The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Third Annual Collection

by Gardner Dozois

  Cage had started the Share project years before when he was still working at the lab full time. He had been thinking about the way social reinforcement seemed to energize recreational drug use. Most users preferred to get twisted with other users, at drug clubs and private parties or before making love or eating a fine meal or free-fall dancing in space. If socialization enhanced pleasure, why not try to find a way for users to share an identical experience? Not just by creating identical surrounds but by synchronizing the effect on a synaptic level. Direct stimulation of the sensory cortex. A kind of artificial telepathy.

  Corporate headquarters was skeptical. The mere mention of telepathy gave the whole project the smell of pseudoscience. And it seemed expensive. At the time Cage had thought that the effect would have to be created electro-chemically; the interaction of psychoactive drugs with electronic brain stimulation. Some kind of wetware would probably be necessary. But marketing research showed that many people were afraid of skull plugs. The zombie factor, they called it.

  Cage kept after them. If nothing else, he thought Share might be a powerful aphrodisiac. It could redefine intimacy. What did it matter how expensive it was, if it turned out to be the ultimate erotic experience? He pointed out that no one had ever gone broke selling love potions, and they let him do a feasibility study.

  He had to doctor the study; there were a lot of holes that only basic research could fill. But the research was being done, if not at Western Amusement then elsewhere. What he was finally able to sell them was a small ongoing effort. The perfect place to bury Bobby Belotti. A side bet on a long shot.

  And now, years later, Belotti had a something which looked very promising. He had borrowed a drug, 7, 2-DAPA, which had been developed by neuropathologists studying language disorders. It could induce an euphoric anomia, disrupting the process of associating certain visual inputs with words. Users had trouble naming what they saw. Nouns, especially abstract nouns and proper names, were especially difficult. The severity of the anomia was related not only to dosage but to the complexity of the visual environment. For example, a user shown a single long-stemmed rose might be unable to speak the words “flower” or “rose” even though he could otherwise carry on intelligent conversation about gardening; show him into a greenhouse and he might well be speechless. However, if he picked the rose up, or smelled it or heard the word “rose” he would make the connection. And in that moment of recognition enkephalin neurons would start pumping like crazy; the brain would be awash in the pleasure of discovery.

  “The problem is,” Belotti explained to Cage, “there’s no way yet to predict exactly which words will be lost. Too much individual variation. For instance, maybe I can’t say “rose” but you can. In that case I can get a flash from you; you get nothing. It’s only if both of us lose the same word and then get an appropriate cue that we share the effect.”

  “Doesn’t sound as if it’s going to replace sex.” Cage laughed; Belotti winced. The man had not changed. What was left of his hair still needed combing. There were webs of broken veins beneath his wrinkled skin. He seemed very old, very empty. Cage found it hard to remember the time when they had been friends.

  “Well, Shared sex might be interesting.” Belotti sounded as if he were repeating excuses he had made before. “But you wouldn’t get much effect by telling someone he’s having an orgasm. Too tactile, very little to do with visual input. Still, since the enkephalin supresses pain impulses, pleasure would be correspondingly enhanced. But remember, this is fairly mild at the dosages we’re looking at. Take too much and there’s a tendency to withdraw. You get into hallucinations. It’s unpredictable—dangerous.”

  “Can the effect be blocked?”

  “So far the neuroleptics are the only true antagonists we’ve found. And they’re pretty slow-acting.” Belotti shrugged. “Testing isn’t finished yet. Actually I haven’t paid that much attention. They took me off it, you know. I spent ten years chasing the specs you wrote and now I’m running computer simulations—make work.”

  Cage had not thought about Bobby Belotti in a long time; suddenly he was sorry for the old man. “What would you use for it, Bobby?”

  “As I said, not my decision. Marketing will find someone to peddle it to, I’m sure. I guess they’re a little disappointed that it didn’t turn out to be the aphrodisiac you promised them.”

  “It’s fine work, Bobby. You don’t have to apologize to anyone. But I can’t believe that you’ve worked as hard and as long as you have without thinking of commercial applications.”

  “Well if you could control which words were lost, then you could use guides to supply the necessary cues.” Belotti scratched the back of his neck. “Maybe you could blend in an hypnotic to give the guides more psychological authority. It might help, say, in art appreciation classes. Or maybe museums could sell it along with those tape recorded tours.”

  Wonderful. A flash for museums. Cage could imagine the ads. The topless vidqueen says to her silver boyfriend, Hey, bucko, let’s shank down to the National Gallery and get twisted! No wonder they had taken it away from him. “Why bother? Sounds like all you need are two people sitting at a kitchen table shooting words at each other.”

  “But words—it’s not that simple. We’re not talking fancy lights here: we’re talking about internalized symbols which can trigger complex mental states. Emotions, memories…”

  “Sure, Bobby. Look, I’ll talk to the front office. See if we can get you a new project, you own team.”

  “Don’t bother.” His expression was stony. “They’ve offered me early retirement and I’m going to take it. I’m sixty-one years old, Tony. How old are you these days?”

  “I’m sorry, Bobby. I think you’ve done wonders bringing Share this far.” He gave Belotti his deal-closing smile. “Where can I get some samples?”

  Belotti nodded, as if he had been expecting Cage to ask. “Still can’t keep your hands off the product? They’re keeping a pretty tight lid on the stuff, you know. Until they decide what they’ve got.”

  “I’m a special case, Bobby. You ought to know that by now. Some rules just don’t apply to me.”

  Belotti hesitated. He looked as if he were trying to balance some incredibly complex equation.

  “Come on, Bobby. For an old friend?”

  With a poisonous grin, Belotti thumbed a printreader to unlock his desk, took a green bottle from the top drawer and tossed it to Cage. “One at a time, understand? And you didn’t get it from me.”

  Cage popped the top. Six pills: yellow powder in clear casings. For a moment he was suspicious; Belotti seemed awfully eager to break company rules. But Cage had long since made up his mind about the man. He could not bring himself to worry about someone for whom he had so little respect. He tried to imagine what it would have been like to be ordinary like poor Belotti: old, at the end of a failed career, bitter, and tired. What kept a man like that alive? He shivered and pushed the fantasy away as he pocketed the green bottle. “What time is it, anyway?” he said. “I told Shaw I’d meet him for lunch.”

  Belotti touched the temple of his eyeglasses and the lenses opaqued. “You know, I really used to hate you. Then I realized it: you didn’t know what the hell you were doing. Might as well blame a cat for batting around a bloody mouse. You don’t see anyone, Tony. I’ll bet you don’t even see yourself.” His hands shook. “That’s all right, I’ll shut up now.” He powered down his terminal. “I’m going home. Only reason I came in was because they said you wanted a meeting.”

  Taking no chances, Cage had one of Belloti’s samples analyzed: it was pure. Then, rather than risk any more confrontation, Cage moved on. There were lawyers in Washington and accountants in New York. He spoke at the American Psychopharmacological Association’s annual meeting at Hilton Head in South Carolina and gave half a dozen telelink interviews. He met a Japanese woman and they made reservations to spend a weekend in orbit at Habitat Three. Afterwards they went to Osaka where he found out she was a corpora
te spy for Unico. It had been almost two months. Time, he thought, for Tod to have screwed up, for Wynne to have recognized that he was born to fail, and for their impossible affair to have collapsed under its own weight. Cage caught the suborbital to Heathrow. He was so sure.

  It was a nasty surprise: Tod Schluerman had been lucky.

  The video Burn London was only five minutes long. It started with a shot of silos. Countdown. Launch. London was under attack. No missiles—enormous naked Wynnes left rainbows across the sky as they hurtled down on the city. They exploded not in flame but in foliage, smothering entire city blocks with trees and brush. Soon the city disappeared beneath a forest. The camera zoomed to a clearing where a band called Flog was playing. They had been providing the dreamy sound track. The tempo picked up, the group played faster and faster until their instruments caught fire, consuming them and the forest. The final shot was a pan over ash and charred stumps. Cage thought it was dumb.

  No one could have predicted that sixteen-year-olds across the UK would choose that moment to take Flog into their callow hearts. When they made Burn London with Tod, Flog was unknown. In the span of a month they went from a basement in Leeds to a floor of Claridges in London. Although Tod did not make much money from Burn London, he had earned a name. The kid who had once compared himself to Nam June Paik was instead making videos for pubescent music fans.

  He and Wynne were living at a tube rack in Battersea. She could have afforded better; he insisted that they live within his means. There were about two hundred plastic sleep tubes stacked in what had once been a warehouse. Each was three meters long; the singles were a meter and a half in diameter, the doubles two. Each was furnished with a locker beneath a gel mattress, a telelink terminal, and a water bubbler passing for a sink. There was always a line for the showers. The toilets smelled.

  It was all right for Tod; he spent most of his time haunting the video labs or dealing with band managers. He even had a desk at VidStar and a regularly scheduled session on its synthesizer: Four to five A.M., Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays. But Wynne was only in the way at VidStar. And although they went out almost every night to clubs around London to hear bands play and show Tod’s videos, there seemed to be very little for Wynne to do. Cage could not understand why she seemed so happy.

  “Because I’m in love,” she said. “For the first time in my life.”

  “I’m glad for you, Wynne. Believe me.” They were sitting over lagers in a pub, waiting for Tod to finish work and join them for dinner. It was dark. It was easier to lie in the dark. “But how long can it last unless you find something to do? Something for yourself.”

  “So I can be famous. Like you?” She chuckled as she rubbed her finger along the rim of her glass. “Why should you care about that now, Tony? You were the one who said I should take some time off after I finished sixth form.”

  “I’ve thought a lot since you’ve been with Tod. You could get into any school you wanted.”

  “You know how Tod feels about school. Still, I have considered taking some business courses. I thought I might be Tod’s manager. That would give him more time to do the important work. He’s really good and he’s still learning, that’s what’s so incredible. Did you get a chance to see Burn London yet?”

  Cage nodded.

  “Did you recognize the women?”

  “Of course.”

  She smiled. She was proud of being in Tod’s video. Cage realized his plan of inaction had gone very, very wrong. He would have to intervene in their affair or he might never get Wynne back.

  “Good news,” said Tod as he slipped onto the bench beside Wynne. They kissed. “I sold them on the idea. I’ve got a commission to shoot a thirty minute video at the free festival.”

  Wynne hugged him. “That’s great, Tod. I knew you could do it.”

  “Free festival?” said Cage. “What are you talking about?”

  “You know, man.” Tod finished the rest of Wynne’s lager. “You’re always lecturing us about it; that’s when I got the idea. I’m going to do a video of the solstice celebration. At Stonehenge.”

  * * *

  History does not record the first use of drugs at Stonehenge. However, there is little doubt that most of the major hallucinogens available in 1974 were ingested during the first Stonehenge free festival. An offshore pirate music station, Radio Caroline, had urged its listeners to come to Stonehenge for a festival of “love and awareness.” On solstice day that year a horde of scruffy music fans in their late teens and twenties set up camp in the field next to the car park. The music back then was called rock; apparently no pun was intended. The empty landscape around the stones was filled with tents and teepees, cars and caravans. Electric guitars screamed and there was a whiff of marijuana on the summer breeze. There are tapes of those early festivals. A vast psychedelia of humanity would gather for the occasion: the glassy-eyed couple from Des Moines in their matching polyester shirts, the smiling engineer from Tokyo taking movies, the young mother from Luton breast-feeding her infant son on the Altar Stone, the Amesbury bobby standing beneath the outer circle, hands clasped behind his back, the Druid from Leicester in her white ceremonial robes, the longhaired teenager from Dorking who had climbed the great trilithon and was shouting something about Jesus, UFO’s, the sun and the Beatles. The festival has always been one of the great surrounds for getting twisted. The pioneers of hallucinogens had a colorful term for the radical perceptual jolts of such an experience, the fascinating strangeness of it all. They would have called the Stonehenge free festival a mind-blower.

  * * *

  Wynne and Tod had their sleep tube shipped from the rack in Battersea to Stonehenge for the five-day festival. It and a thousand others lay near the old car park across the A360 from the dome which now protected the stones. The tubes looked like giant white Soar capsules scattered in the grass. In between were tension bubbles, gortex tents of varying geometries, hovers and cars and even people sitting in folding chairs beneath gaudy umbrellas. Cage stayed at an inn at Amesbury and watched the festival on telelink.

  On solstice eve he was able to coax Tod and Wynne into town with the promise of a free dinner. He proposed his little experiment over dessert.

  “I don’t know, man.” Tod looked doubtful. “Tomorrow is the last day, the big one. I don’t know if I ought to be eating experimental drugs.”

  Cage had expected that Tod might balk; he was counting on Wynne. “Oh, Tod,” she said, “you’ll be the only one there that won’t be twisted. Why not get into the spirit of the thing?” Her eyes seemed very bright. “Look, how many hours have you shot already? Forty, fifty? They only want a half hour. And even if you miss anything, you can always synthesize it.”

  “I know that,” he said irritably. “It’s just that I’m tired. Can hardly think anymore.” He sipped his claret. “Maybe, okay? Just maybe. But start over again. Tell me from the beginning.”

  Cage began by claiming that he had been impressed by Burn London; he said he wanted to get to know Tod better, understand his art. Cage spoke of the inspiration he had had while watching the festival on telelink. They would all take Share and go to the solstice celebrations together, relying on Stonehenge, the crowd, and each other for cues to shape their experience. Cage spoke of the aesthetics of randomness as an answer to the problem of selection. He said they might be on the verge of a historic discovery; Share might well be a new way for non-artists to participate in the very act of artistic creation.

  Cage did not mention that he had laced Tod’s dose of Share with an anticholinergic which would smash his psychological defenses flat. When Tod was completely vulnerable to suggestion—stripped of the capacity to lie—Cage wold begin interrogating. He would force Tod to tell the truth; force Wynne to see how this shallow boy was using her to further his career. At that moment Wynne, too, would see the ugliness that Cage had seen all along beneath the handsome face. When Tod revealed just how little he cared for her, their affair would be over.

 
“Come on, Tod,” said Wynne. “We haven’t done chemicals together in a long time. I’m tired of getting twisted alone. And when Tony recommends something like this, you know it has to be a killer flash.”

  “You’re sure I’ll be able to function while we’re on this stuff?” Tod’s resistance was wearing down. “I don’t want to waste the day shooting blades of grass.”

  “I’ll bring something to neutralize it. If you have problems you can poke yourself straight anytime you want. Don’t worry, Tod. Look, the action of Share should actually help you be more visually oriented. You yourself have said that language gets in the way of art. Share strips away the superstructure of preconceptions. You won’t know what you’re seeing; you’ll just see it. The eyes of a child, Tod. Think of it.”

  For a moment Cage wondered if he had overdone it. Wynne’s attention turned; she seemed more interested in what he was saying than in Tod’s reaction to it. He could feel her appraising stare but did not acknowledge it. The waiter came with the check and as Cage signed for it, he dangled the real bait before Tod.

  “If you’re afraid to try it, Tod, just say so. It is something new, after all. No one would blame you for backing out.”

  “Very good, sir.” A true Englishman, the waiter pretended not to hear as Cage handed him the check. “Thank you, sir.”

  “Still,” Cage continued, “I believe in Share and I believe in you. So much so that when you’re done I’d like to show your video to Western Amusement. They haven’t decided yet how to market Share. If this video is as good as I think it can be, the problem will be solved. I’ll make them buy it. You’ll be the spokesman—hell, the father—of a new collaborative art form.”

  He knew he had Tod then. This was what the kid had wanted all along. Cage had seen right away that Tod had only seduced Wynne as a career move. All right then, let Tod have his introduction to an entertainment multinational—and on his own terms. Let him believe that he had manipulated Cage. It did not matter as long as Cage got Wynne back.