“William—and you must have known this better than any one else, Anea—belongs to that small and select group of men who have been the conquerors of history. There’s a name, you know, for this rare and freakish individual—but a name means nothing by itself. It’s only a tag hung on something we never completely understood. Such men are unopposable— they can do great good. But also, usually, an equally great deal of harm, because they are uncontrolled. I’m trying to make you understand something rather complex. We, on the Exotics, spotted William for what he was when he was still in his early twenties. At that time the decision was taken to select the genes that would result in you.”
“Me!” She stiffened suddenly, staring at him. “You.” Sayona bent his head to her briefly. “Didn’t you ever wonder that you were so instinctively opposed to William in everything he did? Or why he was so perversely insistent on possessing your contract? Or why we, back on Kultis, allowed such an apparently unhappy relationship to continue?”
Anea shook her head slowly. “I … I must have. But I don’t remember—”
“You were intended as William’s complement, in a psychological sense.” Sayona sighed. “Where his instincts were for control for the sake of controlling, yours were towards goals, purposes, and you did not care who controlled so long as the control was directed toward that purpose. Your eventual marriage—which we aimed for—would have, we hoped, blended the two natures. You would have acted as the governor
William’s personality needed Tlie result would have been beneficial … we thought.”
She shuddered.
“I’d never have married him.”
“Yes,” said Sayona with a sigh, “you would have. You were designed—if you’ll forgive the harsh word—to react at full maturity to whatever man in the galaxy stood out above all others.” A little of Sayona’s gravity lifted for a moment, and a twinkle crept into his eyes. “That, my dear, was by no means difficult to provide for; it would have been near impossible to prevent it! Surely you see that the oldest and greatest of the female instincts is to find and conserve the strength of the strongest male she can discover. And the ultimate conservation is to bear his children.”
“But—there was Donal!” she said, her face lighting up.
“Quite so,” Sayona chuckled. “If the strongest male in the galaxy were wrongly directed, misusing his great strength—still, for the sake of the great value of that strength, you would have sought him out. Strength, abilities, are tools; these are important. How they are used is a separate matter.
“But with Donal on the scene … Well, he was the ruin of all our theories, all our plans. The product of one of those natural accidents, outside our domain, a chance combining of genes even superior to William’s. The blending of a truly great line of thinkers, with an equally great line of doers.
“I failed to realize this, even when we tested him.” Sayona shook his head as though to clear it. “Or … perhaps our tests were just not capable of measuring the really important characteristics in him. We . .. well, we don’t know. It’s that that worries me. If we’ve failed to discover a true mutation—someone with a great new talent that could benefit the race, then we have failed badly.”
“Why, what would it have to do with you?” she asked.
“It would be in the area where we are supposed to have knowledge. If a cyberneticist fails to recognize that his companion has a broken bone, he is not culpable; if a physician makes the same mistake, he merits severe punishment.
“It would be our duty to recognize the new talent, isolate it, and understand it, we on the Exotics. It may be that Donal has something he does not recognize himself.” He looked at her. “And that is the question I must ask you. You are closer to him than anyone else; do you think Donal may have something—something markedly different about him? I don’t mean simply his superior genius; that would be simply more of the same kind of thing other men have had; I mean some true ability over and above that of the normal human.” Anea became very still for a long moment, looking beyond rather than at Sayona. Then she looked at Sayona again, and said, “Do you want me to guess? Why don’t you ask him?”
It was not that she did not know the answer; she did not know how, or what she knew, nor did she know how to convey it, nor whether it was wise to convey it. But the knowing within her was quietly and completely certain that Donal knew, and would know what should and should not be said.
Sayona shrugged wryly. “I am a fool; I do not believe what all my own knowledge assures me. It was perfectly certain that the Select of Kultis would make such an answer. I am afraid to ask him; knowing that makes the fear no less. But you are right, my dear. I .. . will ask him.”
She lifted her hand.
“Donal!” she called.
Out on the balcony he heard her voice. He did not move his eyes from the stars.
“Yes,” he answered.
There were footsteps behind him, and then the voice of Sayona. “Donal—”
“You’ll have to forgive me,” said Donal, without turning. “I didn’t mean to make you wait. But I had something on my mind.”
“Quite all right,” said Sayona. “I hate to disturb you—I know how busy you’ve been lately. But there was a question I wanted to ask.”
“Am I a superman?” asked Donal.
“Yes, that’s essentially it,” Sayona chuckled. “Has somebody else been asking you the same question?”
“No,” Donal was smiling himself. “But I imagine there’s some would like to.”
“Well, you mustn’t blame them,” said Sayona, seriously. “In a certain sense, you actually are, you know.”
“In a sense?”
“Oh,” Sayona made a little dismissing gesture with his hand. “In your genera! abilities, compared to the ordinary man. But that wasn’t my question—”
“I believe you have said that a name is without meaning in itself. What do you mean by ‘Superman’? Can your question be answered, if that tag has no meaning, no definition?
“And who would want to be a Superman?” asked Donal in a tone halfway between irony and sadness, his eyes going to the depth beyond depth of starspace. “What man would want twenty billion children to raise? What man would cope with so many? How would he like to make the necessitous choices between them, when he loved-them all equally? Think of the responsibility involved in refusing them candy when they shouldn’t—but could—have it, and seeing that they went to the dentist against their wills! And if ‘Superman’ means a unique individual—think of having twenty billion children to raise, and no friend to relax with, complain to, to blow off steam to, so that the next day’s chores would be more bearable.
“And if your ‘Superman’ were so super, who could force him to spend his energies wiping twenty billion noses, and cleaning up the messes twenty billion petulant bratlings made? Surely a Superman could find some more satisfying use for his great talents?”
“Yes, yes,” said Sayona. “But of course, I wasn’t thinking of anything so far-fetched.” He looked at Donal’s back with mild annoyance. “We know enough about genetics now to realize that we could not have, suddenly, a completely new version of the human being. Any change would have to come in the shape of one new, experimental talent at a time.”
“But what if it were an undiscoverable talent?”
“Undiscoverable?”
“Suppose,” said Donal, “I have the ability to see a strange new color? How would I describe it to you— who cannot see it?”
“Oh, we’d locate it all right,” replied Sayona. “We’d try all possible forms of radiation until we found one you could identify as the color you were seeing.”
“But still you wouldn’t be able to see it, yourselves.”
“Well, no,” said Sayona. “But that would be hardly important, if we knew what it was.”
“Are you sure?” persisted Donal, not turning. “Suppose there was someone with a new way of thinking, someone who in childhood forced himself to do his thinking within the framework of logic—because that was the only way those around him thought. Gradually, however, as he grows older he discovers that there are relationships for him that do not exist for other minds. He knows, for example, that if I cut down that tree just below us out here in my garden, some years in time, and some light-years in distance away, another man’s life will be changed. But in logical terms he cannot explain his knowledge. What good would it do you then, to know what his talent was?”
“No good at all, of course,” said Sayona, good-humoredly, “but on the other hand it would do him no good at all, either, since he lives in, and is part of, a logical society. In fact, it would do him so little good, he would undoubtedly never discover his talent at all; and the mutation, being a failure, would die aborning.”