The Fountain of Age

by Nancy Kress

  “Are you an Adams?” This is an important question.

  He glances at me in his mirror; the car is not on auto. Good. Auto can be traced. But, then, Stevan knows his business.

  The driver grins. “Nicklos Adams, gajo. Stevan’s adopted grandson.”

  All at once I relax. Who knew, until that moment, that my renewed body was so tense? With reason: It had been ten years since I’d seen Stevan and things change, things change. But “gajo,” the Romanes term for unclean outsiders, was said lightly, and an adopted grandson held a position of honor among gypsies. Stevan was not doing this grudgingly. He had sent his adopted grandson. We were still wortácha.

  Nicklos stays underground as we leave Brooklyn, but he doesn’t take the Manhattan artery. Instead he pulls into a badly lit service bay. We move quickly—almost running, I have forgotten how good it feels to run—to a different level and get into a different car. This car goes into Manhattan, where we change again in another service bay. I don’t question the jammers; I don’t have to. Stevan and I are wortácha, partners in an economic enterprise. Once we each taught the other everything we both knew. Well, almost everything.

  When the car emerges aboveground, we are in open country, heading toward the Catskills. We drive through the world I have only read about for ten years, since I went into the Silver Star Retirement Home. Farms guarded by e-fences or genemod dogs, irrigated with expensive water. Outside the farms, the ghost towns of the dead, the shanty towns of the barely living. Until the micro-climate changes again—give it a decade, maybe—this part of the country has drought. Elsewhere, sparse fields have become lush jungles, cities unlivable heat sinks or swarming warrens of the hopeless, but not here. A lone child, a starveling and unsmiling, waves at the car and I look away. It’s not shame—I have not caused this misery. It’s not distaste, either. I don’t know what it is.

  Nicklos says, “The car has stealth shields. Very new. You’ve never seen anything like it.”

  “Yes, I have,” I say. Reuven’s ’bot dog, a flash of nearly invisible light, my arms flailing at the stupid thing. My ring with Daria’s hair, her kiss. All at once my elation at escaping Brooklyn vanishes. Such foolishness. I’m still an old man with a bare finger and an ache in his heart, doing something stupid. Most likely my last stupid act.

  Nicklos watches me in the mirror. “Take heart, gajo. So ci del o bers, del o caso.”

  I don’t speak much Romanes, but I recognize the proverb. Stevan used it often. What a year may not bring, an hour might.

  From your mouth to God’s ears.

  From the alley behind Linn’s I went straight to a public kiosk. That was how little I knew in those days: no cover, no dummy corporation, no off-shore accounts. Also no time. I deposited the 500,000 credits in my and Miriam’s account, thereby increasing it to a 500,016. Fortunately, the deposit proved untraceable because Daria knew more than me—how? How did she learn so much so fast? And what had such knowledge cost her?

  But I didn’t think those compassionate thoughts then. I didn’t think at all, only felt. The credits were blood money, owed me for the loss of the other Daria, my Daria. The Daria who had loved me and could never have married Peter Morton Cleary. I screamed at the screen in the public kiosk, I punched the keys with a savagery that should have gotten me arrested. As soon as the deposit registered, I went to a trading site, read the directions through the red haze in my demented mind, and bought a half million worth of stock in LifeLong, Inc. I didn’t even realize that it was among the lowest-rated, cheapest stock on the exchange. I wouldn’t have cared. I was following Daria’s instructions from some twisted idea that I was somehow crushing her by doing this, that I was polluting her world by entering it, that I was losing these bogus credits exactly as I had lost her. I was flinging the piece of her dirty world that she’d given me right back in her face. I was not sane.

  Then I went and got drunk.

  It was the only time in my life that I have ever been truly drunk. I don’t know what happened, where I went, what I did. I woke in a doorway, my boots and credit chip with its sixteen credits stolen, someone’s spittle on my shirt. If it had been winter, I would have frozen to death. It was not winter. I threw up on the sidewalk and staggered home.

  Miriam screaming and crying. My head pounded and my hands shook, but I had thrown up the insanity with the vomit. I looked at this woman I did not love and I had my first clear thought in weeks: We cannot go on like this.

  “Miriam—”

  “Shut up! You shut up! Just tell me where you were, you don’t come home, what am I supposed to think? You never come home, even when you’re here you’re not here, this is a life? You hide things from me—”

  “I never—”

  “No? What is that plastic bubble with your old uniform? Whose hair, whose kiss? I can’t trust you, you’re devious, you’re cold, you—”

  “You went through my Army uniform? My things?”

  “I hate you! You’re a no-good son-of-a-bitch, even my mother says so, she knew, she told me not to marry you find a real mensch she said, this one’s not and if you think I ever really loved you, a stinking sex maniac like you but—” She stopped.

  Miriam is not stupid. She saw my face. She knew I was going to leave her, that she had just said things that made it possible for me to leave her. She continued on, without drawing new breath or changing tone, but with a sudden twisted triumph that poisoned the rest of our decades together. Poisoned us more, as if “more” were even possible—but more is always possible. I learned as much that night. More is always possible. She said—

  —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 thic
k 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, 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 want 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 150 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.”