World Enough, and Time

by James Kahn

  Josh was quickly spellbound by this intriguing picture of the strange land of his forefathers. Magnetism, mountain-tall buildings. And everyone could read. Most of it was new to Josh—few reliable stories ever filtered down anymore, good histories of what it was like Before the Ice. It fascinated him to think of early Humans—not so dissimilar from himself—living so differently.

  Even Beauty could not help being drawn into the tale, could not help warming to the weaver. “You, a Human,” he whispered in a combination of frank disbelief and total acceptance. “And what of Centaurs? What did they do while Humans reigned?”

  “Oh, Centaurs didn’t exist here,” Jasmine assured him. “Many animals didn’t. Not until much later. But that’s another story.” She ignored Beauty’s incredulity to continue her narrative. “In any case, I was born in 1986, like I said earlier, the year the nuclear plant at Oceanspring had a meltdown and wiped out a big chunk of New England. Not to mention the radiation sickness, the burns, the birth defects. Makes me gag just to think of it. No use you two knowing any more about nuclear energy than that. It was a kind of power people thought they could put in a box and use however they wanted to: take it out and shoot it, or turn on a light, or take an X ray—no, don’t ask me what that is—but what happened was, they couldn’t close the box. That’s what they found out in 1986, the year I was born.

  “Born down in L.A. before it was an island. Now that was a town. Convertibles, movie queens, Disneyland—you don’t know what I’m talking about, do you? Oh well, never mind. Ashes to ashes, we used to say. Well. Things hobbled along for some years after the Oceanspring disaster, probably would have for a lot longer, but there was another disaster, much bigger. Of international proportions. Ever hear of oil?”

  Josh and Beauty looked at each other, then back at Jasmine. “You mean like whale oil?” asked Josh.

  “Oil that gushes black out of the ground, that makes gasoline, that burns. Fuel oil.”

  They shook their heads. Jasmine sighed, then laughed. “It’s hard to know where to begin this story.” They looked at her expectantly. Joshua had quite forgotten the pain in his back. Jasmine went on. “Oil was a natural substance, pumped out of wells in the ground. It was processed and burned, and the energy it gave off lit the lights of the world, powered transportation, heated the chilly, cooled the hot, oil did it all. Only sometimes it would spill out of the ships that carried it and cover the sea with thick, black slime. That was called an oil slick, and Humans hated it.

  “At the same time, there were special scientists called genetic engineers. They—Lord, how am I ever going to—okay, they were … well, the sort of magicians of their time. Only the magic was young, and they were all sorcerer’s apprentices. Anyway, they found out that every creature is made of millions of tiny organisms called cells that are too small even to be seen. And at the center of each cell is an even smaller chamber called a nucleus, and inside of each nucleus are bands of stringy material called chromosomes. And making up the chromosomes, like beads on a chain, are millions of little messages, called genes. And these genes are the messages that tell each creature what it is, how big it is, what shape it is, what it likes to eat, what it thinks about. And these scientists discovered the code that the gene messages were written in. So the scientists could go into the cells, and write whatever messages they wanted to. So that’s what they did—they found a bacteria, which is a certain kind of cell, and they rewrote part of the message inside the cells—that’s called genetic engineering—and when the geneticists had written exactly what they wanted, then the bacterial cells that they’d written in were able to eat oil. Not only that, they loved to eat oil. So the people turned the bacteria loose on the oil slicks, and the bacteria ate all the oil off the surface of the water.”

  Josh was riveted. Here was a true story, of wizards who performed magic, formidable sorcery—by writing. By seizing and harnessing the ineffable, occult power of the written word. Thus it shall be written; thus it shall be done. He’d heard stories of a time when everyone could read, but he’d always discredited them as apocryphal. Reading and writing, he believed, was an ancient art limited to a privileged few. This, at least, was what his parents and friends had always led him to believe. Furthermore, though he could perform feats that seemed magical to others, he knew that anyone could learn the same tricks—if they could read. But now here was a story about prehistoric Scribes who performed true magic with their religion. Or perhaps it wouldn’t seem so, Josh thought, if he could only understand their scripture. He made a mental note to study ancient languages.

  Beauty respected all magic, if it was real, but he didn’t know whether to believe this or not. It sounded a lot like Scribery, about which he was deeply skeptical. He’d heard various stories over the years about what the world was like Before the Ice. Each story was more fantastic than the last: tales of animals who couldn’t talk, of invisible kingdoms, of ships that flew to the moon. Somehow, though, the way Jasmine was speaking—it was as if she’d actually seen the things she was describing. Again, Beauty began to view the Neuroman in a somewhat different light.

  Jasmine saw she had her audience, and continued. “So one day there was an oil spill. The G.E.‘s—that’s the genetic engineers—spread their special germs all over the oil, and that was the disaster. The bacteria spread. Not just happy with one little oil slick. Spread on the water and started infecting oil-tankers, off-shore drilling sites, pipelines. Pretty soon there was an epidemic, and then a pandemic, and before you knew it, before anybody could find a good antibiotic, most all the oil and gas in the world were gone. The lights went out.

  “That’s how I remember my twenty-first birthday, candlelight and warm beer—the refrigerators went out, too. Well, power came back slowly, over the next ten years. Windmill generators were perfected, solar collectors, ocean-current turbines, storage batteries, geothermal units, fecal-methane converters, alcohol burners. By the time I finished medical school, the country was cooking again. That was the setting when I got into things—a couple of technological calamities lowered the pace, but they created a new interest in ingenious alternatives.

  “Sail ships thrived again, and neighborhoods. And horses. Everyone needed a horse again to get around. But there just weren’t enough at first, not for everyone, and horse farms couldn’t turn them out fast enough. That’s when cloning was really perfected—the G.E.‘s were given a task and they rose to it. Learned how to clone a horse in a laboratory to a full-size colt in thirty-five days. Well, you can imagine the assembly line. In two years everyone had a horse.”

  “What’s a Clone?” asked Josh.

  “Oh, dear. Well, cloning is a way of writing the proper code word into the gene-message in a single cell of some creature, so that the cell multiplies and grows into an exact replica of the original creature. This became very important later—oh, when I was about thirty. That’s when it became apparent that since the Oceanspring disaster, with all that ambient radiation, there were a lot of people who either couldn’t have babies, or could only have defective ones. A lot of people. So they said, well, if you can clone horses, you can clone people. Here they’d been screwed out of progeny by technology, and now they wanted to settle out of court. They wanted something of themselves to live on, like all creatures do. They wanted a piece of immortality. And suddenly now they were told: No children. I tell you, they were furious. They started having themselves cloned dextro and levo. Of course, the government tried to regulate it, two to a family and so on, but the rich kept making more and more, probably saw it as a way of producing cheap labor, and then the poor wanted clone subsidies, and then there were pirate operations, quasilegal clone agencies, and—well, you know.”

  They did not exactly know; but they got the flavor. Humans, making copies of themselves over and over. “Remarkable,” Beauty said quietly. Somewhere far far away, an animal howled, soft and searing as the memory of a scream. The three comrades looked up momentarily at the hidden entrance, then at each other.
Josh laughed to find himself—at least temporarily—less interested in events outside the cave than those inside Jasmine’s brain. Beauty answered with a comprehending smile.

  “Anyway,” Jasmine went on, “the reproductive system wasn’t the only one beginning to fail in people then. All that radiation was starting to take its toll, thirty years down the line. People were getting bowel cancers, lung cancers, leukemias, aplastic anemias. People were dying. Other animals, too, the radiation affected everyone. Something had to be done.

  “That’s when the subject of Neuromans came up.

  “See, every organ system was being induced to carcinogenic transformation by the long-term residual radiation, except the central nervous system. The good old brain and company.” She tapped her skull with forefinger. “So someone thought, well, why don’t we just replace everything else with artificial parts, just transplant the brain and nerves into a completely prosthetic, unbreakable, imaging body.

  “Well, I tell you, I heard that idea when I was thirty, and I spent the next ten years of my life, along with a lot of other people from a conglomerate of fields, working on the problem. Artificial hearts were easy—nuclear-powered Teflon hearts had been successfully transplanted into lower animals many times. Lungs were no big problem, the concept of membrane oxygenators had only to be miniaturized. Arms, legs, aluminum bones, modular circuitry; all conceptually and technologically rather simple.

  “Blood. Now there was a problem. How to create an artificial, long-lasting, oxygen-carrying fluid that … but you’re not interested in that kind of detail. Suffice it to say the problems were all solved. Time, it was felt, was crucial, so animal trials were abbreviated. Clinical experiments began with Humans. Dying Humans, of course. Volunteers, naturally. People with nothing to lose. The key, it turned out, was the community of genetic scholars, once more. They engineered another cell—a fungus, actually, a cousin to mucor mycosis—to virulently eat living Human tissue, all Human tissue except nervous tissue and supportive cells. A large inoculation of mucor could disintegrate a body in under a day.”

  “But who would volunteer for such torture? Is it not wiser to die young, with dignity, than to suffer such mutilation?” asked Beauty sincerely. “To be eaten alive by fungus?”

  Jasmine smiled. “7 volunteered. And I think, perhaps, you’re right. Still, I don’t know if I ever had enough dignity to match the three hundred years I’ve been given so far. In any case, I had malignant lymphoma, I had one year to live, so I volunteered. At least, I took one step forward, and all my associates took one step back. There hadn’t been any complete successes to that point, and experimental subjects were really still out on a limb. Anyway, I did it.

  “They put me to sleep, lowered my metabolism with drugs, and near froze me until I was peeking through Death’s cold keyhole. Then they lowered me into a hyperbaric tank of the newly invented blood solution, injected me with mucor and painted me with it as well. My body was a culture medium inside and out. In a day, I was nothing but a tuberous brain trailing the stalk and fine-branching filaments of my entire nervous system.

  “Then the reconstruction began. Direct osmosis of oxygen and glucose in the specially prepared bathing solution kept my brain and its cables alive, while round-the-clock operating teams microsurgically connected nerve to wire, nerve to transducer, wire to sensor. The basic life-saving operation took a week—connecting the heart, the lungs, and so on. The refinements—musculature, plastic skin, oral feeding apparatus, voice—took over a year. But I walked out of there a new woman. One of the early successful Neuromans.

  “Of course, there were some difficulties, some things to get used to. My sense of touch was inadequate, sometimes numb, sometimes painful. I couldn’t taste at all, though that hardly mattered, since all I could eat were simple sugars. My balance was miserable. Subsequent operations changed all that, naturally—we all benefited from refinements over the years, and many of my initial inadequacies were rectified. My diet was expanded, my senses made more sensitive. My eyes, for instance, became much more sophisticated than Human eyes—though I must say, the images were strange, and took some getting used to. My skin was much tougher. My heart was powered by a plutonium cell and would be pumping long after my brain was dead. And my brain, if it came to that, was perfused by a solution containing a congener of BHT, a preservative which was discovered way back in the 1960s to prolong the life of nerve cells: my brain would live to be a thousand, if the animal studies were accurate.

  “So there I was, wobbling like an infant. The first generation of a new race. Of course, I couldn’t have children. Couldn’t even be cloned, you can’t clone nerve cells. But there I was, there I was.”

  She closed her eyes, to better see the old tinted picture of who she had been. Beauty stared at her in mute admiration: her bravery, her cowardice, her agony. She opened her eyes. “Pity I can’t cry anymore,” she said. “Not a very useful function, I suppose, if you’re not Human.”

  Josh reached out and touched her hand, tenderly. It startled her out of reverie. “Naturally,” she said. “Naturally, it made a lot of people want the operation.

  Other centers began performing the surgery, but it was expensive and time-consuming, and even though it was refined over the years—much more sophisticated, more elegant models than I were made—it was finally abandoned. I think a couple thousand Neuromans were constructed eventually. I don’t know how many are left. Anyhow, that’s why Neuromans live so long.”

  The air was silent for a time. Outside, fault forest noises crept around the cave mouth, but didn’t come in. A spider soundlessly scurried up the wall, saw this was not the right tune, scurried back down into his crack.

  Josh said, “So when we found you …”

  “I was bleeding to death. Ordinarily I don’t need a refill of Hemolube but once every fifty, sixty years, unless my valve gets opened like that. I’ve got about five hundred cans buried away up and down the coast, though, in case I ever get caught short. It’s not made anymore, of course.”

  During the retelling of the story, Beauty had felt a certain gnawing, an undefinable malaise, unrelated to the story itself. He couldn’t grab hold of it, but it grew, or maybe just pressed; then every time he was about to get an inkling of it, it shifted. Now in the silence of the aftermath, he found it. “And from what isolated continent did Centaurs migrate here, that they were not yet involved in these grand designs?”

  Jasmine looked at Beauty with the soft, sad eyes of a reluctant parent about to tell her child where babies really come from. “It was a time,” she began, “of decadence. In its truest sense. Society was in decay. Events had occurred that made the Human race aware, fundamentally, of the proximity, the imminence of death. Radiation sickness was random and irrevocable. It was manifestly not possible to buy long life by being moral, or sensible, or productive, or even rich. Yet at the same time, some people, also by a seeming random combination of circumstances, were undergoing operations which, if successful—eighty percent died on the operating table, by the way—promised virtual immortality. Chance and circumstance and the moment were the legs of the tripod upon which society was balanced. Wasn’t that a tune,” she mused a moment, then went on.

  “The situation made it opportune for people to gamble and play, with death and life. Self-destruction, after all, is the best form of self-control, when control over your own life is not an alternative. So that was the way society went for a while. Suicide, violent crime, drug addiction soared. Creative suicide, especially—people paid huge sums of money to have their deaths orchestrated. National parks were set aside for war games—where people could go to kill each other, and not be a danger to people who wanted their decadence softcore. Opium dens and sex parlors multiplied. Funerary art became the high art form. Everyone dabbled in death, in life, and in fantasy.

  “The science of any age is always a manifestation of the fantasies of the age, and our science was no different. Genetic engineers were the executors of our social subcon
scious. Spurred on by successes in cloning, by their role in creating the Neuromans, they began truly to unlock the secrets of the genetic code.

  “They knew the alphabet of the genetic messages and by the middle of the twenty-first century of our calendar, they had mapped the order and meaning of every letter. Once it was discovered which genes said what, it was not difficult, using established methods, to splice genes from one animal with genes from another, and thereby create—a new animal.”

  Beauty’s eyes opened wide at the implication that teetered precariously above his head.

  “For example,” Jasmine continued in a somewhat slower voice, “it was possible to splice the genes coding for the head and torso of a Human with those coding for the torso and legs of a horse, in such a way that the resultant creature, after full embryonic development … was a Centaur.”