Ark (32 page)

Dead people, cute threatened animals! For the time being at least, the news media forgot all about Henry’s crimes against evolution. Besides, there were no pictures, there were no quotes, there was no proof of Bear’s allegations, and as far as anyone knew, Henry was a figment of the world’s imagination. Nothing was happening, there was nothing to report, so how could you make this interesting, let alone exciting, for more than a day or two? On the other hand, the stranded penguins, being swept toward certain destruction as their melting icebergs approached the Tropic of Capricorn, touched millions of hearts. Rescue missions were proposed. Donations flowed. Cascades of fish and several veterinarians and many journalists were dropped from chartered airplanes. Ships steamed at high speed toward the floes, hoping to intercept them and save the penguins before they were destroyed by the sun and warm water, and tow them back to Antarctica.

~ * ~

2

IT WAS EARLY EVENING WHEN
the phone rang, the wrong time of day for Henry to call, but when I switched on the videophone, his image appeared. He looked restored, somehow—happy, even relaxed. Stifling the impulse to ask where he had been and why he had been there, I told him about Ng Fred’s call.

“He told me to give you the message before I said hello. Hello.”

Henry’s image nodded. Message received. Footnote understood.

His voice said, “Hello. Would it be convenient for me to come over for dinner?”

He was in New York? I told him to come over.

It was a rush—several different kinds of rush—to open the door and see the original Henry standing there in his customary Nikes and jeans and untucked T-shirt and Yankees cap instead of the bespoke suit and tie and burnished shoes he had been wearing the last time I saw him. Had he been anyone else, I would have kissed him. Apart from that brief waltz when the earthquake rattled Manhattan and one other quick touch of the hand, Henry and I had never touched each other’s skin. We hadn’t even shaken hands on first meeting. We had conceived children without touching each other. What Henry’s own impulses in this department were, supposing he had any, I could not guess. He seemed glad to see me, but looked at me, I thought, as if he knew me only from a photograph and was measuring the reality against the image.

The conversation was slow at the outset—nonexistent, in fact. I thought Henry wanted to say something, but what? His hand lay on the tablecloth. To my own surprise, I reached across the space between us and touched it with a fingertip. I applied a little pressure, whitening the skin. He didn’t seem to notice.

I thought,
Wake up.
I said, “What about the news from Milan? Where are our children?”

He didn’t seem to be startled by the question. “They’re safe,” he said. “They’re healthy.”

“They’re still on Earth?”

“Yes. In Milan.”

“How many are they?”

“Just two,” Henry said. “A boy and a girl.”

“Were there others?”

“Yes, several. They weren’t viable.”

“You mean they weren’t the kind that can be enhanced?”

“No. Enhancement was never considered in their case.”

“Why not?” I asked.

“Because by then there was no more enhancement.”

“No more enhancement. You didn’t tell me that.”

A silence. I said, “Why?”

“Bad manners,” Henry replied. “Reluctance to admit such a big mistake.”

“What changed your mind about enhancement?”

“Two things,” Henry said. “Your moral disgust over the idea, and the sudden realization that two of the embryos were our own flesh and blood, yours and mine. I came face to face with the personal. I had to admit to myself that I wanted them to be like us, not wake up after a sleep of a thousand years as something else. Objectivity went out the window. Emotion ruled.”

“That took you by surprise?”

Henry paused before he answered. It wasn’t one of those mental disappearances of his that made you think he was going to step out of this world like a visitor from a parallel universe who suddenly remembers that he has an urgent appointment back home.

At last he said, “No. I just understood that I was wrong. Apart from everything else, it made me realize that time was getting away from me.”

I said, “Time is getting away from everybody.”

Before I could say more, Henry held up an arresting hand. He then looked into my eyes and said what he had come to say. He was perfectly composed. There was no preamble or epilogue, no explanation. He just spoke his piece.

His exact words were, “I have always wanted to make love to you.”

I gasped, actually gasped. I was flabbergasted, not that he wanted to make love—why shouldn’t he?—but that he actually said so. My response was not in question, but for the moment I was deserted by the power of speech and gesture. I stood up. I crooked a finger at Henry and left the room like a sleepwalker. He followed.

It was in no way strange to wake up the next morning and find him asleep beside me. It was still early. Just enough light came through the windows to make him visible. He slept on his right side, facing me, with his arms outside the covers. He looked like the proverbial little boy, a lock of hair on his forehead, eyelashes on his cheeks, the white outline of his drugstore wristwatch on the tanned skin of his wrist, his breathing only just audible. The shadow of a beard had grown on his chin overnight. He smelled different naked—a trace of sweat on his skin, a trace of soap, a trace of the two of us; on his breath, a trace of espresso. I wanted to wake him— dimpling the back of his hand with the same fingertip as before, but first I wanted to study him in his sleep a little longer.

However, he woke up.

As soon as his eyes were open, I said, “Why did you wait so long?”

“You seemed to be elsewhere involved.”

“Why would that stop you?”

“I’m not a poacher.”

Was that why Adam got his picture in the paper? I didn’t ask. Henry’s face revealed nothing.

I said, “Tell me, really. How long has this been on your mind?”

“Since you solved the riddle of the sphere that first day in Central Park,” Henry said.

“You’re serious?”

“Absolutely.”

“It wasn’t my bottomless eyes, my glowing face, the wind in my hair, my graceful carriage?”

“I have eyes to see with. But that’s when it started.”

“So you were looking for a marriage of true minds?”

“That and getting naked.”

After a while we showered together as if we were living in the age of innocence and this was the first morning of the honeymoon, and we had come to each other the night before as virgins dying of curiosity. It was a large glassed-in shower, as spacious as an ordinary bathroom, a multifunction water joke with all sorts of showerheads and nozzles spraying water from all directions. I had never been able to figure it out. It was no mystery to Henry, who knew exactly which knob controlled which showerhead.

In his backpack Henry had brought a toothbrush and an electric razor and a clean T-shirt and socks and underwear. One does like a confident man. Because my hair was soaked, it took me longer to get dressed.

When finally I emerged from the bedroom, I found him strolling around the house, looking at the paintings. He was drinking coffee. He gave each picture at least five minutes of scrutiny, as though looking within it for other, concealed paintings. When I stood beside him, he put his arm around me. He kissed me on the forehead. We continued the tour in this fashion. All the while, he never took his eyes off the pictures.

I said something to him and he said, “Hmmm?”

We had breakfast. It was Sunday. The city was quiet. I played with the illusion that we could go window-shopping if the spirit moved us, or walk out for lunch at a nice little restaurant somebody had recommended. As if Henry had issued a command, no earthquakes or volcanic eruptions were reported. Nothing rumbled beneath the sidewalks of New York except the subway. The phones did not ring. Henry showed no disposition to leave. We watched a movie, putting it on hold a couple of times to fool around. We turned on the music and danced, for heaven’s sake. He was a good dancer. We had a long, long talk. Suddenly Henry was so domestic, and so was I, that it wouldn’t have surprised me if he had suggested a game of gin rummy in front of the fireplace, or asked for a liverwurst sandwich on rye with lots of ballpark mustard and a slice of red onion and a glass of beer for lunch.

Or proposed marriage—Ng Fred for best man, Melissa as maid of honor, Clementine frisking the guests, the last of the Duchins conducting the orchestra, no strobes or klieg lights because Henry had bought up every camera on the planet.

At eleven that night, when it was eleven in the morning of the next day in Mongolia, Henry’s phone rang. It was Ng Fred. Henry listened to what he had to say, then made some calls. After that, he told me what was happening.

“He says Beijing is sending a delegation to the Spaceplane plant. Can you be ready in fifteen minutes?”

“Five,” I said.

I packed a bag. Henry never bothered with luggage. He had jeans and T-shirts and sneakers and baseball caps and razors and toothbrushes stashed on all his airplanes. The car took us to the airport. We flew eastward, into the darkness of other time zones, and met the sun again somewhere over Afghanistan.

As we approached the factory in Mongolia, we watched from fifty thousand feet as a Spaceplane launched. It rolled along the tarmac of the long runway, then lifted off, then climbed to an altitude so far above us that we could only see it on a monitor. There, it seemed to pause for an instant before it accelerated and vanished.

~ * ~

3

THE DELEGATION FROM BEIJING ARRIVED
at noon exactly aboard a large military transport. Dozens of men filed off the plane, each with an identical laptop slung across his shoulder and an identical briefcase in his hand. Their somber suits were identical. They formed up in ranks on the tarmac like terracotta soldiers and waited impassively for whatever was going to happen next. It was obvious even to me that these men were not bureaucrats, but troops disguised as bureaucrats. That the deception seemed to be designed to be detected gave the masquerade a certain extra frisson.

Ng Fred, who had gone out alone to meet the delegation, was escorted inside the plane. Long minutes passed before he reemerged, accompanied by General Yao, who wore a light gray suit with a red tie and a matching pocket-handkerchief that mimicked, not to say mocked, the space suits the world had been seeing on television.

We met in a small, unadorned room with a concrete floor and unpainted drywall partitions in which the nailheads showed. The only furniture was a plain, cheap table that teetered because one of its legs was slightly shorter than the others, and several uncomfortable folding metal chairs. Henry omitted the customary hospitable tea. General Yao didn’t bother with the usual smiles and flirtation. Smiles were totally shut down, handshakes perfunctory. The general’s was positively flaccid. Henry and I sat on one side of the table with Ng Fred. General Yao and two other men—obviously army officers in civilian clothes but not the ones I had met before—sat on the opposite side. Never before had I known Henry to place a table, other than a dining table, between visitors and himself.

In a cold voice that also was new to me, Henry said, “We are surprised to see you, General Yao.”