The Bone Forest (30 page)

The experiment, said McCreedy, would continue for as long as circumstances permitted. He
expected
to find nothing—no scientist ever did. He hoped he would find whatever was to be found; a scientist's nightmare was to fail to observe the facts of significance in an experiment.

I could have put it better myself, but the statement was met with a respectful silence.

As to the moral question, he had a license permitting him to work with artificially grown human beings, and he had not yet abused that privilege. Since the effective natural lifespan of the two human subjects was now ended, in a sense they were living on borrowed time, time borrowed from McCreedy himself, and they had no future, really, but to remain as a part of the experiment.

This was in March of '98, and it precipitated a phase of observation overshadowed by our burning enthusiasm. We were eager to discover what lay beyond the normal years of life, and there can be no doubt that privately we all had the wildest of visions.

Truth to tell, mine were perhaps the wildest of all. I sketched possible metamorphoses, imagined arriving at the Institute and facing subjects walking through walls, or transporting themselves instantly into the future to observe the progress of our study. I was, I confess, convinced that the apparent decay of body and—to a certain extent—mind, was a transient phenomenon, and that greater power lay at some indeterminate time in the future of our subjects.

Confiding my belief to McCreedy, I was received with hostility. He condemned me for my lack of discipline. Expect nothing, he said, because if you fervently expect anything at all, then you will tend to see what you want to see.

And then he told me of
his
secret imaginings and they so closely paralleled my own that we talked seriously, thereafter, on the possibility of such a state of existence following naturally upon a span of five or six score disease-free years.

Man had never had a chance to exploit his genetic freedom completely. He was killed, trampled, diseased so early in life that the mechanisms that might have come into operation to protect the body cells from poisoning just never came into play. What we see is man with a lifespan dictated by the length of time his body can survive an increasingly hostile microclimate. But what was his original potential? What great beings have our neotenous forms never been able to reach?

A man of religious inclination, McCreedy could not conceal from my scrutiny the fact that he believed some manifestation of godhead lay as the ultimate destiny of our two subjects.

They grew older. By day and by night they aged weeks, and the flesh sagged, their movements slowed, and the compilations of data mounted in volume, but amounted to nothing. The incidence of disease tried to rise within them, but all was monitored and prevented and they reached the middle of their second century free from infection, from tumor or other bodily breakdown.

It is impossible to chronicle those passing months and years in detail—little happened either to the subjects or to us. We talked and read, participated in any number of short-term projects, wrote papers and took long vacations, all expenses paid. Sanity was—miraculously, I sometimes think—preserved.

In retrospect I can see how, within our scientific microcosm, we became individually insulated, erected barriers behind which we guarded our memories and preserved our philosophy. Thus, I learned nothing of my companions, and—at the time—found no interest in so studying them.

At the age of one hundred and fifty-five Martin's skin seemed to regain its firmness, the loose folds tightening, and he became skeletal, gaunt. Yvonne, by contrast, sagged more, the flesh lying around her neck in three great folds, her legs becoming wrinkled and bowed.

Nothing magical or unexpected happened, however. They just became older, frailer, quieter.

The excitement of year one hundred passed into
our
distant past, and over the course of weeks, then months, the enormous ages reached by the subjects failed to arouse even the slightest whimper of joy. We worked virtually full-time countering the efforts of each of their bodies to shift into a disease condition, but all the time our eyes were watching the loose, trembling folds of skin on Yvonne and the drawn, scaling flesh of her husband. They passed toward their second century with virtually no change, virtually no movement. They were static hulks, housebound where they slept most of the time, ate slowly through tiny mouths that hardly seemed to open for the premasticated food they consumed.

Yvonne watched the monitor all the time, and when she was at her most alert, her eyes were huge, deep and penetrating, and there was a terrible sadness in them.

They passed their second century and the atmosphere in the research center became appalling.

What was the point of it now? demanded Josephine. Why continue when all we were doing was prolonging the agony of gross body decay? There were no great secrets to be discovered. Stop the experiment. Admit defeat!

McCreedy, not surprisingly, refused. His face, these days, was showing signs of great mental strain. He was white, heavily sagging under the eyes, and he seemed… old. He dressed in disorder, and had stopped giving press interviews. The Ministry officials who bombarded us every month were given cursory briefings and hustled away, and letters demanding that we show some results for the financial support to be proven worthwhile were answered abruptly and stingingly, and somehow— don't ask me how—those who put money into us continued to do so.

At about this time Josephine left the group. She said goodbye to me, but there was a distance between us that made our smiles and handshakes just meaningless gestures. She never glanced at McCreedy, and McCreedy paid no attention to her.

"It's all so pointless," she said, reiterating what she had said so many times before. "Man's destiny was always to grow old and die, and what we're demonstrating here is that no matter how we come to terms with the forces that oppress us, our destiny will never be anything but a slow decay. What we see in a pair of individuals reflects our whole race. We have to live with our dreams, not our realities."

She left and for a while I felt moody and listless. McCreedy, looking even older, berated her defeatist and pessimistic attitudes, and in a short time the oppressive atmosphere lifted and I felt the excitement that McCreedy felt, the sensation of hovering at the edge of something greater than imagination.

With the passing months we became a little slack again…

*

Then things began to happen and it was like an injection of life, both into us and into the hulks that peered at us from the environment.

On the morning of his two hundred and twentieth year (and three months) Martin, having remained virtually immobile for the past eighty years of his life, rose and walked swiftly—on legs that barely faltered— toward the edge of the environment. His heartbeat doubled and his blood pressure rose, and there seemed to be great surges of adrenaline passing through his body at thirty-five-second intervals.

He began to shout, in a language strange to my ears:

"Sibaraku makkura na yoru ni te de mono o saguru… yoo ni site… aruite ikimasita ga… tootoo hutaritomo sukkari… tukarete nanimo iwanaide kosi o orosite… simaimasita…"

"My God," shouted McCreedy, ecstatic. "Listen to that. Listen to
that
!"

"Sosite soko ni… taoreta…" Martin seemed to be finding difficulty speaking these strange words, "… mama inoti ga nakunarun' d'ya nai… ka to omou to kyuu… ni… taihen osorosiku natte… simaimasita…"

He fell silent, but continued to stand at the edge of the environment and stare through at that part that was projection.

McCreedy was shaking his head, almost in disbelief. "The language of angels…"he said softly. "It has finally happened… it has finally happened."

"Actually it was very poorly pronounced Japanese," said one of the technicians, a young girl and a member of the Life Plan team.

McCreedy stared at her for a moment while the rest of us tried to hide our smiles. "The point is," he said slowly, "Martin never
knew
Japanese." His face beamed again. "He never
knew
it, don't you see? So how could he have learned it? We have our first mystery… Lip-man, we have our first mystery!" He was obviously delighted. The same technician, looking as if she hardly dared speak, said, "Well, not exactly. We programmed him to take an elementary course in Japanese when he was thirty. The only mystery is how his pronunciation could be so bad…"

McCreedy was completely deflated. The rest of us could hardly hide our mirth, but that was so unfair. We had all lost.

When McCreedy had gone—back to his small office to recover from his disappointment—I asked the technician what Martin had said.

"For a while we were groping our way along as if it was in the deep of night, but eventually we sat down without saying a word, completely exhausted. Then we suddenly felt… frightened, wondering if we were going to die, there where we had fallen."

I looked at Martin, who was still standing at the edge of the park, staring into nowhere. "Beautiful," I said.

"Page 233," she said. "
Teach Yourself Japanese
. Check it up."

One day, when I arrived a little early for my shift, I found McCreedy seated in his small office, holding an alcohol swab to his lower left arm. An ampoule of
Chronon
lay empty on his desk. Immediately I understood why he had begun to look so old these last two years. Immediately the true dedication of the man to his own beliefs was apparent. Immediately his hypocrisy was crystal clear—expect nothing, he had said, and here he was, already modifying his own life on the basis of what he believed would occur—McCreedy, searching for a place in the kingdom of the gods, wearing his age without regret or apprehension. Was he oblivious of the fact that, having never been screened against disease, his destiny was a natural death in an unnatural period of time? I didn't ask. His dreams were his reality now, and I couldn't help but remember Josephine's parting words to me.

McCreedy just stared at me and I stared back. I left his office without saying a word.

The changes began shortly afterward. An initial report of slight increase in girth of the crowns of their heads was followed rapidly by bizarre growth patterns in both subjects. Their heads grew to almost twice their original volumes, the increase being not in the brain but the amount of fluid in which the brain was cushioned. Their eyes became sunken and tiny. Martin's arms lengthened and the fingers stretched from his hands like tendrils, flexing and touching all that they contacted, moving almost independently.

His height increased and he began to walk with an exaggerated stoop. He found Yvonne again.

The changes that Yvonne had experienced were not the same. Her gross flabbiness became packed with fat. She became huge, a mound of flesh, and her limbs, by contrast with Martin's, shrank until they seemed mere protrusions from the bulk of her torso. Her hair fell out and the great shining dome of her head shook constantly. She remained on her bed, slightly propped up by pillows so that her tiny eyes could continue to watch the monitor. Martin fed her and cared for her, kept her covered with blankets now that she could wear no clothes.

They regained an element of their earlier sexual ability; there was a certain revulsion in watching the re-consummation of their life together, but equally there was a certain fascination about the event. We watched silently, and in great discomfort, and drew no immediate conclusions.

"We are seeing the beginning of the metamorphosis," said McCreedy eventually. He was consumed by his dreams, and yet, as the days passed and the features of the subjects became more bizarre, and their copulation became more frequent and more incomprehensible, so we all began to wonder what was to be the end result.

The monitors filled our files with information, the rocketing, fluctuating chemical levels, the unprecedented hormonal changes, the degradation and rebuilding of body parts.

In February of '02, just seven years after the experiment had begun, Martin and Yvonne copulated for the last time, Yvonne not moving from her position, almost flowing across her bed, bearing the weight of her husband. Her great head turned to stare at the monitor and then turned back and looked at the ceiling. Martin slipped off her and crouched by her, staring into the distance. They began to tremble.

The trembling, a violent shaking of their entire bodies, persisted through the day.

McCreedy was bright eyed and full of excitement. "It's happening," he said. "It may take days, but it's happening, the change, the final metamorphosis."

He made copious notes, and in the environment the trembling persisted, a continuous whole-body muscular spasm.

After a few hours their heartbeats began to slow and the electrical output from their brains began to lessen. By evening the hearts had stopped and the brains showed no activity at all.

The monitor screens became quiet, all except one small panel, a red panel that lighted up with black words on red background. "Subjects are dead."

We entered the environment and approached the bodies. McCreedy stared down at the corpses for a moment. He was shaking his head. "I can't believe this," he said finally, thoughtfully. "Keep a brain activity watch… it may be that the whole metabolic rate has slowed to a phenomenally low level. We may be witnessing some sort of stasis prior to a major change."

I said, "Ray—there will be no change. The subjects are dead. Completely dead."

"Nonsense," snapped McCreedy. "To take that attitude at this stage would be disastrous." He began to examine the bodies, apparently oblivious of the fact that he might be contracting or spreading disease.

I left the environment and sat, for a while, among the silent technicians who watched McCreedy on the monitors. I felt the quietness, the emptiness of the place. I stared at the white walls and the meticulously clean equipment and benches. The atmosphere was heavy, dull. One corner of the laboratory was filled with neatly stacked printouts representing the last fifty years of the subjects' lives, and staring at that pile of information I realized that nowhere in its bulk could I put my finger on a single statement of feeling, of awareness. Even the sheets on which were recorded the last living moments of Martin and Yvonne were bare, sterile accounts of failing physiology and murmurings and alpha waves; there would be no account of what they thought, what they felt as death unfurled its protective wings about them.