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immortals, people whose loyalty he'd won by giving them a million pounds'
worth of life. He hadn't bought their treatments, though. All those years of
being the senior economist on the foundation's Board of Governors had paid
interesting dividends. Being in control of all of the checks and balances
meant that he could put people through either clinic for free. And he could
siphon off small amounts of money, mere tens of millions, without fear of
detection.
The Stileman Foundation did not collapse, but it did have to change its
policies in order to compete with
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BUYING TIME - Joe Haldeman
Ulric's Long Life Unlimited. Both of them wound up offering one to two hundred
years' rejuvenation for a million pounds, with no other financial strings
attached. That opened up the clinic doors to a large fraction of the world's
population, since a high-income professional facing a century of productivity
is a pretty good credit risk.
Kamachi became chairman of the Stileman board, and urged me to join, to ease
the foundation's transition back into real life. For some reason I agreed,
though all I really wanted to do was retire to some warm island with Maria and
lie in the sun. And figure things out.
We do spend a week or two on tropical islands sometimes, or desert ones, or
the Moon or wherever, to love each other and talk things over. Usually we take
Eric along, as an inexhaustible fount of data and logical arbiter. (He did
lose some faculties when Briskin's laser jolted him in Nevada, but he was able
to reinstall most of them from his file copy stashed in Vegas.) But it's
obvious to him as well as to us that no normal intelligence, human or machine,
is going to get to the bottom of this new thing. We'll have to build new tools
and figure out how to use them.
The scientists haven't begun to explain what happened to Maria, and then later
to me, and others. The supermeditative state that allows us to manipulate our
perception of time. The cross-cultural ability to communicate through
expression, gesture, body language. Heightened sensory perception; the ability
to concentrate physical strength. And other things that can't be described by
language.
Clinically, it's a side effect of the zombi drug, combined with extremely
advanced age. The scientists stopped testing it, though, after it appeared
that one out of every four or five doesn't survive the combination. That's
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what happened to the little man who kidnapped Maria from Ceres. The autopsy
showed nothing an unusually robust man, less than a year out of his first
Stileman.
It's no mystery to Maria or me, what killed him. But it's not something you
can quantify. He was imprisoned for twenty years in his own skull, with
himself as a cellmate. He literally couldn't live with himself, and so let
himself die. His autonomic body functions kept going until the antidote was
administered. Then the body realized it was a corpse, and stopped.
It happens to a significant number of immortals. That doesn't stop people from
trying. Because the other
Stileman immortals are just old people made young. We are something new. Not
supermen. But not simply men and women, either.
A complex analogy occurs to me, but it's more a felt thing than a reasoned
thing. A verbal simulacrum of it goes like this: a normal human adult stands
in relation to us rather, to what we are becoming as a normal child stands in
relation to the adult. The child can't really comprehend an adult's attitude
toward
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BUYING TIME - Joe Haldeman love, work, morality, and so forth, and he doesn't
have to, in order to be a "successful" child. As he grows, then, he moves
toward being a successful adult partly by copying the adults around him and
partly by developing internal resources adequate for facing adult life. [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]