Son of Man by Robert Silverberg
There are shapes within the column.
Some are strange. Many are familiar. These are the templates of creation. He discerns the outlines of cats, dogs, seals, snakes, deer, cattle, pigs, sheep, raccoons, otters, bison, bears, camels, and other creatures of the remote past. They have had their chance; they are gone; they remain here only in essence, in residue. Then he sees the figures of the beasts of this era, all those he had encountered on the savanna, and scores of others that he has met in his journey. Mixed with them are misty replicas of bizarre new things. They flutter by him madly and vanish, leaving him with a mouth full of sandy questions. Are they life-forms yet to come? Are they animals that have come and gone between his era and this? Are they the lumpy fauna of the Miocene and the Oligocene and the Eocene, forgotten even in his own day? He is tossed in a phantasmagoric bestiary, hurled past hooves and horns and gaping jaws. Here is the fount of invention. Here is the spring of life. How does one tell the dream from the undream? What are these chimeras, sphinxes, gorgons, basilisks, gryphons, krakens, hippogriffs, bandersnatches, jabberwocks, orcs, this whole horde of desperate marvels? Of time past? Of time yet unarrived? The turbulent dreams, nothing more, of the Fountain of Life?
“Mankind,” Clay whispers. “What of mankind here?”
He sees all. Out of the mists come dark figures, fire-haloed, creation’s puppets. Is this brown ape the owner of the Java skullcap? Are these capering clowns the australopithecines? What are you, massive giant: the man of Heidelberg? He wishes he had studied more. Something with a flat crested head nears him; he meets its gaze, and finds only feeble kinship. Then, fair-haired and shaggy, comes an unmistakable Neanderthal, and seizes him and peers eye to eye, and gives off so terrible an aura of intelligence and thwarted striving that Clay becomes a burst of flaming tears strung across the abyss. Who are these others? The unknown simian forebears. The painters in the caves. The gnawers of bones above Peking. The primordial lemurs. The patient scuffers of the fertile Palestinian soil. The builders of walls. The wielders of hand-axes. The chippers of flint. The hunters of mastodons. The gibbering sorcerers, painted yellow and red. The scribes. The pharaohs. The astronomers. The abyss spews humanity faster than he can assimilate what he sees. Every species, every false trail, every dangler from the crowded tree. “I am mankind,” says the Neanderthal, and “I am mankind,” the Pithecanthropus insists, and the fur-clad artist of the caves cries, “I am mankind,” and the lithe Australopithecus calls, “I am mankind,” and the king from his throne says, “I am mankind,” and the priest in his temple says, “I am mankind,” and the astronaut in his capsule says, “I am mankind,” and they hurtle past Clay and are lost in the shaft of brilliant light, and he whispers, “I am mankind” to their backs.
And what are these things that come now?
Spheroids in cages, and turd-spattered goat-men, and things with gills, and beings that are all eye, and many more, and they are mankind too. He calls out. He roasts and bakes amid the history of the race. “We are the changed ones,” they tell him. “We are the ones who devised our own destinies. Who bears witness for us? Who assumes the responsibility?”
“I bear witness,” he replies. “I assume responsibility.”
They pour forth inexhaustibly, a million million forms, all of them claiming humanity. What can he do? He weeps. He stretches forth his hands. He blesses them. How was such prodigality of design ever permitted to a single race? Why were these transformations tolerated? “Will you forgive us our metamorphoses?” they call out to him, and he forgives them, and the legion of the changed ones goes past.
“And we are the sons of man,” proclaim those who next emerge.
Breathers. Eaters. Destroyers. Awaiters. Interceders. Skimmers. All the denizens of this present age. Clay looks close at the Skimmers, hoping to recognize one of his, but they are unfamiliar to him, and drift by. A monstrous Interceder passes him, lost in dreams of mud. A phalanx of Destroyers. Three unmoving Awaiters. Clay senses, as he has never before sensed, the full span of time through which he has passed; for now he is caught in a sea of shapes, prehuman and human and posthuman, coming and going, smothering him, demanding comfort from him, seeking redemption, chattering, laughing, weeping—
“Hanmer?” he calls. “Serifice? Ti? Bril? Angelon? Ninameen?”
He sees them. They lurk near the root of the column, deep in the ground. He cannot reach them. They are swathed in faded colors, and their figures are indistinct. He struggles downward, but again and again is buoyed up. After a time they vanish. Are they dead? Can they be saved? He understands what he must do. He will experience the whole history of his race. He will take all the world’s anguish into himself. He will give himself up so that his Skimmers will not die. He floats freely through the column, passing without hindrance from era to era, now confronting a tormented Neanderthal, now a smug Destroyer, now a spheroid, now a goat. “Give me your sorrows,” he whispers. “Give me your failures and your errors and your fears. Give me your boredom. Give me your loneliness.” They give. He writhes. He has never known such pain. His soul is a white sheet of agony. Yet there is a core of strength within it that he had not known was there. He drains the sufferings of the millennia; he dispenses redemption in crimson spurts. Working his way downward, offering himself freely to men of all species, he reaches the barrier that separates him from the six Skimmers, and gently presses against it, rebounding, returning, rebounding, returning, finally penetrating. Snowflake-light he descends to them. “Look at me,” he murmurs. “How imperfect I am, eh? How coarse. How vile. But consider the potential. You realize that I am you, don’t you? Just as these chinless apes are me. And the Interceders, the Neanderthals, the spheroids, the Destroyers—all one, all streams of the same river. Why deny it? Why turn away? Look at me. Look at me. I am Clay. I am love.” He takes their hands. They smile. They come nearer to him. He perceives their true forms, neither female nor male; he sees the glow within them. “We traveled a long way together,” he says. “But your journey doesn’t end here.” He points upward into the shaft of cold fire, showing them the unborn shapes that hover, the sons of the sons of man. “Give me your fear. Give me your hate. Give me your doubt. And go. And return to your world. And go. And go.” He embraces them. “I am Clay. I am love.” The pain is rising within him; he feels a white pinpoint of anguish in the middle of his skull. “I am Hanmer,” they say to him. “I am Ninameen.” “I am Ti.” “I am Bril.” “I am Angelon.” “I am Serifice.” And he says, “Do you need death? What can you learn from it? Let me. Let me. My time is over; yours is still beginning.” He reaches into them and sees that they throb with pity and love. Good. Good. He gestures; they rise; high above him, they turn, dance in the blazing light, blow him kisses. Farewell. Farewell. We love you. “Dreams end,” Ti once told him. Ending now. Going out on a tide of love. The Skimmers will not die. About him, colors wheel and spiral, and he sees the fiery nebulae, he sees the colliding galaxies, he sees the golden arch of mankind curving out of time past and disappearing, agleam, in time yet to come. And all of the men and sons of man are walking it now, Eaters, Destroyers, spheroids, goats, Hanmer, Ninameen, Ti, Interceders, Neanderthals, Bril, Serifice, Angelon, everyone, the delegates of the eons, heading toward that shimmering spectrum which he after all will not reach. Not now. Not ever. Dreams end. He bears their burdens. He floats up through the abyss, coming now to the rim of the Well. There he pauses, looking back at the splendor of creation’s might, seeing a vision of what will one day emerge, to which this is mere prologue. The pain is gone from him now. He carries himself well. He is man, and he is Son of man, and the dream is over. He climbs from the pit. He walks slowly outward on the porcelain rim. The beasts have assembled in that barren plain. So, too, have all his friends. He smiles. He lies down. At last he sleeps. At last. He sleeps.
Take ye heed, watch and pray: for ye know not when the time is.
For the Son of man is as a man taking a far journey, who left his house, and gave authority to his s
Watch ye therefore: for ye know not when the master of the house cometh, at even, or at midnight, or at the cockcrowing, or in the morning:
Lest coming suddenly he find you sleeping.
And what I say unto you I say unto all, Watch.
—Mark 13:33–37
Robert Silverberg, Son of Man