The Bone Forest

by Robert Holdstock

  When she was with someone else I became depressed and touchy. No one in the laboratory ever found out what I had done, but they might well have gathered the truth if they had bothered to listen to the tapes of what was said in the darkness of her bedroom.

  Time passed and a depression settled upon the laboratory. Perhaps the movement of Martin and Yvonne into their middle years, and into a quieter phase of their lives, reflected itself in our subdued interaction and the almost lethargic approach that we began to show towards the experiment as a whole. McCreedy, I hasten to point out, in no way suffered depression, and the technicians were, I suppose, too distant from the possibility of kudos to have any great enthusiasm at any stage of the project. But the nurses and the Life Planners, myself and Josephine all became very broody.

  Josephine in particular was labouring under a black cloud. Her relationship with McCreedy was abysmal. Everything he said she disagreed with behind his back. She took her only pleasure in putting him down, contributed nothing to any discussion at which he was present, but depended on me to relay her ideas to him.

  In the rapid ageing of the two subjects she saw an inevitability that frightened her.

  “That’s us in so very few years,” she said as she stared at the two subjects during one of their persistent rows. “And there’s nothing any of us can do about it. It’s a stab at our human pride—there are some things that are inevitable, that we cannot control, and our decrepitude is one of them. And what do we do? We accept it! We are Eos watching the ageing of Tithonus and afraid to ask the great Zeus to add youth to immortality. Afraid, I said—and that’s what I meant, but even so, humankind is ageing like each of us individually and our racial fear stops us asking for an injection of youth. It’s so horribly … predictable! I want to live with youth and youth’s dreams … I’m rambling, aren’t I?”

  I see what she meant, now, as I complete this chronicle. In the satisfaction of completion of the project there would come a rationality that I had lost during those years. At the time I didn’t understand her at all.

  I became infatuated with the watching of Yvonne, staring at her for endless hours, trying to find some trace of the eleven-year-old … but all her youth and beauty were now imprisoned behind a wall of years. With each day, with each inoculation of Chronon, she aged before my eyes, now whiter, now more wrinkled, now a little more stooped.

  She and Martin fought persistently. There was not a day passed without them shouting and swearing at each other, and ending the tussle with a cold and slippery silence, that only mellowed towards evening.

  Martin spent a great deal of time alone, and the monitor reported that he indulged less and less in conversation with the ghosts around him. He retired from his work, and from his social life, whilst Yvonne remained socially active and very hostile towards her husband.

  She flirted with numerous ghosts, most of them the ageing lovers she had taken during earlier years. Now, instead of the imaginary copulation that she performed before our eyes, she seemed to indulge in painfully unconcluded flirtation. When I watched her one evening, and heard her mention my name and knew what she was thinking, instead of the thrill I had felt when first I had entered her pseudo-awareness, I now felt only disgust and dismay, and I became deeply embarrassed at what I had done, but still no opportunity to remove my existence presented itself and there was nothing I could do to eliminate these scenes from my memory.

  The time came when all sexual, and much social, contact ceased, and she sat and remembered, staring out from her body at the invisible monitors that brought her heartache to us as we watched from the laboratory outside the environment.

  Martin, now, was alone, spending his time staring directly at the edge of the environment as if he was aware that he could not move beyond that barrier. Within his head, recorded triggers were depressing his interest in wandering beyond the confines, but it seemed to the more analytical among us that he had come to realise that there was nowhere to go anyway.

  It was December of ’96, and they were old people, seventy years into their lives, as healthy and sturdy as when they had been born, but old, none the less. For me, when on my shift, there was just discomfiture in administering examination to the thin torso of the woman I had once watched grow with the beating of my heart. In sleep she stirred, talked, cried. The monitors said all was well, but it was hard not to believe that she had lived too much too fast, and that all the empty days in her past were calling for fulfilment, and the brief and unsatisfactory time she had actually spent with Martin was calling for completion.

  Now, however, a new sense of excitement crept into the laboratory. I felt it myself. For the subjects were at the beginning of the age barrier, and with every day took a step nearer to the figure of one hundred years, our first goal, and the age which, when reached, would be accompanied by our first report to the scientific community at large. And yet, a sort of natural caution prevailed. Within our hearts, as those weeks passed, we all began to imagine what, if anything, lay beyond the barrier of age; but within the microcosm that was our scientific community we never discussed our private fears and hopes. McCreedy talked loosely about possible regenerative processes, and we all talked among ourselves about the rationale behind thinking that age itself did not necessarily mean death. But of what was to come, there were just the imaginings and the anticipations of our scientific hearts. And, an acknowledgment to mythology, above McCreedy’s desk an enormous picture of a cicada, watching us with an expression verging on amusement.

  On the day that they were both ninety-nine years and eleven months old, McCreedy prepared his press statement while the rest of us accumulated the massive files of data and decided on an allotment for processing. The following day, the fifth of March ’98, that momentous event occurred … the centenary of two human beings, and there was a feeling of great relief within the whole Institute, and for the first time ever we drank openly in our laboratory, and it was not just coffee, surreptitiously sipped with backs to the health-hazard notice, but vintage champagne, eight bottles of the stuff!

  I drank with restraint since it was to be my night shift, but somehow we all felt, now, that the years of narrow-minded application had been worthwhile, that there would be an end product; even Josephine seemed brighter, more cheerful.

  I watched McCreedy’s press conference on a small portable TV while I waited for the frail figures in the environment to sink, again, into deep slumber. There was an atmosphere of great excitement in the vast hall from which the programme was coming, and I could see McCreedy, evening-suited and proud, seated between medical experts and two politicians, confronted by a vast array of microphones, and waiting for the hubbub of human movement and whisper to die away.

  The Institute itself seemed to vibrate in sympathy with that meeting of the world, away to the south, in London.

  Yvonne sat for a long while that night, at the edge of the park, listening to the ghosts in her head, and staring through eyes that were as big and innocent as they had been ninety or so years back. The camera lingered on her and I returned her gaze through the monitor and I seemed to hear her laughter and her crying, and her passion, but all so far in the past, now, so long ago.

  Martin was by himself beneath the oak, turning a piece of bark over and over, examining the artificial life which crawled beneath. The “moonlight” was intense and highlighted his rigid expression, the bony crags of his face, the deepset lie of his eyes. What thoughts, I wondered, did he think at his great age? He was not senile, and Yvonne was certainly not senile, and yet there was a calmness, an abstractedness about them, that suggested mindlessness.

  Did they themselves feel something significant? Were they experiencing a quieter excitement within themselves, a personal triumph? They believed themselves ordinary people, and as ordinary people they were a hundred years old. The flesh would not fall away to reveal firm skin and agile muscles and time would not fall away to reveal them in their youth and beauty, but in the mind is a store of ages and per
haps, on this night of nights, a barrier within their consciousness had dissolved for a few hours and they were living, ghostlike, as they had lived in reality, for the last seven years.

  On the television screen McCreedy’s angular features were emphasised by the arc lights above him as he calmly informed the conference of the progress we had made and were continuing to make. He talked about the impossibility of the experiment using ordinary human lifespans—an experiment lasting two hundred years (assuming it was successful) could be run by a computer, but not by mortal scientists. He stressed that the only purpose of the experiment at this time was to evaluate whether or not we were correct in thinking that death in old age was nonetheless a disease-caused process, taking disease to mean—at the least—the gradual failure of vital body cells due to the accumulation of the toxic by-products of mild infection throughout the life of the individual. At one hundred years of age, he said, our two subjects reared from artificial wombs, screened from all disease or body malfunction, showed all the elastic changes of age, were to all intents and purposes very old people, and yet their cellular complement was as vigorous and efficient as it had been when they had been teenagers. All the symptoms of age were built into the genetic message, he explained when prompted further, and all that had been eliminated were the non-genetically coded acquisitions of disease byproducts.

  The all-important questions: how long did McCreedy expect the experiment to continue for? And what did he expect to find out as the decades progressed? And was he morally justified in using human beings for experimentation outside the understanding of normal human life?

  The experiment, said McCreedy, would continue for as long as circumstances permitted. He expected to find nothing—no scientist ever did. He hoped he would find whatever was to be found; a scientist’s nightmare was to fail to observe the facts of significance in an experiment.

  I could have put it better myself, but the statement was met with a respectful silence.

  As to the moral question, he had a licence permitting him to work with artificially grown human beings, and he had not yet abused that privilege. Since the effective natural lifespan of the two human subjects was now ended, in a sense they were living on borrowed time, time borrowed from McCreedy himself, and they had no future, really, but to remain as a part of the experiment.

  This was in March of ’98, and it precipitated a phase of observation overshadowed by our burning enthusiasm. We were eager to discover what lay beyond the normal years of life, and there can be no doubt that privately we all had the wildest of visions.

  Truth to tell, mine were perhaps the wildest of all. I sketched possible metamorphoses, imagined arriving at the Institute and facing subjects walking through walls, or transporting themselves instantly into the future to observe the progress of our study. I was, I confess, convinced that the apparent decay of body and—to a certain extent—mind, was a transient phenomenon, and that greater power lay at some indeterminate time in the future of our subjects.

  Confiding my belief to McCreedy, I was received with hostility. He condemned me for my lack of discipline. Expect nothing, he said, because if you fervently expect anything at all, then you will tend to see what you want to see.

  And then he told me of his secret imaginings and they so closely paralleled my own that we talked seriously, thereafter, on the possibility of such a state of existence following naturally upon a span of five or six score disease-free years.

  Man had never had a chance to exploit his genetic freedom completely. He was killed, trampled, diseased so early in life that the mechanisms that might have come into operation to protect the body cells from poisoning just never came into play. What we see is man with a lifespan dictated by the length of time his body can survive an increasingly hostile microclimate. But what was his original potential? What great beings have our neotenous forms never been able to reach?

  A man of religious inclination, McCreedy could not conceal from my scrutiny the fact that he believed some manifestation of godhead lay as the ultimate destiny of our two subjects.

  They grew older. By day and by night they aged weeks, and the flesh sagged, their movements slowed, and the compilations of data mounted in volume, but amounted to nothing. The incidence of disease tried to rise within them, but all was monitored and prevented and they reached the middle of their second century free from infection, from tumour or other bodily breakdown.

  It is impossible to chronicle those passing months and years in detail—little happened either to the subjects or to us. We talked and read, participated in any number of short-term projects, wrote papers and took long vacations, all expenses paid. Sanity was—miraculously, I sometimes think—preserved.

  In retrospect I can see how, within our scientific microcosm, we became individually insulated, erected barriers behind which we guarded our memories and preserved our philosophy. Thus, I learned nothing of my companions, and—at the time—found no interest in so studying them.

  At the age of one hundred and fifty-five Martin’s skin seemed to regain its firmness, the loose folds tightening, and he became skeletal, gaunt. Yvonne, by contrast, sagged more, the flesh lying around her neck in three great folds, her legs becoming wrinkled and bowed.

  Nothing magical or unexpected happened, however. They just became older, frailer, quieter.

  The excitement of year one hundred passed into our distant past, and over the course of weeks, then months, the enormous ages reached by the subjects failed to arouse even the slightest whimper of joy. We worked virtually full-time countering the efforts of each of their bodies to shift into a disease condition, but all the time our eyes were watching the loose, trembling folds of skin on Yvonne and the drawn, scaling flesh of her husband. They passed towards their second century with virtually no change, virtually no movement. They were static hulks, housebound where they slept most of the time, ate slowly through tiny mouths that hardly seemed to open for the premasticated food they consumed.

  Yvonne watched the monitor all the time, and when she was at her most alert, her eyes were huge, deep and penetrating, and there was a terrible sadness in them.

  They passed their second century and the atmosphere in the research centre became appalling.

  What was the point of it now? demanded Josephine. Why continue when all we were doing was prolonging the agony of gross body decay? There were no great secrets to be discovered. Stop the experiment. Admit defeat!

  McCreedy, not surprisingly, refused. His face, these days, was showing signs of great mental strain. He was white, heavily sagging under the eyes, and he seemed … old. He dressed in disorder, and had stopped giving press interviews. The Ministry officials who bombarded us every month were given cursory briefings and hustled away, and letters demanding that we show some results for the financial support to be proven worthwhile were answered abruptly and stingingly, and somehow—don’t ask me how—those who put money into us continued to do so.

  At about this time Josephine left the group. She said goodbye to me, but there was a distance between us that made our smiles and handshakes just meaningless gestures. She never glanced at McCreedy, and McCreedy paid no attention to her.

  “It’s all so pointless,” she said, reiterating what she had said so many times before. “Man’s destiny was always to grow old and die, and what we’re demonstrating here is that no matter how we come to terms with the forces that oppress us, our destiny will never be anything but a slow decay. What we see in a pair of individuals reflects our whole race. We have to live with our dreams, not our realities.”

  She left and for a while I felt moody and listless. McCreedy, looking even older, berated her defeatist and pessimistic attitudes, and in a short time the oppressive atmosphere lifted and I felt the excitement that McCreedy felt, the sensation of hovering at the edge of something greater than imagination.

  With the passing months we became a little slack again …

  * * *

  Then things began to happen and it was lik
e an injection of life, both into us and into the hulks that peered at us from the environment.

  On the morning of his two hundred and twentieth year (and three months) Martin, having remained virtually immobile for the past eighty years of his life, rose and walked swiftly—on legs that barely faltered—towards the edge of the environment. His heartbeat doubled and his blood pressure rose, and there seemed to be great surges of adrenaline passing through his body at thirty-five-second intervals.

  He began to shout, in a language strange to my ears:

  “Sibaraku makkura na yoru ni te de mono o saguru … yoo ni site … aruite ikimasita ga … tootoo hutaritomo sukkari … tukarete nanimo iwanaide kosi o orosite … simaimasita …”

  “My God,” shouted McCreedy, ecstatic. “Listen to that. Listen to that!”

  “Sosite soko ni … taoreta …” Martin seemed to be finding difficulty speaking these strange words, “… mama inoti ga nakunarun’ d’ya nai … ka to omou to kyuu … ni … taihen osorosiku natte … simaimasita …”

  He fell silent, but continued to stand at the edge of the environment and stare through at that part that was projection.

  McCreedy was shaking his head, almost in disbelief. “The language of angels …” he said softly. “It has finally happened … it has finally happened.”

  “Actually it was very poorly pronounced Japanese,” said one of the technicians, a young girl and a member of the Life Plan team.

  McCreedy stared at her for a moment while the rest of us tried to hide our smiles. “The point is,” he said slowly, “Martin never knew Japanese.” His face beamed again. “He never knew it, don’t you see? So how could he have learned it? We have our first mystery … Lipman, we have our first mystery!” He was obviously delighted. The same technician, looking as if she hardly dared speak, said, “Well, not exactly. We programmed him to take an elementary course in Japanese when he was thirty. The only mystery is how his pronunciation could be so bad …”