The Invention of Man

branch for worldbuilding

Their biological history:

It is easy enough to say that carrots or New Zealand exist in this world. But it is more controversial to call Tedy he or the man, or worst of all, the husband.

Dian's people approximately have one pronoun for people, whose subtle fluted variants have all been collapsed to she without much issue. They have a cattle pronoun, which we can just as easily call it. But they have no he. Some of the animal rights activists tried to invent one, which we will call xe, but it never really worked. They never stopped arguing about whether they should use the people-pronoun for Tedy or the novel pronoun.

Nothing under consideration for Dian's people matches onto he (although they were trying to get there with xe), which reads as all too easily human AND male to us. No word ever made it there, although in their little household they were able exert enough reality over xe that in those sections and in those sections only, Theo is called he.

The trouble began a long time ago, when the demisapient species, the Sus Cantans, evolved a second parallel voicebox so that one could sing in complement with oneself. They had had a rudimentary language, but the second voicebox enabled members to exchange information through a separate channel whose combinatorics allowed more information to be emitted in one time unit. This enabled language to kick off in earnest.

In that old environment, males stayed mated to females for a long time. Serial monogamy or lifelong monogamy were the norm. Males spent more time on solitary, long-ranging hunts in their territory. It was the females that influenced the language acquisition of her children, and females who most used that language to obtain and divide food, coordinate watch schedules, coordinate raids. They were always the verbal species. When the great thawing began there was a great surplus of food, and particularly which surfaced a mineral that had been the bottleneck in Sus Cantans evolving another, costly, third voicebox. This one was harder than adding a second to a single, because the location and the space each voicebox needed from each other meant it competed for space with the lungs and heart. It had to be metabolically quite efficient, well-fed, to accomodate a third one and still be healthy. A third voicebox advantaged the females, who used language much more often, but did not particularly advantage the males, who were despite environmental changes were still solitary hunters. The females banded together to make a co-territory, and the males visited his own mate in her burrow. Obviously there were many opportunities for cuckoldry, and so they evolved jealousy between male and female, but rarely in female-female bonds, as their relationships to each other were almost more important for survival than theirs to the male mate.

They had been been somewhat tool-using species, at the level of throwing spears or crude cooking, but then the females made the awl. They could wear wood and leather armor around their body, and make nets with milkweed and barbed points to trap others. Their warfare against each other escalated, a war in which the males were largely secondary. Stronghold battled stronghold, each a unit of three to nine females. The basic nuclear unit of society. The larger males, large because they had to bring down animals larger than themselves and bring the meat home, were used as the primary soldiers. In between more complex wars fought with traps and armor and other lethalities that the awl could make, there were periods of more productive hunts. Some Sus Cantans took to burning vegetation regularly, seasonally destroying the homes of their prey to drive them out and kill them. This was an all too effective strategy.

starting from the end

In a dingy windowless kitchen lit by one yellow light over the table, a married couple sit down to eat. There is carrot stew in bowls in front of them. Or at least, they are root vegetables, and they are sort of orange. Let's go ahead and call them carrots. The two grunt and fart contentedly as they eat. They are a decorous species – very much so, in fact – but the rules governing the sounds of the body mostly pertain to speech. It would shame them if they spoke off-pitch, and they wince instinctively when they hear a wrong note.

The couple are unlike in size. The man is three times the mass of the woman, and sparsely hairy all over. The woman has much thicker fur, so thick it can be combed and oiled. They both have two eyes, which are amber, and two pointed ears, which flick about as they eat. The woman has shining white tusks capped in gold. The man clearly used to have much larger ones, but they have been ground down to domes, also plated with gold.

Their names are sung, but they have given names and surnames, albeit not granted all at once at birth. Let's go ahead and call the woman Dian Catriona Trescott-Lowry. It should, somewhat, give you some right ideas about her.

And let's call the man Charlie.

This dinner takes place near the end of their story. On the table is an unopened letter sealed in wax. It is from some old friends. They correspond regularly with those friends, but it has been a long time since they received a letter that looked like this. They have a good idea of what it proposes. Or at least, they have a general sense of how costly it will be to their family to agree.

Charlie goes back for seconds. After all these years he still looks a little furtive and embarrassed when he rises for more food. He does not pile much into his bowl. When he finishes there is no further excuse. The woman, flicking him a glance, reaches for the letter. As she opens it he sees the lines cutting horizontally across the paper, three on every row. Solid, dotted, and doubled lines mark the inflections of their tritone language. Years ago he would have reached for the letter – he needed to show, at every occasion, that he was literate. But he's slow at reading and finds it aversive. Now, in the privacy of their home, they divide work the way they really prefer. Dian's eyes dart across the paper, the music fast forwarded in her head.

"Where do they want us to go now?" he rumbles when the woman reaches the end of the letter, gaze lingering on the signatures. "Argentina? China? Or will the revolution begin in Norway this time?" His diction is perfect.

"No. Home."

He shakes his head, smiles. "We battered ourselves against it half our lives."

"It still has the largest support base."

"And a powerful opposition, just as ready to mobilize as the base." He doesn't say no, but he wants to.

"They think," Dian says slowly, "that home has the largest audience, an audience that has context on how we began and is ready to reel at our long, successful partnership here in Greece. Attested to by its witnesses, who are close to adults."

"Close to," said the man. "Can't we wait?"

"There's a new bill – scheduled for vote this winter."

They go outside and take a walk in the garden that wraps around their house, with its high high walls covered in thorny ivy. But even with the walls Charlie doesn't speak. Their estate is isolated, but they still have neighbors who could hear a male voice. The leaves are turning, and a few are falling. When they reach the final corner of their walk, Charlie kneels down to brush them off the three stone slabs. Dian stays behind, looking back towards the house. The graves make her too sad.

Dian's story began when she was humiliated in front of her mother's friends at her eighth birthday party. Everyone got upset. It is why her name is missing an E.

The problem was that she'd been reading a textbook that talks about DNA. She knew what chromosomes are, and that plants have a lot more of them. It was geared towards students who are already assumed to have been given the obvious context. So the book didn't hedge the way it would to a child when it presents the 38 chromosomes of the male and female species in side-by-side prints, with extensive annotations on shared genetic loci in each.

Di liked to show off. She introduced this information brightly between the entree, which was flank steak, and dessert, which was glazed sweetbread topped with chestnut purée and fruit. The guests politely entertained her chatter when she talked about FOXP2, but an awkward chilly silence descended when she adds the information – which was much the same type of information to her mind – that males and females share 99.9% of their genes. Dian's mother kicked her shin, claws almost poking through Di's leather skirt. Di says, "Ow!" and turned indignantly to her.

There was a long awkward silence where Rosamund Trescott-Lowry stared at her daughter, silently saying I don't want to chastise you in public, and Di stared back, silently saying I don't know why I'm being chastised in public. Finally Rosamund said, "Di, this is a quite delicate topic and I don't think we should discuss it here."

"I just thought it was interesting that the animals this –" Di gestured at the plates – "comes from share so much of our genes."

Her mom replied, "Yes, that's why we don't talk about it," at the same time Di continued, "I knew they were birthed the same as us, but –"

"Child, you are eight now," said her least favorite aunt. Her name was Therese and she was only partnered with one of the four other women in the household. She was always trying to make up for this lack of standing by being officious. "You ought to know better than to bring up such a thing at your naming day."

Di decided to ignore Therese's rebuke. She said, "If [ACD/CF#E/GAF#] and [DE/BA#/EB] are genetically almost identical, shouldn't [ACD/CF#E/GAF#] be treated like people too? Since we should expect to diverge from them very little in how our minds and bodies work. And not eaten?"

Di was not trying to provoke. She was merely thinking out loud in public. She already knew she was in trouble but she thought if she kept talking she would be in only slightly worsening amounts of trouble.

Her mother turned her body towards Di all the way, and quickly, a gesture of seriousness that made Di's fur jump up from her hide. "Di. You have, to your embarrassment, repeated an argument promulgated by biologism. Be thankful I think you're just being foolish, not knowingly repeating a notion invented by monstrous, wretched despicables."

Tears sprang into Di's eyes. She was not used to being upbraided so harshly by her mother in public.

Therese said, "She's just a child, Rosamund. She'll grow to learn better."

As if this were a passive process that did not involve Rosamund as teacher and primary parent. Rosamund leveled Therese a very cold look before saying, with poise, "Friends, I apologize for her conduct. I clearly need to have a conversation with her and regret I didn't already. I'm very embarrassed. Please, dig back into dessert and let's hear a singing of Reba's latest poem."

Di was flushed all under, her face-hairs standing up like a porcupine's. Her tears matted the fur around her eyes. She had only been saying her thoughts. She knew herself to be a nice, bright girl to others, and took great pleasure in this self image. She had not known before that someone like her could accidentally have thoughts that belonged only to monstrous despicables.

The guests were still rattled when the clock struck midnight and they started singing the name song: "This little girl is growing up. When we last came here, we named her Di, Di of the Trescott-Lowry family group. Time carries her up and out! As she expands, so does her name. We sing it together into her next year. What will she be called next? Di –"

This song went around repeatedly until the group was in consensus, and each time everyone sang a candidate-name softly, trying it out. The first time, Di was supposed to sing the completion she most preferred. But she was too rattled, and there was no consensus. The second time she sang her name but stuttered on the tritone. Everyone pretended not to notice. Because they were embarrassed for her, they sang it a little too in synchrony the next turn, too much in agreement too fast.

But the syllable was mangled, because everyone had misheard it in their own way. Normally a bold girl, Di was too embarrassed to assert her choice. When the group settled on the new tritone to add to her name – let's call it an – they chose one that was close to a common tritone, but was definitely not the tritone Di had been wanting for herself.

She'd had her whole name played out, all the way into six-tone adult name, and had to scrap it because it couldn't work with the new second tone. She went to bed in tears.

Dian didn't think about the party or the subject of male DNA for a few years. Or more accurately, she pushed it quickly out of mind, a flinch-kick: That's a bad thought. That's a dirty thought. I'm not going to think about that evening.

When she was thirteen, she left children's school, where they kept you day-round before sending you home, to a young ladies' school, which let you off every sixth afternoon for self-development, at one of the many large or small programs there were in the city. Her mother loosened curfew at the same time. So she regularly had almost the whole day free, from noon to midnight.

She usually spent it at library programs. They had easy programs like timing you reading, and the more books you read that you could write a ten paragraph review for, the more points you got in an in-library prize system that you could use for placing holds or jumping queues. But sometimes she went to play tennis, and the courts were across the street from the butcher's. A truck was pulling in just as she walked by one day. Dian watched as they carried out a leg from a hook inside the truck and hung it on a different hook in the back room of the butcher's. The torso cuts they carried out next were nearly unrecognizable, but the leg was really obviously a leg, just... hairless and huge, sawed off at the groin and at the ankle.

Dian stared at the leg and tried to fit it onto the context of a larger, whole animal. She had never seen a male in person, only slightly dirty drawings or abstracted diagrams at the butcher's. Her world did not have the photograph, and the only way one saw a male was for eating or fucking. At schools the worse type of student scrawled on bathroom walls the obscene symbol for males, which was an upside down triangle with a line or a blob for a penis. In more explicit ones it had legs and a head, except instead of an oval for the head it was a cup, with a gap where its brain and tritonal throat should be.

There were two things that came out of a woman's vagina. You might have a normal child, covered with fine, dark, damp fur. If you had the other kind you sold it, usually to the company who had sold you the sperm. The other thing was a patchily haired animal with a penis, which looked like an inverted, bunched-up vagina. It was covered with thin pleated frills that looked like bunched-up fabric, and it was usually scutched for shaved-meat salads, or made into rinds.

The money for selling the male wasn't bad, and for some women it was adequate consolation for the half-year they lost in getting a child. When the farm got the boar they would raise him to peak slaughtering age if they could, killing him early if he caught ill or went lame. If he were well-shaped and articulate he might go to a brothel, but most didn't. If he lived to peak age and could speak in a ditone, sometimes the farm would make him a sperm bull.

This was known to Dian, but she knew it with her brain and not her eyes.

Dian, who was at this point really Dian Ca Trescott-Lowry, folded her arms and watched them drive away. They were large and went slowly on the road, and she could follow them on her bike. She knew there were farms outside the city, but she didn't know where they were exactly. Probably not that far.

She was too young to be let into the brothels where one could talk to boars. But she could see them on a farm, and decide for herself. Did the genes make the person? Were boars people, or not?

"Excuse me, do you ever get delivery after noon?" she asked.

"Every five days, from Redwick farm. We're their last round."

She looked at her calendar to see when she would next be free to follow a Redwick truck back. On that day she waited a block away under the high sun, leaning against a lamp-post on her bike. When the truck left, she took off after it. She wanted to see.