She left the half-moon of bread, which had taken on an ominous look, and walked outside into the autumn morning light. Down the lovely main boulevard of Sabishii’s old quarter, green with streetgrass, red with broad-topped fire maples— there was one maple blocking the low sun, and flaring scarlet. Across the plaza outside their dorm she saw Yeli Zudov, playing skittlebowl with a young child, perhaps Mary Dunkel’s great-great-granddaughter. There were a lot of the First Hundred in Sabishii now, it was working well as their demimonde, all of them tucked into the local economy and the old quarter, with false identities and Swiss passports— everything amazingly solid, enabling them to live surface lives. And all without the need for the kind of cosmetic surgery that had so altered Sax, because age had done that surgery for them: they were unrecognizable just as they were. She could walk the streets of Sabishii and people would see only one ancient crone among many others. If Transitional Authority officials stopped her they would identify one Ludmilla Novosibirskaya. But the truth was, they would not stop her.
She walked through the city, trying to get away from herself. From the north end of the tent she could see outside the town to the great mound of rock that had been brought up out of Sabishii mohole. It formed a long sinuous hill, running uphill to the horizon, across the high krummholz basins of Tyrrhena. They had designed the mound so that from above it formed the image of a dragon, clutching the egglike tents of the town in its talons. A shadowed cleft crossing the mound marked where a talon left the scaled flesh of the creature. The morning sun shone like the dragon’s silver eye, staring back over its shoulder at them.
Her wristpad beeped, and irritably she took the call. It was Marina. “Saxifrage is here,” she said. “We’re going to meet out in the western stone garden in an hour.”
“I’ll be there,” Maya said, and cut the connection.
What a day it was turning out to be. She wandered west along the city perimeter, abstracted and depressed. One hundred thirty years old. There were Abkhasians down in Georgia, on the Black Sea, who were reputed to have lived to such ages without the treatment. Presumably they were still doing without— the gerontological treatments had been only partially distributed on Earth, following the isobars of money and power, and the Abkhasians had always been poor. Happy but poor. She tried to remember what it had been like in Georgia, in the region where the Caucasus met the Black Sea. Sukhumi, the town was called. She felt she had visited it in her youth, her father had been Georgian. But she could call no image to mind, not a scrap. In fact she could scarcely remember anything of any part of Earth— Moscow, Baikonur, the view from Novy Mir— none of it. Her mother’s face across the kitchen table, laughing blackly as she ironed or cooked. Maya knew that had happened because she rehearsed the words of the memory from time to time, when she was feeling sad. But the actual images . . . Her mother had died only ten years before the treatment became available, or she might be alive yet. She would be 150, not at all unreasonable; the current age record was around 170, and rising all the time, with no sign that it would ever stop. Nothing but accidents and rare diseases and the occasional medical mistake were killing the treated these days. Those and murder. And suicide.
She came to the western rock gardens without having seen any of the neat narrow streets of Sabishii’s old quarter. That was how the old ended up not remembering recent events— by not seeing them in the first place. Memory lost before it ever came to be, because one was focusing so intently on the past.
Vlad and Ursula and Marina and Sax were seated on a park bench across from Sabishii’s original habitats, which were still in use, at least by geese and ducks. The pond and bridge, and banks of riprap and bamboo, were straight out of an old woodblock or silk painting: a cliché. Beyond the tent wall the great thermal cloud of the mohole billowed whitely, thicker than ever as the hole got deeper, and the atmosphere more humid.
She sat down on the bench across from her old companions, stared at them grimly. Mottled wrinkled codgers and crones. They looked almost like strangers, people she had never met. Ah, but there were Marina’s sultry hooded eyes, and Vlad’s little smile not surprising on the face of a man who had lived with two women, apparently in harmony and certainly in a completely isolated intimacy, for eighty years. Although it was said that Marina and Ursula were a lesbian couple, and Vlad only a sort of companion or pet. But no one could say for sure. Ursula too looked content, as always. Everybody’s favorite aunt. Yes— with concentration, one could see them. Only Sax looked utterly different, a dapper man with a broken nose that he still had not had straightened. It stood in the middle of his newly handsome face like an accusation against her eye, as if she had done it to him and not Phyllis. He did not meet her eye, but only stared mildly at the ducks clacking around his feet, as if studying them. The scientist at work. Except he was a mad scientist now, wreaking havoc with all their plans, completely beyond rational discourse.