COSMOS magazine

Monday, July 7

Wayne dumped his stolen car just south of the city, picked up a lift into the centre of town, and walked north through teeming rain along the freeway to the Edge. For Wayne, despite the rudimentary living conditions, the community offered his best chance to stay in one place, secure, out of the sight of authorities and do-gooders, certainly out of Blick's purview, long enough to obtain the final regulator dose of the auxosome from Roberta or Paul.

He walked into the drafty space out of warm, drumming rain. Despite the day's heat, fires burned in blackened steel bins. People stood about muttering lethargically to one another or themselves. Some sat by small tents pitched in the dirt. Wayne wandered cautiously until he found the rusted old car used by the friend of the Harris County food vendor. The Somali Muslim immigrant Yusuf gave him a cautious welcome. In exchange for help making sandwiches and other small food items, the newcomer got enough to eat for free. To his surprise, Yusuf offered him a cut of the small profits after Wayne showed him ways to speed up his food preparation and keep it fresh longer using several layers of plastic sheeting and crushed ice liberated, using a small trick he worked out, from a gas station ice dispenser.

He settled finally under the drumming freeway's colossal burden of concrete, watching lightning snap in the sky, dust in his nostrils. Yusuf's laden pedal-cart stood next to the rusting wreck. Nobody touched it or its contents, and nobody would. The black man was curled in the back seat, taking a snoring nap while the rain made his profession unprofitable. Wayne wrapped himself uncomfortably around the shift stick, across both front seats, worrying obsessively about the third shot. In minutes, he fell asleep anyway.

 

In the cool late afternoon beside the insect-buzzing trickle of the San Antonio river, King Curt sat on his throne, the stump of a live oak tree that Ilya Santana, using only a chainsaw and chisel, had carved into the form of a Celtic knot years before he became a famous artist. Soon enough the City Fathers would shovel all these unwanted people away to make room for the promised expansion of the Riverwalk, one of the city's main tourist attractions, maybe second only to the Alamo. At least until then the dumpsters behind the Riverwalk's many eateries provided indifferent day-old food for the work-shy, the luckless, the addicted and the half-deranged who made up the population of The Edge.

Curt was maybe forty years old, with dark brown skin and dreadlocks. Wayne sat across the small camp fire on a folding metal chair, sipping coffee from a cracked china cup. This was surely the most delicious coffee he'd ever drunk, a complex tapestry of flavour. It seemed that he was distinctly tasting each chemical component of the coffee and simultaneously savouring its relationship to the whole. Must be the rain-freshened air and camp fire, he decided. He yearned for the woods.

"I like to meet each new person, get to know them a little, go over the rules." King Curt set his coffee cup down on a highly polished slab of redwood, his worktable, set atop a base made of galvanized plumbing pipe. The big man took a bite of a muffin one of the women had brought for him, washed it down with another swig of coffee. "Where you from?"

"Grew up in Memphis." Somehow, Wayne found it uncomfortable to lie to this fellow. He had given his name as Elliot, nothing more, which seemed to satisfy everyone. It was not uncommon here for people to use only given or nicknames.

Curt looked hard into his eyes without blinking. "Planning on staying long?"

"Don't know for sure. Not too long."

"We encourage people to look for work. There's a place just a few blocks west, where you can wait in the mornings. People who need day help come by and pick up workers."

"I'm a little poorly right now, you understand," Wayne told him, apologetically. "Need to rest up for a week or so until I feel better." And until I can grow out this beard so people are less likely to recognize me, he thought.

"Okay. Long as you keep your space clean, don't cause any trouble, and pitch in a little with the work here."

"Yusuf told me you have a library."

Curt looked at him with new interest. "Over there." An ancient orange Volkswagen camper under the curving concrete roof of the freeway, no wheels, up on blocks. "I've run out of shelf space. I'm trying to come up with enough money to buy one of those Sea Train containers. I'm happy to let people read my books if they look after 'em. Just sign the list so I know you have the book, and don't take it away from here." He shook his head. "Not so many people interested in reading these days. People spend more time just finding food, scraping up enough money for soap and toothpaste." Curt's personal presence was remarkable, and his preacher's voice beautiful, resonant. "I don't like trouble, Elliot. I find it works best to handle minor disputes as soon as possible, before they escalate."

Wayne kept his own voice gruff. "What about someone breaks stuff, or steals it?"

"We try to find a form of restitution both parties will agree to. If we can't work something out, we have a trial by jury. Anyone doesn't want to abide by the jury's decision, they can always take their dispute into the regular court system." His laughter barked. "That's only happened once." Without his standing or moving a muscle, it was plain that the interview was about over. "We've had a few troublemakers through here never had no intention of getting along peacefully. Those types we throw out."

It was not a threat. It was a clear warning. Wayne nodded, stood, went back to Yusuf's car. He stretched out next to it on a six foot strip of foam rubber he'd bought for $3 from an Edge resident who had found a job and was departing to put down a deposit on a rental apartment. He was utterly exhausted, and the auxosomes worked ceaselessly inside his tissues like a fever.

Wednesday, July 16

Blick's evident connections with law enforcement might extend to federal aviation authorities. That risk made their trip more circuitous and far more time-consuming than Roberta was used to. They took a Greyhound bus to the border, a tedious and slightly unnerving experience, but crossed readily enough. Drew and Maureen went through immigration and customs together, Roberta following. The MTJ corporate jet awaited them at the Laredo airport on the Mexican side. The flight across Mexico, east to west and north to south, they devoted to snoozing; all three had gotten up far too early in the day. They landed without incident and took a cab Drew hailed at random.

Squeezed in the back seat against the side of the bumpy Volkswagen Beetle by Maureen and Drew, Roberta made the best of her discomfort by watching the Mexican streetscape. She had spent holiday weekends in Isla de Mujer, Tepotzlan, Mexico city itself, but Guadalajara was new to her. Exotic and beautiful and, refreshingly, not as hot as summer in Texas. It might be the nation's second largest city, but compared to the smoggy horror of the capital, where the air breathed daily by 20 million people literally contained a suspended haze of human faecal matter, it was paradise. A suitable site, perhaps, for the revived and transplanted MTJ research centre.

Paul's associate had arranged a small meeting room in the Universidad's central library. As they entered, a visiting troupe of blond, tanned Californian fundamentalist missionaries in gaudy straw hats and vests, announced with a banner in blue and gold, were setting up outside in the grassy courtyard, to the bemusement of the locals. The meeting room was a cramped space with teak table, plain water jug and sturdy glasses, and a dozen padded chairs, but with state of the art display facilities. Paul closed curtains patterned gaily with tropical blooms, plugged in his laptop, ran them through a PowerPoint presentation of his latest results.

"Undeniable murine-human transposition of the key auxosome elements," he said finally. His face in the coloured LED light of the screen images was grave. "Drew, I believe you have something to show us?"

Drew Chang switched seats, plugged his own thumb-sized memory module into the USB port of Paul's laptop, found a directory. The screen showed a microscope slide with blotchy shapes and blurred lines against a mostly empty white field. Roberta had seen it the day before and sat mutely, but Paul and Jill had an audible reaction.

"My seminal fluid, three days ago," Drew said blandly.

"No wrigglers," Jill said.

"Not a one," Drew told her. He bared his teeth. "I'm as sterile as a mule."

"I'm so sorry," Paul said, voice tight.

"Luckily it only impairs outcome, not performance. A sort of built-in permanent condom."

"Be sorry, but don't be so sorry," Maureen added. She rose from her seat, patted her loosely covered belly, bowed. "Regard the happy parents-to-be."

"Wonderful!" Jill cried, and went immediately to hug the woman. Roberta watched with a fond smile. She herself had passed through menopause five years earlier; there was no dread for her in this engineered Termination of her genetic line. Besides, she told herself, she fully intended to be her own offspring, to live as long and as fully and as goddamn responsibly as she could, for a thousand years or a million. Or to raise a clone, if it came to that and the technology was legalized. The men were shaking hands rowdily. Alex swung his eyes about in a paroxysm of embarrassment. He might be a genius, but he was still a ten year old kid.

"I've been pregnant for two months," Maureen was saying. "I hadn't even told the daddy. First he was nearly dead," and her voice choked, "then he was recovering, then I had to pry him from the grip of his attentive mother..." Everyone laughed except Alex, who was still in bashful mode. "And then I wanted to make completely sure. Now I'm sure, I had a Clearblue test and vaginal echography yesterday and all's proceeding very nicely."

Roberta led a round of applause, and poured glasses of iced water. Light from the screen sparkled as she raised a toast.

"Well, that happy news does take us rather abruptly back to Drew's results," she said at length. "I'm afraid we have to do some major and last-minute ethics assessment on this entire project. Dr. Chang and Dr. Gibson have created a profoundly Promethean moment in history, a crux, a watershed between past and future like no other, greater in significance, I think, even than the taming of fire and the emergence of language."

"The end of dying," Jill said.

"The end of conception," said Maureen, mouth twisting.

"Only for the moment," Paul said quickly. "I think we can regard this as a lucky circuit-breaker. The world has been standing for twenty years on the verge of a major population crisis, getting closer and closer to the edge of unsustainability—"

"Sorry, Paul," Maureen said, face flushed. "That's Green bullshit."

"I'm not saying anything about your baby, Maureen," Paul said placatingly. "This is a larger, global—"

"We can feed and house and clothe a hundred billion if we have to," she told him angrily. "In twenty years time we'll have nanotechnology to take care of food and everything else we need to get by. The analysis is on the web, it's not hard to—"

"From the Papal College of Gynaecologists, I imagine," Paul muttered. He held up his hand immediately, shaking his head. "Sorry, that was a cheap shot."

"Paul, people do have a right to their own children," Jill said. "A powerful need, anyway. It's basic biology, seems to me. I know I'm no expert, but isn't it evolution? The deepest drive we have."

"I think Jill's right," Roberta found herself saying. "Without children, we have no hope for the future. That way lies madness and grief and social ruin." She shuddered, "God, a world without children?"

"No, no, no!" Paul said loudly. He slapped his hand on the table, leaning forward. "That's history speaking, making its last claims on us. But we are in the future. Roberta, you called this a Promethean moment. That's absolutely correct. The Terminator-variant auxosome is the catalyst that will change us from, from... larvae to adults. From caterpillars to butterflies."

"I'm already an adult, love," Jill said. "Besides, butterflies die."

"And we won't! This is so hard to grasp intuitively, I know, I know, I've struggled with it for months now. Nanotechnology or not, we can't afford to let populations go haywire. I know it seems ruthless and inhuman. Our poor human minds find it impossible to take hold of the idea that we might live without aging, without deteriorating, without illness or automatic death."

"Well, Blick might have us killed at any moment," Chang said. "Or some fucking madman like your pal Wayne." He caught himself, glanced at the child. "Sorry, Alex."

"'Sorright, you should hear Mom, sometimes, she's swears like a... a myrmidon!"

"A what?" Jill laughed explosively, and her amusement broke the angry mood gathering like a heavy cloud.

Alex looked bashful. "A soldier, you know, in Homer?"

My God, Roberta thought. He did that deliberately. The child intervened. He really has become a genius. I hope, she thought, that we all can gain something of his wonderful intelligence and grace.

From outside the library, festive mariachi music broke out, diminished by the thick stucco walls but clearly audible, an epic of cultural insensitivity: guitars, a trumpet or two blaring, voices raised in song and laughter, not all of it derisory.

"Very well," she said, taking control again. "I'd like to open the next tranche of our meeting, a consideration of the known epidemiology and likely spread of this unexpected effect. It seems to me that we have an obligation to alert the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta."

"But it's not a disease," Alex said firmly. Everyone looked at him in surprise. "It's a pro-ease." He glanced around the table, his head at shoulder height to everyone else. "It's a life-saver."

The adults regarded him once more in open-mouthed silence.

He added: "I'd like to go out and explore the library now, if that's all right with everyone? You know, play?" He grinned happily.