Supermen: Tales of the Posthuman Future (66 page)

We head down the Bendy, and I keep a lookout for more of those enforcers, but I guess I killed the one they sent this time. I guess they thought one was enough. I can't help but think about where I am going. I can't help but think about leaving the Carbuncle. There's a part of me that has never been outside, and none of me has ever traveled into the outer system. Stray code couldn't go there. You had to pass through empty space. There weren't any cables out past Jupiter.
"I thought you understood why I'm here," TB says. "I can't go."
"You can't go even to save your life, Ben?"
"It wouldn't matter that I saved my life. If there is anything left of Alethea, I have to find her."
"What about the war?"
"I can't think about that."
"You have to think about it."
"Who says?
God? God is a bastard mushroom sprung from a pollution of blood
." TB shakes his head sadly. "That was always my favorite koan in seminary— and the truest one."
"So it's all over?" Andre Sud says. "He's going to catch you."
"I'll hide from them."
"Don't you understand, Ben? He's taking over all the grist. After he does that, there won't be anyplace to hide because Amés will
be
the Met."
"I have to try to save her."
The solution is obvious to me, but I guess they don't see it yet. They keep forgetting I am not really sixteen. That in some ways, I'm a lot older than all of them.
You could say that it is the way that TB made me, that it is written in my code. You might even say that TB has somehow reached back from the future and made this so, made this the way things have to be. You could talk about fate and quantum mechanics.
All these things are true, but the truest thing of all is that I am free. The world has bent and squeezed me, and torn away every part of me that is not free. Freedom is all that I am.
And what I do, I do because I love TB and not for any other reason.
"Ah!" I moan. "My wrist hurts. I think it's broken, TB."
He looks at me, stricken.
"Oh, I'm sorry, little one," he says. "All this talking, and you're standing there hurt."
He reaches over. I put out my arm. In the moment of touching, he realizes what I am doing, but it is too late. I have studied him for too long and I know the taste of his pellicle. I know how to get inside him. I am his daughter, after all. Flesh of his flesh.
And I am fast. So very fast. That's why he wanted me around in the first
place. I am a scrap of code that has been running from security for two hundred years. I am a projection of his innermost longings now come to life. I am a woman and he is the man that made me. I know what makes TB tick.
"I'll look for her," I say to him. "I won't give up until I find her."
"No, Jill—" But it is too late for TB. I have caught him by surprise, and he hasn't had time to see what I am up to.
"TB, don't you see what I am?"
"Jill, you can't—"
"I'm
you
, TB. I'm your love for her. Sometime in the future you have reached back into the past and made me. Now. So that the future can be different."
He will understand one day, but now there is no time. I code his grist into a repeating loop and set the counter to a high number. I get into his head and work his dendrites down to sleep. Then, with my other hand, I whack him on the head. Only hard enough to knock him the rest of the way out.
TB crumples to the floor, but I catch him before he can bang into anything. Andre Sud helps me lay him gently down.
"He'll be out for two days," I say. "That should give you enough time to get him off the Carbuncle."
I stand looking down at TB, at his softly breathing form. What have I done? I have betrayed the one who means the most of me in all creation.
"He's going to be really hungry when he wakes up," I say.
Andre Sud's hand is on my shoulder. "You saved his life, Jill," he says. "Or he saved his own. He saved it the moment he saved yours."
"I won't give her up," I say. "I have to stay so he can go with you and still have hope."
Andre Sud stands with his hand on me a little longer. His voice sounds as if it comes from a long way off, even though he is right next to me. "Destiny's a brutal old hag," he says. "I'd rather believe in nothing."
"It isn't destiny," I reply. "It's love."
Andre Sud looks at me, shakes his head, then rubs his eyes. It is as if he's seeing a new me standing where I am standing. "It is probably essential that you find Alethea, Jill. She must be here somewhere. I think Ben knows that, somehow. She needs to forgive him, or not forgive him. Healing Ben and ending the war are the same thing, but we can't think about it that way."
"I care about TB. The war can go to hell."
"Yes," Andre Sud says, "The war can go to hell."
After a while, I go up on deck to keep a watch out for more pursuit. Molly Index comes with me. We sit together for many hours. She doesn't tell me anything about TB or Alethea, but instead she talks to me about what it was like growing up a human being. Then she tells me how glorious it was when she spread out into the grist and could see so far.
"I could see all the way around the sun," Molly Index says. "I don't know if I want to live now that I've lost that. I don't know how I can live as just a
person
again."
"Even when you are less than a person," I tell her, "you still want to live."
"I suppose you're right."
"Besides, Andre Sud wants to have sex with you. I can smell it on him."
"Yes," Molly Index says. "So can I."
"Will you let him?"
"When the time comes."
"What is it like?" I say.
"You mean with Andre?"
"What is it like?"
Molly Index touches me. I feel the grist of her pellicle against mine and for a moment I draw-back, but then I let it in, let it speak.
Her grist shows me what it is like to make love.
It is like being able to see all the way around the sun.
The next day, Molly Index is the last to say goodbye to me as Makepeace Century's ship gets ready to go. Makepeace Century looks like Gladys if Gladys didn't live in a ditch. She's been trying for years to get Bob to come aboard as ship musician, and that is the price for taking them to Triton— a year of his service. I get the feeling she's sort of sweet on Bob. For a moment, I wonder just who
he
is that a ship's captain should be so concerned with him. But Bob agrees to go. He does it for TB.
TB is so deep asleep he is not even dreaming. I don't dare touch him for fear of breaking my spell. I don't dare tell him goodbye.
There is a thin place in the Carbuncle here, and they will travel down through it to where the ship is moored on the outer skin.
I only watch as they carry him away. I only cry until I can't see him anymore.
Then they are gone. I wipe the tear off my nose. I never have had time for much of that kind of thing.
So what will I do now? I will take the Bendy River all the way around the Carbuncle. I'll find a likely place to sink the hoy. I will set the ferrets free. Bob made me promise to look after his dumb ferret, Bomi, and show her how to stay alive without him.
And after that?
I'll start looking for Alethea. Like Andre Sud said, she must be here somewhere. And if anybody can find her, I can. I will find her.
There is a lot I have to do, and now I've been thinking that I need help. Pretty soon Amés is going to be running all the grist and all the code will answer to him. But there's some code he can't get to. Maybe some of those ferrets will want to stick around. Also, I think it's time I went back to the mulmyard.
It's time I made peace with those rats.
Then Amés had better watch out if he tries to stop me from finding her.
We will bite him.

Tom Purdom made his first sale in 1957, to
Fantastic Universe,
and has subsequently sold to
Analog, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Star,
and most of the major SF magazines and anthologies. He is the author of one of the most unfairly forgotten SF novels of the sixties, the powerful and still-timely
Reduction in Arms,
about the difficulties of disarmament in the face of the mad proliferation of nuclear weapons, as well as such novels as
I Want the Stars, Tree Lord of Imeten, Five Against Arlane,
and
The Barons of Behavior.
In the late eighties, after several years of silence, he launched what amounts to a second career, becoming a frequent contributor to
Asimov's Science Fiction,
where he published a long string of powerful and innovative stories such as "Canaryland," "Romance in Lunar G," "Legacies," "Romance in Extended Time," "Research Project," "Sergeant Mother Glory," "Romance with Phobic Variations," and many others throughout the rest of the eighties and the decade of the nineties. Purdom lives with his family in Philadelphia, where he reviews classical music concerts for a local newspaper and is at work on several new novels
.
Although he made his first sale before some of today's hot new writers were even born, Purdom remains on the cutting edge of speculation about what the posthuman future will be like, and is as much a part of the consensus-building "discussion" now taking place across the whole of the genre as are writers half his age. This is demonstrated in the absorbing novella that follows— a Hugo finalist in 2000— in which we discover that even the enhanced, augmented, and superior (to us!) people who live in the posthuman future may feel the cold wind of obsolescence on the back of their necks.…

*

Morgan's mother and father had given him a state-of-the-art inheritance. It was only state-of-the-art-2117 but they had seen where the world was going. They had mortgaged twenty percent of their future income so they could order a package that included all the genetic enhancements Morgan's chromosomes could absorb, along with two full decades of postnatal development programs. Morgan was in his fifties when his father committed suicide. By that time his father could barely communicate with half the people he encountered in his day-to-day business activities.
Morgan's mother survived by working as a low-level freelance prostitute. The medical technology that was state-of-the-art-2157 could eliminate all the relevant physical effects of aging, and a hidden computer link could guide her responses. For half an hour— as long as no one demanded anything too unusual— she could give her younger customers the illusion they were interacting with someone who was their intellectual and psychological equal. Morgan tried to help her, but there wasn't much he could do. He had already
decided he couldn't survive in a solar system in which half the human population had been born with brains, glands, and nervous systems that were state-of-the-art-2150 and later. He had blocked his mother's situation out of his memory and lived at subsistence level for almost three decades. Every yen, franc, and yuri he could scrape together had been shoved into the safest investments his management program could locate. Then he had taken all his hard-won capital and bought two hundred shares in an asteroid habitat a group of developers had outfitted with fusion reactors, plasma drives, solar sails, and anything else that might make a small island move at nine percent the speed of light. And he and three thousand other "uncompetitive," "under-enhanced" humans had crept away from the solar system. And set off to explore the galaxy.

*

Morgan had lived through three lengthy pairings back in the solar system. Six years after the
Island of Adventure
had begun its slow drift away from the sun, he established a fourth pairing with a woman he had met through the ship's information system. The ship's designers had endowed it with attractive common spaces, complete with parks and cafés, but most of the passengers seemed to prefer electronic socialization during the first years of the voyage. Biographies and lists of interests were filed with the system. Pseudonyms and electronic personalities proliferated. Morgan thought of old stories in which prisoners had communicated by tapping on the walls of their cells.
Savela Insdotter was eleven years younger than Morgan but she was a fully committed member of the EruLabi communion. She used pharmaceutical mental enhancers, but she used them sparingly. Morgan consumed all the mental enhancers his system could accommodate, so his functional intelligence was actually somewhat higher than hers in certain areas.
The foundation of the EruLabi ethos was a revolt against genetic enhancement. In the view of the EruLabi "mentors," the endless quest for intellectual and physical improvement was a folly. Life was supposed to be lived for its own sake, the EruLabi texts declared. Every moment was a gift that should be treasured for the pleasure it brought, not an episode in a quest for mental and physical perfection. The simplest pleasures— touches, languor, the textures of bodies pressed together— were, to the EruLabi, some of the most profound experiences life had to offer.
One of the most important texts in the EruLabi rituals was the words, in ancient Greek, that the Eudoran king had spoken to Odysseus:
Dear to us ever are the banquet and the harp and the dance and the warm bath and changes of raiment and love and sleep
.

*

The
Island of Adventure
had pointed itself at 82 Eridani— a Sol-type star twenty-one light years from the solar system. Eighty-two Eridani was an obvious candidate for a life-bearing planet. A fly-by probe had been launched at the star in 2085— one hundred and eighteen years before Morgan and his fellow emigrants had left their home system. In 2304— just after they had celebrated the first century of their departure— the
Island of Adventure
intercepted a message the probe was sending back to the solar system.
It was the beginning of several years of gloomy debate. The probe had found planets. But none of them looked any more interesting than the cratered rocks and giant iceballs mankind had perused in the solar system.
The third planet from the sun could have been another Earth. It was closer to its sun than Earth was but it could have supported life if it had been the right size. Unfortunately, the planet's mass was only thirty-eight percent the mass of Earth.
Theorists had calculated that a planet needed a mass about forty percent the mass of Earth if it was going to develop an oxygen-rich atmosphere and hold it indefinitely. The third planet was apparently just a little too small. The images transmitted by the probe were drearily familiar— a rocky, airless desert, some grandiose canyons and volcanoes, and the usual assortment of craters, dunes, and minor geological features.
The
Island of Adventure
had set out for 82 Eridani because 82E was a star of the same mass and spectral type as Sol. The second choice had been another star in the same constellation. Rho Eridani was a double star 21.3 light years from the solar system. The two stars in the Rho system orbited each other at a promising distance— seven light hours. With that much separation between them, the theoreticians agreed, both stars could have planets.
When you looked at the sky from the solar system, Rho was a few degrees to the left of 82 Eridani. The
Island of Adventure
was a massive, underpowered rock but it could make a small midcourse correction if its inhabitants wanted to expend some extra reaction mass.