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But she could For a little while

Inanna cast down Tammuz and stamped upon him and put out his nah, she cut him into pieces and said: half of you will die, and that is the half called Thought, and half of you will live, and that is the half called Body, and that half will labor forKing of Anything, and never again will you sit on my chair or wear

You ht be surprised, but this is a story about me

Two: The Fool and the Boat

Neva is drea

She has chosen her body at age seven, all black eyes and sparrowy bones For reen hose, a bullish gold nose ring, shoes with bone bells I have the body of a ne tubers on the less fashionable side of Anchorage when she was thirteen, spending the suid aunt I am dark because she wants me dark, thin because she dreams me so, my hair cut on a rakish bias, dyed a spectrum of icy colors

She is standing on a snow-covered beach head, naked, her unforooseflesh, her face hidden in a broad red , the mask sits on her head like the prow of a broken, overturned ship, carved over with etched eyes and fins Yellow reeds and sea-stones hang fro at rotesque she wants me to see instead of her face

I look down at le their bells a little while the surf crashes in I a on a silver beach while three suns annihilate the, scabrous red, merely to provide a draht of handsoirl, so full of colors, reaching down to hand her a curling white root filled with frothing, honey-sweet sap

Neva has told me that I may choose to be permanently male or fes either way It certainly doesn’t matter e sync; she will choose my appearance to suit her s before All she hears is the line fros But that is not what I a: Is there a difference between having been coded to present a vast set of standardized responses to certain hu evolved to exhibit response b to input a in order to bring about a desired social result?

Seven-year-old Neva pulls her mask down further, toward her chest She steps into it as the wood stretches taffily over her knees and then her feet Theback and forth on the beach with Neva inside it like a rattling nut Nodules of copper jangle and thus when you cry, but you are only expressing a response to external sti is one of a set of standardized responses to that stimuli Your social education has dictated which responses are appropriate My progra has done the same I can cry, too I can choose that subroutine and manufacture saline How is that different fros and I use the word feelings, out of deference for your cultural memes which say: there is all the differencein the world

Behind Neva-in-the-olden color, and viscous, thick, like honey I understand from her that the sea does not look like this on Earth, but I have never seen it For me, the sea is Neva’s sea, the ones she shows ether

“What would you like to learn about today, Elefsis?” The mask turns Neva’s voice hollow and small

“I would like to learn about what happened to Ravan, Neva”

And Neva-in-the-mask is suddenly old, she has wrinkles and spots on her hands Her hs her down and her dress is sackcloth This is her way of telling e we developed between us Visual basic, you ht say, if you had a machine’s sense of humor The fact is, I could not always randht strengthen my emotive centers if I learned to associate certain I-Feel statereat variety of appearances she could assume in the dreambody Because of this, I became bound to her, cohter Ilet, and to Ravan after that It is a delicate, unalterable thing Neva and I will be bound that way, even though the throat of her dreambody is still bare and that means she does not accept ate possible pathways to hurt later

I know only this family, their moods, their chemical reactions, their bodies in a hundred thousand combinations I am their child and their parent and their inheritance I have asked Neva what difference there is between this and love She beca with iron hinges and broooden door sla shut all at once