“I was never good with languages.”
“I guess not. But the point is, the point is…” He was angry, jaw set, reddening. He did another fish and jammed its head back on the hook. “No matter what the outcome, you’ve done it. You’ve said to the world `the hell with Bill and Sara.’ You’re going your own way. Whether Man allows it or not, the intent is there.”
“That’s harsh.” I finished the fish I was doing. “You can come with us. I want you to come with us.”
“And what an offer that is! Throw away everything! Thanks a lot.”
I struggled to keep my voice calm. “You could see it as an opportunity, too.”
“Maybe to you. I’d be over ten-thirty-some, by little years–and everyone I ever knew, except for you, dead for forty thousand. That’s not an opportunity. That’s a sentence! Almost a death sentence.”
“To me it’s a frontier. The only one left.”
“Cowboys and Hindus,” he said quietly, turning back to the fish.
I didn’t say “Pakistanis.”
I could see that he was normal and I was not, even by the standards of my own long-dead culture. Marygay and I, and the other Forever War vets, had repeatedly been flung forward in time, often knowing that when you came to ground, the only people still alive from your past would be the ones you had traveled with.
Twenty years later, that was still central to me: the present is a comforting illusion, and although life persists, any one life is just a breath in the wind. I would be challenged on that the next afternoon, from an unexpected source.
——————————————————————————–
Chapter six
Three times a long Year, I had to report to Diana for some primitive medicine. No human or Man born in the past several centuries had had cancer, but some of us fossils lacked the genes to suppress it. So periodically, Diana had to check, as we politely used to say, where the sun don’t shine.
The wall of her office, upstairs in the dome, had been gleaming metal at first, with really strange acoustics due to its roundness. She could stand across the room and whisper, and it would sound as if she were next to your ear. Charlie and Max and I liberated some studs and panels from a stack behind the firehouse, and nailed together a passably square room. The walls were a comfortable clutter of pictures and holos now, which I tried to study intensely as she threaded a sensor probe up into my colon.
“Your little friend’s back,” she said. “Precancerous lesions. I’ve got a sample to send off.” It was an odd sensation when the probe withdrew, so fast it made me gasp. Relief and a little pain, an erotic shiver.
“You know the drill. When you get the pill, don’t eat for twelve hours, take it, then two hours later, stuff yourself. Bread, mashed potatoes.” She crossed over to the steel sinks of the lab module, carefully holding the ophidian probe away from her. “Get cleaned up and dressed while I set this up.”
She would send the cells off to a place in Centrus, where they’d make up a pill full of mechanical macrophages, programmed to dine on my cancer and then switch off. It was only a minor inconvenience, nothing compared to the skin cancer treatment, which was just painted on, but burned and itched for a long time.
Marygay and I had to chase cancer all the time, like everybody we knew who had gone through limb replacement on the hospital planet Heaven, back in the old days. They’ve licked that now.
I eased myself down by her desk just as she finished wrapping the package. She sat down and addressed it from memory. “I ordered five of these, which should be plenty for ten years. The examination’s just a formality; I’d be surprised if your cancer’s changed since the first one.”
“You’ll be along, though, to check it out?”
“Yeah. I’m as crazy as you are.”
I laughed. She didn’t. She put her elbows on the desk and stared at me. “I’ll never bother you about this again, William, but as your doctor I have to say it.”