Silhouettes in silver, left on the ground through the brightside

Sand castles turned to glass by the brightside crossing

Twenty rocks on a rubble plain painted white and put back in place

A chest-high oval ring of drywall using flat stones, with fat rounded capstones on top, and a single gap for a door into the center

A rock shaped like South America, balanced on its Tierra del Fuego

Stainless steel wire snarled in broken orbits around a boulder

Almost cubical rocks in a single stack twenty rocks high

Elliptically rounded rocks stacked four and five high

Ten thousand pebbles arranged together on their ends in the shape of a whirlpool

Cliff sides carved to mirror smoothness and then etched by the Sanskrit lettering for Om Mani Padme Hum

Rock pile compass roses, Medicine Wheels, stone circles, henges, inuksuk

A conical hut like the end of a spaceship sticking up out of the plain

Inside the terraria, the possibilities blossomed:

Twigs twisted into circles. Leaves into cornucopia

Pink cherry blossoms filling a pool

Branches like bones assembled into a cradle

Red poppy petals wrapped around a boulder, boulder replaced among its gray mates

Ice henges. Igloo segments. Ice sheets broken and reassembled in sphere shapes

Long sticks woven into semicircular patterns in shallow smooth water

Leaf lines, shifting the leaves from red to orange to yellow to yellow-green to green

Earthworks in long sinuous lines

“History is a product of labor just like the work of art itself, and obeys analogous dynamics”

SWAN AND WAHRAM

Swan finished their trip on the tundra feeling better than she had for a long time. She loved her giant toad, her lump of clay, with his groaning slowness and quick little smile. Feeling that feeling in her made her able to think of Alex and Terminator and everything that had happened in a way she could tolerate; so her mood was a strange mix of pain and happiness. A fearful joy, yes. Certain wolf howls, of a kind she had often heard, including in the last month on the taiga, combined just such emotions, mourning and joy, and expressed her current mood quite precisely. She whisper-howled when she heard them out in the night, as she was with Wahram and the others at camp; she didn’t like to howl fully when other people were around. She howled inside. When Jacques Cartier had kidnapped some local chiefs for transport back to France, the night before the ships left, people had gathered on the shore and howled like wolves all night long.

One morning Wahram got a call and took it outside the dining tent, and when he came back in, he was looking thoughtful.

“Listen,” he said to Swan as they trudged out over the tundra, wind and sun at their backs. “I need to go back out to Saturn again. There’s a meeting been called of all the people who were helping Alex. They want it in person so they can keep it off the record.”

“And what’s it about?” Swan asked.

“Well,” he said cautiously, “it has to do with what appears to be a new type of qube. So I shouldn’t really say more.”

“I know when people are talking about me,” Pauline announced.

“We know that,” Swan snapped. “Be quiet.”

“Anyway,” Wahram said, “I think you should join this meeting. And you can do me a favor. Jean Genette is out of touch in an aquarium, and we need to get word to him about this meeting. I should go to Titan directly, but if you could go tell Jean about it on your way out, that would help. And Jean can maybe tell you more about what’s going on.”

“All right,” Swan said. “I can do that.”

“Good.” Wahram smiled his tiny smile. But Swan could tell he was distracted.

Extracts (17)

As many people have significant lifelong quantities of male and female hormones and phenotypically are bisexual, intersex, or indeterminate, the pronouns “he” and “she” are often avoided, or when used are a matter of self-designation, sometimes changing according to situation. Referring to someone else with such pronouns is the equivalent of using “ tu” rather than “ vous” in French, indicating familiarity with the person

deepest phenotypic signals of gender appear to be waist-to-hip ratio, and waist height relative to total height, usually a matter of proportionately longer female femurs and wider female pelvic bones

such as French, Turkish, or Chinese. Alternative ungendered pronouns in English include “it,” “e,” “them,” “one,” “on,” and “oon,” but none of them have

it is not a case of “there is no gender,” but rather a complex and ambiguous efflorescence, sometimes called a fully ursuline humanity, other times just a mess

gatherings composed entirely of gender-indeterminate people are a new social space that some find intensely uncomfortable, eliciting comments such as “like a nakedness I hadn’t thought could happen” or “you’re only yourself, it’s terrifying,” and so on. Clearly, a new kind of psychic exposure

distinctions can be pretty fine, with some claiming that gynandromorphs do not look quite like androgyns, nor like hermaphrodites, nor eunuchs, and certainly not like bisexuals—that androgyns and wombmen are quite different—and so on. Some people like to tell that part of their story; others never mention it at all. Some dress across gender and otherwise mix semiotic gender signals to express how they are feeling in that moment. Outrageous macho and fem behaviors, either matched with phenotype and semiotic indicators or not, create performance art ranging from the kitschy to the beautiful

as there are now people close to three meters tall, and others less than a meter tall, gender may no longer be the greatest divide in human

even approaching the size of spider monkeys, a modification that was severely censured by larger people, until longevity statistics kept reaffirming the association between smaller sizes and longer lifetimes, especially in light gravities. A saying among small people is “smaller is better”

we all began female, and always had both sexual hormones in us. We always had masculine and feminine behavioral traits, which we had to train into gender-appropriate behaviors, even though they were traits that everyone has. We selectively encouraged or repressed traits, so for most of our history we have reinforced gender. But in our deepest selves we were always both. And now, in space, openly both. Very small or very tall—human at last

this culture’s structure of feeling could also be called balkanized. Gender therapy and speciation were both parts of the longevity project, and the combination of the three created a new structure of feeling that is often characterized as fractured, compartmentalized, bulkheaded, firewalled. Usually longevity itself is identified as the primary force driving this; until now, no one has had to integrate a personality in its second century (or more), and often it is experienced as an existential crisis. The super-elderly have had so many experiences, gone through so many phases, lost so many companions to death or simply time that they have grown distanced from other people. Spacers, mobile over huge distances, especially bold in trying all the augmented abilities, often live as isolatoes, in a solipsistic narrative or performance of their own