The Hard SF Renaissance

by David G. Hartwell

  But the sense of satisfaction did not last. It took only three months more for him to become thoroughly disgusted with himself all over again. It was not so much guilt generated by the knowledge that he had cheated his partners into their passionate desire (though that did weigh somewhat upon his conscience); the real problem was that he became convinced that he was not giving them full value in return. He knew that however disappointing any particular session of love-making might be, each and every victim would continue to love him vehemently, but he thought that he could see how disappointed his paramours were, in him and in themselves. They loved him, but their love only made them unhappy. This was partly because they realized that they were all competing with one another for his attentions, but he was convinced that it was mainly because those attentions were so inherently unsatisfying.

  Giovanni could now present to the world the image of a genuine Casanova. He was talked about, in wondering tones. He was envied. But in his own eyes, he remained in every sense a despicable fraud. It was not he that was beloved, but some organic goo that he had concocted in a test-tube; and the women who were its victims were condemned to the desperations of jealousy, the disappointments of thirdrate sex, and the miseries of helplessness. Giovanni had not the stomach to be a wholesale heartbreaker; he was too familiar with misery and desperation to take pleasure from inflicting it on others—not, at any rate, on women that he liked and admired.

  By the time the royalties began to roll in, when Melmoth’s discreet marketing of the discovery to the world’s richest men began to pay dividends, Giovanni was again deep in depression and cynicism. Others, he felt sure, would be able to exploit his invention to the full, as the means to illimitable pleasure, but not he. Casanova the fool had simply confirmed his own wretchedness. His cup of bitterness overflowed.

  It was, as ever, Marmaduke Melmoth who brought it home to him that he was still suffering from an attitude problem.

  “Look, Joe,” said Melmoth. “We got a few little problems. Nothing you can’t sort out, I’m sure, but it’s kinda necessary to keep the customers happy and the cash coming in. The way we’re playing this we have a restricted market, and a lot of the guys are getting on a bit. It’s all very well to offer them a way of getting the slots in the sack, but what they really need is something to get the peg into the slot. You ever hear of this stuff called Spanish fly?”

  Giovanni explained that Cantharides was a beetle rather than a fly; that it was a powerful poison; and that it probably wasn’t terribly satisfying to have a painfully rigid and itchy erection for hours on end.

  “So make something better,” said Melmoth, with that mastery of the art of delegation which had made him rich.

  Giovanni gave the matter some consideration, and decided that it was probably feasible to devise a biochemical mechanism which would make it possible for a man to win conscious control over his erections: to produce them at will, sustain them as long as might be required, and generate orgasms in any desired quantity. This would require a couple of new hormones which Mother Nature had not thought to provide, a secondary system of trigger hormones for feedback control, and a cytogene for transforming the cells of the pituitary gland. Even when the biochemistry was in place, people would have to learn to use the new system, and that would require a training program, perhaps with computer-assisted biofeedback backup, but it could be done.

  He set to work, patiently bringing his new dreamchild to perfection.

  Naturally, he had to test the system to make sure it was worth going ahead with clinical trials. Once the genetic transplants had taken, he spent a couple of hours a night in solitary practice. It took him only a week to gain complete conscious control of his new abilities, but he had started with the advantage of understanding, so he mapped out a training program for the punters that would take a fortnight.

  Once again, he was filled with optimism with respect to his own personal problems. No longer would he have to worry about flaws in his technique; he could now be confident that any girl who was caused to fall in love with him would receive full measure of sexual satisfaction in return. Now, he was in a much better position to emulate his famous namesake.

  But Giovanni was no longer a callow youth, and his optimism about the future was not based entirely on his biotechnological augmentation. He had undergone a more dramatic change of attitude, and had decided that the Casanova he needed to copy was not the ancient Giovanni but his father Marcantonio. He had decided that the answer lay in monogamy, and he wanted to get married. He was now in his mid-thirties, and it seemed to him that what he needed was a partner of his own age: a mature and level-headed woman who could bring order and stability into his life.

  These arguments led him to fall in love with his accountant, a thirty-three-year-old divorcee named Denise. He had ample opportunity to make the fingertip contacts necessary to make her besotted with him, because his fortune was steadily increasing and there were always new opportunities in tax avoidance for them to discuss over dinner. Giovanni orchestrated the whole affair very carefully and—he thought—smoothly, graciously allowing Denise the pleasure of seducing him on their third real date. He still felt clumsy and a little anxious, but she seemed quite delighted with his powers of endurance.

  His parents were glad when he told them the news. His father cried with delight at the thought that the name of Casanova would now be transmitted to a further generation, and his mother (who believed that getting married was a kind of certificate of belonging to the human race) was euphorically sentimental for months.

  Denise gave up work when she became pregnant, mere weeks after the honeymoon, abandoning to other financial wizards the job of distributing and protecting the spring tide of cash which began to pour into Giovanni’s bank accounts as his new discovery was discreetly marketed by the ingenious Melmoth.

  Giovanni loved Denise very much, and became more and more devoted to her as the months of her pregnancy elapsed. When she gave birth to a baby girl—named Jennifer after his mother—he felt that he had discovered heaven on earth.

  Unfortunately, this peak in his experience was soon passed. Denise got postnatal depression, and began to find her energetic sex life something of a bore. She was still hooked, unknowingly, on the produce of Giovanni’s fingertips, but her emotional responses became perversely confused, and her feelings of love and affection generated floods of miserable tears.

  Giovanni was overwrought, and knew not what to do. He was slowly consumed by a new wave of guilt. Whatever was the matter, he was responsible for it. He had made Denise love him, and had avoided feeling like a cheat only because he was convinced that she was reaping all the rewards that she could possibly have attained from a love that grew spontaneously in her heart. Now things were going wrong, he saw himself as her betrayer and her destroyer.

  When Giovanni became anguished and miserable, Denise blamed herself. She became even more confused and even more desperate in her confusion. The unhappy couple fed one another’s despair, and became wretched together. This intolerable situation led inexorably toward the one awful mistake that Giovanni was bound eventually to make.

  He told her everything.

  From every possible point of view, this was a disastrous move. When she heard how he had tied her finest and most intimate feelings to chemical puppet-strings her love for him underwent a purely psychosomatic transformation into bitter and resentful hatred. She left him forthwith, taking the infant Jenny with her, and sued for divorce. She also filed a suit demanding thirty million dollars compensation for his biochemical interference with her affections. In so doing, of course, she made headline news of the enterprises which Marmaduke Melmoth had kept so carefully secret, and released a tempest of controversy.

  The impact of this news can easily be imagined. The world of the 2010s was supposedly one in which the women of the overdeveloped countries had won complete equality with their menfolk. The feminists of the day looked back with satisfaction at centuries of fierce fighting agai
nst legal and attitudinal discrimination; their heroines had battled successfully against sexism in the workplace, sexism in education, sexism in the language and sexism in the psyche. Though progress had brought them to the brink of their particular Millennium, they still had a heightened consciousness of the difficulties which had beset their quest, and a hair-trigger paranoia about any threat to their achievements. The discovery that for nearly twenty years the world’s richest men had been covertly buying biotechnologies specifically designed for the manipulation and sexual oppression of womankind constituted a scandal such as the world of sexual politics had never known.

  Giovanni Casanova, who had so far lived his life in secure obscurity, cosily content with his unsung genius, found himself suddenly notorious. His name—that hideous curse of a name—suddenly became the progenitor of jokes and gibes displayed in screeching headlines, broadcast to every corner of the globe, found as frequently in news bulletins as tawdry comedy shows. Overnight, the new Casanova became a modern folk-devil: the man who had put the cause of sexual emancipation back three hundred years.

  The divorce broke his mother’s heart, and her sufferings were compounded when Marcantonio Casanova died suddenly of heart failure. She hinted to Giovanni in a reckless moment that his father had died of shame, and Giovanni took this so much to heart that he seriously contemplated suicide.

  Denise, the victim of Giovanni’s obscene machinations, achieved a temporary sainthood in the eyes of the women of the world. Melmoth, who had played Mephistopheles to Giovanni’s Faust, was demonized alongside him. Thousands of women filed copycat lawsuits against their rich paramours, against Giovanni, and against Cytotech. Giovanni got sacks of hate mail from tens of thousands of women who believed (usually without any foundation in fact) that his magic had been used to steal their souls.

  As storms usually do, though, this hurricane of abuse soon began to lose its fury. Marmaduke Melmoth began to use his many resources to tell the world that the real issue was simply a little attitude problem.

  Melmoth was able to point out that there was nothing inherently sexist about Giovanni’s first discovery. He was able to prove that he had several female clients, who had been happily using the seductive sweat to attract young men. He argued—with some justice—that the cosmetics industry had for centuries been offering men and women methods of enhancing their sexual attractiveness, and that there had always been a powerful demand for aphrodisiacs. Giovanni’s only “crime,” he suggested, was to have produced an aphrodisiac which worked, and which was absolutely safe, to replace thousands of products of fake witchcraft and medical quackery which were at best useless and at worst harmful. He argued that although Giovanni’s second discovery was, indeed, applicable only to male physiology, its utility and its benefits were by no means confined to the male sex.

  This rhetoric was backed up by some bold promises, which saved Cytotech’s image and turned all the publicity to the company’s advantage. Melmoth guaranteed that Giovanni’s first discovery would now become much cheaper, so that the tissue-transformation would be available even to those of moderate means, and to men and women equally. He also announced that Giovanni had already begun to work on an entire spectrum of new artificial hormones, which would give to women as well as to men vast new opportunities in the conscious generation and control of bodily pleasure.

  These promises quickly displaced the scandal from the headlines. Cytotech’s publicity machine did such a comprehensive job of image-building that Giovanni became a hero instead of a folk-devil. The moral panic died, the lawsuits collapsed, and the hate mail dried up. Denise got her divorce, though, and custody of little Jenny. She did not get her thirty million dollars compensation, but she was awarded sufficient alimony to keep her in relative luxury for the rest of her life. Giovanni was awarded the Nobel Prize for Biochemistry, but this did little to soothe his disappointment even though it helped his mother to recover from her broken heart and be proud of him again.

  Giovanni launched himself obsessively into the work required to make good on Melmoth’s promises. He became a virtual recluse, putting in such long hours at the laboratory that his staff and co-workers began to fear for his health and sanity. As he neared forty his mental faculties were in decline, but the increase in his knowledge and wisdom offset the loss of mental agility, and it is arguable that it was in this phase of his career that his genius was most powerful and most fertile. He did indeed develop a new spectrum of hormones and enkephalins, which in combination gave people who underwent the relevant tissue-transformations far greater conscious control over the physiology of pleasure. As recipients gradually learned what they could do with their new biochemistry, and mastered its arts and skills, they became able to induce in themselves—without any necessary assistance at all—orgasms and kindred sensations more thrilling, more blissful and more luxurious than the poor human nature crudely hewn by the hackwork of natural selection had ever provided to anyone.

  Giovanni created, almost single-handed, a vast new panorama of masturbatory enterprise.

  For once, Giovanni’s progress was the object of constant attention and constant debate. Cynics claimed that his work was hateful, because it would utterly destroy romance, devalue human feelings, obliterate sincere affection, and mechanize ecstasy. Critics argued that the value and mystique of sexual relationships would be fatally compromised by his transformations. Pessimists prophesied that if his new projects were to be brought to a successful conclusion, sexual intercourse might become a thing of the past, displaced from the arena of human experience by voluptuous self-abuse. Fortunately, these pessimists were unable to argue that this might lead to the end of the human race, because discoveries made by other biotechnologists had permitted the development of artificial wombs more efficient than real ones; sexual intercourse was no longer necessary for reproduction, which could be managed more competently in vitro. The cynics and the pessimists were therefore disregarded by the majority, who were hungry for joy, and eager to enter a promised land of illimitable delight.

  As always, Giovanni was the first to try out his new discoveries; the pioneer spirit which forced him to seek out new solutions to his personal troubles was as strong as ever, and the prospect of combining celibacy with ecstasy appealed very much to his eremitic frame of mind.

  In the early days of his experimentation, while he was still exploring the potential of his new hormonal instruments of self-control, he was rather pleased with the ways in which he could evoke rapture to illuminate his loneliness, but he quickly realized that this was no easy answer to his problems. Eight hundred thousand years of masturbation had not sufficed to blunt the human race’s appetite for sexual intercourse, and Giovanni quickly found that the reason for this failure had nothing to do with the quality of the sensations produced. The cynics and pessimists were quite wrong; sexual intercourse could not and never would be made redundant by any mere enhancement of onanistic gratifications. Sex was more than pleasure; it was closeness, intimate involvement with another, empathy, compassion, and an outflowing of good feeling which needed a recipient. Giovanni had found in the brief happiness of his marriage that sex was, in all the complex literal and metaphorical senses of the phrase, making love. However wonderful his new biochemical systems were, they were not doing that, and were no substitute for it.

  So Giovanni ceased to live as a recluse. He came back into the social world, with his attitude adjusted yet again, determined to make new relationships. After all, he still had the magic at his fingertips—or so he thought. He looked around; found a gray-eyed journalist named Greta, a Junoesque plant physiologist named Jacqueline, and a sweetly-smiling insurance salesperson named Morella, and went to work with his seductive touch.

  Alas, the world had changed while he had lived apart from it. None of the three women yielded to his advances. It was not that he had lost his magic touch, but that Cytotech’s marketing had given it to far too many others. When the relevant tissue-transformations had been the secret advant
age of a favored few, they had used it with care and discretion, but now that aphrodisiac sweat was commonplace, any reasonably attractive woman was likely to encounter it several times a week. Because women were continually sated with the feelings that it evoked they could no longer be conditioned to associate the sensation with the touch of a particular person. Greta, Jacqueline and Morella were quite conscious of what was happening when he touched them, and though they thanked him for the compliment, each one was utterly unimpressed.

  Giovanni realized the promiscuity was fast destroying the aphrodisiac value of his first discovery. His quick mind made him sensitive to all kinds of possibilities that might be opened up by the more general release of this particular invention, and he began to look in the news for evidence of social change.

  The logic of the situation was quite clear to him. As users found their seductive touch less effective, they would tend to use it more and more frequently, thus spreading satiation even further and destroying all prospect of the desired result. In addition, people would no longer use the device simply for the purpose of sexual conquest. Many men and women would be taken by the ambition to make everybody love them, in the hope of securing thereby the social and economic success that the original purchasers of the technology had already had. In consequence, the world would suffer from a positive epidemic of good feeling. This plague would not set the entire world to making love, but it might set the entire world to making friends. The most unlikely people might soon be seen to be relaxing into the comfort of infinite benevolence.