Supermen: Tales of the Posthuman Future (80 page)

and I
had reveled in their experiences, to me they were the antics of children, and I learned nothing new. I resolved to edit the memories when an opportune moment arose.
Severnius, with the etiquette of the time, had averted his gaze during the process of merging. Now he looked up and smiled. "You are ready?"
I stood. We crossed to the converter, and then, before stepping upon the plate, both paused to look up at our destination.
The Moon, riding higher now, and more substantial against the darker sky, gazed down on us with a face altered little since time immemorial. The fact of its immutability, in an age passé with the boundless possibilities of change, filled me with awe.
We converted.

*

The Halls of the Fellowship of the Academy occupied the Sea of Tranquillity, an agglomeration of domes scintillating in the sunlight against the absolute black of the Luna night.
We stepped from the converter and crossed the regolith toward the Academy. Severnius led me into the cool, hushed shade of the domes and through the hallowed halls. He explained that if I agreed to steward the Early, then
the ceremony of acceptance to the Fellowship would follow immediately. I glanced at him. He clearly assumed that I would accept without question.
The idea of ministering to the psychological well-being of an Early, for an indefinite duration, filled me with apprehension.
We came to the interior dome. The sight of the subject within the silver hemisphere, trapped like some insect for inspection, brought forth in me a rush of memories and emotions. Five hundred years ago, I, too, had awoken to find myself within a similar dome. Five hundred years ago, I presume, I had looked just as frightened and bewildered as this Early.
A gathering of Fellows— Academics, Scientists, Philosophers— stood in a semicircle around the dome, watching with interest and occasionally addressing comments to their colleagues. Upon the arrival of Severnius and myself, they made discreet gestures of acknowledgment and departed, some vanishing within their own converters, others choosing to walk.
I approached the skin of the dome and stared.
The Early was seated upon the edge of a low foam-form, his elbows lodged upon his knees, his head in his hands. From time to time he looked up and stared about him, his clasped hands a knotted symbol of the fear in his eyes.
I felt an immediate empathy, a kinship.
Severnius had told me that he had died at the age of ninety, but they had restored him to a soma-type approximately half that age. His physique was lean and well-muscled, but his most striking attribute was his eyes, piercingly blue and intelligent.
I glanced at Severnius, who nodded. I walked around the dome, so that I would be before the Early when I entered, and stepped through the skin of the hemisphere. Even then, my sudden arrival startled him. He looked up, his hands gripping his knees, and the fear in his eyes intensified.
He spoke, but in an accented English so primitive that it was some seconds before I could understand his words.
"Who the hell are you?" he said. "What's happening to me?"
I held up a reassuring hand and emitted pheromones to calm his nerves. In his own tongue, I said, "Please, do not be afraid. I am a friend."
Despite the pheromones and my reassurances, he was still nervous. He stood quickly and stared at me. "What the hell's happening here?"
His agitation brought back memories. I recalled my own awakening, my first meeting with Severnius. He had seemed a hostile figure, then. Humankind had changed over the course of thirty thousand years, become taller and more considerate in the expenditure of motion. He had appeared to me like some impossibly calm, otherworldly creature.
As I must have appeared to this Early.
"Please," I said, "sit down."
He did so, and I sat beside him, a hand on his arm. The touch eased him slightly.
"I'd like to know what's happening," he said, fixing me with his intense, sapphire stare. "I know this sounds crazy, but the last I remember… I was dying. I know I was dying. I'd been ill for a while, and then the hospitalization…"
He shook his head, tears appearing in his eyes as he gazed at his hand— the hand of a man half the age of the person he had been. I reached out and touched his arm, calming him.
"And then I woke up here, in this body. Christ, you don't know what it's like, to inhabit the body of a crippled ninety-year-old, and then to wake up suddenly… suddenly
young
again."
I smiled. I said nothing, but I could well recall the feeling, the wonder, the disbelief; the doubt and then the joy of apprehending the reality of renewal.
He looked up at me, quickly, something very much like terror in his eyes. "I'm alive, aren't I? This isn't some dream?"
"I assure you that what you are experiencing is no dream."
"So this is… Afterlife?"
"You could say that," I ventured. "Certainly, for you, this is an Afterlife." I emitted pheromones strong enough to forestall his disbelief.
He merely shook his head. "Where am I?" he asked in little more than a whisper.
"The time is more than thirty thousand years after the century of your birth."
"Thirty thousand years?" He enunciated each word separately, slowly.
"To you it might seem like a miracle beyond comprehension," I said, "but the very fact that you are here implies that the science of this age can accomplish what in your time would be considered magic. Imagine the reaction of a Stone Age man, say, to the wonders of twentieth-century space flight."
He looked at me. "So… to you I'm nothing more than a primitive—"
"Not at all," I said. "We deem you capable of understanding the concepts behind our world, though it might take a little time." This was a lie— there were many things that would be beyond his grasp for many years, even decades.
Severnius had told me that the subject had evinced signs of mental distress upon learning the disparity between his ability to understand and the facts as they were presented. I would have to be very careful with this subject— if, that was, I accepted the Fellowship.
"So," he said, staring at me. "Answer my question. How did you bring me here?"
I nodded. "Very well…" I proceeded to explain, in terms he might understand, the scientific miracle of Enstating and Enabling. It was a ludicrously simplistic description of the complex process, of course, but it would suffice.
His eyes bored into me. His left cheek had developed a quick, nervous tic. "I don't believe it…"
I touched his arm, the contact calming him. "Please… why would I lie?"
"But how could you possibly recover my memories, my feelings?"
"Think of your childhood," I said, "your earliest memories. Think of your greatest joy, your greatest fear. Tell me, have we succeeded?"
His expression was anguished. "Christ," he whispered. "I can remember everything… everything. My childhood, college." He shook his head in slow
amazement. "But… but my understanding of the way the universe works… it tells me this can't be happening."
I laughed at this, "Come! You are a man of science, a rationalist. Things change: what was taken as written in stone is overturned; theory gives way to established fact, which in turn evolves yet more fundamental theory, which is then verified… and so proceeds the advance of scientific enlightenment."
"I understand what you're saying," he said. "It's just that I'm finding it hard to believe."
"In time," I said, "you will come to accept the miracles of this age."
Without warning, he stood and strode toward the concave skin of the dome. He stared at his reflection, and then turned to face me.
"In time, you say? Just how long have I got?" He lifted his hand and stared at it. "Am I some laboratory animal you'll get rid of once your experiment's through?" He stopped and considered something. "If you built this body, then you must be able to keep it indefinitely—"
He stopped again, this time at something in my expression. I nodded. "You are immortal," I said.
I could see that he was shaken. The tight skin of his face colored as he nodded, trying to come to terms with my casual pronouncement of his new status.
"Thirty thousand years in the future," he whispered to himself, "the world is inhabited by immortals…"
"The galaxy," I corrected him. "Humankind has spread throughout the stars, inhabiting those planets amenable to life, adapting others, sharing worlds with intelligent beings."
Tears welled in his eyes. He fought not to let them spill, typical masculine product of the twentieth century that he was.
"If you did this for me," he said, "then it's within your capability to bring back to life the people I loved, my wife and family—"
"And where would we stop?" I asked. "Would we Enstate and Enable the loved ones of everyone we brought forward?" I smiled. "Where would it end? Soon, everyone who had ever lived would live again."
He failed to see the humor of my words. "You don't know how cruel that is," he said.
"I understand how cruel it seems," I said. "But it is the cruelty of necessity." I paused. I judged that the time was right to share my secret. "You see, I, too, was once like you, plucked from my deathbed, brought forward to this strange and wondrous age, fearful and little comprehending the miracles around me. I stand before you as testament to the fact that you will survive this ordeal, and come to understand."
He stared at me, suspicious. At last he said, "But why…? Why you and me?"
"They, the people of this age, considered us men of importance in our time— men whose contributions to history were steps along the way to the position of preeminence that humankind now occupies. Ours is not to wonder, but to accept."
"So that's all I am— a curiosity? A specimen in some damned museum?"
"Not at all! They will be curious, of course; they'll want to know all about your time… but you are free to learn, to explore, to do with your limitless future what you will— with the guidance and stewardship of a patron, as I, too, was once guided."
The Early walked around the periphery of the dome. He completed a circuit, and then halted and stared at me. "Explore," he said at last, tasting the word. "You said explore? I want to explore the worlds beyond Earth! No— not only the worlds beyond Earth, the worlds
beyond
the worlds you've already explored. I want to break new ground, discover new worlds…" He stopped and looked at me. "I take it that you haven't charted
all
the universe?"
I hesitated. "There are places still beyond the known expanses of space," I said.
"Then I want to go there!"
I smiled, taken by his naïve enthusiasm. "There will be time enough for exploration," I said. "First, you must be copied, so that you can send your other selves out to explore the unexplored. There are dangers—"
He was staring at me in disbelief, but his disbelief was not for what I thought. "Dangers?" he almost scoffed. "What's the merit of exploration if there's no risk?"
I opened my mouth, but this time I had no answer. Something of his primitivism, his heedless, reckless thirst for life which discounted peril and hardship, reminded me of the person I had once been, an age ago.
I considered the next one hundred years, and beyond. I had reached that time of my life when all experience seemed jejune and passé; I had come to the point, after all, where I had even considered Quietus.
To go beyond the uncharted, to endanger oneself in the quest for knowledge, to think the unthinkable…
It was ridiculous— but why, then, did the notion bring tears to my eyes?
I hurried across the dome and took his arm. "Come," I said, leading him toward the skin of the hemisphere.
"Where—?" he began.
But we were already outside the dome, and then through the skin of another, and walking across the silver-gray regolith of the lunar surface.
He stopped and gazed about in wonder. "Christ," he whispered. "Oh, Christ, I never thought…"
"Over here," I said, leading him.
We crossed the plain toward the display, unchanged in thirty thousand years. He stared at the lunar module, stark beneath the unremitting light of the Sun. We stood on the platform encircling the display and stared down at the footprints the first astronauts had laid upon the surface of another world.
He looked at me, his expression beatific. "I often dreamed," he said, "but I never thought I'd ever return."
I smiled. I shared the emotions he experienced then. I knew what it was to return. I recalled the time, not long after my rebirth in this miraculous age, when I had made the pilgrimage to Earth and looked again upon the
cell where over thirty thousand years ago, I, Galileo Galilei, had been imprisoned for my beliefs.
Haltingly, I told Armstrong who I was. We stared up into the dark sky, past the earth and the brilliant Sun, to the wonders awaiting us in the uncharted universe beyond.
We embraced for a long minute, and then turned and retraced our steps across the surface of the Moon toward the domes of the Academy, where Severnius would be awaiting my decision.

Looking back at the century that has just ended, it's obvious that Australian writer Greg Egan was one of the Big New Names to emerge in SF in the nineties, and is probably one of the most significant talents to enter the field in the last several decades. Already one of the most widely known of all Australian genre writers, Egan may well be the best new "hard science" writer to enter the field since Greg Bear, and he is still growing in range, power, and sophistication. In the last few years, he has become a frequent contributor to
Interzone
and
Asimov's Science Fiction,
and has made sales as well as to
Pulphouse, Analog, Aurealis, Eidolon,
and elsewhere. Many of his stories have also appeared in various "Best of the Year" series, and he was on the Hugo Final Ballot in 1995 for his story "Cocoon," which won the Ditmar Award and the
Asimov's
Readers Award. His first novel Quarantine appeared in 1992; his second novel
Permutation City
won the John W. Campbell Memorial Award in 1994. He won the Hugo Award in 1999 for his novella "Oceanic." His other books include the novels
Distress
and
Diaspora
and three collections of his short fiction,
Axiomatic, Luminous,
and
Our Lady of Chemobyl.
His most recent book is a major new novel,
Teranesia
. He has a Web site at http://www.netspace.netau/^gregegan/.
Almost any story by Egan would have served perfectly well for this anthology. In fact, with the possible exception of Brian Stableford, Egan has probably written more about the posthuman future than any other writer of the last decade— being one of the key players in
shaping
current ideas about that future— and there were more than a dozen possibilities to choose from, including stories such as "Learning to Be Me," "Dust," "Fidelity," "Reasons to be Cheerful," "The Planck Dive," "Tap," "Oceanic," and many others ("Wang's Carpets" would have been perfect, but I had already used it in another of these anthologies). In fact, if I'd had room here to include
two
stories by any one author (which I didn't have), Egan would have been the one.
I finally settled on the dazzlingly imaginative story that follows, as it takes us as
deep
into that posthuman future as anything that Egan has yet written, for a compelling study of old loyalties and new possibilities.