The Fountain of Age

by Nancy Kress

  “I don’t work for gaje.”

  “Give it up, Max,” Moshe said, with disgust.

  But I trusted my nose. I waited.

  Stevan gazed at me.

  Finally he said, “Have you ever heard of wortácha?”

  Jennifer Kenyon and the FSA let me fly up to Sequene. They have no choice, really. My lawyer is prepared to make a big civil-rights stink if he has to. The current president, who has not had D-treatment, does not want a big civil-rights stink in her administration. She has enough Constitutional problems already. I used to know some of the people causing them.

  Shuttle security takes everything but your soul, and that it maybe nibbles at. Every inch of me is stripped and examined by machines and ’bots and people. If I carried any passengers before—lice, tapeworm, non-human molecules—I don’t have them after Security is finished with me. I can’t bring my own commlink, I can’t wear my own clothes, almost I can’t use my own bones. Shuttles and orbitals are fragile environments, I’m told. Nobody seems to notice that I’m a pretty fragile environment, too. Finally, dressed in a coverall and flimsy disposable shoes, I’m allowed to stagger onto the shuttle and collapse into a recliner.

  Then starts the real punishment.

  Space is a game for the young. The flight is hard on my body despite my renewal, despite their gadgets, despite all the patches stuck on my skin like so much red, blue, green, and yellow confetti. I’m eighty-six years old, what do you want from me. Few people wait that long for D-treatment. The attendant doesn’t knock me out because then he wouldn’t know if anything vital ruptured. It feels like everything ruptures, but in fact I arrive in one unbroken piece. Still, it’s a long time before I can walk off the shuttle.

  “Mr. Feder, this way, please.” A young man, strong. I refuse to lean on his arm. But I look at everything. I’ve never been on an orbital before, and please the Master of the Universe, I never will again. Fifty years they’ve been up here, some of these orbitals, but why should I go upstairs? Money and influence travel by quantum packets, not shuttles. And there’s never been anything upstairs that I wanted. Until now.

  The shuttle bay is disappointing, just another parking garage. My guide leads me through a door into a long corridor lined with doors. Other people walk here and there, but they are led by cute little gold-colored robots, not by a person. Well, this is no more than I expected.

  My guard shows me into a small, bare, white room a lot like the one at the Manhattan Spaceport. These people all need a new interior designer.

  A woman enters. “Mr. Feder, I’m Leila Cleary. How was your trip up?”

  “Fine.” This is Peter Cleary’s daughter by one of his wives before Daria. She looks about thirty but of course would be much older. Red hair, blue eyes, at least at the moment, who knows. Eyes as hard as I’ve ever seen on a woman. She makes Alcozer’s sidekick and Jennifer Kenyon both look like cuddly stuffed toys.

  “We’re so glad you chose to honor Sequene with a trip. And so surprised, especially when we discovered that Sequene had filed a full-responsibility liability acceptance form for you.”

  “Discovered? When, Ms. Cleary?”

  “After you had taken off from Earth and before you landed here. How did that happen, Mr. Feder?”

  “I have no idea, Ms. Cleary. I’m an old man, can’t keep track of all these modern forms. Unfortunately my memory isn’t what it was once.” I make my voice quaver. She isn’t fooled.

  “I see. Well, now that you’re here, what can we do for you?”

  “I want a D-treatment. I know I don’t have an appointment, but I’ll stay at the hotel until you can fit me in. And, of course, I’ll pay whatever premiums you ask for a rush job. Whatever.”

  “We don’t do ‘rush jobs,’ Mr. Feder. Our medical procedures are meticulous and individually tailored.”

  “Of course, of course. Everybody knows that.”

  “You are not just ‘everybody,’ Mr. Feder. And Sequene is a private facility. We reserve the right to grant or deny treatment.”

  “Understood. But why would you want to deny it to me? My record? You’ve treated others with . . . shall we say, complicated backgrounds.” I don’t name names, although I could. Carmine Lucente. Raul Lopez-Reyes. Worst of all, Mikhail Balakov. But D-treatment is supposed to be a private thing.

  “Mr. Feder, you are eighty-six. Are you sure you know what D-treatment can and cannot do? If you think—”

  “I don’t,” I say harshly. Master of the Universe, nobody knows better than I what D-treatment can and cannot do. Nobody. “How about this, Ms. Cleary. I’ll stay in the hotel, your best suite, and your people can confer, can run whatever tests you like. I’ll wait as long as you like. Meanwhile, take all the blood you want, pretend Sequene is Transylvania, ha ha.”

  The joke falls flat. Her look could wither a cactus. How much does she know? I have never, in fifty-six years, found out what Daria told Peter Cleary about me. Nor if Peter ever knew that Daria had given me that first half-million credits, so long ago. My guess is no, she doesn’t know this, but I can’t be sure.

  “All right, Mr. Feder. We’ll do that. You stay in the hotel, and I’ll confer with my staff. Meanwhile, the screen in your suite will inform you about the procedure and all necessary consent forms. You can also send them downstairs to lawyers and relatives. Have a pleasant stay in Sequene.”

  There is no reason to not have a pleasant stay in Sequene. Once I move—or am moved, my young unsolicited bodyguard at my side—out of the shuttle bay area, the place looks like a five-star hotel in the most tasteful British fashion. Not too new, not too glossy, none of that neo-Asian glitter. Comfort and quality over flash, although Reggie (the b-guard’s name) tells me there is a casino “for your gambling pleasure.” Probably the rest of it, too: the call girls, pretty boys, and recreational drugs, all discreet and clean. I don’t ask, despite some professional curiosity. I am eighty-six and here just for the D-treatment, a harmless old man trying a last end run around Death. I stay in character.

  My suite is beautiful, if small. On an orbital, space costs. Off-white and pale green—green is supposed to be soothing—walls, antique armoire for the my clothes, which have arrived on a separate shuttle. State-of-the-art VR, full scent- and tingly-sprays. The bed does everything but take out the trash. One wall chats me up, very courteously giving instructions for “illuminating” the window. I follow them, and gasp.

  Space. The suite abuts the orbital shell, and only a clear-to-the-disappearing-point hull separates me from blackness dotted with stars. Immediately I opaque the window. Who needs to see all that room, all that cold? To me it brings no sense of wonder, only a chill. Three, maybe four atoms per square liter—who wants that? We’re meant for warmth and air and the packed molecules of living flesh.

  Daria is up here. Somewhere, sequestered, reclusive. She’s here. And I’m not going away until I find her.

  Before Stevan and I became wortácha, he insisted that I meet Rosie. He did not have to do this. Romani men do not need their wives’ cooperation to conduct their business affairs; they are not Episcopalians. But Rosie and Stevan did things their own way. He relied on her.

  And she was really something back then. In her late thirties, curly black hair, snapping dark eyes beside swinging gold earrings, voluptuous breasts in her thin white blouse. A pagan queen. Not since Daria had I seen a woman I admired so much. She hated me on sight.

  “Gajo,” she said, by way of acknowledgment. Her lips barely parted on the word.

  “Mrs. Adams, thank you for having me here,” I said. It came out too sarcastic. I was barely “here” at all; we stood outside the building that the kumpania was renting at the moment, a former dance club miles from the Philadelphia Dome. This neighborhood I never would have entered without Stevan and five of his seven brothers surrounding me. A few blocks away, something exploded. Rosie never flinched. She blocked the door to the building like a battalion defending a bridge.

  “Rosie,” Stevan said,
somewhere between irritation and resignation.

  “You make a wortácha with my husband?”

  “Yes,” Stevan said. Irritation had won. “Come in, Max.”

  Carefully I oozed past Rosie, entered directly into the large main room, and sat where Stevan pointed. No one else was present, but I didn’t know then how significant this was. All doors from the dark, thickly curtained room stayed closed. The wall screen had been blanked, although a music cube played softly, something with a lot of bass. In one corner a very large holo of some saint raised his hands to heaven over and over, staring at me with reproachful eyes.

  Stevan said, “Some coffee, Rosie.”

  She flounced off, returning too soon—tension had fallen like bricks the second she disappeared—with three coffees. Two in glasses rimmed with gold, one in the cheapest kind of disposable cup. I like sweetener in mine but I didn’t ask for it. Nobody offered.

  Stevan explained to Rosie the tentative plans that he and I had discussed. She wasn’t listening. Finally she interrupted him to talk to me.

  “You kidnap my husband, my son, my nephews, and now you want us to do business with you? To make a wortácha? With a gajo? Are you crazy?”

  “Getting there fast,” I said.

  Stevan said, almost pleadingly, “He’s a Jew, Rosie.”

  “Do I care? He’s marimé and for you—Stevan!—for you to even—” Abruptly she switched into Romanes, which of course I didn’t understand, but it no longer mattered because now I wasn’t listening.

  “—died early a.m. Family mouth only said—” The soft music had given way to news; it hadn’t been a music cube, after all, but one of the staccato newslinks that shot out information like rapid-fire weapons. “—no accident. Repeat, Peter Morton Cleary dead—”

  “Max?”

  “—and no accident! So—failure of D-treatment? All die? To—”

  “Max!”

  “—see later! Fire in Manhattan Dome—”

  Then Rosie was pouring water on my head and I was sputtering and gasping. A lot of water, much more water than necessary.

  Stevan said, with a certain disgust, “You fainted. What is it? Are you sick?”

  “It was the news,” Rosie said. “About that marimé gaji with the tumors. Have you had D-treatment, gajo?”

  “No!”

  She studied me. I could have been something staked out in a vivisection lab. “Then did you know this Cleary big man?”

  “No.” And then I said—was it despair or cunning? who knows these things—”But once, long ago, I met his wife. Briefly. Before she was . . . when we were both kids.”

  Stevan was not interested in this. Rosie was. She gazed at me a long time. I remembered all the old stories about gypsy fortunetellers, seers, dark powers. Nobody had looked at me like that before and nobody has looked at me like that since, for which I am seriously grateful. Some things are not decent.

  Stevan said, disgust still coloring his voice, “Max, if you’re not well, maybe I—”

  “No,” Rosie said, and the President of the United States should have such authority in her voice. “It’s all right. Set up your wortácha. It’s all right.”

  She left the room, not flouncing this time, and I didn’t see her again for twenty years. This was fine with both of us. She didn’t need a gajo in her living room, and I didn’t need a seer in my soul. Everybody has limits.

  Peter Cleary’s death set off world-wide panic. He’d had D-treatment and all his tissues were supposed to be constantly regenerating to the age at which he’d had it, which was fifty-four. He shouldn’t have died unless a building fell on him. Never was an autopsy more anxiously awaited by the world. The dead Jesus didn’t get such attention.

  The press swarmed from the hive. Peter Cleary hadn’t been the first to get D-treatment because somewhere there had to be anonymous beta-testers. Volunteers, LifeLong had said, and this turned out to be true. None of them stayed anonymous now. Prisoners on Death Row, heartbreaking children dying of diseases with no cure, a few very old and very rich people. Thirty-two people before Peter Cleary had received pieces of Daria’s tumors, and all thirty-two of them were now dead.

  Each one died exactly twenty years after receiving D-treatment.

  Daria Cleary was still alive.

  But was she? That’s what a corporate spokesman said, but no one had seen her for years. She and Cleary lived in the London Dome. He went to meetings, to parties, to court. She did not. Rumors had flown for years: Daria was a prisoner, Daria had been crippled by her constantly harvested tumors, Daria had died and been replaced by a clone (never mind that no had ever succeeded in cloning humans). Every once in a while a robocam snapped a picture of her—if it was really her—in her garden. She still looked eighteen. But now even these illegal images stopped.

  For two weeks I stayed home and watched the newsholos. Moshe handled my business. Stevan, my new partner, didn’t contact me; maybe Rosie had something to do with that. More people who had received D-treatment died: a Japanese singer, a Greek scientist working on the new orbitals, a Chinese industrialist, an American actor. King James of England, perpetually thirty-nine, made a statement that said nothing, elegantly. Doctors spoke, speculating about delayed terminator genes and foreign hosts and massively triggered cell apoptosis and who knows what else. A woman standing in a museum talked about somebody named Dorian Gray.

  I waited, knowing what must happen.

  The mob appeared to start spontaneously, but nobody intelligent believed that. Cleary stock, not only LifeLong but all of it, had tumbled to nearly nothing. The wild trading that followed plunged three small countries into bankruptcy, more into recession. Court claims blossomed like mushrooms after rain. The attacks on the LifeLong facility and on the Clearys had never stopped, not for twenty years, but not like this. It might have been organized by any number of groups. Certainly the professional terrorists involved were not Dome citizens—at least, not all of them.

  The London Dome police would have died to a soldier to stop terrorists, but firing on several thousand of their own citizens, mostly the idealistic young—this they couldn’t bring themselves to do. And maybe the cops disapproved of D-treatment, too. A lot of class resentment came in here, and who can tell from the British class system? For whatever reason, the mob got through. The Cleary force fences went down—somebody somewhere knew what they were doing—and the compound went up in flame.

  Press robocams zoomed in for close-ups of the mess. Each time they showed a body, my stomach turned to mush. But it was never her.

  “Dad,” Geoffrey said beside me. I hadn’t even heard him come into my bedroom.

  “Not now, Geoff.”

  He said nothing for so long that finally I had to look at him. Sixteen, taller than I ever thought of being, a nice-looking boy but with a kind of shrinking around him. Timid, even passive. Where does such a thing come from? Miriam hadn’t exactly been a shy wren and me . . . well.

  “Dad, have you had D-treatment? Are you going to die?”

  I could see what it cost him. Even I, the worst father in the world, could see that. So I tore my eyes away from the news and said, “No. I haven’t had D-treatment. I give you my word.”

  His expression didn’t change but I felt the shift inside him. I could smell it, with that tingling high in the nose that I never ignore. I smelled it with horror but not, I realized, much surprise. Nor even with enough horror.

  Geoff was disappointed.

  “Don’t worry, son,” I said wryly, “you’ll take over all this soon enough. Just not this week.”

  “I don’t—”

  “At least be honest, kid. At least that.” And may the Master of the Universe forgive me for my tone. The cat-o’-nine-tails.

  Geoff felt it. He hardened—maybe there was more in him than I thought. “All right, I will be honest. Are you what they say you are at school? Are you a crook?”

  “Yes. Are you a mensch?”

  “A what?”

 
“Never mind. Just drink it down. I’m a crook and you’re the son of a crook who eats and lives because of what I do. Now what are you going to do about it?”

  He looked at me. Not levelly—he was not one of Stevan’s sons, he would never be that—but at least he didn’t flinch. His voice wobbled, but it spoke. “What I’m going to do about it is shut down all your businesses. Or make them honest. As soon as they’re mine.” He walked out of the room.

  It was the proudest of him I had ever been. A fool but, in his own deluded way, himself. You have to give credit for that.

  I went back to searching the news for Daria.

  She appeared briefly the next day. Immediately the world doubted it was her: a holo, a pre-recording, blah blah blah. But I knew. She said only that she was alive and in hiding. That scientists now told her that only she could host the D-treatment tumors without eventually dying. That she deeply regretted the unintentional deaths. That the Cleary estate would compensate all D-treatment victims. A stiff little speech, written by lawyers. Only the tears, unshed but there, were her own.

  I stared at her beautiful young face, listened to the catch in her low voice, and I didn’t know what I felt. I felt everything. Anger, longing, contempt, misery, revenge, protection. Nobody can stand such feelings too long. I contacted Moshe and then Stevan, and I went back to work.

  My first evening at Sequene I spend in bed. Nothing hurts, not with a pain patch on my neck, but I’m weaker than I expect. This is not the fault of Sequene. The gravity here, the wall screen cheerily informs me, is 95% of Earth’s, “just slightly enough lower to put a spring in your step!” The air is healthier than anyplace on Earth has been for a long time. The water is pure, the food miraculous, the staffs “robotic and human” among the finest in the world. So enjoy your stay! Anything you need can be summoned by simply instructing the wallscreen aloud!