The Golden People

by Fred Saberhagen

  Adam closed his eyes. "What color is the screen?"

  "Make it white. Okay? Got it?"

  "Good. Now, just let the screen stay there, and listen to the story."

  He was about to ask Doc what story, but there was no need. Right on cue, a recorded voice began to reach Adam's ears, coming to him through the helmet. In soothing tones the voice started telling him about a man named Caesar, who at some time, evidently long ago, had loaded an army onto a fleet of eighty ships, and sailed off with them for Britain.

  "Keep your eyes closed, Adam," said Doc's voice, coming through the helmet too, now, as the storyteller paused. "Now, as you listen, try to imagine an ending for the story, and guide the story to that ending. Understand?"

  "No sir, I don't think so. How can / change the story? Isn't it recorded?"

  "You don't have to change it, really. Just give it a try. The effort should make some things happen that I can observe. All right?"

  Adam shrugged, the helmet rustling on his scalp. He felt a faint tug. Somehow the probes in the helmet had taken hold of him, and he hadn't even noticed it until now. "Yessir, all right."

  The whispering voice resumed its narrative. Caesar and his army poked around Britain, exploring and getting into trouble. They lost some of their ships in a storm, and fought against blue-painted warriors who liked to ride in chariots and hurl javelins. Adam didn't think much of Caesar, whoever he was, or had been. He seemed to have had no good reason for going to Britain and bothering the people who lived there.

  Eyes still shut, Adam concentrated on trying to change the story. But, of course, the narrator's recorded voice just droned on. Adam didn't have anything to do with deciding what it said.

  By now, the imaginary white screen in Adam's mind had been forgotten. If he were telling the story, he would have made up a different course of events, disliking Caesar as he did.

  If only…

  Just suppose… that some of the offended Britons could have sneaked into the invaders' camp, bent on revenge. Right into Caesar's tent, why not? Adam could see them clearly now, half a dozen men, not blue-painted but wearing robe-like garments, pulling out their knives suddenly and attacking. And Caesar reeled back and let out a hoarse scream, and his clothing was all blood. And Caesar's eyes closed, then opened, fastening on one of his killers. And…

  "Kai su teknon!" The shouting voice broke with its emotion.

  At the sound of the shout, Adam lurched upright in the giant chair. He was vaguely aware again of Doc Nowell's laboratory around him. But still at the same time, like watching a reflection in a window, he was still able to see the inside of Caesar's tent. Caesar had now disappeared, along with his killers, but something—Adam knew it demanded his full attention—stirred the fabric of the tent flap.

  Now the head of a handsome man was thrust inside the tent. The man's forehead was high, under a fringe of dark hair, and his features were noble and impressive. But something about him was very wrong, frighteningly so. Adam knew that before he had the least idea of what the wrong thing was. The head intruded a little farther now into the tent, and now with horror the boy saw that it was borne on a long, scaly, reptilian neck. The body supporting that neck was still blessedly hidden by the flap of fabric making the tent door…

  … and now, all around Adam in the vision, people were gathering. There might have been a hundred of them surrounding him. All of them, women and men alike, were giants, godlike in their beauty and power.

  And now a single human figure came pushing its way through that awe-inspiring assembly. It was that of a stocky and powerful man, much more ordinary than the rest, except that he was wearing what might have been some kind of elaborate spacesuit. The face of the man in the spacesuit was clearly visible through the faceplate. It was solemn in its expression now, but Adam thought that there was a habit of humor in the eyes.

  "My name is Alexander Golden," the stocky man in the spacesuit said to Adam. Then he turned toward the long-necked creature with the human head, and swung his arm as if to strike at it—

  And then, abruptly, Doc Nowell's psych lab, its enclosing walls and equipment-loaded benches, was again the only visible reality. The psych helmet had already been raised from Adam's head, and Doc was standing close beside the great chair, looking at him intently.

  "What happened?" they asked each other, speaking simultaneously.

  It was Doc who answered first, putting on a faint smile that might not have been quite genuine. "Well, you went to sleep, that's what happened. Sometimes my stories, recorded or otherwise, have been known to have that effect on people. But what did you experience?"

  Adam related as well as he could what he had seen and heard. As if it had been a true dream, some of the details were already starting to go.

  He concluded: "And then the last man said that his name was—Alec Golding. I think. Something like that."

  "It's fading?" Doc's tone was sharp.

  "Yeah. Like a dream."

  "The face of the man in the suit—you say you saw it plainly. Do you know him? Ever see him before?"

  "No. I don't think so." It was hard to be sure. Now that last face was going too.

  Doc hesitated, on the brink of saying something else. Then he turned away to shut things down at the control panel.

  He turned back. "Kai su teknon is Greek—means something like 'you too, my child.' It's what Caesar is supposed to have cried out when he was stabbed, though that didn't happen in Britain—you know who Caesar was?"

  "Nossir. When I read it's mostly about the Space Force." -

  "Damn. Oh, it's not your fault. The Space Force is a worthy subject too, I suppose, but—don't they teach you anything at that Home?"

  "They say next year they're gonna reorganize the school."

  "I should hope so… anyway, Caesar was quite a famous man. He's in the minds of a lot of other people down through the centuries, and his death-scene is one of the classical results we get from this test. Though I must say not one of the more common ones. You picked it up either from me, or directly from the past. Shows you have at least a fair amount of parapsych potential, certainly more than I do myself. If you had begun training very early, you might have become quite adept."

  Doc walked back to the great chair in which his subject was still sitting, and rested his hands on one of the padded arms. "Adam, you interest me. Your biological inheritance is—superb. Almost equal to that of my children here. Whoever your parents were—you said you don't know."

  "Nossir. They never could find out at the Home. Someone just left me there, when I was a baby."

  "An unlucky start, in many ways. I was about to say, whoever your parents were, they at least blessed you with a superb genetic inheritance. One quite good enough to enable you to overcome environmental difficulties. You could, for example, become an outstanding athlete. But I think you have too good a mind to be satisfied with only that. We're going to have to make sure that your schooling is improved. And there is definitely some parapsych potential—but you may be happier with that undeveloped."

  Adam didn't know what to say. Almost equal to that of my children here. He thought of Ray, backed up against the playground wall.

  Out of the hundred Jovian kids, as the news media had christened them, only Merit and Ray ever became anything like close friends to Adam. The others, all of them at least slightly older than Ray, were always pleasant enough to Adam on his visits to Doc Nowell's estate. But when they were out of Adam's sight he sometimes had difficulty in even remembering their names and faces.

  … and now the physical wanting was over, for the moment. In a way, for Adam, it hadn't been much different from what happened when one of the girls in the Home became available and willing. And in another way it had been very different indeed from that.

  Adam lay watching Merit, who at the moment was lying on her back with her eyes closed. It was a summer afternoon, and the two of them were on one of the small, isolated roof-terraces of Doc Nowell's huge house. Their clo
thing was on the tiles at the foot of the lawn-furniture lounge on which they lay, Adam's garments scattered in savage haste, Merit's folded almost neatly.

  "For a minute there," said Adam, and had to pause at that point to find the right words. "It felt like I was in your mind."

  "Mm," said Merit, and turned her face a little more toward him. Her lips smiled faintly but her eyes did not open.

  "Is that what it's like," Adam asked abstractedly, "when Ray or one of the others—?"

  Merit's eyes came open now, but they were looking over Adam's shoulder, not into his face. He turned.

  Ray was there. Adam hadn't heard the only door to the terrace open or close, but Ray was there. He didn't laugh, or even stare at the couple on the lounge, the way any of the guys at the Home would have done. He didn't show embarrassment either. Adam couldn't read the expression on his face at all.

  Merit was at first alarmed to see Ray. Not because her clothes were off, because her first move wasn't to hide herself. Instead she jumped up halfway from the lounge, getting one foot on the deck, as if to be ready for anything. Adam watched her for a moment, then scrambled to do the same.

  All Ray said was: "It's all right, you two. Really. It's all right with me." And there was still that strange look on his face, that was to stay in Adam's memory almost as indelibly as the image of Merit's body did. And Ray turned away and left them alone again, departing in an ordinarily noisy fashion by the ordinary rooftop door.

  On his first encounter with the Jovians in a group, Adam had noticed that most of them seemed to look up to Ray in some subtle way, even though Ray was among the very youngest. Once Adam thought: Ray's a late model, with all the tested improvements built in. Then he felt vaguely ashamed of having such a thought about his friend.

  Adam returned to Doc Nowell's estate for at least a dozen visits, at irregular but gradually increasing intervals, over the next five years. Repeated tests showed Adam's parasych potential to be fading steadily, and eventually Doc gave a shrug and announced that he would test him no more. Such withering away of parapsych abilities was more common than not, he assured Adam, in normal human subjects. It hadn't set in yet in the hundred subjects of his genegineering work; whether it would or not remained to be seen. Parapsych talents had never been established as dependable effects in any segment of the general population; Doc still hoped that with his hundred kids the story would be different.

  Somehow the estate, the school, and the people who worked there seemed a little less familiar every time Adam returned; and except for Ray and

  Merit, the Jovians, though still friendly, were slightly and subtly more remote.

  Adam paid his last visit to Nowell's estate at the age of seventeen, proudly wearing the uniform of a Space Force recruit. On that occasion he opened an unlocked door, one that he had opened often enough before, and walked into a room where he thought he might find Merit. She was there, all right. With Ray. Adam stopped silently in his tracks and stood watching them, without comprehension.

  Hand in hand, eyes closed, Ray and Merit were floating together in the air, more than a meter above the floor. Their eyes were closed, and they gave no sign of being aware of Adam's presence. After staring at them for a few more seconds he retreated, from the room, shaken.

  He would come back later and talk to Merit. Now he decided to find Doc. The halls of the great building, and the grounds around it, were nearly empty of people now. Most of the hundred unique children were out in the world, making their way as adults. As far as Adam knew, they were having invariable success. And no small part of their success, he thought, was the way in which they were managing to fade gradually out of public attention.

  A worker told Adam that Doc was in the laboratory. When Adam slid open the psych-lab door, he saw Doc sitting alone at his desk near the center of the room, just sitting there with his hands folded. There on the desk was a picture of Regina, Doc's wife, killed last year in a pedestrian stampede while she had been visiting New New York.

  When Doc realized the door had opened, he looked up and jumped up and came over quickly to shake hands. "Well, Adam!" His eyes lighted when he took note of Adam's uniform. "So, it's up and out for you! I knew you'd make it."

  "Thanks, I guess I always thought I would."

  "I don't suppose you're sorry now that your PS talents eroded. From what I've seen of the Space Force psychological tests they seem to weed out almost everyone who has such talents, even in rudimentary form; I know that a couple of my own kids tried to enter and were turned down."

  After greeting Doc, Adam mentioned the levitation he had just seen.

  Doc nodded, without surprise. "I've seen that one. I once saw about twenty of my kids bobbing around in the air at once… it apparently requires a trance-like state that keeps them from doing anything else at the same time. And what good it will ever do them I don't know."

  "There must be some other…" Adam gestured vaguely.

  "Applications? Maybe there are. I no longer try to teach them anything, Adam. I just try to keep up with everything they're doing. And I can't." Doc paused.

  "I'm sure they'll do great things."

  "Yes, well, I hope so. That was the idea. I love them all, Adam, I tend to worry about them like a parent. And now, already, a lot of them are out in the world… what kind of lives they're going to have in this world I don't know. And what are their lives going to mean to humanity, after all?"

  The aging man and the young one looked at each other, two mere humans, wondering.

  "But come in, Adam. Have some coffee? Tell about the Space Force, how it strikes you now."

  But he hadn't got far in his relation when Doc, who seemed scarcely to be listening, interrupted:

  "Often, I wonder, Adam. Was there some—some force, some universal, natural law, acting through me, when I pushed my microscopic tools into those living cells, and tore down and rebuilt molecules?"

  "I don't know." The young man felt sorry for the old one, and puzzled by his evident quiet distress.

  "Are these kids of mine really the next step up from humanity?"

  "Oh. Is that what's worrying you? I don't know, Doc. You can be damn proud if they are."

  Unexpectedly Doc scowled. "Proud of what? Of being used?" He fell silent, making an irritated gesture. "Forces and laws," he said obscurely, with something like disgust. Frowning made his face look more lined, considerably more lined, than Adam remembered it. Adam wondered if possibly the mind developed lines and wrinkles too.

  "She was incurably sterile, you know," Doc said. Now he was looking back at the picture on his desk. "We could never have any children biologically our own." Then he looked at Adam again, and brightened, with a visible effort. "Well, enough of that. You're going to the Academy, hey? How soon will you have a chance to try to get into planeteering? I remember how you always talked of that."

  Chapter Three

  The chance to get into planeteering had not come easily, but it had arrived at last, only after Adam had spent four years at the Academy, and three more at other assignments.

  Then planeteering school. After that, his second exploration mission took him to the world that was shortly afterward named Killcrazy, by the survivors among the Earth-descended men and women who had been in the first group to land upon it. But Killcrazy was behind Adam now, along with the homeward-bound starships, and the Terraluna transport run, and the shuttle down to New New York. Ahead of him were thirty glorious days of leave, with Alice. Then the two of them were going together out to the enormous Space Force base located in the Antares system. Alice had a job in the science analysis section, and the baby would be born out there, a spacer right from the start.

  Adam had met Alice only a year ago, and had married her only a month before he had to start out on the Killcrazy mission. But Alice understood. She was Space Force herself, as were her parents before her.

  This time, coming home, it was fun for once to encounter the roaring confusion of the great city. At the shuttle por
t in New New York Adam came dodging his way nimbly through the crowd, a thick-limbed, brown-haired, strong young man of average height, swinging a heavy travel bag. He wore a dress uniform that hadn't seen much use to date and a new ribbon on his chest. Alice had written something about his coming home with the decoration on, and so he was wearing the uniform instead of civvies.

  As Adam emerged from a pedestrian entrance of the shuttle port into canyon-like city streets, he saw a headline flashing on a media kiosk:

  JOVIAN SUPERKIDS—WHERE ARE THEY NOW?

  The headline was quickly, replaced by a giant three-dimensional picture. The face of Ray Kedro, blond and ruggedly handsome, looked down in a multiplied image from each of the kiosk's panels. Adam hadn't seen Doc, or Ray, or Merit, or any of the other kids, for a long time now. For years. He recalled having read and seen news stories from time to time, to the effect that most of the Jovians were intermarrying with each other, that most of them seemed to be blending quite smoothly into society, tending to avoid publicity, not making waves. The suggestion of the stories was that the hundred born, or decanted, out on Ganymede, were after all not that much different from the rest of the world. Very bright and capable people, yes. But…

  Pushing his way through the crowds, Adam wondered now about Merit, what she might be doing at this moment. There had been a time…

  With a small start, a sensation almost of guilt, he recalled that Alice was almost within reach now, waiting for him. She was certainly no Jovian. And for that Adam was thankful—though he had never made the effort to analyze just why.

  The heavy travel bag felt feather-light in Adam's grip as he changed slidewalks for the last time, stepping onto the one that would take him to their little sublevel apartment. Going right home this way was certainly better than trying to meet her in the spaceport swarm. People had been queued up there at all the communication booths, so he hadn't delayed to call her from the shuttle port. Anyway, Alice knew when his ship was due in.