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By Root 1493 0

to the texture of the skin while the devitrification procedure was proceeding. Although the whole point of the exercise was to bring him back exactly as he had been when he went into SusAn — save for supportive IT and a very smart suit of clothes — it seemed to me that a certain amount of cosmetic work would not have been inappropriate. No doubt he would make his own decision about that, when the time came to make informed decisions about the particular technologies of emortality that he would adopt, but I couldn’t believe that he would not have relished the prospect of waking up rejuvenated. “It’s mainly a matter of showmanship,” I said to Christine, when I’d thought it over. “They’re displaying him to the whole solar system as a work of art. This is just the beginning of the story. They want all the phases to be visible, to demonstrate the true significance of what they’re doing.”

“Surely they can’t make him one of them,” she said.

“I’m certain that they can,” I contradicted her, thoughtfully. “The sisters might even be naive enough to think that he might take that option, when they’ve had a chance to work on him, although I can’t believe that anyone else thinks so. Whatever they offer him — and us — will have to be designed exclusively for mortal use, because everybody born into this world was already engineered for emortality. None of them ever had a choice. All their choices were made for them, by their adoptive parents. This is an unprecedented situation.”

“Why should they care what kind of emortality he opts for?” Christine asked.

“Maybe because they’re still making decisions on behalf of their unborn children,” I guessed. “Maybe they’ve become anxious about whether they’re making the right ones, now that there are so many alternatives to choose from. They’re interested to know what kind of emortality mortals would choose for themselves. Zimmerman is the star prize, because he was the first mortal to go for broke in the quest for emortality, but they may have thrown in a couple of controls to make the game more interesting. There are three of us, so there’ll be a clear majority if the decision is split.”

I realized as I voiced it that the last point was wrong, because there had to be more than two alternatives available, but I didn’t bother to correct myself. Nor did I point out that if Adam Zimmerman’s vote was worth more than either of ours, mine had to be worth more than hers because she was a certified lunatic.

“You make it sound like a game show,” Christine observed. “It’s a lot of trouble to go to for that kind of petty kick.”

“In our day,” I reminded her, “all the hopeful emortals used to spend time wondering how they were going to cope with the tedium once they’d been around for a few hundred years. Maybe these people take their game shows more seriously than you or I can imagine. The children of Excelsior really are children, by comparison with people like Lowenthal — and I’d be willing to bet that it’s people of Lowenthal’s generation who are pulling the strings.”

That had been another preoccupation of the hopeful not-quite-emortals of my own day — which was why I’d produced it so readily in my conversation with Davida. The prospect of the oldest generation remaining in charge forever, while the youngest had no possible prospect of inheriting the Earth, had been a popular item of twenty-second-century debate. Nowadays, it seemed, the other worlds of the solar system were all under the dominion of the older generation, even though Titan and Ganymede were still largely icebound and the terraformation of Mars and Venus had hardly begun. If the young wanted to assert their right to the pursuit of property, they already had to look to further horizons, with all the attendant inconvenience of the limiting velocity of light.

Christine was thinking along a different line. “I’m the villain, aren’t I?” she said. “If this is a game, or an improvised drama, I’m not here to make up the numbers — I’m here to be the bad example.”

I turned to look at her, although the drama on the screen was coming toward its