The Mutant Prime

****

Special thanks to Lou Aronica, Janna Silverstein,
David M. Harris, and Alice Alfonsi

For Bob
,
of course

***

INTRODUCTION

.

The seasons move along. The outsiders who have lived submerged among us for so long move into even greater prominence. The world has grudgingly begun to accept the concept that a subculture of not-exactly-human beings with superior mental abilities has existed on our world for hundreds of years, hidden away right in our midst, dwelling virtually invisibly in a worldwide secret ghetto of its own making.

And now an even more unnerving possibility presents itself to an uneasy mankind: the possible emergence of a supermutant, a genetic freak gifted with extrasensory powers that make him as superior to ordinary mutants as the mutants are to the normal population.

That’s the premise of the second volume of this quartet of
Mutant Season
books. The characters of Volume One are some fifteen years older now. The rhythms of their adult lives seem set, for better or for worse. The mutant Michael Ryton, locked in a difficult marriage with his turbulent mutant wife Jena, has moved into control of his family’s aerospace engineering firm. Michael’s troubled sister Melanie, a mutant in whom the mutant powers never developed, has begun a new life for herself as a journalist. Kelly McLeod, the nonmutant woman whose youthful romance with Michael Ryton ended in anguish for them both, is now an officer in the Air Force space service.

And then comes a sudden bewildering telepathic warning:
BEWARE THE SUPERMUTANT
!
BEWARE THE SUPERMUTANT
!
A startled world turns to its television screens and hears a silent voice telling a frightened anchorwoman, “
I can talk to everybody in your audience without opening my mouth
.”

Perhaps the position of the mutants in the American society of the early twenty-first century as this second volume opens can be seen as similar to that of the American blacks not long after the civil rights victories of the 1960s. The legal barriers that had stood in the way of their advancement into the mainstream of American life had been overthrown; the official position of the government was one of absolute equality of opportunity; the majority of the citizens now gave lip service, at least, to that concept.

But what would happen next—for the blacks in the post-Martin Luther King period and the mutants of tomorrow—was far from certain. Would the once oppressed underclass (in the case of the blacks) or the carefully camouflaged special minority (the mutants) be able to consolidate its victories and move on to true integration with the majority faction? Or would the progress of the minority seem so threatening to the majority that a reactionary movement of new repression would arise?

The experience of the blacks in the 1970s and 1980s was a mixed one: gains on the one hand, losses on the other, old problems replaced by new dilemmas. A substantial number were able to find room for themselves in areas—housing, employment, politics—from which they had formerly been largely excluded. Others, less fortunate, discovered that although they were now legally entitled to ride at the front of the bus if they cared to, they were still forced to contend with repression of a more covert kind and their lives were not significantly better than they had been in the old days of open discrimination.

On balance, though, fundamental and probably irreversible changes in the American racial situation did take place in the two decades after the civil rights era. And the United States of America of 1988 saw the surprising spectacle of the Jesse Jackson presidential campaign—the first time a black political figure had seriously sought the nation’s highest office.

Though few political analysts saw much likelihood of Jackson’s winning the nomination of his party and none envisioned him as being capable of attaining the presidency in 1988, the mere fact of his candidacy, and of his obtaining a substantial number of white votes in the primary elections, were both developments that would have been unthinkable in the America of only a few years before. In the vocabulary of
The Mutant Season
and its successors, Jesse Jackson as plausible black presidential candidate can be seen as a kind of supermutant, a figure unexpectedly rising above the supposed limitations that contained his race and breaking a path into startling new territory.

The mutants of Karen Haber’s
Mutant Season
books have already made the leap into national politics. Volume One of the series gave us Eleanor Jacobsen of Oregon, the first mutant member of the United States Senate—ultimately the victim of a bizarre assassination plot hatched by a fellow mutant with presidential ambitions. By the time of Volume Two, the presence of mutants at all levels of power in industry and the government is taken pretty much for granted; and though there has not yet been a mutant President or even a mutant presidential candidate, no one would regard it as astounding for such a figure to appear in the next few years.

But the analogy between blacks and mutants breaks down here.

Both groups, the real ones of our world and the imagined ones of these novels, are minorities that have had a hard struggle against the fears and prejudices of the majority race that surrounds them. Gradually, after years of careful planning, they have come forward into a situation of
equality of opportunity
.

Equality of opportunity is one thing, however, and equality of ability is another. It has been the position of many white supremacists that blacks are less than human, that they are a life-form inherently inferior to whites. Therefore the chief goal of the blacks in twentieth-century America has been to obtain recognition of their fundamental humanity—to demonstrate that they are something more than beasts of burden suitable only for service as slaves, to show that they are, in fact, full members of the human race, entitled to the same legal privileges as the whites who brought their ancestors in captivity to the New World. It is not an issue seriously in dispute any longer, except in South Africa, where the black-white conflict is still in an earlier phase.

The mutants are
more
than human, though. Perhaps all they want politically from the America of the early twenty-first century is equality, but there is no getting around the fact that they are an advanced form of the human species, or perhaps some new species entirely. No well-meaning political rhetoric can hide the uncomfortable truth that the mutants are capable of telepathy, of telekinesis, of all manner of astounding things beyond the understanding of mere normals.

For the two races to be able to live in peace, side by side, thus becomes an exercise in harmony that makes our recent real-world civil rights campaigns seem like kindergarten stuff. No one but the most confirmed racist would try to assert, nowadays, that the blacks are an inferior form of the human race who must be confined to their own districts, their own lunch counters, their own restrooms, their own sections of the bus. They differ somewhat from the majority population in their physical appearance, yes—but that is no reason to deprive them of any of their rights of citizenship.

The mutants, though, are not only a minority group—and in a generally conformist society like ours, minorities are always in danger of some oppression—but are undeniably
superior
. True, their only demand is for equality, the right to live as they please without fear of persecution or discrimination; but the real problem for the nonmutant majority is that equality isn’t the essential issue. What the normals need to do is to arrive at an acceptance of one stunning, gigantic fact:
They’re better than we are
.

The first volume of the
Mutant Season
books showed the United States of the near future doing a remarkably good job of overcoming the not very surprising bigotry and fear that the revelation of the mutant presence in its midst would create.

But now, with the superior mutant minority just barely assimilated into American life, to have to come to terms with the realization that an even more potent human form may have emerged, an actual supermutant—

It may be asking a little too much.

—ROBERT SILVERBERG

Oakland, California

October 1989

CHAPTER
ONE

.

The dome was dear and crystalline and the deep black bowl of space pressed up against it, the sharp light of stars pricking the airless void. Then the stars disappeared behind a filament of fine white lines: a deadly cobweb. Kelly McLeod stared at it in horror. The unthinkable had happened: One of Moonstation’s main domes had cracked.