A Pursuit of Miracles

by George Turner

Genres: Science Fiction; Sci-fi Action & Adventure; Genetic Engineering

Synopsis

Eight journeys into the future from this prize-winning author: a civilized society where barbarism is the norm; a search for super-intelligence that goes horribly wrong; a world where to be Non-Legal is to be non-human; an experiment to test the very nature of reality. Contains: A Pursuit of Miracles Not in Front of the Children Feedback Shut the Door When You Go Out On the Nursery Floor In a Petri Dish Upstairs Generation Gap The Fittest

Release date: December 13, 2018

Publisher: Gateway

Print pages: 212

Sample

Of these eight stories, two are related closely to novels: “In A Petri Dish Upstairs” to the trilogy which began with Beloved Son (both were first published in 1978) and “The Fittest” to The Sea and Summer. All are, however, closely interrelated, clearly the products of the same mind. What are the characteristics of this mind?

George Turner’s aggressive characters, almost all of whom seem to be oppressed by a need to assert their own superiority to everybody unfortunate enough to engage with them in dialogue, reflect a sardonic, humbug-hating, aloof personality that masks not only a surprising humility of authorial demeanour but also an unexpected compassion. One of the principal features of the stories and novels is a deep concern for the plight of the unborn, those hapless children of the future who will inherit the will-less legacy of our wasteful generation. The very titles suggest this concern with children: “Generation Gap”, “The Fittest”, “On The Nursery Floor”, “Not In Front Of The Children”, Beloved Son itself; all suggest a baffled preoccupation with those bitter ironies of improvidence such as are suggested also in writers as various as Wilfred Owen and Walter M. Miller, Jr. Although it might be objected that a concern for the future is a hallmark of the genre rather than one of individuation, a reading of the stories themselves only augments this impression that there is here an unusually strong feeling at work. It is a feeling extended to the animal victims of our imperial experiments, as we see in “A Pursuit Of Miracles” (which, the author tells us himself, was written partly in memory of a beloved dog).

What the next generations are likely to feel for our own is blistering contempt of the kind shown by Teddy for his redundant father in “The Fittest” or, in “On The Nursery Floor”, by the journalist interviewing an ex-Minister for Science and Development, whose first thoughts on his subject are “You ancient, useless bastard.” Farther down the track and between more distant generations, the effect may be of mutual incomprehension, as in “Generation Gap” or “Not In Front Of The Children” (where, however, an unexpected chord may be struck, in the end, between the extremes). It might therefore be argued that what fuels Turner’s satire against the late twentieth-century bumblers is as much fear of future loathing as compassion for the sufferers of future pain.

The theme of class antipathy, a great indignation that there should be artificial divisions between groups of the same species, is only to be expected. That snobbery can divide families is demonstrated easily enough when the younger generation progresses intellectually or socially beyond the parents. We can be made to writhe with shame for the fortunate Francis in “The Fittest” at the same time as we may acknowledge the naturalness of his secession. Here science fiction helps to exhibit human weakness by providing extreme conditions within which the dyspathies between social stratifications may be exacerbated - in this case, between the Sweet and the Swill. The worst of it is that what may begin as snobbishness ends as a survival mechanism. Once we can conceive of other human beings as garbage, we will have little difficulty in throwing them away.

A race fit to survive the population explosion may be predicated without invoking the spectre of a superperson. However, Turner shows that a quasi-evolutionary leap may be triggered, in only a few years from now, by human tinkering with biochemistry (“Not In Front Of The Children”, Beloved Son) or the establishment of space satellite communities (“In A Petri Dish Upstairs”). What he does not foresee is a comparably rapid evolution in ethical quality; physical superiority of the kind offered by greater longevity or, more crudely, a whole lifespan spent above the planet, is, he presumes, at least as likely to produce ethical or cultural throwbacks as greater wisdom or refinement in aesthetics.

It is a mistake to suppose that a confirmed cynic is also a pessimist; I suppose such a person would rather like to be thought of as a meliorist, after the manner of Thomas Hardy. If we look for George Turner’s preferred self-image, we might find it in the epigraphs to his “mainstream” novel of 1967, which come from Oliver Goldsmith’s The Deserted Village and The Good-Natured Man. First comes the portrait of the ideal village priest, Father Turner:

Far other aims his heart had learned to prize,

More skilled to raise the wretched than to rise.

His house was known to all the vagrant train;

He chid their wanderings but relieved their pain.

Immediately afterwards we have the confession of the irritated practical philosopher, Diogenes Turner:

This same philosophy is a good horse in the stable, but an arrant jade on a journey.

The objective correlative for such an apperception is to be found in the story, “Shut The Door When You Go Out” (1986), which tells what happens when a sick wanderer returns, after three thousand years, to the home planet. This is a Gaia story, somewhat similar in its premise - that of a planet where all life forms are telepathic - to one told in the course of Isaac Asimov’s Foundation’s Edge (1982). Long ago Poul Anderson remarked that telepathy would very likely be the quickest way to destroy true love (“Journey’s End”, 1957); the principle operates in a more oblique way in “A Pursuit Of Miracles”.

It is ironical that, just as Diogenes was rewarded for his incivility by the king he told to get out of his light, George Turner has been given, latterly, considerable esteem and even notable overseas sales, by the readers whose smug imbecilities he persists in deriding. (His brusque dismissal of pretension was just as sharp and pervasive in the earlier fiction as it is in the SF.) Along with the chiding, which has been found also in his trenchant reviews and articles that have made the author the obvious choice for information on the recent history of the genre in Australia, goes a great willingness to help other writers, as for instance in creative workshops.

In most cases, we do not read satirical writing with pleasure if we consider that the writer is aiming directly at ourselves. SF writers such as Robert Sheckley, Philip K. Dick, Eric Frank Russell, John T. Sladek, Frederik Pohl and George Turner (I’m not sure how much George will like being paired with extrapolist manqué Fred, but never mind) may please us either because of the displacement factor: they are writing against scientists or politicians or bureaucrats or snobs, and we are none of those; or because they offer the rewards of incidental humour and pathos or simply “a good story”; or because of the less easily determined pleasures derived from a good and distinctive style.

Of these virtues, story-telling is surely the least affected by Turner, though “In A Petri Dish Upstairs” is a sardonic variant of Romeo and Juliet. Rather, he deals in situation comedy (or perhaps “situation irony” would be a better term to coin) and in this respect is very like Russell, Sheckley or Swift. Undeniably, one of Turner’s greatest assets is a highly individual style, one which is wielded like the scalpel of a forensic pathologist who loves his work only because it concerns the dead. Evidently, there is a pleasure in satiric pains which only satirists know: that of lacerating fictional creations with an impunity denied the humane autobiographer.

For the sensitive satirist there is not only the problem of being pained by rubbing up against vagrants; there must also be, one supposes, the interminable jading that comes from having to ride one’s own horse, the ego. In this perspective, “Feedback” may be read as the story of a consummation devoutly to be wished, the quest for a position beyond and even before the self, a position of unhampered consciousness. It begins with a struggle between various naked egos and ends with the annihilation of one ego - and its new, mutated emergence. Turner sets up the conditions for Kransic’s great experiment with care and signals its surprising result early, not only by referring to an apparently unrelated though almost contiguous parallel event but by introducing to the description of the creation of the universe the idea of “pressure”. This carefully chosen word is infinitely suggestive of the creative process - and equally mysterious. What pressures were upon George Turner to create these particular science fictional stories? I have tried to suggest some of them: a reading of the fine autobiography, In the Heart or in the Head (1984), may suggest others.

MICHAEL J. TOLLEY, 30 November 1989.

1. THE RESEARCH

The newscasters and the political PR men called ours the Age of Miracles and, because they were good at their job of maintaining euphoria in a cheek-by-jowl, overcrowded world, the name stuck. And why not, when we counted our blessings? Total control of cancer; the contragerontological processes; mining of the gas- giant satellites by anaerobic bacteria; the terraforming techniques; slowed metabolism (and so, star flight!); the antinuclear shield, and with it something like peace on Earth … name it and it was already in prototype or on the drawing board.

With so much to sing about, still the OB cried discontent. “Every future prospect pleases,” he noted, “and only Man is vile,” and, “The price on progress is that in a mathematically balanced cosmos nothing is or can be given without payment.”

But Reichmann was over eighty and, despite his record of achievement, no longer a viable prospect for anti-ageing. He had some cause to feel cheated and sour. Not that more than a handful would ever get the treatment; life spans are not lightly extended on a planet striving to feed a swarm of forty billions. We could all hope; we all did, because in the Age of Miracles, there was always the chance of a discovery which would relegate all restrictions…

Our own work in Paraphysics was at a dead end, but telepathy had been at dead ends before, plagued by frauds and fools and then revived by researchers with inextinguishable stars in their eyes and minds. Researchers like ourselves, Reichmann’s laboratory slaves, ground down by endless repetition of an effect before he admitted a flicker of a gleam of hope. Scientific method he called his tyranny; OB we called him (not bothering to spell it out), but we never left him.

He touched us with his fire, even when at last we had to admit that direct mind-to-mind contact was out of the question. The background of synaptic ‘noise’ in every brain was as effective a shield as could be devised; only the brain itself could penetrate its own incessant clamour of subconscious interconnections; only the mouth could express thoughts, however ineptly. Electronic masking, however, had not seemed impossible when Reichmann brought in a group of Synaptic Physics mapping staff to work with us. They achieved nothing.

It was an additional insult when the OB nagged, “We get a result and you call it failure! We know now why we cannot receive or transmit. We know where not to waste further time.”

Marian said, “We wasted enough finding that out,” and he all but assaulted her, standing over her and shouting:

“Did you want to succeed? To winkle out your best friend’s opinion of you? To observe your lover’s withdrawal into narcissism in the moment of orgasm? To enter familiarly into the schizoid cesspits of your neighbours’ minds? We need knowledge of the mind, not triumphs of peeping-tommery. God — if you are not too vain to accept the word — has done wisely in providing a guarded dungeon for truth. Only so small a thing as a human being would resent the locking out.”

Marian didn’t fear his sounding off any more than did the rest of us. “You wanted to fail?”

“I wanted to know.”

“And what if the answer had turned out to be an open go for peeping-tommery?”

She should have known better than to badger him. “Then, young lady, humankind would have had to face the falsity of its face-saving vision of itself as a moral, philosophizing, altruistic creature, and it would never have recovered from the first glance in that mirror of the soul. In self-defence it would have been driven to invent antitelepathic shields and wear them ever after, to shut truth away from itself.” He smirked unbearably. “In a great step forward, we have shown that as unnecessary.”

We could cheerfully have killed him. Years of discipline and dreams…

“So,” he continued, “we move to the next step,” as though failure had been part of his long-term planning. “It is time to pay proper attention to Tommy.”

And it is with Tommy that this tale of grubby miracles really begins.

Tommy was a laboratory error (not ours), a fumble in the genetic dark that hadn’t come off. His specification had been cobbled together under Age of Miracles pressuring when it seemed that the terraforming test crews on Mars and Titan were close to developing a workable technique, and the Personnel Product people knew that in a couple of decades they might be called on to supply adaptees — men and women physically tailored to nonterrestrial conditions, where great strength coupled with fatigue resistance could be essential in the early settlement stages.

The sperm and ovum later united as Tommy were anonymous among millions in the Selection Banks — one Caucasian and one possibly Hindu, judging by the outcome. DNA adjustments were computed, gene-surgical alterations inserted for rebalancing of physical characteristics, and fertilization effected, plus a splitting for an identical quadruplet — and ‘Tommy’ happened to be next on the Natatorium’s christening list when he was decanted.

As some dead poet said, “The best laid schemes o’ mice and men gang aft a-gley.” If I have ‘a-gley’ correctly, it is what happened to Tommy. By one of those chances that bedevil genetic interference, he emerged as quite literally the runt of the litter. His three identical brothers were thoroughgoing little power packs, slender but animal-strong and later to develop the stamina of superathletes; Tommy came to life as one more of them, down to the waist — but his legs were short, skinny, and ill- formed, with calf muscles showing signs of a form of dystrophy.

The Age of Miracles had fluffed, but the geneticists said, “You win some, you lose some,” and would have terminated him before birth if a higher authority had not claimed him as a sample for a research group studying such procedural errors. So Tommy lived, if existence in a laboratory creche-warehouse is ‘living’.

Whether or not the procedural error was tracked down only Genetic Research knows, but Tommy was seventeen before the group decided that he was of no further interest to them. He would have been terminated out of hand if one of them with an eye on the Foundation’s never adequate subsistence grants had not seen that the boy was capable of limited but useful drudgeries. As an experimental animal he had no legal rights, of course, so his services would cost the Foundation only minimal upkeep. It made sense; every saving counts.

So Personnel Deployment shuffled its allocations and sent him to Paraphysics as Unskilled, General — someone to oversee the cleaning robots and the automatic maintenance fixtures, keep the notice boards in order, and provide tea and coffee to staff members who neither thanked him nor bothered to hide their resentment of deformity. If he exchanged one hell for another, is that relevant when you’ve never known better?

The OB introduced the boy on his first day and we couldn’t like what we saw. He had the brown eyes, dark skin, and small bones of one half of his genetic heritage, with the craggy features and blond hair of the other. The effect was repulsive, like an artefact poorly shaken together — which is more or less what he was. The rest of him was total disaster. His light bones were packed with all the muscle that could be attached to them, producing a gorilla’s arms and a chest that narrowed suddenly to the waist. He was not quite four and a half feet tall, and only sixteen inches of that was skinny legs held upright by steel splints. His hands knuckled the floor as he rested erect. On the soles of his feet, he wore plates inset with ball bearings and on these he travelled as fast as most of us could run, directing himself with thrusts of his calloused knuckles.

He was a horror. We all wished him somewhere else and probably showed it.

The OB introduced him only so that we were informed of his presence, then dismissed him to his quarters. He pivoted smartly and rolled away.

Reichmann watched him out of sight before he asked, “What are you? He is a child, seventeen years old, but all you see is a grotesque.”

Marian — trust Marian — said, “Don’t ask me to love him. He’s Non-Legal, a Created Creature, and that’s all he is.”

The OB liked Marian because she spoke her mind, though he often cared little for what her mind spoke, but he always gave her the rough edge of his answers. This time he said only, “He’s a product of that Age of Miracles you worship on bended brain.”

It didn’t register with most of the crew. It gave me a moment’s discomfort, like a wisecrack with a grain of truth in it, but a Non-Legal was a Non-Legal and not a cause for bleeding hearts. With forty billion real people to be fed, the Non-Legals lived on sufferance. While they were useful.

Reichmann belonged emotionally to the early half of the twentieth century. Read some of the pre-1940 novels and you’ll see what I mean — prim graciousness, sloppy thinking calling itself open-mindedness, custard-sickly self-righteousness — pap for a people who had not yet faced the reality of an overcrowded planet.

Still, I have to admit that the sentimental tradition dies hard. When we got over Tommy whirling around the halls and corridors, we learned to tolerate him and finally like him after a fashion. Created Creatures are commonly an apprehensive and submissive breed, but this one had some personality and intelligence; we came to treat him with a sort of offhand equality so long as he kept his place, and their place is something biological specimens know very w. . .