Red Mars - Kim Stanley Robinson [144]
“How accurate?” he asked, trying to grasp what it all meant.
“Well, about like if you were ten years old.”
“You’re kidding.”
“No, no. We’ve all done it to ourselves, back around Ls ten of this year, and so far as we can tell, it’s working.”
“Does it last forever?”
“Nothing lasts forever, John.”
“How long then?”
“We don’t know. We ourselves are the experiment, we figure we’ll find out as we go along. It seems possible we might be able to do the therapy again when the rate of division error begins to increase again. If that is successful, it could mean you would last for quite a while.”
“Like how long?” he insisted.
“Well, we don’t know, do we. Longer than we live now, that’s pretty sure. Possibly a lot longer.”
John stared at her. She smiled at the expression on his face, and he could feel that his jaw was slack with amazement. No doubt he looked less than brilliant, but what did she expect? It was. . . it was . . .
He was following his thoughts with difficulty as they skittered around. “Who have you told about this?” he asked.
“Well, we have asked everyone in the first hundred, when they get a check-up with us. And everyone here at Acheron has tried it. And the thing is, we’ve only combined methods, that everyone has, so it won’t be long before others try putting it all together too. So we’re writing it up for publication, but we’re going to send the articles first to be reviewed by the World Health Organization. Political fallout, you know.”
“Um,” John said, considering it. News of a longevity drug loose on Mars, back among the teeming billions. . . my Lord, he thought. “Is it expensive?”
“Not extremely. Reading your genome is the most expensive part, and it takes time. But it’s just a procedure, you know, it’s just computer time. It’s very possible you could inoculate everyone on Earth. But the population problem down there is already critical as it is. They’d have to institute some pretty intense population control, or else they’d go Malthusian really fast. We thought we’d better leave the decisions to the authorities down there.”
“But word is sure to get out.”
“Is that true? They might try to put a clamp on it. Maybe even a comprehensive clamp, I don’t know.”
“Wow. But you folks. . . you just went ahead and did it?”
“We did.” She shrugged. “So what do you say? Want to do it?”
“Let me think about it.”
• • •
He went for a walk on the crest of the fin, up and down the long greenhouse stuffed with bamboo and food crops. Walking west he had to shield his eyes from the glare of the afternoon sun, even through the filtered glass; walking back east, he could look out at the broken slopes of lava stretching up to Olympus Mons. It was hard to think. He was sixty-six years old, born in 1982, and what was it back on Earth now, 2048? M-11, eleven long hi-rad Martian years. And he had spent thirty-five months in space, including three trips between Earth and Mars, which was still the record. He had taken on 195 rems in those trips alone, and he had low blood pressure and a bad HDL-to-LDL ratio, and his shoulders ached when he swam and he felt tired a lot. He was getting old. He didn’t have all that many years left, weird though it was to think of it; and he had a lot of faith in the Acheron group, who, now that he looked at them, were wandering around their aerie working and eating and playing soccer and swimming and so on with little smiles of absorbed concentration, with a kind of humming. Not like ten-year-olds, certainly not; but with an aura of suffused, absorbed happiness. Of health, and more than health. He laughed out loud, and went back down into Acheron looking for Ursula. When she saw him she laughed too. “It’s not really that hard a choice, is it.”
“No.” He laughed with her: “I mean, what have I got to lose?”
• • •
So he agreed to it. They had his genome in their records, but it would take a few days to synthesize the collection of repair strands and clip them onto plasmids