Her glance was humorous and questioning. ‘You’re really alone, Tom, aren’t you? What may be good for the vast living being may not be so good for you…’
She would like to see a society where the young were supported financially until their eighteenth birthday, in order to ‘find themselves’, as she put it. Only then would they be put to work for the good of the society that had nourished them.
At the other end of the scale the compulsory retirement of men and women at the age of seventy-five would be abolished. Molecular technology had reached a point where the curse of Alzheimer’s disease had been banished and both sexes lived healthily well into their early hundreds -barring accidents. It was expected that the class known as the Megarich would live for two centuries. Meditech, she said, had accomplished much of recent decades, although the time when humans lived for 500 years – an opportunity to learn true wisdom, she said – was still far in the future. Say twenty years ahead, given the peace they enjoyed on Mars. Longevity would become inheritable.
When I asked her what pleasure there would be in a lifespan of 500 years, Mary regarded me curiously.
‘You tease me, Tom! You of all people, to ask that! Why, given five centuries, you would be able fully to enjoy and appreciate your own intelligence, with which you are naturally endowed. Growing out of the baser emotions, you would achieve true rationality and experience the pleasures of untroubled intellect. You would live to see the perfection of the world to which you had contributed so much. You’d become, would you not, an authority on it?’
I asked playfully, ‘The baser emotions? Which are they?’
As she leaned towards me to fit a light harness on my head, I caught a breath of her perfume. It surprised me.
‘I don’t mean love, if that’s what you imply. Love can be ennobling. You pay too little heed to your emotional needs, Tom, do you understand?’ Her deep blue eyes looked into mine.
While this discussion was taking place, the nurse was busy securing a cable to my wrist, making sure that it fitted comfortably where a tiny needle entered a vein. The other end of the cable ran to a computer console where a technician sat, his back to me. It in turn was linked with the nanotank.
‘What is happening in surgical advance,’ Mary was saying, ‘is essentially in line with your reforming principles. The technology has developed because of a gradual change in public attitudes. Notably, the dissociation of the acceptance of pain from surgery, which began with the discovery of ether anesthesia halfway through the nineteenth century. You, similarly, wish to separate the association of aggression from society, if I understand you aright.’
Before I could agree or disagree Mary rushed on to say that, as we talked, the computer was analysing the findings of the nanobots that had penetrated my system to check on the concentration of salts, sugars and ATP in the renegade cells of my brain – to, in short, perform a biopsy. The quantputer would order them to redirect the energies of malignant cells, or else to eliminate them.
‘So the words pain and knife no longer—’ I began. But a curious light was streaming in from I knew not where. I could not trace its source. Perhaps it was a flower, temporarily obscuring my view, as if I were a bee entering it for honey, for pollen, burrowing, burrowing, among the white waves of petals, endless white waves, festive but somehow deadly. With them, a dull scent, an unreal buzzing, the two of them interfused.
As if new senses had roused themselves … In the middle of them, a dull orange-tinted stain that moved, weeping through puny mouths as it sucked its way onward. But the holy rollers were pressing forward, extinguishing it to the sound of – sound of what? Trumpets? Honey? Geraniums? It was so fast I could not tell.
Then the light and sound were gone, only the endlessness of white waves remaining, churning over in a great ocean of confused thought. Antonia’s face? Her nearness? Mary’s lips, eyes? A sense of great loss…