The Bone Forest (29 page)

With old age, McCreedy had said, comes a lowering of resistance not just to disease but to the environment and to life itself. We think of age as a barrier that none of us will pass. But is it? If we remove those agents of death that find they can operate better as a person gets older, will age
itself be
a barrier? Might not something, some form, some existence that we are unaware of lie beyond our four score and ten?

In rats there was nothing. They lived twice as long as normal and became twice as old. But rats were without souls, McCreedy had declared, and we should not be disheartened.

This was the first time that McCreedy had referred to a metaphysical concept, and it rather surprised me. He made no great play of his religious beliefs, and directed his actions under no religious dogma. I came to believe that he equated self-awareness with the concept of
soul
, and that he extended his favor toward the metaphysical only to the unscientific degree of regarding self-awareness as having an effect upon the physical form. He believed in mind over matter! But detailed consideration of such things was beyond his scope. At the time this narrowness did not seem significant to me, and it was not until well after the experiment had begun that I remembered his words, and his idle reflections.

Not until late November did any serious psychological stress symptoms begin to develop in the subjects. They were now into their thirty-eighth year and the monitoring consoles were still reporting their physical and physiological condition as completely normal. Certainly there was a slight increase in the incidence of embryonic cell formation, but—with our help—they were maintaining completely adequate control of their body systems. Martin was an enviable sight, advancing into middle age with muscles that were as firm and hard as a twenty-five-year-old's. And Yvonne, whilst showing signs of age in the lines that were tracing themselves around her eyes and on her legs, was still a beautiful woman. But now I felt only sadness when I looked at her, for more and more I was remembering her childhood, her innocence and her fixed gaze from which it was impossible to escape.

There was no trace of that innocence now, and the beautiful eyes were narrower and more canny. When she made love to Martin she was physically demanding but seemed no longer to need the concomitant affection.

Martin, whilst undoubtedly in love with his wife, was tending more and more toward solitariness, and in this I saw a reflection of his first acquaintance with the enormous environment. He was unhappy with his situation, seemed restless and morose, and returned again and again to the realistic-looking oak tree that he had first scrutinized so long, by his terms, in the past.

Here he sat for hours, during the day and often into the night, brooding, staring, perhaps trying to identify some feature, some element of his universe that would give him a clue as to why he felt so wrong.

Perhaps—again—such speculation by those of us who monitored and watched was just a sublimation on our parts of the fact that the experiment, stuck as it was in the "normal" years, had become unbearably boring. We were looking for trouble, or so it seemed to some of us.

With the inevitable slackening of attention, I found ample opportunity to modify the Life Plan of the aging Yvonne. It was an impulsive move, but had, as an idea, been in my mind for a long time. The team was small-three biologists and three technicians working in shifts, two nurses and the four members of the Life Plan team. It was inevitable that we should all learn to cope with the other aspects of the experiment, and I had become relatively adept at the surgically precise process of removing or implanting information/ideas/events into the two subjects.

I implanted my own character, my own physical description, as one of the ghost lovers that Yvonne was taking. There was something akin to the erotic when I thought, thereafter, of what she was seeing and doing, but after a few days the futility of the action came home to me.

Nevertheless, she retained me as a lover and I never found the opportunity to remove that program. When I heard her murmuring my name, voicing the words of her ascending passion as she went through the movements of intercourse, I felt my face burn, and my imagination stretch to its limits.

When she was with someone else I became depressed and touchy. No one in the laboratory ever found out what I had done, but they might well have gathered the truth if they had bothered to listen to the tapes of what was said in the darkness of her bedroom.

Time passed and a depression settled upon the laboratory. Perhaps the movement of Martin and Yvonne into their middle years, and into a quieter phase of their lives, reflected itself in our subdued interaction and the almost lethargic approach that we began to show toward the experiment as a whole. McCreedy, I hasten to point out, in no way suffered depression, and the technicians were, I suppose, too distant from the possibility of kudos to have any great enthusiasm at any stage of the project. But the nurses and the Life Planners, myself and Josephine all became very broody.

Josephine in particular was laboring under a black cloud. Her relationship with McCreedy was abysmal. Everything he said she disagreed with behind his back. She took her only pleasure in putting him down, contributed nothing to any discussion at which he was present, but depended on me to relay her ideas to him.

In the rapid aging of the two subjects she saw an inevitability that frightened her.

"That's us in so very few years," she said as she stared at the two subjects during one of their persistent rows. "And there's nothing any of us can do about it. It's a stab at our human pride—there are some things that are inevitable, that we cannot control, and our decrepitude is one of them. And what do we do? We accept it! We are
Eos
watching the aging of
Tithonus
and afraid to ask the great
Zeus
to add youth to immortality.
Afraid
, I said—and that's what I meant, but even so, humankind is aging like each of us individually and our racial fear stops us asking for an injection of youth. It's so horribly… predictable! I want to live with youth and youth's dreams…I'm rambling, aren't I?"

I see what she meant, now, as I complete this chronicle. In the satisfaction of completion of the project there would come a rationality that I had lost during those years. At the time I didn't understand her at all.

I became infatuated with the watching of Yvonne, staring at her for endless hours, trying to find some trace of the eleven-year-old… but all her youth and beauty were now imprisoned behind a wall of years. With each day, with each inoculation of
Chronon
, she aged before my eyes, now whiter, now more wrinkled, now a little more stooped.

She and Martin fought persistently. There was not a day passed without them shouting and swearing at each other, and ending the tussle with a cold and slippery silence, that only mellowed toward evening.

Martin spent a great deal of time alone, and the monitor reported that he indulged less and less in conversation with the ghosts around him. He retired from his work, and from his social life, whilst Yvonne remained socially active and very hostile toward her husband.

She flirted with numerous ghosts, most of them the aging lovers she had taken during earlier years. Now, instead of the imaginary copulation that she performed before our eyes, she seemed to indulge in painfully unconcluded flirtation. When I watched her one evening, and heard her mention my name and knew what she was thinking, instead of the thrill I had felt when first I had entered her pseudo-awareness, I now felt only disgust and dismay, and I became deeply embarrassed at what I had done, but still no opportunity to remove my existence presented itself and there was nothing I could do to eliminate these scenes from my memory.

The time came when all sexual, and much social, contact ceased, and she sat and remembered, staring out from her body at the invisible monitors that brought her heartache to us as we watched from the laboratory outside the environment.

Martin, now, was alone, spending his time staring directly at the edge of the environment as if he was aware that he could not move beyond that barrier. Within his head, recorded triggers were depressing his interest in wandering beyond the confines, but it seemed to the more analytical among us that he had come to realize that there was nowhere to go anyway.

It was December of '96, and they were old people, seventy years into their lives, as healthy and sturdy as when they had been born, but old, none the less. For me, when on my shift, there was just discomfiture in administering examination to the thin torso of the woman I had once watched grow with the beating of my heart. In sleep she stirred, talked, cried. The monitors said all was well, but it was hard not to believe that she had lived too much too fast, and that all the empty days in her past were calling for fulfillment, and the brief and unsatisfactory time she had actually spent with Martin was calling for completion.

Now, however, a new sense of excitement crept into the laboratory. I felt it myself. For the subjects were at the beginning of the age barrier, and with every day took a step nearer to the figure of one hundred years, our first goal, and the age which, when reached, would be accompanied by our first report to the scientific community at large. And yet, a sort of natural caution prevailed. Within our hearts, as those weeks passed, we all began to imagine what, if anything, lay beyond the barrier of age; but within the microcosm that was our scientific community we never discussed our private fears and hopes. McCreedy talked loosely about possible regenerative processes, and we all talked among ourselves about the rationale behind thinking that age itself did not necessarily mean death. But of what was to come, there were just the imaginings and the anticipations of our scientific hearts. And, an acknowledgment to mythology, above McCreedy's desk an enormous picture of a cicada, watching us with an expression verging on amusement.

On the day that they were both ninety-nine years and eleven months old, McCreedy prepared his press statement while the rest of us accumulated the massive files of data and decided on an allotment for processing. The following day, the fifth of March '98, that momentous event occurred… the centenary of two human beings, and there was a feeling of great relief within the whole Institute, and for the first time ever we drank openly in our laboratory, and it was not just coffee, surreptitiously sipped with backs to the health-hazard notice, but vintage champagne, eight bottles of the stuff!

I drank with restraint since it was to be my night shift, but somehow we all felt, now, that the years of narrow-minded application had been worthwhile, that there would be an end product; even Josephine seemed brighter, more cheerful.

I watched McCreedy's press conference on a small portable TV while I waited for the frail figures in the environment to sink, again, into deep slumber. There was an atmosphere of great excitement in the vast hall from which the program was coming, and I could see McCreedy, evening-suited and proud, seated between medical experts and two politicians, confronted by a vast array of microphones, and waiting for the hubbub of human movement and whisper to die away.

The Institute itself seemed to vibrate in sympathy with that meeting of the world, away to the south, in London.

Yvonne sat for a long while that night, at the edge of the park, listening to the ghosts in her head, and staring through eyes that were as big and innocent as they had been ninety or so years back. The camera lingered on her and I returned her gaze through the monitor and I seemed to hear her laughter and her crying, and her passion, but all so far in the past, now, so long ago.

Martin was by himself beneath the oak, turning a piece of bark over and over, examining the artificial life which crawled beneath. The "moonlight" was intense and highlighted his rigid expression, the bony crags of his face, the deepset lie of his eyes. What thoughts, I wondered, did he think at his great age? He was not senile, and Yvonne was certainly not senile, and yet there was a calmness, an abstractedness about them, that suggested mindlessness.

Did they themselves feel something significant? Were they experiencing a quieter excitement within themselves, a personal triumph? They believed themselves ordinary people, and as ordinary people they were a hundred years old. The flesh would not fall away to reveal firm skin and agile muscles and time would not fall away to reveal them in their youth and beauty, but in the mind is a store of ages and perhaps, on this night of nights, a barrier within their consciousness had dissolved for a few hours and they were living, ghostlike, as they had lived in reality, for the last seven years.

On the television screen McCreedy's angular features were emphasized by the arc lights above him as he calmly informed the conference of the progress we had made and were continuing to make. He talked about the impossibility of the experiment using ordinary human lifespans—an experiment lasting two hundred years (assuming it was successful) could be run by a computer, but not by mortal scientists. He stressed that the only purpose of the experiment at this time was to evaluate whether or not we were correct in thinking that death in old age was nonetheless a disease-caused process, taking disease to mean—at the least—the gradual failure of vital body cells due to the accumulation of the toxic byproducts of mild infection throughout the life of the individual. At one hundred years of age, he said, our two subjects reared from artificial wombs, screened from all disease or body malfunction, showed all the elastic changes of age, were to all intents and purposes very old people, and yet their cellular complement was as vigorous and efficient as it had been when they had been teenagers. All the symptoms of age were built into the genetic message, he explained when prompted further, and all that had been eliminated were the non-genetically coded acquisitions of disease byproducts.

The all-important questions: how long did McCreedy expect the experiment to continue for? And what did he expect to find out as the decades progressed? And was he morally justified in using human beings for experimentation outside the understanding of normal human life?