Supermen: Tales of the Posthuman Future

by Gardner Dozois

  The line of Terrans moving slowly into the vessel seemed to go on forever. A couple of the ship's crew flew above them, throwing out a shield against the rain. They shuffled without much talk or expression, pushing carts filled with their little possessions. Jorun stood to one side, watching them go by, one face after another— scored and darkened by the sun of Earth, the winds of Earth, hands still grimy with the soil of Earth.

  Well, he thought, there they go. They aren't being as emotional about it as I thought they would. I wonder if they really do care.

  Julith went past with her parents. She saw him and darted from the line and curtsied before him.

  "Good-by, good sir," she said. Looking up, she showed him a small and serious face. "Will I ever see you again?"

  "Well," he lied, "I might look in on you sometime."

  "Please do! In a few years, maybe, when you can."

  It takes many generations to raise a people like this to our standard. In a few years— to me— she'll be in her grave.

  "I'm sure you'll be very happy," he said.

  She gulped. "Yes," she said, so low he could hardly hear her. "Yes, I know I will." She turned and ran back to her mother. The raindrops glistened in her hair.

  Zarek came up behind Jorun. "I made a last-minute sweep of the whole area," he said. "Detected no sign of human life. So it's all taken care of, except your old man."

  "Good," said Jorun tonelessly.

  "I wish you could do something about him."

  "So do I."

  Zarek strolled off again.

  A young man and woman, walking hand in hand, turned out of the line not far away and stood for a little while. A spaceman zoomed over to them. "Better get back," he warned. "You'll get rained on."

  "That's what we wanted," said the young man.

  The spaceman shrugged and resumed his hovering. Presently the couple re-entered the line.

  The tail of the procession went by Jorun and the ship swallowed it fast. The rain fell harder, bouncing off his force-shield like silver spears. Lightning winked in the west, and he heard the distant exuberance of thunder.

  Kormt came walking slowly toward him. Rain streamed off his clothes and matted his long gray hair and beard. His wooden shoes made a wet sound in the mud. Jorun extended the force-shield to cover him. "I hope you've changed your mind," said the Fulkhisian.

  "No, I haven't," said Kormt. "I just stayed away till everybody was aboard. Don't like goodbys."

  "You don't know what you're doing," said Jorun for the— thousandth? —time. "It's plain madness to stay here alone."

  "I told you I don't like goodbys," said Kormt harshly.

  "I have to go advise the captain of the ship," said Jorun. "You have maybe half an hour before she lifts. Nobody will laugh at you for changing your mind."

  "I won't." Kormt smiled without warmth. "You people are the future, I guess. Why can't you leave the past alone? I'm the past." He looked toward the far hills, hidden by the noisy rain. "I like it here, Galactic. That should be enough for you."

  "Well, then—" Jorun held out his hand in the archaic gesture of Earth. "Good-by."

  "Good-by." Kormt took the hand with a brief, indifferent clasp. Then he turned and walked off toward the village. Jorun watched him till he was out of sight.

  The technician paused in the airlock door, looking over the gray landscape and the village from whose chimneys no smoke rose. Farewell, my mother, he thought. And then, surprising himself: Maybe Kormt is doing the right thing after all.

  He entered the ship and the door closed behind him.

  *

  Toward evening, the clouds lifted and the sky showed a clear pale blue— as if it had been washed clean— and the grass and leaves glistened. Kormt came out of the house to watch the sunset. It was a good one, all flame and gold. A pity little Julith wasn't here to see it; she'd always liked sunsets. But Julith was so far away now that if she sent a call to him, calling with the speed of light, it would not come before he was dead.

  Nothing would come to him. Not ever again.

  He tamped his pipe with a horny thumb and lit it and drew a deep cloud into his lungs. Hands in pockets, he strolled down the wet streets. The sound of his clogs was unexpectedly loud.

  Well, son, he thought, now you've got a whole world all to yourself, to do with just as you like. You're the richest man who ever lived.

  There was no problem in keeping alive. Enough food of all kinds was stored in the town's freeze-vault to support a hundred men for the ten or twenty years remaining to him. But he'd want to stay busy. He could maybe keep three farms from going to seed— watch over fields and orchards and livestock, repair the buildings, dust and wash and light up in the evening. A man ought to keep busy.

  He came to the end of the street, where it turned into a graveled road winding up toward a high hill, and followed that: Dusk was creeping over the fields, the sea was a metal streak very far away and a few early stars blinked forth. A wind was springing up, a soft murmurous wind that talked in the trees. But how quiet things were!

  On top of the hill stood the chapel, a small steepled building of ancient stone. He let himself in the gate and walked around to the graveyard behind. There were many of the demure white tombstones— thousands of years of Solis Township, men and women who had lived and worked and begotten, laughed and wept and died. Someone had put a wreath on one grave only this morning; it brushed against his leg as he went by. Tomorrow it would be withered, and weeds would start to grow. He'd have to tend the chapel yard, too. Only fitting.

  He found his family plot and stood with feet spread apart fists on hips, smoking and looking down at the markers, Gerlaug Kormt's son, Tarna Huwan's daughter; these hundred years had they lain in the earth. Hello, Dad, hello, Mother. His fingers reached out and stroked the headstone of his wife. And so many of his children were here, too; sometimes he found it hard to believe that tall Gerlaug and laughing Stamm and shy, gentle Huwan were gone. He'd outlived too many people.

  I had to stay, he thought. This is my land, I am of it and I couldn't go. Someone had to stay and keep the land, if only for a little while. I can give it ten more years before the forest comes and takes it.

  Darkness grew around him. The woods beyond the hill loomed like a wall. Once he started violently; he thought he heard a child crying. No, only a bird. He cursed himself for the senseless pounding of his heart.

  Gloomy place here, he thought. Better get back to the house.

  He groped slowly out of the yard, toward the road. The stars were out now. Kormt looked up and thought he had never seen them so bright. Too bright; he didn't like it.

  Go away, stars, he thought. You took my people, but I'm staying here. This is my land. He reached down to touch it, but the grass was cold and wet under his palm.

  The gravel scrunched loudly as he walked, and the wind mumbled in the hedges, but there was no other sound. Not a voice called; not an engine turned; not a dog barked. No, he hadn't thought it would be so quiet.

  And dark. No lights. Have to tend the street lamps himself— it was no fun, not being able to see the town from here, not being able to see anything except the stars. Should have remembered to bring a flashlight, but he was old and absentminded, and there was no one to remind him. When he died, there would be no one to hold his hands; no one to close his eyes and lay him in the earth— and the forests would grow in over the land and wild beasts would nuzzle his bones.

  But I knew what. What of it? I'm tough enough to take it.

  The stars flashed and flashed above him. Looking up, against his own will, Kormt saw how bright they were, how bright and quiet. And how very far away! He was seeing light that had left its home before he was born.

  He stopped, sucking in his breath between his teeth. "No," he whispered.

  This was his land. This was Earth, the home of man; it was his and he was its. This was the land, and not a single dust mote, crazily reeling and spinning through an endlessness of dark and silence, cold
and immensity. Earth could not be so alone!

  The last man alive. The last man in all the world!

  He screamed, then, and began to run. His feet clattered loud on the road; the small sound was quickly swallowed by silence, and he covered his face against the relentless blaze of the stars. But there was no place to run to, no place at all.

  Watershed

  JAMES BLISH

  The late James Blish was one of the most prominent science-fiction writers of the fifties and sixties, and one of the first to concentrate on the use of biological science and technology in SF (he was himself a microbiologist). His "pantropy" (a word coined by Blish himself) stories, including his most famous one, "Surface Tension," and the other stories (including this one) later collected in The Seedling Stars, are among the first science-fiction stories to investigate the idea that humans could be redesigned and reengineered so that they would be able to survive on alien planets under alien conditions… thus opening the door for later investigations of posthumanity, and thus ancestral to all such stories. And even right here, near the beginning of SF's examination of the theme, we can see that Blish was well aware that crossing the threshold into posthumanity was a one-way journey. Once you went through that doorway, you could not go back again. Nor would you necessarily want to…

  Blish's best-known novel was probably A Case of Conscience, still one of SF's most subtle and profound explorations of the theme of religious faith, for which he won a well-deserved Hugo Award in 1959. Also well known at the time— and quite probably an influence on the work of Robert Reed, Ian McDonald, Alastair Reynolds, and other modern practitioners of the vast-scope-and-scale Space Opera— was his "Okie" series, widescreen adventure novels that featured whole Terran cities taking off for the stars, powered by antigravity devices, and which culminates with the death and rebirth of the entire universe; the individual Okie novels— Earthman, Come Home; They Shall Have Stars; The Triumph of Time; and A Life for the Stars— were collected in the omnibus volume Cities in Flight. Blish's other novels include Black Easter, The Day After Judgement, Doctor Mirabilis, The Night Shapes, The Frozen Years, and Jack of Eagles. The best of Blish's short fiction— stories such as "A Work of Art," "Common Time," "The Box," and "Midsummer Century" —holds up well even today, and has been gathered in collections such as Galactic Cluster, Anywhen, Midsummer Century, and The Best Science Fiction Stories of James Blish. Under the name of William Atheling, Blish was also one of the most important early SF critics, rivaled only by his friend and sometime-collaborator, Damon Knight; "Atheling's" reviews were gathered in The Issue At Hand and More Issues At Hand. Blish died in 1975.

  *

  The murmurs of discontent— Captain Gorbel, being a military man, thought of it as "disaffection" —among the crew of the R.S.S. Indefeasible had reached the point where they could no longer be ignored, well before the ship had come within fifty light-years of its objective.

  Sooner or later, Gorbel thought, sooner or later this idiotic seal-creature is going to notice them.

  Captain Gorbel wasn't sure whether he would be sorry or glad when the Adapted Man caught on. In a way, it would make things easier. But it would be an uncomfortable moment, not only for Hoqqueah and the rest of the pantrope team, but for Gorbel himself. Maybe it would be better to keep sitting on the safety valve until Hoqqueah and the other Altarians were put off on— what was its name again? Oh yes, Earth.

  But the crew plainly wasn't going to let Gorbel put it off that long.

  As for Hoqqueah, he didn't appear to have a noticing center anywhere in his brain. He was as little discommoded by the emotional undertow as he was by the thin and frigid air the Rigellian crew maintained inside the battlecraft. Secure in his coat of warm blubber, his eyes brown, liquid and merry, he sat in the forward greenhouse for most of each ship's day, watching the growth of the star Sol in the black skies ahead.

  And he talked. Gods of all stars, how he talked! Captain Gorbel already knew more about the ancient— the very ancient— history of the seeding program than he had had any desire to know, but there was still more coming. Nor was the seeding program Hoqqueah's sole subject. The Colonization Council delegate had had a vertical education, one which cut in a narrow shaft through many different fields of specialization— in contrast to Gorbel's own training, which had been spread horizontally over the whole subject of spaceflight without more than touching anything else.

  Hoqqueah seemed to be making a project of enlarging the captain's horizons, whether he wanted them enlarged or not.

  "Take agriculture," he was saying at the moment. "This planet we're to seed provides an excellent argument for taking the long view of farm policy. There used to be jungles there; it was very fertile. But the people began their lives as farmers with the use of fire, and they killed themselves off in the same way."

  "How?" Gorbel said automatically. Had he remained silent, Hoqqueah would have gone on anyhow; and it didn't pay to be impolite to the Colonization Council, even by proxy.

  "In their own prehistory, fifteen thousand years before their official zero date, they cleared farmland by burning it off. Then they would plant a crop, harvest it, and let the jungle return. Then they burned the jungle off and went through the cycle again. At the beginning, they wiped out the greatest abundance of game animals Earth was ever to see, just by farming that way. Furthermore the method was totally destructive to the topsoil.

  "But did they learn? No. Even after they achieved spaceflight, that method of farming was standard in most of the remaining jungle areas— even though the bare rock was showing through everywhere by that time."

  Hoqqueah sighed. "Now, of course, there are no jungles. There are no seas, either. There's nothing but desert, naked rock, bitter cold, and thin, oxygen-poor air— or so the people would view it, if there were any of them left. Tapa farming wasn't solely responsible, but it helped."

  Gorbel shot a quick glance at the hunched back of Lieutenant Averdor, his adjutant and navigator. Averdor had managed to avoid saying so much as one word to Hoqqueah or any of the other pantropists from the beginning of the trip. Of course he wasn't required to assume the diplomatic burdens involved— those were Gorbel's crosses— but the strain of dodging even normal intercourse with the seal-men was beginning to tell on him.

  Sooner or later, Averdor was going to explode. He would have nobody to blame for it but himself, but that wouldn't prevent everybody on board from suffering from it.

  Including Gorbel, who would lose a first-class navigator and adjutant.

  Yet it was certainly beyond Gorbel's authority to order Averdor to speak to an Adapted Man. He could only suggest that Averdor run through a few mechanical courtesies, for the good of the ship. The only response had been one of the stoniest stares Gorbel had ever seen, even from Averdor, with whom the captain had been shipping for over thirty Galactic years.

  And the worst of it was that Gorbel was, as a human being, wholly on Averdor's side.

  "After a certain number of years, conditions change on any planet," Hoqqueah babbled solemnly, waving a flipperlike arm to include all the points of light outside the greenhouse. He was working back to his primary obsession: the seeding program. "It's only logical to insist that man be able to change with them— or, if he can't do that, he must establish himself somewhere else. Suppose he had colonized only the Earthlike planets? Not even those planets remain Earthlike forever, not in the biological sense."

  "Why would we have limited ourselves to Earthlike planets in the first place?" Gorbel said. "Not that I know much about the place, but the specs don't make it sound like an optimum world."

  "To be sure," Hoqqueah said, though as usual Gorbel didn't know which part of his own comment Hoqqueah was agreeing to. "There's no survival value in pinning one's race forever to one set of specs. It's only sensible to go on evolving with the universe, so as to stay independent of such things as the aging of worlds, or the explosions of their stars. And look at the results! Man exists now in so many forms
that there's always a refuge somewhere for any threatened people. That's a great achievement— compared to it, what price the old arguments about sovereignty of form?"

  "What, indeed?" Gorbel said, but inside his skull his other self was saying: Ah-ha, he smells the hostility after all. Once an Adapted Man, always an Adapted Man— and always fighting for equality with the basic human form. But it's no good, you seal-snouted bureaucrat. You can argue for the rest of your life, but your whiskers will always wiggle when you talk.

  And obviously you'll never stop talking.

  "And as a military man yourself, you'd be the first to appreciate the military advantages, Captain," Hoqqueah added earnestly. "Using pantropy, man has seized thousands of worlds that would have been inaccessible to him otherwise. It's enormously increased our chances to become masters of the galaxy, to take most of it under occupation without stealing anyone else's planet in the process. An occupation without dispossession— let alone without bloodshed. Yet if some race other than man should develop imperial ambitions, and try to annex our planets, it will find itself enormously outnumbered."

  "That's true," Captain Gorbel said, interested in spite of himself. "It's probably just as well that we worked fast, way back there in the beginning. Before somebody else thought up the method, I mean. But, how come it was us? Seems to me that the first race to invent it should've been a race that already had it— if you follow me."

  "Not quite, Captain. If you will give me an example—?"

  "Well, we scouted a system once where there was a race that occupied two different planets, not both at the same time, but back and forth," Gorbel said. "They had a life-cycle that had three different forms. In the first form they'd winter over on the outermost of the two worlds. Then they'd change to another form that could cross space, mother-naked, without ships, and spend the rest of the year on the inner planet in the third form. Then they'd change back into the second form and cross back to the colder planet.