More Than Human

‘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 colours 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?’