Free Otherness by David Brin Page A

an emergency cesarean section.

    Reiko felt it happen then, suddenly, as a burst of pure light seemed to explode within her. For that moment she shared an overwhelming sense of wonder and elation—the joy and beauty of pure mathematics. It was the only language possible in that narrow instant of triumph. And yet it also carried love.

    The surgeon cut. There came a loud pop, as if a balloon had suddenly burst. Her distended belly collapsed abruptly, like a tent all at once deprived of its supports.

    The technicians stared, blinking. Trembling, the stunned surgeon reached in. Reiko felt him grope under the flaccid layers of her empty womb, seeking in bewilderment what was no longer there.

    Applied Topology . She remembered the name of a text, one of the courses they had given her son, and Reiko knew it stood for shapes and their relationships. It had to do with space and time . And it could be applied to problems in transportation.

    The hands did more things to her, but they could not harm her anymore. Reiko ignored them.

    "He has escaped you," she told them softly, and the angry, envious, mad kami as well. "He learned his lessons well and has made his mother proud."

    Frustrated voices filled the room, rebounding off the walls. But Reiko had already followed her heart, beyond the constraints of any chamber or any nation, far beyond the knowledge of living men, where there are no obstacles to love.

Detritus Affected

    Physicians swear a Hippocratic oath whose central vow is "Do no harm." I wonder—how many other professions might do well to set that goal above all others?

    Schliemann, uncovering Troy, gave birth to modern archaeology, begetting it in sin. His clumsy pits tore through the gates and temples of forty levels—three thousand years—callously scattering what might have been sifted, deciphered, all to prove a fact that wasn't going anywhere. Patience would have revealed the same truth, in time.

    The next wave of diggers learned from Schliemann's wrongs. They went about "restoring" ancient sites, sweeping dust from Disney-prim aisles of artfully restacked columns. Such conceit.

    Today we save dust, sampling pollen grains to tell what blossoms once grew on the hills surrounding Karakorum, or Harappa, or fabled Nineveh.

    In truth, we have conceits all our own.

FRIDAY

    Look, see this broken plastic wheel? Part of a cheap toy, circa 1970. Giveaway prize in some fast-food outlet's promotional kiddie meal. Seventy grams of carboniferous petroleum cooked under limestone sediments for two hundred million years, only to be sucked up, refined, press-molded, passed across a counter, squealed over, then tossed in next week's trash.

    And here's a flattened cardboard box bearing the logo of a long-defunct stereo store, stained on one side by a mass of nondescript organic matter, which we'll analyze later in lab, sampling and correlating what garbage once flew between these hills. Hills overlooking fabulous L.A.

    Science, and especially archaeology, is never ideal Professor Paul used to tell us. In the present, as well as the past, real life is all about compromises . Not as lofty a slogan as a Hippocratic oath, I'll admit, but what do you expect from a profession based on rooting through the cellars, garbage heaps, and vanities of bygone days?

    We managed to dig down past the thirty-meter level this week, into rich veins of profligacy from a time that knew no limits. It is a smorgasbord feast of information, and I want to analyze everything. Each gum wrapper. Each crushed Styrofoam peanut and brown ketchup stain. I fantasize computers potent enough to work backward from the positions I find each of these wonders in, tracing how they came to be jammed next to each other under this great pile. I dream of reversing their tumble from grunting, stinking dump trucks, reenveloping them in wrappers of shiny black plastic, and following each bundle back to its source—the effluent of a single twentieth-century home.

    It