The Fountain of Age (23 page)

Ben stood. “I will not be blackmailed by a nine-year-old.”

Cixin didn’t know what “blackmail” was, but it sounded evil. Everywhere he was surrounded by evil. Better to die. Again he turned his face to the wall.

Later, he would always think that had made the difference. His silence, his turning away. If he had fought back, Ben would have said more about blackmail and gone away, angry. But instead he ran his hand through his red hair until it stood up like bristly grass—Cixin could just see this out of the corner of his eye—and then put his hand over his face.

“All right, Cixin. I’ll take you to America. But I warn you, it may take a long, long time to arrange.”

Six: BEN

It took nearly two years.

If Ben hadn’t had family contacts at the State Department, it would have been even longer, might have been impossible. The Chinese were discouraging foreign adoptions; Cixin was from within formerly quarantined Sichuan; the death certificate for Haihong needed to be obtained from a glacially slow bureaucracy and presented in triplicate. But on the other hand, Chinese-American relations were in a positive phase. Ben could prove Haihong had been his second cousin. Ben had received a Citizens’ Commendation from the FBI for exposing the surrogate-ring of American girls exploited by a sleazy Mexican fertility clinic. And Uncle James was on the State desk for East Asia.

During those two years, Ben sent Auntie money and Cixin presents. An iPod, which seemed to be a critical object. Jeans and sneakers. Later, a laptop, to be used at the vineyard foreman’s house to communicate with Ben. They exchanged email, and Cixin’s troubled Ben. Fluent in spoken English, Cixin was barely literate in any language, and he didn’t seem to be learning much from the school software Ben supplied.

Cuzin Ben this is Cixin. Wen r yu comin 4 me. Anty is sik agen. Evrybuddy hates me. I hate it hear. Com soon or I wil die.

Cixin

Cixin—

I am making plans to bring you here as fast as I can. Please be patient.

Could Cixin read that word? Maybe not. The backward connection at the foreman’s house didn’t permit even such a basic tool as a camlink.

Please wait without fuss.

Haihong saying during her pregnancy, “Ben, please don’t fuss at me!”

Take your once-a-week, use your school software, and be good.

What else? How did you write to a child you’d barely met?

You will like America. Soon, I hope.

Ben

Soon, I hope
. But did he? Cixin would be an enormous responsibility, and Ben would bear it mostly alone. His parents, old when Ben had been born, lived in failing health in Florida, his sisters in Des Moines and Buffalo. Ben worked long hours in his lab. What was he going to do with a illegally genemod, barely literate, ADH adolescent who shared less than three percent of Ben’s genetic heritage and nothing of his cultural one?

And then, because complications always attracted more complications, he met Renata.

A group from his department at the Institute went out for Friday Happy Hour. Ordinarily Ben avoided these gatherings. People drank too much, barriers were lowered that might better have stayed raised, flirtations started that proved embarrassing on Monday morning. But Ben knew he was getting a reputation as standoffish, if not downright snobbish, and he had to work with these people. So he went to Happy Hour.

They settled into a long table, scientists and technicians and secretaries. Dan Silverstein, a capable researcher fifteen years Ben’s senior, talked about his work with envelope proteins. Susie, the intern whom somebody really should do something about, shot Ben smoldering glances across the table. Ben spotted Renata at the bar.

She sat alone. Tall, a mop of dirty blonde curls, glasses. Pretty enough but nothing remarkable about her except the intensity with which she was both consuming beer and marking on a sheaf of papers. At Grogan’s during a Friday Happy Hour? Then she looked up, pure delight on her face, and laughed out loud at something on the papers.

Ben excused himself to go to the men’s room. Taking the long way back, he peered over her shoulders. School tests of some kind—

“Do I know you?” She’d caught him. Her tone was cool but not belligerent, looking for neither a fight nor a connection. Self-sufficient.

“No, we’ve never met.” And then, because she was turning back to her papers, dismissing him, “Are you a teacher? What was so funny?”

She turned back, considering. The set of her mouth said,
This better not be a stupid pick-up line
, but there was a small smile in her eyes. “I teach physics at a community college.”

“And physics is funny?”

“Are you at all familiar with John Wheeler’s experiments?”

She flung the question at him like a challenge, and all at once Ben was enjoying himself. “The nineteen-eighty delayed-choice experiment?”

The smile reached her mouth, giving him full marks. “Yes. Listen to this. The question is, ‘
Describe what Wheeler found when he used particle detectors with photon beams
.’ And the answer should be . . .” She looked at Ben, the challenge more friendly now.

“That the presence or absence of a detector, no matter how far down the photon’s path, and even if the detector is switched on
after
the photon passes the beam splitter, affects the outcome. The detector’s presence or absence determines whether the photon registers as a wave or a particle.”

“Correct. This kid wrote, ‘Wheeler’s particles and his detectors acted weird. I think both were actually broken. Either that or it was a miracle.’” She laughed again.

“And it’s funny when your students don’t learn anything?”

“Oh, he’s learned something. He’s learned that when you haven’t got the vaguest idea, give it a stab anyway.” She looked fondly at the paper. “I like this kid. I’m going to fail him, but I like him.”

Something turned over in Ben’s chest. It was her laugh, or her cheerful pragmatism, or . . . He didn’t know what. He stuck out his hand. “I’m Ben Molloy. I work at the Neuroscience Institute.”

“Renata Williams.” She shook hands, her head tipped slightly to one side, the bar light glinting on her glasses. “I’ve always had a thing for scientists. All that arcane knowledge.”

“Not so arcane.”

“Says you. Sit down, Ben.”

They talked until long after his department had left Grogan’s. Ben found himself telling her things he’d never told anyone else, incidents from his childhood that were scary or funny or puzzling, dreams from his adolescence. She listened intently, her glasses on top of her head, her chin tilted to one side. Renata was more reticent about her own past (“Not much to tell—I was a goody-goody grind”), but she loved teaching and became enthusiastic about her students. They were carrying out some elaborate science project involving the data from solar flares; this was an active sun-spot year. Renata pulled out her students’ sunspot charts and explained them in the dim light from the bar. Eventually the weary bartender stopped shooting them meaningful glances and flatly told them, “Leave, already!”

Ben drove to her apartment. They left her car in the parking lot of the bar until the next day. In bed she was different: more vulnerable, less sure of herself. Softer. She slept with one hand all night on Ben’s hip, as if to make sure he was still actually there. Ben lay awake and felt, irrationally but definitely, that he had come home.

Renata worked long hours, teaching five courses (“Community colleges are the sweatshops of academe”), but with a difference. When she wasn’t working, she had a life. She saw friends, she kick-boxed, she played in a chess league, she went to movies. Ben, who did none of these things, felt both envious and left-out. Renata just laughed at him.

“If you really wanted to kick-box, you’d take a class in it. People generally end up doing what they want to do, if they can. My hermit.” She kissed him on the nose.

If they can
. Ben didn’t tell Renata about Cixin. The first month, he assured himself, they were just getting to know each other. (A lie: he’d known her,
recognized
her, that first night at Grogan’s.) Then, as each month passed—three, four, six—it got harder to explain why he’d delayed. How would Renata react? She was kind but she was also honest, valuing openness and sincerity, and she had a temper.

I’m adopting a Chinese boy for whom I’ve broken several laws that could still send me to jail, including practicing medicine without a license and administering untested drugs that induce socially disabling side-effects
. Perfect. Nothing added to romance like felony charges. Unless it was medical experimentation on a child.

Sometimes Ben looked at Renata, sleepy after sex or squinting at her computer, glasses on top of her curly head, and thought,
It will be all right
. Renata would understand. She came from a large family, and although she didn’t want kids herself, she would accept Cixin. Look at how much effort she put into her students, how many endless extra hours working with them on the sunspot project. And Cixin was eleven; in seven more years he’d be off onto his own life.

Other times he knew that he’d lied to Renata, that Cixin was not an easy-to-accept or lovable child, and that his arrival would make Ben’s world fall apart. At such times, his desperation made him moody. Renata usually laughed him out of it. But still he didn’t tell her.

Then, in August, Uncle James called from Washington. His voice was jubilant.

“I just got the final approval, Ben. You can go get your cousin any time now. You’re a daddy! And send me a big cigar—it’s a boy!”

Ben clutched his cell so tight that all blood left his fingers. “Thanks,” he said.

“Tell me how it works,” Renata said. They were the first words she’d spoken in fifteen long minutes, all of which Ben had spent talking. Her dangerous calm reminded him of Haihong, all those years ago.

They were in his apartment, which had effectively if not officially become hers as well. His half-packed suitcase lay open on the bed. Ben stood helplessly beside the suitcase, a pair of rolled-up socks in his hand. Renata sat in a green brocade chair that had been a gift from his mother and Ben knew that if he approached that chair, she would explode.

He took refuge in science. “It’s an alteration in the genes that create functional transporter proteins. Those are the amines that get neurotransmitters across synapses to the appropriate brain-cell receptors. The mechanisms are well understood—in fact, there are polymorphic alleles. If you have one gene, your body makes more transporters; with the other version, you get less.”

“What difference does that make?”

“It affects mood and behavior. Less serotonin, for example, is connected to depression, irritability, aggression, inflexibility.”

“And this alleged genemod in your cousin gave him less serotonin?”

“No.”
Alleged genemod
. Ben dragged his hand through his hair. “He probably does have less serotonin, but that’s a side effect. The genemod affected other proteins that in turn affected others . . . it’s a cascade. Everything’s interconnected in the brain. But the functional result in Cixin would be a flood of transporters and neurotransmitters in two brain regions, the superior parietal lobes and the tempoparietal region.”