Read Online The Body Human by Nancy Kress - Free Book Online
Authors: Nancy Kress
Tags: genatics, beggars in spain
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sets of volu n teers, all people who had long-term terminal diseases but weren’t depressed, people who were willing to take risks in order to enhance the quality of their own perceptions in the time left. I was there observing when they took it. They bonded like baby ducks imprinting on the first moving objects they see. No, not like that. More like…like…” He looked over my shoulder, at the wall, and his eyes filled with water. I glanced around to make sure nobody noticed.
“Giacomo della Francesca and Lydia Smith took J-24 together almost a month ago. They were transformed by this incredible joy in each other. In knowing each other. Not each other’s memories, but each other’s… souls. They talked, and held hands, and you could just feel that they were completely open to each other, without all the ps y chological defenses we use to keep ourselves walled off. They knew each other. They almost were each other.”
I was embarrassed by the look on his face. “But they didn’t know each other like that, Bucky. It was just an i l lusion.”
“No. It wasn’t. Look, what happens when you connect with someone, share something intense with them?”
I didn’t want to have this conversation. But Bucky didn’t really need me to answer; he rolled on all by himself, unstoppable.
“What happens when you connect is that you exhibit greater risk-taking, with fewer inhibitions. You exhibit greater empathy, greater attention, greater receptivity to what is being said, greater pleasure. And all of those r e sponses are neurochemical, which in turn create, reinforce, or diminish physical structures in the brain. J-24 just r e verses the process. Instead of the experience causing the neurochemical response, J-24 supplies the physical changes that create the experience. And that’s not all. The drug boosts the rate of structural change, so that every touch, every word exchanged, every emotional response, reinforces neural pathways one or two hundred times as much as a normal life encounter.”
I wasn’t sure how much of this I believed. “And so you say you gave it to four old couples…does it only work on men and women?”
A strange look passed swiftly over his face: secretive, almost pained. I remembered Tommy. “That’s all who have tried it so far. Can you…have you ever thought about what it would be like to be really merged, to know him—to be him—think of it, Gene! I could—”
“I don’t want to hear about that,” I said harshly. Libby would hate that answer. My liberal, tolerant daughter. But I’d been a cop. Lingering homophobia went with the te r ritory, even if I wasn’t exactly proud of it. Whatever Bucky’s fantasies were about him and Tommy, I didn’t want to know.
Bucky didn’t look offended. “All right. But just ima g ine—an end to the terrible isolation that we live in our whole tiny lives.…” He looked at the raindrops sliding down the window.
“And you think somebody murdered those elderly for that? Who? Why?”
“I don’t know.”
“Bucky. Think. This doesn’t make any sense. A drug company creates a…what did you call it? A neuropharm . They get it into clinical trials, under FDA supervision—”
“No,” Bucky said.
I stared at him.
“It would have taken years. Maybe decades. It’s too radical a departure. So Kelvin—”
“You knew there was no approval.”
“Yes. But I thought…I never thought…” He looked at me, and suddenly I had another one of those unlogical flashes, and I saw there was more wrong here even than Bucky was telling me. He believed that he’d participated, in whatever small way, in creating a drug that led someone to murder eight old people. Never mind if it was true—Bucky believed it. He believed this same company was covering its collective ass by calling the deaths d e pressive suicides, when they could not have been suicides. And yet Bucky sat in front of me without chewing his nails to the knuckles, or pulling out his
“Giacomo della Francesca and Lydia Smith took J-24 together almost a month ago. They were transformed by this incredible joy in each other. In knowing each other. Not each other’s memories, but each other’s… souls. They talked, and held hands, and you could just feel that they were completely open to each other, without all the ps y chological defenses we use to keep ourselves walled off. They knew each other. They almost were each other.”
I was embarrassed by the look on his face. “But they didn’t know each other like that, Bucky. It was just an i l lusion.”
“No. It wasn’t. Look, what happens when you connect with someone, share something intense with them?”
I didn’t want to have this conversation. But Bucky didn’t really need me to answer; he rolled on all by himself, unstoppable.
“What happens when you connect is that you exhibit greater risk-taking, with fewer inhibitions. You exhibit greater empathy, greater attention, greater receptivity to what is being said, greater pleasure. And all of those r e sponses are neurochemical, which in turn create, reinforce, or diminish physical structures in the brain. J-24 just r e verses the process. Instead of the experience causing the neurochemical response, J-24 supplies the physical changes that create the experience. And that’s not all. The drug boosts the rate of structural change, so that every touch, every word exchanged, every emotional response, reinforces neural pathways one or two hundred times as much as a normal life encounter.”
I wasn’t sure how much of this I believed. “And so you say you gave it to four old couples…does it only work on men and women?”
A strange look passed swiftly over his face: secretive, almost pained. I remembered Tommy. “That’s all who have tried it so far. Can you…have you ever thought about what it would be like to be really merged, to know him—to be him—think of it, Gene! I could—”
“I don’t want to hear about that,” I said harshly. Libby would hate that answer. My liberal, tolerant daughter. But I’d been a cop. Lingering homophobia went with the te r ritory, even if I wasn’t exactly proud of it. Whatever Bucky’s fantasies were about him and Tommy, I didn’t want to know.
Bucky didn’t look offended. “All right. But just ima g ine—an end to the terrible isolation that we live in our whole tiny lives.…” He looked at the raindrops sliding down the window.
“And you think somebody murdered those elderly for that? Who? Why?”
“I don’t know.”
“Bucky. Think. This doesn’t make any sense. A drug company creates a…what did you call it? A neuropharm . They get it into clinical trials, under FDA supervision—”
“No,” Bucky said.
I stared at him.
“It would have taken years. Maybe decades. It’s too radical a departure. So Kelvin—”
“You knew there was no approval.”
“Yes. But I thought…I never thought…” He looked at me, and suddenly I had another one of those unlogical flashes, and I saw there was more wrong here even than Bucky was telling me. He believed that he’d participated, in whatever small way, in creating a drug that led someone to murder eight old people. Never mind if it was true—Bucky believed it. He believed this same company was covering its collective ass by calling the deaths d e pressive suicides, when they could not have been suicides. And yet Bucky sat in front of me without chewing his nails to the knuckles, or pulling out his
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