Asimov's SF, March 2008

by Dell Magazine Authors

  As Judith Hillinger had told me, she was working with roses, lilies, and orchids—all long-time favorites of floral engineers. The blooms themselves didn't look particularly beautiful and unusual, by the standards that had been established half a century ago, and the symphony of their nectar was also expectable—but it wasn't the shape, color and scent of the blooms that stunned me with amazement.

  I'd already seen the alates, of course, perched in twos and threes on the rail of my verandah, or fluttering in mid-air in tiny flocks of six or seven—but those were escapees a long way from home. In the greenhouses, the air was filled with them, not merely in their thousands but in their hundreds of thousands. It was their riotous colors, and the play of light on their wings, that struck me with extreme aesthetic force.

  As Judith Hillinger moved among them, the alates settled on her body in their hundreds, and she adjusted her movements so as not to risk crushing them. I did likewise, and as we passed through the greenhouses we both seemed to be moving in slow motion, having undergone a metamorphosis into something far richer and stranger than anything merely human.

  She had to put a hand over her mouth to shield it from invasion in order to speak, but she had a speech to make and she wasn't about to be inhibited.

  “This is the way it should have been, Mr. Anderson,” she said. “This is the path that evolution should have taken. This is one of the reasons why we must become masters of evolution as swiftly as possible—to correct the errors of natural selection. We'll have to start with the harmless ones, of course, in order to establish the principle—but pretty little ventures of this kind will only be the beginning."

  This prompt allowed me to remember a little bit more about the content of the ostentatious speeches that Judith Hillinger had made in court when she'd tried to make herself a martyr for the creationist cause. She'd compared the work of natural selection to that of early computer programmers, who had been far more interested in finding a way to get the job done than in writing elegant code. As computing power and computer networks had grown at an explosive rate, all kinds of hasty improvisations had been built into source-codes, their weaknesses compensated by an ever-increasing mess of ungainly patches—which kept the whole thing working, after a fashion, but whose sheer mass and complexity prevented anyone from ever going back to basics and redesigning the code more efficiently and elegantly. By the same token, she'd argued, the ecosphere had blithely preserved anything that worked, however inelegantly, and built up whole ecosystems by adding patches as they were thrown up by mutation—resulting in a vast ungainly complex that no one with any aesthetic intelligence would ever have designed, but which couldn't be comprehensively overhauled.

  “When flowering plants first evolved,” I said, to demonstrate to her that I was no fool, in spite of my exceedingly plain appearance, “the gymnosperms they were replacing set a very low standard of competition, in terms of their methods of pollination. The new forms didn't need to be very clever—just clever enough. It happened to be the evolutionary era in which the insects were undergoing their first major adaptive radiation, and insect pollination was good enough to do the trick. It would have been so much more elegant—albeit considerably more energy-expensive—for the angiosperms to invent pollen that could fly rather than rely on insects to serve as vectors, but the quick fix took hold. Once it had taken hold, the angiosperms and the insects became the major selective forces shaping one another's consequent evolution, so the whole ecosystem grew more and more elaborate, accumulating all manner of improvisatory patches—and the mutual success story was so spectacular that the prospect of going back to square one and finding a more elegant solution to the pollination problem vanished into the mists of possibility. Until now. You're not just trying to make prettier flowers for the home and garden, are you, Ms. Hillinger? You're trying to lay the groundwork for a whole new phase of plant evolution. So why start with roses, lilies, and orchids?"

  “I may be rich, Mr. Anderson,” she said, “but I'm not super-rich. I need marketable products and healthy profits to finance further investment. This is just the beginning, as I said—and I'm not just talking about building a commercial empire."

  “You're even more determined to get the law changed now than you were before you went to jail,” I said, glad to be able to demonstrate that I was keeping up with her. “This is phase two of the great crusade, whose furtherance will be seriously expensive. It's not just a matter of buying more kit, hiring more techs, and passing a few more brown envelopes to the Hull Police. Changing the law requires a war for hearts and minds, involving powerful advertising campaigns and relentless lobbying. Well, I wish you luck, Ms. Hillinger, I really do."

  “Thank you, Mr. Anderson. I might be able to use a man like you, you know—and I could certainly use your pharm as a second experimental base. I think we could put together a very attractive package for you, which would put an end to your financial difficulties for some time to come, if you didn't want to stay on in a managerial capacity."

  “I'm sorry, Ms. Hillinger, but that's out of the question,” I said. “If I wanted to work for someone else, I'd never have quit Big Pharma."

  “I'm not Big Pharma,” Judith Hillinger stated, as if I'd just delivered a mortal insult. “I'm the absolute opposite. I'm starting out small, but I intend to become one of the leaders of the Revolution."

  “If I weren't a confirmed loner, I wouldn't be holed up in the remoter regions of the Holderness,” I told her. “I really do wish you the best of luck—but I'm just a pharmer, not a revolutionary. I don't want to be a part of your grand plan."

  “You could get your looks fixed,” she said, as if that were her idea of an offer that no one could refuse.

  “I'm sure I could,” I said, “but I think I'd rather wait for ugly to come back into fashion. I'm grateful, but the answer's still no. Can we just be good neighbors?"

  She flashed me a smile that might have been intended to remind me exactly what I was turning down. “Of course we can,” she said. “I'm sure that we shall."

  * * * *

  When I got home, I found that I'd had visitors. I say “visitors” because they didn't seem to have been burglars, exactly, and they didn't seem to have been vandals, exactly. They'd messed things up more than a little, and they'd stolen some trivia, but they hadn't smashed anything up so badly that it would be difficult to make repairs, and they hadn't taken anything that I couldn't do without. Whatever their primary motive had been, it hadn't been robbery or destruction.

  It occurred to me almost immediately, of course, that there might have been another reason why Judith Hillinger had invited me to look over her laboratory and her specimen-houses rather than letting me go home once we'd made an agreement. She had kept me there for a good two and a half hours after I'd told her where I lived and exactly how far away it was. I hadn't seen her make any phone calls, but I hadn't had my eyes on her all the time that I was being introduced to her three lovely assistants and shown around the labs. If the cook-housekeeper and the boatman had been fishing in the marsh rather than the open sea, there had been plenty of time for them to locate my pharm, take a good look around, and leave me abundant evidence that they'd been there.

  I knew that I had to be careful about jumping to conclusions of that sort, because the pills I'd taken to enable me to make the excursion were notorious for inducing paranoid side-effects, but a pharmer has better reason than most people to bear in mind the old adage that just because you're paranoid, doesn't mean they aren't out to get you. If it hadn't been Judith Hillinger's people, who could it have been? If the troubles the dealers in Hull were currently experiencing had extended backward along the supply-chain my visitors would surely have done a great deal more damage.

  Whoever they were, the invaders hadn't done anything serious—but they'd left me a clear enough message as to what they might have done, had they been so minded. I knew that if I picked up the phone and told Judith Hillinger what had happened she'd be full of sympathy, a
nd would put on a big show of being deeply hurt if I suggested, however delicately, that she might have had something to do with it. There was no point in doing that. After all, even if she had been responsible, she wasn't leaning on me hard—not yet. She wasn't trying to get rid of me, or force me to sign on to her Great Crusade. It was probably just that her idea of being a good neighbor wasn't quite the same as mine. She was probably prepared to play nicely, provided that it was perfectly clear who had the upper hand in the game and the power to crush the opposition, should the need arise.

  I tidied up, and got on with my work.

  For the next few days the numbers of the stray alates declined steadily; after a week had elapsed it became rare to see even one in the course of a day. Judith Hillinger had obviously instructed her hired help to put up some efficient netting to the south of her house. I was duly grateful for that, and tried to put her out of my mind. I didn't call her, and I didn't expect her to call me. On the afternoon of the first of July, though, my pocketphone trilled, and when I interrogated the display I recognized the number she had given me.

  “Ms. Hillinger,” I said. “How nice to hear from you again. What do you need?"

  “That depends on what you have for sale,” she said.

  “You mentioned inspirationals and focal intensifiers when I visited you,” I reminded her. “I have basic products in both lines, as well as the usual range of memory-enhancers, euphorics, narcotics, hallucinogens, and stimulants. I don't deliver, though—you'll have to send your boatman to collect the package."

  “I'd prefer to collect them myself,” she said, lightly. “It would get me out of the house for a while, and I'd be interested to look over your pharm. I showed you mine, remember."

  “I remember,” I assured her. “You'd be very welcome. I still need to know what you need, though, so I can make up a package."

  “I'll make my selection when I've looked around,” she told me. “I don't mind waiting while you assemble the package. I'll be there in an hour or so, if that's convenient."

  “Do you need directions?” I asked innocently.

  “I'm sure that my boatman can find you,” she countered. “We have an Ice Age map."

  An hour later, at five o'clock or so, her boat arrived at the crude jetty where I kept my own motorboat tied up. Unsurprisingly, her boat was a lot bigger than mine, with a much nicer canopy to keep the UV at bay—which hadn't prevented Judith Hillinger from carrying a pink parasol, or deterred the boatman from wearing shades with skintight lenses the size of brandy-schooners. The boatman was an exceptionally handsome man with an unfashionably muscular body; he could have broken me in half with his bare hands while smiling like a model for the latest generation of smart underclothes. Judith Hillinger introduced him as Jacquard, but he stayed with the boat while I led her to my home. The shack had never seemed more deserving of its name.

  I gave her the tour, all too well aware of the fact that the plastic-shelled igloos sheltering my poppies and foxgloves were the merest shadow of her magnificent greenhouses, and that my mushroom cellars were hideously rank by comparison with the nectar-laden air of her entire establishment. She was very polite, except when I showed her what had once been my research lab, where Marie and I had tweaked psychoactive compounds in search of something far more radical than the palliative treatments for Asperger's syndrome that Big Pharma had commissioned us to develop.

  “You've let this part of your work languish, I see,” she observed. “You shouldn't have done that, Mr. Anderson. A proteonomicist like you ought to be working at the cutting edge, not growing standard products—isn't that why you went out on your own in the first place?"

  She'd obviously taken the trouble to sort me out from all the other Daniel Andersons, and had been at least a little bit intrigued by what she'd found. She must have known that I hadn't gone out of Big Pharma “on my own,” but she was carefully refraining from mentioning Marie, at present.

  “I went into psychotropic proteonomics because it was fashionable,” I said, modestly. “I was no hotshot. Everybody working in psychotropics at the time dreamed about discovering the ultimate high, so I bought my ticket in the lottery. It turned out to be a loser. I'm just a small pharmer now—it's not glamorous, but my products are guaranteed to be clean and safe. Not everyone can say the same."

  “If you didn't want to do more challenging work for me—or for yourself—because you've lost your creative spark, there are ways and means to reignite it,” she told me. “If your own products aren't up to it, I can help you obtain some that are. You don't have to run to seed out here in the wilderness. You can be part of something that will eventually change the world—and when I say change the world, Mr. Anderson, I mean it."

  “I know what you mean,” I said. “What do you need, Ms. Hillinger? I ought to start making up your order."

  That caused her to sigh, but she brought out a shopping list. The quantities of euphorics, narcotics, and orthodox stimulants were modest, but those of inspirationals and focal intensifiers weren't.

  “I can't supply the anaphrodisiacs,” I said. “It's not a product for which there's a lot of demand. I can't do the quantities of inspirationals and focal intensifiers immediately, but if half this amount will keep you going for a fortnight, I can top up the order then."

  “That's fine,” she said.

  “In all conscience, I have to check,” I said. “This is for the use of four people, yes? Your entire technical staff ?"

  “Of course,” she said.

  “Even so,” I said, “it's a heavy load. You have to be careful alternating drugs with contradictory effects—you can seriously screw up the feedback mechanisms that control their natural analogues."

  “Now that we have compounds that can do the job more efficiently,” she said, a trifle frostily, “we don't need the natural analogues. Natural selection is an improviser, always content with what works well enough. We're our own masters now, Mr. Anderson, in body and mind alike."

  She was speaking for herself, of course, and offering me a subtle insult in the process. Cosmetically unenhanced as I was, I looked my age and I wasn't nearly as handsome as her boatman, but that wasn't what she was getting at. She was accusing me of being a traitor to the cause, of letting my creative impulses decay because I wasn't willing to take charge of them and substitute artful biochemistry for the feeble provision of nature.

  “Taking the drugs yourself is one thing, Ms. Hillinger,” I said. “Feeding them to your employees is another—and don't tell me that they're under no pressure, because I've worked in Big Pharma and I know exactly how much pressure there is for employees to be competitive and keep up with the ambient flow. I'm no nature-knows-best freak, but I do know that our improvisations and patches aren't that much better than those thrown up by natural selection—and reckless interference with feedback mechanisms can really screw people up. Psychotropic effects can be permanent as well as temporary, and the more extreme the effect is, the more likely it is to fry your brain. You're a technologist, so using a technological means to enhance the various phases of the scientific method—inspirationals to stimulate hypothesis-formulation, focal intensifiers to sharpen up rigorous testing—probably seems to you to be the most natural thing in the world, but you need to be careful, Ms. Hillinger, you really do."

  “You certainly wouldn't win any awards for high-pressure salesmanship, Mr. Anderson,” she said. “If you try this hard to put all your clients off your merchandise, I'm surprised that you even scrape a living. I know what I'm doing, and so do the members of my staff. We work hard because we've got a world to change. We don't take undue risks. I trust you when you say that your product is clean and safe, because I know that you were once a well-trained and highly skilled biotechnologist; I expect you to trust me when I say that I know how to use it productively and judiciously, because you know what I am."

  She didn't mean that we were two of a kind, who ought to respect one another's professionalism. She meant that she was a geni
us, to whom a mere hack like me ought to look up, admiringly if not worshipfully.

  “Fine,” I said. “It's good product. It won't do any of you any harm, if you don't abuse it. I'll trust you to use it responsibly."

  “Thank you,” she said—and said no more while I made up as much of her order as I could presently supply.

  She wasn't finished, though. When I'd handed the package over and counted the cash she started again.

  “You really ought to consider my offer seriously, Mr. Anderson,” she said, in what might have been intended to be a seductively challenging manner. “After all, it's almost five years since your beloved Marie ditched you. Don't you think it's time to move on? The world is full of pretty women, you know."

  She wasn't trying to be cruel, even though she knew that she was putting pressure on a broken heart. She really did think that it was a simple matter of time healing all wounds and everyone having to move on eventually. She had no reason to think differently. Nobody knew why Marie had left except me—not even Marie. Where was Marie now, I wondered? Wherever it was, and whomever she was with, she wouldn't be there long.

  “I have moved on,” I told Judith Hillinger. “I just haven't moved away from here. I don't want to, and I don't intend to. Thanks again for the offer, and I'm truly sorry if my refusal offends you, but I'm really not interested in joining your crusade. I just want us to be good and considerate neighbors. Please can we leave it at that?"

  She said yes, but she didn't mean it. As I walked her back to her boat, I knew that even if I'd had the anaphrodisiacs that helped to keep her assistants’ minds on their jobs, and even if I'd been able to supply the full quota of inspiration-and-perspiration enhancers, she still wouldn't have gotten all of what she'd come for. She didn't need chemical assistance to be possessed by a touch of megalomania. The entirely natural inclination that made her determined to alter the entire future course of Gaian evolution, by correcting one or all of natural selection's worst mistakes, also made it difficult for her will to be thwarted in something as ludicrously unimportant as whether I'd sell her my silly little pharm or agree to incorporate into her burgeoning empire.