Christine Caine was keeping me company again, but she seemed unusually subdued as we sat through the suspenseful phase. I assumed that she was experiencing the same self-centered feelings as me, but when she finally broke her silence with something more than a grunt it was to express astonishment at Zimmermans appearance.
Hes so old , were her exact words.
It was trivially true, of course, but that wasnt what she meant. I had only been thirty-nine years old when I was frozen down, but it wouldnt have made much difference to my face if Id been seventy-seven. People of my generation didnt suffer from wrinkles, or gray hair, or any of the other traditional appearances of old age. We
needed elaborate Internal Technology and periodic deep tissue rejuvenation to keep us going even for a mere hundred and fifty years, but the superficial appearances of aging were easier to overcome than the invisible record of intracellular damage and nucleic acid copying errors.
Adam Zimmerman hadnt had our advantages. He wasnt old , even by the standards of Christine Caines day, if one left his millennium in limbo out of the account, but he certainly looked it.
I had seen the superficial signs of old age before. One of my closest associates in the criminal fraternity had worn them almost as a badge of pride. It should not have been a surprise to see them manifest in Adam Zimmermans face and figure, but there seemed something not quite right about the matter. It would not have been impossible, or even particularly difficult, to apply a little somatic engineering to the texture of the skin while the devitrification procedure was proceeding. Although the whole point of the exercise was to bring him back exactly as he had been when he went into SusAn save for supportive IT and a very smart suit of clothes it seemed to me that a certain amount of cosmetic work would not have been inappropriate. No doubt he would make his own decision about that, when the time came to make informed decisions about the particular technologies of emortality that he would adopt, but I couldnt believe that he would not have relished the prospect of waking up rejuvenated. Its mainly a matter of showmanship, I said to Christine, when Id thought it over. Theyre displaying him to the whole solar system as a work of art. This is just the beginning of the story. They want all the phases to be visible, to demonstrate the true significance of what theyre doing.
Surely they cant make him one of them , she said.
Im certain that they can, I contradicted her, thoughtfully. The sisters might even be naive enough to think that he might take that option, when theyve had a chance to work on him, although I cant believe that anyone else thinks so. Whatever they offer him and us will have to be designed exclusively for mortal use, because everybody born into this world was already engineered for emortality. None of them ever had a choice. All their choices were made for them, by their adoptive parents. This is an unprecedented situation.
Why should they care what kind of emortality he opts for? Christine asked.
Maybe because theyre still making decisions on behalf of their unborn children, I guessed. Maybe theyve become anxious about whether theyre making the right ones, now that there are so many alternatives to choose from. Theyre interested to know what kind of emortality mortals would choose for themselves. Zimmerman is the star prize, because he was the first mortal to go for broke in the quest for emortality, but they may have thrown in a couple of controls to make the game more interesting. There are three of us, so therell be a clear majority if the decision is split.
I realized as I voiced it that the last point was wrong, because there had to be more than two alternatives available, but I didnt bother to correct myself. Nor did I point out that if Adam Zimmermans vote was worth more than either of ours, mine had to be worth more than hers because she was a certified lunatic.
You make it sound like a game show, Christine observed. Its a lot of trouble to go to for that kind of petty kick.
In our day, I reminded her, all the hopeful emortals used to spend time wondering how they were going to cope with the tedium once theyd been around for a few hundred years. Maybe these people take their game shows more seriously than you or I can imagine. The children of Excelsior really are children, by comparison with people like Lowenthal and Id be willing to bet that its people of Lowenthals generation who are pulling the strings.
That had been another preoccupation of the hopeful not-quite-emortals of my own day which was why Id produced it so readily in my conversation with Davida. The prospect of the oldest generation remaining in charge forever , while the youngest had no possible prospect of inheriting the Earth, had been a popular item of twenty-second-century debate. Nowadays, it seemed, the other worlds of the solar system were all under the dominion of the older generation, even though Titan and Ganymede were still largely icebound and the terraformation of Mars and Venus had hardly begun. If the young wanted to assert their right to the pursuit of property, they already had to look to further horizons, with all the attendant inconvenience of the limiting velocity of light.