Cryoburn - Lois McMaster Bujold [123]
"It's what I was waiting for," put in Fuwa, a bit mournfully. Suze shot him a scornful look and sat up straighter in her big chair, as if to imply he'd be waiting for a while yet. Miles was less sure. Suze's skin bore more than a little of that pallid slackness that was the harbinger of decline. One couldn't say she glowed with health, not even in her irate stress.
"If the Durona Group doesn't step in," said Mark, "the inevitable end game is that this place will go to the city or the Prefecture, or to Fuwa. And in either case, patron intake stops. The life of one person isn't long enough to see this venture out."
"Although that might change in the future," Kareen observed.
"Or cryofreezing will become obsolete technology, and this whole demographic mess Kibou has created for itself will be naturally swept away," said Mark.
"I'm not so sure of that," said Miles thoughtfully. "If people start getting frozen at eight hundred instead of eighty, the game will still go on, just set to a new equilibrium. Although at eight hundred, it's hard to guess how people will think. At twenty, I could not have imagined myself at almost-forty. I can't imagine eighty even now."
Suze snorted.
Mark shrugged. "That will be for them to decide, however many decades or centuries from now. I expect death will still be cheap and always available, doesn't take high tech."
"During the initial transition period," Kareen said, wrenching things back from this flight of speculation to the practical present, "treatment actually will be free, if the subject is willing to sign up for the experimental protocols and give the legal releases. And anyone coming in can give their own permissions." Not needing, this implied, any cooperation from Madame Suze and company. "I expect the Group will prefer to have a few more healthy live subjects to start on, before tackling the more difficult complications from death trauma and cryorevival. Although they'll certainly want data on those as well."
Suze growled. Tenbury scratched his beard.
Kareen regarded her fingernails, looked up, smiled. Miles wasn't sure if anyone else caught Mark's small gesture, two fingers held out and then curled once more atop his stomach. The pair had the good-cop-bad-cop routine down to an art, Miles thought with admiration, and it would be a naïve observer who concluded that all the bad-cop ideas came from Mark-or the good-cop ones from his partner, for that matter. Kareen continued serenely, "The Durona Group will be doing a lot of local hiring, if this goes through. For example, if you, Madame Suzuki, were to sign up for the first round of protocols, and they proved to work as well as we hope, the position of Director of Community Relations could be made open for you. Which would put you in place to work on these problems on an on-going basis, right from here. This is all too complex to be solved in a night, but that doesn't mean it's too complex to be solved ever."
"Buy me off with an empty title? Oh, as if I haven't seen how that works before!"
"What you make of it could be largely up to you," said Mark, sounding as if he didn't care one way or another. "But in three years, when all those chambers below stairs are emptied out, it may be a whole new situation, here. Employment would keep you in the center of things, with real input."
It wasn't the future Suze had set her mind to; Miles fancied he could hear her imagination creaking with the strain of change, like a gate almost rusted shut. Almost. She said querulously, "What about the rest of us?"
"Tenbury, I'd hire tonight," said Mark readily. "We'll be wanting a Director of Physical Plant first thing-the place certainly needs significant upgrades and repairs, starting from the laboratory core outward. We'll likely"-he flicked a glance at Fuwa-"need a local contractor. Medtech Tanaka as well, Raven vouches for her. The rest on a case-by-case basis. I do require competence.