Supermen: Tales of the Posthuman Future

by Gardner Dozois

  But the Milky Way had been explored in full now, from its Core to its faint far ends, and Thomas had gone elsewhere. "You're exploring the Andromeda Galaxy," Ord told the caveman. "The Families sent a mission. They left more than a million years ago."

  "They left, but did I?" The brother chuckled.

  Ord said nothing.

  "The truth? At the last possible instant, I suffered a chaotic change of desire. Instead of embarking on a great adventure, I decided to chase privacy and self-reflection. Which is my right as a sentient organism, and don't give me that disappointed glare."

  He didn't know he was glaring, stumbling into an apology—

  —and Thomas interrupted him, every affront forgotten. A cackling laugh was followed by an offer of meat, dried and hard and frosted with limestone grit. "Mammoth," he warned. "Chew harder," he advised. Then, "What's wrong? Doesn't the flavor intrigue?"

  Not even a little, no. But Ord made himself eat, as if to prove something. When the last gob of leather was in his belly, dissolving in acids and microchines, Ord felt the confidence to say, "I don't believe you are Thomas."

  "And why not?"

  "I've been around Alice, and this doesn't feel the same. Being with you, I mean." There wasn't the sense of vast energies and intellect, though Ord mentioned neither quality by name. Nor did he say that Thomas looked bizarre and acted the same, laughing too often and never twice with the same sound, the oddest things amusing him without fail.

  Like Ord's doubts, for instance.

  The brother turned red-faced, laughing for a solid minute. Then he gasped, coughed into his maimed hand, and asked, "How is dear Alice? Is her trial just about finished?"

  "You don't know?"

  "On the whole," he confessed, "current events bore me."

  Incredulous, Ord couldn't summon any response.

  "My guess is that they found her guilty."

  "Yes."

  "Good for them." The smile was winsome, bittersweet. "I told her, told her, told her not to fuck around with that nasty work. But you've met our sister. You know how she can be—"

  "She's jailed. They've stripped her of everything."

  "As is right," said the possible Thomas.

  "But then she escaped— I don't know how— and came to see me…!"

  Delight shone in the blue-gray eyes. "And she wants your help, does she? Some conjured chore just for you?"

  "I have to save something. I don't know what." A long pause, then he added, "Brother Perfect is supposed to help me."

  "Oh, is he?"

  Ord nodded, not certain how to respond.

  "Alice appears out of nothingness, expecting obedience." A grimace, a leering smile. "What they should have carved off our sister are her bossy pretenses, I think."

  Perhaps so.

  "Can you give me one good guess as to your mission?"

  "Don't you know?" Ord asked, in horror.

  Thomas stepped closer, his maimed hand lifting, touching the boy on the temple, the whole fingers dipping into his scalp for a chilling instant. Then, with a slow, careful voice, he asked, "Do you wish to help, or don't you? Yes or no." A pause. "Yes and we embark. No and I send you straight home."

  "Embark to where?"

  "All things considered, not far."

  Ord saw a cracked tooth in the narrow smile. "I want to help," he confessed. Then, "If it accomplishes something good—"

  "Tell me yes, tell me no. I'll leave the worthiness for others."

  Ord said, "Yes."

  He said it three times, his voice strengthening, acquiring something that resembled confidence. And Thomas began turning with the first yes, vanishing into his cave without a sound or a backward glance.

  Ord followed.

  *

  Thomas was working in the gloomy half-light. The cave walls were adorned with charcoal bison and ochre ponies. Ord touched one of the stiff-legged ponies, deciding that with the same tools he would be at least as good a painter as his brother.

  Thomas was cramming gear into a leather knapsack, no room left for the smallest charm. With a creaking of rope and skin, he lifted the pack to his shoulders, making adjustments, grimacing with conviction as he remarked, "You're better than me at many things, I suppose."

  Like Alice, he could read a boy's mind.

  Waving his injured hand, he said, "See? No new fingers growing."

  The stumps were blunt and calloused, all right.

  "You could make them if you wanted," Ord objected.

  "Ah, but then I'd forget to be careful when I find a dire wolf hanging in one of my snares." A wink. "Scars are reminders, Baby. They remind me that dire wolves can be tricky bastards."

  An adult Chamberlain— any adult— could look inside an animal, measuring its health and intentions. Particularly if the animal was part of an elaborate illusion built by that adult. But what adult wanted to live inside an ugly cave, much less hunt with snares and spears? Ord's best guess was that this caveman existence helped mask Thomas's presence inside the estates.

  "Perfect," said his brother, again reading thoughts. "That's Alice's name for me, and it's good enough for us."

  A blink and nod. Then Ord said, "Then I'm not Baby."

  "Fair enough." And with that Perfect walked into the sunshine, at a brisk pace, grabbing his spear and singing with a loud, out-of-key wail.

  Ord followed, ignoring the landscape. It was all an illusion, and he assumed they were walking toward someplace close— as promised— and answers would come in short order. He barely noticed his brother's sour songs, concentrating on his excuses for disappearing. Imagining Lyman, he tried half a dozen stories, each involving the old clubhouse. He had sneaked off to meet a girlfriend; why not? He'd already had a variety of adolescent affairs, mostly with friends from the Golds. Wasn't that kind of subterfuge permitted, even encouraged? For a long happy while, Ord imagined meeting Ravleen at the clubhouse. Sanchexes were great warriors and inspired lovers, it was said, and he practiced his lustful daydream until it tasted real, until there was a hint of boredom clinging to it.

  Thomas— Perfect, he reminded himself— took them up a mountainside, through trees noticeably shorter, and barer, as the afternoon passed. The summit was sharp and raw, no mansion built upon it. They climbed past a single greenish boulder, then dropped into a grove of blue-black spruces. With stone tools they cut boughs for bedding. With flint and dried wood they made a sputtering fire, and Perfect held his imperfect hands to it, catching some portion of its tiny heat.

  Ord asked why he lived this way. "You sing out of key. You don't paint particularly well. And you get cold." He listed the items as if they were symptoms of disease. "And you won't even regenerate a simple finger, will you?"

  "I'm not cold," Perfect protested. "And when I am, I'll pull my robe out of my pack."

  Ord was comfortable. As the sun set, his flesh generated its own internal fire. Yet he held his hands to Perfect's fire, remarking, "Alice wouldn't live this way."

  A laugh, insane and infuriating.

  Then, "From what you've said, Alice might be thrilled to live this well now."

  That wasn't what Ord meant, and both knew it.

  "Let me tell you about our dear sister." Perfect pulled dried meat from his pack, offering none to Ord. "Every fancy skill, every energy source, all that godly garb… Alice wanted them. Always, always. Everyone's that way, in their fashion. But she's about the worst, and I'd like to think, with a good Chamberlain modesty, that I'm the best. I acquire only those talents that I absolutely need, and if I'm wrong, I give them away again. To Alice, in some cases."

  "Augmenting your voice… is that too fancy…?"

  "Oh, I sing, and I like singing. I just do it badly." Another laugh while he chewed on the inedible mammoth. "Everything I do I do with joy and within my limits, and that's all I want."

  "But you didn't even know about the trial," Ord complained.

  "If something truly important happens, I'll hear about it." A little wink. "But you
're right, I'm not tied to the universal networks. And I don't know ten million languages. My mathematics are useful, no more. My senses are good enough, no more. And my strengths fit the job of the moment." A soft, slow laugh, then he added, "In case you haven't noticed, my humor is simple. Maybe even a little crude. Which suits my needs fine, thank you."

  But why? Ord kept thinking. Why are you different?

  "My moment of enlightenment?" Perfect waited for his brother's eyes, then said, "Eons ago, I was sitting beside an alien sea, in my best godly fashion, and this fellow happened to stroll past me. Do you know about the Brongg?"

  Bipeds, vaguely fishlike. A home world with methane seas and water-ice continents. They were the oldest known intelligent species, and Brother Thomas was the first human to meet them.

  "Very good," the caveman offered, giving a little chuckle. "Anyway, this little fellow was walking Brongg-fashion, meaning syrupy-slow. When he saw me, he gave me greetings and stopped to chat— the Brongg are great talkers— and eventually I learned his identity. He was famous. Ancient beyond belief. I was a baby, barely a million years old, and of all the creatures I have ever met, he seemed the most genuinely happy. A billion years of happiness walk ing on the beach, carrying nothing but a simple ice lance— he was fishing, Ord— and I've always held that lesson very close to my heart."

  They were a cold, cold species, Ord knew. The Brongg had wondrous technologies, but they did little with them. They traveled sparingly, reproduced slowly, and were as alien and bizarre as anything humans had ever found. How could they bring enlightenment?

  Perfect didn't answer that thought. Rising, he pulled the promised robe from his pack, the fur rich and glossy, sewn together from smaller furs with a certain artless skill.

  "Why did you come back to the Earth?"

  His brother lay down beside the fire, a bent arm serving as a pillow. "I was asked to come," he muttered. "Someone appeared without warning, gave me my marching orders, then framed it as a request before she vanished again."

  Alice.

  Perfect gave a sleepy nod, eyes beginning to close.

  But before he could sleep, or whatever state it was, he heard one last question from a confused little brother. "Are we still in the estates? Because I'm forbidden to leave them—"

  "Watch the sky," Perfect advised.

  Ord obeyed, his heated breath rising toward the night's first stars. They were the right stars in the right places, but where were the planets? And the starships coming and going? Glancing to his left, he saw the green boulder on the summit become a smooth green globe, and the mountain beneath it evaporated, and the stars brightened and multiplied in the sudden vacuum… and a thousand lessons in terraforming told Ord what he was seeing.

  Gazing at the green world, he whispered, "Neptune."

  Against all reason, in one afternoon he and Perfect had hiked their way to the chilled edge of the solar system.

  6

  You will be stripped of possessions, money and mind, and each of your works will be assessed on a case-by-case basis. Worlds terraformed in good faith, by legal means, will be spared. But illegal worlds will be sought out and destroyed by whatever means are deemed humane.…

  —from Alice's sentencing

  Ord watched Neptune, wonderstruck by its presence. Because it was genuine, he sensed. No illusions involved. This was the modern Neptune, terraformed in increments by many people, including Chamberlains.

  Including Alice, in her youth.

  Technical details buoyed up out of his augmented memory. Small gas giants of this class had their volatile gases shattered, hydrogen sequestered inside the deep core while metals and silicates were pulled up in its place. Airborne continents were grown, floating on giant vacuum bubbles. The new atmosphere was nitrogen and helium, sweet oxygen, and the vital trace gases. Light and heat came from fusion, each world capable of fending for itself. An area many times Earth's was made habitable, at a profit; and with modern methods, an Alice-class human could finish the essential work in less than five thousand years.

  Why were they here? he asked himself.

  What was special about Neptune?

  But despite his questions and the lousy bed, Ord felt himself drifting off to sleep, dark and dreamless, then woke when the blunt end of a spear was jabbed into his ribs.

  "Time to leave," said a distant voice, with urgency. "They know you're missing, and you're making them afraid."

  The sky was cobalt blue, another false sun washing away the stars. Ord rose, attempting to ask every question that he had thought up last night. Words came in a rush, then he faltered. Then Perfect was walking and Ord was walking beside his brother, step for step; and a sensation, bizarre and indescribable, made him mutter, "What's happened to me?"

  "You've been altered, a bit. Alice began the work, and I did some tinkering last night." The profile was weathered, sober. "We've rebuilt you as quickly as possible, under these circumstances—"

  "What's wrong with me?"

  "If you're like me, nothing." A bleak, oversized laugh. "The truth? Part of you is a starship. You're built from dark matter and magic, and your engines are an exotic inertialess drive. Your hull is invisible, we can hope. Legs and lungs, and your skin, are projections based on your own expectations." A second smaller laugh. "Despite appearances, we're actually moving at very nearly lightspeed."

  Ord snapped, "I don't believe you."

  "That's probably best, all things considered."

  For an instant, Ord felt the man speaking to him in many voices, most of them in convoluted technical languages that some new, unexpected part of him ingested without fuss, without hesitation. But what made him panic was the sudden sensation of his true self: Huge and ghostly, suffused with liquid energies beyond almost any human's experience.

  He tried to walk slower, and couldn't.

  "For the moment," said Perfect, "I will operate your legs."

  Ord crossed nonexistent arms on his facsimile chest. "I want to know where we're going."

  Perfect squinted, as if he could see their destination. In the illusion, they were marching down a verdant mountainside, birds and other phantoms calling out as they passed.

  "This is illegal," the boy gasped.

  "Immoral," his brother agreed. "And cruel. And dangerous, too." That brought genuine pleasure, bubbling and warm. "But when a famous criminal came to you, did you tell the authorities? When she slipped you a mysterious object, did you say, 'Look here, everyone! Look what Alice gave me!'?"

  Ord was weeping. Sobbing.

  "For now," said Perfect, "we're traveling to the Oort cloud."

  "Then where?"

  "Let's reach the cloud first," his brother replied. "That way, if you're caught, you can claim to have been kidnapped—"

  "I am kidnapped!"

  "Good attitude. Keep it up."

  Ord never would have agreed if he'd known… if he'd been given any hint of what was involved… crimes accomplished, grave danger implied.… an insane journey away from the safety and comfort of home…!

  A five-fingered hand patted Ord on the back.

  "You would have balked, yes. But out of fear and ignorance. That's why I framed the question as I did: 'Do you wish to help?' You do or you don't, and both of us know you do. You can't help but want to help, which is an honored old Chamberlain curse."

  The boy tried to collapse. And couldn't. He felt limp, half-dead and wracked with miseries, uttering a great long sob before asking the perfectly reasonable question:

  "Why me?"

  "My question too." A weighty pause, then another useless pat on the back. "Perhaps Alice wants you because you're the baby. Perhaps it's as simple as that."

  Ord barely heard him, his mind collapsing in on itself.

  "We Chamberlains love closure, that sense of being done. That's why we build exceptional worlds. Durable, full-bodied biospheres equal to three billion years of raw evolution."

  What was he saying?

  "The last Chamber
lain is sent on a great mission by one of the first." Perfect clucked his tongue but didn't laugh. "It's closure, and it feels right, and maybe that's all there is to that. Despite its source, the decision could be that simple."

  *

  They crossed billions of kilometers, and the country, befitting some odd logic, grew colder and drier, forests replaced with open steppe populated with herds of extinct game. Giant bison and woolly mammoths grazed beneath a weakening sun. In the distance, looming like mountains, was a blue-white glacial mass. Sometimes Ord noticed human hunters in the distance, some of them walking, some standing in one place, watching. Watching for us, he suddenly realized. They were symbols meant to mark other ships, but even the nearest of them couldn't find the brothers.

  Ord quit weeping, forcing himself out of self-pity. In a choking voice, he asked, "Why do you travel this way?"

  "In ancient times," said Perfect, "travelers onboard steamships and starships would pin photographs and holos to their cabin walls. To remind them of comfortable places, of course. To give their eyes something other than empty water and space."

  Ord found himself listening, glad for the voice.

  "Space bores me," said his incredible brother. "Hard vacuums and the ancient cold play on my nerves, if you want the truth."

  Ord felt the vacuum surrounding him. It was a thin chill stew of virtual particles, and it felt like a light winter breeze.

  He asked, "How long were you hiding in the estate?"

  "I followed Alice home from the Core, a few years afterward."

  "Because she wanted you to come? Is that the only reason?"

  A mild, quiet laugh, a wisdom implied. "You aren't the only person whom our sister has bewitched."