People should only die when they fall off bridges. Or swim with the sharks. No one’s lights should go out because a clock hidden in his cells has struck midnight.
We seem to have a notion that when nature decrees we self-destruct, it is somehow wrongheaded to do anything about it, and we should go contentedly to our graves. Me, I’m looking for a detour.
- Thomas Dunninger,
Right to Life
Nature cares only that you reproduce and rear the kids.
After you’ve done that, get out of the way.
- Charmon Colm,
Chaos and Symmetry Alex talked about digging him up ourselves. I don’t know how serious he was, but I pointed out that there were severe penalties for grave desecration. And I wasn’t sure what good it would do even if we did find out who was buried there. It was a guessing game. Alex admitted that. And he backed off the idea when I started suggesting what the headlines would look like.
ANTIQUITIES DEALER TURNS GRAVE ROBBER
BENEDICT CHARGED IN DESECRATION PLOT
Sitting in the skimmer on the perimeter of the cemetery, watching the moon drift through the sky, I found myself thinking of Tom Dunninger, who had dreamed of doing away with graveyards. Or, at least, of reducing the need for them.
We decided to stay over in Walpurgis. Most of the restaurants and the larger hotels were closed for the season, but we got a suite overlooking the ocean at the Fiesta and ate in the dining room, which was inauspiciously named Monk’s. But the food was good, and a few other people drifted in, so we weren’t completely alone.
I don’t remember what we talked about. What I remember is that I kept thinking about the grave, and wondering whether it had been an accident or a crime of passion.
Or whether it had been something else entirely: Had someone found it necessary, or expedient, to kill Ed Crisp? Had he known something?
I had trouble sleeping. I got up in the middle of the night and fixed myself a snack.
The sky was full of gauzy clouds, giving the moon a halo effect. For reasons I don’t understand, other than maybe because I associated him with graveyards, I called up Tom Dunninger’s avatar, which materialized in the center of the room and said hello.
He was tall, dark-skinned, with somber features and white hair. He didn’t look like the kind of guy who enjoyed a good laugh.
I had settled onto the sofa, with a donut and coffee at my disposal. “What can I do for you, Chase?” he asked. He was impeccably dressed in creased slacks, a blue jacket, and a white shirt with a string tie.
The last update to the avatar had been made in 1364, a full year before the Polaris flight. This was a Dunninger whose face was lined with age. His knees appeared to be giving him trouble, and he grimaced as he sat down.
“Can we just talk for a bit, Professor?”
“My time is yours,” he said. He glanced around the room. “A hotel?”
“Yes.”
“Where are we?”
“Walpurgis.”
“Ah, yes. The resort. You know, I don’t believe I ever took a vacation. In my entire adult life.”
“You didn’t have time?”
“Didn’t have the interest.” He smiled. “I don’t think I’d have enjoyed myself in these sorts of places.”
“Probably not,” I said. “Professor, you achieved a great deal during your lifetime, but you’re best known for your pursuit of life extension.”
“It’s nice of you to say so, that I made some contributions. But I didn’t manage the one that mattered.”
“-Because people still get old?”
“Yes. Because people are still betrayed by their bodies. Because they live only a relative handful of years before they begin to decay.”
“But isn’t that the natural way of things? What would happen if people stopped dying? Where would we put everybody?”
“It’s the natural way of things that people run through the forests of Earth, chasing deer and wild pigs, I would guess. And getting chased. And huddling around fires on nights like this. Is it as cold out there as it looks?”
“Yes.”
“Is that how you’d prefer to live your life? The way your distant ancestors did?”
“I’m not much into hunting. No.”
“Or being hunted. So the first argument is turned out of court. And you ask, what would happen if people stopped dying? I’d argue, to begin with, it’s the wrong question. Rather, we need to know what would happen if people were able to retain youth and vigor indefinitely. I propose, to begin with, that we would remove, at a single pass, the bulk of human suffering. Not all of it, of course. It’s beyond our power ever to do that. But if we can stop the automatic funeral, kill it dead in its tracks, if we can stop the slow degradation that leads eventually to the grave, we will have given the human race a gift beyond measure.”
“Professor, a lot of people feel death is not necessarily a bad thing. That a life that goes on too long becomes terribly dull-”
“-It only becomes dull because the body becomes stiff and fragile. Things break easily. The energy level declines.”
“-That it becomes a burden both to the individual and to his family-”
“-Again, because of weakness. Of course the extremely old are a burden. I proposed to prevent that very condition.”
I hung in there as best I could: “It might be that art arises from our sense of the transience of beautiful things. That death is part of what makes us human. That people need to get out of the way so their children can move on.”
“Hogwash. Chase, you’re babbling. All that is fine when you’re talking in the abstract. Death is acceptable as part of the human condition as long as we mean somebody else. As long as we are only talking statistics and other people. Preferably strangers.”
“But if you succeeded, where would we put everybody? We don’t have limitless land space. Or resources.”
“Of course not. There’d be a price to be paid. Humans would have to stop reproducing.”
“They wouldn’t do that.”
He smiled in a way that suggested he had heard all this before. “You think not?”
“I’m sure of it.”
“Then I would put it to you that if you offer a young couple the choice between having children, or living forever in young bodies, never having to lose one another, that their response would not be the one you predict.”
“You really believe that?”
“I have no doubt.”
“So we stop having kids.”
“We’d have a few. Have to have a few, to replace those lost in accidents. It would be necessary to work that out, but it would be only a detail.”
“What about evolution?”
“What about it?”
“The race would stop evolving.”
“That probably happened shortly after we climbed down out of the trees.” He sighed. “Okay, that was over the top. But do you really believe that some far-off descendent of yours will be smarter than you are?”
Well, no. But I thought other people could stand a lot of improvement.
When I didn’t respond, he plunged on: “We have no obligation to give nature what it wants. Our obligation is to ourselves, to make ourselves comfortable, to provide the means to live fruitful lives, to eliminate the pain and degradation allotted to us by the natural order, to preserve individual personalities. As far as the evolutionists are concerned, if they like dying so much, let them volunteer to be carried out. If we truly want to see stronger bodies, genetic engineering can already take care of that. If we want smarter people, we have enhancement techniques.”
“I don’t know, Professor. It doesn’t seem right.”
“That’s because people have been getting old and dying for several million years. We’ve gotten used to it. And like any other necessity imposed by nature, because we couldn’t do anything about it, we pretend to approve. Wouldn’t have it any other way. I’ve actually heard people-women, primarily-say they wouldn’t want to live their lives again under any circumstances.
“But we don’t like dying. That’s why we have religion. We’ve always tried to circumvent it, to tell ourselves that we’re immortal. So we embrace physical death and at the same time pretend it doesn’t happen.”
“Professor, somebody said the human race progresses one funeral at a time.
People become less flexible mentally as they age. Wouldn’t we end with a lot of elderly cranks in young bodies?”
“Oh, well, you have something there. There’d be some problems. Bosses would never retire. Never die. You get very little fresh talent. Funeral directors would have to branch out. Find another line of work. Politicians would try to hang on literally forever. But we’ve always shown ourselves to be an adaptive species. I think, for one thing, that if people did not have to face the ageing process, they’d be less likely to defend lifelong opinions. They tend to be crutches, principles people hold on to ever more desperately as the end approaches. But if no end is approaching-” He held out his hands, palms up. What could be more obvious? “There would be a period of adjustment. But I think the end result would be more than satisfactory.”
“What happened to you?” I asked.
“How do you mean, Chase?”
“Most of us accept death and loss as the price we pay for our lives. What happened to you? Did you lose someone especially close?”
“Listen to yourself, Child. Who has not lost someone especially close? A father, a sister, a daughter. A friend. A lover. We sit at memorial services and pretend they’ve gone into some sunny upland. We talk about the happy hereafter and how they’re better off. We tell each other we are immortal, and that there is a part of us that lives on. But the truth, Chase, as everyone who’s thought about it knows in his heart, is that dead is dead. Gone. Forever.
“You can see I’m not young. But if you want to know why I’ve worked on the problem, it’s because I’ve watched too many people die. It’s that simple. I want it stopped. And I saw a way to do it.” The room was illuminated by a single lamp. He gazed at it a long moment. “We love the light,” he said.
“What’s the stumbling block? I mean, I know we’re able to get cells to reproduce indefinitely. That should mean virtual immortality, right? But it doesn’t happen.”
“What’s your background, Chase?”
“I sell antiquities.”
“Really?”
“Well, I also pilot superluminals.”
“Ah. Would you be interested in life extension for yourself? If I could offer it?”
“No. I’m satisfied with what I have.”
“A sensible position, my dear. But self-deluding. And ultimately dishonest.”
“I accept the terms on which I received my life.”
“Oh, Chase, you’re beginning to sound shrill. You’re still young. Give it time.
Wait for the first effects of winter to settle in your joints. Feel the first flutter of your heart, the numbness in your fingertips, the growing chill deep in your stomach as the horseman gallops closer. And he is coming. At a gallop, as you’ll learn. Youth is an illusion, Chase. We are none of us young. We are born old. If a century seems like a long time to someone like you, let me assure you that the annual round of seasons and holidays becomes a blur as the years pass.”
He was right, of course. None of us ever admits directly to wanting something we know we can’t have. It doesn’t matter whether it’s a house, a lover, or avoiding getting old. We just go on pretending. “Professor, am I correct in assuming that it’s true you did not succeed?”
His eyes grew intense. “Look at me,” he said. “Do I strike you as a man with the secret of immortality?”
I said nothing and he broke into a broad smile. “The problem is fundamental. It is not sufficient simply to cause cells to reproduce indefinitely. They must also communicate with one another.”
“Synapses.”
“Very good. Yes. Synapses. That capability is the very core of life. Brain cells collaborating to make a decision that it would be prudent to get out of the way of a flood. Digestive cells working cooperatively to extract nutrition from one’s most recent meal. Cells in muscles taking directives from cells in nerves.
“When a human being reaches 125 or thereabout, cells simply cease talking with one another. For a long time we did not know why.”
“And we do now?”
“Ioline,” he said.
“That makes communication possible?”
“That makes it happen. When the body’s supply of ioline runs out, processes begin to break down. We tried to stimulate internal production, tried adding synthetic concoctions. Nothing works. Except for a very short time. There seems to be a clock, a timer, something that determines when the lights go out. It’s called the Crabtree Limit.” He launched into a detailed explanation, and I was lost from the start. But I listened closely, nodding occasionally as if I understood. When he’d finished, I asked whether he had any hope the problem could be resolved.
“It has been the scientific grail for millennia,” he said. “Barcroft thought he’d solved it at the City on the Crag two centuries ago, about the time it was getting attacked by the Mutes. He was killed, and the lab destroyed. Nobody knows how close he might have been.” His eyes clouded. “Stupidity is always expensive.” He stared past me, focusing on something I could not see. Then he shrugged. “In the last millennium, Torchesky might have found a way to persuade the body to continue to manufacture ioline, and there was even talk that a few immortals were actually created. That they’re still alive out there somewhere, hiding themselves from the rest of us. Legend, of course. The work was taking place in a politically unstable climate.
A lot of people were frightened by what they heard he was doing. There was theological turmoil. Eventually he and his work were seized by a pious mob, and that was the last anyone ever heard of it. Or him.
“There’ve been other reports of breakthroughs, maybe valid, maybe not. But unfortunately nothing that’s made an impact.”
“Are you close?” I asked again.
“Yes,” he said. “It’s imminent.”
Imminent. The word kept popping up.
It was time to go home.
We loaded up on sandwiches and coffee, checked out, and went up to the roof. It was another cold, overcast day, no sun, and maybe snow coming. We retrieved the skimmer and climbed in. Alex took the driver’s seat. “Louise,” he said, “take us home.”
A sudden gust blew in off the ocean. There were only three other vehicles parked up there, which gives you an idea how busy the hotel was.
“Louise? Answer up, please.”
Nothing.
The AI lamp was dark. “She’s down,” I said.
Alex shifted his weight impatiently. He didn’t have a lot of tolerance for glitches. Moreover, when one occurred, he always concluded it was somebody’s fault.
And, of course, never his. “Brand-new vehicle,” he said, “and trouble already.”
He tried the toggle, but there was no sign of activity. “Probably a loose connection,” I said.
He grumbled. “You always claim these things don’t go down.” He switched over to manual and turned on the engine. “We’ll have to drive.” He extracted the yoke and engaged the pods. That always feels good, when nine-tenths of your weight drains off.
There’s another project that’s been going on for a long time: trying to find a way to reduce antigrav engines to something you could wear, say, on your belt. If you could walk around all day feeling the way you do in a skimmer… But that’s another one of those things that I doubt we’ll ever see.
“We should take it back to them tomorrow,” he said. “Get her repaired.” That, of course, would be my job.
He checked the screens for other traffic, touched the vertical thrusters, and we lifted off. I made a show of pulling on my harness to make sure I was securely belted.
He grinned at me and told me to hang on. We swung around, passed over the edge of the roof, and turned south. The core thrusters fired, and we began to accelerate.
A couple of kids were walking on the beach. And somebody in the downtown park was flying a kite. Otherwise, Walpurgis might have been deserted.
If you had to drive, this was the kind of area you wanted to be in. There was nothing else in the sky, save a lone vehicle coming from the west. We soared out over the marshlands, which dominate the land immediately south of the city. A few klicks out, we passed into a gray haze. The sensors showed no traffic ahead, but I knew Alex didn’t like driving when he couldn’t see. So he took us higher, and we emerged into sunlight at about two thousand meters. A few minutes later, the clouds broke up and we glided out over Goodheart Bay. There were a few boats, and I thought I saw a long tentacle rise out of the water and slide back in.
I told Alex, and commented they better stay alert.
Alex enjoyed driving. He didn’t get to do it often. But I think it made his testosterone surge.
The bay is big, 150 klicks before we’d hit land again, and Alex didn’t seem disposed to talk, so I closed my eyes and let my head slip back. I was almost asleep when I realized my hair was rising.
“Something wrong,” I told him.
“What? You’re not feeling well?”
“Zero gee.” That wasn’t a good sign. “We’ve lost all weight.”
He looked at the instrument panel. “You’re right. How’s that possible?”
“I don’t know. What’d you do?”
“Nothing. Are we going down?”
“ Up. We’re going up. ”
I know everybody reading this rides his or her skimmer around and never thinks much about the mechanics of it. As I always did prior to the incident I’m about to describe. The vehicles are usually equipped with two to four antigrav pods. The standard setting for them is.11 gee. You switch them on, eighty-nine percent of the weight cancels out, and you can lift off and go where you want. The way it works is that the pods create an antigrav envelope around the skimmer. The dimensions and arrangement of the envelope differ from one vehicle to another, but it’s designed for economy: The envelope is no larger than necessary to ensure that the entire aircraft, wings, tail assembly, whatever, is enclosed. If you could see it, it would resemble a tube.
The pods can be dangerous, so to change the setting you have to open a black box located in the central panel and do it manually. Alex looked down at it. He didn’t like black boxes. But he pulled the lid up, pressed the control square, and waited for the gravity to come back.
Nothing happened.
He tried again.
We were still going up.
I took a shot at it and got the same lack of result. “It’s not working,” I said. Alex made a face that told me that wasn’t exactly news. I pried the face off the unit and pulled a couple centimeters of cable out of the system. “It’s been disconnected.”
“You mean deliberately?”
I thought about it. “Hard to see how it could happen on its own.”
The skimmer was a dual, which is to say it had two antigrav units, both mounted beneath the aircraft, one just forward of the cockpit, one toward the rear between the cabin and the tail. The control cable, which I held in my hand, divided in two and linked into both pods. When I tugged again on the individual strands, there was still no tension. “It’s been disconnected at both ends,” I said. “Or cut.”
“Can we fix it?”
“Not without getting under the skimmer.”
The color drained out of his face, and he looked down at Goodheart Bay, which was beginning to look pretty small. “Chase,” he said, “what are we going to do?”
We were passing three thousand meters, going up like a cork in a lake. “Lower your flaps,” I said. “And kick in the thrusters.”
He complied. We accelerated, and the rate of climb slowed. But it wasn’t going to be nearly enough.
He got on the radio and punched in the Air Rescue frequency. “Code White,” he said. “Code White. This is AVY 4467. We are in uncontrolled ascent. Request assistance.”
A woman’s voice responded. “AVY 4467. Please state the nature of your emergency.” I wondered if it was the same person we’d talked to last time we got in trouble. “Be as specific as you can.”
“I thought I just did that.” Alex’s temper surfaced. “The pods are on full, and I can’t cut them back. We are stuck at zero gee. Going up.”
“AVY 4467, there is a manual control for the pods, usually located between the front seats. Open the-”
“Rescue, I’ve tried that. It doesn’t work.”
“Understood. Wait one.”
Alex looked out at the sky, looked at me, looked at the black box. “We’ll be okay,” he said. I think he was reassuring himself.
We rose into a cumulus cloud, passed through, and came out the top.
“Four four six seven, this is Rescue. Assistance is on the way. ETA approximately thirteen minutes.”
We didn’t have thirteen minutes, and we both knew it. We passed through four thousand meters. The numbers on the altimeter were blurring.
“Rescue, that will probably be too late.”
“It’s our nearest aircraft. Hang on. We’ll get to you.”
“Chase,” he said, “help.”
Suddenly I was in charge. The only thing I could think of was We could jump.
Get outside the bubble and the ascent would stop quickly enough. “I don’t see an easy way, Alex.”
Lines creased his face. “Air’s getting thinner.”
Skimmers are not designed for high-altitude flight. They have several vents, and if the oxygen gets scarce outside, the people inside are going to feel it. My head was beginning to hurt, and there was already pressure in my chest. “Breathe faster,” I said.
“It’ll help.”
I looked around the cabin. There was a time that these things carried parachutes or glide belts, but accidents were so infrequent that more people died from experimenting with the escape gear than from crashes, so it was eventually decided that it was safer in an emergency for ordinary citizens to ride the aircraft down. But that assumed the aircraft was going down.
“How about,” he suggested, “we shut off the pods?”
“We don’t have that option,” I said. “They’re on and disconnected, so they’re going to stay on.”
We cleared five thousand meters.
“Well,” he said, “if you’ve an idea, this would be a good time.” He was speaking more deliberately by then, inhaling and exhaling with every couple of words.
“You have any cable in this buggy?” I was climbing into the backseat, to get access to the cargo compartment. “Something we can use for a tether?”
“I don’t think so.”
I made a show of looking around, but I knew there was nothing like that.
“Okay,” I told him. “Shut down the thrusters and take off your shirt.”
“I don’t think we ought to be joking around.”
“Do it, Alex.” He complied while I opened the cargo compartment and found the tool box. I took out a pair of shears, a wire cutter, and the key. The key, of course, was a remote that would open panels on the bottom of the aircraft.
“What are you going to do?”
I pulled off my blouse. “I’m going to try to give you back control of the pods. Or at least one of them.” He handed me his shirt, and I used the shears to cut it and my blouse into strips.
He demanded to know how I intended to do that. But we were a trifle short of time, and I was in no mood to go into a long explanation. “Watch and learn,” I said.
I slipped the key into a pocket. Then I climbed back into my seat and tied the cloth strips into a line. I looped one end around my waist and tied the other end to my seat anchor. “Wish me luck.” I opened the door, and the wind roared through the cabin. It was frigid.
Alex was horrified. “Are you crazy? You can’t go out there.”
“It’s safe, Alex.” We were both shouting to get over the wind. “It’s zero gee out to a couple meters from the hull. All I have to do is not drift too far away.” Or get blown off. “But I need you to keep us as steady as you can. Use the verticals if you have to, and hang on to the yoke. Okay?”
“No!” He pushed back in his seat. “I can’t let you do that.”
I was halfway out the door. “It’s not as dangerous as it looks,” I yelled at him.
And damned sure less dangerous than doing nothing.
“No! You stay here. I’ll go.”
We both knew he didn’t mean it. In his defense, I’d argue that he thought he did, but I couldn’t see Alex climbing outside an aircraft under any circumstances. Even on the ground I don’t think he’d have tried it. Moreover, he didn’t know what to do.
“It’s okay,” I said. “I can handle it.”
“You sure?”
“Of course. Now, listen: When the pods reactivate, these two lamps’ll go on. But don’t do anything until I’m back inside.” I was trying to hold the door open against the wind. “If anything goes wrong-”
“What?”
“Nothing. Never mind.” He’d have no way out.
One section of the tether was midnight blue, composed of strips of the most expensive blouse I owned. I sighed and climbed out the door. The wind howled. I wasn’t really prepared for it, I guess. It caught me and ripped me off the fuselage and tossed me partially outside the envelope. My weight came back and my lower limbs felt like a bag of bricks. The skimmer was still going up, and it dragged me behind it.
I suddenly became aware that I was dangling several thousand meters in the air.
I hadn’t thought things out very well. The tether was wrapped around my waist instead of under my arms, and when it snapped tight it knocked the wind out of me. I needed a minute to recoup. Then I began to haul myself back up the line, hand over hand. The drag was horrific, but I’d been smart enough (or lucky enough) to make the tether no longer than I had to. Had I been tossed completely outside the bubble, I’d not have been able to do it.
As I climbed, the antigrav field took hold of my hips and legs again, and my weight went away. I grabbed a tread, got onto it, and tried to catch my breath. I now had access to the underside of the aircraft. It hadn’t been pretty, but I was there.
Each of the pods had an access panel. What I would have liked to do was open both panels and reconnect the control leads to the terminals. The forward pod was within easy reach. But the one toward the tail would be impossible to get to because the tread didn’t extend that far. And I couldn’t just float back there because of the wind. Nor would my tether have been long enough.
It was getting progressively harder to breathe. A darkness was beginning to gather around the edges of my vision. I took the key from my pocket, handling it carefully so the wind didn’t blow it away, and punched the purple button. Both panels opened.
In the forward compartment, I could see the loose cable. It was simple enough: I hung on to a strut with one hand and reconnected it. (I’d brought the wire cutters in case I had to splice.) There was nothing I could do about the rear pod.
When it was done I closed the panels.
We were still going up, of course. We passed through another cloud, and for the moment I couldn’t see anything except cumulus.
When we cleared I climbed back into the cabin, fell into my seat, and pulled the door shut. “I’ve only got one light,” he said.
“That’s because you’ve only got one pod,” I replied. “It should be enough.”
He hit the button and the status lamp glowed green and we got some weight back. The rate of ascent began to slow. The rear of the skimmer went up, and the nose dipped. That figured since the tail still weighed nothing. Gradually we nosed over and continued to rise more slowly until we hit apogee. Then we began to fall.
“Okay.” I reset the black box to zero.
“What are you doing?” he asked. We were looking straight down at the ocean.
“Preventing a crash. If we jiggle it a bit on the way down, turn it on, turn it off, we won’t hit too hard.”
“We’re going to crash again?” he asked.
“Probably,” I told him. “But the air’s going to feel better.”
We drifted down the sky. Alex clapped a shaky hand on my shoulder and told me I’d performed like a trouper. Made him proud.
The Patrol appeared and moved alongside. The bay got closer, but only slowly.
We were descending like a leaf, while the Patrol encouraged us and told us to keep at it. My heart settled back inside my ribs, and color returned to Alex’s cheeks.
Alex tried to manage things to keep us out of the water, but the position the aircraft was in prevented any kind of maneuver except up and down. Forty minutes after we’d begun to fall, we hit the surface. But unlike last time we slipped gently into the waves. It was nice and gradual, and the people in the rescue vehicle actually cheered.