Axiomatic

by Greg Egan

  On his mood?

  He was in a coma, he had no mood.

  In fact, it was easiest, and safest, not to think of him as even being located inside me, let alone experiencing anything there. I was carrying a part of him; the surrogate mother of his clone was carrying another. Only when the two were united would he truly exist again; for now, he was in limbo, neither dead nor alive.

  This pragmatic approach worked, most of the time. Of course, there were moments when I suffered a kind of panic at the renewed realization of the bizarre nature of what I’d done. Sometimes I’d wake from nightmares, believing—for a second or two—that Chris was dead and his spirit had possessed me; or that his brain had sent forth nerves into my body and taken control of my limbs; or that he was fully conscious, and going insane from loneliness and sensory deprivation. But I wasn’t possessed, my limbs still obeyed me, and every month a PET scan and a ‘uterine EEC proved that he was still comatose—undamaged, but mentally inert.

  In fact, the dreams I hated the most were those in which I was carrying a child. I’d wake from these with one hand on my belly, rapturously contemplating the miracle of the new life growing inside me—until I came to my senses and dragged myself angrily out of bed. I’d start the morning in the foullest of moods, grinding my teeth as I pissed, banging plates at the breakfast table, screaming insults at no one in particular while I dressed. Lucky I was living alone.

  I couldn’t really blame my poor besieged body for trying, though. My oversized, marathon pregnancy dragged on and on; no wonder it tried to compensate me for the inconvenience with some stiff medicinal doses of maternal love. How ungrateful my rejection must have seemed; how baffling to find its images and sentiments rejected as inappropriate.

  So… I trampled on Death, and I trampled on Motherhood. Well, hallelujah. If sacrifices had to be made, what better victims could there have been than those two emotional slave-drivers? And it was easy, really; logic was on my side, with a vengeance. Chris was not dead; I had no reason to mourn him, whatever had become of the body I’d known. And the thing in my womb was not a child; permitting a disembodied brain to be the object of motherly love would have been simply farcical.

  We think of our lives as circumscribed by cultural and biological taboos, but if people really want to break them, they always seem to find a way. Human beings are capable of anything: torture, genocide, cannibalism, rape. After which—or so I’d heard—most can still be kind to children and animals, be moved to tears by music, and generally behave as if all their emotional faculties are intact.

  So, what reason did I have to fear that my own minor—and utterly selfless—transgressions could do me any harm at all?

  * * *

  I never met the new body’s surrogate mother, I never saw the clone as a child. I did wonder, though—once I knew that the thing had been born—whether or not she’d found her ‘normal’ pregnancy as distressing as I’d found mine. Which is easier, I wondered: carrying a brain-damaged child-shaped object, with no potential for human thought, grown from a stranger’s DNA—or carrying the sleeping brain of your lover? Which is the harder to keep from loving in inappropriate ways?

  At the start, I’d hoped to be able to blur all the details in my mind—I’d wanted to be able to wake one morning and pretend that Chris had merely been sick, and was now recovered. Over the months, though, I’d come to realise that it was never going to work that way.

  When they took out the brain, I should have felt—at the very least—relieved, but I just felt numb, and vaguely disbelieving. The ordeal had gone on for so long; it couldn’t be over with so little fuss: no trauma, no ceremony. I’d had surreal dreams of laboriously, but triumphantly, giving birth to a healthy pink brain—but even if I’d wanted that (and no doubt the process could have been induced), the organ was too delicate to pass safely through the vagina. This ‘Caesarean’ removal was just one more blow to my biological expectations; a good thing, of course, in the long run, since my biological expectations could never be fulfilled… but I still couldn’t help feeling slightly cheated.

  So I waited, in a daze, for the proof that it had all been worthwhile.

  The brain couldn’t simply be transplanted into the clone, like a heart or a kidney. The peripheral nervous system of the new body wasn’t identical to that of the old one; identical genes weren’t sufficient to ensure that. Also—despite drugs to limit the effect—parts of Chris’s brain had atrophied slightly from disuse. So, rather than splicing nerves directly between the imperfectly matched brain and body—which probably would have left him paralysed, deaf, dumb and blind—the impulses would be routed through a computerised ‘interface’, which would try to sort out the discrepancies. Chris would still have to be rehabilitated, but the computer would speed up the process enormously, constantly striving to bridge the gap between thought and action, between reality and perception.

  The first time they let me see him, I didn’t recognise him at all. His face was slack, his eyes unfocused; he looked like a large, neurologically impaired child—which, of course, he was. I felt a mild twinge of revulsion. The man I’d seen after the train wreck, swarming with medical robots, had looked far more human, far more whole.

  I said, ‘Hello. It’s me.’

  He stared into space.

  The technician said, ‘It’s early days.’

  She was right. In the weeks that followed, his progress (or the computer’s) was astounding. His posture and expression soon lost their disconcerting neutrality, and the first helpless twitches rapidly gave way to coordinated movement; weak and clumsy, but encouraging. He couldn’t talk, but he could meet my eyes, he could squeeze my hand.

  He was in there, he was back, there was no doubt about that.

  I worried about his silence—but I discovered later that he’d deliberately spared me his early, faltering attempts at speech.

  One evening in the fifth week of his new life, when I came into the room and sat down beside the bed, he turned to me and said clearly, ‘They told me what you did. Oh God, Carla, I love you!’

  His eyes filled with tears. I bent over and embraced him; it seemed like the right thing to do. And I cried, too—but even as I did so, I couldn’t help thinking: None of this can really touch me. It’s just one more trick of the body, and I’m immune to all that now.

  * * *

  We made love on the third night he spent at home. I’d expected it to be difficult, a massive psychological hurdle for both of us, but that wasn’t the case at all. And after everything we’d come through, why should it have been? I don’t know what I’d feared; some poor misguided avatar of the Incest Taboo, crashing through the bedroom window at the critical moment, spurred on by the ghost of a discredited nineteenth-century misogynist?

  I suffered no delusion at any level—from the merely subconscious, right down to the endocrine—that Chris was my son. Whatever effects two years of placental hormones might have had on me, whatever behavioural programs they ‘ought’ to have triggered, I’d apparently gained the strength and the insight to undermine completely.

  True, his skin was soft and unweathered, and devoid of the scars of a decade of hacking off facial hair. He might have passed for a sixteen-year-old, but I felt no qualms about that—any middle-aged man who was rich enough and vain enough could have looked the same.

  And when he put his tongue to my breasts, I did not lactate.

  We soon started visiting friends; they were tactful, and Chris was glad of that—although personally, I’d have happily discussed any aspect of the procedure. Six months later, he was working again; his old job had been taken, but a new firm was recruiting (and they wanted a youthful image).

  Piece by piece, our lives were reassembled.

  Nobody, looking at us now, would think that anything had changed.

  But they’d be wrong.

  To love a brain as if it were a child would be ludicrous. Geese might be stupid enough to treat the first animal they see upon hatching as their moth
er, but there are limits to what a sane human being will swallow. So, reason triumphed over instinct, and I conquered my inappropriate love; under the circumstances, there was never really any contest.

  Having deconstructed one form of enslavement, though, I find it all too easy to repeat the process, to recognise the very same chains in another guise.

  Everything special I once felt for Chris is transparent to me now. I still feel genuine friendship for him, I still feel desire, but there used to be something more. If there hadn’t been, I doubt he’d be alive today.

  Oh, the signals keep coming through; some part of my brain still pumps out cues for appropriate feelings of tenderness, but these messages are as laughable, and as ineffectual, now, as the contrivances of some tenth-rate tear-jerking movie. I just can’t suspend my disbelief any more.

  I have no trouble going through the motions; inertia makes it easy. And as long as things are working—as long as his company is pleasant and the sex is good—I see no reason to rock the boat. We may stay together for years, or I may walk out tomorrow. I really don’t know.

  Of course I’m still glad that he survived—and to some degree, I can even admire the courage and selflessness of the woman who saved him. I know that I could never do the same.

  Sometimes when we’re together, and I see in his eyes the very same helpless passion that I’ve lost, I’m tempted to pity myself. I think: I was brutalised, no wonder I’m a cripple, no wonder I’m so fucked up.

  And in a sense, that’s a perfectly valid point of view—but I never seem to be able to subscribe to it for long. The new truth has its own cool passion, its own powers of manipulation; it assails me with words like ‘freedom’ and ‘insight’, and speaks of the end of all deception. It grows inside me, day by day, and it’s far too strong to let me have regrets.

  The Moral Virologist

  Out on the street, in the dazzling sunshine of a warm Atlanta morning, a dozen young children were playing. Chasing, wrestling, and hugging each other, laughing and yelling, crazy and jubilant for no other reason than being alive on such a day. Inside the gleaming white building, though, behind double-glazed windows, the air was slightly chilly—the way John Shawcross preferred it—and nothing could be heard but the air conditioning, and a faint electrical hum.

  The schematic of the protein molecule trembled very slightly. Shawcross grinned, already certain of success. As the pH displayed in the screen’s top left crossed the critical value—the point at which, according to his calculations, the energy of conformation B should drop below that of conformation A—the protein suddenly convulsed and turned completely inside out. It was exactly as he had predicted, and his binding studies had added strong support, but to see the transformation (however complex the algorithms that had led from reality to screen) was naturally the most satisfying proof.

  He replayed the event backwards and forwards several times, utterly captivated. This marvellous device would easily be worth the eight hundred thousand he’d paid for it. The salesperson had provided several impressive demonstrations, of course, but this was the first time Shawcross had used the machine for his own work. Images of proteins in solution! Normal X-ray diffraction could only work with crystalline samples, in which a molecule’s configuration often bore little resemblance to its aqueous, biologically relevant, form. An ultrasonically stimulated semi-ordered liquid phase was the key, not to mention some major breakthroughs in computing; Shawcross couldn’t follow all the details, but that was no impediment to using the machine. He charitably wished upon the inventor Nobel prizes in chemistry, physics and medicine, viewed the stunning results of his experiment once again, then stretched, rose to his feet, and went out in search of lunch.

  On his way to the delicatessen, he passed that bookshop, as always. A lurid new poster in the window caught his eye, a naked young man stretched out on a bed in a state of postcoital languor, one corner of the sheet only just concealing his groin. Emblazoned across the top of the poster, in imitation of a glowing red neon sign, was the book’s title: A Hot Night’s Safe Sex. Shawcross shook his head in anger and disbelief. What was wrong with people? Hadn’t they read his advertisement? Were they blind? Stupid?

  Arrogant? Safety lay only in the obedience of God’s laws.

  After eating, he called in at a newsagent that carried several foreign papers. The previous Saturday’s editions had arrived, and his advertisement was in all of them, where necessary translated into the appropriate languages. Half a page in a major newspaper was not cheap anywhere in the world, but then, money had never been a problem.

  ADULTERERS! SODOMITES!

  REPENT AND BE SAVED!

  ABANDON YOUR WICKEDNESS NOW

  OR DIE AND BURN FOREVER!

  He couldn’t have put it more plainly, could he? Nobody could claim that they hadn’t been warned.

  * * *

  In 1981, Matthew Shawcross bought a tiny, run-down cable TV station in the Bible belt, which until then had split its air time between scratchy black-and-white film clips of fifties gospel singers, and local novelty acts such as snake handlers (protected by their faith, not to mention the removal of their pets’ venom glands) and epileptic children (encouraged by their parents’ prayers, and a carefully timed withdrawal of medication, to let the spirit move them). Matthew Shawcross dragged the station into the nineteen eighties, spending a fortune on a thirty-second computer-animated station ID (a fleet of pirouetting, crenellated spaceships firing crucifix-shaped missiles into a relief map of the USA, chiselling out the station logo of Liberty, holding up, not a torch, but a cross), showing the latest, slickest gospel rock video clips, ‘Christian’ soap operas and ‘Christian’ game shows, and, above all, identifying issues—communism, depravity, godlessness in schools—which could serve as the themes for telethons to raise funds to expand the station, so that future telethons might be even more successful.

  Ten years later, he owned one of the country’s biggest cable TV networks.

  John Shawcross was at college, on the verge of taking up palaeontology, when AIDS first began to make the news in a big way. As the epidemic snowballed, and the spiritual celebrities he most admired (his father included) began proclaiming the disease to be God’s will, he found himself increasingly obsessed by it. In an age where the word miracle belonged to medicine and science, here was a plague straight out of the Old Testament, destroying the wicked and sparing the righteous (give or take some haemophiliacs and transfusion recipients), proving to Shawcross beyond any doubt that sinners could be punished in this life, as well as in the next. This was, he decided, valuable in at least two ways: not only would sinners to whom damnation had seemed a remote and unproven threat now have a powerful, wordly reason to reform, but the righteous would be strengthened in their resolve by this unarguable sign of heavenly support and approval.

  In short, the mere existence of AIDS made John Shawcross feel good, and he gradually became convinced that some kind of personal involvement with HIV, the AIDS virus, would make him feel even better. He lay awake at night, pondering God’s mysterious ways, and wondering how he could get in on the act. AIDS research would be aimed at a cure, so how could he possibly justify involving himself with that?

  Then, in the early hours of one cold morning, he was woken by sounds from the room next to his. Giggling, grunting, and the squeaking of bed springs. He wrapped his pillow around his ears and tried to go back to sleep, but the sounds could not be ignored—nor could the effect they wrought on his own fallible flesh. He masturbated for a while, on the pretext of trying to manually crush his unwanted erection, but stopped short of orgasm, and lay, shivering, in a state of heightened moral perception. It was a different woman every week; he’d seen them leaving in the morning. He’d tried to counsel his fellow student, but had been mocked for his troubles. Shawcross didn’t blame the poor young man; was it any wonder people laughed at the truth, when every movie, every book, every magazine, every rock song, still sanctioned promiscuity and perversion, making
them out to be normal and good? The fear of AIDS might have saved millions of sinners, but millions more still ignored it, absurdly convinced that their chosen partners could never be infected, or trusting in condoms to frustrate the will of God!

  The trouble was, vast segments of the population had, in spite of their wantonness, remained uninfected, and the use of condoms, according to the studies he’d read, did seem to reduce the risk of transmission. These facts disturbed Shawcross a great deal. Why would an omnipotent God create an imperfect tool?

  Was it a matter of divine mercy? That was possible, he conceded, but it struck him as rather distasteful: sexual Russian roulette was hardly a fitting image of the Lord’s capacity for forgiveness.

  Or—Shawcross tingled all over as the possibility crystallised in his brain—might AIDS be no more than a mere prophetic shadow, hinting at a future plague a thousand times more terrible? A warning to the wicked to change their ways while they still had time? An example to the righteous as to how they might do His will?

  Shawcross broke into a sweat. The sinners next door moaned as if already in Hell, the thin dividing wall vibrated, the wind rose up to shake the dark trees and rattle his window. What was this wild idea in his head? A true message from God, or the product of his own imperfect understanding? He needed guidance! He switched on his reading lamp and picked up his Bible from the bedside table. With his eyes closed, he opened the book at random.

  He recognised the passage at the very first glance. He ought to have; he’d read it and reread it a hundred times, and knew it almost by heart. The destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah.

  At first, he tried to deny his destiny: He was unworthy! A sinner himself! An ignorant child! But everyone was unworthy, everyone was a sinner, everyone was an ignorant child in God’s eyes. It was pride, not humility, that spoke against God’s choice of him.