More Than Human

by Theodore Sturgeon

  Her face and body went quite still and in her eyes was an indescribable expression—tenderness, amusement and something else. She said, “I’m not going to tell you because you’re wonderful and brave and clever and strong, but you’re also just a little bit prissy.” She spun away from him and the air was full of knives and forks and neckties, the lamp and the coffeepot, all going back to their places. At the door she said, “Hurry,” and was gone.

  He plunged after her and caught her in the hall. She was laughing.

  He said, “I know why I never kissed you.”

  She kept her eyes down, but could not do the same with the corners of her mouth. “You do?”

  “You can add water to a closed container. Or take it away.” It was not a question.

  “I can?”

  “When we poor males start pawing the ground and horning the low branches off trees, it might be spring and it might be concreted idealism and it might be love. But it’s always triggered by hydrostatic pressure in a little tiny series of reservoirs smaller than my little fingernail.”

  “It is?”

  “So when the moisture content of these reservoirs is suddenly lowered, I—we—uh … well, breathing becomes easier and the moon has no significance.”

  “It hasn’t?”

  “And that’s what you’ve been doing to me.”

  “I have?”

  She pulled away from him, gave him her eyes and a swift, rich arpeggio of laughter. “You can’t say it was an immoral thing to do,” she said.

  He gave her laughter back to her. “No nice girl would do a thing like that.”

  She wrinkled her nose at him and slipped into her room. He looked at her closed door and probably through it, and then turned away.

  Smiling and shaking his head in delight and wonderment, encasing a small cold ball of terror inside him with a new kind of calm he had found; puzzled, enchanted, terrified and thoughtful, he turned the shower on and began to undress.

  They stood in the road until after the taxi had gone and then Janie led the way into the woods. If they had ever been cut, one could not know it now. The path was faint and wandering but easy to follow, for the growth overhead was so thick that there was little underbrush.

  They made their way toward a mossy cliff; and then Hip saw that it was not a cliff but a wall, stretching perhaps a hundred yards in each direction. In it was a massive iron door. It clicked as they approached and something heavy slid. He looked at Janie and knew that she was doing it.

  The gate opened and closed behind them. Here the woods were just the same, the trees as large and as thick, but the path was of brick and took only two turns. The first made the wall invisible and the second, a quarter of a mile further, revealed the house.

  It was too low and much too wide. Its roof was mounded rather than peaked or gabled. When they drew closer to it, he could see at each flank the heavy, gray-green wall, and he knew that this whole area was in prison.

  “I don’t, either,” said Janie. He was glad she watched his face.

  Gooble.

  Someone stood behind a great twisted oak near the house, peeping at them. “Wait, Hip.” Janie walked quickly to the tree and spoke to someone. He heard her say, “You’ve got to. Do you want me dead?”

  That seemed to settle the argument. As Janie returned he peered at the tree, but now there seemed to be no one there.

  “It was Beanie,” said Janie. “You’ll meet her later. Come.”

  The door was ironbound, of heavy oak planks. It fitted with curious concealed hinges into the massive archway from which it took its shape. The only windows to be seen were high up in the moundlike gables and they were mere barred slits.

  By itself—or at least, without a physical touch—the door swung back. It should have creaked, but it did not; it was silent as a cloud. They went in, and when the door closed there was a reverberation deep in the subsonic; he could feel it pounding on his belly.

  On the floor was a reiteration of tiles, darkest yellow and a brownish gray, in hypnotic diamond shapes they were repeated in the wainscoting and in the upholstery of furniture either built-in or so heavy it had never been moved. The air was cool but too humid and the ceiling was too close. I am walking, he thought, in a great sick mouth.

  From the entrance room they started down a corridor which seemed immensely long and was not at all, for the walls came in and the ceiling drew even lower while the floor rose slightly, giving a completely disturbing false perspective.

  “It’s all right,” said Janie softly. He curled his lips at her, meaning to smile but quite unable to, and wiped cold water from his upper lip.

  She stopped near the end door and touched the wall. A section of it swung back, revealing an anteroom with one other door in it. “Wait here, will you, Hip?” She was completely composed. He wished there were more light.

  He hesitated. He pointed to the door at the end of the hall. “Is he in there?”

  “Yes.” She touched his shoulder. It was partly a salutation, partly an urging toward the little room. “I have to see him first,” she said. “Trust me, Hip.”

  “I trust you all right. But are you—is he—”

  “He won’t do anything to me. Go on, Hip.”

  He stepped through. He had no chance to look back, for the door swung swiftly shut. It gave no more sign of its existence on this side than it had on the other. He touched it, pushed it. It might as well have been that great wall outside. There was no knob, no visible hinge or catch. The edges were hidden in the paneling; it simply had ceased to exist as a door.

  He had one blinding moment of panic and then it receded. He went and sat down across from the other door which led, apparently, into the same room to which the corridor led.

  There was not a sound.

  He picked up an ottoman and placed it against the wall. He sat with his back tight against the paneling, watching the door with wide eyes.

  Try that door, see if it’s locked too.

  He didn’t dare, he realized. Not yet. He sensed vaguely what he would feel if he found it locked; he wanted no more just now than that chilling guess.

  “Listen,” he hissed to himself, furiously, “you’d better do something. Build something. Or maybe just think. But don’t sit here like this.”

  Think. Think about that mystery in there, the pointed face with its thick lenses, which smiled and said, Go on, die.

  Think about something else! Quick!

  Janie. By herself, facing the pointed face with the—

  Homo Gestalt, a girl, two tongue-tied Negroes, a mongoloid idiot and a man with a pointed face and—

  Try that one again. Homo Gestalt, the next step upward. Well, sure, why not a psychic evolution instead of the physical?

  Homo sapiens stood suddenly naked and unarmed but for the wrinkled jelly in his king-sized skull; he was as different as he could be from the beasts which bore him.

  Yet he was the same, the same; to this day he was hungry to breed, hungry to own; he killed without compunction; if he was strong he took, if he was weak he ran; if he was weak and could not run, he died.

  Homo sapiens was going to die.

  The fear in him was a good fear. Fear is a survival instinct; fear in its way is a comfort for it means that somewhere hope is alive.

  He began to think about survival.

  Janie wanted Homo Gestalt to acquire a moral system so that such as Hip Barrows would not get crushed. But she wanted her Gestalt to thrive as well; she was a part of it. My hand wants me to survive, my tongue, my belly wants me to survive.

  Morals: they’re nothing but a coded survival instinct!

  Aren’t they? What about the societies in which it is immoral not to eat human flesh? What kind of survival is that?

  Well, but those who adhere to morality survive within the group. If the group eats human flesh, you do too.

  There must be a name for the code, the set of rules, by which an individual lives in such a way as to help his species—som
ething over and above morals.

  Let’s define that as the ethos.

  That’s what Homo Gestalt needs: not morality, but an ethos. And shall I sit here, with my brains bubbling with fear, and devise a set of ethics for a superman?

  I’ll try. It’s all I can do.

  Define:

  Morals: Society’s code for individual survival. (That takes care of our righteous cannibal and the correctness of a naked man in a nudist group.)

  Ethics: An individual’s code for society’s survival. (And that’s your ethical reformer: he frees his slaves, he won’t eat humans, he “turns the rascals out.”)

  Too pat, too slick; but let’s work with ’em.

  As a group, Homo Gestalt can solve his own problems. But as an entity:

  He can’t have a morality, because he is alone.

  An ethic then. “An individual’s code for society’s survival.” He has no society; yet he has. He has no species; he is his own species.

  Could he—should he choose a code which would serve all of humanity?

  With the thought, Hip Barrows had a sudden flash of insight, completely intrusive in terms of his immediate problem; yet with it, a load of hostility and blind madness lifted away from him and left him light and confident. It was this:

  Who am I to make positive conclusions about morality, and codes to serve all of humanity?

  Why—I am the son of a doctor, a man who chose to serve mankind, and who was positive that this was right. And he tried to make me serve in the same way, because it was the only rightness he was sure of. And for this I have hated him all my life … I see now, Dad, I see!

  He laughed as the weight of old fury left him forever, laughed in purest pleasure. And it was as if the focus was sharper, the light brighter, in all the world, and as his mind turned back to his immediate problem, his thought seemed to place its fingers better on the rising undersurface, slide upward toward the beginnings of a grip.

  The door opened. Janie said, “Hip—”

  He rose slowly. His thought reeled on and on, close to something. If he could get a grip, get his fingers curled over it … “Coming.”

  He stepped through the door and gasped. It was like a giant greenhouse, fifty yards wide, forty deep; the huge panes overhead curved down and down and met the open lawn—it was more a park—at the side away from the house. After the closeness and darkness of what he had already seen it was shocking but it built in him a great exhilaration. It rose up and up and up rose his thought with it, pressing its fingertips just a bit higher….

  He saw the man coming. He stepped quickly forward, not so much to meet him as to be away from Janie if there should be an explosion. There was going to be an explosion; he knew that.

  “Well, Lieutenant. I’ve been warned, but I can still say—this is a surprise.”

  “Not to me,” said Hip. He quelled a surprise of a different nature; he had been convinced that his voice would fail him and it had not. “I’ve known for seven years that I’d find you.”

  “By God,” said Thompson in amazement and delight. It was not a good delight. Over Hip’s shoulder he said, “I apologize, Janie. I really didn’t believe you until now.” To Hip he said, “You show remarkable powers of recovery.”

  “Homo sap’s a hardy beast,” said Hip.

  Thompson took off his glasses. He had wide round eyes, just the color and luminescence of a black-and-white television screen. The irises showed the whites all the way around; they were perfectly round and they looked as if they were just about to spin.

  Once, someone had said, Keep away from the eyes and you’ll be all right.

  Behind him Janie said sharply, “Gerry!”

  Hip turned. Janie put up her hand and left a small glass cylinder, smaller than a cigarette, hanging between her lips. She said, “I warned you, Gerry. You know what this is. Touch him and I bite down on it—and then you can live out the rest of your life with Baby and the twins like a monkey in a cage of squirrels.”

  The thought, the thought—“I’d like to meet Baby.”

  Thompson thawed; he had been standing, absolutely motionless, staring at Janie. Now he swung his glasses around in a single bright circle. “You wouldn’t like him.”

  “I want to ask him a question.”

  “Nobody asks him questions but me. I suppose you expect an answer too?”

  “Yes.”

  Thompson laughed. “Nobody gets answers these days.”

  Janie said quietly, “This way, Hip.”

  Hip turned toward her. He distinctly felt a crawling tension behind him, in the air, close to his flesh. He wondered if the Gorgon’s head had affected men that way, even the ones who did not look at her.

  He followed her down to a niche in the house wall, the one which was not curved glass. In it was a crib the size of a bathtub.

  He had not known that Baby was so fat.

  “Go ahead,” said Janie. The cylinder bobbed once for each of her syllables.

  “Yes, go ahead.” Thompson’s voice was so close behind him that he started. He had not heard the man following him at all and he felt boyish and foolish. He swallowed and said to Janie, “What do I do?”

  “Just think your question. He’ll probably catch it. Far as I know he receives everybody.”

  Hip leaned over the crib. Eyes gleaming dully like the uppers of dusty black shoes caught and held him. He thought, Once this Gestalt had another head. It can get other telekines, teleports. Baby: Can you be replaced?

  “He says yes,” said Janie. “That nasty little telepath with the corncob—remember?”

  Thompson said bitterly, “I didn’t think you’d commit such an enormity, Janie. I could kill you for that.”

  “You know how,” said Janie pleasantly.

  Hip turned slowly to Janie. The thought came closer, or he went high and faster than it was going. It was as if his fingers actually rounded a curve, got a barest of purchases.

  If Baby, the heart and core, the ego, the repository of all this new being had ever been or done or thought—if Baby could be replaced, then Homo Gestalt was immortal!

  And with a rush, he had it. He had it all.

  He said evenly, “I asked Baby if he could be replaced; if his memory banks and computing ability could be transferred.”

  “Don’t tell him that!” Janie screamed.

  Thompson had slipped into his complete, unnatural stillness. At last he said, “Baby said yes. I already know that. Janie, you knew that all along, didn’t you?”

  She made a sound like a gasp or a small cough.

  Thompson said, “And you never told me. But of course, you wouldn’t. Baby can’t talk to me; the next one might. I can get the whole thing from the Lieutenant, right now. So go ahead with the dramatics. I don’t need you, Janie.”

  “Hip! Run! Run!”

  Thompson’s eyes fixed on Hip’s. “No,” he said mildly, “don’t run.”

  They were going to spin; they were going to spin like wheels, like fans, like … like …

  Hip heard Janie scream and scream again and there was a crunching sound. Then the eyes were gone.

  He staggered back, his hand over his eyes. There was a gabbling shriek in the room, it went on and on, split and spun around itself. He peeped through his fingers.

  Thompson was reeling, his head drawn back and down almost to his shoulderblades. He kicked and elbowed backward. Holding him, her hands over his eyes, her knee in the small of his back, was Bonnie, and it was from her the gabbling came.

  Hip came forward running, starting with such a furious leap that his toes barely touched the floor in the first three paces. His fist was clenched until pain ran up his forearm and in his arm and shoulders was the residual fury of seven obsessive years. His fist sank into the taut solar plexus and Thompson went down soundlessly. So did the Negro but she rolled clear and bounced lithely to her feet. She ran to him, grinning like the moon, squeezed his biceps affectionately, patted his cheek and gabbled.

  “An
d I thank you!” he panted. He turned. Another dark girl, just as sinewy and just as naked, supported Janie who was sagging weakly. “Janie!” he roared. “Bonnie, Beanie, whoever you are—did she …”

  The girl holding her gabbled. Janie raised her eyes. They were deeply puzzled as she watched him come. They strayed from his face to Gerry Thompson’s still figure. And suddenly she smiled.

  The girl with her, still gabbling, reached and caught his sleeve. She pointed to the floor. The cylinder lay smashed under their feet. A slight stain of moisture disappeared as he watched. “Did I?” repeated Janie. “I never had a chance, once this butterfly landed on me.” She sobered, stood up, came into his arms. “Gerry … is he …”

  “I don’t think I killed him,” said Hip and added, “yet.”

  “I can’t tell you to kill him,” Janie whispered.

  “Yes,” he said. “Yes, I know.”

  She said, “It’s the first time the twins ever touched him. It was very brave. He could have burned out their brains in a second.”

  “They’re wonderful. Bonnie!”

  “Ho.”

  “Get me a knife. A sharp one with a blade at least so long. And a strip of black cloth, so-by-so.”

  Bonnie looked at Janie. Janie said, “What—”

  He put his hand on her mouth. Her mouth was very soft. “Sh.”