Kan det här vara Oceanic ?
De byter könsorgan efter sex.
I said, “We’ve exchanged the bridge. It doesn’t matter that we weren’t married first, but it would make things easier if we went along with convention.” “Martin — ”
Det finns bakterier som gör att människor mår bra.
I started laughing and weeping at the same time. It was almost unimaginable: all the millions of people who’d been misled the same way. All because of the zooytes, and … what? One Freelander, diving for pleasure, who’d stumbled on a strange new experience? Then tens of thousands more repeating it, generation after generation — until one vulnerable man or woman had been driven to invest the novelty with meaning. Someone who’d needed so badly to feel loved and protected that the illusion of a real presence behind the raw emotion had been impossible to resist. Or who’d desperately wanted to believe that — in spite of the Angels’ discovery that they, too, were mortal — death could still be defeated.
I slutet går han till en pool där människor döps.
I stood at the back of the crowd that had gathered on the beach near the rock pool, to listen to the two old men who were standing ankle-deep in the milky water. It had taken me four days to get here from Mitar, but when I’d heard reports of a zooyte bloom washing up on the remote north coast, I’d had to come and see the results for myself. The zooamine group had actually recruited an anthropologist for such occasions — one who could cope with such taxing notions as the existence of objective reality, and a biochemical substrate for human thought — but Céline was only with us for part of the year, and right now she was away doing other research.
“This is an ancient, sacred place!” one man intoned, spreading his arms to take in the pool. “You need only observe the shape of it to understand that. It concentrates the energy of the stars, and the sun, and the ocean.” “The focus of power is there, by the inlet,” the other added, gesturing at a point where the water might have come up to his calves. “Once, I wandered too close. I was almost lost in the great dream of the ocean, when my friend here came and rescued me!”