The Devil in Detail, page 16
It occurred to me that blending the essential sounds of Mummy Dearest and the Tinnitus of Time with the Fields of the Nephilim and the Gardens of Delight—not to mention Ataraxia and Sopor Aeternus, aided and inspired by the Ensemble of Shadows—might produce some strange results. Running through the names like that made me realize that my selections hadn’t been at all inappropriate to the task in hand—probably better, I flattered myself by thinking, than anything that Lionel or the terrible two’s other hapless subjects would be able to come up with.
I wasn’t afraid of becoming bored, even if the relaxation tape had no measurable effect at all. One of the few advantages of accepting a vocation as a writer, apart from licensing various kinds of obsessive/compulsive behavior, is that boredom becomes impossible. When you have nothing else to occupy your mind, you can get down to serious work—in fact, you can’t help but get down to serious work.
You don’t actually have to make a mental resolution to start plotting; it happens anyway. A little bit of conscious guidance and a certain amount of extrapolative discipline help to nudge the process in more productive directions, but they aren’t strictly necessary. Nor do you need to carry your “ideas file” around in your head ready for flicking through; a fertile mind might grow nothing but weeds if it’s too long unattended, but they spring up in much greater profusion than they do on the average mental compost-heap. There’s always something pushing up through a writer’s mental subsoil, hungry for the rays of the interior sun, and if you root through it long enough, you’ll always come up with something usable. The fact that I’d spent much of the previous day free-associating in order to generate potential ideas for development, the wackier the better, gave me a mental stock ready to hand.
I tried to select out a few that might actually make the substance of new stories to add to my long series of “tales of the biotech revolution,” which I’d been turning out for more than a decade. I’d used up all the obvious ideas and plot-twists, and was finding it increasingly difficult to find new wrinkles.
With the previous day’s mental capital fresh in hand, I started thinking about the possibility that mice genetically engineered as disease-models might be persuaded in future to be increasingly better mimics of human disorders, perhaps to the point of being “homunculized” by clever embryological manipulation.
Then I began to wonder what might happen as the pressure of need required the homunculi to get larger and more sophisticated in order to provide more accurate simulations of the human brain, and to what new hazards they might be subjected, especially in the context in their use for testing defenses against possible plague war warfare. How intelligent might they become, I wondered, and at what point would the ethical problems involved in custom-designing guinea-pigs designed to die of nasty diseases become particularly acute?
One of the standard principles of designing a plot to fit around and contain a sciencefictional idea is to ask the question: “Who will get hurt?” so I tried to figure out more elaborate casts of characters, in order that more hurt would be at stake than that of the homunculi themselves, given that it probably wouldn’t be reasonable or desirable to use one of them as a viewpoint character. I wondered whether I could spin the details of the plot in such a way as to license borrowing “I am the very model of a modern Major-General” from The Pirates of Penzance as a title.…
While I was thinking about that, I gradually paid less attention to the music track, although the experimenters had already begun to mix tracks from my own CDs into the relaxation tape. I was certain that I hadn’t even begun to relax yet, in the technical sense of the term, but I tried to put that out of my mind in order to give the experiment a fair chance of making progress. The familiarity of the tracks made them easy enough to relegate them to the backcloth of thought, which I assume that Axel and Claire wanted me to do, so they could monitor the brain’s reaction to them with the mediation of conscious attention reduced to a minimum.
After letting the first story idea run on at an easy pace for a while, I switched tack and started thinking about the possibility of writing a story about the future of biopiracy, which I had long wanted to do. The idea had attracted a certain amount of topical attention recently, because multinational pharmaceutical companies had begun methodically searching through the folk-medicines of the Third World, looking for therapeutically-useful compounds which they could then refine and patent, thus claiming all the profits for themselves. A certain amount of indignation was probably in order, and it did add certain something to the tragedy of the American genocides to imagine how rich the surviving natives of that continent might be if they were permitted nowadays to collect a royalty on sales of quinine, let alone tobacco and the potato.
I wondered if I could represent the future of the situation dramatically, in metaphorical terms, by imagining the multinationals sending out “privateers” running riot throughout the third world in search of Eldorados of biotech treasure, harassed in the meantime by local buccaneers, who hawked their preserved goods in some kind of futuristic Tortuga, as well as law enforcement agents eager to regulate the trade. I speculated as whether it might be worth using The Second Coming of Columbus as a title in order to focus on hypothetical Caribbean biopiracy, and whether, if I did, it might be worth introducing a whole new breed of ecoterrorists determined not to repeat the errors of the ill-fated Carib Indians.
Who, in that case, I asked my Muse, might be able to play Friday to some kind of metaphorical Crusoe, stranded on an island where some kind of biotech motherlode happened to have evolved, in accordance with the typical idiosyncrasy of the differentiation of island populations? On the other hand, I thought, it might to be better to exploit the Byronic imagery of The Corsair, or even the Wagneresque brio of The Flying Dutchman, if I wanted to stay upmarket, provided that I could think of a crime sufficiently unusual to justify some such punishment.…
Commercially, of course, the sensible thing would be to think of cinematic pirates rather than operatic ones, but that might be too restrictive, and also less Romantic…but the crucial thing about the story wasn’t that kind of decorative material anyway; what it really needed, as a narrative anchorage, was a first-rate object of piracy, a biotechnological prize that would generate an adequate competition, without being a mere arbitrary McGuffin….
It wasn’t until that point in my musing, strangely enough, that I first noticed the contribution of Axel’s odor-machine. Whether it was because he’d held it back until my EEG trace suggested that I was in a receptive mood or because my everpresent allergic rhinitis had preventing me from smelling the introductory suite of odors, I had no idea. The first odor I recognized, however, was wood smoke, followed by frying bacon, baking smells and floral scents.
To begin with, the scent-track was distracting, but I tried to relegate it to be background along with the music. I suspect that I failed, because I couldn’t help trying to look for the logic of the streaming. It would be claiming too much to say that I recognized all the odors, but a sequence soon began which had a suggestion of dry and slightly acrid grass, with a slight seasoning of musk and shit. It didn’t take a genius to work out that Axel might trying to recapitulate the perfume of the African savannah, where our remote ancestors had first evolved as primal biotechnologists, developing all the tools and skills required for cooking and making clothes.
Then the odors faded again, or became too difficult to classify. Either way, I eventually lost interest and went back to work.
I began thinking about the possibility of writing a story about human chimeras, compounded as early embryos out of egg-cells donated by as many as eight or twelve genetically-enhanced parents, which might allow the aggregate households of the emortality-challenged future to conserve a biological relationship between the parents and the children. Then I wondered what might happen if the various cell-stocks began a kind of battle to constitute the different tissues and organs of the chimerical individual, and how the eight or twelve parents might feel as they monitored the results of that conflict and witnessed the progress and settlements of a kind of natural selection that had never had a chance to occur before.
I began to examine the possibilities deducible from the hypothesis that the conflict might be able reach resolutions previously unimagined, if the chimerical wholes began manufacturing transposons in order to facilitate their own internal gene-trading mechanisms. That kind of natural selection might give a sudden boost to the pace of human evolution, and deflect it into new directions, especially if gene-sculptors remained actively involved, suppressing some developments and enhancing others, perhaps competitively.…
The odors seemed to have faded away completely by the time that idea had run its course, presumably because Axel had run through the entire sequence whose neurological responses he wanted to track. The music was still playing, but for the first time, the songs that had previously been played in their entirety began to be broken down, presumably in order to get a more detailed account of the nature and pattern of my brain’s reflexive responses. The fragmentation, like the introduction of the odors, was disturbing to begin with, but again, it didn’t take long for me to get used to it and to pay less attention.
Then I wasted a little time on trivia, wondering whether cultures currently practicing surgical clitoridectomy might become interested in taking advantage of a rapid increase of expertise in embryonic engineering to request that their female children should be modified in the womb in such a way that that they wouldn’t require any such surgical operation. What effects, I asked myself, hypothetically, might that have on the consequent generation of declitorized female infants when they grew to adulthood?
If ambitious chimerization became possible at the same time as sophisticated embryonic engineering, I thought, other forms of embryonic engineering might become possible. Was it possible, I wondered, that lycanthropy might one day become fashionable? And if it ever did, what would then happen if the artificial werewolves’ innate gene-trading systems began to exercise a distinct preference for wolfishness…in much the same way that the embryonically-modified clitoris-free children might decide to take charge of their own future development and evolution by continuing the process which their blinkered parents had only begun, without even bothering to wonder what further consequences there might be once the snowball started rolling.…
I got a whiff of something slightly noxious at that point, which put me in mind of a Lovecraftian shoggoth, but somewhere in the distance, Francesca Nicoli of Ataraxia was singing the dolphin song from Lost Atlantis, once again in its entirety rather than in fragments, so I suspected that everything was fundamentally right with the world and decided that I wasn’t yet in danger of hearing the call of Cthulhu, or scenting his reek.
After a moment or two, the noxious suggestion faded, and I got back to work again letting the train of my fanciful ideas run along the by-now well-worn track of my evolving series of tales of the biotech revolution.
I began wondering whether I might be able to make a story out of the dramatically-increased mutation-rates suffered by so-called “mammoth genes” with ten or more introns, and whether the importation of new mammoth genes to plants or animals might be used as a mechanism to speed up evolution, especially in association with artificial transposons. I posed myself the question of whether the double meaning of “mammoth” might help supply a plot as well as a title, especially if I could make out a case for prehistoric mammoths having fallen into an evolutionary trap because their own lack of mammoth genes condemned them to an inflexibility from which a dose of said supergenes might have saved them.
What might have become of the populations of pre-Ice Age Europe, I wondered, if some such dose of mutagenic potential had been provided by a comet from the Oort Cloud exploding in the atmosphere somewhere over Denmark, allowing Neanderthalers to become supermen who not only domesticated mammoths and saber-toothed tigers but became masters of mutational husbandry, pharmacogenetic alchemy and authentic transcendental trancing and dancing as the ice retreated and the world became Sumerland again.…
And so on.
I lost track of time, which was supposedly what I was supposed to do—but I didn’t slip into an alternative state of consciousness. I remained perfectly conscious and perfectly lucid—at least to the extent that that kind of playing with ideas can qualify as lucidity.
Eventually, Axel Castle removed the two halves of the bisected ping pong ball from my face and said: “”That’s excellent, Dr. Stableford. We’ve made all the baseline measurements—now it’s a matter of analyzing them, ready for phase two tomorrow.”
I wasn’t entirely convinced by his judgment that the run had been “excellent.” “Nothing happened,” I told him. “It was just like sitting on a train, the musical leakage and occasional odd whiffs included. I was just doing what I normally do when I have dead time on my hands.”
“I know,” he assured me. “This is just a measuring exercise. Once we’ve analyzed the pattern of your brain’s reflexive responses to the musical and olfactory stimuli, then we can really get cooking. Believe me, now that the machine knows the fundamental pattern of your neurological responses, it will be able to design a sequence of stimuli that will take you down through the layers of consciousness and way beyond, to a perfect somniloquent state.”
“I’ll look forward to it,” I said, insincerely. I wasn’t nearly as convinced of the infallibility of his machinery as he seemed to be.
He reached out to remove the earphones. I heard the echoes of Carl McCoy’s distorted voice fading away from the contrapuntal melody, to leave the synthetic heartbeat in full possession of my earphones before they were lifted away, leaving a silence that seemed strangely obtrusive.
“Actually, I suppose I did relax a little more than usual,” I told him, trying to show willing, “although I wasn’t really aware of it until I came back again.”
“No, you didn’t,” he said. “”The machines were keeping track throughout. Don’t worry about it—just leave it to us. Tomorrow, the kit will be familiar to you, and we’ll get a head start even before we start the hocus pocus. Then, you’ll be able to get to mental states that you’ve never visited before, and we’ll be able to see how exactly your brain reacts to our reconstructed stimuli in the somniloquent state. After that…well, everything will depend on the results we turn in, along with the application for the grant renewal. For tonight, though, you can just leave the machines to do their thing and go for a pizza.”
He wasn’t speaking metaphorically. Lionel and I did exactly that.
Until you’ve had an authentic Welsh pizza, cooked in an oven lined with authentic Pontypridd slate, topped with all the most gorgeous produce of the valleys, including nutty slack and lamb’s testicles, washed down with water from the sacred Snowdonian spring that once nourished the voice of Taliesin and the Bardic custodians of Druidic tradition, you haven’t really lived.…
Well, actually, I made that last bit up—all the sober reportage was getting me down, so I thought I’d relax by throwing in an improbability or two. I’ll be sure to let you know if I do it again, because I have my reputation to think of—after all, what kind of writer would use himself as an unreliable narrator?
The rumor that you can order laverbread as a topping in Welsh pizza parlors is grossly exaggerated; actually, you can’t—except, maybe, in Haverfordwest. What you can get in certain parts of Wales, though, on certain nights of the year, if you’re really lucky, is Lionel Fanthorpe’s after-dinner conversation, which is never less than hugely entertaining, even if it’s only a week since you last saw him.
As in Martin’s bookshop, we ran through the usual gamut of anecdotes about everyone scheduled to appear on the next series of Fortean TV, the plots of a significant fraction of Lionel’s Badger books—except for one that he couldn’t remember, which he probably hadn’t actually written—and the recent exploits of his family, friends, acquaintances, and pets.
Later, the two experimenters, having done their thing, joined us again, and we went back to Axel’s flat for a coffee. That was the cue for Lionel to sing a few songs, punctuated by profuse apologies for having left his guitar at home in Cardiff. It was great fun, especially watching Claire and Axel trying to get the occasional word in edgewise after Lionel had built up a—purely metaphorical—full head of steam. Had the opportunity arisen to inform them that their only hope was to rotate the word in question into the fourth dimension and then slip it back through a chronoclastic double pleat while he was drawing breath, I would have, but it never did.
On the way back to the hotel, though, I found myself in the rear seat of Claire’s Hyundai with Axel.
“Did I say anything into the dictaphone while I was in the chair today?” I asked, because I was beginning to suspect that I might have muttered something unwittingly. I figured that the tape might be useful if I’d managed to jot down a few useful plot ideas.
“Not a word,” he assured me. “That’s perfectly normal, on the measuring run, although a couple of our preliminary testers did seem to feel obliged to maintain a running commentary throughout, under the impression that they were helping us out. Please don’t feel obliged to start talking tomorrow, because it really doesn’t make any difference so far as our reportable results are concerned. It’s actually better, from our viewpoint, that the walls of consciousness separating your little ego-fragment from the Cosmic Mind didn’t crack today, let alone crumble. The difference will be all the more obvious now that computer has synthesized a response to its analysis. Tomorrow is another day, as Scarlett O’Hara said to Rhett Butler.”
