Supermen: Tales of the Posthuman Future (39 page)

Here, I thought, when I had had a chance to weigh up this news, was a
true
marriage of life and death, the like of which I had never dreamed. Here was the promise of a future renewal of the war between man and death— not this time for the small prize of the human mind, but for the larger prize of the universe itself.

In time,
Shiva
's last message warned, spores of this new kind of death-life must and
would
reach our own solar system, whether it took a million years or a billion; in the meantime, all humankinds must do their level best to purge the worlds of other stars of its vile empire, in order to reclaim them for real life, for intelligence and for evolution— always provided, of course, that a means could be discovered to achieve that end.

When the sub delivered me safely back to Severnaya Zemlya, I did not stay long in my hotel room. I went outdoors, to study the great ice sheet which had been there since the dawn of civilization, and to look southward, toward the places where newborn glaciers were gradually extending their cold clutch further and further into the human domain. Then I looked upward, at the multitude of stars sparkling in their bed of endless darkness. I felt an
exhilaratingly paradoxical sense of renewal. I knew that although there was nothing for me to do for now, the time would come when my talent and expertise would be needed again.

Someday it will be my task to compose
another
history, of the next war which humankind must fight against Death and Oblivion.

It might take me a thousand or a million years, but I'm prepared to be patient.

Robert Reed sold his first story in 1986 and quickly established himself as a frequent contributor to
The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction and Asimov's Science Fiction,
as well as selling many stories to
Science Fiction Age, Universe, New Destinies, Tomorrow, Synergy, Starlight,
and elsewhere.

Reed may be one of the most prolific of today's young writers, particularly at short-fiction lengths, seriously rivaled for that position only by authors such as Stephen Baxter and Brian Stableford. And— also like Baxter and Stableford— he manages to keep up a very high standard of quality while being prolific, something that is not at all easy to do. Reed stories such as "The Utility Man," "Birth Day," "Blind," "A Place With Shade," "THe Toad of Heaven," "Stride," "The Shape of Everything," "Guest of Honor," "Decency," "Waging Good," and "Killing the Morrow," among at least a half-dozen others equally as strong, count as among some of the best short work produced by anyone in the eighties and nineties; many of them were recently collected in his long-overdue first collection
, The Dragons of Springplace
. Nor is he nonprolific as a novelist, having turned out eight novels since the end of the eighties, including
The Lee Shore, The Hormone Jungle, Black Milk, The Remarkables, Down the Bright Way, Beyond the Veil of Stars, An Exaltation of Larks,
and
Beneath the Gated Sky.
His most recent book is a new novel,
Marrow.
Reed lives in Lincoln, Nebraska
.

Reed is confident enough in the richness of his imagination to feel comfortable writing stories that take place in the far future, and much of his output is set in milieus millions of years removed from the time we know. Like some other young writers of the nineties, including Paul J. McAuley and Stephen Baxter, Reed is producing some of the most inventive and colorful of Modern Space Opera, stuff of a scale so grand and played out across such immense vistas of time that it makes the "superscience" writing of the thirties look pale and conservative by comparison. His sequence of novellas for Asimov's, for instance, including "Sister Alice," "Brother Perfect," "Mother Death," "Baby's Fire," and "Father to the Man," detail internecine warfare and intricate political intrigues between families of posthuman immortals with powers and abilities so immense that they are for all intents and purposes gods. Or as in the sequence of stories unfolding in
F&SF, Science Fiction Age, and Asimov's,
including "The Remoras," "Aeon's Child," "Marrow," and "Chrysalis," that involve the journeyings of an immense spaceship the size of Jupiter, staffed by dozens of exotic alien races, that is engaged in a multimillion-year circumnavigation of the galaxy.

Here, in one of the best of the "Sister Alice" series, he treats us to a vivid and colorful story that catapults us deep into the heart of the posthuman future, sweeping us along on a fast-paced cosmic chase of mind-boggling scale and scope, with the destiny of worlds at stake.…

1

"Bless the dead!"

—Perfect, in conversation

It was the ultimate toast— "Bless the dead!" —and despite appearances, the toastmaster was human. His scaly arm lifted a stone mug, punctuating the word "dead," then his wide mouth managed both a smile and the appropriate bitterness, viper eyes skipping from face to face, knowing exactly what they wanted to find.

Patrons repeated the blessing with sloppy, communal voices.

No one needed to ask, "Which dead?"

The tavern's longest wall was tied to a feed from the Core, from one of the doomed worlds. People saw a night sky that should have held thousands of closely packed suns, bright and dazzling; but instead there was a single blistering smear of white light, every lesser glow left invisible. The light was an explosion. Greater than a thousand supernovae, it was melting worlds and lifeforms, its heat and hard radiation barely diminished by a century's relentless growth.

Unseen against that fierce light, people were being killed.

And people watched them die— people on the Earth, like here, and throughout the galaxy. For some it was an entertainment, grisly but fascinating. But many found no thrill, watching the carnage for deeply personal reasons.

The tavern was in a poor, crowded district. Its patrons belonged to the local race— human frames embellished with reptilian features, a calculated cold-bloodedness allowing them to thrive on lean, impoverished diets. Yet they were far from simple people. They had a long and durable and thoroughly shared history. Pooling their meager savings, they once sent a chosen few to the Core as colonists. A world was terraformed specifically for them— a lizardly Eden that these patrons could see whenever they wished, on any universal wall. But that world had been close to the explosion's source, and it was obliterated in an evening. There were too many colonists for too few starships, and almost everyone died, boiling in a rain of charged particles and enchanted plasmas.

Some of these very people had watched the cataclysm from this tavern. And from that awful night came a ritual, a new custom, several minutes of each evening dedicated to the blessed dead.

Viper eyes saw something.

The toastmaster's head locked in place, a wry little smile emerging.

"To Alice!" he shouted.

The wall changed feeds, suddenly showing a plainly dressed woman sitting alone in a white-walled prison cell, and the tavern, in one ringing voice, cried out:

"To Alice!"

"Give the bitch a long small horrible life." And with that, the toastmaster drained his mug, enjoying the raucous approval.

"Horrible," voices repeated, mugs striking mugs.

Then others, in drunken rebellion, roared, "Kill the bitch…!"

It was a delicious, much-practiced game.

But the toastmaster broke tradition by taking a slow step forward, wading into the crowd, lifting his emptied mug as his clear, almost songful voice shouted, "To the Families!"

"The Families!" people roared, in mocking admiration.

Then, from the back, a shrill voice cried out, "Kill them, too!"

Nobody repeated those dangerous words, but there was a pause, glacial and strange, nobody defending the Families. All the good
they
had done humanity in its myriad forms… and not so much as a kind word delivered as a whisper, in reflex.

The Ten Million Year Peace wavered on the brink of collapse.

Standing among the tightly packed bodies, the toastmaster fixed his eyes on a young man— dull black scales fringed with red; a crimson forehead merging with a sharp golden crest— and he touched the young man with his free hand, feeling the human face with the tips of his long, cool fingers.

Barely flinching, the patron watched as the toastmaster said, "The Families will pay for every crime."

"Every crime," was the chorus. "Make them pay!"

The young man whispered his response, a half-syllable slow.

The toastmaster appeared amused, but the voice was ice, saying, "Make them weak and poor. Like us."

In an instant, the tavern went silent.

The young man straightened his back, glancing at the wall and the imprisoned woman, blue eyes wishing for instructions of inspiration. A flat voice muttered, "Yes."

"Yes, what?"

"Make the Families weak, and poor—"

A claw-shaped blade struck from behind, piercing his skin at the neck, cutting between scales but with no trace of pain. No blood spurted from the surgical wound. The young man spun around, knocking the knife out of the assailant's hand. But more blades appeared, slicing at his legs and butt and back, and despite strength enough to shatter a hundred arms, Ord stopped resisting, going rigid, standing like a statue while his false skin and cool meat were peeled away, falling in heaps around his ankles.

His true face lay exposed, small cuts healing in a moment. It was much like the face on the wall— the prisoner's face— only younger, and male, the red hair cut short, warm blue eyes watching the world with amazement and a palpable pity.

No face in the galaxy was better known.

"A baby Chamberlain," the patrons muttered, in horror and shock and with a rising visceral rage.

Ord lifted a hand. With remorse, he cried out, "I am sorry—"

They rushed him, using knives and stone mugs and teeth, hacking at his genuine flesh, pulling it from his strong bright bones. Then, with a mob's idiocy of purpose, they soaked the still-living bones and brain in the tavern's inventory, then sabotaged the fire-suppression system, setting a blaze that was
a thousand times too cold to murder the weakest Chamberlain. But it didn't matter. For years and years, that tavern would lay gutted, left as a monument, and people who hadn't been there would claim otherwise, telling how on that night, in a small but significant way, they had helped mete out justice, butchering and cooking one of Alice's own little brothers…!

2

Oh, I can tell you about your sister.…

Every human hope and historic truth, every foible and foolishness you can name, plus even the greenest prehuman emotions… each of them, without exception, have big homes inside Alice's dear soul…!

—Perfect, in conversation

"First," said a voice, "tell me why it happened."

The voice had no source. It rose from the warm blackness, sounding a little angry and thoroughly stern. Ord barely heard his own voice saying, "It's because I left the estates. That's why."

"You did, but that's a wrong answer. Try again."

"Lyman? Is that you—?"

"Try again," boomed the voice. "Why did this happen?"

Ord remembered the attack and his brief, manageable pains. "They saw through my disguise. I must have made a mistake—"

"Many, but none of consequence. Your costume was well-made, and you were well-prepared to wear it."

"Then what went wrong?"

"I am asking you. Think now."

Ord tried to swallow without a mouth. He was home again, he assumed. An attack on him would cause a variety of alarms to sound, and it would be a simple matter for a brother to recover his parts. Yet what if the alarms had failed? His comatose mind could have been taken somewhere secure, unlikely as that seemed. This could be the beginning of a lengthy interrogation, a Chamberlain enemy wanting to pull the secrets out of him. Or, more likely, merely wishing to torture him.

"How did that gruesome drunk find you, Ord?"

"He had to be warned," the boy replied.

"By a sibling, perhaps."

"Never, no." Brothers and sisters might have guessed his plans, but they wouldn't have let others punish him.

"And who would?"

Possibilities swirled in the blackness, one name standing out against the others.

And the brotherly voice said, "I concur. Yes."

A moment later, without warning, Ord had a face and eyes, waking to find himself whole again, new flesh over his salvaged bones. He was sprawled out on his own bed. Even with fresh, unfocused eyes, he recognized his room. Lyman stood in the doorway; Ord knew him by his long hair and the slump-shouldered, tight-faced appearance. Standing over the bed was an older, un-
introduced brother, a hand lifting from Ord's chest, a damp, warm discharge making the new heart shudder, then surge. "A long while since your body died. Am I right?"

"Yes, sir." The brother had to know his complete medical history.

"Well, we pulled you from the ruins." The Chamberlain face showed a large, self-congratulatory smile. "And we have filed criminal charges, plus civil suits. You broke our rules by leaving home, but then again, they broke everyone's rules by attempting murder." A weighty pause, then he asked, "If people maim, can they expect no retribution?"

"No, sir."

From the doorway, Lyman asked, "Who warned the lizards?"

They weren't lizards, thought Ord. It made him uneasy to hear his brother demeaning them.

"We know the culprit," said their ancient brother. His expression changed by the moment, bouncing between menace and amusement. "And I'm sure our little brother will do what is necessary, when it comes time."

They were clones, all derived from the Chamberlain patriarch. Ord and Lyman were babies, their ages counted in years and centuries. But their sibling might be thousands of millennia old, his face composed of substances more intricate than any flesh. Ancient ones like him were coming home again. After millions of years of wandering the Milky Way, suddenly they had vital work to do here: diplomatic missions; planning sessions; the allocation of the Family's enormous resources. But repairing a damaged baby… well, that had to be a trivial chore.…