Supermen: Tales of the Posthuman Future

by Gardner Dozois

  "It's a hard thing to describe. But the point is, this wasn't anything they'd worked out; it was natural to them. They'd evolved that way." He looked at Averdor again. "The navigation was tricky around there during the swarming season."

  Averdor failed to rise to the bait.

  "I see; the point is well taken," Hoqqueah said, nodding with grotesque thoughtfulness. "But let me point out to you, Captain, that being already able to do a thing doesn't aid you in thinking of it as something that needs to be perfected. Oh, I've seen races like the one you describe, too— races with polymorphism, sexual alteration of generation, metamorphosis of the insect life-history type, and so on. There's a planet named Lithia, about forty light-years from here, where the dominant race undergoes complete evolutionary recapitulation after birth— not before it, as men do. But why should any of them think of form-changing as something extraordinary, and to be striven for? It's one of the commonplaces of their lives, after all."

  A small bell chimed in the greenhouse. Hoqqueah got up at once his movements precise and almost graceful despite his tubbiness. "Thus endeth the day," he said cheerfully. "Thank you for your courtesy, Captain."

  He waddled out. He would, of course, be back tomorrow.

  And the day after that.

  And the next day— unless the crewmen hadn't tarred and feathered the whole bunch by then.

  If only, Gorbel thought distractedly, if only the damned Adapts weren't so quick to abuse their privileges! As a delegate of the Colonization Council, Hoqqueah was a person of some importance, and could not be barred from entering the greenhouse except in an emergency. But didn't the man know that he shouldn't use the privilege each and every day, on a ship manned by basic-form human beings most of whom could not enter the greenhouse at all without a direct order?

  And the rest of the pantropists were just as bad. As passengers with the technical status of human beings, they could go almost anywhere in the ship that the crew could go— and they did, persistently and unapologetically, as though moving among equals. Legally, that was what they were— but didn't they know by this time that there was such a thing as prejudice? And that among common spacemen the prejudice against their kind— and against any Adapted Man— always hovered near the borderline of bigotry?

  There was a slight hum as Averdor's power chair swung around to face the captain. Like most Rigellian men, the lieutenant's face was lean and harsh, almost like that of an ancient religious fanatic, and the starlight in the greenhouse hid nothing to soften it; but to Captain Gorbel, to whom it was familiar down to its last line, it looked especially forbidding now.

  "Well?" he said.

  "I'd think you'd be fed to the teeth with that freak by this time," Averdor said without preamble. "Something's got to be done, Captain, before the crew gets so surly that we have to start handing out brig sentences."

  "I don't like know-it-alls any better than you do," Gorbel said grimly. "Especially when they talk nonsense— and half of what this one says about spaceflight is nonsense, that much I'm sure of. But the man's a delegate of the Council. He's got a right to be up here if he wants to."

  "You can bar anybody from the greenhouse in an emergency— even the ship's officers."

  "I fail to see any emergency," Gorbel said stiffly.

  "This is a hazardous part of the galaxy— potentially, anyhow. It hasn't been visited for millennia. That star up ahead has nine planets besides the one we're supposed to land on, and I don't know how many satellites of planetary size. Suppose somebody on one of them lost his head and took a crack at us as we went by?"

  Gorbel frowned. "That's reaching for trouble. Besides, the area's been surveyed recently at least once— otherwise we wouldn't be here."

  "A sketch job. It's still sensible to take precautions. If there should be any trouble, there's many a Board of Review that would call it risky to have unreliable, second-class human types in the greenhouse when it breaks out."

  "You're talking nonsense."

  "Dammit, Captain, read between the lines a minute," Averdor said harshly. "I know as well as you do that there's going to be no trouble that we can't handle. And that no reviewing board would pull a complaint like that on you if there were. I'm just trying to give you an excuse to use on the seals."

  "I'm listening."

  "Good. The Indefeasible is the tightest ship in the Rigellian navy, her record's clean, and the crew's morale is almost a legend. We can't afford to start gigging the men for their personal prejudices— which is what it will amount to, if those seals drive them to breaking discipline. Besides, they've got a right to do their work without a lot of seal snouts poking continually over their shoulders."

  "I can hear myself explaining that to Hoqqueah."

  "You don't need to," Averdor said doggedly. "You can tell him, instead, that you're going to have to declare the ship on emergency status until we land. That means that the pantrope team, as passengers, will have to stick to their quarters. It's simple enough."

  It was simple enough, all right. And decidedly tempting.

  "I don't like it," Gorbel said. "Besides, Hoqqueah may be a know-it-all, but he's not entirely a fool. He'll see through it easily enough."

  Averdor shrugged. "It's your command," he said. "But I don't see what he could do about it even if he did see through it. It'd be all on the log and according to regs. All he could report to the Council would be a suspicion— and they'd probably discount it. Everybody knows that these second-class types are quick to think they're being persecuted. It's my theory that that's why they are persecuted, a lot of the time at least."

  "I don't follow you."

  "The man I shipped under before I came on board the Indefeasible," Averdor said, "was one of those people who don't even trust themselves. They expect everybody they meet to slip a knife into them when their backs are turned. And there are always other people who make it almost a point of honor to knife a man like that, just because he seems to be asking for it. He didn't hold that command long."

  "I see what you mean," Gorbel said. "Well, I'll think about it."

  *

  But by the next ship's day, when Hoqqueah returned to the greenhouse, Gorbel still had not made up his mind. The very fact that his own feelings, were on the side of Averdor and the crew made him suspicious of Averdor's "easy" solution. The plan was tempting enough to blind a tempted man to flaws that might otherwise be obvious.

  The Adapted Man settled himself comfortably and looked out through the transparent metal. "Ah," he said. "Our target is sensibly bigger now, eh, Captain? Think of it: in just a few days now, we will be— in the historical sense— home again."

  And now it was riddles! "What do you mean?" Gorbel said.

  "I'm sorry; I thought you knew. Earth is the home planet of the human race, Captain. There is where the basic form evolved."

  Gorbel considered this unexpected bit of information cautiously. Even assuming that it was true— and it probably was; that would be the kind of thing Hoqqueah would know about a planet to which he was assigned— it didn't seem to make any special difference in the situation. But Hoqqueah had obviously brought it out for a reason. Well, he'd be trotting out the reason, too, soon enough; nobody would ever accuse the Altarian of being taciturn.

  Nevertheless, he considered turning on the screen for a close look at the planet. Up to now he had felt not the slightest interest in it.

  "Yes, there's where it all began," Hoqqueah said. "Of course at first it never occurred to those people that they might produce pre-adapted children. They went to all kinds of extremes to adapt their environment instead, or to carry it along with them. But they finally realized that with the planets, that won't work. You can't spend your life in a space suit, or under a dome, either.

  "Besides, they had had form trouble in their society from their earliest days. For centuries, they were absurdly touchy over minute differences in coloring and shape, and even in thinking. They had regime after regime that tried to impose its own conc
ept of the standard citizen on everybody, and enslaved those who didn't fit the specs."

  Abruptly, Hoqqueah's chatter began to make Gorbel uncomfortable. It was becoming easier and easier to sympathize with Averdor's determination to ignore the Adapted Man's existence entirely.

  "It was only after they'd painfully taught themselves that such differences really don't matter that they could go on to pantropy," Hoqqueah said. "It was the logical conclusion. Of course, a certain continuity of form had to be maintained, and has been maintained to this day. You cannot totally change the form without totally changing the thought processes. If you give a man the form of a cockroach, as one ancient writer foresaw, he will wind up thinking like a cockroach, not like a human being. We recognized that. On worlds where only extreme modifications of the human form would make it suitable— for instance, a planet of the gas giant type— no seeding is attempted. The Council maintains that such worlds are the potential property of other races than the human, races whose psychotypes would not have to undergo radical change in order to survive there."

  Dimly, Captain Gorbel saw where Hoqqueah was leading him, and he did not like what he saw. The seal-man, in his own maddeningly indirect way, was arguing his right to be considered an equal in fact as well as in law. He was arguing it, however, in a universe of discourse totally unfamiliar to Captain Gorbel, with facts whose validity he alone knew and whose relevance he alone could judge. He was, in short, loading the dice, and the last residues of Gorbel's tolerance were evaporating rapidly.

  "Of course there was resistance back there at the beginning," Hoqqueah said. "The kind of mind that had only recently been persuaded that colored men are human beings was quick to take the attitude that an Adapted Man— any Adapted Man— was the social inferior of the 'primary' or basic human type, the type that lived on Earth. But it was also a very old idea on the Earth that basic humanity inheres in the mind, not in the form.

  "You see, Captain, all this might still have been prevented, had it been possible to maintain the attitude that changing the form even in part makes a man less of a man than he was in the 'primary' state. But the day has come when that attitude is no longer tenable— a day that is the greatest of all moral watersheds for our race, the day that is to unite all our divergent currents of attitudes toward each other into one common reservoir of brotherhood and purpose. You and I are very fortunate to be on the scene to see it."

  "Very interesting," Gorbel said coldly. "But all those things happened a long time ago, and we know very little about this part of the galaxy these days. Under the circumstances— which you'll find clearly written out in the log, together with the appropriate regulations— I'm forced to place the ship on emergency alert beginning tomorrow, and continuing until your team disembarks. I'm afraid that means that henceforth all passengers will be required to stay in quarters."

  Hoqqueah turned and arose. His eyes were still warm and liquid, but there was no longer any trace of merriment in them.

  "I know very well what it means," he said. "And to some extent, I understand the need— though I had been hoping to see the planet of our birth first from space. But I don't think you quite understand me, Captain. The moral watershed of which I spoke is not in the past. It is now. It began the day that the Earth itself became no longer habitable for the so-called basic human type. The flowing of the streams toward the common reservoir will become bigger and bigger as word spreads through the galaxy that Earth itself has been seeded with Adapted Men. With that news will go a shock of recognition— the shock of realizing that the 'basic' types are now, and have been for a long time, a very small minority, despite their pretensions."

  Was Hoqqueah being absurd enough to threaten— an unarmed, comical seal-man shaking a fist at the captain of the Indefeasible? Or—

  "Before I go, let me ask you this one question, Captain. Down there is your home planet, and my team and I will be going out on its surface before long. Do you dare to follow us out of the ship?"

  "And why should I?" Gorbel said.

  "Why, to show the superiority of the basic type, Captain," Hoqqueah said softly. "Surely you cannot admit that a pack of seal-men are your betters, on your own ancestral ground!"

  He bowed and went to the door. Just before he reached it, he turned and looked speculatively at Gorbel and at Lieutenant Averdor, who was staring at him with an expression of rigid fury.

  "Or can you?" he said. "It will be interesting to see how you manage to comport yourselves as a minority. I think you lack practice."

  He went out. Both Gorbel and Averdor turned jerkily to the screen, and Gorbel turned it on. The image grew, steadied, settled down.

  When the next trick came on duty, both men were still staring at the vast and tumbled desert of the Earth.

  Slow Tuesday Night

  R. A. LAFFERTY

  R. A. Lafferty started writing in 1960, at the relatively advanced age (for a new writer, anyway) of forty-six, and in the years before his retirement in 1987, he published some of the freshest and funniest short stories ever written, almost all of them dancing on the borderlines between fantasy, science fiction, and the tall tale in its most boisterous and quintessentially American of forms.

  Lafferty has published memorable novels that stand up quite well today— among the best of them are Past Master, The Devil Is Dead, The Reefs of Earth, the historical novel Okla Hannali, and the totally unclassifiable The Fall of Rome— but it is stories like "Narrow Valley," "Thus We Frustrate Charlemagne," "Hog-Belly Honey," "The Hole on the Corner," "All Pieces of a River Shore," "Among the Hairy Earthmen," "Seven Day Terror," "Continued on Next Rock," "All But the Words," and many others, that would establish his reputation, all clearly demonstrating his characteristic virtues: folksy exuberance, a singing lyricism of surprising depth and power, outlandish imagination, a store of offbeat erudition matched only by Avram Davidson, and a strong, shaggy sense of humor unrivaled by anyone.

  His short work has been gathered in the landmark collection Nine Hundred Grandmothers, as well as in Strange Doings, Does Anyone Else Have Something Further to Add?, Golden Gate and Other Stories, and Ringing the Changes. Lafferty retired from writing in 1987, at age seventy-three. His other books include the novels Archipelago, My Heart Leaps Up, Fourth Mansions, Arrive At Easterwine, Space Chantey, and The Flame Is Green. Lafferty won the Hugo Award in 1973 for his story "Eurema's Dam," and in 1990 received the World Fantasy Award, the prestigious Life Achievement Award. His most recent books are the collections Lafferty in Orbit and Iron Star. He lives in Oklahoma.

  Here, with characteristic brio and elan, he shows us that if you're worried about the accelerating rate of Future Shock, just hang on a moment— you ain't see nothing yet!

  *

  A panhandler intercepted the young couple as they strolled down the night street.

  "Preserve us this night," he said as he touched his hat to them, "and could you good people advance me a thousand dollars to be about the recouping of my fortunes?"

  "I gave you a thousand last Friday," said the young man.

  "Indeed you did," the panhandler replied, "and I paid you back tenfold by messenger before midnight."

  "That's right, George, he did," said the young woman. "Give it to him, dear. I believe he's a good sort."

  So the young man gave the panhandler a thousand dollars, and the pan handler touched his hat to them in thanks and went on to the recouping of his fortunes.

  As he went into Money Market, the panhandler passed Ildefonsa Impala, the most beautiful woman in the city.

  "Will you marry me this night, Ildy?" he asked cheerfully.

  "Oh, I don't believe so, Basil," she said. "I marry you pretty often, but tonight I don't seem to have any plans at all. You may make me a gift on your first or second, however. I always like that."

  But when they had parted she asked herself: "But whom will I marry tonight?"

  The panhandler was Basil Bagelbaker, who would be the richest man in the world within an hour and a
half. He would make and lose four fortunes within eight hours; and these not the little fortunes that ordinary men acquire, but titanic things.

  When the Abebaios block had been removed from human minds, people began to make decisions faster, and often better. It had been the mental stutter. When it was understood what it was, and that it had no useful function, it was removed by simple childhood metasurgery.

  Transportation and manufacturing had then become practically instantaneous. Things that had once taken months and years now took only minutes and hours. A person could have one or several pretty intricate careers within an eight-hour period.

  Freddy Fixico had just invented a manus module. Freddy was a Nyctalops, and the modules were characteristic of these people. The people had then divided themselves— according to their natures and inclinations— into the Auroreans, the Hemerobians, and the Nyctalops— or the Dawners, who had their most active hours from four A.M. till noon; the Day-Flies, who obtained from noon to eight P.M.; and the Night-Seers, whose civilization thrived from eight P.M. to four A.M. The cultures, inventions, markets and activities of these three folk were a little different. As a Nyctalops, Freddy had just begun his working day at eight P.M. on a slow Tuesday night.

  Freddy rented an office and had it furnished. This took one minute, negotiation, selection and installation being almost instantaneous. Then he invented the manus module; that took another minute. He then had it manufactured and marketed; in three minutes it was in the hands of key buyers.

  It caught on. It was an attractive module. The flow of orders began within thirty seconds. By ten minutes after eight every important person had one of the new manus modules, and the trend had been set. The module began to sell in the millions. It was one of the most interesting fads of the night, or at least the early part of the night.