Ark

by Charles McCarry

  “The ones with coconut are really good,” he said.

  I took a bite. How right Henry was. My mood lifted. After we finished the donuts, Henry went back to the counter and bought breakfast sandwiches made of fried egg, ham, and melted Velveeta, fishing ones and fives out of several different pockets and dropping a couple of dollar bills into the tip jar. We finished our sandwiches and had more coffee.

  Henry said, “Are you all right? You looked like a ghost after supper last night.”

  “It was the lobster,” I said. “Also, I had a conscience.”

  “You’re all right now?”

  “Yeah. I took the donut cure.”

  “Why the conscience?”

  “I was rude to a guest, didn’t you notice?”

  “I noticed. He’s old enough to take care of himself. Usually he does.”

  “You’ve known him for a while?” I asked.

  “Years,” Henry said. “Don’t worry. He probably argued with you all the way home, shouting all the things he should’ve said if only he had thought of them. He’ll say them the next time you meet.”

  “The Prof and I are going to meet again?”

  “Why not? Sparks flew. That’s a good sign.”

  At the next table a man with a loud voice was telling a dirty joke. Henry paused to listen to it, then grinned. One breath later he turned to me and said, “How serious were you yesterday?”

  I had spent the night trying to forget what I said the day before. The last thing I wanted to do was reconstruct it.

  However, I was on duty, so I said, “About what?”

  “Forgetting about ethics.”

  I said, “Henry, I was babbling. I don’t remember what I said.”

  “I do,” Henry said.

  He then quoted back every word that I had uttered during my monologue in Amerigo’s library. I had heard of total recall. Henry actually possessed it. I felt that I had been eating donuts with an alien.

  I said, “Tell me, Henry, did you have any help with remembering the balderdash?”

  “Like what?”

  “A tape recording? A chip implanted in your brain?”

  He shook his head.

  I said, “Can you recall everything I’ve ever said to you?”

  “Most of it,” Henry said.

  “Also everything you’ve said to everyone else you’ve ever known?”

  “Not everything is worth remembering. Or everyone.”

  He sipped his coffee and studied me. There was something he wanted to tell me, but he hesitated to take the chance. I felt this as if I had just read it on his forehead. Then, speaking in his usual soft voice, he told me. Or started to.

  When he got to what he called “the enhanced embryos,” and started to explain just how they would be enhanced and what the results would be, I said, “Stop. I don’t want to hear this.”

  Henry said, “But I need you to hear it.”

  “No. You’re making me very uncomfortable.”

  “I don’t see why, but I’ll stop now if you really want me to. You need time to think.”

  The last thing I wanted to do was to think about what Henry had just told me.

  I said, “Frankly, Henry, at this point I don’t know what I need.”

  Remorselessly, Henry said, “We’ll talk again when you’re ready.”

  Outside in the parking lot, he gave me the keys to his car, a BMW convertible, and suggested that I skip the rest of the meeting and drive back to the city alone. I could think of nothing better to do, so that’s what I did. Henry didn’t ask for a lift back to Amerigo’s.

  4

  I DIDN’T SEE HENRY FOR days. I assumed he had gone somewhere. I didn’t mind. I was falling in love with loneliness. This was a defensive measure, in case Henry never came back. To be alone again was like living with the ghost of an estranged husband. He was gone, but even when he was absent, there he was, right behind you, breathing on your neck like a ghost. Who knew if he was real? Who had the guts to turn around and surprise the ghost by actually looking at it? Two of my fictitious characters, lovers, had a quarrel from which there could be no escape. I deleted the passage. It didn’t make me feel one whit better about my situation with Henry. I had failed him. I was paid to listen to him, and I had refused to listen to him. I assumed he would delete me from his life.

  What would my post-Henry world be like? I still had the BMW he loaned me, parked in the basement garage. Once again I considered leaving Henry’s money and everything else behind except my manuscript, and driving to, say, Utah. I could ship the car back to him, then live in a used trailer in the high desert, a good place to be when the Event happened. Absolute simplicity, that was the ticket—old clothes, a parka, boots, a warm hat, frozen food, Eight O’Clock coffee, writing with a pencil on the back of junk mail, not even a cat for company.

  In the end, I did not light out for the territories, but my habits changed. I turned off Henry’s videophone and all my throwaway cell phones and stopped checking for email. I no longer answered the intercom when the doormen called. I began to sleep late and write far into the evening. One evening I was still writing—it was dark outside—when the doorbell rang. Oddly, I felt no fear. I opened the door without even asking through the intercom who was there. Whoever it was, whatever it meant, let it happen. What more could fate have in store for me?

  The answer was Henry—a faintly smiling Henry. He cocked his head, checking me out, I guess, for signs of emotional distress.

  He said, “Hi. Sorry for the surprise visit, but you don’t answer the phone.”

  He made no move to cross the threshold on his own authority, so I invited him in. I sat down primly on the sofa, knees and ankle bones together, hands in lap. To my surprise, Henry sat down beside me.

  He said, “I expressed myself badly in Dunkin’ Donuts the other day.”

  I said nothing.

  Henry said, “I’m here to try again.”

  One of our silences gathered. Then Henry spoke.

  “To begin with, humanity is the first species with the capability to influence its own evolution,” he said. “You won’t be crazy about this analogy, but we are now able to perform most of the wonders attributed to the beings in Genesis. Quite soon we’ll surpass them.”

  “By doing what?”

  “When you think about what I started to tell you, think about it in terms of what you know as a twenty-first-century person instead of a character in the Old Testament. Consider the case of Sarah, wife of Abraham. Genesis tells us that God and a couple of his angels stopped by Abraham’s tent one day and stayed for lunch—freshly baked bread and a barbecued calf from Abraham’s herd. God reminded Abraham of the many gifts he had bestowed on him. Abraham replied that he was grateful for the herds and flocks and land, but these things didn’t really mean all that much because he had no children. God said he would rectify that. Abraham’s wife, Sarah, would conceive a son by Abraham. Sarah, who was a very old woman and had long since ceased to menstruate, laughed at the idea. God reproved her for doubting that he could do all things, and said he’d be back in a year and she would, by golly, bear Abraham a son. God did return, and Sarah did bear Abraham’s prophesied child. Abraham was a hundred years old and Sarah not so very much younger when Isaac was born—a miraculous event in his time. But in the late twentieth century, embryos implanted by mortal physicians in the wombs of women in their sixties were carried to term and delivered by caesarian section.”

  “You plan to do something similar?”

  “If not exactly the same thing.”

  “How?”

  “Technically, it’s no great feat,” Henry replied. “All you need is a computer program, detailed knowledge of the genome, and a certain amount of DNA. We have those three things.”

  “Including the computer program?”

  He nodded. I didn’t doubt that he himself had written the program.

  “Where do you get the DNA?” I asked.

  “Every human being is a walking
DNA factory.”

  “So you plan to harvest it from living people?”

  “Obviously.”

  For the first time ever, Henry’s tone was unpleasant. So was mine.

  I said, “What kind of people?”

  “We’ll be working with embryos.”

  “Why embryos?”

  “Because they’re easier to modify, and because they are so small they can’t even be detected by the naked eye. They weigh practically nothing. You can transport tens of thousands of them in the same amount of space that one adult human body would occupy.”

  “How do you keep them alive?”

  “It’s done every day in clinics all over the world. Properly frozen and stored at the right temperature in liquid nitrogen, they will, in theory, live forever.”

  “They live?”

  “Of course they live.”

  He then told me many things about DNA that I already knew and even more that I had not known. It came down to this: It is possible to mold DNA into almost any form. Billions of species had evolved willy-nilly on Earth from the same DNA. What the coincidences of evolution could do, design could also do, and do it much more quickly.

  I said, “Henry, cut the crap. Are you telling me that intelligent design is a fact?”

  “If you leave the supernatural out of it, why shouldn’t it be? Why does it have to be one thing or the other, God or natural selection? It’s not outside the realm of possibility that a design team from outer space deposited our species on this planet forty or a hundred thousand years ago and let evolution take its course. The whole human race has been a design team at work on itself and everything else ever since it was turned loose on this planet. Agriculture, our invention, or maybe the instructions programmed into our DNA, gave us food that made us taller, stronger, smarter. Medicine gave us longer life. Technology gave us the power of gods. Sometimes, even usually, there was no obvious reason to alter the original, but we did it anyway. Look at the many specialized kinds of dogs and other livestock we’ve developed through selective breeding, which is just another term for planned evolution. Look at ourselves. Thanks to all of the above, plus managed marriage, present-day human beings are as different from earlier hominids as the inch-long ears of maize cultivated by the Anasazi Indians are from modern corn on the cob—same DNA, different outcome.”

  I said, “Henry, this is twentieth-century eugenics. You sound like a lunatic.”

  “I do? What we’re thinking about doing next in the case of human evolution—the enhancement of embryos that has you so shook up—is nothing more than the next logical step in an ancient process. Humans have always bred systematically to improve themselves and their fellow animals. Keep an open mind. If I may quote, what about survival being the moral imperative of moral imperatives?”

  Gotcha. I was trying to keep an open mind, but Henry wasn’t making it easy for me. It was DNA, the yeast of the gods, we were talking about here. He was dismissing every ethical standard I had been educated to live by at great cost to my progressive parents. Nevertheless, as so often happened with Henry, I felt myself giving up my doubts.

  Hours had passed, or so it seemed. I had no idea what time it was. Henry yawned, stretched, groaned a little. He wandered into the kitchen, not quite remembering the way, and returned with two bottles of springwater. I visited the bathroom. In the mirror I saw a bewildered woman with dark circles under her eyes. She looked as though she had never, ever smiled and meant it. I smiled at her. She smiled back, most insincerely. I washed my face and went back to the living room.

  Henry said, “Please tell me exactly why you were so upset the other night.”

  Was it possible he really didn’t know? I said, “All I could think about was man and chimpanzee. Is it not true that the DNA difference between man and chimpanzee is very small?”

  “Less than five percent,” Henry said.

  “And you want to produce a new kind of human being who will be as superior to people like you and me as we are superior to chimpanzees? Furthermore, you want to send this creature into space instead of sending people as they now exist?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then what is the point? I thought the idea was to rescue the human race, not mess around with it.”

  “Rescue is the purpose. But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t enhance the species to give it a better chance of survival, which is what the enterprise is all about.”

  I said, “Henry, have you yourself figured out how to fabricate this Übermensch?”

  His voice was calm, his eyes steady. He said, “Yes, I think so.”

  “You think so or you know so?”

  “I see how it can be done. I haven’t actually done it. It’s illegal.”

  “Even in Mongolia?”

  “No.”

  I said, “But the truth is, you really do plan to do it somewhere on the planet before the ship lifts off?”

  “Very likely.”

  “And you have no qualms about it?”

  “None.”

  “You’ve just answered the question you asked me at the start,” I said. “How can you be without qualms? That’s why I’m so upset.”

  Henry said, “Why should I have qualms?”

  “Let me count the ways. First, you might create a race of monsters.”

  “In science fiction, that would probably be the outcome. In a real-life laboratory, properly managed, it will not. If the experiment fails, we will realize that and abandon it.”

  “Really? And what do you do with the product of the failed experiments?”

  “Dispose of it.”

  “Like lab rats.”

  Henry said, “Stop it. Enough human embryos to populate Mars have already been disposed of on Earth without bothering anybody’s conscience, including yours. The idea here is to preserve life, not prevent it.”

  “But the method, the purpose, the arrogance.”

  “Ah. What picture do you have in your mind about how this is going to be done?”

  “The usual one—the terrified victim strapped to a table, the mad scientist injecting him with something and reaching for his scalpel.”

  “It won’t be that way at all.”

  “Oh?” I said. “And how exactly will it be?”

  “You know the answer. We’ll be working with embryos, not conscious beings.”

  “So they’re not human after all.”

  “Of course they’re human. If left alone to develop they become the same as you and me.”

  “Oh, Henry,” I said.

  Henry gave me a look filled with genuine confusion. It was all crystal clear to him. Why could I not understand? What could I not understand? Why couldn’t I understand his purposes? Why wouldn’t he understand my misgivings?

  Something primal was going on within me—but what? Why was I so outraged? Of course I knew the answer. The instinct of self-preservation was at work. Not so very long ago at Amerigo’s house, I had argued that self-preservation trumped everything. These enhanced creatures of Henry’s were not only going to replace us, they were going to enslave us. How could it be otherwise?

  Feigning calm, I said, “The intention is to make our successor species X percent smarter and bigger than we are—right?”

  “More or less,” Henry replied.

  “So if X equals five, the average IQ of a superhuman would be one hundred five instead of one hundred, and the entrance-level test score of genius, now one forty, would become one forty-seven, and the average American male would be six foot one instead of five foot ten. That’s not a whole lot of difference. The average American has grown at least three inches in the last century with no help from anyone, and probably is just as much smarter on the average. So what’s the point?”

  “It doesn’t work that way. The difference would be greater.”

  “How much greater?”

  “As great as the difference between a human being and a chimpanzee,” Henry said.

  We parted in anger. And sadness, in my case. Did
Henry know sadness—or anger, for that matter? Or anything whatsoever about the thoughts of the heart?

  5

  APPARENTLY NOT. NOTHING CHANGED. HENRY and I went on exactly as before. He called, I responded to his summons, we met, I remained a part of what I assumed was his inner circle. My own qualms lingered, even strengthened. I could have resigned for my principles, but that would have meant life without Henry, so I found a way to live with my misgivings. In my fury I had told Henry he was crazy, but at the same time I thought it was more likely that he was saner than the rest of us in some way peculiar to Henry. He saw what others could not see—was famous for it. Maybe genetic engineering was the way to go despite its vile reputation. Maybe Henry’s idea was repugnant to me because it contradicted my notion of who Henry really was. Had he proposed the genetic alteration of human embryos aimed at the production of a new version of H. sapiens that resembled himself, instead of a race of supermen with rippling muscles, I would have been all for it.

  Genetic engineering and the Torah aside, there were other things to think about. A few days after our quarrel about Nietzschean Man, Henry brought me a present. It was a Lucite sphere that looked a lot like the imaginary Antarctic artifact he had described on the day we first met on that bench in Central Park. It came in two boxes, borne by a couple of men. Naturally, Henry didn’t tell me what was in the boxes.

  “Would it be OK if they set it up in the study?” Henry asked.

  It was Henry’s apartment. I said, “Why not?”

  “Stay here,” Henry said. “It’s a surprise.”

  I waited in the living room until the men had done their work and departed. Henry then led me into the study. A gleaming sphere about the size of a honeydew melon was balanced on a pedestal.

  Henry said, “Go ahead—pick it up.” I knew what was going to happen next, but he was in such a state of boyish glee that I did as I was told. After a second or two, the sphere vibrated like a cell phone, then lighted up. Data streamed across its surface—a photograph of Earth taken from orbit, followed by a graphic locating the planet in relation to other bodies in the solar system, the galaxy, the known universe. Then came a slide show about the formation of Earth, its geological ages and life forms past and present. This faded to videos from many angles of men and women and children of many ethnic types. Now a man and woman, both naked, engaged in what appeared to be unsimulated sex, followed by a slide show about sperm and ova and gestation and a video of a live birth and another sequence showing the woman from the sex scene suckling an infant. Then came the animals, trees, plants, grasses, mathematical equations with ingenious illustrations of their meaning and a virtual tour of man’s knowledge. Zeroes and ones streamed across the surface. Music played, the camera zooming in on the instruments, followed by graphics illustrating how they worked.