Supermen: Tales of the Posthuman Future

by Gardner Dozois

  During the decades in which she had been a member of Ari's communion, Miniruta had followed Ari's lead and equipped herself with every pharmaceutical and electrical enhancer she could link to her physiology. The electronic enhancers had all been discarded a few tendays after she had joined the EruLabi. Her pharmaceutical enhancers had been dispensed with, item by item, as she had worked her way up the EruLabi protocols. She had been the second EruLabi on the ship who had made it to the fourth protocol and accepted its absolute prohibition of all non-genetic mental and physiological enhancers.

  Morgan could now talk to her without struggling. His own pharmaceutical enhancers erased most of the intellectual gap that separated two people who had been brought into the universe twenty years apart. He had been surprised when he had discovered Miniruta was spending two-thirds of every daycycle with the data from the fossil hunt, but he had soon realized she had a philosophical agenda.

  To Miniruta, the course of evolution on Athene proved that evolution was a random process. "Ari's right, Morgan," Miniruta said. "This planet can teach us something we need to understand. But it's not the lesson Ari thinks it is. It's telling us there isn't any plan. There's no big overall objective— as if the universe is some kind of cosmic totalitarian state. The only reality is individuals. And their needs."

  *

  To Ari, the critical question was the evolution of intelligence. Obviously, life had died out on Athene before intelligent creatures could build cities or turn meadows into farms. But wasn't there some chance something like the first proto-humans had evolved? If that first glimmer of tool-making, culture-creating intelligence had appeared on the planet, wouldn't it prove that evolution really did lead in a particular direction?

  "I'll grant you the vertebrates were obviously an accident," Ari said. "But you can still see an obvious increase in intelligence if you look at the progressions we've been uncovering. You can't go from stationary sea creatures to land creatures that were obviously highly mobile without a lot of development in the brain. Intelligence is the inevitable winner in the selection process. The life forms that can think better will always replace the life forms with less complex nervous systems."

  "The way human beings replaced the cockroach?" Miniruta asked. "And the oyster?"

  Miniruta was speaking VA13. The lilt in her voice expressed a casual mockery that Morgan would have found devastating if she had directed it at him.

  "We were not in direct genetic competition with the cockroach and the oyster," Ari said in Tych. "The observable fact that certain lines remained static for hundreds of millions of years doesn't contradict the observable fact that natural selection tends to produce creatures with more highly developed brains. We could have destroyed every species on the Earth if we had wanted to. We let them live because we needed a complex biosphere. They survived because they satisfied one of our needs."

  *

  To Morgan, most of the information they were gathering proved that natural selection really was the powerful force the theorists had claimed it was.

  Certain basic patterns had been repeated on both planets. Life forms that had been exceptionally massive had possessed jaw structures that indicated they had probably been herbivores— just as terrestrial herbivores such as the elephant had been the largest organisms in their habitats. Life forms that had possessed stabbing teeth and bone-crunching jaws tended to be medium-sized and looked as if they had probably been more agile.

  But the process obviously had its random qualities, too. Was it just a matter of random chance that vertebrates had failed to develop? Had the shell creatures dominated the planet merely because certain molecules had fallen into one type of pattern on Earth and another pattern on Athene? Or had it happened because there was some difference in the conditions life had encountered on the two planets?

  To Morgan, it didn't matter what the answer was. Evolution might proceed according to laws that were as rigid as the basic laws of physics, or it might be as random as a perfect game of chance. He would be happy with either answer. He could even be content with no answer.

  That was one of the things people never seemed to understand about science. As far as Morgan was concerned, you didn't study the universe because you wanted to know the answers. You studied it to connect. When you subjected an important question to a rigorous examination— collecting every scrap of evidence you could find, measuring and analyzing everything that could be measured and analyzed— you were linked to the universe in a way nothing else could connect you.

  Religious mystics had once spent their lives trying to establish a direct contact with their version of God. Morgan was a mystic who tried to stay in contact with the cosmos.

  *

  Ari had assigned three groups of exploration machines to a hunt for campsites. The teams concentrated on depressions that looked as if they had once been rivers and probed for evidence such as stone tools and places where a large number of animal fossils had been concentrated in a small area. They found two animal deposits within their first three tendays and Ari quickly pointed out that the animals had clearly been disassembled.

  "These aren't just tar pits or places where a catastrophe killed several animals accidentally," Ari argued. "Note how the remains of the different species are all jumbled up. If they had been killed by a rockslide from the surrounding heights— to name just one alternate possibility— the remains of each animal would have tended to stay together. The pattern we're looking at here is the pattern we'd expect to see in a waste pit."

  Miniruta tossed her head. "If they were butchered," she said in VA13, "then somebody had to use tools to cut them up. Show us a flint tool, Ari. Show us some evidence of fire."

  *

  Machines burrowed and probed in the areas around the "waste pits." Scraping attachments removed the dirt and rock one thin layer at a time. Raking attachments sieved the dust and rubble. Search programs analyzed the images transmitted by the onsite cameras and highlighted anything that met the criteria Ari had stored in the databanks. And they did, in fact, find slivers of flint that could have been knives or spearheads.

  Ari had two of the flints laid out on a tray, with a camera poised an arm's length above the objects, and displayed them on one of the wall screens in his apartment. Morgan stared at the tray in silence and let himself surrender to all the eerie, haunting emotions it aroused, even with Ari babbling beside him.

  "On Earth," Miniruta pointed out, "we already knew the planet had produced intelligent life. We could assume specimens like that had been made by intelligent beings because we already knew the intelligent beings existed. But what do we have here, Ari? Can we really believe these objects were shaped by intelligent beings when we still haven't seen anything that resembles hands? So far, you haven't even located an organism that had arms."

  *

  There were other possibilities, of course. Ari had studied most of the ideas about possible alien life forms that humans had come up with in the last few centuries and installed them in the databanks housed in his electronic enhancers. He could produce several plausible examples of grasping organs composed of soft tissue that would only fossilize under rare, limited conditions. The tool makers could have possessed tentacles. They could have used some odd development of their lips.

  Miniruta tipped back her head and raised her eyebrows when she heard Ari mention tentacles. The high-pitched lilt of her VA13 communicated— once again— the condescension that permeated her attitude toward Ari.

  "The cephalopods all lived in the sea, Ari. Our arms evolved from load-bearing legs. I admit we're discussing creatures who evolved in a lower gravity field. But they weren't operating in zero gravity."

  "I've thought about that," Ari said. "Isn't it possible some tentacled sea-creatures could have adapted an amphibious lifestyle on the edge of the sea and eventually produced descendants who substituted legs for some of their tentacles? On our own planet, after all, some of the land dwellers who lived on the edge of Earth's oceans eventually
produced descendants whose legs had been transformed into fins. With all due respect to your current belief system, Miniruta— our discussions would be significantly more succinct if you weren't trying to discuss serious issues without the benefit of a few well-chosen enhancements. You might see some of the possibilities I'm seeing before I have to describe them to you."

  *

  As an adherent of the fourth EruLabi protocol, Miniruta only rejected permanent enhancements that increased her intellectual and physical powers. Temporary enhancements that increased pleasure were another matter. Min iruta could still use a small selection of the sexually enhancing drugs developed in the twenty-first century, in addition to the wines, teas, and inhalants that had fostered pre-pharmaceutical social relations. She and Morgan had already shared several long, elaborately choreographed sexual interludes. They had bathed. They had banqueted. They had reclined on carefully proportioned couches, naked bodies touching, while musicians from a dozen eras had materialized in Miniruta's simulators. The EruLabi sexual rituals had cast a steady, sensuous glow over the entire six decades Morgan had spent with Savela Insdotter. He had resumed their routines as if he had been slipping on clothes that were associated with some of the best moments of his life.

  They were nearing the end of a particularly satisfactory interlude when Miniruta switched on her information system and discovered she had received a please-view-first message from Ari. "I've been looking over some of the latest finds from one of your random-survey teams," Ari said. "Your idea paid off. They've handed us a fossil that looks like it left traces of soft-bodied tissue in the rocks in front of it— imprints that look like they could have been made by the local equivalent of tentacles. Your team found it in the middle of a depression in that flat area on the top of the main southern plateau— a depression that's so shallow I hadn't even noticed it on the maps."

  Miniruta had decided that half her exploration machines would make random searches. Ari and Morgan were both working with intellectual frameworks based on the history of Earth, Miniruta had argued. Morgan was looking at the kinds of sites that had produced fossils on Earth. Ari was looking for traces of hunter-gatherers. "A random process," she had pronounced, "should be studied by random probing."

  Now her own philosophical bias had apparently given Ari what he had been looking for. Ari would never have ordered one of his machines into the winding, almost invisible depression Miniruta's machine had followed. But that dip in the landscape had once been a river. And the river had widened its path and eroded the ground above a fossil that had formed in the sediment by the bank.

  It was a cracked, fragmented shell about a third the length of a human being. Only one side of it had been preserved. But you could still see that it was essentially a tube with a large opening at one end, a smaller opening at the other, and no indications it had openings for legs. In the rock in front of the large opening, Morgan could just make out the outlines of impressions that could have been produced by a group of ropy, soft-bodied extensions.

  Ari highlighted three spots on the rim of the large opening. "Notice how the opening has indentations on the rim, where the extensions leave it. They aren't very big, but they obviously give the extensions a little more room. I've ordered a search of the databank to see how many other shells have indentations like that. If there was one creature like this on the planet, there should have been other species built along the same pattern. I'm also taking another look at all the shells like this we've uncovered in the past. My first pass through the databank indicates we've found several of them near the places where we found the burial pits."

  *

  For Ari, the find proved that it was time to let the solar system know the full truth. He posted a picture of the fossil on the information system an hour after he had notified Morgan and Miniruta. "We now have evidence that creatures with fully developed grasping organs existed on this planet," Ari argued. "The evidence may not be conclusive, but it can't be dismissed either. The people of the solar system have a right to draw their own conclusions. Let them see the evidence we've collected. Let the minority who are resisting stagnation and decline derive hope from the knowledge more evidence may follow."

  It had only been eight tendays since Ari had agreed to the compromise Morgan had worked out. Yet he was already demanding that they cancel the agreement.

  *

  To Miniruta, the idea was absurd. Ari was suggesting that the forests of Athene had harbored tentacled creatures who had hung from trees and occupied the ecological niches monkeys had appropriated on Earth. And he was jumping from that improbability to the idea that some of these hypothetical creatures had developed weapons and become hunter-gatherers.

  "I am not saying anything is true," Ari insisted. "I am merely noting that we now have pits full of butchered animals, tools that could have butchered them, and a type of organism that could have manipulated the tools."

  Ari had even developed a scenario that equipped his fantasy creatures with the ability to move along the ground at a pace suitable for hunters. Suppose, he argued, they had begun their advance to intelligence by learning to control some type of riding animal?

  To Ari, his proposal was a logical variation on the process that had shaped human intelligence. On Earth, tree dwellers had developed hands that could grasp limbs and brains that could judge distances and trajectories. Then they had adapted the upright posture and used their hands to create stone tools. Tool use had created a way of life that put a premium on intelligence, the individuals with the best brains had tended to be the survivors, and a creature who could build starships had taken its place in the universe.

  "On Athene," Ari argued, "the drive toward intelligence may have followed a different course. The tree dwellers couldn't develop upright walking so they began by controlling animals. They became mounted hunters— creatures who could rove like ground animals and manipulate the same simple tools our own ancestors chipped from the rocks. The evolutionary process may take many twists. It may be bloody and cruel. But in the end, it gives us planets populated by creatures who are intelligent and conscious. The arrow points in only one direction."

  *

  Thirty years from now— perhaps even ten years from now— Morgan's feelings about Miniruta would just be a memory. Morgan knew that. There would come a moment when he would wonder how he could have believed all his pleasure in life depended on the goodwill of another human being. But right now he just knew he wanted to create a crowded memory. Right now he felt as if he had spent the last few decades in a state of half-dead numbness.

  He had started playing with his political-analysis programs as soon as he had realized Ari was initiating a new round of agitated debate. The situation had looked dangerous to him, and the picture that had emerged on his screens had confirmed his intuitive judgment. About twentyfive percent of the people on the ship believed a report on the new find should be transmitted to the solar system. Almost thirty percent registered strong opposition. The rest of the population seemed to be equally divided between not-convinced-we-should and not-convinced-we-shouldn't.

  If Ari's first appeals had attracted a solid forty or forty-five percent, Morgan would have given him some extra support and helped him win a quick, overwhelming victory. Instead, the Island of Adventure community had stumbled into one of those situations in which a divisive debate could go on indefinitely.

  Morgan was savoring teas with Miniruta when he suggested the one option that looked as if it might defuse the situation.

  "I've decided to assign all my exploration teams to the search for evidence that supports Ari's theories," Morgan said. "I think it would be a wise move if you did the same thing— for a while anyway. We're not going to get any peace on this ship until we come up with solid evidence Ari's right. Or make it clear we probably never will."

  They had both been speaking Plais— a graceful EruLabi invention that had been designed for the lighter types of social events. Morgan had switched to Jor when he started discussing
his proposal, and Miniruta transferred to Jor with him.

  "You want to divert equipment from all the other research we're doing?" Miniruta said. "As far as I'm concerned, Ari has all the resources he needs. We're producing the first survey of an alien ecosystem. Why should we interrupt that merely because one member of our expedition has become obsessed with a fantasy?"

  The vehemence in her voice caught Morgan off guard. He had thought he was offering her a modest, reasonable proposal. He had run the idea through his political-simulation programs and the results had indicated most of the people on the ship would approve a transmission to the solar system if Ari managed to locate more evidence. A minority would never feel happy with the decision— but at least a decision would have been made.

  "It shouldn't divert us for more than a few tendays," Morgan said. "We can intensify Ari's hunt for campsites. We can look for associations between possible mounts and possible riders. We can ignore the lowlying areas for the time being and concentrate on the regions that probably stayed above sea level when Athene had seas. If we do all that and don't come up with something decisive in a few tendays— I think we can assume we'll get a clear consensus that we shouldn't overrule our current agreement and transmit a message before the next discussion period."