THAT DAY

I shop for an energy-efficient clothes washer for our cooperative house. Find only energy pigs and annoying salesmen. Frustrating.

Next buy pants at a thrift store without a changing room, but they're so cheap I buy three pair based only on their measurements--waist and inseam. At home I find only one really fits. The new low-waist style requires different numbers! My waist hasn't changed, but it's higher up than these pants are built for. I'm shaped like bodies in Northern European paintings around 1400 than anything modern--skinny-hipped, high-waisted.

In the parking lot, a guy comes up to me and says "Please listen to me--I'm not a beggar" and launches into a blurted, confusing sob story, and then hits me up for cash. I feel furious, slam my car door and drive off. Feel guilty--he may really have been in need, I wasn't sure--but he lied up front. If he'd just asked for spare change I might have given it.

Oh. There's a reason I'm so snappish--I'm running a fever! A relapse of this mystery virus I have. Fever, chills, headache. Years of this. No health insurance. No diagnosis.

Last stop! I need tortillas, but every brand at the corner store has additives. I get fruit instead. In line, an old woman argues about cheese forever. 2,800 years later, I stagger out exhausted with two mangos--my big achievement for the day.

THAT NIGHT

I live in a colony of long-lived aliens in Dzungaria, Central Asia. I think of them as strictly Central Asian, but realize while making a report that they ("we" as I first wrote) have one or two travelers--agents--in every region of the Old World, though the Americas are uncovered. I wonder why?

They're not recent settlers or observers; been here since 1400. And since it's now 2250, that's 850 years! But even that's only long enough for their few Earth-born kids to have reached adolescence. Their lifespan's millennia long--like redwoods. The whole colony is a weird mix of adolescent and superhumanly mature, due to their profoundly different sense of time.

I've been helping them for years--most of my life? But that's nothing to them! Intellectually I realize my loyalty and affection may not be reciprocated, for to them I'm ephemeral, just a human hired for a short-term job: my lifespan.

And it matters. Who you love depends on who'll be around--including you. How can you know where to invest your heart if you don't know what lasts?

Is this what humans faced, as lifespans lengthened and faith in an afterlife faded? Subjectively, human life both lengthened and shortened simultaneously! No wonder they're so confused.

I should talk! Confused? I said they. Should it be we? I don't even know what species I am.

NOTES AND GUESSES

• longevity/ephemerality, confused loyalties: I just read Falcondance by Amelia Atwater-Rhodes. The Falcon People are immortal sophisticates who scorn mortals. So one adolescent Falcon raised among mortals feels torn, confused.
• 1400: I'm skinny and high-waisted, like women in Northern European paintings around 1400.
• 2250: my friend Alder mentioned Star Man's Son: 2250 AD, a book we both read as kids. An outsider (as in Falcondance) starts an pan-tribal alliance--the seed of a postnuclear renaissance.
• Old World agents, New World neglected: hints that my picture of humanity is unbalanced. All my era's major wars, famines and dictators are in the Old World that the agents see; they ignore the New world's evidence that humans need not live like that. Is the dream saying I'm blind to hope and change?
• Slow growth, adolescent: I've matured very slowly. The dream suggests why: I'm in shock from landing here on Earth; I haven't accepted being human. My alien(ated) spirit has exploited my body and kept me a distant, dry, timeless observer.
• ACTION: Question my basic identity! Am I just a visitor, a soul meant to observe the natives, and not interfere? Or am I native--here to live?
• ACTION: get out more, I guess. Wait--all that, just to say "get out more"? I don't buy it. I was out all day, and found it boring to annoying. What's the dream really saying? Could it be literal? Will it be impossible for me to really love until I know whether I have a future? This recurring, unidentified illness... will I slowly heal, do I have a long life ahead? Or will it turn out like HIV; should I be hurrying to finish what I can before it kills me? I truly don't know. And so I can't plan. I knew that... but I didn't realize how reserved it was making me! Blind to my future... has that been my prison?

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