The Mammoth Book of Mindblowing SF

by Mike Ashley

  “No riots here.”

  “We’re all trained. We’re military, most of us. We’re used to the discipline. But on Earth, if people lost their ability to feel pleasure all at once they’d freak out. There would be a lot of deaths. You don’t want to be responsible for a lot of deaths, do you?”

  “Are people on Earth such hedonists?” the Hitcher asked.

  “Not – not saying that,” he stuttered, “I’m not saying that human beings are nothing but hedonists. There’s more to homo sapiens than just . . . hedonism.” But what if it is the truth? They are inside our heads; they can tell. “In the sense,” he went on, “that pleasure is the only thing they care about. Pleasure is important, but it’s not the only thing.” But even as he said this he was pondering the pleasure-shaped hole inside his soul. What did the hole leave, if not a thin and flaking shell? “It’s certainly an important part of being human. It is an important part of working, and loving.”

  “Breeding?”

  “That too. It is just – important.” So now pleasure had become it. An evasion? A euphemism? “We want to travel to other stars because it’s in our nature. It’s part curiosity, part . . . part urge. But in either case, there’s pleasure involved. What I mean is that not all pleasures are merely physical. There’s the pleasure of finding new stuff out. Without the pleasure of discovery it’s going to seem to a lot of people there’s no point in going in the first place. Do you see? It’s a double bind. It’s like a deliberate paradox: you can have the pleasure of discovering new stars, but not the technology to get there. Or you can have the technology to discover new stars, but not the pleasure when you do so.”

  This thought had crossed all our minds, of course. We had all wondered whether the Hitcher’s point was precisely that they were testing us. Giving us a double bind and seeing what we did. Except that they didn’t work in such a calculated manner. They were evasive, but curiously ingenuous at the same time.

  This is what they offered: to show. Not to tell. We had a meeting, Keedwell in the chair. Once upon a time (Why upon? Do we really tell children that events sit upon time like scum on a pond? Like human settlement upon Mars?) – once upon a time, we had tried to hold meetings in camera, secret meetings, to keep the Hitchers from knowing what we were discussing. But they were in our heads. The feeling was: they would have destroyed us by now if they wanted to destroy us. They certainly had that capacity. The feeling was they were playing some complex long game. At the same time there were those who felt they were as benign and childlike as they sometimes appeared. Keedwell put before us the results of his team. “It is chemical, the anhedonia, but only in response to neurological stimulus. The dopamine imbalance, the rewiring of the seratonin uptake cascade – it’s almost fractal, it’s very complex. But the Hitchers are not the proximate cause of this. The proximate cause is in the sub-brain. The stem, we think. The spine, we think.” Dosing with dopamine, or SSRI, or any of the usual strategies had no effect whatsoever.

  “And they’re doing this – ” Philps asked, “how?”

  Of course we wanted to know that. Almost as much as we wanted to know why.

  Half a dozen volunteers had submitted to various experimental procedures and there had been no positive outcome except in the case of Militiaman Kawa who had experienced sharp tinges of non-localized pain upon the application of modulated electrostimulation to the mid-spine in combination with a drug regimen of sopamphetamine, 2.1mg in . . .

  “We can all feel pain,” interrupted Philps. Pain was not as intense as once it was.

  “Nonlocalized pain, not as the result of any . . .”

  “But could he feel any pleasure?”

  No. No. Write it out three times. No.

  “There are probably neuropsychiatric experts with the electrochemical expertise to take this research further in Old Europe . . .” Keedwell said, in a weary voice.

  We all spoke with weary voices, of course.

  “Don’t even,” said Li. “Don’t even . . .”

  This was, of course, out of the question.

  “I asked them,” Macro reminded us, “whether they had plans to enforce the anhedonia upon Earth as well.”

  “They didn’t exactly answer you,” said Philps. She was scratching under her left armpit.

  “I don’t think they plan that.”

  “We need to know why they’re doing it to us?”

  This went without saying. “We don’t know what they’re planning,” said Keedwell.

  Macro was the one sent in to speak to them because he was better at reaching them. There’s a stillness to him. Ann says so, for instance. She says it in a necessarily bored tone of voice.

  He began like this. “We are concerned that if the anhedonia becomes general, across the human species, then we’ll cease to breed.” We’d raised this matter with them before, but there didn’t seem any harm in repeating it. It was always possible, as some said, that the Hitchers didn’t understand the necessary human relationship between pleasure and conception.

  “You can still breed,” they said.

  “We’re still physiologically capable of it,” he agreed. “Erection, emission and so forth. But pleasure has been the major evolutionary motor for procreation for millions of years. Not just for us, but for all the higher life forms on our planet. If you take that out, then, then well we think there’s a good chance . . .”

  “It doesn’t.”

  “What doesn’t?”

  “It doesn’t happen that way.” A new voice: a different Hitcher, or the same one putting on a new tone. “Decouple pleasure from procreation and procreation slows; but it don’t stop altogether. And your people have been using contraception precisely to limit procreation for centuries.”

  This was an unusually lengthy and information-rich speech for the Hitchers.

  We, who were watching the exchange on the relay, held our breaths.

  “Is this a standard thing?” Macro asked. Then: “Did it happen to you?”

  “Did it happen to us?”

  “Did it happen to you?” Macro pressed. “In your history.”

  A weird little singsong oo-oo-oo.

  “You’ve said,” Macro pressed, “that you didn’t develop these technologies of interstellar travel yourselves. You said you were gifted them. Was this part of the deal? Were you offered the same deal that you are now offering us?”

  The gold swirls washed and sparkled like slow fireworks through the blue of the roof. Dark blue. Oceanic.

  “Deal?” said a Hitcher voice, a different one again, or the same one adopting a higher register.

  “We understand econo-ethics,” Macro assured them. “We understand that this is a universal principle. There’s no such thing as a free lunch.” They were in his head; they would understand this. “Nothing for nothing. If the Gifters grant you this benefit – the ability to travel to the stars – they expect you to give up something in return. Hence the anhedonia? Is that it? Was it that way for you?”

  “Way?”

  This had happened before; like a software malfunction the Hitchers would sometimes fall back on single words, and repeat those back at their questioners.

  “Please!” Macro urged.

  “Way?” And again: “Way?”

  “You call yourself Hitchers,” he said. “You’re hitching a ride on some older species’ technology. Please tell us this – was your encounter with them run along the same lines as our encounter with you?”

  “Hitch?”

  “You’re the only aliens we’ve encountered,” Macro pointed out. “You’re all we have to go on. Are all alien species like you?”

  “And why,” (a deeper, yet other Hitcher voice this; or the same Hitcher ventriloquizing another voice) “have you never encountered another alien race?”

  They knew what our answer would be to this question. To any question. But Macro answered it anyway: “that’s an old question for us. There was a human called Fermi . . .”

  “The Old Fermi,”
said the Hitcher.

  “Yes, so it used to run, like: if there are other alien races why haven’t we met them? Now it’s: we know there are other alien races. So why have we not encountered any until now? Why are you guys the first? Why haven’t the others approached us?”

  “What are their reasons?” said the Hitchers.

  Macro persevered. “So, so, for instance: what are your reasons for approaching us? Well, maybe to do what you’ve offered: to give us the technological wherewithal to join the galactic club.”

  “And why would they do that?”

  “Why are you doing it?”

  “And why would they do that?”

  Macro breathed in, breathed out. “There could be other reasons for aliens wanting to contact us. Conquest, for instance.”

  “You think aliens might come to conquer you?”

  But he was becoming frustrated, and had to focus to stay still, not to lose them. “We. Here on Mars. We’re predominantly a military base. We understand that the universe is a battleground. We’re not naive. There are plenty who don’t trust your motives, for instance. Who think this is all an elaborate passive-aggressive alien invasion.”

  “Why would we invade?”

  “Same reason anybody makes war on anybody. Power.”

  “And why power?”

  It took him a moment to parse this question. “What do you mean why? Sentient creatures enjoy power. They just do. That’s just the way life is.” I mean, come on.

  “There you go,” a different Hitcher voice – definitely different. Not only pitched differently, but more fluid; almost breathy. “There’s your false step. Enjoy is the false step. There is the mistake you are making in your formulation of the paradoxes of alien encounter – the Old Fermi.”

  That was the end of the exchange.

  It took a while before we began to see that this was indeed a significant breakthrough in our dealings with the Hitchers. Sifting in amongst the recordings of the exchange, it dawned on us that we had uncovered an important alien datum.

  Outside the base was the landscape of Mars, as cold as strawberry ice-cream – no! much much colder than that! The dust was colder than ice, and the boulders were colder than ice. The stones had been cleared away from a two-hectare patch in front of the camp buildings, and a field had been excavated where GE-Grass and Clover and FlogiWheat was growing. But from every other perspective, from any other window or porthole in the base, the view was of a flat rust-coloured plain scattered with large, maroon-coloured boulders. The boulders were surprisingly regularly spaced, and of a surprising uniformity of size. I always thought so, at any rate. And here we were, like ants in a frozen Zen garden, except that ants have the internal chemical and neurological wherewithal to feel ant-pleasure.

  We convened a meeting.

  This was Keedwell’s view: “I don’t believe they’re enforcing our anhedonia as a punishment.”

  “Speculation,” groaned somebody. “You’re guessing.”

  Keedwell was not one to be sidetracked. “I don’t believe,” he repeated, doggedly, “they’re enforcing our anhedonia as a punishment. I don’t believe, either, that they’re doing it as the down payment, as it were, for our acquisition of interstellar technologies. I believe that neither of those theories is correct.”

  As if I care, I thought to myself. As if any of us do! What’s the point? What’s the point? I didn’t say this.

  Various members of the base spoke up on behalf of one or other of these two theories, in a desultory manner that now characterized our interchanges. Ten minutes or so of chat. Let’s not simply dismiss the idea that it would be a punishment, said Li. It surely feels like a punishment. And why, said Kawa, mightn’t they not be testing us? Seeing how we handle hardship – giving us a chance to prove that we’re worthy of being given this secret? But after a quantity of half-hearted chatter, Keedwell came back to his point.

  “I want to revisit the Lagosse hypothesis,” he said. Lagosse was an Earth-based analyst, and he had theorized that the imposed anhedonia was in effect sacramental for the Hitchers. “What,” said Keedwell, “if anhedonia is, like, a religious thing for them? What if it is a virtue in itself? What if they’re the new Puritans? What if we’re just the unlucky Native Americans who happen to have a first-encounter with stuck-up Puritans who consider our ability to enjoy ourselves to be like a kind of god-cursed nakedness? Or heathenness? Or. Or. I don’t know.”

  There was a fan inset in the ceiling of the room, and it ground round and round, with a scratchy relentlessness. The air was stirred and circulated. We continued breathing.

  This was one use for our breath: we talked round and round this possibility, without any great engagement or passion, and Keedwell kept coming back to: “but think what they said at the end of the last communication.” He met all objections with this.

  Macro had once asked them about religious belief and they had denied having any. No Gods, no God. And on another occasion, he had asked whether our first-encounter with them was going to follow the model with which we, as humans, were familiar from the Diasporic Age on our own world; and they had said . . . they had said not at all. By no means. No no no. To this Keedwell only said, “but perhaps they mean something different by religion to what we mean by the word. Maybe they don’t understand our concept of culture shock.”

  The obscure, foundational work of my psyche ground round, and I found myself distantly angry, in an underpowered sort of way. I couldn’t tell you why. Ann used to be my partner – me – how comical! Going out on Mars meant stepping into the most hostile environment! We hardly ever went out! That’s what robots are for! The very idea!

  Ann is a Canadian by birth, though I suppose she’s a Martian now. That she grew up in the world of wolves and snow and cold desert seems right, somehow. There has always been a loose, poised quality to her. Her body is suited to this low-gravity environment. Her legs and arms are long, and although her torso is shorter than you might expect, she does not look disproportionate. Her face is long and lean and her nose sharp. Her black hair is fixed by a clip at the back of her head, the strands pulled up tight above her high, scholar’s brow. Her eyes are grey the way rainfall is grey, or the way silver is grey. Or, her eyes were grey like that until the Hitchers came and they became the same hopeless grey of everything else in the base. Her lips are thin, and her backside is muscular, with a small concavity where each thigh meets its buttock. Despite this leanness of limb and torso she has rounded protruding breasts that sit much better in Martian gravity than they ever did on Earth. When we were first arrived, and when she and I were still lovers, she used to joke that women must originally have come from Mars, the gravity here suited the female form much better – where men (she meant me) must have originated on Venus, whose crushing heat and pressure shaped the intensity of misery in our being. She meant I was on the edge of becoming obsessive about her. She meant that we must guard against the claustrophobia of our environment turning a simple love affair into a dangerous duo-religion of sex and self. The ground plan of the base was 7,000 square metres of enclosed ground, and the team on the base was eighty-people strong. It was a village, and for Ann our relationship was a village fling.

  I said to her: I am in love with you.

  My feelings were very intense, painfully so. But as I have since discovered most of the pain we feel is grounded in our pleasure, such that when the pleasure is taken away the pain recedes to a mere nervous reflex and you are left with the sense only of something missing.

  So, I told her: I love you.

  She said to me: that means a lot to me. That was, of course, her way of saying: I don’t love you back.

  We went about our duties, and each Martian day clocked round and days aggregated into elongated Martian weeks, and I tried to get on with other things, but I was stupidly and intensely in love with her. Keedwell called me to a personal meeting, one-to-one, and told me to rein myself in. This was an order, he told me. This was a direct order. But the inte
nsity of my pleasure in anticipating having sex with Ann was greater even than the pleasure of having sex with her. I thought about her all the time. I thought about her all the time. Her skin was smooth as oil. Her extraordinary black hair. Her mithril-grey eyes. I proposed marriage repeatedly, and took a greater pain-pleasure in her refusals than I ever would have done in any acceptance. I begged, and promised. I humiliated myself.

  I thought about her all the time.

  The Hitchers came. They promised us the technology to travel to the stars.

  Then we woke up to our collective anhedonia.

  Shortly after this Ann broke up with me – it seems to me, even today, as I type this out, just crazy that this adolescent phrase (“broke up with me”) could be applied to something as grand and significant as our love affair. She began seeing Macro. I was not happy, but neither was I profoundly sad. But I was jealous.

  As communications officer I was able to observe her, intimately.

  I am not saying that I hated Macro, because after all, as we all now know, hatred is fuelled by its dark supply of sheer pleasure, and its motor runs sputtery without that fuel. There are, perhaps, few things as intensely pleasurable as full-throated hatred. Hatred is not the right word for the way I was emotionally oriented towards Macro.

  Ann informed me she would have broken up with me sooner or later anyway. It wasn’t the Hitcher’s fault. It wasn’t Macro’s fault. She spoke without emphasis, and I didn’t especially care. Neither did she. Except, I suppose, there was some sort of scorpion inside my cranium when I thought of Macro. If I cannot call it hatred, then I must log it as some akin, bleached version of the same feeling. It crawled. Round and round it went.

  Now, it is different of course. Now I can hate him again. There’s a sheer relief in that, believe me.

  What I am saying is that this has to do with something more than simple jealousy. This was the situation the Hitchers had placed us in. They asked, in effect, a question. It was an important and straightforward question: what happens to love when pleasure is excised from it? It is a straightforward question without being a simple one, because the majority sharehold we all take in love – in our being in love, I mean – is our own dignity. None of us wants to believe that our love for another human being is only a sort of puffed-up and habitual hedonism. We like to think on the contrary that our love is selfless; self-sacrificing; dedicated, pure. Anhedonia puts those beliefs to the test. What we want to believe is that our own pleasure is vindicated by being predicated on the pleasure of the other. What I discovered, on Mars, was the hollowness of this fiction. If we feel no pleasure in ourself, then it is next to impossible to care one way or another about the pleasure of our partner. It’s the other way about. The truth is that the pleasure of the other is always predicated on our own ecstasy.