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
