Richard Powers - Generosity

The woman next to him objects with her whole body. Not Roman, she says. Numidian. Then Libyco-Punic.

Her other seatmate, who had spent the entire trip writing columns of figures into pocket ledgers, claims that the Numidians stole it from the Berbers. The driver plunges into the fray, and the debate turns violent in three languages, only one of which Tonia can follow. The argument over who built the city turns into a fight over who killed it-the Byzantines, the Vandals, the Ottomans, the French, or the UN World Heritage folks.

“No one killed it,” the driver declares, in a voice suggesting that anyone who disagrees can walk the rest of the way to El Kef. “The land just dried up. The damn empire fell apart. What do you do about that?”

The whole louage falls silent for five kilometers.

In one of his long, Tom Swift monologues that began in self-replicating nucleotide sequences and ended up with human colonization of other star systems, Thomas Kurton once told Schiff how all the basic elements of survival-finding food, avoiding prey, selecting mates-depend on holding background noise steady enough to pick out foreground signals. We’re tuned by a billion years of natural engineering to the flashing Now, designed to be dead blind to exactly the kind of huge, slow, incremental changes that will kill us. According to Kurton, the race had two choices: sit like the oblivious frog in the slowly warming pan until we cook, or take our natures into our own hands and sculpt out better angels.

The cab climbs the hairpin twists on the Grand Parcours Cinq, clawing its way up to Kef. As the massive Djebel Dyr plateau breaches the horizon, Tonia Schiff gets ill. She concentrates her willpower on surviving the last fifteen kilometers, but loses. The rattled driver makes an emergency stop, and Schiff finds a small pit in the yellow rocks just off the road to vomit in. When she comes back to the car, the passengers and driver are arguing about what made her sick.

On the ridge outside the city, Schiff gazes south toward the pre-Saharan steppe, even as the Sahara comes slowly northward, toward her.

What does the foster family talk about, over the Maghrebi feast? Four feet from each other, Candace and Russell argue whether anonymous online user ratings for everything from holiday destinations to songbirds are a marvelous new form of cultural interaction (Weld) or the death of the private soul (Stone). Gabe gives the topic one star. When the heat of their hyperboles gets embarrassing, they switch to the recent unmasking of a literary hoax. It turns out that a troubled teenager’s searing memoir-abuse, escape, horrific life on the streets-is really the work of a seasoned, middle-aged feature writer. Candace calls the whole episode fascinating contemporary ethnography. Stone wants the fraud to serve time. Thassa and Gabe just giggle, in bursts of street Arabic.

The food warms them all. But even with passionate debate, they finish the meal almost before they’ve started. The world’s most ephemeral art form-even worse than magazine writing. What kind of life would let dinner pass in a tenth the time of its preparation? This kind. The kind we’re built for.

Stone sits facing the coffee table. The article lies in wait for him, occupying one-quarter of his cerebrum all the way through the dziriettes and coffee. The report is to blame for Candace’s distance all evening. Even Thassa’s attentions to Gabe have seemed preoccupied.

Russell sits nibbling at his little Algerians, inside a familiar domestic scene that ought to know how badly the world has already doomed it. This craving for a shared meal uses him like a seed burr uses a trouser cuff. Stone has spent eight years getting free of exactly this need. Now he wants it back as badly as he’s ever wanted anything.

All dinner long, wind shakes the building and sleet tattoos the windowpanes. An ice storm in late March: more freak weather becoming the norm. After dessert is over, the four of them stay huddled around the table, afraid to leave the one warm spot given them.

Gabe leaves first; he has a heat source elsewhere. He heads down the hall, off to a place whose payoff matrix is far more generous than this one’s. Russell would follow, if Candace didn’t chirp, “You read. We’ll clean up.”

When he objects to that division of labor, Thassa just laughs. “You want a typical Maghrebi meal? You have to exploit the women.”

He sits down to study for his supper. The article is hard, harder than he feared. He’s seen some of the vocabulary during his months with the happiness books, but every sentence here has something to defeat him: epistatic, allelic complementation, coefficient of relatedness, noncoding polymorphism, nucleus accumbens, dopaminergic and serotonergic pathways He’s waylaid in the dense hieroglyphics: 5-HTTLPR, QTL, VNTR, BDNF, monoamine oxidase, dihydroxyphenylalanine He wants to stop after every clause and consult Candace. But he’s the experimental control; his job is to say what this article will mean to the congenitally clueless.

So this is how the species ends. Homo sapiens has already divided, if not into Eloi and the Morlocks, then into demigods and dispossessed, those who can tame living chemistry and those who are mere downstream products. A tiny elite is assembling knowledge more magical than anything in Futopia, perfecting fantastic procedures, determining chemical sequences billions of units long, reading what these spell out, learning how a million proteins interact to assemble body and soul. Meanwhile, Stone and his 99.9 percent of the race can only sit by, helplessly illiterate, simply praying that the story will spare them.

Russell reads, the clink of dishes and soft words floating in from the next room. Apparently Kurton’s group has found a network of several crucial genes that, rumor has it, help build the gates and portals that channel the brain’s molecules of emotion. Control for any of them, and changes in the rest correlate with changes in sanguinity. The graphs are clean and the correlations strong. The variant combinations of these genes produce several clusters of data points along a spectrum running from darkness to bright. Tune each of the genes to the right flavor, and you have subject C3-16f, just now making her friend laugh over some silliness in the kitchen.

The article describes how psychological tests virtually predicted C3-16f’s optimal allele assortment-the happiness jackpot. Russell sits back in the rickety recliner, the journal open on his lap. He himself imagined this development long ago, the first night of his writing class. From before she even arrived in this country, Thassadit Amzwar already belonged to these technicians, the child buyers, the purveyors of human improvement. Way back in chapter one, he predicted her ultimate capture by science before book’s end.

He sits watching a skin of ice crystal culture itself across the living room’s casements. The glass is almost covered, and the ice is thickening. When he looks up from this reverie, the women are standing next to him. They take the sofa, Candace gingerly and Thassa in a flop. The Algerian speaks first. “Nonsense, isn’t it?”

Stone scans Candace, who clearly wants to believe the same thing.

“They make me sound like some kind of bio-factory for ivresse . I’m not like that, am I? That’s just silly. Everyone can be as content as they like. It’s certainly not predestiny.”

Stone wills Candace to look at him. “Is the science any good?”

“Good science?” She’s not the confident woman that he speaks to every other night, in the dark. He doesn’t know the first thing about her, really. If she were the heroine of some hackneyed genre thing that he got it into his skull to write, he wouldn’t even be able to jot down her main character traits. She seems experimental to him, curiously adrift in data. “I suppose we’re already past worrying about that.”