BEYOND FLESH
EDITED BY
JACK DANN & GARDNER DOZOIS
This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental.
eISBN: 978-1-62579-108-5
Copyright © 2013 by Gardner Dozois and Jack Dann
First printing: December 2002
Cover art by: Ron Miller
All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form.
Electronic version by Baen Books
Edited by Jack Dann & Gardner Dozois
UNICORNS!
MAGICATS!
BESTIARY!
MERMAIDS!
SORCERERS!
DEMONS!
DOGTALES!
SEASERPENTS!
DINOSAURS!
LITTLE PEOPLE!
MAGICATS II
UNICORNS II
DRAGONS!
INVADERS!
HORSES!
ANGELS!
HACKERS
TIMEGATES
CLONES
IMMORTALS
NANOTECH
FUTURE WAR
SPACE SOLDIERS
FUTURE SPORTS
BEYOND FLESH
Acknowledgment is made for permission to reprint the following material:
“Call Me Joe,” by Poul Anderson. Copyright © 1957 by Street & Smith Publications, Inc. First published in Astounding. Reprinted by permission of the author’s estate.
“Learning to Be Me,” by Greg Egan. Copyright © 1990 by Interzone. First published in Interzone 37, July 1990. Reprinted by permission of the author.
“Pretty Boy Crossover,” by Pat Cadigan. Copyright © 1986 by Davis Publications, Inc. First published in Asimov’s Science Fiction, January 1986. Reprinted by permission of the author.
“Ancient Engines,” by Michael Swanwick. Copyright © 1998 by Dell Magazines. First published in Asimov’s Science Fiction, February 1999. Reprinted by permission of the author.
“Winemaster,” by Robert Reed. Copyright © 1999 by Mercury Press, Inc. First published in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, July 1999. Reprinted by permission of the author.
“More Adventures on Other Planets,” by Michael Cassutt. Copyright © 2001 by SCIFI.COM. First published electronically on SCI FICTION, January 10, 2001. Reprinted by permission of the author.
“Nevermore,” by Ian R. MacLeod. Copyright © 1997 by Ian R. MacLeod. First published in Dying For It (HarperPrism). Reprinted by permission of the author.
“Approaching Perimelasma,” by Geoffrey A. Landis. Copyright © 1998 by Dell Magazines. First published in Asimov’s Science Fiction, January 1998. Reprinted by permission of the author.
“The Gravity Mine,” by Stephen Baxter. Copyright © 2000 by Dell Magazines. First published in Asimov’s Science Fiction, April 2000. Reprinted by permission of the author.
“Reef,” by Paul J. McAuley. Copyright © 2000 by Paul J. McAuley. First published in Skylife (Harcourt), edited by Gregory Benford and George Zebrowski. Reprinted by permission of the author.
PREFACE
Ever since human beings evolved enough for us to become aware of ourselves as sentient beings with a physical existence in the universe, to know ourselves as living creatures alive and abroad in the world, we have also been made aware of the limitations of that physical existence. Lessons in the limitations of the flesh have been painfully ground home over so many countless millennia that we long ago came to take them for granted: You can’t pick a hot coal out of the fire without being burned, you can’t jump off a cliff and fly, you can’t breathe underwater, you can’t exist for long without food or water or sleep, there are weights too heavy to lift and distances too broad to leap, you can’t go where it’s too cold without freezing to death or where it’s too hot without passing out and dying. You can’t see what’s over the next hill or in the next valley without going there to look. You can’t make yourself heard farther away than your voice will reach. You can’t be in two places at once. You must grow old. You must die.
These limitations have always fretted human beings, though, and ever since the earliest beginnings of human culture, clever men and women have been trying to think up ways to get around them. Technology itself, in its most basic forms, can be seen as methods to get around the fundamental limitations of the flesh: fire and clothing made from animal furs to allow us to venture into the deepest winter (or even Ice Age) climates and survive, levers and pulleys to help us manipulate weights too heavy to be lifted, tools and knives to help us rip flesh and cut wood and stone when the teeth and claws that Nature started us out with as part of our basic human tool-kit proved inadequate to the jobs we wanted to do with them.
As technology increased in sophistication and power, so we have steadily been able to transcend more and more of the limitations of the flesh, of the basic human tool-kit, the basic human form, that we were all issued at birth—so that now, here at the beginning of the twenty-first century, you can jump off a cliff and fly (if you have the right technology, anyway!) and you can also fly higher and longer and faster than any bird possibly could, fly right out of the atmosphere, in fact, and into outer space; you can exist underwater for hours, and may someday be able to live underwater for as long as you’d like; you can lift and manipulate and ship over long distances weights so immense and unwieldy that even thousands of humans all straining together couldn’t shift them; you can talk to people and make your voice clearly heard even if they’re thousands of miles away, you can listen to the voices of the dead, and record your own voice so that it can be listened to someday by people who have yet to be born; and without leaving your chair, you can see what’s happening over the next hill or in the next valley, or on the other side of the world, or in the depths of interstellar space, or even in the secret and heretofore inaccessible inner regions of your own body.
And you ain’t seen nothing yet!
As the anthology that follows demonstrates, here at the beginning of the twenty-first century we stand poised on the brink of scientific revolutions that may do away with all the rest of the limitations of the flesh as well, even fundamental and seemingly unchallengeable ones such as not being able to go where flesh would burn or wither or freeze, or where there is no air for our lungs to breathe (or where the “air” is poison), or where the gravity is strong enough to crush an ordinary human like a bug. Or needing food and water or sleep. Or having to age. Or having to die. Or even not being able to be in two places at once!
So open the pages of this book, and let some of the world’s most expert dreamers show you what it might be like when human consciousness is no longer restricted to the prison of the flesh, or of the basic human form . . . where you can sit safely at home and still explore the deadly frozen ice-fields of Europa or the swirling poison-gas hell of Jupiter . . . where you can download your consciousness into a computer, or into an artificial body-environment the size of a molecule . . . or into a robot body that could last forever . . . or replicate yourself in a hundred different forms in a hundred different environments . . . or find a love that persists, and is reciprocated, even after death . . . or leave not only the flesh but all physical matter behind, and roam through space as discorporate intelligences until the end of the universe itself . . .
Enjoy!
(For more speculations on these themes, check out our Ace anthologies: Genometry, Immortals, Clones, Nanotech, Hackers, Future War, and Space Soldiers.)
CALL ME JOE
Poul Anderson
Here’s one of the earliest explorations in science fiction of the idea that the human spirit, if indomitable enough, may find ways to mo
ve beyond flesh and transcend the limitations of the human form to go where a frail mortal body cannot go—and, forty-five years after its first publication, still one of the best.
One of the best-known writers in science fiction, the late Poul Anderson made his first sale in 1947, while he was still in college, and in the course of his subsequent fifty-four-year career published almost a hundred books (in several different fields, as Anderson wrote historical novels, fantasies, and mysteries, in addition to SF); sold hundreds of short pieces to every conceivable market; and won seven Hugo Awards, three Nebula Awards, and the Tolkein Memorial Award for life achievement.
Anderson had trained to be a scientist, taking a degree in physics from the University of Minnesota, but the writing life proved to be more seductive, and he never did get around to working in his original field of choice. Instead, the sales mounted steadily, until by the late ’50s and early ’60s he may have been one of the most prolific writers in the genre.
In spite of his high output of fiction, he somehow managed to maintain an amazingly high standard of literary quality as well, and by the early to mid ’60s he was also on his way to becoming one of the most honored and respected writers in the genre. At one point during this period (in addition to non-related work, and lesser series such as the “Hoka” stories he was writing in collaboration with Gordon R. Dickson), Anderson was running three of the most popular and prestigious series in science fiction all at the same time: the “Technic History” series detailing the exploits of the wily trader Nicholas Van Rijn (which includes novels such as The Man Who Counts, The Trouble Twisters, Satan’s World, Mirkheim, The People of the Wind, and collections such as Trader to the Stars and The Earth Book of Stormgate,); the extremely popular series relating the adventures of interstellar secret agent Dominic Flandry, probably the most successful attempt to cross SF with the spy thriller, next to Jack Vance’s “Demon Princes” novels (the Flandry series includes novels such as A Circus of Hells, The Rebel Worlds, The Day of Their Return, Flandry of Terra, A Knight of Ghosts and Shadows, A Stone in Heaven, and The Game of Empire, and collections such as Agent of the Terran Empire); and, my own personal favorite, a series that took us along on assignment with the agents of the Time Patrol (including the collections The Guardians of Time, Time Patrolman, The Shield of Time, and The Time Patrol).
When you add to this amazing collection of memorable titles the impact of the best of Anderson’s non-series novels, work such as Brain Wave, Three Hearts and Three Lions, The Night Face, The Enemy Stars, and The High Crusade, all of which was being published in addition to the series books, it becomes clear that Anderson dominated the late ’50s and the pre-New Wave ’60s in a way that only Robert A. Heinlein, Isaac Asimov, and Arthur C. Clarke could rival. Anderson, in fact, would continue to be an active and dominant figure for the rest of the twentieth century and on into the next, continuing to produce strong and innovative work until the very end of his life, winning the John W. Campbell Award for his novel Genesis just months before his death.
Anderson’s other books (among many others) include: The Broken Sword, Tau Zero, A Midsummer Tempest, Orion Shall Rise, The Boat of a Million Years, Harvest of Stars, The Fleet of Stars, Starfarers, and Operation Luna. His short work has been collected in The Queen of Air and Darkness and Other Stories, Fantasy, The Unicorn Trade (with Karen Anderson), Past Times, The Best of Poul Anderson, Explorations, and, most recently, the retrospective collection All One Universe. The last book published in his lifetime was a new novel, Genesis; there are several other new books in the pipeline that will appear posthumously. He died in 2001.
###
The wind came whooping out of eastern darkness, driving a lash of ammonia dust before it. In minutes, Edward Anglesey was blinded.
He clawed all four feet into the broken shards which were soil, hunched down, and groped for his little smelter. The wind was an idiot bassoon in his skull. Something whipped across his back, drawing blood, a tree yanked up by the roots and spat a hundred miles. Lightning cracked, immensely far overhead where clouds boiled with night.
As if to reply, thunder toned in the ice mountains and a red gout of flame jumped and a hillside came booming down, spilling itself across the valley. The earth shivered.
Sodium explosion, thought Anglesey in the drumbeat noise. The fire and the lightning gave him enough illumination to find his apparatus. He picked up tools in muscular hands, his tail gripped the trough, and he battered his way to the tunnel and thus to his dugout.
It had walls and roof of water, frozen by sun-remoteness and compressed by tons of atmosphere jammed onto every square inch. Ventilated by a tiny smokehole, a lamp of tree oil burning in hydrogen made a dull light for the single room.
Anglesey sprawled his slate-blue form on the floor, panting. It was no use to swear at the storm. These ammonia gales often came at sunset, and there was nothing to do but wait them out. He was tired anyway.
It would be morning in five hours or so. He had hoped to cast an axehead, his first, this evening, but maybe it was better to do the job by daylight.
He pulled a decapod body off a shelf and ate the meat raw, pausing for long gulps of liquid methane from a jug. Things would improve once he had proper tools; so far, everything had been painfully grubbed and hacked to shape with teeth, claws, chance icicles, and what detestably weak and crumbling fragments remained of the spaceship. Give him a few years and he’d be living as a man should.
He sighed, stretched, and lay down to sleep.
Somewhat more than one hundred and twelve thousand miles away, Edward Anglesey took off his helmet.
###
He looked around, blinking. After the Jovian surface, it was always a little unreal to find himself here again, in the clean, quiet orderliness of the control room.
His muscles ached. They shouldn’t. He had not really been fighting a gale of several hundred miles an hour, under three gravities, and a temperature of 140 Absolute. He had been here, in the almost nonexistent pull of Jupiter V, breathing oxynitrogen. It was Joe who lived down there and filled his lungs with hydrogen and helium at a pressure which could still only be estimated because it broke aneroids and deranged piezo-electrics.
Nevertheless, his body felt worn and beaten. Tension, no doubt—psychosomatics—after all, for a good many hours now he had, in a sense, been Joe, and Joe had been working hard.
With the helmet off, Anglesey held only a thread of identification. The esprojector was still tuned to Joe’s brain but no longer focused on his own. Somewhere in the back of his mind, he knew an indescribable feeling of sleep. Now and then, vague forms or colors drifted in the soft black—dreams? Not impossible, that Joe’s brain should dream a little when Anglesey’s mind wasn’t using it.
A light flickered red on the esprojector panel, and a bell whined electronic fear. Anglesey cursed. Thin fingers danced over the controls of his chair, he slued around and shot across to the bank of dials. Yes—there—K-tube oscillating again! The circuit blew out. He wrenched the faceplate off with one hand and fumbled in a drawer with the other.
Inside his mind he could feel the contact with Joe fading. If he once lost it entirely, he wasn’t sure he could regain it. And Joe was an investment of several million dollars and quite a few highly skilled man-years.
Anglesey pulled the offending K-tube from its socket and threw it on the floor. Glass exploded. It eased his temper a bit, just enough so he could find a replacement, plug it in, switch on the current again—as the machine warmed up, once again amplifying, the Joeness in the back alleys of his brain strengthened.
Slowly, then, the man in the electric wheelchair rolled out of the room, into the hall. Let somebody else sweep up the broken tube. To hell with it. To hell with everybody.
Jan Cornelius had never been farther from Earth than some comfortable Lunar resort. He felt much put upon that the Psionics Corporation should tap him for a thirteen-month exile. The fact that he knew as much about esprojectors and their cranky
innards as any other man alive was no excuse. Why send anyone at all? Who cared?
Obviously the Federation Science Authority did. It had seemingly given those bearded hermits a blank check on the taxpayers’ account.
Thus did Cornelius grumble to himself, all the long hyperbolic path to Jupiter. Then the shifting accelerations of approach to its tiny inner satellite left him too wretched for further complaint.
And when he finally, just prior to disembarkation, went up to the greenhouse for a look at Jupiter, he said not a word. Nobody does, the first time.
Arne Viken waited patiently while Cornelius stared. It still gets me, too, he remembered. By the throat. Sometimes I’m afraid to look.
At length Cornelius turned around. He had a faintly Jovian appearance himself, being a large man with an imposing girth. “I had no idea,” he whispered. “I never thought . . . I had seen pictures, but—”
Viken nodded. “Sure, Dr. Cornelius. Pictures don’t convey it.”
Where they stood, they could see the dark broken rock of the satellite, jumbled for a short way beyond the landing slip and then chopped off sheer. This moon was scarcely even a platform, it seemed, and cold constellations went streaming past it, around it. Jupiter lay across a fifth of that sky, softly ambrous, banded with colors, spotted with the shadows of planet-sized moons and with whirlwinds as broad as Earth. If there had been any gravity to speak of, Cornelius would have thought, instinctively, that the great planet was falling on him. As it was, he felt as if sucked upward; his hands were still sore where he had grabbed a rail to hold on.
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