Bettina propelled her husband past where I sat in the back row. AY turned his head and slapped his hand feebly on the chair’s armrest. Bettina obeyed and stopped. He raised a withered fasces of fingers and pointed one at me. “Rob Cousins. You’re dead,” he said.
Prickles up my spine.
Bettina whispered in his ear. AY blinked in irritation.
“Forgive me,” he said. “The worst part of this . . . is the loss of my memory, and for me, memory is soul. Your brother was a great man. Greater than you, and more powerful. He used to call and talk to me. Give me advice. Instructions.”
My face burned.
“Much greater than you,” AY persisted. “Definitely the smarter brother.”
“Hush,” Bettina said.
“Why did you call Dr. Mauritz?” I asked.
He rolled his eyes up and coughed gently into a handkerchief. Bettina gave me a fierce glare. How dare you upset him. How dare you rise to the bait of a sick old man. And she was right, but I had to know.
“I do not remember a Dr. Mauritz,” he said when he had his wind back. “But yes, I probably called him. I was told to call a number of people.” AY threw his hand back as his wife again tried to shush him, then pretended to wave at the enthusiasts taking their seats near the front of the hall. “Why waste your time here? You don’t belong, Henry. This is a meeting of gifted dilettantes. Go do your important work, while you can. This is old home week for me. They’ll celebrate my influence and ignore all my warnings, my feeble . . . warnings.”
“Just hush,” Bettina insisted, more forcefully. He waved her off again, leaned over to push aside a folding chair, then rolled himself closer. Bettina stood back with arms crossed, tired of his obtuseness.
AY came within whispering distance. His breath smelled of bad teeth and poor nutrition. “Do you have any idea what men of ill will can do? What they can take from you?” His voice sounded like two crackers rubbed together. “I’m a dying old man, not worth killing. I’m just good for running errands. But you and Rob, you’re the real thing. They know what you’re doing.”
Four young Caucasian men in black jeans walked past, accompanied by two Asiatic girls. They were doubtless part of Phil’s cyberjock contingent. Asiatic girlfriends were de rigueur. They nodded to AY with admiring smiles.
He sat up, moving his lips silently until they were out of earshot. Then he focused on me, pleading. “Listen to Flora Ramone. She’s speaking today at three. The rest . . .” He made a pfft noise. “To think we could ever master the future without truly knowing the past. Don’t take those calls. Don’t take them.”
Another fit of coughing grabbed the patriarch of longevity. Bettina hurried him out of the hall, eager to get away from me.
Against all my instincts, I stayed and listened to Flora Ramone at four in the afternoon—the conference was running late.
She gave a painfully slow, detailed talk, with many diagrams, on social organization and the quest for cellular immortality in neoplasms—cancerous tumors. She warmed to her subject, eyes gleaming.
The cells went rogue. They cut themselves loose from the cellular police, encouraged the growth of knots of arteries, demanded resources beyond their needs. They reproduced wildly and refused to obey the signals that demand self-identification and, failing that, apoptosis—cellular suicide.
Tumors had a certain arrogance and presumption. They reproduced at will—will was one of the operative words. They exhibited free will, free of the larger body. The cells within the tumors tried to make their own society, but having cut loose from the sophisticated controls of the larger organism, they reverted to a more primitive and self-serving kind of biological “politics.”
Tumors often failed to feed all their component cells, and cell death—necrosis—was one consequence. If they sent out missionaries to spread the gospel of freedom and liberation, death of the larger organism was all too often the final result.
“Tumors strive to break their bonds and live forever. Freedom is their quest, but they bring disorder and death,” she concluded. “How are we any different? If we, as individuals, strive to live past our natural lifetimes, what do we contribute to the whole of humanity? Are we smarter at one hundred and fifty then we were at forty? What if we stand in the way of the young? What if we demand all the available resources and starve our society, or go off on eccentric quests that ignore a larger wisdom? Are we then biologically any different, any less malignant, than tumors?”
Silence met her conclusion. Few liked what they had heard. Dr. Ramone fielded a scatter of hostile questions, with little effect. The audience broke up into murmuring groups. Alone on the stage, she raised her eyebrows, sadly tapped her papers on the podium, and stepped down.
I watched her, gritting my teeth.
Castler approached me in a seethe. He shook his composer’s mane and glared at the oak beams high above. “She’s put a damper on the whole afternoon. That was inexcusably myopic. What is she, a Marxist?”
I’ve always hated the naysayers, those who argue for an end to controversial research for the greater short-term good of the whole. But what made me really angry was that I had no convincing argument to refute Dr. Ramone’s quiet and persistent polemic.
AY’s pronouncement and Dr. Ramone’s talk had sucked all the energy out of me. Going for a long trek around Berkeley before returning to my apartment seemed the best remedy for my funk. I walked toward the dark oak doors at the rear of the hall.
“Hal Cousins?”
A shadow in the corner broke free and approached. My first instinct was to back away, but there was neither room nor time. The shadow, as it emerged into the afternoon sunlight, became a short, handsome man in his fifties, with graying temples, a distinct hooked nose, and thick, perfectly formed, aristocratic eyebrows. He was shabbily dressed in a tweed suit with frayed cuffs, a once-expensive linen shirt with a collar worn through by too many pressings, and polished brown Oxfords snubbed high at the toes. He carried something under his buttoned coat—he seemed a little pigeon-breasted.
“You should never have come here,” he said. “Far too obvious.” His accent was hard to place—English with a touch of Eastern European, I guessed. He had an Ace bandage wrapped around his left hand, wrist to knuckles, held by a metal clip. He noticed my attention and tucked the hand firmly in his pocket. “Your brother might have mentioned me. I am K. Shall we leave—this?” He thrust out an elbow like a stubby bird’s wing. “Let’s find some obscure place to talk. We’ll toast your brother’s memory and try to get drunk.”
20
“Hard liquor is the ideal,” K explained, and made a sour face as we took a seat in a back booth at Pascal’s, a pub on College Avenue.
The dark room, illuminated by small yellow parchment lamps and a tiny skylight in the center of the pressed-copper ceiling, smelled of hops and sawdust sprinkled over the brick floor. “Wine is acceptable,” he added. “Beer . . . not very reliable. Water, forbidden, unless we buy it sealed and pick our store at random. Can you guess why?”
“Poison?” I ventured.
Again the sour face, a comment on my naÏveté. “I saw AY in the auditorium,” he said, as if to change the subject. “Did he say anything to you?”
“He’s dying,” I said, and gave a small shiver. “Something about having his strings pulled.”
K made a snuffle of acid amusement. “Did he mention Silk?”
“Silk?” Not silt, I thought.
“Silk,” he affirmed.
“No.”
