"Where the hell does this stuff come from?" I said, brandishing the sheet.
"Isn't it accurate?"
"Never mind that! It's a complete distortion!"
"But is it factually accurate?"
"Yes . . . but it misses out a lot of things."
"We didn't ask for these details. This is just what came out of the computer."
"Do they have files like this on everyone?"
"I've no idea," Lareen said. "You must ask your own government that. All we're concerned with is your life e.xpectaney, although this extra information can have a bearing. Have you read the medical summary?"
"Where is it?"
Lareen left her seat and stood beside me. She pointed with her pencil.
"These figures are our codes. Don't worry about them. This is where your life expectancy is printed."
The computer had printed 35.46 years.
"I don't believe it," I said. "It must be a mistake."
"We're not often wrong."
"What does the figure mean? Is that how long I have to live?"
"That's the age at which the computer says you are most likely to die."
"But what am I suffering from? I don't _feel_ ill!"
Beside me, Seri took my hand. "Listen to her, Peter."
Lareen had returned to her seat behind the desk. "I can arrange for a medical examination, if you like."
"Is there something wrong with my heart? Is it something like that?"
"The computer doesn't say. But you can be cured here."
I was hardly listening. All of a sudden my body felt as if it were a mass of previously unnoticed symptoms. I remembered the numerous aches and pains I had felt: indigestion, bruises, stiff legs, a sore back after working too long, the hangovers I sometimes suffered, the headaches at university, the coughing with head colds. All seemed innocuous and explicable at the time, but now I wondered. Did they hint at something worse? I imagined clotted arteries and neoplasms and gall-stones and ruptures, lurking within me, destroying me.
Yet it still had a faintly ridiculous aspect: in spite of everything I continued to feel as healthy as ever.
I resented utterly the fact that the Lotterie had thrust this on me. I stood up, looked out of the window, and across the lawns towards the sea. I was free, under no compulsion; Seri and I could leave immediately.
But then the realization: no matter what was wrong with me, there was a cure for it! If I took the athanasia treatment I should never again be ill, I should live forever. Illness thwarted.
It was an exhilarating feeling, one that seemed to give me great power and freedom. I suddenly realized how inhibiting was the prospect of illness: that one was cautious with food, or wary of too little exercise, on too much, aware of the signs of advancing age, shortage of wind, not getting enough sleep, or drinking on smoking too much. I would never need worry about such things again: I could abuse my body as I wished, or ignore it. I should never weaken, never decline.
Already, at the advanced age of twenty-nine, I had felt the first stirrings of envy of those younger than me. I saw the effortlessly agile bodies of younger men, the slender unsupported bodies of girls. They all looked so fit, as if good health were something to be taken for granted.
Perhaps someone older than myself would find this amusing to contemplate, but from my point of view I had already noticed myself slowing up. After the athanasia treatment I would remain forever twenty-nine. In a few years' time, those young adults I secretly envied would be my physical equals, yet I would have extra years of insight. And with every new generation I would acquire a greater mental stature.
Given the jolt, the news of my life expectancy, I began to recognize that the Lotterie's treatment was subtly different from Deloinne's interpretation. Because I read his book at an impressionable age, Deloinne had influenced me too much. I made his ideas my own, without questioning them.
Deloinne saw athanasia as an abnegation of life, yet really it was an affirmation.
As Seri had pointed out, the coming of death brings the destruction of memory. But life is memory. As long as I am alive, as long as I wake every morning, I remember my life, and as the years pass my memory becomes enriched.
Old men are wise, not by nature but by absorption and retention, and by the accumulation of sufficient memories to be able to select what is important.
Memory is continuity too, a sense of identity and place and consequence.
I am what I am because I can remember how I became it.
Memory was the psychic force I had described to Seri: the momentum of life, driving from behind and anticipating what is to come.
With increased life span the quantity of memory would increase, but a mind can fine-tune this into quality.
As memory is enhanced, so is one's perception of life.
This is the fear of death. Because it is unconsciousness, the obliteration of all physical and mental processes, the memory dies with the body. The human mind, at pivot of past and future, vanishes with its memories.
Thus, from death there is no remembering.
The fear of dying is not just the terror of pain, the humiliation of the loss of faculties, the fall into the abyss . . . but the primeval fear that afterwards one might _remember_ it.
The act of dying is the only experience of the dead. Those who are living cannot be alive if memory includes that of the state of death.
I was aware, beyond my new introspection, that Seri and Lareen were speaking to each other: polite exchanges and pleasantries, places for Seri to visit on the island, an hotel she might stay in. And I was also aware that a man had brought a large tray bearing breakfast, but I was not interested in food.
Lareen's computer print-out lay on the desk, the prediction of my life expectancy visible on the face I could see. 35.46 years . . . a statistical probability, not really a prediction.
A young man in his early twenties would have an expectancy of half a century. Of course, he might only live another three weeks, but the statistics were against this.
My own expectation was said to be another six years. I could live to be ninety, but the statistics were against this too.
However, I had no way of knowing if the figures were reliable. I looked again at the print-out, stamped with all the implacable neatness of a computer, and read again through the sundry evidence against me. It was a biased picture, saying almost nothing about me that could be construed in my favour. I was said to drink a lot, was moody, had a certain political dubiety.
This was supposed to influence my general health and well-being; from this the computer had estimated my life span.
Why had it not taken other facts into account? For instance, that I often went swimming in summer, that I enjoyed wellcooked fresh food and ate plenty of fruit, that I had given up smoking, had attended church until I was fourteen, was generous to charities, kind to animals and had blue eyes?
They all seemed just as relevant or irrelevant to me, yet each would presumably influence the computer, and some might predicate a few extra years for me.
I felt suspicious. These figures had been produced by an organization that sold a product. No secret was made of the fact that Lotterie-Collago was profit-making, that its principal source of revenue was the sales of its tickets, and that every healthy athanasian who emerged from the clinic was a walking advertisement for their business. It was in their interests that winners of the lottery accept the treatment, and therefore they would offer any inducement they could.
I reserved judgement on the treatment, but I resolved that I would make a decision only after an independent medical examination. I continued to feel healthy; I was suspicious of the computer; I found athanasia a challenge.
I turned back to the other two. They had started on the toast and cereals the man had brought. As I sat down, I saw Seri looking at me, and she knew I had changed my mind.
15
The clinic's medical centre occupied one wing of the main building. Here all recipients of the athanasia treatment were given a screening before progressing further. I had never before undergone a complete medical, and found the experience in turn tiring, alarming, boring, humiliating and interesting. I was readily impressed by the array of modern diagnostic equipment, but I was intended not to understand the functions of most of it.