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
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