“But how? Surely your own clothes were destroyed.”
She giggled. “Hid it in me. …”
“Oh,” he said, understanding. “Of course.”
“Sleep now,” she said and let her head drop on to the mattress. Within seconds she was asleep.
Milo remained where he was, staring down at her. When he was certain she was in a deep sleep he reached over and again removed the cylinder from her overall. He studied it thoughtfully for some time then returned it to her pocket. He got up and went to his bed. As he lay there he concentrated on damping down the sexual desire that the girl’s presence had induced. Eventually he slept and for the first time in decades he dreamed of Miranda.
The feeling of well-being was still with Jan when she woke up, though not as intense as before. She sat up. Milo was already awake. He was dressed and sitting on the edge of his bed, looking at her. “Feel better?” he asked.
“Yes,” she admitted. “Thank you.” She looked around. The lights were back on. Then she remembered what had happened just before she’d fallen asleep and quickly felt her pocket. The bomb was still there.
“Don’t worry,” he said wryly. “I haven’t stolen your precious heirloom.”
She felt herself blush. “What was in that pill you gave me?” she asked, changing the subject. “Some kind of Old Science drug?”
“A product of Old Science, yes, but not a drug in the sense that you probably understand the word,” he told her. “As I tried to explain to you last night, the actual drug that makes you feel better is produced by your own brain. The pill contained a substance that stimulates the specific part of your brain into producing large amounts of the ‘drug’.”
She frowned at him, trying to make sense of his words. As before, she was unsure if he was deliberately spinning her a tall tale or telling the truth—or what he believed was the truth. “You are saying there is a drug in my brain that caused that marvellous feeling I had before I went to sleep last night?” she asked. “But that can’t be, otherwise I would have felt like that before.”
He gave a small sigh. “You wouldn’t have experienced the effect as intensely before because your brain had never before released so much of the relevant encephalin—‘drug’—into your nervous system.”
She continued to look doubtful. Milo said, ‘“You are familiar with the drug called morphine?”
“Yes. It comes from the poppy. A gift from the Mother God. It deadens pain. …”
“Well, a long, long time ago scientists discovered that the human central nervous system possessed its own version of morphine, which explained how some people could suffer serious injuries and not feel any pain—at least not immediately. And as research into the biochemical workings of the brain continued more and more substances were discovered that were analogous not only to narcotics and anaesthetics but also to a large variety of other mood-changing drugs. It became apparent that human thought was the end result of a veritable chemical cocktail. Identifying all the different chemical participants and pinpointing their exact function took many years and along the way several interesting discoveries about human nature were made. One of them concerned depression. You know what the word depression means, don’t you?”
“Yes, of course. It means to feel sad or miserable.”
“Do you feel that way often?”
“Well, not often, but sometimes. More so lately. …”
He smiled. “But not at this exact moment, right? Even though your present situation is a bleak one you feel mellow, at ease—yes?”
She admitted she did. He said, “The lingering effects of the hormone I gave you. But you are physiologically incapable of experiencing depression of the kind familiar to many pre-Prime Standard people, thanks to the genetic modification your ancestors underwent. In the days before the genetic era many were prone to a condition known as manic depression. The condition was regarded as an illness—the result of either a psychological flaw or a physical one. It was then considered ‘normal’ not to suffer such a state of mind; that the natural state of the human mind was a kind of emotional equilibrium with an innate leaning towards an underlying feeling of well-being and vague optimism, depending on exterior circumstances, of course.”
“But that’s natural, isn’t it?” she asked.
“That’s the point,” he said. “The scientists had made the discovery that Nature had ensured that human beings were continually drugged up to the eyeballs, in a manner of speaking, in order to cope with life. The normal ones, anyway. The abnormal ones, those prone to manic-depression or other chronic mental problems, did indeed suffer from an organic malfunction in the brain, but their brains were failing to produce enough of the neurotransmitters to ensure that they possessed the somewhat rosy, if distorted, outlook on life experienced by ‘ordinary’ people. As a result these abnormal individuals apparently experienced a more objective viewpoint of reality, given the human condition as it is. …”
She shook her head wonderingly. “You do talk a lot of nonsense.”
“Well, that’s exactly what a lot of people said when this theory was first made public—that it was nonsense. It is human nature for an individual to believe that his, or her, perception of reality is objective. But the sad truth is that our perception of anything—and everything we think and feel—is at the mercy of our genetic programming, which in turn controls the manufacture of all the hormones that in their turn dictate the play of the chemical activities within our brains. Even our very perception of time itself is a product of these processes. The human concept of time is a biologically-induced illusion; there is no such thing as linear time, instead time is. …” He looked at her and didn’t continue. “Forgive me,” he said wearily. “My need to be able to talk to someone again got the better of me. I keep forgetting that for all your native intelligence you’re still a savage, like the rest of them in this place.”
“I’m no savage!” she protested.
“No? So you understand what I’m saying?” he asked, teasingly.
“Well, not much of it,” she admitted. “But I do know that you are wrong about the mind. It is part of the Minervan creed that the mind is separate from the body. It is the property of the Mother God and when we die she reclaims it. She will either keep it as a part of her in paradise or if it needs a further spiritual cleansing she will send it back to Earth to live out another life.”
“So much for Minervan theology,” he sneered. “Heaven and Earth reduced to a giant laundry.”
His words infuriated her. “It makes more sense than all that rubbish you speak!”
“My poor little amazon, you yourself are a product of all that so-called ‘rubbish’. As I told you before, your very own Minervan genegineers saw to that. Your ancestors were modified past the specifications set down in the Prime Standard ruling. Both physically and mentally you are different, not only from the pre-gene era women of the past but also the women on this airship. Your female ancestors, thanks to the genetic tinkering with the hormonal balances, became not only bigger physically but slightly more masculine in emotional outlook. Your men subsequently underwent a more drastic modification. The end product was a smaller, non-aggressive, non-competitive, non-threatening human male—in short the feminist ideal of what a man should be.”
“It’s unthinkable that any Minervan would ever make use of genetic engineering but it’s true, I admit, that Minervan men were changed,” said Jan.