Supermen: Tales of the Posthuman Future

by Gardner Dozois

  "Severnius? How long has it been? No— I'll see him now."

  The light disappeared.

  It was the end of a long autumn afternoon, and a low sun was filling the garden with a rich and hazy light. I had been contemplating my immediate future, quite how I should approach the next century. I am a man methodical and naturally circumspect: not for me the grand announcements of intent detailing how I might spend my next five hundred years. I prefer to plan ahead one hundred years at a time, ever hopeful of the possibility of change, within myself and without. For the past week I had considered many avenues of inquiry and pursuit, but none had appealed to me. I had awoken early that morning, struck with an idea like a revelation: Quietus.

  I composed myself on a marble bench beneath an arbor entwined with fragrant roses. The swollen sun sank amid bright tangerine strata, and on the other side of the sky, the moon rose, full yet insubstantial, above the manse.

  Severnius stepped from the converter and crossed the glade. He always wore his primary soma-form when we met, as a gesture of respect: that of a wise man of yore, with flowing silver-gray hair and beard. He was a Fellow some two thousand years old, garbed in the magenta robes of the Academy.

  We embraced in silence, a short communion in which I reacquainted myself with his humanity.

  "Fifty years?" I asked.

  He smiled. "More like eighty," he said, and then gave the customary greeting of these times: "To your knowledge."

  "Your knowledge," I responded.

  We sat and I gestured, and wine and glasses appeared upon the bench between us.

  "Let me see, the last time we met, you were still researching the Consensus of Rao."

  "I concluded that it was an unworkable proposition, superseded by the latest theories." I smiled. "But worth the investigation."

  Severnius sipped his wine. "And now?"

  "I wound down my investigations ten years ago, and since then I've been exploring the Out-there. Seeking the new…"

  He smiled, something almost condescending in his expression. He was my patron and teacher; he was disdainful of the concept of the new.

  "Where are you now?" he asked. "What have you found?"

  "Much as ever, permutations of what has been and what is known…" I closed my eyes, and made contact. "I is on Pharia, in the Nilakantha Star-drift, taking in the ways of the natives there; I is in love with a quasi-human on a nameless moon half a galaxy away; I is climbing Selerious Mons on Titan."

  "It appears that you are… waiting?" he said. "Biding your time with meaningless pursuits. Considering your options for the next century."

  I hesitated. It occurred to me then how propitious was his arrival. I would never have gone ahead with Quietus without consulting him.

  "A thought came to me this morning, Severnius. Five hundred years is a long time. With your tutelage and my inquiries…" I gestured, "I have learned much, dare I say everything? I was contemplating a period of Quietus."

  He nodded, considering my words. "A possibility," he agreed. "Might I inquire as to the duration?"

  "It really only occurred to me at dawn. I don't know— perhaps a thousand years."

  "I once enjoyed Quietus for five hundred," said Severnius. "I was reinvigorated upon awakening— the thrill of change, the knowledge of the learning to be caught up with."

  "Precisely my thoughts."

  "There is an alternative, of course."

  I stared at him. "There is?"

  He hesitated, marshaling his words. "My Fellows at the Academy last week Enstated and Enabled an Early," he said. "The process, though wholly successful physiologically, was far from psychologically fulfilled. We had to wipe his memories of the initial awakening and instruction. We are ready to try again."

  I stared at him. The Enstating and Enabling of an Early was a rare occurrence indeed. I said as much.

  "You," Severnius said, "were the last."

  Even though I had been considered a success, my rehabilitation had required his prolonged patronage. I thought through what he had told me so far, the "urgency" of his presence here.

  He was smiling. "I have been watching your progress closely these past eighty years," he said. "I submitted your name to the Academy. We agreed that you should be made a Fellow, subject to the successful completion of a certain test."

  "And that is?" I asked, aware of my heartbeat. All thought of Quietus fled at the prospect of becoming a Fellow.

  "The patronage and stewardship of the Early we Enstated and Enabled last week," Severnius said.

  It was a while before I could bring myself to reply. Awareness of the great honor of being considered by the Academy was offset by my understanding of the difficulty of patronage. "But you said that the subject was psychologically damaged."

  Severnius gestured. "You studied advanced psychohealing in your second century. We have confidence in your abilities."

  "It will be a considerable undertaking. A hundred years, more?"

  "When we Enstated and Enabled you, I was your steward for almost fifty years. We think that perhaps a hundred years might suffice in this case."

  "Perhaps," I said, "before I make a decision, might I meet the subject?"

  Severnius nodded. "By all means," he replied, and while he gave me the details of the Early, his history, I closed my eyes and made contact. I recalled I from his studies on Pharia, and I from Titan. I I gave a little time to conclude his affair with the alien.

  Minutes later I and I followed each other from the converter and stepped across the glade, calling greetings to Severnius. They appeared as younger, more carefree versions of myself, before age and wisdom had cured me of vanity. I stood and reached out, and we merged.

  Their thoughts, their respective experiences on Pharia and Titan, became mine— and while I and I had reveled in their experiences, to me they were the antics of children, and I learned nothing new. I resolved to edit the memories when an opportune moment arose.

  Severnius, with the etiquette of the time, had averted his gaze during the process of merging. Now he looked up and smiled. "You are ready?"

  I stood. We crossed to the converter, and then, before stepping upon the plate, both paused to look up at our destination.

  The Moon, riding higher now, and more substantial against the darker sky, gazed down on us with a face altered little since time immemorial. The fact of its immutability, in an age passé with the boundless possibilities of change, filled me with awe.

  We converted.

  *

  The Halls of the Fellowship of the Academy occupied the Sea of Tranquillity, an agglomeration of domes scintillating in the sunlight against the absolute black of the Luna night.

  We stepped from the converter and crossed the regolith toward the Academy. Severnius led me into the cool, hushed shade of the domes and through the hallowed halls. He explained that if I agreed to steward the Early, then the ceremony of acceptance to the Fellowship would follow immediately. I glanced at him. He clearly assumed that I would accept without question.

  The idea of ministering to the psychological well-being of an Early, for an indefinite duration, filled me with apprehension.

  We came to the interior dome. The sight of the subject within the silver hemisphere, trapped like some insect for inspection, brought forth in me a rush of memories and emotions. Five hundred years ago, I, too, had awoken to find myself within a similar dome. Five hundred years ago, I presume, I had looked just as frightened and bewildered as this Early.

  A gathering of Fellows— Academics, Scientists, Philosophers— stood in a semicircle around the dome, watching with interest and occasionally addressing comments to their colleagues. Upon the arrival of Severnius and myself, they made discreet gestures of acknowledgment and departed, some vanishing within their own converters, others choosing to walk.

  I approached the skin of the dome and stared.

  The Early was seated upon the edge of a low foam-form, his elbows lodged upon his knees, his head in his hands. From
time to time he looked up and stared about him, his clasped hands a knotted symbol of the fear in his eyes.

  I felt an immediate empathy, a kinship.

  Severnius had told me that he had died at the age of ninety, but they had restored him to a soma-type approximately half that age. His physique was lean and well-muscled, but his most striking attribute was his eyes, piercingly blue and intelligent.

  I glanced at Severnius, who nodded. I walked around the dome, so that I would be before the Early when I entered, and stepped through the skin of the hemisphere. Even then, my sudden arrival startled him. He looked up, his hands gripping his knees, and the fear in his eyes intensified.

  He spoke, but in an accented English so primitive that it was some seconds before I could understand his words.

  "Who the hell are you?" he said. "What's happening to me?"

  I held up a reassuring hand and emitted pheromones to calm his nerves. In his own tongue, I said, "Please, do not be afraid. I am a friend."

  Despite the pheromones and my reassurances, he was still nervous. He stood quickly and stared at me. "What the hell's happening here?"

  His agitation brought back memories. I recalled my own awakening, my first meeting with Severnius. He had seemed a hostile figure, then. Humankind had changed over the course of thirty thousand years, become taller and more considerate in the expenditure of motion. He had appeared to me like some impossibly calm, otherworldly creature.

  As I must have appeared to this Early.

  "Please," I said, "sit down."

  He did so, and I sat beside him, a hand on his arm. The touch eased him slightly.

  "I'd like to know what's happening," he said, fixing me with his intense, sapphire stare. "I know this sounds crazy, but the last I remember… I was dying. I know I was dying. I'd been ill for a while, and then the hospitalization…"

  He shook his head, tears appearing in his eyes as he gazed at his hand— the hand of a man half the age of the person he had been. I reached out and touched his arm, calming him.

  "And then I woke up here, in this body. Christ, you don't know what it's like, to inhabit the body of a crippled ninety-year-old, and then to wake up suddenly… suddenly young again."

  I smiled. I said nothing, but I could well recall the feeling, the wonder, the disbelief; the doubt and then the joy of apprehending the reality of renewal.

  He looked up at me, quickly, something very much like terror in his eyes. "I'm alive, aren't I? This isn't some dream?"

  "I assure you that what you are experiencing is no dream."

  "So this is… Afterlife?"

  "You could say that," I ventured. "Certainly, for you, this is an Afterlife." I emitted pheromones strong enough to forestall his disbelief.

  He merely shook his head. "Where am I?" he asked in little more than a whisper.

  "The time is more than thirty thousand years after the century of your birth."

  "Thirty thousand years?" He enunciated each word separately, slowly.

  "To you it might seem like a miracle beyond comprehension," I said, "but the very fact that you are here implies that the science of this age can accomplish what in your time would be considered magic. Imagine the reaction of a Stone Age man, say, to the wonders of twentieth-century space flight."

  He looked at me. "So… to you I'm nothing more than a primitive—"

  "Not at all," I said. "We deem you capable of understanding the concepts behind our world, though it might take a little time." This was a lie— there were many things that would be beyond his grasp for many years, even decades.

  Severnius had told me that the subject had evinced signs of mental distress upon learning the disparity between his ability to understand and the facts as they were presented. I would have to be very careful with this subject— if, that was, I accepted the Fellowship.

  "So," he said, staring at me. "Answer my question. How did you bring me here?"

  I nodded. "Very well…" I proceeded to explain, in terms he might understand, the scientific miracle of Enstating and Enabling. It was a ludicrously simplistic description of the complex process, of course, but it would suffice.

  His eyes bored into me. His left cheek had developed a quick, nervous tic. "I don't believe it…"

  I touched his arm, the contact calming him. "Please… why would I lie?"

  "But how could you possibly recover my memories, my feelings?"

  "Think of your childhood," I said, "your earliest memories. Think of your greatest joy, your greatest fear. Tell me, have we succeeded?"

  His expression was anguished. "Christ," he whispered. "I can remember everything… everything. My childhood, college." He shook his head in slow amazement. "But… but my understanding of the way the universe works… it tells me this can't be happening."

  I laughed at this, "Come! You are a man of science, a rationalist. Things change: what was taken as written in stone is overturned; theory gives way to established fact, which in turn evolves yet more fundamental theory, which is then verified… and so proceeds the advance of scientific enlightenment."

  "I understand what you're saying," he said. "It's just that I'm finding it hard to believe."

  "In time," I said, "you will come to accept the miracles of this age."

  Without warning, he stood and strode toward the concave skin of the dome. He stared at his reflection, and then turned to face me.

  "In time, you say? Just how long have I got?" He lifted his hand and stared at it. "Am I some laboratory animal you'll get rid of once your experiment's through?" He stopped and considered something. "If you built this body, then you must be able to keep it indefinitely—"

  He stopped again, this time at something in my expression. I nodded. "You are immortal," I said.

  I could see that he was shaken. The tight skin of his face colored as he nodded, trying to come to terms with my casual pronouncement of his new status.

  "Thirty thousand years in the future," he whispered to himself, "the world is inhabited by immortals…"

  "The galaxy," I corrected him. "Humankind has spread throughout the stars, inhabiting those planets amenable to life, adapting others, sharing worlds with intelligent beings."

  Tears welled in his eyes. He fought not to let them spill, typical masculine product of the twentieth century that he was.

  "If you did this for me," he said, "then it's within your capability to bring back to life the people I loved, my wife and family—"

  "And where would we stop?" I asked. "Would we Enstate and Enable the loved ones of everyone we brought forward?" I smiled. "Where would it end? Soon, everyone who had ever lived would live again."

  He failed to see the humor of my words. "You don't know how cruel that is," he said.

  "I understand how cruel it seems," I said. "But it is the cruelty of necessity." I paused. I judged that the time was right to share my secret. "You see, I, too, was once like you, plucked from my deathbed, brought forward to this strange and wondrous age, fearful and little comprehending the miracles around me. I stand before you as testament to the fact that you will survive this ordeal, and come to understand."

  He stared at me, suspicious. At last he said, "But why…? Why you and me?"

  "They, the people of this age, considered us men of importance in our time— men whose contributions to history were steps along the way to the position of preeminence that humankind now occupies. Ours is not to wonder, but to accept."

  "So that's all I am— a curiosity? A specimen in some damned museum?"

  "Not at all! They will be curious, of course; they'll want to know all about your time… but you are free to learn, to explore, to do with your limitless future what you will— with the guidance and stewardship of a patron, as I, too, was once guided."

  The Early walked around the periphery of the dome. He completed a circuit, and then halted and stared at me. "Explore," he said at last, tasting the word. "You said explore? I want to explore the worlds beyond Earth! No— not only the worlds beyond
Earth, the worlds beyond the worlds you've already explored. I want to break new ground, discover new worlds…" He stopped and looked at me. "I take it that you haven't charted all the universe?"

  I hesitated. "There are places still beyond the known expanses of space," I said.

  "Then I want to go there!"

  I smiled, taken by his naïve enthusiasm. "There will be time enough for exploration," I said. "First, you must be copied, so that you can send your other selves out to explore the unexplored. There are dangers—"

  He was staring at me in disbelief, but his disbelief was not for what I thought. "Dangers?" he almost scoffed. "What's the merit of exploration if there's no risk?"