The Fountain of Age

by Nancy Kress

  Katherine had fought for these children’s lives, had tended them for ten years, had loved them as her own. What mother would choose the deaths of her children over the fate of the world?

  What rational human being would not?

  Hail Mary, Mother of God . . . More useless words, rising out of her distant past like subterranean rocks in an earthquake. Her hand again moved toward the fuel tank, again drew back.

  She couldn’t do it. It was physically impossible, like suddenly flying up into the air. And in less than a few hours she, too, would be dead, and none of this would matter to her any longer. That, too, was a choice: to do nothing.

  From beyond the ruined village came wailing, many voices at once. So everyone hadn’t gone to sleep, after all. The Indians were holding a ritual mourning for the three dead in the quake. Sudden light flared in the darkess: a bonfire.

  Katherine clicked off the lighter and sank hopelessly to the ground. In a moment she would do it, in just another moment. The explosion would be violent and instantaneous; the children would not suffer . . . in just a moment. There was no other choice. Light found its way to her eyes, and she closed them because in such a world there should not be even the flickering light of the bonfire, let alone the steady lying beauty of the silver moon in the wide desert sky.

  She woke at dawn. Cold, stiff, shivering—but alive.

  With enormous effort, Katherine got to her feet. Limping, she made her way to the medical tent. Everyone in it was dead. So were villagers in the emergency inflatables, and an old man lying beside the ashes of the bonfire. Only Katherine lived.

  Trembling, she hobbled back to the mobile, climbed the steps, and unlocked the door. Only Kim was awake, tearing at a loaf of bread with her small sharp teeth. She took one look at Katherine, dropped the bread, and began to lick Katherine’s face. Katherine, stretched almost to breaking, started to shove Kim away . . . and stopped.

  No. Not possible.

  Li woke. “Taney!” he said, rubbing his dark eyes. “I was sleeping.”

  “Yes.” It was a croak. Li noticed . . . those dark eyes, that quick little mind, missed nothing.

  “You said you will answer my questions today.”

  “Yes.” Her arms were tight around Kim, so tight the child squirmed. When had Katherine put her arms around Kim, who usually had to be shoved away? She couldn’t remember, couldn’t think . . . She got out, “Li, when does Kim lick people’s faces?”

  “When she thinks they’re sad or angry or hurt. Taney, you said it was my turn to ask questions today.”

  “Yes.”

  He crowded close to her, smelling terrible. “You said the first world was to keep us safe. But the feeder broke and we were hungry and then the first world broke, Taney, it broke, and all this other world was out here. Why did you say the first world would keep us safe?”

  “A safeguard,” Katherine said, and wasn’t sure what she was saying. “Oh, the bastards—an antidotal safeguard for the first researchers. In her saliva.”

  “What?”

  “Thousands of compounds in saliva. We couldn’t possibly have tested them all.”

  “What—”

  “Taney,” Jana said sternly from the floor, “stop crying. There’s nothing to cry about. We found you. . . . Stop it, please, Taney, stop it before my kindness gets all used up.”

  The real fight was just beginning, she knew that. It would rage on so many fronts: medical, military, political, even journalistic if they drove her to that. So much energy would be required, so much strategy. She had won ten years ago but she was older now, and much more tired.

  Nonetheless, her mind was already marshalling arguments. The enemy’s research division had been thoroughly destroyed, and so had its personnel. But there was no guarantee that the bombs had actually gotten them all; there had never been any guarantee. The enemy was supposedly our ally now, but if the world situation changed again . . . and things always changed. A biological antidote was the first step toward a vaccine . . . No, Mr. President, tissue samples cannot provide the same mechanisms as a living organism . . .

  Katherine, driving the DDR mobile across the Mojave, glanced back over her shoulder at Kim, the only ugly and unappealing child of the four. Kim, erratic about controlling her bowels, screaming like a stuck siren, forever licking the faces of people she loved. A child no one would want, a child likely to have been stuck in the back ward of some institution somewhere, while the other three babies would have been adopted, cuddled, loved. Kim, now the most important child on the planet.

  “It’s my turn now!” Jana said.

  “In a minute,” Li answered, just as the computer said, “Cat. ‘Cat’ starts with ‘c.’ Say ‘kuh’ for ‘c.’”

  “Kuh,” Li and Jana said simultaneously, and the computer broke into congratulatory song. Li and Jana laughed with excitement.

  Sudie suddenly appeared beside the driver’s seat. “Taney,” she said seriously, “Now that the real world got broke, are you going to keep us safe?”

  Medical fights, military fights, political fights, journalistic fights. Katherine’s knee throbbed. The desert shimmered in front of her, murderous with heat, the earthquake disaster behind. Katherine was nearly seventy years old, and her knee hurt.

  “Yes, dear heart, I am,” she said, and drove on across the desert, toward the next world.

  FOUNTAIN OF AGE

  I had her in a ring. In those days, you carried around pieces of a person. Not like today.

  A strand of hair, a drop of blood, a lipsticked kiss on paper—those things were real. You could put them in a locket or pocket case or ring, you could carry them around, you could fondle them. None of this hologram stuff. Who can treasure laser shadows? Or the nanotech “re-creations”—even worse. Fah. Did the Master of the Universe “re-create” the world after it got banged up a little? Never. He made do with the original, like a sensible person.

  So I had her in a ring. And I had the ring for forty-two years before it was eaten by the modern world. Literally eaten, so tell me where is the justice in that?

  And oh, she was so beautiful! Not genemod misshapen like these modern girls, with their waists so skinny and their behinds huge and those repulsive breasts. No, she was natural, a real woman, a goddess. Black hair wild as stormy water, olive skin, green eyes. I remember the exact shade of green. Not grass, not emerald, not moss. Her own shade. I remember. I—

  “Grampops?”

  —met her while I was on shore leave on Cyprus. The Mid-East war had just ended, one of the wars, who can keep them all straight? I met Daria in a taverna and we had a week together. Nobody will ever know what glory that week was. She was a nice girl, too, even if she was a . . . People do what they must to survive. Nobody knows that better than me. Daria—

  “Grampops!”

  —gave me a lock of hair and a kiss pressed on paper. Back then I kept them in a cheap plastolux bubble, all I could afford, but later I had the hair and tiny folded paper set into a ring. Much later, when I had money and Miriam had died and—

  “Dad!”

  And that’s how it started up again. With my son, my grandchildren. Life just never knows when enough is enough.

  “Dad, the kids spoke to you. Twice.”

  “So this creates an obligation for me to answer?”

  My son Geoffrey sighs. The boys—six and eight, what business does a fifty-five-year-old man have with such young kids, but Gloria is his second wife—have vanished into the hall. They come, they go. We sit on a Sunday afternoon in my room—a nice room, it should be for what I pay—in the Silver Star Retirement Home. Every Sunday Geoff comes, we sit, we stare at each other. Sometimes Gloria comes, sometimes the boys, sometimes not. The whole thing is a strain.

  Then the kids burst back through the doorway, and this time something follows them in.

  “Reuven, what the shit is that?”

  Geoffrey says, irritated, “Don’t curse in front of the children, and—”

  “�
�Shit’ is cursing? Since when?”

  “—and it’s ‘Bobby,’ not ‘Reuven.’”

  “It’s ‘zaydeh,’ not ‘Grampops,’ and I could show you what cursing is. Get that thing away from me!”

  “Isn’t it astronomical?” Reuven says. “I just got it!”

  The thing is trying to climb onto my lap. It’s not like their last pet, the pink cat that could jump to the ceiling. Kangaroo genes in it, such foolishness. This one isn’t even real, it’s a ’bot of some kind, like those retro metal dogs the Japanese were so fascinated with seventy years ago. Only this one just sort of suggests a dog, with sleek silver lines that sometimes seem to disappear.

  “It’s got stealth coating!” Eric shouts. “You can’t see it!”

  I can see it, but only in flashes when the light hits the right way. The thing leaps onto my lap and I flap my arms at it and try to push it off, except that by then it’s not there. Maybe.

  Reuven yells, like this is an explanation, “It’s got microprocessors!”

  Geoff says in his stiff way, “The ’bot takes digital images of whatever is behind it and continuously transmits them in holo to the front, so that at any distance greater than—”

  “This is what you spend my money on?”

  He says stiffly, “My money now. Some of it anyway.”

  “Not because you earned it, boychik.”

  Geoffrey’s thin lips go thinner. He hates it when I remind him who made the money. I hate it when he forgets.

  “Dad, why do you have to talk like that? All that affected folksy stuff—you never talked it when I was growing up, and it’s hardly your actual background, is it? So why?”

  For Geoffrey, this is a daring attack. I could tell him the reason, but he wouldn’t like it, wouldn’t understand. Not how this “folksy” speech started, or why, or what use it was to me. Not even how a habit can settle in after it’s no use, and you cling to it because otherwise you might lose who you were, even if who you were wasn’t so great. How could Geoff understand a thing like that? He’s only fifty-five.

  Suddenly Eric shouts, “Rex is gone!” Both boys barrel out the door of my room. I see Mrs. Petrillo inching down the hall beside her robo-walker. She shrieks as they run past her, but at least they don’t knock her over.

  “Go after them, Geoff, before somebody gets hurt!”

  “They won’t hurt anybody, and neither will Rex.”

  “And you know this how? A building full of old people, tottering around like cranes on extra stilts, and you think—”

  “Calm down, Dad, Rex has built-in object avoidance and—”

  “You’re telling me about software? Me, boychik?”

  Now he’s really mad. I know because he goes quiet and stiff. Stiffer, if that’s possible. The man is a carbon-fiber rod.

  “It’s not like you actually developed any software, Dad. You only stole it. It was I who took the company legitimate and furthermore—”

  But that’s when I notice that my ring is gone.

  Daria was Persian, not Greek or Turk or Arab. If you think that made it any easier for me to look for her, you’re crazy. I went back after my last tour of duty ended and I searched, how I searched. Nobody in Cyprus knew her, had ever seen her, would admit she existed. No records: “destroyed in the war.”

  Our last morning we’d gone down to a rocky little beach. We’d left Nicosia the day after we met to go to this tiny coastal town that the war hadn’t ruined too much. On the beach we made love with the smooth pebbles pocking our tushes, first hers and then mine. Daria cut a lock of her wild hair and pressed a kiss onto paper. Little pink wildflowers grew in the scrub grass. We both cried. I swore I’d come back.

  And I did, but I couldn’t find her. One more prostitute on Cyprus—who tracked such people? Eventually I had to give up. I went back to Brooklyn, put the hair and kiss—such red lipstick, today they all wear gold, they look like flaking lamps—in the plastolux. Later, I hid the bubble with my Army uniform, where Miriam couldn’t find it. Poor Miriam—by her own lights, she was a good wife, a good mother. It’s not her fault she wasn’t Daria. Nobody was Daria.

  Until now, of course, when hundreds of people are, or at least partly her. Hundreds? Probably thousands. Anybody who can afford it.

  “My ring! My ring is gone!”

  “Your ring?

  “My ring!” Surely even Geoffrey has noticed that I’ve worn a ring day and night for the last forty-two years?

  He noticed. “It must have fallen off when you were flapping your arms at Rex.”

  This makes sense. I’m skinnier now, arms like coat hangers, and the ring is—was—loose. I feel around on my chair: nothing. Slowly I lower myself to the floor to search.

  “Careful, Dad!” Geoffrey says and there’s something bad in his voice. I peer up at him, and I know. I just know.

  “It’s that . . . that dybbuk! That ’bot!”

  He says, “It vacuums up small objects. But don’t worry, it keeps them in an internal depository . . . Dad, what is that ring? Why is it so important?”

  Now his voice is suspicious. Forty-two years it takes for him to become suspicious, a good show of why he could never have succeeded in my business. But I knew that when he was seven. And why should I care now? I’m a very old man, I can do what I want.

  I say, “Help me up . . . no, not like that, you want me to tear something? The ring is mine, is all. I want it back. Now, Geoffrey.”

  He sets me in my chair and leaves, shaking his head. It’s a long time before he comes back. I watch Tony DiParia pass by in his powerchair. I wave at Jennifer Tamlin, who is waiting for a visit from her kids. They spare her twenty minutes every other month. I study Nurse Kate’s ass, which is round and firm as a good pumpkin. When Geoffrey comes back with Eric and Reuven, I take one look at his face and I know.

  “The boys found the incinerator chute,” Geoffrey says, guilty and already resenting me for it, “and they thought it would be fun to empty Rex’s depository in it . . . Eric! Bobby! Tell Grampops you’re sorry!”

  They both mumble something. Me, I’m devastated—and then I’m not.

  “It’s all right,” I say to the boys, waving my hand like I’m Queen Monica of England. “Don’t worry about it!”

  They look confused. Geoffrey looks suddenly wary. Me, I feel like my heart might split down the seam. Because I know what I’m going to do. I’m going to get another lock of hair and another kiss from Daria. Because now, of course, I know where she is. The entire world knows where she is.

  “Down, Rex!” Eric shouts, but I don’t see the stupid ’bot. I’m not looking. I see just the past, and the future, and all at once and for the first time in decades, they even look like there’s a tie, a bright cord, between them.

  The Silver Star Retirement Home is for people who have given up. You want to go on actually living, you go to a renewal center. Or to Sequene. But if you’ve outlived everything and everybody that matters to you and you’re ready to check out, or you don’t have the money for a renewal center, you go to Silver Star and wait to die.

  I’m there because I figured it’s time for me to go, enough is enough already, only Geoffrey left for me and I never liked him all that much. But I have lots of money. Tons of money. So much money that the second I put one foot out the door of the Home, the day after Geoffrey’s visit, the feds are on me like cold on space. Just like the old days, almost it makes me nostalgic.

  “Max Feder,” one says, and it isn’t a question. He’s built with serious augments, I haven’t forgotten how to tell. Like he needs them against an old man like me. “I’m Agent Joseph Alcozer and this is Agent Shawna Blair.” She would have been a beauty if she didn’t have that deformed genemod figure, like a wasp, and the wasp’s sting in her eyes.

  I breathe in the artificially sweet reconstituted air of a Brooklyn Dome summer. Genemod flowers bloom sedately in manicured beds. Well-behaved flowers, they remind me of Geoffrey. From my powerchair I say, “What can I do for you,
Agent Alcozer?” while Nurse Kate, who’s not the deepest carrot in the garden, looks baffled, glancing back and forth from me to the fed.

  “You can explain to us the recent large deposits of money from the Feder Group into your personal account.”

  “And I should do this why?”

  “Just to satisfy my curiosity,” Alcozer says, and it’s pretty much the truth. They have the right to monitor all my finances in perpetuity as a result of that unfortunate little misstep back in my forties. Six-to-ten, of which I served not quite five in Themis Federal Justice Center. Also as a result of the Economic Security Act, which kicked in even earlier, right after the Change-Over. And I have the right to tell them to go to hell.

  Almost I get a taste of the old thrill, the hunt-and-evade, but not really. I’m too old, and I have something else on my mind. Besides, Alcozer doesn’t really expect answers. He just wants me to know they’re looking in my direction.

  “Talk to my lawyer. I’m sure you know where to find him,” I say and power on down to the waiting car.

  It takes me to the Brooklyn Renewal Center, right out at the edge of the Brooklyn Dome, and I check into a suite. For the next month doctors will gene-jolt a few of my organs, jazz up some hormones, step up the firing of selected synapses. It won’t be a super-effective job, nor last too long, I know that. I’m an old man and there’s only so much they can do. But it’ll be enough.

  Scrupulous as a rabbi, the doctor asks if I don’t want a D-treatment instead. I tell her no, I don’t. Yes, I’m sure. She smiles, relieved. For D-treatment I’d go to Sequene, not here, and the renewal center would lose its very expensive fees.

  Then the doctor, who looks thirty-five and might even be that, tells me I’ll be out cold for the whole month, I won’t even dream. She’s wrong. I dream about Daria, and while I do I’m young again and her red mouth is warm against mine in a sleazy taverna. The stinking streets of Nicosia smell of flowers and spices and whatever that spring smell is that makes you ache from wanting things you can’t have. Then we’re on the rocky little beach, our last morning together, and I want to never wake up.