Aftermath

38

From the secret diary of Oliver Guest.

My house is a three-bedroom brick rambler. Its one oddity, to external eyes, would probably be the disproportionately large lot size for so unpretentious a structure. The building sits in the middle of two acres of land.

The large garden had been woefully neglected. My hybrid climbing roses, so carefully bred and so lovingly tended, now straggled over the lattice frames and fought for lebensraum with wild honeysuckle. The flower beds had become weed beds. The clematis, buddleia, and wisteria were overgrown and infested with tent caterpillars.

I observed all this with mingled annoyance and satisfaction. Since there was no sign of recent cultivation, I had hopes that the house itself might have remained equally undisturbed.

The front and back doors were secured by new locks and plastered with yellow stickers: judicial control board, do not enter. I had no keys of any kind, for locks old or new. One enters long-term judicial sleep naked, not accompanied by wallet, watch, and personal knickknacks. In any case, electronic keys were now presumably useless.

“The kitchen window,” I said. “I’ve done it before. The latch doesn’t work.”

Seth nodded. I led us around to the back of the house. On the way I paused at the herb and vegetable garden. It, too, was a wilderness of weeds. I went to the warmest corner, a patch of sun-warmed brick by the chimney positioned to catch day-long sun. The old box tortoise was still there, drowsing away the hours and years. I went across and picked up Methuselah, trying not to let my excitement show. No matter what had happened inside the house, my backup storage was intact. The complete genetic code of every one of my darlings was stored safely away here, in the form of introns added to Methuselah’s own DNA. Given equipment and time, I would be able to separate them and reconstruct them exactly.

“If you don’t mind, Doc,” Seth said, “I’m not real big on turtles. Unless you’re proposing to eat that thing, put it down and let’s get inside.”

I replaced Methuselah on his warm, dry patch. Not warm and dry for long, I suspected, because dark storm clouds were racing in from the south. Together Seth and I pried the window open and he helped me through. He had become more alert than ever, and his hand hovered at the gun at his belt. Perhaps he suspected that on my home turf I would attempt violent action.

He could not have been more wrong. At the moment, all my attention was focused on the condition of the house. Every counter and flat surface of the kitchen bore a reassuring layer of dust. The small dining room and living room were the same, mute testimony of long neglect. It occurred to me that my house had presented the judicial control board with an unusual problem. The living areas bore no evidence of my illegal pastime, and the lab in the basement served quite legitimate research needs. However, many prospective renters might imagine otherwise. Easier, then, for the judicial control board to leave the place vacant, until memories of Oliver Guest had weakened and faded.

My interest, however, lay not in kitchens and bedrooms. It centered on the lower levels.

Seth was climbing cautiously in through the window when I descended the steps leading to the basement. Pressing the light switch produced no result. Either power was off for the whole neighborhood or the judicial control board had reasonably decided that an empty house needs no electricity. An eerie light creeping in through dusty window wells gave evidence of the coming storm. It was just enough to reveal the benches, with their untidy equipment and incomplete experiments. Things had been moved around and presumably examined, but I saw nothing missing. I had everything here that I needed to satisfy the telomere monitoring needs of Seth and his companions.

But my own needs took precedence. Had the presence of the subbasement level been discovered? I moved toward the cupboard, at the back of which the doubly concealed door was located.

I had a premonition of bad news as soon as I saw the cupboard door. It was open. I went inside. The inner door was open also, the staircase beyond it visible in the gloom. I went down slowly, brushing away cobwebs and trying to suspend judgment. Seth dogged my heels. He had no idea what lay below. He just wanted to know — instantly, immediately, at once — if equipment to permit telomere monitoring was still in the lab.

I had observed the critical rules of concealment. The subbasement had its own supply of water and electricity, delivered and metered separately from the rest of the house. An array of fullerene batteries provided backup. When I touched the switch, fluorescent bulbs lit up at once.

The lab was revealed in all its bleak, horrible inadequacy. Every monitor was disconnected, its wires ripped loose. Every nutrient container had been drained. Hoses, severed at both ends, writhed along the floor like headless gray snakes. Worst of all, the clone tanks were all empty. Their delicate glass viewing ports had been shattered.

I could go no farther. The events of the past twenty-four hours, coupled with this anticipated but no less dreadful shock, were too much for me. I sat down on the bottom step and hid my face in my hands.

“You all right?” Seth had stopped. Still wary, he was three or four steps behind me.

“They are vandals.” I could hear the shake in my voice, but I could not control it. “Ten years’ hard work, wantonly destroyed in a few minutes. What sort of travesty of judicial control is this? What perversion of justice was at work here? The law is quite clear. The property of a person in judicial sleep is not to be abused or disposed of. But look what they have done to my lab — tanks and feeds smashed, equipment stolen, supplies poured down the drain. How dare they do such a thing?”

Seth edged his way around me and went to peer in through the broken front of one of the clone tanks.

“With all due respect, Doc, when it came to your rights I don’t think they were high on anybody’s list. You were s’posed to be iced down for six hundred years. Nobody expected you’d be back an’ bitchin’ about the state of this place. I sure didn’t. I got a question, though. Was there anybody in these tanks?”

“No.”

It was close enough to the truth. The clones in the tanks had been in a vestigial stage when I was arrested. No police officer had recognized them for what they were, otherwise the subbasement would not have been trashed and the nutrient supplies turned off. Also, their existence would have surely, no matter how irrelevantly, been introduced as evidence in my trial.

While I sat silent, Seth wandered around the long room. He examined everything and finally came back to stand in front of me. “Are you tellin’ me that because all this is busted, you can’t make anything to help me an’ my buddies?”

He placed his hand on his gun. Only later did I realize that I was at that moment in great personal danger. If I could not help Seth, he would be better off getting rid of me at once.

“Oh, no, no,” I said. “Not at all.”

I hardly noticed him. My eye and mind were wandering the room, wondering if anything could be saved or salvaged. Reluctantly, I decided that it could not. My hope of continuing my clone work was over, at least for the time being.

I stayed slumped over, exhausted and despairing. Would I ever have the heart to start all over again? I was not sure. Then, like a sunrise, the faint light of optimism crept into my brain. Look at things positively. I faced not defeat, but delay. My darlings were safely hidden away inside Methuselah; they could stay there for years or decades. And Seth had it right. Nobody, myself included, had expected me to be alive and awake as early as 2026. Of course, if I wanted to prolong that desirable condition and know true freedom from pursuit, my “death” would have to be arranged. Did the authorities know by now that my body drawer at the Q-S Syncope Facility was empty? Even with the supernova playing games with weather and everything else, at some point my absence would be noticed. The hunt would then be on — unless I was believed dead and gone.

“If you can, how will you do it?” Seth asked.

“Do what?” My thoughts were so far away, I imagined that he was reading my mind.

“Help me and my friends with the telomod therapy.”

“I can do that easily enough,” I said. “All the things that we need for the telomere work are up on the next level. But look at this.” I gestured angrily around me. “The mindless destruction and the wanton savagery, you would think that after ten thousand years of civilization—”

“Yeah, yeah, yeah. You’re all broke up, don’t need to tell me about it again. I got another question for you. You must have known that the telomod therapy has other effects than curing cancer. The second step, with the telomerase stimulators, rejuvenates. It might let somebody live forever. So why didn’t you take it yourself?”

“It might let somebody live forever. On the other hand, it might produce an unexpected side effect and kill anybody who tried it. You and your group are pioneers. You certainly made the right decision, given your circumstances. Telomod risks are better than death. But I’m not sick. My plan would be to wait for thirty or forty years, see what happens to the test groups, and then undergo the treatment. Remember what Hippocrates didn’t say: First, do no harm — especially to yourself.”

He laughed. “I’ll second that. Come on. Let’s get back up there. The other half of that saying is: Do some good — to yourself.”

He started toward the stairs, then paused. “We got power down here. We got lights. We got” — he went across to a faucet and tested — “running water.”

“Tanks, not external supply. And the batteries will run down in a few days without recharge.”

“Even so. Better we work down here than up there in the dark. Eat here, too — if we had food.”

“I have — I had — lots of it, up in the kitchen. Unless those swine …”

How could I change so quickly, from blind despair to eager thoughts of food?

Easily. I was extremely hungry. Forget what the media said about me. I am human, as fully human as anyone else. At my trial, I in fact quoted in my own defense the words of the Roman poet Terence Africanus: “I am human, and I embrace to me everything that is human.”

It was not a great success. The courtroom went utterly silent. I think maybe the translation I used was a poor one.

I followed Seth upstairs into the kitchen, to see what we could find in the way of dried and canned foods.

It was clear as soon as we arrived upstairs that, food or not, we were in for the night. My poor little house shook to great blasts of wind and driving torrents of rain. The afternoon was so dark that I was reduced to groping in the kitchen cabinets and passing the cans and packages that I found to Seth so he could take them to the window and read them.

This room had, so far as I could tell, not been pillaged by the judicial horde. There was far more food than we could eat or, indeed, be patient enough to examine. We settled for the first half-dozen items and carried them downstairs to where we had heat and water.

Soup, beans, oatmeal, tuna, olives, and pineapple juice, in that order, are better than they sound. Seth and I ate steadily, and stared at each other. When we were finished, he stood up.

“I’m not going to suggest starting work tonight, because I think neither one of us is up to it. I’m going to leave you down here and lock the door at the top. If you want pillows and blankets, better come up and get them now.”

“There’s no bathroom down here,” I said.

He gestured to the sink and headed for the stairs. I followed him, and we did not speak again as I helped myself to a load of musty blankets and pillows. When I went back below to the subbasement level, I was more than ready to call it a day.

I made myself a bed, and as I lay down I reviewed the situation.

Seth’s caution was perfectly natural, and in his place I would have acted no differently. He had brought me all the way from the Q-5 Syncope Facility to my own house, and no one else — not even his two companions — knew where we were.

My need for him was over. He was a burden to me, and he knew it. On the other hand, his need for me was as great as ever. The modification of equipment here in my lab to take care of the modest telomere monitoring needs of Seth and his friends was simple — for me. For him, it would be quite impossible.

I was, therefore, from that one point of view in a much superior position. He certainly knew it. He, on the other hand, had both a gun and a knife, and he was at the moment far stronger than I. He also, though this was an asset whose worth was difficult to evaluate, knew far more about the Supernova Alpha world than I. From those points of view, he held the better position. We both knew that.

What else? Well, if I didn’t develop the tests to monitor his telomeres, and after a while he became convinced that either I could not or would not do it, then all he had to do was open the door and shout, “Oliver Guest. I have Oliver Guest in here.” But so long as I was developing those tests, that was the last thing on earth that he would do.

Of course, when he had the test methods and materials, he would no longer need me at all. At that point he would be eager to have me arrested again, no matter what he told me. Only in that way would his own safety be assured.

I know all this; and he knows all this. And I know he knows it. And on, through the infinite regression.

I snuggled into the pillow, which carried with its mustiness a faint gardenia smell reminding me of LaRona. I was over my ghastly disappointment when I saw what those police-state barbarians had done to my cloning facility. I had no clone of myself, but I would find some other answer when Seth and I reached our unknown destination. I always had, and I always would. Somewhere, somehow, I would build again.

I see it clearly. My darlings rise from their dead ashes. They grow as I want them to grow, learn as I want them to learn, clear of the encumbrances of dreadful unhealthy diets and half-witted parents and siblings. I make only one genetic change. They remain fourteen forever; and I possess them at that golden age — forever.

Giddy with that splendid vision of the future, I want to remain awake longer. It is much against my will that I quickly descend into profound, and regrettably vision-free, sleep.