The inhabitants of 11 Soro spend much of their lives alone. Women live in communities, but do not enter each others homes as adults. Those men who survive life within the brutal adolescent gangs go on to live as hermits. This has made it all but impossible for past expeditions of Ekumen researchers to understand the lives and culture of the planet. But now, an anthropologist has realised that her own children might provide a window into this guarded and private world.
First published in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, vol. 87 and then later in "The Birthday of the World" and the "The Unreal and the Real" (Volume 2)
The inhabitants of 11 Soro spend much of their lives alone. Women live in communities, but do not enter each others homes as adults. Those men who survive life within the brutal adolescent gangs go on to live as hermits. This has made it all but impossible for past expeditions of Ekumen researchers to understand the lives and culture of the planet. But now, an anthropologist has realised that her own children might provide a window into this guarded and private world.
First published in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, vol. 87 and then later in "The Birthday of the World" and the "The Unreal and the Real" (Volume 2)