Читать книгу Sexual Chemistry and Other Tales of the Biotech Revolution - Brian Stableford - Страница 5

SEXUAL CHEMISTRY

There are some names that are more difficult to wear then others. Shufflebottoms, Bastards, and Pricks start life with a handicap from which they may never recover, and one can easily understand why those born into families which have innocently borne since time immemorial such surnames as Hitler and Quisling often surrender such birthrights in favor of Smith or Villanova. People who refuse to change embarrassing names are frequently forced into an attitude of defensive stubbornness, brazenly and pridefully staring out the mockery of the world. For some people, an unfortunate surname can be a challenge as well as a curse, and life for them becomes a field of conflict in which heroism requires them to acquit themselves well.

One might be forgiven for thinking that Casanova is a less problematic name than many. It is by no means vulgar and has not the slightest genocidal connotation. It is a name that some men would be glad to have, conferring upon them as it would a mystique that they might wittily exploit. It is nevertheless a label that could be parent to a host of embarrassments and miseries, especially if worn by a gawky schoolboy in an English inner city comprehensive school, which was where the Giovanni Casanova who had been born on 14 February 1982 first became fully aware of its burdensome nature.

Giovanni’s father, Marcantonio Casanova, had always been fond of the name, and seemed well enough equipped by fate to wear it well. He was not a tall man, but he had a handsome face and dark, flashing eyes that were definitely no handicap in the heart-melting stakes. He had made no serious attempt to live up to the name, however, accepting it as a nice joke that he found contentment in placid monogamy. His grandparents had come to Britain in the 1930s, refugees from Mussolini’s Italy, and had settled in Manchester at the height of the Depression. Marcantonio therefore came from a line of impoverished intellectuals who had been prevented by social circumstance from achieving their real potential.

Giovanni’s mother had also had no opportunity to fulfill her intellectual potential. Her maiden name was Jenny Spencer, and she had been born into the kind of respectable working-class family that would make every effort to set its sons on the road of upward social mobility, but thought that the acme of achievement for a daughter was to be an apprentice hairdresser at 16, a wife at 17 and a mother at 18. All of these expectations Jenny had fulfilled with casual ease.

The whims of genetic and environmental fortune combined to give these humble parents a uniquely gifted son, for Giovanni soon showed evidence of a marvelous intelligence beyond even the latent potentialities of his parents. Nature’s generosity was, however, restricted entirely to qualities of mind; in terms of looks and physique Giovanni was a non-starter. He was undersized, out of proportion, and had an awful complexion. A bout of measles in infancy added insult to injury by leaving his eyesight terribly impaired; astigmatism and chronic myopia combined to force him to wear spectacles that robbed his dark eyes of any opportunity they ever had to flash heart-meltingly, and made him look rather cross-eyed. His voice was high-pitched, and never broke properly when he belatedly reached puberty. His hair insisted on growing into an appalling black tangle, and he began to go thin on top when he was barely seventeen. As dozens of thoughtless people were to remark to his face, and thousands more were to think silently to themselves, he certainly didn’t look like a Casanova.

The class culture of England had proved remarkably resilient in the face of the erodent egalitarianism of the twentieth century, and bourgeois morality never did filter down to the poorer streets of Northern England, even when the old slums were demolished and new ones erected with indoor toilets and inbuilt social alienation. Where Giovanni spent his formative years, very few girls preserved their virginity past the age of fourteen, and many a boy without a CSE to his name had done sufficient research to write a PhD thesis on sexual technique by the time he was old enough to vote. This tide of covert sexual activity, however, passed Giovanni Casanova by. He was acutely conscious of the flood of eroticism that seethed all around him, and wished devoutly to be carried away by it, but to no avail.

Other ugly boys, who seemed to him as unprepossessing as himself, managed one by one to leap the first and most difficult hurdle, and subsequently gained marvelously in confidence and expertise, but Giovanni could not emulate them. His unattractiveness made things difficult, and his name added just sufficiently to his difficulties to make his task impossible, because it made even the girls who might have felt sorry for him laugh at him instead. Even the most feeble-minded of teenage girls could appreciate that there was something essentially rib-tickling about saying “no” to a Casanova.

Giovanni had started out on his journey through adolescence bogged down by self-consciousness, and by the time he was seventeen he was filled with self-loathing and incipient paranoia. By then he was already doomed to a long career as a social misfit. He was so withdrawn, having suffered such agonies from his failures, that he had completely given up talking to members of the female sex, except when forced to do so by absolute necessity.

His sanity was saved, though, because he found a haven of retreat: the world of scientific knowledge, the certainties of which contrasted so sharply with the treacherous vicissitudes of the social world. Even his teachers thought of him as a slightly unsavory freak, but they recognized that in intellectual terms he was a potential superstar. He compiled the most impressive scholarly record that his very moderate school had ever produced, and in October 2000 he went triumphantly to university to study biochemistry.

Biochemistry was the glamour science in those days, when every year that passed produced new biotechnological miracles from the laboratories of the genetic engineers. Giovanni was entranced by the infinite possibilities of the applied science, and set out to master the crafts of gene-mapping, protein design and plasmid construction. In everyday life he seemed extremely clumsy and slow of wit, but he was a very different character in the privacy of a laboratory, when he could manage the most delicate operation with absolute control, and where he had such a perfect intuition and understanding of what he was doing that he soon left his educators far behind.

In the new environment of the university, where intelligence was held in reasonably high esteem by female students, Giovanni tried tentatively to come out of his shell. He began talking to girls again, albeit with ponderous caution and unease. He helped other students with their work, and tried once or twice to move on from assistance to seduction. There was a black-haired Isabel who seemed to think him an interesting conversationalist, and a freckled Mary who even cooked a couple of meals for him because she thought he was neglecting himself, but they politely declined to enter into more intimate relationships with him. They could not think of him in such a light, and although they were prepared to consider Giovanni a friend of sorts, the boys they welcomed into their beds were of a very different type. Giovanni tried hard not to resent this, and to see their point of view. He certainly did not blame them, but the sympathy he felt for their attitude only made him more disappointed with himself, and even more sharply aware of the mockery in his name.

Transforming bacteria by plasmid engineering was passé long before Giovanni’s graduation, and he felt that the engineering of plants, although it certainly offered great opportunities for ingenuity and creativity, was not quite adventurous enough for him. He knew that his talents were sufficiently extraordinary to require something a little more daring, and so he channeled his efforts in the direction of animal engineering. His doctoral research was devoted to the development of artificial cytogene systems, which could be transplanted into animal cells without requiring disruption of the nucleus or incorporation into the chromosomal system; these made it practicable to transform specific cells in the tissues of mature metazoans, avoiding all the practical and ethical problems that still surrounded work on zygotes and embryos.

Giovanni’s early ambition was to apply this research to various projects in medical science. He produced in his imagination half a dozen strategies for conquering cancer, and a few exotic methods of combating the effects of aging. Had he stayed in pure research, based in a university, this was undoubtedly what he would have done, but the early years of the new millennium were a period of economic boom, when big biotechnology companies were headhunting talent with a rare ruthlessness. Giovanni never applied for a job or made any inquiry about industrial opportunities, but found potential employers begging to interview him in the comfort of his own home or any other place he cared to name. They sent beautiful and impeccably-manicured personnel officers to woo him with their tutored smiles and their talk of six-figure salaries. One or two were so desperate to net him that they seemed almost willing to bribe him with sexual favors, but they always stopped short of that ultimate tactic, much to his chagrin.

He was so fiercely dedicated to his work, and had such noble ideals, that he hesitated for a long time before selling out, but the temptations were too much for him in the end. He sold himself to the highest bidder—Cytotech, Inc.—and joined the brain drain to sunny California, being careful to leave most of his bank accounts in convenient European tax shelters so that he could be a millionaire before he was thirty. He had the impression that even the most ill-favored of millionaires could easily play the part of an authentic Casanova, and he could hardly wait to set himself up as a big spender.

Cytotech was heavily involved in medical research, but its dynamic company president, Marmaduke Melmoth, had different plans for this most extraordinary of hirelings. Melmoth invited Giovanni to his mansion in Beverley Hills, and gave him the most fabulous meal that the young man had ever seen, and then he told Giovanni where, in his terminology, “the game was to be played.”

“The future,” said Melmoth, sipping his pink champagne, “is in aphrodisiacs. Cancer cures we can only sell to people with cancer. Life-expectation is great, but it isn’t worth a damn unless people can enjoy extended life. To hell with better mousetraps—what this world wants is better beaver-traps. You make me a red-hot pheromone, and I’ll make you a billionaire.”

Giovanni explained to Melmoth that there could be no such thing as a powerful human pheromone. Many insects, he pointed out, perceive their environment almost entirely in olfactory terms, so that it makes sense for female insects with limited periods of fertility to signal their readiness with a smelly secretion which—if produced in sufficient quantities—could draw every male insect from miles around. Humans, by contrast, make very little use of their sense of smell, and their females are unafflicted by short and vital phases of fertility, which must at all costs be exploited for the continued survival of the species.

“All this I know,” Melmoth assured him, “and the fact that you thought to tell me about it reveals to me that you have an attitude problem. Let me give you some advice, son. It’s easy to find people who’ll tell me what isn’t possible and can’t be done. For that I can hire morons. I hire geniuses to say ‘If that won’t work, what will?’ Do you get my drift?”

Giovanni was genuinely impressed by this observation, although it could hardly be reckoned original. He realized that his remarks really had been symptomatic of an attitude problem, which had manifested itself all-too-powerfully in his personal life. He went to his laboratory determined to produce for Mr. Melmoth something that would stand in for the impossible pheromone, and determined to produce for himself some sexual encounters that would put him on course for a career as an authentic Casanova. It was simply, he decided, a matter of strategy and determination.

In fact, Giovanni was now in a position where he had more than a little prestige and influence. Although he was notionally starting at the bottom at Cytotech, there was no doubting that he would go far—that he was a man to be respected no matter how unlovely his appearance might be.

Thus advantaged, he had little difficulty in losing his virginity at last, with a seventeen-year-old blonde lab assistant called Helen. That was a great relief, but he was all too well aware of the fact that it represented no considerable triumph. It was a fumbling affair, throughout which he was trembling with anxiety and embarrassment; he felt that his everyday clumsiness and awkwardness, although he could leave them behind in his laboratory work, were concentrated to grotesque extremes in his sexual technique. Pretty Helen, who was not herself overburdened with experience or sophistication, uttered not a word of complaint and made no reference to his surname, but Giovanni found himself quite convinced that in the privacy of her thoughts she was crying out “Casanova! Casanova!” and laughing hysterically at the irony of it. He dared not ask her to his bed again, and tended to shun her in the workplace.

Deciding that he needed more practice, Giovanni arranged visits to whores whose telephone numbers he found scrawled on the walls of the payphones in the main lobby, and although he avoided by this means the embarrassment of knowing that his partners knew his name, he still found it appallingly difficult to improve his performance. If anything, he thought, he was getting worse instead of better, becoming steadily more ludicrous in his own eyes.

Clearly this was what Melmoth would have called an attitude problem, but Giovanni now knew that simply calling it by that name would no more solve it than calling him Casanova had made him into an avatar of his famous namesake. Self-disgust made him give up visiting prostitutes after his third such experience, and he could not bring himself to try to resuscitate his relationship with Helen. He had little difficulty convincing himself that celibacy was to be preferred to continual humiliation.

In his work, however, he was making great strides. Taking Melmoth’s advice to heart, he asked himself what would constitute, in human terms, an alternative to pheromones. The dominant human sense is sight, so the nearest human analogue of an insect pheronome is an attractive appearance, but this has so long been taken for granted that it sustains a vast cosmetics industry dedicated to helping members of the desired sex to enhance their charms. Giovanni felt that there was relatively little scope in this area for his expertise, so he turned his attention instead to the sense of touch.

He eventually decided that what was needed was something that would make the touch of the would-be seducer irresistible to the target of his (or her) affections: a love-potion of the fingertips. If he could find a psychotropic protein that could be absorbed quickly through the skin, so that the touch of the donor could become associated with subsequent waves of pleasurable sensation, then it should be fairly easy to achieve an operant conditioning of the desired one.

Giovanni brought all his artistry in protein-design to bear on the production of a psychotropic that would call forth strong feelings of euphoria, tenderness, affection and lust. It wasn’t easy—understanding of that kind of psychochemistry was then at a very primitive level—but he was the man for the job. Having found the ideal protein, he then encoded it in the DNA of an artificial cytogene, which he tailored for incorporation in subepidermal cells, whose activation would be triggered by sexual arousal. The protein itself could then be delivered to the surface of the skin via the sweat-glands.

When the time came to explain this ingenious mechanism to Marmaduke Melmoth, the company president was not immediately enthused.

“Hell’s bells, boy,” he said. “Why not just put the stuff in bottles and let people smear it on their fingers?”

Giovanni explained that his new psychotropic protein, like the vast majority of such entities, was so awesomely delicate that it could not be kept in solution, and would rapidly denature outside the protective environment of a living cell. In any case, the whole point was that the object of desire could only obtain this particular fix from the touch of the would-be seducer. If it were to be used for conditioning, then its sources must be very carefully limited. This was not a technology for mass distribution, but something for the favored few, who had to use it with the utmost discretion.

“Oh shit,” said Melmoth, in disgust. “How are we going to make billions out of a product like that?”

Giovanni suggested that he sell it only to the very rich at an exorbitant price.

“If we’re going to do it that way,” Melmoth told him, “we’re going to have to be absolutely sure that it works, and that there’s not the ghost of an unfortunate side-effect. You work for customers like that, they have to get satisfaction.”

Giovanni agreed that this was a vital necessity. He set up a series of exhaustive and highly secret clinical trials, and did not tell Melmoth that he had already started exploring the effects and potentials of the tissue-transformation. In the great tradition of scientific self-sacrifice, he had volunteered to be his own guinea-pig.

To say that the method worked would be a feeble understatement. Giovanni found that he only had to look at an attractive girl, and conjure up in his imagination fantasies of sexual communion, to produce the special sweat that put magic at his fingertips. Once he was sufficiently worked up, the merest touch sufficed to set the psychochemical seduction in train, and it required only the simplest strategy to achieve the required conditioning. Girls learned very quickly—albeit subconsciously—to associate his touch with the most tender and exciting emotions. They quickly overcame their natural revulsion and began to think that, although he was not conventionally attractive, he was really rather fascinating.

Within three weeks of the experiment’s launch four female lab assistants, two word-processing operatives, three receptionists, one industrial relations consultant and a traffic warden were deep in the throes of infatuation. Giovanni was on top of the world, and gloried in the victory of becoming a self-made Casanova. The dignity of celibacy was cast casually aside. Women were desperate now to get him into bed, and he obliged them with pleasure. He even managed to overcome some of the limitations of his awkwardness, and was soon no longer troubled by premature ejaculation.

But the sense of satisfaction did not last. It took only three months more for him to become thoroughly disgusted with himself all over again. It wasn’t so much guilt generated by the knowledge that he had cheated his partners into their passionate desire, although that did weigh somewhat upon his conscience; the real problem was that he became convinced that he was not giving them full value in return. He knew that, however disappointing any particular session of love-making might be, each and every victim would continue to love him vehemently, but he thought that he could see how disappointed his paramours were, in him and in themselves. They loved him, but their love only made them unhappy. That was partly because they realized that they were all competing with one another for his attentions, but he was convinced that it was mainly because those attentions were so inherently unsatisfying.

Giovanni could now present to the world the image of a genuine Casanova. He was talked about, in wondering tones. He was envied by others—but in his own eyes, he remained, in every sense, a despicable fraud. It was not him that was beloved, but some organic goo that he had concocted in a test-tube; and the women who were its victims were condemned to the desperations of jealousy, the disappointments of third-rate sex, and the miseries of helplessness. Giovanni did not have the stomach to be a wholesale heartbreaker; he was too familiar with misery and desperation to take pleasure from inflicting it on others—not, at any rate, on women that he liked and admired.

By the time the royalties began to roll in, when Melmoth’s discreet marketing of the discovery to the world’s richest men began to pay dividends, Giovanni was again deep in depression and cynicism. Others, he felt sure, would be able to exploit his invention to the full, as the means to illimitable pleasure, but not him. Casanova the fool had simply confirmed his own wretchedness. His cup of bitterness overflowed.

It was, as ever, Marmaduke Melmoth who brought it home to him that he was still suffering from an attitude problem.

“Look, Joe,” said Melmoth, “we have a few little problems—nothing you can’t sort out, I’m sure, but it’s necessary to keep the customers happy and the cash coming in. The way we’re playing this, we have a restricted market, and a lot of the guys are getting on a bit. It’s all very well to offer them a way of getting the slots in the sack, but what they really need is something to get the peg into the slot. Did you ever hear of this stuff called spanish fly?”

Giovanni explained that Cantharides was a beetle rather than a fly; that it was a powerful poison; and that it probably wasn’t terribly satisfying to have a painfully rigid and itchy erection for hours on end.

“So make something better,” said Melmoth, with the casual mastery of the art of delegation that had made him rich.

Giovanni gave the matter some consideration, and decided that it was probably feasible to devise a biochemical mechanism that would make it possible for a man to win conscious control over his erections: to produce them at will, sustain them as long as might be required, and generate orgasms in any desired quantity. It would require a couple of new hormones that Mother Nature had not thought to provide, a secondary system of trigger hormones for feedback control, and a cytogene for transforming the cells of the pituitary gland. Even when the biochemistry was in place, people would have to learn to use the new system, and that would require a training program, perhaps with computer-assisted biofeedback back-up, but it could be done.

He set to work, patiently bringing his new dream-child to perfection.

Naturally, he had to test the system to make sure that it was worth going ahead with clinical trials. Once the genetic transplants had taken, he spent a couple of hours a night in solitary practice. It only took him a week to gain complete conscious control of his new abilities, but he had started with the advantage of understanding, so he mapped out a training program for the punters that would take a fortnight.

Once again, he was filled with optimism with respect to his own personal problems. No longer would he have to worry about flaws in his technique; he could now be confident that any girl who was caused to fall in love with him would receive full measure of sexual satisfaction in return. Now, he was in a much better position to emulate his famous namesake.

Giovanni was no longer a callow youth, however, and his optimism about the future was not based entirely on his biotechnological augmentation. He had undergone a more dramatic change of attitude, and had decided that the Casanova he needed to copy was not the ancient Giovanni but his father Marcantonio. He had decided that the answer to the problem of happiness lay in monogamy, and he wanted to get married. He was now in his mid-thirties, and it seemed to him that what he needed was a partner of his own age: a mature and level-headed woman who could bring order and stability into his life.

These arguments led him to fall in love with his accountant, a thirty-three-year-old divorcee named Denise. He had ample opportunity to make the fingertip contacts necessary to make her besotted with him, because his fortune was steadily increasing, and there were always new opportunities in tax avoidance for them to discuss over dinner. Giovanni orchestrated the whole affair very carefully and—he thought—smoothly, graciously allowing Denise the pleasure of seducing him on their third real date. He still felt clumsy and a little anxious, but she seemed quite delighted with his powers of endurance.

His parents were glad when he told them the news. His father cried with delight at the thought that the name of Casanova would now be transmitted to a further generation, and his mother—who believed that getting married was a kind of certificate of belonging to the human race—was euphorically sentimental for months.

Denise gave up work when she became pregnant, mere weeks after the honeymoon, abandoning to other financial wizards the job of distributing and protecting the spring tide of cash that began to pour into Giovanni’s bank accounts as his new discovery was discreetly marketed by the ingenious Melmoth.

Giovanni loved Denise very much, and became more and more devoted to her as the months of her pregnancy elapsed. When she gave birth to a baby girl—named Jennifer, after his mother—he felt that he had discovered heaven on earth.

Unfortunately, this peak in his experience was soon passed. Denise got post-natal depression, and began to find her energetic sex life something of a bore. She was still hooked, unknowingly, on the produce of Giovanni’s fingertips, but her emotional responses became perversely confused, and her feelings of love and affection generated floods of miserable tears.

Giovanni was overwrought, and knew not what to do. He was slowly consumed by a new wave of guilt. Whatever was the matter, he was responsible for it. He had made Denise love him, and had avoided feeling like a cheat only because he was convinced that she was reaping all the rewards that she could possibly have attained from a love that grew spontaneously in her heart. Now things were going wrong, he saw himself as her betrayer and her destroyer.

When Giovanni became anguished and miserable, Denise blamed herself. She became even more confused and even more desperate in her confusion. The unhappy couple fed one another’s despair, and became wretched together. This intolerable situation led inexorably toward the one awful mistake that Giovanni was bound eventually to make.

He told her everything.

From every possible point of view, this was a disastrous move. When she heard how he had tied her finest and most intimate feelings to chemical puppet-strings, her love for him underwent a purely psychosomatic transformation into bitter and resentful hatred. She left him forthwith, taking the infant Jenny with her, and sued for divorce. She also filed a suit demanding thirty million dollars compensation for his biochemical interference with her affections. In so doing, of course, she made headline news of the enterprises that Marmaduke Melmoth had kept so carefully secret, and released a tempest of controversy.

The impact of the news can easily be imagined. The world of the 2010s was supposedly one in which the women of the overdeveloped countries had won complete equality with their menfolk. The feminists of the day looked back with satisfaction at centuries of fierce fighting against legal and attitudinal discrimination; their heroines had battled successfully against sexism in the workplace, sexism in education, sexism in the language and sexism in the psyche. Although progress had brought them to the brink of their particular Millennium, they still had a heightened consciousness of the difficulties that had beset their quest, and a hair-trigger paranoia about any threat to their achievements. The discovery that, for nearly twenty years, the world’s richest men had been covertly buying biotechnologies specifically designed for the manipulation and sexual oppression of womankind constituted a scandal such as the world of sexual politics had never known.

Giovanni Casanova, who had so far lived his life in secure obscurity, cozily content with his unsung genius, found himself suddenly notorious. His name—that hideous curse of a name—suddenly became the progenitor of jokes and gibes displayed in screeching headlines, broadcast to every corner of the globe, found as frequently in news bulletins as tawdry comedy shows. Overnight, the new Casanova became a modern folk-devil: the man who had put the cause of sexual emancipation back three hundred years.

The divorce broke his mother’s heart, and her sufferings were compounded when Marcantonio Casanova died suddenly of heart failure. She hinted to Giovanni in a reckless moment that his father had died of shame, and Giovanni took this so much to heart that he seriously contemplated suicide.

Denise, the victim of Giovanni’s obscene machinations, achieved a temporary sainthood in the eyes of the women of the world. Melmoth, who had played Mephistopheles to Giovanni’s Faust, was demonized alongside him. Thousands of women filed copycat lawsuits against their rich paramours, against Giovanni, and against Cytotech. Giovanni got sacks of hate-mail from tens of thousands of women who believed—usually without any foundation in fact—that his magic had been used to steal their souls.

As storms usually do, though, this hurricane of abuse soon began to lose its fury. Marmaduke Melmoth began to use his many resources to tell the world that the real issue was simply a little attitude problem.

Melmoth was able to point out that there was nothing inherently sexist about Giovanni’s first discovery. He was able to prove that he had several female clients, who had been happily using the seductive sweat to attract young men. He argued—with some justice—that the cosmetics industry had for centuries been offering men and women methods of enhancing their sexual attractiveness, and that there had always been a powerful demand for aphrodisiacs. Giovanni’s only “crime,” he suggested, was to have produced an aphrodisiac that worked, and which was absolutely safe, to replace thousands of products of fake witchcraft and medical quackery that were at best useless and at worst harmful. He argued that, although Giovanni’s second discovery was, indeed, applicable only to male physiology, its utility and its benefits were by no means confined to the male sex.

This rhetoric was backed up by some bold promises, which saved Cytotech’s image and turned all the publicity to the company’s advantage. Melmoth guaranteed that Giovanni’s first discovery would now become much cheaper, so that the tissue-transformation would be available even to those of moderate means, and to men and women equally. He also announced that Giovanni had already begun to work on an entire spectrum of new artificial hormones, which would give to women as well as to men vast new opportunities in the conscious generation and control of bodily pleasure.

These promises quickly displaced the scandal from the headlines. Cytotech’s publicity machine did such a comprehensive job of image-building that Giovanni became a hero instead of a folk-devil. The moral panic died down, the lawsuits collapsed, and the hate-mail dried up. Denise got her divorce, though, and custody of little Jenny. She didn’t get her thirty million dollars compensation, but she was awarded sufficient alimony to keep her in relative luxury for the rest of her life. Giovanni was awarded the Nobel Prize for Biochemistry, but this did little to soothe his disappointment, even although it helped his mother to recover from her broken heart and be proud of him again.

Giovanni launched himself obsessively into the work required to make good on Melmoth’s promises. He became a virtual recluse, putting in such long hours at the laboratory that his staff and co-workers began to fear for his health and sanity. As he neared forty his mental faculties were in decline, but the increase in his knowledge and wisdom offset the loss of mental agility, and it is arguable that it was in this phase of his career that his genius was most powerful and most fertile. He did indeed develop a new spectrum of hormones and enkephalins, which in combination gave people who underwent the relevant tissue-transformations far greater conscious control over the physiology of pleasure. As recipients gradually learned what they could do with their new biochemistry, and mastered its arts and skills, they became able to induce in themselves—without any necessary assistance at all—orgasms and kindred sensations more thrilling, more blissful and more luxurious than the poor human nature crudely hewn by the hackwork of natural selection had ever provided to anyone.

Giovanni created, almost single-handed, a vast new panorama of masturbatory enterprise.

For once, Giovanni’s progress was the object of constant attention and constant debate. Cynics claimed that his work was hateful, because it would utterly destroy romance, devalue human feelings, obliterate sincere affection, and mechanize ecstasy. Critics argued that the value and mystique of sexual relationships would be fatally compromised by his transformations. Pessimists prophesied that if his new projects were to be brought to a successful conclusion, sexual intercourse might become a thing of the past, displaced from the arena of human experience by voluptuous self-abuse. Fortunately, these pessimists were unable to argue that this might lead to the end of the human race, because discoveries made by other biotechnologists had permitted the development of artificial wombs more efficient than real ones; sexual intercourse was no longer necessary for reproduction, which could be managed more competently in vitro. The cynics and the pessimists were therefore disregarded by the majority, who were hungry for joy, and eager to enter a promised land of illimitable delight.

As always, Giovanni was the first to try out his new discoveries; the pioneer spirit that forced him to seek out new solutions to his personal troubles was as strong as ever, and the prospect of combining celibacy with ecstasy appealed very much to his eremitic frame of mind.

In the early days of his experimentation, while he was still exploring the potential of his new hormonal instruments of self-control, he was rather pleased with the ways in which he could evoke rapture to illuminate his loneliness, but he quickly realized that this was no easy answer to his problems. Eight hundred thousand years of masturbation had not sufficed to blunt the human race’s appetite for sexual intercourse, and Giovanni quickly found that the reason for this failure had nothing to do with the quality of the sensations produced. The cynics and pessimists were quite wrong; sexual intercourse could not, and never would, be made redundant by any mere enhancement of onanistic gratifications. Sex was more than pleasure; it was closeness, intimate involvement with another, empathy, compassion, and an outflowing of good feeling that needed a recipient. Giovanni had found during the brief happiness of his marriage that sex was, in all the complex literal and metaphorical senses of the phrase, making love. However wonderful his new biochemical systems were, they were not doing that, and were no substitute for it.

So Giovanni ceased to live as a recluse. He came back into the social world, with his attitude adjusted yet again, determined to make new relationships. After all, he still had the magic at his fingertips—or so he thought. He looked around; found a grey-eyed journalist named Greta, a Junoesque plant physiologist named Jacqueline, and a sweetly-smiling insurance salesperson named Morella, and went to work with his seductive touch.

Alas, the world had changed while he had lived apart from it. None of the three women yielded to his advances. It was not that he had lost his magic touch, but that Cytotech’s marketing had given it to far too many others. When the relevant tissue-transformations had been the secret advantage of a favored few, they had used it with care and discretion, but now that aphrodisiac sweat was commonplace, any reasonably attractive woman was likely to encounter it several times a week. Because women were continually sated with the feelings that it evoked they could no longer be conditioned to associate the sensation with the touch of a particular person. Greta, Jacqueline and Morella were quite conscious of what was happening when he touched them, and although they thanked him for the compliment, each of them was utterly unimpressed.

Giovanni realized that promiscuity was fast destroying the aphrodisiac value of his first discovery. His quick mind made him sensitive to all kinds of possibilities that might be opened up by the more general release of this particular invention, and he began to look in the news for evidence of social change.

The logic of the situation was quite clear to him. As users found their seductive touch less effective, they would tend to use it more and more frequently, thus spreading satiation even further and destroying all prospect of the desired result. In addition, people would no longer use the device simply for the purpose of sexual conquest. Many men and women would be taken by the ambition to make everybody love them, in the hope of securing thereby the social and economic success that the original purchasers of the technology had already had. In consequence, the world would suffer from a positive epidemic of good feeling. This plague would not set the entire world to making love, but it might set the entire world to making friends. The most unlikely people might soon be seen to be relaxing into the comfort of infinite benevolence.

Giovanni monitored the headlines very carefully, and realized before it became generally known that he had wrought a more profound change in human affairs than he had intended or supposed.

Wars were gradually petering out.

Terrorism was on the decline.

Violent crime was becoming steadily rarer.

Oddly enough, these trends passed largely unnoticed by the world at large. The majority of people did not begin to wake up to the significance of it all until a much-advertised contest to settle the heavyweight boxing championship of the world was stopped in the third round when the weeping combatants realized that they could not bear to throw another punch, and left the ring together with their arms around one another’s shoulders.

Because of these upheavals in the world’s routines, the clinical trials of Giovanni’s new hormones and enkephalins attracted a little less attention than they might have, but their outstanding success was still a matter for widespread celebration. In 2036 Giovanni was awarded a Nobel Peace Prize to set beside his earlier award, and there was some discussion about the possibility of making it the last prize of its kind, given that the world no longer seemed to require peacemakers. Once again, Giovanni became the darling of the world’s media. He was billed as a modern Prometheus, sometimes even as a modern Dionysus, who had brought into the world of men a divine fire more precious than any vulgar power-source.

Giovanni was still embarrassed by these periodic waves of media exposure. He still felt very self-conscious about his physical appearance, and every time he saw his own picture on news-screen or in a videomag he blushed with the thought that half a billion viewers were probably saying to themselves: “He doesn’t look like a Casanova!” He was probably being oversensitive; nowadays it was his face and his achievements that were now called to the mind of the man in the street by the mention of the name Casanova; his ancient namesake had been eclipsed in the public consciousness.

In addition, Giovanni no longer appeared to the unbiased eye to be as unprepossessing as he once had seemed. He was now graciously bald, and his bare pate was by no means as freakish as the tangled black hair that once had sprouted there. He still wore spectacles for his myopia, but corneal surgery had corrected his astigmatism, and his eyes now looked kind and soft behind the lenses, not at all distorted. His complexion was still poor, but his skin had been roughened and toughened by age and exposure to the elements, and its appearance was no longer offensive. His paleness and frailness could now be seen as appealing rather than appalling.

He was startled the first time that he realized that a woman was using his own aphrodisiac technology upon him, and quickly jumped to the conclusion that she must be one of those people who used it on everyone, but he gradually became accustomed to the idea that he really was admired and desired. In time, the secretion of aphrodisiac sweat became subject to a new etiquette, whereby indiscriminate use was held to be in bad taste, and also to be unnecessary as it could now be taken for granted that everyone could love one another even without its aid.

Politeness came to demand that a sophisticated and civilized person would use the Casanova secretion occasionally and discreetly, to signal a delicate expression of erotic interest with no offense to be taken if there was no response. As this new code of behavior evolved, Giovanni was surprised to find himself a frequent target for seduction, and for a while he reveled in sexual success. Many of the younger women, of course, were interested primarily in his wealth and status, but he did not mind that—he could, after all, claim responsibility for his status and wealth, which he had won by effort.

Anyway, he loved them all. He loved everybody, and everybody loved him.

It was that kind of a world, now.

In this way, Giovanni Casanova succeeded at last in adapting to his name. He lived up to the reputation of his august namesake for a year or two, and then decided that the attractions of the lifestyle were overrated. He gladdened his mother’s heart by marrying again, and this time he chose a woman who was very like the earliest memories which he had of his mother. His new bride was named Janine. She had been born in Manchester, and she had embarked on a career in cosmetic cytogenics, which was the nearest thing to hairdressing that the world of 2036 could offer. She was much younger than Giovanni, but did not mind the age difference in the least.

Giovanni and Janine favored one another constantly with the most delicate psychochemical strokings, and learned to play the most beautiful duets with all the ingenious hormonal instruments of Giovanni’s invention, but they also had a special feeling for one another—and eventually for their children—which went beyond mere chemistry and physiology: an affection which was entirely a triumph of the will. This was a treasure which, they both believed, could never have come out of one of Giovanni’s test tubes.

With all these advantages, they were able to live happily ever after.

And so was everybody else.