Young Blood

by Brian Stableford

  She was a little crazy, too. No, not crazy—just very, very nervous. That was only to be expected, I guess, given that she was away from home for the very first time, and given that her home seemed to have been a real oasis of calm in a troubled world—the kind of safe haven that a home is supposed to be and almost never is. From what she told me I gathered that her parents were every bit as ambitious for her as Dad was for me, but their tactics couldn't have been more different—layer upon layer of kid glove, and never a single lecture on how tough you have to be to get by in a tough world. Anne wasn't tough. Neither was I, really, but I was every bit as tough as Dad could make me. But Anne's wasn't just the ordinary, expectable nervousness. It cut deeper than that. Nor was her anorexia the only symptom.

  How many neurotic habits and rituals she'd accumulated I couldn't really say, because she never let me close enough to observe them all, even after she let me into her bed. But there was one that was plain enough for all the world to see. She had this weird way of clutching at her own neck, worrying and scratching it with her fingernails. I'm not sure that she was even aware that she was doing it. Once or twice when I actually reached out and pulled her hand away she looked far more surprised than annoyed. She had a permanent mark on the side of her throat, which looked a little like a lovebite, though it obviously wasn't. Sometimes it faded a little, but she was always picking at it.

  Once, I made her look at the mark in a mirror. ‘You've got to let it heal, Anne,’ I told her. ‘Hell, it could get infected.'

  'It's nothing,’ she told me, flatly. ‘Nothing at all.'

  'People are going to think I did it,’ I said, hoping that if I could make a joke out of it I might somehow crack the neurotic impulse behind it.

  'So what?’ she said. ‘It's nothing. It doesn't hurt.'

  She lived on the far side of the campus, in what I thought of as the old part, though the Hall she lived in was as modern as the others of its kind. Her department still retained certain traditional echoes of the theological college which was one of the ancestors of the modern university, and was housed in the worst building on campus—an ugly, dilapidated thing whose grounds were infested with rats. It was regarded with the kind of unquestioning reverence people usually give to things that are old, but in my opinion it was the kind of place which ought to have been pulled down so that something functional could be put up in its place.

  Anne really liked the dump, although it took her some time to overcome her initial terror of the guy she had to see every week to talk about her paper. I could never understand why she liked it. There was a little bridge over a stream close to the building, and that's where I first kissed her; but while we were standing there I could hear the rats moving in the undergrowth, coming out of their hidey-holes on their nightly pilgrimage to the campus garbage dumps. I couldn't bring myself to feel any exaggerated sentimental attachment to the location.

  'They should build a gym here,’ I told her once. ‘A real sports centre to replace that god-awful pavilion thing. They should rip out all those ragged trees and build a real stadium.'

  'Secretly,’ she said, ‘you just want me to be a cheerleader. All the rest is just an excuse to get me leaping about in spangled boots and a miniskirt, waving pom-poms.'

  I tried to make a joke about her having to eat more and build up her muscles, but she just switched off, the way she always did. I didn't push it, because I had this naive faith that a real relationship—not necessarily love, just a normal, healthy relationship—would cure her of everything. Eventually, I thought, she'd wind herself down and loosen up and just start eating. With a little ordinary care and attention, I figured, she'd stop mutilating herself. She'd lose her peculiar affection for all things dark and shadowy, and her antipathy for bright lights and slick design. Even though she had signed up to be a philosopher, to learn to worry about all the things the rest of us took for granted, I thought she'd straighten out. I thought that just being with me—me being, of course, a paragon of normality—would gradually shape her up into a sensible, laid-back, fun-loving person.

  Evidently, I thought too highly of myself. Either that, or I seriously underestimated the extent of her hang-ups. One way or another, it didn't work. Every time that stupid mark on her neck faded and I'd start hoping for a breakthrough, back it came again, redder and bluer than ever.

  If ever there was anyone who shouldn't have been infected by the thing that somehow got into me, it was Anne. She never stood a chance against it. She was wide open to its ravages. If someone like me couldn't cope—and I sure as hell failed in a big way—what possible chance had someone like her?

  I did love her. It was because I loved her, in a way, that I accidentally gave her the virus. If I hadn't loved her she wouldn't have been condemned to lie so long in her unnatural coma, beset by frightful dreams. Sometimes, you just have to pause and ask: what kind of world do we live in, where such things as that can happen?

  It was really no big deal, of course, compared to what happened to me, but I was a volunteer. Even though I had no real idea what the risks were, I went into Mike Viners’ lab knowing that there were things in it which might really screw me up if I got careless. Even in my wildest dreams, I'd never have guessed how completely screwed up I could become, but I knew that I was taking on something new, something unknown, something with potential. That was why I came to England in the first place.

  If you wanted to be really cruel, you could say that I got what I deserved. Anne didn't. Anne deserved the best.

  I wish I could have given it to her.

  3

  By the time Anne came looking for me I was in a reasonably level-headed frame of mind. I thought I knew what I had to do. It still seemed to me that the odds were stacked against my having picked up one of Viners’ viruses, but I felt that I ought to cover all the angles. If I'd been infected by one of the laboratory specimens—and at that point I was still thinking very much in terms of if — then my obligation as a scientist was to make the most of the opportunity for scientific observation. I had to stay calm, stay indoors and make notes.

  I'd long ago realised, of course, that the kind of work we were doing in the lab was working blindfold. The animal operations gave us a chance to observe behaviour, after a fashion, but you can't see into an animal's mind. You don't really have any idea what it's experiencing. The rest of the stuff, with the brain tissue, was just cookery. I knew—and I knew that Mike Viners knew—that trying to study psychotropics without access to real conscious minds was at best only half a research programme. There was no way that sectioning brains and mapping the brain proteins by chromatography and electrophoresis could ever approach the real questions: those big, deep questions which fascinated me. I also knew that in the golden years before there were such things as ethics committees and the Food and Drug Administration it was standard practice for scientists to be their own experimental guinea pigs.

  For a few paranoid seconds I even entertained the fancy that maybe Viners had arranged for me to be infected—that maybe he'd brought me all the way from California so that he wouldn't have to try it out on someone close to home—but I soon let go of that one. I knew I had to avoid paranoia, and pay more scrupulous attention to matters of fact.

  Even so, I had to consider the alternatives thrown up by the elementary calculus of probability.

  If I really had picked up a virus, then the probability was that I'd already passed it on to Anne. Should I warn her? The answer, I quickly decided, had to be ‘no', or at least ‘not yet'. There was no point in worrying her unnecessarily, and there was every reason to assume, given her tendency to anxiety, that she'd react badly to any such suggestion. Better to keep insisting that I couldn't have caught anything, and that even if I had, and even if she were to catch it from me, its effects would be entirely innocuous. At that point in time I'd had no recurrence of the spaced-out feeling that had affected me the night before; I had every reason to think that it would be innocuous.

  Having settled
that, I quickly moved on. The only other people I might have infected were Viners and Teresa, who were also the prime candidates for consideration if I had been infected by someone else. It wasn't easy to judge how many other people either of them might have infected in their turn. I knew that Viners was married and that Teresa lived with her parents, so the probability was that it wouldn't stop with them if they did have anything. Then again, if it took really intimate contact to pass this kind of virus on, Teresa's parents would be safe. She and I didn't talk all that much, and I could never have plucked up the courage to ask point-blank how many other people she played games with. I suspected Viners—I could hardly help suspecting Viners—but even that possibility seemed so bizarre that there was no way to attach an estimated probability to it. What she did off campus, I had no idea. I hadn't a clue whether or not she had a steady boyfriend, or whether she spent every night putting herself about.

  In the end, I decided that there wasn't much point worrying about a possible epidemic. If Teresa had given it to me, I reasoned, she must have gone through the whole cycle already, and had obviously shown no lasting ill effects. The same was true if she'd given it to Viners, or he to her. If the bug had been going round for some time before catching up with me, then it was evidently harmless. On the other hand, if my infection were recent and original, it wasn't very likely that I'd passed it on to either of them. I hadn't been into the CT room with Teresa for at least two weeks.

  I was tempted to let go of the epidemic question then, in order to focus on my mental condition, but I kept coming back to it. I knew that I had to consider the whole matter very carefully and objectively, lest I should ever have occasion to put it all on the record for the benefit of future generations of psychotropic geneticists, but it was difficult looking back on the Teresa situation with calm objectivity, and even harder to contemplate writing it all down one day in careful scientific language. Maybe I'd led a sheltered life, but to me it still seemed like the stuff of cheap pornographic fiction, the kind of thing which couldn't possibly be reported in a scientific paper.

  I guess I was sweating out my guilt, maybe far too belatedly. No matter what the calculus of probability said, I couldn't help coming back again and again to the question of Teresa. Had I caught it from her? Had she caught it from me? And in either case, so what?

  It all began to seem so weird, while I was going over it in my mind, that I began to wonder whether it had ever really happened. Perhaps, I remember thinking, that too was just a hallucination generated by some momentary outburst of a stray virus. Maybe it was just a sexual fantasy triggered by infection, given an altogether false gloss of perceived reality simply because my brain wasn't expecting to be hit by a dream from that direction. I tried hard to recall the exact circumstances of the first encounter, searching belatedly for some kind of clue which might serve to prove its reality or its falsehood.

  We were working in the high-security lab, on separate experiments—she on one of Viners', me on one of my own. It wasn't that late, but it was already dark outside; it must have been the last week in September. Viners had gone home at the usual time, leaving us to it. He did his fair share of late-night stints; this one was just our turn on the rota. It had been a long afternoon, requiring steady if not intense concentration, but now we were just culling the results, recording at regular intervals. There were periods of half an hour when there was nothing to do. I was tired; she must have been utterly bored, letting her mind wander wherever the mood took it.

  There were no conversational preliminaries; she just came over to where I was working, and said: ‘I'll give you a blow job if you'll give me one.'

  I had never been so shocked in all my life. At first, I thought I'd misheard her, but when I looked at her lopsided grin I saw that she'd known exactly what effect her words would have. She was playing with me; the blush must have been the first part of the payoff for her, the first tiny thrill. I can't imagine what the expression on my reddening face must have looked like, but I didn't have to ask her to repeat what she'd said, or what she meant. I didn't want her to think that I could be that slow on the uptake. After all, I was from California, not some shitty backwoods English village.

  All I said, after what must have been a heavily pregnant pause, was: ‘Here?’ I did my best to seem casual.

  'The medium CT room's comfortable,’ she said, laconically. ‘Not too warm, not too wet.’ The way she said it was calculated to imply that she'd done it before, many a time, but that may have been bluff. Perhaps she was covering up the outrageousness of her own action by trying to give the impression that it was no big deal, that it was her favourite sport. Perhaps she was deliberately trying to make me believe that it was a regular thing between her and Viners, when they were here after dark.

  The lab had three constant temperature ‘rooms’—no more than big closets, really. One was maintained at thirty-seven Celsius—blood heat—and had a high enough relative humidity to choke you; it was heaven for tissue cultures. One was kept at four Celsius and near-zero RH, and was good for keeping bacterial cultures and infected tissues in suspended animation. The medium room was twenty-four and thirty, supposedly the kind of external temperature at which infectious agents had to be equipped by natural selection to migrate with reasonable efficiency from one host to another, by means of touch or bodily fluids.

  There was a certain irony in wondering whether it might have been in that CT room that the virus migrated from Teresa's body to mine, or vice versa.

  She leaned against the soft plastic wall and shoved down her tights and knickers, leaving it to me to drag them further down. I was already kneeling down. She lifted up her skirt and spread her legs as far as the tights around her ankles would let her. When I looked up she had already leaned her head back against the wall and closed her eyes.

  She was attractive enough, in her way, but I'd never really thought of making a move on her. I suppose that was strange, given that we spent so much time in high-security isolation. A lot of guys would have asked her out within the first week, or at least asked probing questions calculated to test her availability. I'd been there for three weeks, maybe four, and hadn't said a word out of place. Maybe it was just that I felt out of place myself, that I hadn't settled yet into England, or into the lab.

  Even then, while we were playing the game, I didn't feel that it was the beginning of a relationship. Maybe it was too casual a leap from mere acquaintance to an exchange of orgasms; maybe that froze me a bit, made me wary of her. It was impersonal, trading rather than sharing. However crazy it sounds, it didn't really break the ice between us. Maybe it would have been different, given more time for a real relationship to develop, but that first time was just six days before I first met Anne, and on the other occasions—there were only three more—my relationship with Anne was in the way. I couldn't help comparing the two of them, and deciding that Anne was the one I liked best. Teresa had the fuller figure, the softer flesh, the casual self-confidence—but I could never have warmed to her the way I had warmed to Anne. In spite of what Teresa and I did—maybe because of it—I didn't want to get involved with her. I never wanted her to be my girl.

  When Teresa was finished, we swapped places. She always went first, and then did me. It was quick, mechanical and curiously unsatisfying, as different as could be from making love to Anne, which happened when it eventually did happen in a more orthodox and infinitely more leisurely fashion. But Teresa did come, with an alacrity and an apparent satisfaction which suggested abundant practice, and Anne never could.

  Afterwards, Teresa and I just went back to work. We tucked our things away and became scientists again.

  If it had only happened the once, I think I might have given more time and attention to the theory that it was a phantom memory, a hallucinatory product of the virus; but it had happened four times, and I couldn't believe in a phantom memory which had that kind of redundancy built in. Could I have picked up the virus that way? If Teresa's sterile technique was as loos
e as her sexual habits, I thought, there might be every chance that I'd licked the virus right out of her, under optimum conditions for infection. And if, by chance, it had been me who'd got it first, I might have shot it straight into her avid mouth.

  If I had it, I felt guiltily certain, then she must have it too—or must once have had it. And if she had it still, there was no way of knowing just how fast the epidemic was going to spread. But I had never heard her complain of any illness, had never seen her blow her nose or heard her cough. She certainly hadn't had a day off work in three months. All of which meant that if I had caught it from her, and she'd had it for some time, it hadn't caused her the least anxiety. If it had done anything at all to her, it had done it in her dreams, unless...

  Unless what she'd done with me had been an effect of the virus. Unless she'd been driven to it by something freaky in her head.

  I had to let that one go, too. I knew that if I began to follow lines of thought like that I could eventually have begun to wonder whether this still purely hypothetical virus might have been responsible for every crazy thing that had happened in the British Isles, Europe and the rest of the world since the decline and fall of the Roman Empire.

  The thing to do, as I knew full well, was to begin monitoring my own state of consciousness, alert for any alteration—but not so enthusiastically that I started inducing odd states of mind by the very intensity of my introspection. I had to try to act naturally and behave normally.

  It was easy enough to do that, in the beginning. When Anne knocked on the door, even when she accused me of thinking I'd been affected, it was perfectly plain what would qualify as a rational answer to every one other questions and complaints. It wasn't quite so easy when she'd gone again, hurt and annoyed, leaving me to wonder what she might be going away to.