The Fountains of Youth - Brian Stableford [59]
My doctor, whose name was Ayesha Sung, reckoned that it would take a week for the crushed tissues in my leg to regenerate the bones and sinews.
“You’ll have to be immobilized for at least four days,” she told me, sternly. “The cell masses have to be returned to quasi-blastular innocence before they can lay the foundations for a new knee and ankle. Once the superstructure is in place, the differentiation can be concluded and the synovial fluid can get the whole thing working. Once my nanomachines have finished, the rest is up to you. It could take as much as three months to train up the muscles again. If you had any special skills built into the old set you’ll have to reeducate the reflexes. You’re not a ballet dancer, I hope?”
She knew full well that I wasn’t a ballet dancer. She could easily have picked a less derisive example—skier, maybe, or climber.
“You were very lucky,” she added. “If you’d fallen headfirst, you’d be dead.”
“Fortunately,” I told her, unable to resist the temptation to be sarcastic, “I was standing on my feet when the ground gave way. I was in a hurry to rescue poor Mister Majumdar, so I hadn’t given the possibility of standing on my head much thought.”
“Very amusing,” she said, coldly. “If I offered a discount on my fee for a helpful attitude, you’d just have lost yours. You should try to be more like Mister Majumdar. All experience enriches us as it transforms us.”
“Thanks a lot, Mister Majumdar,” I said, when she’d gone.
“Call me Ziru,” was his only reply.
“Mortimer,” I offered in return, figuring that he could shorten it when he’d demonstrated a little more camaraderie. Then I repented, remembering that we were going to be together for several days and that it was at least thirty years since I’d last spent such a long time in the actual company of another human being. “You aren’t really enjoying having frostbite, are you?” I asked by way of making conversation. “You have programed your IT to cut out the pain, I suppose.”
“Of course,” he said. “But cutting out pain isn’t just a practical issue, is it? It’s not just a straightforward matter of leaving the warning flash in place and then obliterating the rest.”
“Isn’t it?” I queried, having always thought that it was. Given that good IT is a far better monitor of internal damage than pain ever was, it had always seemed to me entirely reasonable that technologically sophisticated humans, old and new alike, should reserve pain responses to the triggering of withdrawal reflexes.
“Certainly not,” Majumdar said. “The fact that we don’t need pain any longer to inform us that all is not well within our internal being—a job for which it was always ludicrously ill-fitted—it doesn’t follow that it’s entirely useless and ought to be discarded. It’s a resource, which ought to be carefully explored, if only for aesthetic reasons.”
“Aesthetic reasons?” I echoed, in frank astonishment. “Connoisseur masochism, you mean?”
“If that’s what you want to call it,” he replied, loftily. “But I’m not talking about anything as crude as trying to find a paradoxical pleasure in pain. What I’m talking about is taking care to learn what pain as pain has to teach us about who and what we are—and, more importantly, who and what we were.”
“The empire of fear hath the greatest of all despots set at its head,” I quoted, “whose name is Death, and his consort is named Pain.”
“Who said that?” Majumdar wanted to know—but not enough to wait for the answer. “A mortal, of course. We live in a different world now. Anyway, pain was always the handmaiden of life, whatever mortals