by Greg Egan
Jack didn’t know how to respond to this claim. Even when he couldn’t quite follow the man there was something mesmerizing about his ramblings, like a cross between William Blake and nursery talk.
“If computers don’t excite you, we’re doing all kinds of other things with DNA.” Stoney ushered him into the next room, which was full of glassware, and seedlings in pots beneath strip lights. Two assistants seated at a bench were toiling over microscopes; another was dispensing fluids into test tubes with a device that looked like an overgrown eye-dropper.
“There are a dozen new species of rice, corn, and wheat here. They all have at least double the protein and mineral content of existing crops, and each one uses a different biochemical repertoire to protect itself against insects and fungi. Farmers have to get away from monocultures; it leaves them too vulnerable to disease, and too dependent on chemical pesticides.”
Jack said, “You’ve bred these? All these new varieties, in a matter of months?”
“No, no! Instead of hunting down the heritable traits we needed in the wild, and struggling for years to produce cross-breeds bearing all of them, we designed every trait from scratch. Then we manufactured DNA that would make the tools the plants need, and inserted it into their germ cells.”
Jack demanded angrily, “Who are you to say what a plant needs?”
Stoney shook his head innocently. “I took my advice from agricultural scientists, who took their advice from farmers. They know what pests and blights they’re up against. Food crops are as artificial as Pekinese. Nature didn’t hand them to us on a plate, and if they’re not working as well as we need them to, nature isn’t going to fix them for us.”
Jack glowered at him, but said nothing. He was beginning to understand why Willie had sent him here. The man came across as an enthusiastic tinkerer, but there was a breath-taking arrogance lurking behind the boyish exterior.
Stoney explained a collaboration he’d brokered between scientists in Cairo, Bogotá, London and Calcutta, to develop vaccines for polio, smallpox, malaria, typhoid, yellow fever, tuberculosis, influenza and leprosy. Some were the first of their kind; others were intended as replacements for existing vaccines. “It’s important that we create antigens without culturing the pathogens in animal cells that might themselves harbor viruses. The teams are all looking at variants on a simple, cheap technique that involves putting antigen genes into harmless bacteria that will double as delivery vehicles and adjuvants, then freeze-drying them into spores that can survive tropical heat without refrigeration.”
Jack was slightly mollified; this all sounded highly admirable. What business Stoney had instructing doctors on vaccines was another question. Presumably his jargon made sense to them, but when exactly had this mathematician acquired the training to make even the most modest suggestions on the topic?
“You’re having a remarkably productive year,” he observed.
Stoney smiled. “The muse comes and goes for all of us. But I’m really just the catalyst in most of this. I’ve been lucky enough to find some people – here in Cambridge, and further afield – who’ve been willing to chance their arm on some wild ideas. They’ve done the real work.” He gestured toward the next room. “My own pet projects are through here.”
The third room was full of electronic gadgets, wired up to picture tubes displaying both phosphorescent words and images resembling engineering blueprints come to life. In the middle of one bench, incongruously, sat a large cage containing several hamsters.
Stoney fiddled with one of the gadgets, and a face like a stylized drawing of a mask appeared on an adjacent screen. The mask looked around the room, then said, “Good morning, Robert. Good morning, Professor Hamilton.”
Jack said, “You had someone record those words?”
The mask replied, “No, Robert showed me photographs of all the teaching staff at Cambridge. If I see anyone I know from the photographs, I greet them.” The face was crudely rendered, but the hollow eyes seemed to meet Jack’s. Stoney explained, “It has no idea what it’s saying, of course. It’s just an exercise in face and voice recognition.”
Jack responded stiffly, “Of course.”
Stoney motioned to Jack to approach and examine the hamster cage. He obliged him. There were two adult animals, presumably a breeding pair. Two pink young were suckling from the mother, who reclined in a bed of straw.
“Look closely,” Stoney urged him. Jack peered into the nest, then cried out an obscenity and backed away.
One of the young was exactly what it seemed. The other was a machine, wrapped in ersatz skin, with a nozzle clamped to the warm teat.
“That’s the most monstrous thing I’ve ever seen!” Jack’s whole body was trembling. “What possible reason could you have to do that?”
Stoney laughed and made a reassuring gesture, as if his guest was a nervous child recoiling from a harmless toy. “It’s not hurting her! And the point is to discover what it takes for the mother to accept it. To ‘reproduce one’s kind’ means having some set of parameters as to what that is. Scent, and some aspects of appearance, are important cues in this case, but through trial and error I’ve also pinned down a set of behaviors that lets the simulacrum pass through every stage of the life cycle. An acceptable child, an acceptable sibling, an acceptable mate.”
Jack stared at him, nauseated. “These animals fuck your machines?”
Stoney was apologetic. “Yes, but hamsters will fuck anything. I’ll really have to shift to a more discerning species, in order to test that properly.”
Jack struggled to regain his composure. “What on Earth possessed you, to do this?”
“In the long run,” Stoney said mildly, “I believe this is something we’re going to need to understand far better than we do at present. Now that we can map the structures of the brain in fine detail, and match its raw complexity with our computers, it’s only a matter of a decade or so before we build machines that think.
“That in itself will be a vast endeavor, but I want to ensure that it’s not stillborn from the start. There’s not much point creating the most marvelous children in history, only to find that some awful mammalian instinct drives us to strangle them at birth.”
#
Jack sat in his study drinking whisky. He’d telephoned Joyce after dinner, and they’d chatted for a while, but it wasn’t the same as being with her. The weekends never came soon enough, and by Tuesday or Wednesday any sense of reassurance he’d gained from seeing her had slipped away entirely.
It was almost midnight now. After speaking to Joyce, he’d spent three more hours on the telephone, finding out what he could about Stoney. Milking his connections, such as they were; Jack had only been at Cambridge for five years, so he was still very much an outsider. Not that he’d ever been admitted into any inner circles back at Oxford: he’d always belonged to a small, quiet group of dissenters against the tide of fashion. Whatever else might be said about the Tiddlywinks, they’d never had their hands on the levers of academic power.
A year ago, while on sabbatical in Germany, Stoney had resigned suddenly from a position he’d held at Manchester for a decade. He’d returned to Cambridge, despite having no official posting to take up. He’d started collaborating informally with various people at the Cavendish, until the head of the place, Mott, had invented a job description for him, and given him a modest salary, the three rooms Jack had seen, and some students to assist him.
Stoney’s colleagues were uniformly amazed by his spate of successful inventions. Though none of his gadgets were based on entirely new science, his skill at seeing straight to the heart of existing theories and plucking some practical consequence from them was unprecedented. Jack had expected some jealous back-stabbing, but no one seemed to have a bad word to say about Stoney. He was willing to turn his scientific Midas touch to the service of anyone who approached him, and it sounded to Jack as if every would-be skeptic or enemy had been bought off with some rewarding insight into their own field.
Stoney’s personal life was rather murkier. Half of Jack’s informants were convinced that the man was a confirmed pansy, but others spoke of a beautiful, mysterious woman named Helen, with whom he was plainly on intimate terms.
Jack emptied his glass and stared out across the courtyard. Was it pride, to wonder if he might have received some kind of prophetic vision? Fifteen years earlier, when he’d written The Broken Planet, he’d imagined that he’d merely been satirizing the hubris of modern science. His portrait of the evil forces behind the sardonically named Laboratory Overseeing Various Experiments had been intended as a deadly serious metaphor, but he’d never expected to find himself wondering if real fallen angels were whispering secrets in the ears of a Cambridge don.
How many times, though, had he told his readers that the devil’s greatest victory had been convincing the world that he did not exist? The devil was not a metaphor, a mere symbol of human weakness: he was a real, scheming presence, acting in time, acting in the world, as much as God Himself.
And hadn’t Faustus’s damnation been sealed by the most beautiful woman of all time: Helen of Troy?
Jack’s skin crawled. He’d once written a humorous newspaper column called “Letters from a Demon,” in which a Senior Tempter offered advice to a less experienced colleague on the best means to lead the faithful astray. Even that had been an exhausting, almost corrupting experience; adopting the necessary point of view, however whimsically, had made him feel that he was withering inside. The thought that a cross between the Faustbuch and The Broken Planet might be coming to life around him was too terrifying to contemplate. He was no hero out of his own fiction – not even a mild-mannered Cedric Duffy, let alone a modern Pendragon. And he did not believe that Merlin would rise from the woods to bring chaos to that hubristic Tower of Babel, the Cavendish Laboratory.
Nevertheless, if he was the only person in England who suspected Stoney’s true source of inspiration, who else would act?
Jack poured himself another glass. There was nothing to be gained by procrastinating. He would not be able to rest until he knew what he was facing: a vain, foolish overgrown boy who was having a run of good luck – or a vain, foolish overgrown boy who had sold his soul and imperiled all humanity.
#
“A Satanist? You’re accusing me of being a Satanist?”
Stoney tugged angrily at his dressing gown; he’d been in bed when Jack had pounded on the door. Given the hour, it had been remarkably civil of him to accept a visitor at all, and he appeared so genuinely affronted now that Jack was almost prepared to apologize and slink away. He said, “I had to ask you—”
“You have to be doubly foolish to be a Satanist,” Stoney muttered.
“Doubly?”
“Not only do you need to believe all the nonsense of Christian theology, you then have to turn around and back the preordained, guaranteed-to-fail, absolutely futile losing side.” He held up his hand, as if he believed he’d anticipated the only possible objection to this remark, and wished to spare Jack the trouble of wasting his breath by uttering it. “I know, some people claim it’s all really about some pre-Christian deity: Mercury, or Pan – guff like that. But assuming that we’re not talking about some complicated mislabeling of objects of worship, I really can’t think of anything more insulting. You’re comparing me to someone like … Huysmans, who was basically just a very dim Catholic.”
Stoney folded his arms and settled back on the couch, waiting for Jack’s response.
Jack’s head was thick from the whisky; he wasn’t at all sure how to take this. It was the kind of smart-arsed undergraduate drivel he might have expected from any smug atheist – but then, short of a confession, exactly what kind of reply would have constituted evidence of guilt? If you’d sold your soul to the devil, what lie would you tell in place of the truth? Had he seriously believed that Stoney would claim to be a devout churchgoer, as if that were the best possible answer to put Jack off the scent?
He had to concentrate on things he’d seen with his own eyes, facts that could not be denied.
“You’re plotting to overthrow nature, bending the world to the will of man.”
Stoney sighed. “Not at all. More refined technology will help us tread more lightly. We have to cut back on pollution and pesticides as rapidly as possible. Or do you want to live in a world where all the animals are born as hermaphrodites, and half the Pacific islands disappear in storms?”
“Don’t try telling me that you’re some kind of guardian of the animal kingdom. You want to replace us all with machines!”
“Does every Zulu or Tibetan who gives birth to a child, and wants the best for it, threaten you in the same way?”
Jack bristled. “I’m not a racist. A Zulu or Tibetan has a soul.”
Stoney groaned and put his head in his hands. “It’s half past one in the morning! Can’t we have this debate some other time?”
Someone banged on the door. Stoney looked up, disbelieving. “What is this? Grand Central Station?”
He crossed to the door and opened it. A disheveled, unshaven man pushed his way into the room. “Quint? What a pleasant—”
The intruder grabbed Stoney and slammed him against the wall. Jack exhaled with surprise. Quint turned bloodshot eyes on him.
“Who the fuck are you?”
“John Hamilton. Who the fuck are you?”
“Never you mind. Just stay put.” He jerked Stoney’s arm up behind his back with one hand, while grinding his face into the wall with the other. “You’re mine now, you piece of shit. No one’s going to protect you this time.”
Stoney addressed Jack through a mouth squashed against the masonry. “Dith ith Pether Quinth, my own perthonal thpook. I did make a Fauthtian bargain. But with thtrictly temporal—”
“Shut up!” Quint pulled a gun from his jacket and held it to Stoney’s head.
Jack said, “Steady on.”
“Just how far do your connections go?” Quint screamed. “I’ve had memos disappear, sources clam up – and now my superiors are treating me like some kind of traitor! Well, don’t worry: when I’m through with you, I’ll have the names of the entire network.” He turned to address Jack again. “And don’t you think you’re going anywhere.”
Stoney said, “Leave him out of dith. He’th at Magdalene. You mutht know by now: all the thpieth are at Trinity.”
Jack was shaken by the sight of Quint waving his gun around, but the implications of this drama came as something of a relief. Stoney’s ideas must have had their genesis in some secret war-time research project. He hadn’t made a deal with the devil after all, but he’d broken the Official Secrets Act, and now he was paying the price.
Stoney flexed his body and knocked Quint backward. Quint staggered, but didn’t fall; he raised his arm menacingly, but there was no gun in his hand. Jack looked around to see where it had fallen, but he couldn’t spot it anywhere. Stoney landed a kick squarely in Quint’s testicles; barefoot, but Quint wailed with pain. A second kick sent him sprawling.
Stoney called out, “Luke? Luke! Would you come and give me a hand?”
A solidly built man with tattooed forearms emerged from Stoney’s bedroom, yawning and tugging his braces into place. At the sight of Quint, he groaned. “Not again!”
Stoney said, “I’m sorry.”
Luke shrugged stoically. The two of them managed to grab hold of Quint, then they dragged him struggling out the door. Jack waited a few seconds, then searched the floor for the gun. But it wasn’t anywhere in sight, and it hadn’t slid under the furniture; none of the crevices where it might have ended up were so dark that it would have been lost in shadow. It was not in the room at all.
Jack went to the window and watched the three men cross the courtyard, half expecting to witness an assassination. But Stoney and his lover merely lifted Quint into the air between them, and tossed him into a shallow, rather slimy-looking pond.
#
Jack spent the ensuing days in a s
tate of turmoil. He wasn’t ready to confide in anyone until he could frame his suspicions clearly, and the events in Stoney’s rooms were difficult to interpret unambiguously. He couldn’t state with absolute certainty that Quint’s gun had vanished before his eyes. But surely the fact that Stoney was walking free proved that he was receiving supernatural protection? And Quint himself, confused and demoralized, had certainly had the appearance of a man who’d been demonically confounded at every turn.
If this was true, though, Stoney must have bought more with his soul than immunity from worldly authority. The knowledge itself had to be Satanic in origin, as the legend of Faustus described it. Tollers had been right, in his great essay “Mythopoesis”: myths were remnants of man’s pre-lapsarian capacity to apprehend, directly, the great truths of the world. Why else would they resonate in the imagination, and survive from generation to generation?
By Friday, a sense of urgency gripped him. He couldn’t take his confusion back to Potter’s Barn, back to Joyce and the boys. This had to be resolved, if only in his own mind, before he returned to his family.
With Wagner on the gramophone, he sat and meditated on the challenge he was facing. Stoney had to be thwarted, but how? Jack had always said that the Church of England – apparently so quaint and harmless, a Church of cake stalls and kindly spinsters – was like a fearsome army in the eyes of Satan. But even if his master was quaking in Hell, it would take more than a few stern words from a bicycling vicar to force Stoney to abandon his obscene plans.
But Stoney’s intentions, in themselves, didn’t matter. He’d been granted the power to dazzle and seduce, but not to force his will upon the populace. What mattered was how his plans were viewed by others. And the way to stop him was to open people’s eyes to the true emptiness of his apparent cornucopia.
