A Stand-In for Dying Page 6

  The farming community of New Quest, a cooperative founded by a couple of dozen families dedicated to organic farming methods, provided nurturing soil in which the Takana family could grow and thrive. The land had lain fallow long enough for the soil to replenish its nutrients, and sufficient water still came in the spring from the combination of glacial melt on the mountain peaks and the dwindling rains blowing in from the Pacific to sustain crops and pastures when judiciously managed. The farmers of New Quest became adept at microirrigation and water recycling. In the springtime, the valley around their community turned deep green. In the fall and winter, the rich brown soil became a distinctive feature of their landscape when viewed from the air.

  Marcus’s family were cattle farmers. Their grass-fed dairy cows produced luscious milk reminiscent of the early twentieth century. The beef from their cattle was prized among natural chefs all over the west coast. While some people decried the revival of raising animals for meat, others appreciated that the herds were growing and the domesticated species were being saved from extinction. The Takanas were respected pioneers of a new wave of humane livestock treatment.

  Marcus grew up with the animals his parents lovingly raised as his playmates. From the time he could walk, he seemed to have a gift for communicating with them. As he matured, he regarded them as sentient beings, treating them almost as though they were people. In return, they seemed to treat him as one of their own. Calves followed him around. He walked fearlessly in the pastures with the bulls, risking no more than a playful nudge. He became known in the community as “The Little Cattle Whisperer.”

  By the time he was seven, Marcus was participating in the birthing of the calves. One particular bull calf that he helped to deliver lost its mother shortly after birth. When it wouldn’t nurse with another mother, Marcus began bottle-feeding it and named it Hugo. There formed an enduring bond between them. While it was still small, it allowed Marcus to ride on its back. From time to time, it would buck and shake, but was only being playful. His landings were always soft enough to avoid injury. Even when fully grown, Hugo let Marcus ride him. The bull riding boy became a familiar sight in the community and a legend in the surrounding region.

  Marcus was also known in the community for his instinctive ability to decipher grazing patterns. When he was eleven, he noticed that the herd was avoiding a strip of pasture along the eastern perimeter of their property. He guessed that something was amiss with the land despite the lack of any visible signs of disease. When winter came and the pastures turned brown, that strip remained lush and green, but despite it being the only grass on the landscape, the cattle wouldn’t touch it. HibernaTurf had begun to invade their paradise. It would continue to spread until it eventually took over the entire valley.

  The Takana home became the community’s meeting place as the desperate farmers searched for ways to prevent the spread of an invasive vegetation that was resistant to all known herbicides. Marcus listened as they debated one strategy after another, but none emerged that seemed adequate to the challenge. He spent hours considering the problem and looking for a solution that would spare his beloved animals.

  He awoke one morning from a dream of a raging fire and recalled that firefighters sometimes stopped forest fires with controlled burns to create a barren perimeter that fires could no longer cross. Perhaps he could create such a perimeter to contain the spread of HibernaTurf. While most of the community scoffed at the apparent futility of his plan, his parents encouraged him to try it on their land.

  By spring, Marcus and the farm hands had dug a long trench along the western edge of the strip of HibernaTurf and another two hundred yards to the east. They set fire to the grass along the edge of the first trench and watched as the westerly winds carried the blaze across the expanse between the trenches. The combination of the winds and the arid land allowed the grass to burn. The billowing smoke rising from the blazing turf against the distant backdrop of the Cascade Mountains felt surreal. His efforts had enough of an effect upon the march of HibernaTurf that by summer it had covered only the eastern third of their pastures, while most of their neighbors’ pastures had already been wiped out.

  By the following spring, the devastation was nearly complete. HibernaTurf blanketed ninety percent of their land while their cattle crowded into the remaining grassland fighting to eke out enough nutrients to survive. Their flesh and muscle gradually melted away until they could barely stand. The lowing of the starving beasts was heartrending. As they grew weaker, they were sent one by one to slaughter before becoming totally helpless. The killings were for their own good. They were too far gone to salvage even the hides.

  Marcus watched the herd dwindle, overcome by his impotence to save them. In the throes of helplessness, he began running and soon was covering more than ten miles a day. Weakness, he was learning, was fatal. He was determined from then on always to be strong.

  Hugo was among the last to perish. Marcus insisted on being present when he was euthanized and held his head as he died. The boy’s anguished wails rang out over the din of the last surviving animals and brought their cries to a momentary halt.

  Once the last of the herd had been slaughtered, there was nothing left to keep the Takanas in New Quest. They packed their belongings in a trailer and made their way north looking for another place to settle and start over, but patches of HibernaTurf were sprouting all over the landscape and beginning to merge into a continuous blanket. There was nowhere else to go.

  They wound up in Seattle, where Marcus’s mother found a job as a veterinary assistant, while the only work his father could find was as a technician in a meat growing factory. As a farmer, he’d developed skills in meat handling that proved useful enough in the vat industry for him to earn a living, but he detested having to participate in it, sinking steadily into despair. Even with both parents working, the family barely scraped by. In the spring of 2037, when Marcus was not quite 18, his father gave up and took his own life.

  Marcus finished high school and took over his father’s job in the meat vat factory, giving up his dreams of becoming a biologist and saving the world from HibernaTurf. The only remnant of his life on the farm was the microparticle body art he gave himself as a graduation present. On his chest was the head of a bull. It’s tail in the background rose in the form of a tree, with the roots and branches braided together, an affirmation of life’s flow. The image, invisible at rest, waxed and waned with his metabolic rate. When he was at peak arousal, smoke seemed to spew from the beast’s nostrils. Hugo would always remain vital and close to his heart.

  What Marcus left out of the story was the remarkable turn of events that enabled his dream to revive. That Ray Mettler was ultimately responsible for making Marcus Takana’s work possible was an irony for which only Terra and her shadowy organization held enough of the puzzle pieces to appreciate.

  9

  FROM THE MOMENT Lena left, darkness infiltrated Ray’s heart like tendrils of a vine that gradually encircled and threatened to crush it. She was right, of course. Their home had become a hollow prison for them both, devoid of joy or meaning. It was a place for him to wait. But for what? He no longer had any idea what, if anything, would ever make him happy. At the end of the long, dark tunnel there was no glimpse of light, no end, no destination. For all the disharmony between them, Lena’s presence was all that separated him from utter desolation.

  His real prison wasn’t his home, but his thoughts, which were now spinning out of control. He should have been happy. He had enough wealth to buy whatever he needed or wanted, even the promise of immortality that was supposed to lift the burden of perpetual worry about illness and death and bring him peace. But nothing really changed. His obsession with disease was, if anything, more pervasive than ever, and he continued to see threats around every corner. He was an insufferable companion, but neither could he stand to be alone.

  His brooding knew no respite. All the havoc he’d caused with HibernaTurf haunted him. When he closed his eye
s, he sometimes saw the huddled faces of children he imagined had starved to death because of him. At other times, he saw barren, windswept landscapes covered in clouds of dust where once stood verdant forests. These images cast doubt in his mind about whether or not he deserved to live. Even sleep couldn’t rescue him from his torment. He lay awake for hours, his brief interludes of slumber shadowed by dreams more troubled than his waking thoughts.

  He was lost. Every moment of his existence had become agonizing and he couldn’t imagine how he would endure another hour. And yet he’d signed up for an eternity. If he were eventually to wind up in another body, would the transfer of his identity include his baneful mood and the painfully morbid outlook that accompanied it? Did that reside within his data or did it arise out of of his brain’s biology and perhaps be mercifully left behind? An interminable future as unbearable as his last minutes and hours exceeded any version of hell he had ever imagined.

  By the third day, Ray was frazzled with lack of sleep. The sunlight shining through the expanse of glass that surrounded him tormented him with its relentless glare. He longed for nightfall and missed the comforting gloom of his underground lair. For the first time in a lifetime of avoiding death, he began to contemplate suicide.

  At first, it was a curiosity, a distraction that paradoxically removed him from his suffering. He found some fascination in imagining all the ways he could bump himself off: poisoning, hanging, cutting, asphyxiation...

  “Not gunshot,” he thought, “Don’t have one...and not jumping.” And for a moment he grinned at the irony. “Not with these marvelous windows.”

  The fundamental question of whether to live or die was more daunting than choosing a method. While most who considered suicide were faced with a choice between a finite existence and endless oblivion, his was between eternal life and eternal death, which made the stakes even more overwhelming.

  To complicate matters further, he had no idea whether or not it was even possible for him to die. Terra had warned him that he was forbidden to do anything to deliberately end his life and bring about the transfer prematurely, but she never spelled out the consequences if he did. And if his data did make the leap into another body, it would mean the end of another person’s existence. He would be committing not suicide, but murder.

  And so Ray sat, hour after hour, setting sun after rising sun, paralyzed by his life’s most inscrutable dilemma.

  *****

  When Lena returned from her two-week absence, dusk was beginning to fall. She emerged from the elevator to an outlandish scene. The furniture cast shadows of the setting sun, the only source of light in the darkening apartment. In place of the usually barren, sterile interior were piles of dirty dishes, crumpled clothing, and trash. The rancid odor that permeated the place nauseated her. She covered her nose and mouth with her hand as she assessed the wreckage.

  She found Ray sitting bolt upright in a chair in the bedroom, staring straight ahead. His face was as blank as a fledgling SPUD on its first day at Corinne’s school. Bits of mucus clung to the corners of his mouth. His hair was unkempt, his face covered in stubble, and his clothes disheveled. He showed no sign that he was aware of her presence. As she approached him, she was overwhelmed by the stench of urine and a faint smell of ammonia.

  “My God,” Lena thought. “What’s happened to him? Could he be that lost without me?” She looked around for signs that he’d been drinking, but there were no empty bottles and nothing missing from their modest liquor supply. Ray wasn’t much of a drinker and alcohol didn’t seem to have contributed to his current state of mind.

  “Ray!” she shouted in his face, shaking him by the shoulders. “It’s me, Lena. Talk to me.” His regular breathing was punctuated by a deep sigh, but there was no other response. She shook him again.

  “I’m calling a doctor,” she said. But as she turned away a hand shot out and grasped her forearm in an iron grip.

  “No doctors,” he hissed between his teeth, “and no hospitals.”

  She turned back to face him. In place of the blank expression was a penetrating intensity in his sunken eyes. His hand still gripped her forearm, which was beginning to ache.

  “You’re scaring me Ray,” she pleaded. “We’ve got to get you help.” She looked down at her arm. He released his grip, sighed again, and his face relaxed.

  “I’ll be alright, Lena. Really,” he said in his usual voice, “now that you’re home. No doctors,” he repeated, “Please!”

  Things were worse than she thought. She wondered as she looked at the red indentations on her forearm what else might have tipped the balance. How much did he know? Had he figured out the subject of her assignment? Or worse, had he discovered where she sometimes wound up when she ventured alone from their home?

  “Let’s get you cleaned up,” she said as she helped him to his feet and led him to the bathroom. She stripped off his clothes, bagged them, and turned on the shower, grateful for the water that again flowed freely thanks to Marcus Takana. She spent the next several hours cleaning the apartment, disposing of most of the soiled clothing and some of the encrusted dishes that littered the floors.

  The air circulator had been off for days. When she turned it up to its maximum settings, the rancid odor soon dissipated along with her nausea. There remained a sinking sensation in the pit of her stomach, accompanied by the realization that something was horribly wrong beyond her ability to fix.

  *****

  The warm water flowing over Ray’s body washed away more than the filth on its surface. The darkness that had engulfed him ebbed away. Lena was home at last. The apartment no longer felt so empty. Color was finding its way back into his black and white world. Not quite Technicolor, but at least faded pastels. He was no longer ready to die. Still, if Lena’s presence was so crucial to his peace of mind, what was going to happen to him after the leap when he left her behind? Would he find a way to reconnect with her in his new identity? Would he even want to find her or would his new life on the other side come already furnished with people to take her place?

  By the time he’d dried himself off and wrapped himself in a soft, clean robe, Lena had made up his bed with fresh, crisp linens. The soothing tones of Native American flutes permeated the bedroom. Ray left all the questions behind as he crossed the threshold, slid between the sheets, and let sleep enshroud him like the dead.

  10

  IT WAS AN INTIMATE wedding. The date and location were a well-kept secret. Otherwise, they would have been overrun by both the curious and well-wishers in the face of Marcus’s newfound celebrity. Even Lena Holbrook, who had managed to infiltrate Corinne and Marcus’s privacy for the first journalistic portrait of the world’s savior, was given no inkling of when and where the nuptials were to take place.

  Twenty-three people stood in a natural clearing within the remote bamboo grove on Maui where the inspiration for Takana Grass had dawned. The guests included a trusted cadre of friends who shared their passions for the environment and for the rights of all beings to share equally in the bounty of the planet.

  In an honored place by Corinne’s side was a fresh-faced young woman with pale skin, a freckled nose, and a sprout of black hair that erupted from the top of her head and fell in even bangs in all directions, covering the tips of her ears, neck, and forehead. Photina was Corinne’s prized pupil, a SPUD with an extraordinary aptitude for both reading and reflecting human emotions, who had become a devoted member of her teacher’s household. Corinne regarded her as a daughter and a friend and had long since stopped thinking of her as anything less than fully human.

  To be married amidst a flourishing symbol of the earth’s capacity to renew her natural treasures was in keeping with the heart of their beliefs. Neither of them belonged to any organized religion. They nonetheless shared a spirituality based upon their faith that life on earth would prevail over the forces that threatened it through the ages. And together they were committed to preserving the marvelous diversity of life that populated the pl
anet.

  As they stared into one another’s eyes and recited their vows, Corinne missed the barely perceptible shudder that went through Marcus’s body when he spoke the words “until death do you part.” Little did she know how complicated that phrase had become for a man whose body might never die, but whose identity could evaporate at a moment’s notice.

  Committing to sharing his life with Corinne underscored for Marcus the weight of the secrets from her that he unwillingly bore. He had not broached with her his intention for her to undergo the Conversion and had no idea how he would justify it without first revealing that he was already transformed. Neither had he discussed his plan for her to get implanted with a MELD chip so that she could share the remarkable wealth of information that was already at his command.

  Corinne was already thinking about starting a family. She wanted to have at least one child, perhaps two, who might someday carry the torch of their mission for the next generation. Her biological clock was beginning to tick. For Marcus it was ticking even louder. If she did not undergo the Ambrosia Conversion within the next year or two, her cells would age beyond their capacity to become immortal and she would grow old alone.