The Mammoth Book of Best New SF 13

by Gardner Dozois

  “Sildenafil citrate. That last one is already patented by Pfizer. It was the first of the Viagra-class drugs. But it would still be my first suggestion here.”

  “It was tried earlier this year. There was some success, but also side effects – headaches, and alarming fluctuations in blood pressure. I judged it too risky to continue.”

  My mind felt topsy-turvy. So many years with the image of the Patriarch as all-powerful and all-knowing, and now Cyrus Walker spoke of the Blessed Jasper like some prize animal needing to be restored to working condition.

  “There are many other drugs,” I said. “I can suggest dozens. The problem is, they have never been tried on human subjects under controlled conditions. It would take years for Tilden to get any of them through the FDA.”

  Prompted by another blank look from Elder Walker, I added, “FDA is the Food and Drug Administration. It would have to approve any drug.”

  “Why should they know anything of the drugs that you have developed? They belong to us and Tilden.”

  “The FDA has to be told of any experiments involving humans. And Tilden won’t risk crossing the FDA; they have too much at stake on hundreds of products.”

  “Then neither Tilden nor your FDA shall know of the experiments.” Elder Walker had regained control of himself, and of the meeting. “It is very simple, Rachel. You will develop and provide the test drugs. Here within the Order I will find males to take part in your experiments. The results will come back to you, and you will make the evaluation. No one outside will know anything.”

  I shook my head. I was frightened, but I had to protest. “I can’t do that.”

  “What do you mean, can’t?” Elder Walker was scowling.

  “It’s dangerous, and unethical, and unfair to Tilden. They’ve always worked in good faith with the Blessed Order. Walter Cottingham has treated me kindly, and I regard him as my friend.”

  “Tilden, and Walter Cottingham, are unbelievers. Your duty is to serve the Blessed Order.” Perhaps there was still a hint of rebellion in my look, because he went on, “You will do as you are told, Rachel. Or would you rather never see your daughter again?”

  He had hit my weak point, and he knew it. They had Naomi. I dared argue no more. I nodded, and said softly, “It will be as you say.”

  If I am completely honest, I must admit that the decision was not so difficult as it may sound. I was fascinated by the prospect of applying some of the ideas that bubbled up in my head as soon as the problem was defined. Also, my whole upbringing had been one in which obedience to Elder Cyrus Walker and the needs of the Blessed Order was immediate and unquestioned.

  So the secret programme was launched – secret from Tilden, secret from the university, secret from my friends and fellow workers in the lab. I was told, and accepted, that in the interests of secrecy I would be interrogated regularly during my visits to Bryceville.

  I was allowed to spend an extra four days with Naomi. Then I returned to the university and I began to work, harder than ever in my life. I cannot deny that I revelled in the challenge.

  It would be two more years before I began to suspect that Cyrus Walker’s motives were not what they seemed. And a year beyond that when I started to question the whole structure and raison d’être of the Blessed Order.

  Not for nothing do the priests of another religion say, “Give me the child for the first seven years, and I’ll give you the man.”

  Whatever an infant finds around herself is, by definition, the natural order of things. Quite reasonable to me, all through my first and second decades, was the idea that a man had the right to take several wives; accepted, that a woman’s success would be measured by the number of healthy children that she bore, and that she would function in all the affairs of life as “the lesser man”; natural, that children were first and foremost the possessions and servants of the Blessed Order; unquestioned, that the sex rights and privileges of the males should contain a defined hierarchy, with the Patriarch at the head and Elder Walker as his powerful lieutenant.

  In every class in Bryceville’s school, biblical authority was cited for these matters. At home, my mother and seldom-seen father drove home the same message. Is it any wonder that five full years were necessary, away from Bryceville and in the company of heretics, before I began to feel differently?

  And yet with hindsight I believe that I was in some ways always a rebel. Unknown to anyone, I had secretly named my first frog Jasper. Taking the name of the Patriarch in vain was blasphemy. Unknown to anyone, I had done my private froggy investigations and mailed the results to a science contest in the huge and unknown world beyond Bryceville and the Blessed Order. That was, at the very least, gross disobedience. It ought to have raised a red flare on the lofty roof of the Patriarch’s lodge, glaring enough to warn any alert Council member that Rachel Stafford was the worst possible person to send into an outside world of sceptics and unbelievers.

  Perhaps they were overconfident. After all, they had Naomi. And indeed, during my first years at the university any Council member would have seen little reason to doubt the decision to send me there. True, I did take driving lessons and obtain my licence, something denied to female members of the Blessed Order; but I used the licence mainly as an ID in stores. I was young and shy and avoided social contacts. My work and my visits to Naomi filled my life; and although it should not be for me to say it, my understanding of neurotransmitters, human biochemistry, and the human mind-body interface grew to exceed anything that I could find elsewhere in the world. I published little, but Walter Cottingham filed a torrent of patents based upon my work. He told me – strictly, I am sure, against company policy – that Tilden was more than getting their money’s worth. No other company had anything remotely like the selective-memory suppression and keyed-memory access drugs that my work provided. Of course, the “forgetters”, the “truth tellers”, and the “button pressers” (Walter’s terminology) still had a long way to go before they could be turned on and off in hours rather than in a few weeks; even so, he and Tilden were highly satisfied.

  But I was not. It was not so much that the Order used the truth tellers on me. Rather, it was that as year followed year I became increasingly convinced that I was just getting started. The human brain and body form a wondrous and complex interacting system. The idea that a drug – any drug – might produce a single effect on the delicately balanced human brain is as preposterously naïve and wrong as the thought that a combination of two medications will produce no effect beyond their separate influences. Tilden had its patents; I, mapping cross-connections, had something more: the vision of a whole new world where drugs affecting the mind affected the body that affected the mind . . . on and on, in infinite regress.

  As year followed year I also became more certain that the society of the Blessed Order was corrupt and rotten at its heart.

  I looked up. The sun was high in the sky. I glanced at my watch and realized that I had spent two dazed hours staring at the bright posters in the window of the bicycle shop. The hard bench seat had cut into my thighs. When I stood up, my calves felt the pins and needles of returning circulation.

  I walked slowly back to the campus. Nothing was happening now that had not happened many times before. I had been to Bryceville, reported to Elder Walker, and delivered to him my latest work. He had given me test results for analysis, and he had interrogated me, in detail, while I was under the influence of drugs of my own devising. Soon the effects would wear off, and I would feel normal.

  Back in my office, I again turned on the computer and called up the hidden data files. The response is decidedly nonlinear and follows an approximate two-thirds power law . . . The words felt no less remote. However, I could now tell myself that there was a good reason. I had been away for a week, naturally my work would seem a little strange, a little less immediate.

  Then why was I filled with such an alien sense of dissatisfaction? I have a powerful memory, but somehow I did not feel that I could trust it. S
omething was missing. Was that real, or just more drug aftereffects?

  I leaned back in my seat and stared at the screen. My office lies at the end of the corridor. I heard no sound but the soft whir of the disk drive and faint footsteps on the floor above.

  I felt a strengthening conviction. During my absence someone had been in my office, started my computer, and tampered with my hidden files.

  Who? That was not difficult. The Council of the Blessed Order knew exactly when I would be visiting Bryceville and away from the university. Asking me questions was only one way of making sure the secrets of my work were safe; a more direct method was to explore my records firsthand. I did not remember doing so, but under earlier drugged interrogations I might have revealed everything about my secret files.

  It was easy enough to check my suspicion. I went to the central log, where records were kept of every transaction of material called from storage. The history was in reverse chronological order. My hidden work files contained nine years of notes on the anti-impotence drugs and protocols, from their earliest beginnings when I arrived at the university through to the same pages that I had been examining earlier in the day. Those last pages had been accessed on March 16 – a date when I was away in Bryceville.

  During my absence, representatives of the Blessed Order had been here and examined my files.

  I had my answer. It was exactly what I expected, but it brought no peace of mind. I folded my arms, stared at nothing, and wondered. Since it was no surprise to me that my files would be explored in my absence, why the continued uneasiness? These records said nothing that I had not already revealed, in full, to Elder Walker and the Council of the Blessed Order.

  The rhythmic click of leather shoes sounded far off in the corridor. Someone, probably Dr Jeffers, was pacing steadily up and down. It was his preferred way of thinking. As this was mine. Sitting in a half-trance, lulled by the sound of footsteps and by the faint hum of the computer’s hard drive, I listened to my inner voice. I realized that my worries had nothing to do with my work, or who had been investigating it.

  My worry was Naomi. I know that a mother is not the best judge, but I had always thought her an exceptionally pretty child.

  A child.

  Except that on my most recent visit, that word had not been appropriate. In the six months since I had last seen her, Naomi had become a woman. Not just the young breasts, filling out her tight cotton dress; not just the way that the men of the Order looked at her – covertly, hotly, with the eyes of lust. That was bad enough, but worse was the way she responded to those looks; the knowing sideways glance of her dark eyes, the way she held herself and moved her body.

  I have suggested already that I am not a stupid woman. Why, then, was I so slow to realize that Naomi, at 13 years, was close to the age when I had been taken to the Patriarch, and far less innocent than I?

  I had not seen, because I did not wish to see. To me it was unthinkable that Naomi would be forced to endure what I had gone through myself, 14 years ago. Unthinkable that she would be made to commit incest, even though such a union with the Patriarch, the earthly embodiment of God himself, was sanctioned and blessed within the Order. Unthinkable, but unavoidable.

  I became aware that something in front of me had changed. The computer, unattended for more than 10 minutes, had switched its display. Instead of the chronological list of files accessed, it showed a variable screen-saver pattern. A flood of multicoloured bubbles rose slowly up the screen, popped, and dispersed.

  The upward drift was random, and then after a while not quite so. I stared, puzzled by a twisting area where green and blue bubbles faded into each other, I was seeing letters – words. Sharon File 32V. Visible for a few seconds, then vanishing. Random bubbles formed and rose and burst.

  I kept looking. After about half a minute, another confluence of merging bubbles formed the words again: Sharon File 32V.

  Very few people would be able to read that message. Even if they switched on my computer and let it sit idle until the screen-saver pattern appeared, chances were that they would see nothing. To a person with normal vision, there was no message. Only someone colour-blind exactly as I was colour-blind would find anything on the screen but random bubbles.

  I had left a message to myself. And I had no idea what it might be.

  The hours from noon to early evening were very difficult. Sharon Prostley would be gone by 5:30, but others of the lab left later and they would find it odd to see me using Sharon’s work station. I could plead problems with my own computer, but I did not want anyone peering over my shoulder and offering helpful advice when I took a look at File 32V in Sharon’s system.

  I waited as long as I could stand. It was 20 minutes after seven when I walked for the tenth time along the corridor, found every office empty, and tiptoed into Sharon’s room. Most of one wall was a long window, so even with the door closed I would be perfectly visible from the corridor as I turned on her computer.

  It took a few minutes to feel my way in – Sharon’s machine was organized quite differently from mine. I was forced to look in quite a few places until, in an operating system directory where Sharon was never likely to go, I found 32V. It was a text file; or, more accurately, a nested set of them.

  I loaded Sharon’s word processing system. Nervously, wondering what I might find, I brought in the first file.

  FLGEYRRO PROCIUET PSCIQCXN OFPAJWFS.

  Gibberish. Not words, not data, not anything.

  Unless . . . I stared, became dizzy, felt the room sway and rock around me. Memories, suppressed by my own drugs and keyed now by the button pressers, flooded back.

  My fingers sought and found the new data bank. Terse notes filled the screen – secret from Tilden, Inc., secret from Elder Walker, secret from everyone. Scanning them, I doubted that they would be intelligible to anyone but me. But scanning them, I saw ample reason for extreme caution.

  First entry: Penta-sild. + cyto. heptahydrate + oxidant → strong short-term increase.

  It was a tailored anti-impotence drug that I had recently developed and was testing on members of the Blessed Order. Strictly speaking, any drug was merely being evaluated before being made available to the Blessed Jasper. In practice there was never a shortage of volunteers. Elder Walker told me to bring increasing amounts on each of my six-monthly visits.

  And now the subtext: Penta-sild. + cyto. heptahydrate + GABA undergoes metamorph. → new neuro.+ feedback → 6-mo. Î(sero. & dopa. levels) → pituit. down → testost. to zero. Permanent.

  Interpretation: The same drug, plus gamma-aminobutyric acid, crossed the blood-brain barrier and had a neurotransmitter breakdown product. Used for six months or more, the pituitary gland would be increasingly affected and the male testosterone level would drop to zero; with that decline would go all sexual desire. Furthermore, the effect would not reverse itself after use of the drug ended.

  How much did I hate the Order that had raised me? Enough to want to destroy it; but I told myself that was not my motive. All I wanted was to save Naomi. Another few months would be enough; provided that they did not take her virginity until July or August, she would escape my fate.

  March, with its warm days and pleasantly cool nights, slowly gave way to the baking heat of June. I worked late every night, but the sidewalk was still warm beneath my sandals as I walked home to my single-bedroom apartment.

  As always, I checked my answering machine. Every week I had a friendly call from Walter Cottingham, and now and again there were questions or comments from the scientists at Tilden, Inc. Occasionally there was a message from Bryceville. The Blessed Order did not approve of electronic devices but it did not always follow its own rules. I knew from Walter that Elder Walker telephoned him every week on financial matters. For a senior member of a sect that eschewed all worldly concerns, Cyrus Walker was surprisingly interested in money. I did not know how much Tilden, Inc. paid the Order for what I was doing, but it was far more than the cost of my room and board, plu
s a small discretionary amount for incidentals. That had been granted, grudgingly, after strong words on my behalf from Walter.

  On June 28, I arrived home at nine. I made myself a glass of iced tea and listened to the calls. Raoul Caprice, from Tilden, with a shrewd question about an implied viral inhibitor effect of one of my recent reports. Would it work equally well for retroviruses? I wondered. Would it? Probably. I liked Raoul, or at least I liked his mind. We had never met in person. I looked at the clock and decided, regretfully, that it was a bit late to call him back on the East Coast.

  A telemarketer, who must have had more spare time than sense, had left a long message inviting me to buy “heating oil futures”, whatever they were. Sharon Prostley had called, apologizing for not dropping in that morning. She was PMS-y and had been in a shitty mood all day. See you tomorrow. Abner Wurtshelm, of whom I had never heard, nervously wondered if I could tell him how the prostaglandins worked. He was doing a science report for high school – deadline in three days – was going to pull a certain D unless he came up with something spectacular – got my name from the college book – would love to buy me a coffee – lunch even – if I would answer a few questions.

  I smiled. Abner had a real nerve, but maybe I would call him back. He sounded bright. I started to walk towards the phone when the final message started in midsentence.

  “– later on. I have something tremendous to tell you. Call me on return – as soon as you get this message.”

  Naomi, too impatient to wait for the end of my standard message to callers. Naomi!

  I was dialling before I could ask myself where she was, or how she had managed to place a call.

  “Yes?” The gruff voice that answered was male.

  “Naomi Stafford.” I was filled with a mixture of excitement and terror. Something tremendous – surely that couldn’t be anything to do with the Blessed Jasper. So what was it? “I mean, I would like to speak to Naomi Stafford.”

  “I’m sure you would, Rachel.” It was Elder Walker. “She’s right here. One moment.”