The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Third Annual Collection

by Gardner Dozois

  But there was Wynne, his beautiful Wynne, beaming at Tod as if he were the second coming of Leonardo. The son of a bitch was going to take her away.

  * * *

  Sir Edmund Antrobus, the baronet who owned Stonehenge, died without an heir in 1915. For years he had squabbled with the Church of the Universal Bond, a modern reincarnation of Druidism based on equal parts of wish fulfillment and bad scholarship, over access to the site. The Chief Druid announced that it had been a Druid curse which had struck Sir Edmund down. Several months later his estate came up for sale. Mr. Cecil Chubb bought Stonehenge at auction for 6600 pounds. He claimed it was an impulse purchase. Three years later Chubb offered Stonehenge to the nation and was knighted by Lloyd George for his generosity.

  To the cautious bureaucrats in the Office of Works, Stonehenge was a disaster waiting to happen. Several leaning stones threatened to collapse; wobbly lintels needed readjustment. The government sought help from the Society of Antiquaries for this work. The antiquarians seized the opportunity to expand the repairs into a grandiose, and disastrous, excavation of the entire monument. The government, however, withdrew funding soon after the stones were straightened and for years the Society struggled to finance the dig itself. More often than not Colonel William Hawley had to work alone, living in a drafty hut on the site. In 1926 the project was mercifully suspended, having accomplished little more than to disturb evidence and embarrass the Society. As the bewildered Hawley told the Times: “The more we dig, the more the mystery appears to deepen.”

  * * *

  Like many people, Cage did not chose his career; he became a drug artist by accident. When he started at Cornell he intended to study genetic engineering. At that time Boggs was developing viruses that could alter chromosomes in existing cells. Kwabena had published her pioneering work reconstructing algae for human consumption. It seemed as if every month a different geneticist stepped forward to promise a miracle that would change the world. Cage wanted to make miracles, too. At the time, idealism did not seem so foolish.

  Unfortunately, genetic engineering excited every other bright kid in the country. The competition at Cornell was fierce. Cage started doing drugs in his sophomore year just to keep up with the course work. Soon he was the king of the all-nighters. He started with small doses of metrazine; it was only supposed to be psychologically addicting. Cage knew he was tougher than any drug. He did not much care for the recreational stuff back then. No time. He tried THC on occasion: both pot and the new aerosols from Sweden. Once over a spring break a woman he had been seeing gave him some mescal buttons. She said it would give him new insight. It did—he realized he was wasting his time with her.

  Three semesters later it all went wrong. By then he was poking megamphetamines in massive doses, sometimes over eighty milligrams. The initial rush felt like a whole-body orgasm; he did not feel like studying much afterward. His advisor told him to switch out of the program after he took a “C” in genetic chemistry. He was burning up brain cells and losing weight; he had already lost his direction. He knew he had to get clean and start over again.

  He had signed up for a course in psychopharmacology on a paranoid whim. If he had to study something, why not the chemistry of what he was doing to himself with his habit? Bobby Belotti was a good teacher; he soon became a friend. He helped Cage get off the megs, helped him salvage a plain vanilla degree in biology and encouraged him to apply to graduate school. Much of Cage’s idealism had been seared away during those twisted semesters of amphetamine psychosis. Maybe that was why it was so easy to convince himself that developing new drugs was just as noble as curing hemophilia.

  Cage wrote his master’s thesis on the effects of indole hallucinogens on serontonergic and dopaminergic receptors. The eary indole hallucinogens like LSD and DMT had long since been thought to inhibit production of the neuroregulator serotonin, not surprising since their chemical structures were remarkably similar. His work showed that hallucinogens of this family also effect the dopamine-producing system and that many of the reported effects of these drugs resulted from interactions between these neuroregulators. It was not, he had to admit, particularly innovative or brilliant work; the foundations had been laid long ago. But by then he had grown tremendously bored with being a student. The work reflected it.

  He took his degree in the middle of the brief, inglorious rule of the America First Party, a pack of libertarian fanatics bent on dismantling the government of the United States. Sunsetting the Food and Drug Administration sparked the revolution in recreational drug use. Cage was still debating whether to slog on for his doctorate when Bobby Belotti called to say that he was leaving Cornell. Western Amusement was recruiting people to do R&D for its new psychoactive drug division. Belotti was going. Did Cage want in? Of course.

  Belotti’s team was supposed to be looking for a businessman’s flash. Something fast and dirty: fat-soluble so that it could pass quickly into the brain and reach its site of action within minutes after ingestion. It had to be easily metabolized so that the psychoactive effect would fade within an hour or two. No needles, keep the tolerance effect low. They did not want the users to see God or experience the ultimate orgasm, just a little psychic distortion, some pretty visuals, and leave them with a smile.

  Since Cage had already worked with the indole hallucinogens, Belotti gave him pretty much of a free hand. After a couple of frustrating months, he began to look seriously at DMD. It seemed to fit the specifications, except that animal tests did not show significant psychoactive effect. He worried that it might be too subtle. No matter how safe it was, the stuff was no good if it left the user straight as a Baptist accountant. Still Cage was able to convince Belotti to authorize microiontophoretic tests on rats.

  Bobby Belotti was a thoroughly disheveled man. His curly black hair resisted combing. He was forever tucking in his shirt; his paunch tugged it out again. There were rings of dried coffee on the upper strata of memos and reports piled on his desk; dust gathered undisturbed in the nooks of his terminal. For all his ability, he was the kind of employee that management preferred to hide from the outside world.

  “Look at this.” Cage burst into Belotti’s office and dropped a ten centimeter stack of fanfold paper on his desk. “The DMD results. The stuff inhibits the hell out of the serotonergic system.”

  Belotti pulled off his glasses and rubbed his eye with the back of his hand. “Great. Have you got an effect to show me?”

  “No, but these numbers say there has to be one. Must be some kind of trigger.”

  Belotti sighed and began to shuffle through the papers on his desk. “The front office is screaming for something to sell, Tony. I don’t see that DMD is the answer. Do you?”

  “A couple of weeks, Bobby. I’m almost there—I can taste it.”

  Belotti found a memo, handed it to Cage. “Give it a rest, Tony. Let’s get a couple of products under our belt, then maybe you can try again.” The memo reassigned Cage to work directly under Belotti’s supervision.

  They argued. Cage had never learned to argue and he had a hair-trigger temper. Belotti was too calm, too damn understanding. Although it was never mentioned, the debt that Cage owed Belotti only fueled his outrage. He felt as if he were the wayward student being corrected once again by his kindly professor.

  Fuming, Cage brought the odious memo back to his cubicle, shut down his terminal and glared at the empty screen. He was in a mood to lash out, do something crazy. The idea came to him in anger, a stunt straight right out of a mad scientist video. He requisitioned ten milligrams of DMD and went home to try it on himself.

  Half an hour after eating the drug, he was lying on the bed in a darkened room, waiting for something, anything to happen. He felt jittery, as if he had just poked some mild speed. His pulse rate was up, he was sweating. He knew from the tests that the drug must have already found its way to his brain. He felt nothing—he was not even angry anymore. At last he got out of bed, turned up the lights and went into the kitchen to m
ake himself a snack. He settled in front of the telelink with a ham and cheese sandwich and turned the monitor on. News. Change channel. Click, click.

  No signal. Just visual static. Exactly what it took to trigger DMD’s psychoactive effect. He never ate that sandwich.

  Instead he spent the next hour gazing intently at the screen of red, green, and blue phosphors flashing at random. Except that to Cage they were not at all random. He saw patterns, wonderful patterns: wheels of fire, amber waves of grain, angels dancing on the head of a pin, demon faces. He felt as if he himself were a pattern. He was liberated from his body, soaring into the screen to play amidst the beautiful lights.

  And then it was over, a very clean finish. It had been an hour and a half since he had eaten the pill; the peak had lasted about forty-five minutes. It was perfect. With a sophisticated light show to trigger DMD’s effect, it might be the most popular drug since alcohol. And it was his, he realized. All his.

  After all, Belotti had cut himself out of the action with his memo. It was Cage who had taken the risk, put his body and sanity on the line. Friendship was friendship but Cage knew that if he played this right he could change his life. So he made sure that management heard about DMD from him, making the case that Belotti had tried to stifle important research. If his co-workers resented him for stepping on a friend’s face on his scramble up the ladder, Cage learned not to care. The front office was secretly relieved; Cage was much more presentable than Belotti. Soon he was in charge of the team, then the whole lab.

  Cage expected Bobby Belotti to leave, go back to Cornell, but he never did. Perhaps Belotti intended it as a subtle kind of revenge: showing up for work every day, drinking coffee with the man who had betrayed him. Cage refused to be ashamed. He found ways to avoid Belotti, eventually burying him on a minor project that had little chance of success. The two never spoke much after that.

  They called the drug Soar and proceeded to market the hell out of it. Western Amusement’s PR flacks made Cage famous before he understood quite what they were doing to him. The interviewers on telelink could not get enough of him. A sanitized bio appeared on most of the major information utilities: the brilliant young researcher, the daring breakthrough, the first step of an incredible psychic journey—at first Cage was amused by it all.

  When he could get to the lab he spent much of his time brainstorming mechanisms to trigger Soar’s psychoactive effect. The light table, which can read EEG patterns and transform them into hi-res computer pyrotechnics, was the most successful but there were others. In fact, the hardware aftermarket made Western Amusement almost as much as the drug itself. Cage’s lab turned into a money machine. To keep the corporate headhunters from stealing him away, Western Amusement gave him participation in the profits. He was soon one of the richest young men in the world.

  There were three parts to the recreational drug experience: the chemical itself, the mental state of the user and the environment in which the drug was consumed. What Cage liked to call the surround. As the years passed he became much less involved in developing chemicals. The kids coming out of grad school were better researchers than he had ever been. He was more interested in conceptual design and especially liked dreaming up new surrounds: the sensory deprivation helmet, the alpha strobe. The flacks made the best of his evolving interests; he was no longer a psychopharmacological researcher. He was anointed as the first drug artist.

  However, the real reason Cage was forced to cut back on his involvement with drug development had nothing to do with artistic yearning. He had the classic addictive personality; he really loved to get twisted. Over the years he had let some vicious psychoactive chemicals sink claws into his synapses. Although he always managed to pull free, management was nervous. They had made Tony Cage a corporate symbol; they could not afford a meltdown.

  Cage should not have been surprised to see his taste for drugs mirrored in Wynne. She began using them when she was nine. By the time she was eleven he was letting her poke some of the major psychoactives. It could hardly have been otherwise if Wynne was to share his life. One of Cage’s perks was a personal bar that put most drug clubs to shame. And his own lab was developing a cannabinol chewing gum aimed at the preteen market. Despite what the Temperance League preached, Cage had not made the drug culture: it had made him. Kids all over the world were getting twisted, reaching for the brightest flash. Still, Wynne’s zest for drugs disturbed him.

  Cage tried to ensure that Wynne was never addicted to any one chemical. He saw to it that her habit was various. If she started to build up a cross-tolerance to hallucinogens, for example, he would make her give the whole family a vacation and switch to opiates. Nor was she constantly twisted. She would go on sprees that would last anywhere from a few hours to a few days. Then nothing for a week or two. Still, Cage worried about her. She took some astounding doses.

  The summer before she met Tod they flew from the States into da Vinci airport and checked into the Hilton. Even though they had taken the sub-orbital they were having a hard time getting their biological clocks reset. Since Cage had business in Rome the next day he could not afford to stay jet-lagged. Wynne called room service and had them bring up a couple of strawberry placidex shakes. Cage settled back on his bed; the stuff made him feel as if he were melting into the mattress. Wynne sat in a thermal chair and listlessly switched channels on the telelink. Finally she shut it off and asked him if he thought he took too many drugs.

  Cage had been about to doze off; suddenly he was alert as anyone with placidex seeping into his brain can be. “Sure, I think about it all the time. Right now I think I’m okay. There have been times, though, when I thought that I might be in trouble.”

  She nodded. “How do you know when you’re in trouble?”

  “One sign is when you stop worrying about it.”

  She folded her arms as if she were chilled. “That’s a hell of a thing to say. You’re only safe if you’re worried?”

  “Or if you’re clean.”

  “Oh, come on. What’s the longest you’ve been clean? Recently.”

  “Six months. When I was in the tank.” They both laughed. “Since you brought it up,” he said, “let me ask you. Think you do too much?”

  She considered, as if the question had surprised her. “Nah,” she said at last. “I’m young. I can take it.”

  He told her then about how he had been hooked on amphetamines at Cornell. The story did not seem to impress her.

  “But you beat it, obviously,” she said. “So it couldn’t have been that bad.”

  “Maybe you’re right,” he agreed. “But it seems to me that I was lucky. A couple more months and I might never have been able to get clean again.”

  “I like getting twisted,” she said. “But there are other things I like just as much.”

  “For instance?”

  “Sex, as if you didn’t know.” She stretched. “Space, weightlessness. Losing myself in a book or a play or a video. Spending your money.” She yawned. The words were coming slower and slower. “Falling asleep.”

  “Come to bed, then,” he said. “You’re keeping both of us up.”

  She touched the shoulder clasp and her wrapper uncoiled, crinkling, into a pile on the floor. She climbed in next to him. Her skin was cool to the touch. “Who invented placidex anyway?” she said as she snuggled next to him. He could feel the smoothness of her belly against his back. “Man knew what he was doing.”

  “The man did not know what he was doing.” It was the placidex that laughed; Cage would rather have made the point. Still, it was funny in a macabre way. “Took a big dose one day, fell asleep in a thermal chair. He had overridden the timer. Baked to death.”

  “Died happy, anyway.” She patted his hip and rolled over. “Pleasant dreams.”

  * * *

  In 1965 the astronomer Gerald Hawkins published a book with an immodestly bold title: Stonehenge Decoded. Earlier explainers had always looked beyond Stonehenge for evidence to back up their theories
. Some ages found authority in the Bible and church tradition, others in the ruins of Rome or the great historians of antiquity. Like his predecessors, Hawkins invoked the authorities of his time to support his ingenious theory. Using the Harvard-Smithsonian IBM 7090 computer to analyze patterns of solar and lunar alignments at Stonehenge, Hawkins reached a conclusion that electrified the world. Stonehenge had been built as an observatory for ancient astronomers. In fact, he claimed that parts of it formed a “Neolithic computer” which had been used by its builders to predict eclipses of the moon.

  Hawkins’ theory caught the popular imagination, in large part due to uncomprehending coverage by the old printed newspapers. Reporters dithered over this marvel: Stone Age scientists had built a computer of sarsen and bluestone that only a modern electronic brain could “decode.” There was even a television special on some of the old pre-telelink networks. Much was made of Hawkins’ use of the computer despite the fact that the numbers it had crunched could easily have been done by hand. And what Hawkins had, in fact, proved was entirely different from what he claimed to have proved. The computer studies showed that the Aubrey holes, a ring of fifty-six regularly spaced pits, could be used to predict eclipses. They did not show that the builders of Stonehenge had had any such purpose in mind. Others soon offered conflicting interpretations and closely-reasoned Stonehenge astronomies proliferated. The problem was soon recognized: Stonehenge had too much astronomical significance. It was a mirror in which any theoretician could see his ideas reflected.

  * * *

  Cage did not immediately follow Tod and Wynne to England. Instead he flew back to the States to check with Western Amusement after his cryogenic vacation. Cage was no longer an actual employee of the company. An independent contractor, he was himself a corporation. Still, there were no doors shut to him at the lab he had made famous, no secrets that he could not learn. The hot news was that in the six months Cage had been in the tank, Bobby Belotti had made a breakthrough on the Share project.