SFGD - OUTLINE #1 4/23/80
Sime From Gen Divided
by
Jacqueline Lichtenberg
For permission to use any of this (or any other) copyrighted material posted on the official Sime~Gen websites, email AmbrovZeor@aol.com.
(1997 NOTE : This is now to be regarded as an "alternate universe" -- it didn't happen quite this way.)
This sixth novel in the Sime/Gen Series takes place eighty years after Mahogany Trinrose, (eight years after the short story "Operation High Time" which was the first story published in the Sime/Gen Series).
This is the first story in which the calendrical numbering or years is featured, in order to aid the reader's sense of time passing.
It is the story of Laneff Farris, the Farris renSime woman who first discovers a chemical test which can distinguish Sime from Gen before birth. This is her contribution to history - as each novel so far has focused on a protagonist whose personal life choices have shaped human destiny. Laneff, likewise, is driven to make her contribution by the spur of her own personal anguish.
PART I - Human Experimentation
In the two chapters here attached you can see the conflicting forces assembling. Laneff and Mairis become allies in the battle for change, against the inertia of human society. "Better the devil you know than the devil you don't," says The Diet. "Leave well enough alone," is the motto of one goodly sized faction. Digen's death, like President Kennedy's, provides a spirited momentum for continued change, led by Mairis and Laneff Farris.
Mairis gets Laneff her research grant, and she goes about setting up the project at Westfield Sime Center - the same Center/Hospital complex where Digen Farris served his internship in UNTO ZEOR, FOREVER. Digen's spirit seems deeply infused into bedrock here. Laneff is constantly aware of it.
Laneff calls for women to volunteer for her program. It goes very slowly at first, but then pregnant women begin to come in and apply. They are warned of the inherent dangers in the testing procedure (it's amniocentesis the first such procedure to be used on humans. 1980's medicine does recognize a certain medical risk involved.) This risk is even greater among Simes in the year 232!)
We meet some of the mothers who will figure in Part III as fifteen years pass, Laneff becoming personally involved with their destinies.
No sooner does she have her volunteers than she gets a Court Order to cease and desist pending a ruling. (of course, pregnancies don't obey court orders, so she has a race on her hands.) People object to the idea of "Human Experimentation". This harks back to the days of Dr. Lankh (UNTO), and horrifies people. Mairis goes to court - and to the press - with her, defending her right to do the experiment.
During this time, she gets to know Mairis very well. She may even come to suspect something about his "Endowment". (As a descendent of Ercy Farris, he has inherited a degree of ESP, but the decision has been made that channels who have an endowment keep it secret lest people feel channels are too powerful and revolt in fear.)
Because she is disjunct and renSime - and Farris enough to be able to kill most Thirds - she is required to go out-Territory only with a "comparable plus" escort. That is a channel or a Donor who can handle her transfer speed should she lose self-control. She does feel the ignominy in that, and it becomes a sore point as the story progresses.
The escort appointed to her during one of these trips to defend her right to her experiment is the "Blond" from Chapter One, Yuan Sirat Tiernan, a powerful Tecton Donor who seduces Laneff in order to gain her support for his neo-Distect group. He wants her to convince Mairis to have the anti-Distect laws struck from the books. (He has found Valleroy's Journals and is convinced Digen made a mistake and knew it.)
The Diet's various innovative terrorist moves give rise to an in-Territory group also advocating the status quo, "If they (out-Territory Gens) don't want Unity, why should we suffer to give it to them?" Many anti-householders gravitate to this movement, calling itself The Tectonists.
Through Mairis's contacts and his political skills, they eventually gain a ruling that permits Laneff's experiment (though by this time, some of her volunteers have delivered!)
Though this time she is hedged around with imposed regulations: she must add a psychological experiment to her protocols to placate the remnants of the Church of the Purity, "you become what you believe you should become", so some of the kids are told the results of their tests and raised to be whatever the test indicates, some are told the opposite of what the test indicates, and some are kept in the dark. No amount of argument by scientists about experimental design seems to make a dent in the laymen dictating this experimental design.
They also impose on her a monitoring system. The regulating bodies have the right to send "snoops" into her labs, look at all her records, even "confidentials" between physician and patient, and so forth. One of these is of course there to prevent cruelty to children.
Laneff's story is the simple and common one of self-acceptance. As a Farris, who was obviously not a channel from her birth characteristics she expected to be Gen and become a Donor and Companion (probably First Companion) in Sat'htine. Changeover caught her (and others) by surprise, and as a result she killed both the QN-3 and the TN-3 who tried to provide her first transfer. (as a renSime, she has not much capacity, but as a Farris she has incredible speed. She has, in fact, the speed of a Farris channel without the accompanying control.)
She has recovered (she thinks) from this devastating experience with the firm determination to spare such surprises to every other child who comes after her. And so she gained the education to invent her method. Part of her unshakable confidence in her method is based on her inability to conceptualize what failure would mean - in personal terms.
She has not accepted herself as a renSime. She has great repressed envy of channels - and even of Donors - who participate in Sime-Gen transfer, an experience denied her by the Tecton because she is renSime. However, the Distect philosophy would allow her free access to direct Gen transfer, and allow her to give a Gen the unique pleasure of slil (the Gen experience in transfer).
Thus she is ripe for Yuan's attempt at seduction.
PART II - The Dawning of the Age of Capricorn
This spans the years after her data is taken and before the children reach changeover age. (10 to 15 years)
She takes a position at one of the hospitals run by House of Sat'htine.
Mairis finds her there. He is running for a third term as World Controller (a term is one year - that's all anyone can tolerate!) He convinces her that the battle for her technique has only begun. She thinks that the data will prove her point one way or another - and if it works, everyone, will immediately begin doing the test. He says she's naive, and proves it.
The situation is very similar to that at the turn of the twentieth century of the Ancients when contraceptive information was illegal for doctors to give women, and the proper terms for various VD infections were considered obscene by the Post Office. Emotions obscure the simple logic; people resist change.
Mairis proposes one of his vast campaigns of social engineering (he mounted a successful one when he did away with retainers and retainer laws about a decade previous to this, and he proposes now to duplicate that success.) Using popular drama, (allowing television shows to depict life in the days of Klyd Farris - and even the story of Rimon Farris - when Simes actually killed Gens), there is a new religion taking hold he proposes to encourage, there is a new space program proposal, and a tremendous creative community is turning out new art traditions by the month which he proposes to guide in order to bring to consciousness the image of the world as it would be if people didn't have to grow up uncertain of whether they would be Sime or Gen. (a revival of sf as a literature? Fantasy?)
She becomes caught up in his election campaign - traveling, speaking for him (she's a celebrity by this time), working hard. Through Yuan, she is initiated into the new-Distect underground, taken to a dark basement fitted out sumptuously for transfer, and she experiences a new freedom of life.
Yuan has people planted in the Tecton's computer records section, filing false reports about where and when his renSimes took transfer. The conspiracy is growing. She is caught up in it because it gives her a wellbeing she's never known before and which allows her to work all the harder for Mairis's plans.
Mairis - a Farris channel - realizes something is strange, but he's never seen this before (and even if he had, it zlins differently in her nager than it would in a non-Farris).
As World Controller, Mairis proposes a new award to be called The Digen, and awarded to those who have made outstanding contributions to Unity. Surprisingly (to him) there is quite a controversy over this idea, and it doesn't pass immediately.
But the "Age of Capricorn" sense of the dawning of a newness in human society eventually sweeps the Award idea past all opposition. Then controversy focuses on who should receive the first Digen. (There's probably a cash award associated with it, too.)
PART III - 80%
During Part II, we haven't lost track of some of the key people in the Protocol. Now the kids start maturing like popcorn. As the results start to come in, media coverage picks up. She gathers the families from the experiment together in Westfield, and personally watches the changeovers and establishments.
One thing she has learned in the intervening years - most people are as discontented with their lots in life as she is. Her envy of channels (and Donors) is not unique. And this discontent is the source of much misery in people's lives. The people around her all seem to reflect back at her this very aspect of herself that she would as soon forget.
Whereas in Part I, we watched her become a "workaholic", working herself to a frazzle to avoid confronting these facts about those she has gathered about her, and in Part II we watched Yuan and the neo-Distect gradually break into her workaholic shell with the salient questions about herself that she does not want to face, here we see her nose rubbed in it again -- and this time, she looks.
She sees the kids who knew whether they were Sime or Gen having just as hard a time psychologically as those who did not know or were told wrong. The knowledge doesn't make any difference to the emotional adjustment.
She sees she has devoted her whole life to a futility, a fallacy.
Her method is 80% effective, when all the statistics are in and not one person is any happier for it.
With Mairis and Yuan both there at the same time, she confronts the fact that the main attraction of the neo-Distect for her lay in her repressed envy of channels and Donors and their relationship to each other. She has betrayed the very principles Digen Farris stood for while kidding herself that she was building a real monument to that incredible statesman. The self-disgust almost destroys her.
In the midst of this total confusion and reversal, she is informed that she has won the first Digen Award.
After what Digen sacrificed for the Tecton, how can she accept an award in his name while sneaking out to take secret Gen transfers.
There may be a flashback section here to the time of her changeover and kills - and subsequent disjunction.
She must choose between Yuan and Mairis. Her awareness of the Endowment and what it implies about the true natural purpose of the channel mutation has to be a heavy factor in this confrontation. Valleroy's Journals are another factor - dealing with the philosophy of a world order in which channels are not set between Gen and renSime to keep them apart. The children of the Protocols are another factor - living examples of the psychological scars the dread uncertainty creates. [Question: why do some of them seem immune to scarring? That's a key question she must answer.) In the end, she tells Mairis about Yuan.
There is also the question of what Mairis will do when he finds out about Yuan. She will find she didn't know him as well as she thought she did. Mairis is content to let this Distect movement retire to its secret mountain stronghold - as long as it remains invisible, it's a good thing. As to her involvement - that's a very dangerous thing if she intends to continue living in the Tecton cities.
But Mairis has a surprise for her. He has known about her clandestine activities for some time, and has been hoping she would confess. In preparation, he has had a Special Dispensation prepared for her. She will have a Donor (of her own choice) permanently assigned to her - a privilege no other renSime has had before.
The Special Dispensation is a new innovation of Tecton procedure which Mairis has pushed through. It is to be issued where ordinary Tecton procedures would likely cause enough stress to make life untenable, or to actually endanger life. In his judgement, forcing her to go back to channel's transfer would either kill her or drive her insane.
(Historically, this last ditch effort to patch up an unworkable system by making exceptions to the rules has two effects - it delays the demise of the Tecton by centuries, and it leaves the Tecton wide open to a form of white-collar crime and graft that makes Watergate look pristine.)
Mairis wants her (and Yuan, or whatever Gen she chooses) to become his allies in his new campaign - to eradicate the Territory Borders within the next two decades.
Fired with renewed dedication, she marches out on the stage and accepts the Digen Award and the microphone to make her speech. She has come to realize that being anything means not-being something else. Everyone finds pain in limitations but limitations are tools which focus growth energy. Science can not be done without the concept of limits. Progress toward Unity requires recognition of this fact.
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