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Beth this is for gossamer :) Towards the end of her afternoon lesson, Beth overheard one of her mothers receiving a phone-call from someone off-world. She hung back just behind the kitchen door, hoping that she'd hear something that her parents wouldn't want her to hear; unfortunately, she only caught the last minute of the discussion. It was from a man whose name (which her mother spoke in an exasperated tone) was Cyrim; he was, apparently, her uncle. Uncle Cyrim? She didn't know she had any uncles! She listened intently; the very fact that they'd concealed this uncle's existence from her meant that his company was worth cultivating. Her parents were Straights; good- natured, kind and careful not to jeopardise their parents' license, but unimaginative, bland. Dull as carbon dioxide. "Come on, i've been away for over six years... and it's not as if i'll be on earth long," the other voice said. It wasn't trying to talk her mother into anything; it sounded more joking than anything else. "I've already said that it's fine by both of us if you visit -" "- but you don't want me staying with you. That's okay, i usually stay at the Studio. i'll be by on Sixday, around sixteen." "Try to behave like a citizen, please?" He laughed and the connection beeped softly as it was closed. Sixday - that was tomorrow! Before anyone could catch her listening, she went back to her terminal and continued working on a painting. As she smeared pixels about on the display, she wondered if he meant the AnarchArtist Studio. It would make sense that her mothers wouldn't want him around if he was in with that crowd... It appeared that she wasn't going to be given the chance to talk to Uncle Cyrim; at least, not the way she wanted to. A formal dinner had been set up as a kind of barricade, to protect her from untoward influences. She almost managed to follow the convoluted train of argument they used to make it sound like it was to her benefit. She knew better than to argue. She'd dressed in the clothes they'd set out for her -shapeless, baggy, faded grey denim coveralls - and had resigned herself to an evening of being 'good'. None of them had factored her strange uncle into this equation. It was sixteen point two before he arrived. Through the door display, she saw him in the hallway, talking animatedly to a hulkingly tall alien with a T-shaped head. To her shock, her uncle suddenly kicked the xeno in the shin; in return, it slapped him a roundhouse blow to the side of his head, almost knocking him over. Just then, Marianne (her foremother) gently pulled her aside and opened the door. After waving to the alien without any trace of hostility, he entered with an unfamiliarly dramatic sweep. He was aged somewhere in his late twenties or early thirties, unfashionably long hair, thinning at the front, dyed an unlikely shade of crimson. Physically, Beth could see the resemblance between him and Marianne; she'd heard enough complaints from her foremother about trying to control her weight to see that Cyrim had the same metabolism. However, his bizarre clothing more than made up for his dumpy physique. He wore a knee-length coat made of some shiny black material, sewn together, seemingly, without using a pattern; asymmetric seams ran in all directions, dodging the many bright silver grommets and studs that held it all together. His baggy pants were made of the same material except somewhat more structured in form. His feet were bare; toenails painted the same shade of red as his hair. Every so often, the folds of his coat would part enough for her to see a T-shirt with curling alien text written on the front in glowing purple. He carried a draw-string bag made of some bright, metallic cloth that shifted colour whenever she wasn't looking, odd shapes inside bulging out against the material enticingly. After a brief, awkward pause, Cyrim and Marianne hugged. She held his shoulders, pushed him back and regarded him dubiously. "What were you two arguing about out there? That xeno looked like it wanted to take your head off." Cyrim laughed. "His name is Jamie, and he's a Dakha. They're a very old, very socially convoluted culture; a lot of their kinesics are based on ritualised violence, and he was just saying goodbye." His attention lighted on her; his expression brightened significantly. "And this must be Beth. You have grown! i'm sorry if this seems a little, uh, inappropriate - i only found out that you were twelve years old yesterday," (giving Marianne a mock frown). "i found it on Sthelanar and i thought you might like it anyway." Before Marianne could protest, he'd opened the draw-string bag, produced a small box and had given it to Beth. She accepted it and made the polite bow her parents had taught her, ducking her head slightly. "Thank you, Uncle." He gave a look of mock-pain at this. "Oh, please, don't call me that. It makes me feel twenty years older!" She smiled to herself. "Yes, Uncle." He made a wry face at Marianne. "Well, i know where she gets that from." Seeing Marianne's doubt at the gift, he explained (with a tone of patient condescension that even Beth could hear); "It's harmless. Entirely passive. The technical term for it is an Entropy-Informatics Resolution and Display Meter." He kneeled before her, gently took the box from her and pointed out the raised gold circles on the side. "This is the level control; you can turn it between zero, which is empty space, and one, which is complete chaos. You won't usually see anything at either extreme; the interesting stuff is in the upper-middle range, around zero point seven two." He turned the box around and held it up for her; unlike the other sides which were decorated with swirling patterns in copper on black, this face was completely blank. He indicated a second contact, moved her finger over onto it. As she touched the cold metal, the end of the box came alive, showing what looked like the surface of a sun, an unusual yellow-green colour, solar prominences leaping up slowly. It was bright, but not uncomfortably so. To Marianne, Cyrim explained further: "There are about a dozen different scales which can be adjusted, but the safety level isn't one of them. It's always set at maximum, so nothing that can harm her can possibly be displayed." Marianne looked somewhat mollified at this. The dinner was an odd experience. Josie (her other mother) and Marianne made it painfully obvious that Cyrim's open discussion of the alien worlds he'd lived on were in poor taste; Beth vacillated between obedient, surprised distaste at his disregard for what were obvious indicators of topics he should avoid and her decidedly un-Straight interest in what he was saying. "i've been living on Sthelanar for the past three years. You know, they were the only civilisation apart from the Moridani that the NoSanNoOs couldn't subjugate? When the Bythians landed there, the population had all vanished. The Bythians left and they came back again... the Bythians went back, and they vanished again. They kept this up for thousands of years before the Bythians got tired of it and agreed to leave them alone. Personally, I think the NoSanNoOs were trying to learn something from them - they're the most capable mathematicians around, it seems." He gestured towards the box, which Beth had placed next to her plate, the powdered-lime sun still glowering from the end. "That device was given to me by the head of the Dormitory. The Sthelane have been modifying themselves for so long, this one actually looked like a dining-room table, one that spoke perfect Terrestrial. He'd been working on Entropy Informatics for hundreds of years, all of his work going towards making that box... and when he'd finished it and got it working, he just gave it to me and said, `You'll know who to give it to.' Of course, my first thought was, `Beth will love this'..." he smiled at her. Josie cleared her throat and asked again, "Are you sure it's harmless?" Cyrim tried to conceal his impatience. "If it was dangerous, the NoSanNoOs wouldn't have let me take it off the planet." This was enough for Josie, who was the kind of Straight who believed everything the Government told her. She simply looked on while Marianne and Cyrim debated Interdiction policies and Beth surreptitiously fiddled with the controls on the box. The sun-scene faded, to be replaced by an unusual variety of comet, one with two tails. She adjusted the controls again, but couldn't find anything more interesting than a long-shot of a small moon showing violent volcanic activity. She turned it off. It was just after Cyrim had left that she found the card he'd slipped into her pocket. She took it to the privacy of her room and bent it in half, activating it. The card snapped back into shape and Cyrim's face, drawn in tiny, vaguely flesh-toned hexagons, appeared. "i thought i should tell you about the other controls," the card said. "The fourth and fifth ones fine-tune the complexity. It's set very low at the moment, which is why you're probably only seeing scenery. If you turn it up a bit, it'll pick up more complex forms. Living systems. Even further up, and it'll show complex living systems, like civilisations." Given the low resolution of the card she couldn't be sure, but his expression seemed bemused. "Experiment with the other controls. You'll find out which ones work best." The colours on the card faded to pale grey. Immediately, Beth turned the box on and cautiously brushed her index finger against the fourth circle. The display swirled crazily and cleared to show a meadow which seemed to be set on the side of a very steep incline. The parts of the sky she could see were bright green. She deftly adjusted what she'd come to call the 'zoom' control and brought the scene closer. The grass was actually finger-thick strands of crimson foliage, in which hundreds of tiny creatures played. She watched the six-legged mice gambol and leap about for hours. She carefully scanned the setting so she could reset the device to show this scene again later. Fine adjustments of the fifth circle seemed to produce wildly different scenes, many of them showing cities of one kind or another, with hundreds of different species of beings inhabiting them; yet many of the scenes were of unadorned grey boxes the size of underground rail cars, sitting on concrete circles. If the settings were any guide, these boxes were representations of a high level of complexity. Outwardly, they seemed very boring. Inevitably, she found the combination of settings which showed Earth. Excitedly, she zoomed in on the southern hemisphere, waiting for the daytime view to cycle around to the continent on which her city lay. It was harder than she thought to find the city, but once she'd located it, very easy to locate the building in which she lived. The building looked subtly different to the views she'd glimpsed when their AV was landing on the roof. She panned down the side of the building to the ninth-floor landing, then in through the window to her room. She looked around abruptly, almost expecting to see either a holographic camera, or perhaps some disembodied alien eye peering at her. Of course, there was nothing there. The room looked different, too. Her school-terminal was on the wrong side of the bed; there were clothes all over the place, hanging from rails which didn't exist in the real world, posters which she didn't recognise on the walls and ceiling. She glanced up from the end of the box, examined her room, looked back. It was the same room, but... different. According to the display, she wasn't lying on the bed looking at a box. As she stared at it, the bedroom door on the display opened and she watched herself enter... was that her? It looked older, at least twenty years old. The figure in the display had much longer hair and was dressed in a fashion that her mothers would definitely not approve of. And this older person - this other, older Beth - was with someone else, holding hands with another girl with a bright purple sweep of hair and laughing eyes. They sat down on the end of the bed, hugged... While Beth lay on the bed and observed them with wide eyes, Marianne peeped at her through the home video system, saw her rapt attention and smiled. "I guess Cyrim isn't that bad after all," she murmured.

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