Magazine - Interzone Science Fiction and Fantasy - 2009 - Issue 223 by July August (v1.0)

Author:July August (v1.0) [html] [August, July]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

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THE TRANSMIGRATION OF AISHWARYA DESAI—Eric Gregory

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Illustrated by Arthur Wang

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Eric Gregory lives in the mountains of Virginia with his wife and too many books. His stories have recently appeared (or are forthcoming) in Black Static, Strange Horizons, and Apex Books’ The Blackness Within. He has also written non-fiction for Fantasy Magazine and the Internet Review of Science Fiction. Visit him online at ericmg.com.

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Every summer, Ganesha Colony invited a major scholar to spend a month on their outrageously monied premises, six jumps from Earth on a planet that only the wealthy could love. There were lectures and workshops, reading groups and research, and at the end of the month there was a twist.

This year, Simon Trung was the major scholar.

I was the twist.

"For lack of a better word,” said Simon Trung, “my colleague and I are called anthropologists.” He spoke from a grand Earth-oak podium to the Ganeshans assembled in the General Philosophy Hall. There were perhaps three hundred present, a good percentage of the colony's population, most in their late fifties or sixties. I stood at the opposite side of the stage, behind a less expensive podium.

In the final three days of the Summer Lectures, a second, rival thinker was invited to debate the Guest of Honor on the Ganeshan stage. If the upstart won, she took the lecturer's stipend, as well as bragging rights that could earn a tenured chair at any university in the worlds.

"That word,” continued Trung, “is of course a misnomer: anthropos is only the Greek for ‘human'. Whatever we have in common with traditional anthropologists, my studies and Dr Desai's are not much concerned with the human.” This garnered an appreciative chuckle from the crowd. They loved a pedant. I knew where Trung was headed.

"Others in our field have proposed a range of neologisms we might adopt instead, such as ‘Embedded Transplanar Xenologist'. Perhaps I'm old-fashioned, but I insist there's some value left in our familiar classification. For all its imprecision, ‘anthropologist’ has a certain earthiness I enjoy; more to the point, I'm not convinced that the other titles are any less problematic. Call me conservative, but I prefer not to be embedded on a first date."

Another round of appreciative laughter.

He smiled brightly.

At thirty-four, Trung was younger than most Guests of Honor. He held, however, the same class of credentials: a doctorate from Oxford São Paulo and dual Nobel Prizes (Peace and Chemistry). Small-statured and more or less attractive, he wore short hair and long mutton chops. His eyes, owing either to expensive genetics or expensive nanites, glowed a faint blue. The overall impression was striking.

"I apologize if I've strayed a bit outside the purview of today's debate, but I raise the questions of name and taxonomy for a reason. I want to suggest that Dr Desai has forgotten—anthropologist though she may be!—that she no longer studies man. Too often she defines alien behavior in human terms, when those terms derive from a specifically human conceptualisation of the world.

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