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phonemes was optimum. The earliest forms even used something she had to struggle to understand: letters with two cases, big and small, with almost no value added to the doubling of symbols.
    Later languages dropped these cultural carbuncles. Down through the myriad millennia, letters assumed shapes to show the position taken by the vocal organs (which varied) in articulating the sounds. Those quickest to draw evoked the most frequent sounds.
    She got the idea of serial writing right away. Humans liked the step-by-step nature of stories, of narrative momentum, and sentences carried one forward in a pleasurable way.
    Still, she was glad to get back into the hohlraum. It was a wondrous tool that shaped itself to her (in)abilities. Supple, subtle, sly. Deftly it brought her intense, layered knowledge. After reading the serial languages, the hohlraum was like the experience of having read. The memories of the serial texts were there, but reachable instantly at many levels.
    The hohlraum flew like a bird over a rumpled landscape, spying all. It could see the geological layers beneath that bore in massive strata the assumptions, histories, and worldviews that slumbered beneath the surface text. It could sense the warp and weave of time, as well. Like conceptual lava, information flowed up to the surface, seeping hot and new, there to cool and congeal into ravines of reasoning and mountains of conclusion. In the long sweep of time those peaks and valleys would in turn crumble, their continental wisdoms collide, rumbling into dust.
    All this came into her mind in the slow pace of gravid change, its majesty impressing her. This was the lot of being human over the long eras, in which whole grand cultures were mere mayflies.
5

GROWING UP FAST
    S HE TAUGHT HERSELF not to mind when he vanished for days. Supras did that.
    It was as if, on leaving, he turned out the light. Supra-style sex, having come rushing to her out of nowhere, rushed away. So she worked.
    Then he would return, send her a quirky smile. His tide came roaring back in.
    Supras had other concerns, matters lying well beyond her conceptual horizons. Yes, yes, she understood that. But…
    She understood that her father fascination was a bump in the roadway of life, and Kurani’s absences called up deep resonances of being left behind. So much for conscious knowledge. For the first time she got it that conscious understanding—the kind that came from her Meta upbringing—had to be used to overpower the blindsiding emotional lurches of life. Or so the litany went.
    Still, when he reappeared, it was always first things first. First, as in Original. Was this his first affair with an Original? He seemed to savor the simplicities of her body.
    With him, she felt less like a verb in his vocabulary, more a noun. An object for his attentions, even at work. When they were discussing some fine point of translation—his voice low and precise, hers skittering higher, quicker—and his hand drifted over her leg, she did not know what to do with this reference to their other life together. Except that the wry joke of the gesture, touch tasking them to the basics of their species, made her smile.
    She liked his taste, and not merely his skin. He had kept the Original cock, a handsome wick indeed. No efficient Supra rig for him, no. Nor the off-putting earlier Sigma engineering, which she—though not some of her stunned girlfriends—had avoided.
    She had seen it all before, of course, literally. There was to the entire act, up close, the quality of being attacked by a giant, remorseless snail. The whole arrangement seemed on the face of it unlikely, a temporary design that had gotten legislated into concrete.
    But it worked. Somehow. Wisdom of the ancients. Snail and swamp, who could have guessed?
    Kurani paid attention to site selection for their trysts, too. Nothing was more Original than what humans of all brands called, with unthinking arrogance, “the out of doors”—as if all