Asimov's SF, March 2008

by Dell Magazine Authors

  The phone wasn't the only thing the visitors had left undamaged. They had stolen my stores, but they hadn't discovered my secret stores. They had taken my commercial products, but they hadn't taken the products that no one knew I had: the products of my wayward creative genius—assisted, of course, by the best inspirationals and focal intensifiers that expert psychotropic proteonomics could produce.

  I took what I needed from my secret stores, and hid the remainder away again. I'd never been utterly determined that my secret would die with me, or else I've have destroyed the products, but I hadn't expected to ever use one in anger, as a weapon of destruction, either. I'd always conserved the faint hope that they might one day be useful, once inherent hazards had been overcome by ingenious modification. As Susan Oxhey would doubtless have pointed out, though, I hadn't actually done anything about it. I hadn't actually tried to undo their capacity to do damage, to find the antidotes to their poison. I'd given up, running away from the problem ... even though running away, in a crudely literal sense, was one thing I could no longer do.

  With the water-soluble crystals ready for deployment, I went back to the boat and retraced my mazy route back to the nascent Isle of Withernsea and the mansion that had been raised thereon.

  The house was dark; the party had broken up immediately after my departure and the guests had gone to bed.

  I knocked on the door, mentally rehearsing what I would have to say to Jacquard in order to force him to rouse his employer. I didn't have to. In her recklessly brave fashion, Judith Hillinger was still answering her own door to unexpected callers.

  “Daniel!” she said, although I'd never granted her the privilege of addressing me by my first name. “What on earth is the matter?"

  So she's prepared to brazen it out! I thought. She's prepared to keep on playing the game. Good. It'll make it all the more certain that she can't win.

  She let me in, and I made my way to the settee on which I sat during my first visit.

  “I need a drink,” I said. “Iced water, if that's okay."

  Making a big show of alarm, she poured iced water from a jug into two tall glasses. She was still calm and relaxed, but it was the after-effect of the euphoric she'd taken earlier, not the more recent effect of a narcotic. Although everyone had gone to bed, she hadn't taken anything to make her sleep. Taking the euphoric had been a mistake, I thought. It made her relaxed, off guard. It made her vulnerable. That was why natural selection, working on our remote ancestors, had been so parsimonious in laying on a natural supply of euphorics within the brain. Such compounds provided an exceedingly pleasant experience for people who were among friends and safe, but they rendered people in any sort of jeopardy virtually defenseless. The efficiency of pharmed euphorics made natural selection look like a very inefficient innovator, but the whole point of nature's rough patches was that they worked well enough in the kinds of hostile situations that everyday struggles for survival and the vicissitudes of primitive culture routinely laid on.

  “What's happened?” she asked.

  “My place has been smashed up,” I told her, prepared to spell it out if she insisted on pretending not to know. “While I was enjoying myself here with your charming companions, someone did a very thorough hatchet job on the house and all my crops. They smashed everything. It's irredeemable. I'm finished—as a pharmer, at any rate. I can't afford to refit and restock. I'm finished."

  I saw a brief flash of guilt in her eyes, then—but it was gone in an instant. It was just a brief temptation, rejected with confidence. She didn't feel guilty. I drained my glass in a single long draught, before she'd even taken a sip from hers, and held the glass out to her. She took it, and went to refill it. I slipped the crystals into her glass while her back was turned. It was simpler and easier than I'd ever imagined. There was more than enough water in the glass to dissolve them all, and the resultant solution was tasteless.

  “I'm sorry, Daniel,” she said. “Truly sorry."

  “Are you?” I asked, accusingly.

  She winced slightly, and took a sip of water to cover her confusion. “You don't think that I had anything to do with this, do you?” she said, defensively.

  “Why would I?” I riposted.

  She took another sip, and then a larger gulp. “When you first came here,” she said, “I phoned Jacquard and asked him to find your place and take a look around. I didn't know you then, you see. I hadn't looked you up, or pulled your records from Big Pharma. I didn't know that you were one of us. You must have noticed, but when you didn't say anything, I assumed that you understood. I wouldn't destroy your operation, though. Is that why you came back—because you thought I'd ordered it done? Please say it isn't. If you need a place to stay—and you do, obviously—you're welcome here. Tell me that's why you came.” By now, her glass was half-empty. It was all over. The crystals would take a few hours to take effect, and it would be a few more days before the symptoms became clearly manifest. The effect was irreversible.

  “You didn't want to take no for a answer,” I said. “You couldn't bear it. Why should you? You wouldn't take it from the law, and you wouldn't compromise, even with the law. Why should you take it from some petty pharmer who won't even get his face fixed, who insults you merely by existing?"

  “Daniel, that's absurd! You have to believe me. I would never do such a thing.” She drained her glass.

  “There's no point in denying it,” I said. “I know. I didn't listen to your phone call, but I presume that's all sweet pretence as well, without a trace of honest gloating. It makes no difference. It doesn't matter any longer how you play the game. I know. It's over."

  “I don't know what you're talking about,” she complained. “What phone call?"

  And that was when the whole edifice came tumbling down. In itself, the datum was irrelevant, but it broke the spell of illusory certainty. It reminded me that I might be wrong. It reminded me that one of the possible side-effects of the stimulant I'd taken to permit me to attend her dinner party was galloping paranoia—and that sometimes, when you're paranoid, they really aren't out to get you.

  I took my phone out of my pocket and played back the missed call. It was from the communards in Patrington. Things had turned sour in Hull; our relatively honest dealers had come off worse in a feud with gangsters hawking inferior products. The rival dealers had decided to solve the problem by cutting off the supply of the superior products. They'd raided the commune while its residents were still there, and had smashed up the residents as comprehensively as the real estate, though stopping short of actual murder. Then they'd come looking for me. The communards had been desperate to tell me to get out—to run and hide.

  Judith Hillinger was telling the truth. She hadn't had anything to do with it. She might well be capable of organizing a gang of drug-peddlers to do her dirty work, but she'd never have tolerated a gang who were trying to destroy quality-controlled products in order to peddle their own polluted poisons.

  I cursed silently. I knew that I couldn't take back or repair what I'd done. That was the one thing, above all else, that the experience with Marie had burned into my consciousness. I couldn't take back or repair what I'd done.

  “I'm sorry,” I said, weakly. “I seem to have gone crazy—crazier than usual, that is. The call was from Patrington, warning me that the wreckers were on their way. Things have gone sour higher up the supply chain. I'm truly sorry."

  “It's all right,” she said, not knowing what I meant. “No harm done. You thought I was trying to force you to work for me—and I had been, in a way. It was gentle force, but it was force. You were right in what you said just now. I can't abide people saying no to me, even the law. It's an odd sort of compulsion—one they haven't yet found a psychotropic to control."

  “Be careful if and when they do,” I said. “Sometimes, the cure is worse than the disease.” I downed my second ration of cold water and handed the glass back to her. She refilled her own as well.

  “I wish you'd tell me w
hy you keep throwing out these sinister hints,” she said. “Obviously, something went badly wrong with the research you and Marie were doing, and it split you up irrevocably—but what's the point of keeping it all locked up inside? If you explained, maybe someone could help—not me, necessarily, but someone."

  Now that the paranoia had evaporated, I could see that she had a point. She deserved an explanation, even though it couldn't possibly do her any good. She and Marie were two of a kind now, or soon would be.

  “Did you hear all that stuff I was telling your lovely guests at dinner?” I asked.

  “About psychotropics being responsible for the evolution and shaping of human consciousness, and for the origins of civilization, art, and culture, and what a bad job natural selection made of it? I only caught snatches—but I think I have the gist of it. I looked up your archived documents. Big Pharma never throws anything away."

  “Big Pharma throws all sorts of things away,” I told her. “All the research results that aren't convenient and don't fit in with their current marketing strategies, for instance. That can be very frustrating."

  “So I understand,” she said. “What was it, exactly, that drove you and Marie to leave and set up your own outlaw operation?"

  The situation felt very odd, but I figured that I might as well explain the background. It wouldn't do her any good, and I certainly had no intention of explaining exactly how relevant it had just become, but she did deserve an explanation, and I had nothing better to do. In any case, I thought, talking might distract me from wanting to cut my throat.

  * * * *

  “We were working on potential treatments for the spectrum of autistic disorders, especially Asperger's,” I told her. “It was an awkward area, not least because some Asperger's sufferers get compensation for their social difficulties in terms of unusual mental abilities, especially calculative facility and feats of memory. The holy grail of that kind of research was finding a way of treating the undesirable aspects while retaining the beneficial ones—eventually leading to a means of inducing the beneficial abilities in healthy individuals without risk—but Big Pharma doesn't go questing for grails. Big Pharma just wanted a marketable treatment—a way to achieve a temporary suppression of symptoms, which would keep the punters coming back for more and more.

  “The general line of thought was that the Asperger's-related ability to do complicated math or memorize prodigious amounts of information must derive from a similar process to those stimulated by focal intensifiers, so almost all the past research had dealt with chemical descendants of ADHD treatments and the latest digitalid derivatives. Sometimes, though, you can get superficially similar results from very different causative processes. Because the symptomatic spectrum extended all the way from severe autism to what used to be termed ‘ordinary male behavior'—fascination with sports statistics, collecting fervor, that sort of thing—Marie and I thought that most of the researchers were looking in the wrong place. We thought that they shouldn't be looking specifically at the metabolics that were most active in the cerebrum, but at something more basic, maybe even functioning in the hind-brain.

  “What I said to our guests about the initial development of agriculture being associated with psychotropic cultivation is an idea I took seriously. In itself, it doesn't deny the common assumption that settling down was a choice—a rational response to newly perceived opportunities. But I wondered whether that assumption might be wrong. Throughout the animal kingdom, you see, you find contrasts between different basic behavior patterns. Some animals are permanently sedentary, some incessantly nomadic, but most have well-defined sedentary phases in their life and well-defined migratory ones. That's what the logic of natural selection favors: most animals settle down temporarily to breed, but they don't stay where they are thereafter, because the ones that thrive in the evolutionary story are the ones that spread most widely. How that's determined chemically we don't know, but there has to be some kind of chemical mechanism that's effective even in the most primitive parts of the vertebrate brain.

  “I wondered whether that mechanism might have something to do with the impulse to settle down—that there might be some kind of trigger that had been squeezed in some of our remote ancestors as a result of haphazardly selective psychotropic ingestion. The trigger would still be there, you see, even if it had fallen out of use—that's the way natural selection operates, by applying layers of patches. I wondered, too, if it might be the same psychotropic complex that was involved in the autism spectrum: calculation and collecting are, after all, both closely associated with the behavior patterns inherent in settling down and managing crops.

  “I assumed that what we were looking for was some kind of two-way switch controlled by a feedback mechanism—a feedback mechanism that could not only be interrupted but overridden, by producing compounds that had more powerful effects than the naturally occurring ones. The basic problem of proteonomic analysis—that most proteins the body produces are transient and only produced in specialist cells, making them hard to detect and trap—is, of course, further magnified in psychotropic proteonomics, where the compounds are not merely transient but tend to occur in complex families produced by different combinations of exons in the same intimate gene-groups. It was a laborious business, but I figured that as long as I was looking in the right place, I'd eventually stand a good chance of trapping one or more of the family. I was right.

  “It was when I reported back on the compound I'd identified that the company pulled the plug on us. It wasn't the biochemists that blackballed us but the product-development people. The work was theoretically interesting, but they couldn't see the treatment potential. They couldn't see a route from discovering a psychotropically activated trigger, which might have been responsible for the sudden changes of behavior that led to the birth of agriculture, to producing an effective treatment for Asperger's."

  “They did have a point,” Judith Hillinger put in.

  “Yes they did,” I agreed. “A better one than they knew. I tried to argue that if we could discover the biological bases of such mental phenomena as lightning calculation, eidetic memory, and collecting fervor we might not only be able to preserve the more desirable aspects of some Asperger's cases but also produce them at will, but that sort of objective wasn't in their sights. I also argued that if we could find a way to tweak the basic switch that would turn hyper-agriculturalists back into nomads, we might begin to get a grip on an autism treatment, but it didn't stop the ultimatum. Change direction, or go. We went.

  “We set up our own lab, trying to continue the work with the aid of stolen materials—materials that Big Pharma had been perfectly content to throw away. We supported ourselves by pharming the kinds of drugs for which there's always a steady demand. I can't honestly say that we got much further, in terms of the biochemistry, but I did manage to engineer half a dozen analogues of the compound I'd trapped. We had no one to test them on but ourselves, so that's what we did. We assumed that any effects we detected would be temporary."

  “But you were wrong?” Judith Hillinger prompted, when I paused.

  “We were wrong,” I agreed. “Delicate feedback mechanisms, once disrupted, sometimes stay disrupted. Psychoactive compounds can't always be metabolized in the flesh that natural selection designed. Sometimes, like the prion proteins that cause BSE, they not only stick around but multiply, reproducing themselves by means of a process far simpler than DNA/RNA coding. We were idiots. It only required one dose to fuck up our systems. I was the first guinea pig, and it seemed at first that the compound I'd taken hadn't done anything much at all, so after a decent interval we tried the second on Marie. Again, the result was slow to appear, but eventually it did."

  Judith Hillinger was a clever woman. She'd followed the argument every step of the way. “She didn't leave you because she'd fallen out of love with you,” she guessed. “She left you because the psychotropic you'd engineered—more powerful than the naturally occurring compound—turned her back i
nto a nomad. She was possessed by wanderlust, more powerfully than any actual nomad ever was. She couldn't stay in one place any longer. She had to move on—and on, and on. Whereas...."

  “I couldn't leave,” I finished for her. “I got the opposite effect. She can't stay in one place for long without being heavily sedated; I need stimulants to drown out the separation anxiety I get if I leave familiar ground. We both get side effects from the medication, mine being periodic fits of paranoia. Neither effect was temporary, and all our attempts to reverse or counter them came to nothing. The hind-brain's a stubborn brute, far less amenable to manipulation than the cerebrum. You change it at your peril. I tried a lot of counter-treatments. At first, they simply didn't work—then they began to trigger violent reactions; the immune system had got involved. I had to stop. I still have little or no idea what the long-term effects might be, but at least I can still think about the problem, in a brooding sort of way. Marie can't. She lives for the moment nowadays—but she is still alive, as far as I know. Last time I heard from her, she seemed happy. She doesn't know why she's the way she is, and she doesn't care. She just keeps on moving on. In my fashion, I've moved on too—I just haven't gone anywhere. I can't. I think I need to go home now.

  “You said they'd smashed it up."

  “They did—but that's not the point. I need to go back."

  “I'll help you,” she said. “I'll help you rebuild. You don't have to sell me the place, or work for me. I can get you protection from the rogue dealers, I think. We can work through this, as good neighbors should."

  I burst into tears then, because I knew I'd blown it. I knew that I'd ruined everything, and had thrown away my last chance to sustain or improve my life. I couldn't even tell myself that it wasn't my fault—that it was just an unfortunate side effect of wayward psychotropics—because it was my fault, precisely because it was an unfortunate side effect of wayward psychotropics.