Fountain of Age

by Nancy Kress

  —and everything closed in on me forever—

  "—but I'm pregnant."

  * * * *

  Technology has been good to the Rom.

  They have always been coppersmiths, basket makers, auto-body repairers, fortune tellers, any occupation that uses light tools and can easily be moved from place to place. And thieves, of course, but only stealing from the gaje. It is shame to steal from other Romani, or even to work for other Romani, because it puts one person in a lower position than another. No, it is more honorable to form wortácha, share-and-share-alike economic partnerships to steal from the gaje, who after all have enslaved and tortured and ridiculed and whipped and romanticized and debased the Rom for eight centuries. Technology makes stealing both safer and more effective.

  Nicklos drives along mountain roads so steep my heart is under my tongue. He says, “Opaque the windows if you're so squeamish,” and I do. It does not help. When we finally stop, I gasp with relief.

  Stevan yanks open the door. “Max!"

  "Stevan!” We embrace, while curious children peep at us and Stevan's wife, Rosie, waits to one side. I turn to her and bow, knowing better than to touch her. Rosie is fierce and strong, as a Romani wife should be, and nobody crosses her, not even Stevan. He is the rom baro, the big man, in his kumpania, but it is Rom women who traditionally support their men and who are responsible for their all-important ritual cleanliness. If a man becomes marimé, unclean, the shame lies even more on his wife than on him. Nobody with any sense offends Rosie. I have sense. I bow.

  She nods her head, gracious as a queen. Like Stevan, Rosie is old now—the Rom do no genemods of any kind, which are marimé. Rosie has a tooth missing on the left side, her hair is gray, her cheeks sag. But those cheeks glow with color, her black eyes snap, and she moves her considerable weight with the sure quickness of a girl. She wears much gold jewelry, long full skirts, and the traditional headscarf of a married woman. The harder the new century pulls on the Rom, the more they cling to the old ways, except for new ways to steal. This is how they stay a people. Who can say they're wrong?

  "Come in, come in,” Stevan says.

  He leads me toward their house, one of a circle of cabins around a scuffed green. Mountain forest presses close to the houses. The inside of the Adams house looks like every other Rom house I have ever seen: inner walls pulled down to make a large room, which Rosie has lavished with thick Oriental carpets, thick dark red drapes, large overstuffed sofas. It's like entering an upholstered womb.

  Children sit everywhere, giggling. From the kitchen comes the good smell of stuffed cabbage, along with the bickering of Rosie's daughters-in-law and unmarried granddaughters. Somewhere in the back of the house will be tiny, unimportant bedrooms, but here is where Rom life goes on, rich and fierce and free.

  "Sit there, Max,” Stevan says, pointing. The chair kept for gaje visitors. No Rom would ever sit in it, just as no Rom will ever eat from dishes I touch. Stevan and I are wortácha, but I have never kidded myself that I am not marimé to him.

  And what is he to me?

  Necessary. Now, more than ever.

  "Not here, Stevan,” I say. “We must talk business."

  "As you wish.” He leads me back outside. The men of the kumpania have gathered, and there are introductions in the circle among the cabins. Wary looks among the young, but I detect no real hostility. The older ones, of course, remember me. Stevan and I worked together for thirty years, right up until I retired and Geoffrey took over the Feder Group. Stevan, who is also old but still a decade younger than me and the smartest man I have ever met, and I made each other rich.

  Richer.

  Finally he leads me to a separate building, which my practiced eye recognizes for what it is: a super-reinforced, Faraday-cage-enclosed office. Undetectable unless emitting electronic signals, and I would bet the farm I never wanted that those signals were carried by underground cable until they left, heavily encrypted, for wherever Stevan and his sons wanted them to go. Probably through the same unaware satellites I had used to call him.

  Here, too, one chair was marimé. Stevan points and I sit.

  "I need help, Stevan. It will cost me, but will not make money for you. I tell you this honestly. I know you will not let me pay you, so I ask your help from history, as well as from our old wortácha. I ask as a friend."

  He studies me from those dark eyes, sunken now but once those of the handsomest Rom in his nation. There are reasons that stupid novels romanticized gypsy lovers. Before he can speak, I hold up my hand. “I know I am gajo. Please don't insult me by reminding me of the obvious. And let me say this first—you will not like what I ask you to do. You will not approve. It involves a woman, someone I have never told you about, someone notorious. But I appeal to you anyway. As a friend. And from history."

  Still Stevan studies me. Twice I've said “from history,” not “from our history.” Stevan knows what I mean. There has always been affinity between Rom and Jews: both outcasts, both wanderers, both blamed and flogged and hunted for sport by the gaje, the Gentiles. Enslaved together in Romania, driven together out of Spain, imprisoned and murdered together in Germany just one hundred fifty years ago. Stevan's great-great-great-grandfather died in Auschwitz, along with a million other of the Rom. They died with “Z,” for Zigeuner, the Nazi word for “gypsy,” branded on their arms. My great-great-grandfather was there, too, with a blue number on his arm. A hundred fifty years ago is nothing to Romani, to Jews. We neither of us forget.

  Stevan does not want to do this for me, whatever it is. But although the Rom do not make family of gaje, they are fast and loyal friends. They do not count the cost of efforts, except in honor. Finally he says, “Tell me."

  * * * *

  Two days after I bought the LifeLong stock, the news broke. Daria Cleary had had not only a brain tumor but another tumor on her spine, and both were like nothing the doctors had ever seen before.

  I am no scientist, and back then I knew even less about genetics than I know now, which is not much. But the information was everywhere, kiosks and the Internet and street orators and the White House. Everybody talked about it. Everybody had an opinion. Daria Cleary was the next step in evolution, was the anti-Christ, was an inhuman monster, was the incarnation of a goddess, was—the only thing everybody agreed on—a lot of money on the hoof.

  Both of her tumors produced proteins nobody had ever seen before, from some sort of genetic mutation. The proteins were, as close as I could understand it, capable of making something like a warehouse of spare stem cells. They renewed organs, blood, skin, everything in the adult person. Daria had looked still eighteen to me because her body was still eighteen. It might be eighteen forever. The fountain of youth, phoenix from the ashes, we are become as gods, blah blah blah. Her tumors might be able to be grown in a lab and transplanted into others, and then those others could also stay young forever.

  Only, of course, it didn't work out that way.

  But nobody knew that, then. LifeLong, the struggling biotech company that Peter Cleary secretly took over to set up commercial control of Daria's tumors, rocketed to the stratosphere. Almost you couldn't glimpse it way up there. My half-million credits became one million, three million, a hundred million. The entire global economy, already staggering from the Change-Over and the climate changes, tripped again like some crazy drunk. Then it got up again and lurched on, but changed for good.

  No more changed than my life. Because of her.

  Should I say the success of my new stock was ashes in my mouth? I would be lying. Who hates being rich? Should I say it was pure blessing, a gift from the Master of the Universe, something that made me happy? I would be lying.

  "I don't understand,” Miriam said, holding in her hands the e-key I had just handed her. “You bought a house? Under the Brooklyn Dome? How can we buy a house?"

  Not “we,” I thought. There was no more “we,” and maybe there never had been. But she didn't need to know that. Miriam was my wife,
carrying my child, and I was sick of our cruelty to each other. Enough is enough already. Besides, we would be away from her mother.

  "I got a stock tip, never mind how. I bought—"

  "A stock tip? Oh! When can I see the house?"

  She never asked about my business again. Which was a good thing, because the money changed me. No, money doesn't change people, it only makes them more of whatever they were before. Somewhere inside me had always been this rage, this desperation, this contempt. Somewhere inside me I had always been a crook. I just hadn't known it.

  I could have lived for the rest of my life on the money Daria gave me. Easy. Miriam and I could have had six children, more, another Jacob with my own personal twelve tribes. Well, maybe not—Miriam still hated sex. Also, I didn't want a dynasty. I never touched my wife again, and she never asked. I took prostitutes sometimes, when I needed to. I took business alliances with men, Italians and Jews and Russians and Turks, most of whom were well known to the feds. And this is when I took on a separate identity for these transactions, the folksy quaint Jew that later Geoffrey would hate, the colorful mumbling Shylock. I took on dubious construction contracts and, later, even more dubious Robin Hoods, those lost cyber-rats who rob from the rich and give to the pleasure-drug dealers.

  But dubious to who? The Feder Group did very well. And why shouldn't I loot a world in which Daria—Daria, to whom I'd given my soul—could give me money instead of herself ? Money for a soul, the old old bargain. A world rotten at the core. A world like this.

  I regret none of it. Miriam was, in her own way, happy. Geoffrey had everything a child could want, except maybe respectability, and when I retired, he took the Feder Group legitimate and got that, too.

  I put Daria's lock of hair and paper kiss in a bank deposit box, beyond the reach of Miriam and her new army of obsessive cleaners, human and ‘bot. After she died in a car crash when Geoff was thirteen, I had the hair and paper set inside my ring. By then LifeLong had “perfected” the technique for using Daria's tumor cells for tissue renewal. The process, what came to be called D-treatment, couldn't make you younger. Nothing can reverse time.

  What D-treatment could do was “freeze” you at whatever age you had the operation done. Peter Cleary, among the first to be treated after FDA approval (the fastest FDA approval in history—mine wasn't the only soul for sale) would stay fifty-four years old forever.

  Supermodel Kezia Dostie would stay nineteen. Singer Mbamba would stay thirty. First came Hollywood, then society, then politicians, and then everybody with enough money, which wasn't too many people because after all you don't want hoi polloi permanently cluttering up the planet. When King James III of England was D-treated, the whole thing had arrived. Respectable as organ transplants, safe as a haircut. Unless the king was hit by a bus, Princess Monica would never succeed to the throne, but she didn't seem to care. And England would forever have its beloved king, who had somehow become a symbol of the “British renewal” brought about by Daria's shaved head.

  There were complications, of course. From day one, many people hated the whole idea of D-treatment. It was unnatural, monstrous, contrary to God's will, dangerous, premature, and unpatriotic. I never understood that last, but apparently D-treatment offended the patriotism of several different countries in several different parts of the world. Objectors wrote passionate letters. Objectors organized on the Internet and, later, on the Link. Objectors subpoenaed scientists to testify on their side, and some tried to subpoena God. A few were even sure they'd succeeded. And, inevitably, some objectors didn't wait for anything formal to develop: they just attacked.

  * * * *

  I stay with Stevan two days. He houses me in a guest cottage, well away from the Rom women, which I find immensely flattering. I am eighty-six years old, and although renewal has made me feel good again, it isn't that good. Sap doesn't rise in my veins. I don't need sap; I just need to see Daria again.

  "Why, Max?” Stevan asks, as of course he was bound to do. “What do you want from her?"

  "Another lock of hair, another kiss on paper."

  "And this makes sense to you?” He leans toward me, hands on his knees, two old men sitting on a fallen log in the mountain woods. There is a snake by the log, beyond Stevan. I watch it carefully. It watches me, too. We have mutual distaste, this snake and I. If man was meant to be in naked woods, we wouldn't have invented room service, let alone orbitals. Although in fact this woods is not so naked—the entire kumpania and its archaically lush land are encased under an invisible and very expensive mini-Dome and are nourished by underground irrigation. This is largely due to me, as Stevan knows. I don't have to issue any reminders.

  I say, “What in this world makes sense? I need another lock of hair and a paper kiss, is all. I have to have them. Is this so hard to understand?"

  "It's impossible to understand."

  "Then is understanding necessary?"

  He doesn't answer, and I see that I need to say more. Stevan has still not noticed the snake. He is ten years younger than me, he still has much of the strength in his arms, he lives surrounded by his wife and family. What does he know from desperation?

  "Stevan, it's like this: To be old, in the way I'm old, this is to live in a war zone. Zap zap zap—who falls next? You don't know, but you see them fall, the people all around you, the people you know. The bullets are going to keep coming, you know this, and the next one could just as well take you. Eventually it will take you. So you cherish any little thing you still care about, anything that says you're still among the living. Anything that matters to you."

  I sound like a damn fool.

  But Stevan lumbers to his feet and stretches, not looking at me. “Okay, Max."

  "Okay? You can do it? You will?"

  "I will."

  We are still wortácha. We shake hands and my eyes fill, the easy tears of the old. Ridiculous. Stevan pretends not to notice. All at once I know that I will never see him again, that this completes anything I might be owed by the Rom. Whatever happens, they will not set a pomona sinia, a death-feast table, for me, the gajo. That is all right. You can't have everything. And anyway, the important thing is not to get, but to want.

  After so long, I am grateful to want anything.

  We walk out of the woods. And I am right, Stevan never notices the snake.

  Nicklos drives me back to the Manhattan Dome. “BaXt, gajo."

  "Good-bye, Nicklos.” The young—they believe that luck is what succeeds. I don't need luck, I have planning. Although this time I have planned only to a point, so maybe I will need luck after all. Yes, definitely.

  "BaXt, Nicklos."

  I climb out of the car at the Manhattan Space Port, and a ‘bot appears to take my little overnight bag and lead me inside. It seats me in a small room. Almost immediately a woman enters, dressed in the black-and-green uniform of the Federal Space Authority. She's a shicksa beauty, tall and blonde, with violet eyes. Genemod, of course. I'm unmoved. Next to the Rom women, she looks sterile, a made thing. Next to Daria, she looks like a pale cartoon.

  "Max Feder?"

  "That's me."

  "I'm Jennifer Kenyon, FSA. I'd like to talk to you about the trip you just booked up to Sequene."

  "I bet you would."

  Her face hardens, pastry dough left out too long. “We've notified Agent Alcozer of the CIB, who will be here shortly. Until then, you will wait here, please."

  "I've notified my lawyer, who will holo here shortly. Until then, you will bring me a coffee, please. Something to eat would be nice, too.” Rom food, although delicious, is very spicy for my old guts.

  She scowls and leaves. A ‘bot brings very good coffee and excellent doughnuts. Max Feder is a reprobate suddenly awakened from the safely dead, but money is still money.

  Twenty minutes later Agent Alcozer shows up, no female sidekick. He, Ms. Kenyon, and I sit down, a cozy trio. Almost I'm looking forward to this. Josh holos in and stands in front of the wall screen, sighing. “Hello,
Joe. Ms. Kenyon, I'm Josh Zyla, Max Feder's attorney of record. Is there a problem?"

  She says, “Mr. Feder is not cleared for space travel. He has a criminal record."

  "That's true,” Josh agrees genially. He's even more genial than his father, who represented me for thirty years. “But if you'll check the Space Travel Security Act, Section 42, paragraph 13a, you'll see that the flight restrictions apply only to orbitals registered in countries signatory to the Land-Gonzalez Treaty and—"

  "Sequene is registered in Bahrain, a sig—"

  "—and which received global Expansion Act monies to subsidize some or all construction costs and—"

  "Sequene received—"

  "—and have not filed a full-responsibility liability acceptance form for a given prospective space-faring individual."

  Ms. Kenyon is silent. Clearly she, or her system, has not checked to see if Sequene had filed a full-responsibility liability acceptance form to let me come aboard. At least, she hasn't checked in the last hour.

  Alcozer frowns. “Why would Sequene file a flight acceptance for Max Feder?"

  Why indeed? Full-liability acceptances were designed to allow diplomats from violent countries, who might violently object to exclusion, attend international conferences. The acceptances are risky. If said diplomat blows up the place, no government is legally responsible and no insurance company has to pay. The demolition is then considered just one of those things. Full-liability acceptances are rare, and not designed for the likes of Max Feder.

  Josh shrugs. “Sequene didn't tell me how it made its decisions.” This is true, since Sequene doesn't know yet that I am coming upstairs. Money isn't the only thing that can be stolen. Every alteration of every record is a kind of theft. Stevan's people are very good thieves. They have had eight centuries to practice.