Supermen: Tales of the Posthuman Future (42 page)

A child's clubhouse stood on the border of the Sanchex and Chamberlain estates, in a dead-end valley. Built with lumber by boys and girls barely old enough to swing hammers, it had stood empty for almost a century, the Golds disbanded not long after Alice's arrival. That was natural, the children too old for the club's games. Yet a new generation should have come and burned this structure with an appropriate solemnity, then built their own. It hadn't happened because every Family, in view of the times, had delayed their next generations; and the old place had fallen into a dishonorable entropy, its roof collapsing, its wooden floor buckling, and the childlike signatures on the far wall becoming soft and imprecise with many species of rot.

Ord barely saw his own name, second in rank.

Below Ravleen's, of course. Sanchexes
always
led the Golds.

He was looking for Xo's signature when a badger emerged from a hole in the floor, its thick, low body reminding him of a jailer's, a sudden
hiss
aimed straight for him. It could see him, obviously. And he growled in turn, causing it to slip out the back door, toward what should have been a high raw wall of slick granite. But the wall had vanished, replaced with a long valley and
a meandering brook, plus trees not as tall as seemed right, or as broad, or generally as healthy, their leaves in autumnal colors too, but all too drab and haphazard to belong in a Chamberlain wood.

"Hello?" Ord called.

Birds flew in terror. Save for some kind of jaybird that perched on a high branch, cursing Ord for trying to steal its acorns.

"Hello?"

No human answered.

A narrow dung-marked game trail led across the brook, and here he made deep bootprints that filled with swirling brown water. Now and again he shouted, "Hello!" A noisy indifference filled the woods. Finally Ord thought to say, "I'm looking for someone," and then, "Brother Perfect," and his answer came in the form of a skin-clad figure stepping from the shadows, almost from underfoot.

"And who is doing this looking?" the figure asked.

He was a Chamberlain, Ord saw. No telling which brother, but he felt disappointment and a jumble of doubts.

"And if you don't know who
you
are," the brother continued, "maybe you can remember who
sent
you here. How about it, my boy?"

He was Ord, and nobody sent him, he claimed. The brother appeared shorter than him, but stocky in a strong, comfortably fattened way, his red hair matted and tied into a ponytail, a thin red-and-snow beard obscuring the famous Chamberlain jaw. It wasn't an impressive body, conjured or not. But the trousers and heavy vest were remarkable, made from sewn skins and mended with dirty lengths of gut and hemp. A leather belt held several elegant stone tools. One pale hand held a spear by its blond shaft, its long Folsom point drawing pointed stars in the air between them.

"And who are you?" asked Ord.

"You wanted someone named Perfect. Maybe that's me."

But no Chamberlain had that name. It would be cruel to saddle their own with such an outrageous boast—

"You know every name, do you?"

"In order of birth, yes. And I know a little of everyone's biography."

"What a gruesome waste!" The Stone Age figure broke into a laugh, shaking his head in a blurring motion. "Which anal-retentive child of Ian dreamed up that waste of neural capacities?"

Ord couldn't guess who.

The brother cursed, laughed, and said, "So you're the Baby."

"Pardon?"

"The Baby. That's your nickname." A pause. "Are you familiar with the concept of nicknames—?"

"Yes."

"Then I've given you enough of a clue. Come. Hurry on now, Baby."

Ord tried to ask where he was, where they were going, and why the woods looked wrong. But the brother, whoever he was, had walked away, bulling his way through the tangled landscape. Ord had to run in pursuit, catching him as they splashed across the brook. "Is Perfect a nickname?"

"Oftentimes." The left hand gestured, its two smallest fingers missing, the wagging stumps showing no sign of regrowth. "Have you ever known someone you'd like to call Perfect?"

Maybe.

"To make them angry, of course. Am I right?"

Ord ignored the question. "I deserve to know where we are—"

"In the estate, of course. Embedded inside the granite." He kicked and stomped his way through a wall of vegetation, thorns leaving bloody sketches on his exposed arms. "A clever little house of mine, don't you think?"

"Why am I here?"

"No, Baby. It's my turn to ask the question."

He hated that name.

"Humans," said the brother, "have lived for twenty million years. As apes, then as simple souls. And finally, less simple. But now, if you were pressed to decide, when would you claim that we had reached our peak? Our grand climax? Today, perhaps? Last week? When?"

"Who are you?"

A sideways glance and grin, then the brother stepped through a wall of golden leaves, branches rushing back into place, conspiring to make him vanish.

Ord hesitated, wondering if he should flee.

From behind the leaves, a deep, rough Chamberlain voice said, "Humans. Peak. Give a shot, Baby!"

Stepping through the wall, Ord saw an abrupt hillside and a simple cave worn into its face. The rocks weren't false granite; they were limestone. The limestone was encrusted with fossilized crinoids, thousands of the flowery animals laid into the fine, dead sediments. This was a caveman's camp, the air stink of old fires and tainted game, and the brother seemed at home, setting his spear against the cave's broad mouth, then turning to say:

"My given name? It is Thomas. Thomas Chamberlain."

No. Impossible…!

"And since you won't guess, I'll tell you my choice for our species' crowning moment." Thomas laughed easily, then said, "They were the final years of the final Ice Age, when we were expanding across new continents and wild, unmapped seas." Another laugh. "You look doubtful, Baby. But consider this: There weren't many of us, and each of us was important. A few million modified apes, each of us armed with stone and wood, and our cunning, and our mobile little cultures… and we came to rule the entire green world…!"

Trembling, Ord stared at his ancient brother.

"And you know what the world was then, don't you?" A quick, disarming smile. "It was the universe. It was
everything
. A vast globe encompassing every imaginable beauty, and it was set inside a sea of ink and tiny, unimaginable stars. And it was
ours
." A wave of the maimed hand. Then, "Do you know my opinion? All the history since, every human venture… everything has been one long and frustrating and absurd attempt to regain those glory days!"

And with that pronouncement, Thomas broke into a thunderous laugh, a
sudden rain of golden leaves falling on them, then swirling, vainly fighting the urge to settle, to die.

5

Alice gave me that lance of a nickname.

I was a new adult, proud of my augmentation and promise, and she was a very young, relentlessly mouthy child. I would talk at length about all the good I would be doing— for the Family; for all people; for all time— and she'd growl at me. She would say, "Oh, you think you're the perfect Chamberlain. The very best. But you're the same as us, brother. Brother Perfect. Oh, yes, you are. You are, you are…!"

—Perfect, in conversation

Alice— the great and infamous and bankrupt sister— was the twelfth Chamberlain. Ord, in contrast, was the twenty-four thousand, four hundred and eleventh pearl on the string. And he knew that Thomas was Ian's eighth clone, meaning his designation was Nine, which in turn meant that he was almost exactly as old as Alice and Ord combined. If this was indeed Thomas, of course. Which seemed a preposterous idea, a thousand history lessons recalled in an instant, and this skin-clad figure nothing like any of them.

Chamberlains were terraformers, by and large. But Thomas was an oddity who built little but loved to explore— a godlike wanderer whose passion and genius were to find and befriend new alien species.

Uninterested in alliances of trading links, Thomas left those blessings for others. The bloodless Nuyens, for instance. By the time Nuyens would flock to some newly charted system, eager for technologies and clear profits, Thomas would have struck out into the wilderness again, chasing radio squawks and free oxygen signatures until he found another wondrous species. Or found nothing. Because as any halfway educated person knew, intelligence arose infrequently in the universe, and imperfectly, and judging by the assorted war-killed worlds, it was a fundamentally perishable form of life, too.

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.