The final mutant

He lay in a hospital bed. The sheets, fresh and smooth, stretched tightly across his lean body. His eyes were closed and his breath whispered lightly between his parted lips. His head was shaven and attached to it were small conducting discs, taped to his temples and the supraorbital ridges. Inside was his brain.

He wasn’t thinking;—he wasn’t anything yet. He failed to exist. He lay in a negative state and would remain so until his makers, who sat in the large room that looked like the ground control of some starship venture, decided it was time to wake him.

It had taken him a long time to come this far. Seventy-seven years.

Those who had brought him to this place hoped the effort would prove worthwhile. But none of them would know for sure—not until someone pressed the switch to wake him.

He was seventeen years old and all his life had been unknowing. They had taught him, trained him, given him knowledge. But he was unaware of it, would remain unaware until they woke him for the first time. And then he would know all

He lay in the bed, unstirring.

The air in the room hummed slightly. The air-conditioning system was blowing in sterilized air from which his lungs filtered oxygen.

Inside his head …

In the control room there could be no more excuses, no more delay. Someone depressed the switch and beneath his dark eyelids his eyes rolled in their sockets as he dreamed of waking.

He was running—away— the horizon a never-approaching black line. Looking down, beneath his feet he saw the solid white line and he planted each foot in turn on it. Lifting the lagging limbs and bringing them forward—motion—running—without the knowledge of what it was he did. Something strange in the idea of motion—we all progress—only—there was just the roadway and the white line and he didn’t look up because ahead was only the horizon, still as distant as ever.

And the rain—always there was the rain, falling fine in misty droplets that soaked into his skin and his feet, making a shlick-shlick-shlick sound against the roadway as he ran. The rain: the only reality, ever-present …

A beginning—Year 0: Day 001

The idea had been postulated long before anyone thought of attempting to bring it into reality. Three brains: each representing a point in evolution. Three layers of neural tissue, each with its own function, each overlapping the other, impinging into the other’s territory and at times conflicting.

If only the three separate brains could be combined. If only when one felt an action was truly right it could be carried out, instead of the intellect’s or the instinct’s breaking in and preventing action. If only there were an end to the conflict inside the head, perhaps then conflict would end outside as well.

Two possibilities existed for the realizatidn of the concept: surgical and biological.

Surgery was attempted, but the techniques required were too complex for surgeons to master. That left only the biological. Speed up the rate of evolution, so that the fusion of the disparate functions would occur naturally.

Take a normal man and a normal woman and subject them to controlled radiation. And correlated predictables.

Cut sections from ovaries—take samples of semen.

Let them mature—mix them— allow and encourage growth, stimulate them so that there are finally contained in a neutral medium many fertilized cells, each with the potential for life.

Care for them, allow them to develop.

And as they grow—note the differences. In some the radiation has had a detrimental effect. In the majority—this is only the first generation—a high failure rate is to be expected. But some have adapted beneficially. Search out the embryo deformities—and terminate.

Allow the rest to develop.

Birth of the first generation.

Some are blind, others deaf— some have no sensory apparatus at all.

Some are deformed in minor ways. Club feet. Harelips.

Terminate failures.

You are left with a score of infants, each in its own isolated crib. Eight are male and eleven are female—of one you are uncertain. Discuss that. Is hermaphroditism what we want?

No. But interesting—isolate hermaphrodite and study development.

The survivors number nineteen.

At two years of age only five can talk and only four are capable of movement.

The others are failures. Terminate.

Two males. Two females.

At age eight one of the males dies. No one knows the reason.

Terminated by an act of God.

At age twelve the children, previously isolated from all contact with each other and the outside world—except for that filtered through to them by the scientists— are brought together.

A place is prepared for them, where there is always a vibration in the air from powerful radiation.

Their skin is slightly darker than that of normal children. Their eyes are a little brighter. Their minds are a little sharper, quicker to grasp at unrelated facts and make a whole of them.

They have names, given to them by the scientists who in sentimental moments have felt some small spark of feeling equivalent to parental concern. The real parents are long dead, killed by radiation poisoning. They were volunteers to begin with. No loss.

There are left—two females, one male.

The male is called Joseph (someone had suggested Adam, but that was too great a cliche for all of them).

The females are called Mary and Janet.

At age sixteen they are gradually weaned from their diet of drugs prescribed to prevent early onset of sexual interest.

It would be possible to produce offspring directly from these without need of intercourse, but there is some feeling among their makers. Allow them some little life—they will have so little time.

In the room [19:192]

Jo was reading a book, stretched out on the sofa, relaxed. Mary watched him, a small fluttering smile at the corners of her mouth. She stared at his absorbed face. Then her eyes moved down his body.

“Jan?” Mary turned and looked at the other girl. They had talked last night in their room, under the bedcovers, while Jo slept in his own bed in the same room, but unaware of their conversations.

“Mm?” Janet glanced back from the window she had been staring through all morning, watching the distant vista of trees and grass and rivers and mountains, seeing all from this room. She had been wondering if the outside could be real. All she knew of was this room, their bedroom and the washroom where they bathed and excreted bodily wastes.

Mary nodded toward Jo and smiled. Janet looked across and lifted her thin shoulders. Her small breasts trembled slightly in sympathy with the movement.

“Might as well. You know what to do, don’t you?”

“I asked Dr. Roberts and he told me all about it.”

“Well, if he said it was okay, then—” Janet was at that time far less affected by adolescent longings. But she had to admit that the sight of Jo lounging there had some kind of fascination.

Mary rose to her feet and walked to the couch. Jo looked up over the cover of his book at the movement and smiled distractedly at the girl. He took it all as a matter of routine. There was nothing in Mary’s approaching him that he found either unusual or enticing.

Mary sat on the edge of the couch and placed her hand on his chest.

“Yes?” Jo looked up at her again. Mary said nothing, but moved her hand down to his groin. He flinched slightly. She had never touched him in that way before except accidentally.

“Jo—” Mary said softly.

Janet watched them, finding an excitement building inside her. She touched her breasts timidly—her own hand suddenly strange—and found her nipples had swollen.

She watched—mesmerized—as Mary leaned toward Jo and touched his mouth with her own. The action seemed so right.

And where Mary had her hand, Jo was growing. The meaning of the word man became clear in Janet’s mind. Jo muttered something that was not words and slowly he and Mary slid from the couch to the floor. Janet moved across the room and kneeled at their side, pressing her hand to Jo’s cheek. He looked up at her, something not before seen in his eyes, and his free hand reached up and touched her breast. It activated latent systems within her body which caused her to relax and lie down with the other two, touching Jo. Touching Mary touching Jo.

Watching on their monitor screens the scientists smiled.

“Pornography is not yet dead,” one said and the others grinned in response.

The technology of change [19: 301]

Gravid ovulation is possible in both females.

Flash to computer: PREPARE INCUBATION AND FERTILIZATION PROCEDURE.

Their life is not yet ended. While they sleep plastic-suited technicians enter the room and untangle their limbs—all are now sleeping in one bed. The technicians are unable to separate them now that they have fully discovered each other, but are able to take samples from each of the three. These are carried back to the laboratories, where they are prepared and irradiated and forced to fertilization.

Eggs form.

The embryos are the beginnings of a second generation.

Some are deformed—terminate.

Mary, Joseph and Janet continue in their enclosed environment. When they have to, they eat. They are now being fed drugs to increase their sexual vigor and the scientists concerned with reproduction are replaced by those interested in anthropology. It is the first chance anyone has ever had to study future humans.

To some the entire procedure seemed very unfair—inhuman.

But we are making them human. Beings who will be the first true humans.

Inhuman — inhuman — inhuman—

Employment was curtailed.

Signs of mental retardation can now be detected in embryos (in eighteen years science has advanced and it has become possible to tell the sex, partially the intelligence and possible attitudes of a child before it is fully formed.)

Terminate.

“Oh, Jo—yes, Jo—oh, do that Jo, again—Jo—”

He does it, while Janet watches from eyes that are too bright, awaiting her turn. Stamina, that’s what that boy’s got, says a man in the control room. Who can blame him? Wouldn’t you have with those two? asks another and they all laugh.

Five female doctors are on the staff, observing. During this phase of the experiment two of them become pregnant.

Finally, in the incubation vats, there are over a hundred tiny embryos hanging in vitreous fluid who have passed all the preliminary tests. Some will survive—perhaps ten percent. Possibly less.

Mary/Joseph/Janet—one final night of mingling.

Terminate.

Present time: in the slow sleep [77:218]

Only one doctor was present in the control room. She sat in a weary attitude in a chair facing the banks of monitor screens—five of them. The one directly in front of her showed the man lying in the unruffled bed. To its left were a readout of his life systems and a trace of his brain wave pattern. The jagged line of the latter was different from any other brain pattern ever recorded. To the right were a static display of the subject’s genetic code and, below it on the same screen, his family tree. A screen beyond showed many observers crowding a room next to the subject’s, watching him through a large sheet of one-way glass.

She hadn’t cared to go down there with them. Not knowing why. For some reason reluctant.

She had been here longer than any of the others. Now she was approaching old age. She would be sixty-eight in another week. She did not yet feel old—but sometimes when she looked at herself and remembered how she had been years ago she experienced brief pangs of regret at what she had missed. She remembered moments of decision when she could have made her life other than what it now was.

Not that she hadn’t done her homework—1-she was no virgin spinster. She had none of that in her past. But she had known times— moments of softness that had promised permanence of another kind. She had passed them by because at the time her work had

seemed more important.

Now, she wasn’t quite sure her decisions had been the right ones.

Looking down, watching Juan.

The first one. One. Juan.

He looked so peaceful. She knew she would never be able to tell what went on inside that head. That superior head, where all three brains had been fused into one, so that he could feel his instincts, control all the previously involuntary processes, utilize eighty per cent of his brain, instead of her own meager thirty per cent, and his brain itself half as large again as her own.

“You’re getting old, Frances Pryce,” she said to herself. “It’s the way it had to be, and you know it very well.” She smiled to herself and the lines in her face tightened, creasing the corners of her eyes.

Dream wakedream/hallucinate …

Running down through helical spirals of thought and returning along different pathways. Look at my genes, see the convolutions of my chromosomes. Fourth generation perfection.

I.

Am I what I am?

Running, slowing, halting.

Lungs filling, feel down in my mind to where the thoughts coalesce into action, energy links, reaction, feel the blood sigh through my veins, into capillaries, in the echoing lung caverns of air-filled silence, the hemoglobin comes tumbling down between the muscled walls and grabs with sticky protean fingers at the atoms of oxygen, grabbing with a needy greed at the substance of life.

Move in to depth. Heartbeat. Fibrils relax and jar back into contraction. Pump the blood, hissing through the veins another step.

Stomach contractions. Feel the electrodes taped to my skull. Vague awareness of many people close by. Awareness of body—of bed—sheets taut across skin—of walls— window looking out across countryside, pleasant—of a mirror—beyond it the many people—their thoughts tickling and intermingling with my consciousness.

Waking through layers of multiple sleep.

With full memory of past and present and—

The ten (38:075]

Abraham sat cross-legged on the table. The reason for the table was that it was the only surface upon which he could sit in this position and still be able to look out through the window.

There was something compelling about the view. He felt the pull of it with the edges of his mind, was aware of it distantly, but the awareness lay beyond his control so that he could not search out its cause or its source beyond simply knowing it was there.

He found fascination, too, in the duality of the scene. One view was made up of mountains and trees and rivers, grass before the building. Over the top of that lay another scene, where the mountains were bare and dust storms blew across a dark violet sky.

The duality was one he and the others had all lived with and didn’t question. It had always been with them. It was natural.

He moved back inside his head and grew aware of the links being forged there. He could feel his heartbeat, always the heartbeat, the passage of blood through veins and arteries. But that was all.

So many things were still beyond his control.

He glanced down at his naked body, dark and smooth. Then he looked up at the window again. Something was moving through his field of vision. A large flying animal, swooping high up on shining leathery wings. Present and future fused.

He turned around and looked at the others in the room. All were at that moment absorbed in their own bodies, their own heads. This was the time for contemplation. Later they would eat and after that there would be the time for sex.

Abraham realized he was eighteen years old and felt in some way that ought to be remarkable. Something was missing in his life. Eighteen shouldn’t be this way. It should be—should . . ,

But that was part of his inner brain—the part” he could not yet understand. That was instinct. It was there, affecting him, but he couldn’t yet unravel its meaning or change it. That was for his children to do.

There had been fourteen of them. Abraham could remember the others who had been with hitji when he had been younger. But they had been taken away. They had acted strangely, screaming in the night and in the day their eyes had rolled as they fought off imaginary devils. The doctors had said it was a thing called insanity. It was bound to happen to some of them—the changes were so great and rapid.

The doctors said that what Abraham and the others were doing was very important. The most important thing men had ever done.

Abraham didn’t care.

He would have to love with Sheela tonight. He didn’t find the prospect greatly exciting. He thought sex something of a bore, a task that had to be carried out because the doctors wanted it so.

But he would rather sit on this table and study the dual scenery outside.

He sighed and looked toward

Sheela. She was pleasant to look at and pleasant to touch. Loving was perhaps better with her than with the others. He and Sheela would attain their own individual pleasures and the doctors would be satisfied until the next time.

Beyond the triple layer of glass the flying animal returned, its mouth opening but no sound reaching him.

The staff [36:027]

She stood outside the plain wooden door, feeling nervous and very young.

When the buzzer sounded she jumped slightly, then admonished herself with a brief grin and went in. The director was sitting behind his desk, the top covered with papers and books. He looked up at her, his contact lenses catching the light from his lamp and making his eyes look blank twin globes of white.

“Miss Pryce—so nice to see you, please, come in and sit down.”

She smiled shyly and closed the door, went across and sat in the chair across from him, pulling her skirt down around her legs. She wondered if perhaps she should have worn something longer.

“Now then, Miss Pryce, no need to be nervous.”

Does it really show that much?

“You know that you have already been accepted for a post in this establishment, but I always like to have a few words with new employees. It can get pretty hectic in here at times and I might not get the chance to come out for air for several weeks at a time. So just that I know who you are—and you know me—I have these little informal chats.”

She waited, then wondered if he expected some form of response. Finally she settled for a simple: “Yes, sir.”

“You’re working with—uh, let me see—” he flapped around the papers on his desk, not seeming to read any of them before he again looked up and said, “Yes, Dr. Thomas’s group, isn’t it?”

“That’s right, sir. On the biomedical monitoring section.”

“Yes. Rather important work that.”

“Thank you, sir.”

“Mm. But then, I suppose all work here is important in its own way. Even that of the ladies in the canteen. We couldn’t do our work if we went unfed, could we?”

“1 suppose not, sir.”

“Yes.” He hummed gently to himself, thinking perhaps of lunch, then seemed to pull himself back to the present. “You’ve—uh—been shown where you’ll stay, have you? Not bad little places, really, our dormitories. Of course you can see the necessity of living on the premises, can’t you? Highly secret work here. Hm. And you’ve been told about—uh, marriage—and that kind of stuff?”

“Yes, sir. If I marry outside the group my contract is automatically canceled.”

“Yes, that’s it.’’ He seemed vaguely embarrassed, but didn’t go on to explain why.

The girl nodded.

“Well, anything else you want to know—uh—Frances?”

She smiled sweetly.

“No, I don’t think so, sir.” “Well. Good luck then. If-ever there’s any problem, just see my deputy about it. That’s what we’re here for.”

“Yes. Thank you, sir.” She stood up and smiled one final time at him and left. The director watched her go, his eyes following the tight curves inside her skirt and the long exposed backs of her legs.

Then he picked up his pen and began to leaf through the notes on his desk again.

The technology of change-revisited [39:000]

Only four of the ten were found to be fertile. It was something no one had thought to check on.

The redundant six were terminated.

For a while Abraham wondered what had happened to Sheela, but it had happened before. They always took away the people he liked most. Some malevolent God read his thoughts and then spirited the goodness from his life.

He slept on, unaware when they took the samples of semen from him.

Fertilize.

First stage blastula—progression.

The tiny First intimation of humanity lay curled, no longer than a centimeter, complete with folded arms and legs and large blind eyes.

After selection there were forty developing fetuses locked into their metal and plastic-weave wombs.

The bummer [56:100]

The third generation was a foul-up. One hundred per cent snafu.

Not one of the Third was completely normal. Some were almost there, but even Jenny, the best of the twenty-eight thirds had her left leg six inches shorter than the right and six fingers to each hand (her feet were normal).

The physical changes were becoming far more noticeable than in previous generations. The skin was black with a sheen. Hair had begun to grow more rapidly and cover greater areas of the body (surprise was expressed: … didn’t think evolution would go that way). Males were now wearing fine pelts of soft hair, covering all but the palms of hands, soles of feet, lips, and eyelids. The females’ faces were free of hair and they had some bare patches on the buttocks and around their nipples—palms, feet, lips were hairless.

Features had changed also. The forehead was becoming more pronounced. The face was as before, but seemed to be compressed into a smaller area. Eyes were enlarged; nose was slightly reduced; mouth was wider, lips were thinner. Teeth were much smaller, but no less in number.

In their own way, to the scientist who had made them, they were quite beautiful, though they seemed hardly human any more. The scientists felt they were watching the performance of some species of exotic animal, some alien form. More than one thought of them as monkeys and watching them at sex could be embarrassing.

But they were also frightening animals. They were highly intelligent, but their intelligence was incomprehensible to their makers. Previous generations had been given lessons and taught about the outside world—this one was kept in ignorance, taught nothing. The observers were afraid of what present knowledge might do to them.

At age ten, nine of the twenty-eight were dead of disease of metabolic breakdown. At fourteen their number was reduced to an even dozen. Ten females and only two males. The males were watched over constantly, protected. If they should die out now, after all this time …

Sex was introduced.

A year passed.

One male died. He was ripped apart by five females fighting over him.

The last male was stronger and the females realized he was all they had left, so they took him in turns. Except when Jenny wanted him. Jenny was the leader, her word was always law.

In many ways they were like animals, fighting and bickering among themselves for simple favors, arranging themselves into a heirar-chic system of rights and privileges. But they reasoned brilliantly— without any information to base their reason on.

As infants and untutored, they had seemed from the first to be aware of that central core of their brains where instinct is stored, where emotion springs from. Tapping into it, discovering its uses, they deliberately passed through all stages of evolution as they grew—a process their observers equated with a search for knowledge. When young they had crawled like reptiles. As they grew older they lifted to hands and knees—at age thirteen they walked and moved as men and women with a sure knowledge of what they were.

No one else could understand or know them, quite. They were visitors from the future, images of man in a million years brought back in time by harsh scientific logic and harsher radiation on their cells.

They had crept through the instincts in their minds and then abandoned them as useless. Now they existed on pure but twisted logic. But what did they think? What did they see?

A strange, sorry lot.

Interval [58:276]

Fran Pryce lit a cigarette and shook out the match. She placed it carefully in the tin top from some dried milk can she had salvaged for an ashtray on this table. She looked across at the man sitting opposite and shook her head.

“I still don’t see why they should evolve in this way,” she said. “Look—according to all the predictions we’ve run through the computers they should gradually change to fit into the environment. Right? We know that happened all along with other life forms, including humans. So why, now, do they go against all laws? They should be four feet tall, hairless, with no teeth and reduction in locomotor function. But they’re the opposite. They have more hair. The teeth are still there and even more efficient if anything. So why? Tell me, why the hell?”

The man shook his head, stared across at Fran. She was still very attractive and didn’t look in her late forties. If he hadn’t known and had been asked to guess he might have said she was thirty-four or thirty-five.

“Perhaps our computations are based on the wrong premises,” he finally said. “What if there is a change in the environment in the future? How can we take that into consideration?”

“But how do they?”

“I ran it through the big computer in the basement. I asked what environmental conditions would be necessary to produce what we’ve gof. I figured we’ve tried the other way around enough—trying to figure out why they should be how they are.” “What did it say?” Fran asked. “Reduction in atmosphere, much of upper layer blown away so more radiation coming in. Little ozone layer, so high ultraviolet. Dessication of planet surface. Lack of plant life—therefore they’d have to be largely carnivorous—probably fishing in what few oceans were left. Population would be very low, most likely, but then who’d expect man in a million years still to be around on Earth at all?”

“They could be adapted to space flight,” Fran said.

“The computer said that, too. The same factors fit. Low intake of liquids—storage problems. Exposure to harsh radiation. I’m not sure about the teeth, but maybe they’ve invented some equivalent of hardtack and need pretty efficient choppers to deal with it.”

Fran smiled slightly. “We’re talking as if they were from some time up there,” she nodded at the ceiling, an arbitrary direction. “But we made them. How can they tell what it might be like a hundred, a million years ahead?”

The man shrugged.

Fran sighed out a thin streamer of smoke. “They can’t, can they? It’s impossible.”

“Why are they like they are then?”

She shook her head. “There has to be some reason, we just haven’t found it yet.”

Jenny [59:107]

The last remaining male was schizophrenic—there was nothing anyone could do about it. His body chemistry was so altered by evolution that nothing they gave him helped.

The man shrugged.

He sat most of the time in a corner, looking up at the bright images which he projected from his own private skull.

Two of the females were idiots— drooling, only coming alive when the male’s fantasies took a sexual turn. The others had fairly normal intelligence—that is, for them. The team of observers translated the results of their tests to read something like 210 on the standard human I.Q. scale.

Jenny read somewhere over 280.

She had light yellow eyes and a face that even the most unfeeling among the observers agreed was pretty.

Her hair was all over blond and contrasted with the dark sheen of her skin. She was well formed and she always had first priority on the male. With this generation the children were not formed artificially, but allowed to come naturally.

Jenny became pregnant. Then, as if on signal, two other females were gravid.

Parturition took place thirteen months after conception.

Juan was born.

Then Dee, and finally Tricia.

A nicely balanced group, the observers thought.

The third generation died out naturally. They had been the penultimate leap. Their body chemistries, in previous generations so tortured and forced, had finally revolted and in the process severely cut their life spans. Jenny was the last to die. She was just twenty years old.

Dawnlight [77:218]

Dreams. Oh the dreams that pull at the seams of my mind. Tell me what I am!

Filtering down through the grayness is a small spark, settling into my mind, floating down through the layers I know so intimately, until finally it stops, deep in my core, the one place I cannot yet reach and I sleep, waiting for the light to flood out the shadows in this skull.

“He blinked. I saw it, he blinked!” The girl swung around and hugged the man next to her. The roomful of observers tensed.

From her solitary post Frances

Pryce watched, her lips held in a tight line. This wasn’t right—she knew it wasn’t, had known it all along but, once committed, she had never had the courage to say so. She had been here so long now that her alternatives had vanished.

Wake me wake me wake me 1 want to see the light and smell and taste the sun. Everything is blurred, dancing on my retinas. But I can reach out and soothe the optic nerve fibers and the jarring stops. Images form. Neural highways are opening—I have to grow up so quickly, but it’s coming—I feel it all coming to me now.

In my brain. All laid open to me now. Like a brightly lit plan seen from high above I see who I am, what I am, how 1 am. I am. I—

Fran watched his lean body as it moved beneath the sheets. Then his hand rose to scratch the tip of his nose in a gesture so human she smiled despite her tenseness. And then he sat up, threw back the sheet and stood erect. She opened her mouth slightly, because it was impossible not to be awed.

He stood almost seven feet tall, with skin that seemed to glow with dark light through a fine down of pale white hair. His face was caught up beneath that ponderous brow—the eyes clear and deep.

showing no whites, only the irises and the pupils dark in their centers. He stretched his arms—then smiled.

“Juan—” she whispered to herself and to the empty control room that had suddenly taken on a derelict air. Seventy years of purpose and activity and now she was left with just herself, the machines run down and their functions ended^ except for the almost silent tick of the clock above her head.

Body. Good. That is a body. Correlate and index. Arms/legs/chest/stomach/ genitals/feet/hands/fingers/ eyes/nose/mouth/lips.

Smile. Feels good. Awake.

Look in the mirror and see myself for the first time. A strange experience. Correlate. Not too bad, considering. 1 quite like how they’ve made me.

They must think I can’t see them. I’ll wave. That’ll surprise them. Hi there!

No wave back. Just puzzlement.

HI THERE!

Oh, what have I done?

In the observation room the doctors and nurses clutched their heads as the static burst into their brains. From a distance Frances Pryce caught the tail end of the thought/call and heard it as it was meant to be. She stared at her instruments, then at the central console showing Juan,

Someone’s there, I can tell. What have I done to the others?

She didn’t know how to answer and discovered the beginnings of fear.

Juan reached out with his mind, curious, and touched the edges of the woman’s. There was top much noise from those who were nearer— all of them were crying out over something that pained.

He felt her thoughts and entered them.

She gasped. It was like … But that had been long ago.

He moved along through the ’ dusty, ancient tracks of man as he used to be. Growing to know this woman as she had been. Seeing through her eyes all of her past, feeling through her body all that had been. He found joy, pain and ecstasy all mixed and intermingled. And a terrible confusion. She lived in a mind sealed within itself, not knowing how to control her body or where her thoughts came from—or where she was among it all, where the feelings of sadness and love and weeping came from or went to.

He felt with her the moments of her past. The first time she made love. The last time. How her body felt now. The times in between. Her thoughts, ambitions, secrets, fantasies. He saw her harbored and

secret shames and discovered her deep guilt feelings.

Why did she keep them, harbor them, nurse them? Presently he saw why. She couldn’t rid herself of them. Memory for this woman was permanent.

He couldn’t imagine how it was possible to live as she did. With all that shut up inside her head and with her all the time.

He sorted her mind, cleaned it, bundled it up safe and left.

She opened her eyes as she felt the last traces of Juan’s presence leave her.

She felt sated, all passions and all guilts gone. She felt happy.

She turned to the screen and Juan was gone. She reached out and spun the dial and found all the rooms empty.

She stopped suddenly and sat back in the chair. Why not? Why should they stay here? Surely enough has been done to them already. We made them, forced them into an early growth and how can we act surprised that they show no gratitude?

But she could feel no anger or pain or loss—or guilt—any more.

Just a soft, enclosing contentment.

She closed her eyes slowly, tired now that it was finally all over.

Triad [77; 300]

They were high on a mountain and they could tell there was no danger yet of their being found.

And this was good, for there were decisions to be made.

Juan stood on a spur of rock jutting out over the face of a tall cliff. Below him stretched the bare, tan stone, the sun wavering heat from its face. Farther down grew scrubby trees—then a rolling forest reached down through the foothills, beyond which lay the plains.

He realized distantly the metaphysical aspects of his standing where he stood. A practical need for privacy and freedom had brought him here. Now, with the whole world beneath him, open to his view, a part of his mind drew information from the racial memories evoked by the scene in his mind. These were, he discovered, a constant reality to him, so that he lived as much in the past as he did in the present, time flow only a set of ascending slopes to him. Before, there had been no Juan—but there had been image of Juan in the future memory of the race.

But such considerations could wait. He had immediacies to decide—he and Dee and Tricia.

Aware of the hills and the trees and also of the barren dry world of the future—and again of his million-years-in-the-future self, a product of the natural evolution that coursed between the stars—he focused on the present.

He looked back over his shoulder to where the two women were sitting on the bare rock and smiled at them. He loved them both, with an equal intensity, knowing every contour of their bodies and every convolution of their thoughts.

He linked with their two minds and the triad became a greater whole, able to reach out and touch the globe, feeling within its awareness the flickering candles of intelligence that were men and women and children and the dim slow movements of their thoughts.

They’re too old. the part that was Tricia communicated to the other two.

Or perhaps we are too young, Juan thought. We arrived too early. Our time is yet a long way off.

We were forced to come. They made us come, Tricia sent.

Dee remained silent, the core of their binding, holding each to the other. Each member of the group was playing an individual role and together they were greater than the sum of the three.

Tricia, the synthesist, said, They made us for their own reasons. They were selfish, with no thought for us in the matter. They wanted to make themselves greater and it didn’t matter to them how we might feel.

Juan, the questioner, answered. They didn’t know. They meant well. Who are we to blame them?

Their children. We are their children. Dee sent and the other two knew it was right, because Dee was their inner core of certainty.

Was it a premature birth? Juan asked. Did we come too early?

Too early for what? Too early for them? Or for us?

Tricia—we and they are the same. They are us—we are they. But the separation makes matters difficult. We belong to a time a million years ahead, but not to their time. It can’t be this way.

So? Tricia asked.

She and Juan waited, because they could feel the answer Dee held. Dee was their soul, Dee their center, the decider. She knew and she would tell them.

Well? Juan asked gently.

We are the future, Dee sent. They are the past. We cannot join with our own kind, but we can bring the future back to this time. It s the only way it can be.

So … Juan left the thought open.

No other way, Dee sent.

Tricia?

Yes. Dee is right. They brought us here—now. We must bring ourselves here, too, without them.

Juan turned away from the cliff and walked to the two women, sat down with them. He reached out and touched each of their faces with his fingertips and they smiled at him.

The thought came simultaneously in each of their minds.

Terminate.

Zero Time—Infinity

Cold dry air and small, thick, salty ocean with strange fish beneath its surface. Stars. ★