The Mammoth Book of Best New SF 13

by Gardner Dozois

  I scrolled towards the end. The response is decidedly nonlinear and follows an approximate two-thirds power law. When the oral dose is doubled, the average time of sustained erection increases from nine minutes to 14 minutes. When the dose is quadrupled, the average erection time becomes 22 minutes. Elevated nitric-oxide levels persist in the corpora cavernosa for 38 minutes after orgasm . . .

  It was my own work, without a doubt. More than that, they were my own words. I may not be the world’s greatest stylist, but one thing I recognize, always and unmistakably, is what I have written. Change an adjective, add a comma, and I will know.

  My own words, but surely not my recent words. I checked the file. It was dated Thursday. Yesterday. The experimental data had been entered three days earlier.

  I was still staring at the screen when I heard footsteps in the corridor and a quiet knock at my closed door.

  Although I was fairly sure that only one person would be visiting my office at eight in the morning, the key strokes to change to a second document area were pure reflex. By the time the door opened, the screen in front of me showed a bland table of daily blood pressure from an unidentified subject.

  “Good morning, Doctor Rachel,” said a cheerful voice behind me. “Let’s take a look at you.”

  As expected, it was Sharon Prostley, administrative assistant to the head of the lab. I stood up and turned around, and she gave me my morning head-to-toe critical examination.

  “Not bad. Not bad at all.” She came forward and touched the clip in my hair. “My own choice would have been apple-green as a better match to your skirt. But emerald will do nicely, and it goes well with your eyes.”

  “Thanks, Sharon.” Colour-blindness in women is 10 times rarer than in men, but I suspect that it usually matters a lot more. I was relatively lucky. I had trouble only in distinguishing certain classes of blues and greens.

  “Happy to do it,” she said. “Not many things let me feel useful early in the morning.” She moved away towards the door, but turned at the threshold. “I forgot to ask. How was the vacation?”

  I stared at her, and she went on, “Did you get to spend time with your family?”

  My autopilot took over. “Yes. Oh, yes, it was great, thanks. I had a wonderful time.”

  “Wish I could get away. I’m tied here till spring break.” And Sharon was gone, back along the corridor towards her office.

  As the sound of her footsteps receded, I switched my computer back to its hidden document area. The response is decidedly nonlinear . . . The familiar/unfamiliar words confronted me. Yesterday’s date. Except that – I clicked to the day and date setting on my computer. Friday, as it should be. But instead of March 12 it was March 19.

  I had lost a week. Vacation. Family. I felt a moment of dizzy memory and partial understanding, and I turned my computer off abruptly without waiting for the usual utilities disk-check. I had to get out of here – out of the room, out of the building, off the campus, alone into the fresh air where I could think.

  By 8:15 the sun was rising and the overnight chill was already off the street. I walked west from the university campus along the flat, even thoroughfare of St George, toward the distant brown hills that rose clear and stark in the dry air.

  I wandered seven long blocks and finally sat down on a bench in front of a bicycle store. The vivid posters in the shop window showed grinning riders drifting effortlessly uphill. While I stared, the lost week filtered back into my head fragment by random fragment. I knew that I had been again to Bryceville, 95 miles to the northeast beyond the Zion National Park. I knew that I had seen Naomi and the rest of my family there. I knew I had been heavily drugged; and I knew why.

  “It’s for your own sake more than anyone else’s.” Elder Cyrus Walker’s bald dome and twinkling grey eyes had been part of my life for a quarter of a century. With his barrel chest and strong sloping shoulders he was like a rugged tree, never seeming a day older as the years passed. “We still trust you completely. But suppose you are doing things that might give you away, and you don’t even realize it?”

  An interrogation was inevitable. It was standard on each return trip. The fact that drugs of my own design were used in the questioning added a special irony. “Can’t I at least see my family first?” I pleaded. “Today is Naomi’s 13th birthday. She sent me a class picture, and she’s grown so much I hardly know her.”

  “Of course you can see her. There’s absolutely no rush, you’ll be with us at least five more days.” Elder Walker patted my shoulder with a hand as thick and hard as a chopping board. “But we don’t want you going back to the university, do we, acting and feeling groggy? We all have too much invested to jeopardize the effort now. And there’s other work to do. Shall we say, the day after tomorrow for the tests of your latest work?”

  “I suppose so.”

  “I don’t care for that tone of voice.” Elder Walker stood up and wandered over to the window. Beyond him I saw the bleached wooden walls and steep roof of the Patriarch’s lodge, jutting high into the blue desert sky. He went on, “You know, Rachel, you are a very fortunate young woman.”

  “I realize that. And I’m truly grateful to have such a wonderful opportunity to serve the Blessed Order.” Before I was 11 years old I had learned to hide most of my thoughts and all my opinions. Yet in a sense I agreed with Elder Cyrus Walker. I was lucky; lucky to have an unusual mind, one with a memory and logical powers that even the Council members could not ignore.

  Had it been otherwise . . .

  The Escalante bus had dropped me off in late afternoon at the edge of town, and as I walked through slanting sunlight I saw Deborah Curzon and Mary Dixon waiting outside the school until classes were over and the older children were let out. Deb and Mary each had one babe in arms and three kids in tow. Young ones. The two women were 27, my exact contemporaries. They looked twice my age. Nine or 10 kids can wear down even the strongest.

  Deb and Mary had stared back at me – with pity. Their nods said, Why, it’s poor Rachel Stafford, not pretty enough to be taken as a third or even a fourth wife. My one child, Naomi, hardly counted. Her father was the Patriarch himself, and from their looks they thought that he had surely bedded me from duty rather than desire.

  “And, of course, we must have adequate time for the tests. Can’t afford to rush.” Elder Walker still had his back to me, gazing out of the window at a tumbleweed rolling ghostlike along the dusty street. “I assume that you have made further progress, and brought the results of your work with you?”

  “I think so. But I won’t really be sure until the tests are complete.”

  “Naturally.” Elder Walker turned and held out his hand. “Better, don’t you think, to put them in my safekeeping?”

  It was phrased as a question but I never doubted that it was an order. I handed over the vials. Cyrus Walker ran Bryceville. Oh, sure, the Patriarch was the ultimate authority, the Blessed Order’s spiritual leader and final point of decision. But the Patriarch was 89 years old. No one spoke of his health or even suggested his mortality, but 13 years ago, when I had been led a nervous virgin to his bed, he had been stick-limbed and wheezing and barely able to become aroused. Without the drugs and careful preparation given to me and the generous lubricants, entry would have been impossible.

  Thank God, he had met the challenge. He had known me, briefly, and five minutes later he lay snoring. I remained wretched at his side for two full hours before I dared to leave the chamber and creep down the broad wooden staircase. What I remembered most was the scaly touch of his skin and his unpleasant smell, like mouldy wet straw. For a full month afterwards I prayed that I was pregnant and would not have to go back to him. As my period failed to arrive, day after late day, relief and joy burgeoned within me like the child itself.

  One month before Naomi was born, a chance event altered the course of my life. Confined to bed in the final trimester of a difficult pregnancy, nervous and uncomfortable and bored, I saw in a magazine the announcement
of a national science essay contest. Although the deadline was only four days away, I scribbled 20 pages on the role of nitrous oxides in amphibian metabolism, and on amphibian reproductive cycles. The results arose from my own observations – and, let me admit it, my own experiments – on my pet frog, Jasper, and his descendants.

  My entry went out in the next mail. I sent it without permission, a major sin. On the other hand, I was sure that I had no hope of winning one of the four cash prizes, or even of achieving an honourable mention. And, in fact, I received neither. What I did receive was a visit from Elder Walker. With him came a tall, dark-suited stranger with a maroon bow tie, piercing dark eyes, and a drooping black moustache.

  Walter Cottingham was a lawyer from one of the big pharmaceutical companies. The home office of Tilden, Inc. was near Philadelphia, a city which at the time sounded to me as far away as the Moon. Walter Cottingham, to my 14-year-old perspective, was a senior authority figure. Only later did I learn that he was just 10 years older than me and fresh out of law school. The suit, bow tie, and moustache were his attempt to look older. But he was good at his job. For two hours, closely watched by Elder Walker, Walter Cottingham sat on my bed end and asked me polite but shrewd questions related to my paper. What did I know about cyclic guanosine monophosphate? Had I ever heard of phosphodiesterase-5? How had I known that nitric oxide serves to relax blood vessels?

  At the end of that time he stood up, turned to Elder Walker, and said, “I am authorized to offer one hundred thousand dollars, payable at once.”

  “It must be discussed with the Council.”

  “Naturally.” Cottingham, to my vast surprise, winked at me. “There must also be one other condition.”

  “That she does no additional work which could possibly infringe on or affect your patents?”

  “Good heavens, no.” Walter Cottingham stared at Elder Walker, and I think that for the first time since his arrival he was genuinely astonished. “That would be the very last thing we at Tilden would suggest.” He grinned down at me, and the smile changed him from a ferocious stranger to a friend. “When the baby is born, Miss Rachel, and you are recovered, you will receive a proper education. Naturally, at our expense.” He turned again to Elder Walker. “Miss Rachel should pursue research, preferably in the area where she is already active. However, Tilden will not constrain in any way the nature of her work, or the institution where she chooses to apply her talents. My company demands one thing only: Tilden will enjoy an exclusive right to any resulting patents. In return for this we will give you a royalty on gross product sales, plus other financial rewards.”

  I understood only a fraction of what Walter Cottingham was saying. Certainly, I had some idea that the direction of my life was changing, but I did not realize that I had at that moment diverged for ever from the other fertile females in the Blessed Order. Unlike them, I would have no more than one child. Unlike them, I would become no man’s wife – first, second, third, or fourth.

  After Naomi was born I was allowed to remain and care for her for two more years. Depending on your definition, that was either an easy or a very hard period for me. I did no manual work, which for a female in the Blessed Order was unheard of. On the other hand, in every spare moment two tutors from Tilden crammed me with physics, chemistry, and biology. Mostly I loved it, but sometimes, struggling to absorb difficult material while Naomi suckled at my breast, I broke down in tears. At the time I had never heard of postpartum depression, and really I don’t think that was my problem. It was that soon I would be in a far-off town, while my baby would remain in Bryceville.

  I was just 17 when the time came for me to leave. By then Naomi was a sturdy two-year-old, more beautiful than I had ever been. She had my dark eyes, and my chin, but the nose and cheekbones were a mystery. Others said that they saw the Patriarch in her. I agreed – in public. In private, I rejected fiercely the suggestion that anything in that wrinkled face and those bleary eyes could live on in my child.

  I left Bryceville, sure that I would miss Naomi every waking second. For the first week, I did. Then the heady thrill of access to a real lab with real equipment grabbed me. I moved my area of study from amphibians to mammals, and I mapped out an ambitious research program.

  My area of study. My research program. Even, my laboratory – I thought of it that way, although a dozen other research workers were there.

  What an innocent! At the time I saw nothing peculiar in the fact that a lab suitable for my specialized work lay less than a hundred miles from Bryceville. It never occurred to me that the long arm of Tilden, Inc. could reach out across the country and endow and equip a new university facility in the town of St George in less time than it took me to wean Naomi. Most of all, I had no idea how closely the interests of Tilden coincided with those of certain members of the Blessed Order.

  I had mapped out a research program? Yes, and no. Certainly I had written the proposal. But now I know that I was steered to it by a master plan of directed education, existing equipment, and available funding.

  Five and a half years after my scribbled notes on amphibian reproduction, I was offered – but did not understand – evidence that the direction of my “independent” research work had been carefully channelled from the beginning. It came during my usual six-monthly visit to Bryceville. Naomi was by this time a precocious handful, taxing the patience and stamina of my ailing mother. I wanted to be with both of them as much as I could, but half a day after my arrival I was called to a meeting with Elder Walker in his private quarters.

  “Rachel, my dear.” As I entered he stood up and enfolded me in a hug. Maybe I had become hypersensitive since leaving Bryceville, but that embrace felt more personal than paternal. Elder Walker’s sexual energy was no secret in Bryceville. Rather than taking the seat offered on the couch next to him, I remained standing.

  He looked at me sharply but said only, “I have been reading your research summaries.” He picked up and waved a sheaf of papers. “I want to tell you a way in which you can be of extraordinary service to the Blessed Order. Before we begin, you must swear that what we will discuss today will be held absolutely secret.”

  “I promise.” I was intrigued, as any 19-year-old is intrigued by secrets, and I could see no reason not to give my word.

  “Secret,” he added, “even from other members of the Blessed Order. Unless I give permission for you to do so, you must not speak of this to your mother or to anyone else in your family. And, of course, to no one outside.”

  That made me hesitate, but after a few moments I nodded. “I promise that I will speak to no one unless you tell me that I may.”

  “Very good.” Elder Walker relaxed back onto the couch. “Rachel, you are a highly intelligent and talented young woman. But you have been here very little for the past five years. You have not seen the changes in the Patriarch.”

  Cyrus Walker was on very delicate ground. The Patriarch was eternal and unchanging, almost by definition. It was forbidden to speak of him except in terms of veneration and as a symbol of absolute authority. I said, truthfully, “I have not seen the Patriarch for more than five years.”

  The last time had been on the occasion of my impregnation with Naomi, as Elder Walker surely knew.

  “Then take my word for it,” he said, “there is cause for concern. I must be direct with you, and on a highly sensitive subject. The Blessed Jasper is not what he was. Mentally, he remains acute; but physically, he has trouble performing . . . certain traditional functions of our Order.”

  He glanced at me hopefully, eyebrows raised. Could he be saying what he seemed to be saying? I declined to take the risk, and stared at him in silence.

  He sighed, and went on. “It is an element of the faith in the Blessed Order that our numbers in the world will increase and we will thrive. Our children are drawn from superior stock. They grow untainted by the habits of a degraded society. And, of course, the Patriarch is the best father that any child could ever have.”

  N
ow I was sure. I said flatly, “The Blessed Jasper has become impotent.”

  He grimaced. “My dear, never ever say such a thing outside this room, or hint at it to any other person. But what you say is correct.”

  “Into which category does his impotence fall?” My professional interest had been roused – the physiological interplay between the conscious mind and the autonomous nervous system was the very area of my own research – and for me, scientific curiosity always overcomes shyness and diffidence. Elder Walker stared at me and I went on, “Male erectile disorder falls into several categories. Primary impotence means that the male has never been able to maintain an erection long enough to perform sexual intercourse. Of course, we know that is not the case with the Blessed Jasper.”

  Elder Walker flinched and raised his hand, as though to ward off blasphemy, but after a moment he took a deep breath and nodded.

  “You are disconcertingly frank, my dear. I blame your exposure to subversive influences beyond the Order, and I excuse your conduct. Continue.”

  “Secondary impotence covers several different cases. Sometimes a male is intermittently potent. Sometimes a male is potent with certain partners, and not with others. Sometimes the male achieves an erection, but cannot sustain it long enough to complete the act; and sometimes a previously potent male, because of age or illness, loses all ability to achieve erection. Which one of these best describes the Blessed Jasper?”

  I thought he was not going to answer. He stood up and went over to his desk. Half a minute later, without looking at me, he said, “The last one. But the Patriarch is not ill – at least, no worse than he has been for years. Can anything be done to help him?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You must, it is your area of specialty. Surely there are medications, injections?” He turned to me and he was holding papers in his hand. “You mention them in your own reports. The scientists at Tilden have 32 pending patents based on your work.” Stumbling over the words, he read, “Alprostadil, CGMP, guanine hexafluorate. Sildena-what’s-this-say?”