been satisfied with her present condition—attractive enough to pull interesting and interested men, fit enough for her work and her undemanding exercise routines, but in no way good enough to fool anyone that she was actually young, once they saw more of her than her face, or saw her face close up.
Another aspect, she realised, was a certain patriotic stubbornness, of the kind that kept her driving her ancient Skoda Traverser. She didn’t want to buy youth from… not so much the West as… the new breed, the post- nanotech generation. She ^vanted to muddle along with the fixes that had worked for her so far: the Swiss collagen jabs, the British circulatory-system microbots, the Georgian bacteriophage immune-system back-ups, the Vietnamese phytochemical neural regenerators, the American telomere hack… all assembled in a post-Soviet package deal that the health services of the Former Union and the communistans had been doling out for decades.
The Kazakhstani President had taken about thirty seconds to persuade her that it was her personal right and patriotic duty to go for the full works, the one-shot nanotech silver bullet for death. Freed from the burden of responsibility for the ISTWR, given a mission on which even history might some day smile, that legitimacy somehow legitimised her selfish stab at immortality.
But still,
She thought that death had caught her several times over the next few hours. The journey from Izmir’s airport, Adnan Menderes, to Olu Deniz on the Aegean coast was terrifying, even in the armoured limo. It wasn’t just the hairpin bends, the appalling driving, the precipitous drops and—after nightfall—the way the headlamp beams swung out into empty black space. It was all that, and the dead men.
The car had just laboured up an incline, overtaking a couple of coaches with centimetres to spare between the booming metal of the coaches on one side, and a tyre-width away from the drop on the other, and two seconds to get out of the way of an oncoming truck. In the crook of the bend, a stand of pine a little away from the main forest; three bloodied men hanging from the branches, by the neck, dead. The mind retained from the sight a shocking impression of absences: at the faces, at the ends of limbs, at the crotch. Blink and you’d miss it.
Myra yelped. The driver’s gaze met hers in the mirror. The crinkles around his eyes deepened to a smile.
“Greek partisans.”
He started telling her the story, of how Izmir had once been Smyrna before Kemal liberated the nation, and had—only thirty-five years ago—been Smyrna again, and the airport had been named after the Greek fascist Grivas rather than the Turkish democrat Menderes, and how the Greeks had begun to re-colonise, and how the New Turks had risen to again drive out the Hellenic chauvinist pawns of imperialism, and… and so on. Myra listened intently to the long, winding tale of nationalist grievance; it distracted her, it kept her mind off all but the worst of the roadside attractions and the most heart-stopping turns in the road. This was a place where the small wars were real, with no simulations played and no quarter given.
Why had Suleimanyov booked her into a clinic here, of all places? She knew the answer had something to do with the complex diplomacy of the rest of her journey—the Turkish Federation was as usual in dispute with the Russians, who were backing the Bulgars and Serbs and Greeks, and most of the US successor regimes were backing Turkey, and Kazakhstan’s on-again-off-again relations with the rest of the Former Union were currently in “off” mode, so…
But still.
At last, in the darkness, she saw that they were heading down a long incline, towards the bottom of a valley that opened to the sea. Lights dotted along the roadside and along the sides of the valley increased in frequency to a cluster behind the beach, beyond which were the lights of ships. As the road levelled out the driver turned left, then right through a big iron gate which opened for them. Concrete walls topped with coils of razor wire, a short gravelled drive. She stepped out and looked around. She could see a swimming-pool with a bar, and multilevel apartments. The driver handed her luggage to a couple of lads in jeans and polo-shirts. She tipped the driver, checked in, followed the guys to her room, dumped her gear, tipped the lads and made her way down the stairs and over slippery tiles to the bar, where she ordered a Pils. She sank it in seconds. After the air-conditioned interior of the car the heat was horrendous.
She was on to her third lager and fourth cigarette when a small, dark woman in a white lab-coat strolled over to her.
“Madame Davidova?” She stuck out a hand. “Dr. Selina Masoud.”
“Hi. Pleased to meet you. You’re looking after me?”
“Yes.” Dr. Masoud clicked a tablet out of a dispensary. “Swallow this. Wash it down with—”
Myra swallowed. Dr. Masoud smiled. She had curly hair and pretty white teeth. “Something non alcoholic, I was going to say. But it’s all right—it’ll just make you sleepy, now, that’s all.”
Tine,” said Myra, covering a yawn. “I’m tired already. Smoke?”
Thank you.” The doctor took her cigarette and flipped a gold lighter, slipped it back into her pocket, inhaled gratefully. “Ah… I needed that.” She sat up on the stool beside Myra, ordered a Coke.
“So when do I go for treatment?” Myra asked.
Dr. Masoud flashed her brows. “That
“Oh,” said Myra. It seemed something of an anticlimax. “So what should I do?”
“Relax. Drink a lot—mainly non-alcoholic, to avoid dehydration. If you want to help the process along, smoke and sunbathe as much as you can. Both are carcinogenic, and they denature collagen too, you know—”
She said it as though relaying a recent and controversial discovery.
“Yes,” said Myra. “And?”
“They catalyse the telomerase reactions.”
She smiled, downed the Coke, hopped off the tall seat. “I must go. Enjoy your stay.”
The muezzin’s taped cock-crow cry from the minaret’s tannoy woke her before eight. She lay for a while enjoying the coolness of the room, and the fast-growing light. The room was, compared with her own, refreshingly uncluttered: painted and furnished in shades of white, the crisp straight lines of the decor and fabrics jiggled here and there with a twiddle of eyelet or a tuft of lace, as though the white ambience wavered between clinical and bridal, undecided whether it signified a hospital or a hotel. Not a bad honeymoon destination, Myra guessed—she’d noticed plenty of young, loud couples at the bar the previous evening, though she couldn’t help wondering if the implications of staying together
By the pool she sat on a lounger and rubbed sun-cream on her limbs and torso. Her hands were as claw-like (but supple), her muscles as stringy (but strong), her skin as mottled (but taut) as they had all been for forty years.
On her left, behind the clinic’s main buildings, the ground rose as a farmed foothill to a high, barren cliff. Across the kilometre or so of valley bottom, it faced a lower cliff, which sprouted scrub and trees. Overhead, the sky was deep blue. Paragliders, their canopies shaped like brighdy coloured nail-parings, drifted by, from a higher range far behind the high cliff, to the beach a mile or so distant. Cicadas whirred like small electrical devices. The rest of the people here seemed to be either young, getting their fix, or old like her, getting their rewind.
For two days, it was great. The sun rose above the cliff on the left, set behind the cliff on the right, regular as clockwork. In the evenings the barren cliffs looked red and martian, and the clinic like a Moon colony, a little artificial environment over which the gravity-defying paragliders swooped. Myra spent her days in sunshine and swimming and not dying. It was better than heaven. She rolled over and let the sun bake her back.
Big bare feet stopped in front of her face, in a spreading stain of water on the concrete tiles. Her gaze tracked up hairy brown legs, wet stretched trunks, hairy brown chest, to a face. Beaky nose, bright brown eyes, dark red-brown strandy hair swept back. The man smiled down at her, nodded unconsciously to himself.
“Myra Godwin?”
“Yeah?” like, what’s it to you?
He squatted. Big, white, irregular teeth.
Jason Nikolaides,” he introduced himself. “I’ve been asked to speak to you.”
She felt slightly befuddled.
You’re Greek?”
He laughed. “Oh no. Not for generations. American.” He bowed slightly. Drops of water fell from his hair.
