Richard Powers - Generosity

“I just kept thinking, We’re overrun with this stuff. It’s out of control. Kill yours before it multiplies .”

“I see,” she says. Wholly without judgment. He can hear her private diagnosis: patient has lost his nerve.

He closes his eyes and writes in the air. Left-handed, from Yacine’s Nedjma: Keep still or say the unspeakable .

Another night. Candace says, “Thassa called today.”

“Did she?” The topic might be Chinese hydroelectric development.

“She was full of Boston stories.”

“Was she?”

“She thinks she’s upset you.”

“Why would she think that?”

Candace won’t play. She’s trained not to. “You never answered her messages from the trip. She’s afraid you’re angry at her for going out.”

He’s not even sure what that might mean: Thassa afraid . She can’t possibly be losing any sleep. He doesn’t care who she gives her genome away to. He doesn’t care what science might find out about her. He wants Truecyte to work out the precise biochemistry for every ridiculous bait-and-switch human emotion that people have ever taken seriously and then develop an antidote. Fifty years from tonight, between genetic intervention, rising consumer satisfaction, upgraded telecommunications, pharmacology, the solidifying hive mind, improved diet, exercise, and behavioral modification, anger will be less of a concern than ringworm.

“I’d be ridiculous to be angry at her,” he says.

“You would be,” the therapist agrees.

Chance grows like a tumor in Stone. Ever since Thassa went to Boston, he’s been plagued by the body’s code, the twenty thousand genes hatching their million protein votes into his heart, lungs, and flooded brain. In the dark, safely on his end of the phone line, he asks the counselor, “How programmed are we?”

Candace will not fictionalize for him. The data keep accumulating: impulsivity, aggression, anxiety, self-destruction-all heritable. The genetic contribution to addictive behavior: 30 to 50 percent. Anorexia and bulimia: a 70 percent genetic component. “But still, the students who come to see me change. They can get better.”

“From talking to you? Or from drugs?”

“From both. The point is, for better or worse, will and words make a difference.”

“How much of a difference?”

For whatever reason, she humors his despair. “I don’t know, Russell. How much is enough? Did I ever tell you about my tightrope lessons? For my final exam, I walked across a twelve-foot gap on a piece of hemp half the width of my foot. Twenty feet in the air. And I’m terrified of standing on a footstool. Turns out, you just take one baby step. Then another. I’ve seen it happen. Temperament can self-modify. People can get free, or at least a little freer. And then a little more.”

“But not as free as we’re bred to believe we are.”

“Gosh, Russell. You make life sound like a sadistic experiment.”

“Let’s just say the grant proposal would never have passed my ethics board.”

“Hope is useful, man. It keeps us moving.”

“I see. Like a hamster wheel?”

He likes the sound of her midnight sigh.

They talk nine times in two weeks. It’s something out of the archaic novels he used to love: a prisoner who lives for the letters from a companion he’s never met. An invalid obsessed with a vivid woman sealed in a century-and-a-half-old daguerreotype.

They keep deep down, amid the productive psychosis of the city. Neither one of them suggests that they get together for lunch or drinks or anything. They are each other’s solitary reading. The world is graduating from face time to MySpace anyway. The two of them are simply a little ahead of the curve

Stone puts it to himself: If the sound of Candace Weld’s voice suffices for the night that needs getting through, why should he escalate? Who decided that words are just action’s junior prom? He’s richer with her now, in the tangled inventions of their nightly sentences, than they would be after three weeks stranded in sexual intimacy.

Not disabled: deliberate. He’s read in his happiness books that deaf couples sometimes refuse medical intervention that might “cure” their offspring and banish them to the world of the hearing. Why should he be forced into the community of touch, when this is his real medium?

Candace’s voice asks for nothing. He can’t simply be imagining it: she’s grateful, as well, for this reprieve from the short-range senses. Yes, their nightly calls may be all too much like how she makes her living. Yet this -the free trade of signs-is where she, too, would live.

He likes when her midnight housekeeping stops, when the only background sound is Candace Weld lowering herself with contentment to a repose he can only imagine. Make me a pallet on your floor.

The question is whether affection can need no more than itself.

He stops being the one who says when their conversations end. She’s the one who sends them off now. And that, too, becomes their ritual. “Well, Master Stone. Any further words for you tonight?”

And one night, to Russell Stone’s quiet astonishment, he discovers: there might be.

Kurton has held up the study for too long, waiting for an ideal subject who will solidify the correlation at the outer edges of their model. Then C3-16f comes to visit. Even before Thassa completes the routine tests, everyone on the project knows what they have: a candidate whose alleles confirm their extreme-end predictions. They measure the lengths of repeating segments in the promoter regions of her transporter genes, then map these variants onto a new data point, high up in the blank area of the graph pointed to by the rest of their data set. And when they see how close she is to the existing straight line of their larger sample, even Thomas Kurton is ready to announce.

They pay the fee for fast-track peer review and-after filing all the appropriate patent papers-they publish in a respectable journal. From a holding pattern to a record finish. All viable labs have been bred for speed, and each generation, science gets better at hunting the mastodon. It’s either that or go extinct.

Time passes , as the novelist says. The single most useful trick of fiction for our repair and refreshment: the defeat of time. A century of family saga and a ride up an escalator can take the same number of pages. Fiction sets any conversion rate, then changes it in a syllable. The narrator’s mother carries her child up the stairs and the reader follows, for days. But World War I passes in a paragraph. I needed 125 pages to get from Labor Day to Christmas vacation. In six more words, here’s spring.

Weeks vanish, during which Stone achieves the moral equivalent of contentment. He works. One part per billion of the world’s magazine prose gets detoxified. His days contain no agitations greater than spam. He returns all the happiness books to the public library, which makes him feel much better. In their place, he reads forty pages of gruesome details a day from a doorstop text about the French colonial enterprise outre-mer . And at intervals frequent enough to steady him and scarce enough to surprise, he has his nighttime lifelines with Candace-travelogues to anywhere.