The Dragon Man - Brian Stableford [70]
“So I did discover something,” Sara said. “It really might be news.”
“It’s not the kind of news that makes TV, or even the local notice boards, but yes—it’s something new, something unexpected, something that might even open up a profitable line of scientific and technological inquiry. If I get any credit, I’ll made sure you get credit too, but long experience suggests that the manufacturers will keep all the credit that’s going for themselves, as the price of letting me keep my tweaking license...which is hardly fair to you, but nothing either of us can do anything about.”
“That’s okay,” Sara said. “I don’t mind, really. I don’t want you to lose your license.”
The Dragon Man smiled. “Nor do I,” he confessed. “Not that I’m likely to need it much longer, of course—but I’m rather attached to it. I’ve had it well over a hundred years, you know, although I’ve had to update it three times and only had it modified for sublimates three years ago. I was in business for well over a hundred years before I got it, but I could hardly go back to the kinds of work I was doing in those days. There’s no demand for tricks as old as that nowadays.”
“They might come back into fashion,” Sara suggested, although she was thinking of dragons rather than needles.
“I don’t think so,” the Dragon Man said, “but I’m not worried. I think I lost my ability to worry a while ago, including my ability to worry about whether the loss of my ability to worry is something I ought to be worried about...and my ability to care much one way or the other seems to have gone with it. I’m still trying to figure out whether it’s so hard to give a damn about anything because my emotional spectrum has gone to hell or because there really isn’t much worth giving a damn about when you get to my age. Comes to the same thing in the end, I guess.”
“Father Lemuel says that it gets harder to feel things as you get older,” Sara told him. “He says it’s because Internal Technology isn’t as messy as the natural systems it has to substitute for. He says we’re all turning into robots, although we’re doing it so slowly that we don’t really notice it.”
“Evolution, not revolution,” the Dragon Man quoted. “Well, he’s only half right. I notice it more and more, nowadays. It gets harder to feel things, and harder to bring back the feelings that go with your memories, but that doesn’t prevent you being all too well aware that you aren’t the man you used to be. Tell Lem he’s too young yet to know what old age really feels like...and with luck, he never will. He’s had IT all his life, but I was already old before I got anything more than a few squirts of friendly bacteria. I missed out on being a miracle child, but I’m certainly a miracle now. You have no idea how smart this suit is, or how much help it has from all the deep cyborgery I’ve taken aboard...but nothing lasts forever, Sara, especially when it’s done as much ageing as I have. With luck, you might really be emortal, but I was born too soon. If I thought I had a serious chance to be Achilles’ ship I’d be happy to be the guinea-pig, but Achilles’ ship didn’t have a brain.”
“What’s Achilles ship?” Sara asked. She had taken note of the fact that the Dragon Man had begun using her first name, but she didn’t yet feel able to address him as “Frank”.
“An old conundrum,” he told her. “Achilles’ ship kept going in for repairs. The hull was patched up time and time again, the mast replaced, and then the keel...until there came a time when there wasn’t a single one of the original timbers left. Compared to the original, it was a completely new ship—but there was never an identifiable point in time when it had ceased to be the old one. As I said, it’s a matter of evolution, not revolution. I’ve had quite a few replacements myself, and if I thought I could go on living by replacing every bit of natural flesh I had with some ultra-modern synthetic, evolving into a robot, I’d certainly go for it...but my brain can’t take that kind of rebuilding,