body where it doesn't normally take place, such as the brain. In other parts, the enzymes control replication, preventing malignancies and keeping your organs in good condition. After the treatment, in other words, your body will constantly renew itself.'
'I've heard that I have to have a check-up every year,' I said.
'No, but you can if you wish. What the surgeons will also do is implant a number of microprocessor monitors. These can be checked at any of the Lotterie's offices, and if anything is going wrong you will he given advice on what to do. In some cases you can be ne-admitted here.'
'Lareen, either the treatment is permanent, or it isn't.'
'It's permanent, but in a particular way. All we can do here is prevent organic decay. For instance, do you smoke?'
'No. I used to.'
'Suppose you were to start again. You could smoke as many cigarettes as you wished, and you would never develop lung cancer. That's definite. But you could still contract bronchitis or emphysema, and carbon monoxide would put a strain on your heart. The treatment won't prevent you from being killed in a road accident, and it won't stop you drowning, and you can still get hernias and chilblains, and you can still break your neck. We can stop the body degenerating, and we can help you build immunity to infections, but if you abuse yourself you can still find ways of causing damage.'
Reminders of a body's frailties: ruptures and fractures and bruises. The weaknesses one knew about, tried not to think about, observed in other people, overheard in shop conversations. I was developing sensibilities about health I had never had before. Did the acquisition of immortality simply make one more aware of death?
I said to Lareen: 'How long does this take?'
'Altogether, about two or three weeks. There'll he a short recovery period after the operation tomorrow. As soon as the consultant thinks you're ready, the enzyme injections will start.'
'I can't stand injections,' I said.
'They don't use hypodermic needles. It's a hit more sophisticated than that. Anyway, you won't he aware of the treatment.'
'You mean I'll be anaesthetized?' A sudden dread.
'No, but once the first injections are made you'll become semiconscious.
It probably sounds frightening, but most patients have said they found it pleasant.'
I valued my hold on consciousness. Once, when I was twelve, I was knocked off my bicycle by a bully, and suffered concussion and three days'
retrospective amnesia. The loss of those three days was the central mystery of my childhood. Although I was unconscious for less than half an hour, my return to awareness was accompanied by a sense of oblivion behind me. When I returned to school, sporting a black eye and a splendidly lurid bandage around my forehead, I was brought face to face with the fact that those three days had not only existed, but that _I_ had existed within them. There had been lessons and games and written exercises, and presumably conversations and arguments, yet I could remember none of them. During those days I must have been alert, conscious and self-aware, feeling the continuity of memory, sure of my identity and existence. An event that _followed_ them, though, eradicated them, just as one day death would erase all memory. It was my first experience of a kind of death, and since then, although unconsciousness itself was not to be feared, I saw memory as the key to sentience. I existed as long as I remembered.
'Lareen, are you an athanasian?'
'No, I'm not.'
'Then you've never experienced the treatment.'
'I've worked with patients for nearly twenty years. I can't claim any more than that.'
'But you don't know what it feels like,' I said.
'Not directly, no.'
'The truth is, I'm scared of losing my memory.'
'I understand that. My job here is to help you regain it afterwards. But it's inevitable that you must lose what you now have as your memory.'
'Why is it inevitable?'
'It's a chemical process. To give you longevity we must stop the brain deteriorating. In the normal thanatic body brain cells never replicate, so your mental ability steadily declines. Every day you lose thousands of brain cells. What we do here is induce replication in the cells, so that however long you live your mental capacity is unimpaired. But when the replication begins, the new cellular activity brings almost total amnesia.'
'That's precisely what frightens me,' I said. A mind sliding away, life receding, continuity lost.
'You'll experience nothing that will scare you. You will enter the fugue state, which is like being in a continuous dream. In this, you'll see images from your life, remember journeys and meetings, people will seem to speak to you, you will feel able to touch, experience emotions. Your mind will be giving up what it contains. It's just your own life.'
The hold released, sentience dying. Entry into fugue, where the only reality was dream.
'And when I come round I'll remember nothing about it.'
'Why do you say that?'
'It's what surgeons always say, isn't it? They believe it comforts people.'
'It's true. You'll wake up here in this chalet. I'll be here, and your friend, Seri.'
