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 don’t enjoy having a lot of normals around. In winter here there’s just the little hard core of year-round residents like us. And we don’t mind the mutants so long as they don’t bother us.

I can see them now, frolicking along the shore, kids and grownups. The cold doesn’t seem to affect them at all. It would affect me plenty, being outside in this weather, but they don’t even trouble themselves with wearing overcoats. Just light windbreakers and pullovers. They have thicker skins than we do, I guess—leathery-looking, shiny, apple-green—and maybe a different metabolism. They could almost be people from some other planet, but no, they’re all natives of the USA, just like you and me. Mutants, that’s all. Freaks is what we used to call them. But of course you mustn’t call them that now.

Doing their mutant tricks. They can fly, you know. Oh, it isn’t really flying, it’s 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 don’t 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, that’s called.

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

Levitation. Telekinesis. Mutants renting beach houses. It’s a crazy world these days.

Look at them jumping around. They look happy, don’t they?

It’s three weeks since they came. Cindy, my younger girl—she’s nine—asked 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 they’re pretty much all the same. But the mutants are really different. They have special powers and some of them have strange bodies. They’re more different from us than other races are, and that’s what I don’t understand.

They’re 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. We’re 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 family’s 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?

They’ve always been here, I said.

But why didn’t anybody ever talk about them? Why isn’t 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 didn’t 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 don’t they hide any more?

Because they don’t need to, I said. Things have changed. The normal people accept them. We’ve 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 difference—skin color, religion, language—caused trouble, Cindy. Well, we learned to accept people who aren’t like ourselves. We even accept people who aren’t 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 what’s-his-name?

Ellen’s friend went back to college right after the Christmas holidays. Tim, his name is. He’s a junior at Cornell. I think she’s 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. They’ve been here a month and a half and we’ve just exchanged the usual token greetings—friendly nods, smiles, nothing more. We don’t even know their names. I could get along without knowing them, I said. But all right. Let’s go over and invite them to have drinks with us tonight.

We went across to the place Tim’s 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 didn’t ask us in. I was able to see odd things going on behind him in the house—people 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 wasn’t interested. You can tell when people aren’t interested in being mixed with. Very coolly he said they were busy now, expecting guests, and couldn’t drop by. But they’d be in touch.

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

Well, never mind. I don’t need to socialize with them. They’ll 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 it’s 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. Cindy’s already been over visiting. She says this year Tim’s 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 didn’t know there were mutant dogs.

I was hoping Tim had gone into the army or something. No such luck. He’ll be here for two weeks at Christmastime. Ellen’s already counting the days.

I saw the mutant dog out on the beach. If you ask me, that’s no dog, that’s 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 they’re normals. She accepts them and they accept her. I suppose it’s healthy. I suppose their attitudes are right and mine are wrong. But I can’t help my conditioning, can I? I don’t want to be prejudiced. But some things are ingrained when we’re very young.

Ellen stayed out way past midnight tonight with Tim.

Tim at our house for dinner this evening. He’s 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 daughter’s in love with him.