Woman on the Edge of Time

They had adapted the old buildings, although between them were the same fields and plantings as everyplace else. An old man with a wispy beard was slowly picking blackberries, eating some, putting most in a basket over his withered arm, on what must once have been the lawn of a resort hotel. With him was a child who was eating rather more than picking and singing with him sometimes in unison and sometimes in a bouncy counterpoint, interrupting with questions every few minutes which he slowly answered.

“Why is life short?” Connie asked. “Your old people are healthy, sure, they live with everybody else. But they age. And they die, not much later than we do. Why not live longer?”

“We decided not to try.”

“Who’s ‘we’?”

“The councils. The town meetings. That’s how general questions of direction of science get decided.”

“You mean by people like me? How could I decide if they should build an atom bomb or something?”

“Of course you could decide. It affects you—how not? A rep from the base talks. On the local level for a small proj. But if it’s a major proj—such as research on prolonging life would be—then everybody decides. What it would cost to begin. What it would use up in the way of resources and labor. All that would be set out. What would be consequences on the whole yin-and-yang of it, that we could foresee or guess.”

“But how could I know if you’re a good scientist or not? I know nothing from nothing about genetics. By the time I figured it all out, I’d be an old woman.”

“You couldn’t tell. But you could decide whether my base should stiff on breeding borer-resistant zucchini or scab-free potatoes or gorgeous and edible day lilies. As for results, whether experiments are valid, we researchers all put in time checking each other’s work. Done by lot.”

“But it sounds like some kind of dictatorship. I mean in our time, science was kept … pure maybe. Only scientists could judge other scientists. All kinds of stories about how scientists got persecuted by the church or governments and all that because they were doing their science.”

“But Connie, in your day only huge corporations and the Pentagon had money enough to pay for big science. Don’t you think that had an effect on what people worked on? Sweet petunias! And what we do comes down on everybody. We use up a confounded lot of resources. Scarce materials. Energy. We have to account. There’s only one pool of air to breathe. You grasp neurologists made the aplysia extinct by using it up in experiments? Almost did the same to chimpanzees! What arrogance!”

“But why don’t you prolong life? Did old people vote on that too?”

“Fasure. We did a breakdown by age after to make sure young weren’t voting extended age away from the old … . I think it comes down to the fact we’re stirr reducing population. Longer people live less often we can replace them. But most every lug wants the chance to mother. Therefore, we have to give back. We have to die. Finally, people get tired. After a while people you were sweet friends with, hand friends, they die of accidents or diseases, whatever. The old age of the heart comes.”

“You just give up.”

“We’re part of the web of nature. Don’t you find that beautiful?”

“Like dumb animals? No! Dust to dust and all that?”

“We have a hundred ceremonies to heal us to the world we live in with so many others. Listen.” Luciente waved toward the child and the old man, who had finished picking blackberries. They sang together as they got ready to leave:

“Thank you for fruit.

We take what we need.

Other animals will eat.

Thank you for fruit,

carrying your seed.

What you give is sweet.

Live long and spread!”

“We learn when we’re kids to say that to every tree or bush we pick from.”

Seconal or not, she did not sleep that night. The next morning they were coming for her, they were going to take her to the hospital where they performed the actual operations. Night before the electric chair. She stared into the thin dark, the light on down the hall at the nurses’ station, where the weekend night crew were playing contract bridge. They had an ongoing game in which the night nurse played partners with Stan the Man, the women’s attendant Jean played partners with the orderly Chris. The nurse and Stan the Man were ten years older than Jean and Chris, and they called their game the Generation Gap. They were full of jokes and drank beer all night.

Although their game was noisy, they were not what was keeping her awake, no more than Tina’s soft mumbled snoring from the other bed. It was the morning to come. Tomorrow they were going to stick a machine in her brain. She was the experiment. They would rape her body, her brain, her self. After this she could not trust her own feelings. She would not be her own. She would be their experimental monster. Their plaything, like Alice. Their tool. She did not want to pass over to Mattapoisett tonight; she wanted to taste the last dregs of her identity before they took it from her.