More Than Human (21 page)

you
.”
       “I don’t get you.”
       “Listen,” she said passionately, “we’re not a group of freaks. We’re
Homo Gestalt
, you understand? We’re a single entity, a new kind of human being. We weren’t invented. We evolved. We’re the next step up. We’re alone; there are no more like us. We don’t live in the kind of world you do, with systems of morals and codes of ethics to guide us. We’re living on a desert island with a herd of goats!”
       “I’m the goat.”
       “Yes, yes, you
are
, can’t you see? But we were born on this island with no one like us to teach us, tell us how to behave. We can learn from the goats all the things that make a goat a good goat, but that will never change the fact that we’re not a goat! You can’t apply the same set of rules to us as you do to ordinary humans; we’re just not the same thing!”
       She waved him down as he was about to speak. “But listen, did you ever see one of those museum exhibits of skeletons of, say horses, starting with the little Eohippus and coming right up the line, nineteen or twenty of them, to the skeleton of a Percheron? There’s an awful lot of difference between number one and number nineteen. But what real difference is there between number fifteen and number sixteen?
Damn
little!” She stopped and panted.
       “I hear you. But what’s that to do with—”
       “With you? Can’t you see?
Homo Gestalt
is something new, something different, something superior. But the parts—the arms, the guts of it, the memory banks, just like the bones in those skeletons—they’re the same as the step lower, or very little different. I’m
me
, I’m
Janie
. I saw him slap you down like that; you were like a squashed rabbit, you were mangy and not as young as you should be. But I recognized you. I saw you and then I saw you seven years ago, coming out into the yard with your detector and the sun on your hair. You were wide and tall and pressed and you walked like a big glossy stallion. You were the reason for the colors on a bantam rooster, you were a part of the thing that shakes the forest when the bull moose challenges; you were shining armour and a dipping pennant and my lady’s girdle on your brow, you were, you were... I was
seventeen
, damn it, Barrows, whatever else I was. I was seventeen years old and all full of late spring and dreams that scared me.”
       Profoundly shaken, he whispered. “Janie... Janie...”
       “Get away from me!” she spat. “Not what you think, not love at first sight. That’s childish; love’s a different sort of thing, hot enough to make you flow into something, interflow, cool and anneal and be a weld stronger than what you started with. I’m not talking about love. I’m talking about being seventeen and feeling... all...” She covered her face. He waited. Finally she put her hands down. Her eyes were closed and she was very still. “...all...
human
,” she finished.
       Then she said, matter-of-factly, “So that’s why I helped you instead of anyone else.”
       He got up and walked into the fresh morning, bright now, new as the fright in a young girl’s frightening dream. Again he recalled her total panic when he had reported Bonnie’s first appearance; through her eyes he saw what it would be like if he, blind, numb, lacking weapons and insight, had walked again under that cruel careless heel.
       He remembered the day he had emerged from the lab, stepped down into the compound, looking about for a slave. Arrogant, self-assured, shallow, looking for the dumbest Pfc in the place.
       He thought more then about himself as he had been that day; not about what had happened with Gerry, for that was on the record, accomplished; susceptible to cure but not in fact to change. And the more he thought of himself as he had been the more he was suffused with a deep and choking humility.
       He walked almost into Janie as she sat watching her hands sleeping in her lap as he had slept and he thought, surely they too must be full of pains and secrets and small magics too, to smile at.
       He knelt beside her. “Janie,” he said, and his voice was cracked, “you have to know what was inside that day you saw me. I don’t want to spoil you-being-seventeen... I just want to tell you about the part of it that was me, some things that—weren’t what you thought.” He drew a deep breath. “I can remember it better than you because for you it’s been seven years and for me it’s only just before I went to sleep and dreamed that I went hunting for the half-wit. I’m awake again and the dream is gone, so I remember it all very well...
       “Janie, I had trouble when I was a child and the first thing I learned was that I was useless and the things I wanted were by definition worthless. I hardly questioned that until I broke away and found out that my new world had different values from my old one and in the new I was valuable. I was wanted, I belonged.
       “And then I got into the Air Force and suddenly I wasn’t a football hero and captain of the Debating Society. I was a bright fish with drying scales, and the mud-puppies had it all their way. I nearly died there, Janie.
       “Yes, I found the degaussing field all by myself. But what I want you to know is that when I stepped out of the lab that day and you saw me, I wasn’t the cockerel and the bull moose and those other things. I was going to discover something and bring it to humanity, not for humanity’s sake, but so that they would...” he swallowed painfully, “...ask me to play the piano at the officers’ club and slap me on the back and... look at me when I came in. That’s all I wanted. When I found out that it was more than magnetic damping (which would make me famous) but anti-gravity (which would change the face of Earth) I felt only that it would be the President who asked me to play and generals who would slap my back; the things I wanted were the same.”
       He sank back on his haunches and they were quiet together for a long time. Finally she said, “What do you want now?”
       “Not that any more,” he whispered. He took her hands. “Not any more. Something different.” Suddenly he laughed. “And you know what, Janie?
I don’t know what it is!
”
       She squeezed his hands and released them. “Perhaps you’ll find out. Hip, we’d better go.”
       “All right. Where?”
       She stood beside him, tall. “Home.
My
home.”
       “Thompson’s?”
       She nodded.
       “Why, Janie?”
       “He’s got to learn something that a computer can’t teach him. He’s got to learn to be ashamed.”
       “Ashamed?”
       “I don’t know,” she said, looking away from him, “how moral systems operate. I don’t know how you get one started. All I know about morals is that if they’re violated, you feel ashamed. I’ll start him with that.”
       “What can I do?”
       “Just come,” she flashed. “I want him to see you—what you are, the way you think. I want him to remember what you were before, how much brilliance, how much promise you had, so he’ll know how much he has cost you.”
       “Do you think any of that will really make a difference?”
       She smiled; one could be afraid of someone who could smile like that. “It will,” she said grimly. “He will have to face the fact that he is not omnipotent and that he can’t kill something better than he is just because he’s stronger.”
       “You want him to try to kill me?”
       She smiled again and this time it was the smile of deep achievement. “He won’t.” She laughed, then turned to him quickly. “Don’t worry about it, Hip.
I am his only link with Baby
. Do you think he’d perform a prefrontal lobotomy on himself? Do you think he’d risk cutting himself off from his memory? It isn’t the kind of memory a man has, Hip. It’s
Homo Gestalt’s
. It’s all the information it has ever absorbed, plus the computation of each fact against every other fact in every possible combination. He can get along without Bonnie and Beanie, he can get things done at a distance in other ways. He can get along without any of the other things I do for him. But he can’t get along without Baby. He’s had to ever since I began working with you. By this time he’s frantic. He can touch Baby, lift him, talk to him. But he can’t get a thing out of him unless he does it through me!”
       “I’ll come,” he said quietly. Then he said, “You won’t have to kill yourself.”

They went first to their own house and Janie laughed and opened both locks without touching them. “I’ve wanted so to do that but I didn’t dare,” she laughed. She pirouetted into his room. “Look!” she sang. The lamp on the night table rose, sailed slowly through the air, settled to the floor by the bathroom. Its cord curled like a snake, sank into a baseboard outlet and the switch clicked. It lit. “Look!” she cried. The percolator hopped forward on the dresser-top, stopped. He heard water trickling and slowly condensed moisture formed on the outside as the pot filled up with ice water. “Look,” she called, “look, look!” and the carpet grew a bulge which scuttled across and became nothing at the other side, the knives and forks and his razor and toothbrush and two neckties and a belt came showering around and down and lay on the floor in the shape of a heart with an arrow through it. He shouted with laughter and hugged her and spun her around. He said, “Why haven’t I ever kissed you, Janie?”
       Her face and body went quite still and in her eyes was an indescribable expression—tenderness, amusement, and something else. She said, “I’m not going to tell you because you’re wonderful and brave and clever and strong, but you’re also just a little bit prissy.” She spun away from him and the air was full of knives and forks and neckties, the lamp and the coffeepot, all going back to their places. At the door she said, “Hurry,” and was gone.
       He plunged after her and caught her in the hall. She was laughing.
       He said, “I know why I never kissed you.”
       She kept her eyes down, but could not do the same with the corners of her mouth. “You do?”
       “You can add water to a closed container. Or take it away.” It was not a question.
       “I can?”
       “When we poor males start pawing the ground and horning the low branches off trees, it might be spring and it might be concreted idealism and it might be love. But it’s always triggered by hydrostatic pressures in a little tiny series of reservoirs smaller than my little fingernail.”
       “It is?”
       “So when the moisture content of these reservoirs is suddenly lowered, I—we—uh—... well, breathing becomes easier and the moon has no significance.”
       “It hasn’t?”
       “And that’s what you’ve been doing to me.”
       “I have?”
       She pulled away from him, gave him her eyes and a swift, rich arpeggio of laughter. “You can’t say it was an immoral thing to do,” she said.
       He gave her laughter back to her. “No nice girl would do a thing like that.”
       She wrinkled her nose at him and slipped into her room. He looked at her closed door and probably through it, and then turned away.
       Smiling and shaking his head in delight and wonderment, encasing a small cold ball of terror inside him with a new kind of calm he had found; puzzled, enchanted, terrified, and thoughtful, he turned the shower on and began to undress.

They stood in the road until after the taxi had gone and then Janie led the way into the woods. If they had ever been cut, one could not know it now. The path was faint and wandering but easy to follow, for the growth overhead was so thick that there was little underbrush.
       They made their way towards a mossy cliff; and then Hip saw that it was not a cliff but a wall, stretching perhaps a hundred yards in each direction. In it was a massive iron door. It clicked as they approached and something heavy slid. He looked at Janie and knew that she was doing it.
       The gate opened and closed behind them. Here the woods were just the same, the trees as large and as thick, but the path was of brick and took only two turns. The first made the wall invisible and the second, a quarter of a mile farther, revealed the house.
       It was too low and much too wide. Its roof was mounded rather than peaked or gabled. When they drew closer to it, he could see at each flank the heavy, gray-green wall, and he knew that this whole area was in prison.
       “I don’t, either,” said Janie. He was glad she watched his face.
      
Gooble
.
       Someone stood behind a great twisted oak near the house, peeping at them. “Wait, Hip.” Janie walked quickly to the tree and spoke to someone. He heard her say, “You’ve
got
to. Do you want me dead?”
       That seemed to settle the argument. As Janie returned he peered at the tree, but now there seemed to be no one there.
       “It was Beanie,” said Janie. “You’ll meet her later. Come.”
       The door was ironbound, of heavy oak planks. It fitted with curious concealed hinges into the massive archway from which it took its shape. The only windows to be seen were high up in the moundlike gables and they were mere barred slits.
       By itself—or at least, without a physical touch—the door swung back. It should have creaked, but it did not; it was silent as a cloud. They went in, and when the door closed there was a reverberation deep in the subsonic; he could feel it pounding on his belly.
       On the floor was a reiteration of tiles, darkest yellow and a brownish gray, in hypnotic diamond shapes they were repeated in the wainscoting and in the upholstery of furniture either built-in or so heavy it had never been moved. The air was cool but too humid and the ceiling was too close. I am walking, he thought, in a great sick mouth.
       From the entrance room they started down a corridor which seemed immensely long and was not at all, for the walls came in and the ceiling drew even lower while the floor rose slightly, giving a completely disturbing false perspective.
       “It’s all right,” said Janie softly. He curled his lips at her, meaning to smile but quite unable to, and wiped cold water from his upper lip.
       She stopped near the end door and touched the wall. A section of it swung back, revealing an ante-room with one other door in it. “Wait here, will you, Hip?” She was completely composed. He wished there were more light.
       He hesitated. He pointed to the door at the end of the hall. “Is he in there?”
       “Yes.” She touched his shoulder. It was partly a salutation, partly an urging towards the little room. “I have to see him first,” she said. “Trust me, Hip.”
       “I trust you all right. But are you—is he—”
       “He won’t do anything to me. Go on, Hip.”
       He stepped through. He had no chance to look back, for the door swung swiftly shut. It gave no more sign of its existence on this side than it had on the other. He touched it, pushed it. It might as well have been that great wall outside. There was no knob, no visible hinge or catch. The edges were hidden in the panelling; it simply had ceased to exist as a door.
       He had one blinding moment of panic and then it receded. He went and sat down across from the other door which led, apparently, into the same room to which the corridor led.
       There was not a sound.
       He picked up an ottoman and placed it against the wall. He sat with his back tight against the panelling, watching the door with wide eyes.
       Try that door, see if it’s locked too.
       He didn’t dare, he realized. Not yet. He sensed vaguely what he would feel if he found it locked; he wanted no more just now than that chilling guess.
       “Listen,” he hissed to himself, furiously, “you’d better do something. Build something. Or maybe just
think
. But don’t sit here like this.”
       Think. Think about that mystery in there, the pointed face with its thick lenses, which smiled and said, Go on, die?
       Think about something else! Quick!
       Janie. By herself, facing the pointed face with the—
      
Homo Gestalt
, a girl, two tongue-tied Negroes, a mongoloid idiot, and a man with a pointed face and—
       Try that one again.
Homo Gestalt
, the next step upward. Well, sure, why not a psychic evolution instead of the physical?
Homo sapiens
stood suddenly naked and unarmed but for the wrinkled jelly in his king-sized skull; he was as different as he could be from the beasts which bore him.
       Yet he was the same, the same; to this day he was hungry to breed, hungry to own; he killed without compunction; if he was strong he took, if he was weak he ran; if he was weak and could not run, he died.
      
Homo sapiens
was going to die.
       The fear in him was a good fear. Fear is a survival instinct; fear in its way is a comfort for it means that somewhere hope is alive.
       He began to think about survival.
       Janie wanted
Homo Gestalt
to acquire a moral system so that such as Hip Barrows would not get crushed. But she wanted her
Gestalt
to thrive as well; she was a part of it. My hand wants me to survive, my tongue, my belly wants me to survive.
       Morals: they’re nothing but a coded survival instinct!
       Aren’t they? What about the societies in which it is immoral not to eat human flesh? What kind of survival is that?
       Well, but those who adhere to morality survive within the group. If the group eats human flesh, you do too.
       There must be a name for the code, the set of rules, by which an individual lives in such a way as to help his species—something over and above morals.
       Let’s define that as the ethos.
       That’s what
Homo Gestalt
needs: not morality, but an ethos. And shall I sit here, with my brains bubbling with fear, and devise a set of ethics for a superman?
       I’ll try. It’s all I can do.
       Define:
       Morals: Society’s code for individual survival. (That takes care of our righteous cannibal and the correctness of a naked man in a nudist group.)
       Ethics: An individual’s code for society’s survival. (And that’s your ethical reformer: he frees his slaves, he won’t eat humans, he “turns the rascals out”.)
       Too pat, too slick; but let’s work with ’em.
       As a group,
Homo Gestalt
can solve his own problems. But as an entity:
      
He can’t have a morality, because he is alone
.
       An ethic then. “An individual’s code for society’s survival.” He has no society; yet he has. He has no species; he is his own species.
       Could he—should he choose a code which would serve all of humanity?
       With the thought, Hip Barrows had a sudden flash of insight, completely intrusive in terms of his immediate problem; yet with it, a load of hostility and blind madness lifted away from him and left him light and confident. It was this:
      
Who am I to make positive conclusions about morality, and codes to serve all of humanity?
       Why—I am the son of a doctor, a man who chose to serve mankind, and who was positive that this was right. And he tried to make me serve in the same way, because it was the only rightness he was sure of. And for this I have hated him all my life... I see now, Dad. I see!
       He laughed as the weight of old fury left him forever, laughed in purest pleasure. And it was as if the focus was sharper, the light brighter, in all the world, and as his mind turned back to his immediate problem, his thought seemed to place its fingers better on the rising undersurface, slide upward towards the beginnings of a grip.
       The door opened. Janie said, “Hip—”
       He rose slowly. His thought reeled on and on, close to something. If he could get a grip, get his fingers curled over it... “Coming.”
       He stepped through the door and gasped. It was like a giant greenhouse, fifty yards wide, forty deep; the huge panes overhead curved down and down and met the open lawn—it was more a park—at the side away from the house. After the closeness and darkness of what he had already seen it was shocking but it built in him a great exhilaration. It rose up and up, and up rose his thought with it, pressing its fingertips just a bit higher...
       He saw the man coming. He stepped quickly forward, not so much to meet him as to be away from Janie if there should be an explosion. There was going to be an explosion; he knew that.
       “Well, Lieutenant I’ve been warned, but I can still say—this
is
a surprise.”
       “Not to me,” said Hip. He quelled a surprise of a different nature; he had been convinced that his voice would fail him and it had not. “I’ve known for seven years that I’d find you.”
       “By God,” said Thompson in amazement and delight. It was not a good delight. Over Hip’s shoulder he said, “I apologize, Janie. I really didn’t believe you until now.” To Hip he said, “You show remarkable powers of recovery.”
       “Homo sap’s a hardy beast,” said Hip.
       Thompson took off his glasses. He had wide round eyes, just the color and luminescence of a black-and-white television screen. The irises showed the whites all the way around; they were perfectly round and they looked as if they were just about to spin.
       Once, someone had said,
Keep away from the eyes and you’ll be all right
.
       Behind him Janie said sharply, “Gerry!”
       Hip turned. Janie put up her hand and left a small glass cylinder, smaller than a cigarette, hanging between her lips. She said, “I warned you, Gerry. You know what this is. Touch him and I bite down on it—and then you can live out the rest of your life with Baby and the twins like a monkey in a cage of squirrels.”
       The thought, the thought—“I’d like to meet Baby.”
       Thompson thawed; he had been standing, absolutely motionless, staring at Janie. Now he swung his glasses around in a single bright circle. “You wouldn’t like him.”
       “I want to ask him a question.”
       “Nobody asks him questions but me. I suppose you expect an answer too?”
       “Yes.”
       Thompson laughed. “Nobody gets answers these days.”
       Janie said quietly, “This way, Hip.”
       Hip turned towards her. He distinctly felt a crawling tension behind him, in the air, close to his flesh. He wondered if the Gorgon’s head had affected men that way, even the ones who did not look at her.
       He followed her down to a niche in the house wall, the one which was not curved glass. In it was a crib the size of a bathtub.
       He had not known that Baby was so fat.
       “Go ahead,” said Janie. The cylinder bobbed once for each of her syllables.
       “Yes, go ahead.” Thompson’s voice was so close behind him that he started. He had not heard the man following him at all and he felt boyish and foolish. He swallowed and said to Janie, “What do I do?”
       “Just think your question. He’ll probably catch it. Far as I know he receives everybody.”
       Hip leaned over the crib. Eyes gleaming dully like the uppers of dusty black shoes caught and held him. He thought,
Once this Gestalt had another head. It can get other telekines, teleports. Baby: Can yon be replaced?
       “He says yes,” said Janie. “That nasty little telepath with the corncob—remember?”
       Thompson said bitterly, “I didn’t think you’d commit such an enormity, Janie. I could kill you for that.”
       “You know how,” said Janie pleasantly.
       Hip turned slowly to Janie. The thought came closer, or he went high and faster than it was going. It was as if his fingers actually rounded a curve, got a barest of purchases.
       If Baby, the heart and core, the ego, the repository of all this new being had ever been or done or thought—if Baby could be replaced, then
Homo Gestalt
was
immortal!
       And with a rush, he had it. He had it all.
       He said evenly, “I asked Baby if he could be replaced; if his memory banks and computing ability could be transferred.”
       “Don’t tell him that!” Janie screamed.
       Thompson had slipped into his complete, unnatural stillness. At last he said, “Baby said yes. I already know that. Janie, you knew that all along, didn’t you?”
       She made a sound like a gasp or a small cough.
       Thompson said, “And you never told me. But of course, you wouldn’t. Baby can’t talk to me; the next one might. I can get the whole thing from the Lieutenant, right now. So go ahead with the dramatics. I don’t need you, Janie.”
       “Hip! Run! Run!”
       Thompson’s eyes fixed on Hip’s. “No,” he said mildly. “Don’t run.”
       They were going to spin; they were going to spin like wheels, like fans, like... like...
       Hip heard Janie scream and scream again and there was a crunching sound. Then the eyes were gone.
       He staggered back, his hand over his eyes. There was a gabbling shriek in the room, it went on and on, split and spun around itself. He peeped through his fingers.
       Thompson was reeling, his head drawn back and down almost to his shoulderblades. He kicked and elbowed backward. Holding him, her hands over his eyes, her knee in the small of his back, was Bonnie, and it was from her the gabbling came.
       Hip came forward running, starting with such a furious leap that his toes barely touched the floor in the first three paces. His fist was clenched until pain ran up his forearm and in his arm and shoulders was the residual fury of seven obsessive years. His fist sank into the taut solar plexus and Thompson went down soundlessly. So did the Negro but she rolled clear and bounced lithely to her feet. She ran to him, grinning like the moon, squeezed his biceps affectionately, patted his cheek and gabbled.