At that moment I managed to identify at last the vague feeling of unease I had had ever since winning.
The lottery was something that existed for other people. I was the wrong person to have won.
Lotterie-Collago gave athanasia treatment as its principal prize: genuine immortality, medically guaranteed. The clinic claimed a success rate of 100 per cent; no one who ever received the treatment had yet died. The oldest recipient was said to be one hundred and sixty-nine years old, had the physical appearance of a woman in her mid-forties, and, it was claimed, was in full possession of all her faculties. She was often featured in the Lotterie's television advertising: playing tennis, dancing, solving crosswords.
Before all this I had sometimes made the sardonic comment that if eternal life meant a century and a half of crossword puzzles, I was content to die of natural causes.
There was also a feeling I had never entirely thrown off, that the award always went to the wrong kind of person: in short, it went to people who entered lotteries, who were deserving only of luck.
In spite of what I now knew was the Lotterie's advice, prizewinners were sometimes given a great deal of publicity. More often than not, under media examination these winners turned out to be dull, ordinary people from narrow backgrounds, who lacked ambition or inspiration, and who were patently incapable of envisaging themselves iiving forever. In interviews they would usually come out with homilies about devoting their new lives to good or public works, but the sameness of these sentiments seemed to indicate that they had been prompted by the Lotterie. This aside, their main ambition was generally to see their grandchildren grow up, or take a long holiday or retire from work and settle down in a nice house somewhere.
Although I had derided the prosaic aspirations of such innocent winners, now that I had become one myself I found I had not much more to offer. All I had done to deserve the prize was to take temporary, and ultimately meaningless, pity on a crippled soldier in a park. I was no less dull or ordinary than any of the other prize-winners. I had no use for a prolonged life. Before the lottery I had lived a safe, uncontroversial life in Jethra, and after the athanasia treatment I should probably continue it. According to the publicity, I could expect to do so for at least another century and a half, and possibly as much as four or five hundred years.
Athanasia increased the quantity of life, but offered nothing for the quality.
Even so, who would turn down a chance of it? I feared death rather less now' than I had done when I was an adolescent; if death was a loss of consciousness then it held no horrors. But I had always been lucky with my health, and like many people who escape illness I dreaded pain and disability, and the prospect of actually dying, of going through a helpless decline, suffering pain and immobility, was something I could not think about without shrinking away. The athanasia clinic gave treatment that totally cleansed the system, that controlled cell regeneration indefinitely. It gave immunity from the degenerative diseases like cancer and thrombosis, it protected against viral diseases and it ensured the retention of all muscular and mental abilities. After the treatment, I should remain forever at my present physical age of twenty-nine.
I wanted that; I could not deny it. Yet I knew the unfairness of the Lotterie system, both from my own short experience of it and from the many passionate criticisms that had been voiced in public. It was unfair; I knew I was unworthy of it.
But who was worthy? The treatment effectively provided a cure for cancer, but hundreds of thousands of people still died of the disease every year. The Lotterie said that cancer could not he cured, except as a by-product of their treatment. The same was true of heart disease, of blindness, of senility, of ulcers, of a dozen serious ailments that marred or shortened the lives of millions of people. The Lotterie said the treatment, expensive and difficult, could not he given to everyone. The only fair way, the only unquestionably democratic and undiscriminating way, was by lottery.
Hardly a month passed without the Lotterie being criticized. Were there not, for instance, genuinely deserving cases? People who had devoted their lives to the care of others? Artists, musicians, scientists, whose work would be curtailed by the inevitable decline? Religious leaders, peacemakers, inventors? Names were frequently put fonvard by the media, by politicians, all intending to further the apparent quality of the world.
Under such pressure, the Lotterie had several years before proposed a scheme designed to counter the criticism. A panel of international judges was appointed to sit annually, and every year they nominated a small number of people who, in their opinion, were worthy of the elixir of life. The Lotterie then undertook to provide the treatment.
To the surprise of most ordinary people, almost all of these laureates declined the treatment. Notable amongst them was an eminent author named Visker Deloinne.
As a result of his nomination, Deloinne later wrote an impassioned book called _Renunciation_. In this he argued that to accept athanasia was to deny death, and as life and death were inextricably linked it was a denial of life too. All his novels, he said, had been written in the knowledge of his inevitable death, and none could or would have been written without it. He expressed his life through literature, but this was in essence no different from the way other people expressed their own lives. To aspire to live forever would be to acquire living at the expense of life.
Deloinne died of cancer two years after _Renunciation_ was published. It was now recognized as his greatest work, his highest literary achievement. I had read it while still at school. It had had a profoundly moving effect on me, yet here I was, halfway to Collago, halfway to eternal living.
At the other end of the office I heard Seri put down the telephone receiver, and I turned towards her.
"They had to let your reservation go," she said. "But they've booked you into another hotel."
"Can you tell me how to find it?"
She picked up a raffia basket from the floor, and placed it on the desk in front of her. She took off her red jacket, and laid it down between the handles.
"I'm leaving now. I'll show you where it is."
She locked the desk drawers, checked that an inner door was closed, and we went out into the road. Heat assaulted me, and I looked around and above me in a reflexive gesture, thinking stupidly that some hot-air vent must be blowing out from above. It was just the climate, the tropical humidity. I was wearing only light slacks and a short-sleeved shirt, but with my holdall I felt totally unadapted to this place.
We walked to the main street and headed through the crowds. The shops and doorways were open, lights were blazing, and the traffic rushed past in a bedlam of noise and speed. It was all vested with a _purpose_ I had never noticed at home; everyone seemed to know where they were going, and obeying the chaotic rules of this unreal place.
Seri led the way along the densely crowded pavements, passing restaurants, coffee shops, strip clubs, bookstalls, cinemas. Everyone seemed to be jostling or shouting, no one moved slowly or silently. On several corners, open-air kitchens were selling skewered meat on rice, served in flimsy paper wrappers. Meat, bread and vegetables lay bare to the hot air in the open_fronted shops, attracting hundreds of flies. Transistor radios, strapped to the wooden uprights of stalls, gave crackling, distorted pop music to the uproar. A water truck roared down the road, sluicing the street and pavement with total disregard for anyone there; afterwards, vegetable peelings collected in the gutters. Through it all, a sickly, pervasive scent, far too sweet and unwholesome: perhaps it was rancid meat, or incense burned to smother the smell of dung. It had an intangible "hot" quality, as if the climate brought the perfume seeping from the walls and streets themselves.