“Thanks,” said Anna. “I appreciate it.” She wasn’t sure that half an hour would be enough, but she knew she had to settle for whatever she could get.
She’d been on the pitch for twenty-three minutes when the car drew up. In a way, she was grateful it had taken so long. Now, she wouldn’t be able to go back afterward.
The punter tried to bargain her down to thirty, but the car was a souped-up fleet model whose gloss shouted to the world that he wasn’t strapped for cash, and there was no one else on the line with exactly her kind of spoliation.
The client was a wise guy; he knew enough about the chemistry of his own tastes to think he could show off. It probably didn’t occur to him that the doctors had taken pains to explain to Anna exactly what had happened to her, or that she’d been better able to follow their expert discourse than his fudged mess. Nor did it occur to him that she wouldn’t be at all interested in the important lessons which he thought were there to be learned from the whole sorry affair. She didn’t try to put him right; he was paying, after all, and the torrent of words provided a distraction of sorts from the various other fluxes generated by their brief and—for her—painful intercourse.
“That whole class of euphories should never have been licensed, of course,” he opined, after he’d stumbled through a few garbled technicalities. “It’s all very well designing fancy proteins by computer, but just because something’s stable in cyberspace doesn’t mean it’s going to behave itself under physiological conditions, and physiological conditions is a politer way of putting it, when we’re referring to the kind of witch’s cauldron you get up a whore’s you-know-what. They say they have programs now that will spot likely mutation sites and track likely chains of mutational consequence, but I reckon they’re about as much use as a wooden fort against a fire-breathing dragon. I mean, this thing is out of control and there’s no way to lock the stable door now the nags have bolted. Personally, I’m not at all distressed—I mean, I’ve had all the common-or-garden stuff up to here. I never liked whores wired up for the kind of jollies you can get from a pill or a fizzy drink. I mean, it’s just stupid to try to roll up all your hits into one. It’s like praying mantises eating their mates while they fuck—no sense to it at all. Me, I like things spread around a bit. I like it sour and sweet, in all kinds of exotic combinations. People like me are the real citizens of the twenty-first century, you know. In a world like ours, it ain’t enough not to be xenophobic—you have to go the other way. Xenophilia is what it takes to cope with today and tomorrow. Just hang on in there, darling, and you’ll find yourself back in demand on a big scale. Be grateful that they can’t cure you—in time, you’ll adapt, just like me.”
She knew that in her own way she had adapted, and not just by taking her medication regularly. She had adapted her mind and her soul, and knew that in doing that she had adapted her body chemistry, too, in subtle ways that no genetic engineer or ultra-smart expert system could ever have predicted. She knew that she was unique, and that what Alan had felt for her really did qualify as love, and was not to be dismissed as any mere addiction. If it had been mere addiction, there wouldn’t have been any problem at all; he would simply have switched to another girl who’d been infected with the same virus vectors but had proved to be immune—so far—to the emergent mutations.
The punter wasn’t a bad sort, all things considered. Unusual tastes weren’t necessarily associated with perverted manners. He paid Anna in cash and he dropped her right outside the door of Lambeth North tube station. It was, he said, pretty much on his way home—which meant that he could conceivably have been Isabel’s next-door neighbor. Anna didn’t ask for further details, and he wouldn’t have told her the truth if she had. There was an etiquette in these matters which had to be observed.
By the time Anna got back to the cemetery the grave had been filled in. The gravedigger had arranged the wreaths in a pretty pattern on the freshly turned earth, which was carefully mounded so that it wouldn’t sink into a hollow as it settled beneath the spring rains. Anna studied the floral design very carefully before deciding exactly how to modify it to incorporate her own wreath.
She was a little surprised to note that her earlier impression had been mistaken; there were several wreaths made up of genetically engineered exotics. She quickly realized, however, that this was not a calculated expression of xenophilia so much as an ostentatious gesture of conspicuous consumption. Those of Alan’s friends and relatives who were slightly better-off than the rest had simply taken the opportunity to prove the point.
When she had rearranged the wreaths she stood back, looking down at her handiwork.
“I didn’t want any of this to happen,” she said. “In Paris, it might almost pass for romantic—man becomes infatuated with whore, recklessly smashes himself up in his car when she becomes infected with some almost-unprecedented kind of venereal disease—but in Pinner it’s just absurd. You were a perfect fool, and I didn’t even love you… but my mind got blown to hell and back by the side effects of my own mutated psychotropics, so maybe I would have if I could have. Who knows?”
I didn’t want it to happen either, he said, struggling to get the words through the cloying blanket of her medication, which was deeply prejudiced against any and all hallucinations. It really was an accident. I’d got over the worst of the withdrawal symptoms. I’d have been okay. Maybe I’d even have been okay with Kitty, once I’d got it all out of my system. Maybe I could have begun to be what everybody wanted and expected me to be.
“Conformist bastard,” she said. “You make it sound like it was all pretense. Is that what you think? Just a phase you were going through, was it? Just a mad fling with a maddening whore who went completely mad?”
It was the real thing, he insisted, dutifully.
“It was a lot realer than the so-called real thing,” she told him. “Those expert systems are a hell of a lot cleverer than Old Mother Nature. Four billion years of natural selection produced Spanish fly and rhino horn; forty years of computerized protein design produced me and a thousand alternatives you just have to dilute to taste. You couldn’t expect Mother Nature to take that kind of assault lying down, of course, even if she always has been the hoariest whore of them all. Heaven only knows what a psycho-chemical wilderness the world will be when all the tailored pheromones and augmentary psychotropics have run the gamut of mutational variation. You and I were just caught in the evolutionary cross fire. Kitty and Isabel too, I guess. No man is an island, and all that crap.”
I don’t think much of that as a eulogy, he said. You could try to be a little more earnest, a little more sorrowful.
He was right, but she didn’t dare. She was afraid of earnestness, and doubly afraid of sorrow. There was no way in the world she was going to try to put it the way Ecclesiastes had—in much wisdom is much grief, and he that increaseth knowledge in-creaseth sorrow and all that kind of stuff. After all, she had to stay sane enough to get safely back to the hospital or they wouldn’t let her out again for a long time.
“Good-bye, Alan,” she said, quietly. “I don’t think I’ll be able to drop in again for quite a while. You know how things are, even though you never once came to see me in the hospital.”