The Golden Fleece (18 page)

Even while cooking a four-course dinner for six, Eve Miller was in total control; there was not a drop of spatter anywhere on the gleaming tiles, dumb as they were, not a crumb or a flake on the polished work-surfaces. The crockery for the later courses was stacked with military precision; the knives, ladles and spatulas assembled in wall-racks were gleaming so brightly they might have been chrome-plated. Eve was wearing a frilly apron that was as dead as a doornail, but the blood-red dress she was wearing underneath was vibrant with artificial life.

Nick, like Adam, was conscientiously clad in drab plumage; a superficial glance might have rated them as nearly alike as two peas in a pod, although Adam saw things very differently. He always had, even before the divorce from Lilith, but his new circumstances had sharpened his regrets considerably. Reducing the dosage of his patches might have helped with that particular problem, but that kind of retreat was unthinkable for a man of Adam’s stripe.

The door chime resounded again, impossibly mellow, and Nick rushed off to admit Seth and Ruth Wright, leaving Adam alone with Eve. That hadn’t been in Nick’s script—the effusive host had to tidy his inconvenient guest away into the sitting-room as soon as the perfection of the busy kitchen had been dutifully observed—but Eve had known Adam far too long ever to be flustered by his presence. She gave him a swift peck on the cheek and whispered: “How are you holding up?”

“Pretty well,” Adam replied—but his hands were now free, and he couldn’t help a reflexive twitch of the right hand towards the left bicep, where his patch was. Eve pretended not to notice, but he knew that she had. Her fake ruffled sleeves were amply long enough to conceal her own patch. The day was not far off, Adam knew, when the work of patches would be fully integrated into the smartness of clothing, but the time was not quite yet. Lilith was still working on the problem, among others, but she was unlikely to win the race to the crucial breakthrough.

Nick hustled Seth and Ruth into the kitchen, creating a crowd. There was a further handover of flowers and wine, efficiently executed, given the crowding. Adam was relieved to note that Seth had brought silver carnations and Chilean wine. Seth and Ruth were both solicitors; he was a specialist in company law while she was in criminal—another marriage made in Heaven, but one more likely to survive internal corrosion. Legal minds always tended, in Adam’s slightly churlish estimation, to be somewhat lacking in the aesthetic department, although legal stomachs certainly seemed to enjoy fine food.

Adam was proud of his own aesthetic sensibilities, even though he was a scientist through and through. He was always prepared to argue that there was as much aesthetics as logic in bioscience, especially its creative aspects.

At least, Adam thought, neither Seth nor Ruth would be inclined to spend all night explaining to him how badly the divorce settlement had been mismanaged by his solicitor. He greeted them both politely, but with a certain reserve. They were among Nick’s newer acquaintances—of which he had made a great many since he had become a successful corporate analyst, assessing the potential of takeover targets for a mysterious cabal of private equity investors—but they had already achieved a remarkable closeness, to Eve as well as Nick.

Nick had assured Adam when issuing the invitation, with all the sincerity he could fake, that the sixth guest would merely be making up the numbers, but Adam knew well enough what his fate and his role now was within all the overlapping social circles in which he moved. Wherever he went, there would always be “someone to make up the numbers”, until he was “fixed up” again. It would become a telic objective, with an appropriate psychological reward attached.

The Millers’ sitting-room was as spick and span as the kitchen, though not as conspicuously polished. There was not a speck of dust on the carpet, nor a thread of lint on the sofa, nor the remotest ghost of a cobweb in the corners of the ceiling. Adam, determined not to be consigned to the sofa with an empty space yawning beside him, beat Seth to the armchair without seeming to make a race of it.

Nick was busy with the cocktail-shaker when the chime sounded again; politeness demanded that he pass it to Adam, who was the older friend, and Adam stood up to pour, allowing him to turn his back to the door when it eventually opened after the obligatory sidestep kitchenwards. Nick would, in any case, have introduced the newcomer to the couple first, leaving Adam for last.

“And this is my old friend Adam Goldsmith,” Nick finished, as Adam handed round the chartreuse-tinted cocktails. “He lectures in biotechnology at the Uni—the old one, not the new one. Adam, this is my new friend Judith Apter. She’s a web developer.”

There was something about the combination of a female Christian name and the term “web developer” that made Adam think “black widow”, but Judith Apter wasn’t dressed in black and he had no reason to think that she was a widow. The miracles of cosmetic somatic engineering made it impossible to judge anyone’s age simply by looking at them, but there was something about Judith’s smile suggestive of authentic innocence. Her purple sleeves came all the way down to her wrists. There wasn’t the slightest hint of a bulge, but Adam guessed readily enough that she’d be wearing a patch the size of a five-pound coin, just like his own. Even if she were just making up the numbers, there had to be something at stake between her and Nick, business-wise. She had to be feeling the stress of opportunity and expectation, and must have taken extra precautions in the interests of maintaining focus and incentive.

“What sort of biotech to you do?” Judith asked, politely.

“Mostly artificial,” Adam replied. “Some microbial, some textile. What sort of web development do you do?”

“The usual cocktail of commissions—two-thirds ads, one-third edutainment.”

“Are you doing some work for Nick?

“Consultancy for one of his takeovers. You?”

“We’ve never worked together,” Adam said. “We used to play together, when we were young—back at the dawn of time.” He looked away, slightly discomfited, when the careless metaphor stirred up ideative echoes. At the dawn of time, according to
Genesis,
Adam and Eve had been happy in the garden, until Old Nick had come along in serpentine guise—but Adam had had another wife before then, if you believed the Apocrypha: a nonconformist Lilith who would doubtless have insisted on baring her arms to demonstrate her independence, her “ownership of her emotions”, her “responsibility for her own telic intensity”. Adam felt an urgent necessity to change the subject.

Fortunately, Judith did it for him. “Are the Wrights old friends too?” she asked.

Seth Wright, having left his wife to entertain Nick, immediately elbowed his way into the conversation. “I only met Nick a few months ago,” he volunteered. “We came into the Propriotech takeover from different directions and joined forces to manage the leverage. We’ve become thick as thieves, though—we live within walking distance, although we’d never dream of actually walking. Adam was somewhere in the Propriotech battle-line too, although I didn’t meet him at the time—he made a small killing when the buyout went through.”

“
Killing’s
a corporate lawyer’s term,” Adam said. “He means that one of my patents was among the assets that got stripped.”

“Stripped
isn’t a corporate lawyer’s term,” Seth quipped, “and my lovely wife has far more to say about killing than I do. She sometimes defends killers of the literal kind—paratelic killers, of course. There’s no point defending telic murderers— no arguments to be made in mitigation.”

“Patches aren’t supposed to encourage violence, let alone murder,” Judith observed, gauchely—making it obvious that she really was as young as she looked.

What she said was true, of course—PIA patches were only supposed to encourage
socially acceptable
telic behavior, although they couldn’t forbid natural telic behavior, or the association of such behavior with inappropriate neural rewards. The sin that Judith had committed was an error of judgment rather than fact. Discussions of that particular topic were already passé, quite worn out.

“Adam’s a bioscientist,” Seth observed, dismissively. “He can give you all the technical details, if you’re really interested.”

“Actually,” Adam said, “the problem with designing patches to promote telic violence is economic rather than technical. There’s no substantial black market in them. Patches promoting paratelic violence, on the other hand, are always in demand.”

“I thought that was a tabloid myth,” Judith said.

“Just because it’s a tabloid myth,” Seth put in, beating Adam to the punch, “doesn’t mean that it’s untrue.”

Nick ushered them into the dining-room then, and promptly disappeared into the kitchen, from which he returned bearing bowls of asparagus soup, a basket of French bread and a bottle of Chardonnay in a portable cooler. Adam had to count Nick’s hands twice to make sure that he still only had two. Eve emerged in his wake, bearing more soup-bowls, a second bread-basket and Adam’s bottle of ‘98 Bordeaux. There were no place-cards on the oval table, but Nick and Eve cleverly maneuvered all of the guests into their carefully-allotted seats. Adam was set between Eve and Judith, directly but rather distantly opposite Ruth.

The soup, as was only to be expected, was divine. Seth was the first to spill a stray drop on the tablecloth, but the smart cloth swallowed it with alacrity. Adam could not suppress a pang of regret as he looked at the place where it had vanished; in a kinder world, that might have been one of his patents, worth a great deal more than the one that had brought him such a derisory windfall in the Propriotech takeover. It might even have been a shared patent, cementing his Heaven-made marriage and protecting it against disaster—but treacherous Lilith had refused to take advantage of the technology that could have facilitated their partnership.

~ * ~

 “It’s obscene,” Lilith had said, when the first PIA applicators came on to the market, eighteen months after the first TGAD applicators. Until then, TGAD patches had been called “pleasure patches” by their users and detractors alike, but as soon as the new antithesis was established the popular parlance shifted. TGAD stood, somewhat euphemistically, for Third Generation Anti-Depressant but PIA wasn’t so stubbornly descriptive; it stood for Pride In Achievement. From that day onwards, the rival product-categories were known as Pride and Joy, at least among the users who loved Joy. Those who preferred Pride eventually came to favor a sterner terminology; it was they who had taken up the telic/paratelic dichotomy.

“It’s inevitable,” Adam had assured his wife. What had begun as a mild philosophical debate had then turned into their fiercest and most enduring argument; at its beginning they had not been long out of the honeymoon period, and the sporadic continuation of the quarrel hurt them both more deeply than they knew.

Adam took the position that people had been using drugs to control their moods for millennia, ever since the primal discovery of the intoxicating effects of fermented grains and the hallucinogenic effects of certain fungi. Organic chemistry had made that kind of artificial intervention far more sophisticated, eventually leading to the invention of the first- and second-generation anti-depressants. It was inevitable, he argued, that genomic augmentation would lead to a further order of sophistication, ensuring not only that people would never have to feel miserable again if they didn’t want to, but that they could actually employ artificial happiness as a carrot to encourage them in productive endeavor.

“That’s the beauty of it, you see,” he told her, when he still thought or hoped, that he could make his point by the sheer force of reason. “The problem with TGADs is that all they do is make people feel good, with no regard to circumstances. They’re just the latest opium of the people, blotting out the pain and misery of poverty and failure with blunt neurochemical instruments. They take away incentives, facilitating bliss in ignorance. PIAs are different. PIAs recognize and accommodate the fundamental principle that feeling good—happiness, joy, pleasure, or whatever label you care to use—ought to be
earned,
as a reward for some task completed, some artistry attained. What PIAs do is enhance the neural pathways that connect the pleasure areas in the brain with purposive action, with physical and intellectual accomplishment. They guarantee that people can take an entirely proper delight in the results of their creativity, and an entirely appropriate pleasure in the products of their labor. Whereas TGADs drag their users down, forging a society of modern lotus-eaters, PIAs will lift their users up, reopening the road to Utopia.”

“That’s a foolishly optimistic expectation, Adam,” was Lilith’s bitter riposte. “These things have more in common with the old nicotine patches than mere appearance. What they’re peddling is poison; while pretending to help us free ourselves from addiction, they’re actually feeding and enhancing addiction. We’ve grown used to thinking of TGAD reliance as the ultimate in addiction, but that’s because we couldn’t see PIA coming. You can trumpet all the slogans you want, but at the end of the day, all PIAs offer is the opportunity to become happier workaholics. When you talk about enhancing the neural pathways connecting to the pleasure areas in the brain, you mean that it will intensify the rewards associated with the pathways that are already there, not that it will encourage the development of new pathways. In fact, it will discourage the development of new pathways, preventing the further elaboration and sophistication of an individual’s spectrum of rewards. PIA isn’t a road-map to Utopia, Adam; it’s a recipe for a society of obsessive-compulsive freaks who rejoice in their obsessivecompulsiveness.”