Cryoburn - Lois McMaster Bujold [27]
Miles encouraged the tech to expand upon the arcana of his craft with much the same noises he'd used on Yani, to better effect. When Miles had absorbed as much about how cryochambers were built as he could stand, he asked, "But won't you run out of parts?"
"Not for a while yet. This facility was originally set up to serve twenty thousand patrons. In twenty years, we've only accumulated about a ten-percent occupancy. I admit we started much smaller, back when. We can go for decades yet. Till I'm gone, for sure."
"And what then? Who are you relying on for your revivals?"
"We don't need anyone to do the revivals, yet. Anyway, they're much trickier."
Indeed. "Who does the cryoprep, then?"
"Plant nurse. You'll meet her sooner or later. She's real good, and she has an apprentice, Ako, too. I need to get myself a couple of youngsters like that, I guess."
Miles didn't marvel at this. Emergency cryoprep was a common enough medical procedure that even he had learned it, at least theoretically, as part of military field-aid. Under nonemergency conditions there were doubtless more refinements, resulting in less cryo-amnesia and other unwanted side-effects, after. Less trauma to start with left less trauma to recover from, but to choose to go down to that darkness in cold blood, so to speak, while still breathing . . . "It's still frightening to think about," he said honestly.
"For most folks, it's a last choice, not a first one. We all come to it in time, though. No one wants to go of a coronary in the night and not-wake-up warm and rotting. Safer not to wait too long." Tenbury's lips twisted. "Although some of the corps are trying to increase market share these days by encouraging folks to freeze early. I'm not sure if the math works out."
"It does seem an inelastic demand, yes," agreed Miles in fascination. "More customers now can only mean fewer later. A short-term strategy for such a long-term enterprise."
"Yah, except maybe for those who'd miss their chance."
It was Miles's turn to tilt his head in consideration. "I suppose they're not up to one-hundred-percent market saturation, even now. What about the religious types?"
"Oh, yah, there are still a few refusers."
"Refusers?"
"You're not from around here, are you? Figured from your accent, but I'd have thought you must have been on Kibou longer. In order to end up here, I mean."
"It was something of an accident. I'm glad I stumbled on you, though."
Refusers, like revives, were another item the careful corps tours had neglected to mention, but they hardly needed even Tenbury's brief explanation, which he obligingly supplied, for Miles to figure out. Tenbury's judgment was that those who chose burial over freezing for superstitious reasons were a self-limiting phenomenon. Miles thought of those fringe utopian communities that had practiced strict celibacy and thus died out within the first couple of generations, or non-generations, and nodded provisional agreement.
Tenbury then kindly took Miles through the far door, out of the workshop and into another corridor-thankfully lit, though even with illumination the general effect was of an unsettling cross between a space station corridor and a morgue. There he opened an empty cryo-drawer, recently reconditioned, and pointed out its features, rather like a very restrained used-vehicle salesman.
"It seems . . . small," said Miles.
"Not much head room," Tenbury agreed. "But you're past sitting up suddenly by the time you arrive in it. I've often wondered if folks would retain any memory of their time in these, but the revives I've met all say not." He slid the drawer closed and gave it a fond thump to seat the latch.
"You just go to sleep, and then wake up in a future somebody else picked for you. No dreams," Miles agreed. "Blink out, blink back in. Like anesthesia, but longer." An intimate preview of death, and doubtless a lot less traumatic when the blink out part wasn't accomplished by a needle-grenade blowing out one's chest,