Behind the Eyes of Dreamers (18 page)

She had been in her fifties when the techniques for extended life became available. The treatment had seemed simple enough; it consisted of shots which would remove the collagen formed by the cross-linkage of proteins and thus halt or retard the physical manifestations of aging. Even this technique, which could make one no younger but only keep one from aging as rapidly, had created controversy, raising the specter of millions of old citizens lingering past their time. Many chose to die anyway. Others had themselves frozen cryonically after death, hoping they would be revived when medical science could heal them and make them live forever. Cryonics became big business. Some concerns were legitimate. Many were fraudulent, consigning their customers to an expensive, cold, permanent death.

Josepha, retired but in need of extra money, became a maintenance worker for a cryonic interment service. She walked among the stacks of frozen dead, peering at dials. By chance, she found that several of her fellow workers dealt illegally in anticollagen shots, selling them to people under the mandatory age of sixty-five for recipients. Knowing that penalties for selling the shots were severe, she was too frightened to become a pusher. But she bought a few shots.

Soon after, work on the mechanisms which caused cancers to multiply, along with genetic research, had yielded a way of restoring youth. Research papers had been presented tentatively; most people had waited cautiously, until at last impatience outran caution and the world entered the Transition in bits and pieces, one country after another.

There were failures, although few wanted to remember them now; people who were victims of virulent cancers, those who could not be made younger, a few who grew younger and then died suddenly. Some theorized that the mechanisms of death could not be held in check forever; that in the future, death might come rapidly and wipe out millions. Testing the new technique thoroughly would have taken hundreds of years, and people would not go on living and dying while potential immortals were being sustained in their midst.

Everyone knew about the Transition, the upheavals, the collapsing governments, the deaths, the demands. There were some facts not fully known, that were still strangely absent from computer banks and information centers; exact figures on suicides, records of how many were killed by the treatments themselves, who the first subjects had been and what had happened to them. Josepha had searched, and found only unpleasant hints; one small town with a thirty percent mortality rate after treatment, prisoner-subjects who had mysteriously disappeared, an increase in “accidental” deaths. She had lived through it, surviving a bullet wound as a bystander at a demonstration of older citizens, hiding out in a small out-of-the-way village, and yet any present-day historian knew more than she could remember. She suspected that the only people who knew almost everything were a few old biologists and any political leaders who were still alive.

In her nineties, half-blinded by cataracts, hands distorted into claws by arthritis, Josepha had at last been treated and begun her extended life. She had survived Peter Beaulieu, her first husband, and Gene Kolodny, her second. She had outlived her brother and her parents and her few close friends. And until now, she often thought, she had done little to justify that survival.

She could not accept that so many had died for the world as it was now. The vigor and liveliness had gone out of human life, or so it seemed. Perhaps those who would have provided it were gone and the meek had inherited the Earth after all.

But she could change. She was changing. Either the death cultists were right and their lives were meaningless or their extended lives were an opportunity which must be seized. She recalled her own near-death and the promise of another life; even that possibility did not change things. She had to earn that life, if there was such a thing, with a meaningful life here, and if there was no other life, then this one was all she had.

More than three hundred years to discover that—it was absurd. There were no more excuses for failure, which explained the suicides and death cults at least in part. Merripen’s project would force the issue. She remembered how his enthusiasm for his dream had been conveyed to her during their first discussion, in spite of her doubts. She thought: maybe most of us are slow learners, that’s all, well, we’ll learn or be supplanted.

She refused to think of another possibility; that the world might not accept the children, that any future beyond the present was unthinkable.

Josepha arrived at the village where the parents and children were to live a month after her visit with Merripen. Three houses, resembling chalets, stood on one side of a clearing. Four others, with enclosed front porches, sat almost two hundred meters away on the other side of the clearing. Behind them, on a hill, she saw a red brick structure which was large enough for several people.

A bulldozer, a heavy lumbering metallic beast, excavated land doggedly while two men watched. She assumed that the two were involved in the project, although they might be only curious bystanders.

Josepha walked through the clearing, which would be transformed into a park. A tall African man stood on the porch of one house, his back to her. She saw no one else. She came to a stone path and followed it, passing the unoccupied houses. Each was surrounded by a plot of ground which would become a garden. The park would eventually contain two large buildings; a hall where everyone could gather for meals, recreation, or meetings, and a hostel for the children. One part of the recreation hall would be used as a school.

The path ended at a low stone wall. Josepha stood in front of an open metal gate and looked past a small courtyard at a two-story stone house. She approached the gray structure and peered through a window. She saw sturdy walls instead of movable panels, a stairway instead of a ramp, and decided this was where she would live. The house was too large for only one parent and child, but she could find someone to share it with her.

She heard footsteps and turned. The tall African man stood at the gate. He adjusted his gold-trimmed blue robe and bowed slightly. She returned the bow and moved toward him, stopping about half a meter away. His black hair was short and his beard closely trimmed. “Chane Maggio,” he said in a deep voice as he extended his right hand.

She was puzzled, startled by the lack of ceremony. She suddenly realized that he was telling her his name. He continued to hold out his hand and at last she took it, shook hands, and released it. “I’m Josepha Ryba.”

“You are startled by my informality.” He folded his slender arms over his chest. “Perhaps I am being rude, but we have little time to become acquainted, only a few months before gestation begins and then only nine months to the birth of the children. I am afraid we cannot stand on ceremony in our salutations.”

She smiled. “How long have you been here?”

“I arrived this morning. I believe we are the only prospective parents here.” He offered his arm and she took it. They began to amble along the stone path.

She sensed that Chane Maggio remembered the Transition. She was not sure how she knew; perhaps it was the informality of his greeting, the sense of contingency in his voice, or his silence now as they strolled. Younger people always wanted to fill the silences with words or games or actions of some kind. The Transition was only history to them. To Josepha, and those like herself, it would forever be the most important time of their lives, however long they lived. It had made them survivors with the guilt of survivors. The simplest sensation meant both more and less to them than to those born later. Josepha, acutely conscious of Chane’s arm, the clatter of their sandals on the stones, the warm breeze which brushed her hair, remembered that she was alive and that others were not and that she was somehow coarsened by this. A younger person, caught in the timeless present, would accept the sensations for themselves.

“This venture promises to be most interesting,” Chane said softly in his deep voice. “I have raised children before—I had a son and daughter long ago—a rewarding task, watching a child grow, trying to—” He paused.

Josepha waited, not wanting to be rude by interrupting. “There are problems, of course,” he continued, and she caught an undercurrent of bitterness and disappointment. “There is always the unexpected.” His voice changed again, becoming lighter and more casual. “They live on Asgard now, at least they did fifty years ago. They claim it’s too dangerous to live here.”

“I once wanted to visit a space community,” Josepha said. “For years I kept intending to go, but I never did.”

“More people live in space than on Earth, but of course you know that.”

“I didn’t know.”

Chane raised an eyebrow. “I was a statistician for many years. There are approximately two billion people on Earth and almost twice as many in space.”

“That many,” Josepha murmured, inwardly chastising herself for not knowing. She could have asked her Bond.

“Of course, there has been a small but noticeable decline in the population.” The man paused again, having strayed too near an unpleasant topic. “Tell me,” he went on, “did you ever make pottery? I believe I own a vase you made, it was a gift from a friend.”

“That was a long time ago. I had a shop with a friend, Hisa Onoda. Hisa made jewelry and I did pottery, that was a little while after the Transition, when we all still had to credit purchases to our accounts.”

“This was later, after accounts.”

“Well, we stayed in business after that just for our amusement. We’d trade our items for things we liked, paintings, sculptures, but the Whatfor finally ruined it for us. We refused to duplicate anything we made, but others duped the items anyway.”

“Even so,” he said, “what is important about a thing is its beauty or utility, not its scarcity.”

“I know that,” she replied. “I don’t think Hisa understood it, though. She’d always made jewelry, things like that. It was important to her that each item be unique, she used to tell me that everything she made was only for a certain individual, was right for that person and wrong for anyone else. Sometimes she would refuse to sell a particular object to a customer, she would insist that he look at something else. What’s strange is that the customer would always like the item she would pick out more.” An image of Hisa’s small body crossed her mind: Hisa in her sunken tub, wrists slashed, lips pale, red blood in swirls on the water, her Bond detached and resting helplessly on the floor.
Too late.
Josepha quickly buried the image. “I’d been a salesperson before the Transition, but Hisa made it an art.”

“I was a politician,” Chane said. He stopped walking and released her arm. “Does that startle you?”

She thought: what must you have done? She did not reply; she could not judge him.

“I was fortunate. I survived because I saw clearly where things were going and knew when to relinquish my power and wait. I saw that those in power could not hold the tide back indefinitely, and that those who tried to hang on would suffer—as they did.”

She listened, only too conscious of her own past sins of omission. She had heard the stories of powerful people who had gained access to the treatments, then given up their positions to go into hiding. Not all had survived. Others had kept their power, many hoping to restrict the gift of extended life to themselves. Both groups bore responsibility for the collapse of civil order at the beginning of the Transition.

“I have changed,” he was saying. “I have little interest in such things now.” She nodded, almost hearing his unspoken challenge: would it be better if I had died?

The mood of their meeting had been destroyed. Chane bowed, murmured a few courteous phrases, and departed.

The other parents had arrived, one at a time, for the past few months. Construction was finished; the machines had moved to a nearby lake, where three lodges would be built.

Josepha, unused to groups, had grown more reticent. She was quiet at the frequent parties for the thirty prospective parents and at the meetings with the biologists and psychologists who lived nearby. The parties were usually formal; word games were played, objects and sensations were exhaustively described or put into short poems in various languages by the literarily gifted. Direct questions were never asked.

Most of the villagers had remained only names to her. She saw Chane Maggio fairly often, although even he seemed more reserved. Wanting to know more about her companions, she had resorted to the public records in her computer.

She had discovered what she had suspected; most of them were veterans of the Transition. Had Merripen wanted older people, or were older people the only ones willing to volunteer for the project?

Her other discoveries were more intimidating. She reviewed them now as she sat in her living room knitting a sleeve for a sweater. The villagers included Amarisa Drew, who had been both an agronomist and a well-known athlete, Dawud al-Ahmad, former poet and chief engineer of the Asgard life support systems, and Chen Li Hua, a clothing designer and geologist.

She looked up from the blue wool and saw Merripen Allen entering her courtyard. She called to him, telling him to enter. Her door slid open; Merripen stamped his feet in the small foyer, then entered the living room.

He settled in a high-backed gray chair in the corner across from her. “What can I do for you?” she asked.

“I’ve been visiting each person here individually, I want to be sure there aren’t any problems and that everybody’s settling in. I hope you’ll all start loosening up soon, get to know each other better.”