Aftermath

EPILOGUE

From the secret diary of Oliver Guest.

Even Jove nods.

I do not know what mistake I made, and in a sense it does not matter. But, cursed as I am with a mind obliged to “wear itself and never rest,” I cannot help wondering. What contingency did I fail to cover? Why was not my “perfect” disappearance a total success?

I can only offer as excuse my need to improvise action when I arrived with Seth Parsigian at Catoctin Mountain Park, and discovered that more people were involved than I had expected. I am not at my best when given little time to develop and consider alternatives.

Of course, I have not been recaptured. But I gather from the media that I am still officially alive, and therefore subject to potential pursuit.

It is, in one sense, quite unfair. I am an honorable man and I give fair value. Seth and his companions freed me from the syncope facility, and for that I was in their debt. The telomod therapy that I provided for them should work for at least three years, by which time other centers of treatment will surely be in operation. I left them full notes. I cited Otto Redman’s name, over in England, my old colleague Bousson on the Canadian West Coast, and Akhtar Parvali in Iran. All of them have done significant work on telomod therapy, and at least one of them ought to have survived.

What more could be expected? My actions should have been enough to earn my complete freedom, freedom in perpetuity.

It has not done so, but I will not complain. What though the field be lost? All is not lost.

I still have Methuselah. Hidden away within his introns lie my darlings’ full genetic codes. He and I are safe in another country, where my little hobby is quite unknown. The temptation to indulge it again burgeons within me.

Meanwhile, the reconstruction, cloning, and training of my darlings must wait a little longer.

That can be endured. I know I will not wait forever.