By the end of the day’s performances, Heris understood a bit more about the sport, but she had no intention of risking her own neck that way. People who craved that much danger should be firefighters, or some other job that accomplished something worthwhile to balance the danger. Cecelia was flushed and happy, eager to talk now about today’s winner (someone she’d known as a junior competitor) and the number of Rejuvenants competing. Of the five top placings, three were Rejuvenants.
“Does that mean you’ll go back to competition—if other Rejuvenants are doing it?”
“I might,” Cecelia said. “I’m not sure. Pedar—my friend that I went out with last night—wants to talk to me about Rejuvenant politics.” She made a face, then grinned. “I’ll listen to him—but I can’t think of myself as a person whose interests have changed just because I’m going to live longer.”
“Perhaps not,” Heris said. “But if three of the top five riders are Rejuvenants, where does that leave the youngsters just starting? Experience counts.” She was sure Cecelia would compete again; she was far too happy to give it up. She couldn’t help wondering what that would mean for her and the Sweet Delight.
“And some Rejuvenants don’t place,” Cecelia said, laughing. “I certainly didn’t.” But she looked thoughtful.
Cecelia had recognized the face but at first had not known whether this was Pedar himself, a son, or a grandson. The long, bony, dark-skinned face looked all of thirty. Had Pedar taken rejuvenation? How many times? He wore a full-sleeved white shirt with lace at the collar over tight gray trousers . . . he had always, she recalled, favored a romantic image. He had been the first man she knew to wear earrings . . . though now he wore three small platinum ones, in place of the great gold pirate hoop of his flamboyant youth.
“My dear Cecelia,” he said, holding her hand a long moment. “You look . . . lovely.”
“I look fortyish,” Cecelia said, with some asperity. “And I was never lovely.”
“You were, but you didn’t like to hear it,” he said. “And yes, I’m Pedar himself.” He tilted his head; his rings flashed in his ear. “I notice you aren’t wearing any—are you trying to pass?”
“Pass?” Now she was completely bewildered.
“As your apparent age, I meant. Perhaps you are planning to compete seriously again, and—”
Rage tore through her. “I am not trying to be anything but myself. I never did.”
“Sorry,” he said. “I seem to have hit a sore point. It’s just that you aren’t wearing any earrings—”
“I don’t follow fads in jewelry,” Cecelia said, biting each word off. “I prefer quality.” She glared, but he didn’t flinch. Of course, he hadn’t flinched much when they were both in their twenties and she’d glared at him. Now, he shook his head, and chuckled. She had always liked his chuckle; for some reason it made her feel safe.
“Forgive me,” he said. “I should not laugh, but it is so like you to be unaware of the code. You’re right, Cecelia: you never paid attention to fads, or tried to be anything but what you are. Let me explain.” Without waiting for her reaction, he went on. “Those of us who’ve experienced the Ramhoff-Inikin rejuvenation process several times found that we were confusing some of the people we’d always known. Even within the family we might be taken for our own descendants. We didn’t want to wear large signs saying ‘I am Pedar Orrigiemos, the original,’ or anything like that. We wanted some discreet signal, and—” he touched the rings in his left ear, “—this is what we use.”
“Earrings?” Cecelia asked. It seemed a silly choice. She tried to remember how many earrings she’d seen lately, and whether Lorenza had worn them.
Pedar laughed. “They aren’t just earrings. The first serial rejuvenations were all done under special license, with very close monitoring. They wore implanted platinum/ceramic disks encoded with all the necessary medical information, from their baseline data to the dosages. Someone—I forget who—objected to the disk, and asked if it could be made more decorative. Next thing you know—rings. Now we use them to indicate how many rejuvenations we’ve had, which is a clue—though not really precise—to our full age.”
“But why would you want to?” Cecelia said, intrigued in spite of herself. “I can see what you mean about families—although there’s no young woman in mine who resembles me that closely. But surely they could learn—”
“Oh, I suppose so. It’s handy in business, though, when associates know that the youngish man with the three earrings is the CEO, while the one with the single earring is his son, merely a division vice-president.”
“Ross never sneaks in another earring?” asked Cecelia, remembering Ross very well. She had never liked him.
“Not while I’m in the same system,” Pedar said. “I suppose he could, but then he’d have to sustain conversations with any of my friends—and he couldn’t. Which brings up the other issue, perhaps the main one. Haven’t you discovered yet how boring the young are?”
“I have not,” said Cecelia. She was in no mood to agree with Pedar about anything.
“You will.” His face twisted into the wry expression she had once found so fascinating. “Having a young body is one thing—I like it, and I’m sure you do too. No more aches and pains, no more flab and stiffness. Vivid tastes and smells, a digestive tract with renewed ability to cope with all the culinary delights of a hundred worlds. You can ride a competitive course again, if you want. But—will you want to?”
“I just did,” Cecelia pointed out.
“True, but that was—survival euphoria, perhaps, after your ordeal. Will you continue to compete?” When she didn’t answer immediately, he went on. “The physical sensations you enjoyed, those are strong again, just as I swim in big surf, which I always loved. You will always ride, perhaps. But you may not always want to compete. One reason is the constant contact with the young. There’s nothing wrong with the young—they will grow up to be old—but you have already solved the problems they find so distressing. Just as, when you were originally forty, you found adolescents boring—and don’t tell me you didn’t, because I remember what you said about Ross when he was in school.”
That was Ross, Cecelia thought to herself. Ross had been boring because all he thought about was Ross. Although, come to think of it, that description fit most of the adolescents she’d known. Certainly Ronnie had been like that.
“Take your average forty-year-old,” Pedar said. Cecelia immediately thought of Heris. Heris wasn’t average, but she didn’t like average anyway. “Your average forty-something is worrying about a personal relationship, and if not rejuved, is having concerns about the first signs of physical aging.” Well, that was true. She could not have missed the tension between Heris and Petris, and both of them were making a fetish out of using the gym. “More than half the things you know directly, they know only by hearsay—from their education, which includes only what educators think is important. Nothing of the little things that you and I remember effortlessly. Remember the craze for sinopods?”
Cecelia laughed. She hadn’t thought about that for years, a fashion so peculiar it had penetrated even her horse-focussed mind. She had had a sinopod herself, a red and yellow one.
Pedar nodded at her expression. “You see? If sinopods are mentioned anywhere outside obscure biology texts, it’s in some terminally boring treatise on the economic impact of fads for biologicals on the ecology of frontier worlds. You and I—the others our age, with our background—we remember the sinopods themselves, and even if we can’t explain the attraction, we remember the ones we had.”