Natural Selection
Malinda Lo
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It may be said that natural selection is daily and hourly scrutinizing, throughout the world, every variation, even the slightest; rejecting that which is bad, preserving and adding up all that is good; silently and insensibly working, whenever and wherever opportunity offers, at the improvement of each organic being in relation to its organic and inorganic conditions of life.
—Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species
1
Kurra
Kurra is a planet of oceans and mountains, all vertical ascent or plunging drop to rock-strewn waves. Out on the water, floating cities spread like silver lattices over deep blue.
My family comes from the mountains, and that’s where we live. My mother told me that her great-great-great-grandparents built our house. It’s perched on the edge of the mountain called Isi Na, a ten-minute cable ride from Isina’uru, Isi Na City, which is anchored to the mountain with long metallic ropes like a spider’s web.
I stand at the edge of the deck, leaning against the glass and steel railing, and look out and away. I imagine I’m a bird soaring high above the water, the islands tiny dots below. But there aren’t any birds here—not exactly. Not like on Earth.
I was born on Earth, not Kurra. I’m not human, even though I try to be. My people, the Imria, think I’m a little unusual because of that. They call me an Earthsider: as if I’ve crossed a line, chosen a side. Gone native.
“Be careful,” Ama warns me. “Don’t lean too far over.”
I look back at my parents seated at the table behind me. “I’m not going to fall,” I say, irritated. Ama’s always telling me to stop doing things. I think all her years on Earth have dulled her Imrian sense of adventure.
Aba—one of my fathers—reaches for Ama’s hand as he says, “She’ll be fine. She has to learn how to watch out for herself.”
Ada, my other father, glances over at me. Ada has heard Aba and Ama argue over this too many times to count, and lately he’s been siding with Ama. “Be careful,” he tells me.
I sigh but pull back from the edge a bit as I look down toward the city. I see the bright sheen of it on the mountainside below, the buildings gleaming in the sun. I haven’t been to Isina’uru in a week, and I wonder what’s been going on at school. I’m so isolated up here, cut off from my friends and their lives. It’s startling to realize that I miss them, that I’ve become part of their world—this world.
Eight months ago, when Ama and I returned to Kurra after four years on Earth, I felt like a freak. I looked like a freak, dressed in my clothes from Earth that are totally weird here. I realized soon enough, though, that my Earthsider status was exciting as well as strange. We Imria have been going to Earth for so long, but I’m the first one to be born there, to grow up there. On Earth, I had to keep all that secret, but here on Kurra, it makes me sort of a celebrity. I never expected that.
“… remember what it was like when you were her age?” Aba says.
“Of course,” Ama replies, snorting. “I was reckless.”
“And you survived,” Ada says.
“I only want what’s best for her,” Ama responds.
I stiffen. My parents have started in again on what they think I should do with my life. It’s another old debate. I think they like arguing about it; they don’t even seem to notice I can hear them.
“We have to let her follow her interests,” Aba says. He always says he wants me to be free to do what I want, but I know he really wants me to be a painter, like him. Ama wants me to be a scientist—preferably a geneticist—like her.
“Only within the confines of her duties,” Ama says. “She knows that.”
“I don’t see why we need to impose that on her,” Aba objects.
“Within the confines of her duties, our daughter can choose how she can best serve,” Ada says. He’s never said flat out what he thinks I should be, but I know he wants me to be like him: a diplomat. “She’s young. She has plenty of time to decide.”
But Ada’s wrong. I’m turning fifteen in a few days, and then I will have to make a choice. Who do I think I am? I will have to know by then.
2
Earth
When I was thirteen, at the end of eighth grade back on Earth, I went on a school-sponsored camping trip to the Coconino National Forest near Sedona, Arizona. I was at the Hunter Glen School then, a private academy outside Flagstaff, because I couldn’t exactly live with Ama at Project Plato on Area 51. As far as her US government employers knew, I didn’t even exist.
At Hunter Glen, the end-of-eighth-grade camping trip was kind of a legend. There were all these stories about kids wandering off in the mountains and falling down hidden ravines in the dark, but I suspected it was a bunch of crap. The Hunter Glen School did not take chances with their charges, especially when their parents paid so much to make sure they were safe.
On the hot Friday morning in May when we gathered in the Founders’ Hall parking lot to leave, I wasn’t surprised to count five adult chaperones—our two science teachers, Ms. Lucas and Mr. Santos; two parents I didn’t know; and a cook who was in charge of preparing all our meals. In addition to the five adults were the dozen members of the Nature Club, including myself. A special bus had been chartered to drive us to Coconino National Forest. It read SEDONA OUTDOOR ADVENTURES on the side and had tinted windows.
I dragged my gear over to Morgan Jacobsen’s and said, “Somehow I don’t think we’re going to experience much nature this weekend.”
Morgan was my best friend. She had wavy blond hair and a perfect smile, and the only issue I had with her was her continuing obsession with Zach Montgomery, who was, in my opinion, a jerk. Morgan tossed her ponytail and shrugged. “I’d rather spend the weekend at the Four Seasons, anyway.” Morgan’s parents were loaded. “I wish you could come with us in June,” she said.
“Me too,” I said, feeling depressed. Morgan’s birthday was in June, and her parents were taking her and her closest friends to Scottsdale for a girls’ spa weekend. I really wanted to go, but in June I was returning to Kurra with my mom.
Morgan gave me a sad smile and put her arm around my shoulders, hugging me briefly. “I’ll miss you! Don’t forget to call.” She thought I was moving to California, because that’s what I had told her.
I wanted to lean into her, rest my head on her shoulder. Her hair smelled like strawberries. Okay, I kind of had a crush on Morgan. But I knew better than to ever bring that up. There were no out gay kids at Hunter Glen, and I didn’t want to be the first. I knew there was nothing wrong with me—Imrians don’t care about that stuff—but humans could be a little weird about it. I also knew there was no chance I was ever going to be able to call Morgan from Kurra. But I said, “I’ll try.”
“All right, everyone, let’s get packed up and head to the mountains,” said Ms. Lucas, consulting her clipboard as she moved down the line of students and their gear. I saw Zach roughhousing with his friend Brian on the edge of the parking lot, and I wished he wasn’t coming. But of course he was. Zach was the only reason Morgan agreed to join Nature Club with me in the first place, and she was watching him out of the corner of her eye. Any second now, I knew Morg
an was going to be hit with the Zach Effect. She’d get all moody and start whispering in my ear about how she didn’t understand why he flirted with her all the time but never asked her out. I pulled away from Morgan before I sensed too much of what she was feeling.
Imrians can sense other people’s emotions through touch, which is great on Kurra, where that’s part of everyday life, but on Earth it can lead to problems. Humans don’t have this ability, which means they’re also not used to controlling how much emotion they express internally. One of the first things I had to learn on Earth was how to close myself off from sensing humans’ emotions so that I wouldn’t become overwhelmed by them. But also, it’s not right for us to eavesdrop on their feelings without their consent. That’s one of the first things my parents taught me when I realized I was different from humans. I slip up sometimes, and it can be really tempting to do it, but I try not to.
I heard Morgan’s breath catch. “Who’s that?” she whispered, nudging me.
A man was emerging from the Sedona Outdoor Adventures bus. “I don’t know,” I said. He had short, dark blond hair and was wearing cargo shorts and a muscle shirt that showed off tanned biceps. The other girls in Nature Club giggled nervously.
“He’s so cute,” Morgan breathed.
“Yeah,” I said. He was cute, and he knew it. I could tell by the way he grinned at Ms. Lucas, who looked the teeniest bit flustered.
“Listen up, everyone,” Ms. Lucas called, turning away from the guy. When we were standing in a circle, Ms. Lucas said, “Let me introduce you to our professional guide. This is Matt Steiger, a grad student at Arizona State. Matt studies ecology and leads tours through the Coconino every summer. We are lucky to have him.”
“Hey everyone,” Matt Steiger said with a grin. Morgan practically swooned, and all of a sudden the Zach Effect seemed way less important. Nice to meet you, Matt, I thought. Thank you for distracting Morgan. Maybe this camping trip would be more fun than I expected.
3
Kurra
I was born on Earth, and I lived there with my parents until I was five years old. That’s when we came back to Kurra for four years. My parents wanted me to go to school for a while with the other Imrian kids in Isina’uru—to learn what it was like to be Imrian—but they were also worried that if I went to elementary school on Earth, I’d slip up and reveal who we were. I had to learn how to lie.
By the time I was nine, I understood what was expected of me. Ama took me back to Earth and enrolled me at Hunter Glen, a boarding school. It was horrible at first. I missed my parents and my Imrian friends, and after four years on Kurra, Earth felt like an alien planet. The food was weird, the clothes were strange, and I had to speak English all the time, which meant I had to remember to call my parents mom and dad rather than ama, aba and ada. The thing that made me most uncomfortable was hiding the fact that I had two fathers. I could have said one was my stepdad; I could have said my fathers were gay and my mom was their surrogate. There were plenty of lies I could have made up, but all of them felt wrong. I’d lie about me, but I didn’t want to lie about my family, and I knew nobody at school would understand my parents’ relationship. Humans were just so incredibly different from the Imria. Their emotions were so volatile that even though I tried to close myself off to them, sometimes they still broke through unexpectedly. At the beginning, it felt like I was trapped in an unending game of dodge ball, and I couldn’t keep my defenses up 24/7.
It wasn’t until I became friends with Morgan, who seemed to totally get me, that I began to relax and to accept my life on Earth. Of course, as soon as I started to feel like I belonged, it was time to leave. I had to go back to Kurra after eighth grade to prepare for my first kibila.
Kibila is a ritual of renewal that each Imrian goes through every fifteen years. The first one, kibila’sa, takes place when you turn fifteen. It’s the most important one, because it’s the first time you officially choose your own identity. Depending on which region of Kurra your family lives in, the ritual involves hiking into the mountains or spending time at sea. You go with a cohort of other Imrians in your age group, and every fifteen years, that cohort will reunite and renew their identities together.
Historically, everyone born on the same day undergoes kibila together, but in recent generations there have been fewer and fewer Imria born, so now we have to fudge the dates a little. Now, kibila links together those born within the same month. There’s only one other Imrian in the Isi Na region whose birthday corresponds to mine: Nasha Shuri.
I knew Nasha when we were little; she was one of only a couple of dozen students at the Isina’uru school. She changed a lot in the time I was at Hunter Glen on Earth. I remembered her only as part of the group—she didn’t stand out or anything—but when I returned at fourteen, Nasha was clearly the one in charge. She dressed in amazing, crazy clothes that looked like costumes to me: with headdresses and platform shoes and makeup that I had never seen before. For a couple of months, she colored her entire body purple and wore semi-clear robes that obscured very little.
The other students weren’t as over the top as Nasha, though her closest friends emulated her styles. She was the one everybody wanted to be friends with; she was the one everybody wanted, period. She was nice enough to me, but she didn’t make any serious attempts to befriend me. I tried a couple of times, but she always seemed uninterested. A few times I got the impression that she was going out of her way to avoid touching me, which was really weird for an Imrian. We usually only do that when we’re hiding something, and I couldn’t figure out what she might be hiding.
My friend Uli told me that she thought Nasha was holding back because we were too alike. “You’ll clash,” she said. “You’d always be competing for attention.”
“We’re nothing alike,” I objected. “She’s dressed like—I don’t know like what—and I’m just normal.” I was wearing a Hunter Glen T-shirt that day.
Uli gave me a pointed look. “Nobody else here looks like you. You wear those clothes to show that you’re different from us. Just like Nasha.”
I had never thought about it like that before. I knew that despite Nasha’s popularity, I was the famous one on Kurra. I was the Earthsider. I hadn’t realized I was wearing that label like ga’emen—an identity—just like Nasha’s purple skin.
So I gave Uli one of my extra pairs of jeans, and later, I kissed her. It was so easy, so straightforward, because I knew Uli wanted to kiss me. I knew when I touched her hand and sensed it in her: that unmistakable bubble of anticipation, that invitation.
I bought some Kurran clothing after that, but I couldn’t bring myself to stop wearing my Earth-made clothes. Maybe I did it to stand out, like Uli said, but I also did it because I missed Earth, and putting on my jeans and T-shirts made me feel a little bit more at home.
Nasha’s ga’emen, on the other hand, changed. She got her black hair tipped with living green sea fronds so that she resembled an underwater Medusa. Uli told me Nasha had to feed the sea fronds regularly by bathing in a nutrient bath or else they would die and turn into stinky brown weeds.
During kibila, everyone wears the same stuff: a climate-controlled suit for the overnight excursion before the ritual, and traditional robes for the ritual itself. I have a hard time imagining Nasha in anything as plain as the clothes I’ve been fitted for.
I wonder what she’ll be like during kibila’sa. Everyone says that the experience changes everything. That it builds bonds between cohort members. For one thing, you’re not allowed to communicate via touch during kibila, so your relationship with your kibila cohort is different from your relationships with other Imrians. Since communication through physical touch—we call it susum’urda—is basically the cornerstone of Imrian culture, it’s kind of a big deal. A lot of Imrians get freaked out about the idea of being isolated within their own consciousness because they’re so accustomed to knowing, always, how others feel about them. I’m not worried about it, since I’ve lived on Earth. Humans ne
ver know for sure how others feel.
Kibila culminates in a ritual at one of the ancient temples. The one I’m going to is at the top of Isi Na, and I’ve visited it before. The ascent is pretty steep, but once you get up there, the view is worth it. You feel like you’re on top of the world. You are on top of the world.
I’m looking forward to that part—the arrival. It’s the end of it that scares me. That’s when I will step out of the ritual pool and reconnect with my parents, who will take my hands and, through susum’urda, welcome me back to the community of shared consciousness. That’s when they will sense the name I have chosen for myself, and they will speak it out loud for the first time.
What if I’ve chosen the wrong name? What if I’m wrong about who I am?
4
Earth
The drive to the campground in the Coconino National Forest only took an hour, and when we arrived, I saw that we definitely weren’t camping in the depths of nature. Cave Springs Campground had well-maintained lawns, picnic tables, and coin-operated showers. The Hunter Glen School had reserved four sites next to one another, all within a couple of minutes’ walk from the bathrooms.
Ms. Lucas and Mr. Santos divided us up, six boys on one side and six girls on the other, and then assigned us to campsites. Morgan and I begged Ms. Lucas to let us pitch our tents next to each other, and because Courtney McKittrick wanted to camp next to her best friend, Ms. Lucas let me and Courtney switch places.
After we finished putting up our tents, we went on a hike. Matt Steiger led us along a trail through Oak Creek Canyon, where reddish-orange layers of sedimentary rock formed walls that looked like they belonged in Alice in Wonderland. Morgan dragged me up front with the rest of the girls, and we clustered around Matt as he talked about wildlife and plants. I could tell he enjoyed the attention, but he was actually nice about it. And at least it meant Morgan wasn’t obsessing over Zach.