Generosity

“Ah, yes. I remember it well.”

She sticks her tongue out at him, then pretends she didn’t. “If you’re scouting and find food, that’s dandy. But if a pride of lions discovers your hidey-hole while you’re sleeping: Game Over. The bad can hurt you much more than the good can help. So nature selects for pessimists.”

He catches himself twirling his spoon between his fingers. He’s been doing it for minutes. He drops his hands into his lap, like stones. “So how did she slip through?”

The counselor’s face is novice bewilderment. It’s like they’re discussing their daughter’s just-discovered eating disorder. “That’s why I thought someone might want ”

But Candace doesn’t push it. She doesn’t push anything. It’s almost relaxing, and Russell Stone wonders just where this woman’s clinical interests start and stop.

They split the check down the middle. Then they walk back out into the outrageously gorgeous day. The sky is a Chagall deep cobalt, and the buildings are etched against it with a fine ink liner. Even the surly pedestrians pressing past them seem like friends. The psychologist sighs. “Just look at this beautiful place!” Grace’s good twin twists her face up at him, and he has to look away.

He closes his eyes and inhales. He’s deeply depressed by the thought: true happiness may depend on the weather. And in the next breath, he’s depressed that it might not. One of his happiness manuals claims that weather and mood strongly correlate, but only until people are cued to notice it

“So why should autumn make people feel so good?”

She smiles secretly. “I don’t know the precise chemistry. I’m sure it’s been studied.”

It’s the perfect day to play the tourist in one’s own life. They walk three blocks, into the shopping crowds surging up and down the Magnificent Mile, hunting for a cure to their misery that has not yet hit the market. She cranes her neck up at the Hancock. “When was the last time you went up?”

He squints at the calculation. “Sixteen years ago?”

Her eyes are aghast, delighted. “Come on. You can see four states from up there. And a good seventy-five percent of them aren’t ours!”

In my country, a new work of fiction is published every thirty minutes. That’s 17,530 new volumes annually, not including Web publication. Even assuming a tenth of the U.S. rate in other parts of the world, the total figure may be something like 50,000 invented worlds in this year alone.

Say the infant novel was born four centuries ago and grew at the rate of 100 titles a year for its first several decades. Say the curve shoots up sometime in the last century. I don’t know: a million total novels seems a plausible worldwide guess. You know what the next decade will bring. Beyond that, imagining is beyond imagining.

I try to calculate how many of those million-and-growing volumes are saddled with a romance-bright or doomed, healthy or diseased. I can’t do the math. Surely it must be most of them.

Sexual selection, the surest and most venerable form of eugenics, has molded us into the fiction-needing readers we are today. Part of me would love to belong to a species free, now and then, to read about something other than its own imprisonment. The rest of me knows that the novel will always be a kind of Stockholm syndrome-love letters to the urge that has abducted us.

They stand at the glass wall, elbow to elbow, watching crowds flow through the gorges below them. The city turns into a techno-opera, a glorious nanotechnological enterprise beyond the power of any coordinated forces to engineer. They find their neighborhoods, the college, six universities, a dozen museums and monuments, the dead stockyards and living stadiums, churches and commodities exchanges, the river-reversing channel, the four-mile- wide particle accelerator off in the distance. Their city is a staging ground too huge and hungry to dope out, lying like a scale maquette at their feet.

“Gabe loves it up here,” Candace says. She keeps her eyes earthward. “My son. Anything complicated and blinking, from high up. Ten years old, and he already has a resume on file with NASA.”

“High up or deep down.” Stone talks to the glass, remembering. “Or far away, in some parallel universe. A thousand years before or after, anywhere but now.”

“That’s right!” She smiles at him, surprised. “How do you know my little guy?”

He shrugs: met him way back. “So tell me where that comes from. Infinite hunger for the unreal. Why should that be useful, in little boys?”

She gazes back down at the microbe races. He watches her trying to take in the panorama. Puzzled, vulnerable, hand-knit: she will not look like this again, the next time he sees her.

“I wish I knew.”

Numbing to the aerial view, they return to ground. The elevator drops so fast his ears hurt. This scene ends with Candace Weld studying him in return, in the tower lobby.

“So. Mr. Stone. I’m sorry to say, but I’ve enjoyed this. We should do it again somewhere else, sometime.”

He wonders if she means the Sears Skydeck.

Though he stays silent, she doesn’t wither. “I’m all about gathering more data. We in the social sciences like to avoid the small-N problem.”

“I sure. That sounds like fun.”

I watch him twist, the way he did so often in real life. Sounds like fun. A little of her poise, and he’d admit: Fun isn’t something I do very well. A little of her candor, and he’d ask: Is this about me or my student?

“And we can wait and see, about taking Thassa to visit the group at Northwestern. No hurry, obviously.”

They stand there awkwardly, two more victims of natural selection, caught between negativity bias and the eternal belief that the future will be slightly better than the present. In possession of all the data she’s going to get, Candace Weld smiles and waves and weaves her way across the homicidal traffic of Michigan Avenue.

He’s still awake the next morning at three thirty, doing the math, wondering how a thirty-two-year-old editor is going to take care of a ten-year-old son who works for NASA, let alone a twenty-three-year-old daughter who’s still in college.

Interior: a lab at Truecyte, one of Thomas Kurton’s many experimental spin-offs. A long room with eight rows of fifteen-foot workbenches, half of them capped by chemical fume hoods. Glassware and reagents spread a chaos across shelves and countertops, although the gloved, safety-goggled lab workers know exactly where everything is.

Some of the profuse gear could be straight out of labs two centuries old: pipettes and flasks, burners and retorts. But the crucial new gear has all gone digital: inscrutable black boxes covered in LEDs, sealed microelectronic sarcophagi that swallow up samples and report the relevant chemistry in clean columns on bright monitors; devices the size of bread machines that accept matchbox cartridges filled with tens of thousands of biological macromolecules suspended in arrays; sensors that read millions of data points in minutes, that make errors only once every few million reads, and that spit out answers to questions three billion years in the making.

The whole room is charged and alert, perched on the threshold of the next liberation.

Thomas Kurton’s close-up fills the video frame, a koala with a shy smile. He could fund-raise for some endangered wildlife fund. At fifty-seven, the man looks like he’s just been awarded a Presidential Junior Investigators grant to visit the National Institutes of Health over summer vacation.

TONIA S CHIFF:

You sure you don’t have a painting tucked away in the attic somewhere, taking the hits for you?

KURTON [deadpan]:

Actually, all you need is a high-resolution JPEG, these days.

He’s befriending the camera-slipping it a rum candy out on the far edges of the playground, while the proctor is