Fountain of Age

by Nancy Kress

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  Fictionwise, Inc.

  www.Fictionwise.com

  Copyright ©2007 by Nancy Kress

  First published in Asimov's Science Fiction, July 2007

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  NOTICE: This work is copyrighted. It is licensed only for use by the original purchaser. Making copies of this work or distributing it to any unauthorized person by any means, including without limit email, floppy disk, file transfer, paper print out, or any other method constitutes a violation of International copyright law and subjects the violator to severe fines or imprisonment.

  * * *

  I had her in a ring. In those days, you carried around pieces of a person. Not like today.

  A strand of hair, a drop of blood, a lipsticked kiss on paper—those things were real. You could put them in a locket or pocket case or ring, you could carry them around, you could fondle them. None of this hologram stuff. Who can treasure laser shadows? Or the nanotech “re-creations"—even worse. Fah. Did the Master of the Universe “re-create” the world after it got banged up a little? Never. He made do with the original, like a sensible person.

  So I had her in a ring. And I had the ring for forty-two years before it was eaten by the modern world. Literally eaten, so tell me where is the justice in that?

  And oh, she was so beautiful! Not genemod misshapen like these modern girls, with their waists so skinny and their behinds huge and those repulsive breasts. No, she was natural, a real woman, a goddess. Black hair wild as stormy water, olive skin, green eyes. I remember the exact shade of green. Not grass, not emerald, not moss. Her own shade. I remember. I—

  "Grampops?"

  —met her while I was on shore leave on Cyprus. The Mid-East war had just ended, one of the wars, who can keep them all straight? I met Daria in a taverna and we had a week together. Nobody will ever know what glory that week was. She was a nice girl, too, even if she was a ... People do what they must to survive. Nobody knows that better than me. Daria—

  "Grampops!"

  —gave me a lock of hair and a kiss pressed on paper. Back then I kept them in a cheap plastolux bubble, all I could afford, but later I had the hair and tiny folded paper set into a ring. Much later, when I had money and Miriam had died and—

  "Dad!"

  And that's how it started up again. With my son, my grandchildren. Life just never knows when enough is enough.

  * * * *

  "Dad, the kids spoke to you. Twice."

  "So this creates an obligation for me to answer?"

  My son Geoffrey sighs. The boys—six and eight, what business does a fifty-five-year-old man have with such young kids, but Gloria is his second wife—have vanished into the hall. They come, they go. We sit on a Sunday afternoon in my room—a nice room, it should be for what I pay—in the Silver Star Retirement Home. Every Sunday Geoff comes, we sit, we stare at each other. Sometimes Gloria comes, sometimes the boys, sometimes not. The whole thing is a strain.

  Then the kids burst back through the doorway, and this time something follows them in.

  "Reuven, what the shit is that?"

  Geoffrey says, irritated, “Don't curse in front of the children, and—"

  ” ‘Shit’ is cursing? Since when?’”

  "—and it's ‘Bobby,’ not ‘Reuven.’”

  "It's ‘zaydeh,’ not ‘Grampops,’ and I could show you what cursing is. Get that thing away from me!"

  "Isn't it astronomical?” Reuven says. “I just got it!"

  The thing is trying to climb onto my lap. It's not like their last pet, the pink cat that could jump to the ceiling. Kangaroo genes in it, such foolishness. This one isn't even real, it's a ‘bot of some kind, like those retro metal dogs the Japanese were so fascinated with seventy years ago. Only this one just sort of suggests a dog, with sleek silver lines that sometimes seem to disappear.

  "It's got stealth coating!” Eric shouts. “You can't see it!"

  I can see it, but only in flashes when the light hits the right way. The thing leaps onto my lap and I flap my arms at it and try to push it off, except that by then it's not there. Maybe.

  Reuven yells, like this is an explanation, “It's got microprocessors!"

  Geoff says in his stiff way, “The ‘bot takes digital images of whatever is behind it and continuously transmits them in holo to the front, so that at any distance greater than—"

  "This is what you spend my money on?"

  He says stiffly, “My money now. Some of it, anyway."

  "Not because you earned it, boychik."

  Geoffrey's thin lips go thinner. He hates it when I remind him who made the money. I hate it when he forgets.

  "Dad, why do you have to talk like that? All that affected folksy stuff—you never talked it when I was growing up, and it's hardly your actual background, is it? So why?"

  For Geoffrey, this is a daring attack. I could tell him the reason, but he wouldn't like it, wouldn't understand. Not how this “folksy” speech started, or why, or what use it was to me. Not even how a habit can settle in after it's no use, and you cling to it because otherwise you might lose who you were, even if who you were wasn't so great. How could Geoff understand a thing like that? He's only fifty-five.

  Suddenly Eric shouts, “Rex is gone!” Both boys barrel out the door of my room. I see Mrs. Petrillo inching down the hall beside her robo-walker. She shrieks as they run past her, but at least they don't knock her over.

  "Go after them, Geoff, before somebody gets hurt!"

  "They won't hurt anybody, and neither will Rex."

  "And you know this how? A building full of old people, tottering around like cranes on extra stilts, and you think—"

  "Calm down, Dad, Rex has built-in object avoidance and—"

  "You're telling me about software? Me, boychik?"

  Now he's really mad. I know because he goes quiet and stiff. Stiffer, if that's possible. The man is a carbon-fiber rod.

  "It's not like you actually developed any software, Dad. You only stole it. It was I who took the company legitimate and furthermore—"

  But that's when I notice that my ring is gone.

  * * * *

  Daria was Persian, not Greek or Turkish or Arab. If you think that made it any easier for me to look for her, you're crazy. I went back after my last tour of duty ended and I searched, how I searched. Nobody in Cyprus knew her, had ever seen her, would admit she existed. No records: “destroyed in the war."

  Our last morning we'd gone down to a rocky little beach. We'd left Nicosia the day after we met to go to this tiny coastal town that the war hadn't ruined too much. On the beach we made love with the smooth pebbles pocking our tushes, first hers and then mine. Daria cut a lock of her wild hair and pressed a kiss onto paper. Little pink wildflowers grew in the scrub grass. We both cried. I swore I'd come back.

  And I did, but I couldn't find her. One more prostitute on Cyprus—who tracked such people? Eventually I had to give up. I went back to Brooklyn, put the hair and kiss—such red lipstick, today they all wear gold, they look like flaking lamps—in the plastolux. Later, I hid the bubble with my Army uniform, where Miriam couldn't find it. Poor Miriam—by her own lights, she was a good wife, a good mother. It's not her fault she wasn't Daria. Nobody was Daria.

  Until now, of course, when hundreds of people are, or at least partly her. Hundreds? Probably thousands. Anybody who can afford it.

  * * * *

  "My ring! My ring is gone!"

  "Your ring?"

  "My ring!” Surely even Geoffrey has noticed that I've worn a ring day and night for the last forty-two years?

  He noticed. “It must have fallen off when you were flapping your arms at Rex."

  This makes sense. I'm skinnier now, arms like coat hangers, and the ri
ng is—was—loose. I feel around on my chair: nothing. Slowly I lower myself to the floor to search.

  "Careful, Dad!” Geoffrey says and there's something bad in his voice. I peer up at him, and I know. I just know.

  "It's that ... that dybbuk! That ‘bot!"

  He says, “It vacuums up small objects. But don't worry, it keeps them in an internal depository.... Dad, what is that ring? Why is it so important?"

  Now his voice is suspicious. Forty-two years it takes for him to become suspicious, a good show of why he could never have succeeded in my business. But I knew that when he was seven. And why should I care now? I'm a very old man, I can do what I want.

  I say, “Help me up ... no, not like that, you want me to tear something? The ring is mine, is all. I want it back. Now, Geoffrey."

  He sets me in my chair and leaves, shaking his head. It's a long time before he comes back. I watch Tony DiParia pass by in his powerchair. I wave at Jennifer Tamlin, who is waiting for a visit from her kids. They spare her twenty minutes every other month. I study Nurse Kate's ass, which is round and firm as a good pumpkin. When Geoffrey comes back with Eric and Reuven, I take one look at his face and I know.

  "The boys found the incinerator chute,” Geoffrey says, guilty and already resenting me for it, “and they thought it would be fun to empty Rex's depository in it ... Eric! Bobby! Tell Grampops you're sorry!"

  They both mumble something. Me, I'm devastated—and then I'm not.

  "It's all right,” I say to the boys, waving my hand like I'm Queen Monica of England. “Don't worry about it!"

  They look confused. Geoffrey looks suddenly wary. Me, I feel like my heart might split down the seam. Because I know what I'm going to do. I'm going to get another lock of hair and another kiss from Daria. Because now, of course, I know where she is. The entire world knows where she is.

  "Down, Rex!” Eric shouts, but I don't see the stupid ‘bot. I'm not looking. I see just the past, and the future, and all at once and for the first time in decades, they even look like there's a tie, a bright cord, between them.

  * * * *

  The Silver Star Retirement Home is for people who have given up. You want to go on actually living, you go to a renewal center. Or to Sequene. But if you've outlived everything and everybody that matters to you and you're ready to check out, or you don't have the money for a renewal center, you go to Silver Star and wait to die.

  I'm there because I figured it's time for me to go, enough is enough already, only Geoffrey left for me and I never liked him all that much. But I have lots of money. Tons of money. So much money that the second I put one foot out the door of the Home, the day after Geoffrey's visit, the feds are on me like cold on space. Just like the old days, almost it makes me nostalgic.

  "Max Feder,” one says, and it isn't a question. He's built with serious augments, I haven't forgotten how to tell. Like he needs them against an old man like me. “I'm Agent Joseph Alcozer and this is Agent Shawna Blair.” She would have been a beauty if she didn't have that deformed genemod figure, like a wasp, and the wasp's sting in her eyes.

  I breathe in the artificially sweet reconstituted air of a Brooklyn Dome summer. Genemod flowers bloom sedately in manicured beds. Well-behaved flowers, they remind me of Geoffrey. From my powerchair I say, “What can I do for you, Agent Alcozer?” while Nurse Kate, who's not the deepest carrot in the garden, looks baffled, glancing back and forth from me to the fed.

  "You can explain to us the recent large deposits of money from the Feder Group into your personal account."

  "And I should do this why?"

  "Just to satisfy my curiosity,” Alcozer says, and it's pretty much the truth. They have the right to monitor all my finances in perpetuity as a result of that unfortunate little misstep back in my forties. Six-to-ten, of which I served not quite five in Themis Federal Justice Center. Also as a result of the Economic Security Act, which kicked in even earlier, right after the Change-Over. And I have the right to tell them to go to hell.

  Almost I get a taste of the old thrill, the hunt-and-evade, but not really. I'm too old, and I have something else on my mind. Besides, Alcozer doesn't really expect answers. He just wants me to know they're looking in my direction.

  "Talk to my lawyer. I'm sure you know where to find him,” I say and power on down to the waiting car.

  It takes me to the Brooklyn Renewal Center, right out at the edge of the Brooklyn Dome, and I check into a suite. For the next month doctors will gene-jolt a few of my organs, jazz up some hormones, step up the firing of selected synapses. It won't be a super-effective job, nor last too long, I know that. I'm an old man and there's only so much they can do. But it'll be enough.

  Scrupulous as a rabbi, the doctor asks if I don't want a D-treatment instead. I tell her no, I don't. Yes, I'm sure. She smiles, relieved. For D-treatment I'd go to Sequene, not here, and the renewal center would lose its very expensive fees.

  Then the doctor, who looks thirty-five and might even be that, tells me I'll be out cold for the whole month, I won't even dream. She's wrong. I dream about Daria, and while I do I'm young again and her red mouth is warm against mine in a sleazy taverna. The stinking streets of Nicosia smell of flowers and spices and whatever that spring smell is that makes you ache from wanting things you can't have. Then we're on the rocky little beach, our last morning together, and I want to never wake up.

  But I do wake, and Geoffrey is sitting beside my bed.

  "Dad, what are you doing?"

  "Having renewal. What are you doing?"

  "Why did you transfer three hundred fifty million from the Feder Group on the very day of our merger with Shanghai Winds Corporation? Don't you know how that made us look?"

  "No,” I say, even though I do know. I just don't care. Carefully I raise my right arm above my head, and it goes up so fast and so easy that I laugh out loud. There's no pressure on my bladder. I can feel the blood race in my veins.

  "It made us look undercapitalized and shifty, and Shanghai Winds have postponed the entire—Why did you transfer the money? And why now? You ruined the whole merger!"

  "You'll get lots of mergers, boychik. Now leave me alone.” I sit up and swing my legs, a little too fast, over the side of the bed. I wait for my head to clear. “There's something I need to do."

  "Dad....” He says, and now I see real fear in his eyes, and so I relent.

  "It's all right, Geoffrey. Strictly legit. I'm not going back to my old ways."

  "Then why do I have on my system six calls from three different federal agencies?"

  "They like to stay in practice,” I say, and lie down again. Maybe that'll make him go away.

  "Dad..."

  I close my eyes. Briefly I consider snoring, but that might be too much. You can overdo these things. Geoff waits five more minutes, then goes away.

  Children. They tie you to the present, when sometimes all you want is the past.

  * * * *

  After the war, after I failed to find Daria in Cyprus, I went home. For a while I just drifted. It was the Change-Over, and half the country was drifting: unemployed, rioting, getting used to living on the dole instead of working. We weren't needed. The Domes were going up, the robots suddenly everywhere and doing more and more work, only so many knowledge workers needed, blah blah blah. I did a little of this, a little of that, finally met and married Miriam, who made me pick one of the thats. So I found work monitoring security systems, because back then I had such a clean record. The Master of the Universe must love a good joke.

  We lived in a rat-hole way outside the Brooklyn Dome, next door to her mother. From the beginning, Miriam and I fought a lot. She was desperate for a child, but she didn't like sex. She didn't like my friends. I didn't like her mother. She didn't like my snoring. A small and stifling life, and it just got worse and worse. I could feel something growing in me, something dangerous, until it seemed I might burst apart with it and splatter my anguished guts all over our lousy apartment. At night, I walked.
I walked through increasingly dangerous neighborhoods, and sometimes I stood on the docks at three in the morning—how insane is that?—and just stared out to sea until some robo-guard ejected me.

  Then, although I'd failed to find Daria, history found her instead.

  A Tuesday morning, August 24—you think I could forget the date? Not a chance. Gray clouds, 92 degrees, 60 percent chance of rain, air quality poor. On my way to work I passed a media kiosk in our crummy neighborhood and there, on the outside screen for twenty seconds, was her face.

  I don't remember going into the kiosk or sliding in my credit chip. I do remember, for some reason, the poison-green lettering on the choices, each listed in six languages: PORN. LIBRARY. COMMLINK. FINANCIALS. NEWS. My finger trembled as I pushed the last button, then STANDARD DELIVERY. The kiosk smelled of urine and sex.

  "Today speculation swirls around ViaHealth Hospital in the Manhattan Dome. Last week Daria Cleary, wife of British billionaire-financier Peter Morton Cleary, underwent an operation to remove a brain tumor. The operation, apparently successful, was followed by sudden dizzying trading in ViaHealth stock and wild rumors, some apparently deliberately leaked, of strange properties associated with Mrs. Cleary's condition. The Cleary establishment has refused to comment, but yesterday an unprecedented meeting was held at the Manhattan branch of Cleary Enterprises, a meeting attended not only by the CEOs of several American and British transnationals but also by high government officials, including Surgeon General Mary Grace Rogers and FDA chief Jared Vanderhorn.

  "Both Mr. and Mrs. Cleary have interesting histories. Peter Morton Cleary, son of legendary ‘Charging Chatsworth’ Cleary, is known for personal eccentricity as well as very aggressive business practices. The third Mrs. Cleary, whom he met and married in Cyprus six years ago, has long been rumored to have been either a barmaid or paid escort. The—"

  Daria. A brain tumor. Married to a big-shot Brit. Now in Manhattan. And I had never known.

  The operation, apparently successful....

  I paid to watch the news clip again. And again. The words welded together and rasped, an iron drone. I simply stared at Daria's face, which looked no older than when I had first seen her leaning on her elbows in that taverna. Again and again.