The Golden Space

by Pamela Sargent

  Josepha did not want to think about death cults and the sudden flare-ups of violence that had reminded her of the Transition and had made her retreat to this house. She looked down at the small blue stone set into a gold bracelet on her wrist, the Bond that linked everyone through a central system. The microcomputer link lit up and rang softly when someone called her; she could respond over her holo or touch her finger to the stone, indicating that she was unavailable and that a message should be left. More important, the Bond protected her and could summon aid. But even the blue stone could not guard her from everything; many knew how to circumvent the mechanism.

  “But matters must be different in space,” she replied, thinking of the huge, cylindrical dwellings that hovered in space at the Trojan points equidistant from Earth and moon.

  Merripen shrugged. “Not as much as you might think. The space dwellers were more innovative when they first left Earth, but now … you know, they pride themselves on being safe from the vicissitudes of life here, the storms, the quakes, the natural disasters. They make endless plans for space exploration and carry out none of them. Their cult is a cult of life with no risks.”

  “But there are the people on Mars, the ones out near Saturn, or the scientists who left our solar system a century ago. Surely they’re not stagnating.”

  “They are so few, Josepha. And as for the ones who left, we have heard nothing. They may be dead or they may have found something, but in any event, it’ll have no effect on us.”

  “I think you’re too pessimistic,” she argued, wanting to believe her own words. “How long have we had our extended lives? A little more than two hundred years. That’s hardly long enough for a fair test. People change, they need time.”

  “I’m afraid the only thing time does for some people is to confirm them in their habits. Oh, some change, those who have cultivated flexibility. But they are so few. The others are a heavy weight holding us back. In the past, it took great deprivation and a strong leader to make such people change. There is no deprivation now and no leader. Perhaps these new children will open our eyes.”

  She found this turn in the conversation distasteful, but she had to expect such views from Merripen. He was too young to remember the surge of creativity, the high hopes that had existed for a short time after the difficulties of the Transition, but he knew of them and must sometimes have longed for them. She tried not to think of her own placid life and how hard it had been to force herself to consider being a parent. Stability, serenity, the eternal present—she would forsake them for something less sure. She thought of the ones who had left the solar system and wondered how they had brought themselves to do it.

  “The children,” she murmured. “I’d rather discuss them for a bit, settle some of my questions, I still don’t understand completely.” She was trying to draw Merripen away from his disturbing speculations.

  “You’ve heard it all before.”

  “I didn’t really listen, though. I didn’t want to confront the details, I guess.”

  Merripen frowned. “If you’re still ambivalent, you’d better back out now.”

  “But I’m not ambivalent. I agree with your general goal at least. And maybe part of it is that I’m afraid if I don’t try something different now, I may never be able to … that’s not the best motive, but …” She was silent.

  “I understand.”

  “You said the children won’t have our hormones. Won’t that limit them?”

  “That’s not accurate,” he replied. “Certain hormonal or glandular secretions are needed to insure their growth. But they won’t be subject to something like the sudden rush of adrenaline we feel when disturbed or under stress.”

  “That could be dangerous. They might not react quickly enough.”

  “We’ve allowed for that. Refinements in the nervous system, quicker reflexes, will allow them to respond as quickly as we do, perhaps even a bit more quickly. The difference is that they won’t act inappropriately. Our behavior is often the result of feelings, which are in turn rooted in our instincts and our survival biology. Their behavior will be based on rational decisions as much as on that.”

  “Our instincts have served us well enough in the past.”

  “They may not serve us well any longer. We don’t have inevitable physical death any more, yet our instincts probably go on preparing us for it. The rationality of these children will take the place of instinct and complement the instincts that remain.”

  Merripen paused as Josepha considered what he had told her before. The children would look human, but would have stronger muscles, and bones less vulnerable to injury. They would have the ability to synthesize certain amino acids and vitamins, such as C and B12; they would be able to live on a limited vegetable diet.

  But the most extreme change, she knew, involved their gender. Merripen had explained that thoroughly, although she was aware that she had only a general understanding of it. They would have no gender—or maybe it was more appropriate to say they would have two genders. They would bear both male and female reproductive organs. They could reproduce naturally, each one able to be either father or mother, or by using the same techniques human beings now used. But they would lack sexuality. Their desires and ability to reproduce would become actualized only when they decided to have offspring; they would have conscious control of the process. Merripen had outlined this, too, in detail, but she recalled it only vaguely.

  Josepha imagined that this radical alteration had probably alienated prospective parents who might otherwise have participated in the project. They must have thought it too much; sex had been separated from reproduction for ages and androgynous behavior was commonplace for men and women. Physically androgynous beings seemed unnecessary; the lack of sexuality, such a major part of human life, repellent.

  Josepha was not bothered by it because sex, she thought sadly, thinking of the few men she had loved, had never been very important to her. But Merripen was reputed to be a compulsive sexual adventurer. She wondered if that was why he asserted that the children would be more rational without such an intense drive. He might be fooling himself; the children might develop sexual desires of their own once they started to reproduce.

  “We don’t really know what they’ll be like in the end,” she said.

  “We’ve done the projections,” he answered. “We have a pretty good idea. But it is an experiment. Nothing is guaranteed.” He picked up the empty wine bottle and turned it in his hands. “This entire society is an experiment. The results are not yet in. All of us crossed that line a long time ago.”

  The room had grown dark. Josepha reached over and touched the globular lamp on the table near her. It glowed, bathing the room in a soft blue light. “It’s late,” she said. “You’re probably hungry.”

  He nodded.

  “Let’s have some supper.”

  Later, alone in her room, Josepha mused. She could not hear Merripen, who was in the bedroom at the end of the hall, but she sensed his presence. She had been alone in the house for so long that the presence of anyone impinged on her; her mind could no longer expand to fill up the house’s empty space. She drew up her coverlet.

  Merripen had once discussed what he called the “natural selection” of immortality, his belief that certain mechanisms still operated, that those unsuited to extended life would fall by the wayside. He believed this even as he tried to prevent death. The Transition had weeded out many. The passing centuries would dispose of many more.

  Ironically, she had survived. Nothing in her previous life had prepared her for this, yet here she was. She had been a student, a file clerk, a wife, a divorcée, a saleswoman, a sales manager, a wife again, a widow. She had been a passive graduate student who thought knowledge would give her a direction; she had succeeded only in gaining some small expertise on the pottery of Periclean Athens and in avoiding the real world. She had always worked because her first husband had been a student and her second an attorney paying child support and alimony to
his first wife. Her purse had been snatched once, her home had been burglarized once, she had undergone two abortions. In this ordinary fashion, while the world lurched toward the greatest historical discontinuity it had ever experienced, Josepha had survived to witness the Transition. Only now did she feel, after so long, that she was even approaching an understanding of the world and her place in it.

  She had been in her fifties when the techniques for extended life became available. The treatment had seemed simple enough; it consisted of shots which would remove the collagen formed by the cross-linkage of proteins and thus halt or retard the physical manifestations of aging. Even this technique, which could make one no younger but only keep one from aging as rapidly, had created controversy, raising the specter of millions of old citizens lingering past their time. Many chose to die anyway. Others had themselves frozen cryonically after death, hoping they would be revived when medical science could heal them and make them live forever. Cryonics became big business. Some concerns were legitimate. Many were fraudulent, consigning their customers to an expensive, cold, permanent death.

  Josepha, retired but in need of extra money, became a maintenance worker for a cryonic interment service. She walked among the stacks of frozen dead, peering at dials. By chance, she found that several of her fellow workers dealt illegally in anticollagen shots, selling them to people under sixty-five, the mandatory age for recipients. Knowing that penalties for selling the shots were severe, she was too frightened to become a pusher. But she bought a few shots.

  Soon after, work on the mechanisms which caused cancers to multiply, along with genetic research, had yielded a way of restoring youth. Research papers had been presented tentatively; most people had waited cautiously, until at last impatience outran caution and the world entered the Transition in bits and pieces, one country after another.

  There were failures, although few wanted to remember them now; people who were victims of virulent cancers, those who could not be made younger, a few who grew younger and then died suddenly. Some theorized that the mechanisms of death could not be held in check forever; that in the future, death might come rapidly and wipe out millions. Testing the new technique thoroughly would have taken hundreds of years, and people would not go on living and dying while potential immortals were being sustained in their midst.

  Everyone knew about the Transition—the upheavals, the collapsing governments, the deaths, the demands. There were some facts not fully known, that were still strangely absent from computer banks and information centers; exact figures on suicides, records of how many were killed by the treatments themselves, who the first subjects had been and what had happened to them. Josepha had searched and found only unpleasant hints; one small town with a thirty percent mortality rate after treatment, prisoner-subjects who had mysteriously disappeared, an increase in “accidental” deaths. She had lived through it, surviving a bullet wound as a bystander at a demonstration of older citizens, hiding out in a small out-of-the-way village, and yet any present-day historian knew more than she could remember. She suspected that the only people who knew almost everything were a few old biologists and any political leaders who were still alive.

  In her nineties, half-blinded by cataracts, hands distorted into claws by arthritis, Josepha had at last been treated and begun her extended life. She had survived Peter Beaulieu, her first husband, and Gene Kolodny, her second. She had outlived her brother and her parents and her few close friends. And until now, she often thought, she had done little to justify that survival.

  She could not accept that so many had died for the world as it was now. The vigor and liveliness had gone out of human life, or so it seemed. Perhaps those who would have provided it were gone and the meek had inherited the earth after all.

  But she could change. She was changing. Either the death cultists were right and their lives were meaningless or their extended lives were an opportunity which must be seized. She recalled her own near-death and the promise of another life; even that possibility did not change things. She had to earn that life, if there was such a thing, with a meaningful life here, and if there was no other life, then this one was all she had.

  More than three hundred years to discover that—it was absurd. There were no more excuses for failure, which explained the suicides and death cults at least in part. Merripen’s project would force the issue. She remembered how his enthusiasm for his dream had been conveyed to her during their first discussion, in spite of her doubts. She thought: Maybe most of us are slow learners, that’s all; well, we’ll learn or be supplanted.

  She refused to think of another possibility: that the world might not accept the children, that any future beyond the present was unthinkable.

  A month after her visit with Merripen, Josepha arrived at the village where the parents and children were to live. Three houses, resembling chalets, stood on one side of a clearing. Four others, with enclosed front porches, sat almost two hundred meters away on the other side of the clearing. Behind them, on a hill, she saw a red brick building that was large enough for several people.

  A bulldozer, a heavy, lumbering, metallic beast, excavated land doggedly while two men watched. She assumed that the two were involved in the project, although they might have been only curious bystanders.

  Josepha walked through the clearing, which would be transformed into a park. A tall brown-skinned man stood on the porch of one house, his back to her. She saw no one else. She came to a stone path and followed it, passing the unoccupied houses. Each was surrounded by a plot of ground which would become a garden. The park would eventually contain two large buildings: a hall where everyone could gather for meals, recreation, or meetings, and a hostel for the children. One part of the recreation hall would be used as a school.

  The path ended at a low stone wall. Josepha stood in front of an open metal gate and looked past a small courtyard at a two-story stone house. She approached the gray structure and peered through a window. She saw sturdy walls instead of movable panels, a stairway instead of a ramp, and decided this was where she would live. The house was too large for only one parent and child, but she could find someone to share it with her.

  She heard footsteps and turned. The tall man stood at the gate. He adjusted his gold-trimmed blue robe and bowed slightly. She returned the bow and moved toward him, stopping about half a meter away. His black hair was short and his beard closely trimmed. “Chane Maggio,” he said in a deep voice as he extended his right hand.

  She was puzzled, startled by the lack of ceremony. She suddenly realized that he was telling her his name. He continued to hold out his hand and at last she took it, shook hands, and released it. “I’m Josepha Ryba.”

  “You are startled by my informality.” He folded his slender arms over his chest. “Perhaps I am being rude, but we have little time to become acquainted, only a few months before gestation begins and then only nine months to the birth of the children. I am afraid we cannot stand on ceremony in our salutations.”

  She smiled. “How long have you been here?”

  “I arrived this morning. I believe we are the only prospective parents here.” He offered his arm and she took it. They began to amble along the stone path.

  She sensed that Chane Maggio remembered the Transition. She was not sure how she knew; perhaps it was the informality of his greeting, the sense of contingency in his voice, or his silence now as they strolled. Younger people always wanted to fill the silences with words or games or actions of some kind. The Transition was only history to them. To Josepha, and those like her, it would forever be the most important time of their lives, however long they lived. It had made them survivors with the guilt of survivors. The simplest sensation meant both more and less to them than to those born later. Josepha, acutely conscious of Chane’s arm, the clatter of their sandals on the stones, the warm breeze that brushed her hair, remembered that she was alive and that others were not and that she was somehow coarsened by this. A younger person, caught in the timele
ss present, would accept the sensations for themselves.

  “This venture promises to be most interesting,” Chane said softly in his deep voice. “I have raised children before—I had a son and daughter long ago—a rewarding task, watching a child grow, trying to—” He paused.

  Josepha waited, not wanting to be rude by interrupting. “There are problems, of course,” he continued, and she caught an undercurrent of bitterness and disappointment. “There is always the unexpected.” His voice changed again, becoming lighter and more casual. “They live on Asgard now; at least they did fifty years ago. They claim it’s too dangerous to live here.”

  “I once wanted to visit a space community,” Josepha said. “For years I kept intending to go, but I never did.”

  “More people live in space than on Earth, but of course you know that.”

  “I didn’t know.”

  Chane raised an eyebrow. “I was a statistician until recently. There are approximately two billion people on Earth and almost twice as many in space.”

  “That many,” Josepha murmured, inwardly chastising herself for not knowing. She could have asked her Bond.

  “Of course, there has been a small but noticeable decline in the population.” The man paused again, having strayed too near an unpleasant topic. “Tell me,” he went on, “did you ever make pottery? I believe I own a vase you made—it was a gift from a friend.”

  “That was a long time ago. I had a shop with a friend, Hisa Onoda. Hisa made jewelry and I did pottery. That was a little while after the Transition, when we all still had to credit purchases to our accounts.”