by John Brunner
“Is the clinic still in existence?”
“It’s mutated into a general fertility clinic, with a pretty good reputation, I believe. But like I said, I can’t speak for all the other similar operations there were in Britain. There must have been dozens—scores!”
“Some not quite as—ah—ethical as others?”
Claudia waited a long moment for an answer. None came. Peter’s face had frozen into a mask of concentration.
At long last he said, “I think I know someone who might fund your research. I know you don’t much care for the media, but if you want to reduce the load on Strugman…”
“I certainly don’t want to abuse his generosity.”
“Well, do you know a paper over here called the Comet?”
“You did a program about it,” Claudia said. “One of your last. It was all alleged to possess the most technically advanced—Just a second! I think I see what you’re aiming at. I need access to one hell of a lot of cheap computer capacity, don’t I? Would they provide it?”
“It’s worth trying. I know for a fact that Jake—the editor—is desperate for any sort of an exclusive.”
Waiting for her reaction, he drained his glass, feeling the last fragments of ice chill against his lip.
“You’re right,” she said eventually. “I don’t care too much for the media. But so long as we could sew up a good tight contract, so they didn’t rush into print with some half-assed corruption of my findings… You know, I never thought I’d be driven into a corner like this! You think this—this Jake can be trusted?”
“About as far as I could throw a taxicab.” Peter set his glass down with a slam. “But at least he’s an honest rogue. The ones I can’t stand are the ones who don’t even know they’re bent. He does. I’ll give him that.”
“Sounds like the best one can hope for in this day and age,” Claudia grunted, retrieving her bag and rising. “Do you want to copy my disk or not? I have to get home.”
“Sure!”—hastily. “Just a second while I find a scratch one.”
And while the copy was being made (he noted it was autoprotected against copying the copy, but that was to be expected):
“Are you serious about taking over my old place?”
“Sure!” She raised her eyebrows. “Sounds like the ideal solution to my problem.”
“In that case I’d better give you the address and the name of my bank.” He seized pen and paper and wrote rapidly. Handing her the note, he added, “This has been kind of a constructive meeting. Thanks for changing your mind about me.”
“You’re still on probation,” she retorted, reaching to reclaim her own disk as the copying process went to completion. “But… Okay, constructive I will grant. If I’d realized you had personal experience of artinsem, I’d have called you sooner.”
“But it wasn’t a personal experience. It was the opposite. It was just about the most totally impersonal experience of my entire life. That’s why—like I said—I literally hadn’t given it a thought in a good ten years.”
“Were all the donors you met as detached as you?”
“I hope so. I sincerely hope so. Imagine getting hung up on biological paternity!”
“You’re asking me to imagine it?” Her tone was oddly gentle, albeit mocking, as she scrutinized him with those strange artificial-looking irises. “Me, who can’t even imagine being hung up on maternity? Or didn’t you realize?”
For a second he was confused; then he caught on. Having spent so long in his company and alone, she was warning him not to try and kiss her good night, or the like. But this must surely be a reflex. He hadn’t been aware she was gay, though now he had to assume she was, or wanted to be taken as such…
Grief! The shifts and makeshifts of our society!
“Shall I call you a cab?” he said at length, having decided the whole matter was too trivial to waste more breath on.
“No thanks. I guess I can find one myself.”
Was that the tone of an offended feminist? Peter was too tired, and possibly also too drunk, to figure it out. He said with what cordiality he could muster, “I’m flattered that you shared your data with me. I’ll be as helpful as I can.”
“Fine. Just don’t forget I still have the agreement you signed when we had dinner together.”
“As though I would!”
When she had finally departed, Peter stole into the room that had become Ellen’s. She was fast asleep, the phones of her stereo still on her head although the broadcast she had been listening to had gone off the air.
Detaching them with maximum gentleness, he stared around at what he had never expected to find in any of his homes: a teenager’s bedroom. It was weird to see his old belongings in this novel context. In particular, he was impressed by the way she had taken to the computer he had given her. He had to admit that the teaching at her former school must have been pretty good, for she had got the knack of its more esoteric potential remarkably quickly, and it kept her occupied for hours on end.
He only hoped she wasn’t going to start running up heavy bills due to interrogating distant data-bases.
The rest of the changes, though, were entirely hers: indefinably juvenile-plus-feminine touches that had made even the furniture look different…
It was no use. He couldn’t define them. They were just there.
And he had better not be any longer, not after so much whiskey and such a weird conversation. Did Claudia really think she’d lucked into a genetic component of criminality? Against all her prior convictions, and everybody else’s?
It was all too much to digest at a single sitting. Peter switched off the lights and stole as quietly as possible to bed.
By morning, however, he had reached a firm conclusion.
He was going to have to follow up Claudia’s lead. He was going to have to con as much money as possible out of both Jake Lafarge and TV Plus, to fund his investigation.
There simply wasn’t anything else in the offing that held out any promise whatsoever.
PART TWO
“But if God is love, why is there any bad at all? Is the world like a novel in which the villains are put in to make it more dramatic, and in which virtue triumphs only in the third volume? It is certain that the feelings of the created have in no way been considered. If indeed there were a judgment day, it would be for man to appear at the bar not as a criminal but as accuser.”
—Winwood Reade:
The Martyrdom of Man
As it turned out, Harry Shay needed little persuading to sell his company and return to England. The alternative was to stay on but now as managing director of a wholly-owned subsidiary, and he was not of the temperament to work well in committee or by consensus, let alone submit his proposals for approval by higher authority. Alice was far more reluctant—she had become addicted to Californian weather—but David coaxed and wheedled and eventually she gave in. So there was no need to explain about the secret bank accounts in the Bahamas.
The company fetched an excellent price, much higher than the gloomy Goldfarb had predicted. But then, the prospective buyer had had the benefit of a business dinner at the Shays’, during which David was able to soften his resistance. In short, everything went extremely well—or almost everything.
The exception was due to a man called Pedro Gui, one of the pushers who had been making handsome profits out of David’s ingenuity. He had also, obviously, made a grievous mistake: he had sampled the product much too often.
Thanks to certain precautions he had taken after being visited by the FBI, David had imagined his identity secure. How Gui could have traced him he had no idea, but on the Saturday before the family’s departure, when he was at home alone except for Bethsaida, who was in the kitchen, an unfamiliar car drew up and out got a black-haired, sallow-faced man in his late twenties. After a cursory glance around, he walked across to where David lay on dry grass, half his mind on a book and the other on a broadcast from Pacifica Radio.
There was a b
ulge under the newcomer’s jacket; that was the first thing the boy spotted.
A great coldness invaded his mind as he rose to his feet. Imposing his will on his parents, whom he had known all his life, or on ignorant and timid Bethsaida, or on businessmen who could be manipulated by appealing to their greed, or even on an FBI agent, was very different from outwitting an armed stranger who, by the wild look in his eyes, was angled on one of several kinds of dope.
After surveying David head to toe, he said incredulously, “You? Goddamn. I didn’t believe it when they said you were just a kid… You are David Shay?” he added with an access of suspicion. “The growser who figures out all those featly kinds of yeast?”
Feigning a boldness he did not command, David retorted, “Sure. And if you’re anybody, you have to be Pedro Gui—am I right?” He made a point of checking out his dealers’ credentials, discreetly.
“How the hell did you—? Ah, shit. So you know me, I know you. Puts us on level terms, I guess.”
There was a canvas chair nearby. David gestured at it.
“By the sound of it, you have business to discuss. Normally I wouldn’t consider it, but since you must have gone to a lot of trouble to find me, I presume it’s urgent. Care to sit down while we talk?”
Gui shook his head as though fearing a trap. “I just got one thing to say to you. Don’t quit.”
“I don’t understand,” David prevaricated.
“I said don’t quit! Word is, you’re winding down the operation. I won’t let you!”
He uttered the last sentence with such force that tiny drops of spittle flew from his lips, glinting in the sun.
David relaxed a trifle. Gui was clearly not in control of himself, and that ought to provide an opening. He needed one in a hurry, though; Harry and Alice were due back soon—in fact, on hearing the car he had glanced up, imagining it might be theirs.
For an instant he considered countering, “And how are you going to stop me?” But he was too aware of the presence of the gun. Instead he said, “Why not? There are other designers—”
“Ain’t none like you!” Gui folded his thin hands and squeezed until the tendons stood up in ridges. “Man, you got any idea how good that shit is that you teach the bugs to make? No, I guess you don’t use. Like the chef in the classy restaurant picks up a cheeseburger on his way home. But, oh man… Listen!” He approached David, dropping his voice to a confidential whisper.
“Listen, man, you’re on the track of the Last with the capital L. You know what I mean? You follow me?”
Mouth dry, David gave a nod. Where the legend had sprung from, no one could say, but within the past year the simple symbol of an L had been scrawled on walls from Baja to Nantucket, from Taos to Yellowknife—and maybe elsewhere, too. There had been a program on TV that he had watched out of professional interest. It stood for and defined the conviction among users that soon now, very soon, the Big L would be discovered, or rather invented—the ultimate drug that bestowed total enlightenment, comprehension of the purpose of the universe.
Perhaps, he remembered thinking as he watched the broadcast, this was a counter-culture response to the teaching of the Rapture. When so many people were predicting the imminence of Judgment Day, it was hard not to be half-convinced if only by the sheer weight of repetition. The drug of drugs, the super-duper drug, was just as much a chimera, yet for the majority of poor or disappointed people far more credible.
But Gui was still talking. To be precise, he was saying, “—so I won’t let you quit! Not when you’re so close!”
David’s sense of calm increased still more. This man only thought he had come here to threaten. In fact he had come to beg and plead.
In that case—!
He donned his most convincing smile.
“Well, hell. You know you’re the first person to figure it out?”
Gui looked blank.
“Why do you think I’m quitting? Don’t I have a sweet racket? Don’t you think it’s made me a fortune? And like you said I am still only a kid—can’t deny that, because it’s true. So why do you think I’m winding up the operation if it’s not because I reached my final goal?”
He waited for the bait to be taken. Gui’s dope-slow mental processes could be read in his face as clearly as on the screen of a computer. At last, eyes round with wonder, he forced out, “You—you got it?”
“The L for Last,” David solemnly confirmed. “And since like I said you’re the only growser so far who’s figured it out, I guess you deserve to sample it.”
By this time Gui was practically drooling. Holding out both hands, palm up and shaking terribly, he whispered, “Oh man! I dreamed about this day so long… How much?”
Abruptly he was groping inside his jacket, heedless of the fact that the movement exposed his gun to view. He produced a wad of hundred-dollar bills, but David waved it away nonchalantly.
“The only reason for me to make money was so I could carry on my research. Now it’s over… Wait here and I’ll bring you a sample. No charge.”
For an instant a ghost of rationality seemed to haunt Gui’s deranged mind, bringing with it the possibility that this might all be a trick. But he wanted to believe too much.
“Yeah!” he said. “Yeah!”
On his return, carrying a test-tube wrapped in crumpled tissues that held about a quarter-teaspoonful of grayish-yellow crystals as fine as table salt, David half expected to find that Gui had fled after all. Since that would have engendered later complications, he was pleased to find him still there, trembling with anticipation.
“There you go,” David said encouragingly.
Turning the glass tube around and around, unable to take his eyes off it, Gui husked, “How do you use it?”
“Shoot it, toot it, stuff it up your ass—doesn’t matter. I’d say let it dissolve on your tongue. Reaches the brain faster that way, via the palatal route. But listen!” David’s tone was abruptly stern.
“You need to take it in the right kind of surroundings, hear? Like don’t get so eager you stop off in the nearest men’s room! You go home, you make yourself comfortable—like on your bed, or in a good deep armchair, so you don’t get all stiffened up while you’re under. And maybe lock the door because you won’t want to be disturbed.”
“Sounds like a long trip,” Gui ventured.
“The longest. The ultimate. And afterward you won’t ever want to use anything else.”
For an instant he feared that Gui was going to embrace and maybe kiss him. Instead he thrust the tube into his breast pocket and ran full pelt back to his car. He burned rubber on the driveway as he left for home.
Well, one thing at least was true, David thought as he resumed his book. Gui would never use a drug again. Not after ingesting five or six lethal doses of ricin. A year or so ago, out of curiosity, he had isolated a quantity of it from a castor-oil plant that grew right alongside the house. The rest of what the test-tube held was sugar tinted with tobacco-ash and turmeric.
So long as nothing worse interfered with what he had planned…
You’re watching TV Plus. It’s time for Newsframe.
Have you noticed any starlings today? According to the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, one of Britain’s commonest and best-loved birds is in danger of dying out. A “Save the Starling” fund has been launched today to try and preserve it. More follows in a moment.
Charges brought against supporters of General Thrower in Newcastle under the Race Relations Act, alleging that they threw black members out of a multi-racial club, were dismissed by magistrates today. One of the injured victims…
From the kitchen, whence emanated a distinct smell of burning oil, Ellen bore a laden tray into the living room. Setting it down on a table beside her father, who was deep in argument with Claudia, she said anxiously, “Here you are—I do hope it’s okay!”
Peter suppressed a sigh. This was not the first time she had attempted to reproduce her mother’s Indian dishes for him, so
far without notable success, and he recognized that she had brought them: rotis stuffed with yesterday’s leftovers plus a dash of curry powder.
But when she’s so desperate to please… And besides, according to today’s news, if this gene-tinkered rye-grass gets as much of a grip on our farmland as the experts are predicting, we’ll soon be eating worse…!
“Ellen, you’re a sweetheart,” Claudia said without even glancing up. “Pop mine on a plate, hm? And bring a fork—I’m not terribly good with my fingers.”
Delighted that her efforts had met with approval, Ellen made haste to comply, for Peter as well. Then, having topped up their glasses—beer tonight—she took the last roti for herself and withdrew to an armchair in the corner to eat it.
As it turned out, this time her cooking had much surpassed her previous endeavors. After his first bite Peter raised his eyebrows.
“Ellen, darling, this is good!”
“Really?” Her eyes were instantly alight.
“Yes, really! Carry on like this and—” He had been about to say she would become as good a cook as her mother, but there was a tacit agreement between them not to refer to Kamala, even indirectly. He compromised: “And you’ll have me eating at home every night!”
After which he resumed his conversation with Claudia. They were planning the pitch they intended to make to Jake Lafarge tomorrow, noting and discarding dozens of possible approaches. Jake was their only hope, TV Plus having decided the story was too long-term, so they were determined to present it in the best possible guise.
Which was why Peter didn’t notice when the brightness in his daughter’s eyes overflowed and trickled down her cheeks.
When they had eaten, Ellen took the dishes to be washed and then, unusually, instead of withdrawing to her room, returned to her chair in the corner. By then Peter and Claudia were so engrossed they scarcely registered her presence, and she eavesdropped as though she were a shadow.
