“That’s the curve starting up. Now think back over the last ten years to people about your age that you know. Anybody expire of natural causes?”
“More than I want to think about.”
“The curve shifting into a higher gear. Let’s go back and start with that class of ten-year-olds, all alive and kicking. Each year, the odds go up that one or more of them will expire during that year. Very small at first, maybe one in a few thousand. But by the time they reach high school, it’s maybe one in a few hundred. Still pretty small, but big enough that you see it working. But by the time they hit your age, it’s down to one in, say, fifty. Get the idea?”
“Unfortunately, yes.”
“Well, by the time you hit one hundred twenty, the odds are essentially one in one. As you age, more and more people in your age group die each year of natural causes. If you plot it all out, it’s a curve, called the Gompertz curve, after the guy that figured it out.”
“Lucky fellow.”
“Let’s go back to where you started. You asked how long people live. I’m a little disappointed in you, Lane. There’s a much more fascinating question that’s hardly ever considered, and that’s why do people age at all?”
“If we didn’t get old and die, we’d overrun the planet, which we’ve almost done anyway.”
“That’s a problem, but it really doesn’t answer the question.”
“Then what does?”
“If you put aside spiritual beliefs, evolution requires only two things of you. The first is to survive until you’re old enough to reproduce. The second is to pass your genes on through the so-called germ line, which extends all the way back to the origins of life itself. Now, as it turns out, nature is very finicky about the germ line, and much less so about you personally.”
“So what’s that got to do with getting old?”
“Every organism, yourself included, has a limited amount of energy at its disposal to do things. Nature assures that you’ll have a big energy budget to spend on keeping your eggs or sperm in good shape to maintain the germ line, and something less on the upkeep for the rest of your cells. As it turns out, this second part of the budget is just enough to make sure that you live until you reproduce and take care of what popped out for a while.”
“And then you start to go to hell.”
“Pretty much. In the past, natural selection let us last until about thirty, then pulled the plug. By that time, we were past our peak and got sick, murdered, eaten, or all three. The bodily upkeep budget no longer mattered. So now we have the answer: All your cells have repair mechanisms, but by the time your salad days are over, they can no longer keep up with the damage. You get old. You die.”
“So what if you could repair the damage faster than it accumulates? Could you prevent someone from aging?”
“Great in theory but almost impossible in practice. Your cells are the product of millions of years of evolution. They don’t answer to you. They answer only to life itself.”
Lane thinks of Autumn, of the stunning contrast between her youthful beauty and her apparent age. Maybe it has nothing to do with prevention. “Okay, so what if a person was already old and you wanted to wind the clock back to when they were young. What then?”
Wynn smiles patiently. “Boy, you drive a hard bargain, don’t you?”
“So what would you do?” Lane persists.
“Simple. I’d put everything back in original working order. I’d repair all the genetic damage to each cell.”
“And how would you do that?”
“Through some kind of extraordinarily advanced genetic therapy. To pull it off, you’d have to raise an entire army of very specialized artificial viruses.”
“Viruses?”
“Yes, viruses. You see, nature has already provided us with a highly evolved vehicle to deliver genetic material into the cell nucleus, where the genome resides. It’s called a retrovirus.”
“So why does the virus have to be artificial?” Lane asks.
“Many reasons,” Lynn answers. “For one thing, the immune system usually destroys real viruses before they can reach all their destination cells. What you need is a little protein vessel that’s of no real interest to the immune system. Now there’s all kinds of such devices.”
“You think they’d do the job?”
“Not really.”
“Why not?”
“There’s a very old song with a line that goes, ‘Got to make it real, compared to what?’ You have to have some way to define exactly the extent of the damage that’s accumulated over the years. A tricky business, at best. The human genome has about three billion base pairs. So which ones are still good, and which ones have gone bad and mutated? And you also have to analyze when and how the genes are expressed. Then you have to figure out how to imprint them onto the proper locations with the genome.”
“But if you could do all that, could you wind the clock back to that golden age,” Lane asks, “when the genes in all your cells were in a maximum state of repair?”
Wynn smiles. “Lane, you’re still quite the clever boy. Now, you get back to me when you’ve figured out how to do that.”
***
“Well, hello Mr. Durbin,” Warhead says as Lane enters into his chaotic jumble of technology run amok. “Are you having fun with your new self? Getting a little more pussy than usual?”
“Not really. You got a minute?”
The maze of indicator lights and small displays is broken only by a large Ultrares screen that shows a woman in coveralls binding a somewhat younger woman with bungee cords to the crumpled chrome bumper of a wrecked highway rig in a junkyard somewhere in the urban wasteland.
“A minute, huh?” Warhead says. “That’s my minimum billable increment.”
“I’ll take it. And maybe a few more, if you can help.”
“So what’s your problem?”
“There’s a woman named Autumn West. She was born about a hundred years ago in a small town somewhere in Nebraska. I need the location and the date of birth.”
Warhead spews an incomprehensible stream of phonemes into the microphone mounted on his headset. His wheelchair twists toward the array of consoles and displays, which are rapidly shifting their visual content. He rattles out yet another verbal stream, which spins him back toward Lane.
“This might take a minute. I told you about how I got to be a stub, right?”
“You mean the dope and the plane crash?” Lane hopes he has the right version.
“Yeah. Well, they put me on trial for drug smuggling. Didn’t work. All the evidence went up in the fireball at the crash site. Everything except me. I wound up in a tree, like a big piece of trimmed meat. After all that, they just gave up and sent me home.”
Something beeped and Warhead rotated back to his gear and smiled. “Well, what do you know about that? Autumn Denise West. Born in Elkton, Nebraska, population seven hundred and fifty-three. Died in the same place one hundred and one years later. Too bad about her twin.”
“Her twin?”
“April Clarisse West. Died two years after they were born. Some kind of staph infection.”
“That’s all?”
“That’s all, and given the time span, I think that’s a lot.”
Warhead softens a little. “Next time, I’ll tell you about the rehab place where they dumped me after I got home. But right now, I’ll just give you a little hint: Horny nurses come in pairs.”
***
“I need to fly to Nebraska. With you or without you. As soon as possible,” Lane tells Rachel on his handheld as he strides through the parking lot.
“You’re serious?” she asks.
“I’m serious.”
“You’re assuming that I can get us there.”
“I have no doubt you can get us there. That’s why you do what you do.”
“We’ll see about that.”
***
Autumn West sits at Zed’s side in Bay 1, where he lies in a maze of tubes, wires, and sensors. He re
aches out for her hand, and she takes it. His skin feels cool and parched.
“We can’t really know if this is the beginning or the end,” he whispers as the sedation starts to set in. “But we’ll soon find out. Wait for me. Please wait for me.”
“I’ll wait,” she assures him.
From across the room, Zed can hear the sound of an antique clock, whose presence he requested during the procedure. It holds an elegant assemblage of springs, gears, cams, levers, and artful inscriptions. As he retreats into that twilight on the border of somnolence, the ticks of the clock fade away and only the tocks remain, little subtractive pulses that reverse the cruel vector of time. The pulses become integers, and the integers become years, and the years become burning posts impaled in a featureless desert full of yellow sky.
And there his father kneels, beside the heaped stones marking the little grave. He turns toward Zed’s febrile gaze. Diphtheria, son. It took your brother down. Your only brother, your twin, your perfect twin. It got your mother, too. I left before she died, you know. Tears fill his eyes. I had to. It would’ve killed you and me, too, and we were all that was left.
The yellow overhead turns mustard. The posts lose their flame. They glow and smolder, sending blue smoke into a dying sky.
Autumn finds it odd to see Zed in such a vulnerable and helpless state. His eyelids twitch and his head oscillates from side to side. She still wonders how he can be so tender with her yet so callous to others. At first, she took all his attention at face value. After all, she was confused and vulnerable, and he fabricated a credible foundation to ground her. In the process, he provided only a highly simplified description of how they had peeled seventy-five years off her. Instead he focused on the need for a careful and controlled recovery. “We must handle you as we would a beautiful yet fragile work of art,” he told her. “You need to be gradually reintroduced to the outside world.”
They often dined together and he regaled her with stories of his adventures abroad. He cautioned her about the potential pitfalls ahead. If the media discovered her secret, they would hound her incessantly. She would become a freak, naked and exposed to the predation of lenses and microphones without end. She heeded his warnings and was content to remain within the confines of Mount Tabor, at least for now. Her strange revival had left her in a state of emotional shock, and hardly ready to face the world at large.
It didn’t take long for her sexuality to return. She felt it most strongly when she strolled through the lavish gardens that surrounded the residence. It felt like her erotic core had never really died, but only lingered in a deep slumber. And with this reignited lust came a surge of passion for Thomas Zed and all the power, charisma, and mystery that attended him. It was accompanied by a persistent regret over the difference in their physical age, which would prevent her from consummating a union with him. He’d already explained that she was a rare and special case not applicable to humanity at large. For this reason, she assumed that what had worked for her would never be available to him.
She was wrong, of course.
Chapter 16
Dead Ringer
“I need to feel good about what we’re doing,” Rachel says as they start across the tarmac outside the flight services building at Portland International Airport. “And I’m not quite there yet. So let’s go through it one more time.”
“Can’t say as I blame you,” Lane sympathizes. “I’m sure this is a lot of trouble.”
Up ahead, an exotic yet beautiful plane awaits them, a Piaggio 180. Twin canards project from the sides of its sleek nose, and its two turboprop engines face backward off each wing.
“It’s more trouble than you can possibly imagine,” Rachel says. “So let’s have it.”
“After I found out that Autumn West had an identical twin, I went back to Wynn Pearson. I wondered if you could somehow leverage the infant twin’s genes to capture that perfect moment when you physically peaked as a young adult. She said no, because the baby hasn’t developed into an adult yet and a lot will change along the way. I think Johnny figured a way around the problem, a way to wind an infant’s genetic clock forward to that golden moment. Are you with me so far?”
“So far.”
“Autumn West’s dead little sister was a perfect genetic copy of her. With Johnny’s help, they could predict exactly how she would turn out as a young adult. Then, up at Mount Tabor, they had some way to correct the mistakes in her old body, and truly rejuvenate her.”
“So you’re sure about this?” Rachel asks with a trace of skepticism.
“If I’m right, we’re going to find a grave at the local cemetery in Elkton, Nebraska, for an April Clarisse West. And when we dig it up, we’re going to find it either empty or tampered with. Why? Because they took the genes and ran.”
They’ve reached the foldout stairs leading up to the cabin right behind the cockpit. For the first time, Lane notices that the plane appears unattended. He stops at the foot of the stairs.
“Where’s the crew?”
“You’re looking at it,” she said.
Twenty minutes later, Lane watches Mount Hood slide by off the starboard side of the cockpit. Next to him, Rachel arms the autopilot and settles back. “So how do we pull this thing off when get there?” she asks.
“We need to have a talk with the doctor who signed her death certificate. Somehow, I don’t think her papers are exactly in order. Think about it. She’s over a hundred years old. She’s outlived her entire family and all her friends. She’s alone in the world. No one’s going to make much of a fuss about the disposition of her body. So the doctor pronounces her dead slightly in advance of the real thing. And the undertaker plays along. In the meantime, they swoop down, grab her, and transport her to Mount Tabor before she actually expires. And then they start to work their magic.”
“But who’s they? Who’s directing all this?”
“I don’t know yet, but it’s a pretty good bet that they’re both very old and very wealthy. It’s also a pretty good bet that Autumn is some kind of prototype. I can’t believe that they would spend that much time and money on someone of such modest origins.”
“Maybe she’s not alone,” Rachel suggests. “Maybe they’ve done it with others. There have to be numerous cases where a person lived to a ripe old age and also had an identical twin that died in childhood.”
“You might be right. And if all this is being done on Mount Tabor, your boss hit the political jackpot. Poor people tolerate a lot of things, but they won’t sit by and die quietly while the rich live on forever.”
Rachel lapses in a reflective silence. The harsh whisper of the displaced stratosphere spills through the cabin. “He may have hit the jackpot, all right,” she finally says. “But I don’t think he plans on sharing the winnings. Johnny must have told Harlan exactly what was going on up on Mount Tabor, and he decided to keep it to himself.” She slams her fist into her palm. “Damn! I should’ve seen it coming. He’s going to make a deal with the devil, and why not? He came to me the other day and said he was going to be taking a little time off. Bullshit. He’s never taken time off. He’s setting the stage for something.”
“Like coming back as a college boy?”
Rachel shakes her head. “Never happen.”
“Why not?”
“He never went to college.”
Lane shrugs. “Too bad.” He slumps in his seat, closes his eyes, and promptly nods off.
Rachel does her periodic scan of the avionics, then looks over at Lane’s slumbering profile and smiles. He has this remarkable composure about him. Is it sadness and resignation that lets him surrender to the moment like this? She hopes not. She resists an impulse to reach out and gently touch the back of his hand.
Lane awakens to the prairie landscape coming up from below. Thin lines crease the fields, defining roads that run straight north or south. They form a land of countless rectangles and squares. Numerous earthen circles crowd within these shapes, their patterns etched by the
sweep of giant irrigation arms.
They dip to the right and Elkton appears. The main street runs about a quarter mile and terminates in a couple of grain elevators and railroad tracks. Houses spill off for a few blocks on either side, and then the fields take over.
The airport’s single runway comes and goes from view as they line up to land. “So how do you propose we go about this?” Rachel asks. “I mean, this is your area of expertise, right?”
“Right. First thing we do is buy ourselves a ride into town. Then we see if we can pick up the paper trail. Elkton is the county seat, so that helps. We go there first and check out death certificates. Next we track down the doctor who signed them. Then we have a chat with the local funeral home. Finally, we make a little trip out to the cemetery, which can’t be far from town.”
Their plane touches down and goes to full brakes and reverse to avoid shooting off the far end of the short runway. They turn left onto a short taxiway and stop in front of an old hangar with a small office in one corner. An elderly man in jeans and a plaid wool jacket opens the door.
“And that would be our ride,” Lane announces.
“So you guys are attorneys, right?” Mr. Larson, the airport custodian, asks. He drives down the main street of Elkton at glacial speed in the old pickup.
“I suppose you could say that,” Lane answers.
“I figured as much when you said you wanted to go to the courthouse. Especially after you came in a plane like that. A Piaggio 180. Never seen one for real. You’re lucky. It used up every damn foot of the runway.”
“You’re right,” Rachel agreed. “We’re very lucky.”
“If you’re hungry,” Mr. Larson informs them, “there’s only one place left to eat, and it’s not always open.”
Looking out the window, Lane can see why. Aging single-story buildings line both sides of the wide street, some brick, some concrete. Faded and fallen signage prevails, along with many boarded-up windows. Weeds grow through the sidewalks like tiny tree lines of ragged green and yellow. Only three vehicles are visible, all gas powered, all hobbled by the sky-high price of even the lowest-grade petrol. The solitary pedestrian is an elderly woman pulling a child’s wagon full of used bottles.
The Forever Man: A Near-Future Thriller Page 18
