Ark (13 page)

I said, “Henry, this is twentieth-century eugenics. You sound like a lunatic.”

“I do? What we’re thinking about doing next in the case of human evolution—the enhancement of embryos that has you so shook up—is nothing more than the next logical step in an ancient process. Humans have always bred systematically to improve themselves and their fellow animals. Keep an open mind. If I may quote, what about survival being the moral imperative of moral imperatives?”

Gotcha.
I was trying to keep an open mind, but Henry wasn’t making it easy for me. It was DNA, the yeast of the gods, we were talking about here. He was dismissing every ethical standard I had been educated to live by at great cost to my progressive parents. Nevertheless, as so often happened with Henry, I felt myself giving up my doubts.

Hours had passed, or so it seemed. I had no idea what time it was. Henry yawned, stretched, groaned a little. He wandered into the kitchen, not quite remembering the way, and returned with two bottles of springwater. I visited the bathroom. In the mirror I saw a bewildered woman with dark circles under her eyes. She looked as though she had never, ever smiled and meant it. I smiled at her. She smiled back, most insincerely. I washed my face and went back to the living room.

Henry said, “Please tell me exactly why you were so upset the other night.”

Was it possible he really didn’t know? I said, “All I could think about was man and chimpanzee. Is it not true that the DNA difference between man and chimpanzee is very small?”

“Less than five percent,” Henry said.

“And you want to produce a new kind of human being who will be as superior to people like you and me as we are superior to chimpanzees? Furthermore, you want to send this creature into space instead of sending people as they now exist?”

“Yes.”

“Then what is the point? I thought the idea was to rescue the human race, not mess around with it.”

“Rescue is the purpose. But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t enhance the species to give it a better chance of survival, which is what the enterprise is all about.”

I said, “Henry, have you yourself figured out how to fabricate this Übermensch?”

His voice was calm, his eyes steady. He said, “Yes, I think so.”

“You think so or you know so?”

“I see how it can be done. I haven’t actually done it. It’s illegal.”

“Even in Mongolia?”

“No.”

I said, “But the truth is, you really do plan to do it somewhere on the planet before the ship lifts off?”

“Very likely.”

“And you have no qualms about it?”

“None.”

“You’ve just answered the question you asked me at the start,” I said. “How can you be without qualms?
That’s
why I’m so upset.”

Henry said, “Why should I have qualms?”

“Let me count the ways. First, you might create a race of monsters.”

“In science fiction, that would probably be the outcome. In a real-life laboratory, properly managed, it will not. If the experiment fails, we will realize that and abandon it.”

“Really? And what do you do with the product of the failed experiments?”

“Dispose of it.”

“Like lab rats.”

Henry said, “Stop it. Enough human embryos to populate Mars have already been disposed of on Earth without bothering anybody’s conscience, including yours. The idea here is to preserve life, not prevent it.”

“But the method, the purpose, the arrogance.”

“Ah. What picture do you have in your mind about how this is going to be done?”

“The usual one—the terrified victim strapped to a table, the mad scientist injecting him with something and reaching for his scalpel.”

“It won’t be that way at all.”

“Oh?” I said. “And how exactly will it be?”

“You know the answer. We’ll be working with embryos, not conscious beings.”

“So they’re not human after all.”

“Of course they’re human. If left alone to develop they become the same as you and me.”

“Oh, Henry,” I said.

Henry gave me a look filled with genuine confusion. It was all crystal clear to him. Why could I not understand?
What
could I not understand? Why couldn’t I understand his purposes? Why wouldn’t
he
understand my misgivings?

Something primal was going on within me—but what? Why was I so outraged? Of course I knew the answer. The instinct of self-preservation was at work. Not so very long ago at Amerigo’s house, I had argued that self-preservation trumped everything. These enhanced creatures of Henry’s were not only going to replace us, they were going to
enslave
us. How could it be otherwise?

Feigning calm, I said, “The intention is to make our successor species
X
percent smarter and bigger than we are—right?”

“More or less,” Henry replied.

“So if
X
equals five, the average IQ of a superhuman would be one hundred five instead of one hundred, and the entrance-level test score of genius, now one forty, would become one forty-seven, and the average American male would be six foot one instead of five foot ten. That’s not a whole lot of difference. The average American has grown at least three inches in the last century with no help from anyone, and probably is just as much smarter on the average. So what’s the point?”

“It doesn’t work that way. The difference would be greater.”

“How much greater?”

“As great as the difference between a human being and a chimpanzee,” Henry said.

We parted in anger. And sadness, in my case. Did Henry know sadness—or anger, for that matter? Or anything whatsoever about the thoughts of the heart?

~ * ~

5

APPARENTLY NOT. NOTHING CHANGED, HENRY
and I went on exactly as before. He called, I responded to his summons, we met, I remained a part of what I assumed was his inner circle. My own qualms lingered, even strengthened. I could have resigned for my principles, but that would have meant life without Henry, so I found a way to live with my misgivings. In my fury I had told Henry he was crazy, but at the same time I thought it was more likely that he was saner than the rest of us in some way peculiar to Henry. He saw what others could not see—was famous for it. Maybe genetic engineering was the way to go despite its vile reputation. Maybe Henry’s idea was repugnant to me because it contradicted my notion of who Henry really was. Had he proposed the genetic alteration of human embryos aimed at the production of a new version of
H. sapiens
that resembled himself, instead of a race of supermen with rippling muscles, I would have been all for it.

Genetic engineering and the Torah aside, there were other things to think about. A few days after our quarrel about Nietzschean Man, Henry brought me a present. It was a Lucite sphere that looked a lot like the imaginary Antarctic artifact he had described on the day we first met on that bench in Central Park. It came in two boxes, borne by a couple of men. Naturally, Henry didn’t tell me what was in the boxes.

“Would it be OK if they set it up in the study?” Henry asked.

It was Henry’s apartment. I said, “Why not?”

“Stay here,” Henry said. “It’s a surprise.”

I waited in the living room until the men had done their work and departed. Henry then led me into the study. A gleaming sphere about the size of a honeydew melon was balanced on a pedestal.

Henry said, “Go ahead—pick it up.” I knew what was going to happen next, but he was in such a state of boyish glee that I did as I was told. After a second or two, the sphere vibrated like a cell phone, then lighted up. Data streamed across its surface—a photograph of Earth taken from orbit, followed by a graphic locating the planet in relation to other bodies in the solar system, the galaxy, the known universe. Then came a slide show about the formation of Earth, its geological ages and life forms past and present. This faded to videos from many angles of men and women and children of many ethnic types. Now a man and woman, both naked, engaged in what appeared to be unsimulated sex, followed by a slide show about sperm and ova and gestation and a video of a live birth and another sequence showing the woman from the sex scene suckling an infant. Then came the animals, trees, plants, grasses, mathematical equations with ingenious illustrations of their meaning and a virtual tour of man’s knowledge. Zeroes and ones streamed across the surface. Music played, the camera zooming in on the instruments, followed by graphics illustrating how they worked.

Finally, the sphere went dark.

“It’s just a demo,” Henry said. “There will be much more—all of human knowledge, just as we discussed.”

I said, “Brilliantly done.”

“Brilliantly conceived. Congratulations.”

“For what?”

“Your answer that day in the park was what made all this possible.”

“Come on. We were just fooling around.”

“Nevertheless, this sphere was your idea, and what you imagined actually will happen.”

“But it’s you who made it happen.”

“With a lot of help from Ng Fred. The basic idea was yours—on that point I will not yield. Human hands will pick up the sphere, it will detect a temperature of thirty-seven degrees Celsius, and it will activate just as it did in your imagination.”

“That’s a romantic prospect,” I said. “You’re going to leave the sphere behind on Earth when the mother ship leaves, to be found at some point in the future?”

“Several of them, so as to give coincidence a better chance,” Henry replied.

“What about other planets, or a few spheres wandering the universe?”

“Too risky. Forget all that and give yourself credit.”

“Thanks. How much time do you figure will have elapsed before the sphere is found by someone and does its thing?”

“Mere centuries, if we’re lucky. Maybe sooner, or longer. Maybe never. It’s a gamble.”

“Won’t the batteries be dead by that time somebody finds it?”

“I don’t think so,” Henry said.

I took that to mean that Henry had once again invented something that was new in the world—batteries that lasted forever or maybe weren’t even batteries. But I didn’t ask.

Instead I said, “Has it occurred to you that those who find it might worship it instead of studying it?”

“Maybe they will. But if they follow the instructions, what does it matter?”

~ * ~

THREE

~ * ~

1