by Moira Crone
“He used my Trust. If Ginger hadn’t—my Trust would have been spent. You knew, didn’t you?”
“I suspected,when I heard him talking to bank officials. But Vee had gone to tell Ginger not to go through with the show—I didn’t ask questions.”
“What do you think?” I asked.
“I think, I think,” she said and looked down, at her own small breasts, then back up at me—as if she were asking her heart for the answer. “I think Ginger should not have put her—she should not have been their show. Horrible. I think exactly as my husband thinks. And I also think that your money is yours and Chef Menteur has no right to it.”
“Even if you would drown without it?”
“Don’t make me answer that,” she said. “I have to believe in my own life.”
“So do I,” I said.
I decided I would go back in, and talk to Lazarus about his life. I would do this for myself, so I could see, and so I could understand, and I was going to listen, not yell. I was waiting for self-control. It wasn’t easy to muster, anymore.
Marilee was going on. “Ginger said she wanted to give her so-long meaning. She had her wish—the enclave will do well, it will have a start—and what more can we ask? The land they have given us is very high ground, with pines. We are supposed to start settling in two days, going north, all the transports. The boats will go up the Pearl River. We can make our gardens again, without the saltwater killing them. We can put in the dams. All this is very good. But you should have what you worked for,” she said. “Lazarus was right and wrong. He has been writing this.” She handed me the folder that had been tucked under her arm. “Why don’t you figure out what he’s been going through? Read it now, before he gets here.”
“Who gets here?”
“Ariel, coming today,” she smiled.
Always was her favorite.
VI
My Life, Beginning With the Early Pfiswell Trials, In Short When It’s Been Very Long, Very, Very Long—
I was born in 1920, spent my earliest years in the first optimism of last century’s profligate plasti-materialism, saw war, saw one wife, Rachel, die, married a second, Alexis, much younger, with whom I had children in the late 1960’s, boys, who wanted me to live forever, so they said. Who wouldn’t? I was a rich doctor, good-looking, sixty, young seeming when I first heard of the Albers trials. I had big gas cars, a house with thousands and thousands of square feet. Life was very good. I had contacts in the medical field, people who said the new longevity science was solid. Albers, a genius. I heard through the grapevine that he wasn’t going to go public with any of it; put it out into the refereed journals—I could see why he wanted it to be proprietary. It could be a goldmine, after all. And of course he needed human subjects. I paid a million—imagine, a million! What I could do now with the equivalent!—to go to a seminar. I heard what they had to say. I knew they wouldn’t kill me. It was a huge investment. You had to be at least forty—mature, very sane, to get into the program. Some as old as sixty-eight got in. I could afford it. I thought I’d try. I didn’t even tell my wife, because she was too young to do it. I said I was going to a study course in London, in my specialty, cardiology.
So I went in, went under—they put you into a coma for two weeks then for the RNA interferences. The surgeries were hard, the nano-monitors. But I came back good as new, invigorated, though I’d had my balls replaced with neuticals, and had to go to an analog testosterone. The first thing anyone noticed was that my hair stopped turning gray. My boys thought my secret was that I ran, ate the right diet, and looked fifty at sixty-five, then at seventy, then at seventy-five. I wasn’t running. I faked that too. I jogged out of the driveway, and then hid in a culvert in the park.
Alexis didn’t know. She had her questions, as I could perform, but not exactly in the same way. But she didn’t ask too much of me. I was the doctor. I had the answers. She knew she’d married an older man. The probes, the enhancers, all that hadn’t been invented. This was still the dark ages.
My boys were the ones who couldn’t get over it—in the nineteen nineties, I still looked fifty. By then the Albers techs had decided we needed prodermises, because of the UV, and the lack of fat. I got one that looked aged. I appeared to be perhaps sixty-five, finally, in the year 2000. I was eighty. We had to get these prodermises ordered, custom detailed in Malaysia. Each tiny hair was “invaginated” into the fatty layer back then. Even at that, of course, the hairs didn’t grow. I pretended to shave.
When Alexis was old enough, I explained it all to her. I remember that night. I took her to the beach, Rehoboth, in Delaware. It was winter. People still enjoyed the beach back then, they weren’t afraid of it. We were on the boardwalk, the wind was hard—I told her we could do this forever, and she said she didn’t understand. And I said forever, again and she heard me out but refused to believe it. When we got home, I had to show her the place where my prodermis had its seam in the crack of my ass—they weren’t behind the ears then, the seams—I showed her the way she could pull my hair and I didn’t feel a thing. “Let’s see you really,” she said then. “Let’s see you really. You have been hiding?” she asked. “I knew you were hiding from me, hiding, you have always been hiding—” She pounded on my chest. But in the end, she went in to get it done—she was too late for the trial, I had to bribe them. But it turned out she had ovarian cancer, early stage. So she was not a candidate. We did not win that war. I felt great grief about all the years when our love had been synthetic, when I pretended my ecstasy. It was the first true grief I felt on account of my commitment to the trials, my transformation.
I could hardly bear burying my second wife. I remember my boys at the funeral, though, were less grieved than amazed, or perhaps, dismayed, by my vigor. I still looked far too young, regardless of how well “distressed” the prodermis was. “You always look the same, Dad,” they said to me. It was hard to seem frail, hard to fake it. Some members of the First Wave trial just staged their own deaths and went off and lived in some other country, passing for young, marrying one woman and then another, sneaking back in every year for checkups, the rough, early Re-jobs, with Albers. I heard about this but I thought it would be lonely, I thought I would miss my sons. So I kept up appearances. There was the great difficulty of pretending to eat, and not eating. Pretending to have functions you didn’t have, appetites you didn’t have. There were no decent brosias then. You just had to scatter your plate. If you did eat anything significant, except the vitamins on the regimen, they would kick you out of the trial. It was hard, a great challenge. But most made it. The major problem was the loneliness. There were almost no women in the same cohort, except wives, at least not any I knew of. Pfizwell—Albers’ company—didn’t give us too much to go on, in terms of helping us contact each other. We were all underground. They thought it would be better that way.
Of course it was fun to travel, to do everything you had ever wanted to do in life. But eventually I learned that there are only so many things in this world, only so many pleasures in this universe, which bring you happiness when you are alone. The number is not infinite.
“What’s your secret father?” my sons asked. “How did you find the Fountain of Youth?” It was getting lonely—so many acquaintances died. I didn’t know how much longer I could go on, but then the Reveal was announced. That was my hope. I could meet my cohorts. For four years, we waited until all the data was in, all of us were examined over and over, by doctors who knew about the trials and doctors who didn’t. This was all very clandestine. This issue of our health was a distraction from the loneliness. We were all followed around, our intimates interviewed. Albers’ agents were given the same leeway as the FBI. My sons even asked me if I were involved in something illegal. I just told myself to wait. To hold on. Eventually the Reveal would come down, which I thought would be our liberation. We could share our secret with the world. Make the whole world immortal—just like us.
I told my sons a few days before the trip to
Washington. They were flabbergasted, and curious, amazed. But most of all, angry.
I thought at most there would be a few thousand—
But Pfizwell had over four hundred thousand in the trial. A group of senators who were all in Pfizwell’s employ, it turned out, as was the President, who ran the country then, and his father, and all his cabinet. They made the announcement, said that it was one of the greatest events in the history of the world, greater than walking on the moon or finding America or penicillin or flight. And they marched out the specimens—men who were chronologically close to one hundred ten, who were physically fifty. We all left our distressed prodermises at home, and came out with fresh cultured ones, which used our own DNA—Albers’ team had finally perfected the process—and we looked terribly natural. If you call “natural” how we look today. No sign of aging, all the doctors announced, inside or out. My boys saw me on—they were called TVs then. I thought now I would be free of the isolation, the weariness of keeping the secret so long. Now that the trials were public, our medical histories and conditions were clear—that we had stopped aging, my stock in Pfizwell soared, broke every known record. I was terribly rich.
I gave my sons some stock, and soon they were comfortable. They settled down, got married, and had children quickly. Saul was a lawyer and he was doing well. There were many suits between couples, where one was Treated and the other not—many more men than women had been done. There was a whole new area of the law—a new kind of breach of contract, of grounds for divorce. I told my sons they could be Treated. Access was open. I could pay, I told them. What more can a man give his children than this long long long long long, possibly infinitely extended life? I thought that would make them happy. “You are as rich as gods,” Archie said. He always had some disdain for me, for my judgment. He was the artist. You are guinea pig gods,” he said. But when it was time to be Treated, he got Treated.
I did what I could for the others in my family. And so did most of our cohort, those who hadn’t hidden out in other countries, divorced and disowned their relatives somewhere along the way. We were incredibly rich. The giddiness of the predictions was absurd, in retrospect. The whole world would be immortal, the Pfizwell-owned newspapers and the Net declared. The horrible burden of death finally lifted from mankind. All the strain upon the natural resources, all the difficulties caused by disease and by debilitation, over. That was the official version. We could plan to live between two and six hundred years, they said. But in two hundred years, even a hundred years, we certainly would have the mechanisms to live even longer, and then, even longer. Our lives expanding and expanding, like rubber bands. And we would just have to limit population growth, which would be a natural outcome of the Treated process, which required sterilization. The argument went—why reproduce when you will live on and on yourself? Pfizwell, Albers’s personal corporation, had already expanded to WELLFI, and WELLFI merged with the banks, holding companies, media. All the laws to keep things separate had been overruled by the government, which was controlled, entirely, within a few years—more than we had ever imagined possible-by WELLFI’s interests. There were millions and millions Treated over the next eighteen years. WELLFI encouraged it—the Trust system was set up, the contracts for perpetual care, the warranties. WELLFI knew it needed a statistical majority Treated. As long as it was the United States. It was still a democracy, then, and without a majority Treated, there could be problems. Cheap offers, easy access—it was never as cheap again to buy in. The rule was set that the earliest you could be Treated was twenty-six, and the maximum was forty-five. This staggered the pace a bit, so it took almost two decades for the great bulk who could afford it to be Treated.
Around 2030, we started to notice that numbers who could be in the elite, had started to dwindle. People blamed the single-focus economy. There were no investments in any other area beside Treatedness, and upkeep of Heirs, and lifestyle research for Heirs. The non-Heirs—still a majority, then, but just barely—began to get anxious. Their life expectancy was dropping and dropping. We could all see it coming, before it actually happened, but once the economy was so single-pointed, and so shrunken, the task of developing anything else seemed so big—after all, we were just individuals, what could we do? The system broke down. I had grandchildren. My Trust was where my money was now tied up—mine, that is, and my sons’ Trusts, and their wives’ Trusts. I couldn’t afford to pay for my grandchildren. They started calling it the Manic Depression—inflation, deflation, inflation again. WELLFI tried a series of policies, each one more disastrous than the last. I started to realize around then, I think, that WELLFI’s policy toward those Untreated, regardless of what their propaganda said, was to let them die off, so they could just grab the political majority. Suddenly there was no money, except in the Trusts. WELLFI itself had to diversify—its own investments weren’t growing enough. It had to start investing in fugue capitalist states, overseas. About this time, the tide shifted—all our laws were to accommodate the ease of the Treated strat, the wealth and leisure of our strat. That was when they coined that ugly word, “strat.” “Class” not even “caste,” was sufficient for the “magnitude of the difference,” so they said. There were more than a hundred million who had never been able to afford being Treated, and all our own children couldn’t, now, afford it. That didn’t matter somehow. All that mattered was that our “strat” kept its privileges.
My grandchildren were Lucian, Michael, and Jennifer. I couldn’t do anything for them. It broke my heart. They couldn’t even live decently—they had no money, couldn’t get jobs, even though we managed education, which cost two million—that was all we could manage. Some of my fellow First Wavers said the young Nyets—our children—were selfish and unthinking, didn’t respect what we had sacrificed, had brought forth on this continent, this new age, this supreme gift. The problems in this world as far as my “strat” were concerned were these: having enough variety, and finding ways to remain excited by life when you were a hundred and ten years old in the approximate body of a forty-five-year-old, or finding ways to have sex that felt like sex, and love that felt like love, and food that tasted like food. The great Untreated saw the world differently, obviously. VERY DIFFERENTLY. Then, I guess, it was about 2044, the potential Third Wave, my own grandchildren, stopped playing nice—even at the time, I didn’t blame them—
VII
7:15 PM October 18, 2121
Audubon Foundling House, Audubon Island
New Orleans Islands, Northeast Gulf De-Accessioned Territory,
U.A. Protectorate
The pages just ended there, I wanted more—I was fascinated, for I’d never known about Lazarus’s root self. He had always said it didn’t matter. I had been told that, when I went through my Boundarytime, I would see that light, too—that the past didn’t count, what I’d been, once I became an Heir. Another lie, for he had not forgotten a bit of his own story. If I hadn’t been so angry at him, I would have barged in to ask him questions—but I was afraid of what I would do—but just then, in the yard:
“What? What? Vee? Yoo-hoo!” Ariel’s liquid baritone. “Anyone at home? Anyone?”
The first thing I saw was the black bandana. Then I saw he was wearing the smile he used to have when he was six—a too-big smile, wide and face-stretching—dating back to before he’d met O. I watched him descend the ladder of rebar loops poking out of the concrete wall—his long narrow legs, his slouchy shoulders. After the last step, he had to jump. When he landed, his feet slapped and splashed the muddy ground.
He rushed up and grabbed me by the shoulders, in a gesture not of anger, or competition, but of delight. In my ear, “Brother,” he said. “I need to see Lazarus, alone, for a little—then we will talk. I have the secrets of the universe!”
Secrets of the universe and he was going to make me wait to hear them? He galloped off, to Lazarus’s office, but said to me, “Fifteen minutes. Wait for me.”
I had met him in the entry hall, near the old close
d-off dining hall. I went in and found the sill of the double windows where we used to conceal ourselves during hide and seek. I used to sit there sometimes when I wanted to think. Remain alive, but not be part of the world. I climbed in, or tried to. I sat in the old spot, facing into the dining area, too leggy now to close the wooden gates. But it was almost the same as before. Ariel was with Lazarus a long time. I could hear their voices, but not the words.
I listened to other sounds echoing in the house. Vee arrived, back from having buried his daughter. I had heard Marilee tell him something, and then I heard him go in and talk to Lazarus. Ariel was still in there. Vee went in, and he came out. I heard him say to Marilee on the stairs, “Lazarus used Malcolm’s Trust. Malcolm’s! ”
“He knows,” Marilee said.
“Where is he?”
I did not come out. “I don’t know,” she said. “He must have gone out into the garden.”
“I’ll find him after I rest, I can hardly stand,” Vee said with great weariness in his voice.
It was getting to be dark.
I heard Ariel call my name one time.
And then, I think, he figured it out.
He came to find me—he didn’t even ask what I was doing there.
“Lazarus is in an awful mood, you spoke to him?” he asked me, and then he shrugged. “Marilee said there was some drug for it. Do you want dinner? I brought all sorts of goodies. Those Gaists in Florida can cook.”
I shook my head no. I was still fasting, I insisted he should know this, but I came down into the kitchen anyway. I had been fasting for so long now food seemed impossible, in fact. I couldn’t believe I had ever eaten it. Tea was my mainstay. I could also take broth—it was the smooth, bright part of the fast. I had no interest in thickening up things now.
