The Golden Fleece (21 page)

“You really ought to phone Lilith too,” Nick suggested. “After all, she’s known us as long as you have. She’d want to know what happened wouldn’t she?”

“I’ll phone tomorrow,” Adam said, still looking into Eve’s eyes, and knowing that she would understand that he intended to phone her, not Lilith. “It was the single greatest mouthful of roast pork I’ve ever tasted, or ever hope to taste.”

“I know,” said Eve, softly. “It blew my mind.”

~ * ~

As Adam and Judith arranged themselves in the back seat of the cab they were both careful to leave a symbolic margin between them. He was glad that they seemed to be in agreement on the issue, although there hadn’t been much doubt about it. It would have been embarrassing if one of them had been interested if the other wasn’t, but the catastrophic interruption of the party would have put paid to any chance either one of them might have had of forming such an interest. Contrary to what Nick had said, Judith was in far less of a “state” than any of the other diners, but she was still a telic whose purpose had been interrupted and frustrated. She was in no condition to form attachments, no matter how tentative.

“One thing I’ve never understood,” Judith said, by way of making conversation, as the cab set off in the direction of her home, “is why the patches work so well in helping people to work harder and more effectively, but don’t seem to have any effect at all on personal relationships. You’d expect them to reward success in marriage just as much as success at work, wouldn’t you?”

“No,” Adam told her, slipping easily enough into his lecturing mode now that he was sure that he and she were ships that would pass in the night without a flicker of remorse. “The whole point about PIAs is that they assist
telic
behavior. They can only increase the pleasure derived from the completion of goal-orientated tasks.”

“You’re saying that marriages—romantic relationships in general—aren’t goal-orientated?”

“Yes.”

“But TGADs don’t affect them either.”

“Of course not. TGADs are their own reward—that’s the essence of paratelic experience.”

“I don’t believe that relationships are paratelic,” Judith said, flatly. “They’re not just things to be enjoyed for the sake of the experience. They
are
goal-orientated. At least, they can be. They
should
be.”

“I thought so once,” Adam admitted. “I changed my mind.”

“Thanks to bitter experience?”

“Thanks to more careful theoretical analysis, and the lessons of objective empirical observation. If romantic relationships were as telic as mythmongers sometimes pretend, there really would be PIAs that function as love potions. There aren’t.”

“There aren’t any that enhance the rewards of telic violence,” she observed, “but you wouldn’t rule out that possibility on theoretical grounds when we were talking earlier.”

“There’s no substantial pressure of demand on that particular innovation,” Adam reminded her, “in spite of the potential military interest. The demand for love potions, on the other hand, is potentially immense—and so are the potential commercial rewards.”

What a terrible thing it would be,
he heard Lilith whisper, in the depths of his mind,
if we could choose who to love, and who would love us, and make our choices stick with the aid of drug-induced reinforcement.

Would it?
Adam asked, silently.
Would it, really?

“I still don’t think that you can rule out the possibility,” Judith insisted. “We can’t know today what we might discover tomorrow. The world is changing more rapidly now than ever before—human society as well as the climate—and we have no idea where it might end up.”

“The road to Utopia isn’t closed,” Adam said. “It’s just that there aren’t very many of us capable of following the map.”

The cab drew to a halt then, and Judith got out.

Adam didn’t bother to get out with her. He already knew that she wasn’t going to invite him in. He leaned over before she shut the door to say: “I’m sorry the evening was such a disaster.”

“It wasn’t,” she said. “I’ve never seen a house so perfect, and a meal so perfectly planned and executed. It was quite an inspiration, in its way. I’m sorry for Eve, of course—but I hope I’ll have the opportunity again. Perhaps they’ll invite us both.” She tried hard to sound enthusiastic, but couldn’t.

As soon as the door closed, the cab got under way again. Adam’s flat was only five minutes away.

As he paid the driver, Adam was struck by a gust of cold wind, whose suddenness overwhelmed the compensatory capacity of his smart sweater. He shivered. The patch on his left arm made itself felt, although the heat it seemed to generate was illusory. As the cab drew away Adam paused to scratch his arm, resolving not to use such a heavy dose the next time he went out.

The problem with being wired to obtain superabundant pleasure from success
, he thought, framing the words as carefully as he would have done had Judith still been there to hear him,
is that when, in spite of one’s best efforts, one can’t seem to succeed, life becomes very difficult indeed.

As he walked up the stone steps to his front door, he heard someone in one of the other flats laughing excitedly.
Bloody paratelics,
he thought, uncharitably.
It’s all so very easy for them.

Lilith, he felt sure, would not have laughed, any more than Eve would. She had loved him, after all, in her fashion.

<>

~ * ~

MORTIMER GRAY
’
S HISTORY OF DEATH

1.

I was an utterly unexceptional child of the twenty-ninth century, comprehensively engineered for emortality while I was still a more-or-less inchoate blastula and decanted from an artificial womb in Nabum Hatchery in the county of York in the Defederated States of Europe. I was raised in an aggregate family which consisted of six men and six women. I was, of course, an only child, and I received the customary superabundance of love, affection and admiration. With the aid of excellent role-models, careful biofeedback training and thoroughly competent internal technologies I grew up reasonable, charitable, self-controlled and intensely serious of mind.

It’s evident that not everyone grows up like that, but I’ve never quite been able to understand how people manage to avoid it. If conspicuous individuality—and frank perversity—aren’t programmed in the genes or rooted in early upbringing, how on earth do they spring into being with such determined irregularity? But this is my story, not the world’s, and I shouldn’t digress.

In due course, the time came for me—as it comes to everyone—to leave my family and enter a community of my peers for my first spell at college. I elected to go to Adelaide in Australia, because I liked the name.

Although my memories of that period are understandably hazy I feel sure that I had begun to see the fascination of history long before the crucial event that determined my path in life. The subject seemed—in stark contrast to the disciplined coherency of mathematics or the sciences—so huge, so amazingly abundant in its data, and so charmingly disorganized. I was always a very orderly and organized person, and I needed a vocation of that kind to loosen me up a little. It was not, however, until I set forth on an ill-fated expedition on the sailing-ship
Genesis
in September 2901, that the exact form of my destiny was determined.

I use the word “destiny” with the utmost care; it is no mere rhetorical flourish. What happened when
Genesis
defied the supposed limits of possibility and turned turtle was no mere incident, and the impression which it made on my fledgling mind was no mere suggestion. Before that ship set sail, a thousand futures were open to me; afterwards, I was beset by an irresistible compulsion. My destiny was determined the day
Genesis
went down; as a result of that tragedy my fate was sealed.

~ * ~

We were en route from Brisbane to tour the Creationist Islands of Micronesia, which were then regarded as artistic curiosities rather than daring experiments in continental design. I had expected to find the experience exhilarating, but almost as soon as we had left port I was struck down by sea-sickness.

Sea-sickness, by virtue of being psychosomatic, is one of the very few diseases with which modern internal technology is sometimes impotent to deal, and I was miserably confined to my cabin while I waited for my mind to make the necessary adaptation. I was bitterly ashamed of myself, for I alone out of half a hundred passengers had fallen prey to that strange atavistic malaise. While the others partied on deck, beneath the glorious light of the tropic stars, I lay in my bunk, half-delirious with discomfort and lack of sleep. I thought myself the unluckiest man in the world.

When I was abruptly hurled from my bed I thought that I had fallen—that my tossing and turning had inflicted one more ignominy upon me. When I couldn’t recover my former position after spending long minutes fruitlessly groping about amid all kinds of mysterious debris, I assumed that I must be confused. When I couldn’t open the door of my cabin even though I had the handle in my hand, I assumed that my failure was the result of clumsiness. When I finally got out into the corridor, and found myself crawling in shallow water with the artificial bioluminescent strip beneath instead of above me, I thought I must be mad.

When the little girl spoke to me, I thought at first that she was a delusion, and that I was lost in a nightmare. It wasn’t until she touched me, and tried to drag me upright with her tiny, frail hands, and addressed me by name—albeit incorrectly—that I was finally able to focus my thoughts.

“You have to get up, Mr. Mortimer,” she said. “The boat’s upside-down.”

She was only eight years old, but she spoke quite calmly and reasonably.

“That’s impossible,” I told her.
“Genesis
is unsinkable. There’s no way it could turn upside-down.”

“But it is upside-down,” she insisted—and as she did so, I finally realized the significance of the fact that the floor was glowing the way the ceiling should have glowed. “The water’s coming in. I think we’ll have to swim out.”

The light put out by the ceiling-strip was as bright as ever, but the rippling water overlaying it made it seem dim and uncertain. The girl’s little face, lit from below, seemed terribly serious within the frame of her dark and curly hair.

“I can’t swim,” I said, flatly.

She looked at me as if I were insane, or stupid, but it was true. I couldn’t swim. I’d never liked the idea and I’d never seen any necessity. All modern ships—even sailing-ships designed to be cute and quaint for the benefit of tourists—were unsinkable.

I scrambled to my feet, and put out both my hands to steady myself, to hold myself rigid against the upside-down walls. The water was knee-deep. I couldn’t tell whether it was increasing or not—which told me, reassuringly, that it couldn’t be rising very quickly. The upturned boat was rocking this way and that, and I could hear the rumble of waves breaking on the outside of the hull, but I didn’t know how much of that apparent violence was in my mind.

“My name’s Emily,” the little girl told me. “I’m frightened. All my mothers and fathers were on deck. Everyone was on deck, except for you and me. Do you think they’re all dead?”

“They can’t be,” I said, marveling at the fact that she spoke so soberly, even when she said that she was frightened. I realized, however, that if the ship had suffered the kind of misfortune which could turn it upside-down, the people on deck might indeed be dead. I tried to remember the passengers gossiping in the departure lounge, introducing themselves to one another with such fervor. The little girl had been with a party of nine, none of whose names I could remember. It occurred to me that her whole family might have been wiped out, that she might now be that rarest of all rare beings, an orphan. It was almost unimaginable. What possible catastrophe, I wondered, could have done that?

I asked Emily what had happened. She didn’t know. Like me she had been in her bunk, sleeping the sleep of the innocent.