Ark (12 page)

She said, “I’m told everyone is spending the night. And that brings me to a question.”

“Which is?”

“You and Henry. One room or two?”

“Two.”

Her eyes were bright, and in them you could read her thoughts. She wasn’t fooled by this deception, not Garbo. What else could I be for if not to sleep with the trillionaire?

But as things turned out, I did spend part of the night with Henry. Before dawn—it was still dark of night—I heard someone tapping on my door. My visitor was Henry. He was fully clothed, Yankees cap and all.

“I’m going out for coffee,” he said in a half whisper. “Want to join me?”

In the nearest town he found a Dunkin’ Donuts with a bunch of pickup trucks parked outside. Inside, everyone was dressed pretty much the same way Henry was—that is to say, like people who lived from paycheck to paycheck. Most of the guys were beefy, and when he came back to the table with our breakfast, I understood why. Each donut represented an instantaneous weight gain of not less than twice its own bulk. Henry had bought us two apiece, along with two enormous cups of coffee.

“The ones with coconut are really good,” he said.

I took a bite. How right Henry was. My mood lifted. After we finished the donuts, Henry went back to the counter and bought breakfast sandwiches made of fried egg, ham, and melted Velveeta, fishing ones and fives out of several different pockets and dropping a couple of dollar bills into the tip jar. We finished our sandwiches and had more coffee.

Henry said, “Are you all right? You looked like a ghost after supper last night.”

“It was the lobster,” I said. “Also, I had a conscience.”

“You’re all right now?”

“Yeah. I took the donut cure.”

“Why the conscience?”

“I was rude to a guest, didn’t you notice?”

“I noticed. He’s old enough to take care of himself. Usually he does.”

“You’ve known him for a while?” I asked.

“Years,” Henry said. “Don’t worry. He probably argued with you all the way home, shouting all the things he should’ve said if only he had thought of them. He’ll say them the next time you meet.”

“The Prof and I are going to meet again?”

“Why not? Sparks flew. That’s a good sign.”

At the next table a man with a loud voice was telling a dirty joke. Henry paused to listen to it, then grinned. One breath later he turned to me and said, “How serious were you yesterday?”

I had spent the night trying to forget what I said the day before. The last thing I wanted to do was reconstruct it.

However, I was on duty, so I said, “About what?”

“Forgetting about ethics.”

I said, “Henry, I was babbling. I don’t remember what I said.”

“I do,” Henry said.

He then quoted back every word that I had uttered during my monologue in Amerigo’s library. I had heard of total recall. Henry actually possessed it. I felt that I had been eating donuts with an alien.

I said, “Tell me, Henry, did you have any help with remembering the balderdash?”

“Like what?”

“A tape recording? A chip implanted in your brain?”

He shook his head.

I said, “Can you recall everything I’ve ever said to you?”

“Most of it,” Henry said.

“Also everything you’ve said to everyone else you’ve ever known?”

“Not everything is worth remembering. Or everyone.”

He sipped his coffee and studied me. There was something he wanted to tell me, but he hesitated to take the chance. I felt this as if I had just read it on his forehead. Then, speaking in his usual soft voice, he told me. Or started to.

When he got to what he called “the enhanced embryos,” and started to explain just how they would be enhanced and what the results would be, I said, “Stop. I don’t want to hear this.”

Henry said, “But I need you to hear it.”

“No. You’re making me very uncomfortable.”

“I don’t see why, but I’ll stop now if you really want me to. You need time to think.”

The last thing I wanted to do was to think about what Henry had just told me.

I said, “Frankly, Henry, at this point I don’t know what I need.”

Remorselessly, Henry said, “We’ll talk again when you’re ready.”

Outside in the parking lot, he gave me the keys to his car, a BMW convertible, and suggested that I skip the rest of the meeting and drive back to the city alone. I could think of nothing better to do, so that’s what I did. Henry didn’t ask for a lift back to Amerigo’s.

~ * ~

4

I DIDN’T SEE HENRY FOR
days. I assumed he had gone somewhere. I didn’t mind. I was falling in love with loneliness. This was a defensive measure, in case Henry never came back. To be alone again was like living with the ghost of an estranged husband. He was gone, but even when he was absent, there he was, right behind you, breathing on your neck like a ghost. Who knew if he was real? Who had the guts to turn around and surprise the ghost by actually looking at it? Two of my fictitious characters, lovers, had a quarrel from which there could be no escape. I deleted the passage. It didn’t make me feel one whit better about my situation with Henry. I had failed him. I was paid to listen to him, and I had refused to listen to him. I assumed he would delete me from his life.

What would my post-Henry world be like? I still had the BMW he loaned me, parked in the basement garage. Once again I considered leaving Henry’s money and everything else behind except my manuscript, and driving to, say, Utah. I could ship the car back to him, then live in a used trailer in the high desert, a good place to be when the Event happened. Absolute simplicity, that was the ticket—old clothes, a parka, boots, a warm hat, frozen food, Eight O’clock coffee, writing with a pencil on the back of junk mail, not even a cat for company.

In the end, I did not light out for the territories, but my habits changed. I turned off Henry’s videophone and all my throwaway cell phones and stopped checking for email. I no longer answered the intercom when the doormen called. I began to sleep late and write far into the evening. One evening I was still writing—it was dark outside—when the doorbell rang. Oddly, I felt no fear. I opened the door without even asking through the intercom who was there. Whoever it was, whatever it meant, let it happen. What more could fate have in store for me?

The answer was Henry—a faintly smiling Henry. He cocked his head, checking me out, I guess, for signs of emotional distress.

He said, “Hi. Sorry for the surprise visit, but you don’t answer the phone.”

He made no move to cross the threshold on his own authority, so I invited him in. I sat down primly on the sofa, knees and ankle bones together, hands in lap. To my surprise, Henry sat down beside me.

He said, “I expressed myself badly in Dunkin’ Donuts the other day.”

I said nothing.

Henry said, “I’m here to try again.”

One of our silences gathered. Then Henry spoke.

“To begin with, humanity is the first species with the capability to influence its own evolution,” he said. “You won’t be crazy about this analogy, but we are now able to perform most of the wonders attributed to the beings in Genesis. Quite soon we’ll surpass them.”

“By doing what?”

“When you think about what I started to tell you, think about it in terms of what you know as a twenty-first-century person instead of a character in the Old Testament. Consider the case of Sarah, wife of Abraham. Genesis tells us that God and a couple of his angels stopped by Abraham’s tent one day and stayed for lunch— freshly baked bread and a barbecued calf from Abraham’s herd. God reminded Abraham of the many gifts he had bestowed on him. Abraham replied that he was grateful for the herds and flocks and land, but these things didn’t really mean all that much because he had no children. God said he would rectify that. Abraham’s wife, Sarah, would conceive a son by Abraham. Sarah, who was a very old woman and had long since ceased to menstruate, laughed at the idea. God reproved her for doubting that he could do all things, and said he’d be back in a year and she would, by golly, bear Abraham a son. God did return, and Sarah did bear Abraham’s prophesied child. Abraham was a hundred years old and Sarah not so very much younger when Isaac was born—a miraculous event in his time. But in the late twentieth century, embryos implanted by mortal physicians in the wombs of women in their sixties were carried to term and delivered by caesarian section.”

“You plan to do something similar?”

“If not exactly the same thing.”

“How?”

“Technically, it’s no great feat,” Henry replied. “All you need is a computer program, detailed knowledge of the genome, and a certain amount of DNA. We have those three things.”

“Including the computer program?”

He nodded. I didn’t doubt that he himself had written the program.

“Where do you get the DNA?” I asked.

“Every human being is a walking DNA factory.”

“So you plan to harvest it from living people?”

“Obviously.”

For the first time ever, Henry’s tone was unpleasant. So was mine.

I said, “What kind of people?”

“We’ll be working with embryos.”

“Why embryos?”

“Because they’re easier to modify, and because they are so small they can’t even be detected by the naked eye. They weigh practically nothing. You can transport tens of thousands of them in the same amount of space that one adult human body would occupy.”

“How do you keep them alive?”

“It’s done every day in clinics all over the world. Properly frozen and stored at the right temperature in liquid nitrogen, they will, in theory, live forever.”

“They live?”

“Of course they live.”

He then told me many things about DNA that I already knew and even more that I had not known. It came down to this: It is possible to mold DNA into almost any form. Billions of species had evolved willy-nilly on Earth from the same DNA. What the coincidences of evolution could do, design could also do, and do it much more quickly.

I said, “Henry, cut the crap. Are you telling me that intelligent design is a fact?”

“If you leave the supernatural out of it, why shouldn’t it be? Why does it have to be one thing or the other, God or natural selection? It’s not outside the realm of possibility that a design team from outer space deposited our species on this planet forty or a hundred thousand years ago and let evolution take its course. The whole human race has been a design team at work on itself and everything else ever since it was turned loose on this planet. Agriculture, our invention, or maybe the instructions programmed into our DNA, gave us food that made us taller, stronger, smarter. Medicine gave us longer life. Technology gave us the power of gods. Sometimes, even usually, there was no obvious reason to alter the original, but we did it anyway. Look at the many specialized kinds of dogs and other livestock we’ve developed through selective breeding, which is just another term for planned evolution. Look at ourselves. Thanks to all of the above, plus managed marriage, present-day human beings are as different from earlier hominids as the inch-long ears of maize cultivated by the Anasazi Indians are from modern corn on the cob—same DNA, different outcome.”