When hope is certain, doesn’t it become something else?
A mourner told me the victim had died from a rare form of leukemia. One of the types they still couldn’t do anything about. But the sort of thing, I assumed, Armistead would eliminate right at the gate.
After the service they drifted back to their cars. Some needed help; many were in tears. This, I thought, is part of what everyone calls our common heritage. It is what makes us human. It is how we achieve salvation, whatever that might be.
I stood watching the leaves swirl among the headstones. And a hand touched my arm. “Are you all right, Miss?”
It was the cleric. “Yes,” I said. “I think so.”
“Are you sure?” He was round-faced with deep-set gray eyes. Not much older than Hal. “I’m Father McMurtrie,” he said. “From St. Agnes.”
It had gotten cool. A gust of wind swirled around us. I told him my name and, when he offered his condolences, I explained I was a stranger. Had never met the deceased. Knew no one in the family.
“Really?” he said, and I saw that he’d concluded I was one of those deranged persons who get their entertainment from attending funerals.
So I explained why I was there, as best I could. As best I understood it myself. He listened and nodded and agreed that the decision was not an easy one. “I suspect,” he said, “that some of the protestors might take a different view if they were being offered a prolonged youth, instead of the next generation.” On the side away from the highway, the cemetery rose into low hills which in turn gave way to forest. He looked in that direction for a few moments. “Are you a Catholic?” he asked.
“I’m not even a believer, Father. Truth is, I don’t think there is a God.”
“I see.”
“I mean, if there really were somebody looking out for us, all these terrible things wouldn’t happen, would they?” I mentioned the accident I’d seen. And here was a young husband taken from his family. And every day the TV reported kids murdered by irritated boyfriends of the mother and sometimes by the mother herself. And all the tidal waves that were forever killing thousands in Bangladesh. And I threw in World War II and the Holocaust for good measure.
He turned his back to the wind. “So you’ve stumbled onto the great secret, have you?”
“I beg your pardon.”
“Think you’ve got hold of something the rest of us have missed.”
“I don’t understand, Father.”
He folded his arms and looked at the sky. It was slate. “You’re probably right. There certainly doesn’t seem to be anyone out there taking care of us. But that’s really old news, isn’t it?”
I was aghast. “Father, are you telling me you don’t believe in God?”
He looked around to be sure we were alone. “I think His lack of engagement is self-evident, don’t you?”
“I don’t understand—.”
“Of course, I wouldn’t be saying this to you if you were a Catholic. As things are, though, I can’t see that it does any harm. It’s a relief, from time to time, to be able to tell someone what I really think.”
“But you’re a priest.”
He nodded and his eyes were bright with an emotion I couldn’t identify. “Whether He’s there or not, Mrs. Cumberland, people need God. And if you’re correct, I’m as close as many of them are ever going to come to finding Him.”
“Oh.”
We looked at one another for a long time, and he dropped his eyes like a kid caught stealing chocolate.
“So,” I said, “where would the Church stand in all this? With regard to Project Sunrise, I mean.”
“Oh, we’d be against it.”
“I see.”
“We’re always more or less against things. Safety lies in maintaining the status quo, you know.” His eyes sparkled and I realized he was enjoying himself.
“Seriously,” I asked, “what would you do if it were your decision?”
“That’s quite a different question.”
“And your answer—?”
“You’re talking about a body that stays young and healthy. What about the mind?”
“They tell me that the child would be quite stable.”
“But will its mind continue to accept new ideas? Will it be flexible at eighty? Or at two hundred?”
“I didn’t think to ask.”
“Ask. It’s very important. I’d say this: if they can assure me that the child’s outlook would remain as young and energetic as its body, then I’d say yes without hesitation. Choose life.”
“You’re really certain, aren’t you?”
A frown worked its way into his eyes and he looked out toward the canopy, which was struggling against the wind. Cemetery workers had arrived and were preparing to lower the casket. “Mrs. Cumberland,” he said, “do you have any idea how many of these I’ve presided over? Or how many death beds I’ve visited? I’m tired of helping people leave this world. If there’s a way to bar the door, even temporarily, I’m for it.” And with that he touched his hat, told me he hoped he’d been of some help, wished me luck, and walked rapidly toward his car.
I was watching him drive away when I noticed a tall vaguely-familiar man in a dark suit studying a nearby tombstone. The method of the examination, the tilt of the body, the arms casually folded, the expression on the long face, told me his attention was really riveted elsewhere. When I started toward the Honda, his gaze followed me.
Plainfield.
He smiled, not unpleasantly. “Mrs. Marshall,” he said. “What a surprise to see you here.”
It was a bad moment. “I suspect the surprise is only on one side,” I said. I looked around to make sure the cemetery workers were within range.
He nodded and smiled. “You have found me out. I saw you at Biolab earlier this morning.”
And you followed me. My stomach began to churn.
“Please don’t be frightened,” he said. “I’m perfectly harmless. You can walk away any time you want, and you’ll never see me again. But I do wish you’d give me a minute.”
I started toward my car, which was parked about sixty yards away.
He made no move to follow.
So I stopped and turned back. “Mr. Plainfield,” I said, “I’m only one woman. Why bother me about this?”
“Dr. Plainfield,” he said.
“Pardon me?”
“Dr. Plainfield. My specialty is evolutionary biology.”
I shrugged, “Why me?” I asked again.
“We have to start somewhere. Someone must make a stand. Why not you?”
“What can I do that you can’t?”
“You’ll have a forum,” he said. “You can tell them what they need to hear.” The good humor disappeared and I saw judgment in those eyes. “Have you any idea what would happen if everyone behaved as you’re proposing to do?”
“I’ve no idea what you mean.”
“Have you made your decision?”
“What makes you think I was ever in doubt?”
“I’ve watched you for the last couple of hours. You are very much in doubt. May I ask why?”
I scrambled for a response. “They want too much—.” It was the wrong thing to say. It embarrassed me and I tried to call it back but once I’d started it was too late.
He appraised me and his eyes registered disapproval. “You’ve no philosophical position then, have you? Possibly a little later, when they run an end-of-year sale, you’ll be able to manage a better deal.”
“I think that’s uncalled for.”
“Yes,” he said. “You’re right.”
“Anyway, why do you need me to speak? You’re the expert. You tell them whatever the problem is.”
“They won’t listen to me. I’m just one more crank with a degree. But you. You’re in the position of having looked at their offer. You have much to gain. Yet you can see the dangers along that road. So you’ve turned back.
“Of course it does require you to turn back. The issue we n
eed to put before the public, Mrs. Marshall, is quite simpler: Sunrise is the end of human development. The end of progress. We are going to turn our world over to a few power brokers, those who know how to maintain and extend their influence. The only protection we’ve had against these kinds of people is the course of nature. In time they die, Mrs. Marshall. But that is going to stop. Now they will go on and on, accumulating wealth, oppressing those who are less ruthless, and there will be no end to their reigns. The flow of new human beings, of new ideas, will cease. Even art will die.
“Death, whether we like to admit it or not, serves a real purpose: it helps erase old hatreds, heal old wounds. It clears the board for progress. It gets rid of the debris. Imagine a world in which almost no one had been born since, say, the sixteenth century. And those people, the popes, Henry VIII, Philip of Spain, imagine they were all here, and still running things. That is the world you propose to create.” He pushed his hands into his pockets and glanced toward the cemetery workers. The coffin had now disappeared into the ground and they’d begun shovelling earth in on top of it.
“It doesn’t have to be that way,” I said.
“Have to? Perhaps not. But it will be. Human nature will take charge. All the things that make life worth having will disintegrate. There’ll be no families, because there’ll be no children. Love as we understand it will become a poor thing; its most noble expression will be reduced to hollow acts of self-gratification.”
“I really must be going,” I said.
“What’s your first name?” he asked. “Mrs. Marshall is so formal.”
“Catherine,”
“Catherine. A good Christian name. Are you a Christian?”
“Yes,” I lied.
“I’m not. We live in a mechanical universe, Catherine. It doesn’t care about us, one way or the other. So we need to be very careful. If we violate the rules, it will take its price. We do not occupy a special place; we have no protection.”
It sounded like my conversation with Father McMurtrie. But I’d switched sides. “I know,” I said, looking at my watch. “I’m late, Dr. Plainfield. I have to go.”
“The problem is, nobody cares. Except a few crazies, right? It’s all too far in the future.” I was off and moving quickly across the curve of the lawn.
“We’ll all be dead in the water,” he said, his words blown about my ears by the wind. “Unless you do something.”
He was still standing in the same place, framed against the tombstones, when I drove off.
I proceeded to get lost in the cemetery. I’d never been there before and there was a series of curving roads, all looking the same. I drove in circles for several minutes, and at one point passed the canopy again, which the two workers were taking down. The casket was gone. As was Plainfield.
I pulled out onto Wildberry Avenue, turned left, and started home.
I thought about heads rolling around the Tower of London and crusades setting out for the Middle East. I thought about how it had been to know that the next boy to come into my life might be the one. I thought of the innocence and the passion of being seventeen and in love for the very first time and wondered how such things would be possible in the Sunrise world.
The sudden blare of an airhorn caught my attention: I was halfway across Garden Avenue, sailing through a red light, and watching a tractor-trailer bear down from the left. The driver’s face twisted with horror.
It was one of those moments that freezes, where the whole world squeezes down to a single piece of reality, to a little bulldog ornament atop the hood of that oncoming truck.
Then time resumed its flow, and I jammed down on the gas, stomped the pedal through the floor. Brakes screeched, and the street rolled overhead, the air bag exploded in my face, and my lights-went out.
I woke up in a bed at Mercy Hospital with a broken arm, a lot of cuts and bruises, and several traffic citations. The truck driver, they told me, was okay. Not happy, but okay.
Hal shook his head and lectured me about being more careful. I described how the day had gone, and he said he’d assumed something like that had happened.
“Are you any closer to making up your mind how you feel?” he asked.
“Yes,” I said. “Absolutely.”
“You’re ahead of me.”
“I’d like to go for it, Hal. Give our kid a chance at the centuries.”
“I thought you’d come down on that side,” he said. “Was it the priest?”
“No. I don’t think so.”
“What then?”
I wanted to smile but I was swollen and the effort hurt. “I think I realized what I wanted when I looked up and saw the driver’s face.”
“His face!”
I replayed the moment. “It was contorted, like he knew he’d killed me. So I thought I was dead too.” I looked at him and realized how much I loved him. “There’s no advantage in being dead. Life is very sweet, and I can’t see anything either inspiring or dignified about dying. If we can beat it, I say we go ahead. And do it any way we can.”
Hal reached over and took my hand. “But the truth is,” he said, “the looney, this guy Plainfield, has a point. Without new people getting born on a regular basis, we will become static. We will decay.”
It was early evening. The sunlight was fading in the window. I looked at it for a moment. “Yeah, Hal. Maybe we will. But I think we’ve gotten so used to dying we think that’s part of what it means to be human. I say we take over for the DNA and try it the other way for a change. See what happens.”
HENRY JAMES,
THIS ONE’S FOR YOU
It came in over the transom, like a couple hundred other manuscripts each week, memoirs of people nobody ever heard of, novels that start with weather reports and introduce thirty characters in the first two pages, massive collections of unreadable poetry from someone’s grandmother.
They all go into a stack for the screeners, who look through them, attach our form rejection, and send them back.
Actually there’s only one screener. Her name is Myra Crispee. She has one green eye and one blue eye, and a talent for going through the slush pile. She picks out the occasional possibility and gets rid of the rest. Every day. Love my job, she says. When I ask her why, she says it’s because I pay her the big bucks.
Tempus Publishing isn’t a major outfit, but we do okay. We don’t specialize. Tempus will publish anything that looks as if it’ll make money. But most of the manuscripts we see have already made the rounds at Random House, HarperCollins, and the other biggies. Some come in from an agent, but that has no effect on the way we treat them. Unless we know the author, they all go into the pile.
Sometimes we get lucky. We published a couple of self-help books last year that did extremely well, and a novel about Noah’s ark that became a runaway bestseller.
Anyhow, the day it arrived was cold and wet. The heating system had gone down again so I was wrapped in a sweater. I’d just opened the office and had turned on the coffee when Myra came in, carrying an umbrella and a manuscript. That was unusual. She doesn’t usually take these things home. “Hey, Jerry,” she said, “I think we’ve got a winner.”
“Really?”
She was beaming. “Yes. I was up half the night with it.” She trooped over to her desk and sat down in front of what I thought was a second manuscript, but which turned out to be the rest of the submission.
“My God,” I said, “that looks like a thousand pages.”
She peeked at the end. “Twelve hundred and twelve. I’ve only read a few chapters, but if the rest of it is like what I’ve seen—.”
“That good, huh?”
“I couldn’t put it down.” The magic words. We seldom saw anything that wasn’t easy to walk away from. She leafed through the pages. “Incredible,” she said. “Who is this guy?”
“What is it?” I asked.
“He calls it The Long War. It’s about the war in the Middle East.”
“Which one?”
&nbs
p; “How many are we involved in? I didn’t see the news this morning.”
“It’s been done,” I said.
“Not like this, boss.” She was still turning pages.
“Who’s it by?”
“Guy named Patterson.” She shook her head. “Edward Patterson. Ever hear of him?”
He was a stranger to me. “What’s the cover letter say?”
She needed a minute to find it. “‘Novel enclosed.’”
“That’s all?”
“That’s it.”
We used to have a screener’s box where she could deposit manuscripts that were potentially publishable. We dispensed with it because Myra rarely put anything in it. So she just brought the manuscript over and laid it on a side table. Then she walked back to her desk, pulled the next submission off the pile, and began turning pages. But I knew she was really waiting for me. Wanted me to pick up The Long War. “I’ll look at it before I go home,” I said.
She continued turning pages, sighed, and touched her keyboard. The printer kicked out a fresh rejection. “Okay,” she said.
I was working on Make Straight the Path, an inspirational book by Adam Trent. It was pious and reassuring, loaded with anecdotes showing how the unbelievers get theirs. You wouldn’t believe how his other books had sold. Penguin would have loved to have him.
I stayed with it, resisting the temptation to look at Patterson’s epic. It resembled an epic. The manuscript obscured a coffee stain half a foot above the table. That made it official.
Now, lest you think I’m one of those editors who only cares how many copies can be moved, let me tell you that, while sales figures matter, it’s always been my ambition to discover a new writer. Well, okay, all editors feel that way. But that’s because we’re generous and compassionate. So when Myra got up and headed for the washroom, I took a look.
Patterson lived in New Hampshire.
I lifted the cover page and glanced at the opening lines. That night I hauled it down in the elevator, the whole twelve hundred pages, and took it home.
I read it on the train. Read during dinner at Milo’s. Read through the evening and took it to bed. In the summer of 2001, I went to the Army recruiting office with the young college student hero and cringed while he joined the Reserves. I rode with the UN inspectors while they played tag with Iraqi “escorts” and tried to surprise their hosts at suspect facilities. I sat in the councils of the president while his aides urged an attack on Saddam and constructed arguments they hoped the UN and the voters would buy.
Cryptic - The Best Short Fiction of Jack McDevitt Page 58