Supermen: Tales of the Posthuman Future

by Gardner Dozois

  "What are you talking about?"

  "She fell in love with him."

  "I don't understand."

  "Alethea fell in love with Thaddeus."

  "But she was already in love with Thaddeus."

  "Think about what I've said."

  "Ben," Andre said after a moment. "Thaddeus and Ben were not the same person."

  "It was a very melodramatic situation."

  "Ben lost his love to… another version of himself."

  "The new, improved Ben was born in Thaddeus. Of course he would be the one Alethea loved. The only problem was, the old Ben was still around."

  "God," Andre said. "How—"

  "Peculiar?"

  "How very peculiar."

  Molly stood up and went to her window. She traced a line along the clean glass with her finger, leaving a barely visible smudge. The light was even and clean in Connacht. It was very nearly perfect if what you wanted was accurate illumination. Andre gazed at the shape of Molly against the light. She was beautiful in outline.

  "Let me tell you, so was the solution they came up with, the three of them," Molly said. "Peculiar."

  "Alethea would become like Thaddeus."

  "How did you guess?"

  "It has a certain logic. There would be the new Alethea, and there would be the old Alethea left for Ben."

  "Yes," said Molly. "A logic of desperation. It only left out one factor."

  "Alethea's heart."

  "That's right. She loved Thaddeus. She no longer loved Ben. Not in the same way." Molly turned to face him, but Andre was still blinded by the light streaming in. "But she let them go ahead with it. And for that, I can never forgive her."

  "Because she wanted to be a LAP."

  "More than anything. More than she loved Ben. More than she loved Thaddeus. But I supposed she was punished for it. They all were."

  "How did she get around the screening? I mean, her condition should preclude—"

  "You know Ben. Thaddeus and Ben decided they wanted it to happen. They are very smart and persuasive men. So very smart and persuasive."

  Andre got up and stood beside her in the window, his back to the light. It was warm on his neck.

  "Tell me," he said. He closed his eyes and tried only to listen, but then he felt a touch and Molly was holding his hand.

  "I am Molly," she said. "I'm the aspect. All my converts and pellicle layers are Molly— all that programming and grist— it's me, it's Molly, too. The woman you once loved. But I'm all along the Diaphany and into the Met. I'm wound into the outer grist. I watch."

  "What do you watch?"

  "The sun. I watch the sun. One day I'm going to paint it, but I'm not ready yet. The more I watch, the less ready I feel. I expect to be watching for a long time." She squeezed his hand gently. "I'm still Molly. But Ben wasn't Thaddeus. And he was. And he was eaten up with jealousy, but jealousy of whom? He felt he had a right to decide his own fate. We all do. He felt he had that right. And did he not? I can't say."

  "It's a hard question."

  "It would never have been a question if it hadn't been for Alethea Nightshade."

  "What happened?" he asked, eyes still closed. The warm pressure of her hand. The pure light on his back. "Were you there?"

  "Ben drove himself right into Thaddeus's heart, Andre. Like a knife. It might as well have been a knife."

  "How could he do that?"

  "I was there in Elysium when it happened," she said.

  "On Mars?"

  "On Mars. I was on the team, don't you know? Aesthetic consultant. I was hired on once again."

  Andre opened his eyes and Molly turned to him. In this stark light, there were crinkles around her lips, worry lines on her brow. The part of her that was here.

  We have grown older, Andre thought. And pretty damn strange.

  "It's kind of messy and… organic… at first. There's a lab near one of the steam vents where Ben was transmuted. There's some ripping apart and beam splitting at the quantum level that I understand is very unsettling for the person undergoing the process. Something like this happens if you're a multiple and you ever decide to go large, by the way. It's when we're at our most vulnerable."

  "Thaddeus was there when Alethea underwent the process?"

  "He was there. Along with Ben."

  "So he was caught up in the integration field. Everyone nearby would be," Andre said. "There's a melding of possible futures."

  "Yes," said Molly. "Everyone became part of everyone else for that instant."

  "Ben and Thaddeus and Alethea."

  "Ben understood that his love was doomed."

  "And it drove him crazy?"

  "No. It drove him to despair. Utter despair. I was there, remember? I felt it."

  "And at that instant, when the integration field was turned on—"

  "Ben drove himself into Thaddeus's heart. He pushed himself in where he couldn't be."

  "What do you mean, couldn't be?"

  "Have you ever heard the stories of back when the merced effect was first discovered, of the pairs of lovers and husbands and wives trying to integrate into one being?"

  "The results were horrific. Monsters were born. And died nearly instantly."

  Andre tried to imagine what it would be like if his pellicle or his convert presence were not really him. If he had to live with another presence, an other, all the time. The thing about a pellicle was that it never did anything the whole person didn't want to do. It couldn't. It would be like a wrench in your toolbox rebelling against you.

  Molly walked over to the painting and gave it an appraising look, brushed something off a corner of the canvas. She turned, and there was the wild spatter of the Pollock behind her.

  "There was an explosion," Molly said. "All the aspects there were killed. Alethea wasn't transmuted yet. We don't think she was. She may have died in the blast. Her body was destroyed."

  "What about you?"

  "I was in the grist. I got scattered, but I reformed quickly enough."

  "How was Thaddeus instantiated there at the lab?"

  "Biological grist with little time-propagating nuclei in his cells. He looked like a man."

  "Did he look like Ben?"

  "Younger. Ben was getting on toward forty." Molly smiled wanly and nodded as if she'd just decided something. "You know, sometimes I think that was it."

  "What?"

  "That it wasn't about Thaddeus being a god at all. It was about him looking like he was nineteen. Alethea had a soft spot for youth."

  "You're young."

  "Thank you, Andre. You were always so nice to me. But you know, even then my aspect's hair was going white. I have decided, foolishly perhaps, never to grow myself a new body."

  There she stood with her back against the window, her body rimmed with light. Forget all this. Forget about visions and quests. He put his hands on her shoulders and looked into her fractal eyes.

  "I think you are beautiful," he said. "You will always be beautiful to me."

  They didn't leave the studio. Molly grew a bed out of the floor. They undressed one another timidly. Neither of them had been with anyone for a long time. Andre had no lover on Triton.

  She turned from him and grew a mirror upon the floor. Just like the full-size one she used to keep in their bedroom. Not for vanity. At least, not for simple vanity. She got on her hands and knees over it and looked at herself. She touched a breast, her hair. Touched her face in the mirror.

  "I can't get all the way into the frame," she said. "I could never do a self-portrait. I can't see myself anymore."

  "Nobody ever could," Andre said. "It was always a trick of the light."

  Almost as if it had heard him, the day clicked off, instantly, and the studio grew pitch-dark. Connacht was not a place for sunsets and twilight.

  "Seven o'clock," Molly said. He felt her hand on his shoulder. His chest. Pulling him onto her until they were lying with the dark mirror beneath them. It wouldn't break. Molly's grist wouldn't
let it.

  He slid into her gently. Molly moved beneath him in small spasms.

  "I'm all here," she told him after a while. "You've got all of me right now."

  In the darkness, he pictured her body.

  And then he felt the gentle nudge of her pellicle against his, in the microscopic dimensions between them.

  Take me, she said.

  He did. He swarmed her with his own pellicle, and she did not resist. He touched her deep down and found the way to connect, the way to get inside her there. Molly a warm and living thing that he was surrounding and protecting.

  And, for an instant, a vision of Molly Index as she truly was:

  Like— and unlike— the outline of her body as he'd seen it in the window, and the clear light behind her, surrounding her like a white-hot halo. All of her, stretched out a hundred million miles. Concentrated at once beneath him. Both and neither.

  "You are a wonder, Molly," he said to her. "It's just like always."

  "Exactly like always," she said, and he felt her come around him, and felt a warm flash traveling along the skin of the Diaphany— a sudden flush upon the world's face. And a little shiver across the heart of the solar system.

  Later in the dark, he told her the truth.

  "I know he's alive. Ben didn't kill him; he only wounded him."

  "And how do you know that?"

  "Because Ben wasn't trying to kill him. Ben was trying to hurt him."

  "My question remains."

  "Molly, do you know where he is?"

  At first he thought she was sleeping, but finally she answered. "Why should I tell you that?"

  Andre breathed out. I was right, he thought. He breathed back in, trying not to think. Trying to concentrate on the breath.

  "It might make the war that's coming shorter," he said. "We think he's the key."

  "You priests?"

  "Us priests."

  "I can't believe there's going to be a war. It's all talk. The other LAPs won't let Amés get away with it."

  "I wish you were right," he said. "I truly do."

  "How could Thaddeus be the key to a war?"

  "He's entangled in our local timescape. In a way, Thaddeus is our local timescape. He's imprinted on it. And now I think he's stuck in it. He can't withdraw and just be Ben. Never again. I think that was Ben's revenge on himself. For taking away Alethea Nightshade."

  Another long silence. The darkness was absolute.

  "I should think you'd have figured it out by now, in any case," she said.

  "What?"

  "Where he went."

  Andre thought about it, and Molly was right. The answer was there.

  "He went to the place where all the fugitive bits and pieces of the grist end up," Molly said. "He went looking for her. For any part of her that was left. In the grist."

  "Alethea," Andre said. "Of course the answer is Alethea."

  Bender

  The bone had a serial number that the grist had carved into it, 7sxq688N. TB pulled the bone out of the pile in the old hoy where he lived and blew through one end. Dust came out the other. He accidentally sucked in and started coughing until he cleared the dried marrow from his windpipe. It was maybe a thigh bone, long like a flute.

  "You were tall, 7sxq," TB said to it. "How come you didn't crumble?"

  Then some of TB's enhanced grist migrated over to the bone and fixed the broken grist in the bone and it did crumble in his hands, turn to dust, and then to less than dust to be carried away and used to heal Jill's breastbone and mend her other fractures.

  But there is too much damage even for this, TB thought. She's dying. Jill is dying and I can't save her.

  "Hang on there, little one," he said.

  Jill was lying in the folds of her sack, which TB had set on his kitchen table and bunched back around her. He looked in briefly on her thoughts and saw a dream of scurry and blood, then willed her into a sleep down to the deeper dreams that were indistinguishable from the surge and ebb of chemical and charge within her brain— sleeping and only living and not thinking. At the same time, he set the grist to reconstructing her torn-up body.

  Too late. It was too late the moment that doe rat was finished with her.

  Oh, but what a glory of a fight!

  I set her to it. I made her into a hunter. It was all my doing, and now she's going to die because of it.

  TB couldn't look at her anymore. He stood up and went to make himself some tea at the kitchen's rattletrap synthesizer. As always, the tea came out of synth tepid. TB raked some coals from the fire and set the mug on them to warm up a bit, then sat back down, lit a cigarette, and counted his day's take of rats.

  Ten bagged and another twenty that he and Bob had killed between them with sticks. The live rats scrabbled about in the containing burlap, but they weren't going to get out. Rats to feed to Jill. You shouldn't raise a ferret on anything other than its natural prey. The ferret food you could buy was idiotic. And after Jill ate them, he would know. He would know what the rats were and where they came from. Jill could sniff it out like no other. She was amazing that way.

  She isn't going to eat these rats. She is going to die because you took a little scrap of programming that was all bite and you gave it a body and now look what you've done.

  She didn't have to die like this. She could have been erased painlessly. She could have faded away to broken code.

  Once again, TB looked long and hard into the future. Was there any thing, any way? Concentrating, he teased at the threads of possible futures with a will as fine as a steel-pointed probe. Looking for a silver thread in a bundle of dross. Looking for the world where Jill lived through her fight. He couldn't see it, couldn't find it.

  It had to be there. Every future was always there, and when you could see them, you could reach back into the past and effect the changes to bring about the future that you wanted.

  Or I can.

  But I can't. Can't see it. Want to, but can't, little Jill. I am sorry.

  For Jill to live was a future so extreme, so microscopically fine in the bundle of threads, that it was, in principle, unfindable, incomprehensible. And it if he couldn't comprehend it, to make it happen was impossible.

  And of course he saw where almost all of the threads led.

  Jill would be a long time dying. He could see that clearly. He could also see that he did not have the heart to put her down quickly, put her out of her misery. But knowing this fact did not take any special insight.

  How could I have come to care so much for a no-account bundle of fur and coding out here on the ass-end of nowhere?

  How could I not, after knowing Jill?

  Two days it would take, as days were counted in the Carbuncle, before the little ferret passed away. Of course it never really got to be day. The only light was the fetid bioluminescence coming off the heaps of garbage. A lot of it was still alive. The Carbuncle was in a perpetual twilight that was getting on toward three hundred years old. With the slow decay of organic remnants, a swamp had formed. And then the Bendy River, which was little more than a strong current in the swamp, endlessly circulating in precession with the spin of the module. Where was the Carbuncle? Who cares? Out at the end of things, where the tendrils of the Met snaked into the asteroid belt. It didn't matter. There wasn't a centrifuge here to provide gravity for people. Nobody cared about whoever lived here. The Carbuncle was spun— to a bit higher than Earth-normal, actually— in order to compact the garbage down so that humanity's shit didn't cover the entire asteroid belt.

  The big garbage sluice that emptied into the Carbuncle had been put into place a half century ago. It had one-way valves within it to guard against backflow. All the sludge from the inner system came to the Carbuncle, and the maintenance grist used some of it to enlarge the place so that it could dump the rest. To sit there. Nothing much ever left the Carbuncle, and the rest of the system was fine with that.

  Somebody sloshed into the shallow water outside the hoy and cursed. It was th
e witch, Gladys, who lived in a culvert down the way. She found the gangplank, and TB heard her pull herself up out of the water. He didn't move to the door. She banged on it with the stick she always carried that she said was a charmed snake. Maybe it was. Stranger things had happened in the Carbuncle. People and grist combined in strange ways here, not all of them comprehensible.