The Golden Space (2 page)

She was still holding her cigarette as he came up to her. She had been living alone too long and had forgotten how some felt about such habits. She concealed it in her palm, hoping Merripen had not seen it, then dropped it, grinding it into the ground with her foot. She entered the house, motioning for him to follow.

Josepha disliked thinking about her life before the Transition. But her mind had become a network of involuntary associations, a mire of memories. She had been living in her isolated house for almost thirty years and would not have realized it without checking the dates.

It was time to pack up and leave, go somewhere else, do something she had not tried. Her mind resonated here. The sight of an object would evoke a memory; an odor would be followed by the image of a past experience; an event, even viewed at a distance, would touch off a recollection until it seemed she could barely get through the day without succumbing to reveries.

Josepha was more than three hundred years old but she could still feel startled by the fact. She looked twenty-two—except that when she had actually been twenty-two she had been overweight, myopic, and had dyed her hair auburn. She had become a slim woman with black hair and good vision. She was no longer plagued by asthma and migraine and could not remember how they felt.

But she remembered other things. The events of her youth sprang into her mind, often in greater detail than more recent happenings. She had thought of clearing out the memories; RNA doses, some rest, and the reverberations would be gone, the world would be fresh and new. But that was too much like dying. Her memories made her life, uneventful and pacific as it was, more meaningful.

But now Merripen was here and the peace would soon end.

Merripen Allen slouched in the dark blue chair near the window. His dark brown eyes surveyed the room restlessly. He seemed weary, yet alert and decisive. All the biologists were like that, Josepha thought. They were the ones who had made the world, who kept it alive, who had banished death. They held the power no one else wanted.

Merripen was the descendant of English gypsies. His clipped speech was punctuated by his expressive arm gestures. Josepha suspected that he deliberately cultivated the contrast.

They had spent several minutes engaging in courtesies; exchanging compliments, describing the weather to each other, asking after people they both knew, making an elaborate ceremony of dialing for refreshments. Now they sat across the room from each other silently sipping their white wine.

Josepha wanted to speak but knew that would be rude; Merripen was still savoring the Chablis. He might want another glass and after that there would be more ceremonial banter, perhaps a flirtation. He would pay her compliments, embellishing them with quotations from Catullus, his trademark, and she would fence with him. She had gone through all this in abbreviated form with his image. A seduction, at least in theory, could last forever. Sex, however inventive, and however long it went on in all its permutations, grew duller. It was too much a reminder that other things still lived and died.

Merripen finished the wine, then gazed out her window at the clearing, twirling the glass in his fingers. At last he turned back to her.

“Delicious,” he said. “Perhaps I’ll have another.” He rose to his feet. She motioned to him to sit, got up, and walked slowly to the oak cabinet in the corner where the opened bottle stood. She brought it to him and poured the wine carefully, placed the bottle on the table under the window, then sat down again.

Merripen sipped. His visage blurred as she focused on the red rose in the slender silver vase on the low table in front of her. As she leaned back, the rose obscured Merripen’s body. The redness dominated her vision; she saw a red bedspread over a double bed in the center of a yellow room. She was back in her old room, in the house of her parents, long ago.

She was fourteen and it was time to die. She locked her door.

She gazed at the small bottle, fumbling with the cap, suspended in time past, vividly conscious of the red capsules, the red bedspread, the cheerful flowered curtains over her window. The pain these sights usually brought receded for a moment. A voice called to her, the same soft voice that had called to her before, the disembodied voice she had never located.

She had been dying all along. The black void inside her had grown while the pain at its edges quivered. It would end now. As she swallowed the capsules, she was being captured by eternity, where she would live at last.…

She had emerged from a coma bewildered, uncomprehending, connected to tubes and catheters, realizing dimly that she still breathed. She tried to cry out and heard only a sighing whistle. She reached with her left hand for her throat, touched the hollow at the base of her neck, and felt an open hole. They had cut her open and forced her to live as they lived.

At night, as she lay in the hospital bed trying not to disturb the needle in her right wrist, she remembered a kind voice and its promise. Someone had spoken to her while she lay dying, while she hovered over her drugged body watching a tube being forced into her failing lungs. The voice had not frightened her as had the voice she had been hearing for months. It had been gentle, promising her that she would live on, that she would one day join it, and then had forced her to return. She was again trapped in her body.

Perhaps her illness or the barbiturates had induced the vision. Yet it had seemed too real for that. She knew dimly that she could not discuss it, could not make anyone understand it, could not even be sure it was real. She felt she had lost something without even being sure of what it was. But the promise remained
: not now, but another time.

Josepha touched the rose and a petal fell. Her death was still denied her. She had lived, coming to believe she should not seek death actively, that three hundred, or a thousand, or a million years did not matter if the promise had been real.

Merripen spoke. She looked away from the rose.

The evening light bathed the room in a rosy glow. Merripen’s skin was coppery and his tight white shirt was pinkish. “You are still with us,” he said.

“Yes.”

“You still want to be a parent to these children.”

“Certainly.” Josepha had decided to become a parent two years earlier and had registered her wish. Her request had been granted—few people were raising children now. Her genes would be analyzed and an ectogenetic chamber would be licensed for the fetus. She had been surprised when Merripen Allen contacted her, saying that before she went ahead with her plans he had a proposal to make.

He and a few other biologists wanted to create a new variant of humanity. They had been consulting for years, using computer minds to help them decide what sort of redesigned person might be viable. Painstakingly, they had constructed a model of such a being and its capacities, not wanting to alter the human form too radically for fear of the unknown consequences, yet seeking more than minor changes.

Merripen sighed, looking relieved. “I expected you wouldn’t back out now. Almost no one has, but two people changed their minds last week. When you asked me here I thought you had also.”

She smiled and shook her head. It was Merripen’s motives she wished to consider. She had worried that she might change her mind after seeing the child, but that was unlikely. There were no guarantees even with a normal child, since the biologists, afraid of too much tampering with human versatility, simply ensured that flawed genes were not passed on rather than actively creating a certain type of child.

Even so, she had wondered when Merripen first made his offer. They had argued, he saying that human society was becoming stagnant while she countered by mentioning the diversity of human communities both on Earth and in space.

“We need new blood,” he said now, apparently thinking along similar lines. “Oh, we have diversity, but it’s all on the surface. I’ve seen a hundred different cultures and at bottom they’re the same, a way of passing time. Even the death cults …”

She recoiled from the obscenity. “In Japan,” he went on, “it’s
seppuku
over any insult or failure, in India it’s slow starvation and extreme asceticism, in England it’s trial by combat, and here you play with guns. For every person we bring back from death, another dies, and the people we bring back try again or become murderers so that we’re forced to allow them to die for the benefit of others.” He glanced apologetically at her, apparently aware he was repeating old arguments.

Josepha did not want to think about death cults and the sudden flare-ups of violence that had reminded her of the Transition and had made her retreat to this house. She looked down at the small blue stone set into a gold bracelet on her wrist, the Bond that linked everyone through a central system. The microcomputer link lit up and rang softly when someone called her; she could respond over her holo or touch her finger to the stone, indicating that she was unavailable and that a message should be left. More important, the Bond protected her and could summon aid. But even the blue stone could not guard her from everything; many knew how to circumvent the mechanism.

“But matters must be different in space,” she replied, thinking of the huge, cylindrical dwellings that hovered in space at the Trojan points equidistant from Earth and moon.

Merripen shrugged. “Not as much as you might think. The space dwellers were more innovative when they first left Earth, but now … you know, they pride themselves on being safe from the vicissitudes of life here, the storms, the quakes, the natural disasters. They make endless plans for space exploration and carry out none of them. Their cult is a cult of life with no risks.”

“But there are the people on Mars, the ones out near Saturn, or the scientists who left our solar system a century ago. Surely they’re not stagnating.”

“They are so few, Josepha. And as for the ones who left, we have heard nothing. They may be dead or they may have found something, but in any event, it’ll have no effect on us.”

“I think you’re too pessimistic,” she argued, wanting to believe her own words. “How long have we had our extended lives? A little more than two hundred years. That’s hardly long enough for a fair test. People change, they need time.”

“I’m afraid the only thing time does for some people is to confirm them in their habits. Oh, some change, those who have cultivated flexibility. But they are so few. The others are a heavy weight holding us back. In the past, it took great deprivation and a strong leader to make such people change. There is no deprivation now and no leader. Perhaps these new children will open our eyes.”

She found this turn in the conversation distasteful, but she had to expect such views from Merripen. He was too young to remember the surge of creativity, the high hopes that had existed for a short time after the difficulties of the Transition, but he knew of them and must sometimes have longed for them. She tried not to think of her own placid life and how hard it had been to force herself to consider being a parent. Stability, serenity, the eternal present—she would forsake them for something less sure. She thought of the ones who had left the solar system and wondered how they had brought themselves to do it.

“The children,” she murmured. “I’d rather discuss them for a bit, settle some of my questions, I still don’t understand completely.” She was trying to draw Merripen away from his disturbing speculations.

“You’ve heard it all before.”

“I didn’t really listen, though. I didn’t want to confront the details, I guess.”

Merripen frowned. “If you’re still ambivalent, you’d better back out now.”

“But I’m not ambivalent. I agree with your general goal at least. And maybe part of it is that I’m afraid if I don’t try something different now, I may never be able to … that’s not the best motive, but …” She was silent.

“I understand.”

“You said the children won’t have our hormones. Won’t that limit them?”

“That’s not accurate,” he replied. “Certain hormonal or glandular secretions are needed to insure their growth. But they won’t be subject to something like the sudden rush of adrenaline we feel when disturbed or under stress.”

“That could be dangerous. They might not react quickly enough.”

“We’ve allowed for that. Refinements in the nervous system, quicker reflexes, will allow them to respond as quickly as we do, perhaps even a bit more quickly. The difference is that they won’t act inappropriately. Our behavior is often the result of feelings, which are in turn rooted in our instincts and our survival biology. Their behavior will be based on rational decisions as much as on that.”

“Our instincts have served us well enough in the past.”

“They may not serve us well any longer. We don’t have inevitable physical death any more, yet our instincts probably go on preparing us for it. The rationality of these children will take the place of instinct and complement the instincts that remain.”

Merripen paused as Josepha considered what he had told her before. The children would look human, but would have stronger muscles, and bones less vulnerable to injury. They would have the ability to synthesize certain amino acids and vitamins, such as C and B
12
; they would be able to live on a limited vegetable diet.

But the most extreme change, she knew, involved their gender. Merripen had explained that thoroughly, although she was aware that she had only a general understanding of it. They would have no gender—or maybe it was more appropriate to say they would have two genders. They would bear both male and female reproductive organs. They could reproduce naturally, each one able to be either father or mother, or by using the same techniques human beings now used. But they would lack sexuality. Their desires and ability to reproduce would become actualized only when they decided to have offspring; they would have conscious control of the process. Merripen had outlined this, too, in detail, but she recalled it only vaguely.