already critical as it is. They’d have to institute some pretty intense population control, or else they’d go Malthusian really fast. We thought we’d better leave the decisions to the authorities down there.”
“But word is sure to get out.”
“Is that true? They might try to put a clamp on it. Maybe even a comprehensive clamp, I don’t know.”
“Wow. But you folks … you just went ahead and did it?”
“We did.” She shrugged. “So what do you say? Want to do it?”
“Let me think about it.”
He went for a walk on the crest of the fin, up and down the long greenhouse stuffed with bamboo and food crops. Walking west he had to shield his eyes from the glare of the afternoon sun, even through the filtered glass; walking back east, he could look out at the broken slopes of lava stretching up to Olympus Mons. It was hard to think. He was sixty-six years old, born in 1982, and what was it back on Earth now, 2048? M-11, eleven long hi-rad Martian years. And he had spent thirty-five months in space, including three trips between Earth and Mars, which was still the record. He had taken on 195 rems in those trips alone, and he had low blood pressure and a bad HDL-to-LDL ratio, and his shoulders ached when he swam and he felt tired a lot. He was getting old. He didn’t have all that many years left, weird though it was to think of it; and he had a lot of faith in the Acheron group, who, now that he looked at them, were wandering around their aerie working and eating and playing soccer and swimming and so on with little smiles of absorbed concentration, with a kind of humming.
Not like ten-year-olds, certainly not; but with an aura of suffused, absorbed happiness. Of health, and more than health. He laughed out loud, and went back down into Acheron looking for Ursula. When she saw him she laughed too. “It’s not really that hard a choice, is it.”
“No.” He laughed with her: “I mean, what have I got to lose?”
So he agreed to it. They had his genome in their records, but it would take a few days to synthesize the collection of repair strands and clip them onto plasmids and clone millions more. Ursula told him to come back in three days.
When he got back to the guest rooms Maya was already there, looking as shocked as he felt, wandering nervously from dresser to sink to window, touching things and looking around as if she had never seen such a room before. Vlad had told her about it after her physical, just as Ursula had with John. “Immortality plague!” she exclaimed, and laughed strangely. “Can you believe it?”
“Longevity plague,” he corrected her. “And no, I can’t. Not really.” He felt a little dizzy, and he could see she hadn’t heard him. Her agitation made him nervous. They heated soup, ate in a daze. Vlad had told Maya to come to Acheron, and intimated what it was all about; that was why she had insisted that John accompany her to Acheron. When she told him that, he felt a shiver of fondness for her. Standing next to her washing the dishes, observing her hands shake as she spoke, he felt exceptionally close to her; it was as if they knew each other’s thoughts, as if, after all the years, in the face of this bizarre development, there were no need for words, only for each other’s presence. That night in the warm dark of their bed she whispered hoarsely, “We’d better do it twice tonight. While it’s still us.”
Three days later they both got the treatment. John lay back on a medical couch in a small room, and stared at an intravenous plug in the back of his hand. An IV feed shot, just like all those he’d had before. Except this time he could feel a strange heat rising up his arm, flushing his chest, pouring down his legs. Was it real? Was he imagining it? For a second he felt extremely odd all over, as if his ghost had walked through him. Then he was just very hot. “Should I be this hot?” he asked Ursula anxiously.
“It’s like a fever at first,” she said. “Then we put a small shock through you to push the plasmids into your cells. After that it’s more chills than fever, as the new strands bond to the old. People often feel