But that was just the beginning of the unusual series of events. The
implementation proved successful. The 10,000 members of the founder
population had been well chosen. By temperament and ideology, and even
by their previous practises, they were very well attuned to this new
system. They were comfortable with constantly changing partners, they
were ready to give up their own biological offspring, and even any
knowledge or trace of the connection (10,000 was large enough so a
newborn baby, already passed to someone other than the birth-mother for
nursing at birth, would be assimilated into its Human peer cohort with
no way to link it to its birth mother). And no one tried to trace the
connection, because no one minded, neither the parents, nor the
children, as they were raised in their aggregates-in-flux and growing
into exactly the kind of humanists that Evan had predicted they would
become.
But what became of Evan and Freida? Soon after they arrived, like
everyone else, they were to split up and form other bonds, and they did.
Or rather they tried. And Freida succeeded. It was not forbidden to
contact prior partners, the way it was forbidden to pursue links with
biological offspring, but it was discouraged. The assumption was that
10,000 was a large enough founding population to minimize lifetime
recouplings if the average coupling duration was of the order of a few
months, weeks, or even days. So Evan and Freida ran across one another
now and again, but when Evan proposed their third recoupling, Freida
said she didn't think it would be a good idea.
Evan did not protest; he complied with the dictates of the Human system,
but for some reason he was not as successful as everyone else. He found
that when he chose, or was chosen by, or assigned to, new partners, he
kept thinking of Freida. He lost sexual interest in new partners very
fast, sometimes before there had been any sexual contact at all. And he
lost interest in other things as well. He assumed that among the growing
ranks of Human youngsters were some children of his own as well, and he
obsessively scrutinized children he encountered to see whether he could
detect any family resemblance -- and he sometimes thought he could --
but those children would just look at him with the same bland, friendly
look as all the other children, so he gave up.
Against accepted practice, he kept recontacting Freida. He surprised her
by asking her whether she was having any of these feelings he was having
(thinking of her, thinking of his parents, wondering about his
children). She was surprised, because he had never seemed interested in
such matters before, even in the pre-Human days. But she replied,
honestly, no, she was not having problems of that kind. She was thinking
more about how, now that the experiment had proved so successful, they
could spread it to the rest of the world. She suggested that Evan, as
the originator of the theory, might now turn his abstract capacities to
that task; maybe it would get his mind off these other discomforts he