by Sharon Webb
A muscle pulsed over his jaw as he stared at the screen. He had an innate distrust of the vague, the inexact. Was that why he had temporized over this so long? Statistical measurements weren't pure math though. Too much margin for error, yet-
She took the thought from his mind, "What's the alternative, Kurt?"
He leaned back in his chair, looking at the screen, seeing nothing for a moment, saying nothing.
"It's dying, Kurt. Maybe already dead. We find it in the young children, but when the process begins, the test scores, fall off. Then, in a few more years it's gone." She pressed another button and the screen changed. "You can't deny it anymore. It's there in front of you."
He didn't look at the screen; he didn't have to. It was the process. He had known it for some time. Cameran Mencken's graphs and charts only added confirmation.
"Kurt, there's been nothing new in biochemistry since Adler died twenty years ago. And physics-nobody's left to carry on Carmody's work, or Kraft's-no one for eighteen years."
His mind took up the refrain. The last gifted sculptor died thirty years ago, leaving in her dust nothing but a feeble imitation of art. And music? Where were the Sniffens, the Havilands, the Sucharitkuls now? He looked, at his hands, remembering a long time ago when those hands had moved over a keyboard, over the keys of an oboe, with what had been called genius.
Mencken's voice interrupted his thoughts. "Something's got to be done. The plan we discussed. It-"
"It will be my decision," he said sharply.
"But how can you-"
"Do I have to remind you that I'm your superior?" He watched as the color drained from her face.
She raised her chin slightly. Her voice chilled the room. "Of course. I'll leave you with these final results." She put a subtle emphasis on "final" as she stood, straightened her shoulders and walked out.
He took a slow breath when she'd gone. She didn't deserve that, he thought. She was just doing her job. And she was right, of course. It was easy to be right in her position.
He pressed his hands flat on the desk top and stared at his outstretched fingers for a moment. Then, abruptly, he stabbed out a communicator code. In a moment, printouts began to slide into a neat stack. The pages had a single word at the top: RENASCENCE.
* * *
At twelve hundred hours, Kurt Kraus took the sublif to the underground and stepped into a solo. As he pressed a code, it accelerated smoothly. In three minutes it stopped. In two more, he walked into the lobby of the Peoples' Hotel.
The high ceiling glowed blue. Fully holo clouds floated in the surrogate sky overhead. He took a seat and waited. In a few minutes, the sublif doors opened again, and a withered old man got out.
Throughout the lobby, people nodded and smiled at the old man. He was a celebrity to them-the last mortal. Not the last really, but less than a dozen remained now. All the others were gone. Dust and memories.
He walked slowly, bent over his cane, pausing to feel his way with each faltering step. He hesitated and looked around the large room. His eyes were dim and pale.
Kurt was walking toward him, reaching out, touching his arm. "It's been a long time." He guided the old man, slowing his vigorous stride to match the halting one. "I'm taking you to lunch. And, happy birthday to you."
He steered the old man toward the hotel restaurant. They sat in soft white chairs amid green plants hanging in confused tumbles. Electric blue fish swam behind transparent curving walls. Kurt glanced at the menu that glowed from the table top, then he studied the old man across from him. He was appalled at the changes he saw. He was so frail now, and his skin was as translucent as parchment. "Have you been well?" he finally asked in a voice as stilted as a computer's. But he was thinking, why did I bring you here? And why did you accept? Why didn't you just stay in Tambay? That's where you'd rather be.
The old man peeped out of faded eyes that reflected, fleetingly, the youth of the other. "Fine, Kurt. And you?"
"Oh, very well," he said, and he thought, this is what we say to each other-"How are you?" "Fine." We say the trivial things, the meaningless things, as if we were merely acquaintances or neighbors passing in the halls. He remembered the stack of letters, years of them, full of ideas, commitments, humor, pathos-full of touching. He looked at the old man. A stranger. Not like his letters. Not like his letters at all. One hundred sixteen today, he thought. Only one year older than he was, and frail, clinging to life with fragile stick fingers and will. Eric-his brother.
They ordered. Their food came, and then Kurt said, "What are you remembering on your birthday?"
The old man started from his reverie. "I was remembering being ten."
"Ten?"
"I think I got to be ten and then stayed that way." A wisp of a smile trailed across his face. "I don't feel any older now, really. Inside." He looked down then, as if he were ashamed of what he said.
Kurt reached out and touched the old man's arm. Eric had never been ten, he thought. He had always been older. When they were boys, it was always Eric who stood between him and disaster, between him and the world, between him and his father-I'm going to watch you die. I'm going to live and watch you die. He blinked at the thought and felt the dark edge of guilt shadow his soul.
"A silly conceit, isn't it?"
Kurt stared, then shook his head and gently squeezed the thin arm.
"When you're my age-" He stopped and looked at Kurt, "That is, when you're old it's hard to keep up the illusions. Your body has a way of betraying you."
Kurt's eyes narrowed in sympathy. He wanted to tell Eric about his work-about Renascence. But how could he tell him what Renascence meant? Could he say, "Eric, the world made a mistake. We made everybody immortal and that killed creativity. And now we have to change things. Now we have to take our brightest, most talented children and ask them to choose between losing their immortality or losing their creativity?" Could he look at Eric and say that? Could he look at him and say, "We'll be asking our children to choose to be what you are?" Yet, shouldn't he? Wouldn't it make the old man less lonely to know that there would be others, to know that he wouldn't be the last mortal anymore? Or would it really matter?
We should have kept it to letters, he thought. If they had kept it to letters, it would have been easier. He looked at his strong hand resting on Eric's arm, and he thought of contrasts and of betrayals. Finally, he looked at Eric, "Now, tell me. How has the weather been in Tambay?"
* * *
He stood in the hotel lobby, watching as Eric made his halting way to the sublif. When the doors opened, the old man stepped inside and, leaning on his cane, turned toward him. The programmed lights of the lobby ceiling were dimming-fading to black. As the vast room plunged into total darkness for a moment, the lights of the sublif played on the old man's wispy white hair as he stood alone. Steadying himself, he lifted one hand in a trembling goodbye.
&nbs
p; In the dark, Kurt's hand rose in a like gesture, and when the hologram of Saturn with its wheeling rings winked on, lighting the room once more, the sublif doors had closed and Eric was gone.
Shaken, Kurt sank into a chair. The meeting had jarred loose a part of him that he had locked away-a portion of his youth that he had forgotten until now: Eric's voice was saying "…we've got each other. We'll always have each other…" Eric was only fifteen then… no, sixteen.
His brother's face shifted in his mind again. He could see it-see the brow furrow as Eric struggled with a piano passage that had come so easily to his younger brother.
So much came back, so much, from so long ago… A hand reaching out, steadying him, as they played that summer in the creek at Juniper Springs, as he plunged into first one, then another boy-sized spring, sinking to his chest, then popping up again with the pressure of the water. Shrieks of "Quicksand!" …burbling, giggling screams of "Help!"
He remembered the time he had blacked Eric's eye. He remembered the talks. Oh, the talks… about sex, about what it would be, must be, like… the talks about what they would do with their lives, where they would go… the talk that magic night as they lay in sleeping bags under the stars. "We’ll go there someday, Kurt. To the farthest star in the whole universe…"
As people passed, Kurt leaned back in his chair and stared at the ceiling, stared at the rings of the bogus Saturn moving slowly above him, stared at the dim electric stars that burned beyond. "We'll go there, Kurt. To the farthest star…"
Would they?
They had opened the door to infinity; yet, as they stood on the threshold, they saw that no other doors lay open to them. The process had given them time-all the time there was- and it had robbed them of their dreams, individually and collectively.
He remembered a boy of fifteen standing on the brink of it, a boy who thought he had inherited the Earth. He had. And more. He-all of them-had inherited a series of minor planets revolving around a secondary sun-nothing more. Now, they had the rest of time to contemplate how truly small, how truly insignificant they would always be.
He could hear his fifth-grade teacher-what was her name? Mary Will Chase-talking about the pioneers who faced great hardships as they crossed a hostile land in flimsy covered wagons. The old woman's face had glowed with an emotion he had never seen there before, and he had felt stirrings within himself. She talked of die frontier of space-the last frontier-the one with no limits. "It's beginning," she had said. "One day, there will be colonies in the asteroids and mining on the moons of Jupiter and Saturn. After that, human beings will travel among the stars." He had looked at her then with wonder. She won't go, he had thought. She's too old. And then, somehow, he knew that this didn't matter to her. It didn't matter because someone would go.
And they had traversed and conquered these planets, these circling worlds, to their limits. Now, there was only one pioneer left-gone before he was born-a little unmanned ship that carried on its hull a thin gold disc engraved with the likeness of a man and a woman.
A bitter smile crept onto his lips. Spacecraft moved now at eight times the speed of the little Pioneer-for brief times, much faster. And at this speed, immortal man, sealed inside a tiny surrogate Earth, would take over eight thousand years to reach the nearest star-a star that had no worlds.
He knew then the terrible legacy they all shared. It was as if the comfortable God who dwelt in the stolid brick Presbyterian church of his childhood had cast aside his disguise, had suddenly burst into a geometric growth so huge, so all-encompassing, as to be completely and forever unreachable. Only echoes were left, elusive shadows of unguessable dimensions mocking and taunting him.
They had created their own immortality, and in the doing they had shrunk themselves into something infinitesimal; as part of the design, they had cast away the leaven of their own creativity, the only Godlike touch humanity held. They were left as tiny shells of protein and acid, collections of helical strands of being that raged at puny longevity. And one day they would stand at the far reaches of a tiny system of circling planets; they would watch the giant red disc of a dying sun and know that there was indeed no place, no future, no hope left to them.
The universe would expand and then begin to fall back upon itself, contracting its growing energies into a tiny primordial mass until, full circle, it would once again explode, again contract-a pulsing, living thing, a beating heart. While immortal man would end in futile entropy; all his energies dissipated by his aimless, outward drift to a boundary he could not cross, could never learn to cross, without the fuel of a lost creativity.
Their hope now-their only hope-lay in their children… at the cost of their lives.
* * *
Back in his office, Kurt found the message light blinking on his console. He pressed it. The communicator's silky voice said:
Re requested meeting this date, 1400 hours: Minister of Education-verified. Minister of Finance-verified. Minister of Communication-verified.
He glanced at the time signal 1342. He stared at the console, reached out, pressed a button.
Waiting .
"Add Cameran Mencken, Liaison." He clicked off. He picked up the stack of printouts beside the console and read the title again:
RENASCENCE
He had no choice. Not anymore. Children in dormitories all over the world and in the space colonies would be reaching a critical period within weeks. No child born within the last eleven years had been given the immortality process.
He made up his mind. Irrevocably. He entered the code for the operation and signed it with his own. Then he stared in silence at his fingers spread before him, thoughtfully, as if he had never seen them before.
He entered the conference room at 1400 hours on the dot. Cameran Mencken was already there. She looked up. "Are you ready?"
He nodded and faced the imager.
She pressed the conference button, and the life-sized hologram of the Minister of Education formed. The tiny woman nodded affably in spite of the early hour in Sungchiang.
"Greetings, Yu Hsuan-chi," he said formally.
"Greetings, Kurt Kraus," she answered.
The imager roiled into focus a blustery red-faced man with beefy jowls. "About time," he growled. "I'm waiting dinner for this."
A wry smile curled the corner of Kurt's lip. "Greetings, Alexei Kapov." It would be a short meeting if Kapov's stomach was involved.
Kapov snapped a formal greeting in reply, then stared impatiently at Kurt.
Severin Jastrow, Minister of Communication, signed in. Her pale gray eyes and square face bare of makeup, contrasted with her carefully done hair. Jastrow, at least, was neither sleepy nor suffering from a delayed dinner. Her image was transmi
tted from the Communication office only blocks from Kurt's own. She entered the meeting with formal greeting to Kurt and nods to the others.
Kurt shifted in his chair and began. "After careful deliberation, and after input from all your departments, I have instituted the operation known as Renascence. I know that you are all familiar with this operation. I want to know from you now about any new developments that might affect this project."
Kapov leveled his belligerent glare toward Kurt. "Commerce and Industry are not represented."
Kurt met his gaze, "Commerce and Industry have been notified of my decision. Those departments are not represented because they have no direct bearing on Renascence."
"They have direct bearing on my department," snapped Kapov. "There are problems now with the asteroid colonies-in particular, Vesta. The tail is trying to wag the dog. I suggest your project may cause trouble there."
"For what reason?"
'The Vestans are technicians, with a technician's orientation. They place small value on the arts and not much more on the pure sciences. The climate on Vesta is provincial." Kapov's hand stabbed the air to emphasize his point. "The Vestans believe that Earth is exploiting the Belt. Commerce feels that Renascence will be interpreted by Vesta as a skimming off of their best potential. They won't react well when their most promising children are taken to Earth. I say, delay Renascence."
"Impossible," said Kurt. "The program must start while the children are young enough to make a choice."
"Then produce an alternate site. One on Vesta would take the sting from the wasp."