“I know, but what if they’re not?”
Sighing, Frank gave in. “But we’ll take his picture first at least, all right? I’d quite like to have one.”
“Okay, I guess that can’t do any harm.” So, having wiped the mud off his hands as best he could, Frank snapped several pictures with Jenny’s camera, with its close-up lens for photographing wildflowers, before beginning to push the peat back into the hole containing the perfectly preserved body of Woof Howe Hob.
In a fortnight’s time the reeds had reestablished themselves upon the grave; in another month nobody could have said for certain just where the bog at May Moss had been disturbed. No one’s curiosity was aroused and no inquiries were made; and that would have been the end of the matter, except for this:
About the time the sedge was growing tall again above Woof Howe, Frank stood in the kitchen door and called to Jenny, “What in the name of sanity possessed you to try mucking out the chicken coop all on your own?” He sounded quite cross, for him.
Jenny came into the kitchen carrying a book. “Is this a clever way of shaming me into action? You know I’ve had the bloody chicken coop on my conscience for weeks, but if anybody’s been mucking it out it wasn’t me.”
“Come and see.” Frank led her through the gathering dusk, across the barnyard. There stood the coop, its floor scraped down to the wood and spread with clean straw. The hens clucked about contentedly in their yard. The manure-filled rubbish had been raked into a tidy heap for composting. Jenny stared flabbergasted.
“Do you actually mean to say,” said Frank, “that this isn’t your doing?”
“It ought to be, but it’s not.”
They walked slowly back toward the house, arms about each other, trying to puzzle it out.
“Maybe Billy Davies dropped by after school, thinking to earn a few pounds and surprise us,” Frank suggested. “I’ve paid him to muck out the pigs, and the barn, and he knows about composting … but it doesn’t seem his style somehow.”
“I guess it could have been John, or Peter,” Jenny said doubtfully. “Though why either of them would take it upon himself … and the only person I’ve actually spoken to about wanting to get around to the job is you. Did you mention it to anybody?”
The thought struck each of them at the same instant.
“Waaaaaaait a minute—” said Frank, and “Good God, you don’t think—” said Jenny; and both were speechless, staring at one another.
Frank found his voice first. “Now, if they’re not all dead—”
Jenny interrupted: “Frank! What if one of the sheep on the commons, that day at May Moss—wasn’t a sheep!”
His eyes opened wide. “Wasn’t a sheep? You mean—and followed us here somehow, found out who you were, and where we lived?”
“Is that possible? Could they do it? What if they could!”
“You said it wasn’t him in the grave, you were sure of it.”
“I still am. It wasn’t him.”
“Well then, who else would muck out a chicken coop without being asked, tell me that!”
By now they were laughing and clutching at each other, almost dancing. Abruptly Jenny broke free and ran up the kitchen steps. She snatched a stoneware jug down from a shelf, filled it to the brim with cream from the crock in the fridge, and set the jug on the top step, careful not to spill a drop.
BRUCE STERLING
Our Neural Chernobyl
One of the major new talents to enter SF in recent years, Bruce Sterling sold his first story in 1976, and has since sold stories to Universe, Omni, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, The Last Dangerous Visions, Lone Star Universe, and elsewhere. He has attracted special acclaim in the last few years for a series of stories set in his exotic Shaper/Mechanist future, a complex and disturbing future where warring political factions struggle to control the shape of human destiny, and the nature of humanity itself. His story “Cicada Queen” was in our First Annual Collection; his “Sunken Gardens” was in our Second Annual Collection; his “Green Days in Brunei” and “Diner in Audoghast” were in our Third Annual Collection; his “The Beautiful and the Sublime” was in our Fourth Annual Collection; his “Flowers Of Edo” was in our Fifth Annual Collection. His books include the novels The Artificial Kid, Involution Ocean, and Schismatrix, a novel set in the Shaper/Mechanist future: and, as editor, Mirrorshades: The Cyberpunk Anthology. His most recent novel was Islands in the Net. Upcoming is another novel, The Difference Engine, in collaboration with William Gibson.
In the compact little story that follows, packed with enough new ideas to last most writers for a 400-page novel, he shows us that even the smallest actions can have large, and often totally unexpected, consequences.
OUR NEURAL CHERNOBYL
Bruce Sterling
The late twentieth century, and the early years of our own millennium, form, in retrospect, a single era. This was the Age of the Normal Accident, in which people cheerfully accepted technological risks that today would seem quite insane.
Chernobyls were astonishingly frequent during this footloose, not to say criminally negligent, period. The nineties, with their rapid spread of powerful industrial technologies to the developing world, were a decade of frightening enormities, including the Djakarta supertanker spill, the Lahore meltdown, and the gradual but devastating mass poisonings from tainted Kenyan contraceptives.
Yet none of these prepared humankind for the astonishing global effects of biotechnology’s worst disaster: the event that has come to be known as the “neural chernobyl.”
We should be grateful, then, that such an authority as the Nobel prize-winning systems neurochemist Dr. Felix Hotton should have turned his able pen to the history of Our Neural Chernobyl (Bessemer, December 2056, $499.95). Dr. Hotton is uniquely qualified to give us this devastating reassessment of the past’s wrongheaded practices. For Dr. Hotton is a shining examplar of the new “Open-Tower Science,” that social movement within the scientific community that arose in response to the New Luddism of the teens and twenties.
Such pioneering Hotton papers as “The Locus Coeruleus Efferent Network: What in Heck Is It There For?” and “My Grand Fun Tracing Neural Connections with Tetramethylbenzidine” established this new, relaxed, and triumphantly subjective school of scientific exploration.
Today’s scientist is a far cry from the white-coated sociopath of the past. Scientists today are democratized, media-conscious, fully integrated into the mainstream of modern culture. Today’s young people, who admire scientists with a devotion once reserved for pop stars, can scarcely imagine the situation otherwise.
But in chapter 1, “The Social Roots of Gene-Hacking,” Dr. Hotton brings turn-of-the-century attitudes into startling relief. This was the golden age of applied biotech. Anxious attitudes toward “genetic tampering” changed rapidly when the terrifying AIDS pandemic was finally broken by recombinant DNA research.
It was during this period that the world first became aware that the AIDS retrovirus was a fantastic blessing in a particularly hideous disguise. This disease, which dug itself with horrible, virulent cunning into the very genetic structure of its victims, proved a medical marvel when finally broken to harness. The AIDS virus’s RNA transcriptase system proved an able workhorse, successfully carrying healing segments of recombinant DNA into sufferers from myriad genetic defects. Suddenly one ailment after another fell to the miracle of RNA tanscriptase techniques: sickle-cell anemia, cystic fibrosis, Tay-Sachs disease—literally hundreds of syndromes now only an unpleasant memory.
As billions poured into the biotech industry, and the instruments of research were simplified and streamlined, an unexpected dynamic emerged: the rise of “gene-hacking.” As Dr. Hotton points out, the situation had a perfect parallel in the 1970s and 1980s in the subculture of computer hacking. Here again was an enormously powerful technology suddenly within the reach of the individual.
As biotech startup companies multiplied, becoming ever smaller and more a
dvanced, a hacker subculture rose around this “hot technology” like a cloud of steam. These ingenious, anomic individuals, often led into a state of manic self-absorption by their ability to dice with genetic destiny, felt no loyalty to social interests higher than their own curiosity. As early as the 1980s, devices such as high-performance liquid chromotographs, cell-culture systems, and DNA sequencers were small enough to fit into a closet or attic. If not bought from junkyards, diverted, or stolen outright, they could be reconstructed from off-the-shelf parts by any bright and determined teenager.
Dr. Hotton’s second chapter explores the background of one such individual: Andrew (“Bugs”) Berenbaum, now generally accepted as the perpetrator of the neural chernobyl.
Bugs Berenbaum, as Dr. Hotton convincingly shows, was not much different from a small horde of similar bright young misfits surrounding the genetic establishments of North Carolina’s Research Triangle. His father was a semisuccessful free-lance programmer, his mother a heavy marijuana user whose life centered around her role as “Lady Anne of Greengables” in Raleigh’s Society for Creative Anachronism.
Both parents maintained a flimsy pretense of intellectual superiority, impressing upon Andrew the belief that the family’s sufferings derived from the general stupidity and limited imagination of the average citizen. And Berenbaum, who showed an early interest in such subjects as math and engineering (then considered markedly unglamorous), did suffer some persecution from peers and schoolmates. At fifteen he had already drifted into the gene-hacker subculture, accessing gossip and learning “the scene” through computer bulletin boards and all-night beerand-pizza sessions with other would-be pros.
At twenty-one, Berenbaum was working a summer internship with the small Raleigh firm of CoCoGenCo, a producer of specialized biochemicals. CoCoGenCo, as later congressional investigations proved, was actually a front for the California “designer drug” manufacturer and smuggler Jimmy (“Screech”) McCarley. McCarley’s agents within CoCoGenCo ran innumerable late-night “research projects” in conditions of heavy secrecy. In reality, these “secret projects” were straight production runs of synthetic cocaine, beta-phenethylamine, and sundry tailored variants of endorphin, a natural antipain chemical ten thousand times more potent than morphine.
One of McCarley’s “black hackers,” possibly Berenbaum himself, conceived the sinister notion of “implanted dope factories.” By attaching the drug-producing genetics directly into the human genome, it was argued, abusers could be “wet-wired” into permanent states of intoxication. The agent of fixation would be the AIDS retrovirus, whose RNA sequence was a matter of common knowledge and available on dozens of open scientific databases. The one drawback to the scheme was, of course, that the abuser would “burn out like a shitpaper moth in a klieg light,” to use Dr. Hotton’s memorable phrase.
Chapter 3 is rather technical. Given Dr. Hotton’s light and popular style, it makes splendid reading. Dr. Hotton attempts to reconstruct Berenbaum’s crude attempts to rectify the situation through gross manipulation of the AIDS RNA transcriptase. What Berenbaum sought, of course, was a way to shut off and start up the transcriptase carrier, so that the internal drug factory could be activated at will. Berenbaum’s custom transcriptase was designed to react to a simple user-induced trigger—probably D, 1, 2, 5-phospholytic gluteinase, a fractionated component of “Dr. Brown’s Celery Soda,” as Hotton suggests. This harmless beverage was a favorite quaff of gene-hacker circles.
Finding the coca-production genomes too complex, Berenbaum (or perhaps a close associate, one Richard [“Sticky”] Ravetch) switched to a simpler payload: the just-discovered genome for mammalian dendritic growth factor. Dendrites are the treelike branches of brain cells, familiar to every modern schoolchild, which provide the mammalian brain with its staggering webbed complexity. It was theorized at the time that DG factor might be the key to vastly higher states of human intelligence. It is to be presumed that Berenbaum and Ravetch had both dosed themselves with it. As many modern victims of the neural chernobyl can testify, it does have an effect. Not precisely the one that the CoCoGenCo zealots envisioned, however.
While under the temporary maddening elation of dendritic “branch-effect,” Berenbaum made his unfortunate breakthrough. He succeeded in providing his model RNA transcriptase with a trigger, but a trigger that made the transcriptase itself far more virulent than the original AIDS virus itself. The stage was set for disaster.
It is at this point that one must remember the social attitudes that bred the soul-threatening isolation of the contemporary scientific worker. Dr. Hotton is quite pitiless in his psychoanalysis of the mental mind-set of his predecessors. The supposedly “objective worldview” of the sciences is now quite properly seen as a form of mental brainwashing, deliberately stripping its victims of the full spectrum of human emotion and response. Under such conditions, Berenbaum’s reckless act becomes almost pitiable; it was a convulsive overcompensation for years of emotional starvation. Without consulting his superiors, who might have shown more discretion, Berenbaum began offering free samples of his new wetwares to anyone willing to shoot them up.
There was a sudden brief plague of eccentric genius in Raleigh, before the now-well-known symptoms of “dendritic crash” took over, and plunged the experimenters into vision-riddled, poetic insanity. Berenbaum himself committed suicide well before the full effects were known. And the full effects, of course, were to go far beyond even this lamentable human tragedy.
Chapter 4 becomes an enthralling detective story as the evidence slowly mounts.
Even today the term “Raleigh collie” has a special ring for dog fanciers, many of whom have forgotten its original derivation. These likable, companionable, and disquietingly intelligent pets were soon transported all over the nation by eager buyers and breeders. Once it had made the jump from human host to canine, Berenbaum’s transcriptase derivative, like the AIDS virus itself, was passed on through the canine maternal womb. It was also transmitted through canine sexual intercourse and, via saliva, through biting and licking.
No dendritically enriched “Raleigh collie” would think of biting a human being. On the contrary, these loyal and well-behaved pets have even been known to right spilled garbage cans and replace their trash. Neural chernobyl infections remain rare in humans. But they spread through North America’s canine population like wildfire, as Dr. Hotton shows in a series of cleverly designed maps and charts.
Chapter 5 offers us the benefit of hindsight. We are now accustomed to the idea of many different modes of “intelligence.” There are, for instance, the various types of computer Artificial Intelligence, which bear no real relation to human “thinking.” This was not unexpected—but the diverse forms of animal intelligence can still astonish in their variety.
The variance between Canis familiaris and his wild cousin, the coyote, remains unexplained. Dr. Hotton makes a good effort, basing his explication on the coyote neural mapping of his colleague, Dr. Reyna Sanchez of Los Alamos National Laboratory. It does seem likely that the coyote’s more fully reticulated basal commissure plays a role. At any rate, it is now clear that a startling advanced form of social organization has taken root among the nation’s feral coyote population, with the use of elaborate coded barks, “scent-dumps,” and specialized roles in hunting and food storage. Many of the nation’s ranchers have now taken to the “protection system,” in which coyote packs are “bought off” with slaughtered, barbecued livestock and sacks of dog treats. Persistent reports in Montana, Idaho, and Saskatchewan insist that coyotes have been spotted wearing cast-off clothing during the worst cold of winter.
It is possible that the common household cat was infected even earlier than the dog. Yet the effects of heightened cat intelligence are subtle and difficult to specify. Notoriously reluctant lab subjects, cats in their infected states are even sulkier about running mazes, solving trick boxes, and so on, preferring to wait out their interlocutors with inscrutable feline patience.
&nbs
p; It has been suggested that some domestic cats show a heightened interest in television programs. Dr. Hotton casts a skeptical light on this, pointing out (rightly, as this reviewer thinks) that cats spend most of their waking hours sitting and staring into space. Staring at the flickering of a television is not much more remarkable than the hearthside cat’s fondness for the flickering fire. It certainly does not imply “understanding” of a program’s content. There are, however, many cases where cats have learned to paw-push the buttons of remote-control units. Those who keep cats as mousers have claimed that some cats now torture birds and rodents for longer periods, with greater ingenuity, and in some cases with improvised tools.
There remains, however, the previously unsuspected connection between advanced dendritic branching and manual dexterity, which Dr. Hotton tackles in his sixth chapter. This concept has caused a revolution in paleoanthropology. We are now forced into the uncomfortable realization that Pithecanthropus robustus, formerly dismissed as a large-jawed, vegetable-chewing ape, was probably far more intelligent than Homo sapiens. CAT scans of the recently discovered Tanzanian fossil skeleton, nicknamed “Leonardo,” reveal a Pithecanthropus skull-ridge obviously rich with dendritic branching. It has been suggested that the pithecanthropoids suffered from a heightened “life of the mind” similar to the life-threatening, absentminded genius of terminal neural chernobyl sufferers. This yields the uncomfortable theory that nature, through evolution, has imposed a “primate stupidity barrier” that allows humans, unlike Pithecanthropus, to get on successfully with the dumb animal business of living and reproducing.
But the synergetic effects of dendritic branching and manual dexterity are clear in a certain nonprimate species. I refer, of course, to the well-known “chernobyl jump” of Procyon lotor, the American raccoon. The astonishing advances of the raccoon, and its Chinese cousin the panda, occupy the entirety of chapter 8.
The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Sixth Annual Collection Page 41
