The Crystal Child (33 page)

Aaron assumed an amused smile.  “Perhaps you’ve noticed.  I’m living rather comfortably these days.  I have no need of money.  Besides, no test would mean anything unless you could bring me back with you and put me on public display.  I’m the living proof you need for any conclusions you might draw.  Isn’t that so?”

“Yes, that’s true.”

“You see, Kevin, if all you wanted was the truth, we might be able to agree on something.  If you were willing to spend some time, become my student …”

Forrester flinched.  “Your student?”  At his side he felt Julia tug at his trouser leg.  He settled back.

“Yes, my student,” Aaron continued coolly.  “I could teach you quite a bit.  A lot of it would be hard for you to accept at first.   An entirely new system of healing, a new image of the body and its potentialities.  But it wouldn’t be the sort of knowledge you could lay before the scientific world.  And that’s probably where we part company.  You want to publicize what you know.  You want to go into print, hold press conferences, tell the world, win prizes.  I can’t agree to that.  I have no interest in the world, not in your world at least.”

“I don’t think there’s anything — certainly anything about the body — that can’t be explained scientifically.  Just give me the chance.”

There was a long silence.  Beside him, Forrester noticed Julia shifting uncomfortably.  He heard her say, “Aaron … Aaron … don’t.”  But Aaron was ignoring her.

Finally he spoke again. “Come over here, Kevin. Let me show you something.”  He was holding a silver letter opener he had picked up from the desk.  The instrument had a long, wicked-looking blade.  With his eyes held steadily on Forrester, he placed the point of the blade against his wrist and then pressed it until it entered his flesh.  Blood welled up where he had made the wound, ran in tiny streams down his arm and began to form a pool on the desk.

“Jesus!” Forrester shouted. “Stop that!” Instinctively he reached out to prevent Aaron from doing himself harm.  He knew there was an artery where the point of the letter opener had penetrated the boy’s wrist.  Aaron drew back out of his reach and pressed harder, driving the blade in deeper until its point showed on the other side of his wrist.  With one last thrust, he forced several inches of the blade through his extended arm.  His eyes had not stopped being fixed on Forrester.

Forrester reached out again, but before he could touch Aaron, the bleeding had ceased.  Then, slowly, Aaron, who had betrayed not a hint of pain, drew the blood-stained blade back out of his arm.  He held his wrist out for Forrester to examine.  There was no wound, not even a bruise.  Forrester looked into Aaron’s face, finding nothing there but calm, then ran his hand over the boy’s skin.  It was smooth and whole, a peculiarly slick, almost glassy surface, cool to the touch.  “What is this?” he asked angrily.  “A sleight-of-hand trick?”  He turned to look at Julia.  She was standing now before the sofa.  Her expression was one of disgust.  She crossed her arms across her chest as if she were trying to keep warm. Under Forrester’s furious gaze, a guilty shadow crossed her face.  She swallowed hard and turned her eyes away.

“No tricks,” Aaron said.  He had taken out a handkerchief and was sopping up the small pool of blood on the desk.  “I stopped bleeding because I wanted to.  If there were an infection, I could have stopped that too.  As for the healing you see, that’s nothing more than minor tissue regeneration.”

“It’s a stupid trick,” Forrester insisted.  “A carnival act.”

“Seeing is believing, isn’t it?” Aaron replied.  “You can’t be that surprised.  There are people in your laboratory working on regeneration.  They think they can transfer it from other species to the human genome.  It can be done that way; one day, they’ll manage to do it.  But they’re going at it the wrong way.  Tell me, Kevin, what else in nature can repair itself, as if it were programmed to preserve its integrity?”

Forrester felt too perturbed to try answering.  “You tell me.”

Aaron held out his hand, opened it, and dropped something on the desk.  A small shiny object that at once threw off splinters of colored light.  “A crystal.  Isn’t that so?  Crystals hold their form tenaciously.  Imagine a crystal maturing at a very high velocity, speeding through time.  Damage it and it will reconstitute itself almost at once.”

“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” Forrester snapped.  “We aren’t made of crystal.”

Aaron mimicked amazement.  “Kevin, DNA is a crystal.”

Forrester made a pained face.  “Look, I grant you that DNA can be crystallized.  But it’s quite a bit more complex than any crystalline mineral.”

“Of course.  Because it has evolved very nearly as far as it can.  Crystals evolve like living organisms.  They adapt, they reproduce themselves.  Probably the first crystals were simple box-like structures. Now their variety rivals organic nature.  You’re familiar with the theory that the first DNA molecules patterned themselves on clay crystals.  Think of the desmids and the diatoms, the most primitive forms of cellular life.  Crystalline, all of them.  And the viruses too — barely alive, and yet so powerful, so durable.  Your fellow geneticists could never have discovered the structure of DNA if they hadn’t imagined that it was crystalline and could be x-rayed.  Of course, I grant you: DNA is an inferior crystal, which makes it difficult to recognize greater potentialities.”

“I don’t know what you mean by ‘inferior’.”

“As measured by its life capacity.  It can shelter life, but only for a limited time — several decades.  Like a house built of straw. Then it begins to deteriorate.”

Forrester wagged his head as if he were hearing hopeless nonsense.  “Well, I guess it’s the best Mother Nature can do.”

“Oh, no,” Aaron protested.  “Hardly.  The tragedy was to deviate in a direction that made sexual reproduction necessary.  I don’t know why that happened; it’s part of a story I haven’t been privileged to learn.  True crystal transcends that need.”  He leaned forward, eager now to draw Forrester in.   “You know, Kevin, one day, when all the galaxies have drifted away into the darkness, when life on Earth has passed into extinction, the sun will become a crystal, a burning diamond.  And that crystal will sing.  It will sound with the music I can hear inside me now.  How do I know this?  Because I’ve reached the place where that knowledge unfolds.  It’s an adaptation whose time has not yet come  But it will.  Perhaps not on this Earth, but somewhere.  When life needs it, it will be there in the same way that eyes emerged to see the light and intelligence emerged to explore the realm of ideas.  Cling to that idea, Kevin.  The richest idea in science.  We adapt.  We grow into the far reaches of nature.  The trouble is: scientists like yourself have never grasped our need to adapt
upward
, to a higher purpose, something greater and grander than physical survival.”

Forrester gave a petulant shake of the head.  “Where is this getting us, Aaron?  I didn’t come here to hear a lecture on quack biology.”

Aaron let out a small, weary groan.  “Kevin, Kevin.  You wanted to know how I managed to close up this wound, didn’t you?  The only way I can explain that is to invite you to step beyond the limits of your fondest assumptions.  The truth is there waiting to be found, man.  Just dare to take the next step.  Look at this marvelous thing we are — a structured, symmetrical being.  Matter shaped by beauty.  We’re living crystals,  crystals that have evolved beyond inorganic bondage.  But you have to open yourself to the symbolism of the crystal; you have to see it as something more than a mineral.  The crystal is embodied light, the matrix where life and light meet, the light descending, life ascending.  This whole story is buried inside us, in the depths of our chemistry, this ancient memory.  Start there and you’ll find the secret of regeneration, of longevity, of transcendence.  I’d offer you a demonstration, but frankly, if you won’t believe the evidence of your senses …”

Aaron had begun to sound like a preacher in his pulpit.  Forrester turned to look at Julia, a mute plea for help. 
What am I to do?
his eyes pleaded.  She gave him a blank stare that neither confirmed nor denied what Aaron had said.  “What would you say if I were to tell you,” Aaron continued, “that one day everybody will have outlived pain and infection just as they’ll know how to regenerate lost parts?  If you were willing to learn, Kevin, I could teach you how to get there sooner, as I have.  It wouldn’t be easy, but I believe you could learn.  It’s an evolutionary capacity that’s there, inside of you.  I could wake it up.  I even know where it’s located, someplace we once discussed.”

Forrester was too confused to know if he wished to go on with the meeting.  Aaron was toying with him.  He resented that, but if he walked out now, he was a long way from home.  “What do you mean?”

“Remember once when I asked you about junk DNA?  We argued about that.  I said it was presumptuous of you and your colleagues to relegate so much of our genetic inheritance to the rubbish heap simply because you can’t understand it.  It’s like the barbarians burning all the books they couldn’t read.  As you well know, some of that so-called junk is what remains of the many evolutionary paths our species didn’t take.  Genetic fossils you might say.  A few million years ago, human beings gave up most of their mammalian sense of smell, but you can still find the remnants of hundreds of scent genes in the human genome — barely recognizable, but still there like the discarded version of a story lying at the bottom of a waste basket.  There are amphibians and crustaceans that can regenerate lost parts.  That’s another capacity humans gave up; but remnants of the genes that made that possible are still with us, if you know where to look.”  Aaron leaned forward across the desk, his face now fully lit by the lamp. There was an unearthly glow to his complexion as if he were lit from within. “Have you never considered the possibility that those genes can be salvaged and rebuilt by other genes you haven’t yet learned to read?”  He paused to register Forrester’s skeptical expression, smiled, and shrugged.  “As fanciful as all this may seem, Kevin, that’s only the beginning.”

“Oh?  And what’s to follow?”

“Exploring the other kind of junk, the capacities that haven’t yet announced their presence in any living species.  Why?  Because so-called junk DNA only goes to work after a certain age.  Humans haven’t lived long enough to see these possibilities triggered.  Legends, folklore, myths — that’s all we know about the later transformations of life.  We think of them as the powers of the gods.”

Forrester asked, “You believe you’re superhuman?”

“No.  Just superold, in the same way all human beings will be superold one day.”

“How old?  The records say you’re twelve.”

“Just turned thirteen, actually, by the calendar.  But you know that’s not correct.  In fact, that’s what irritates you so much about me.  You find it impossible to accept me as a normal …”  He paused, then tossed off, “Well, say, a normal three-hundred-year-old.  Don’t quote me on that age.  Beyond a certain point, I’m not sure how to express age.  Perhaps you could use my DNA to work out the potential developmental agenda of the body, all the attributes that are waiting to be realized but which never will be in most people.  Think of it this way.  Is a butterfly simply an elderly caterpillar?  Or is it a wholly different creature?  That would be a new way of calculating age.”

Trying to work off his frustration, Forrester rose and paced back and forth a few times.  The room was cool, but he felt his shirt sticking to him.  “This isn’t getting us anywhere.”

“Don’t you think so?” Aaron asked.  “I’ve actually told you quite a lot, though I’m not sure you’re listening.  Or if you are, you’re not understanding.”  He fell into a reflective silence.  His hand moved across the desk and picked up the blood-stained handkerchief that lay on the desk.  He carefully folded the cloth and slipped it into an envelope.  “You wanted a specimen.  Take this, if you wish.”

Forrester was irked to have the envelope presented to him like a handout tossed into a beggar’s cup. “Thanks,” he said sarcastically.  “I’ll take any crumb I can get.”

“It’s not a crumb,” Aaron said, a note of authentic pity in his voice.  “It’s solid intellectual gold.  But you may not be the man to recognize that.  Did you read that story I passed along to you?”

Forrester took a moment to focus on the question. 
Story?  What story?
  Then he remembered.  “I didn’t get much out of it,” he said dismissively.

“That’s too bad,” Aaron said, rather too smugly.  “It might tell you all you need to know.”

“Sorry.  Not to my taste,” Forrester said gruffly.  “I didn’t come here to do a short course in comparative mythology.”

“Narcissus beside the pond,” Aaron went on as if Forrester had asked him to say more.  “It’s a famous moment.  A moment out of time, as with all myths.  The beautiful young man sees himself reflected in the water and falls in love with his own image.  What are we to make of that?”  Forrester dropped his head in impatient boredom.  “There’s a variation on the tale that you may find interesting,” Aaron continued.  “Narcissus becomes so enamored of himself that he reaches down to embrace the image he sees below him and falls into the water.  In the myths, water is the symbol of materiality: the feminine, the womb, the flesh.  Narcissus falls into the world of mortality.  The light falls into the darkness.  We lose our pristine nature, our perfection.  Or rather we lose touch with that perfection.  The greatest of sacrifices.  We forget.  But it remains in us, a spark, an ember.  That’s what your science can’t seem to grasp about me, Kevin.”

“I wish you’d stop calling it ‘my’ science,” Forrester muttered.  “It isn’t ‘my science.’  The things we can verify and measure and prove by experiment belong to everybody.  Shared knowledge, that’s what science means to me.  If you believe I can’t throw in with esoteric mumbo-jumbo, you’re right.  I won’t apologize for that.”

“And I shouldn’t expect you to,” Aaron said, but with a note of pity in his voice. “But I work from experience just as you do.  What I find written in my flesh and bone is as real as any laboratory experiment.  In any case, everything about the origin and history of the body is lost in time.  We can only make assumptions.  You assume we’ve worked our way up from inert nature, from dead chemicals, from the brute animals toward higher intelligence.  But I know that’s exactly wrong.  We were once as perfect as Narcissus.  Creatures of light.  We descended into this physical body.  Descended, fell, blundered.  And that makes all the difference — where we started, where we’ll finish.”