Architects of Emortality - Brian Stableford [96]
His IT had already taken charge of his heart, and his pituitary monitors would ensure that his endocrine system would soon be finely tuned and perfectly balanced, but within the gap that separated state of being from state of mind there was still a considerable margin of unease.
Stuart adjusted the brim of his hat to take better account of the angle of the afternoon sun and stared out over the quiet Pacific, fixing his eyes on the distant horizon. Although he knew that there were countless smaller islands out there, hidden by the subtle curvature of the earth, it was easy enough to imagine that the ocean went on forever, unsullied by the dabblings of the so-called continental engineers and their Creationist clients. One day, he supposed, the Hawaiian archipelago would be so extensively augmented that there would be islet eyesores by the score visible in every direction, but he counted himself fortunate to have lived in an era of relative stability, when the most ingenious efforts of the world’s environmental revisionists had been directed to the repair of the damage done to the natural islands by the Greenhouse Crisis and the eco-catastrophic Crash.
The sight of the seemingly infinite sea calmed him, as it always had done, and helped him to feel that his true self had been restored to him. Ever since childhood, Stuart had been claustrophobic. He had consulted therapists of half a dozen different kinds, but their analyses and practical advice had never had the least impact on the problem. Before his second rejuve, while it still seemed that brainfeed research might yield results, he had taken as keen an interest as any nonspecialist could in the painful advance of neurophysiological science and technology, but he had waited in vain for a product that might cure him of his unwanted delicacy.
There were, of course, worse afflictions that a man might be condemned to live with for a hundred and ninety-four years, but Stuart had never been able to take comfort from that fact. His situation would not have been so bad if he had only been required to avoid such close confinement as that associated with elevators and whole-body VE apparatuses; that would have been a definite inconvenience, but not a crippling handicap. The real problem was the slow unease which crept upon him by day whenever he was confined to his house. It was not something that caused him any acute pain, and it never threw him into a panic attack no matter how long the pressure was sustained, but its very slightness was annoying. It was like an insidious internal tickling, whose effect grew by degrees until its psychological effect was out of all proportion to its sensational marginality.
In order to maintain his sense of equilibrium, he had to get out into the open for an hour or more at least once a day. That was one of the reasons why he lived on Kauai, where the air was always warm enough and rarely too hot for comfort, and where the stars were clearly visible at night in order that they might emphasize the limitlessness of the universe. That was also why he lived close to the beach, where the land met the huge and seemingly infinite sea. He had always loved beaches. All the most significant encounters in his life had taken place on beaches.
Ever since his second full rejuve, his claustrophobia seemed to be more easily aggravated than it had been before. The repair work, which the nanotech shock-troops had carried out within his brain seemed to him to have increased the magnitude of the innate flaw in his makeup, if only slightly. Nowadays, it required only the merest disturbance of his routines to set him on edge and to cause the inexorable closing-in of his walls to proceed just a little bit faster.‘ When Inspector Watson of the UN police had called to tell him that he might be on the hit list of a mad murderer, it had not mattered in the least that the assertion was patently absurd; it had unsettled him nevertheless.
He had been angry, of course—especially when he discovered what