Richard Powers - Generosity

Kurton praises the long, mysterious journey of literature. “Imaginative writing has always been the engine of future fact.” He thanks his opponent. “You’ve made a lot of good points that I’ll have to think about.” He concedes that genetic enhancement does force major reconsiderations, starting with the boundaries between justice and fate, the natural and the inevitable. “But so did the capture of fire and the invention of agriculture.”

He invites a thought experiment. Suppose you want to have a baby, but you’re at high risk for conveying cystic fibrosis. You go to the clinic, where the doctors, by screening your eggs, guarantee that your child will be born free of a hideous and fatal disease. “Not too many prospective parents will have a problem with that.”

As the scientist speaks, the novelist stares down at the table in front of him, his head in his hands. Russell Stone wants to mercy-kill him.

Thomas Kurton sees only the audience. “Now suppose you come to the clinic already pregnant, and tests show cystic fibrosis in your fetus. Assuming that the doctors can bring a treatment risk down to acceptable levels ”

Russell glances at Candace, who winces back. He looks at Thassa. She holds up a tiny digital movie camera and pans it around the auditorium. At his glance, she grabs his arm and pulls his ear near her mouth. “Many beautiful faces in here tonight. I’m so glad we came!”

Her casual touch pumps his neck full of blood. Minutes pass before he can concentrate on Kurton again. The geneticist progresses to removing the disease gene from the germ line before the malicious message has a chance to get copied again.

Russell comes alert when Kurton invokes the uses of literature. “For most of human history, when existence was too short and bleak to mean anything, we needed stories to compensate. But now that we’re on the verge of living the long, pain-reduced, and satisfying life that our brains deserve, it’s time for art to lead us beyond noble stoicism.”

In short: if it’s getting too rich for you, get off the ride. The Nobel novelist looks like he wants to do just that. Kurton concedes that change is always upheaval. “But upheaval is opportunity’s maiden name.” He concludes by mentioning a construction sign he saw on the torn-up expressway coming in from O’Hare: Inconvenience is temporary; improvement is permanent. The hall laughs appreciatively, pretty much ready to play.

When the applause ends, the novelist begins the rebuttal. “I’ve used that same expressway myself, and it’s true: improvement has been more or less permanent.” It must be his timing, because only a few people in the hall chuckle. But the laureate now talks with a freedom that gives up on persuading anyone.

The novelist’s metamorphosis baffles Kurton. He replies that anyone who prefers nasty, brutish, and short to glorious and paradisiacal may be suffering from depression. We’ve cured smallpox; we’ve done away with polio. “Of course we want to eliminate the toxic molecular sequences that predispose us to suffering, whether cystic fibrosis, Alzheimer’s, or heart disease. And if we can prevent the harmful, why not promote the helpful?”

Bunkering down into his seat, Russell can’t even begin to list the objections. He looks to Candace, but she stares straight ahead.

Right at the finish line, the novelist stumbles badly. Instead of pinning Pollyanna to the dissecting table, he capitulates. Enhance away, he says. Enhancement will mean nothing, in the long run. The remodeling of human nature will be as slapdash and flawed as its remodelers. We’ll never feel enhanced. We’ll always be banned from some further Eden. The misery business will remain a growth industry. When fiction goes real, reality will need a more resistant strain of fiction.

Uncertainty ripples through the house. The moderator, on orders from the co-sponsoring booksellers and café, chooses the unsettled moment to wrap things up. Democracy is thwarted; there is no Q and A.

Thassa is on her feet before her friends, camera in front of her, filming as the crowd drifts past. To those few who are old enough to resent someone recording them without asking, she just smiles and waves.

Russell is left alone with LPC Weld. “Well?” he asks. He doesn’t have the heart to volunteer what he thinks.

“Well what? It’s not a professional boxing match, you know.”

He cocks an eyebrow. “And you’re not a public relations manager.”

She flares a little, then nods, embarrassed. “Right. Well. I’m afraid it was Optimism, by a technical knockout.”

He wants to tally differently, but can’t.

“Should we try to say hello?” she asks.

He points at the crowd mobbing Thomas Kurton and lifts his palms.

“You’re right,” she says. “Let’s get out of here.”

They find Thassa conversing with a couple who recognize her from the Reader story. The man asks, “Do your relatives in Canada have your same hypothermia?” The woman asks, “What kind of exercise do you do?”

Candace apologizes to the couple and leads a puzzled Thassa away by the arm. The woman calls after them. “What are your favorite dietary minerals?”

They press through the crowded foyer. Safely outside in the bone-crunching cold, Candace tests Thassa. “You still want to talk to him?”

Thassa stops on the salted sidewalk, clouds of breath condensing around her. “He’s a funny man. We say: he knows how to make the donkey think it’s choosing the rope.”

Russell and Candace trade bewilderment.

Thassa takes their arms and starts forward again. “Yes, I’ll meet him tomorrow, like he wants.”

“He seems harmless enough.” Candace checks with Russell, who is helpless even to nod.

“But the author!” Thassa exclaims. “He’s the one I’d really like to meet. Did you read him ever, Russell?”

High up on the building’s corner, a tiny white coffin of a security camera tracks them with its red cyclopean eye. The last five years of Russell’s life could be reconstructed from archived videotape all over this city. He looks at the Algerian, his face a blank. “I don’t think so.”

“So many thoughts. I wonder if he might be ill? His sadness is so steady. I would love to experiment emotionally on him.”

Candace jerks to a stop. The arm-linked chain breaks. “You what?”

Thassa doesn’t even blush. “Just once! Just for science.”

He has her with the belugas.

On the phone the next morning, Thomas Kurton tells Thassa Amzwar to pick a meeting spot anywhere in the city. She laughs at the blank check. This city has forests in the northwest big enough to get lost in. To the south, black neighborhoods the size of Constantine that white people never enter. Convention centers with the look of fifties science-fiction space colonies. Warehouse districts full of resale contraband peppered with refrigerated corpses. Cemeteries a hundred times the length of a soccer pitch, with gravestones in forty-one languages. There’s Chinatown, Greek Town, Bucktown, Boystown, Little Italy, Little Seoul, little Mexico, little Palestine, little Assyria Two Arab neighborhoods-the southwest Muslims and the northwest Christians-where people from a dozen countries congregate to eat, recite Arabic poetry, and mock one another’s dialects.

She has my problem: too much possibility. A thousand parks, four hundred theaters, three dozen beaches, fifty colleges, fifteen bird sanctuaries, seven botanical gardens, two different zoos, and a glass-encased tropical jungle. Meet anywhere ? The scientist doesn’t realize the scale of the place.

She says to meet her in front of the fish temple.