The Sopaths (19 page)

“She did not know you as well as I do. I’d have been more careful. I’d have known not to try to hurt your family.”

Nefer was a child. But she would not remain one long. The time was apt to come when she, aided by the pheromones, had the body and desire of Autopsy. But that was a future problem. “See that you never forget,” Abner told her.

“Someone there,” Nefer said alertly, gazing down at the bombed motor home. “Someone making sure we’re dead, maybe.”

“We need to get out of here before they discover the body,” Bunty said, alarmed.

“Abner can call in another mortar strike,” Nefer said. “Zero in on our position, then move on so the pursuers are there when it lands. Then we can call Pariah and have them send a van to pick us up and spirit us away.”

“You’re quite the organizer,” Bunty said.

“It comes with the territory of being a genius. I want to save my own hide.”

“What do you think, dear?” Bunty asked Abner. She was always careful to defer to him with major decisions, in private and in public, promoting his authority. He rather liked that.

“I think there’s no need for heroics,” Abner said. “It should be easy to take over this town. I doubt Autopsy had the wit to establish any formal government other than her whim, or any second in command. With her gone, it will be chaos until a new sopath takes her place. That would be a waste of a perfect opportunity.”

“I don’t follow.”

“We are going to need a manufacturing plant to make the fungus pheromone product.”

“Fungo,” Clark said.

Abner laughed, and that was a relief. The horror of Autopsy was already fading. Then he reconsidered. “Fungo as in fun, and as in fungus,” he said. “I believe you have named it, Clark.”

“Yeah,” Clark said, pleased.

“Anyway,” Abner continued, “If we want to circulate this contraceptive globally, why give it away to a big soulless company that will seek to maximize profits rather than distribution? We can start out by distributing it free, then charge a modest amount as it catches on. Soon enough the demand will become huge. We’ll need more than a garage laboratory to refine it. We will have here a complete town in need of employment, and this can provide it. Souler adults to handle the various aspects competently, sopath children to test samples.”

“But it’s an aphrodisiac!” Bunty protested.

“Those girls have been whoring in Sweetpea all along. This will not only enhance their business, it will keep them sterile and VD free. It will give them options to advance themselves in ways other than sexual. That’s an improvement.”

“I suppose it is,” she agreed thoughtfully.

“It promotes orgasm in the woman, too,” he said. “I saw it and felt it in Autopsy. She was climaxing as powerfully as I was. Sexual equality in the truest sense.”

“We shall have to verify that soon,” she said. “That alone would make it commercially irresistible.”

“This can be our base for saving the world,” he said grandly. “All we need to do is organize it.”

“What’s in it for me?” Nefer asked, echoing Autopsy’s question.

And there was the problem. They did owe her, but she was a sopath. “What do you want?”

“Your favor. To be part of your family. To start.”

It was that “to start” that made him especially cautious. “You want Bunty and me to adopt you into the family, as we did Clark and Dreda?”

“She did save us,” Dreda said.

“You’re not my sister!” Clark protested with surprising vehemence.

“I’ll never be your sister,” Nefer agreed, eying him. She returned to Abner. “But I do want to be Nefer Slate when I mature.”

That was what he had feared. She had a larger design, and they could not ignore it. “I’m not going to marry you, regardless how you mature,” Abner said. “I am more than satisfied with Bunty, and yes, I am prepared to kill anyone who tries to kill her. You know that. One experience with Autopsy was far more than enough.” He realized that now that Autopsy was dead, he no longer cared about her. She had compelled him with fascination and transcendent sex, not true love.

“I was thinking maybe of being a second wife.”

A larger design indeed!

“Not in this culture,” Bunty said. “One wife at a time is the limit. But if you mean to be his mistress, when you’re grown, there are problems there too.”

Abner was glad to have her take over this dialogue. She had a perspective he lacked.

“What problems?” Nefer asked.

“A mistress does not take her lover’s name.”

“Oh.” That evidently set the girl back. “What else?”

“By the time you are grown, your crush on Abner will have faded. You will be more interested in boys your own age. So he can’t promise you anything now that will survive the passage of time. It would be a deceit, and therefore cheat you of a reward you surely deserve.”

Nefer’s jaw dropped. “I’ll be damned!”

“You think about it,” Bunty said. “We will do right by you. You just need to come to better understand your true will.”

Bunty just might have saved him some extreme future awkwardness. When Nefer matured physically, enhanced by the pheromones, she would be as compelling as Autopsy had been. “Did I mention that I love you?” he asked her.

“Not often enough. Now let’s attend to that man.” For the man they had seen was walking purposefully toward them.

“I’ll take it from here,” Abner said. He raised a hand, hailing the man. “You’re one of Autopsy’s minions.”

The man nodded. “Yes.”

“She had you plant a bomb in our motor home.”

“Yes. I do what she tells me to.”

“Well, things have changed. My family escaped the bomb, but it annoyed me, and I stabbed Autopsy to death. You will now take your orders from me.”

That brought the man up short. “You killed her?”

“Go into the grotto and see the body. Then convey us to your vehicle. We’re going into town, where I will address the citizens. There will be a new order, and chances are your lives will markedly improve. Get moving.”

The man hesitated, then walked on past them toward the grotto.

“A new order,” Nefer repeated. “I think I’m going to like this.”

“You should,” Abner said. “You will be one of my chief lieutenants, helping me get important things done.”

“Gee,” she said, pleased. “And can I hold your hand?”

“Often,” he agreed. He saw that Bunty, Clark, and Dreda approved. He had found a way to keep Nefer satisfied without displacing any of them.

They all had a phenomenal future to explore.

AFTERWORD

That was the turning point. The samples proved workable, and a formula developed for the “cosmetic” supplement Fungo. The spores were imperfectly adapted to the human species, and unable to convert a woman’s body into a spore-making machine. Thus the effect was limited to a few hours before it faded, but they were phenomenal hours. Soon after application it rendered an average adult woman into a fervent beauty emitting pheromones that could rapidly seduce almost any man. Her newfound desire for sex made her ardent, and she climaxed as rapidly as her partner did. Each use caused her body to shape up further, in that respect being cumulative. It was addictive in the sense that she craved additional sexual fulfillment, but when she stopped using it, that craving subsided and she returned to normal without withdrawal pangs.

The fact that none of these women could conceive was not advertised, though before long religious groups struggled without much success to suppress Fungo. Samples were at first distributed free, then more was made available at a moderate price. The demand ballooned, and the facility at the town of Sauerkraut had to strain to keep up. Licenses were granted, and the phenomenon became global. All over the world the birth rate dropped dramatically. Most women simply were not interested in giving up their hourglass figures and enhanced sex appeal for the sake of having more babies, and the men they associated with were glad to support their decision. It is generally agreed that there is no sex like Fungo sex.

With the descent of the birth rate, the problem of the sopaths faded and before long was almost forgotten. Few cared to remember how difficult it had been. Some folk even claimed that there never had been a sopath problem; that it was an urban legend circulated to terrify young married couples.

Today the global population is only half what it was, and still declining. Those who choose to have children are assured that they will have souls. Many women cease taking Fungo at the time they wish to conceive, then resume using it once they birth their babies. The point is that today there are virtually no unwanted babies. There is an enormous amount of sex, but hardly any venereal disease. It is a better world, thanks to Abner Slate, who is now retired with his wife Bunty. His children remain active in the Fungo project at Sauerkraut, regarding it as highly beneficial to mankind despite the condemnation of many religious groups. Dreda Slate now runs the operation, traveling widely to demonstrate its effect, and has been described as the world’s sexiest CEO.

One of the most important achievements of Abner Slate’s effort was his demonstration that it was after all possible to tame and civilize sopaths by providing them with sufficient motive and stern discipline. They did not have to be killed. He proved this by allowing one of them to associate closely with his own family, even with his children. Some might liken it to having a pet crocodile uncaged in the house: you have to exercise constant caution, but such pets do have their satisfactions.

I wish to thank all those who facilitated my research for this volume, especially my father Abner, my mother Bunty, and my sister Dreda. Especially my smart, lovely, and passionate wife, the soul singer Nefer Slate, whose eidetic memory and merciless objectivity greatly improved the detail.

Clark Slate

AUTHOR’S NOTE

I have been trying to tie up loose ends as I get older, so as not to leave any projects unfinished. I am 75 at this writing, and while there is as yet no clear indication of my termination, chances are it will occur in the next decade or three.
The Sopaths
is the last one of any magnitude. Another reason I scheduled it for this time is that the death of my elder daughter from cancer—melanoma—in 2009 put me in the depressed mood for horror, which is not normally to my taste. That seems to have been effective.

The project dates way back. My earliest penciled note is dated 9-11-80: “Notion: when the souls run out. World population burgeons so much that the supply of new souls is exhausted, and so babies start being born without souls. This could be a horror story.” The underlying assumption being that the soul is the source of empathy, conscience, remorse, and emotional appreciation for the arts, which I see as deriving from empathy. In science, these things may derive from mirror neurons, which echo our feelings as events happen, enabling us to relive the associated feelings and to relate them to others, feeling their feelings. Empathy may be the foundation of what makes us human. Perhaps, for this novel, we could assume that it is the soul that activates the mirror neurons.

I started collecting newspaper clippings relating to man’s inhumanity to man, to serve as inspiration and relevance, and the earliest ones date from that time on. In the course of a decade there were so many I just had to stop. Here’s a random sample: in 1979 a Milwaukee waitress and her boyfriend picked up a pair of hitchhikers, who then killed him and beat and raped her and left her for dead. Her skull was fractured with a tire iron, but she survived and identified them. At the trial they showed no emotion, being blank and staring. They smirked and giggled to themselves, as if it were a big joke. The legal maneuvers dragged on for years, with the brothers constantly escaping and being caught, showing no remorse. They were essentially sopaths, creatures without conscience. That was just one of hundreds of similarly sickening items.

I made more pencil notes in 1981, the project now titled
Angst.
Somewhere in the world a woman owed two men money, so she denounced them as guerrillas, and the police killed them. There were two more men at the bus stop, so the woman denounced them too, and the police killed them. All the men were innocent. I saw how that could apply to my story: denounce people as sopaths and get them killed. There were items of mass starvation in Africa, where resources went instead to making further war. That could be considered a sopath government. There was a TV program on mercenary soldiers: ideal employment for sopaths who don’t care whom they hurt as long as they get theirs. Penciled note in 1985 about prison rape and public indifference to it. Sopaths in and out of prison, no? I made a note: “A girl could attack a man sexually, and blame him for attacking her. Sopaths can cause innocent people to be condemned by others.”

In 1986 I retitled the project
The Sopaths
, but it remained too ugly to write. The news items continued. In 1991 was one about a twelve-year-old boy raping a four-year-old girl. There was reference to eight- and nine-year-old boys sexually abusing a nine-year-old girl at a playground. I realized that sexual abuse isn’t limited to adults. Also that the sopath problem would manifest long before the soulless children reached adulthood, and would have to be dealt with then. So most of my huge collection of horrors became irrelevant. My last clippings are dated 1998; that aspect seemed pointless to continue.

Still I did not write the novel. It was simply too horrible for my taste. The project languished.

Finally I realized that I didn’t
have
to have the story as ugly as the clippings showed. I could lighten up on the detail and address the underlying problem: overpopulation and the exhaustion of the supply of souls. In fact, at times during the writing I discovered that it wasn’t horrible enough, as I moved the ugliness off-stage, and I had to restore some of it to maintain a proper balance.

That made it viable, and on February 7, 2001 I typed formal notes for the story. It was to be in three stages: first the babies born without souls and the horror one family experiences, and the reconstitution of a family of survivors. Second realization by society of the sopath menace and the need to kill sopaths. Third, the horror of the discovery that it didn’t matter if some souled people were killed, because their souls would be returned to the pool and be reborn. Thus there could be wholesale slaughter, in the name of saving the world. Still plenty ugly.

I used it as a trial project to test the word processor Word Perfect in the Linux operating system, which I was then switching to. I wrote the first chapter, but the word processor was difficult and balky. My note for February 14, 2001 says, “WordPerfect locked up, costing me my last 60 words of notes, but not any text, I think.” By the end of the month I was satisfied that I did not want that word processor, and that repulsion spread to the novel I had been using it on, and I set it aside.

In February 2010 I returned to it, this time trying out the Ubuntu Linux distribution with a word processor I liked and had been using for years, OpenOffice. Heavy reading piled in—I don’t read so much for pleasure as for business—soaking up my working time, and then my wife tripped, fell, and fractured her left elbow and right knee. She was in the emergency room, in the hospital, then at a rehabilitation center, and it was most of a month before I got her back. When she returned she was still in recovery, restricted to the house, using wheelchair and walker. I ran the house, making meals, doing laundry, shopping and so on, and managed to keep it on an even keel, but my working time was only a fraction what it had been. Thus it took four months to write the 65,000 word novel, when in prior times I had written 60,000 words a month. Fortunately I had no other projects at that time, and could take the time I needed. I am well into retirement age, but I will never retire alive. I will always be writing something, and speed is not of the essence. My next project will be another funny fantasy Xanth novel, a considerable contrast to
The Sopaths
.

I have written more than 140 books in my career so far, and each has its separate cast of characters. I try to avoid repeating names, but having used thousands, I find it an increasing challenge to come up with new ones. I have books of first names, and turn the pages looking for ones I haven’t used before. I don’t think I have used Abner before; it reminds me of the famous comic strip Li’l Abner. Similarly Clark; I have known people with that name but never used it. Similarly Dreda, once common, now out of fashion, the name reminding me of the spinning toy dreidel. And Bunty. When I was a baby my parents were doing relief work in Spain during the Spanish Civil War of 1937-40 and left my sister and me with our maternal grandparents in England, who hired a nanny, who I believe was a teenaged Scottish girl named Bunty. It was I think only for a couple of years, but my earliest memories are of being cared for by Bunty, who seemed like my mother. In fact I was severely disappointed when my real mother took us back and we traveled to Spain and then to America, barely escaping World War Two in Europe. That emotional disruption may account for my later emergence as a fiction writer; that sort of thing is typical of the breed, who it seems need to be jolted out of their comfortable tracks and thrown into limbo for a period to evoke their imaginative creativity. It was not a pleasant experience, and for a time I felt I would have been better off never to have existed. I never saw Bunty again, and don’t know what became of her, but the experience remains as my memory of happiness before the darkness claimed me. That name seemed fitting for the role in this novel, a woman who became an effective mother to two unrelated children in need.

This was conceived as a horror novel, and it is that, but I found that it has also an environmental and perhaps a theological theme of a sort. In this case it’s not the viability of air, earth, and sea that mankind’s overpopulation is despoiling, but the supply of souls. I am agnostic and have no belief in the supernatural, and I regard souls as fantasy. But I should think those who do believe should have a care not to exhaust this resource too. So far they don’t seem to care, though the world is horribly hostage to the consequence. As Nefer asks in the novel: is religion really serving God or Satan? I think that’s a damn good question. If the intention is to serve God and preserve and protect the world God gave us, this business about procreation at any price has to go. Since sex can’t be abolished, or people’s desire for it—after all, God made these things too—there needs to be effective contraception. If not—then maybe we do know which side is being served.

I suspect this may be a traditionally unpublishable novel, not because of its occasional gore or the horror of its thesis, but because it recognizes the sexuality of children, which would be unleashed by those without conscience, as they are in real life. The horror and erotic markets are girt about by as many taboos as are other genres, and certain aspects of reality are avoided. So be it. I showed the sopaths the way I believe they really would be. Though I write fantasy, without believing in it, I do believe that the concept of souls being the key to conscience and human empathy is a useful way to address the problem that mankind’s unfettered exploitation of the planet is causing. We need to clean up our act soon, or we will all suffer a horrendous crash. Desperation and hunger will make people become indistinguishable from sopaths, their mischief magnified because they won’t be children.

Hereafter, the serious material covered, I will return to writing light fantasy. I enjoy that, and it is easy to do, as this present novel was not.

—Piers Anthony, June 10, 2010.