Supermen: Tales of the Posthuman Future

by Gardner Dozois

  He was as sweet and fluid as the heart of a rotting melon. This was fluidity, slick as grease, all right.… Acting on intuition, he opened his valise, took a mechanical comb from a grooming case, and flicked it on with the iridescent nail of his right thumb. Black dye from the comb's vibrating teeth soothed and darkened his blue zaibatsery coif.

  He unplugged the tiny jack that was coupled to the auditory nerve of his right ear and unclipped his computer earring. Humming to himself to cover the gaps in its whispering, he opened a flat case clipped inside the valise and restored the minicomp earring to its own padded socket. Inside the case were seven others, little jeweled globes packed with microminiature circuitry, soaked tight with advanced software. He plugged in a new one and hung it from his pale, pierced lobe. It whispered to him about his capabilities, in case he had forgotten. He listened with half an ear.

  The chopper landed on the Replicon emblem on the rooftop pad of the four-story apparat headquarters. The spook walked to the elevator. He nibbled a bit of skin from the corner of his nail and flicked it into the recessed slot of a biopsy analyzer, then rocked back and forth on his clean new heels, grinning, as he was weighed and scanned and measured by cameras and sonar.

  The elevator door slid open. He stepped inside, staring ahead easily, happy as a shadow. It opened again, and he walked down a richly paneled hall and into the office suite of the head of Replicon security.

  He gave his credentials to the secretary and stood rocking on his heels while the young man fed them through his desktop computer. The spook blinked his narrow green eyes; the corporate Muzak was soaking into him like a hot bath.

  Inside, the security chief was all iron-gray hair and tanned wrinkles and big ceramic teeth. The spook took a seat and went limp as wax as the man's vibrations poured over him. The man bubbled over with ambition and corruption like a rusting barrel full of chemical waste. "Welcome to Rockville, Eugene."

  "Thank you, sir," the spook said. He sat up straighter, taking on the man's predatory coloration. "It's a pleasure."

  The security chief looked idly into a hooded data screen. "You come highly recommended, Eugene. I have data here on two of your operations for other members of the Synthesis. In the Amsterdam Gill Piracy case, you stood up under pressure that would have broken a normal operative."

  "I was at the head of my class," said the spook, smiling guilelessly. He didn't remember anything about the Amsterdam case. It had all slicked aside, erased by the Veil. The spook looked placidly at a Japanese kakemono wall hanging.

  "We here at Replicon don't often enlist the help of your zaibatsery apparat," the chief said. "But our cartel has been allotted a very special operation by the Synthesis coordinating board. Although you're not a member of the Synthesis, your advanced zaibatsery training is crucial to the mission's success."

  The spook smiled blandly, waving the toe of his decorated shoe. Talk of loyalties and ideologies bored him. He cared very little about the Synthesis and its ambitious efforts to unite the planet under one cybernetic-economic web.

  Even his feelings about his native zaibatseries were not so much "patriotism" as the sort of warm regard that a worm feels for the core of an apple. He waited for the man to come to the point, knowing that his earring computer could replay the conversation if he missed anything.

  The chief toyed with an electronic stylus, leaning back in his chair. "It hasn't been easy for us," he said, "facing the ferment of the postindustrial years, watching a relentless brain drain into the orbital factories, while overpopulation and pollution wrecked the planet. Now we find we can't even put the pieces back together without help from your orbiters. You can appreciate our position, I hope."

  "Perfectly," said the spook. Using his zaibatsery training and the advantages of the Veil, it wasn't hard at all to put on the man's skin and see through his eyes. He didn't like it much, but it wasn't difficult.

  "Things are settling down now, since most of the craziest groups have killed themselves off or emigrated into space. The Earth cannot afford the cultural variety you have in your orbiting city-states. Earth must unite its remaining resources under the Synthesis aegis. The conventional wars are over for good and all. What we face now is a war of states of mind."

  The chief began doodling absently with the light pen on a convenient videoscreen. "It's one thing to deal with criminal groups, like the Gill Pirates, and another entirely to confront those, ah, cults and sects who refuse outright to join the Synthesis. Since the population diebacks of the 2000s, large sections of the undeveloped world have gone to seed.… This is especially true of Central America, south of the People's Republic of Mexico.… It's there that we face a dissident cult calling itself the Maya Resurgence. We Synthetics are confronting a cultural mindset, what your apparat, Eugene, would call a paradigm, that is directly opposed to everything that unites the Synthesis. If we can stop this group before it can solidify, all will be well. But if their influence continues to spread, it may provoke militancy among the Synthesis. And if we are forced to resort to arms, our own fragile concordance will come apart at the seams. We can't afford to remilitarize, Eugene. We can't afford those suspicions. We need everything we have left to continue to fight ecological disaster. The seas are still rising."

  The spook nodded. "You want me to destabilize them. Make their paradigm untenable. Provoke the kind of cognitive dissonance that will cause them to crumble from within."

  "Yes," the chief said. "You are a proven agent. Tear them apart."

  The spook said delicately, "If I find it necessary to use interdicted weapons…?"

  The chief paled, but set his teeth and said bravely, "Replicon must not be implicated."

  *

  It took four days for the small solar-powered zeppelin to float and whir its way from the dikes of Washington, D.C., to the bloated Gulf of Honduras. The spook rode alone, on a sealed flight. He spent most of the trip in a semiparalyzed state, with the constant whisper of his computer taking the place of conscious thought.

  At last the zep's programming brought it to a grayish waterlogged section of wave-lapped tropical forest near the dock of New Belize. The spook had himself lowered by cable to a firm patch by the churned-up earth of the docks. He waved cheerily to the crew of a three-masted schooner, who had been disturbed from their afternoon siesta by his almost silent arrival.

  It was good to see people again. Four days with only his fragmentary self for company had left the spook antsy and hungry for companionship.

  It was suffocatingly hot. Wooden crates of bananas were ripening odoriferously on the dock.

  New Belize was a sad little town. Its progenitor, Old Belize, was underwater somewhere miles out in the Caribbean, and New Belize had been hastily cobbled together from leftovers. The center of the town was one of the pre-fabricated geodomes the Synthesis used for headquarters in its corporate concessions. The rest of the town, even the church, clung to the dome's rim like the huts of villagers around a medieval fortress. When and if the seas rose farther, the dome would move easily, and the native structures would drown with the rest.

  Except for its dogs and flies, the town slept. The spook picked his way through the mud to a bumpy street of corduroyed driftwood. An Amerindian woman in a filthy shawl watched him from her butcher's stall beside one of the dome's airlocks. She brushed flies from a suspended pig's carcass with a palm-leaf fan, and as his eyes locked with hers he felt a paradigmatic flash of her numb misery and ignorance, like stepping on an electric eel. It was weird and intense and new, and her stupefied pain meant absolutely nothing to him except for its novelty; in fact, he could barely stop himself from leaping over her dirty counter and embracing her. He wanted to slide his hands up under her long cotton blouse and slip his tongue into her wrinkled mouth; he wanted to get right under her skin and peel it off like a snake's.… Wow! He shook himself and went in through the airlock.

  Inside, if smelled of the Synthesis, compressed and tangy like the air in a diving bell. It was not a large
dome, but not a lot of room was needed for the modern management of information. The dome's lower floor was loosely divided into working offices with the usual keyboards, voice decoders, translators, videoscreens, and com channels for satellites and electric mail. The personnel ate and slept upstairs. In this particular station, most of them were Japanese.

  The spook mopped sweat from his forehead and asked a secretary in Japanese where he might find Dr. Emilio Flores.

  Flores ran a semi-independent health clinic that had slipped suspiciously from Synthetic control. The spook was forced to take a seat in the doctor's waiting room, where he played antique videogames on a battered old display screen.

  Flores had an endless clientele of the lame, halt, diseased, and rotting. These Belizeans seemed bewildered by the dome and moved tentatively, as if afraid that they might break the walls or floor. The spook found them intensely interesting. He studied their infirmities— mostly skin disease, fevers, and parasitic infestations, with a sprinkling of septic wounds and fractures— with an analytic eye. He had never before seen people so sick. He tried to charm them with his expertise on the videogames, but they preferred to murmur to one another in English patois or sit huddled and shivering in the air conditioning.

  At last the spook was allowed to see the doctor. Flores was a short, balding Hispanic, wearing a physician's traditional white business suit. He looked the spook up and down. "Oh," he said. "Now your illness, young man, is one I have seen before. You want to travel. Into the interior."

  "Yes," the spook said. "To Tikal."

  "Have a seat." They sat down. Behind Flores's chair a nuclear magnetic resonator sat ticking and blinking to itself. "Let me guess," the doctor said, steepling his fingers. "The world seems like a dead end to you, young man. You couldn't make the grade or get the training to migrate to the zaibatseries. And you can't bear wasting your life cleaning up a world your ancestors ruined. You dread a life under the thumb of huge cartels and corporations that starve your soul to fill their pockets. You long for a simpler life. A life of the spirit."

  "Yes, sir."

  "I have the facilities here to change your hair and skin color. I can even arrange the supplies that will give you a decent chance of making it through the jungle. You have the money?"

  "Yes, sir. Bank of Zurich." The spook produced an electronic charge card.

  Flores fitted the card into a desktop slot, studied the read-out, and nodded. "I won't deceive you, young man. Life among the Maya is harsh, especially at first. They will break you and remold you exactly as they want. This is a bitter land. Last century this area fell into the hands of the Predator Saints. Some of the diseases the Predators unleashed are still active here. The Resurgence is heir to Predator fanaticism. They, too, are killers."

  The spook shrugged. "I'm not afraid."

  "I hate killing," the doctor said. "Still, at least the Maya are honest about it, while the cost-benefit policies of the Synthetics have made the entire local population into prey. The Synthetics will not grant me funds of any kind to prolong the lives of so-called nonsurvival types. So I compromise my honor by accepting the money of Synthetic defectors, and finance my charities with treason. I am a Mexican national, but I learned my profession at a Replicon university."

  The spook was surprised. He hadn't known there was still a Mexican "nation." He wondered who owned its government.

  The preparations took eight days. The clinic's machines, under Flores's token direction, tinted the spook's skin and irises and reworked the folds around his eyes. He was inoculated against the local and the artificially introduced strains of malaria, yellow jack, typhus, and dengue fever. New strains of bacteria were introduced into his gut to avoid dysentery, and he was given vaccines to prevent allergic reactions to the inevitable bites of ticks, fleas, chiggers, and, worst of all, burrowing screwworms.

  When the time came for him to bid farewell to the doctor, the spook was reduced to tears. As he mopped his eyes, he pressed hard against his left cheekbone. There was a clicking sound inside his head and his left sinus cavity began to drain. He carefully but unobtrusively caught the draining fluid in his handkerchief. When he shook hands in farewell, he pressed the wet cloth against the bare skin of the doctor's wrist. He left the handkerchief on Flores's desk.

  By the time the spook and his mules had passed the cornfields and entered the jungle, the schizophrenic toxins had taken effect and the doctor's mind had shattered like a dropped vase.

  The jungle of lowland Guatemala was not a happy place for an orbiter. It was a vast canny morass of weeds run wild that had known man for a long time. In the twelfth century, it had been cauterized for the irrigated cornfields of the original Maya. In the twentieth and twenty-first it had been introduced to the sinister logic of bulldozers, flamethrowers, defoliants, and pesticides. Each time, with the death of its oppressors, it had sprung back, nastier and more desperate than before.

  The jungle had once been threaded by the trails of loggers and chicleros, seeking mahogany and chicle trees for the international market. Now there were no such trails, because there were no such trees left.

  This was not the forest primeval. It was a human artifact, like the genetically altered carbon-dioxide gobblers that stood in industrial ranks across the Synthetic forests of Europe and North America. These trees were the carpetbaggers of an ecological society smashed and in disarray: thorn, mesquite, cabbage palm, winding lianas. They had swallowed whole towns; even, in places, whole oil refineries. Swollen populations of parrots and monkeys, deprived of their natural predators, made nights miserable.

  The spook took constant satellite checks of his position and was in no danger of losing his way. He was not having any fun. Disposing of the rogue humanitarian had been too easy to enjoy. His destination was the sinister hacienda of the twentieth-century American millionaire, John Augustus Owens, now the headquarters of the Mayan brain trust.

  The stuccoed roof-combs of the Tikal pyramids were visible from treetops thirty miles away. The spook recognized the layout of the Resurgent city from satellite photographs. He traveled till dark and spent the night in the decaying church of an overgrown village. In the morning he killed his two mules and set out on foot.

  The jungle outside Tikal was full of hunters' trails. A mile outside the city the spook was captured by two sentries armed with obsidian-studded clubs and late-twentieth-century automatic rifles.

  His guards looked too tall to be actual Mayans. They were probably outside recruits rather than the indigenous Guatemalan Indians who made up the core of the city's population. They spoke only Maya, mixed with distorted Spanish. With the help of his computer, the spook began eagerly sucking in the language, meanwhile complaining plaintively in English. The Veil gave him a talent for languages. He had already learned and forgotten over a dozen.

  His arms were bound behind him and he was searched for weapons, but not otherwise harmed. His captors marched through a suburban complex of thatched houses, cornfields, and small gardens. Turkeys scratched and gobbled underfoot. He was turned over to the theocrats in an elaborate wooden office at the foot of one of the secondary pyramids.

  There he was interrogated by a priest, who put aside a headdress and jade lip plug to assume the careful colorlessness of a bureaucrat. The priest's English was excellent, and his manner had that ingrained remoteness and casual assumption of total power that only a long acquaintance with industrial-scale power structures could breed. The spook slipped easily into the expected responses. With immediate success, he posed as a defector from the Synthesis, in search of the so-called "human values" that the Synthesis and the zaibatseries had dismissed as obsolete.

  He was escorted up the pyramid's limestone stairs and imprisoned near the apex in a small but airy stone cell. His integration into Mayan society, he was told, would come only when he had emptied himself of old falsehoods and was cleansed and reborn. In the meantime, he would be taught the language. He was instructed to watch the daily life of the city and to expec
t a vision.

  The cell's barred windows provided a splendid view of Tikal. Ceremonies were carried out every day on the largest temple pyramid; priests climbed like sleepwalkers up its steep stairs, and stone caldrons sent black threads of smoke rising into the pitiless Guatemalan sky. Tikal held almost fifty thousand people, a tremendous number for a preindustrial city.

  At dawn, water glittered from a hand-dug limestone reservoir east of the city. At dusk the sun set in the jungle beyond a sacred cenote, or sacrificial well. About a hundred yards from the cenote was a small but elaborate stone pyramid, closely guarded by men with rifles, which had been erected over the bombproof shelter of the American millionaire, Owens. When the spook craned his neck and peered through the stone bars, he could see the entrances and exits there of the city's highest-ranking priests.

  The cell went to work on him the first day. The combination of his spook training, the Veil, and his computer protected him, but he observed the techniques with interest. During the day, he was hit with occasional blasts of subsonics, which bypassed the ear and dug right into the nervous system, provoking disorientation and fear. At night hidden speakers used hypnagogic indoctrination techniques, peaking around three A.M. when biorhythmic resistance was lowest. Mornings and evenings, priests chanted aloud at the temple's summit, using a mantralike repetition as old as humanity itself. Combined with the mild sensory deprivation of the chamber, its effect was powerful. After two weeks of this treatment, the spook found himself chanting his language lessons aloud with an ease that seemed magical.

  In the third week they began drugging his food. When things began to trail and pattern about two hours after lunch, the spook realized he was not facing the usual vibratory thrill of subsonics but a powerful dose of psilocybin. Psychedelics were not the spook's drugs of choice, but he rode out the dose without much difficulty. The peyote next day was considerably harder— he could taste its bitter alkaloids in his tortillas and black beans— but he ate it all anyway, suspecting that his intake and output were monitored. The day crawled by, with spasms of nausea alternating with elation-states that made him feel his pores were bleeding spines. He peaked sometime after sunset, when the city gathered by torchlight to watch two young women in white robes plummet fearlessly from a stone catafalque into the cold green depths of the sacred well. He could almost taste the chill green limestone water in his own mouth as the drugged girls quietly drowned.