“No. We parted company. Five years ago. When I migrated.”

To asex. “Five years ago? How old were you?”

“Sixteen.”

“Isn’t that too young for surgery?” I was, still, only guessing, but it would take more than superficial androgyny to split up most families.

“Not in Brazil.”

“And they took it badly?”

Ve said bitterly, “They didn’t understand. Technolibération , asex – everything that mattered to me; none of it made sense to them. Once I had a mind of my own, they started treating me like some kind of … alien foundling. They were highly educated, highly paid, sophisticated, cosmopolitan … traditionalists. They were still tied to Malawi – and to one social stratum, and all its values and prejudices – wherever they went. I had no homeland. I was free.” Ve laughed. “Travel shows up the invariants: the same hypocrisies repeating themselves, over and over. By the time I was fourteen, I’d lived in thirty different cultures – and I’d figured out that sex was for dumb conformists.”

That almost shut me up. I asked tentatively, “You mean gender – or intercourse?”

“Both.”

I said, “Some people need both. Not just biologically – I know, you can switch that off. But … for identity. For self-esteem.”

Kuwale snorted, highly amused. “ Self-esteem is a commodity invented by twentieth-century personal growth cults. If you want self-esteem – or an emotional center – go to Los Angeles and buy it.” Ve added, more sympathetically, “What is it with you Westerners? Sometimes it sounds to me like all the pre-scientific psychology of Freud and Jung – and all its market-driven US regurgitations – has hijacked your language and culture so completely that you can’t even think about yourselves anymore, except in cult-speak. And it’s so ingrained now, you don’t even know when you’re doing it.”

“Maybe you’re right.” I was beginning to feel unspeakably old and traditionalist myself. If Kuwale was the future, the generation after ver was going to be entirely beyond my comprehension. Which was probably no bad thing, but it was still a painful realization. “But what do you put in place of Western psychobabble? Asex and technolibération I can almost understand – but what’s the great attraction of Anthrocosmology? If you want a dose of cosmic reassurance, why not at least choose a religion with an afterlife?”

“You should join the murderers up on deck, if you think you can choose what’s true and what isn’t.”