Richard Powers - Generosity

Slightly better than something that’s not quite a leafy sea dragon.

“You are the man who got cows to make medicines. If I come to Boston, can you give me one of those branches, growing out of the back of my head?”

“It might take a few tries.”

She crouches down again, examining the implausible monster. “ Farhana? Hnnn? Tu es heureuse là-dedans, ma belle? What do you think, Mr. Kurton? Can fish be happy the way we are happy?”

“No one knows-yet. But ask me again, in a few years.”

An announcement comes over the building’s speakers: a behavior display in the oceanarium will start in fifteen minutes. She shoots him a hopeful look. He checks his watch and decides that she’s worth missing a plane for. Minneapolis can wait. For the first time in months, he’s enjoying being in a place more than he’ll enjoy leaving it.

The water-theater design is pure genius. The glass curtain arcing behind the huge tank vanishes, and the pool merges seamlessly with the endless lake beyond. The day is azure, and they could be sitting in a Carthaginian amphitheater on the shores of the Mediterranean. A creature breaks the surface, then another. Three sleek gray missiles clear the water and plunge in synchrony back in. The crowd gasps, music starts up, a human with a wireless headset and a fish bucket appears, and it’s showtime.

Soon, pods of marine mammals are spinning, leaping, tail-dancing, squirting, and chattering-everything that the woman with the wireless headset asks them to do. It looks like mutually alien species breaking through into shared play.

No one is more pleased than this show’s regular. She asks the scientist, “Do you think they truly understand her?”

“She’s making little hand signals.”

“Obviously! But this signal communicates, no?”

That’s when he tells her. Only a handful of genes separate speaking primates from mute ones. When humans are born with one of these genes knocked out, they can’t learn language. “Soon, we’ll be able to fix or replace those genes. So I don’t know. If belugas are a kind of disabled intelligence, maybe we have a moral obligation to give them language genes, someday.”

She grabs his elbow, thrilled. “Serious? Serious? ”

And he knows, then, that she’s coming to Boston.

They say goodbye where they met, out on the sun-coated steps. She stands peering at the rainbow skyline, enraptured again, as if she forgot these buildings existed while she was away, underwater. She promises to go over all the paperwork and call his secretary to make travel arrangements.

He offers a hand, which she squeezes. “ Houta alik, ” he says.

The words start her giggling.

“What? Did I say it wrong?”

She shakes her head, still laughing. “How do you know this?”

“I did my homework on you. At least I thought I did.”

“No; I’m sorry. It’s good. But do you know what it means?”

“I was told it meant good luck.”

“Yes, sure. But really ” She jerks a thumb over her shoulder, backed toward the Doric temple. Her eyes light up with more pointless pleasure. Every novel is allowed one major coincidence and one minor one. “It means: A fish on you .”

Stone succumbs and calls Candace. This must be three days before Thassa heads east. He should call Thassa herself, but that would involve courage. Instead, he abuses Weld. It’s her job to calm neurotics. Everyone must suffer the penance of their abilities.

“You can’t just let her go out there,” he tells the psychologist.

“It’s not my decision.”

“One word from you and she’d return the tickets.”

“Or one word from you,” she counters.

“Me? What do I know about science? You’re the authority.”

“Authority?”

“This whole thing is bogus. Nothing as complicated as feeling can possibly reduce to genetics. You have to tell her that.” Her silence rattles him. “Come on. You know this isn’t good science. They can’t possibly think they’ll find anything.”

“Are you worried they might?”

He reads to her from a ten-month-old article in US News & World Report calling Thomas Kurton the “Sergei Diaghilev of genomics.”

She says something about science being self-correcting. If the man is bogus, he’ll disappear. If not, others will validate his work. The discoverer doesn’t matter; only the discovery does.

“You can’t possibly believe that.”

She asks, “Why does this upset you so much?”

He wants to say: Please don’t therapy me . Instead, he manages, “It’s exploitation. We’re complicit. We’ve been given this amazing gift, and somebody wants to take it apart and look inside without voiding the warranty. She’s not an object.”

“No, you’re right. She’s a college kid who gets an all-expenses-paid vacation to Beantown. She can say no if she wants.”

“All right. Fine. Just remind her she can refuse any test she doesn’t want to take.”

Candace says they’ve been over all the human subject protection guidelines. “Russell. She’s fine. Anyone who survived a childhood in Algiers can survive a weekend in Boston.”

You know the story in Boston. You know what the lab will have to discover.

Thassa flies out. She lands on that Logan runway jutting out into Boston Harbor, thinking until the last second that the plane is going into the drink. She’s prepared to die, but she’s delighted when she doesn’t.

Even as the plane touches down, it’s snowing. The northern world is dark by early afternoon, and she finds the harborside dusk unbearably beautiful. They put her up in a hotel ten minutes from the lab. She’s never stayed in a hotel before. She cries out at the spread of the Charles and laughs at the view of Beacon Hill climbing the far shore. She loves the town center, the jumbled harbor, the genteel circus of Downtown Crossing, the Freedom Trail’s inscrutable red thread, the colonial churches with their thin white steeples fingering God. The whole city plays itself, as if a movie of the real place.

She gives all her money to street people. She listens to the buskers in the subway, staying for three full songs and applauding, solo, after each. She’s a shameless tourist, keen for everything. She especially loves the graveyards-King’s Chapel, the Granary, Copp’s Hill. She gets no frisson from the names of the famous dead. Not even natives get that anymore. She just loves the slate tombstones, with their winged skulls and their quatrains of eternity, the patches of holy ground surrounded by amnesiac skyscrapers.

In Cambridge, near the lab, the streetlights carry banners celebrating the twenty-three human chromosomes. She succumbs fatalistically to the lab tests. If something interesting truly does coil up in her cells, someone will find it. If not Truecyte, then some other research group, private or public, will pinpoint whatever part of the secret of happiness lies hidden in the body. This decade or the next. The species will learn to read whatever is there to be read.

Her job, meanwhile, is to see the sights as best she can. Hit the Freedom Trail, before history catches up with it.

Stone calls Candace on Thassa’s second night out east. They compare the short e-mails each has received. Stone pillories her with questions. “What does she mean when she says, ‘They took my DNA’?”

“That’s nothing, Russell. Painless and noninvasive.”