FICTION Meaning Davor Slomnig Davor Slamnig isa Croatian writer,musician, and composer. "Smisao" was first published inKrumpirovarodbina(Thepotato family) in2005 and appears here for the firsttime inEnglish. Formore on Croatia's colorful SF scene, read Aleksandar Ziljak's survey in thismonth's issue ofWLT online. Seek meaning, or else reproduce?these were the only two options on the distant planet of Torte. The dominant life form was represented by intelligent cephalomorphic Torteons, and for millennia the Torteonic practi cal social philosophy had carried out two ancient directives: (1) An adult Torteon was expected to con tribute (asmuch as possible) to the general civi lizational understanding of themeaning of life. Every original individual insight was entered into The Book. (2) Reproduction was the task of thosewho were not capable of cognition?be itthat theyhad never even tried,or that the springs of the spirit had dried up in them.Upon embarking on repro duction, the individual spent all his energy on the cultivation and education of the offspring. Thus he lost forever, both practically and formally, the right toparticipate in the collective cognitive process. A child did not reach independence for at least the firstthirty years. For the firstseven years ithad the form of a beaked larva that couldn't move at all,whose gaping opening expected pre digested food nine times a day. It spent thenext seven years in the tadpole stage, only to form a cocoon at fifteen. Then there followed two years of relative relaxation for the parents (the cocoon merely had to be moved from time to time so it wouldn't mildew). But in the seventeenth year a giddy butterfly-like creature emerged from the cocoon and, to its parents' horror, fluttered off through theworld at great speed, exposing itself to unnecessary dangers (but still coming home several times a week to raid the parental nutrimat). With singed wings, sometime after twenty-five,it would begin serious schooling and the quest for its own cognitive vocation, and then sometime after thirty itwould finally stabilize into a socially responsible unit. Young Emul, too,passed through all of this. Gradually grasping the state of things,he began to feel ashamed of his own parents who, by the very act of giving birth to him, had renounced cognition. For he was at liberty to sail the seas of existence, to discover themystery, while his parents had condemned themselves to a kind of debilitating servitude. Emul, gifted as he was, made it through all the schools with ease and excellence. After he had satisfied even thehighest educational criteria,he began towrite a dissertation with theworking title Circular Autocognition: Consciousness as the Consciousness of Consciousness. At first the ideas announced themselves in a clear but short-lived flash; theprocess of exact formulation demanded a great deal more time. Emul realized that intro spection, with his own consciousness as the sole experimental subject, would be only one of the many tools he would need touse. But how could he observe someone else's consciousness? As his first experimental subjects, he took some electroluminescent dodecapods from the depths of theocean. Proceeding from thehypoth esis that the flickering illuminative phenom ena within those translucent organisms reflected their conscious processes, he placed a mirror in their aquarium. Theoretically, the dodecapods would, as they looked at themselves in the mirror, May-June 2010 i61 SCIENCE FICTION Davor Slamnig (b. 1956, Zagreb) spent some time in the U.S. inhis youth, getting hooked on folk songs and SF. He had a go at different musical instruments, ranging from ukulele to saxophone, before finally settling on the guitar. His firststories were published inCroatia in the 1980s, followed by four books (three story collections and a novel). Currently, he iswriting mostly inC++. Sibelan Forrester has published translations from Croatian, Russian, and Serbian, including Irena Vrkljan's Svila, Skare and a bilingual edition of Elena Ignatova's B03?WHblft KOJIOKOJI/The Diving Bell. In her day job, she isProfessor of Russian Language and Literature at Swarthmore College. perceive their own psyche. Thus theywould be trapped in a perceptual-expressive positive feed back loop, culminating in theend in some kind of psychic singularity. And indeed, the dodecapods would float over to...