Generosity: An Enhancement (26 page)

No one knows exactly what the chief’s hesitation means. It may be good science; it may be loss of nerve. In practice, it means an extended delay in publishing that any day—given the rate of post-genomic discoveries being plucked daily from the air—could prove fatal. The mastodon will still kill you, whether you charge it or stand stock-still.

Weld consulted with two colleagues first. She tried one of each: stringent Christa Kreuz and expansive Dennis Winfield, the counseling center’s head. Christa was at her hardest-assed. “You’re dating someone who works for the college?”

“He’s not working for the college anymore. And I’m not exactly
dating
him.”

“He got fired over this incident.”

“He was temporary. They just didn’t renew.”

“It doesn’t feel right, Candace. He comes to talk to you about this student, the student gets raped by another one of his students, and now . . . ?”

“She didn’t get raped. She talked her way out.”

“And now you want to sleep with the teacher.”

“I don’t want to sleep with him. I just enjoy his company.”

“Why?”

Weld fell back on that old counseling trick: counting to five. “Because he’s not fatuous and he’s not banal. He feels things. He cares about something other than himself.” She fights off a bizarre impulse to say:
He makes me smile
. “He thinks. That’s hard to come by, these days.”

“Have you thought about an epistolary relationship? And you might want to keep one copy of everything on file.”

Nor did Dennis Winfield entirely let her off the hook. “In the best world, of course, I’d wish you something less problematical.”

She’d seen it in Dennis’s eye from time to time: in his best world, Dennis wouldn’t be married, she wouldn’t be working for him, and
he
would be her problem.

“It’s not problematical, Dennis. It’s just companionship.”

“Does he get along with Gabe?”

“I’ve just met him. I only want to be sure I’m not breaking any rules.”

“You’re not breaking any rules. Technically. If you’re sure that you’ve never had a professional relationship with him or the student . . .” He appraised her. “This is not about some kind of indirect therapy for either one of them, is it?”

She shook her head, exasperated.

“Good. Because you’ve had . . . We’ve been over this in the past. You are a wonderful woman, Candace. But you do need to protect yourself from your best intentions sometimes. Do be careful. Boundaries get blurry so fast.”

She sat still for the justified lecture, and when Dennis encouraged her to come back and talk if she ever felt any uncertainty, she nodded and said she would.

Candace Weld arrives right on time, Saturday night, an experimental tease in her tea-green eyes and a veil of light snow on her hair. She shows up with her chest-high son, who holds out one diffident paw to shake Russell’s. The child has seen this drill before, and places no faith in the latest candidate. As soon as he rescues his hand from Russell’s, he pulls a flashing, bleeping Game Boy back out of his pocket.

Stone ushers them in from the cold. She no longer looks that much like Grace. He was crazy ever to imagine a resemblance. Candace’s features are more fluid and eager. Her eyes don’t have Grace’s webcam look. Her nose twitches like it’s trying to sniff him. She hands him a nice Shiraz, then cups his elbow hello. With her other hand, she shakes a colorful sack of pungent Happy Meal. “For Gabe,” she says.

“I’m carnivorous,” the child at her side explains.

Russell slaps his forehead. “I should have asked.”

The boy shrugs. “Many primates are. But those are cool pictures,
anyway.” He points to Stone’s pastels. “Are they like dungeon creatures? Three stars, at least.”

Russell takes a beat. “Thanks, I think.”

Over the meal, he and Candace hunt for a conversation topic other than the only one they’ve ever talked about. Weld is oddly at ease in her awkwardness. She asks about Stone’s magazine editing. He’s too considerate to give her a real answer.

Finally, it’s Stone and the boy who find a theme. Gabe regales his host with tales of an online world called Futopia. The boy raves about his life as a Ranger, discovering ancient artifacts and selling them for tons of gold in cities scattered around virgin continents. Stone marvels to see this sullen child bloom into a full-fledged raconteur, a Marco Polo who can’t get enough of the questions Stone asks.

The mother is embarrassed for the first time all evening. “It’s terrifying. Like there’s a probe directly stimulating the pleasure centers of his brain. He gets ninety minutes a night. I know: it should be zero.”

The kid is all over her in panic. “Mom, no! We’ve talked about this. It’s
social
. It’s completely social. There’s almost no killing at all.”

After dessert, when the talk runs out, Candace stands and starts stacking dishes. “Leave them,” Russell says. “I’ll get them after you go.” But she insists on helping.

He fills the basin with hot water. She takes a dish towel and stands next to him, snatching dishes as he cleans them. It surprises him to discover how easy she is to be with—just company, just variation, a respite from his own inescapable self. Side by side, five inches from each other, in front of the double basin, he doesn’t even have to look at her to find her painfully pleasing.

She grins, admiring his washing technique. “You’ve done this before, haven’t you?”

Candace Weld is
flirting
. Russell would like to call it something else, but English won’t cooperate.
Chapter four: in any closely observed scene, your key protagonists will have different action objectives, driven by different inner needs.

The boy Gabe sits at the cleared table, flipping through a book that Stone has left out:
Emotional Chemistry: How the Brain Lifts and Lowers Us.

“You’re still researching?” she asks.

He twists the sponge into a drinking glass. “Did you know that most people say they are happier than average?”

“I’m not surprised,” she says.

“You’re not?”

“I’m not surprised that that’s what most people
say
.” She crosses to the cold window casement by the pantry and breathes on the glass. In the condensation, she draws two contentment graphs. The first is a steady, high, straight line. The second is a diagonal, starting at zero and maxing out at the end. She stands aside, a counselor pretending to be an actress playing a schoolteacher. “Which of these two is happier?”

By any measure that Stone can think of, it’s the first.

“Now: which life do most people want to have?”

He stares at his choices. “Are you serious?”

She shrugs. “Number two is a better story. Most people are already pretty happy. What we really want is to be
happier
. And most people think they will be, in the future. Keeps us in the trenches, I guess.”

She rubs her finger slowly across the chill glass, obliterating all graphs.

“Have you come across Norbert Schwarz’s work? It’s classic. Subjects fill in a questionnaire about life satisfaction. But the subject must go into the next room to make a copy of the questionnaire before filling it in. One group finds a dime sitting on the copy machine. Their lucky day. The control group finds nothing.”

Stone grips a plate. “Don’t tell me.”

“I’m afraid I have to; it’s science! The lucky group reports significantly higher satisfaction with their
entire life
.”

He grins, shakes his head, and plunges his fists back in the hot water, now tepid to his accustomed hands.

“Don’t take it so hard.” She grazes his shoulder with her towel. “Works with a chocolate bar, too.”

He lifts his hands from the water and presses his soapy palms to his cheeks. “We’re pathetic.”

“We’re beautiful,” she replies. “We just have no idea how we feel or what makes us feel that way!”

“So feeling good is really that cheap?”

“Not
cheap
.” She traces out a quick hieroglyphic on the upper arm of his waffle shirt. “
Affordable
. And easier than we think.”

Easy
is exactly the problem. He turns and faces her, holds her eyes for the first time all evening. “And Thassa?”

“And Thassa.” She gazes off into a ceiling corner full of cobwebs he missed in the afternoon’s scrub-down. “She must carry around one hell of a chocolate bar.”

At the evening’s end, mother and son don coats, scarves, hats, and gloves. Outside, the snow is thin but gathering, a taste of things to come. The boy sticks out a king crab claw and shakes Russell’s hand. He promises to show Stone his life in Futopia, anytime. Bundled, the mother turns to Stone, slips one padded arm around his middle, turns her head away, and pulls him into her. She lays her right ear on his clavicle and listens.

He plays dead. The one time Grace was this gentle was right before she left.

Dr. Weld breaks the embrace. “Merry Christmas,” she says. She looks up at him, wincing. She waves an erasing mitten in the air.
Don’t worry
, it says.
Means nothing. A dime’s a dime. Grab it when you see it.

No one at Truecyte searches for the story. They come across it by data mining, scouring the Web with automated scripts and prospecting bots. The company’s intelligent agents race from server to server at all hours, extracting patterns and converging on the next genetic trends before they’ve even materialized.

Nodes, clusters, trackbacks, memes . . . Truth follows bandwidth, as sure as use follows invention. By now, the idea is a commonplace: only that massively parallel computer, the entire human race, is powerful enough to interpret the traffic that it generates. No single expert can calculate the outcome of tomorrow’s big game. But the averaged aggregate guess of hundreds of millions of amateurs can come as close as God.

In this way, a self-assembling network of page traffic presents itself daily to three graduate-student interns trained to prowl around each morning’s tidal pools and pull out shiny things. If two out of the three of them tag the same story, it goes to Kurton’s own news aggregator. And for an hour every morning before dawn, the inventor of rapid gene signature reading mulls over the day’s trove of stories.

He consumes the feeds, looking for new upheaval, the same constant upheaval that has carried him this far. He still remembers the Boethius that his ex-wife made him read at Stanford a third of a century
ago, insisting it would make him a better person: no one will ever be safe or well until Fortune upends him.