Half Past Human (S.F. MASTERWORKS) Read online

  Half Past Human

  T.J. BASS

  Enter the SF Gateway . . .

  In the last years of the twentieth century (as Wells might have put it), Gollancz, Britain’s oldest and most distinguished science fiction imprint, created the SF and Fantasy Masterworks series. Dedicated to re-publishing the English language’s finest works of SF and Fantasy, most of which were languishing out of print at the time, they were – and remain – landmark lists, consummately fulfilling the original mission statement:

  ‘SF MASTERWORKS is a library of the greatest SF ever written, chosen with the help of today’s leading SF writers and editors. These books show that genuinely innovative SF is as exciting today as when it was first written.’

  Now, as we move inexorably into the twenty-first century, we are delighted to be widening our remit even more. The realities of commercial publishing are such that vast troves of classic SF & Fantasy are almost certainly destined never again to see print. Until very recently, this meant that anyone interested in reading any of these books would have been confined to scouring second-hand bookshops. The advent of digital publishing has changed that paradigm for ever.

  The technology now exists to enable us to make available, for the first time, the entire backlists of an incredibly wide range of classic and modern SF and fantasy authors. Our plan is, at its simplest, to use this technology to build on the success of the SF and Fantasy Masterworks series and to go even further.

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  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  SF Gateway Introduction

  Introduction

  1 Toothpick, Moon and Dan

  2 Tinker’s Ritgen Rag

  3 Moses Eppendorff

  4 Kaia the Male

  5 Moses and the Coweye

  6 Dundas Incident

  7 Big Hunt at 50:00

  8 Tektite Shower

  9 GITAR

  10 Olga

  SF Gateway Website

  About the Author

  Also By T.J. Bass

  Copyright

  INTRODUCTION

  Thomas J. Bassler (1932–2011) was a medical doctor, who for too few years wrote science fiction as T.J. Bass. This book and its sequel, The Godwhale (1974) are the main part of his legacy. In them the conflict between humanity and nature – including humanity’s own nature – is pushed to its limit.

  Nature was big in the sixties. So was population, whose growth seemed all the more pressing in cities crowded at the core and sprawling at the edge. Wartime destruction and post-war reconstruction had created in the advanced countries a new landscape of motorway, freeway and high-rise, of suburbia and supermarket. Above it hung a haze of pollutants, and the permanent threat of nuclear attack; beyond it, in what was then called the Third World, growing numbers of undernourished, dark-skinned people poured into slums and shanty towns or slipped silently into the shadows to swell the ranks of nationalist and communist insurgencies.

  From Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (1962) to Paul Ehrlich’s The Population Bomb (1968), bestseller after bestseller sounded the alarm. By the end of the decade many people felt that the megalopolis crushed the human nature within it as much as it despoiled the natural world without. The notion pervaded the counterculture so plangently evoked in Charles Reich’s The Greening of America (1970), with its rejection of consumerism and its embrace of rural, folk, and Native American culture and styles. In this – as in so many other respects – the young radicals were only expressing more strongly, if not always more coherently, a view shared by many of their mainstream elders. Desmond Morris followed up his bestselling zoological analysis of humanity, The Naked Ape (1967) – serialized in the Daily Express – with The Human Zoo (1969), which compared urban humanity to caged animals.

  The concern was vividly expressed in SF with John Brunner’s masterpiece Stand on Zanzibar (1968), which draws dire warnings for the human future (exemplified by the violent, decadent, dome-covered New York City of 2010) from John B. Calhoun’s studies of overcrowding in rats. One of the few technologically and ecologically optimistic works from that time, Approaching the Benign Environment (R. Buckminster Fuller et al, 1970) was swiftly countered and sharply criticized in the far more influential The Environmental Handbook (1970), soon to be followed by A Blueprint for Survival (1972) and The Limits to Growth (1972) on the shelves of every long-haired student’s bedsit, including mine.

  In Half Past Human, Bass takes these and related environmental and cultural hot topics and turns up the heat a thousandfold. Never mind the three and a half billion of 1968, or the seven billion of Brunner’s 2010 (and ours): Bass projects a global population of three thousand billion. But as the title suggests, and the first page tells us, almost all of the three trillion are not quite human: ‘mankind was evolving into the four-toed Nebish – the complacent hive citizen.’ Stunted, pallid, brittle-boned and short-lived, this genetically engineered and prenatally mutilated subspecies can stand the overcrowding that normal humans can’t, so it lives and in a measure thrives on the stacked levels of underground shaft cities. The seas are sterile. The entire useable surface of every continent is turned over to automated agriculture. The food chain is short (and circular). The scattered million or so surviving five-toed humans skulk and scavenge in these gardens as vermin, spotted by sensors and despatched by hunters. They are the last endangered species. Though savage, they are far from noble. They hunt the hunters, and they eat what they kill.

  At first, all the characters are repulsive. The relict humans are cultish, clannish, and cannibals. The Nebish are callous, calculating, and cannibals. Bass describes appearances, physiques, emotions and bodily reactions in the same language, that of physiology. The effect is deeply alienating. Horror and visceral disgust are natural reactions to much that passes – not to mention confusion, as the pace of events is swift. But we know we’re not trapped in the nightmare: two artefacts that are themselves characters, Toothpick and Ball, imply past technological marvels, and hint at some continuation of an earlier human project. The mystery deepens as unauthorized radio messages beam into the underground cities from outside. It is soon apparent that the artificial intelligence that runs Earth Society has found an opponent that matches it in mettle, and in ruthless loyalty to its chosen human breed.

  The story that unfolds is increasingly engrossing and entertaining, indeed thrilling. I’ll be blunt: I found it hard to get going, and then I found it impossible to stop. It’s a cracking piece of science fiction, an original and thought-through vision of a post-human world, and it sticks uncomfortably in your head. It’ll make you think differently about a lot of things, including your own body and what you eat. The book’s one glaring flaw is its treatment of women: in human and Nebish society, they exist solely as sex objects and mothers. Bass gives no indication that he notices, let alone cares. The book fails the Bechdel test with flying colours. Mark that down to the blinkers of male-chauvinist, late-sixties counterculture, before Women’s Liberation got on its case.

  By the end of the book, Bass has brought us to sympathise with human, Nebish, and machine characters, and to revel in the godlike sport with which he – and the rival AIs – slaughter them in millions or pick them off one by one. To say that this challenges our ethical intuitions is to put it mildly. But our ethical intuitions themselves are less secure than we may think. There is a well-known paradox in moral philosophy, identified years after Bass wrote but implicit in the utilitarian doctrine of the greatest good of the greatest number: the repugnant co
nclusion – as Derek Parfit (in Reasons and Persons, 1984) called it – that a large population whose lives are barely worth living may be better than a smaller population every one of whose lives are rich and fulfilling.

  The brief lives of most of the Nebish are more than barely worth living – they have their little pleasures and rewards, and even joys – and there are three trillion of them. Are cannibalism, mass extinction of all non-edible species, prenatal brain hacking, occasional selective infanticide, and all the other horrors a price worth paying for such an enormous aggregate of dim happiness? Can we rationally and honestly prefer the violent, ignorant, brutish lives of savages, just because the savages share the full complement of our genes? Are we not, perhaps, being something close to racist when we side with Homo sapiens against Homo superior? Especially as the hive can itself engender at will new generations of the five-toed, if it decides it needs them for its own projects, all to the good of the greatest number? Isn’t there something a bit fascist about our instinctive sympathies here?

  There is a terrible Darwinian and utilitarian logic to Earth Society, of which Bass is well aware. Any successful human civilization, on this planet or on far-flung space colonies, carries the seed of the hive. Whether that seed grows is up to us, but there’s a price to be paid, too, for nipping any such sinister development in the bud.

  By making the repugnant conclusion literally repugnant, and by bringing the stern alternatives to it home to us like a hunter’s bloody trophy, Bass makes us question some of our unthinking priorities, and does us all a powerful amount of good.

  Ken MacLeod

  1

  Toothpick, Moon and Dan

  Complex you are, Earth Society.

  Simple I am, an aborigine,

  One of the In-betweens.

  Your tubeways and spirals, everywhere.

  Indigenous biota, long gone from there.

  I hunger for your greens.

  In the Year of Olga, twenty-three-forty-nine, Moon and Dan returned to Rocky Top Mountain. Edentulous and withered with years, they sought refuge above the ten-thousand-foot level where the Big ES couldn’t reach. In this, the third millennium, Earth was avocado and peaceful. Avocado, because all land photosynthesized; and peaceful, because mankind was evolving into the four-toed Nebish – the complacent hive citizen.

  Moon and Dan had no time for complacency. Hunted and starving, they struggled for survival in an ecology where the food chain had been shortened to its extreme. Earth Society had squeezed its docile citizens between the plankton ponds and the sewers, until there were no niches for the In-between people except with the varmints and vermin – thieving from garbage and gardens.

  The hive culture flourished underground. Three trillion Nebishes shared in Earth’s bounty and found their happiness in the simple, stereotyped rewards rationed out by Earth Society – the Big ES. Nothing moved on the planet’s surface except the Agromecks and a rare fugitive such as Moon. He was a five-toed throwback unable to adjust to the crowded society. Both he and his dog Dan were living fossils. Their species were crowded out by the Nebish masses, but they lived on. Both had been subjects in ancient experiments on the metabolic clock – rendering them clockless; so their bodies lingered through the generations enabling them to witness, in agony, the extinction of their kind. The extinction was still going on, for an occasional throwback still appeared in the Nebish stock – primitives left behind by evolution.

  Faithful, dull-witted Agromecks labored in the avocado-colored vegetation, striving to catch every quantum of the sun’s light energy and transform it into the needed carbohydrates. Their mechanical intelligences were suited to their tasks – they were dedicated, reliable. On this day in 2349 AO, a new meck brain stirred on Rocky Top Mountain. Its circuitry was far more complex – it was quick-witted and dedicated to no one and nothing but itself.

  ‘Hi ho! Old man with dog. Pick me up.’

  ‘Who speaks?’ asked Moon, picking up a stone.

  Dan’s snout wrinkled back in a toothless snarl.

  ‘I am down here, under these leaves.’

  ‘The spirit of the spear?’

  ‘No – I’m a machine. Toothpick is my name.’

  Moon and Dan crouched a respectable distance away.

  ‘You are no machine I know. Machines can move.’

  ‘I am a small one – to be carried. Pick me up.’

  Moon hesitated.

  ‘But the metal detectors . . .’

  ‘Don’t worry. I’m not iron,’ coaxed Toothpick. ‘Pick me up. I can feed you.’

  Moon and Dan were hungry.

  ‘Edibles are always welcome, but how can you feed us if you cannot move?’

  ‘Carry me and I will show you.’

  Moon and Dan remained hidden.

  ‘Feed us first, and we’ll talk some more.’

  In the silence that followed they heard the dry leaves rustle. Like a frozen worm the spear edged into view. They saw several inches of blade-on-shaft, then an optic. Toothpick studied them. They crouched lower.

  ‘Return to the valley, old man,’ instructed the cyber. ‘There you will find Harvesters. When the rains fall it will be safe to take what you need.’

  Moon scoffed silently to himself. He knew there were Harvesters. There always were. But rain! The sky was perfectly clear. Without a word he and his dog backed away from Toothpick. They would return to the valley, not out of faith in the talking spear, but out of caution – they felt safer in the valley with a strange intruder in their mountain refuge – and if there was one thing that their long In-between years had taught them, it was caution.

  Senses alert, they crawled between the trees on the edge of the orchard. Harvesters rolled by on wide soft wheels like giant beetles, appendages folded up and thorax-like bins laden with plankton powder, fruits and vegetables. The sky glinted a bright, glassy plum-blue. They waited.

  Moon saw an old familiar Harvester carrying a load of wooden tomatoes. He stood up shouting and waving at the machine’s anterior bulge of sensors – the ‘head’ that housed neurocircuitry and communicator. The huge machine stopped and rotated its head toward the approaching human. Moon gave the balloon wheel a friendly pat.

  ‘Good afternoon, human.’

  Moon nodded and walked around the bulky machine giving its undercarriage a critical eye.

  ‘Need any repairs?’

  ‘Just a loose dust cover on my L box – but it can wait until I get back to—’

  ‘I’ll take a look at it,’ said Moon, going to the tool kit. While he worked he glanced hopefully at the western horizon. The evening sun hid intermittently behind dark clouds. ‘Anyone asking for me these days?’

  ‘No,’ answered the Harvester.

  ‘Are you going to report seeing me?’

  ‘I have not been ordered to. I only report what I am ordered to report.’

  ‘I know,’ said Moon, patting the machine affectionately. He knew it must report him if he stole part of the harvest. It would never hurt him or try to interfere, but it had to report any loss or damage.

  Thunder rumbled softly in the distance.

  ‘Mind if I ride along?’

  ‘Enjoy your company,’ said the machine as it started to roll.

  Dan perked up his ears and began to pad along behind. A breeze carried scattered drops which pock-marked the dust. Soon, as Toothpick had predicted, fierce lightning flashed. Blinking through the downpour, old Moon packed slippery wooden tomatoes into his sack. Shouting over the thunder’s roar, he asked the machine to stop. It obliged. He hopped off into the mud. It waved and moved on. It would report him as soon as the storm lifted – but that would be several hours later, if Toothpick proved right.

  The banana sun was well up in the grape sky when Moon and Dan returned to the spot where Toothpick protruded from the musty humus. Below, on the flats, the thunderstorm dissipated.

  ‘You are a god!’ exclaimed Moon, sorting damp spheres.

  ‘Hardly.’

 
; ‘You brought the rains and kept Harvester from reporting me,’ said Moon, cracking one of the tomato-colored, ten-inch fruits on a stone. He tossed pulp to Dan and began to gum a piece himself.

  The cyber spoke carefully, didactically: ‘I predicted the rain. The electrical activity of the storm prevented the Harvester from reporting. My abilities are based on science, not sorcery.’ Toothpick paused to watch the old man and dog struggle with nutritious pulp in toothless mouths – then continued: ‘Of course we could represent my powers as spiritual – gather a following – organize a religion—’

  ‘Gather a following? Never!’ spat old man Moon. He tossed down a coarsely gummed rind. Face screwed up in disgust, he shouted: ‘Organization is what the Big ES thrives on – organize, cooperate and crush the individual. Never. Man was meant to be wild and free.’

  Toothpick flexed his surface membrane charge and squirmed in the chocolate debris.

  ‘Pick me up.’

  Moon and Dan were still a bit chary about letting a talking javelin into their tight partnership.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I am a companion robot – designed to offer companionship in exchange for companionship.’

  ‘Dan and I are sufficient. What do we need with you? You can’t even walk. You’d be a burden.’

  Toothpick watched them preparing to move on. His little cyber circuits raced.

  ‘Teeth,’ it said. ‘Both of you need teeth. Carry me and I’ll help you find teeth.’

  Moon flicked his tongue over the stumps of tender dentine that were almost covered by hypertrophic gum tissue. Almost two centuries of chewing had worn them away. The subsequent softening of his diet was softening his body too. He sighed. Oh, to bite and chew again – he could not finish the thought. He picked up the hundred-centimeter javelin and the three of them left Rocky Top.

  William Overstreet stood on the long knoll watching a distant Huntercraft zigzag along the valley. He was naked except for a crumbling utility belt and dented helmet. The rest of his closed-environment suit had shredded away months ago. His skin showed the ugly geographic pattern of scar and keloid where the harsh sun had repeatedly peeled it away. His face – protected by the helmet – was only slightly pitted and puckered.