Generosity: An Enhancement (36 page)

She drifts alongside Kurton back up the driveway. They’ve talked to each other for weeks, on and off camera, testing each other’s bright and dark places, familiar, now, as any two adversaries. She watches him stack empty flower pots. “People will be swabbing each other soon, won’t they? Before you hire somebody. Before you
marry
somebody. Consent or not. We’re going to be on file with hospitals, corporations, the government . . .”

“I believe that is already under way.”

“It doesn’t bother you, does it? How creepy society is going to get.”

He shrugs his shoulders, like a sixteen-year-old answering the question
What the hell do you think you’re doing?
“There was a time when income tax and government-issued IDs were unthinkably creepy. Technology changes what we think is intolerable.”

She squirrels the line away for use in the interview’s introduction.

He stares down through the thin line of pines across the road to the shimmering water, a
Boy’s Book of Adventure
look. “Would you like to take a quick sail? We have a couple of hours before dusk.”

His boat is a beautiful little gaff-rigged twelve-footer, cedar, oak, and Doug fir, from the sixties. He takes them down the inlet past the headlands, then hands her the rudder. Gulls gather on the rocky spit, like whispers. As the sky plushes out toward ginger and the waves quiet, he leans back against the front of the cockpit, toying with a cleat. They glide on no sound. She comes about, catches the wind,
settles into the flow, and is filled with the most profound sense of aimlessness to be had anywhere.

“May I ask you something? Completely off the record.”

He tilts his face back in a speckle of sun, eyes closed, smile compliant.

“How in God’s name do your companies make a profit?”

He laughs so hard it folds him upright. “You’re making a small assumption, there.”

“Seriously. You must be bleeding money away into all these projects, some of which, if you’ll pardon me, seem as flaky as pie crust. Okay: You have a couple of drug patents. You’ve licensed a pair of processes to larger pharmaceutical outfits. And you own the rights to two diagnostic screens. But all of that together can’t possibly pay for even half the R and D—”

He juts out his iconoclastic chin. “You’re right! It doesn’t!”

She tacks again, taking a bead back up the inlet, toward his dock and home. “So how do you stay in business?”

He smiles more generously, unable to keep from admiring her. “You’re not much of a businessman, are you?”

“Enough of one to know that credits are supposed to be greater than debits.”

He waves away the nuisance technicalities. “Forget about bookkeeping. You can’t bookkeep what’s coming. In a few years, we’re going to be biologically literate. We’ll have figured out how to make cells do whatever chemistry we want. You think computer programming has changed the world? Wait till we start programming the genome.”

“Thomas. Relax. We’re done filming.”

He turns toward starboard and pushes his curls back over the crown of his head. “I’m sorry if I sound like I’m still performing. But believe me. It’s coming.”

“Okay. So medicine keeps getting more complicated. I see the revenue potential there, down the line. But you can’t run a business without products. What exactly are you selling?”

He gazes at her with the warmth caught so nakedly on film an hour earlier. “At the moment, Truecyte is in the business of selling the same product as most of the biotech sector: vaporware. But the venture capitalists know what’s in the pipeline.”

His voice drops to the hush of the wake against the hull. “The coming market is endless. Think about the five years just before the Internet. The five years just before the steam engine. Only those companies that free themselves of preconceptions will take advantage of the biggest structural change in society since . . .”

The simile eludes him, as irrelevant as bookkeeping. The sail starts to luff. She nudges the tiller and lets out the boom. Whatever Thomas Kurton’s knowledge of the future, he’s right, in any case, about
her
. For all her seasons
Over the Limit
, she’s never really taken the flood of transcendental hype seriously. That’s been her source of appeal: the clear-eyed, unflappable skeptic who simply wants to see the future’s photo ID.

She brings the boat in line with his dock, now yawning up in front of them. Together she and Kurton furl the sail and drift into a light knock against the hanging tire bumpers. Kurton leaps onto the dock, ties down the prow and stern, and helps her over the gunwales.

On the dock, she says, “You really think we’re going to get life to play by our rules?” The sun burnishes the water’s surface. In a moment, the air and the pines on the crag behind them turn crazed orange.

He comes next to her and takes her forearm. She has predicted this, with no skill in futurism at all. She lets him. It feels lovely. In her experience, it has never
not
felt lovely, at first. Dopamine, serotonin, oxytocin. Does knowing the chemistry change anything? How long ago did she discover that
lovely
was a chemical trick?

“I’m telling you: Forget what you know. Free your mind. Use your
imagination
.” His eyes fish for hers. No end of stories play in his. Microbes that live on dioxins and digest waste plastics. Fast-growing trees that sequester greenhouse gases. Human beings free from all congenital disease.

She looks away, back out over the water. “You’re overselling again.”

“It’s not sales. It’s just what happens next.” His thumb strokes her wrist. He lets go of her arm. He shrugs again, and in that simple gesture suggests that all literature, all fiction, all prediction to date is nothing more than a preparatory sketch of the possibilities available to the human animal.

He detaches and wraps the tiller, tucks it under his arm, and climbs back up the boardwalk toward the house. She falls in at his side, the rhythm of this early evening remarkably familiar to her.

He thinks out loud. “Your show will run. Your gang will edit me into some sort of white-coated huckster too cheerily Faustian to hear how nutty he sounds. Good television, right?”

She asks him, with a scowl, not to pity himself or resent the millions of dollars in free advertising.

“You’ll weave this whole story about a man and his company and its detractors and competitors. You’ll construct this whole dramatic arc for Truecyte . . . Listen: Truecyte is nothing. Truecyte is irrelevant. Yes, we’re in the spotlight at the moment. But you know how science works now. Several hundred thousand researchers, propelled along on collective will. None of us fast enough to keep up. We make this big announcement, this exciting but ambiguous finding, and within a few weeks, a dozen more start-ups are all breathing down our necks, threatening to beat us to this thing.”

She can’t keep irritation from flooding her voice. “What
thing
?”

He turns and points back out over the water, now a swirl of cinnamon. “Fifteen minutes ago, you were the queen of creation. Correct? I saw it in your face.”

She blushes, some other flush of chemicals. But you can’t have opinions about truth.

“If your alleles were a little different, you’d feel that way
most of the time
.”

Her head shakes, all by itself. “And if I were William Gates the Third, I’d buy me a nice little inlet like this and a sloop to call my own.”

He smiles as richly as she did fifteen minutes ago. “With the right genetic compliment, you wouldn’t even need an inlet. You wouldn’t need anything. Your enemies could be shelling you, and you’d still be filled with a confident desire to make something worthwhile of the day.”

“And this is a good thing?”

They cross the coast road and head up the foot of his drive. She doesn’t want to speak again, but she does. “This woman with all the right alleles: Does she even know she’s that happy? If she’s that lifted up all the time, does she even have a measure . . . ?”

“Oh, she goes up and down like anyone else. It’s just that her envelope of high and low is considerably higher than ours.”

Schiff pauses by her rented Camry. The crew is waiting for her in Damariscotta. She needs to rejoin them for dinner and postmortems.
They have to be at Logan first thing tomorrow. “That’s my point. I’m happier than most people, but what good does that do me? She’s happier than I am. If you moved us all up a notch, wouldn’t we just acclimate and forget, like we do with everything else? Wouldn’t ten just become the new seven?”

“I wondered about that, too, until I met this ten. And the weird thing is, her genome differs from yours by only a few small tweaks.”

She sees it in Thomas Kurton’s trusting, suppliant face: There’s only one real resource. One fungible commodity that the future will trade in. “You’re going to make us all happy. Is that the plan?”

His eyebrows crumple and his lips sour. She’s hurt him, at least as much as he’s capable of being hurt by anyone. He shrugs off her mockery. “A little more capable of being well in this world. But not if you don’t want it, of course.”

“You folks have finally found the formula for soma. Damn.”

He breathes out a long-suffering sigh and leans against her car. “First, I really do hope that Aldous Huxley is burning in the pain-ennobling hell of his choice. That book is one of the most dangerous, hope-impeding, ideological rants ever written. Just because the author is stunted by some virtuous vision of embattled humanism, the rest of the race is supposed to keep suffering for all time?”

“I’m not sure that’s exactly his—”

“Second, yes: our initial
products
, if you insist, will likely consist of pharmaceuticals. But not the shot-in-the-dark stuff that we dispense today. Drugs tailor-made to the genome of the recipient. Smart bullets, genetically personalized prescriptions, and the sooner we get there, the faster we can finally get medicine out of the dark ages. Once we understand the brain chemistry behind depression and elation . . .”

He catches himself this time. He nods, repentant, but the fingers of both hands flick rapidly against his thumbs. “I’m sorry. I’m an enthusiast. Guilty. What’s your problem with that? I assume you have no moral qualms about curing depression? We’re talking about substances that will be to today’s serotonin reuptake inhibitors what fentanyl is to biting on a towel.”

“Why do I have the funny feeling that genetically tailored pills are just the beginning?” She catches him appraising her hair with the gaze of a connoisseur. Her left hand sweeps up, brushes back her flowing bangs, and lets them fall again.

He copies her involuntarily. “Because you are America’s most irreverent science television journalist.” His voice can’t help revering that
irreverent
.

“And all this public talk about life-span extension—”

“Oh, we’re working on that, too. Quality
and
quantity. Listen. We’re after the same thing humanity has been after since toolmaking.”

“Except for the bit about rewriting the script?”

He looks genuinely puzzled. “We’ve been doing that all along, as well.”

“And we’re not allowed to stop until every appetite is satisfied and every itch is scratched.”

The honest bafflement only grows.
What else would you suggest?
“Speaking of appetite satisfaction: stay for dinner.”

She pushes off of the car and drifts toward the house before the invitation is out. “I don’t know. What about this massive calorie-restriction diet you’re on?”

“I make each one count.”

Back in a rocker on the wraparound porch, she calls Nicholas Garrett, in Damariscotta. “Boss? Listen. I’m going to be a little delayed. Go on and eat without me.”

She can hear Keyes cackling in the background:
What did I tell you? A hundred bucks, suckers. Pay up.

She tells Nick she won’t be too late, but no need to wait up. Then she rings off, to her director’s suppressed mirth. She sits in the rocker for a moment, examining herself. It’s not even an effort, really. Not even a decision. Just large molecules, passing their oldest signals back and forth across the infinite synapse gap.

A noise comes from up in the woods. She can’t tell if it’s a mammal, bird, or something stranger. A throat considerably smaller than hers, but monstrous compared to the rest of creation, moans in spectral restlessness. She waits until the sound returns. It’s a call from back long before contentment and agitation parted ways. She walks around the side of the porch to get a look. There’s nothing to see but dark woods, the prison-bar stand of pines and spruce, the rising hillside, and needle-covered night.