The Medusa Encounter

by Paul Preuss

  Bridget Reilly was the soul of friendliness at work, but her coworkers, male and female, soon learned that she had not the least interest in getting to know them better than her job required. When the workday was over, Ms. Reilly rode the underground to a tiny, ugly apartment in a dirty, ugly neighborhood, where prudence suggested she keep indoors, away from her neighbors and other strangers. She thawed dinner each night in an autochef; after she ate she went straight to her narrow bed. Six hours later the room’s tiny videoplate would brighten the predawn darkness with the BBC’s morning news, waking her to another day.

  Her inward life was richer and stranger by far.

  By night, there were dreams. Night after night she descended into the vortex of lurid clouds. She knew they were the clouds of Jupiter; more than that she did not know. The wind sang to her in a language she could not name, and although she seemed to understand it perfectly she could never remember a word of what had been said when she woke up. All she could remember were the tumbled emotions of ecstasy and fear, of ego-dissolving hope, of poisonous self-hatred.

  By day, her intellect was the very edge of Occam’s razor. While she booked group tours to Port Hesperus and Labyrinth City with one hand on the keyboard, her other hand rested with PIN spines extended, penetrating her computer’s ports, running other programs in the interstices of processing. She needed no screen except the one in her head.

  Not even the commander knew where she was or who she pretended to be. She maintained tenuous contact with him through untraceable circuits to his office at the Board of Space Control—somehow he was never in his office—but on the rare occasions they actually conversed, she made little pretense of heeding his suggestions; she was not running his programs. Indeed, although she said nothing of this to the commander, she had deferred her researches into Howard Falcon’s affairs while he investigated a deeper mystery, the contents of her own mind. . . .

  Seated at her travel agency computer, she absorbed whole encyclopedias of neuroanatomy, neurochemistry, drug lore. Using the infolinks, she arranged prescriptions for women who did not resemble each other and did not resemble Bridget Reilly in the least; late at night, in neighborhoods filled with people of wealth or people of color, these women collected their medicines. Sparta’s pill and patch collection grew into a pharmacopeia.

  At the safe house they’d used drugs on her in an attempt to penetrate her dreams. But she’d refused to work with the commander on his terms; perhaps because of that, perhaps for some deeper reason, the commander had refused to share everything they’d learned from that part of herself she could not reach. Now she used drugs on herself, trying to crack her own subconscious.

  Amphetamines and barbiturates and psychedelics acted on her just as a century’s documentation said they would; they were useless. Metal salts changed her behavior and threatened to poison her internal organs and left her mind reeling. Alcohol increased the rate of dreaming but reduced the cogency of the dreams and left her nauseated in the morning, with burning eyes. The known neurotransmitters—dopamine and the rest—seemed to add vivid flourishes to familiar dream scenes, but did nothing for her insight or her memory.

  Her researches took her farther afield. One taste of a chemical on her tongue and she knew what she was ingesting, for its precise formula spread itself across the screen of her mind. Of the estimated 30,000 significant proteins and peptides in the brain, a comparative handful had been characterized. Still, it was a long list. Methodically she worked her way through it. She recorded the effects of her self-experimentation with clinical accuracy.

  But she became ever more isolated. Her coworkers thought she disdained them, and they developed a cordial, low-temperature hatred for her in return. Still, her sacrifices were not in vain. After weeks of horrific nights, she stumbled upon a result.

  A short-chain peptide, some nine amino-acid residues long, known to play a role in the formation of the striped columns of the visual cortex, seemed to release an image from her dreams, allowing it to be held in memory.

  With the image a word was associated, perhaps two words, whose meaning she did not recognize: “moonjelly.”

  She took more of the peptide, a cheap and simple preparation that in the previous decade had been a favorite of some aggressively inclined psychotherapists, the type who liked roughing up their clients in the name of love and were inclined to become impatient with the slow unfolding of the talking cure. Cutely, they’d called the stuff Bliss. Bliss had started in the designer drug labs on L-5 as an analogue of controlled substances, not itself illegal. But it quickly made its way to Earth, where it soon developed that Bliss had unfortunate “side effects.” A few suicides were enough to get it banned for all but controlled experiments. A single pharmaceutical company manufactured it for the use of researchers, under the brand name Striaphan.

  Each successive night that Sparta took Striaphan, the dream word and the dream image became more closely associated, the vision more focused. The “moonjelly” took on a precise form: as if a miniature of the containing dream, the thing she envisioned was itself a fleshy vortex, which pulsed rhythmically in the center of the vortex of clouds. It could have been a terrible sight, but to her it seemed exquisitely beautiful.

  She no longer awoke in terror. The conviction grew in her that there was some thing in the eye of the Jovian vortex that sang to her, called to her, welcomed her . . . home.

  She forgot what she knew of Striaphan’s history and contraindications. In the midst of her thrilling discovery, Sparta’s extraordinary capacity for self-analysis, for self-awareness, failed her, having dissolved away without her notice. She never noticed the moment when she became dependent upon the stuff.

  PART THREE

  THE CARNIVAL OF THE ANIMALS

  XI

  The ramjet from London began its final approach to Varanasi; steady deceleration pushed the passengers forward against their seat harnesses. Sparta looked much like the Indian women who crowded the jitney: delicate, dark-skinned, black-haired, and swathed in colorful cotton. From her seat window she could see a distant rise of snow-covered peaks, defining the curve of Earth. Then the plane was into the smog.

  Her ears popped. She shook a white wafer from a thin plastic tube containing a stack of them. She sucked it silently, urgently; the taste of it was like honey and lemon on her tongue.

  A slender woman wrapped in a gauzy cotton sari threaded with gold rose from her chair and smiled as Sparta entered the room. “Welcome, Inspector Troy. Doctor Singh will be free shortly. Please make yourself comfortable.”

  “Thanks. I’m comfortable standing.” Sparta stood at something resembling parade rest. She was wearing dress blues now, with ribbons for marksmanship, good conduct, and extraordinary heroism—the only ribbons she possessed—in a thin colored line above her left breast pocket. The Space Board uniform made for high visibility; voluntarily, she had made herself a walking target.

  “Would you like tea? Other refreshments? These are rather good.” The woman touched one of her long polished fingernails to a silver tray that held bowls of colorful sweets, marble-sized balls of ground nuts and coconut milk and pistachios wrapped in silver foil, the foil being part of the treat. The tray rested on the corner of an elaborately carved teak table, as low as a coffee table, which carried nothing else except a discrete imitation-ivory flatscreen and commlink.

  “Nothing, thanks.” Sparta saw the red dot in the center of the woman’s brown forehead and thought of her own “soul’s eye,” the dense swelling of brain tissue behind the bone of her forehead. She walked to the window and stood with legs braced and hands clasped behind her. “You have quite a view here.”

  The reception room was on the fortieth floor of the Space Board’s Biological Medicine Center, a sprawling glass polygon that rose on the edge of Ramnagar, on the right bank of the broad Ganges; the modernist building had started as a conceptual cube, so savagely sliced and carved by its architect that it might have been chipped from a block of glacial ic
e that had wandered too far south from the Himalayas. Through the tall windows Sparta could see northwest to the holy city of Varanasi, to its spiked temples rising from the smog and its riverbank steps crowded with bathers descending to share the brown water with drifting flotsam.

  The Indian woman resumed her chair, but she seemed to have nothing very much to do. “Is this your first trip to our facility, Inspector?”

  “My first trip to India, in fact.”

  “Forgive me, I hope I am not prying, but you are rather famous”—the woman’s voice was clear and musical; perhaps her principal job was to entertain visitors waiting on Dr. Singh—“for you have already been to the moon, to Mars, even down onto the surface of Venus.”

  Sparta half turned from the window and smiled. “I’ve seen very little of our own exotic planet.”

  “What one can see today is mostly haze, I fear.”

  “Does the city still use fossil fuel?”

  “No, our fusion plant works well. That is wood smoke from the funeral pyres on the ghats.”

  “Woodsmoke?” Sparta focused her attention on a stepped terrace beside the river. Her right eye enlarged the scene telescopically, and she could see the flames rising from the stacked logs, see the blackened shape lying atop them.

  “Much of the wood is imported from Siberia, these past several decades,” said the woman. “The Himalayan forests have been slow to recover.”

  Sparta’s telescopic view darted to another ghat, and another. On one, the partially burned remains of a body were being wrapped in bright cloth; it made a bundle like those floating in the river.

  “Perhaps you are thinking, what a strange place for a biological research facility,” the secretary said cheerfully. “The holiest city in India.”

  Sparta turned her back to the window. “And you? Do you regard it as strange?”

  “Many of our visitors do.” The woman deftly evaded the question. “Particularly when they learn that some of our distinguished researchers, very thoroughly grounded in microbial biology, I assure you, are also good Hindus who believe that drinking from the sacred waters of the Ganges purifies the body and unburdens the soul.” The commlink chimed and the secretary, without answering it, curved her wide red lips in a smile. “Doctor Singh will see you now.”

  The woman who came out from behind the desk might have been her secretary’s sister. She had a graceful red mouth, huge brown eyes, and straight black shining hair pulled tightly back behind her neck. “I’m Holly Singh, Inspector Troy. I’m pleased to meet you.” The accent was pure Oxbridge, however, without a trace of Indian lilt, and the costume was polo: silk blouse, jodhpurs, and polished riding boots.

  “It was good of you to make time for me on short notice.” Sparta shook hands firmly and, in the momentary exchange, studied Singh in ways the woman might not have enjoyed knowing about, had she sensed them—the sort of scrutiny one was likely to receive from inquisitive machines upon seeking entry to a military base, or the upper floors of the Board of Space Control’s Earth Central headquarters in Manhattan. She focused her right eye on the lens and retina of Singh’s left, until its round brown circles filled her field of view. From the retinal pattern, Sparta saw that Singh was the person the files in Earth Central said she was. Sparta analyzed the aroma of Singh’s perfume and soap and perspiration, and found in it hints of flowers and musk and tea and a complex of chemicals typical of a healthy body in repose. Sparta listened to the tone of Singh’s voice, and heard in it what she should have expected to find, a mixture of confidence, curiosity, and control.

  “You wish to ask me about ICEP, Inspector? Some questions not covered in the records?”

  “Implied by the records, Doctor.”

  Singh looked rueful. “I suppose the prose in those reports is rather dry. With a few minutes’ notice, I might have been able to save you a trip halfway round the world.”

  “I don’t mind travel.”

  “So I have heard.” The hint of a smile.

  Sparta had prolonged her inspection an extra few seconds. At first glance—and sniff and listen—Holly Singh appeared to be no more than thirty years old, but her skin was so smooth and her visage so regular that it was evident that she had had most of her physiognomy reconstructed. Yet there was no record of trauma in her file. A disguise, then. And her body odor, too, was a disguise, a compound of oils and acids intended to reproduce just that very smell of a relaxed thirty-year-old female.

  Sparta briefly flirted with the notion that Singh was not human at all, but that mythical creature, an android. But who would bother to build a machine that looked like a human, when what was wanted was humans with the capacities of machines?

  No, Singh was human enough, someone who wanted to seem other than she was and who knew that nonverbal cues were as important as verbal ones. Her overtrained, impossibly relaxed voice revealed that just as surely as the faint but sharp odor of adrenaline that underlay her customized body-odor, announcing that her nerves were strung tight.

  “Please sit down. Did my assistant offer you refreshments?”

  “Yes, thanks. Nothing for me.” The white wafer was still a bittersweet memory on her tongue.

  Sparta sat in one of the comfortable armchairs facing Singh’s desk and adjusted the line of her trouser creases over her knees. The doctor sat in the armchair opposite. The room was shadowed, its glass wall curtained; dappled warm light shone from lamps of brass filigree.

  Singh gestured to a cluster of framed holographs on the table between them. “There they are—Peter, Paul, Soula, Steg, Alice, Rama, Li, Hieronymous—their graduation pictures.”

  “How old were they when these were taken?”

  “All young adults, fourteen to sixteen years old. Peter, Paul, and Alice were acquired as youngsters in Zaire—in accordance with local law and Council regulations regarding trade in endangered species, of course. The others were born here at our primate facility.” Singh’s gaze lingered on the holos. “Chimps have a limited range of expressions, but I like to think there is considerable pride to be seen in those young faces.”

  “You were fond of them,” Sparta said.

  “Very. They were not experimental animals to me. Although that’s how the program began.”

  “How did it begin?” Sparta coaxed more warmth into her tone; she was surprised at the effort it cost her. “I don’t mean officially. I mean, what inspired you, Dr. Singh?”

  Singh found the question flattering, as Sparta had hoped, and returned the compliment by favoring Sparta with the steady gaze of her dark eyes—as she no doubt favored everyone on whom she decided to expend valuable time. “I conceived of the program at a time when nanoware technology had finally begun to show the promise that we had dreamt of since the 20th century. It was the middle ’70s . . . has it really been almost fifteen years ago now?”

  Perhaps a little more than fifteen, Sparta thought—you must have thought up the chimp experiments before someone decided to try them on a human subject as well. . . .

  Singh continued. “You may be too young to remember the excitement of the ’70s, Inspector, but they were glorious days for neurology, here and at research centers everywhere. With the new artificial enzymes and programmed, self-replicating cells we learned to repair and enhance damaged areas of the brain and nervous system throughout the body . . . to arrest Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson’s disease, ALS, and a host of other diseases. To restore sight and hearing to virtually all patients whose deficits were due to localized neurophysical damage. And for those in high-risk jobs”—Singh’s glance flickered to Sparta’s dress blue uniform, with its thin line of ribbons—“the benefits were even more immediate: a cure for paralysis due to spinal cord injury, for example. The list is long.”

  “You made progress on all those fronts simultaneously?”

  “The potential benefits were great and, by comparison, the risks were small. Once we were armed with the informed consent of our patients—or their guardians—nothing stood in the way o
f our research. Other areas were more problematic.”

  “Such as?”

  “We also saw opportunities—and we have yet to achieve our goals here—of making subtler improvements. Restoring memory loss in some cases, correcting certain speech defects, certain disorders of perception. Dyslexia, for example.”

  Sparta leaned forward, encouraging Singh to expand.

  “But you can see the ethical problems,” Singh said, confiding in Sparta as if she were a fellow researcher. “A dyslexic can learn to function within the normal range through traditional therapies. Some of the older literature even suggested that dyslexias might be associated with higher functions—what used to be called creativity, the writing of fiction and so on. We were in a position where we really didn’t understand the hierarchical relationships. We were possessed of very powerful neurological tools but inadequate knowledge of the organization of the brain itself.”

  “And of course you couldn’t experiment with humans.”

  “Some of our own researchers were reluctant even to experiment with higher primates.”

  “Not you.”

  “I’m sure you’ve heard many stories about India, Inspector. Perhaps you’ve heard of the Jains, who sweep the ground before them so as not to step on a flea? Well, I have been known to crush mosquitos—even on purpose.” For a moment Singh’s wide red lips stretched into a smile, and her white teeth gleamed.

  Sparta was reminded more of the Hindu Kali than of the peaceful deities of the Jains.

  “But I have a healthy respect for life, and especially for its most evolved forms,” Singh went on. “First we exhausted the possibilities of computer modeling—it was from this research, incidentally, that many features of the modern organic micro-supercomputers arose. Meanwhile we pursued neuroanalytical work on species other than primates—rats, cats, dogs, and so on. But when finally it came to the subtler questions I’ve mentioned, questions of language, questions of reading and writing and remembered speech, no other species could stand in for humanity.”