“There’s no need to worry,” Adam told her, not meaning it kindly. “There’s no reason to expect anything like that to happen to you. You’re not Eve.”
Judith looked at him sharply, but Adam judged that she hadn’t taken offence, or even been aware that she might have done. Judith wasn’t wondering what Eve had that she didn’t; she was wondering how Adam had ended up with Lilith instead of Eve, if he felt as intensely about Eve as he seemed to do. That was something that Adam had no intention of explaining.
Nick interrupted them then, having been brought back down to earth by Seth. He was still exceedingly fretful, though, even by the standards of a telic forced to wait. “She is going to be all right, isn’t she?” he said, to Adam.
“She’ll be fine,” Adam assured him. “It’s just nature’s way of telling her to take it a little bit easier. She’s bright enough to heed the warning.”
“It’s not that easy, though, is it?” Nick said.
“Yes it is,” Adam told him. “It really is.”
~ * ~
The reason why Adam and Lilith had ended up together, instead of Adam and Eve—if there really had been a reason, rather than a mere freak of circumstance—was that Adam and Lilith had had the potential to change the world, whereas Adam and Eve would only have changed one another.
Adam and Eve might have been—would have been, Adam now felt sure—the happier couple, but Adam and Lilith had planned to be collaborators as well as eternal lovers. They were both bioscientists, and their specialisms had an obvious overlap in the economically significant field of smart clothing. If only they had been able to sustain an adequate level of domestic harmony, they might have worked together as closely, and as productively, as Pierre and Marie Curie—but they hadn’t. The patent applications they might have formulated and filed together had never come to term, and they had missed out on their due share of the big boom. They had had their separate successes, but they had been very minor ones compared to what they might have done together.
Adam knew that he ought to phone Lilith, to tell her what had happened to Eve. After all, she’d known Nick and Eve as long as he had, and just as well. But for a whim of circumstance, it might have been her they’d invited to dinner tonight, along with some unattached Byronic hunk who cherished his satanic gloom far too much ever to surrender to the joys of PI A...except that it wasn’t a whim of circumstance at all. There was no way Eve Miller would ever tolerate a refusenik at her dinner table, even one she had known since childhood and loved, in her fashion. Lilith knew that too, and the knowledge would only add to the awful confusion of her emotions when she heard the news.
It was better, Adam decided, not to phone her. Not now, at any rate. Instead, he rehearsed the argument in his mind that he would have been forced to put to her, to prove to her that Eve’s misfortune wasn’t any kind of proof that she was right about the awful iniquity of PIA patches.
“The problem,” he would have told her, “isn’t the enhancement of pleasure in achievement. The problem is the complexity of the enhanced neural pathways that are set up. It’s a matter of focus. Common-or-garden workaholics like me and Nick, or Seth and Ruth, can narrow the scope of our potential achievements, so the neural pathways enhanced by the patches are relatively simple and direct—motorways of the mind. Common-or-garden mothers can do the same—but Eve is an artist, who brings an unmatchable flair to everything. She could never be content to concentrate on motherhood. She might have given up her own career, but she hasn’t given up her involvement in Nick’s, and she hasn’t given up her determination to maintain a social life outside of motherhood and Nick’s work alike. She’s tried to maintain too many strings to her bow, that’s all. The enhanced pathways she’s built in her brain, with the aid of PIA, are too complicated and intricately tangled. All she needs to do is slow down, take things a little easier, lower her standards just a little.”
Unfortunately, Adam had known Lilith for far too long not to be able to synthesize the arguments she would have constructed in opposition to his. “That’s exactly what I’ve been telling you all along,” she would have retorted. “PIAs are creating a culture of obsession. They help people with unhealthy tendencies to become even more unhealthy, even more manically focused on their petty specialisms. To a mentally healthy person—a well-rounded person like Eve—they’re a curse, which can only lead to neural overload and mental breakdown. How can she slow down, take things easier and lower her standards a little while she’s addicted to her PIA cocktail of choice?”
“She’s not addicted,” Adam replied, reflexively. “PIAs aren’t addictive.”
“Not physiologically addictive,” his Lilith-anima countered, “but in psychological terms, they’re as addictive as addictive can be. Who can’t get hung up and strung out on success? Who can resist the temptation to excel. But we have to resist it, Adam, don’t you see? We have to retain mastery of our own motivation.”
“But we could have had success,” Adam objected, plaintively. “We could have made a killing. We could have done our bit to change the world.”
~ * ~
“Are you all right, Adam?” Judith asked, yet again.
Adam woke up with a start, convinced that he had not really been asleep. He became aware that the fingers of his right hand had been plucking at his left arm—not, he realized, to test the patch beneath the fleshcloth but to tease the garment itself, the living clothing to whose evolution he and Lilith might have made a crucial contribution, if only they had not been torn apart by a difference of opinion.
“Yes,” he said. “I’m fine.”
“Eve’s awake,” Judith told him. Nick popped his head out just now to say that you can go in to see her if you want. Seth and I just waved at her from the doorway.
Adam looked around and saw that Seth was in the far corner of the waiting room, muttering into his phone while staring at his wristwatch—the perfect image of Telic Man. He was presumably bringing Ruth up to date, and assuring her that they would soon be back on track, back on the timetable.
Adam stood up, and went in to see Eve. The room she was in was very clean, although it wasn’t easy to find telic cleaners, but Adam couldn’t believe that it seemed clean to Eve. To her, it must seem gloomy, dingy and dangerous. She was desperate to be out of it and home, but she had the obligatory fluid drip attached to her arm and a whole battery of electrodes clustered on her skull, feeding data to an EEG. The doctor had doubtless set a deadline for the completion of his enquiries, but the waiting would be agony for the patient.
Nick stayed where he was, sitting on the right-hand side of the bed holding Eve’s right hand. Adam brought a chair up to the other side.
“You gave us a fright,” Adam observed, as Eve’s anxious blue eyes met his.
“I ruined the dinner,” she said, tearfully. “The whole evening.”
“The dinner was fabulous,” Adam told her. “You know as well as I do that no further mouthful can ever match up to the first. It was a kindness to interrupt us, really. Imagine the emphasis your performance lent to the memory of that perfect moment. It was a masterstroke—pure coup-de-théâtre.”
Eve smiled.
“I wish I could bullshit like that;’ Nick said. “You should never have been a scientist, Adam—with a talent like that you could have worked for the tabloids.”
“I wanted to change the world,” Adam said, pretending to answer Nick’s veiled insult. “I still might.”
“You never got dessert” Eve lamented, losing her smile again.
“It’s dessert,” Adam said. “It’ll keep.”
“You didn’t even get to finish the ‘98 Bordeaux.”
“It’s a full-bodied claret,” Adam said. “It’ll be all the better for a chance to breathe.”
“You really should have decanted it instead of just uncorking the bottle,” Eve immediately said to Nick. “We really must try to get things right.”
“Not according to Adam,” Nick retorted, a trifle spitefull
y. “Slow down, take it easy, lower our standards—that’s his advice. Did the doctor say anything?”
“The same, but not as economically. Is Samuel all right? He won’t like it if I’m not there when he wakes up.”
“Ruth’s with him,” Nick assured her. “He’ll be fine. You’d better go now, Adam—it’s getting late, and you must have things to do tomorrow. You ought to take Judith home—this isn’t really her concern, and she must be in a bit of a state.”
“What must she think of us?” Eve wondered, aloud. “Do you like Judith, Adam?”
“Yes,” said Adam, dutifully. “She’s very nice—brought a perfect balance to the party.”
“I picked her,” Nick said, proudly.
“And you’re absolutely right about my seeing her home,” Adam said. “Be sure and take the doctor’s advice, Eve. You don’t have to be perfect in every respect, and you’re already perfect in more ways than any normal human being could ever hope to be.”
“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.
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