The Metropolis by Matthew Gallaway Read Free Book Online Page A

garden. He pulled at the edgesof his eyes to both sharpen and distort his vision, as if that might help him to see her. “She’s here—I know it!”
    “I doubt that,” Guillaume said before he paused and looked around. “But I’m happy to tell you that you’re not completely crazy.” He sat down on a bench and pointed at a row of trees across the river. “You see those?”
    “I might,” Lucien responded, not particularly pleased with the direction this exchange was taking.
    “Your mother used to wear a perfume made from an extract of tilia, which as you can see are in bloom, and whose scent is being carried here on the breeze.”
    Lucien sighed. “Why don’t you ever want to believe in ghosts—or souls?”
    “Because I’m a scientist,” Guillaume offered, “and ghosts and souls are the basis of folktales, superstitions, and religion, which as we’ve talked about have been the source of too much needless, irrational harm.”
    “And you don’t believe in God either?” Lucien asked glumly, although he already knew the answer.
    “God is for those who don’t know how to think,” Guillaume said with a nod. “Or are too lazy to figure out how something really works. A hundred years ago, if someone got sick and died, people would say things like ‘It was God’s will.’ Too many people are still like this.”
    “Do you think if Maman were alive now and got sick, you would be able to cure her?”
    “Not yet,” admitted Guillaume, whose smile seemed to indicate that he was more amused than troubled by his son’s question, “but someday, I’m sure there will be a cure for what killed her—and for every other sickness, too.”
    Since his wife’s death, Guillaume had devoted his research to the increasingly validated theory that many diseases could be preventedif molecular compounds—either derived from or resembling the pathogens in question—were delivered to the body in proper doses, allowing it to build a resistance. At the university, he worked with a team on cholera, rabies, childbed fever, and syphilis; in his new quarters, he planned to devote his spare time to an even more radical concept, albeit one that had tantalized his predecessors for centuries, namely that the most debilitating disease of all—the aging process—could also be greatly inhibited by means of a vaccine, if the proper ingredients could be discovered. As he often discussed with his colleagues, there were pockets of humanity around the world—most notably in the Ural Mountains of Russia, the Gobi desert, and the jungles of the Amazon—said to live more than two hundred years, and he believed that understanding the fauna (primarily) and microorganisms (secondarily) of these regions would eventually provide the key to bringing such longevity to the people of France.
    “So does that mean we could live forever?” Lucien asked when his father explained his reasons for cultivating such exotic plants in the greenhouse; some had enormous vein-covered leaves and twisting tendrils that Lucien found monstrous, so that—while he wouldn’t have admitted such a childish fear—he preferred not to be alone with them.
    “No, of course not. But much longer than we do now—assuming you weren’t killed by a bullet or run over by a carriage.”
    As much as Lucien disliked school, it made him proud to consider his father making such an important discovery. “But how—how will you figure it out?”
    Guillaume turned so that the reflection of the sun off his hair—once curly and dark like Lucien’s, it was now short and flecked with gray—caused Lucien to squint as he looked up. “You may have a scientific future in you yet,” he noted as he pulled his stopwatch from his pocket and handed it to Lucien. “You understand how a watch works,with gears and dials?” Lucien nodded as Guillaume split open the stem of a rose, where he displayed the fibrous system that transported water and nutrients from the roots to the leaves and