Generosity

by Richard Powers

  She pauses before the linen-closet door. Signals race on the air. She feels the molding with one hand, then turns, the back of her pelvis pressing against the wall, bracing it. Her legs are slightly splayed. One hand drops and reads the stucco, while the other holds her auburn hair off her forehead. Russell comes to a stop in front of her. The flame of his votive casts a globe around them. She just studies him, her pupils dilated, her breath coming in surges. Waiting is her art; her medium, the confusion of others.

  Wanting her has never been Stone’s problem. She knows him exactly, his hopes and fears, his reach and shortfall, and still she stands there, holding her hair from her eyes, not quite daring him, just studying to see if he, too, might think that it’s possible to double-cross nature, exploit the exploiter once, in this life.

  He holds the candle to her cheek, leans forward, and puts his mouth on hers. Lowering a bucket to a well. He watches her close her eyes and thaw. His chemicals teach something that he long ago discounted.

  A sigh comes from down the hall, the master bedroom door closes, and they both snap back to the business of blankets. “Here you are,” she says, loading him. An inward smile tightens her lips. He doesn’t know the word for it. Wise. “Call me if you need anything. You have my number, I think. Sleep well.” And she walks down the hall, brisk and rhythmic, letting herself into the closed bedroom, from which emerges a brisk duet of laughter.

  He goes about the apartment, putting out candles. For a minute, he’s a surplice-covered twelve-year-old altar boy following the Benediction at St. John’s Episcopal, Aurora. Amazingly, that ancient creature is still paddling around inside him like some coelacanth, protected by the rumor of its own extinction.

  The apartment gathers in eerie silence-no compressor, no blower, no hum or ticking of any powered device. He gets in bed fully dressed. He falls asleep to a ridiculous sense of rightness, dopamine run pointlessly amok. And he does sleep, on his sofa-pillow bed, deeper than any reason. But he dreams himself into a Pynchon novel, with an international cartel trading in the arcane incunabula hidden in people’s cells. His own sperm carries a sequence on the Index Librorum Prohibitorum, and he has to chase through several genomically controlled cities, looking for a doctor who will transfuse his gametes.

  He wakes early to the second day of spring. All the lights are on. He rises and makes the rounds, turning them all off. The devices all flash 12:00. He looks outside. The spell is broken. Sometime after midnight, the earth warmed ten degrees. The diamond crust has crumbled and liquefied. Neighbors are scraping off their cars and driving away. The disaster is over, before extracting any but the most token sacrifice. A shame.

  Stone relieves his long-suffering bladder, splashes tepid water on his face, and bumbles in the kitchen to start the coffee. From the boy’s room comes the click of keys. Voices muzzy with morning hum from down the hall. Steps falter; doors open and close. Communal return to consciousness: the routine that he’s spent his whole life fleeing.

  Candace emerges first. She’s immaculate as ever, in tan blouse and creased gray slacks, but her face is somehow different. Pale and ever so slightly featureless. Cosmetic-free. She raises a thin eyebrow at him.

  “Party’s over? Back to the salt mines?”

  He nods sympathetically and hands her a cup of coffee.

  “Bless you. You’re a secular saint.” She sits wrapped around her stimulant, sufficient unto the day.

  Before they’re forced into the exigency of talk, Thassa shows. She’s puffy, frazzled, and wobbly. Her eyes are still pinched shut. “Do not look at me. Not a happy sight!”

  Her loginess is deeply comforting. She doesn’t spring up full-blown with the sun. Science should test her now, put this bleary, sedated postadolescent into the data set, before she’s had her morning tea.

  Gabe comes out, more charged than the three adults combined. “Everything’s fine,” he reassures Stone, chopping the air. “I only lost like a tenth of my Experience.”

  They share another meal, American style this time. They sit at the small round table over synchronized cereal. Why do we need to turn the most naked animal dependency aside from breathing into a religious ritual?

  Everyone’s already late. The whole city. The roads have mostly melted, and Candace decides to drive. Stone refuses a lift. All three beg him to get in the car, but he holds his ground. He looks at Thassa, heading off to a last week of normalcy before the subtlest biochemical assays ever discovered publicly declare her a freak of nature. Her face apologizes. What else can I do?

  It’s Chicago, morning rush hour. Crusts of ice fall from the blowing branches. Stone steps back, out of the range of anyone’s embrace. The riders wave, the car pulls out, and he starts the long slog back home through the disenchanted world.

  “Give me your coffee cup,” Thomas Kurton tells Schiff, who’s caught by the second camera. “We can take a swab off that.” It’s a funny, telegenic moment. Director, camera operators, and sound tech share a look with Tonia, and they all wordlessly agree to a wrap.

  But the minute the DV cameras turn off, Kurton does as threatened. He flings himself up off the porch rocker and into his utility room, where he retrieves a six-inch cotton swab. He tears the sterile packaging, dips into Tonia Schiff’s coffee-cup backwash, and seals the swab in its plastic housing.

  The gesture is weirdly intimate. “I now have your genetic profile. Your SNPs and indels-the variations in your genome of any significance. I can identify your ancestors-and your descendants. I can predict your health and development, and I can even speculate about your disposition. I can make a good bet of your likely age span and what you’ll die of, if you don’t get hit by a car first. Hide this away in the cooler for a few years, and I’ll be able to do a whole lot more. Would you like a look? It’s the closest thing to time travel you’ll ever get.”

  The man has morphed into something out of Wagner. The whole crew regrets shutting down the cameras too soon. The future hits Tonia, and her stomach folds. She rearguards: “Am I allowed to look? Or is somebody like you going to sue me for infringement?”

  “Good question. Let’s say the law is in a period of adjustment at the moment.”

  She’s not really listening. She has her eyes on the plastic tube and its contents, which he’s waving around in the air like a conductor’s baton. “I’m sorry. Could I just ”

  He teases her for a second, the swab barely out of reach. “Sure. It’s all yours.” He turns to the mesmerized film crew. “Anyone want to wash the other cups?”

  Schiff and Kurton are still disputing the phrase the wisdom of repugnance as the crew brings the gear down to the van. Tonia looks up to see her colleagues spinning their wheels, waiting for her. “Go on ahead. I’ll meet you back at the B and B in Damariscotta.”

  The smirking crew pulls away in the van, but not before that punk Kenny Keyes gives her a little knowing finger salute off the side of his nose. She denies him the pleasure of a reaction.

  She drifts alongside Kurton back up the driveway. They’ve talked to each other for weeks, on and off camera, testing each other’s bright and dark places, familiar, now, as any two adversaries. She watches him stack empty flower pots. “People will be swabbing each other soon, won’t they? Before you hire somebody. Before you marry somebody. Consent or not. We’re going to be on file with hospitals, corporations, the government ”

  “I believe that is already under way.”

  “It doesn’t bother you, does it? How creepy society is going to get.”

  He shrugs his shoulders, like a sixteen-year-old answering the question What the hell do you think you’re doing? “There was a time when income tax and government-issued IDs were unthinkably creepy. Technology changes what we think is intolerable.”

  She squirrels the line away for use in the interview’s introduction.

  He stares down through the thin line of pines across the road to the shimmering water, a Boy’s Book of Adventure look. “Would you like to take a quick sail? We ha
ve a couple of hours before dusk.”

  His boat is a beautiful little gaff-rigged twelve-footer, cedar, oak, and Doug fir, from the sixties. He takes them down the inlet past the headlands, then hands her the rudder. Gulls gather on the rocky spit, like whispers. As the sky plushes out toward ginger and the waves quiet, he leans back against the front of the cockpit, toying with a cleat. They glide on no sound. She comes about, catches the wind, settles into the flow, and is filled with the most profound sense of aimlessness to be had anywhere.

  “May I ask you something? Completely off the record.”

  He tilts his face back in a speckle of sun, eyes closed, smile compliant.

  “How in God’s name do your companies make a profit?”

  He laughs so hard it folds him upright. “You’re making a small assumption, there.”

  “Seriously. You must be bleeding money away into all these projects, some of which, if you’ll pardon me, seem as flaky as pie crust. Okay: You have a couple of drug patents. You’ve licensed a pair of processes to larger pharmaceutical outfits. And you own the rights to two diagnostic screens. But all of that together can’t possibly pay for even half the R and D-”

  He juts out his iconoclastic chin. “You’re right! It doesn’t!”

  She tacks again, taking a bead back up the inlet, toward his dock and home. “So how do you stay in business?”

  He smiles more generously, unable to keep from admiring her. “You’re not much of a businessman, are you?”

  “Enough of one to know that credits are supposed to be greater than debits.”

  He waves away the nuisance technicalities. “Forget about bookkeeping. You can’t bookkeep what’s coming. In a few years, we’re going to be biologically literate. We’ll have figured out how to make cells do whatever chemistry we want. You think computer programming has changed the world? Wait till we start programming the genome.”

  “Thomas. Relax. We’re done filming.”

  He turns toward starboard and pushes his curls back over the crown of his head. “I’m sorry if I sound like I’m still performing. But believe me. It’s coming.”

  “Okay. So medicine keeps getting more complicated. I see the revenue potential there, down the line. But you can’t run a business without products. What exactly are you selling?”

  He gazes at her with the warmth caught so nakedly on film an hour earlier. “At the moment, Truecyte is in the business of selling the same product as most of the biotech sector: vaporware. But the venture capitalists know what’s in the pipeline.”

  His voice drops to the hush of the wake against the hull. “The coming market is endless. Think about the five years just before the Internet. The five years just before the steam engine. Only those companies that free themselves of preconceptions will take advantage of the biggest structural change in society since ”

  The simile eludes him, as irrelevant as bookkeeping. The sail starts to luff. She nudges the tiller and lets out the boom. Whatever Thomas Kurton’s knowledge of the future, he’s right, in any case, about her. For all her seasons Over the Limit, she’s never really taken the flood of transcendental hype seriously. That’s been her source of appeal: the clear-eyed, unflappable skeptic who simply wants to see the future’s photo ID.

  She brings the boat in line with his dock, now yawning up in front of them. Together she and Kurton furl the sail and drift into a light knock against the hanging tire bumpers. Kurton leaps onto the dock, ties down the prow and stern, and helps her over the gunwales.

  On the dock, she says, “You really think we’re going to get life to play by our rules?” The sun burnishes the water’s surface. In a moment, the air and the pines on the crag behind them turn crazed orange.

  He comes next to her and takes her forearm. She has predicted this, with no skill in futurism at all. She lets him. It feels lovely. In her experience, it has never not felt lovely, at first. Dopamine, serotonin, oxytocin. Does knowing the chemistry change anything? How long ago did she discover that lovely was a chemical trick?

  “I’m telling you: Forget what you know. Free your mind. Use your imagination.” His eyes fish for hers. No end of stories play in his. Microbes that live on dioxins and digest waste plastics. Fast-growing trees that sequester greenhouse gases. Human beings free from all congenital disease.

  She looks away, back out over the water. “You’re overselling again.”

  “It’s not sales. It’s just what happens next.” His thumb strokes her wrist. He lets go of her arm. He shrugs again, and in that simple gesture suggests that all literature, all fiction, all prediction to date is nothing more than a preparatory sketch of the possibilities available to the human animal.

  He detaches and wraps the tiller, tucks it under his arm, and climbs back up the boardwalk toward the house. She falls in at his side, the rhythm of this early evening remarkably familiar to her.

  He thinks out loud. “Your show will run. Your gang will edit me into some sort of white-coated huckster too cheerily Faustian to hear how nutty he sounds. Good television, right?”

  She asks him, with a scowl, not to pity himself or resent the millions of dollars in free advertising.

  “You’ll weave this whole story about a man and his company and its detractors and competitors. You’ll construct this whole dramatic arc for Truecyte Listen: Truecyte is nothing. Truecyte is irrelevant. Yes, we’re in the spotlight at the moment. But you know how science works now. Several hundred thousand researchers, propelled along on collective will. None of us fast enough to keep up. We make this big announcement, this exciting but ambiguous finding, and within a few weeks, a dozen more start-ups are all breathing down our necks, threatening to beat us to this thing.”

  She can’t keep irritation from flooding her voice. “What thing?”

  He turns and points back out over the water, now a swirl of cinnamon. “Fifteen minutes ago, you were the queen of creation. Correct? I saw it in your face.”

  She blushes, some other flush of chemicals. But you can’t have opinions about truth.

  “If your alleles were a little different, you’d feel that way most of the time.”

  Her head shakes, all by itself. “And if I were William Gates the Third, I’d buy me a nice little inlet like this and a sloop to call my own.”

  He smiles as richly as she did fifteen minutes ago. “With the right genetic compliment, you wouldn’t even need an inlet. You wouldn’t need anything. Your enemies could be shelling you, and you’d still be filled with a confident desire to make something worthwhile of the day.”

  “And this is a good thing?”

  They cross the coast road and head up the foot of his drive. She doesn’t want to speak again, but she does. “This woman with all the right alleles: Does she even know she’s that happy? If she’s that lifted up all the time, does she even have a measure ”

  “Oh, she goes up and down like anyone else. It’s just that her envelope of high and low is considerably higher than ours.”

  Schiff pauses by her rented Camry. The crew is waiting for her in Damariscotta. She needs to rejoin them for dinner and postmortems. They have to be at Logan first thing tomorrow. “That’s my point. I’m happier than most people, but what good does that do me? She’s happier than I am. If you moved us all up a notch, wouldn’t we just acclimate and forget, like we do with everything else? Wouldn’t ten just become the new seven?”

  “I wondered about that, too, until I met this ten. And the weird thing is, her genome differs from yours by only a few small tweaks.”

  She sees it in Thomas Kurton’s trusting, suppliant face: There’s only one real resource. One fungible commodity that the future will trade in. “You’re going to make us all happy. Is that the plan?”

  His eyebrows crumple and his lips sour. She’s hurt him, at least as much as he’s capable of being hurt by anyone. He shrugs off her mockery. “A little more capable of being well in this world. But not if you don’t want it, of course.”

  “You folks ha
ve finally found the formula for soma. Damn.”

  He breathes out a long-suffering sigh and leans against her car. “First, I really do hope that Aldous Huxley is burning in the pain-ennobling hell of his choice. That book is one of the most dangerous, hope-impeding, ideological rants ever written. Just because the author is stunted by some virtuous vision of embattled humanism, the rest of the race is supposed to keep suffering for all time?”

  “I’m not sure that’s exactly his-”

  “Second, yes: our initial products, if you insist, will likely consist of pharmaceuticals. But not the shot-in-the-dark stuff that we dispense today. Drugs tailor-made to the genome of the recipient. Smart bullets, genetically personalized prescriptions, and the sooner we get there, the faster we can finally get medicine out of the dark ages. Once we understand the brain chemistry behind depression and elation ”

  He catches himself this time. He nods, repentant, but the fingers of both hands flick rapidly against his thumbs. “I’m sorry. I’m an enthusiast. Guilty. What’s your problem with that? I assume you have no moral qualms about curing depression? We’re talking about substances that will be to today’s serotonin reuptake inhibitors what fentanyl is to biting on a towel.”

  “Why do I have the funny feeling that genetically tailored pills are just the beginning?” She catches him appraising her hair with the gaze of a connoisseur. Her left hand sweeps up, brushes back her flowing bangs, and lets them fall again.

  He copies her involuntarily. “Because you are America’s most irreverent science television journalist.” His voice can’t help revering that irreverent.

  “And all this public talk about life-span extension-”

  “Oh, we’re working on that, too. Quality and quantity. Listen. We’re after the same thing humanity has been after since toolmaking.”