Stoney smiled. “The muse comes and goes for all of us. But I’m really just the catalyst in most of this.
I’ve been lucky enough to find some people-here in Cambridge, and further afield-who’ve been willing to chance their arm on some wild ideas. They’ve done the real work.” He gestured toward the next room. “My own pet projects are through here.”
The third room was full of electronic gadgets, wired up to picture tubes displaying both phosphorescent words and images resembling engineering blueprints come to life. In the middle of one bench, incongruously, sat a large cage containing several hamsters.
Stoney fiddled with one of the gadgets, and a face like a stylized drawing of a mask appeared on an adjacent screen. The mask looked around the room, then said, “Good morning, Robert. Good morning, Professor Hamilton.”
Jack said, “You had someone record those words?”
The mask replied, “No, Robert showed me photographs of all the teaching staff at Cambridge. If I see anyone I know from the photographs, I greet them.” The face was crudely rendered, but the hollow eyes seemed to meet Jack’s. Stoney explained, “It has no idea what it’s saying, of course. It’s just an exercise in face and voice recognition.”
Jack responded stiffly, “Of course.”
Stoney motioned to Jack to approach and examine the hamster cage. He obliged him. There were two adult animals, presumably a breeding pair. Two pink young were suckling from the mother, who reclined in a bed of straw.
“Look closely,” Stoney urged him. Jack peered into the nest, then cried out an obscenity and backed away.
One of the young was exactly what it seemed. The other was a machine, wrapped in ersatz skin, with a nozzle clamped to the warm teat.
“That’s the most monstrous thing that I’ve ever seen!” Jack’s whole body was trembling. “What possible reason could you have to do that?”
Stoney laughed and made a reassuring gesture, as if his guest were a nervous child recoiling from a harmless toy. “It’s not hurting her! And the point is to discover what it takes for the mother to accept it.
To ‘reproduce one’s kind’ means having some set of parameters as to what thatis. Scent, and some aspects of appearance, are important cues in this case, but through trial and error I’ve also pinned down a set of behaviors that lets the simulacrum pass through every stage of the life cycle. An acceptable child, an acceptable sibling, an acceptable mate.”
Jack stared at him, nauseated. “These animals fuck your machines?”
Stoney was apologetic. “Yes, but hamsters will fuck anything. I’ll really have to shift to a more discerning species, in order to test that properly.”
Jack struggled to regain his composure. “What on Earth possessed you, to do this?”
“In the long run,” Stoney said mildly, “I believe this is something we’re going to need to understand far better than we do at present. Now that we can map the structures of the brain in fine detail, and match its raw complexity with our computers, it’s only a matter of a decade or so before we build machines that think.
“That in itself will be a vast endeavor, but I want to ensure that it’s not stillborn from the start. There’s not much point creating the most marvelous children in history, only to find that some awful mammalian instinct drives us to strangle them at birth.”
Jack sat in his study drinking whiskey. He’d telephoned Joyce after dinner, and they’d chatted for a while, but it wasn’t the same as being with her. The weekends never came soon enough, and by Tuesday or Wednesday any sense of reassurance he’d gained from seeing her had slipped away entirely.
It was almost midnight now. After speaking to Joyce, he’d spent three more hours on the telephone, finding out what he could about Stoney. Milking his connections, such as they were; Jack had only been at Cambridge for five years, so he was still very much an outsider. Not that he’d ever been admitted into any inner circles back at Oxford: he’d always belonged to a small, quiet group of dissenters against the tide of fashion. Whatever else might be said about the Tiddledy winks, they’d never had their hands on the levers of academic power.
A year ago, while on sabbatical in Germany, Stoney had resigned suddenly from a position he’d held at Manchester for a decade. He’d returned to Cambridge, despite having no official posting to take up.
He’d started collaborating informally with various people at the Cavendish, until the head of the place, Mott, had invented a job description for him, and given him a modest salary, the three rooms Jack had seen, and some students to assist him.
Stoney’s colleagues were uniformly amazed by his spate of successful inventions. Though none of his gadgets were based on entirely new science, his skill at seeing straight to the heart of existing theories and plucking some practical consequence from them was unprecedented. Jack had expected some jealous back-stabbing, but no one seemed to have a bad word to say about Stoney. He was willing to turn his scientific Midas touch to the service of anyone who approached him, and it sounded to Jack as if every would-be skeptic or enemy had been bought off with some rewarding insight into their own field.
Stoney’s personal life was rather murkier. Half of Jack’s informants were convinced that the man was a confirmed pansy, but others spoke of a beautiful, mysterious woman named Helen, with whom he was plainly on intimate terms.
Jack emptied his glass and stared out across the courtyard.Was it pride, to wonder if he might have received some kind of prophetic vision? Fifteen years earlier, when he’d writtenThe Broken Planet, he’d imagined that he’d merely been satirizing the hubris of modern science. His portrait of the evil forces behind the sardonically named Laboratory Overseeing Various Experiments had been intended as a deadly serious metaphor, but he’d never expected to find himself wondering if real fallen angels were whispering secrets in the ears of a Cambridge don.
How many times, though, had he told his readers that the devil’s greatest victory had been convincing the world that he did not exist? The devil wasnot a metaphor, a mere symbol of human weakness: he was a real, scheming presence, acting in time, acting in the world, as much as God Himself.
And hadn’t Faustus’s damnation been sealed by the most beautiful woman of all time: Helen of Troy?
Jack’s skin crawled. He’d once written a humorous newspaper column called “Letters from a Demon,” in which a Senior Tempter offered advice to a less experienced colleague on the best means to lead the faithful astray. Even that had been an exhausting, almost corrupting experience; adopting the necessary point of view, however whimsically, had made him feel that he was withering inside. The thought that a cross between theFaustbuch andThe Broken Planet might be coming to life around him was too terrifying to contemplate. He was no hero out of his own fiction-not even a mildmannered Cedric Duffy, let alone a modern Pendragon. And he did not believe that Merlin would rise from the woods to bring chaos to that hubristic Tower of Babel, the Cavendish Laboratory.
Nevertheless, if he was the only person in England who suspected Stoney’s true source of inspiration, whoelse would act?
Jack poured himself another glass. There was nothing to be gained by procrastinating. He would not be able to rest until he knew what he was facing: a vain, foolish overgrown boy who was having a run of good luck-or a vain, foolish overgrown boy who had sold his soul and imperiled all humanity.
“ASatanist? You’re accusing me of being a Satanist?”
Stoney tugged angrily at his dressing gown; he’d been in bed when Jack had pounded on the door. Given the hour, it had been remarkably civil of him to accept a visitor at all, and he appeared so genuinely affronted now that Jack was almost prepared to apologize and slink away. He said, “I had to ask you-”
“You have to be doubly foolish to be a Satanist,” Stoney muttered.
“Doubly?”
“Not only do you need to believe all the nonsense of Christian theology, you then have to turn around and back the preordained, guaranteed-to-fail, absolutely futilelosing side.” He held up his hand, as if he believed he’d anticipated the only possible objection to this remark, and wished to spare Jack the trouble of wasting his breath by uttering it. “Iknow, some people claim it’s all really about some pre-Christian deity: Mercury, or Pan-guff like that. But assuming that we’re not talking about some complicated mislabeling of objects of worship, I really can’t think of anything more insulting. You’re comparing me to someone like…Huysmans, who was basically just a very dim Catholic.”
Stoney folded his arms and settled back on the couch, waiting for Jack’s response.
Jack’s head was thick from the whiskey; he wasn’t at all sure how to take this. It was the kind of smart-arsed
