Yet Hazel was a good girl—honest, kind, gentle. She had been so desperately worried about the two little girls, in the beginning; she had been so sweet to all the children. If she’d been Prima’s daughter, Prima would have been proud of her. But now she’d go off to some school, or fly on a ship, or—Prima could not even imagine all the possibilities, and knew she couldn’t. How could a child like this know what she wanted, what was right?
“God’s blessing on you,” Prima said, greatly daring in offering a blessing to a heathen. She wanted to tell Hazel not to use any abominable technology, but she knew that was futile. The girl was the product of that technology; her family used it, she would use it too. She prayed silently that God would keep Hazel safe.
“We now know what happened, Admiral.” The chief medical officer touched the display controls, and blurred blots of color sharpened into focus. “The Surgeon General’s office sent this out by ansible; the research labs finally figured it out. In a normal rejuvenation, on the left, the metabolites of the rejuv drugs are each involved in scavenging specific degradation products.”
“In plain language?” Vida Serrano asked. She knew, and knew they knew, what was meant, but she was determined to make them say it in language that anyone could understand. She had already been briefed, very secretly, by Marta Katerina Saenz.
“The rejuv drugs break down in the body into other chemicals, and those chemicals—metabolites—bind to and remove the chemical compounds characteristic of aging.”
“Very well.”
“In a normal rejuvenation, that leaves only healthy, undegraded tissues as a matrix for replication, the second part of the rejuvenation process.”
“So the first part throws out the old, as it were, and then the second part builds up the new?”
“Yes, Admiral. But on the right—if you’ll look right here—you can see that these tissues, which stain green, are not being removed. No green on the left, and green—”
“On the right. Yes. And I presume that means that age-deteriorated tissues are left in the matrix when the rejuv proceeds.”
“Exactly. Which replicate into age-deteriorated tissues, so that after some years—it depends on the amount of deterioration in the original as well as the exact kind of faulty drug—the deterioration affects brain function like any other senile dementia.”
“So—how do you fix it?”
“Unfortunately, we don’t know. It appears that if no actual functional degradation has occurred, then a rejuvenation with good drugs produces a fresh start. But when we tried that on one of the first patients, it didn’t work. The body rejuvenated to a young age, but the mental function stayed the same. We have been observing him for months now, and while the deterioration has not progressed, it has also not improved.”
“What about other treatments? Surely you had something for this kind of problem before rejuv?”
“No, not really. Admiral—I know that nobody likes to hear this, but medical miracles are rarely miracles.”
Marta had told her the same thing, but she’d hoped for better news.
“How early can you detect the problem?” If they couldn’t reverse it, perhaps catching it early would work.
“Within a year of a bad rejuv, which is plenty of time to correct it. But the tests take weeks—maybe we can speed it up later, but not yet—and we have a lot of people to test.”
What were they going to do with those whose rejuvs had failed, who had already been damaged . . . Vida shuddered. Rejuvenate them to youthful bodies and senility of mind? Who would take care of them? For how long? Or . . . let them die? Neither horn of the dilemma seemed tenable, and for once she was glad that it wasn’t her decision. Let the Grand Admiral and the Surgeon General figure it out; the mathematics of equity in this escaped her.
For dinner, Pedar had chosen Raymond’s, that year’s fashionable restaurant. She steered him away from discussing the Trials—he wanted her to dissect all the other competitors for his amusement.
“It’s not right,” she insisted. “They’re my friends as well as my fellow competitors; it’s not honorable to pick them apart like that.” She touched the table controls and brought up the chessboard. “Let’s play.”
“Don’t be naive, Cecelia,” Pedar said. Had he rejuved yet again? She couldn’t tell. He still dressed more like an actor in some deep-historical play. Her interest in history didn’t extend to clothing styles, so she wasn’t sure what period. “There’s no place in real life for honor. In sports, perhaps—” He picked up a black knight and a white, and made them bow to each other. “But even you know that what really matters is winning.” He clashed the pieces together.
“If you break the rules,” Cecelia said, trying to be reasonable, “they eliminate you.”
Pedar tilted his hand. “Then you might say that Bunny broke the rules.”
She could not believe what she was hearing. “You—”
“Cecelia—the rules are on a different level, when you’re talking about realities . . . surely you know that.” His tone indulged her, the knowledgeable adult to the ignorant adolescent. “Men like Bunny make the rules . . . until someone else displaces them.” He pushed the white king along the board, knocking the other pieces askew, until it rested on the edge of the board. “Yet there are always rules beyond rules . . . the rules that keep a man in his place—or move him away.” His finger touched the game piece; it teetered a moment on the edge of the table, then fell.
Her body tensed, as if she had seen an unexpected ditch looming beyond a jump she thought she knew. His expression shifted, reflecting hers; she hated that he had noticed. But he kept smiling, waiting her answer. She couldn’t think what to answer. She had to say something, though; she could feel his smile beginning to stiffen in place, like overbeaten egg whites.
“I see,” she said, buying time. She didn’t understand about Bunny yet, what rules he had broken that brought this man and his faction to the desperate action they had taken. She didn’t understand why he had hinted so broadly, or what he expected her to do about it. But she did see that none of it was accidental, not Bunny’s death, or this dinner meeting, or anything else Pedar did. Perhaps as far back as the Trials several years ago, her first ride in years. He had tried then to talk to her about the politics of the Rejuvenants, and she had dismissed it as mere fashion. “I do wonder,” she said after a long pause, “what, if anything, the New Texas Godfearing Militia has to do with Rejuvenants.”
He relaxed just that fraction which told her she had chosen the safer alternative at that conversational fence.
“People need something to blame for their disappointments,” he said. “As some opportunities are foreclosed, others must be seen to open. Or unrest might become general.”
Cecelia puzzled at this. Again, he waited for her, that indulgent smile which told her he expected her to be slow to understand. She hated that patience; if this was what she would become, as a Rejuvenant, she might just as well run her horse over a cliff and be done with it. Opportunities foreclosed—that had to be because Rejuvenants could live well-nigh forever, and who was going to give up power and privilege while still young and capable? Mentally, she transferred the problem to horse breeding, where it made more sense to her. If the old horses didn’t die off, and you kept breeding at the same rate . . . well, of course.
“I wonder if rejuv drugs would work on horses,” she said, before she could get a lock on her tongue.
Pedar burst out laughing, and the bald man at the next table looked up. “Cecelia, my dear! Only you would think of rejuvenating a horse!”
She could feel the heat in her face. Yet—if he laughed at her like that, he was not afraid of her wits. She allowed her voice to carry a little sting. “I see what you mean, Pedar. Those who cannot afford rejuvenation, or who are simply impatient, see ahead of them a lifetime of blocked opportunities—blocked by the Rejuvenants. But the universe is large—if they are discontented and ambitious enough, there are colony worlds—”