COSMOS magazine

Friday, June 13

Paul walked aimlessly, considering endless variations on the same questions. When he found himself outside Jill's house the sun had gone down. Too late to knock on the door? The kitchen light was shining through the side window. To avoid waking Alex, he walked along the side of the house, pushed open the gate into the back yard and tapped on the back door.

"You startled me," Jill said, but looked glad to see him.

"Busy?"

"Yes. But I'm ready to take a break." She stepped on to the porch. "Mind if we sit out here?"

"How's Alex?"

"A little stronger, I think."

She pulled out one of the wooden picnic benches, but Paul felt jittery, full of energy going nowhere. Alex's swing set was next to the picnic table; he grabbed the upper bar and began to do chin-ups.

"I started Alex on the SMV-9b," Jill said. "He seems to be feeling a little better already."

Probably feeling better because they stopped the chemo, thought Paul. But he smiled down at her and said, "Glad to hear that, Jill."

"You're certainly energetic tonight." Her voice was tired.

Breathing hard, he dropped to the ground and squeezed into one of the swing seats. "Ever been in a situation where you had a chance to accomplish something great—but to do it, you'd have to risk everything?"

"I've never come that close to greatness," she said with a wan grin. "When I realized I wasn't ever going to be a famous filmmaker, I thought I could do wonderful things with a law degree. You know, do my part to make laws setting limits on pollution and destruction of farmland. Once I got out into the real world, I discovered that most environmental lawyers spend their time finding ways for land developers to get around EPA regulations." She sighed, pushed her hair away from her lowered face.

"Okay, fair enough. But suppose you really could—" He broke off, then let the words spill out. "What I was talking about before. Take a drug to make your brain work more effectively. Maybe make you the smartest person in the world?"

"Like your mice."

"Right." He sat down beside her, leaned back against the edge of the table.

"You really think it'll work on people?"

"That's the risky part. I'm not sure. And I can't afford to test the auxosome on primates. Chimps are incredibly expensive, and now MTJ won't be able to help out any time soon. Besides, these days there's all sorts of protective protocols." Quickly, he added: "And a good thing too."

Jill pondered silently for a time. "When I can't decide what to do," she said thoughtfully, "I ask myself: what's the worst thing could possibly happen one way or the other?"

"If I inject myself with the auxosomes? Jill, it could fry my brain. Burn me out. I could end up psychotic, or..." He cleared his throat. "Retarded. You ever read Flowers for Algernon?"

"Uh, don't think so. Wait a minute, wasn't that on television a couple of years ago? A retarded man called Charlie, right?"

"Yeah, but the book's more impressive. I read it last month when I first started thinking about this. What if I trial the auxosome treatment and it works—but only for a short time? How could I bear it? I mean, to remember being brilliant, knowing I couldn't ever experience such clarity again?"

She frowned in the dimness. "Paul, I read a magazine article once about a woman who tried to gas herself. She didn't die, but her brain was badly damaged."

Grim, he nodded. "Insufficient oxygen."

"She had to settle for some shit menial job, but it's like you said, Paul—the most horrifying thing is that she could remember speaking several languages and using complex math, all the skills she'd lost."

He thought: Jill instantly understood what's frightening me. God, it's good to have someone to talk to. He sat down next to her on the bench, wanting to put an arm around her. He didn't dare to, not yet. "Right. I could end up stupid. There's no evidence of that happening to the mice, but I still don't fully understand how the gene tweaks work. Of course, maybe if I increase my brain power, even for a little while, I'll be able to figure it out."

"But your mice are okay?"

"So far. Problems could show up in a year's time. Or in their offspring. And the homeobox package might work differently on humans. I doubt it, though. The genome maps show a common basic mechanism in both species. All the auxosomes are doing is... How can I put it? Kick-starting the same dormant stem cell machinery that grows healthy new tissue and proof-reads and safeguards sperm and ova."

"Paul, suppose there has to be a trade-off? I mean, you're saying human intelligence could be boosted just by manipulating a few genes. Surely evolution would have come up with the same trick during the past 100,000 years?"

"No, it's more than just a few genes, and besides, natural selection doesn't plan ahead, Jill."

A little sharply, she said, "I do understood that. I'm saying that maybe for a mutation to work in one direction—enhancing cleverness, say—it has to steal resources from existing parts of the brain. Coarsen other abilities or feelings. That happens with autistic savants, doesn't it—they can hear a piece of music once and play it faultlessly, or list 200 prime numbers off the top of their heads, but they can't tie their own shoelaces. That sort of thing?"

He got to his feet, pacing. "I agree. There's a technical term for that, 'antagonistic pleiotropy'. But look, we've worked out how to beat tissue rejection in organ transplants, and that's something nature never managed."

"Okay, and I guess anaesthetics is another example. Why didn't perfect pain control get evolved?" She paused, thinking about it. "Pain's useful. Lets you know when to pull your hand back from the hot stove."

Paul sat back on the bench, this time a bit nearer to Jill. "Yeah, but you're right, anaesthesia could've occurred as a natural mutation and then been conserved by selection. Not to obliterate pain, just mute it. Tune agony down to dull discomfort. Surely pain doesn't need to be so disabling."

"That's what I mean. We use pain killers all the time these days and it doesn't bother us."

"Right. So a mutation that increased our voluntary control over really bad pain needn't be a disadvantage. It just didn't happen to happen, that's all." He grinned at his own word-play. "Sheer chance. Okay, same with improved intelligence, maybe. Species get trapped in a local optimum. To try a totally fresh track, their offspring would have to do worse before the next generation can mutate in interesting ways."

"Like when you're stuck at the top of a hill," she said, nodding, "and there's no direct way across to a higher peak, right?" Even in the darkness her eyes were bright with the excitement of this intellectual chase, and the sight of her burned in him. He hadn't felt this strongly with a woman for too long. "You need to climb down again and start again at the foot of the new hill. You're saying evolution mightn't produce extreme intelligence by itself just because it can't see ahead, can't see the value of it."

"Exactly. A species can only make a giant leap by risking almost inevitable failure. But science can look before it leaps. We beat blind evolution every day."

"Like... surgeons performing heart transplants," Jill said, "even though natural selection frowns on it."

Paul grinned at her. "You hardly ever find heart transplants happening in the wild."

"But suppose it is like that book, it only works for a short time, then you're worse off than before."

"Yeah, but Flowers for Algernon wasn't a scientific report of an actual experiment. It's just a beautifully crafted work of fiction. And its heartbreaking power depends on its tragic conclusion."

"Hmm. I guess logically Charlie Gordon could have found a way to mend his poor brain. But then the movie wouldn't have made me cry."

They fell silent, gazing at each other. He was excited and encouraged. A touching and tragic work of sheer fiction had nearly overwhelmed his own intelligent assessment of the prospects. That should have been a clue, he thought. The very process of reading a book... It'll ruin your damned eyes, his parents had nagged him, get outside and kick the football around. The irritating scientist inside his head started to nag: maybe his parents weren't so dumb after all. If you keep your gaze fixed on pages of print for hours at a time when you're a kid, you really might screw up the developmental pathways that work perfectly well in the environment we're adapted for, the hunter-gatherer world that's swiftly vanishing from the face of the Earth. Paul laughed out loud.

"What?" She leaned forward, as though anticipating a treat.

God, he thought, her face becomes tremendously appealing when she's interested in something. "All that reading really does ruin our eyes, just like our mothers warned us," he said, teasing her to see her lips curve into a smile. "Poor vision mostly doesn't kick in until we're past our reproductive prime, so mutations that could correct the problem just don't get selected in. But intelligent intervention can fix things in one fell swoop. I agree, Charlie didn't have to get stupid again."

"All right, already. I'm convinced."

Well, maybe; he wasn't really so sure. Tormented by the possibility, he continued to rack his limited human brain for an answer, but there was no way to find the truth except by performing the experiment.

"My God, Paul," Jill was saying, "I wonder what it would be like to be that smart?"

"Hard to say. Almost like becoming... something different. A meta-human. A post mortal. We'd conquer death in an afternoon." He smiled at her in the half-darkness. "PMS. Post mortal syndrome."

"If you were that much smarter than everyone else, who would you talk to? Wouldn't the rest of us seem very boring to you?"

"That's one of the risks I'd be facing."

Her face fell. "It's as if you're talking about leaving and never coming back."

Finally he put his arm around her. She tensed but did not move away. "It could be very lonely. I don't think I want to risk it." Even as he said the words, he mentally argued with himself: it would be worth any risk to experience life as intensely as possible, even if only for a year. To be an Einstein, a Goethe, a Kandinski, a Beethoven.... a Groucho Marx. To soar. To caress the universe. To make the whole world laugh with hilarious joy. And what if I weren't the only one to take the journey? What if... what if someone like Jill came with me?

They were silent for a long moment, a companionable silence rather than an awkward one. "It must be terribly late," he said at last. "I'd better go so we can both get some sleep."

When he rose to leave, Jill got up too and put a tentative hand on his shoulder. The kitchen window shed a triangle of light on her face, revealing one glistening eye. He moved toward the warmth of her body and then stopped. She seemed too vulnerable; this was not someone who'd enjoy intimate fun for a night or a month and then go on with her life without looking back. He gave her a friendly pat on the arm and said, "See ya later."

Before he could turn away, her hands were moving up the bare skin of his arms to his shoulders, through his hair. Reflexively, his arms closed around her, pulling her closer. She slid her hands down his back, under his shirt, turned her face away so that he kissed her jaw instead of her lips, buried his face in the soft fragrance of her hair. A mosquito whined close to his ear as Jill lifted her face and kissed his lips.

"Let's go inside," he said.

He felt her nod against his chest. Arms around each other, they walked to the house, paused awkwardly at the screen door, unable to pass through the opening together but not wanting to separate. Finally, Jill stepped away from him. Taking his hand in the darkness, she led him into the kitchen.

They stopped and kissed in front of the refrigerator, and then again just inside her bedroom. She clicked on a small lamp beside the bed, sat down to pull off her sandals. He kicked his own shoes away, peeled off his socks, then raised her up again, pulled her tee shirt over her head and kissed her neck as he reached around to unhook her bra. The clasp seemed to be stuck.

"Um. You don't happen to have a pair of scissors handy?"

Giggling, she pushed his hands aside, easily unfastened the bra and flung it aside. The smell of her intoxicated him. In the dim golden light, he found it hard to read her expression. Would she regret this and hate him for it later? At the moment it didn't seem to matter. He slid her shorts down to her ankles, she stepped out of them.

"Maybe we should close the door," he said, moving away from her. "Alex."

"Yes."