Buying Time

  Buying Time

  Joe Haldeman

  This book is dedicated to the

  interesting people doing research in life

  extension, cryonics, and other such

  intimations of immortality.

  May you outlive your critics.

  After the first hundred years, some people stop taking chances. With a new young body—or at least a healthy one—every ten or twelve years, there’s a strong temptation to go out and use it. But if you did try to occupy centuries climbing mountains, skin diving, abseiling, and so forth, sooner or later the force of statistics would catch up with you. The Stileman Clinics will cleanse you of cancer and sclerosis and make your vital organs and muscle and bone think they’re brand-new again—but lose a wing in a sudden storm and you’re as dead as any mortal. Any “ephemeral.”

  Dallas Barr had ignored this reality for almost a century. He had sailed around the world in a forty-foot sloop, had braved vicious currents to swim the lonely corridors of the Titanic, had come to terms with himself in a winterlong Antarctic vigil. On the Moon he had climbed the Straight Wall and tramped the Plato desert in search of fairy lights. He’d bought his way onto the first team to climb Olympus Mons, on Mars. Then just before his ninth rejuvenation he had been rappeling down an easy cliff in Australia’s Blue Mountains when a foolproof rope snapped to give him three seconds of weightlessness and then a broken back.

  That almost killed him, twice. It’s hard to amass a fortune immobilized inside a body cast and either distracted by constant pain or dulled by analgesia. The ninth fortune is easier than the first, though, and a person without a knack for making money has to get used to the idea of growing old.

  (Lord Stileman himself had lived only to a hundred and five, dying in the fiery wreckage of an antique racing car. By then his clinics already were the second-wealthiest foundation in the world and only a few years away from first place.)

  The only people who got immortality for free were King Richard, a few politicians and administrators, and about a hundred medical people, each of whom guarded one part of the complicated secret that was the Stileman Process. Everyone else bought the next dozen years on the same terms: all your worldly goods signed over to the foundation. And don’t even reach for your checkbook if you have less than a million pounds.

  Your perennial million pounds didn’t buy true immortality, not in the absolute sense. The Stileman Regeneration Clinics could slow down the decay of brain tissue, but couldn’t stop it altogether. Nobody had lived long enough to put it to the test, but from the clinics’ extrapolations, it looked as if the upper limit would be less than a thousand years. Sooner or later your brain would fog up, and when your time came around, you wouldn’t be able to find a million pounds. You would grow old and die.

  Dallas Barr didn’t spend much time mulling over that, even though he’d been in the first Stileman group and was therefore one of the oldest people in the world. Tightrope walkers don’t worry about distance records.

  When he’d hurtled down the side of that cliff, Dallas had been in the ninth year of his current rejuvenation. A disastrous poker game in Adelaide, which he’d hoped would put him over the million-pound mark, had left him with less than fifty thousand Australian dollars. He had about two years to multiply that by sixty.

  Most of the people he dealt with over the next eighteen months did not know him as Dallas Barr, the rather conspicuous American playboy. Many of them did not know he was an immortal. He had a number of personas scattered around the world, most with impeccable credit references, even if they were currently short of liquid assets. He vouched for himself and then at usurious rates lent himself borrowed money, some of which was invested quietly, some conspicuously, weaving a complex skein of notes and handshakes and whispered confidences that eventually, inevitably, began to generate real money. He made his million and put it in a safe place and then spent a couple of months ensuring discreetly that when Dallas Barr walked out of that clinic young again and nearly flat broke, he wouldn’t stay broke for long.

  He did decide to be Dallas Barr a third time, though it meant public immortality. (He had been public once before, as Georges Andric, who “died” attempting to scale Everest alone.) The notoriety was sometimes pleasant and always profitable, though it involved some risk. Despite all the evidence to the contrary, there were people who thought the Stileman immortals made up an underground cabal that ruled the world. There were no statistics—if the clinics kept records, they didn’t release them—but it seemed likely that the second most frequent cause of death among immortals was assassination, usually spectacular, by some crazy who thought he was saving the world from a conspiracy.

  No immortal ever remembered exactly what happened during the month of rejuvenation therapy. This was for sanity more than security. The first three weeks were sustained agony, beyond imagination, being pulled apart and put back together; the last week was sleep and forgetting. When he left the Sydney clinic this ninth time Dallas Barr felt, as always, renewed but deeply rattled: a strong man of a hundred and thirty who couldn’t remember the nine times he had begged for the release of death.

  Stileman, Geoffrey Parke, MP, 1950–2055

  Lord Stileman is, of course, best remembered as having founded the immortality clinics that still bear his name, but even before that accomplishment he was a prominent (perhaps notorious) public figure.

  Born into considerable wealth, Stileman was nevertheless, from his earliest years, an outspoken enemy of privilege. As a New Labour MP, though, he turned out to be anything but doctrinaire, apparently following the dictates of his conscience even when that led him into the Tory camp. So he was never a great success as a practical politician, not being willing to compromise, but his rhetorical ability and striking camera presence made him a valuable asset to a variety of liberal and libertarian causes.

  In 1991 a group of medical researchers approached him with the outline of what the Stileman Process (q.v.) would be. It was one of them, not Lord Stileman himself, who had come up with the idea of using the process as a way to delimit the accumulation of private wealth: past a certain age, in order to stay alive, a wealthy person must become a relative pauper every ten years.

  Once the process had been demonstrated, Lord Stileman was in a position to effectively blackmail any person who preferred life over wealth. (Not all did at first; many fortunes were carried to the grave.) He didn’t use this power to greatly increase his own wealth, but rather encouraged donations and investments in areas he was passionately involved with—the encouragement being the complex legal instrument one must sign for the second and subsequent treatments. This not only requires a large payment to the clinic, for services rendered, but disallows “certain modes of divestiture”—in plain language, you can’t lend anybody, or any corporation, a significant amount of money that would be paid back after your treatment. You can’t even give it away, except to approved charities and industries.

  It’s no exaggeration to say that, through this selective encouragement, Lord Stileman financed the British and American presence in space in the twenty-first century. Neither the Britannia satellite complex nor the ill-fated lunar colony Downside—not to mention the immortals’ own quixotic enterprise adastra—would have been possible without the billions transferred from the estates of millionaires unwilling to give everything to the Stileman Clinics.…

  —American Encyclopedia, 2068 edition

  The clinic gave him a cheap bag with a change of clothes and two thousand dollars in small bills. He had a pub lunch (using the pub phone to make arrangements with a local bodyguard agency) and checked into a fleabag hotel. He sat in his room for an hour of concentrated thought, then punched up a long number from memory and had a brief conversation in Japanese. A few
minutes later the phone rang, and he talked for a while in French. Then he checked his watch and went out for a paper and a pint.

  Though Dallas was a fairly well-known personality in America and Britain, he felt comfortably anonymous here. The Aussies were not as easily impressed by playboy money, and at any rate the stay in the clinic had disguised him with a generally haggard look and a month of beard. He looked forward to drinking some real beer and catching up on the news unmolested. He bought a sleazy London paper and looked for an appropriate bar.

  There were several places within a couple of blocks of the hotel, but none of them looked particularly safe. His love of adventure didn’t extend to making himself a target for griefballs and dizneys, so he headed crosstown toward the Rocks area. The beer was more expensive there, but you wouldn’t have to sit with your back to a wall.

  It was broad daylight, and Dallas looked stronger than he felt, so no one gave him any trouble beyond the occasional shouted offer or challenge. He found an upper-middle-class bar with an interesting format—1930’s Art Deco American—and the bouncer let him in for a mere ten dollars.

  He threaded his way through the chrome and glass clutter of mostly unoccupied tables to the bar, placed his order, and unfolded the newspaper.

  He didn’t even get to read the headlines. While the barmaid was drawing his brew, a fat man squeezed onto the stool next to him. “Mr. Barr,” he said, not a question.

  Dallas sighed and looked at the man. The bodyguard wasn’t due until afternoon, and probably wouldn’t be fat. “I don’t know you,” he said, noting that the man’s sloppy business suit could conceal a large weapon or two, measuring the distance to his trachea, right hand automatically tensing into a stiff blade. He had been kidnapped before.

  “I don’t expect you would remember. We met in Chicago.” His voice dropped. “Seventy years ago.”

  Dallas gave the barmaid a five and told her to keep the change. He sipped the strong dark brew and studied the immortal’s face. “The conference?”

  “That’s right. You were Andric then.” The Chicago conference had been one of the last annual get-togethers before the Singapore Bombing ended the custom. Several thousand immortals in one place were too tempting a target.

  “If this is a touch, you’re a little premature.” Immortals did borrow from one another, though it was done carefully; that had been the purpose of Dallas’s call to Japan. “You must know I just got out of the clinic.”

  He nodded. “I’ve only been out a year myself.” He saw Barr’s look and pinched a huge wad of fat. “It’s not real. Foam implant, protective coloration.”

  “Glad to hear it.”

  “There’s going to be a meeting.”

  “I don’t go to meetings anymore.”

  “We know. This time you must.”

  The barmaid came by to draw another beer. Dallas waited until she was out of earshot. “Who are ‘we’? You and your implant?”

  “We don’t have a name. Just a group that meets here and there. Every three months or so.”

  “Not interested.” He opened the paper and gazed at the pinup on page three.

  “Maria Marconi,” he said. “She’ll be there.”

  Dallas stared at the picture. The girl was not slim or dark-haired and was probably a good deal less than a century old. “Marconi,” he said. “She’s still alive.”

  “She would like to see you.”

  “And I her.” He turned the page noisily. “Be a good chap and tell her where I am.”

  “Our group has been meeting almost since Singapore.”

  “Do tell. How can you have gotten along all this time without me?” He started to turn the page again and the man put his hand on it. He looked up. “I’m tiring of your company.”

  “You can afford to be patient. Most of us would have contacted you long ago. But the group is conservative that way; if one member objects to a new person, that’s enough.”

  “The person who was blackballing me died?”

  “Yes.”

  For the first time Dallas showed some interest. “Was it Lobos? Sandra Bell?” The man shook his head. “Not Jim-bo Peterson?”

  “No. I don’t think you knew the man personally. A Russian, Dmitri Popov.”

  “A Soviet? Stileman must be turning in his grave.”

  The man smiled. “We didn’t know he was a Soviet when he was asked to join. In fact, he was a deputy administrator of the American CIA.”

  “Ah.” Dallas returned his attention to the paper. “This group of yours. I suppose you don’t sit around and eat little sandwiches. Discuss poetry or footie scores.”

  “Nothing so wholesome.”

  Dallas nodded soberly. “You know what I like about this newspaper? The people who put it out know what’s really important in the real world. Gossip. Sex. Small human dramas like ‘I Killed My Baby and Ate It.’ Like them, I don’t have much stomach for politics.” He shook his head. “If you people are an underground organization running the world, I wish you’d get into another line of work. You’re doing a really bad job.”

  “If we were running the world, it would be a much safer place.”

  “I’ve probably been hearing that since before you were born. It’s not true. Stileman immortality doesn’t confer wisdom. We have more than our share of rich sociopaths.” Dallas looked at his watch and took a deep breath. “In five minutes I’m going next door for a shave and a haircut. I’m going alone. Until then, I’ll listen.”

  “Fair enough.” The barmaid drifted by and he ordered a glass of Bundaberg. He stared at Dallas for a moment, thoughtful. “Do you worry about getting old? The brain death?”

  “Not much. They say I’ve got another seven or eight hundred years, at least. By then they’ll probably come up with something—hell, I gave a half million to that fund.” The Nervous Tissue Preservation Prize was the result of a rare instance of solidarity among the maverick immortals. Each one had given 10 percent of his assets to it; the research team that could come up with a cure for entropic brain dysfunction would split a billion pounds. Immortality for a thousand people. Real immortality, barring accidents or violence.

  “Yes, that’s what they used to say, ten centuries, more or less.” He paused, staring at Dallas. “They’re wrong.”

  “What?”

  “You don’t have six or seven—” He stopped talking while the woman served him his rum. He left it untouched and continued. “You may not have even a hundred years left. Maybe not fifty.”

  Dallas studied his newly young hands. “Okay. You’ve got my attention.”

  Transcript

  The Lloyd Barnes Show 20 June 2064

  LB:

  We should have some fireworks tonight, gentle viewers. To my right we have Dallas Barr, who is—well—Dallas Barr. To my left … [we follow LB’s gaze to empty chair with grey box on seat] … is a thing, or man, or program that claims to be all that remains of Professor Woodward Harrison.

  Box:

  I am Woodward Harrison.

  Barr:

  Not himself nowadays.

  Box:

  Look me up in a couple of thousand years.

  LB:

  Professor Harrison spent most of his life perfecting a process that he called Turing Imaging. What’s in that box is the Turing Image of Harrison, who died of pneumonia—old age—last month.

  Box:

  I wore out my body, as we all do. The rest of me is still alive.

  LB:

  Care to explain?

  Box:

  Certainly. The Turing Image is named after Alan Turing, a mathematician who lived in the last century, one of the people who helped develop the first computers. He devised the first meaningful test for artificial intelligence: suppose you had a human being in one room and a computer in another. You can talk to either one only through a computer keyboard. The computer is programmed to act like a human, even to the extent of being able to lie and make mistakes, seeming to be slow in computations, and so
forth. If, by the answers they give to any question you can come up with, you aren’t able to tell which room has the human in it, then the machine has demonstrated actual artificial intelligence.

  Of course, nowadays you wouldn’t need a keyboard; just talk the way we’re doing.

  LB:

  That’s all you actually are, then? A computer program?

  Box:

  Well … what are you? Sixty liters of water and a few bucks’ worth of chemicals?

  Barr:

  That’s great. A grey box programmed to do Philosophy 101.

  Box:

  No, Mr. Barr. What I am is an actual immortal human being. You’re just a man, one with enough money to get his body overhauled every ten years.

  Barr:

  Depends on your point of view. I guess you will outlast me—as long as nobody gets mad at you and pulls the plug—but hell, so will the statue of Robert E. Lee out in front of this building. What good is hanging around forever if all you ever see is the south end of a pigeon?

  Box:

  Ha-ha. You’re right, though; no one would want to be an inanimate object. I am alive. In some ways, I am more alive than you are.

  Barr:

  Sure.

  LB:

  How could that be?

  Box:

  All right. Tiptoe with me through the semantic, semiotic minefield of Philosophy 101. How many ways are there to define life?

  Barr:

  Seven billion.

  Box:

  True in a sense, but not relevant. Of formal definitions—in cosmology and various biological disciplines, as well as philosophy—I have access to 149, some of which overlap. [Reaction shot of Barr, eyes rolling.] I will spare you 148 of them.

  The way in which I am demonstrably more alive than you is thermodynamical—