The Bone Forest

by Robert Holdstock

  She soon became very interested in Raymond McCreedy, a man in his mid-thirties, unmarried, unforthcoming about himself, a scientist totally involved in his work, to the great benefit of the scientific community, but to the detriment of any personal relationships between the members of the various teams. McCreedy was the head of our team, and had supplied the initial impetus for this particular experiment; it was also his own applied pressure that had secured the necessary funding from the Rockefeller Foundation.

  Josephine worked hard trying to draw the man out of his test-tube shell, and indeed, before the full programme had begun, he was amenable enough to conversational foreplay; but any emotional involvement was destined to be just a dream on Josephine’s part. The full programme began and McCreedy’s interests became centrally directed upon the two human subjects behind the observation wall.

  In September the programme of deep hypnosis began: hours and hours of factual adjustment and psychological disguise. Martin’s prevailing disquiet with the environment was buried very deeply. In tests in the next few days there were signs that he would accept the environment long enough for it to become so familiar to him that he would be able to control the insecurity as it crept back to his awareness.

  Three weeks before the first of the rapid growth treatments was administered, the two subjects received their Life Education. The Life Plan team, led by Doctor Martin Rich, had spent six months devising and recording nearly four hundred years of everyday experiences. A complete catalogue of friends, acquaintances and enemies, of events and non-events, of tragedy and success. One for Martin and one for Yvonne, the two systems knitting together gradually as they grew together themselves according to blueprint. The events they would live through were implanted first, followed by the complex series of visual and sonic codes with which the Life Operator in charge could direct events beyond the wall.

  Finally, the enormous bank of experiences that they would never actually participate in—the twenty-nine “false” days that would pass as they slept each night, giving them the illusion of a full and active life.

  On the first day of November there was a promise of snow, but the skies, overcast and depressing, vanished into night without releasing their burden in any form. This was the day the full programme began.

  I was lucky to draw my Christmas leave over the Christmas period itself. I returned to the Institute on the twenty-seventh of December to find Josephine, two nurses and two of the technicians in attendance. The Life Plan team had left an auto-programme in operation for seven days, and McCreedy himself had succumbed to the need for rest and was spending time in London.

  “You could have taken your leave with McCreedy,” I remarked to Josephine, tactless as ever. “Any of the technicians who were here over Christmas would have been glad to swap.”

  “Why should I have wanted to swap?” she asked as we prepared for the day’s observation.

  “To be with McCreedy?” Oh hell, I thought. I’ve put a foot in somewhere.

  Her look at me was pure contempt. “Why should I have wanted to be with Doctor McCreedy?”

  I had received all the warning signals, but momentum carried me to desperate conclusion. “I’m sorry, I just thought …”

  “I very much doubt, Doctor Lipman,” she said stonily, “if you thought anything at all. What you laughingly call thinking rarely transcends a naive and superficial curiosity.”

  “Look, I’m sorry, let’s drop the subject, shall we?”

  Her look changed from contempt to distress. “Yes, why not. Let’s drop the subject of McCreedy, let’s forget him for three days and have ourselves a real ball. For your information, and to ensure that you don’t open your mouth again, Doctor Lipman, I have nothing going with McCreedy, and have no desire to try and change that state of affairs.”

  I couldn’t think of any suitably witty remark with which to extricate myself from my wretched corner, so I fell silent and monitored the two subjects, aware that Josephine was sitting staring at nothing in particular.

  In the five months of Yvonne’s life that I had missed—by taking a five-day break—she had altered remarkably. Her hair was very short, now, cut in the style of her currently favourite singer, and she was beginning to discover the versatility of cosmetics. She was still living in a separate building from Martin, ostensibly with her parents, but, as dictated by the programme within her, she was finding Martin’s pre-adolescent form an attraction. He, according to script, was not too keen on his playmate. She was still plump, but the lipid-metabolism figures were indicating that soon this would fall away.

  She was approaching adolescence at the late age of fifteen.

  Although it is difficult to admit to such predictable behaviour, it was about now that I realised that my affection for the increasingly beautiful girl went far beyond fatherly emotion. On that first night back from my break I followed Josephine and the nurse into the environment and approached the sleeping form of Yvonne with a strange sensation of anticipation. The nurse seemed oblivious of my feelings and in the matter-of-fact mannerism of a woman who regards the human body as an organism to be stripped, scrubbed, powdered, plugged and buried, she exposed the maturing body of the girl and proceeded to inject the ageing chemical known familiarly as Chronon. The hiss of the parcutaneous inoculation snapped me from my lingering contemplation of Yvonne and I performed the ritual of recording with an almost blank mind: I took whole body temperature scan, a tiny skin biopsy that would not be noticed the following day; I took smears and scrapes, tested reflexes and conductivity, obtained a ten-second recording of the girl’s heart (probably the most vital organ she possessed, and the part of her body likely to give us the most trouble in later years), and finally stood back, flushed, shaking, aroused.

  Perhaps the nurse was not as insensitive as I had thought for she was suddenly very quiet, watching me curiously. My embarrassment became acute and I glanced at Josephine who was standing silently beside me, looking at Yvonne. Quickly I said, “I can’t decide if she’s losing weight or not …”

  The nurse nodded slowly, then covered Yvonne’s body, blowing the sound signal to bring her back into normal sleep.

  As we walked to Martin’s “house” I considered my feelings. I was not really surprised that now, in December of ’94, I should be feeling love for a young woman, since my marriage, never a satisfactory affair from the beginning, was awaiting legal dissolution and had been doing so for six months. What perturbed me was that I should have responded to the experimental subject and not to one of the technicians or nurses, or even Josephine.

  Josephine. Had she noticed my momentary lapse of self-discipline? As we examined Martin so I studied the girl and I decided that she was too preoccupied with her own troubles to have read anything into my actions.

  She suddenly said, softly, perhaps afraid of rousing Martin although she knew that he was in deep sleep: “What do you make of people who are so one tracked they can’t think of anything but work?”

  “McCreedy?”

  She looked at me. She seemed sad, and after a moment, “He’s an example, yes.”

  “Annoying,” I said. “Pointless.”

  “You don’t believe in dedication?”

  I concluded the examination and we walked from the environment, sealed it and sterilised it again.

  “I don’t believe in isolation,” I said. “And McCreedy is becoming isolated because of what you mistakenly label as dedication. His reactions, his behaviour, his approach to all of us working for him is becoming unreal. He begins to think we’re machines, and should never turn off.”

  Josephine said nothing. After a moment I asked, “How do you see him?”

  “With increasing difficulty,” she said after a while. “It’s something I can’t explain.”

  Perhaps these days, or if you prefer, these months, were the worst. By the end of February ’95 Yvonne was a fully grown woman of twenty, and Martin, though the same age, was an immediately post-adolescent young man, still self-consci
ous, still unsure of himself, still given to the sort of tantrum directed at the ghosts who surrounded him that one expects in a normal male in his late teens.

  The two months of my subjective time had done nothing to drown my desire for Yvonne, but more worrying to me, as a supposedly impartial observer, was the feeling of resentment I began to nurture, resentment directed at the young man I now watched and monitored as he devised some scheme to avoid parental retribution for his being out so late.

  Josephine watched over my shoulder as Martin walked across the environment, oblivious of his watchers, concerned only with the non-existent forms awaiting him in his house. Yvonne, whom he had just left, was already in bed and—as our monitors showed us—peacefully asleep, about to age a month in the passing of her dreaming hours.

  Tonight they had approached each other as adults, that much was apparent. I had watched them kiss in the shelter of the first oak that Martin had ever interested himself in, fourteen of his years ago. He had held her and explored her, and I could feel what he was feeling as his fingers had invaded her body.

  Josephine turned away and sat staring into space. I was glad because my face was burning and I could feel my hands shaking as I directed the remote sensors to record all heartbeat and temperature changes, and instruct me if there was anything abnormal in their physical and physiological response to love-play. There was no satisfaction in the green panel that flashed “normal” in a repetitive insult to my stricken ego.

  That night, as the nurse and I monitored and examined each of them, it was with Martin that I lingered, noting his emerging masculinity and the involuntary ejaculation that occurred as my fingers brushed him during perfunctory examination. I hated his youth, and I hated his good looks; I hated his smugness as he lay in sleep, I hated the fact that he was fully entitled to everything that was Yvonne. I hated his dreams. What he dreamed I shall never know for certain, but in my uncertainty lies an impression that choked me at the time. And I hated him for that too.

  Three days of my night shift passed in the Institute, and I received promising news from my lawyer—that the separation would be made legal within days—and received a substantial cutback of my monthly stipend which would make even my bachelor life very difficult. Josephine had finished her spell on nights and it was the intense and disinterested McCreedy who sat with me at the beginning of March. I wondered if he knew of Josephine’s feelings, I wondered if he had detected her waning enthusiasm … Almost certainly he had. Perhaps he had even told her of it. He was becoming more abstract with every passing day.

  Since there was nothing to talk about with the intense young man who gave orders, I watched Yvonne with greater concentration than was usual or than I would have liked.

  Now she was long-haired and slim, her breasts small and perfect and seeming fuller behind the attractive blouses she wore. She worked in an imaginary office and took every opportunity to meet Martin in the park, and on the third night of March, my last day on nights …

  I shall record it for the sake of completeness.

  In each other’s arms beneath that tree they passed a few minutes, petting and kissing, then undressed and he made love to her, and the recording instruments said, heart beat 137 per minute, deep body temperature 0.5 degrees high, slight blood loss, loss of lachrymal fluid …

  And so on, and so forth, as Yvonne cried and a significant moment in the life plan was reached and passed.

  The loss of her virginity was five years in Yvonne’s past before the pain of that incident faded from me. It was the beginning of May, and the first really hot day of the year. Long-range weather predictions were for a summer as hot and stifling as the last, and the thought of it was not welcomed by the Institute staff.

  I looked at Yvonne, and at Martin, and saw mature people, Yvonne a full and lovely woman, delighting in life and love, almost passionately hungry for her husband. Martin was a strong, lean man, full bearded and fierce tempered. It was hard to remember that just a year ago they had been infants.

  The years between twenty-five and thirty passed normally and uneventfully, and our first report, on the fifth of August, was summarised by the words: “In all aspects of their lives the two subjects are normal thirty-year-olds. The effect of the chemical Chronon is seen only in the acceleration of their developmental rates, and the false experience implants seem fully capable of compensating for their accelerated lives. There is no evidence at all that mentally the subjects are anything but reasonably secure, reasonably stable thirty-year-olds. There is no evidence that either subject suspects their true situation. The experiment is continuing.”

  It was heartening news to our sponsors, and a mood of exhilaration enveloped our laboratory. We began to feel that we had a breakthrough in our grasp.

  A breakthrough into what was difficult to say. The kudos for the original discovery of Chronon was not ours. The chemical of age, the simple protein that accumulates in body cells at a steady rate and dictates the phenomenon of ageing, was the discovery of a Swedish biochemist seven years before. The acceleration of development, and of ageing, under the influence of artificially high concentrations of synthetic Chronon, was the contribution of a Scottish behaviourist at the University of Edinburgh, four years later.

  The fact that synthetic Chronon worked as well on human beings as on rats would make a name for us, but hardly a reputation.

  McCreedy was well aware of this, and we had both been aware of this when we had met nearly two years before to discuss the phenomenon of ageing, and the newly discovered facts about its chemical dependence.

  With old age, McCreedy had said, comes a lowering of resistance not just to disease but to the environment and to life itself. We think of age as a barrier that none of us will pass. But is it? If we remove those agents of death that find they can operate better as a person gets older, will age itself be a barrier? Might not something, some form, some existence that we are unaware of lie beyond our four score and ten?

  In rats there was nothing. They lived twice as long as normal and became twice as old. But rats were without souls, McCreedy had declared, and we should not be disheartened.

  This was the first time that McCreedy had referred to a metaphysical concept, and it rather surprised me. He made no great play of his religious beliefs, and directed his actions under no religious dogma. I came to believe that he equated self-awareness with the concept of soul, and that he extended his favour towards the metaphysical only to the unscientific degree of regarding self-awareness as having an effect upon the physical form. He believed in mind over matter! But detailed consideration of such things was beyond his scope. At the time this narrowness did not seem significant to me, and it was not until well after the experiment had begun that I remembered his words, and his idle reflections.

  Not until late November did any serious psychological stress symptoms begin to develop in the subjects. They were now into their thirty-eighth year and the monitoring consoles were still reporting their physical and physiological condition as completely normal. Certainly there was a slight increase in the incidence of embryonic cell formation, but—with our help—they were maintaining completely adequate control of their body systems. Martin was an enviable sight, advancing into middle age with muscles that were as firm and hard as a twenty-five-year-old’s. And Yvonne, whilst showing signs of age in the lines that were tracing themselves around her eyes and on her legs, was still a beautiful woman. But now I felt only sadness when I looked at her, for more and more I was remembering her childhood, her innocence and her fixed gaze from which it was impossible to escape.

  There was no trace of that innocence now, and the beautiful eyes were narrower and more canny. When she made love to Martin she was physically demanding but seemed no longer to need the concomitant affection.

  Martin, whilst undoubtedly in love with his wife, was tending more and more towards solitariness, and in this I saw a reflection of his first acquaintance with the enormous environment. He was unhappy with his situation,
seemed restless and morose, and returned again and again to the realistic-looking oak tree that he had first scrutinised so long, by his terms, in the past.

  Here he sat for hours, during the day and often into the night, brooding, staring, perhaps trying to identify some feature, some element of his universe that would give him a clue as to why he felt so wrong.

  Perhaps—again—such speculation by those of us who monitored and watched was just a sublimation on our parts of the fact that the experiment, stuck as it was in the “normal” years, had become unbearably boring. We were looking for trouble, or so it seemed to some of us.

  With the inevitable slackening of attention, I found ample opportunity to modify the Life Plan of the ageing Yvonne. It was an impulsive move, but had, as an idea, been in my mind for a long time. The team was small—three biologists and three technicians working in shifts, two nurses and the four members of the Life Plan team. It was inevitable that we should all learn to cope with the other aspects of the experiment, and I had become relatively adept at the surgically precise process of removing or implanting information/ideas/events into the two subjects.

  I implanted my own character, my own physical description, as one of the ghost lovers that Yvonne was taking. There was something akin to the erotic when I thought, thereafter, of what she was seeing and doing, but after a few days the futility of the action came home to me.

  Nevertheless, she retained me as a lover and I never found the opportunity to remove that programme. When I heard her murmuring my name, voicing the words of her ascending passion as she went through the movements of intercourse, I felt my face burn, and my imagination stretch to its limits.