Freelance Illustrator

The mind still feels: even in this drab, not quite lifeless, cold beyond cold it functions well enough, and still maintains a kind of fond remembrance for the slab of meat that brought me, more or less whole,through one life's, the first life's, pleasures and pains.

Perhaps I think about this body more now that I'm detached from it. The pain that was eight years of unrelenting drain that skewed my life-spattered it with gore and rot!—penetrated to the core of whatever self we have. The brain is not the "self," I know. But it's plain that something like a self will be restored.

If anything's restored. They gave no bond, no guarantee. I gladly paid the tab for this most expensive and, of course, priceless, gift, to find myself beyond the cancer pain, even in this drab temporary death. Ice to freeze those sores.

Something's different. Something's happening. I hear a sound, like a flute that's purring low and softly. Then, dim colors sparkling at the edge of vision. A smell of snow not a smell remembered, but a true perception...the smell of liquid nitrogen? The colors merge into a solid blue; I suddenly, all over, feel my skin screaming pain, beyond the cancer pain, shrieking now from skin through gut and bone and then it stops. The senses dead again, but now the body absolutely gone. A different kind of numbness from before...if it's real death, then it is nothing more.

But then I heard my name. Not as a word so much as a thought-but it was an alien thought, that didn't come from me! The Outside sought attention, the warm Outside. I said I'd heard, and in a microsecond they transferred a trillion bits of truth: the life I'd bought was ready to be claimed. I could be thawed...at least the brain. The body's dead, interred.

Which is what I'd felt. Of course it stops the senses dead, this being bodiless. They had a new young body they could splice me to. A good chance, but I die if it flops. Fifty-fifty? No, a little less. The chance of death was figured in the price.

But this requires some thought. I could remain for centuries in this not unpleasant state. Be content to live within my brain--a metaphor made frozen flesh-my fate, at very worst, to sit and glaciate in ponderous senility. At best,

a simple winking out. I did debate this for a blink or two. But my bequest to my future self was not a slow surrender: millenniums of icy rest. What's the future like? I had to know. They claimed I could be thawed. So here's the test. Let's throw the dice. That was the reason for the price that left my heirs a little poor.

It only worked part way. I felt the cold diminish at what seemed a rapid pace then realized what it was! The old ice-on-skin sensation on my face and body, new body: tingling, then I braced for pain, for frostbite pain not quite controlled by drugs...it didn't come. The doctors raced to save my future self. They lost their hold.

I lost a neuron here and there, but wound up pretty much the same, in this nice private cryogenic paradise. They'd offered me a choice: be wheeled around in some robot thing, alive though bound. But I would rather put my life on ice.

Again and then again they tried. Technique improved, and after only forty years more than twenty bodies--this antique brain blinked, and saw, blurred by sudden tears, the chrome and white and glare: the very room where I had gone to die two centuries before. I braced for pain, but it didn't come. They'd fixed that part. The body that I bore was male and young, but weak. Too weak to rise. A nurse, in accents very strange, said Wait. A month or two of painful exercise and you will be...whoever you create. So hurt me. More than anyone on earth, I'm old enough to know what life is worth.

To you who read this, that "future" world's a strange and near-forgotten relic. I've survived years enough to see the Pole Star change. This antique brain rebuilt, rewired, revived, until the clever scientists contrived a body that would last. So now we all slip forward to our future life, deprived of death unless we want to die. Life palls, you leave. I've never heard that Siren call myself, and hope to persevere until the heat death of the universe. We all should keep warm until that final chill. A million suns have risen since my birth: I'm old, but still too young for ash or earth.

-- JOE HALDEMAN