Supermen: Tales of the Posthuman Future

by Gardner Dozois

  The potentates evolved slowly to be larger in size— they were at the top of the food chain, and there was no evolutionary pressure toward smaller size. The various human hrat subspecies, on the other hand, evolved to be smaller— there was a tremendous pressure to use fewer resources, to be faster, more agile, more adaptable.

  Over the course of a hundred millennia, the potentates evolved. Intelligence was no longer a selection force. The potentates had genetically engineered into their biological structure most of the technology that had put them at the top of the food chain, fiber-optic receptors for direct high-bandwidth computer links, and microwave transceivers for low-bandwidth communications. What, exactly, did they need intelligence for? (The fourth law of ecology: Attributes not required by a species for survival will be lost.) Fat and happy (they engineered themselves to be happy) and with a low reproduction rate— at the top of their food chain with no natural enemies, they had to have a low reproduction rate, or they would kill their own ecology— they became, in all essential respects, dinosaurs. Huge and invulnerable, over the course of a quarter of a million years they lost the desire and the need to control the Earth.

  The humans that the potentates had once denigrated as "hrats" live in a species-depleted, struggling ecology. The great ecological crash had resulted in a die-off, and the hrats lived in an ecology where survival of large animals was a difficulty. No global transportation systems— or at least none accessible to hrats— were left functional, so the hrats speciated, evolving separate forms on different continents and in different climatic zones on each continent. Like the potentates, the hrats also evolved away from intelligence— in the struggle for survival, traits that required a prolonged infancy and adolescence were too hard to maintain.

  By a million years, there were no truly intelligent species on Earth.

  Which is not to say that genus homo was extinct, far from it! With the extinction in the crash of all the species of large mammals (with the exception of dogs, preserved by the potentates), species of homo radiated to fill all of the open evolutionary niches. As the ecology recovered complexity, much of the diversity came from hominid species, now adapted to fill niches from grazers— hominid deer— to omnivores— hominid apes and pigs— and even some carnivore slots, hominid bears and jackals competing with the canine descendants to prey on squirrels and hominid deer.

  In many ways, it was a beautiful and placid world: a new Eden.

  *

  One of the casualties of the great die-off was the extinction of a species of oceanic algae that had served a thermostatic function in the Earth's overall heat balance by removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. The die-off of the oceanic algae and of a vast number of terrestrial plant species led to a buildup of atmospheric carbon dioxide and consequent warming of the Antarctic continent. The Earth settled into a second thermal equilibrium, a full interglacial period with no permanent ice features anywhere on the globe.

  But climate eventually changes. A thousand-year period of unusually low volcanism stimulated a new algae to fit into a niche. This algae thrived in waters of low temperature and low carbon-dioxide saturation, and in the mindless way of single-celled organisms, went about producing these condi tions. The resultant reduction in greenhouse-effect warming triggered glaciation, at first only minor glaciation, but then increasing the spread of ice north across the warm valleys of Antarctica.

  This glaciation resulted in a period of chaotic changes in the ecosystem, which opened a niche for intelligence to out-compete nonintelligent species. Following ancient laws of Darwin, intelligence arose in the savannas of Antarctica. (The fifth law of ecology: Evolution always occurs at the margin of an ecosystem.)

  The new sophonts spread quickly from the Antarctic savanna to the northern arctic regions, and then in only a few millennia across the globe. Their first excursion into technology had been to discover the Antarctic coal deposits, one of the few fossil-fuel sources on the planet remaining in easily recoverable form. From there they developed a technology of ceramics and biopolymers that regarded metal as a pretty, but technologically unimportant, form of rock.

  They quickly learned not to hunt the enormous and placid potentate beasts; while the beasts were not intelligent in any real sense, they were nevertheless still networked by microwave links (the new sophonts never did learn about microwaves), and an event experienced by any one of them was shared by all of the others, and never forgotten. With no visible weapons, no claws, no tusks, nevertheless the potentate beasts wielded invisible weapons, and a herd of potentates, acting together as a phased array of microwave beams, could melt cities. Leave them alone, the sophonts found, and they will leave you alone.

  The sophonts never had the ambiguous benefit of believing that they had been the only intelligent race on Earth; even a million years after the last cities of Homo sapiens had collapsed into rubble, they lived in a world of abundant and incomprehensible artifacts, and it was clear that they had lived in a world that once had been inhabited by a world-treading race that had leveled mountains and built tremendous cities.

  For the most part, the artifacts they found had little meaning. Cities they understood, but having never discovered electricity, the remnants of printed circuit boards were meaningless, and while buried fiber-optic cables were obviously a technology for piping light, the purpose for doing so was obscure. But with their own technology that owed little or nothing to Homo sapiens, they developed factories and eventually spaceflight. The enormous space artifacts of the era of the potentates, pinwheels and staging stations, had long since decayed from orbit. The geosynchronous-orbit communications satellites remained as curiosities to be retrieved and puzzled over, but never understood.

  They never traveled as far as the Moon, and with no knowledge of radio and no requirements for communications satellites, their era of spaceflight was a brief one. There would have been nothing to find of any interest on the Moon in any case; the lunar ecosystem had died back to a sparse ecology consisting of little more than the great photovoltaic trees, two species of mold, and a few dozen species of small mobile life that filled the niche of crawling insects.

  Over the course of a hundred thousand years, their civilization grew stagnant and died, and less than a half-million years later, the Earth had no trace of them except for a heritage of cryptic ceramic artifacts, sharing the ground with the artifacts of Homo sapiens.

  Over the next twenty million years, two more species that could arguably be called intelligent arose. Neither achieved spaceflight. Although the second of the two species lasted for a period of five million years, eventually they succeeded in adjusting the world to suit them, and reached the point where they no longer had a need for intelligence.

  *

  The planet Mars has no magnetic field and is therefore subject to a withering bullet-storm of solar and galactic cosmic radiation. In designing forms of life to survive on Mars, the potentates had engineered a more robust form of DNA, with quintuply redundant information storage, with error-correction coding at every stage of reproduction and cell growth. It had not been their actual intent to design an ecology to be immune from evolution, but that had been the result.

  Nevertheless, eventually error-correction codes fail. The quintuply redundant information storage corrupted to merely quadruple redundancy, and then slightly faster corrupted down to triple, and faster yet to double, and single redundant. In fifty million years, evolution started up on Mars.

  It took well over a hundred million years before the Mars life evolved to intelligence, and from there only a few millennia before they invented spaceships. They had, of course, no notion of their terrestrial roots.

  The sixth law of ecology tells us that when isolated populations are brought into contact, the more robust forms quickly drive out the less robust. In this case, the harsh conditions on Mars had made the Martian lifeforms highly robust. The Earth lifeforms really didn't have a chance. The contact with Mars was a K-T level event, and like the end of th
e Ternary period, it resulted in rapid evolutionary radiation in all directions. And then history gets seriously weird.

  But this is a history of the various human species, and so the history of what happened after the return of the Martians must be beyond the bounds of this story.

  —for Olaf Stapledon

  The Great Goodbye

  ROBERT CHARLES WILSON

  The hardest part of the Great Goodbye, for me, was knowing I wouldn't see my grandfather again. We had developed that rare thing, a friendship that crossed the line of the post-evolutionary divide, and I loved him very much.

  Humanity had become, by that autumn of 2350, two very distinct human species— if I can use that antiquated term. Oh, the Stock Humans remain a "species" in the classical evolutionary sense: New People, of course, have forgone all that. Post-evolutionary, post-biological, budded or engineered, New People are gloriously free from all the old human restraints. What unites us all is our common source, the Divine Complexity that shaped primordial quark plasma into stars, planets, planaria, people. Grandfather taught me that.

  I had always known that we would, one day, be separated. But we first spoke of it, tentatively and reluctantly, when Grandfather went with me to the Museum of Devices in Brussels, a day trip. I was young and easily impressed by the full-scale working model of a "steam train" in the Machine Gallery— an amazingly baroque contrivance of ancient metalwork and gas-pressure technology. Staring at it, I thought (because Grandfather had taught me some of his "religion"): Complexity made this. This is made of stardust, by stardust.

  We walked from the Machine Gallery to the Gallery of the Planets, drawing more that a few stares from the Stock People (children, especially) around us. It was uncommon to see a New Person fully embodied and in public. The Great Goodbye had been going on for more than a century, but New People were already scarce on Earth, and a New Person walking with a Stock Person was an even more unusual sight— risqué, even shocking. We bore the attention gamely. Grandfather held his head high and ignored the muttered insults.

  The Gallery of the Planets recorded humanity's expansion into the Solar System, and I hope the irony was obvious to everyone who sniffed at our presence there: Stock People could not have colonized any of these forbidding places (consider Ganymede in its primeval state!) without the partnership of the New. In a way, Grandfather said, this was the most appropriate place we could have come. It was a monument to the long collaboration that was rapidly reaching its end.

  The stars, at last, are within our grasp. The grasp, anyhow, of the New People. Was this, I asked Grandfather, why he and I had to be so different from one another?

  "Some people," he said, "some families, just happen to prefer the old ways. Soon enough Earth will belong to the Stocks once again, though I'm not sure this is entirely a good thing." And he looked at me sadly. "We've learned a lot from each other. We could have learned more."

  "I wish we could be together for centuries and centuries," I said.

  I saw him for the last time (some years ago now) at the Shipworks, where the picturesque ruins of Detroit rise from the Michigan Waters, and the star-traveling Polises are assembled and wait like bright green baubles to lift, at last and forever, into the sky. Grandfather had arranged this final meeting— in the flesh, so to speak.

  We had delayed it as long as possible. New People are patient: in a way, that's the point. Stock Humans have always dreamed of the stars, but the stars remain beyond their reach. A Stock Human lifetime is simply too short; one or two hundred years won't take you far enough. Relativistic constraints demand that travelers between the stars must be at home between the stars. Only New People have the continuity, the patience, the flexibility to endure and prosper in the Galaxy's immense voids.

  I greeted Grandfather on the high embarication platform where the wind was brisk and cool. He lifted me up in his arms and admired me with his bright blue eyes. We talked about trivial things, for the simple pleasure of talking. Then he said, "This isn't easy, this saying goodbye. It make me think of mortality— that old enemy."

  "It's all right," I said.

  "Perhaps you could still change your mind?"

  I shook my head, no. A New Person can transform himself into a Stock Person and vice versa, but the social taboos are strong, the obstacles (family dissension, legal entanglements) almost insurmountable, as Grandfather knew too well. And in any case that wasn't my choice. I was content as I was. Or so I chose to believe.

  "Well, then," he said, empty, for once, of words. He looked away. The Polis would be rising soon, beginning its cons-long navigation of our near stellar neightbours. Discovering, no doubt, great wonders.

  "Goodbye, boy," he said.

  I said, "Goodbye, Grandfather."

  Then he rose to his full height on his many translucent legs, winked one dish-sized glacial blue eye, and walked with a slow machinely dignity to the vessel that would carry him away. And I watched, desolate, alone on the platform with the wind in my hair, as his ship rose into the arc of the high clean noonday sky.

  Table of Contents

  Preface

  The Chapter Ends

  Watershed

  Slow Tuesday Night

  Aye, and Gomorrah

  Nobody's Home

  The Hero as Werewolf

  Halfjack

  Dancers in the Time-Flux

  Spook

  Understand

  None So Blind

  Brother Perfect

  A Child of the Dead

  Nevermore

  The Wisdom of Old Earth

  Toast: A Con Report

  The Gardens of Saturn

  Grist

  Fossil Games

  The Wedding Album

  Steps Along the Way

  Border Guards

  Epilogue