“That’s what bothers me,” I admitted. “I can think of two or three reasons offhand—and they all imply either great clumsiness or great cunning. I don’t know which I’d prefer. Well… anyone else see any heat?”
“I haven’t seen a thing,” Norrey said judiciously, “but I wouldn’t be surprised if Ludmilla has a weapon of some kind.”
“Anybody else?”
Nobody responded. But each of the diplomats had fetched a sizable mass of uninspected luggage.
“Okay. So the upshot is, we’re stuck in a subway with three rival gangleaders, two cops and a nice old man. This is one of the few times I’ve ever been grateful that the eyes of the world are upon us.”
“Much more than the eyes of the world,” Linda corrected soberly.
“It’ll be okay,” Raoul said. “Remember: a diplomat’s whole function is to maintain hostilities short of armed conflict. They’ll all pull together at the showdown. Most of ’em may be chauvinists—but underneath I think they’re all human chauvinists, too.”
“That’s what I mean,” Linda said. “Their interests and ours may not coincide.”
Startled silence, then, “What do you mean, darling? We’re not human?” from Tom.
“Are we?”
I began to understand what she was driving at, and I felt my mind accelerate to meet her thought.
What does it mean to be human? Considering that the overwhelming mass of the evidence has been taken from observation of humans under one gravity, pinned against a planet? By others in the same predicament?
“Certainly,” Tom said. “Humans are humans whether they float or fall.”
“Are you sure?” Linda asked softly. “We are different from our fellows, different in basic ways. I don’t mean just that we can never go back and live with them. I mean spiritually, psychologically. Our thought patterns change, the longer we stay in space—our brains are adapting just like our bodies.”
I told them what Wertheimer had said to me the week before—that we choreographed as well as humans but not like humans.
“That’s John Campbell’s classic definition of ‘alien,’ ” Raoul said excitedly.
“Our souls are adapting, too,” Linda went on. “Each of us spends every working day gazing on the naked face of God, a sight that groundhogs can only simulate with vaulting cathedrals and massive mosques. We have more perspective on reality than a holy man on the peak of the highest mountain on Earth. There are no atheists in space—and our gods make the hairy thunderers and bearded paranoids of Earth look silly. Hell, you can’t even make out Olympus from the Studio—much less from here.” The distant Earth and Moon was already smaller than we were used to.
“There’s no denying that space is a profoundly moving place,” Tom maintained, “but I don’t see that it makes us other than human. Ifeel human.”
“How did Cro-Magnon know he was different from Neanderthal?” Raoul asked. “Until he could assess discrepancies, how would he know?”
“The swan thought he was an ugly duckling,” Norrey said. “But his genes were swan,” Tom insisted.
“Cro-Magnon’s genes started out Neanderthal,” I said. “Have you ever examined yours? Would you know a really subtle mutation if you saw one?”
“Don’t tell me you’re buying into this silliness, Charlie?” Tom asked irritably. “Do you feel inhuman?”
I felt detached, listening with interest to the words that came out of my mouth: “I feel other than human. I feel like more than a newman. I’m a new thing. Before I followed Shara into space, my life was a twisted joke, with too many punchlines. Now I am alive. I love and can be loved. I didn’t leave Earth behind. I put space ahead.”
“Aw, phooey,” Torn said. “Half of that’s your leg—and I know what the other half is because it happened to me, at Linda’s family’s place. It’s the city-mouse-in-the-country effect. You find a new, less stressful environment, get some insights, and start making better, more satisfying decisions. Your life straightens out. So something must be magic about the place. Nuts.”
“The Mountain is magic,” Linda said gently. “Why is magic a dirty word for you?” At that stage of their relationship, it suited Tom and Linda to maintain a running pseudodisagreement on matters spiritual. Occasionally they realized what was obvious to the rest of us: that they almost never actually disagreed with each other on anything but semantics.
“Tom,” I said insistently, “this is different. I’ve been to the country. I’m telling you that I’m not an improved version of the man I was—I’m something altogether different now. I’m the man I could never have been on Earth, had lost all hope of being. I—I believe in things that I haven’t believed in since I was a kid. Sure I’ve had some good breaks, and sure, opening up to Norrey has made my life more than I ever thought it could be. But my whole makeup has changed, and no amount of lucky breaks will do that. Hell, I used to be a drunk.”
“Drunks smarten up every day,” Tom said.
“Sure—if they can find the strength to maintain cold turkey for the rest of their lives. I take a drink when I feel like it. I just hardly ever feel like it. I stopped needing booze, just like that. How common is that? I smoke less these days, and treat it less frivolously when I do.”
“So space grew you up in spite of yourself?”
“At first. Later I had to pitch in and work like hell—but it started without my knowledge or consent.”
“When did it begin?” Norrey and Linda asked together.
I had to think. “When I began to learn how to see spherically. When I finally learned to cut loose of up and down,”
Linda spoke. “A reasonably wise man once said that anything that disorients you is good. Is instructive.”
“I know that wise man,” Tom sneered. “Leary. Brain-damage case if I ever heard of one.”
“Does that make him incapable of having ever been wise?”
“Look,” I said, “we are all unique. We’ve all come through a highly difficult selection process, and I don’t suppose the first Cro-Magnon felt any different. But the overwhelming evidence suggests that our talent is not a normal human attribute.”
“Normal people can live in space,” Norrey objected. “Space Command crews. Construction gangs.”
“If they’ve got an artificial local vertical,” Harry said. “Take ’em outdoors, you gotta give ’em straight lines and right angles or they start going buggy. Most of ’em. S’why we get rich.”
“That’s true,” Tom admitted. “At Skyfac a good outside man was worth his mass in copper, even if he was a mediocre worker. Never understood it.”
“Because you are one,” Linda said.
“One what?” he said, exasperated.
“A Space Man,” I said, spacing it so the capitals were apparent. “Whatever comes after Homo habilis and Homo sapiens. You’re space-going Man. I don’t think the Romans had the concept, so Homo novis is probably the best you can do in Latin. New Man. The next thing.”
Tom snorted. “Homo excastra is more like it.”
“No, Tom,” I said forcefully, “you’re wrong. We’re not outcasts. We may be literally ‘outside the camp, outside the fortress’—but the connotation of ‘exile’ is all wrong. Or are you regretting the choice you made?”
He was a long time answering. “No. No, space is where I want to live, all right. I don’t feel exiled—I think of the whole solar system as ‘human territory.’ But I feel like I’ve let my citizenship in its largest nation lapse.”