Free Supermen: Tales of the Posthuman Future by Gardner Dozois Page A

night was a paper pyramid that had risen to incredible heights; but Basil laughed to himself as he savored the manipulation it was founded on.

    Three ushers of the Toppers' Club came in with firm step.

    "Get out of here, you dirty bum!" they told Basil savagely. They tore the tycoon's toga off him and then tossed him his seedy panhandler's rags with a three-man sneer.

    "All gone?" Basil asked. "I gave it another five minutes."

    "All gone," said a messenger from Money Market. "Nine billion gone in five minutes, and it really pulled some others down with it."

    "Pitch the busted bum out!" howled Overcall and Burnbanner and the other cronies.

    "Wait, Basil," said Overcall. "Turn in the President's Crosier before we kick you downstairs. After all, you'll have it several times again tomorrow night."

    The period was over. The Nyctalops drifted off to sleep clinics or leisure-hour hideouts to pass their ebb time. The Auroreans, the Dawners, took over the vital stuff.

    Now you would see some action! Those Dawners really made fast decisions. You wouldn't catch them wasting a full minute setting up a business.

    A sleepy panhandler met Ildefonsa Impala on the way.

    "Preserve us this morning, Ildy," he said, "and will you marry me the coming night?"

    "Likely I will, Basil," she told him. "Did you marry Judy during the night past?"

    "I'm not sure. Could you let me have two dollars, Ildy?"

    "Out of the question. I believe a Judy Bagelbaker was named one of the ten best-dressed women during the frou-frou fashion period about two o'clock. Why do you need two dollars?"

    "A dollar for a bed and a dollar for red-eye. After all, I sent you two million out of my second."

    "I keep my two sorts of accounts separate. Here's a dollar, Basil. Now be off! I can't be seen talking to a dirty panhandler."

    "Thank you, Ildy. I'll get the red-eye and sleep in an alley. Preserve us this morning."

    Bagelbaker shuffled off whistling "Slow Tuesday Night."

    And already the Dawners had set Wednesday morning to jumping.

Aye, and Gomorrah

    SAMUEL R. DELANY

    Samuel R. Delany was widely acknowledged during the sixties as one of the two most important and influential American SF writers of that decade (the other being Roger Zelazny). He won the Nebula Award in 1966 for Babel 17, won two more Nebulas in 1967 for The Einstein Intersection and for his first short story, "Aye, and Gomorrah," and his 1968 novella "Time Considered as a Helix of Semi-Precious Stones," won both the Nebula and Hugo awards. By 1969, critic Algis Budrys was hailing him as "the best science-fiction writer in the world" —an opinion it would have been possible to find a great deal of support for, at least on the American side of the Atlantic; he is still regarded by many critics as one of our greatest living authors. His monumental novel Nova was, in my opinion, one of the very best SF novels of the sixties, and its influence on everything from the Shaper/Mechanist stories of Bruce Sterling, on through William Gibson and Michael Swanwick, and on to the work of nineties' authors such as Paul J. McAuley and Alastair Reynolds, is impossible to overestimate.

    Delany only ever wrote a handful of short stories— unlike Zelazny, he made his biggest impact on the field with his novels— but they deserve to be numbered among the best short work of the sixties. Aside from the stories already named, they include the marvelous novella "The Star Pit," the ornately titled "We, In Some Strange Power's Employ, Move On A Rigorous Line," "Corona," and "Dog in a Fisherman's Net." Almost all of his short fiction was assembled in the landmark collection Drift-glass. Which contains the elegant, tight, and poetically intense story that follows, an early look at the posthuman condition, as science makes the boundary lines of race, class, and even sex, obsolete, in favor of sharply drawn new boundaries.…

    After Nova, Delany fell silent for seven years, and when he did return, it was with work