The Golden Fleece (20 page)

Judith sat down beside him, awkwardly tense. “Are you all right, Adam?” she asked, in a low voice—as if she feared that the question, or its answer, might somehow upset Nick if he were to overhear it.

“Fine.” Adam lied. “It gave us all a fright, I dare say—but she’ll be fine now. It won’t take the doctor long to give her the all-clear.”

“I’ve seen it on the news plenty of times,” Judith said, “but never for real. They’re adamant that it isn’t the patches that cause it, but that can’t really be true, can it? As Seth says, just because something’s a tabloid myth doesn’t mean it’s a lie.”

“PI A patches don’t cause the seizures,” Adam told her. “They just make them possible. It’s always been possible, of course, for that kind of neural amplification to happen naturally, but it almost never happened before PIA. Now, it’s much easier to die of happiness than it ever was before—or at least to go into literal fits of ecstasy.”

“It can’t be the pleasure that does it,” Judith objected, again displaying her naivety. “Paratelics don’t have fits like that.”

“No, they don’t,” Adam admitted, dully. “The new epilepsy is strictly a middle class disease. It’s not the pitch of the joy so much as the tautness of the obsession. Thank God Lilith’s not here—the conflict of emotions would probably tear her apart.”

“What conflict of emotions?” Judith asked, keeping her voice strictly neutral. She obviously knew that Lilith was the name of Adam’s ex-wife.

“She’s known Eve for as long as I have,” Adam said. “Loved her just as much, in her fashion. She’d be heartbroken—but Lilith, being Lilith, wouldn’t be able to hold back a surge of triumph. She’d see this as proof that she was right, you see—it isn’t, but that’s the way she’d see it.”

“She’s a dissenter,” Judith observed. It was a comment, not a question.

“Is she? Is that what we’re calling refuseniks these days? She’s clean; she doesn’t use patches. Never has, never will—and I really do mean
never
.”

“That’s why you divorced,” Judith said, maintaining her tentative tone.

“Irreconcilable differences,” Adam replied. “When they say mixed marriages don’t work they usually mean telics and paratelics, but that can sometimes be a winning combination. Refuseniks and paratelics can get along too, if the rest of the chemistry’s right. I loved Lilith and she loved me, in her fashion, but there’s no hope for a marriage between a telic and a...dissenter. Didn’t Nick and Eve give you strict instructions to avoid the subject of Lilith when they invited you along to balance the numbers at the party?”

“Of course they did,” said Judith, but carried on regardless. “What does she do for a living?”

“Industrial biotech. Textiles.”

“And she doesn’t feel the pressure to compete? She doesn’t feel she’s losing out to her PIA-enhanced peers?” Judith’s voice had suddenly become more intense, and Adam guessed that she was not disobeying orders just for the hell of it; it was her own situation that she was thinking about.

“No,” Adam said, shortly. “She insists that they’re the ones who are losing out. There’s none so blind as those who will not see.”

“I wouldn’t dare to try,” Judith told him, confirming his conclusion, “but when you see something like that....”

“There’s no need to worry,” Adam told her, not meaning it kindly. “There’s no reason to expect anything like that to happen to you. You’re not Eve.”

Judith looked at him sharply, but Adam judged that she hadn’t taken offence, or even been aware that she might have done. Judith wasn’t wondering what Eve had that she didn’t; she was wondering how Adam had ended up with Lilith instead of Eve, if he felt as intensely about Eve as he seemed to do. That was something that Adam had no intention of explaining.

Nick interrupted them then, having been brought back down to earth by Seth. He was still exceedingly fretful, though, even by the standards of a telic forced to wait. “She is going to be all right, isn’t she?” he said, to Adam.

“She’ll be fine,” Adam assured him. “It’s just nature’s way of telling her to take it a little bit easier. She’s bright enough to heed the warning.”

“It’s not that easy, though, is it?” Nick said.

“Yes it is,” Adam told him. “It really is.”

~ * ~

The reason why Adam and Lilith had ended up together, instead of Adam and Eve—if there really had been a reason, rather than a mere freak of circumstance—was that Adam and Lilith had had the potential to change the world, whereas Adam and Eve would only have changed one another.

Adam and Eve might have been
—would
have been, Adam now felt sure—the happier couple, but Adam and Lilith had planned to be collaborators as well as eternal lovers. They were both bioscientists, and their specialisms had an obvious overlap in the economically significant field of smart clothing. If only they had been able to sustain an adequate level of domestic harmony, they might have worked together as closely, and as productively, as Pierre and Marie Curie—but they hadn’t. The patent applications they might have formulated and filed together had never come to term, and they had missed out on their due share of the big boom. They had had their separate successes, but they had been very minor ones compared to what they might have done together.

Adam knew that he ought to phone Lilith, to tell her what had happened to Eve. After all, she’d known Nick and Eve as long as he had, and just as well. But for a whim of circumstance, it might have been her they’d invited to dinner tonight, along with some unattached Byronic hunk who cherished his satanic gloom far too much ever to surrender to the joys of PI A...except that it wasn’t a whim of circumstance at all. There was no way Eve Miller would ever tolerate a refusenik at her dinner table, even one she had known since childhood and loved, in her fashion. Lilith knew that too, and the knowledge would only add to the awful confusion of her emotions when she heard the news.

It was better, Adam decided, not to phone her. Not now, at any rate. Instead, he rehearsed the argument in his mind that he would have been forced to put to her, to prove to her that Eve’s misfortune wasn’t any kind of proof that she was right about the awful iniquity of PIA patches.

“The problem,” he would have told her, “isn’t the enhancement of pleasure in achievement. The problem is the complexity of the enhanced neural pathways that are set up. It’s a matter of focus. Common-or-garden workaholics like me and Nick, or Seth and Ruth, can narrow the scope of our potential achievements, so the neural pathways enhanced by the patches are relatively simple and direct—motorways of the mind. Common-or-garden mothers can do the same—but Eve is an artist, who brings an unmatchable flair to
everything.
She could never be content to concentrate on motherhood. She might have given up her own career, but she hasn’t given up her involvement in Nick’s, and she hasn’t given up her determination to maintain a social life outside of motherhood and Nick’s work alike. She’s tried to maintain too many strings to her bow, that’s all. The enhanced pathways she’s built in her brain, with the aid of PIA, are too complicated and intricately tangled. All she needs to do is slow down, take things a little easier, lower her standards just a little.”

Unfortunately, Adam had known Lilith for far too long not to be able to synthesize the arguments she would have constructed in opposition to his. “That’s exactly what I’ve been telling you all along,” she would have retorted. “PIAs are creating a culture of obsession. They help people with unhealthy tendencies to become even more unhealthy, even more manically focused on their petty specialisms. To a mentally healthy person—a
well-rounded
person like Eve—they’re a curse, which can only lead to neural overload and mental breakdown. How can she slow down, take things easier and
lower her standards a little
while she’s addicted to her PIA cocktail of choice?”

“She’s not addicted,” Adam replied, reflexively. “PIAs aren’t addictive.”

“Not
physiologically
addictive,” his Lilith-anima countered, “but in psychological terms, they’re as addictive as addictive can be. Who can’t get hung up and strung out on
success
? Who can resist the temptation to
excel.
But we have to resist it, Adam, don’t you see? We have to retain mastery of our own motivation.”

“But we could have had success,” Adam objected, plaintively. “We could have
made a killing.
We could have done our bit to change the world.”

~ * ~

“Are you all right, Adam?” Judith asked, yet again.

Adam woke up with a start, convinced that he had not really been asleep. He became aware that the fingers of his right hand had been plucking at his left arm—not, he realized, to test the patch beneath the fleshcloth but to tease the garment itself, the living clothing to whose evolution he and Lilith might have made a crucial contribution, if only they had not been torn apart by a difference of opinion.

“Yes,” he said. “I’m fine.”

“Eve’s awake,” Judith told him. Nick popped his head out just now to say that you can go in to see her if you want. Seth and I just waved at her from the doorway.

Adam looked around and saw that Seth was in the far corner of the waiting room, muttering into his phone while staring at his wristwatch—the perfect image of Telic Man. He was presumably bringing Ruth up to date, and assuring her that they would soon be back on track, back on the timetable.

Adam stood up, and went in to see Eve. The room she was in was very clean, although it wasn’t easy to find telic cleaners, but Adam couldn’t believe that it seemed clean to Eve. To her, it must seem gloomy, dingy and dangerous. She was desperate to be out of it and home, but she had the obligatory fluid drip attached to her arm and a whole battery of electrodes clustered on her skull, feeding data to an EEG. The doctor had doubtless set a deadline for the completion of his enquiries, but the waiting would be agony for the patient.

Nick stayed where he was, sitting on the right-hand side of the bed holding Eve’s right hand. Adam brought a chair up to the other side.

“You gave us a fright,” Adam observed, as Eve’s anxious blue eyes met his.

“I ruined the dinner,” she said, tearfully. “The whole evening.”

“The dinner was fabulous,” Adam told her. “You know as well as I do that no further mouthful can ever match up to the first. It was a kindness to interrupt us, really. Imagine the emphasis your performance lent to the memory of that perfect moment. It was a masterstroke—pure
coup-de-théâtre.”

Eve smiled.

“I wish I could bullshit like that;’ Nick said. “You should never have been a scientist, Adam—with a talent like that you could have worked for the tabloids.”

“I wanted to change the world,” Adam said, pretending to answer Nick’s veiled insult. “I still might.”

“You never got dessert” Eve lamented, losing her smile again.

“It’s dessert,” Adam said. “It’ll keep.”

“You didn’t even get to finish the ‘98 Bordeaux.”

“It’s a full-bodied claret,” Adam said. “It’ll be all the better for a chance to breathe.”

“You really should have decanted it instead of just uncorking the bottle,” Eve immediately said to Nick. “We really must try to get things right.”

“Not according to Adam,” Nick retorted, a trifle spitefully. “Slow down, take it easy, lower our standards—that’s his advice. Did the doctor say anything?”

“The same, but not as economically. Is Samuel all right? He won’t like it if I’m not there when he wakes up.”

“Ruth’s with him,” Nick assured her. “He’ll be fine. You’d better go now, Adam—it’s getting late, and you must have things to do tomorrow. You ought to take Judith home—this isn’t really her concern, and she must be in a bit of a state.”

“What must she think of us?” Eve wondered, aloud. “Do you like Judith, Adam?”

“Yes,” said Adam, dutifully. “She’s very nice—brought a perfect balance to the party.”

“I picked her,” Nick said, proudly.

“And you’re absolutely right about my seeing her home,” Adam said. “Be sure and take the doctor’s advice, Eve. You don’t have to be perfect in
every
respect, and you’re already perfect in more ways than any normal human being could ever hope to be.”