Son of Man

by Robert Silverberg

  “What?”

  “One of the earliest, I suppose. Caught in the time-flux like the rest. We love you. We bid you be welcome. Do we seem fearfully strange? Are you lonely? Do you grieve? Will you teach us things? Will you give yourself to us? Will you delight us?”

  “What world is this?”

  “The world. Our world.”

  “My world?”

  “It was. It can be.”

  “What era is this?”

  “A good one.”

  “Am I dead?”

  Hanmer chuckles. “Death is dead.”

  “How did I get here?”

  “Caught in the time-flux like the rest.”

  “Swept into my own future? How far into the future?”

  “Does it matter?” Hanmer asks, looking bored. “Come, Clay, dissolve with me, and let’s begin our travels.” He reaches for Clay’s hand again. Clay shrinks back. “Wait,” he murmurs. The morning is quite bright now. The sky is that painful blue again; the sun is a gong. He shivers. He puts his face close to Hanmer’s and says, “Are there any others like me here?”

  “No.”

  “Are you human?”

  “Of course.”

  “But changed by time?”

  “Oh, no,” says Hanmer. “You are changed by time. I live here. You visit us.”

  “I speak of evolution.”

  Hanmer pouts. “May we dissolve now? We have so much to see—”

  Clay tugs at a tuft of the foul weeds of the night before. “At least tell me about these. Three creatures came by, and these grew where—”

  “Yes.”

  “What were they? Visitors from another planet?”

  “Humans,” sighs Hanmer.

  “Those also? Different forms?”

  “Before us. After you. Caught in the time-flux, all.”

  “How could we have evolved into them? Not even in a billion years would humanity change so greatly. And then change back? You’re closer to me than they are. Where’s the pattern? Where’s the track? Hanmer, I can’t understand!”

  “Wait until you see the others,” says Hanmer, and begins to dissolve. A pale gray cloud springs from his skin and envelops him, and within it he grows misty, fading placidly away. Bright orange sparks shoot through the cloud. Hanmer, still visible, appears ecstatic. Clay is able to see a rigid fleshy tube slide out of the pocket at Hanmer’s loins: yes, he is male after all, showing his sex in this moment of pleasure. “You said you’d take me!” Clay cries. Hanmer nods and smiles. The internal structure of his body is apparent now, a network of nerves and veins, illuminated by some inner fire and glowing red and green and yellow. The cloud expands and suddenly Clay too is within it. There is a sweet hissing sound: his own tissues and fibers boiling away. Hanmer has vanished. Clay spins, extends, attenuates; he perceives his own throbbing organs, an exquisite mixture of textures and tones, this one green and oily, that one red and sticky, here a gray spongy mass, there a coil of dark blue, everything so ripe, so lush, in the last moments before dissolution. A sense of adventure and excitement possesses him. He is drifting upward and outward, flowing over the face of the land, taking on infinite size and surrendering all mass; he covers acres now, whole counties, entire realms. Hanmer is beside him. They expand together. Sunlight strikes him along the vast upper surface of his new body, making molecules dance and leap in prickly gaiety, pinging and popping as they bounce around. Clay is aware of the shuttling electrons climbing the energy ladder. Pip! Pop! Peep! He soars. He glides. He visualizes himself as a great gray carpet skimming through the air. Instead of a tasseled fringe he has a hundred eyes, and in the center of everything the hard knotted mass of the brain glows and hums and directs.

  He sees last night’s scenes: the valley, the meadow, the hills, the creek. Then the field of vision changes as they go higher, and he takes in a tumbled, scarred countryside of rivers and cliffs, of eroded teeth jutting from the earth, of gulfs, of lakes, of headlands. Figures move below. Here are the three goaty ones, farting and mumbling beneath a sprawling rubbery tree. Here are six more of Hanmer’s kind, merrily coupling at the edge of a golden pond. Here are nightcrawlers slumbering in the soil. Here is a savage thing with monstrous choppers in place of teeth. Here is something buried shoulders-deep in the ground, radiating solemn, passionate thoughts. Here comes a platoon of winged creatures, birds or bats or even reptiles, flying in tight formation, darkening the sky, now catching an updraft, piercing Clay’s body from underside to top like a million stinging bullets and vanishing in the cloudless heights. Here are saturnine intelligences browsing in the mud of dark pools. Here are scattered blocks of stone, perhaps ancient ruins. Clay sees no whole buildings. He sees no roads. The world bears no human imprint of consequence. It is springtime everywhere; things bulge with life. Hanmer, billowing like a stormcloud, laughs and cries out, “Yes! You accept it!”

  Clay accepts it.

  He tests his body. He makes it fluoresce and sees violet shadows dance below him. He creates steely ribs and an ivory backbone. He weaves a new nervous system out of bristles of vacuum. He invents an organ sensitive to colors beyond ultraviolet, and happily topples off the spectrum’s deep end. He becomes a vast sexual organ and rapes the stratosphere, leaving contrails of luminous semen. And Hanmer, beside him constantly, calls out, “Yes,” and “Yes,” and “Yes” again. Clay now covers several continents. He accelerates his pace, seeking his own termination, and after some brief effort finds it and links with himself so that he now is a cloudy serpent encircling the world. “See?” Hanmer cries. “It is your world, is it not? The familiar planet?” But Clay is not sure. The continents have shifted. He sees what he believes to be the Americas, but they have undergone changes, for the tail of South America is gone and so is the Isthmus of Panama, and west of what should have been Chile is an enormous cancerous extension, possibly a displaced Antarctica. Oceans drown both poles. Coastlines are new. He cannot find Europe. A tremendous inland sea winks up out of what he suspects is Asia; a sunblink glances off it, transforming it into a giant mocking eye. Weeping, he scatters gobbets of lava along the equator. A domed shield bulges serenely where Africa might have been. A chain of radiant islands glitters across thousands of miles of altered ocean. Now he is frightened. He thinks of Athens, Cairo, Tangier, Melbourne, Poughkeepsie, Istanbul, and Stockholm. In his grief he grows chilled, and, freezing, splits into a shower of icy particles, which small buzzing insects instantly seek, darting up from swamps and marshes; they begin to gobble him, but Hanmer cries out to them, sending them stunned to the ground, and then Clay feels himself being collected and restored. “What happened?” Hanmer asks, and Clay replies, “I remembered.” “Don’t,” says Hanmer. Again they soar. They spin and leap and break through into the realm of darkness girdling the world, so that the planet itself is nothing more than a little spherical impurity in the soft fluttering mantle of his body. He watches it turning. So slowly! Has the day lengthened? Is this my world at all? Hanmer nudges him and they transform themselves into rivers of energy millions of miles long and go boiling out into space. He is inflamed with tenderness, love, the hunger for union with the cosmos. “Our neighbor worlds,” says Hanmer. “Our friends. See?” Clay sees. He knows now that he has not been whisked to a planet of some other star. This is plainly Venus, this cloudy ball here. And this red pocked thing is Mars, although he is puzzled by the green weedy sea that laps the rusty plains. He cannot find Mercury. Again and again he slides into that inner orbit, hunting for the tiny rolling globe, but it is not there. Has it fallen into the sun? He dares not ask, for fear that Hanmer will say that it has. Clay cannot bear to lose a planet now. “Come,” says Hanmer. “Outward.”

  The asteroids have vanished. A wise move: who needs such debris? But Jupiter is there, wondrously unchanged, even to the Great Red Spot. Clay exults. The bands of color also remain, bright stripes of rich yellow, brown, and orange, separated by darker streaks. “Yes?” Clay asks, and Hanmer says it can be done, so they plun
ge planetward, swirling and floating in Jupiter’s atmosphere. Foggy crystals engulf them. Their attenuated bodies entwine with molecules of ammonia and methane. Down they go, down, to cliffs of ice rising above bleak greasy seas, to turbulent geysers and boiling lakes. Clay spreads himself flat across a snowy continent and lies panting, loving the sensuous impact of the atmosphere’s many tons upon his back. He becomes a mallet and probes the great planet’s craggy core, striking it happily, with a bong and a bong and a bong and a whong, and waves of sound rise up in jagged creamy blurts. He spends himself in ecstasy. But then, immediately afterward, there is compensating loss: brilliant Saturn is ringless. “An accident,” Hanmer confesses. “An error. It was long ago.” Clay will not be consoled. He threatens to fracture again and patter down to Saturn’s tawny surface in a cloud of snowflakes. Hanmer, sympathetic, hoops himself and surrounds the planet, whirling, gliding up and down the spectrum, flashing gilded lights, turning now edge-on, now at a sumptuous angle. “No,” Clay says. “I’m grateful, but it won’t work,” and on they go toward Uranus, toward Neptune, toward frosty Pluto. “It was not our doing,” Hanmer insists. “But we never realized anyone would care so much.” Pluto is a bore. Hovering, Clay watches five of Hanmer’s cousins trekking across a black wasteland, going from nowhere to nowhere. He looks questioningly outward. Procyon? Rigel? Betelgeuse? “Another time,” Hanmer murmurs.

  They return to Earth.

  Like matched jewels they plummet through the atmosphere. They land. He is in his mortal body again. He lies in a manicured field of short fleshy blue-green plants; above him looms a giant triangular monolith, forked at the peak, and through the fork races a bubbling river that hurtles hundreds or perhaps thousands of feet down the huge slab’s onyx face into a neatly circular basin. He is trembling. His journey has drained him. When he can, he sits up, presses his palms to his cheeks, draws some deep breaths, blinks. The worlds swing in stubborn circles inside his skull. His joy over Jupiter wars with the grief for Saturn’s rings. And Mercury. And the beloved old continents, the friendly map. Stabbed by time’s needles. The air is mild and transparent, and he hears distant music. Hanmer stands at the edge of the basin, contemplating the waterfall.

  Or is it Hanmer? When he turns, Clay sees differences. On the smooth waxen chest two breasts have emerged. They are small, like those of a girl newly come into her womanhood, but beyond any question they are female. Tiny pink nipples tip them. Hanmer’s hips have widened. The vertical pocket at the base of the belly has narrowed to a slit, of which only the upper cleft is visible. The scrotal hemisphere below has vanished. This is not Hanmer. This is a woman of Hanmer’s species.

  “I am Hanmer,” she says to Clay.

  “Hanmer was male.”

  “Hanmer is male. I am Hanmer.” She walks toward Clay. Her stride is not Hanmer’s: in place of his free-wheeling loose-jointed jauntiness there is a more restrained motion, equally fluid but not as flexible. She says, “My body has changed, but I am Hanmer. I love you. May we celebrate our journey together? It is the custom.”

  “Is the other Hanmer gone forever?”

  “Nothing goes forever. Everything returns.”

  Mercury. Saturn’s rings. Istanbul. Rome.

  Clay freezes. He is silent for a million years.

  “Will you celebrate with me?”

  “How?”

  “A joining of bodies.”

  “Sex,” Clay says. “It’s not obsolete, then?”

  Hanmer laughs prettily. She eases herself in one quick sprawl to the ground. The fleshy plants sigh and quiver and sway. Eyelets open in their tips and spurts of jeweled fluid leap into the air. A balmy fragrance spreads. An aphrodisiac: Clay is abruptly aware of the rigidity of his member. Hanmer flexes her knees. She parts her thighs and he studies the waiting gate between. “Yes,” she whispers. Lost in amazement, he covers her body with his. His hands slip down to grasp her cool flat silken buttocks. Hanmer is flushed; her transparent eyelids have gone milky, so that the scarlet glow of her eyes is dimmed; when he slides a hand up and caresses her breasts, he feels the nipples hardening, and he is dazed with wonder at the changelessness of certain things. Mankind tours the solar system in a moment, birds talk, plants collaborate in human pleasures, the continents are jumbled, the universe is a storm of marvelous colors and dazzling scents; and yet in all the gold and crimson and purple miracle of this altered world, pricks still cry out for cunts and cunts cry out for pricks. It does not seem fitting. Yet with a small smothered cry he goes into her and begins to move, a swift piston in the moist chamber, and it is so unstrange to him that he briefly loses the sense of loss that had been with him since his awakening. He comes with such haste that it shatters him, but she merely sings a fragile series of semitones and he uncomes just as quickly, and is disembarrassed, and they continue. She offers him a spasm of disciplined intensity. Her swivel-kneed legs twine about him. Her pelvis churns. She gasps. She whispers. She chants. He chooses his moment and unleashes his lightning a second time, touching off a storm of sensation in her, during which the texture of her skin undergoes a series of changes, becoming now rough and bristly, now liquid-smooth, now stiffened into high-crested waves, at last returning to its original state. In the moment after final ecstasy he remembers the moon. The moon! Where was it when he and Hanmer sped through the cosmos? There is no moon. The moon is no more. How could he have forgotten to look for the moon?

  They disengage and roll apart. He feels exhilarated but also faintly depressed. The beast from the past has soiled the sprite of the future with his salty flow. Caliban topping Ariel. When they join bodies here, do they mark completion with such a torrent of fluid? He is prehistoric. Moments pass before he dares to look at Hanmer. But she is smiling at him. She rises, gently draws him to his feet, and leads him to the basin beneath the waterfall. They bathe. The water is knife-cold. Hanmer’s many fingers fly gaily over his body; she is so wholly feminine that he can barely summon a memory of the lean and muscular male with whom he began his journey. She is coquettish, playful, archly possessive.

  She says, “You couple with great enthusiasm.”

  A sudden shower of radiance falls from the sun, which is almost directly overhead. A line of unfamiliar colors marches across the peak of a lofty mountain to the—west? He reaches for her, and she eludes him, and runs laughing through a thorny thicket; the plants claw halfheartedly at her but cannot touch her. When he follows, they shred him. He staggers forth bloodied and finds her waiting for him beside a stubby, squat tree no taller than herself. The latches of her nostrils flutter; her eyelids open and close repeatedly; her little breasts heave. Briefly he sees her with flowing green hair and a dense black pubic mat, but the moment passes and she is as sleek as before. Five creatures call his name hoarsely from branches of the tree. They have huge mouths and scrawny necks and puffy wings, and, so far as he can tell, no bodies at all. “Clay! Clay! Clay! Clay! Clay!” Hanmer dismisses them; they hop to the ground and scurry away. She comes to him and kisses each scratch, and it heals. Austerely she examines the parts of his body, handling everything; learning his anatomy as though she may have to build something just like him one day. The intimacy of the inspection disturbs him. At length she is satisfied. She unzips the ground and draws a tuber from it, as the other Hanmer had done yesterday. Trustingly he takes it and sucks the juice. Blue fur sprouts on his skin. His genitals grow so monstrous that he sags to the ground under the pull of their weight. His toes unite. The moon, he thinks bitterly. Hanmer crouches over him and lowers herself, impaling herself on his rod. The moon. The moon. Mercury. The moon. He barely notices the orgasmic jolt.

  The effects of the tuber’s juice diminish. He lies belly-down, eyes closed. Stroking Hanmer, he finds that the scrotal bulge again has grown at the juncture of her thighs. Hanmer is male again. Clay looks: yes, it is so. Flat chest, wide shoulders, narrow hips. Everything returns. Too soon, sometimes.

  Night is coming. He searches for the moon.

  “Do y
ou have cities?” he asks. “Books? Houses? Poetry? Do you ever wear clothing? Do you die?”

  “When we need to,” Hanmer says.

  3

  In the darkness they sit side by side, saying little. Clay watches the procession of the stars. Their brilliance often seems unbearable. Now and again he thinks of embracing Hanmer once more, and has to remind himself of Hanmer’s unmetamorphosis. Perhaps that female Hanmer will return eventually; her turn upon the stage seems all too brief to him.

  To the existing Hanmer he says, “Am I monstrously barbaric? Am I coarse? Am I gross?”

  “No. No. No.”

  “But I’m a dawn-man. I’m a fumbling early attempt. I have an appendix. I urinate. I defecate. I get hungry. I sweat. I stink. I’m a million years inferior to you. Five million? Fifty million? No clue?”

  “We admire you for what you are,” Hanmer assures him. “We do not criticize you for what you could not have become. Of course, we may modify our estimate as we come to know you better. We reserve the right to detest you.”

  There is a very long silence. Shooting stars split the night.

  Later Clay says, “Not that I mean to apologize. We did our best. We gave the world Shakespeare, after all. And—you know of Shakespeare?”

  “No.”

  “Homer?”

  “No.”

  “Beethoven?”

  “No.”

  “Einstein.”

  “No.”

  “Leonardo da Vinci.”

  “No.”

  “Mozart!”

  “No.”

  “Galileo!”

  “No.”

  “Newton!”

  “No.”

  “Michelangelo. Muhammad. Marx. Darwin.”

  “No. No. No. No.”