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By Root 2406 0

him to understand parts of himself he hadn’t even known existed. Michel was gone. He wouldn’t be back. They had carried the last version of his body out of the apartment. He had been around Sax’s age, about 220 years old. It was an advanced age by any previous standard; why then this pain in Sax’s chest, this hot blur of tears? It didn’t make sense. But Michel would have understood. Better this than the death of the mind, he would have said. But Sax wasn’t so sure; his memory problems seemed less important now, Maya’s as well. She remembered enough to be devastated, after all. Him too. He remembered what was important.

Strange to recall: he had been in her company immediately in the wake of the death of all three of her consorts. John, Frank, now Michel. Each time it got worse for her. And the same for him.

• • •

Michel’s ashes, up in a balloon over the Hellas Sea. They saved a pinch for return to Provence.

2

The literature on longevity and senescence was so vast and specialized that Sax found it difficult at first to organize his usual assault on the material. Recent work on the quick decline was the obvious starting point, but understanding articles on the subject meant going back to their predecessors and coming to some fuller understanding of the longevity treatments themselves. This was an area Sax had never understood more than superficially, shying away from it instinctively because of its messy biological inexplicable semimiraculous nature. A subject very near the heart of the great unexplainable, really. He had left it happily to Hiroko and to the supremely gifted Vladimir Taneev, who along with Ursula and Marina had designed and overseen the first treatments, and many major modifications since then.

Now, however, Vlad was dead. And Sax was interested. It was time to dive into viriditas, into the realm of the complex.

There was orderly behavior, there was chaotic behavior; and on their border, in their interplay, so to speak, lay a very large and convoluted zone, the realm of the complex. This was the zone in which viriditas made its appearance, the place where life could exist. Keeping life in the middle of the zone of complexity was, in the most general philosophical sense, what the longevity treatments had been about— keeping various incursions of chaos (like arrhythmia) or of order (like malignant cell growth) from fatally disrupting the organism.

But now something was causing the gerontologically treated individual to go from negligible senescence to extremely rapid senescence— or, even more disturbingly, straight from health to death, without senescence at all. Some heretofore unseen irruption of chaos or order, into the border zone of the complex. This was how it seemed to him, in any case, at the end of one very long session of reading the most general descriptions of the phenomenon he could find. And it suggested certain avenues of investigation as well, in the mathematical descriptions of the complexity-chaotic border, likewise the order-complexity border. But he lost this holistic vision of the problem in one of his blankouts, the train of thought concerning the substance of the math gone forever. And it had probably (he tried to console himself afterward) been too philosophical a vision to do him any good anyway. The explanation after all was not going to be obvious, or else the massive concerted effort of medical science would have searched it out by now. On the contrary; it was likely to be something very subtle in the biochemistry of the brain, an arena that had resisted five hundred years of effort to investigate it scientifically, resisted like the hydra, every new discovery only suggesting another headful of mysteries. . . .

Nevertheless he persevered. And over the course of a few weeks’ absorbed reading, he certainly gave himself a better orientation in the field than he had ever had before. Previously his impression had been that the longevity treatment consisted of a fairly straightforward injection of the subject’s own DNA, the artificially produced strands reinforcing the ones