The Fountain of Age

by Nancy Kress

  And, of course, there were always rumors of totally banned procedures available there for a price. But no big pharm or rogue genetics outfit would actually use a legitimate fertility clinic for experimentation . . . would they?

  “Haihong, what’s the name of the clinic?”

  “Why?”

  Their drinks came, Dos Equis for him and Diet Coke for her. After the waitress left, Ben said casually, “I may be able to find out stuff for you. Their usual pay rate for surrogates, for instance. Make sure you’re not getting ripped off.” Unlike Haihong, Ben was a good liar.

  Haihong nodded. So it was the money. “Okay. The clinic is called Dispensario de las Colinas Verdes.”

  He’d never heard of it. “How did you learn about this place?”

  “Emily.” She was watching him warily now, ready to resent any criticism of her friend. He said only, “Okay, I’ll get on it. How did your meeting with your thesis advisor go yesterday?”

  He saw her relax. She launched into a technical discussion of semiotics that he didn’t even try to follow. Instead he tried to find traces of his family’s faces in hers. Around the eyes, maybe, and the nose . . . but he and his brothers stood six feet, his hair was red, and he had the spare tire of most sedentary Americans. She was tiny, fragilely made. And fragile in other ways, too, capable of an hysterical emotionalism kept in check only by her relentless drive to accomplishment. Ben had seen her drunk once, it was not pretty, and she’d never let him see her that way again. Haihong was a mass of contradictions, this cousin of his, and he groped through his emotions to find one that fit how he felt about her. He didn’t find it.

  Abruptly he said, interrupting something about F. Scott Fitzgerald, “Is the egg yours or a donor’s?”

  Anger darkened her delicate features. “None of your business!”

  So the egg was hers, and she was more uneasy about the whole business than she pretended. All at once he remembered a stray statistic: Twenty-one percent of surrogate mothers changed their mind about giving up their babies.

  “Sorry,” he said. “Now what was that again about Fitzgerald?”

  She was eight months along before he cracked Dispensario de las Colinas Verdes.

  His work at the Neuroscience Institute was with genetically modified proteins that packaged different monoamines into secretory vesicles, the biological storage and delivery system for signal molecules. Ben specialized in brain neurotransmitters. This allowed him access to work-in-progress by the Institute’s commercial and academic partners. Colinas Verdes was not among them.

  However, months of digging—most of it not within the scope of his grant and some of it blatant favor-trading—finally turned up that one of the Institute’s partners had a partner. That small company, which had already been fined twice by the FDA, had buried in its restricted online sites a single reference to the Mexican clinic. It was enough. Ben was good at follow-through.

  Haihong was huge. She waddled around campus, looking as if she’d swallowed a basketball, her stick legs in their little sandals looking unable to support her belly. The final chapter of her dissertation had been approved in draft form by her advisor. The date for her oral defense had been set. She beamed at strangers; she fell into periods of vegetable lassitude; she snapped at friends; she applied feverishly for teaching posts. Sometimes she cried and then, ten minutes later, laughed hysterically. Ben watched her take her vitamins, do her exercises, resolutely avoid alcohol. He couldn’t bring himself to tell her anything.

  The day in her fourth month that she said to him, awe in her voice, “Right now he’s growing eyelashes,” Ben was sure. She was going to keep the baby.

  Twenty-one percent.

  He went himself to Mexico, presenting his passport at the border, driving his Saab through the dusty countryside. Two hours from Tijuana he reached the windowless brick building that was not the bright and convenient clinic Haihong had gone to. This was the clinic’s research headquarters, its controlling brain. Ben went in armed with the names and forged references of the partner company, with his formidable knowledge of curing-edge genetics, with pretty good Spanish, with American status and bluster. He spent an hour with the Mexican researchers on site, and left before he was exposed. He obtained names and then checked them out in the closed deebees at the Institute. Previous publications, conference appearances, chatter on the e-lists that post-docs, in self-defense, create to swap information that might impact their collective futures. It took all his knowledge to fill in the gaps, complete the big picture.

  Then he sat with his head in his hands, anxiety battering him in waves, and wondered how he was ever going to tell Haihong.

  He waited another week, working eighteen hours a day, sleeping in his lab on a cot, neglecting the job he was paid to do and cutting off both his technicians and his superiors. The latter decided to indulge him; they all thought he was brilliant. Every few hours Ben picked up the phone to call the FBI, the FDA, the USBP, anyone in the alphabet soup of law enforcement who could have shut it all down. But each time he put down the phone. Not until he had the inhibitor, which no one would have permitted him to cobble together had they known. Let alone permit giving it to Haihong.

  A lot had been known about neurotransmitters for over seventy years, ever since the first classes of antidepressants. Only the link with genetics was new, and in the last five years, that field—Ben’s field—had exploded. He had the fetus’s genome. The genetics were new, but the countermeasures for the manifested behaviors were not. Ben knew enough about brain chemistry and cerebral structures.

  What he hadn’t known enough about was Haihong.

  “An inhibitor,” she said at the end of his long, lurching explanation, and her calm should have alerted him. An eerie, dangerous calm, like the absence of ocean sucked away from the beach just before the tsunami rolls in. He should have recognized it. But he’d been awake for twenty-two hours straight. He was so tired.

  “Yes, an inhibitor,” he echoed. “And it will work.”

  “You’re sure.”

  Nothing like this was ever sure, but he said, “Yes. As sure as I can be.” He tried to put an arm around her but she pushed him away.

  “An inhibitor calibrated to body weight.”

  “Yes. Increasing in direct proportion.”

  “For his entire life.”

  “Yes. I think so. Haihong—”

  “Side effects?” Still that eerie calm.

  Ben ran his hand through his red hair, making it all stand up. “I don’t know. How can I know?” He wanted to be reassuring, but the brain contained a hundred billion neurons, each with a thousand or so branches. That was ten-to-the-hundred-trillionth power of possible neural connections. He was pretty sure what neurotransmitters the genemods on the baby would increase production of, and pretty sure he could inhibit it. But the side effects? Anybody’s guess. Even aspirin affected different people differently.

  Haihong said, “A six-month shelf life and a one-week half-life in the body.”

  She echoed his terminology perfectly, still in that quiet, mechanical voice. Ben put out his hand to touch her again, drew it back. “Yes. Haihong, we need to call the FDA, now that I have something to use as an emergency drug, and let them take over the—”

  “Give me the first batch.”

  He did. This was why he’d made it, because he’d known months ago what she had never told him in words. Twenty-one percent.

  He agreed to put off calling the authorities for one more day. “Just give me time to assimilate it all, Ben. A little time. Okay?”

  He’d agreed. It was her life, her child. Not his.

  The next day she’d been gone.

  In the foul public cyberbooth, nine years later, Ben deleted Haihong’s email. Rumors, she’d written, Sichuan quarantine may lift soon. Interred in her remote village, which the most modern of technologies had forced back into the near primitive, she hadn’t even heard the news. The quarantine had always been as much political as anything
else, or it wouldn’t have been in force so long. It was to be lifted today and even now, right there in Chengdu from which she must have sent her email, she still seemed oblivious. I cannot do this anymore. I just cannot.

  What exactly did that mean?

  He left his coffee untouched in the filthy booth. Outside, in the fresh air under California’s blue sky, he pulled out his handheld and booked a flight to China.

  Four: Haihong

  She left the People’s Internet Building at dusk. Usually she spent several hours online, as long as she could afford, in an orgy of catching up on news, on the academic world, on anything outside the quarantine. She only had the opportunity every six months.

  This time, she left as soon as she’d emailed Ben, uploading onto him her bi-annual report, her gratitude, her despair. Unfair, of course, but how could it matter? Ben, in California, had everything; he could add a little despair to his riches. To Haihong nothing mattered any longer, nothing except Cixin, the unruly child who did not love her and for whom she’d given her future. A fruitless sacrifice, since Cixin had no future, either. Everything barren, everything a waste.

  She clutched the package in her hand, the precious six-month supply of inhibitor of proteins in the posterior superior parietal lobes. The pills were sewn inside a gift for Cixin, a stuffed toy he was too old for. Ben had not done any further work on the side-effects. Maybe he had no way to measure them, eight thousand miles away from his research subject. Maybe he had lost interest. So Cixin would go on being irritable, restless, underweight, over-stressed. He would—

  Outside, Haihong blinked. The sparse and rotting skeleton left of Chengdu seemed to have gone mad! Gongs sounded, sirens blared, people poured out of the dilapidated buildings, more people than she had known were left in the city. They were shouting something, something about the quarantine . . .

  Starting forward, she didn’t even see the pedicab speeding around the corner, racing along the nearly trafficless street. The driver, a strong and large man, saw her too late. He yelled and braked, but Haihong had already gone flying. Her tiny and malnourished body struck the ground head first. Bleeding from her mouth, unable to feel any of her body below the neck, her last thought was a wordless prayer for her son.

  Five: Cixin

  By afternoon Cixin was exhausted from walking away from the village, up into the mountains. His legs ached and his empty stomach moaned. Worse, he was afraid he was lost.

  He had been careful to follow the path where Mama used to ride her bicycle, and it had led him to their old picnic place. Cixin had stopped and rested there, but the usual calm had not come over him. Should he try to worship, like Auntie did when she bowed in front of her little shrine? Mama said, in the secret language, that worship was nonsense. But nothing Mama said could be trusted. She was a drunk and a whore.

  Cixin swiped a tear from his dusty cheek. It was stupid to cry. And he wasn’t really lost. After the picnic place, the path had become narrower and harder to see, and maybe—maybe—he had lost it, but he was still climbing uphill. Tibet was uphill, at the top of the mountains. He was all right.

  But so thirsty! If he just had some water . . .

  An hour later he came to a stream. It was shallow and muddy, but he lay on his belly and lapped at the water. That helped a little. Cixin staggered up on his aching legs and resumed climbing.

  An hour after that, it began to get dark.

  Now fear took him. He’d been sure he would reach Tibet before nightfall . . . after all, look how far he’d come! There should be monks coming out to greet him, taking him into a warm place with water and beancurd and congee . . . Nothing was right.

  “Stupid monks!” he screamed as loud as he could, but then stopped because what if the monks were on their way to get him and they heard him and turned back? So he yelled, “I didn’t mean it!”

  But still no monks came.

  Darkness fell swiftly. Cixin huddled at the base of a pine tree, arms wrapped around his body and legs drawn up for warmth. It didn’t help. He didn’t want to race around, not on his hurting legs and not in the dark, and yet it was hard to sit still and do nothing. Every noise terrified him—what if a tiger came? Mama said the tigers were all gone from China but Mama was a drunk and a whore.

  Shivering, he eventually slept.

  In the morning the sun returned, warming him, but everything else was even worse. His belly ached more than his legs. Somehow his tongue had swollen so that it seemed to fill his entire dry mouth. Should he go back to the place where the water had been? But he didn’t remember how to get there. All the pine trees, all the larches, all the gray boulders, looked the same.

  Cixin whimpered and started climbing. Surely Tibet couldn’t be much farther. There’d been a map of China in the village school he’d attended until his inability to sit still made him leave, and on the map Tibet looked very close to Sichuan. He was almost there.

  The second nightfall found him no longer able to move. He collapsed beside a boulder, too exhausted even to cry. The picture of the dead dog in the road filled his mind, filled his fitful dreams. When he woke, he was covered with small, stinging bites from something. His cry came out as a hoarse, frustrated whimper. The rising sun filled his eyes, blinding him, and he turned away and tried to sit up.

  Then it happened.

  Cixin knew.

  He was lifted out of his body. Thirst and hunger and insect bites vanished. He was not Cixin, and everything—the whole universe—was Cixin. He was woven into the universe, breathed with it, was one with it, and it spoke to him wordlessly and sang to him without music. Everything was him, and he was everything. He was the gray boulder and the yellow sun rising and the rustling pine trees and the hard ground. He was them and he felt them, it, all, and the mountains reverberated with surprise and with his name: Cixin.

  Come.

  Cixin.

  The child sat on the parched ground, expressionless, and was still and calm.

  “Cixin!”

  A sour, familiar taste melting on his tongue, a big hand in his mouth. Then, after a measureless time that was not time, water forced down his throat.

  “Cixin!”

  Cixin blinked. Then he cried out and would have toppled over had not the big man—how big he was! How pale!—steadied him. More water touched Cixin’s lips.

  “Not too much, buddy, not at first,” the big man said, and he spoke the secret language that only Cixin and Mama knew. How could that be? All at once everything on Cixin hurt, his belly and neck and swollen legs and most of all his head. And the big man had red hair standing up all over his head like an attacking rooster. Cixin started to cry.

  The big man lifted him in his arms and put him over his shoulder. Cixin just glimpsed the two other men, one from his village and one a stranger, their faces rigid with something that Cixin didn’t understand. Then he fainted.

  When he came to, he lay on his bed at Auntie’s house. The big man was there, and the stranger, but the village man was not. The big man was saying, very slowly, some words in the secret language to the stranger, and he was repeating them in real words to Auntie. Cixin tried to say something—he didn’t even know what—but only a croak came out.

  Auntie rushed over to him. She had been crying. Auntie never cried, and fear of this made Cixin wail. Something terrible had happened, and it had happened to Mama. How did Cixin know this? He knew.

  And underneath: that other knowing, half memory and half dream, already faded and yet somehow more real even than Auntie’s tears or the big man’s strange red hair:

  Cixin. Come. Cixin.

  The big man was Cousin Benjamin Jinkang Molloy. Cixin tasted the ridiculous name on his tongue. Despite the red hair, Cousin Ben sometimes looked Chinese, but mostly he did not. That made no sense, but then neither did anything else.

  Auntie didn’t like Cousin Ben. She didn’t say so, but she wouldn’t look at him, didn’t offer him tea, frowned when his back was turned and she wasn’t crying or at her shrin
e. Ben visited every day, at first with his “translator” and then, when he saw how well Cixin spoke the secret language, alone. He paid money to Xiao’s father to sleep at Xiao’s house. Xiao was not allowed to visit Cixin at his bed.

  He said, “Why can you talk Mama’s secret words?”

  “It’s English. Where I live, everybody speaks English.”

  “Do you live in Tibet?” That would be exciting!

  “No. I live in America.”

  Cixin considered this. America might be exciting, too—Xiao’s iPod came from there. Sudden tears pricked Cixin’s eyes. He wanted to see Xiao. He wanted Mama, who was as dead as the dog in the road. He wanted an iPod. He wanted to get out of bed and race around but his body hurt and anyway Auntie wouldn’t let him get up.

  Ben said carefully, “Cixin, what happened to you up on the mountain?”

  “I got lost.”

  “I know. I found you, remember? But what happened before that?”

  “Nothing.” Cixin closed his lips tight. He didn’t actually remember what had happened on the mountain, only that something had. But whatever it was, he wasn’t going to share it with some strange red-headed cousin who wasn’t even from Tibet. It was his. Maybe if Mama hadn’t got dead . . .

  The tears came then and Cixin, ashamed, turned his face toward the wall. Gently Ben turned it back.

  “I know you miss your mother, buddy. But my time here is short and I need you to pay attention.”

  That was just stupid. People needed food and water and clothes and iPods—they didn’t “need” Cixin’s attention. He scowled.

  Ben said, “Listen to me. It’s very important that you go on taking the pills your mother was giving you.”