by Robin Roseau
“So you would prefer what happens naturally.”
“My question was not rhetorical.”
“Oh,” I said. “I am sorry. Within the empire, it’s fairly common. But style is quite diverse. There are several main areas to consider. Some women prefer to carry no hair under their arms.” I gestured to my own. “Some like smooth, smooth legs. Some prefer no hair, um. Other places.”
“I think I can figure out those other places,” Mistalarn said. “They actually want to talk about this?”
“It’s a choice, and some people are quite particular about this. Some don’t care. It is your body, Mistalarn.”
She turned to Ginger and surprised us, speaking a few words of English. “Ginger. You. Girls. Boys. Like?”
Ginger smiled. “I like girls,” she said. “Like this.” She gestured to the hologram.
Mistalarn smiled. “I want her to pick these choices for me. They can be a surprise.”
I translated that, watching the doctor. She didn’t look pleased, but nodded. “We can’t take a week each going over everything.”
“We put together the information, but it’s so much that it’s overwhelming,” I said.
“I am starting to understand. Ginger, can you make the remaining choices?”
“If she really means it, I’m going to make the choices I like. Maddalyn, is that what she really wants?”
“I think it is, Ginger,” I said.
“Tell her that. Tell her for the other choices, I’ll use what I did the last time I went in.”
I nodded and explained that to Mistalarn. “Good,” she said. “Ginger’s a hottie, don’t you think?”
I laughed. “Yes, I do, but I’m not translating that.”
“Ask her what she thinks of this.”
“Oh, I think it’s perfect,” Ginger said. She reviewed the big items with me, taking just a few minutes. I nodded and didn’t even try to explain them to Mistalarn.
“All right,” said Doctor Horton. “She’s scheduled to begin mid-morning in three days. No eating or drinking after midnight the night before, and only a light meal that evening. No alcohol. No drugs.” She considered. “And don’t take her from the facility. I can’t promise she’ll live three days.”
I thought the doctor was being melodramatic.
* * * *
Most of our patients had brought someone with them. Mistalarn had a grandson, and so I left her in his care, but I made sure he knew how to reach me.
I checked on her every day. She had questions, which I answered, but I was pleased to see she was enjoying the facility.
We had her for dinner the night before her surgery, assembling a light meal. Mistalarn was quiet, but after dinner she asked, “Maddalyn, this isn’t a joke, is it?”
“No, Mistalarn. No one is playing a joke on you.”
“There are athletic fields here.”
“There are,” I said. “Including a few for games that haven’t been played on Talmon before, as best I can tell.”
“And in a few weeks, I could play these games.”
“Do you dance, Mistalarn?”
“Not in two decades, but I was once known to.”
“There is a style of dancing that has become popular on Tarriton, or at least was when I was last there. I am trying to import the style here. Maybe you’ll let me teach you.”
“Are you sure your wife won’t mind?” she asked, smiling at Kalorain.
“I’ll be teaching her, too. It’s just dance, although as danced on Tarriton, it can be quite exciting, if one desires.”
“Am I making a mistake? I asked for a body that isn’t at all like mine.”
“We normally suggest small changes, but you’re already going from 81 to 18. Almost nothing could be more drastic than that. But when you said you wanted to be prettier, I didn’t think you would take the choice you made.”
“It’s what Ginger recommended first,” she said. “She likes that look, doesn’t she?”
“And you like Ginger’s looks?”
“I just might.”
“Mistalarn…”
“Oh, don’t worry. I’m not going to throw myself at her. But if someone like her likes it, it must be a good choice.”
“I’m not sure I can fault that logic,” Kalorain said.
A half hour later, Mistalarn’s grandson, Fandorid, pulled me aside. “Maddalyn. Is Grandma going to be okay?”
“Oh, Fandorid,” I said. “She’s going to be absolutely fabulous. How do you feel about this? You know, she’s going to look younger than you are after this.”
“That is difficult to understand.”
“I know,” I said. “This isn’t really something that the star people will understand. Kalorain and Sartine had a hard time explaining it to me. You grew up seeing your grandmother in a certain way. Matronly. It's not even something I understand. No one on Frantzland is matronly. But that’s how you saw your grandmother. That’s going to change. She’s going to seem like an entirely different person. Nearly everything about her will change. Her mind will be the same, but her body will be entirely different.”
“That is just so strange,” he said. “If everyone looks young, how do you, I don’t know. How do you decide who you want to marry?”
“Well, I came here and asked for a Galatzi trade,” I said with a smile. “But what you’re asking isn’t as important to us. You’re asking how you keep from being attracted to someone old enough to be your grandmother. Do you think the governor is attractive?”
“Will she get angry if you tell her I said ‘yes’?”
I laughed. “No, but I won’t tell her.”
“She looks really good, maybe the most attractive woman I’ve ever seen.”
“She’s over a hundred years old, Fandorid. You understand that, don’t you?”
“Yes, although she’s not my grandmother!”
“And that’s what I meant.”
He looked out the window for a minute. “Fandorid, the doctors are distressed. I don’t think they understood the reality of our situation here.”
“That we don’t have all the things they’re used to?”
“No. Mistalarn’s doctor has never seen arthritis. Sometimes they get a patient with an unusual disease. Sometimes they get someone who has been in a horrible accident. But most of the time, their patients appear to be no older than 35 or 40 years. They appear to still be in the prime of their health. But here, our first patients are not in their prime. They have so many things failing in their bodies. Mistalarn’s doctor didn’t know where to begin.”
He nodded. “Grandmother would die without this.”
“I didn’t ask about that, but yes. A few years? Maybe a decade? Now she’ll be 18 again, but she’ll have all her old knowledge and wisdom. Can you imagine? All that wisdom from an entire lifetime, and an 18-year-old body.”
“That sounds pretty fabulous.” He turned to me. “Can you promise she’ll be all right?”
“No, Fandorid. She could die in her sleep before morning. A meteor could strike us all dead tomorrow. Any manner of things can go wrong. But I can say this: the doctors can heal a lot worse than they’re healing here. The likelihood of a complication is exceedingly small, but it does happen. I have every belief your grandmother will be fine, but I cannot make that promise. I can only tell you that this is her best chance.”
He nodded. “I can’t ask for more than that.”
“You love her.”
“She’s my grandmother. She raised me as much as my parents did.”
“You live with her?”
“Yes. What happens tomorrow?”
“We’ll bring her to the clinic building early in the morning. The technicians will take her from us and make her ready, and then we’ll stay with her until it’s time. We won’t be able to see her for a few days. Then she’ll be very weak. Part of the reason the center is here is so that when people come, they have a beautiful place to recover before they go home.” We had told them all
of this, but it didn’t hurt to tell them again.
He nodded.
* * * *
We wheeled Mistalarn to the clinic, then told her we would see her shortly. Fandorid hugged her before they wheeled her through the double doors to prepare her. He turned to me, and he was a little wild about the eyes. I took his hand and said, “They’ll take very good care of your grandmother.”
There was a waiting room, attended by two men from Indartha. They had tea and small snacks for us. I did what I could to keep Fandorid distracted. And then the nurse stepped out. “You can visit with her for a while, but she’s loopy.”
I explained that to Fandorid and then we followed the nurse.
Mistalarn smiled from her hospital gurney. “I already feel so good,” she said. “That pretty nurse gave me something.”
Fandorid and I separated to opposite sides and each took a hand. Mistalarn looked up at her grandson. “Do not be worried, my boy. I have lived a good, long life. If one of the one in a million chances occurs, I am at peace with my choices. I lived to make a better place for you, and I lived to see us reunited with the remainder of humanity.”
In that statement, I understood why Luradinine had selected this woman. And as I had that thought, the Beacon Hill Vendart entered the room. “Hello, Mistalarn.”
“Vendart,” replied the woman.
“Can you two give us a minute?” Luradinine asked. I nodded and grabbed Fandorid’s arm. We stepped out into the hallway.
“Your grandmother is quite a woman,” I said.
“She is,” he agreed. Then we both looked away.
I was trying to put on a brave face, but I’d seen the doctor. She’d been rattled, and that rattled me. Was I offering confidence where I shouldn’t? I hoped not. I sincerely hoped not.
Luradinine spent five minutes with Mistalarn before poking her head into the hall. “They’re about to wheel her away, if you want to see her once more, Fandorid.” He nodded and hurried into the preparation room. Luradinine joined me. “She’s a brave woman.”
“She is,” I agreed.
“There is a part of me that wonders if we are doing this correctly.”
“Oh?”
“It is not my way to lead from behind.”
“Ah,” I said. “I have been through rejuvenation three times, although the third was to undo mistakes made during the second.”
“The doctors made mistakes?”
“No. I did. Misplaced trust. I’ll tell you about it sometime. Sartine has done this. I don’t know how many times the other members of the delegation have had rejuvenation, but some could have gone twenty times or more.”
“But none had a body as old as Mistalarn’s.”
“No, probably not,” I said. “But if you were to lead by example, you wouldn’t, either. Luradinine, this is going to be drastic for her, about as drastic as it could be. It may be months before she fully recovers. When they make such modest changes as our current patients are taking, one or two weeks of recovery is common, but it can be up to six months for extreme changes.”
She nodded. “This didn’t come up before.”
“It wasn’t that anyone was intentionally hiding anything from you. I think no one thought about it. And I could be wrong. I’m not a doctor.”
“I guess we’ll see,” she said.
* * * *
Rejuvenation wasn’t surgery. It wasn’t something that took a few hours. It was a process, and it took days. What would have happened to Mistalarn, as best she would be able to tell, is that the doctor and technicians would wheel her into the next room. There, they didn’t even transfer her to another bed. The entire purpose of this room was to induce sleep. That was done by placing a device over her head that monitored her brainwave patterns for a few minutes and then slowed them until she was unconscious.
This step wasn’t required for the process. People have gone through rejuvenation, or at least the beginning, fully conscious. But it tends to be disturbing, and over time, the doctors learned to induce unconsciousness.
And so Mistalarn was wheeled out of the preparation room and across the hall. There, she was sent to sleep. And then she was wheeled down the hall to the rejuvenation room. This room contained two rows of rejuvenation tanks. The nurses would transfer her into her tank. The doctor and technicians would check and double check that the programming was correct, and then it would begin.
And it would last a week or two.
I didn’t understand the details, not really. But the body was basically convinced to heal itself. Stem cells and nanotechnology were involved.
The process typically took one to two weeks, although it could be longer if someone were making drastic changes to their body structure. I could be made to be much taller and powerful, but a change like that took time. Anything that added to the time required cost the individual a fee, and it was never a minor fee. You could ask for small changes, and those didn’t actually lengthen your stay. But big changes took far more time.
The machines would monitor Mistalarn very carefully, second by second. The process would take as long as the process took, with the machines controlling it. The technicians monitored the machines, and occasionally the machines needed help. But that was rare, and so once the process started, it didn’t take many people to monitor all the machines.
But that had to happen around the clock.
In a way, the doctors had it easier. They were required to be available on call, but they could keep regular hours, and it was rare they were required outside of those hours.
For an outside observer such as Fandorid, Luradinine, or me, there were distinct points where we could receive meaningful status updates. The first, of course, was during the initial consultation.
We waited for the second, notice which took two hours to arrive in the form of Doctor Horton. She stepped into the waiting room and took a chair. “Mistalarn is doing well. The process has begun. We watched the progress for a while. Sometimes we can get a good feeling for how long it will take. This is going to take longer than it might have you, Ms. Herschel. We’ll know more in three or four days.”
I translated all that, although Luradinine could have as well. Fandorid asked, “Could I see her?”
“I’m sorry,” said the doctor. “There’s not really anything to see. She’s inside a big machine.”
Fandorid didn’t respond to that. I knew that, technically, the doctor could have let him see. There were observation windows. But what he would see was his sleeping grandmother, unclothed and bathed in the chemicals of the machine. I’d never heard of a family member being allowed to visit once the process began.
The doctor turned to me. “This is routine now,” she said. “All the indications are good. But she’s going to be bottled for at least a week, and I think two weeks is more likely.”
“I understand.” I switched languages. “Fandorid, now is when you use that English phrase I taught you a few days ago. Do you remember?”
He nodded. “Thank you, Doctor.”
“You’re very welcome,” she replied. “Your grandmother is going to be fine.”
I nodded to Luradinine, and between us, we got Fandorid moving. We were outside before he realized. “Fandorid,” I said. “You may stay here if you want, but there is little to do. I imagine you’ll sit and worry.”
“You want me to go home,” he said.
“Yes.”
“Where I can sit and worry.”
“Where you can ask Darratine to assign you to some easy duty for your home,” Luradinine said.
“If we have any news,” I said. “Someone will tell you. If it’s important to come back here, we’ll get you.”
He looked at me then at his vendart. “I don’t know what to do.”
She stepped forward and wrapped him in a hug. “That is the best thing to admit right now,” she said. “So you’re going to let me be your vendart.”
“Yes, Vendart,” he whispered.
“Maddalyn, could someone
help me take him home?”
“I’ll do it myself,” I said. I gestured to get us moving, leading the way to the bungalow Fandorid had been sharing with his grandmother. We collected his things.
“What about Grandmother’s clothes?”
“We’ll leave them here for her,” I said. “Fandorid, there are things you can do. If she has anything at home she didn’t bring, or if she has her favorite tea or fuzzy slippers, anything like that, you can find them. When she begins recovery, having familiar things about can help.”
“She has a quilt.”
“Then when you come back,” I said, “You should bring it.” After that, I let Luradinine manage Fandorid. I took his bag and then led the way to my jumper. I got them both settled in and then said, “This is an easy flight. We’ll be home in twenty minutes.”
I got us in the air then put the jumper on automatic. From there, I dived into my implant and sent a message to Darratine. I brought her up to speed and then said I would be landing in the village square.
I’d gotten a lot better, after all. Beaches were for wimps.
It wasn’t long before we saw Beacon Hill. I did an easy circle before setting up a landing in the square. Luradinine didn’t say a word, but Darratine and Farratain were waiting. As soon as we were shut down, they were both there.
“Hello, Fandorid,” Darratine said. “I’m so happy Mistalarn is doing well. Mother, will we have a big party when she comes home?”
“The biggest,” Luradinine promised.
Darratine took over management of Fandorid, and I could see she was far better at it than I would be. Farratain took his bag, and we watched as the two women led the man away.
“She’s going to be an amazing Vendart if you ever decide to retire,” I said.
“How did she know to meet us?”
“My implant.”
“Oh. Of course. Maddalyn, I’d like to go back, but someone is going to need to return me eventually.”
“Certainly,” I said. “But your younger daughter is not authorized to land in the square.”
She laughed. “You really should ask permission from the vendart.”
“Some people say it’s better to ask forgiveness than permission,” I said. I let my smile fade. “Vendart, were you serious just now?”