Greg Bear

by Vitals (v5)

  As I extended my hand to the cashier for three dollars back, a small man with a pushed-in nose and thick black hair shuffled between the registers, bumping me in his haste. More of my change clattered on the floor.

  The little man’s desperate grip dimpled the soft plastic of an unmarked spray bottle, trailing drips of clear liquid.

  A young and totally bald male clerk ran after him. “God damn it, get out of here and don’t come back!” the clerk shouted. He swung his booted foot, face drawn into a pimply mask of disgust. The boot missed, and the man skittered through the double door.

  The clerk swung around to glare at the cashier, then at me. “Sorry about the language,” he apologized. He was festooned with ear and nose rings. “Now I’ve got to throw out all that lettuce.” He held up his hand as if gripping a pistol and disgustedly mimicked both the motion and the sound of sphritz-sphritz. “Mrs. Lo will kill me.”

  “I’ve seen him here before,” said a plump red-haired woman in her fifties. She hoisted her canvas shopping bag onto the counter and pinched a lovely green head of romaine, as if it were a big insect. “I thought he worked for you.”

  “I never noticed him,” said the young cashier. She stood on tiptoes to peer over the cigarette case. The little man was out of sight.

  “Christ,” the young clerk said, and apologized again.

  I shook my head, no offense. Just a normal day in Berkeley.

  That night, I had a dream about the little man. He was spraying water on everything, and the whole town was shriveling up. The Claremont Hotel was ablaze, and the stately old houses of Berkeley melted like wax in the heat from the fire. Then I was back in the desert, walking beside the man with the white hair.

  He was my father, and he was trying to tell me something important about Rob.

  Hell Week began brilliantly. My friend at the University of San Francisco called and told me that on August 8 there was going to be a Promethean conference on the Clark Kerr campus at UC Berkeley. He had wangled an invitation for me from the directors, Phil Castler and his wife Frieda—the same Phil Castler who had not impressed Owen Montoya.

  The Prometheans are visionaries, innocent in many ways, and wise beyond our time in many others. Castler himself combined a grave sensibility about larger-scale politics with a childlike enthusiasm for Progress, an enthusiasm I had once shared, and now long for desperately. They were devoted to listening and exchanging information and enthusiasms, and ideas were their common coin. They were my people, my friends, even when we competed for funding, even when we disagreed.

  Castler’s invitation, and a conference badge, arrived in the mailbox the next day, along with a quickly penned note from Frieda clipped to a collection of past newsletters: “Wherever have you been? Phil and I are anxious to get caught up on news!”

  Never in my life had I looked forward to a conference so much. It would mark my return to the real world.

  I spotted Phil on the tiled entrance portico outside the beautiful, mission-style Joseph Wood Krutch Auditorium. He wore a Mr. Rogers yellow sweater unbuttoned over a white shirt, loose gray slacks, and scuffed black shoes, and he was talking with a portly young man in jeans and a black-leather jacket. Their conversation was intense. The young man jabbed his finger in the air, and Castler rocked back and forth on his heels, absorbing every point as if it had real weight. At key moments, he nodded a professorial, even courtly nod I have observed in older scientists from Europe. Castler, however, was born and raised American; it was his personality that was old-world and courtly.

  An armed security guard stood by the entrance, arms folded like a genie. That was a first for a Promethean conference. Too many scientists were dying.

  As I drew near, Castler spotted me from the corner of his eye and paused the young man in mid-point, then spun about and marched toward me.

  “Hal!” he cried, smiling and holding out his hand. His hair was longer than when I had last seen it, down to his collar, thick and flowing. The Lizst look suited him. “How good to see you! It’s been a hard couple of months—so many friends gone. We had feared the worst!”

  At Castler’s wide-eyed urging, I gave him a not-very-scary version of the last couple of months—severely truncated and minus key facts. He listened sympathetically, commiserated with me about Rob’s death—a horrible loss, he said. Then he launched into the Prometheans’ difficulties. Memberships were up but corporate contributions were down. There had been a particularly vicious attack on his theories in the Wall Street Journal.

  I listened with a strong sense of disengagement, like a soldier home from the front listening to a businessman’s prattle.

  “What did we ever do to the Wall Street Journal?” Castler asked with a world-weary smile. He stared at me intensely, and wrung a neck of air with his hands.

  Another conference attendee distracted Castler, and he spun away to engage in a new debate.

  I looked around the hall, admiring the dark oak Spanish beams supporting the high ceiling, the orange and white and blue Moorish tilework along the walls. I picked up my packet and booklet at the registration desk, chatted for a minute with Frieda—a fashion designer who deftly fit her humanities training into Phil’s technocratic schemes—and read through the topics. Most of them were standard fare. Five single-track presentations and several break-out meetings would spread over two days. The keynote speaker was giving a talk on second-stage proteomics and the potential for identifying single-gene roadblocks on the highway to rejuvenation.

  I felt an itch of irritation, reading the abstract of his talk. There were no single-gene solutions—that had been proven years ago. The bright-eyed enthusiasm was familiar, but the approach was also familiar, and the answers were no longer cutting-edge.

  A flip through the membership list told the tale: eighty members attending, down from a hundred the year before.

  We filed into the auditorium. I was one of the few in the audience not taking notes on a palm or laptop. The beeping and clicking of keys went on for several minutes as Phil and Frieda and their staff finished coordinating video cameras and digital projectors.

  My restlessness crossed over into sadness. Around me flocked the people who had created the scientific approach to longevity research. Some of them had been working the ideas and exploring the possibilities for over forty years. But the conference had an air of been-there, done-that, musty backslapping rather than cutting-edge thinking.

  I knew it was not Castler’s fault. In part it was a result of most of the talent going into corporate biotech. The big corporations—and the small—seldom shared their hot-button results, certainly not with visionary pioneers. Visionaries could not be trusted to hold their tongues, and pioneers were often inclined to file lawsuits.

  The MC, a molecular engineer from Stanford, was introduced by Castler. He took the podium, cracked a few jokes as the crowd settled in for the morning session, and challenged the audience with a restatement of the old theory that longevity was a function of sexual strategy—breed copiously and die young, raise fewer young and live long.

  “And what do we say to that?” he said provokingly.

  “Bring ’em on!” shouted a young woman in the back.

  A young man with two knotted black pigtails rose. He had missed the MC’s humorous tone and argued that this totally neglected the social aspect, so crucial to understanding human life span. Humans are part of a social tissue, the young man said, not wild-type animals breeding indiscriminately, flecked with sperm and yolk, red of fang and claw.

  The MC politely reversed course, from humor to debate, countering that sex was more than just exchange of sperm, it was also an exchange of viruses and bacteria. An isolated monk might live longer not because he was celibate, but because he didn’t swap spit. A forest of hands shot up.

  “Hey, we’re hot now!” the MC crowed. “Now why don’t we get started on the real program—”

  But the small crowd was having none of that. Castler himself stood and asked a leading questi
on, enjoying the debate for its own sake and the hell with decorum.

  A tall, heavyset young man and a small, grandmotherly woman in her sixties took on the assertion that natural selection ceased after we stopped reproducing. In other words, we were out of the genetic game completely once we stopped bearing children. Half a dozen disagreed—good for them, I thought. That had been the standard evolutionary explanation of aging since Bidder came up with it in 1925, and it creaked.

  Castler rode over the murmurs, conceding that while this was true, the health of the society—and thus of the individuals relying on that society as much as any bee in a hive—depended on elder wisdom. Retirement age typically occurs thirty years after one stops having children, and grandparenting goes on for years after that. The health of a society is reflected in both the numbers of offspring, and the elder vigor that allows society to support more offspring.

  The keynote speaker, already onstage, stood back with his notes, quite happy with the orderly trashing of the schedule.

  I began to relax. These were my people. This was my meat and drink. This was real.

  A discussion soon raged over the statistical fact that entropic maximum was reached at age twenty—that we consumed more, per unit of weight, and engaged in more activity and cellular growth, with the potential for genetic error, before most of us reproduced. Yet it was on the long slope of comparative entropic stability that aging and death finally caught up with us. Which genes kept us healthy during the time when entropy and hence error should accumulate?

  It was an interesting question, several agreed, but very complex and quite beside the point. We did not want to get off in a discussion of entropy and closed systems when in fact we should be discussing information-binding and complexity.

  Castler swiftly cut off debate between two would-be-physicists intent on exploring the differences between open and closed systems.

  “May I speak now?” the keynoter asked. He was ignored.

  Frieda Castler made an ingenious suggestion. Leapfrogging from a previous statement that longevity depended on how long it took to raise our children, she claimed we all deserved to live thousands of years. It was going to take that long to raise our real children—the coming silicon-based artificial intelligences. Clever, but it didn’t make a hell of a lot of sense to me. I was a firm believer in slime, not silicon—and in that, differed from Gus Beck, the Castlers, and most of the audience in the hall.

  But the conference was getting my juices flowing, and that was one of the reasons I had come.

  We broke for lunch, before the keynoter had a chance to deliver his address and, at the back of the auditorium, picked up boxes stuffed with sandwiches, apples, cookies, and canned soft drinks. I chose my box from the bottom of the stack, then ate sitting alone on a bench in a courtyard, watching wind blow leaves around a dried-up fountain.

  Nobody offered to join me. People walked by in small clusters and moved on.

  I ate more slowly. Felt the gloom creeping back. Castler and Frieda had been glad to see me, but others had sharper instincts.

  The belly of the whale had left a fishy stench.

  AY3000 arrived in his wheelchair after the break was over, and was promptly surrounded at the rear of the hall by a crowd of well-wishers. To me, he looked like a rolling museum exhibit on mortality. His flesh clung to his skull. His pate was covered with thin patches of wispy white hair, and his brow beaded with sweat. He could barely raise his thin, knobby fingers to shake hands with well-wishers and students, his intellectual children. Still, there was a light in his eyes I recognized even from twenty feet away. The same glow of conviction that our birth certificates were not also our death warrants.

  I could not imagine this venerable old man making crank phone calls.

  His wife of thirty years, Bettina, pushed his wheelchair and wiped his lips with a linen handkerchief. Bettina was in her early sixties, and her hair stood thick and silvery white above a high forehead. She rolled him out of the press of well-wishers after ten minutes, giving AY the chance to take some air before the conference resumed. The hall would get stuffy, and old men tended to fall asleep. The crowd parted politely.

  Bettina propelled her husband past where I sat in the back row. AY turned his head and slapped his hand feebly on the chair’s armrest. Bettina obeyed and stopped. He raised a withered fasces of fingers and pointed one at me. “Rob Cousins. You’re dead,” he said.

  Prickles up my spine.

  Bettina whispered in his ear. AY blinked in irritation.

  “Forgive me,” he said. “The worst part of this . . . is the loss of my memory, and for me, memory is soul. Your brother was a great man. Greater than you, and more powerful. He used to call and talk to me. Give me advice. Instructions.”

  My face burned.

  “Much greater than you,” AY persisted. “Definitely the smarter brother.”

  “Hush,” Bettina said.

  “Why did you call Dr. Mauritz?” I asked.

  He rolled his eyes up and coughed gently into a handkerchief. Bettina gave me a fierce glare. How dare you upset him. How dare you rise to the bait of a sick old man. And she was right, but I had to know.

  “I do not remember a Dr. Mauritz,” he said when he had his wind back. “But yes, I probably called him. I was told to call a number of people.” AY threw his hand back as his wife again tried to shush him, then pretended to wave at the enthusiasts taking their seats near the front of the hall. “Why waste your time here? You don’t belong, Henry. This is a meeting of gifted dilettantes. Go do your important work, while you can. This is old home week for me. They’ll celebrate my influence and ignore all my warnings, my feeble . . . warnings.”

  “Just hush,” Bettina insisted, more forcefully. He waved her off again, leaned over to push aside a folding chair, then rolled himself closer. Bettina stood back with arms crossed, tired of his obtuseness.

  AY came within whispering distance. His breath smelled of bad teeth and poor nutrition. “Do you have any idea what men of ill will can do? What they can take from you?” His voice sounded like two crackers rubbed together. “I’m a dying old man, not worth killing. I’m just good for running errands. But you and Rob, you’re the real thing. They know what you’re doing.”

  Four young Caucasian men in black jeans walked past, accompanied by two Asiatic girls. They were doubtless part of Phil’s cyberjock contingent. Asiatic girlfriends were de rigueur. They nodded to AY with admiring smiles.

  He sat up, moving his lips silently until they were out of earshot. Then he focused on me, pleading. “Listen to Flora Ramone. She’s speaking today at three. The rest . . .” He made a pfft noise. “To think we could ever master the future without truly knowing the past. Don’t take those calls. Don’t take them.”

  Another fit of coughing grabbed the patriarch of longevity. Bettina hurried him out of the hall, eager to get away from me.

  Against all my instincts, I stayed and listened to Flora Ramone at four in the afternoon—the conference was running late.

  She gave a painfully slow, detailed talk, with many diagrams, on social organization and the quest for cellular immortality in neoplasms—cancerous tumors. She warmed to her subject, eyes gleaming.

  The cells went rogue. They cut themselves loose from the cellular police, encouraged the growth of knots of arteries, demanded resources beyond their needs. They reproduced wildly and refused to obey the signals that demand self-identification and, failing that, apoptosis—cellular suicide.

  Tumors had a certain arrogance and presumption. They reproduced at will—will was one of the operative words. They exhibited free will, free of the larger body. The cells within the tumors tried to make their own society, but having cut loose from the sophisticated controls of the larger organism, they reverted to a more primitive and self-serving kind of biological “politics.”

  Tumors often failed to feed all their component cells, and cell death—necrosis—was one consequence. If they sent out missionaries to spread
the gospel of freedom and liberation, death of the larger organism was all too often the final result.

  “Tumors strive to break their bonds and live forever. Freedom is their quest, but they bring disorder and death,” she concluded. “How are we any different? If we, as individuals, strive to live past our natural lifetimes, what do we contribute to the whole of humanity? Are we smarter at one hundred and fifty then we were at forty? What if we stand in the way of the young? What if we demand all the available resources and starve our society, or go off on eccentric quests that ignore a larger wisdom? Are we then biologically any different, any less malignant, than tumors?”

  Silence met her conclusion. Few liked what they had heard. Dr. Ramone fielded a scatter of hostile questions, with little effect. The audience broke up into murmuring groups. Alone on the stage, she raised her eyebrows, sadly tapped her papers on the podium, and stepped down.

  I watched her, gritting my teeth.

  Castler approached me in a seethe. He shook his composer’s mane and glared at the oak beams high above. “She’s put a damper on the whole afternoon. That was inexcusably myopic. What is she, a Marxist?”

  I’ve always hated the naysayers, those who argue for an end to controversial research for the greater short-term good of the whole. But what made me really angry was that I had no convincing argument to refute Dr. Ramone’s quiet and persistent polemic.

  AY’s pronouncement and Dr. Ramone’s talk had sucked all the energy out of me. Going for a long trek around Berkeley before returning to my apartment seemed the best remedy for my funk. I walked toward the dark oak doors at the rear of the hall.

  “Hal Cousins?”

  A shadow in the corner broke free and approached. My first instinct was to back away, but there was neither room nor time. The shadow, as it emerged into the afternoon sunlight, became a short, handsome man in his fifties, with graying temples, a distinct hooked nose, and thick, perfectly formed, aristocratic eyebrows. He was shabbily dressed in a tweed suit with frayed cuffs, a once-expensive linen shirt with a collar worn through by too many pressings, and polished brown Oxfords snubbed high at the toes. He carried something under his buttoned coat—he seemed a little pigeon-breasted.