Generations

by Francis Rosenfeld

  "And that would make?" Sarah anticipated.

  "Propionamide", said Jesse.

  "And?" asked Sarah.

  "And oxazolidine", swallowed Jesse, uncomfortable.

  "And?" asked Sarah.

  "Dimethylformamide", whimpered the youngster, fretting.

  "And?" asked Sarah, mercilessly.

  Jesse shrugged and looked down, annoyed.

  "There are two more, 1-amino-2-propanone and isoxazolidine, we'll get back to this another time", Sarah ended the inquiry.

  "Let's hope not," thought Jesse.

  "Back to the first molecule, do you know what it is?" Sarah asked.

  "It is a rare unsaturated amino-acid found mostly in bacteria," Lily jumped in.

  "It's a rare unsaturated amino-acid," Jesse mocked her, but got caught in Sarah's gaze and said noting. The redhead continued.

  "I promised I'd show you an antibiotic and here it is. Now, everybody please create your own experiments starting with the same eight atoms and figure out how many different molecules you can make out of them. Jimmy, I can see you!"

  Jimmy fumbled to get rid of the prickly balloon he was about to throw at Lily's sugar molecule and asked a decoy question to get himself out of trouble.

  "So, did they answer, sister?"

  "Who, the purple goo?" she asked. "No, Jimmy, not yet."

  "Are they made like us?" the little boy asked.

  "You mean the same chemical composition? They are a bit different, their genetic make-up incorporates a lot of germanium."

  "What did you tell them?" Jimmy asked. Sarah frowned when she remembered the gibberish.

  "Not a real message, really, we just wanted to see if they'd react. Have you found all the possible molecules you can think of?" the redhead attempted to continue the exercise.

  "Can we practice with Germanium, please, can we, can we?"

  "Go ahead if you wish but you're not going to get as many configurations, it is a little heavy."

  "Do you think this is what their genes look like?" Lily weaved a complex cat's cradle of covalent bonds, infinitely linked in a gracefully rhythmic pattern.

  "Not exactly, Lily, they are more like this," Sarah forgot for a second that she was teaching an introductory class and started painting an elaborate tapestry of what looked vaguely like amino-acids, twisting around a triple helix that went on indefinitely. The kids breathed a sigh of relief; every time they managed to divert her from the lesson plan into her own work it was like early dismissal.

  "Can we see them again, please?" the kids whined. This was the hundredth time they had asked Sarah to do this but she didn't mind. She brought out from the database an image of an immortal and zoomed in until she reached cellular and then molecular level.

  "It's alive!" Jesse gasped, startled by a sudden movement of the triple looped genetic strand.

  "Of course it's alive, they don't die," said Sarah.

  "I didn't think we'd watch them move around," Jesse hesitated, still a little apprehensive. "Can you ask them why they live underwater?"

  "I'll put the question on the list for when we can communicate with them. Can we go back to the lesson, please?" Three little pigs paraded between Sarah and her pupils, dancing on their hind legs and playing an oboe, an accordion and a violin. "Great, saved by the bell!" Sarah said. "I'll see you next...Tuesday." The shop was already vacated, except for Jimmy, who was trying to remain unnoticed behind the distillation apparatus.

  "You are not playing with the gamma ray machine in my lab, Jimmy, might as well go home," Sarah said.

  Jimmy got up, disheartened, and dragged his feet out of the shop.

  Chapter Five

  Of Conversation and Cultural Differences

  Lily and Jimmy were absolutely thrilled. After many unsuccessful attempts to communicate with the microscopic locals the sisters gave up on their musical bit generator and decided to take a break to ponder a different approach. Sister Roberta handed the machine to the children who proudly took possession of it immediately, eager to try it out. They played the little jingle so many times inside Roberta's lab that the latter, in a moment of human weakness, suggested that the sound quality and her mental health would benefit greatly if they moved the circus outside and took the gizmo with them. Lily and Jimmy obliged, relieved to be out of sight and get first dibs on the coveted article.

  "I thought you said I could try it first!" Lily jumped. Jimmy yielded and watched her turn the dials to listen to the now so familiar music for the hundredth time. The children were sitting on the beach at the edge of the water and Jimmy, who had just discovered a passion for "speaking" binary code, was generating score after score of sheet music with the weirdest messages, like "Do you like raspberries?" and "My sister's name is Lisa."

  "They don't care, Jimmy! They can't even understand you!" Lily said with an all knowing smirk.

  "How do you know, just because everybody says..." Jimmy continued his sequence of communications, more stubborn than ever. Lily rolled her eyes but gave up, typing the pointless messages into the machine.

  "Would you like to ask them if they want to play hopscotch too?" she asked, sarcastically.

  Jimmy didn't answer and continued writing down feverishly every crazy thought that passed through his creative little head. He kept writing and writing and after a while Lily protested that she should get to send messages too, so she told the immortals that she aced her chemistry quiz and that she was a great swimmer and that she had a tortoise shell cat named Ella, who was two. She told them she liked black cherry ice cream and salad, but not if it had any spinach at all, and definitely hated parsley.

  After a few days Jenna figured out the gig and the three started this little secret club: they met every day to write about their lives, likes and dislikes, happenings at school, whether they were happy or sad, who they befriended or argued with that day, and then entrusted their thoughts and wishes to the ocean in binary jingles like digital messages in a bottle. The club grew slowly, first with Tommy, then Jesse, then a dozen other children who fed their hopes and dreams to the restless waters, their plans for the future and their disappointments, their laughter and their tears.

  They forgot they were supposed to wait for an answer and turned this experience into a collective diary, a sequence of snapshots of their enchanted childhood. Months passed, then years, they grew into their tweens but never abandoned their private conversations with the ever patient ocean who didn't talk back but made for a great nonjudgmental listener.

  One morning Jimmy woke up early, he had tons of homework and a lot on his mind. He wanted to spend a few minutes alone and he went to the beach to gather his thoughts. Out of habit he wrote a couple of sentences and sent them to the waves. The ocean was moving slowly, concealing strong currents under the quiet mirror of its surface. Everything was still, no macaw squawks, no swish of ships, when the immortals threw their soft breathy voice across the waters and whispered "Hi. Jimmy."

  ***

  "What was that?" Seth jumped from her sleep, alerting the sisters.

  "Did they speak?" Sarah continued, besides herself with excitement. "Jimmy, where are you?"

  "On the beach. I'm not exactly sure what happened..." hesitated the boy.

  The sisters joined him moments later at the edge of the water trying to figure out where to take the experiment from here.

  "Sister," the ocean whispered, softly, almost inaudibly.

  "I think it means you, Sarah," Seth offered.

  "Love. Sister." the ocean spoke again.

  "Do you think they can understand speech? It looks like they can dial down the frequency to the audible range," said Sarah.

  "Answer them," Seth urged her.

  "I love you too," Sarah said. Her heartfelt message generated an irritated sigh and an eye roll from sister Joseph. Time accentuates personality traits and more time accentuates them more deeply. Two hundred years managed to bring out whatever aspects of sister Joseph's scrappy personality managed to sta
y hidden during her earlier days.

  "Jimmy. Raspberries."

  "Yes, Jimmy loves raspberries."

  "Raspberries. What."

  "They are fruit, food."

  "Boron. Sugar."

  "Yes, like that."

  "Live. Length."

  "How long do we live? Normally around 120 Earth years, that is around 324 planet rotations, but now with our symbiotic relationship with you we're not sure anymore. How long do you live?"

  "Not. Know. Sister. Sanctuary."

  "I apologize, I didn't know at the time, you got absorbed through my skin."

  "More. Sanctuary."

  "Yes, there are two more beings in direct symbiotic relationship with you: my cat Solomon and a bean plant," answered Sarah.

  "Cat. What. Bean. What."

  Solomon came quickly, as if summoned, and started pawing at Sarah's legs until the latter picked him up and started petting him.

  "This is Solomon, my cat. Bean is a plant." Sarah graciously introduced the purring feline and tried to picture the purple bean plant as clearly as her mind allowed it.

  "Cat. Sister. Bean. Sister." said the ocean. "Love. Cat. Love. Bean. Sister." it continued like a chatterbox, relieving the frustration of so many years of silence and watching these weird looking gigantic conquistadors move around the planet completely oblivious to their sentience.

  "I think they assumed sister means family," sister Joseph mumbled under her breath.

  "No. Sister. Sarah. Sister." the ocean contradicted her immediately. Joseph didn't get the language nuance, since what she had assumed made perfect sense, but she didn't feel comfortable talking to this single word sentence chatterbox, it made her feel ridiculous. She envied Sarah for the ease with which she could make a complete fool of herself at every opportunity, not everybody was born with the complete lack of social awareness that would facilitate such a diminished capacity for embarrassment. Seth stopped the mental ramble in its tracks with a few well seasoned unspoken commentaries. Lately sister Joseph could go on and on for hours in the absence of appropriate backstops.

  "Love. Sister." the ocean ordered, strangely assertive.

  "Well, you got your knight in shining armor, aren't you special!" mumbled sister Joseph more morose than ever.

  "Love. Sister." said the ocean again, more assuaged.

  "How do you know they didn't mean the cat?" asked Seth, yielding to logic.

  "Same brains," sister Joseph continued with her well known good natured attitude.

  "Jimmy. Love." said the ocean. "Hopscotch. Dehydroalanine." the ocean continued. "Jenna. Love. Lily. Love."

  "Great, they love everybody! This should serve as a lesson to all of you about what happens when you put the airhead in charge of communications," sister Joseph continued to grumble. "I'm not sure what she's growing in that garden, but it sure makes her chipper," she suggested.

  Sarah breathed a sigh of relief realizing that under different circumstances the first words the immortals could have learned might have been 'useless' and 'yakking'.

  ***

  Seth was pacing around the shop, tense, one could almost feel the strain between her shoulder blades contract the muscles on the back of her neck like those of a large cat ready to pounce.

  "What is it? You are making me dizzy," Sarah asked.

  "What are we going to do next?" Seth replied.

  "In relation to what?" Sarah elaborated.

  "In general," Seth continued.

  "There is no such thing," Sarah responded. "In general we should be long dead by now, resting in peace atop a gentle hill not too far from where we were born with a heartfelt epitaph pointing out we were great family members and would be sorely missed."

  "Speak for yourself, I would have gone out in smoke and ashes, my family would definitely insist on that, it is tradition," Seth laughed, a little more relaxed.

  "But I always thought..." Sarah exclaimed, puzzled.

  "Don't ask! It's too complicated," Seth dismissed the query.

  "The answer to your immediate question is that I am going to finish the fractional distillation of this bowl of tarry muck into something that smells like vanilla and something else that smells like lily of the valley. Why the existential angst?" the redhead prodded along.

  "I am supposed to mentor Lily in a choice of career, whatever that means, and I don't know what to tell her. I really didn't make any plans when I came here, mostly because I thought terra forming will be enough work for eight or nine decades."

  "And this is a bad thing?" Sarah asked, slightly amused.

  "No, I just didn't make any plans," Seth continued with a forlorn look in her eyes.

  "We went through a couple of centuries without this being an issue. Why now, Mother Superior?" Sarah continued drilling her mentor with a smile on her face.

  Seth was startled by the title, she rarely thought of herself as such but they were a religious order after all and she was its head.

  "Oh, go ahead, rub it in!" she said, betrayed. "Nobody has all the answers, leader or not!" she continued. "Why don't you mentor Lily, you seem contented enough?"

  "She could try every trade until she found something she liked and still have centuries worth of fruitful career. Why the pressure to make the right choice? There is no right choice, just living."

  "You wouldn't be happy in a field other than bio-chemistry, doesn't she deserve guidance that allows her to develop her talents?" asked Seth.

  "How do you know? Maybe I am a blend of my father's, aunts' and mother's wishes and dreams. Maybe if I were born in Bonn I'd be a violinist."

  "You can't carry a tune!" Seth commented.

  "Details," Sarah said.

  "She wants to be great at everything, I worry she seeks to excel for others and not for herself, if I ask her whether she likes a subject she will always say yes," said the former.

  "Then don't ask," Sarah followed, completely unperturbed. "How is she going to know if she wants to be an engineer? She can't know what an engineer is or does until she is one. Do you think I grew up wishing to join a religious order?" she asked rhetorically.

  "I actually believe that you did," Seth pressed the point. "Didn't you go on and on about your aunts and the convent and the cloistered garden?"

  "Well, then, we should let Lily's childhood experiences mold her future choices," Sarah followed logically.

  "And become a doctor-teacher-painter-athlete-physicist?" Seth asked.

  "What did you want to be growing up?" Sarah asked.

  "A ballerina," Seth said, pinning Sarah down with a stare that didn't leave room for amusing commentary.

  "It's never too late..." Sarah pushed with a wry smile. "Anyway, why offer what already is? What if she masters a domain that doesn't exist yet?"

  "Maybe experience binds my perspective. Speaking of life choices, I seem to have a lot of free time lately, I thought about getting a hobby."

  "What did you have in mind?" Sarah asked, curious.

  "I'll develop the language," Seth tried to dilute the subject.

  "The language?" Sarah jumped.

  "It would be nice, don't you think? Speaking in sentences, using grammar..."

  "So much for career advice! I don't think microscopic immortal linguistics was on Lily's list of options. Do you want me to talk to sister Roberta about it?" Sarah tried to anticipate.

  "What makes you think I need help?" Seth smiled enigmatically.

  Sarah stared into the transparent eyes curious to get more information about the unexpected skill, but their clear mirror-like surfaces didn't let anything through. For once the redhead regretted that their neural interlink bracelets were turned off and she couldn't just go in and grab the details she wanted to know, even at the cost of harsh admonition for rude and intrusive behavior.

  ***

  "They are driving me nuts!" Lily blurted, careful not to raise her voice but definitely annoyed. "Everybody is on my case constantly, I can't breathe a word without advice, I think I got a
ll the help I can take and at this point am seriously considering a ride on one of the currents. Do you know where sister Novis's body suit is?"

  Jimmy didn't think she was serious but he listened to the rant like the good friend that he was. They were sitting on the beach, as usual, the beach had become the unofficial children's realm and the grown-ups didn't bother them much there.

  "No, I don't. Besides I'm not allowed in the lab, sister Roberta's orders," he responded.

  "Ride. Danger. Child." whispered the ocean, soft as a gossamer.

  "Great, more babysitters! If the sisters don't offer assistance the immortals will!" Lily continued, even more frustrated. "Why can't anybody leave me alone, over and over with the future and the choosing, like the universe depends on it! If anybody pestered sister Roberta like that she would definitely give them a piece of her mind, just because I'm a child they think they can organize all my life for me!"