Son of Man

by Robert Silverberg

“Plato? Aristotle? Jesus?”

  “No, no, no.”

  Clay says, “Do you remember the moon that this planet once had?”

  “I have heard of the moon, yes. But none of these other things.”

  “Everything we did is lost, then? Nothing survives. We are extinct.”

  “You are wrong. Your race survives.”

  “Where?”

  “In us.”

  “No,” Clay says. “If everything we have done is dead, our race is dead. Goethe. Charlemagne. Socrates. Hitler. Attila. Caruso. We fought against the darkness and the darkness swallowed us anyway. We are extinct.”

  “If you are extinct,” Hanmer says, “then we are not human.”

  “You are not human.”

  “We are human.”

  “Human, but not men. Sons of men, maybe. There’s a qualitative gap. Too great a lapse of continuity. You’ve forgotten Shakespeare. You race through the heavens.”

  “You must remember,” Hanmer says, “that your period occupies an extremely narrow segment of the band of time. Information crammed into a narrow bandwidth becomes blurred and distorted. Is it surprising that your heroes are forgotten? What seems like a powerful signal to you is merely a momentary squirt of noise to us. We perceive a much broader band.”

  “You speak to me of bandwidths?” Clay asks, astounded. “You lose Shakespeare and keep technical jargon?”

  “I sought a metaphor, only.”

  “How is it you speak my language?”

  “Friend, you speak my language,” says Hanmer. “There is only one language, and everything speaks it.”

  “There are many languages.”

  “One.”

  “Ci sono molte lingue.”

  “Only one, which all things comprehend.”

  “Muchas lenguas! Sprache! Langue! Språk! Nyelv! The confusion of tongues. Enchanté de faire votre connaissance. Welcher Ort is das? Per favore, potrebbe dirigermi al telefono. Finns det någon här, som talar engelska? El tren acaba de salir.”

  “When mind touches mind,” Hanmer says, “communication is immediate and absolute. Why did you need so many ways of speaking with one another?”

  “It is one of the pleasures of savages,” says Clay bitterly. He wrestles with the idea that everyone and everything are forgotten. By our deeds we define ourselves, he thinks. By the continuity of our culture we signify that we are human. And all continuities are broken. We have lost our immortality. We could grow three heads and thirty feet, and our skins become blue scales, and so long as Homer and Michelangelo and Sophocles live, mankind lives. And they are gone. If we were globes of green fire, or red crusts on a rock, or shining bundles of wire, and still we remembered who we had been, we would still be men. He says, “When you and I flew through space before, how did we do it?”

  “We dissolved. We went up.”

  “How?”

  “By dissolving. By going up.”

  “That’s no answer.”

  “I can’t give you a better one.”

  “It’s just something you do naturally? Like breathing? Like walking?”

  “Yes.”

  “So you’ve become gods,” Clay says. “All possibilities are open to you. You zoom off to Pluto when you need to. You change sexes on whim. You live forever, or as close to forever as you like. If you want music, you can outdo Bach, each of you. You can reason like Newton, paint like El Greco, write like Shakespeare, except you don’t bother to do it. You live every moment in a symphony of colors and forms and textures. Gods. You’ve come to be gods.” Clay laughs. “We tried for that. I mean, we knew how to fly, we could get to the planets, we tamed electricity, we made sound come out of the air, we drove out sickness, we split atoms. For what we were, we were pretty good. For when we were. Twenty thousand years before my time men wore animal skins and lived in caves, and in my time men went walking on the moon. You’ve lived twenty thousand years all by yourself, haven’t you? At least. And has there been any real change in the world in that whole time? No. You can’t change once you’re a god, because you’ve attained everything. Do you know, Hanmer, that we used to wonder whether it was proper to keep striving upward? You’ve lost the Greeks, so maybe you don’t know about hybris. Overweening pride. If a man climbs too high, the gods will strike him down, for certain things are reserved only for the gods. We worried about hybris a lot. We asked ourselves, are we getting too godlike? Will we be smitten? The plague, the fire, the tempest, the famine?”

  “Did you really have such a concept?” Hanmer asks, genuine curiosity in his voice. “That it is evil to attempt too much?”

  “We did.”

  “A stinking myth conceived by cowards?”

  “A noble concept invented by the deepest minds of our race.”

  “No,” Hanmer says. “Who would defend such an idea? Who could refuse the mandate of human destiny?”

  “We lived,” Clay says, “in the tension between the striving and the fear of climbing too high. And we kept climbing, though choked with fear. And we became gods. We became you, Hanmer! You see our punishment, though? For our hybris we were forgotten.”

  He is pleased with the intricacy of his argument. He awaits Hanmer’s reply, but no reply comes. Gradually he realizes that Hanmer is gone. Bored with my chatter? Will he come back? Everything returns. Clay will wait out the night without moving from this place. He tries to sleep, but finds himself wholly awake. He has not slept since his first awakening here. He can see little in the starry blackness. But there are sounds. The tone of a snapping string twangs in the air. Then there comes a sound like that of some vast mass shifting its period of vibration. Then he hears six hollow stone columns rising and thumping the ground. A thin high whine. A rich black boom. A sprinkle of pearly globes. A sappy gurgle. A scraping of wings. A splash. A clink. A hiss. Where is the orchestra? No one is near him. He is certain that he is contained in a dark cone of solitude. The music dies away, leaving only a few vagrant scents. He can feel a mist drifting in and engulfing him. He wonders how much contagion there is in Hanmer’s miracles, and experiments with transforming his own sex; lying belly-up on a slick slaty slab, he attempts to grow breasts. Rigid with concentration, seeking to make mounds of flesh rise on his chest, he fails; he wonders if it might be more effective to begin by creating the inner glandular structure of mammaries, and tries to imagine what that structure might be like, and fails; he asks himself if it might not be impossible to take on female glands without first ridding himself of his male organs, and briefly he contemplates willing them out of existence, but he hesitates, and fails. He writes the sex-changing experiment off as unsuccessful. Next, thinking of touring the seacoasts of Saturn, he tries to dissolve and soar. Though he writhes and sweats and grunts, he remains hopelessly material; but then he surprises himself when in a moment of relaxation between efforts, he does indeed bring forth the pale gray cloud of dissolution. He encourages it. He yields to it. He believes that he is getting there, and tentatively flickers his periphery, trying to rise. Something surely is happening, but it does not seem to be quite the same thing as before. A greasy green glow envelops him and he hears ragged sputtering sounds. And he is pinned to the ground. He gives way to fear and goes sliding halfway down the spectrum before he can regain some control. Was man meant to do such things? Is he not venturing into forbidden territory? No! No! No! He deliquesces. He dissolves. He flaps like a sheet in the wind, nearly taking off, unable somehow to commit that final severing of the terrestrial bond. He is so close, though. Lights swirl in the sky: orange, yellow, red. He is fiercely eager to succeed, and for a moment he thinks he has succeeded, for he has the sensations of ripping loose and bounding into the firmament, and cymbals clash and lightnings flash, and there is a terrible wrenching pull and some potent event occurs.

  He realizes that he has gone nowhere. Instead he seems to have drawn something to him.

  It sits beside him on the slaty slab. It is a smooth pink oval spheroid, jellylike but firm, within a r
ectangular cage of some heavy silvery metal. Cage and spheroid are interwoven, the bars passing through the body at several points. A single gleaming spherical wheel supports the floor of the cage. The spheroid speaks to him in a prickly gurgle. Clay cannot understand a thing. “I thought there’s only one language,” he says. “What are you telling me?” The spheroid speaks again, evidently repeating its statement, enunciating more precisely, but Clay still cannot comprehend. “My name is Clay,” he says, forcing a smile. “I don’t know how I came to be here. I don’t know how you came to be here either, but I may have summoned you accidentally.” After a pause the spheroid replies unintelligibly. “I’m sorry,” Clay says. “I’m primitive. I’m ignorant.” Suddenly the spheroid turns deep green. Its surface ripples and trembles. A string of glossy eyes appears and vanishes. Clay feels cold fingers sliding through his forehead and stroking the lobes of his furrowed brain. In one broad blurting flow he receives the soul of the spheroid and understands it to be saying: I am a civilized human being, a native of the planet Earth, who has been ripped from his proper environment by inexplicable forces and carried to this place. I am lonely and unhappy. I would return to my matrix-group. I beg you, give me all assistance, in the name of humanity!

  The spheroid subsides against the bars of its cage, obviously exhausted. Its shape sags into asymmetry and its color changes to pale yellow.

  “I think I follow your meaning,” Clay says. “But how can I help you? I’m a victim of the time-flux myself. I’m a man of the dawn of the race. I share your loneliness and unhappiness; I’m as lost as you are.”

  The spheroid flickers feebly orange.

  “Can you understand what I say?” Clay asks. There is no response. Clay concludes that this creature, which claims to be human though it is so wholly alien in form, must come from still farther down the curve of time, out of Hanmer’s race’s own future. The logic of evolution tells him that. Hanmer, at least, has arms and legs and a head and eyes and genitals. So, too, had the goatish man-beasts whose era lay somewhere between Clay’s and Hanmer’s. But this, with all limbs gone, all humanity tucked into some internal packet, surely is an ultimate version of the pattern. Clay feels faintly guilty, believing he has dragged the spheroid from its matrix-group in the course of his bungled attempt at soaring, but also he feels a tremor of pride that he could have done such a thing, however unintentionally. And it is a delight to meet someone even more displaced and confused than himself. “Can we possibly communicate?” he asks. “Can we reach across this barrier? Look: I’ll come closer. I’m opening my mind as wide as I can. You have to forgive me my deficiencies. I come from the Vertebrate Age. Closer to Pithecanthropus than I am to you, I bet. Talk to me. Donde está el teléfono?” The spheroid returns to something like its original pink hue. Wearily it offers Clay a vision: a city of broad plazas and shining towers, in whose lovely streets move throngs of pink spheroids, each in its own glittering cage. Fountains send cascades of water to the skies. Lights of many colors twirl and bob. The spheroids meet, exchange greetings, occasionally extend protoplasmoid blobs through the bars of their cages in a kind of handshake. Night arrives. There is the moon! Have they rebuilt it, pocks and all? He surveys the beloved scarry face. Gliding like a camera’s eye, he passes into a garden. Here are roses. Here are yellow tulips. Here are narcissi and jonquils and heavy-headed blue hyacinths. There is a tree with familiar leaves, there another, there another. Oak. Maple. Birch. These are antiquarians, then, these jiggling giant mounds of bland meat, and they have rebuilt old Earth for their pleasure. The vision wavers and crumbles as an impenetrable curtain of regret descends. Clay realizes he has drawn an improper conclusion. Are the spheroids not beings of the incalculably remote future? Are they, then, the short-term descendants of man? The vision returns. The spheroid seems more animated, telling him he is on the right track. Yes. What are they, the mankind of five, ten, twenty thousand years after Clay’s own day, a time when oaks, tulips, hyacinths, and Luna still exist? Yes. And where is the evolutionary logic of it? There is none. Man has reshaped himself to please himself. This is his oval spheroid phase. Later he will choose to be a vile goat. Still later he will be Hanmer. All of us, swept up by the time-flux. “My son,” Clay says. (Daughter? Niece? Nephew?) Impulsively he tries to slip his hands between the bars to embrace the solemn spheroid. He is dealt a jolt of force that sends him sprawling many yards away, and he lies there, stunned, while some twining plant wraps tendrils about his thighs. Gradually he regains his strength. “I’m sorry,” he whispers, approaching the cage. “I didn’t mean to intrude on your space. I was offering friendship.” The spheroid is dark amber now. The color of fury? Fear? No: apology. Another vision fills Clay’s mind. Spheroids cage to cage, spheroids dancing, spheroids conjugating with ropy extended strands. A hymn of love. Try again, try again, try again. Clay extends one hand. It goes between the bars. He is not jolted. The surface of the spheroid puckers and whirlpools and a thin tentacular projection arises and clasps Clay’s wrist. Contact. Trust. Fellow-victims of the time-flux. “I am called Clay,” Clay says, thinking it vehemently. But all he can get from the spheroid is a series of vivid snapshots of his world. The universal language must not have been invented yet in the spheroid’s time. It can communicate with him only in images. “All right,” Clay says. “I accept the limitations. We’ll learn to get along.”

  The tentacle releases him. He withdraws from the cage.

  He concentrates on forming images. Handling the abstractions is difficult. Love? He shows himself standing beside a woman of his own kind. Embracing her. Touching her breasts. Now they are in bed, copulating. He depicts the union of the organs explicitly. He stresses such characteristics as body hair, odors, blemishes. Keeping the coupling couple coupling, he produces an adjoining image of himself atop the female Hanmer, performing the same rite. Then he shows himself reaching into the cage and permitting the tentacle to wind around his wrist. Capisce? And now to show trust. Cat and kittens? Child and kittens? Spheroid without cage, embracing spheroid? A sudden response of anguish. Change of hue: ebony. Clay edits the image, returning the spheroids to their cages. Intimations of relief. Good. Now, how to convey loneliness? Self naked in broad field of alien flowers. Flickering dreams of home. Scene in twentieth-century city: bustling, cluttered, yet beloved.

  “We’re communicating now,” Clay says. “We’re making it.”

  The long night ends. By azure dawn Clay sees a whole flora that had not been there at sundown: spiky trees with red ribs, looping coils of sticky pulsing ground-creeping vines, vast blossoms twice the diameter of a rowboat, within which little hammerheaded anthers bob and nod, scattering diamond-faceted pollen. Hanmer has returned. He sits cross-legged at the far end of Clay’s slab.

  “We have a companion,” Clay says. “I don’t know if the time-flux caught him or if I dragged him here myself. I was making some experiments inside my head. But anyway, he’s—”

  Dead?

  The spheroid is a withered husk glued to one side of his cage. A trickle of iridescent fluid has dyed three of the bars. Clay is unable to rouse the spheroid’s now-familiar imagery. He goes to the cage, tentatively pokes two fingers into it, and feels no shock.

  “What happened?” he asks.

  “Life goes,” Hanmer says. “Life comes again. We’ll take him with us. Come.”

  They walk in the direction away from the sunrise. Without touching it, Hanmer pushes the cage along before them. They are passing now through a grove of tall square-topped yellow trees whose red leaves, dangling in thick clusters, writhe like annoyed starfish. “Have you seen beings like this one before?” Clay asks.

  “Several times. The flux brings us everything.”

  “I gathered it was also an early form. Close to my own time, in fact.”

  “You may be right,” Hanmer says.

  “Why did it die?”

  “Its life went out of it.”

  Clay is growing accustomed to Hanmer’s style of answer.

/>   Shortly they halt at a pond of dark blue fluid in which round golden plaques solemnly swim. “Drink,” Hanmer suggests. Clay kneels at the edge. Scoops up a careful handful. Peppery to the taste. It fills him with a keen expansive sadness, a consciousness of lost opportunities and missed turnings, that threatens in the first instant to overwhelm him; he sees all the possible choices that any moment presents, the infinity of darkened blurred highways marked with unintelligible road signs, and he finds himself fleeing down all those roads at once, dizzied, overextended. The sensation passes. Rather, it refines itself into a more exact nature, and he realizes that he is gifted with a new means of perception, which he has employed metaphorically instead of spatially. He drinks again. The perception deepens and intensifies. He accepts glimmering images: eleven sleeping nightcrawlers in a shallow tunnel just behind him, blood pulsing like sparks within Hanmer’s compact body, the misty formlessness of the dead spheroid’s rotting flesh, the crisp crustacean interiors of these little golden swimming plaques. He drinks again. Now he sees the inwardness of things still more precisely. His zone of perception has become a sphere five times his own height, with his brain at its center. He assesses the structure of the soil, finding a layer of black loam over a layer of pink sand over a layer of jumbled pebbles over a layer of slippery tilted blocks of granite. He measures the dimensions of the pool and remarks on the mathematically perfect curve of its floor. He calculates the environmental stress caused by the simultaneous passage of a trio of small batlike things just overhead and the growth of six cells in the roots of a nearby tree. He drinks again. “So easy to be a god here,” he tells Hanmer, and observes the tones of his voice ricocheting from the surface of the pool. Hanmer laughs. They move on.

  4

  His new senses fade before midday. A dim residue remains; he still can see a short distance into the ground, and he is aware of events behind his head. But only cloudily. Things are too transient in this world. He hopes they will find another pool, or that the female Hanmer will return, or that the spheroid’s time of death will end.