One Million Tomorrows

by Bob Shaw

Genres: Science Fiction; Sci-fi Action & Adventure; Hard Science Fiction

Synopsis

The Price of Eternal Life In the 22nd Century, no one had to die of old age: an immortality drug was available to all. Its only drawback was the side-effect that ended a man's sex drive, so most men waited till their youth was fading before they took the final step and became "cools." But Will Carewe became the first man to test a new variety of the drug, one without any side effects at all. The limitless future, a million tomorrows, stretched before him with golden hope - until a series of "accidents" made him realise that someone was trying to murder him. As an immortal Carewe had an infinitely greater stake in remaining alive. So he began the battle to find out who was after him, and why...

Release date: September 29, 2011

Publisher: Gateway

Print pages: 187

Sample

In the early part of the morning Carewe sat quietly at his desk, doing absolutely nothing. He was not experiencing the physical effect of a hangover—the oxygen and ascorbic acid bomb he had swallowed before breakfast was taking care of that—but a faint tension, the ghost of a tremor flickering in his nerves, told him Nature was not so easily cheated. In an obscure way he felt he would have been happier serving penance with a raging headache and nausea.

I’m forty years old and can’t take it so well any more, he thought. One of these days I’ll have to tie off. Instinctively he touched the bristles on his upper lip and chin. They were five millimeters long—fashionable for a funkie of his age—and had an almost metallic resistance to the pressure of his fingers, rows of little toggle switches which brought pleasure/pain/reassurance when he pushed them over. Don’t die off, he repeated the catch phrase to himself, tie off.

He looked out through the transparent wall of his office. Beyond the glittering trapezoids of the city, the Rockies shone with a whiteness which pulsed in tune with his heartbeats. There should have been more snow that morning but the weather control teams had got in first, and the sky above the icy palisades was strangely alive. Sunlight heaved and shifted on the intangible membranes of control fields made visible by the ice particles they contained. To Carewe’s depressed gaze the sky was a vista of overworked gray gut. He turned his head away and was trying to concentrate on a sheaf of compcards when the telepres chimed its soft note. The head of Hyron Barenboim, president of Farma Incorporated, floated at the set’s projection focus.

“Are you there, Willy?” The insubstantial eyes quested blindly. “I want to see you.”

“Right here, Hy.” Carewe pushed the compcards out of sight before he opened the vision circuits—they should have been dealt with two days earlier. “What can I do for you?”

Barenboim’s eyes steadied on Carewe’s face and he smiled. “Not over the beam, Willy. Come into my office in five minutes. That is, if you can get away.”

“I can, of course.”

“Good boy. I’ve got something I want to discuss with you—in private.” Barenboim’s hairless face faded into the air leaving Carewe prey to vague alarms. The president had seemed friendly—Carewe had never found him otherwise, in spite of what most Farma employees said about the man—but he had given a distinct impression of having something on his mind. And Carewe disliked personal contact with old cools, even on a purely social basis. The age of one hundred years was the barrier in his mind—below that a cool could still be regarded as an ordinary human being. But when it came to dealing with someone like Barenboim, who was five years past his two hundredth birthday …

Carewe got to his feet uneasily. He mirrored the outer wall of the office, straightened his tunic and examined himself. Tall, wide-shouldered without being particularly athletic, with straight black hair and a pale, slightly desperate face on which dark bristles sketched a signoral beard—he looked presentable enough, if not exactly the ideal picture of an accountant. Why then did he dread talking to cools like Barenboim and the vice-president, Manny Pleeth? Because it’s time you were going cool, an inner voice told him. It’s time for you to tie off and you don’t like to be reminded. You’re a real funkie, Willy, and I’m not using the word as a corruption of functional, but the way the cools use it. Funkie!

Stroking his bristles the wrong way, jabbing them painfully into his flesh, Carewe hurried out of the office and into the reception area. He made his way through the waist-high admin machines, nodding thoughtfully at Marianne Toner as she tended her electronic charges, and went into to the short corridor leading to Barenboim’s suite. The inner door’s round black eye blinked at him once, in recognition, and the polished wood slid aside. He stepped through into the big sunny suite which was always filled with the smell of coffee. Barenboim, working with papers on his blue-and-red desk, smiled and waved Carewe into a chair.

“Just relax for a moment, son. Manny will be with us in a few seconds—I want him to be in on this too.”

“Thanks, Hy.” Suppressing his curiosity, Carewe sat down and studied his employer. Barenboim was a medium-sized man with a flat, sloping forehead, pronounced eyebrow ridges and an upturned, flaring nose. In contrast to the almost simian cast of the upper part of his face, his mouth and chin were small and delicate. His white hands, busy arranging papers and comp-cards, were hairless and slightly puffy. Unlike many cools of his age, he made a point of always being a few months ahead of fashion. He looks forty, but he’s two centuries old, Carewe thought. He’s entitled to address me as son—by his standards I’m pre-adolescent. He touched his bristles again and Barenboim’s eyes flickered in their grottoes of bone. Carewe knew that his reflexive action had been noted and interpreted in the light of two hundred years of stored experience. He also understood that by making the movement of his eyes perceptible Barenboim was telling he knew what he was thinking, and wanted him to know that he knew. … Carewe felt the pressure mounting within his skull and he shifted uncomfortably, looked out the wall. A snowstorm was still being digested in the troubled gray air. He watched the Valkyrian struggle until the door to the connecting office announced that Vice-President Pleeth was coming in.

In his six months with Farma, Carewe had seen Manny Pleeth only a few times, usually at a distance. He was a sixty-year-old cool who, judging by his boyish appearance, had tied off around the age of twenty. His face, like that of any other cool, was beardless and looked as though it had been scrubbed with pumice stone to remove even the last traces of down. The skin was a uniform glowing pink from hairline to throat, a color which extended into the whites of his pale blue eyes. Carewe was forcibly reminded of the comic book characters he had seen in history of literature programs—a cartoonist would have rendered Pleeth’s nose with a single hooked stroke, the lipless mouth with a small up-curving line representing taut amusement over some unknowable, unguessable thought lurking behind the plastic-smooth forehead.

Pleeth wore an amber-colored tunic and hose, unadorned except for a cigar-like ornament of ciselé gold hanging from his neck. He nodded at Carewe, the curve of his mouth changing radius fractionally, and took up his position beside Barenboim, sitting down apparently on empty air but supported by the Queen Vic magnetic chair built into the seat of his hose.

“Well, here we are,” Barenboim said immediately, pushing his papers to one side and fixing Carewe with a solemn, friendly stare. “How long have you been with Farma, Willy?”

“Six months.”

“Six months—and would it surprise you if I told you that Manny and I have been watching you very closely during your time with us?”

“Ah … I do know you keep in close contact with the whole operation,” Carewe fenced.

“That’s true, but in your case we’ve been taking a special interest. A personal interest, Willy, because we like you. And the reason we like you is that you have a very rare quality—common sense.”

“Oh?” Carewe looked closely at the two men, seeking guidance; but Barenboim’s face was unreadable as ever, and Pleeth rocked gently on his invisible chair, his eyes pale flat disks, mouth smiling tightly as he considered secret triumphs.

“Yes,” Barenboim continued. “Common sense, horse sense, plain savvy—call it what you will, but no business can prosper without it. I tell you, Willy, I get some bright boys coming to me for jobs, and I send them away because they’re too bright, educated to the point where they’re never lost for somebody else’s words. They’re like computers which do a million calculations a second and at the end of it all send a newborn babe a power bill for a thousand dollars. Know what I mean?”

“I’ve met some like that.” Carewe laughed compliantly.

“So have I—too many of them—but you’re not like that. Which is why I’ve brought you along so fast, Willy. You’ve been here six months and already you’re monitoring costs for the whole of biopoiesis division. In case you’re in any doubt about it—that’s very fast. Other men have been with me four, five years and are still out on the floor.”

“I do appreciate all you’ve done for me, Hy.” Carewe’s curiosity intensified. He knew he was a reasonably good cost accountant—could it be that some freak interaction of personalities, working out in his favor, was going to catapult him to top-management status years ahead of time?

Barenboim looked at Pleeth, who was toying with his gold cigar, and then back at Carewe. “Now that I’ve made the position clear—will you permit me to ask you a very personal question? Do you feel that I have that right?”

“Of course, Hy.” Carewe swallowed. “Ask away.”

“Fine. Here it is then. You are forty years old, Willy, and you’re still a functional male—when are you planning to tie off?”

The question hit Carewe with savage force, devastating in both its unexpectedness and the way in which it stabbed straight to the core of the anxiety about his marriage which had been building up for over five years, ever since that first gray hair had appeared on Athene’s temple. He felt his cheeks warm up as he struggled for words.

“I … I hadn’t set a firm date, Hy. Athene and I have talked a lot about it, naturally, but we both feel there’s plenty of time.”

“Plenty of time! You surprise me, Willy. You’re forty years old. The sterols don’t wait for any man, and you know as well as I do that the build-up of arterial plaque is the one physiological process that the bio-stats can’t reverse.”

“There are anticoagulants,” Carewe said quickly, with as little conscious thought as a fighter fending off a blow.

Barenboim looked unimpressed but, obviously deciding on a different tack, he picked up a compcard and slipped it into a reader. “This is your personnel file, Willy. I see that”—he peered into the hand-sized screen —“your wife is still registered with the State Health Board as a mortal. And, according to the record, she’s thirty-six. Why has she delayed so long?”

“It’s difficult for me.” Carewe took a deep breath. “Athene is a funny girl in some ways. She … She …”

“She refused to fix until you had done it too. The same situation crops up more often than you’d think among couples who are trying one-to-one marriages. It isn’t too surprising in a way, but …” Two centuries of sadness showed themselves in Barenboim’s smile. “Just between us, Willy—how long can you let it go on?”

“I … As a matter of fact, Hy, we’re ten years married next week.” Carewe listened to his own voice with amazement, wondering what enormities were going to emerge. “I had privately made up my mind that Athene and I should have a second honeymoon to mark the anniversary. Then I was going to tie off.”

Wonderment and gratitude showed on Barenboim’s face as he glanced at Pleeth, who nodded and bounced, a pink caricature of satisfaction. “You don’t know how pleased I am that you’ve made your decision, Willy. I didn’t want to put any kind of pressure on you. I wanted you to act as a completely free human being.”

What’s happening to me? Carewe fought to keep from touching his bristles as the thought became a cold flame in his mind I wasn’t planning to tie off next month.

Barenboim said kindly. “You’re no fool. Up till now this conversation has had absolutely no point— and you’re sitting there wondering why I asked you in here. Right?”

Carewe nodded abstractedly. I can’t tie off, he thought. Athene loves me, but I’d lose her in a year.

“Well, here is the point.” Barenboim’s words, shaped and projected with the mastery of three normal life-spans, were taut with sudden excitement, and Carewe found himself filled with an icy premonition. How would you like to become the first man in the history of the human race to become immortal—and still remain a functional male?”

Explosion of images, unrelated words, concepts, desires, fears. Carewe’s mind went on a trip across multiple infinities, black stars wheeling above silver seas.

“I see I’ve hit you pretty hard, Willy. Take a moment to get used to the idea.” Barenboim leaned back contentedly, interlacing his white fingers.

“But it can’t be done,” Carewe said. “Everybody knows …”

“You’re like the rest of us, Willy. You can’t accept the realization that Wogan’s Hypothesis is just what it claims to be—a hypothesis. It’s a very neat, very elegant philosophical notion that an immortal being must be unable to reproduce its kind … that where a biostatic compound comes into existence, whether by accident or design, Nature will apply the brake of male sterility to preserve the ecological balance

“But wasn’t he being presumptuous, Willy? Wasn’t he elevating a local phenomenon to the level of a universal …”

“Have you got it?” Carewe interrupted harshly, his mind clouded with the knowledge that every pharmaceutical house in the world had been in reckless, squandering pursuit of a spermatid-tolerant biostat for more than two centuries—without success.

“We’ve got it,” Pleeth whispered, speaking for the first time, the pink curvatures of his face glowing with inhuman certainty. “All we need now is a billion-dollar guinea pig—and that’s you, Willy.”

“I’ll need a complete rundown on what’s involved,” Carewe said, in spite of the fact that he had already made his decision. Athene had never looked more attractive, but lately he had begun to notice in her face the first faint reminders that it was time to stop playing the game of walking-around-in-small-circles-and-pretending-it-isn’t-wearing-your-shoes-out-just-the-same. We enjoy a weekend of purple-glowing noons, and when its last minutes run through our fingers we have. . .