Richard Powers - Generosity

He detaches and wraps the tiller, tucks it under his arm, and climbs back up the boardwalk toward the house. She falls in at his side, the rhythm of this early evening remarkably familiar to her.

He thinks out loud. “Your show will run. Your gang will edit me into some sort of white-coated huckster too cheerily Faustian to hear how nutty he sounds. Good television, right?”

She asks him, with a scowl, not to pity himself or resent the millions of dollars in free advertising.

“You’ll weave this whole story about a man and his company and its detractors and competitors. You’ll construct this whole dramatic arc for Truecyte Listen: Truecyte is nothing. Truecyte is irrelevant. Yes, we’re in the spotlight at the moment. But you know how science works now. Several hundred thousand researchers, propelled along on collective will. None of us fast enough to keep up. We make this big announcement, this exciting but ambiguous finding, and within a few weeks, a dozen more start-ups are all breathing down our necks, threatening to beat us to this thing.”

She can’t keep irritation from flooding her voice. “What thing ?”

He turns and points back out over the water, now a swirl of cinnamon. “Fifteen minutes ago, you were the queen of creation. Correct? I saw it in your face.”

She blushes, some other flush of chemicals. But you can’t have opinions about truth.

“If your alleles were a little different, you’d feel that way most of the time .”

Her head shakes, all by itself. “And if I were William Gates the Third, I’d buy me a nice little inlet like this and a sloop to call my own.”

He smiles as richly as she did fifteen minutes ago. “With the right genetic compliment, you wouldn’t even need an inlet. You wouldn’t need anything. Your enemies could be shelling you, and you’d still be filled with a confident desire to make something worthwhile of the day.”

“And this is a good thing?”

They cross the coast road and head up the foot of his drive. She doesn’t want to speak again, but she does. “This woman with all the right alleles: Does she even know she’s that happy? If she’s that lifted up all the time, does she even have a measure ”

“Oh, she goes up and down like anyone else. It’s just that her envelope of high and low is considerably higher than ours.”

Schiff pauses by her rented Camry. The crew is waiting for her in Damariscotta. She needs to rejoin them for dinner and postmortems. They have to be at Logan first thing tomorrow. “That’s my point. I’m happier than most people, but what good does that do me? She’s happier than I am. If you moved us all up a notch, wouldn’t we just acclimate and forget, like we do with everything else? Wouldn’t ten just become the new seven?”

“I wondered about that, too, until I met this ten. And the weird thing is, her genome differs from yours by only a few small tweaks.”

She sees it in Thomas Kurton’s trusting, suppliant face: There’s only one real resource. One fungible commodity that the future will trade in. “You’re going to make us all happy. Is that the plan?”

His eyebrows crumple and his lips sour. She’s hurt him, at least as much as he’s capable of being hurt by anyone. He shrugs off her mockery. “A little more capable of being well in this world. But not if you don’t want it, of course.”

“You folks have finally found the formula for soma. Damn.”

He breathes out a long-suffering sigh and leans against her car. “First, I really do hope that Aldous Huxley is burning in the pain-ennobling hell of his choice. That book is one of the most dangerous, hope-impeding, ideological rants ever written. Just because the author is stunted by some virtuous vision of embattled humanism, the rest of the race is supposed to keep suffering for all time?”

“I’m not sure that’s exactly his-”

“Second, yes: our initial products , if you insist, will likely consist of pharmaceuticals. But not the shot-in-the-dark stuff that we dispense today. Drugs tailor-made to the genome of the recipient. Smart bullets, genetically personalized prescriptions, and the sooner we get there, the faster we can finally get medicine out of the dark ages. Once we understand the brain chemistry behind depression and elation ”

He catches himself this time. He nods, repentant, but the fingers of both hands flick rapidly against his thumbs. “I’m sorry. I’m an enthusiast. Guilty. What’s your problem with that? I assume you have no moral qualms about curing depression? We’re talking about substances that will be to today’s serotonin reuptake inhibitors what fentanyl is to biting on a towel.”

“Why do I have the funny feeling that genetically tailored pills are just the beginning?” She catches him appraising her hair with the gaze of a connoisseur. Her left hand sweeps up, brushes back her flowing bangs, and lets them fall again.

He copies her involuntarily. “Because you are America’s most irreverent science television journalist.” His voice can’t help revering that irreverent .

“And all this public talk about life-span extension-”

“Oh, we’re working on that, too. Quality and quantity. Listen. We’re after the same thing humanity has been after since toolmaking.”

“Except for the bit about rewriting the script?”

He looks genuinely puzzled. “We’ve been doing that all along, as well.”

“And we’re not allowed to stop until every appetite is satisfied and every itch is scratched.”

The honest bafflement only grows. What else would you suggest? “Speaking of appetite satisfaction: stay for dinner.”

She pushes off of the car and drifts toward the house before the invitation is out. “I don’t know. What about this massive calorie-restriction diet you’re on?”

“I make each one count.”

Back in a rocker on the wraparound porch, she calls Nicholas Garrett, in Damariscotta. “Boss? Listen. I’m going to be a little delayed. Go on and eat without me.”

She can hear Keyes cackling in the background: What did I tell you? A hundred bucks, suckers. Pay up.

She tells Nick she won’t be too late, but no need to wait up. Then she rings off, to her director’s suppressed mirth. She sits in the rocker for a moment, examining herself. It’s not even an effort, really. Not even a decision. Just large molecules, passing their oldest signals back and forth across the infinite synapse gap.

A noise comes from up in the woods. She can’t tell if it’s a mammal, bird, or something stranger. A throat considerably smaller than hers, but monstrous compared to the rest of creation, moans in spectral restlessness. She waits until the sound returns. It’s a call from back long before contentment and agitation parted ways. She walks around the side of the porch to get a look. There’s nothing to see but dark woods, the prison-bar stand of pines and spruce, the rising hillside, and needle-covered night.

I have no center. The thought wastes her. Not even a thought: just a fact the exact size of her body. She’s disappeared into playing herself. She has no clue what her bliss is, and trying to follow it would lead worse than nowhere.

She walks back around the side door to the kitchen, where he’s already started slicing a cornucopia of phytonutrients. “I’m sorry,” she says. She doesn’t even know what she’s saying until she hears it announced. “I’ve got to get back.”

“Really?” His disappointment is insultingly anemic. “Are you sure you wouldn’t like to stay? You should stay. You should experiment. Almost sixty is the new forty.”