quite cold, actually.”
An hour later a big IV bag had drained into him. He was still hot, and his bladder was full. They let him get up and go to the bathroom, then when he returned he was strapped into what looked like a cross between a couch and an electric chair. That didn’t bother him; astronaut training had inured him to all devices. The shock when it came lasted about ten seconds, and felt like a disagreeable tickling everywhere in him. Ursula and the others detached him from the apparatus; Ursula, her eyes twinkling, gave him a kiss full on the mouth. She warned him again that in a while he would start to feel chilled, and that it would last for a couple of days. It was okay to sit in the saunas or whirlpool baths; in fact they recommended it.
So he and Maya sat in the corner of a sauna together, huddled in the penetrating warmth, watching the bodies of the other visitors, who came in white and went out pink. It seemed to John an image of what was happening to the two of them—come in sixty-five, go out ten. He really couldn’t believe it. It was still very hard for him to think, he found his thoughts simply blanked, his mind stunned. If brain cells were reinforced too, had his clogged unexpectedly? He had always been a ragged slow thinker. In fact this was probably no more than his usual obtuseness, brought to his attention because he was trying so hard to come to grips with the thing, to think what it meant. Could it really be true? Could they really be sidestepping death for some years, perhaps some decades? …
They left the sauna to eat, and after their meals they took short walks in the crest greenhouse, looking out at the dunes to the north, the chaotic lava to the south. The view north reminded Maya of early Underhill, with the random litter of stones on Lunae replaced by Arcadia’s windswept quilt pattern of dunes, as if her memory had cleaned up her recollections of that time, making them more patterned,tinting their faded ochres and reds to rich lemon yellows. Patination of the past. He stared at her curiously. It had been M-11 years since those first days in the trailer park, and in most of the years since, the two of them had been lovers, with a number of (blessed) interruptions and separations, of course, caused by circumstances or, more usually, their inability to get along. But they had always started again when the opportunities came, and the upshot was that now they knew each other just about as well as any old married couple with a less interrupted history; perhaps even better, because any completely constant couple was likely to have stopped paying attention to each other at some point, while the two of them, with all their separations and reunions, fights and rapprochements, had had to relearn each other countless times. John said some of this to her, and they talked about it—it was a pleasure to talk about it—“We have had to keep paying attention,” Maya said intently, nodding with a look of solemn satisfaction, sure that this was mostly her doing. Yes, they had paid attention, they had never fallen into the mindless rut of habit. Surely, they both agreed as they sat in the baths, or walked the crest, this compensated for the time they had spent apart, more than compensated for it. Yes; no doubt they knew each other even better than any old married couple.
And so they talked, trying to stitch their pasts to this strange new future, in the anxious hope that it would not prove to be an unbridgeable rupture. And late the following evening, two days after the inoculation, sitting alone naked in the sauna, their flesh still cold, their skin all rosy with sweat, John looked at Maya’s body sitting there beside him, as real as a rock, and he felt a glow like the IV injection running all through him. He had not eaten much since the treatment, and the beige and yellow tiles they sat on had started to throb, as if lit from within; light gleamed on every water droplet covering the tiles, like tiny chips of lightning scattered everywhere, and Maya’s body sprawled over these sparkling tiles pulsing before him like a pink candle. The intense thereness of it—“haecceity,” Sax had called it once, when John had asked