are naturally repulsed by soulless beings."

"But there are three castes, aren't there? The Bound, the Unbound, and the last one - the C bodies. They're called the I'soiafsi, I believe."

"They are. [...] They might be called Boundless, because the Bound/Unbound distinction is meaningless to them. The I'soiafsi are the 'parents' of the Vaurca, the mothers and fathers. The fathers in particular, the type-CB, are outside the system because they have physical bodies that are truly their own. They alone can interact with other Mothers, with other Virtual Realms - they ferry themselves from place to place, inscrutable to us. Because of this, they cannot truly be 'known' as the Unbound know each other, which makes them somewhat apostlary. [...] As for the 'mothers,' the type-CA, their existence has no human antecedent. They are a parliament, trillion-member strong, and yet an existence above and beyond the sum of its parts. It is that super-nature, along with the dualistic 'fathers,' that we revere above all things. [...] This is a summary, but should suffice for comparative purposes."

"Trillion? Really?"

"The subject of death is an impossible one to articulate, for Vaurca only 'die' as Unbound. If a Bound body dies, it is trivial - more are made all the time, and the actual spirit and essence is safe in the Virtual. Those who remain in the Virtual are perfectly safe unless... there is... a catastrophe." The notion of 'catastrophe' was so disturbing to him that he paused for a moment to collect his thoughts.

"Absent such an event, a Vaurca in the Virtual will enjoy what is essentially life eternal. There are far and away more Vaurca living in the Virtual then there are bodies for them; the ratio may be 100 to one. Because of these overwhelming numbers, the very young and many of the very old generally aren't incorporated in our society; the young must first become mature, and the old, interestingly, grow either stronger or weaker with time, and those that can't cross the thresh-hold eventually just wither away."

"So what do the inhabitants of the Virtual Realm do all day?"

"Once they are old enough and have learned enough, their business is to think. Virtual society is ridden through with groups that you called "noyaus" - groups of Vaurca organized around a specific task or topic. Noyaus can be devoted to any subject, and a Vaurca can belong to more than one of them. Most identify primarily with a single noyau, but dabble in others; some belong only to a single one, some belong to many but with none primary, and some actually belong to none at all. I myself have my primary noyau called the Cathedral of Thought which is devoted to epistemology, but am also a casual or semi-casual member of noyaus devoted to things like economic forecasting, political theory, aerospace, theology, strategic board games, and trochaic verse.

"But the noyau, and the way it affects our society, is such a complicated and important topic that it deserves its own day. As we started with names, let us return to names. To humans, I identify myself as Ka'Akaix'Zishik Zo'Ra, because in the material realm, that is who they're dealing with. In the Virtual, every Vaurca has a unique "tag" that is ineffable; it's not a name and it's not a number, but wholly unique and non-sensory. Rather than by some title or label, they think of me as 'this one,' and appended thereby is my whole history - my experiences, my works, my creations, and all that I do and have done. We are not Vaurca 'beings,' we are Vauric 'doings' - for the creator and the creation are one and the same."

Part 2: The Noyau and Life in the Virtual, featuring Zishik

In our second session, I wanted to talk more about the lives of Unbound specifically, and Zishik elected to begin with the life-cycle. This session was much more intensive in the use of proper nouns, and I was forced to make my best efforts in translating or equivocating them "on the fly."

"Despite our spiritual nature, the origins of the Unbound are essentially physical. When the Mother lays an egg, it eventually hatches into a larva. An embryonic consciousness appears in the larva, as it does in all sapient infants, but shortly after hatching the body is "Bound" - the corpus callosum is intentionally retarded and body begins its service as public property; the mind, or spirit, enters the Virtual and begins its true life."

"From there, the juvenile recieves a tremendous body of information - which they receive instantly, you understand, as though it were instinct, as though they had always known it - covering various scientific and artistic subjects, documents, and even sensory memories. They are brought instantly up to the level of a baseline, run-of-the-mill person, and in fact you could say that they are brought up instantly to be the same baseline, run-of-the-mill person - an entire personality is grafted onto them. This is the sacred responsibility of the Maturation Board, to decide on the base-level knowledge that all Unbound must possess."

"From there, the custom is that the young juvenile will attach itself to one of several noyaus that devote themselves to providing secondary education, helping them grow into a more unique individual. While the customer for these noyaus is always identical - for newly-educated juveniles are, in fact, properly identical - their appeals change over time with the personalities and capabilities of their curators. "Curator" is the proper term for it, as the main business of these 'secondary education' noyaus is to create and refine a body of material, a body of text and experience, for the student to consume. Some juveniles, depending on the relative strength of weakness of these educational noyaus, may skip them entirely and simply apprentice themselves to an 'adult' noyau - one with members but no customers."

"Educational noyaus don't simply curate memory-stores; they also give students opportunities to make memories and experiences of their very own, by interacting with their teachers and other students. They also help place the juveniles in temporary apprenticeships in adult noyaus, hopefully providing their students with a well-rounded education. While the correlation is not strong, there does exist a link between the educational noyau one attends and the professions or interests they follow later in life; my education was at the Crystal Lyceum, which has strong connections to the Cathedral of Pure Thought, and many other students from the former have gone on to involve themselves, primarily or tangentially, with the latter."

"But soft, soon our juvenile has completed a secondary education; they now possess not only a baseline set of memories, experiences, and ideas, but has also attained real practice in testing, proving, and working with the same. Now it is time for them to take the great leap into society and join, or possibly even start, a Primary Noyau. It is at this point that it becomes almost impossible to generalize, for every noyau has its own unique way of governing itself and of relating to the young and socially-mobile. Some are elite, and force prospective members through trials and probation; others actively solicit new members and offer them benefits for joining."

"You must understand that life in the Virtual brings with it first and foremost a sense of communicative freedom. Imagine if you will a society that only communicates via written correspondence; all the people in it live in closed rooms and can only talk to each other by writing letters. However, these people have an infinite supply of paper and ink, and infinitely large filing cabinets - and an infinite supply of stamps, besides. It is a simple task for them to think, 'here are my thoughts on this subject. Let me write a letter to this person; let me write a letter to these people; let me write a letter to everybody; let me write a letter to everyone except these people.' This is how we think; we organize ourselves by circulation, by attaching ourselves to mailing lists and contributing to them. The educational noyaus, therefore, can be understood as creating back-catalogs of interesting or noteworthy letters, and when a new person appears, they give this new person their very own archive, to peruse at leisure - competing with one another as to who has the best archive, who has the best catalog."

"As for adult noyaus, their basic business is to think about something, to develop knowledge and theory in a particular field. To that end, noyaus generally divide themselves into two halves [...] called the Rogaria and the Rhetorica, in charge of formulating and answering questions respectively. The Rogaria decides what questions to ask, and the Rhetorica is responsible for answering those questions. The Rogaria is generally a superior position, but the Head Rhetor - the Rhetor Emeritus - is generally the single most important member, and new or unproven members will generally join the Rhetorica as their default assignment. These are, of course, generalities, and the very old or very young noyaus will often deviate from this in some way."

"By convention, a Vaurca will identify himself primarily with one noyau at a time, and the others are strictly secondary. By our metaphor of the postage-people, a Vaurca devotes the largest share of his time - and understand that time is our only resource in the Virtual, time and credibility - to reading letters from, and composing letters to, his primary noyau. But it would be a rare and socially-stunted fellow who had only one interest, and Vaurca frequently join other noyaus as secondary members or even observers."

"To use myself as an example, my primary noyau is the aforementioned Cathedral of Pure Thought, and its focus is philosophy - particularly epistemology, the study of knowledge and justified belief. My highest rank in this noyau is my highest rank anywhere in the Virtual, and it is Rhetor Sub-Emeritus, meaning I am one of three sitting directly beneath the Rhetor Emeritus. I am a Quaternary Rhetor in the College of River-Gazers, which is devoted to economic forecasting - this is one of the two noyaus I share with my good friend Tlexa, who sits on its Rogaria. I sit on the Rogaria of three others - the Rogaria is not my preference, generally - involving aerospace design, theology, and a a set of eight-row strategy games - and I am a rank-and-file Rhetor for six others, including trochaic poetry. Poetry is one of the highest pursuits in our civilization, as you may know, and is deeply important to us in subtle ways that I'm not qualified to talk about."

"In the Virtual, our lives are cyclical. We are born with little influence, and then we slowly start to gain it, which makes it easier to gain more. However, every time we make a mistake - every time our questions cannot be answered, every time our answers are incorrect, every time the group goes against us - there appear little cracks, little pieces of entropy that appear in our hearts. Failure begets failure, and over time it becomes harder and harder to capitalize on our past successes. Our concentration begins to waver, and we devote more of our time to navel-gazing and private recreation. Eventually, most of us retreat from primary noyaus completely, idling away our time playing games and pondering puzzle-toys. From there, unless they make a miraculous recovery, Vaurca tend to simply slide into lethargy, into idleness, and then to oblivion, to what is essentially death. This is what is meant by the phrase, "the old grow stronger or weaker - the greater they are, the harder it is to keep getting greater, and once you are deflected there begins a downward spiral."

"That is our imperative, then, in the Virtual. We must keep our minds moving; we must keep up our intellectual momentum. We, who will live until something kills us, must keep accelerating or else we will die."

Part 3: Government and Politics, featuring Zishik and Tlexa

Zishik had indicated that the next session would cover the systems by which the Vaurca organize and govern themselves, and for that reason he invited his friend Za'Akaix'Tlexa Zo'Ra. From a distance, it was easy for a human observer to assume that Vaurca "all look the same," but once I had the opportunity to look at the two of them side-by-side for an extended period of time, it became obvious to me how different they could be. Zishik towered over Tlexa, 2.1 meters to his friend's 1.6, but where Zishik looked slender and elegant, Tlexa was stout and barrel-chested. The difference was strongest in their hands; Zishik had elongated, nimble, even fragile-looking fingers, while Tlexa's digits were thick and curled. One was for typing or surgery; the other was for grappling and striking.

"My dear friend Tlexa," said Zishik, "is a much more seasoned politician than I am. Even though I am the elder of us, he has spent perhaps a hundred times as long in the Material, and much of it has been spent doing exciting things - holding positions of leadership, fighting in campaigns, administering new territories... he doubtless has a great deal to say about them."

I wanted to start Tlexa with as general and non-leading a question as possible, and so as Zishik attended to our beverages - Tlexa must have consumed three liters of water during our conversation - I went as abstract and basic as I could. I asked him the following question:

"How does the Zo'Ra hive govern itself?"

"Government," he began, "functions on three axes. The first is the parliament of the Virtual itself, which debates all questions and issues decrees based on the consent of the interested. The second is the system by which these decrees are issued to the Unbound in the Material and to the Bound that they supervise. The third is poetry, which signifies the divisions in our mindsets."

His mention of poetry surprised me so profoundly that I asked him to explain, but he insisted that he would mention it at the proper time.

"The Vaurca govern themselves as a sort of elegant anarchy. In the Virtual, there are no resources and only two pressures, those being the survival of the Queen and one's own resistance against death; because of this, a being there can occupy their time however they wish. Thus, beings in the Virtual are not "governed," at all, except by voluntary associations that they might join. There is nothing but social pressure to keep a Vaurca from spending their whole lives doing nothing but solving game-puzzles, completely unaffected, hindered, or coerced by any other Vaurca."

"But as a group, we have material possessions - the Bound, and the places where they work and respirate. Thus, we have to cooperate in order to manage our public property, to choose its functions and goals. The only end that matters to the Vaurca is the survival of the Queen; it is our primary concern, with all other matters in some way supporting it."

"There are many things we must do in order to ensure the survival of our Queen. We must feed her and house her; we must ensure that she is in good health and free from disease. We must protect her from environmental hazards, from the elements; and from other Queens. We must ensure that she has plentiful access to the resources she needs to bear more young, and that these young can grow up and be healthy - and support the Hive. This is our business."

"The Master Hive on Sedantis has created 19 "boards" that oversee different parts of this work. Your people have already interacted with several of them - the Boards of Integrity, Achievement, and Harmony certify Vaurca to come and work in human territories. The Board of Adjacency has also been very important in negotiating agreements with human and skrellian bodies. The other important boards are Allocation, which determines how newborn Vaurca should be augmented; Vision, which is in charge of scientific research; Prophecy, which is in charge of our religious activities; and Cleanliness, which is in charge of warfare. There are several others as well, of lesser importance."

"These Boards have no official leaders; each one operates purely on consensus and prestige. The oldest and most famous noyaus, led by the oldest and most famous Vaurca, propose broad questions and broad answers; lesser noyaus apply to componentize these questions and answers, and ultimately to reify them. Noyaus gain pretige, and thus access to more high-level and fundamental planning, simply by gaining recognition from other noyaus and by nurturing and attracting talent."

"Let me give an example. I am the First Speaker - what might in other places be called the First Rogator, or Rogator-Emeritus - of a noyau called the Temple of Praxis in Motion. It is a noyau concerned with warfare, which means it has attached itself with the body of noyaus that consider military questions and is in constant correspondance with them. Thus, you could consider me a 'board member' of the Cleanliness Board, though there are many billions of others."

I asked Tlexa to estimate how highly-ranked he was in the Cleanliness board, and he answered only after a moment's consideration.

"I would estimate that I am half as far from the top-ranked member, if there is one, than I am from the bottom one. One third is above me, two thirds below me. Leadership, even in a small noyau, provides a certain cachet - granting of course that you received it from someone else and didn't simply start your own. That would be my estimate. What would you say, Zishik?"

Zishik answered, "I think I am closer to the top than you are, but the Verity Board isn't as important as yours, so I wouldn't count it for as much."

"Be that as it may," Tlexa continued, "the system is cyclical and doesn't have a clear start or end to its processes. In general, the highest and oldest noyaus begin by formulating a large question, generating a large answer, and contacting lesser noyaus to take care of the details. This process iterates itself through multiple levels, for which there is no clear chain of command - noyaus compete with each other to see who can provide a crisper and better "high level" answer, and those that do will be asked preferentially in the future. Those that fail will be relegated to lower-level questions, or their best people will jump ship for noyaus that have better fortunes. If the members of a noyau decide that they should be handling higher questions, they simply confront a noyau that distributes them and asks for a chance. They may or may not get it, depending on their past performance and their personal connections."

"You mentioned something about "jumping ship." How common is that?"

"Until a noyau has its 'big break,' transferring is commonplace and easy. I have counted 16 noyaus as my 'primary' before the Temple, and I'm sure Zishik has counted even more."

Zishik interjected at this point to say, "that's not true. After finishing my education, I worked at three other noyaus, founded one, and then left it to join the Cathedral. But I would say that I've spent half my life here, more than a thousand years."

"I jumped a great deal," said Tlexa, "but I eventually settled down with this noyau shortly after it was founded. I was named First Speaker by one of its founders, who is now the First Reader - the Rhetor Emeritus. I have only spent a quarter of my life in it, but I've seen its fortunes grow tremendously due to bold action. We have jumped the queue several times since we started, and now regularly entertain higher-level questions than we used to."

"So what then is poetry? I have to ask; it sounds bizarre to me."

"Poetry is the highest artistic pursuit in our whole society. Our greatest treasure is our culture of letters, and no unlettered person is worthy of consideration to us. To be to the point, everyone who has any interest in the respect and esteem of others must pursue poetry to some degree; they must dedicate some part of their life, some part of their energies, to writing and discussing it."

"So, important Vaurca engage in poetry, and they prefer to engage in it - to write it, to criticize it, to study it - with other Vaurca who feel similarly about life. Poetry is an oblique way of approaching our society, and of developing and expressing an overall worldview."

"As such, the different factions in our society - not the Boards, which contend with only one portfolio or sphere, but the general ideas that encompass all portfolios, all spheres, all fundamental ideas of how our society should be run - they correspond to poetic meters. They are the safe, non-threatening avenue on which Vaurca working with different Boards can connect with one another and develop a unified picture. Though there was never any conscious intention that it would or should occur, in the modern day, in the Master-Hive of Sedantis and other hives that follow its culture closely, the different poetical styles - iambs, trochees, dactyls, anapests and amphibrachs and other things that exist only in our language - correspond to different overall political affiliations."

"This is not to say that these meters and styles actually form a meaningful platform. Just as a political party in your society might choose some totem - a color, an animal, a symbol or image - the parties in our society, despite having no official existence, affiliate themselves with different forms of poetry. The poetic noyaus are the 'smoke-filled rooms' of back-channel negotiation between the different Boards."

"Are you both members of poetic societies, then?" Zishik answered first.

"I am a Trochaist, but then again so are most philosophers. If the Trochees have a position, I would say it's to increase the weight of Prophecy and Verity - religion and philosophy - in our society and our decision-making. But I'm not political."

"I," said Tlexa, "am a Pyramist. Does TCB have pyramidal verse?"

"It does not," said Zishik, "not that I know of."

"Pyramidal verse decreases the number of verses in each foot until it's down to a single stress, and then increases them again. Let me give an example:

However so much/

the winter's chill/

might come near/

I fear/

none/

the cold/

is nothing/

when compared to/

pain from solitude.

"It works better in the original, I assure you - it's supposed to stress the last syllable on each line. In any case, the actual poetry itself is unimportant. The general idea of the pyramists is boldness. It was the Pyramists who chose to obtain bluespace technology from humans, and the Pyramists are among those, along with some of the Dactylists, who are calling for maximum prosecution of the war with Li'idra."

"But the Pyramists are the chivalrous ones," said Zishik. "I wouldn't be his friend if he was a Dactylist; they actually want to kill the High Mother of Li'idra."

"Li'idra," Tlexa said, "opened the door of actually killing a Mother. Zo'Ra would never have stooped to such a thing, not if they hadn't done it first, and if we do eventually kill the High Mother of Li'idra, then I will be deeply ashamed. I myself would never do it."

"You said that Zo'Ra wouldn't do such a thing if Li'idra hadn't done it first. Does that mean Zo'Ra has killed a Li'idra queen?"

The both of them hedged and hawwed, and looked at each other as if wondering what to say. I had an image of teeming millions - billions - trillions that lived within the Virtual Realm within one Queen, and pondered the magnitude of what I had just asked them. Worse, hearing the way that Tlexa had phrased his words, I worried for a moment that he might perhaps have done such a thing himself.

Fearing the answer, I decided to assure them that the next interview would be about Bound allocation, and thanked them for their time. Neither had spoken much of a word by the time I had left.

On Love: A Short Digression

(This statement was given by Zishik during a discussion about the dynamics between noyaus)

"I have seen it said by some amateur ethnologists that the Vaurca do not love one another; that we are incapable of it. This is wholly outside of the truth. There are five categorized forms of love, of agape, known to the Unbound. One, of course, is the deep and supreme love that all Unbound feel for our Mother Goddess* and for the I'soiafsi. It is returned in kind by the all-permeating affection they give unstintingly to us, as her children and her body - the second kind. The third kind is the awe and admiration felt towards elders and instructors, taking genuine delight in their work and their teaching beyond its utility to the self or society; it is of course reciprocated in the fourth kind."

"But it is the fifth that is most priceless, for it is the warm love felt by equals for one another. It is a bond of genuine brotherhood, real fellowship, made all the more real by the fact that it is untainted by reproduction or coercion or by the promise of sexual ecstasy. It is a statement that another's happiness brings happiness to one's own self all upon itself, a delight in one's doings and a desire to penetrate ever-deeper into their self-knowledge. Parents choosing their children; children choosing their parents; a sense of marriage that is more priceless because there is no fear of diminishing its price by sharing it, or that it serves as a means to an end."

"We do love, fiercely and unapologetically, even if it takes no form as a human might recognize."

*When either guest was speaking, they would immediately and perhaps automatically follow any mention of the Mother Goddess with a sort of salawat, which can roughly be translated as "the top of my head beneath the dust under the dust of her feet." I have omitted it from the transcription. Her consort, the type-CB I'soiafsi, does not seem to merit this honor.

Part 4: Rationing, featuring Tlexa

After our last meeting, I was worried that I had grievously offended them. Zishik did not immediately contact me to schedule another interview, and when I took the leap of contacting him, he said he would look into his schedule and get back to me. It was three nerve-wracking days before he finally got back in touch, but even then, he pleaded that he was too busy to speak to me now and that he could only get me an interview with Tlexa. I accepted his offer with tremendous gratitude.

Tlexa visited me in my home, the first time either of them had done such a thing. Before the interview began, he asked me if it would be okay for him to smoke. The habit had no place in their society, but Zishik had recently taken it up after some stressful situations and had successfully evangelized it to Tlexa. To hear him tell it, they were now both chain-smokers; Zishik apparently was on four packs a day. I proferred him an improvised ashtry and we began.

"How," I asked, "do the different Boards and Noyaus allocate Bound bodies?"

"One of the 19 Boards of Sedantis is called the Allocation Board; it controls both the modification of Bound bodies and the apportionment of those bodies to different noyaus. As its "master question," the Allocation Board determines what bodies everyone needs and how they should be rationed."

"Why do Vaurca become Unbound? Why do they fill up bodies when they could stay inside the Virtual forever?"

"As a matter of security, there are no external connections to the Virtual save those for the uploading or downloading of minds, and these are kept under heavy guard. A computer virus in our network would be unthinkably catastrophic; it would allow a dedicated cyber-warfare effort to decapitate our entire civilization in one swoop. For that reason, there are very few entry points into our system. The Mother Brain, the highest body on Sedantis, has only twelve, and they're under constant and heavy surveillance."

"Because of this, there is no way to transmit a message between the Virtual and the Material except for a Vaurca to memorize that message, enter the Material through a body, and recite it. Eight of these twelve terminals are reserved for 'Rapid Transfer' - a Vaurca enters a body, taps out his message on a computer terminal, and then immediately departs the body, or else they read the incoming message and carry it back with them into the Virtual as a memory. This may seem fast, but the mental transfer between Virtual and Material takes about ten minutes either way - not counting the amount of time it takes for the message to travel to this terminal, or the amount of time it takes to think about the reply, or in some cases simply how long it takes for the message to be typed up. The other four are for longer-term assignments, but even four is a small number for how many bodies they process."

"The fact remains that in order to direct our Bound, there must be Unbound to observe local conditions and issue on-the-spot orders. The message queues are always massive, and without local initiative we'd never get anything done - to say nothing of trying to do anything on other planets, where simply transferring the message itself through bluespace might take hours, days, or weeks."

"Before we go on to that, could you tell me how Rapid Transfer works?"

"The rarest of all B-type Vaurca are rooted in their cells in perpetuity; they have no ability to move or feed themselves. Their arms and hands are designed to manipulate a special console - you've seen Zishik, his hands are a degenerate form of the same - and to receive and send messages as quickly as possible. Working in Rapid Transfer is an unpleasant and tedious job, but it's considered an essential part of climbing the ladder of respectability. Zishik and myself have both worked it in the past, and in fact in the same body. Having a 'hard break' in connections - the Rapid Transfer drone must use their eyes to read the message and their hands to compose it - prevents any contamination from entering the Virtual."

"Are eight enough?"

"Eight are most definitely not enough; we would need some three hundred in order to have constant spare capacity. Moreover, the more we had, the more we'd use - ready access to Rapid Transfer would increase our reliance on it, as we'd make fewer and fewer decisions on our own onus. Still, increasing our Rapid Transfer slots is an unthinkably massive operation; it would involve actual surgery on the body of the Mother Brain, for the duration of which all transfers, Rapid and otherwise, would have to be suspended."

"And so, command responsibility."

"The lifeblood of Vaurca civilization are the Unbound, those willing and able to take responsibility for a given group of assets - space, equipment, personnel - and accomplish a given specific or open-ended task with them. Those Vaurca who become Unbound and do well at it are the officer class of our society, standing above both the Bound drones in the Material and the home-bound gamesters and theoreticians of the Virtual."

"Why did you specify that they have to do well at it?"

"As part of our upbringing and our circumstances, we live an essentially risk-free, consequence-free life - the only dangers threatening the average Vaurca are social ones. As such, excess bravado is a common Vaurca vice; it's hard for most of us, especially the young people looking for their first assignments, to viscerally grasp any real consequences to their actions except inasmuch as they lose the esteem of their peers."

"So with all that, how does the Allocation Board decide who gets more bodies?"

"It's simpler than you'd expect. The Allocation Board has one master-level noyau for each other board, to which noyaus affiliated with that respective board apply for their needs. This master-level noyau has subsidiary noyaus that ponder specific requests in more detail, and negotiate with them on the number and type of bodies and the duration of their use.

"For example, when I received this body, I applied to the Allocation Noyau for Cleanliness. I explained to them that I wanted a body for the purpose of voyaging to human space, and I described what sort of body I wanted and for how long I wanted it. The Allocation Noyau for Cleanliness kicked my request down to another noyau, which was involved in allocating for Cleanliness members who were making this sort of voyage. I haggled with them for a little while - I started my bid asking for more than I really wanted, as you do, and we met somewhere in the middle - and then we finalized my bid. My bid went up to Allocation for Cleanliness again, and it was shortly granted. Cleanliness, as you can imagine, uses a lot of bodies, second only to Achivement and to economic production. I was put in the queue, and after 171 days, my entry was finally processed and I entered my current body."

"171 days! Is that unusually long?"

"It's longer than average, but not dramatically. There are 90 million unbound in Zo'Ra, 25 million of which live on Sedantis and have to use the four terminals reserved for long-term transfer. The hardest part is simply waiting for the queue to process."

"Your body is somewhat customized, I hear."

"The benefits of leadership, I suppose. Because my slot was so far in the future, I was able to commission this body from scratch - it was build more-or-less to my exact specifications."

"Did you have to pay for that somehow?"

"I did, through a complicated network of monetized favor-trading. But that, I'm afraid, is a subject for another day."