Richard Powers - Generosity

. whatever was the beginning of this world, the end will be glorious and paradisiacal, beyond what our imaginations can now conceive.

– Joseph Priestley

For the point is this: not that myth refers us back to some original event which has been fancifully transcribed as it passed through the collective memory; but that it refers us forward to something that will happen, that must happen. Myth will become reality, however skeptical we might be.

– Julian Barnes, A History of the World in 10 ݣ Chapters

And on a May night in the near future, Tonia Schiff will land at Tunis-Carthage International. Seen from the airport shuttle, the dense glow surprises her. So much flickering enterprise up so late, refining fresh surplus into new necessities. Tunis glitters as furtively as any of the earth’s two-hundred-or-so-million-inhabitant cities. This one just happens to be four thousand years old.

The science-show host wakes up in the Centre Ville , feeling that she’s landed by mistake in southern Italy. Only the palms along Avenue Mohammed V reassure Tonia. And these turn out to be just a holdover French colonial fantasy. For a day, she wanders at random. The perfect day to play the tourist in one’s own life. She climbs up to the Belvedere, loses herself in the tight medina maze, strolls through the bey’s palace. She stands overwhelmed in the heart of the suq, beyond the simplest bargaining.

A pair of guards turn her away at the entrance to the Grande Mosquée, on account of her clothes. She tells herself she’ll try again later, more suitably dressed, but knows she won’t.

The city’s scent veers crazily from dawn to dusk. In the morning, fetid breezes blow over the dried salt lake, mixing with exhaust. Toward sundown, the flower vendors creep out to thread the cafés with jasmine garlands. A tiny white snail of a flower, whose scent is like falling down a bottomless well: solvent, secret, and as strange as sex, with final arrival lying just a few inches below reach Tonia Schiff might have come to this place for that smell alone.

The next day will be clearer still. In midmorning, she’ll make her way out to the marble carcass of Carthage. She winds up sitting at a stone table above the surf, aside the Chicago of the ancient world, scribbling production notes for her redemptive film now under way. Salt spray from the Mediterranean curls her pages. Coastal sun douses her, in a country she was sure she’d never live long enough to see.

The sea air is heavenly. Even the smearing haze over the city is beautiful. At a nearby table, a family of six picnics. A sinuous voice dances out of their radio; a woman who sounds seven feet tall threads a melody around instruments Schiff can’t even name. She won’t be able to tell the key, the scale, the words, the age, or even the feelings at stake. Her ignorance verges on glorious.

She digs into her bag and pulls out a beaten-up copy of Frederick P. Harmon’s Make Your Writing Come Alive . The book’s spine was broken long before it came to Tonia. She lays the volume flat on the table, open to chapter two: “Vital Fiction.” Ink fills the margins-words in three languages, sketches, diagrams, snaking arrows. Half the sentences are underlined in an elaborate, uncrackable color-code. The last paragraph on page 123is double-underscored, in Berber red:

Here is the single most important secret of vivid writing: let your reader travel freely. No border checks, no customs declarations, no visa: let every reader reach the country of her innermost need.

In the margin, next to “travel freely,” the Berber woman has written “scares some people.”

“Innermost” is circled. Above it, the words “ le plus profond ” lead to another phrase in a language Tonia Schiff won’t be able to tell from random scratches in stone

Thassa reads Kurton’s message on a computer in a Montreal Public Library branch six blocks from her aunt and uncle’s council flat. She’s still on winter vacation and looking for messages from someone else-an interest only now dawning on me. She has had scores of e-mails from strangers in the last week, but this one ranks with the strangest. She laughs at the would-be Berber greeting. She clicks on the link in Kurton’s signature but can’t make much of the site. She googles “how you tick,” but ends up more in the dark than when she started.

She refuses to snub anyone, even obvious cranks. Many of the most interesting people in her life seemed like cranks, at first. She forwards the entire message to Chicago, adding a note of her own:

Chère Candace,

No foggy clue what this means. Yiii: it’s sci-ence! So you know all about that, and you told me once if anything ever looks funny, just to ask your opinion.

Your opinion?

Je t’embrasse très fort.

T.

Candace Weld’s opinion was split at best. She read three print interviews with Thomas Kurton and listened to the man play himself on a podcast. She found him vaguely messianic, but neither the thuggish Edward Teller nor the grandiose Craig Venter that scared or envious reporters made him out to be. Weld knew plenty of researchers like Kurton. She’d gone to school with them, studied under them, competed with them for her own PhD. These men had simply accepted science’s latest survival adaptation-salesmanship. Any funded researcher who condemned them was a hypocrite.

She looked up the full Priestley quote from Kurton’s signature, finding ten different mutations that fanned across the Web in adaptive radiation. Thousands of people were out there, disseminating the clergyman-chemist’s ecstatic vision. The coming paradise was fast becoming a start-up industry all its own:

[N]ature, including both its materials, and its laws, will be more at our command; men will make their situation in this world abundantly more easy and comfortable; they will probably prolong their existence in it, and will grow daily more happy, each in himself, and more able (and, I believe, more disposed) to communicate happiness to others

Part of Weld wanted this genomicist to see Thassa, to be there when the transhumanist met something that no amount of blood work, tissue samples, or gene sequencing would ever explain. Thassadit Amzwar’s gift had little to do with molecules; on that, Candace was ready to bet her own well-being. The Kabyle had found something about how best to be alive. Mr. Omega Point could find the same, by meeting her.

Candace recalled Dennis Winfield’s warning about boundaries, and she briefly considered consulting him. But Thassa had written her as a friend, not as a client. Candace wrote back on her Gmail account, not her college one. She told Thassa what she’d learned about the controversial scientist. Thassa should feel no obligation to meet the man, but if she wanted to, Candace would be happy to chaperone.

The reply came in, as good as predictable. That’s great. That’s perfect. Can Mister Stone come, too?

Men will grow daily more happy, each in himself, and more able to communicate happiness to others. Schiff reads the words at the end of dozens of e-mails. She reads at night by the dim ceiling light in her hotel above the ficus trees on Avenue Habib Bourguiba. Whatever the beginning of this world, the end will be glorious and paradisiacal. Beyond imagining