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.
The preliminary screening was by direct interaction with a computer; later I was placed in a machine I took to be a whole-body scanner; after further more detailed X-raying of specific pants of my body--my head, my lower back, my left forearm and my chest-- I was briefly interviewed by a doctor, then told to dress and return to my chalet.
Seri had left to fluid an hotel, and there was no sign of Lareen. I sat on my bed in the cabin, reflecting on the psychological factors in hospitals, in which the removal of the patient's clothing is only the first step of many by which he is reduced to an animated slab of meat. In this condition, individuality is suppressed for the greaten glory of symptoms, the former presumably interfering with the appreciation of the latter.
I read my manuscript for a while, to remind me of who I was, but then I was interrupted by the arrival of Lareen Dobey and the man who had interviewed me, Doctor Corrob. Lareen smiled wanly at me, and went to sit in the chain by the desk.
I stood up, sensing something.
'Mrs. Dobey tells me you are in doubt as to whether or not you will accept the treatment,' Connob said.
'That's night. But I wanted to hear what you had to say.'
'My advice is that you should accept the treatment without delay. Your life is in great danger without it.'
I glanced at Lareen, but she was looking away. 'What's wrong with me?'
'We have detected an anomaly in one of the main blood vessels leading to your brain. It's called a cenebro- vascular aneurysm. It's a weakness in the wall of the vessel, and it could burst at any time.'
'You're making it up!'
'Why do you think that?' Corrob at least looked surprised.
