Robert Silverberg - The Mutant Season

It snowed yesterday, three inches. Today a cruel wind comes ripping off the ocean, kicking up the snowdrifts. This is the dead of winter, the low point of the year. This is the season when the mutants arrive. They showed up ten years ago, the same six families as always, renting all the beach houses on the north side of Dune Crest Road. They like to come here in winter when the vacationers are gone and the beaches are empty. I guess they dont enjoy having a lot of normals around. In winter here theres just the little hard core of year-round residents like us. And we dont mind the mutants so long as they dont bother us.

I can see them now, frolicking along the shore, kids and grownups. The cold doesnt seem to affect them at all. It would affect me plenty, being outside in this weather, but they dont even trouble themselves with wearing overcoats. Just light windbreakers and pullovers. They have thicker skins than we do, I guessleathery-looking, shiny, apple-greenand maybe a different metabolism. They could almost be people from some other planet, but no, theyre all natives of the USA, just like you and me. Mutants, thats all. Freaks is what we used to call them. But of course you mustnt call them that now.

Doing their mutant tricks. They can fly, you know. Oh, it isnt really flying, its more a kind of jumping and soaring, but they can go twenty, thirty feet in the air and float up there about three or four minutes. Levitation, they call it. A bunch of them are levitating right out over the ocean, hanging high above the breakers. It would serve them right to drop and get a soaking. But they dont ever lose control. And look, two of them are having a snowball fight without using their hands, just picking up the snow with their minds and wadding it into balls and tossing it around. Telekinesis, thats called.

I learn these terms from my older daughter Ellen. Shes seventeen. She spends a lot of time hanging around with one of the mutant kids. I wish shed stay away from him.

Levitation. Telekinesis. Mutants renting beach houses. Its a crazy world these days.

Look at them jumping around. They look happy, dont they?

Its three weeks since they came. Cindy, my younger girlshes nineasked me today about mutants. What they are. Why they exist.

I said, There are all different kinds of human beings. Some have brown skins and woolly hair, some have yellow skins and slanted eyes, some have

Those are the races, she said. I know about races. The races look different outside but inside theyre pretty much all the same. But the mutants are really different. They have special powers and some of them have strange bodies. Theyre more different from us than other races are, and thats what I dont understand.

Theyre a special kind of people, I told her. They were born different from everybody else.

Why?

You know what genes are, Cindy?

Sort of, she said. Were just starting to study about them.

Genes are what determine how our children will look. Your eyes are brown because I have the gene for brown eyes, see? But sometimes there are sudden changes in a familys genes. Something strange gets in. Yellow eyes, maybe. That would be a mutation. The mutants are people who had something strange happen to their genes some time back, fifty, a hundred, three hundred years ago, and the change in the genes became permanent and was handed down from parents to children. Like the gene for the floating they do. Or the gene for their shiny skin. There are all sorts of different mutant genes.

Where did the mutants come from?

Theyve always been here, I said.

But why didnt anybody ever talk about them? Why isnt there anything about the mutants in my schoolbooks?

It takes time for things to get into schoolbooks, Cindy. Your books were written ten or fifteen years ago. People didnt know much about mutants then and not much was said about them, especially to children your age. The mutants were still in hiding. They lived in out-of-the-way places and disguised themselves and concealed their powers.

Why dont they hide any more?

Because they dont need to, I said. Things have changed. The normal people accept them. Weve been getting rid of a lot of prejudices in the last hundred years. Once upon a time anybody who was even a little strange made other people uncomfortable. Any sort of differenceskin color, religion, languagecaused trouble, Cindy. Well, we learned to accept people who arent like ourselves. We even accept people who arent quite human, now. Like the mutants.

If you accept them, she said, why do you get angry when Ellen goes walking on the beach with whats-his-name?

Ellens friend went back to college right after the Christmas holidays. Tim, his name is. Hes a junior at Cornell. I think shes spending too much time writing long letters to him, but what can I do?

My wife thinks we ought to be more sociable toward them. Theyve been here a month and a half and weve just exchanged the usual token greetingsfriendly nods, smiles, nothing more. We dont even know their names. I could get along without knowing them, I said. But all right. Lets go over and invite them to have drinks with us tonight.

We went across to the place Tims family is renting. A man who might have been anywhere from thirty-five to fifty-five answered the door. It was the first time I ever saw any of them up close. His features were flat and his eyes were set oddly far apart, and his skin was so glossy it looked like it had been waxed. He didnt ask us in. I was able to see odd things going on behind him in the housepeople loating near the ceiling, stuff like that. Standing there at the door, feeling very uneasy and awkward, we hemmed and hawed and finally said what we had come to say. He wasnt interested. You can tell when people arent interested in being mixed with. Very coolly he said they were busy now, expecting guests, and couldnt drop by. But theyd be in touch.

I bet thats the last we hear of them. A standoffish bunch, keeping to themselves, setting up their own ghetto.

Well, never mind. I dont need to socialize with them. Theyll be leaving in another couple of weeks anyway.

How fast the cycle of the months goes around. First snowstorm of the season today, a light one, but its not really winter yet. I guess our weird friends will be coming back to the seashore soon.

Three of the families moved in on Friday and the other three came today. Cindys already been over visiting. She says this year Tims family has a pet, a mutant dog, no less, a kind of poodle only with scaly skin and bright red eyes, like marbles. Gives me the shivers. I didnt know there were mutant dogs.

I was hoping Tim had gone into the army or something. No such luck. Hell be here for two weeks at Christmastime. Ellens already counting the days.

I saw the mutant dog out on the beach. If you ask me, thats no dog, thats some kind of giant lizard. But it barks. It does bark. And wags its tail. I saw Cindy hugging it. She plays with the younger mutant kids just as though theyre normals. She accepts them and they accept her. I suppose its healthy. I suppose their attitudes are right and mine are wrong. But I cant help my conditioning, can I? I dont want to be prejudiced. But some things are ingrained when were very young.

Ellen stayed out way past midnight tonight with Tim.

Tim at our house for dinner this evening. Hes a nice kid, have to admit. But so strange-looking. And Ellen made him show off levitation for us. He frowns a little and floats right up off the ground. A freak, a circus freak. And my daughters in love with him.

His winter vacation will be over tomorrow. Not a moment too soon, either.

Another winter nearing its end. The mutants clear out this week. On Saturday they had a bunch of guestsmutants of some other type, no less! A different tribe. The visitors were tall and thin, like walking skeletons, very pale, very solemn. They dont speak out loud: Cindy says they talk with their minds. Telepaths. They seem harmless enough, but I find this whole thing very scary. I imagine dozens of bizarre strains existing within mankind, alongside mankind, all kinds of grotesque mutant types breeding true and multiplying. Now that theyve finally surfaced, now that weve discovered how many of them there really are, I started to wonder what new surprises lie ahead for us so-called normals. Will we find ourselves in a minority in another couple of generations? Will those of us who lack superpowers become third-class citizens?