The Golden Fleece Read online

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  The Golden Fleece

  Tales of the Biotech Revolution

  Brian Stableford

  No copyright 2012 by MadMaxAU eBooks

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  CONTENTS

  INTRODUCTION

  THE GOLDEN FLEECE

  SOME LIKE IT HOT

  ALFONSO THE WISE

  NEXT TO GODLINESS

  MORTIMER GRAY’S HISTORY OF DEATH

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  INTRODUCTION

  This is the seventh collection of shorter “Tales of the Biotech Revolution” that I have published, the others being: Sexual Chemistry (Simon & Schuster UK, 1991), Designer Genes (Five Star, 2004), The Cure for Love (Borgo Press, 2007), The Tree of Life (Borgo Press, 2007), In the Flesh (Borgo Press, 2009) and The Great Chain of Being (Borgo Press, 2010). There have also been eleven novels of the same ilk: Inherit the Earth (Tor, 1998), Architects of Emortality (Tor, 1999), The Fountains of Youth (Tor, 2000), The Cassandra Complex (Tor, 2001), Dark Ararat (Tor, 2002), The Omega Expedition (Tor, 2002), The Dragon Man (Borgo Press, 2009), The Undead (Borgo Press, 2010; in a double volume with the novella Les Fleurs du Mal), Xeno’s Paradox (Borgo Press, 2011), Zombies Don’t Cry (Borgo Press, 2011) and Nature s Shift (Borgo Press, 2011). Many, but by no means all, of the stories in the series share a common future-historical background, an early version of which was first sketched out in a futurology book, The Third Millennium: A History of the World 2000-3000, written in collaboration with David Langford in 1983 and published by Knopf and Sidgwick & Jackson in 1985.

  The train of thought transporting the stories has, therefore, now been running for more than a quarter of a century, and the dates attached to some of the earlier stories have already elapsed without any sign of the possibilities sketched therein materializing (the one obvious exception being the advent of Viagra, anticipated, although not under that brand name, in the story variously known as “Sexual Chemistry” and “A Career in Sexual Chemistry”). Although such dates are, in essence, arbitrary, progress in practical biotechnology has, indeed, been a trifle slower than I anticipated in 1985, and it now seems highly unlikely that its products will be able to make the kind of impact on the current phase of the unfolding ecocatastrophe that I once hoped it might. It is, of course, the general fate of possibilities that only a tiny minority ever come to fruition, but there are still grounds for hope (no matter how slim) that constructive biotechnology might eventually have a role to play in recovery from the Crash whose inevitability all the stories in the series anticipate, so I am not yet ready to consign the entre sequence to the rubbish heap of optimistic moonshine.

  This collection includes the story that maps out the first revised version of the Third Millennium future history in the greatest detail, “Mortimer Gray’s History of Death,” the first version of which was drafted in April 1987. That version did not sell, and I revised it in 1994, increasing the wordage from 19,000 to 26,000, mostly by fleshing out the first and last chapters, which thus became a frame narrative of sorts. The revised version was published in the April 1995 issue of Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine. I subsequently expanded the story again in 1999, into the novel The Fountains of Youth, fleshing out all the chapters concerning the protagonist’s own biography, thus altering the balance of the story very markedly, obliterating what little remained of the careful symmetry of the original version. Had the original version survived I might have been tempted to reprint it here instead of the published novella, but I no longer have a copy of it. The Asimov’s version is probably the most widely-read of the stories in the series, being included in Gardner Dozois’ Best of the Year collection and then in his Best of the Best sampler, but I thought it worth reprinting anyway, if only for the sake of completeness.

  “Alfonso the Wise” was first published under the pseudonym Francis Amery in Interzone 105 (March 1996); it was one of two ultra-short stories that the editor asked me to produce in order to pad out the contents list of the issue in question, which was dominated by a very long novella (much longer than the various novellas of mine that the editor in question had previous rejected on the grounds that they were too long). It is admittedly trivial, but, again, I thought it worth reprinting on the grounds of completeness.

  An abridged version of “Next to Godliness” was published in an anthology edited by Ian Whates, entitled Celebration (2008) and published by Newcon Press. As all regular sf readers will have noticed by now, the standard requested length for contributions to anthologies of original stories is 6,000 words, but I routinely exceed that, usually hoping to get away with 8,000 or even more. In this instance, alas, the editor demanded that I cut the product down to the required size, which I obligingly did, consoling myself with the thought that, one day, I would be able to reprint the unabridged version in a collection like this one.

  “Some Like it Hot” was written in January 2008 in response to a request from an editor who was trying to assemble a collection of stories on the theme of global warming (which had been a constant feature of my vague future history since The Third Millennium, although I claim no credit for the anticipation, which was blatantly obvious even in the early 1980s to anyone but an idiot or a professional liar). The anthology was never published, probably because of the controversy deliberately stirred up by professional liars, and the story eventually appeared in Asimov’s in the December 2009 issue.

  The most recent story in the collection, “The Golden Fleece,” written in the last days of 2011 and the early days of 2012, is original to this volume, largely because it overshot the initial target length of 6,000 words by such a ludicrously vast margin that there seemed to be no point in even trying to submit it to the market that I originally had in mind for it. Even as I realized that fact while being carried away during the white heat of the composition process, I consoled myself with the thought that I would at least be able to include it in a collection like this one.

  I do not know whether there will be any further volumes in the series, but as it is proverbially unwise ever to say never, I shall refrain from negative prognostication.

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  THE GOLDEN FLEECE

  When Adrian told his Ph.D. supervisor, Professor Clark, that he’d been invited to the Savoy to meet Jason Jarndyke, the professor sighed.

  “It wasn’t me,” the old man said.

  Adrian knew what he meant. You couldn’t apply for a job at Jarndyke Industries; you had to be recommended, or spotted by a professional headhunter. Professor Clark was denying that he’d been the one to put the bloodhounds on Adrian’s trail.

  “It’s okay,” Adrian assured him. “In fact, it’s the perfect opportunity for me. I only hope I can impress him.”

  The professor took on the expression of a man who had just found half a caterpillar in his apple, but he controlled it swiftly. “If you think so,” he said, implying that no sane man would. “But you have real talent. You could do anything.”

  He meant real talent as a genetic reverse engineer—the kind of talent you could take into the pharmaceutical industry, or retain in the upper echelons of Academe; the professor had never understood Adrian’s real real talent. Few people did—but there was just a possibility that Jason Jarndyke might appreciate its potential results, even though he was reputed to be a crass businessman and an epitome of Yorkshire bluntness, with no talent at all but a genius for making money.

  Adrian was pretty sure that he could make Jason Jarndyke money—lots of money—by means of his talent as a reverse engineer, but his real objectives lay far beyond that. They were vague, as yet, but he was sure that they would become clearer in time. The first step was to get a good and secure job, working in the field of the genetics of pigmentation
. Once that base was secure, other possibilities would become visible, with the all the myriad blues of the sky to tempt and guide him. The future would be limitless.

  Adrian figured that if the industrialist could only be persuaded to glimpse the prospect of the future bottom line that innate coloration would add to his products, Jarndyke would forgive him, not only for being a effete southerner and a confirmed esthete, but even, perhaps, for having ambitions beyond the confines of the textile industry—although he hoped to keep those further ambitions under wraps to begin with, and only to confess them, as and when necessary, by degrees.

  “Well,” said Professor Clark, sighing again. “I suppose the only advice I can give you is to watch out for Medea.”

  “Who’s Medea?” Adrian asked.

  Professor Clark raised his eyes to the heavens. All serious scientists cultivated some area of humanistic interest in order to deflect of suspicion of terminal dullness. Clark was fond of mythological references. “Jason’s wife.“ he said, wearily.

  Even Adrian could get the gist of that, although he knew that he would have to use a search engine to find out exactly what crimes the mythical Medea was supposed to have committed, if he could ever be bothered—but he couldn’t help putting on an ingenuous expression and replying: “I believe that Mrs. Jarndyke’s name is Angelica.” He had no definite knowledge, but presumed that she must be an effete southerner too. Even in this day and age, no one in Yorkshire would ever name a girl “Angelica.”

  The professor sighed again, and muttered something that might or might not have been a reference to “lamb to the slaughter”—which, in turn, might or might not have been an attempt at a witty play on words based on the fact that Jason Jarndyke’s most profitable mills produced sheepskin by the mile, without the necessity of employing actual sheep.

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  In fact, Jason Jarndyke didn’t seem quite as bad as the scurrilous newsfeeds painted him—but that shouldn’t really have been surprising, even to an ingénu, and Adrian scolded himself for having fallen victim to web-spun prejudice in spite of knowing better.

  Jarndyke was a big man, to be sure, with rather coarse features, and he spoke with a broad Yorkshire accent—which had become rare, except as deliberate affectation, since exposure to TV had begun smoothing all regional dialects into subtlety. Once he’d been in the man’s company for half an hour, though, Adrian no longer believed that Jarndyke’s accent was an affectation, any more than his renowned bluntness was mere rudeness with a tacit apology in tow. Jarndyke gave every sign of being honest, sincere and intelligent.

  The textile-manufacturer didn’t get down to business right away. For a while, they ate and drank and chatted. Adrian knew that he was being subtly pumped and weighed up all the while, but he didn’t mind. He had secrets, of a sort, but he didn’t think that they were the kind of secrets that would compromise his usefulness to Jarndyke Industries, and he knew that it was in his interests to be accurately measured for his true worth in purely scientific terms, or even terms of vulgar gold, so he answered all the subtle queries honestly.

  Jarndyke was in informal mode, so he wasn’t calling Adrian “Mr. Stamford,” in the same way that Adrian was addressing him as “Mr. Jarndyke, but he wasn’t calling him “Adrian” either. He had settled for the patronizing device of calling him “Son,” which Adrian was trying not to mind too much—and succeeding, because he rather liked the old sod, all things considered.

  When Jarndyke eventually decided to get to the point, he headed straight for it. “Okay, Son,” he said, “you’re a bright lad, so you know exactly why I’m interested in you. I’ve helped to bring about a revolution in the textile industry by growing fabrics from tissue cultures: first wools, then silks. In terms of texture, my products are first-rate, but thus far, I’ve remained reliant on the traditional dyeing industry for coloring my fabrics. Even if it hadn’t been for the provocation of all the stupid media jokes about my supposed quest for the sodding Golden Fleece, genetically-determined pigmentation would be the natural next step in the process.”

  He tapped Adrian’s CV, which was on the table in front of him, with the knuckle of his right forefinger. “I won’t try to bullshit you, Son: according to this, and what my spies tell me, you’re the best man in England right now to pick up that particular torch and run with it. For that reason, I’d like to hire you, but first, tell me why a bright young reverse engineer like you—a genius of sorts—chose to specialize in a field like pigmentation instead of joining the great crusade to rid the world of disease and make us all immortal.”

  “You can see the results of coloration genes,” Adrian said baldly, as he always did when asked that question. “There’s no waiting around while the DNA strings you’ve designed and the proteins they produce go through elaborate testing schemes administered by bureaucrats. Then again, the delicate sculpting of the relevant proteins, not merely to duplicate but also to enhance the extraordinarily elaborate palette of nature’s colors, is a technical process that poses fundamental challenges of method and understanding. The fact that you can see the results immediately when working with pigmentation genes, and connect up cause and effect directly, helps to provide a useful insight into the mysterious workings of amino-acid destiny, which is transferable to other areas where the evidence is far less obvious. Mendel started off the entire science of genetics by studying the heredity of manifest characteristics like color, because it was the most practical starting-point. It’s still an important gateway to understanding.”

  “Gateway to understanding,” Jarndyke echoed, pensively. “Very neat. Cut the bullshit, Son, and tell me the truth. You’re too bright to know that I wouldn’t look behind this thing”— he tapped the CV again—”because you know as well as I do that what’s really important is always what’s left out. The job offer stands, so you don’t have anything to worry about on that score. I just want to know what you’re about before you join the crew of the Airedale Argo—and I want to hear it from you, as straight as you can.”

  Adrian gulped—not because he hadn’t expected to have to come clean eventually, and not because there was any reason why he shouldn’t do so right away, but simply because he wasn’t used to being hustled like that. He was used to doing things at his own pace, and he had learned to be wary of letting his secret out too soon in potentially-hostile environments. Jarndyke obviously knew the gist of it, so the sensible thing to do was, indeed, to give his future employer his own account of the truth, and to try to make him understand.

  “I do have my own personal reasons for being interested in the genetics of pigmentation,” he admitted.

  “Well, don’t beat around the bush, Son—we don’t do that up north. What are they?”

  Adrian didn’t beat around the bush. “Sight,” he said, launching forth into a familiar argument, “is a three-phase process. People differ in all three respects. Phase one is what the retina can register; all eyes are different. You doubtless remember the old schoolboy question about whether what you see as red is the same as what I see as red, even though we’ve both learned to call it red. Physiology tells us that it’s a good question. Different people’s retinas really do differ in their sensitivity to particular wavelengths and the neuronal signals they transmit in response.”

  “So?” Jarndyke prompted.

  Adrian didn’t want to be hurried; if he was going to give Jarndyke the explanation, he wanted to do it his way. “The second phase,” he said, “is the other end of the neuronal chain: what the cells of the brain pick up from the signal and how they process it. Everybody’s brain is slightly different; identical signals, if there were any, don’t always produce the identical results in making raw information available to consciousness.”

  “Which is phase three,” Jarndyke put in, to demonstrate that he was keeping up. “Different minds, different interpretations again. Some people are color blind. Some people have no taste—I’m one of them, according to my wife. This I know. So what? Not in terms of phil
osophical paradoxes, but in terms of material difference.”

  “People differ in their perception of color and sensitivity to its nuances,” Adrian said, refusing to be hurried, but now deliberately slanting the argument in a direction that might seem relevant to the industrialist, “but the number of people whose physiology makes them objectively incapable of discriminations—as in color blindness—is relatively small. Most insensitivity occurs at the level of consciousness. The individual’s brain can discriminate, and does—but the mind takes no notice. Lots of people are unaware of color clashes when they dress, or when they look at other people’s costumes—but the fact that they’re consciously unaware doesn’t mean that they’re immune to the subtle effects of color that they’re registering physiologically. It really does make a psychological difference what colors you put on your bedroom walls, whether you’re consciously aware of it or not. You really can be driven mad by creepy wallpaper. And you might not know, when you look at someone else’s outfit, what message it’s sending to your brain—but that doesn’t mean that it isn’t making a difference to your perception of them, and hence to your attitudes and your treatment of them. Power-dressing works, especially if it’s cleverly color-coordinated. Color matters, Mr. Jarndyke, in textiles as in everything else. Esthetics matter. Some people might not know exactly how or why they matter, and they might sneer at the people who can bring those things to the level of consciousness, but what we see and what we wear makes far more difference than insensitive people are able to see.”