Generosity

already the worst kind of guilt.

She comes up for air again in Times Square. Genes loose, tearing everywhere, splash their riot messages across a horizon of hundred-foot flashing screens. The future floods her with messages. She stops for the light at Eighth, and for a long sixty seconds, she wants to be more than dead.

Chance tries to hand her something, a film she can just dimly begin to see. I want to heckle her, from years away: Look harder

She turns uptown. For the next six blocks, she starts to make out the shape of her reparation. She’ll assemble the simplest of documentaries, a look at life about to be born. A simple take on things to come, the past’s only shot at payback Production should be no problem. Schiff has a track record, fame; funding is hers for the asking.

By the time she hits the park, she’s committed. She has a name already: “The Child of Choice.” She heads through the Merchants’ Gate and cuts up toward the Reservoir, already filming in her head. And a hundred steps into that town-sized open-air ark, she feels suddenly, inexplicably well, ridiculously healthy. She’d almost say free, if she didn’t know better.

The long-deliberating judge in Truecyte v. Future Families Fertility Center, Houston at last concludes that the fair market value of Thassa’s eggs in no way depends upon the discovered association patented by Thomas Kurton, et al. Truecyte is entitled to a reasonable licensing fee for any novel tests or products resulting from their discovery, but they cannot profit from any transactions involving an unaltered, preexisting genome.

The decision is a blow to Truecyte, one that might never have happened without Kurton’s provocation. Yet the judgment rocks the biotech industry, shocking the experts in intellectual property law as well as that small fraction of the general public who are still following the case. It calls into question the whole idea of ownable bio-value. Some talking heads declare it the fast track to the future. More say that the choke of potential profit will kill innovation.

Future Families declares it a forward-looking guarantee of social progress. Truecyte instantly files an appeal. Pundits both paid and self-employed conclude that the decision can’t possibly stand.

But for now-this now-Thassa Amzwar is free to donate her eggs for more money than her brother could earn in years.

Days pass in a short forever. Stone and Weld go on seeing each other. They spend three nights out of seven together. They cook, revising favorite recipes. They talk less and watch more family television. They watch several incredibly dramatic historical re-creations. They watch documentaries about forms of life that should never have survived into the present. Gabe no longer considers either of them a Yahtzee challenge, and he tries to train them in Liar’s Dice.

Candace starts Stone on little projects. She teaches him yoga and brings him to the gym for a session on the balance beam. They no longer play the novel-writing game. She no longer brings up work, psychology, will, North Africa, science, French, Arabic, or the future. He is just as careful never to say a thing that could be mistaken for second-guessing.

Their days are stable and respectful, and they could go on unchanged until Stone dies and his genome disappears peacefully from the face of the earth. But when he’s home alone, he scours the Web for news. It doesn’t feel traitorous. He can’t endanger Candace just by looking. His searches turn up hearsay enough to make him all flavors of crazy.

He wakes up in hot darkness, from a vile dream. He was something medical, in a surgical gown, maybe an anesthesiologist, watching while the patient woke up in the middle of having a gelatinous internal organ removed with a coal scoop. He shudders awake, then instantly suppresses any movement, lest he wake Candace.

But Candace isn’t there. He’s in his own bed, his own apartment, by himself. He has confused the chill of solitude with the other kind, again. It’s 1:30, but it takes him three entire lifetimes between then and 2:45 before he admits there will be no more sleeping tonight.

He tries reading, old guilty pleasures-love poetry, nineteenth-century behemoth novels, clever contemporary metafiction-but nothing speeds the clock or makes him the least bit drowsy. He’s done with breakfast by five. At 8:00 a.m., he starts wandering around the apartment with the phone in his hands. At 9:01, he calls in late to work. Immediately after, he dials Charlotte Hullinger. He gets her voice mail. He hangs up and goes down his old class roster, landing on Sue Weston.

Artgrrl picks up with a sleepy “Hey.” He starts to identify himself, but she cuts him off. “I know who it is, Teacherman.” Her voice is odd, almost flirtatious. She says, “We were wondering how long it would take you to check in.”

“Where is she?” he asks, too quickly.

“Southwest side? She’s fine. She’s like a week or two away from delivering the goods. Only ”

He hears her teeter, trying to decide. Decide if the thing is worth mentioning. Decide if he can be trusted. A twenty-one-year-old, experimenting with wisdom.

“I think the shots are changing her. They can do that, you know. She’s different.”

Shots. Changing. He’s back in the depravity of his dream. “What do you mean, different?”

“Those hormones have her on a roller coaster. I actually saw her cry. She’s just like anybody, now.”

He wants to ask if he can see her, but he can’t. Can’t do that to Candace. Can’t bear to hear Sue Weston tell him, She doesn’t want that.

“Give her my best,” he tells his former student.

Artgrrl asks, “How good is that?” He doesn’t wield the grade book anymore. He never really did.

He creeps to work and spends nine hours making bad prose worse. He calls Candace in the afternoon and asks if they might see each other later, although they aren’t scheduled until tomorrow. She’s characteristically supportive, and he’s at her place before she gets home. He waits on her doorstep; he’s still not comfortable with letting himself in.

She greets him with a kiss, apologizing. “I don’t have much for dinner. Gabe is at his father’s.” Stone wonders why people can never call their former spouses by name. He suggests they go out, to a Lebanese place four blocks away. Lebanon: far enough for mutual comfort. Candace perks up at the idea, a chance holiday.

He tells her over the mezze. He’s been debating all day whether to say anything. But withholding finally seems the bigger betrayal. He says, “I heard from one of my students today.” Is it possible for anyone to go through forty-eight hours without inviting someone else to buy a lie? “She was very concerned about Thassa.”

Candace folds her arms on the table in front of her. She looks up, bright, game. But she’s not about to volunteer a thing.

“She thinks the hormone treatment for the the donation thing might be making Thassa emotionally unstable.” He lets the statement hang just long enough for the two of them to die a few times. “Can they do that?”

Her smile doesn’t waver, per se. It just turns inward, chastising itself for the foolishness of hope. Of course they had to arrive here, eventually. What self-respecting author would let them escape alive? Weld spreads her palms out flat on the tabletop. “I suppose they can, Russell. It’s not really my line. You might see what you find on the Web.”

He throws his knife down on his plate. A dime-sized chip shoots off the edge, narrowly skirting her eye. She cries out and shields her face. She drops her hands into her lap, looks down, and composes herself, yoga-style.

He wants to apologize, but his body won’t let him. A censorious waiter comes by to swap out the broken plate. They sit silently while order is restored. Then she’s all decorum again. It relieves and maddens him, how quickly she recovers.

“Russell, don’t hate me. I’ve worked so hard on this. Since I was two years old I’ve been a helper. Total facilitator. Absolutely codependent. My first marriage?” She hears the adjective, and flushes a little. But practice powers through embarrassment. “All my life I’ve defined myself by what I can do for others. I’ve finally found a way to do that legitimately, without slighting myself or anyone else, with the help of a whole lot of other people to keep