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By Root 1423 0

their children while they were still alive, and very often they had several at intervals of only twenty or thirty years. An aggregate family of fabers often had three or even four children growing up in parallel. In the infinite reaches of space, there was no population control, and no restrictive “right of replacement.” A microworld’s population could grow as fast as the microworld could acquire extra biomass and organize more living space. Then again, the fabers were always doing things. Even though they had four arms, they never seemed to leave one dangling. They seemed to have no difficulty at all in doing two different things at the same time, often using only one limb for attachment. On the moon this generally meant hanging from the ceiling like a bat while one exceedingly busy hand mediated between the separate tasks being carried out by the remaining two.

I quickly realized that it wasn’t just the widely accepted notion that the future of mankind must take the form of a gradual diffusion through the galaxy that made the fabers think of Earth as decadent. From their viewpoint, the habits and manners of the lunar footsloggers seemed annoyingly slow and sedentary. The Earthbound, having long since attained control of the ecosphere of their native world, seemed to the fabers to be living a lotus-eater existence, indolently pottering about in its spacious garden, and unmodified spacefarers seemed to the fabers to have brought that deep-seated indolence with them into environments where it did not belong.

The most extreme fabers, in this and other respects, were the “converts” who had attained that state by means of somatic engineering rather than having been born four-handed. Many footsloggers did not regard the converts as “real” fabers and emphasized this point by referring to the faber-born as “naturals,” borrowing an obsolete term that false emortals had once applied to the earliest Earthbound ZTs. The converts, on the other hand, regarded themselves as the formulators and best practitioners of faber philosophy.

Most fabers weren’t contemptuous of legs as such, but converts were often inclined to draw nice distinctions in their arguments about the relative worth of different variants of humankind. They would give their wholehearted endorsement to the hypothetical spacefaring folk who would one day be given legs by genetic engineers in order that they might descend to the surfaces of new and alien worlds, but they would be casually dismissive of those emigrants from Earth who insisted on hanging on to the legs their ancestors had bequeathed to them in order to enjoy the fruits of the labors of past generations.

Such airy discussions came as a shock to me, because I was suddenly able to see Mama Siorane as the faber converts must have seen her rather than as she had seen herself—as a flawed pioneer who had never quite had the courage of her convictions, who had gone all the way out to Titan but had stopped short of modifying her own unfortunately mortal flesh. I was very conscious of the fact that Emily was following in Mama Siorane’s footsteps, and I could not help but wonder whether she would take up the challenge of the converts and trade her emortal feet for emortal hands.

Papa Ezra, by contrast, was a hero even to converts despite that he had hung on to his legs till he died. The name of Ezra Derhan meant nothing to anyone on Earth, but it was familiar in every household on the moon and in the micro worlds. Papa Ezra had made converts and had contributed to the perfection of the Zaman transformations with which every faber infant was now equipped. In Mare Moscoviense in 2825 hardly anyone had heard of Mortimer Gray, historian of death and unsuccessful scourge of the Thanaticists, and only one person in five was impressed if I introduced myself as a friend of Emily Marchant, gantzer extraordinaire and ice-palace designer, but everyone reacted when I mentioned that I was the foster son of Ezra Derhan.

I quickly came to understand that although unmodified men were still the majority population of the moon in