"What if you had more sophisticated instruments?" he asked.
Of course, they said. But we do not have them. You'll have to wait another generation, or two, or three, and by then the damage will be done. We'll never live to see it.
"Then," the president said, "we must get busy. Make sure your assistants and their assistants and their assistants as well know everything you know. Prepare them to continue your work. We can't give up. "
Todd looked around the table as everyone nodded sagely, lips pursed in the identical expression of grim courage. The spirit of man: We shall overcome. Todd couldn't bear it anymore. Like his bladder, his emotions could be contained for progressively shorter periods of time.
"For Christ's sake, do you call this optimism?" he said, and was instantly embarrassed that tears came unbidden to his eyes. They would dismiss him as an emotional wreck, not listen to his ideas at all. Sound clinical, he warned himself. Try to sound clinical and careful and scientific and impartial and uninvolved and all those other impossible, virtuous things.
"I have the cure to the Premature Aging Phenomenon," Todd said. "Or at least I have the cure to the misery. "
Eyes. All watching him intently. At last I have their attention, he thought.
"The cure to the misery is to go home and go to bed and stop trying. We've done all we can do. And if we can't cure the disease, we can live with it. We can adapt to it. We can try to be happy. "
But the eyes were gone again, and two of the scientists came over to him and dabbed at his eyes with their handkerchiefs and helped him get up from the table. They took him to another room, where he sat (guarded by four men, just in case) and sobbed.
At last he was dry. He sat and looked at the window and wondered why he had said the things he had said. What good would it do? Men didn't have it in them to stop trying. We are not bred for despair.
And yet we learn it, for even in our efforts to repair the damage done by premature aging, we are as blind as lemmings, struggling to go down the same old road to a continent that a million years before had sunk under the sea—yet the road could not be changed. The age of forty had its tasks; therefore we must strive to live to forty, however far away it might be now.
The meeting ended. He heard voices in the hall. The words could not be deciphered, but through them all was the tone of boisterous good cheer, good luck my friend and I'll see you soon, here's to the future.
The door to Todd's private (except for the guards) room opened. Anne Hal-lam and Ryan came in, stepping quietly.
"I'm not asleep," Todd said. "Nor am I emotionally discommoded at the moment. So you needn't tiptoe. "
Anne smiled then. "Todd, I'm sorry. About the embarrassment to you. It happens to all of us now and then. "
Todd smiled back (thank God for a little warmth—how had she kept it?) And then shook his head. "Not then. Just now. Well, what did the meeting find out?
Have the Chinese found a magic cure and only now are radioing the formula
To Honolulu?"
Ryan laughed. "As if there were any Chinese anymore. "
Anne said, "We decided two things . First, we haven't found the cure yet. "
"Astute," Todd aid, raising an imaginary glass to clink with hers.
"And second, we decided that there is a cure, and we will find it. "
"And while you were at it," Todd asked, "did you decide that faster-than-light travel was possible, and declare that it would be discovered next week by two youngsters in France who by chance were walking in the field one day and plunged into hyperspace?"
"Not only that," Anne said, "but one of the children immediately will follow a rabbit down a hole and find herself in Wonderland. "
"Blunderland," Todd added, and Anne and Todd laughed together with understanding and mutual compassion. Ryan looked at them, puzzlement in his eyes. Todd noticed it. The younger generation still knows only life: Ah, youthful Caesar, we who are about to die salute you, though we have no hope of actually communicating with you.
"But there is a cause," Anne insisted, "and therefore it can be found. "
"Your faith is touching," Todd said.
"There's a cause for everything, we don't change overnight with no reason, or else nothing that any human being has ever called ‘true' can be counted on at all. Will gravity fail?"
"Tomorrow afternoon at three," Todd said.
"Only if there's a cause. But sometimes—right now, with PAP—the cause eludes us, that's all. Why did the dinosaurs die out? Why did the apes drop from the trees and start talking and lighting fires? We can guess, perhaps, but we don't know; and yet there was a cause or there's no reason in the world. "
"I rest my case," Todd said. "My basket case, to be precise. "
Ryan's face twisted, and Todd laughed at him. "Ryan, the nearly dead are free to joke about death. It's only the living to whom death is tabu. "
"Maybe," Anne Hallam said, leaning back in a chair (and the guards' eyes followed her, because they watched everybody, guarded everybody), "maybe there's some system, some balance, some ecosystem we haven't discovered until now, a system that demands that, when one species or group gets out of hand, that species changes, not for survival of the fittest, but for survival of the whole. Perhaps the dinosaurs were destroying the earth, and so they—stopped. Perhaps man was—no, we know man was destroying the earth. And we know we were stopped. Any talk of nuclear war now? Any chance of too much industry raping the earth utterly beyond of hope of survival?"
"And in a moment," Ryan said, his mouth curled with distaste, "you'll be mentioning the thought that God is punishing us for our sins. I, personally, find the idea ridiculous, and seeing two of our finest minds seriously discussing it is pathetic. "
Ryan got up and left. Anne smiled again (warmly!) at Todd, patted his hand, and left. After a few minutes, Todd followed.
A plane ride east.
Midnight at the airport. Nevertheless, a crowd bustling through. At one end of the terminal, a ragged old man was shouting to an oblivious crowd.
Todd and the others tried to pass him without paying attention, but he called to them. "You! You with the briefcases, you in the suits!" Ryan stopped and turned, and so they all had to. Todd was irritated. He was tired. He wanted to get home to Sandy.
"You're scientists, aren't you!" the man shouted. They didn't answer. He took that for agreement. "It's your fault! the earth couldn't bear so many men, so many machines!"
"Let's get out of here," Todd said, and the others agreed.
The old man kept calling after them. "Rape, that's all it was! Rape of a planet, rape of each other, rape of life, you bastards!" People stared at them all the way out of the terminal.
"There was a day," Ryan said, "when people expected science to work miracles, and cursed us when we failed. Now they curse us for the miracles we did give them. "
Todd hunched his shoulders. Scientists hell. Who were scientists? People with blue security cards.
The old man's voice echoed even out in the parking lot. "the earth gets even! the violated virgins will have their revenge!"
Todd got in his car and drove home alone. Shaking.
When he got home he found all as he had left it. The student from the university had come in and fed Sandy—there were dishes in the sink that the boy apparently hadn't thought of cleaning up.
Sandy was where Todd had left her. Lying on the bed. Breathing. Her eyes were closed.
Todd lay on the bed beside her. He had carried despair with him to the meeting, and carried it as a burden multiplied many times over when he came back. With a gentle finger he traced the wrinkles that radiated from Sandy's eyes, followed the folds of skin down her neck, twisted the brown hair now showing gray roots, pressed his lips against her closed eyes. He could remember when the skin was smooth, not cracked and hard as parchment, not thin and vein-lined.
"I'm sorry," he said again and again, unsure who he was apologizing to or what for. "I'm so sorry. "
And the
n he told his wife's unhearing ears about the conference. They had found nothing. And finding nothing, they could find no cure. You're going to die, he said softly into her ear. "You're going to die, I'd stop it if I could, but I can't, you're going to die. "
He got up and sat at his desk. He wrote by hand on the blank envelope sitting there, because he felt too tired to type, too tired to reach up to the shelf above the desk and pick up the sheets of paper. the ink scrawled:
"Our senility is not just age. In the books it is possible to age gracefully. Let us age with grace and strength, please, not madly and with terror and in the darkness and clinging to our pillows and our blankets calling names of parents we never knew, names of soft friends who never answered us. "
He stopped writing for as little reason as he had begun. He wondered who he had been writing to. He leaned back and touched the mattress. It was soft. He buried his hand in the blanket. It was soft.
On his knees by the bed, he clung to the blanket saying quietly, "Dappa," and then, "Coopie. Dappa, you're back. "
Lying naked on the bed, curled up with a pillow tucked under his arm, he knew somewhere back in his mind that he was not quite what he should be, not quite thinking and acting as he ought. But it was too good to have Dappa and Coopie back.
He fell asleep with tears of comfort and relief spotting the sheets.
He woke with blood pumping upward out of his heart. His wife Sandy knelt on the bed, straddling him, the letter opener still in her hand, her face splotched red with his blood.
"Poogy," she said angrily, her face contorted. "You've got Poogy and I want him. "
She stabbed him again, and Todd felt the letter opener in his chest. It fit as snugly and comfortably as a new organ that had long been missing from his body. It was, however, cold.
Sandy pulled out the letter opener and a new spout erupted and spattered. She stuck out her lower lip. "I'm taking Poogy now," she said. Then she reached down and pulled the bloody pillow from under his arm.
"Dappa," Todd said in feeble protest. But as the pillow moved away, cradled in his wife's arms, he saw clearly again, he recognized what was happening, and as his arms and legs got colder and the bloodspout weakened, he longed to cry out for help. But his voice did not work. there was no rescue.
Death and madness, he thought in the last moment left to him. They are the only rescuers. And where madness fails, death will do.
And it did.
Arties Aren't Stupid
by Jeremiah Tolbert
Jeremiah Tolbert's fiction has appeared in Fantasy Magazine, Interzone, Ideomancer, and Shimmer, as well as in the anthologies Federations and Polyphony 4. He's also been featured several times on the Escape Pod and Podcastle podcasts. In addition to being a writer, he is a web designer, photographer, and graphic artist—and he shows off each of those skills in his Dr. Roundbottom project, located at www.clockpunk.com. He lives in Colorado, with his wife and cats. This story first appeared in my anthology Seeds of Change.
Does it hurt an artist to go a week without painting? Does it pain a singer to spend a day without singing? Do creative people suffer when they are denied the chance to create?
Our next story is the story of artists who do suffer when circumstances keep them from creating art. They suffer real pain—because they are genetically engineered constructs whose bodies are specially designed to make art. These "arties" aren't alone in their specialization. There are "brainiacs" whose bodies are atrophied beneath massive brains, and "thicknecks" and "skinnybois," too. Each group has their own skills, their own weaknesses, their own strange places in a strange world.
In such a regimented society, it's not surprising that even a temporary mural needs to be licensed. But when their latest art experiment is rejected, the crew of artists have to find a new kind of creativity, an art so big it will transcend the boundaries between every specialty.
This piece sketches a dark reality where art is dangerous and creativity hurts. It confronts us with the value of art in our own time and place. It asks: can society thrive without art? Can we live without it?
Would we want to?
A few of us arties were hanging out in Tube Station D, in the dry part that hadn't flooded. Tin men had busted Blaze and Ransom doing an unlicensed mural on Q Street behind a soytein shop, and a small crowd of us watching (too chick-shit to Make with the tin men cracking down) scattered when the pig-bots hummed in from every direction like it was some kind of puzzle bust and not just a bunch of arties trying to wind down. We'd all clustered back down in the Station on Niles's turf. Tin men didn't bother below ground. So long as the Elderfolk couldn't see turd, they didn't give a turd.
Niles wasn't there, so some rat-faced kid started posing and posturing about taking a little swatch of wall for himself, doing it up special. Pecking order is pecking order, so nobody wanted to be near the turd-head if Niles heard him talking like that, so every bodies was giving him space and lots of it. Look-outs on the street announced with sharp whistles that Niles was headed down, and the kid shut right up.
Niles was a year or two older than the rest of us. Some bodies liked to say he was a proto-arty, but I don't know about that. He was different, and it didn't have nothing to do with his age or Make. All age did was give him a few inches of height to make bossing easier. He bossed good, not mean like Elderfolk, but kept us out of trouble with the thicknecks and just-plains. Something about him was plain special. We few girlies knew it, specially.
He was taller than me by a head, hair burnt umber and long, styled nice with lip-curl and spike. He wore a worker man's jumpsuit adorned with patches and swatches of fabric that he liked. Very anime, very hip. Arties have good fashion sense, but Niles set trends in our clade.
Boo was with him as usual, a stunted runt of a melodie that Niles had found sleeping on his turf. She wore an old fashioned mp3 player around her neck, earbuds nearly soldered into her ear bits. Whenever you got close to her, you could make out tinny music, but what kind of music it was, you couldn't figure. Unlike other melodies, Boo never sung, not once. Didn't speak either. Bum batch, probably. It happens, although most get recycled early. Nobody questioned her hanging around, seeing's how Niles tolerated her.
"This stuff is snazzy," he said. "No paint, just water and plant stuff. Nozzle works the same though. Sprays right on. " I recognized the stuff. I'd seen advertisements for it on my Elderfolk's vidiot box. Moss-in-a-can. They sold it to Elderfolk for the recreation yards, for making everything look all old and natural, whatever that meant. Simple biotech, nothing too crazy, nothing like us arties.
Niles tossed us each a metal can from a satchel that Boo carried, except for the rat-faced kid—Niles gave him zip. "You get out of here, go home to your Elderfolk. I heard what you were saying before I stalked a-on down," he said to him, wagging his finger, and rat-face's eyes got all comic and big. Rat-face sputtered something about how his Elderfolk didn't want him around, but Niles just shook his head.
"No bodies do, Zinger. "that's right, I remembered, rat-face was a new transfer to the city hood named Zinger something-something. Niles was a lot better at names than the rest of us, but you could see that he had to think real hard for it, sometimes. His face'd scrunch up and he'd just freeze to concentrate past all the shapes and colors that dance in an arties head from wake to sleep.
"Yah," said Tops. He stepped up out of the crowd and gave Zinger a short shove on the shoulder. Tops was Ransom's best friend, and he'd been spoiling for a fight all day, ever since the Tin Men busted Ransom.
"Cerulean, "Niles said, and the color flashed through our heads and everybody calmed down just a little. "Go on, you can come back tomorrow. This is my studio, don't forget it, 'kay?"
Zinger nodded, then turned and ran up the stone steps to street level. Niles sighed and finished handing out the moss-in-a-can.
"We supposed to Make with this instead of paint? It's all one color," Tops said, his voice all whiny like some spoiled just-plain.
"That'
s right," Niles said. "Better mossy than going in the pokey-pokey. " I winced at the word, which was both the name of a bad place and a description of what they did to you there.
I took my can happy, feeling better already. Design-shapes were practically pushing out my ears. My Elderfolk wouldn't give me any scratch for paints lately, using it all on themselves and drugas To feel better. Was okay with me, Niles gave stuff that he got from trading to the thicknecks and skinnybois for gang logos. Drugas made my Elderfolk less shouty which was just good-nogreat with me.
I went up and found some alley space and I Made until it all went away into an eggshell white haze.
We messed around with the moss-in-a-can for a few days until the Elderfolk decided they didn't like the "mess" and the tin men got new marching orders. They started spraying down all the fractals and designs with some kind of ick and it all turned turd-brown and dusted away. Hurt to see it, but what can arties do? Tin men can't be argued or fought with like Elderfolk.
We were all sulking in Niles' station, feeling the pain of not-Making like aching all over and Niles got mad and stomped off without even waking up Boo. We were a little scared, because Niles only left Boo behind when he was going to do something that might get him sent into the pokey for a long long time, and without Niles to keep everything straight, we'd all be in trouble. Boo woke up while we were fighting about what to do and came and cuddled up to me. I could almost feel the music vibrating through her into me. It made me feel a little sick.
"Don't know why she likes you so much," Tops said with a sneer. "Your Make sucks the big dong. "
I shrugged. Niles knew my Make was okay. Didn't much care if Tops and the other arties did. "I don't know," I said.
"Maybe because Mona isn't a ‘big dong' like you," sneered Tess. She helped whenever the boys thought they could gang-up on me. "And Mona's Make is okay. You're just scared because Niles is doing something bad. "
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