Supermen: Tales of the Posthuman Future

by Gardner Dozois

  "Jill, I will fix you," he says.

  I know.

  "That must have been the Great Mother of rats."

  She was big, so big and mean. She was brave and smart and strong. It was wonderful.

  "What did you do?"

  I bit her.

  "I'll never see your like again, Jill."

  I killed her, and then I killed all her children.

  "Let's go home, Jill."

  Yes. Back home.

  Already in the dim burlap of the sack, and I hear the call of TB's grist to go to sleep, to get better, and I sigh and curl as best I can into a ball and I am falling away, falling away to dreams where I run along a trail of spattered blood, and the spoor is fresh and I'm chasing rats, and TB is with me close by, and I will bite a rat soon, soon, soon—

  A Simple Room with Good Light

  Come back, Andre Sud. Your mind is wandering and now you have to concentrate. Faster now. Fast as you can go. Spacetime. Clumps of galaxy clusters. Average cluster. Two-armed spiral.

  Yellow star.

  Here's a network of hawsers cabling the inner planets together. Artifact of sentience, some say. Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, hung with a shining webwork across blank space and spreading even into the asteroids. Fifty-mile-thick cables bending down from the heavens, coming in at the poles to fit into enormous universal joints lubricated by the living magma of the planets' viscera. Torque and undulation. Faster. Somewhere on a flagellating curve between Earth and Mars, the Diaphany, you will find yourself. Closer in. Spinning spherule like a hundred-mile-long bead on a million-mile-long necklace. Come as close as you can.

  All along the Mars-Earth Diaphany, Andre saw the preparations for a war like none before. It seemed the entire Met— all the interplanetary cables— had been transformed into a dense fortress that people just happened to live inside. His pod was repeatedly delayed in the pithway as troops went about their movements, and military grist swarmed hither and yon about some task or another. We live in this all-night along the carbon of the cables, Andre thought, within the dark glistening of the corridors where surface speaks to surface in tiny whispers like fingers, and the larger codes, the extirpated skeletons of a billion minds, clack together in a cemetery of logic, shaking hands, continually shaking bony algorithmic hands and observing strict and necessary protocol for the purposes of destruction.

  Amés— he only went by the one name, as if it were a title— was a great one for martial appearances. Napoleon come again, the merci reporters said as a friendly joke. Oh, the reporters were eating this up. There hadn't been a good war in centuries. People got tired of unremitting democracy, didn't they? He'd actually heard somebody say that on the merci.

  How fun it will be to watch billions die for a little excitement on the merci, Andre thought.

  He arrived in Connacht Bolsa in a foul mood, but when he stepped out of his pod, there was the smell of new rain. He had walked a ways from the pod station before he realized what the smell was. There were puddles of water on the ground from the old-fashioned street-cleaning mechanism Connacht employed. It was still raining in spots— a small rain that fell only an inch or so from the ground. Little clouds scudded along the street like a miniature storm front, washing it clean of the night's leavings.

  Connacht was a suburb radial off Phobos City, the most densely populated segment on the Met. A hundred years ago in the Phobos boom time, Connacht had been the weekend escape for intellectuals, artists, moneyed drug addicts— and the often indistinguishable variety of con men, mountebanks, and psychic quacksalvers who were their hangers-on. The place was run-down now, and Andre's pellicle encountered various swarms of nostalgia that passed through the streets like rat packs— only these were bred and fed by the merchants to attract the steady trickle of tourists with pellicular receptors for a lost bohemia.

  All they did for Andre was made him think about Molly.

  Andre's convert— the electronic portion of himself— obliged him by dredging up various scenes from his days at seminary. The convert was usually silent, preferring to communicate in suggestive patterns of data— like a conscience gifted with irreducible logic and an infallible memory.

  Andre walked along looking at the clouds under his feet, and as he walked, his convert projected images into the shape of these clouds and into the shift and sparkle of the puddled water they left behind.

  I have a very sneaky conscience, Andre thought, but he let the images continue.

  —Molly Index, Ben Kaye, and Andre at the Westway, in one of their long arguments over aesthetics when they were collaborating on their preliminary thesis, "Knowing, Watching and Doing: The Triune Aspect of Enlightenment."

  "I want to be 'Doing'!" Molly mocked-yelled and threw a wadded-up piece of paper at Ben.

  He caught it, spread it out, and folded it into a paper airplane. "This is the way things have to be," he said. "I'm 'Doing.' You're 'Watching.' And we both know who 'Knowing' must be." They turned to Andre and smiled vulture smiles.

  "I don't know what you think I know, but I don't know it," he said, then nearly got an airplane in the eye.

  —Molly's twenty-four-year-old body covered with red Martian sand under the Tharsis beach boardwalk. Her blue eyes open to the sky-pink sky. Her nipples like dark stones. Ben a hundred feet away, rising from the gray-green lake water, shaking the spume from his body. Of course he had run and jumped into the lake as soon as they got there. Ben wouldn't wait for anything.

  But Molly chose me! I can't believe she chose me.

  Because I waited for her and dragged her under the boardwalk and kissed her before I could talk myself out of it.

  Because I waited for the right moment.

  How's that for Doing.

  —Living together as grad students while Molly studied art and he entered into the stations of advanced meditation at seminary.

  —Molly leaving him because she would not marry a priest.

  You're going to kill yourself on the moon.

  Only this body. I'll get a new one. It's being grown right now.

  It isn't right.

  This is the Greentree Way. That's what makes a priest into a true shaman. He knows what it's like to die and come back.

  If you Walk on the moon, you will know what it's like to lose a lover.

  Molly, the Walk is what I've been preparing for these last seven years. You know that.

  I can't bear it. I won't.

  Maybe he could have changed her mind. Maybe he could have convinced her. But Alethea Nightshade had come along, and that was that. When he'd come back from the moon reinstantiated in his cloned body, Molly had taken a new lover.

  —His peace offering returned with the words of the old folk song, turned inside out: "Useless the flowers that you give, after the soul is gone."

  —Sitting at a bare table under a bare light, listening to those words, over and over, and deciding never to see her again. Fifteen years ago, as they measure time on Earth.

  Thank you, that will be enough, he told the convert.

  An image of a stately butler, bowing, flashed through Andre's mind. Then doves rising from brush into sunset. The water puddles were just water puddles once again, and the tiny clouds were only clouds of a storm whose only purpose was to make the world a little cleaner.

  Molly was painting a Jackson Pollock when Andre arrived at her studio. His heavy boots, good for keeping him in place in Triton's gravity, noisily clumped on the wooden stairs to Molly's second-floor loft. Connacht was spun to Earth-normal. He would have knocked, but the studio door was already open.…

  "I couldn't believe it until I'd seen it with my own eyes," Molly said. She did not stop the work at her easel. "My seminary lover come back to haunt me."

  "Boo," Andre said. He entered the space. Connacht, like many of the old rotating simple cylinders on the Diaphany, had a biofusion lamp running down its pith that was sheathed on an Earth-day schedule. Now it was day, and Molly's skylights let in the white light and its clean s
hadows. Huge picture windows looked out on the village. The light reminded Andre of light on the moon. The unyielding, stark, redeeming light just before his old body joined the others in the shaman's Valley of the Bones.

  "Saw a man walking a dog the other day with the legs cut off," said Molly. She dipped the tip of her brush in a blue smear on her palette.

  "The man or the dog?"

  "Maybe the day." Molly touched the blue to the canvas before her. It was like old times.

  "What are you painting?"

  "Something very old."

  "That looks like a Pollock."

  "It is. It's been out of circulation for a while and somebody used it for a tablecloth. Maybe a kitchen table, I'm thinking."

  Andre looked over the canvas. It was clamped down on a big board as long as he was tall. Sections of it were fine, but others looked like a baby had spilled its mashed peas all over it. Then again, maybe that was Pollock's work after all.

  "How can you possibly know how to put back all that spatter?"

  "There're pictures." Molly pointed the wooden tip of her brush to the left-hand corner of the canvas. Her movements were precise. They had always been definite and precise. "Also, you can kind of see the tracery of where this section was before it got… whatever that is that got spilled on it there. I also use grist for the small stuff. Did you want to talk about Ben?"

  "I do."

  "Figured you didn't come back to relive old times."

  "They were good. Do you still do that thing with the mirror?"

  "Oh, yes. Are you a celibate priest these days?"

  "No, I'm not that kind of priest."

  "I'm afraid I forgot most of what I knew about religion."

  "So did I."

  "Andre, what do you want to know about Ben?" Molly set the handle of her brush against her color palette and tapped it twice. Something in the two surfaces recognized one another, and the brush stuck there. A telltale glimmer of grist swarmed over the brush, keeping it moist and ready for use. Molly sat in a chair by her picture window, and Andre sat in a chair across from her. There was a small table between them. "Zen tea?" she said.

  "Sure," Andre replied.

  The table pulsed, and two cups began forming on its surface. As the outsides hardened, a gel at their center thinned down to liquid.

  "Nice table. I guess you're doing all right for yourself, Molly."

  "I like to make being in the studio as simple as possible so I can concentrate on my work. I indulge in a few luxuries."

  "You ever paint for yourself anymore? Your own work, I mean?"

  Molly reached for her tea, took a sip, and motioned with her cup at the Pollock.

  "I paint those for myself," she said. "It's my little secret. I make them mine. Or they make me theirs."

  "That's a fine secret."

  "Now you're in on it. So was Ben. Or Thaddeus, I should say."

  "You were on the team that made him, weren't you?"

  "Aesthetic consultant. Ben convinced them to bring me on. He told me to think of it as a grant for the arts."

  "I kind of lost track of you both after I… graduated."

  "You were busy with your new duties. I was busy. Everybody was busy."

  "I wasn't that busy."

  "Ben kept up with your work. It was part of what made him decide to… do it."

  "I didn't know that."

  "Now you do. He read that paper you wrote on temporal propagation. The one that was such a big deal."

  "It was the last thing I ever wrote."

  "Developed a queer fascination with rocks?"

  "You heard about that?"

  "Who do you think sent those merci reporters after you?"

  "Molly, you didn't?"

  "I waited until I thought you were doing your best work."

  "How did you see me…?" He looked into her eyes, and he saw it. The telltale expression. Far and away. "You're a LAP."

  Molly placed the cup to her lips and sipped a precise amount of tea. "I guess you'd classify me as a manifold by now. I keep replicating and replicating. It's an art project I started several years ago. Alethea convinced me to do it when we were together."

  "Will you tell me about her? She haunted me for years, you know. I pictured her as some kind of femme fatale from a noir. Destroyed all my dreams by taking you."

  "Nobody took me. I went. Sometimes I wonder what I was thinking. Alethea Nightshade was no picnic, let me tell you. She had the first of her breakdowns when we were together."

  "Breakdowns?"

  "She had schizophrenia in her genes. She wanted to be a LAP, but wasn't allowed because of it. The medical grist controlled her condition most of the time, but every once in a while… she outthought it. She was too smart for her own good."

  "Is that why you became a LAP?" Andrew asked. "Because she couldn't?"

  "I told myself I was doing it for me, but yes. Then. Now things are different." Molly smiled, and the light in the studio was just right. Andre saw the edge of the multiplicity in her eyes.

  The fractal in the aspect's iris.

  "You have no idea how beautiful it is— what I can see." Molly laughed and Andre shuddered. Awe or fright? He didn't know.

  "She was just a woman," Molly said. "I think she came from around Jupiter. A moon or something, you know." Molly made a sweeping motion toward her window. As with many inner-system denizens, the outer system was a great unknown, and all the same, to her. "She grew up on some odd kind of farm."

  "A Callisto free grange?"

  "I'm sure I don't know. She didn't talk about it much."

  "What was she like?"

  "Difficult."

  "What do you mean?"

  "I'll tell you." Tea sip. Andre realized he hadn't picked his up yet. He did so, tried it. It was wonderful, and all grist. A bit creepy to think about drinking it down.

  I'll take care of it, don't you worry, said his pellicle.

  I know you will.

  "Alethea had two qualities that should never exist within one organic mind. A big intellect and a big heart. She felt everything, and she thought about it far too much. She was born to be a LAP. And she finally found a way to do it."

  "Ben."

  "They fell in love. It was also her good fortune that he could get her past the screening procedures. But Alethea always was a fortunate woman. She was lucky, on a quantum level. Until she wasn't."

  "So she and Ben were together before he became… Thaddeus."

  "For a year."

  "Were you jealous?"

  "I'd had enough of Alethea by then. I'll always love her, but I want a life that's… plain. She was a tangle I couldn't untangle." Molly touched her fingers to her nose and tweaked it. It was a darling gesture, Andre thought. "Besides," Molly said, "She left me."

  "What did that do to you and Ben?"

  "Nothing. I love Ben. He's my best friend."

  She was speaking in the present tense about him, but Andre let it pass.

  "Why did he change his name, Molly? I never understood that."

  "Because he wasn't a LAP."

  "What do you mean? Of course he was. A special one. Very special. But still—"

  "No. He said he was something new. He said he wasn't Ben anymore. It was kind of a joke with him, though. Because, of course, he was still Ben. Thaddeus may have been more than a man, but he definitely was at least a man, and that man was Ben Kaye. He never could explain it to me."

  "Time propagation without consciousness overlap. That was always the problem with the time tower LAPs. Interference patterns. Dropouts. But with Thaddeus, they finally got the frequency right. One consciousness propagated into the future and bounced back with antiparticle quantum entanglement."

  "I never understood a bit of that jargon you time specialists use."

  "We made God."

  Molly snorted and tea came out her nose. She laughed until tears came to her eyes.

  "We made something," she said. "Something very different than what's come b
efore. But Andre, I knew Thaddeus. He was the last thing in the universe I would consider worshiping."

  "Some didn't share your opinion."

  "Thaddeus thought they were crazy. They made him very uncomfortable."

  "Was Alethea one of them?"

  "Alethea? Alethea was a stone-cold atheist when it came to Thaddeus. But what she did was worse. Far worse."