Permutation City

She missed rooms, streets, smells. Sometimes it was so painful it was comical. She lay awake thinking about the shabbiest abandoned buildings of Pyrmont, or the cardboard stench of ersatz popcorn wafting out of the VR parlors on George Street. And she knew that she could reconstruct her old house, all of its surroundings, all of Sydney, and more, in as much detail as she wished; she knew that every last idiot ache she felt for the amputated past could be dealt with in an instant. Understanding exactly how far she could go was more than enough to rid her of any desire to take a single step in that direction.

But having chosen to make no effort to relieve the pangs of homesickness, she seemed to have forfeited her right to the emotion. How could she claim to long for something which she could so easily possess -- while continuing to deny it to herself?

So she tried to set the past aside. She studied the Lambertians diligently, preparing for the day when contact would be permitted. She tried to immerse herself in the role of the legendary eighteenth founder, roused from her millennia of sleep to share the triumphant moment when the people of Elysium would finally come face to face with an alien culture.

Lambertian communities -- despite some similarities to those of terrestrial social insects -- were far more complex, and much less hierarchical, than the nests of ants or the hives of bees. For a start, all Lambertians were equally fertile; there was no queen, no workers, no drones. The young were conceived in plants at the periphery of the local territory, and upon hatching usually migrated hundreds of kilometers to become members of distant communities. There, they joined teams and learned their speciality -- be it herding, defense against predators, or modeling the formation of planetary systems. Specialization was usually for life, but team members occasionally changed professions if the need arose.

Lambertian group behavior had a long evolutionary history, and it remained the driving force in cultural development -- because individual Lambertians were physically incapable of inventing, testing or communicating the models by which the most sophisticated ideas were expressed. An individual could learn enough about a model while taking part in a successful dance to enable it to exchange roles with any other individual the next time the dance was performed -- but it could never ponder the implications of the idea itself, in solitude. The language of the dance was like human writing, formal logic, mathematical notation and computing, all rolled into one -- but the basic skills were innate, not cultural. And it was so successful -- and so much in tune with other aspects of their social behavior -- that the Lambertians had never had reason to develop a self-contained alternative.

Individuals were far from unthinking components, though. They were fully conscious in their own right; groups performed many roles, but they did not comprise "communal minds." The language of sounds, movements and scents used by individuals was far simpler than the group language of the dance, but it could still express most of the concepts which preliterate humans had dealt with: intentions, past experience, the lives of others.

And individual Lambertians spoke of individual death. They knew that they would die.

Maria searched the literature for some clue to the way they dealt with their mortality. Corpses were left where they dropped; there was no ritual to mark the event, and no evidence of anything like grief. There were no clear Lambertian analogs for any of the human emotions -- not even physical pain. When injured, they were acutely aware of the fact, and took steps to minimize damage to themselves -- but it was a matter of specific instinctive responses coming into play, rather than the widespread biochemical shifts involved in human mood changes. The Lambertian nervous system was "tighter" than a human's; there was no flooding of regions of the brain with large doses of endogenous stimulants or depressants -- everything was mediated within the enclosed synapses.

No grief. No pain. No happiness? Maria retreated from the question. The Lambertians possessed their own spectrum of thoughts and behavior; any attempt to render it in human terms would be as false as the colors of the Autoverse atoms themselves.