Supermen: Tales of the Posthuman Future

by Gardner Dozois

  Like many writers of his generation, Tony Daniel first made an impression on the field with his short fiction. He made his first sale, to Asimov's, in 1990, with "The Passage of Night Trains," and followed it up with a long string of well-received stories both there and elsewhere throughout the nineties, stories such as "The Careful Man Goes West," "Sun So Hot I Froze To Death," "Prism Tree," "Death of Reason," "Candle," "No Love in All of Dwingeloo," "The Joy of the Sidereal Long-Distance Runner," "The Robot's Twilight Companion," and many others. His story "Life on the Moon" was a finalist for the Hugo Award in 1996, and won the Asimov's Science Fiction Readers Award poll. His first novel, Warpath, was released simultaneously in America and England in 1993. In 1997, he published a major new novel, Earthling. His most recent book is his first short-story collection, The Robot's Twilight Companion, and coming up soon is a new novel Metaplanetary, based in part on the story you're about to read, "Grist."

  In the complex, compelling, and pyrotechnic novella that follows, he takes us to a bizarre, far-future world peopled with some of the strangest characters you're ever likely to meet, many of them transhuman, with vast, almost godlike, powers and abilities, a world poised on the brink of a war that may destroy it utterly. It's a vivid and exotic adventure that revolves around the connections that join people together— and in this strange, high-tech future, sometimes makes it difficult to tell where one person ends and another begins.…

  Things that really matter, although they are not defined for all eternity, even when they come very late, still come at the right time.

  —Martin Heidegger,

  Letter on Humanism

  Midnight Standard at the Westway Diner

  Standing over all creation, a doubt-ridden priest took a piss.

  He shook himself, looked between his feet at the stars, then tabbed his pants closed. He flushed the toilet, and centrifugal force took care of the rest.

  Andre Sud walked back to his table in the Westway Diner. He padded over the living fire of the plenum, the abyss— all of it— and hardly noticed. Even though this place was special to him, it was really just another café with a see-through floor— a window as thin as paper and as hard as diamond. Dime a dozen, as they used to say a thousand years ago. The luciferin sign at the entrance said FREE DELIVERY. The sign under it said OPEN 24 HRS. This sign was unlit. The place will close, eventually.

  The priest sat down and stirred his black tea. He read the sign, backward, and wondered if the words he spoke, when he spoke, sounded anything like English used to. Hard to tell with the grist patch in his head.

  Everybody understands one another on a general level, Andre Sud thought. Approximately more or less they know what you mean.

  There was a dull greasy gleam to the napkin holder. The saltshaker was half-full. The laminate surface of the table was worn through where the plates usually sat. The particle board underneath was soggy. There was free-floating grist that sparkled like mica within the wood: used-to-be-cleaning grist, entirely shorn from the restaurant's controlling algorithm and nothing to do but shine. Like the enlightened pilgrim of the Greentree Way. Shorn and brilliant.

  And what will you have with that hamburger?

  Grist. Nada y grist. Grist y nada.

  I am going through a depression, Andre reminded himself. I am even considering leaving the priesthood.

  Andre's pellicle— the micoscopic algorithmic part of him that was spread out in the general vicinity— spoke as if from a long way off.

  This happens every winter. And lately with the insomnia. Cut it out with the nada y nada. Everything's physical, don't you know?

  Except for you, Andre thought back.

  He usually thought of his pellicle as a little cloud of algebra symbols that followed him around like mosquitoes. In actuality, it was normally invisible, of course.

  Except for us, the pellicle replied.

  All right, then. As far as we go. Play a song or something, would you?

  After a moment, an oboe piped up in his inner ear. It was an old Greentree hymn— "Ponder Nothing" —that his mother had hummed when he was a kid. Brought up in the faith. The pellicle filtered it through a couple of variations and inversions, but it was always soothing to hear.

  There was a way to calculate how many winters the Earth-Mars Diaphany would get in an Earth year, but Andre never checked before he returned to the seminary on his annual retreat, and they always took him by surprise, the winters did. You wake up one day and the light has grown dim.

  The café door slid open and Cardinal Filmbuff filled the doorway. He was wide and possessive of the doorframe. He was a big man with a mane of silver hair. He was also space-adapted and white as bone in the face. He wore all black with a lapel pin in the shape of a tree. It was green, of course.

  "Father Andre," said Filmbuff from across the room. His voice sounded like a Met cop's radio. "May I join you?"

  Andre motioned to the seat across from him in the booth. Filmbuff walked over with big steps and sat down hard.

  "Isn't it late for you to be out, Morton?" Andre said. He took a sip of his tea. He'd left the bag in too long and it tasted twiggy.

  I was too long at the pissing, thought Andre.

  "Tried to call you at the seminary retreat center," Filmbuff said.

  "I'm usually here," Andre replied. "When I'm not there."

  "Is this place still the seminary-student hangout?"

  "It is. Like a dog returneth to its own vomit, huh? Or somebody's vomit."

  A waiter drifted toward them. "Need menus?" he said. "I have to bring them because the tables don't work."

  "I might want a little something," Filmbuff replied. "Maybe a lhasi."

  The waiter nodded and went away.

  "They still have real people here?" said Filmbuff.

  "I don't think they can afford to recoat the place."

  Filmbuff gazed around. He was like a beacon. "Seems clean enough."

  "I suppose it is," said Andre. "I think the basic coating still works and that just the complicated grist has broken down."

  "You like it here?"

  Andre realized he'd been staring at the swirls in his tea and not making eye contact with his boss. He sat back, smiled at Filmbuff. "Since I came to seminary, Westway Diner has always been my home away from home." He took a sip of tea. "This is where I got satori, you know."

  "So I've heard. It's rather legendary. You were eating a plate of mashed potatoes."

  "Sweet potatoes, actually. It was a vegetable plate. They give you three choices, and I chose sweet potatoes, sweet potatoes, and sweet potatoes."

  "I never cared for them."

  "That is merely an illusion. Everyone likes them sooner or later."

  Filmbuff guffawed. His great head turned up toward the ceiling, and his copper eyes flashed in the brown light. "Andre, we need you back teaching. Or in research."

  "I lack faith."

  "Faith in yourself."

  "It's the same thing as faith in general, as you well know."

  "You are a very effective scholar and priest to be so racked with doubt. Makes me think I'm missing something."

  "Doubt wouldn't go with your hair, Morton."

  The waiter came back. "Have you decided?" he said.

  "A chocolate lhasi," Filmbuff replied firmly. "And some faith for Father Andre here."

  The waiter stared for a moment, nonplussed. His grist patch hadn't translated Cardinal Filmbuff's words or had reproduced them as nonsense.

  The waiter must be from out of the Happy Garden Radial, Andre thought. Most of the help was in Seminary Barrel. There's a trade patois and a thousand long-shifted dialects out that way. Clan-networked LAPs poor as church mice and no good Broca grist to be had for Barrel wages.

  "Iye ftip," Andre said to the waiter in the Happy Garden patois. "It is a joke." The waiter smiled uncertainly. "Another shot of hot water for my tea is what I want," Andre said. The waiter went away looking relieved. Filmbuff's aquiline presence could be inti
midating.

  "There is no empirical evidence that you lack faith," Filmbuff said. It was a pronouncement. "You are as good a priest as there is. We have excellent reports from Triton."

  Linsdale, Andre thought. Traveling monk, indeed. Traveling stool pigeon was more like it. I'll give him hell next conclave.

  "I'm happy there. I have a nice congregation, and I balance rocks."

  "Yes. You are getting a reputation for that."

  "Triton has the best gravity for it in the solar system."

  "I've seen some of your creations on the merci. They're beautiful."

  "Thank you."

  "What happens to them?"

  "Oh, they fall," said Andre, "when you stop paying attention to them."

  The chocolate lhasi came, and the waiter set down a self-heating carafe of water for Andre. Filmbuff took a long drag at the straw and finished up half his drink.

  "Excellent." He sat back, sighed, and burped. "Andre, I've had a vision."

  "Well, that's what you do for a living."

  "I saw you."

  "Was I eating at the Westway Diner?"

  "You were falling through an infinite sea of stars."

  The carafe bubbled, and Andre poured some water into his cup before it became flat from all the air being boiled out. The hot water and lukewarm tea mingled in thin rivulets. He did not stir.

  "You came to rest in the branches of a great tree. Well, you crashed into it, actually, and the branches caught you."

  "Yggdrasil?"

  "I don't think so. This was a different tree. I've never seen it before. It is very disturbing because I thought there was only the One Tree. This tree was just as big, though."

  "As big as the World Tree? The Greentree?"

  "Just as big. But different." Filmbuff looked down at the stars beneath their feet. His eyes grew dark and flecked with silver. Space-adapted eyes always took on the color of what they beheld. "Andre, you have no idea how real this was. Is. This is difficult to explain. You know about my other visions, of the coming war?"

  "The Burning of the One Tree?"

  "Yes."

  "It's famous in the Way."

  "I don't care about that. Nobody else is listening. In any case, this vision has placed itself on top of those war visions. Right now, being here with you, this seems like a play to me. A staged play. You. Me. Even the war that's coming. It's all a play that is really about that damn Tree. And it won't let me go."

  "What do you mean, won't let you go?"

  Filmbuff raised his hands, palms up, to cradle an invisible sphere in front of him. He stared into this space as if it were the depths of all creation, and his eyes became set and focused far away. But not glazed over or unaware.

  They were so alive and intense that it hurt to look at him. Filmbuff's physical face vibrated when he was in trance. It was a slight effect, and unnerving even when you were used to it. He was utterly focused, but you couldn't focus on him. There was too much of him there for the space provided. Or not enough of you.

  I am watching chronological quantum transport in the raw, Andre thought. The instantaneous integration of positronic spin information from up-time sifted through the archetypical registers of Filmbuff's human brain.

  And it all comes out as metaphor.

  "The Tree is all burnt out now," Filmbuff said, speaking out of his trance. His words were like stones. "The Burning's done. But it isn't char that I'm seeing, no." He clenched his fists, then opened his palms again. "The old Tree is a shadow. The burnt remains of the One Tree are really only the shadow of the other tree, the new Tree. It's like a shadow the new Tree casts."

  "Shadow," Andre heard himself whispering. His own hands were clenched in a kind of sympathetic vibration with Filmbuff.

  "We are living in the time of the shadow," said Filmbuff. He relaxed a bit. "There's almost a perfect juxtaposition of the two trees. I've never felt so sure of anything in my life."

  Filmbuff, for all his histrionics, was not one to overstate his visions for effect. The man who sat across from Andre was only the aspect— the human portion— of a vast collective of personalities. They were all unified by the central being; the man before him was no more a puppet than was his enthalpic computing analog soaking up energy on Mercury, or the nodes of specialized grist spread across human space decoding variations in antiparticle spins as they made their way backward in time. But he was no longer simply the man who had taught Andre's Intro to Pastoral Shamanism course at seminary. Ten years ago, the Greentree Way had specifically crafted a Large Array of Personalities to catch a glimpse of the future, and Filmbuff had been assigned to be morphed.

  I was on the team that designed him, Andre thought. Of course, that was back when I was a graduate assistant. Before I walked on the Moon.

  "The vision is what's real." Filmbuff put the lhasi straw to his mouth and finished the rest of it. Andre wondered where the liquid went inside the man. Didn't he run on batteries or something? "This is maya, Andre."

  "I believe you, Morton."

  "I talked to Erasmus Kelly about this," Filmbuff continued. "He took it on the merci to our Interpreter's Freespace."

  "What did they come up with?"

  Filmbuff pushed his empty glass toward Andre. "That there's a new Tree," he said.

  "How the hell could there be a new Tree? The Tree is wired into our DNA like sex and breathing. It may be sex and breathing."

  "How should I know? There's a new Tree."

  Andre took a sip of his tea. Just right. "So there's a new Tree," he said. "What does that have to do with me?"

  "We think it has to do with your research."

  "What research? I balance rocks."

  "From before."

  "Before I lost my faith and became an itinerant priest?"

  "You were doing brilliant work at the seminary."

  "What? With the time towers? That was a dead end."

  "You understand them better than anyone."

  "Because I don't try to make any sense of them. Do you think this new Tree has to do with those things?"

  "It's a possibility."

  "I doubt it."

  "You doubt everything."

  "The time towers are bunch of crotchety old LAPs who have disappeared up their own asses."

  "Andre, you know what I am."

  "You're my boss."

  "Besides that."

  "You're a manifold. You are a Large Array of Personalities who was specially constructed as a quantum-event detector— probably the best in human history. Parts of you stretch across the entire inner solar system, and you have cloudship outriders. If you say you had a vision of me and this new Tree, then it has to mean something. You're not making it up. Morton, you see into the future, and there I am."

  "There you are. You are the Way's expert on time. What do you think this means?"

  "What do you want me to tell you?" said Andre. "That the new Tree is obviously a further stage in sentient evolution, since the Greentree is us?"

  "That's what Erasmus Kelly and his people think. I need something more subtle from you."

  "All right. It isn't the time towers that this has to do with."

  "What then?"

  "You don't want to hear this."

  "You'd better tell me anyway."

  "Thaddeus Kaye."

  Filmbuff shrugged. "Thaddeus Kaye is dead. He killed himself. Something was wrong with him, poor slob."

  "I know you big LAPs like to think so."

  "He was perverted. He killed himself over a woman, wasn't it?"

  "Come on, Morton. A pervert hurts other people. Kaye hurt himself."

  "What does he have to do with anything, anyway?"

  "What if he's not dead? What if he's just wounded and lost? You understand what kind of being he is, don't you, Morton?"