Son of Man

by Robert Silverberg

  11

  Unmanned by this sea-change, he rises to take inventory. The rite, he sees, has transformed them all: Hanmer and Bril now are female, Angelon, Ninameen, and Ti male. For them no chaos, though; for him, otherwise. He surveys himself. He has lost perhaps six inches in height—no taller than Hanmer is he, now, and the angle from which he views the world is different. Flesh has pooled at his hips. He runs his hands from his armpits to his haunches and is amazed at that outward-sloping contour. He squeezes the meat and is dimly aware of the bony structure buried within, the hidden pelvic girdle. He has breasts. They sway when he moves his shoulders. From above they seem pear-shaped, tapering to small dark nipples. They appear farther apart on his chest than he expects breasts to be; putting his hand between them, he runs up and down the wide track of the sternum, feeling only flat boniness. He searches his memory. Do breasts indeed belong over here in the corners, sprouting almost from his armpits? He exaggerates. They are normally placed. He has never studied breasts with quite this degree of intensity before, he tells himself. Nor from quite this angle. He puts his hands over them. Squeezes. Traps the nipples between his fingers. Pushes the mounds of flesh close together to create a deep deceptive valley. Cups them from below, savoring their heft. He has not touched true female breasts since his awakening; he realizes now how different the feel of a female Skimmer is from the feel of genuine Homo sapiens flesh. Yet he is not unduly aroused. These breasts are his own.

  He releases them. He sweeps his hands downward over the gently curving belly. He ponders the mysterious internal anatomical tangle, the vena femoralis, the vasa ovarica, the uterus, the os pubis, the vasa iliaca externa, the fornix, the cervix, the fallopian tubes, the Graafian follicles, the infundibula, the mesovaria, the infundibulopelvic ligaments. He wonders if he would be fertile if there were someone to impregnate him. Surely not Ti (how do they bear their young in this time? do they have young at all?) but some other captive of the time-flux, coming upon him, topping and entering him, filling him with swimming sperm, the embryo blossoming, the uterus expanding—is it possible? He shivers. He touches his thighs, so satiny, so strangely smooth, and, hesitating just a moment, sweeps four fingers of his right hand inward to his groin. The absence of his accustomed genitals alarms him far less than he would ever have thought likely. The familiar swinging organs are gone, yes, leaving a void, leaving this open empty place, but yet he does have something else here, after all. He pushes the tight, springy pubic floss aside and, wonderstruck, touches the slit, the knob, the moist inner place, telling himself: these are my labia minora, this must be the clitoris, here are the labia majora, this is the vaginal opening, this the mons veneris. I shall squat hereafter to void my urine. I shall be the penetrated and not the penetrator. He sees a view as through a fluoroscope: his body jammed up close against another, and a thick long object stuck deep into him, nudging his organs out of place. How odd. He parses the grammar of his metamorphosis: not to fuck but to be fucked is how it shall be. I must learn to hold my thighs open for prolonged lengths of time; I must master my inner muscles; I must school my back to new horizontal postures. Shall I menstruate? Is it going to be painful? How can I keep from bruising my breasts as I move carelessly about? Is my walk feminine enough? Should I mince and prance? Will I wrinkle early? Henceforth will I deal with situations in a different way? He closes his eyes. He leans against the side of the cliff, shaking his head, running his bewildered hands over breasts, belly, thighs, loins. The change is getting to him now. He remembers Ti on top of him, thrusting herself inside him. Is that how they all see it, his fellow members of the female sex? An invasion? A battering ram? They must like it more than that. A million million million years and they’re still doing it; my reaction can’t be typical. A result of my male orientation. Or just an ex-virgin’s initial hostility. And even I got pleasure from it. Though feeling insulted and assaulted.

  Will I ever change back?

  He puts both hands to his crotch. He tries to remember his lost maleness. What a good feeling it was to grow hard! And the anticipatory tickle, and the throb, the hammerblows, the spurt. Gone. Now he will merely soften and flow, and receive.

  Hanmer, male again, approaches him.

  “How beautiful you look,” he says. “How strange. How elegant.”

  Clay wishes he could hide his body.

  Hanmer moves closer. “May I touch you? May I examine you? We admire your other self, but we value this new one. Is it an accurate rendition of the original?”

  Clay makes a thick sound of assent.

  “I love you,” Hanmer says calmly.

  “Please.”

  “We should celebrate once again. We have had a very successful Lifting of the Sea.”

  “Perhaps another time.”

  “Postponement would be cruel. Here. Here.” Hanmer touches Clay’s breasts. The small slender fingers seem like a thousand arthropodal digits as they bristle against his nipples. He indicates his displeasure. Hanmer saddens. “We must share sensations,” he says. “Come. Let me enter you as you once entered me.” Clay remembers: a Hanmer turned female, soon after their meeting, a warm and delicious companion, swiftly to disappear. Clay had not objected to Hanmer’s transsexualization then. It had not seemed improper to couple with one who had been so lately male. But now he cannot yield when the cases are altered. He will not be had. A tough lay; an iron maiden; he tries to cover his nakedness, one arm flung across his bobbing breasts, one hand spread over the base of his belly. A paragon of pudicity. Hanmer utters the melancholy smile of the disappointed roué, beating a prudent retreat in the face of invincible maidenhood; he will not force him, for the game may not be worth the candle. Eh? Eh? Clay’s eyes flutter. Golden bees buzz round his head. He turns. He rushes away, down a steep path toward the river at the foot of the gorge. Brambles snatch at him, snagging one soft breast and leaving a red track. He grows winded quickly. The path twists and shifts angles, so that within moments he can no longer see the ledge on which the Skimmers lie. They have not followed him. Naked, jiggling, too fleshy, he speeds downward.

  He falls the last ten feet of the way and is stunned a while. Then he rises. He is alone. Pulling himself together. The walls of the gorge like slabs of black glass above him. The sky a distant crack. No trees here, only small red phallic fungi sprouting on the steamy riverbank. He makes his way between them, trembling to crush one beneath his heel.

  The river is not quite as he expects rivers to be.

  Its basic color is blue, but it is tinged with bright streaks of red, yellow, and green, as though it carries a swarm of tinted particles that just barely reach the threshold of visibility. The effect is a dazzling one of perpetual change, as the rainbow hues sweep and crest and mingle. Where fangs of rock jut above the flow, a dazzling spray is hurled into the air.

  He kneels on the bank, leaning forward to look closely. Yes, tinted particles, discrete and distinct, no doubt of it; this may be water, but it has passengers. A torrent of jellyfish? He cups his hand and scoops up a small quantity of water. Sparkling lights play in it; things flash. Quickly, though, the colors die. The water now dribbling out between his pressed fingers is water-colored, no more. He empties his hand and tries again. Again the same: he scoops something up, but the something does not remain.

  Clamping hands against a rocky overhang, he puts his face near the flow. Now he can hear a hazy chattering sound, as of the river talking to itself in a dim monotone. And its colors are brilliant. They do not seem to come from particles in the river, though, so much as they appear to be components of the river, segments of its actual bulk. There is an overlap of identities between the bits of color and their carrier. He sees the river suddenly as a living thing, on the borderline between the animate and the inanimate; these are its cells, its corpuscles, its homunculi.

  Shall he enter it?

  He finds a sandy place where the river is accessible and wades out into it. Ankle-deep, he watches the tickling colors coruscating around his fee
t. He feels an invitation to proceed.

  Deeper. Thigh-high, now. He splashes water over his breasts and shoulders. He rubs it on his face. He takes another step; the bottom is smooth and firm. His buttocks now touch. His loins. Come, he tells the river, give me back my balls. The dark pubic triangle is bright with river-colors. Something odd is happening to his feet, but he can no longer see them. He goes deeper. Navel-high. He shivers. He is being lifted and swept away. With a splash he topples face-forward into the current. It is fiery against his breasts. Burn them, yes, sear them off! He kicks his legs; he swims. Then he relaxes. Why work? He is going downstream regardless. He drifts. His mood eases. He feels some mild regret, now, about wanting to give up his new femaleness so swiftly. Why the panic? Why the haste? Should he not learn first what it is like to wear such a body? He has always been receptive to new experiences; he has taken pride in that. Was it not just a short while ago that he was trying to bring about this very transformation in himself, simply to see if it could be done? And now it has. And he is fighting it. Choked with horror because Ti had poked something into him. Refusing Hanmer. Surly, ungracious, ungiving. A bitch. A tease. He is dense with sorrow, suddenly. He has not begun to explore the possibilities of this body. Is being had so much more repugnant than having? Does it shock you to be plugged after a lifetime of plugging? Are you unable to adapt? Are you rigid in your orientation? Why not lie back, spread, let them in? Expand your awareness. Come to understand the Other Side. Yield. Yield. Yield. You can have your pecker back some other time.

  He attempts to get out of the river.

  But he is unable to reach the shore. He thrashes his legs ferociously, he windmills his arms, he cuts the water with cupped hands, and still he sweeps serenely downstream. The shining rocky bank gets no closer. He seeks bottom with his feet, trying to anchor himself for a landward crawl, and finds no bottom. He bobs along. He fights more fiercely and the result is the same. Exhaustion spears his skull. He gulps oceans. The brilliant corpuscles of the river permeate his intestines.

  He is trapped in a swirling tangle of brightness. His thighs are chained. The river will not let him go. But ahead looms a chance for escape: a sleek gray dome of rock rising in mid-channel. He will let himself be swept into it, and he will somehow scramble up onto it and rest until he is strong enough to fight the current. Yes. The boulder approaches. He braces himself for the impact. Hit it shoulder-first, he decides. Protect the sensitive breasts. He sees himself tossed high, a flurry of kicking limbs, white meat, dark hair, rosy nipples, vacuum at the crotch. Cling. Cling. But it does not happen that way. He rockets toward the stony mass and it cleaves his body; without pain he is neatly divided, part of him flowing to the left of the boulder, part to the right; he unites beyond it and continues his effortless journey.

  Now he understands.

  The river has eaten him. This body, this arrangement of organs and flesh and muscle and bone, this heap of calcium and phosphorus and hydrogen and whatnot, is an illusion. These breasts are an illusion. These plump alluring buttocks are illusions. This hairy triangle is an illusion. He has become one with the sparkling flow. He has contributed his body; he now is composed of the same sparkling particles, hovering on the borderline between life and nonlife, that he admired when first he came to this river. Nor can he distinguish the particles that are he from the particles that are not. All are one in this stream of life.

  Is escape possible?

  Escape is not possible.

  He will go on and on and on, borne by the speeding current, until he reaches the sea that so lately he has helped to lift. And he will pour forth and be scattered on its vast bosom. Will his consciousness then remain intact, when he is tossed like a million million colored dots into those unfathomable fathoms? Already he is losing himself. Already too many tiny blazes of alien fire have mixed themselves with his dissevered substance. He is diluted. He is dissolving. He has given up all sense of himself as female or as male, and barely remembers himself as metabolizing organism; gone are breasts, gone are balls, gone are eyes, gone are toes; only twinkling corpuscular particles remain. To die a pointillist death: how ethereal! To lose oneself in a rush of dazzling lights! The universe shimmers. He endures a Brownian motion of the soul. He is distantly aware of the migrations of his former components through the body of the river: there goes one looping strand shooting ahead, there one sinks, there one is caught in a whirlpooling bywater. He is aware also of the terrain through which the river passes. The gorge has disappeared, and he travels in flat, alluvial country, rambling over a broad flood-plain, elbowing around unpredictable meanders, bypassing mud-walled islands. Night is coming on. The waters hurry. He is dismembered, disintegrated, dispersed, dissected, disjoined, dissociated, disunited, disrupted, divorced, detached, divided. By darkness the river takes on a fiery brilliance; its light illuminates the entire alluvium. He descends. The sea is near. The river has entered its delta. What deposit shall it make here? What silt is to be dropped? Ahead lie many channels; this stream finds its way deviously to Mother Sea. He will be further subdivided. He will be wholly disbanded. The waters sing. Shiver with brilliant fury and furious brilliance. His fellow corpuscles cry hosannah to him. Destiny, here. Peace ahead. Apart, asunder, alone, adrift. Go, now. Nunc dimittis. Journey’s end, here, new journey beginning. To the sons of man, farewell. Go. Go. Parting. Brightness falls from the air. Lights everywhere. Lights! Such a beautiful glow. These colors are my selves. This red, this green, this yellow, this blue, this violet. Easily, easily, easily, lighting my way through the night, down, down, unresisting, a last flicker of brightness before I go. What’s this? Dropping out, here? The heaviness of me. The mass. The coarseness. I am silt. I am to be the delta. Can it be so? Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Adhering here. Stick. Cling. Coagulate. Conglomerate. Cohere. Here. Here. Here. I thicken. I accumulate. I consolidate. I amalgamate. I incorporate.

  What unexpected coalescence befalls him?

  His giddy voyage has halted short of the sea. He has precipitated out of the flow; his momentum is spent at last, and, particle by particle, he tumbles and heaps against the fringed shore of some small isle. He collects himself. He does not join; he does not regain his human form, male or female; he is merely a mound of washed up fragments, like the tiny larvae of crustaceans cast up by the tide. Mixed with his matter are some alien particles that he has somehow carried with him to this place; he feels them amidst him like blades. He suspects that this entire island is constituted of the river’s castoffs, and the mud of which it is built is not mud but dropped organic matter such as himself. What now? To remain here, rotting in the dark? He still is lapped by the river along one side, but he is not eroded now: he has been ejected. Can he move? He cannot. Can he perceive? Only dimly. Can he remember? He can remember. Will there be a further change in his nature? He does not know. He is at rest. He is debris. He will await new developments.

  “I also wait,” declares a mighty voice.

  Who spoke? Where? Another pile of refuse brought here by the river? How can he reply?

  He has no way of replying.

  If I can hear, he insists inwardly, I can speak. And I can hear. He says, therefore, “Can you help me? Can you tell me what I’ve become?”

  “You are pure potential.”

  “And you?”

  “I wait.”

  “Let me see you,” Clay asks.

  A vision comes: he sees a creature of great size planted in the reddish sandy ground of the island. Only the head and shoulders rise above the surface. The head is flat and broad, with great dish-sized eyes and no other features; it sprouts necklessly from the wide enormous shoulders. He sees also the portion of the being that is buried in the ground. It is long and limbless, with a rough, porous skin and a surrounding mantle of fibrous filaments that appear to function as roots, draining nutrients from the sand. Clay recognizes the creature as one of the Awaiters of whom Quoi the Breather had briefly told him. For all its vegetable appearance, then, it is animal, and, mor
e than that, one of the several species of humanity that coexist in this epoch. The vision blurs and goes.

  “I am human too,” Clay says. “Was.”

  “Still are.”

  “But what am I, now?”

  “A constellation of possibilities. You are still in transit, though your passage now has halted. What would you be?”

  “Myself again.”

  “You are yourself.”

  “This is not my true form.”

  The Awaiter seems to laugh. “How can you say what your true form is?”

  “The form in which I started my journey.”

  The Awaiter shows him a series of shifting forms: an infant Clay, a pubescent Clay, Clay grown, Clay asleep, Clay awake, Clay alert, Clay dull, Clay naked, Clay clothed, Clay altered by the cleansing creek, Clay a Breather in Quoi’s pool, Clay female, Clay dissolved by the living river, Clay heaped at the delta. “Which is you?” the Awaiter asks, and Clay says, “All,” and the Awaiter says, “These and others. Why limit yourself? Accept experience as it comes. What would you be?”