“And it acts on what sites?"
“All of them,” Joy said. “I know"—she held up a hand, palm out—"it sounds bizarre. Its surface is sort of a molecular skeleton key, though."
Something nagged at me. “How long has Pinky been working on this?"
“Since the summer."
“But—"
“I know,” she said, “it's years’ worth of work, isolating compounds out like that. That's point number two—it's a neuroamplifier that lets you read, for lack of a better word, atomic structures."
The sick feeling in my stomach was getting worse. “What do you mean? How is that possible? It's like ... reading the data on a magnetic disc with something the size of a skyscraper—no, more! The scales are hugely different."
“The strings that make up subatomic particles—they aren't really strings in any meaningful sense, but never mind that—are arranged in configurations that you could call an alphabet. There are more than twenty-six characters, but that's the basic idea: the particular configuration of the neuroamplifier's own subatomic particles in the cabbage amplifies the signals, for lack of a better word, coming from all the other particles that constitute your body, including those you ingest in food, respiration, and transdermally."
She looked at me anxiously, and it broke my heart a little: whatever else was going on in Joy's head, she was scared.
“In effect,” she said, “it's a window into the history of every atom you're exposed to. Everything that's happened to that atom, from its creation in the heart of a star on down through time, leaves a mark on it, and those marks can be read."
My heart sank then. Pinky had gone over the edge, and he'd taken Joy with him. I didn't know where to start the next thing I knew I had to say, so I just blurted it out.
“Joy, you've got to go to the hospital."
“I knew that was going to be your reaction,” she said, with what I thought was bitterness. None of this made a lot of sense to me.
“Joy, look,” I said, groping for the words to reach her. “What's the most likely conclusion here; that Pinky has discovered a new super-neurotransmitter and reformed subatomic physics, or that the cabbage is a hallucinogen, and that he, and you, are suffering from its effects?"
“I know.” She nodded briskly. “It all sounds delusional. I would say the same thing if I were in your shoes."
Rather than reassuring me, her brightly rational demeanor made me more uneasy.
Joy drummed her fingers on the countertop. “Okay, let me ask you a question: how do you think I knew Pinky was being held at Phil's house? Or that the cabbages were at Byerly's?"
“You said yourself the Byerly's thing was a hunch,” I said. “Pinky had a Byerly's bag and we went to the store closest to his house. You knew he had more of the cabbages; how much of an intellectual leap did it take?"
“Okay, then what about Phil's?"
“What about it?” I said, exasperated by her reasonable tone.
“Wouldn't it make more sense if they held him at the campus?” she said.
“Yes. And?"
“Just that it's not the first thing you'd think of—Pinky being at Phil's house."
“No, agreed,” I said.
Joy took a deep breath, preparing herself for a dive into deep water. “The air molecules that Phil breathed out, when we were at Pinky's house, had passed through Pinky's lungs and Nancy's,” she said. “It had to be Phil's home."
I got a phone call one night, two years after we'd been married, from a nurse in the emergency room at Hennepin County Medical Center: Joy had been in a car crash. It turned out to be a minor accident, but I died in the five seconds it took for the nurse to put Joy on the line. I had the same feeling of dread now—my wife had gone crazy. Of course she instantly saw the fear in my face.
“All right,” she said, her voice sharp, “today you had a root beer with lunch. Lunch was a salad and a salami sandwich on whole wheat bread, with mustard. You got your watch battery replaced. You bought a newspaper and coffee at the little Greek place with the roaches. You were using Ginny's computer sometime today or yesterday and Bill Mason had at least two beers at lunch with you. A shingle on the garage roof is worn through at its bottom edge, and water is leaking into the loft, though it hasn't seeped through the insulation yet. You used my toothpaste this morning ... Oh, hell, you get the idea."
She looked at me—I must have had a priceless expression—and said in a much softer tone, “I could go on."
I didn't want her to go on. I was confused by how much Joy knew: some of the things she could have guessed by knowing my daily routine and preferences, but not all of them, but I still couldn't buy her explanation. I was used to my wife being a rational person—sometimes too rational—and now I had the feeling that she'd swum too far from shore, and I couldn't reach her.
“Joy, you're scaring the hell out of me,” I finally said, blurting out the truth because I couldn't think of anything else to say.
“I know.” She looked sad.
“I need to think about this,” I said. “I'm going to go upstairs for a while."
“All right. I'll fix some dinner, meanwhile. I hope you're in the mood for salad.” She managed a wan smile that made me feel worse.
I closed my office door and lay down on the couch. I tried to make sense of what Joy told me—what I knew about subatomic particles and string theory wasn't much—and I tried to find an explanation that was neither drug-induced psychosis nor a new insight into neurochemistry and particle physics. But every time I tried to focus on Joy's seemingly supernatural perception, my mind skipped off the issue like a flat rock skimmed across the surface of a pond. My own anxiety was keeping me trapped above the surface of the problem.
The truth was, I wanted to do anything but think about it. I wanted to pull the covers over my head, go to sleep, and wake up back in the rational world. It was the first time, in ten years of marriage, that I felt truly lonely. I fell asleep into a brown morass of emotional fatigue and self-pity.
* * * *
There was a note taped to my door when I arrived at the lab the next morning: SEE ME. PHIL.
The boom was about to be lowered, I thought. I dropped my briefcase and coat off in my office and went up to see Phil.
“Where's Joyce?” was the first thing he said.
“We took separate cars. She should be here soon."
“Okay. I left a note on her door, and with Phyllis.” He sat down on the leather couch and gestured to one of the soft chairs grouped around his coffee table.
“Pinky wasn't freelancing,” he said. “And he wasn't sampling the pharmaceuticals."
If Phil's intent was to surprise me, it worked. A dozen possible responses went through my head—jamming each other in the doorway, so to speak. I didn't say anything.
“He hasn't done anything illegal, or unethical, or even against company policy,” Phil continued, “and as of this afternoon, he'll be back in his lab, unless he decides to take the rest of the day off."
I knew that Pinky had been eating that damn cabbage—so had Joy. Maybe it wasn't illegal, or unethical—but it had to be against company policy. What was I supposed to say to that?
“Why this sudden change of heart?” I said. “Yesterday you had him under house arrest."
“Yes, about that,” Phil said. “What was that yesterday, you and Joyce showing up at my house?"
I was at a loss for words again—the last thing I wanted to talk about was Joy's newfound “intuition,” doubly so with Phil. I was even more confused that morning because I'd checked the worn shingle in the garage and found it exactly as Joy had said it would be. How did she know? Smell, taste, some other sense? The shingle was invisible from the ground; the drop ceiling, dry to the touch and covered in undisturbed dust, also gave no clue. Until I'd stuck my hand up into the fiberglass wool and felt the wetness, I was sure Joy was wrong.
Phil was staring at me, waiting for an answer. I was never good at hiding my feelings, though, and
some of my confusion and doubt must have shown on my face.
Phil leaned forward in his chair. “What's going on, Sam? You look miserable."
“Oh, the whole thing's upsetting,” I said. I wanted to tell someone—Joy's mental state, and the considerable question of her involvement in Pinky's problems, weighed heavily on me. I felt cut off from her in a way I hadn't felt since we'd been together. A part of me knew Phil was a very poor choice of confessors, but I think I might have told him anyway, not meaning to reveal everything, of course. I was saved by Joy's dramatic entrance into Phil's office.
“You son of a bitch!” Joy said, staring at Phil. She had a memo in her fist, and when I started to ask what was going on, Joy thrust it angrily into my hands.
It was a notification that Joy was required to appear at a hearing before the company's Professional Standards Committee—the disciplining body for the research workers at Ihinger-Ibex. Pinky's name was also listed as one of the subjects of the hearing. So was I. Until then we were all suspended.
“Well, Phil,” I finally said, “this is very nice."
He had trouble meeting my eyes. His hands, seemingly given marching orders by his anxiety, passed over the objects on his desk while he tried not to respond to the anger in my voice.
I left his office, glancing back before I closed the door. He looked like a man who couldn't find his house keys.
* * * *
In retrospect, I can see that Joy was already cut loose from the moorings of conventional society before we walked out of Phil's office. I planned to fight Phil's maneuvering, of course, but it hadn't occurred to me to do so from outside the system. Joy was already operating out of the blue and into the black, thank you Neils Young and Armstrong.
Had I tried to do it my way, things would have certainly ended up differently. I would probably be in a white-collar prison, somewhere in the Minnesota countryside, making thirty-five cents an hour washing institutional linens.
Sometimes I think that would have been an easier fate to comprehend.
* * * *
During that time, what I now think of as The Beginning of The End, the subject of the cabbage came up only once. I walked into the kitchen while Joy was shredding some leaves into a bowl, and she started as though I'd surprised her with a lover. After a second's pause, she got a defiant look on her face and continued shredding.
“So you're going to continue with this,” I said, trying not to sound angry.
“I am. And I'm going to ask you again if you won't give it a try,” she said. “I won't beg, though."
“What if you're wrong, Joyce?” I asked her. “It's a lot to ask."
She put the leaves down and wiped her hands on a paper towel. “So far we've got two hypotheses working here,” she said. “Either you're right, and the Brassica is making me deranged, or I really am seeing deeper into the nature of the universe because of its neuroamplifying properties. That I can tell you things I shouldn't know—about your doings out of my sight and other testable propositions—supports my hypothesis, rather than yours. Okay: can you suggest a third hypothesis?"
Of course I couldn't. I'd thought of little else since our suspension, and I couldn't imagine that Joy's insights, for lack of a better word, were lucky guesses. Moreover, on the one occasion I'd seen Pinky, he'd displayed the same abilities—though he seemed to care less whether I was convinced. He'd been eating the cabbage longer than my wife, and he'd retreated further into his own world.
“I don't have another hypothesis, no,” I said, “but I can't believe your explanation is right, either. Just because I can't think of a simpler explanation doesn't mean one doesn't exist."
“Well, that's a dilemma for you, isn't it?” Joy said.
I started to make a furious retort when I realized she was on the verge of crying. Her mouth was set in a firm line, but her eyes were wet with unshed tears. I stood there thinking, Why is she upset? I'm the one who's left behind.
* * * *
Joy, Pinky, and I were all suspended, with pay, for the three weeks until the hearing. It was an unpleasant indication of how seriously the company was taking things.
It was the first time in several years that Joy and I been thrown together all day, every day, and the contact soon began to rub both of us raw. I wanted to do something about the situation, but there was nothing to be done. Conversation about the problem was stillborn, the one or two times I attempted it, because there was nothing new to say.
Worst of all, Joy spent an alarming amount of time around the house with the lights dimmed, just staring into space, as if she were watching a private screening of the world's longest movie. It seemed more and more difficult to engage her, and after a certain point I was damned if I was going to chase her down whatever neurological rabbit hole she'd disappeared into.
Ten days into this sentence of enforced passivity, Pinky showed up at our door at eleven at night with a bottle of red table wine and two pizzas that were ice-cold from being driven around in the passenger seat of his car since dinnertime.
I didn't know whether to be relieved or annoyed that Joy came out of her trance at Pinky's arrival. She heated the pizzas while I opened the bottle of Corvo, an inexpensive Sicilian wine that I happened to like. The choice was uncharacteristic of Pinky, who rarely drank, and whose attention to other people's tastes was legendarily deficient.
We ate in the kitchen, and at first the memories of numerous other nights around the table lightened my mood. But Joy and Pinky seemed to be making an effort to include me in the conversation—for the first time in my marriage, and in my friendship with Pinky, I felt condescended to.
After the pizza Pinky got around to the reason he'd come by.
“Joyce said you're still not convinced,” he said.
“No,” I said. “Though I can't offer a better hypothesis than yours..."
“I won't appeal to your empirical instincts,” Pinky said, smiling. “Let me remind you of a story, instead. It starts, In the beginning ... Does that ring a bell?"
“What are you talking about, Pinky?” I said.
“The Old Testament, specifically the Judeo-Christian notion of The Fall of Man."
“Yes?"
“Where do you think that story comes from—eating the fruit of the tree of knowledge?” he said. “I mean, if you accept that the account is not divinely inspired, but is a myth written to explain historical, or pre-historical events. What does that bring to mind?"
“I'm not reassured, Pinky, that you need to bolster your case with Biblical citations,” I said. “Whatever the genesis, pardon the pun, of the mythic Fall, I don't buy that it's related to your cabbage."
“No, how about this?” he said. “Here's a plant indigenous to the middle of Africa, including the Great Rift Valley, at least fifteen million years ago, later spreading to the rest of Africa and Asia Minor—fossil evidence is solid on this point."
“Circumstantial at best, Pinky,” I said. “You still have to go a long way to show a causal relationship."
“I know, I know,” he said. “But the only proof is experiential. I know the causal relationship is there, beyond a shadow of a doubt. Don't you think it's the first thing I went looking for? In an experiment without external controls, I had to find some framework to test my hypothesis against.
“Sam, we evolved with this plant, and for millions of years our way of knowing the world was informed by its use. Why do you think written language evolved so late? It wasn't necessary; there didn't have to be written records when everyone could know, directly from nature, everything they needed to know."
He looked off into space for a moment. “I can't even imagine what it must be like to access these perceptions from birth,” he said. “I suspect finding this Brassica at our age is like learning a new language in your fifties: once you're past that age of maximum neural plasticity, it takes much greater effort to achieve more modest fluency."
“That's very lyrical,” I said, “but then why did written language ev
olve at all? Why wasn't knowledge of the plant passed down through historical times?"
“Why else?” Pinky said. “Power."
His face was flushed from the wine and the prodigious amounts of red pepper he heaped on his pizza. I wish I could say that he seemed imbalanced; that he had the delusional affect of a zealot, but the truth is that Pinky seemed as normal to me then as he had a hundred other times, arguing some theory over a friendly meal.
“What were the first written records?” he went on. “Accounts. Laws. Who got what from whom; who was allowed to do what to, and with, whom. As long as everyone could know things for themselves—know God, if you want to extend the Judeo-Christian metaphor—as long as there were no intermediaries, everyone was more or less equal.
“But we evolved from killer apes, Sam, and it's in our genes to covet everything we see. Some people more so than others. As long as everyone had access to the plant, there wasn't a way to know more than anyone else, but if you took their access away by force, you could make them know less than you. And that's the way it's been ever since—imbalances in power enforced by a monopoly on knowledge.
“It also explains, by the way, some of the forkings in the evolutionary bush. Like Neanderthal extinction. Neanderthal brain size, though less than ours, wasn't crucial; brain chemistry was. They didn't have receptors for the plant."
Pinky took a sip of his wine. “Not to belabor the point, Sam, but the New Testament, and its notion of redemption, has its roots in the suppressed knowledge of this strain of Brassica. And the same is true for every other belief system you care to name. I know; I checked. They all spring from the same fundamental conflict."
“So you're saying that the status quo is maintained by a global conspiracy to prevent people from eating this plant..."
“No, no, no!” Pinky cut me off. “The Fall of Man is a good metaphor for what's happened: we don't know what we've lost, other than in a deep, unconscious way. I think the yearning for what we lost drives the universal impulse toward spirituality in humans, but no one is deliberately suppressing the knowledge today; the world just is what it is."
Analog SFF, December 2005 Page 16