Asimov's SF, March 2008

by Dell Magazine Authors

  “I'd like you to come to dinner tomorrow night, Mr. Anderson,” she said, abruptly, as Jacquard extended a supportive hand to help her board the boat. “Seven-thirty for eight; informal dress. I have some other guests coming—you'll be interested to meet them."

  I wasn't at all sure that I would be interested to meet her friends, and I didn't like the way the invitation had been phrased as a virtual command, but I figured that it would only make matters worse if I were churlish enough to refuse. I was still keen for us to be good neighbors, and I knew that if we could do the sort of business we'd just transacted on a regular basis, it really would work wonders for my increasingly uneasy profit margins.

  “I'd be delighted,” I said, mentally calculating the kind of dose I'd have to take to sustain myself through a high-pressure evening.

  * * * *

  Judith Hillinger hadn't specified how many “other guests” she was expecting, but for some reason I was thinking in terms of ten or a dozen, and of the kind of party where I could discreetly fade into a hectic background. It was quite a surprise to arrive in Withernsea, in my very best freshly laundered clothes, to find that we were only six at the table. Her technical assistants hadn't been invited.

  The other four guests comprised two well-established couples, so I was tacitly paired with Ms. Hillinger in a numerical sense. No one could possibly have mistaken us for a couple, though, even if we hadn't been seated at opposite ends of the table. I felt more like her court jester—a grotesque fool included in the company as a reminder of what true mortality looked like.

  The two couples were each seated next to one another on the longer sides of the dining-table, the two men placed to either side of Ms. Hillinger and the two women to either side of me. The cosmetically enhanced women were no trophy wives, though; these were synergistic combinations of near-equals. The brace to my left were Henry Perrott and Susan Oxhey, floral engineers of high repute and impeccable respectability, who had never been charged with any breach of the Institute's regulations. The unit to my right comprised Wickham Stanton and Andrea Strettington, who were proprietors of a highly fashionable advertising agency. They had all been summoned to discuss the matter of winning the public to the cause of legal reform, in which unprecedentedly charming flowers were to supply the thin end of a stout wedge. It was painfully obvious, while we made our way through the first two courses, that neither Ms. Oxhey nor Ms. Strettington had the faintest idea why I was present, and I was in full sympathy with their uncertainty.

  “I'm just a pharmer,” I told them, when they began a delicate exploration of the subject. “I grow psychotropics."

  “Well, the law certainly needs to be changed in that respect too,” Ms. Oxhey said, diplomatically. “The follies of biotechnological regulation only date back to the twentieth century, so there are a mere dozen layers of idiot improvisation to unravel, but the follies of drug regulation go back to the nineteenth and beyond."

  “We have several clients interested in that field,” Ms. Strettington confirmed, unsurprisingly. “I wonder if Judith is planning some kind of alliance between the two groups of lobbyists. That might make sense eventually, as a tactical move—but not to begin with. We don't want to start off with that kind of controversial baggage in tow."

  “It would be more than a mere tactical alliance,” I said, just for the hell of it. “The liberation of psychotropic research and the liberation of the kind of angiosperm engineering Ms. Hillinger is interested in relate to two of the most glaringly manifest cock-ups of natural selection."

  They didn't get it, and were proud enough to be annoyed by their failure. They knew all about Judith Hillinger's theories about the horrible wrong turn that angiosperm evolution had taken when early flowers plumped for reliance on insect vectors rather than producing their own antheric alates, but they hadn't a clue what I was talking about. Judith Hillinger might have, because she'd obviously take the trouble to research my background thoroughly, but she hadn't filled in her guests on the subject of my long-gone days as a firebrand champion of artifice. The two women had to invite me to explain.

  “You'll find it a lot easier, of course, to persuade people that it's desirable to correct natural selection's mistakes in respect of the evolution of flowers, Ms. Strettington,” I said. “After all, from the human point of view, flowers are just pretty things that hang around in vases and gardens. Making way for a more ingeniously gilded lily seems a harmless enough pursuit, and I don't suppose you'll find any substantial opposition coming out to bat for the insects that will be thrown out of work. Human workers can hardly be expected to come out on strike in solidarity with their sisters in the beehive. Psychotropics, on the other hand, have been the principal selective agent shaping the development of human consciousness and civilization. The mistakes that natural selection made in that respect are engraved in our genes, our brains, and our cultural institutions. The task of putting them right will meet stern opposition all the way."

  My listeners were adequately tantalized, and invited me to expand on the theme.

  “The human use of psychotropics predates civilization,” I pointed out. “It may well be the case that it was the cultivation of psychotropic substances rather than foodstuffs that prompted the initial development of agriculture, while fungal hallucinogens like psilocybin and muscarine were probably the catalyst responsible for the initial development of human self-consciousness. That's speculation—but the role of psychotropic experience in the subsequent development of religion and art has much more empirical evidence to support it. The differences between religions are explicable in terms of their origins in different kinds of psychotropic experience. Hallucinogens are associated with shamanistic cults, while the rituals associated with religions of the ancient Mediterranean—the Dionysian rites of ancient Greece, the Egyptian festivals of Hathor and the Christian Eucharist—all involved calculated alcoholic intoxication.

  “The emergence and development of Western civilization and culture reflect the relative ease with which alcohol could be obtained by technological manufacture. A significant boundary between the sacred and the profane was crossed when the domestication of fermentation technology made alcohol freely available for recreational use. Intoxication was reduced to mere drunkenness and the noble Dionysus of early Greek religion gave way to the Sileni of subsequent folklore. The association of artistic creativity with psychopathology—as in the old saws relating genius to madness—is based in the conviction that artistic creativity is an inherently psychotropic process, akin to the sacred functions of intoxication rather than mere drunkenness, but essentially innovative rather than repetitively ritual. Artists have always been psychotropic pioneers, because art is a key product of psychotropic adventurism.

  “The psychological rewards of psychotropic adventurism were, of course, perfectly adequate in the ancient world to outweigh considerable costs in terms of toxic side effects. Literary representations of artistic creativity, like religious representations of revelation, frequently call attention to the costliness of such inspirational experiences—the muses of old were often represented as exacting, even vampiric, mistresses. The costs of creativity were seen as necessary—a matter of paying a just price—but that's nonsensical. It's just that natural selection had fudged the whole thing, the way natural selection always does.

  “The whole mess—genius allied with madness, religion allied with arbitrary commitments of faith and with fervent persecution—was the result of a catalog of biological accidents. The selective processes that created and shaped human consciousness and human civilization were essentially haphazard, based on the casual happenstance of the availability of psychotropic fungi, opium poppies, and so on, and on the fortunate simplicity of primal technologies of fermentation. If the evolution of human consciousness had been intelligently designed, human individuality and society would be much finer things. Unfortunately, we've learned to love our horrid faults as much as our wonderful abilities, and there's never been any shortage of peo
ple willing to fight to the death to defend them.

  “In the nineteenth century, when the psychotropic pharmacopeia began to expand with remarkable rapidity as the resources of organic chemistry were brought to bear on drug extraction, refinement, and innovation, it became obvious to the enlightened few that if the process of the emergence and evolution of consciousness could only have been subject to intelligent design, we might have become far better people than we are. If our use of psychotropic compounds, and the adaptation of our brains to that usage by natural selection, had only been subject to elegant and intelligent design, we would be more creative than we are, more inclined to love and affection than hatred and envy, and immune to the follies and evils of faith. Unfortunately, that particular enlightenment never gained any kind of mass support, and it's still hard to see light at the end of the tunnel. If ever there was a case for discarding the awful improvisatory legacy of natural selection and going back to basics, it's the psychotropic evolution of human nature and culture—by comparison, Ms. Hillinger's grand plan for changing the world is just glorified flower-arranging—but it's not a nettle that anyone with any real clout has yet been prepared to grasp."

  I thought it was a nice example of fascinating dinner conversation, whose sophistication belied the fact that I hadn't been invited to dinner by anyone in the previous five years. It was a testament to the quality of the drugs that had allowed me to come so far from home, into such a stressful situation—but if I expected the ladies to be stunned by my genius, I was wrong. It wasn't that they couldn't take me seriously—they were far too intelligent and open-minded for any such commonplace failure of imagination—but that they could clearly see the next step in the argument, which I'd somehow contrived to forget.

  “That's very interesting,” Susan Oxhey said. “And what, exactly, are you doing to further that cause, Mr. Anderson?"

  “Not a lot,” I had to confess. “There was a time....” Then I shut up.

  “Judith mentioned that you once had a partner,” Andrea Strettington observed, “and that the two of you were engaged in proteonomic research."

  I wondered then exactly how deep Judith Hillinger's research had gone, and whether I might have mistaken the reasons for her unaccountable enthusiasm to offer me a job. Given that she couldn't possibly know the one thing that she actually needed to know, it seemed more than possible that she had made a crucial mis-estimation of where my aborted research had actually wound up.

  “That's true,” I said to Ms. Strettington, “but I gave it up."

  They were far too polite actually to look down their noses at me, but I thought I could feel the carefully concealed contempt. Judith Hillinger had made a circus out of a courtroom and had gone to jail to defend her cause, and now that she was out again she'd built a mansion on the farthest edge of the Holderness Everglades, dedicated to the repair of one of natural selection's most spectacular errors. She was holding a planning meeting at this very moment, which was intended to launch a chain of events that would change the world. I, on the other hand, had given up. Susan Oxhey and Andrea Strettington didn't know why, but they didn't think they needed to. The fact was enough in itself. Perhaps Judith Hillinger really had wanted me to meet her friends, in order that they might serve as shining examples to guide me back to the fold.

  “That's a pity,” one of the ladies said, speaking for both.

  “I don't think so,” I said. “Psychotropic innovation is a difficult and hazardous business. You never know exactly what you might turn up. We may be capable of cleverer planning than natural selection, but we still make mistakes—and we don't have the advantage of natural selection's blithe unconsciousness of the costs of progress. Some people are better suited to living peacefully than dangerously, sustaining the world rather than trying to change it."

  “That may be the case,” Susan Oxhey said, “but the world is changing by itself, in a desperately catastrophic fashion. Things were different at the dawn of human consciousness and the beginning of civilization, when we only had farmers instead of pharmers, but Gaian evolution is far too unstable nowadays to be entrusted to the vagaries of natural selection. The laws that take it for granted that nature somehow knows best were fatuous even in the twentieth century—they're actively dangerous now. Even people who think they might be better suited to a peaceful existence have a duty to act."

  “I'm fully in sympathy with your cause,” I assured them both, “but I can assure you that it doesn't need me any more than I need it. I just want to cultivate my little patch of newborn land, and be a good neighbor.” I was beginning to suspect, though, that Judith Hillinger was never going to be satisfied with that. She hadn't yet realized that attempting to undo natural selection's mistakes can make things worse as well as better.

  * * * *

  After dinner I was offered the chance to sample some more of my own products, but I declined. They didn't know how much I'd already taken, simply in order to get that far. They didn't put any pressure on. They seemed intent on relaxation now—on winding down gently to the sleep they'd need to get them ready for intensive planning on the following day. I figured that I would probably need some downers myself when I got home, but I daren't take anything of the sort until I actually got there, because I still had to make the difficult journey.

  I was glad when the conversation turned to lighter matters, although I found it much harder to make any sort of contribution. I'd been away too long from the tide of current affairs and the minutiae of common concerns. It was pleasant to listen, though, and occasionally to laugh. The time didn't drag at all, and it was late when I finally excused myself. Darkness had already fallen, although the clear and starry sky hadn't quite lost the last tint of summer twilight. Judith Hillinger walked me over the false coral to the bank where I'd moored my boat.

  “I'll ring you when I've put the rest of your order together,” I told her.

  “I'll send Jacquard to collect it,” she replied. “I hope you enjoyed the meal."

  “Excellent food and excellent company,” I assured her. “I'm sure that it did me the world of good."

  “I hope so,” she said. “That's what neighborliness is all about."

  I felt good enough, at that moment, to forgive her for putting pressure on me to become one of her loyal band of followers. She had, after all, gone to some trouble to keep the pressure polite. Maybe, I thought, she had done all that she intended to do, and would now leave it up to me to make up my own mind.

  I held that thought all the way home—but when I found out what had happened to my home in my absence my good mood turned foul on the instant. I felt a terrible surge of anger and bitterness, and berated myself cruelly for ever having been so innocent and so stupid as to believe that such a delicate velvet glove might not have an iron fist inside.

  This time, the visitors who'd taken advantage of my absence had done a very thorough job. They'd smashed up all my equipment and torn up all my crops, with ruthless efficiency. They'd broken my windows, my doors, and my bed. They'd stolen my stores. They'd wrecked everything that I'd built, everything that I treasured—had done everything, in fact, short of torching the place to rip up the fabric of my life. They'd devastated my home, my work, my expectations. I was incandescent with rage. If any one of them had still been around when I'd gotten home, it would have been a matter of kill or be killed. I was well beyond the reach of sanity.

  I wasn't violent in myself, though. I didn't howl or tear my hair or stamp my feet. I moved like a robot from room to room and plot to plot, looking at everything. I wasn't calculating the extent of the damage or weighing up what I would have to do to make a new start, but I was taking it all in, making sure that I didn't miss anything. I wasn't searching for anything useful or valuable that the thieves might have missed, but I turned the debris over as I went, to see what remained underneath.

  Eventually, I found my phone—the phone I hadn't taken with me to Judith Hillinger's house in case it made an unsightly bulge in my jacket pock
et, and because I knew full well that no one would call, because no one ever did. The indicator was lit now, though, telling me that I had missed a call.

  I put the phone in my pocket without even thumbing the keypad to find out who the missed call was from—because I knew.

  I knew that I had missed a call from Judith Hillinger, because I knew now that I had missed the whole import of her invitation. I knew that what she'd intended to provide was not merely an inspirational example but an exercise in contrasts, with the intention of intensifying the focus of my thoughts to an inordinate degree. “Come aboard,” her whole message had been, “and this is what you can expect, as a matter of daily routine—but refuse to come aboard, and this is what you can expect, by way of a conclusion.” I didn't look at the phone because I didn't need to hear her honeyed voice underlining the brutal demonstration without even deigning to mention it, adding contemptuous insult to vile injury.

  If she'd come to deliver the message herself, I would have killed her, unless she or Jacquard had managed to kill me first. Fortunately, I was alone. I had no one ready to hand upon whom to exact my revenge—and even in circumstances such as these, I knew that I would be unable to leave home again without taking yet another dose of a powerful stimulant—something to obliterate my innate separation anxiety.

  It wasn't agoraphobia that I had, even in the inexact sense in which most psychologists and psychiatrists used the term. It was something more basic, less cerebral—something that was anchored in the most primitive parts of the hind-brain. The damage was self-inflicted, of course, but that didn't mean that it was easily self-medicable.

  I knew that I shouldn't take any more pills—I'd already exceeded the dose that would normally be reckoned safe—but I needed to confront Judith Hillinger for one last time. I didn't intend to kill her, because killing her would only have been possible as a reflexive gesture, in an uncontrollable fit of temper, but I did feel an urgent need to make it clear to her exactly what she'd done, and exactly what the cost of her ignorance had been.