hi there, u know there bidding on her genes now? the bid is up to 19K; no u dont and maybe dont care since u havent been in touch but shes getting a bit sick of everything coming down on her at the moment. dont worry were taking care of her, someone has to. I know shed like to hear something so if u have any teachery advice (;)) just e me, im sure shell appreciate.
The note wraps him in a gray cocoon. All of Charlotte’s pieces for him were just exercises in deceit. This is how the woman really writes. Writing has become some mutant thing that will eat him alive and shit him into fertilizer.
He calls Thassa. There’s no answer and no voice mail. He hops on the Red Line and rides down to Roosevelt. It takes a fiscal quarter. He jogs to her dorm building, the pedestrian streams cursing as he wades through them. He turns the corner at Eighth Street and stops.
A knot of people flock the entrance to her building. It’s some kind of ad-hoc Flag Day. A woman with her hands and face painted cerulean sports a hand-lettered poster mounted on her head: No Jenetic Jimmying. A younger female, perhaps her daughter, painted to match, wears a sandwich board that reads Sad and Proud. A man struggles to remove the helmet of his cartoony hazmat suit. Three college kids in matching Gee, I’m a GMO T-shirts exchange raucous laughter. Policemen make two others take down a first-story banner with the two-foot-high words Bio-Value-Add Me. A short, hoary black woman-eighty years old if she’s a day-jabs her finger at a white gnome a decade her senior, who holds a limp megaphone at his thigh. Even as the police try to break up the geriatric scuffle, the woman keeps shouting, “Where the hell is the law in all of this?”
Around the edges, the parade trickles out. But the core of the spectacle holds steady, and other bystanders stop to watch. A woman Stone’s age toting a stack of pamphlets mistakes his expression for disappointment. “You just missed the StreetSharp News. They sent two vans. They pulled out about fifteen minutes ago.” She hands him a pamphlet; it’s about how virtually anyone can atomize their egos, dissolve the boundary between their cells and the rest of creation, and tap into the nirvana that spiritual leaders have known about for millennia, all with little medical intervention to speak of. She smiles, like she wants to be his friend.
“Is she here?” Stone asks, his voice veering.
“Who?”
Helpless, he points upward, toward the plate glass of Thassa’s apartment.
“You mean her?” The pamphlet woman laughs, like he’s making a joke she doesn’t quite understand yet. “Nobody has seen her for days. That guy says she was at the window on Thursday night. But he’s probably lying.”
Russell Stone clamps both sides of his forehead. “How long have you been here?”
The pamphlet woman seems ready to help, if only she could follow him. “Me? Here? You mean, all together?”
He pauses in the doorway of the music shop where he once hid out from Thassa’s gaze. For the first time in his life, he wishes he had a cell phone. He jogs to the Roosevelt stop, waits for a train, and rides it back up to Logan Square. He calls her latest number, which he’s surprised to find he has memorized. No one answers, of course, and there is no voice mail.
Schiff called Thomas Kurton from the concourse at O’Hare. Garrett sat in the scoop chair next to her, eavesdropping.
“I figured I’d hear from you,” Kurton said, before she could identify herself. “Did you call to gloat?”
“Is it true?” she asked.
“I’m wondering if I’m really your best go-to person for that question.”
“Someone is trying to auction her gametes? I thought it was illegal to bid on body parts.”
He chuckled without mirth. “Thousands of coeds are paying their way through school by ‘donating.’ It’s a bazaar, online. One hundred and fifty ads a day on Craigslist. The question is: What’s a fair market price, for someone with her genetic profile?”
“What’s the going rate?”
“Up to $10,000, if you’re 1300 or higher on the SAT.”
Lots more, apparently, for off-the-chart scores in well-being.
“But are these bids coming from commercial scientists, or just ”
“Just rich, infertile couples running their own experiments?”
She could hear the water kneading the rocks and the wind slipping through the evergreens.
“I can think of no use of her sex cells that is both scientifically legitimate and legal. This year, that is. But put them in the freezer for a while-”
“Where are you?” she asked. If he were within shooting distance of LaGuardia, they could get him in front of a camera that evening, while this wistful, penitent mood still ran him. Science. Real science.
“Front porch. I’ve been holing up here all week. I answered when I saw it was you. Tell me, Tonia. Should I have predicted this?”
She was merciful and did not quote back any of a dozen incriminating things he’d said to her on camera. She only wished she had a recorder running now.
He said, “You know, I’m sorry if this complicates the woman’s life. But choices are coming that we all simply have to hammer out.”
Paradise, his voice maintained, was still just down the road. And to bring it about, even suffering was a civic duty.
Then Thomas Kurton’s tone turned, tilted by some small change in the quality of light. “I heard from a colleague at MIT who has been looking over her fMRIs. He thinks there might be something distinctive about the way her hemispheres are communicating. It might help explain ”
Tonia Schiff gestured madly in the air to Garrett-a computer, a pad of paper, a wiretap, anything. “I don’t understand. Something structural, or just something she’s learned to ”
Kurton started to come alive again. “That’s not entirely clear. A good team needs to take a closer look.”
Say that the six thousand years of writing are a six-hundred-page novel, suitable for getting you through the longest captive flight. Romance, mystery, thriller: a little something for everyone. At a decade a page, it’s a slow starter. Only belatedly does the opening hook-secret marks that hurl meaning magically through time and space-reveal itself to be a Trojan horse. By
The plot starts to pick up on page 350. After a ridiculously long exposition, the development section starts at last. Characters emerge, cities clashing in the freshness of youth, driven by the varied needs of their patron gods. Wars spread and trade expands. The characters harden and age. They join together into sprawling clans. Freed from the present, papyrus starts to spawn new subplots. By page 400, the basic conflict becomes clear: preservers against revisers, sufficers against maximizers, those who think the book is coming apart versus those who think it’s coming together.
There are a few longueurs for some readers in the middle two-thirds. But this is when the story is at its most desperate: when techne and sophia are still kin, when the distant climax is still ambiguous, the outcome a dead heat between salvation and ruin.
Page 575 starts a series of quick reveals (although each one foreshadowed, early on). Every discovery triggers two more. The cast of characters explodes, as do the sudden reverses. The book makes one of those massive finish-line sprints-twenty-five pages to wrap up all the lingering plot points and force a denouement. The last chapter is filled with deus ex machinas, and on the very final page, the very last paragraph, the characters throw off the limits of the Story So Far and complete their revolt. The ultimate sentence is a direct quote-“Author, we’re outta here”-the happy ending of the race’s own making.