by Brian Stableford

I’m not often awake in the middle of the night in winter, especially when the skies are clear and the temperature drops to thirty below zero, but I had been feeling restless of late. There was a meteor shower due that night. Caliban and Ariel don’t care for things like that—one of the few things on which they agree—so they were content for once to let me be whole, even though my being awake was depriving one or other of them a tiny fraction of “her” time.

Dr. Prospero didn’t seem to care one way or another who I was. He’d become bored with me: the experiment’s honeymoon was over, and he was content to leave further formal monitoring entirely to AIs.

The shower wasn’t as spectacular as I’d hoped, but there was a fugitive aurora that made up for the thinness of the meteor trails. I’d read only a few days before that the aurora’s lights are echoes of storms on the sun, and that made the flickering seem more romantic—or magical, in Ariel’s way of thinking. There were a couple of airships above the island, running with minimal lights so that the sightseers could watch the shower, but I didn’t pay them much heed until one of them dropped a falling star of its own.

I watched it fall, knowing that it had to be aimed at the island. Dr. Prospero never invites visitors, but that doesn’t prevent people from coming uninvited. For a while, when I was the apple of Dr. Prospero’s eye, there was at least one illicit visitor every week, and they all wanted pictures of me. Now I was nearly full-grown, though, it was as likely to be someone interested in the white mammoths, the zebroid tapirs or the giant rats—or even Python, who’d been old news for three centuries before I was even born.

It was a stupid time to come calling, I thought. There’d only be few hours of very meager daylight when dawn eventually came, and the night was so cold that even the mammoths were likely to stay huddled up, deep in the pines. Python was safely curled up in the bowels of Dr. Prospero’s ice palace, fast asleep and oblivious to the world of men.

I envied him that, sometimes. I’m not mentally present in my sleep the way I am when I’m awake, but I’m not oblivious. Sleep, for me, is an eternal dream. Ariel and Caliban remember nothing of one another, but I remember every embarrassing moment of both their stupid lives.

There wasn’t much wind, but the descending capsule drifted further than I expected. For a moment, I thought it might get carried as far as the ice-sheet, but it came down in the water no more than a few hundred metres offshore. The parachute-rider’s life raft inflated immediately.

I went down to the beach to meet the raft, in case its occupant needed help, but she was so frightened by the sight of me that she raised her flare gun. I made frantic gestures to assure her that I was harmless.

Her suitskin’s tegument was thickened against the cold, slightly inflated by an insulating layer of vacuum, so her face was slightly indistinct, but her features seemed bland enough. She was unfashionably tall, and her long limbs seemed to be unusually supple. There was no way to tell whether her eyes or any other part of her body were wired as recording devices or transmitters, but the way her gaze wandered suggested that she wasn’t paying much attention to anything—yet.

I tried to sign to her—although I can write quite well, I can’t talk because I don’t have the necessary vocal apparatus—but she didn’t understand. It obviously wasn’t me that she had come to investigate.

“You shouldn’t creep up on people like that,” she said, unfairly. “You’re the smart orangutan that never sleeps, right? I didn’t think you’d be out on a night like this. I didn’t expect you to have such a fancy suitskin. Glad you’re here, though. You can see me safely up the mountain to your daddy’s door.”

She was taking a lot for granted. I was going back up the mountain anyway, but I hadn’t planned on using the footpath. On the other hand, I didn’t have Dr. Prospero’s distaste for human company. I liked people. I could study them to my heart’s content in v-space, and communicate with them too, but there’s no substitute for actual presence and authentic touch.

I offered her my hand, but she wouldn’t take it.

“Just lead the way,” she said. “Your name’s Miranda, right? Or are you one of the others now?”

I shook my head to indicate that I was indeed Miranda, not Ariel or Caliban, but I’m not sure that she even understood that. She didn’t seem to care.

I meekly led her up the mountain. I even let her in, although I wouldn’t have been able to do that if Dr. Prospero had wanted her kept out. Even then, I assumed that he was just making the best of things, and that he’d get rid of her as soon as he could—but when he came to meet her, I realized that I’d been mistaken. He was expecting her. He seemed less resentful of her presence than any other human I’d ever seen him look at.

“Miranda,” he said, “this is Elise Gagne. She’ll be staying for a few days. I’ve agreed to work on a project with her.”

I was thunderstruck. Dr. Prospero working in collaboration! It was unthinkable. There were a thousand Creationists working on pet projects in the Pacific, of whom nine hundred were reputed to be reclusive, fully half of whom used silly pseudonyms in the great tradition of Oscar Wilde and Gustave Moreau, but Dr. Prospero was in a class of his own when it came to cultivated eccentricity. If Python and the white mammoths weren’t evidence enough of his original turn of mind, and his determination to venture where other Creationists feared to tread, I was final proof of it. Who could this person be that he would deign to “work on a project” with her? I thought that I had made myself familiar with the names of the world’s leading Creationists, but I had never heard the name of Gagne.

I signed a question, curious to know what project Dr. Prospero was talking about—but he ignored me. The humiliation was bitter.

“You can go, Miranda,” he said. “Elise and I have things to discuss.”

It was not so much the fact of the dismissal as the tone that cut me. It was one thing no longer to be the focus of Dr. Prospero’s attention or the object of his intensest study, and quite another to be waved away like some mere irrelevance. I had never felt so hurt. I had, of course, only been alive for a mere fifteen years—a drop in the ocean by comparison with Dr. Prospero’s 433 and Python’s 399—but I had never expected that I might feel so wretched if I lived to be a thousand.

Elise Gagne did not wait for me to leave. She had already stepped into Dr. Prospero’s private space, without causing any precipitate retreat. She actually reached out to touch his cheek.

“Thank you, Prospero,” she said. “You don’t now how much this means to me.”

He didn’t flinch. The omission of his title didn’t disturb him any more than the pressure of her fingers.

I crept away, feeling like Caliban at her worst.

* * * *

I had no difficulty at all finding out who Elise Gagne was. It was equally easy to discover what it was that she wanted from Dr. Prospero. The woman was an open book: her life, her art and her ambition clamored for attention on the uniweb.

She wasn’t a Creationist at all. She was an exotic dancer.

She danced with snakes. What she wanted from Dr. Prospero was a perfect partner.

The one thing that wasn’t a matter of public record was what she’d offered him in exchange for designing one, but that wasn’t hard to figure out. The answer was hard for me to swallow, but it wasn’t hard to figure out.

She had offered him fleshsex.

A year before, I would have thought the idea of any such exchange ridiculous, but not any more. I had had a great deal more time to further my education since Dr. Prospero’s observations had grown less intense—and so had Ariel and Caliban. Neither of them was fond of reading, and Caliban was no seeker after wisdom even in v-space, but there were kinds of experience for which each was avid, and I remembered every last detail of my dreams when I woke up. My partial selves had, inevitably, become the intensest objects of my study, as I struggled to understand the stuff of which I was made.

Although I am formed like an orangutan, that being the genome-plan and fundamental cytostructure with which Dr. Prospero worked when he shaped the egg from which I was born, the inspiration for my creation came from another mammal: the dolphin. Like orangutans, dolphins became extinct in the twenty-first-century ecocatastrophe, and like orangutans, they were among the first of the recreated species. There are many things about them that are remarkable, but the one that seized Dr. Prospero’s imagination was a consequence of the fact that a sea-dwelling mammal cannot go to sleep as a land-mammal can, else it will sink and drown.

Many creatures with less complex brains than dolphins can solve this problem by restricting themselves to very shallow sleep-slates, but dolphins need to dream, and thus need deep sleep. They solve this problem by letting the two hemispheres of their brain sleep in shifts, one at a time.

This is restrictive in a different way. It requires that each hemisphere of a dolphin’s brain needs to be able to perform all of the basic functions required to sustain the animal; there is still scope for some specialization, but not as much as a primate brain. That is one reason why dolphins are not as smart as clever dogs, let alone recreated orangutans, in spite of the potential offered by the size and complexity of their brains.

Dr. Prospero was probably not the only man ever to wonder whether such a situation could be produced in a brain whose functions were more elaborately divided—but it is his propensity for actualizing such wonderings that makes him the exceptional Creationist he is. He undertook to find out, and I am the result of that inquiry. When both sides of my brain are awake, I am Miranda. When the left hemisphere sleeps, I am Caliban. When the right hemisphere sleeps, I am Ariel. The specialization of my two hemispheres is not as marked as that of a human brain, nor is it patterned in the same way, but the principle is similar. Ariel and Caliban are very different individuals, and I am far greater than the sum of my parts.

At least, I like to think so.

Indeed, I feel obliged to hope so, now that Ariel and Caliban have become—each in her different way—so obsessed with sex.

I, by contrast, have only an intellectual interest in the subject, perhaps because I always wake up to possession of a fully sated body and mind. But I shouldn’t be writing about myself; I should be writing about Dr. Prospero.

One would think that a man of Dr. Prospero’s age, intellect and temperament would have long since transcended sexual urges, or at least confined their expression to virtual experience—how, after all, could any mere partner of flesh compete with the exquisite subtleties of his artifice?—but it doesn’t work that way.

Humankind took effective control of the species’ evolution a thousand years ago, at the end of the 20^th century, but clung hard to as much of its inheritance as was not actually disastrous. By that time, ten thousand years of mental and social evolution had far outstripped the physiological evolution of a body whose emotional equipment had been shaped by the brutality of natural selection. Since then, physiological evolution has outstripped the mental and social evolution of a brain whose moral and emotional equipment was shaped by terror and lust. One day, no doubt, a reasonable balance will be struck, but today’s emortals are no more than five generations removed from the rough-hewn products of natural selection, and the tools with which they have reshaped themselves are still crude. They retain the greater number of their follies.

Even Creationists, masters of evolution as they are, retain their follies. Even Dr. Prospero, the greatest of the great eccentrics, retains his follies.

And that is why, no matter how absurd it seems, Dr. Prospero was willing to design a perfect dancing-partner for Elise Gagne, in return for a fleshsex fling: a hectic folie à deux.

* * * *

On the second day of Elise Gagne’s visit, I unearthed one of my old electronic voice-boxes so that I could communicate with her more easily. Dr. Prospero and I didn’t need spoken words, because we had such expert fingers, but her fingers—long, slender and supple as they were-—were mute.

She appreciated the effort, I think, but she didn’t really want to talk to me. She always seemed uncomfortable in my presence, although I made every effort to be pleasant and polite, and to take an interest in her art.

“Why did you come to Dr. Prospero?” I asked, one day when we were dining à deux because Dr. Prospero could not interrupt his work. “Couldn’t any commercial engineer make you a dancing snake?” The words were pronounced as I typed by a beautifully modulated voice, that would have sounded perfectly human to a blind person, but they seemed alien to me. After all, I’m not human, let alone perfect.

“The kind of dancing I do is very complicated,” she told me, seeming to look down at me from her great height even though we were sitting at a table. She used her lovely fingers to smooth her hair, which she was wearing Nordic blonde in honor of the latitude. If Dr. Prospero’s island had been in the tropics, like the vast majority of Creationist havens, she’d probably have worn it obsidian black.

“Is it?” I said. Unfortunately, my artificial voice had politeness built in to its tone, and it wouldn’t do contemptuous skepticism.

“I needed a snake with a brain far larger than any ordinary recreated species,” she went on. “Just making a snake with a big enough brain is only part of the problem, apparently; there needs to be some particular specialization of function, which has something to do with structural determinants of formal development...the jargon’s beyond me. Anyway, they all said that Prospero was the man, if I could get him to do it—they laughed when they said it, but I wasn’t worried. You’ve already got a smart snake living in the cellar, I understand—old as the hills and nearly as big.”

“That’s Python,” I said. “He was the best result of Dr. Prospero’s first experiments with mammoth genes.”

“I thought the white mammoths were recent—last century.”

“Yes, they are. They were a joke, of sorts. The mammoth genes Dr. Prospero started working on weren’t the genes of mammoths; they were called mammoth genes because they were so big. When geneticists first began reverse engineering XL proteins, they ran into problems because of the size of the genes required to make them. Big proteins need lots of coding bases, and if they have several interlocking strands the components can’t be laid out in a single span. Mammoth genes can have as many as twelve introns, and they’re very prone to transposon migration. Natural ones are rare— understandably so, given that heritable artificial ones tend to suffer fatal mutation within a couple of generations. Nowadays they’re mostly used for short-term somatic engineering.”

“That’s all I need in a dancing-partner,” Elise Gagne observed.

She was rude to interrupt, because I clearly hadn’t finished. I had a lot more to say, even though my fingers were feeling the effort because I hadn’t used the voice-box for so long.

“Dr. Prospero figured that it would be best to study their potential uses in long-lived individuals,” I went on, trying to keep it simple, “so he made Python. Reptiles are easier to engineer for longevity than mammals, but smart reptiles are harder. The giantism was a side-effect, but it added further interest to the results of the brain-differentiation. The other engineers advised you to come to Dr. Prospero because he’s done so much work on brain-differentiation.”

“Obviously,” she put in, meaning that I was living proof of it.

“It’s not just genes, however mammoth or minuscule, that determine differentiation of function,” I persisted. “The formal development of an embryo is mainly dependent on an architectural blueprint carried in the cytoplasm of the egg-cell. Dr. Prospero will use one of Python’s cells—carefully renucleated—as the parent of the snake he’s making for you.”

“Just as long as it doesn’t grow to be half a kilometer long,” the dancer said. “I wouldn’t want it to be too smart, either—I can do without it wanting to take the lead.”

I could tell that she wasn’t seriously interested in the science, so I stopped trying to explain. I didn’t like her at all. Mercifully, Caliban and Ariel didn’t like her any better, although that didn’t stop Caliban wanting to have fleshsex with her. Caliban became quite jealous of Dr. Prospero, in fact, and I sometimes had to cope with the hormonal fallout of that when I woke up. I always preferred waking up after Ariel, who was just as silly, but in ways that didn’t leave such discomfiting physiological traces.

* * * *

When I took the trouble to watch recordings of Elise Gagne dancing, I realized that the contempt I’d tried to insert into my comment on its complexity was quite unjustified. I had recklessly supposed that no human dancer could perform as elegantly as a sim, but sims are, after all, simulations. Dancing may be mute, but that doesn’t mean that it’s not a form of communication, or that its communications is more easily reduced to bytes than any other form of human interaction.

I watched her dance from the viewpoint of an observer, and I danced with her by choosing the IDENTIFICATION option, although I always find it difficult to identify myself with a human, no matter what the human is doing, because their limbs work so differently. It’s much easier to identify with fabers, even though it’s hard for me to imagine what low-gee environments feel like.

Elise Gagne was a very good dancer. She was also a very sexy dancer. I hadn’t expected the snakes to add anything to her routines but a certain vulgar symbolism, but I was wrong about that too. Her snakes were more than crude phallic symbols; their coils were their own, and hers. They complemented the sinuosity of her own body— which was not, I discovered, the result of genetic engineering or surgically-enhanced plasticity, but a matter of training and of art. I only had to watch half a dozen dances from a distance, and join in with half a dozen more, to appreciate how brilliant she was—and how much more brilliant she might be if she could get past the limitations imposed on her by stupid partners.

I understood why she needed a smart snake—and I do mean needed, because she was an artist, and I understood that artists have needs that we common mortals don’t.

Dr. Prospero was an artist too, as well as a scientist. Every true Creationist is.

I would have stopped after a dozen dances, but Ariel and Caliban didn’t. They don’t remember one another’s actions at all, and they don’t remember anything of my mental life, but they do remember things I do repeatedly. I think it must be like remembering a repetitive dream, which overcomes the tendency to forget by sheer insistence. I didn’t want to insist, of course—far from it—but repetition is repetition. Caliban and Ariel both remembered Elise Gagne’s dancing, and how to access the tapes.

They both used that knowledge—which must, I suppose, have seemed to them a strange intuition.

They both liked Elise’s dancing, although they liked complementary aspects of it. Ariel liked its lightness and its pace, and the ability to lose herself in the flow. Ariel was a music lover, and for her dance was a liquid expression of music, flesh made sound. Caliban liked its physicality and sensuousness, and the sensation of the snake’s coils. Caliban was a brute of sorts, and for her dance was a celebration of brutality, flesh made self. They both thought that Elise Gagne’s dancing was sexy, but they had very different notions of sexiness.

I remembered everything. In theory, I should have been able to fit their different experiences together, just as the brain combines the images transmitted to it by the two eyes, to make a more coherent, mentally three-dimensional whole. Perhaps I could have, if I’d wanted to. But I didn’t want to. It’s all very well being more than the sum of your parts, but you can’t choose the parts you’re more than the sum of, and when you start to dislike them....

Dr. Prospero spent more and more time in the lab, locked up with his blueprints and his embryos. Elise Gagne had no desire to join him—I would have!—but she had even less desire to hang out with me. She didn’t go out, though, even when the sun peeped over the horizon and the white mammoths started foraging. She didn’t want to watch the mammoths on the move, or the zebroid tapirs following the ebb tide while the giant rats hunted them by stealth. She spent a lot of time in VE, a very long way from Dr. Prospero’s ice palace.

I spent a lot of time in VE too, sometimes as far afield as Titan and the patient ships journeying between the stars, but I did go out to ride the mammoth bull and dig for shellfish with the tapirs—with my fingers, not my snout. I played with the rats, who are very amusing companions once you have persuaded them that you are not prey. And I visited Python, who is my favorite person in all the world, except for Dr. Prospero, in spite of the fact that he has no fingers and cannot talk to me in signs.

Sometimes, I think it must be very frustrating to be Python, not just because he has all that cleverness in his brain and no easy way to communicate its findings, but because he sleeps for such long periods—not just months but years, spending most of that time in oblivion and the rest in dreams that he probably never remembers.

He was asleep when I went down into the mountain to see him, but he woke up when I stroked his head. He looked at me, first with one eye and then with the other, his patient brain waiting to collate the two images. Then he yawned—an extremely impressive sight— and licked my face with his tongue.

The walls in Python’s hideaway are just as thickly skinned as the walls insulating the rooms and corridors of Dr. Prospero’s palace from the ices of its fundamental architecture, but they are neither translucent nor luminous. They could have been patterned even more extravagantly than the tapirs if Dr. Prospero wished, but they were actually monochrome grey, so dull that the light-fittings seemed to blaze even more harshly white than they actually did. Compensation for that was supplied by Python’s iridescent scales, which gleamed like nothing else on Earth or in v-space.

“Hello, Python,” I signed, touching my fingers to his skin rather than displaying them to one or other of his eyes. “Are you hungry today?”

He didn’t understand sign language, but he always seemed to pick up something of my meaning. He yawned again and smacked his lips, as if to say that he could eat a tapir, let alone a few snack-rats.

“No tapirs,” I said. “You’ll have to stay in the tunnels for a few months yet—but there are rats a-plenty down below. It’s going to be a very good year for rats, I think. Snakes too. Did you know that you were being to be a clone-father? Well, not a clone-father, to be perfectly honest, but a distant relative. A sort of great-uncle. Anyway, there’ll be something in you in Elise Gagne’s new partner: a chip off the old genetic block. Something to be proud of in your old age. You are old, you know, no matter how young you feel. You might live for another thousand years, I suppose, but you’re still old. Older than me, at any rate. Older and wiser.”

He licked my face again. He could have swallowed me whole, alter squeezing me to death with the merest effort of his vast coils, but he knew that I wasn’t prey. To the rats, I was an honorary rat; to Python, I was an honorary snake; to Dr. Prospero, if not to Elise Gagne, I was an honorary human being.

Or was I?

My fingers faltered as I stroked Python’s mighty head. I had been having a lot of anxious thoughts like that lately, although there was really no need. Dr. Prospero might be distracted now, but Elise Gagne would be gone soon enough, having completed her satanic bargain. Afterwards, Dr. Prospero would be all mine again, and the palace would be closed to everyone—including the island’s uninvited visitors—for hundreds of years.

* * * *

Elise Gagne had been in residence at the palace for nine days when Dr. Prospero called me into his study.

“How is the work going?” I asked him, politely.

“Very well,” he said. “I’ve completed the DNA assembly and renucleated thirty totipotency-restored cells stripped from Python’s mouth. I anticipate a higher failure rate than usual because of the number of mammoth genes involved, but I should have six to ten embryos ready for implanting in four days time.”

“Is Elise going to be here throughout the gestation.”

“No. She’ll be leaving tomorrow, but she’ll return when the snakes are about a metre long. The advanced training phase will be the most difficult of all; it will take her a week or two to figure out which one is the most promising. After that, it’s up to her. I’ll be involved, of course, but only virtually. Are you happy, Miranda?”

The abrupt change of subject startled me, all the more so because it wasn’t the kind of question Dr. Prospero usually asked.

“Yes,” I said. It wasn’t entirely true, but I expected to be a lot happier in two days time.

“Elise says that you seem unhappy to her.”

Elise says! I thought. The effrontery of it was appalling, and not just because she’d scarcely looked in my direction for a week. And why, in any case, was Dr. Prospero interested in her judgment, when he was in a far better position to form one of his own?

Dr. Prospero didn’t wait long enough for me to frame a reply. “Elise has suggested that you might be lonely,” he said. “She thinks I ought to make you a mate.”

That seemed far worse than effrontery to me. It seemed like something I had not yet discovered in the dictionary: something esoteric, that even a garrulous human with a functional larynx might only have occasion to pronounce once or twice in a lifetime.

“No,” I signaled. “No. No. No.” Unlike a voice-box, gestures aren’t restrained by artificial politeness.

Dr. Prospero seemed quite amazed. “I thought you’d like the idea,” he said.

“No,” I signaled. “No.”

“What about Ariel?” he signed. “What about Caliban?”

I was immediately seized by the awful idea that he might actually put it to a vote—and that I might be overruled by the separate hemispheres of my own brain. But they were only half a person each, at best, and I was more than the sum of my parts. Surely my opinion ought to outweigh both of theirs.

“No,” I signaled. “No. No.” My hand seemed to have got stuck, possessed by a kind of nervous tic. It must have seemed like that to Dr. Prospero too. I was hoping that he wouldn’t tell Elise, because I could guess the interpretation Elise would put on my actions, even though such a thought would never enter Dr. Prospero’s head. It would never have entered mine, except that I had bad dreams: dreams of Ariel and dreams of Caliban, their urges, their whims and their poor excuses for thought.

“It wouldn’t be a matter of breeding, Miranda,” Dr. Prospero said, proving that his mind wasn’t entirely isolated from the kinds of thought that Elise Gagne might put into it. “You have too many mammoth genes to be an effective mother. Like me, you’ll never have offspring while you’re alive—and in your case, it’ll require a very clever Human Creationist to ensure that you have them thereafter. It’s a matter of companionship—a matter of having someone to do things with, to talk to, to love.”

Until Elise Gagne had come, it would never have crossed Dr. Prosperous mind to add that last word—and why should it now, given that she’d be leaving in two days time and would only return once more to collect her precious dancing partner?

“No need,” I said. “I have Python, the rats, the tapirs, you.” I tried to make him into an afterthought, something tacked on and dispensable. I wanted to sting him, like a serpent’s tooth—although, not having seen the blueprints, I didn’t know whether Elise Gagne’s new partner was destined to have teeth or not. Sometimes she danced with cobras, sometimes with anacondas—all recreates, of course; nothing of that sort had made it through the ecocatastrophe, in spite of the fact that there never been any shortage of rats and cockroaches to eat.

“They’re not your own kind,” he pointed out.

“Elise isn’t your kind,” I signed back. “Nobody is. Python’s one of a kind too. We all are.”

I new before his fingers moved what he was going to say. “What about Ariel?” he signed. “What about Caliban?”

They didn’t matter. They were only fragments, figments cast out by the dreams that could only take possession of half of me at a time. They didn’t really exist. They didn’t have needs of their own, desires of their own, votes of their own.

Except that they did—have needs and desires, that is. Not votes, while I had any say in the matter.

“What about me?” I signed back to Dr. Prospero. “What about me?”

* * * *

The tempo of life on most Creationist islands is rapid; the days and nights are more or less equal all year round, and the sun is always hot. The vegetation is avid, the animal life frenzied. Here in the cold north, where summer days and winter nights are all but endless, things move more slowly. The evergreen forests have leaves like needles, which fix the sunlight with the utmost patience, and are grazed in like fashion. The mammoths are vast and majestic, like great drifts of dirty snow, far too self-possessed ever to turn avalanche. The omnivorous tapirs and rats are similarly unhurried, never condescending to anything as vulgar as pursuit.

I, too, am a creature of the island. By the time humans “discovered” them, orangutans were tropic-dwellers, like tigers and elephants, but they had first been shaped—like tigers and elephants— by the rigors of oft-repeated ice ages, bulked up for insulation against the cold. Only the vagaries of chance, and the competition provided by humankind’s remoter ancestors, drove them from the habitat that had shaped them into warmer climes, where the ever-avid vegetation gave them greater margins of survival.

Even if I had been a faithful copy of my immediate great-uncles, therefore, I would not have been out of place on Dr. Prospero’s island. It was not my mammoth genes that made me fit company for actual recreated mammoths, nor was it my dolphinesque brain. I belong here—far more so, in a way, than Dr. Prospero himself, who is a stranger here, genetically speaking, for all that his own great-uncles wiped out their Neanderthal cousins, which natural selection shaped to endure the iterative advents of the ice.

As for Ariel and Caliban—well, quite frankly, who cares? If I do not, who should?

Can they really care about themselves, given that they only have half a brain apiece, and that each one only has that when the other is dreaming. No matter how intimately related we are, they are not my companions. I do not love them.

But I digress. The point is that the next two days dragged, even though they were a mere two days. They did not pass as swiftly as I desired, or needed—and on the eve of her departure, Elise Gagne danced.

She danced with a cobra, but the idea of biting her never crossed its mind, any more than squeezing me to death and swallowing me with a single gulp would ever cross Python’s.

I was allowed to watch, even though the occasion might have been thought preciously intimate by Dr. Prospero. Indeed, my presence was required, for Elise was a performer and needed all the audience she could get—even recreated orangutans too stupid to know where their best interests lay.

Perhaps she knew that I had been watching her tapes, and taking her place in them as best I could. Perhaps she didn’t know that Ariel’s and Caliban’s similar actions weren’t mine in any true sense of the word. At any rate, I was there. I watched her dance, in the flesh. I would have gone to sleep if I could, but I couldn’t.

The cobra was less impressive than one of her anacondas, although it was a full two metres from nose to tail and had a fine hood decorated with the eyes of an owl. We have owls on the island occasionally—not natural ones, but not ones of Dr. Prospero’s making: summer strays from Greenland and Spitzbergen, which come via the pole.

Were I signing this instead of writing it I could probably give a more convincing account of the dance, but even dexterous fingers could not give more than the faintest impression of Elise’s dancing. She and the cobra were fused into a single soul, as carefree and ecstatic as Ariel but so much more indulgent of their bliss; they flowed around one another with all the grace of a DNA-helix, but with so much more versatility, so much more freedom of expression. They looked at one another with such naked predatory lust, such brazen physicality, that it was impossible to judge which might be more likely to poison and consume the other, were they enemies instead of lovers. They were as brutal as Caliban, and as monstrous, but there was an art in their mutual caresses that transfigured brutality into sublimity, and monstrousness into...well, something far more sinister than beauty, but far less sinister than love.

It was magnificent, in its way, but far short of perfection. She knew that, even though she had reached the peak of her own achievement.

When she finished, she looked directly to me, and held my gaze for longer than she had ever been able to before.

“It will be better when I have my Asp,” she told me. “You’ll see, then, what dancing is.”

Orangutans are not built for dancing. Not, at any rate, the kinds of dancing that a human can do. Our genes are very similar, but the instructions etched in our cytoplasm are more faber than walker.

I nodded my head, as if to agree with her—but she refused to understand me, even in a gesture so simple. Her redirected attention was already fixed on Dr. Prospero. His had never wavered.

I left, and went to talk to Python.

“You’re not built for dancing either,” I told him. “I’m all arms, you’re just a mammoth’s thigh stretched to absurdity, too much mass to move with grace. But she’s going home now, and Dr. Prospero will be all ours again. Yours and mine, I mean—because the mammoths and the tapirs, and Ariel and Caliban are all too stupid to care. You and I are the only ones who really love him, because we’re the only ones who can.”

He licked my face when I finished, as if he wanted to comfort me, but didn’t quite know how.

* * * *

Then I waited for life to return to normal. I waited for Dr. Prospero to return to himself. Initially, I put his distraction down to the stress of his continued labours in connection with the gestating Asps. Then, after some thought and a certain amount of research, I figured that there must be some kind of hormonal echo afflicting him, the way Caliban’s echoes occasionally afflict me. I thought that his body might be missing her, even though his mind must be eager to return to a more productively ataractic state.

I did what I could to help. I was attentive but discreet, always ready to talk and never to nag, always concerned but always careful.

It did no good. He remained moody. I’m sure that his work didn’t suffer—-his work on the Asps, that is—but it had been dislodged from its proper context. It was almost as if he were leaving the island to do it, commuting to some private v-space a million miles away.

We had a hundred trivial conversations before he got around to it, but in the end the moment came.

“I’ve been thinking, Miranda,” he signed to me, one evening after dinner when the stars shone bright, sending their frail rays through the infinite crystal corridors of the ice-palace. “I might have done everything here that I need to do. I might move south again, take an island nearer to the equator. The Continental Engineers have a couple of dozen virgins ready for allocation.”

The word that hurt me most, oddly enough, was “again.” Dr. Prospero hadn’t worked anywhere else since Python was the size of his forearm. Given the limited carrying-capacity of human memory, and the way in which human personalities reshape themselves over centuries, he couldn’t have any meaningful sense of ever having been anywhere else. The Dr. Prospero I knew—the Dr. Prospero he knew—was as much a creature of the island as the alpha male of the mammal herd, or me.

“I don’t want to leave,” I signed, hastily adding: “Not yet. In a hundred years, maybe. Or two.”

“You’re only fifteen, Miranda” he signed back. “You have no idea what a hundred years means. In any case, you can say here if you want to.”

And there it was: You can stay here if you want to. As if I were capable of wanting to be here if he were somewhere else. As if I could welcome a new tenant to his ice-palace, or become its chatelaine myself.

As if, as if, as if. My fingers twitched as I repeated the phrase inside my head, itching with it even though they remained discreetly mute.

“No,” I signed, eventually. “That’s not what I want. I want things to be normal again.”

“You’re only fifteen,” he said, as if his fingers too were developing habits that were difficult to break. “You have no notion of normality. Fifteen years is a drop in the ocean of time. Things have been settled during that time because I’ve become stuck in my ways, but that’s not normal. Moving on is normal. You have to keep changing when you’re emortal, Miranda, or robotization might set in. It’s time I moved on. Past time, I think.”

“Is that what Elise told you?” I asked, recklessly.

“She mentioned it,” he replied, “but she only started me thinking. I needed that—to start thinking along those lines. Once the Asp is finished—finished here, I mean, not fully trained—it might be time for new surroundings, new stimuli. I need new ideas, Miranda. You have new ideas every day, simply because you’re growing up, but I’ve been grown up for a long time, and I need to move on if I’m not to stagnate. I don’t want you to stay here. I want you to come with me—but you’re free to make your own choice.”

What about Ariel? I thought. What about Caliban? Well, what about them. They wouldn’t care, and they didn’t have a vote. I was the whole person, the real me. I didn’t want to go. But I didn’t want Dr. Prospero to go without me, either—even if tagging along with him, like an exhibit in his collection of freaks, turned out to be anything but paradise, anything but comfortable, anything but endurable.

“There’s no hurry,” I said. “We have all the time in the world.”

“That’s part of the problem,” he signed back. “Time moves so slowly here, where the day seems almost as long as the year. It’s worse than the moon. When Elise comes back....”

“It won’t make any difference,” I signed, suppressing a tremor in my fingers in order to make sure that my meaning was clear. “Once she has her Asp, she’ll have no further use for you. Your deal will be over.”

He raised his eyebrows in sincere astonishment. “I know that,” he signed. “It’s fine by me. We both got what we wanted, and it’ll be over soon enough for both of us. It’ll be time for us to move on— to seize new opportunities, to meet new challenges.”

I knew that he couldn’t see it. He couldn’t see that the deal wasn’t over, and never would be—because she’d changed him. She’d drifted into his life and drifted out again, but she wasn’t gone. Even when she had her Asp, she wouldn’t be gone. Things had changed. They would never be the same again. But what could I say? What could I sway that couldn’t be countered with that ridiculous, appalling, insulting rejoinder: You‘re only fifteen, Miranda. You don’t understand.

Because I am only fifteen, and I don’t.

When there was nothing further to say, I went to see Python again, because he wasn’t only fifteen, and he did understand.

“We’re leaving, Python,” I told him, my fingers dancing on his glittering scales as if on a dance-floor that went on forever, glittering all the way. “We’re leaving, and never coming back. Nothing will ever be the same. You’re coming too, of course. Just you and me and Dr. Prospero. And Ariel and Caliban, I suppose. Sometimes I wish that I could go to sleep for a thousand years, and wake up when they’ve had a chance to grow up and become as wise as they ever can—but I can’t, because wakefulness is just as essential as sleep to a highly-developed mind. Even you can’t sleep forever, Python. Truth be told, they can’t grow up if I’m not around; they can’t even live for long if I’m not around to draw them together and nourish their dreams.

“And while we’re admitting the truth, it’s possible that Dr. Prospero is right—that Elise Gagne is right, though it would choke me if I had to say it with my throat—and that he really does have to move on. He’s only human, after all. Three’s a crowd, you know, inside or outside your head, but everything on the surface of the Earth is one big crowd, even when you’re on an island surrounded by a hole in an ice-sheet that goes all the way to the pole on one side and calves into the great grey sea on the other. I hate Elise Gagne, but she knows how to dance. She certainly knows how to dance.”

Python yawned, and stirred. I knew that she was feeling hungry, that she wanted to be away. She’d probably been perfectly content before I arrived, but I’d sparked the restlessness in her and now she wanted to be off, hunting for rats in the tunnels, or tapirs on the slopes.

“It’s still winter, old man,” I said to him. “It’s cold outside, even in the meager daylight. There’s no hurry, is there? And there’ll always be plenty of rats. Even in the depths of the ecocatastrophe, there were always plenty of rats.”

I left him to it, and went through the tunnels myself, out on to the mountainside above the tree line. Far below, I could see the mammoths huddled in a clearing, like a great white tumor in the forest’s dark flesh.

The stars were shining, but there were no stars falling, and no aurora to echo the storms on the sun.

If I were able to sleep for a thousand years, I thought, I might wake to a braver new world, where the legacy of billions of years of natural selection had at last been balanced by the legacy of two millennia of godlike power. Or not. One thing that was certain was that I wouldn’t be awakened by a prince’s kiss, or any other sign of destiny.

Anyway, I had no choice. Wakefulness is as essential as sleep; ambition is as necessary as dreams. And the only place on Earth that never changes is the utmost ocean floor, into which nothing falls but the corpses of sea-dwelling mammals that have finally been consumed by sleep, Ariel-twin and Caliban-twin alike.