The Golden Space Read Online Free

interment service. She walked among the stacks of frozen dead, peering at dials. By chance, she found that several of her fellow workers dealt illegally in anticollagen shots, selling them to people under sixty-five, the mandatory age for recipients. Knowing that penalties for selling the shots were severe, she was too frightened to become a pusher. But she bought a few shots.
    Soon after, work on the mechanisms which caused cancers to multiply, along with genetic research, had yielded a way of restoring youth. Research papers had been presented tentatively; most people had waited cautiously, until at last impatience outran caution and the world entered the Transition in bits and pieces, one country after another.
    There were failures, although few wanted to remember them now; people who were victims of virulent cancers, those who could not be made younger, a few who grew younger and then died suddenly. Some theorized that the mechanisms of death could not be held in check forever; that in the future, death might come rapidly and wipe out millions. Testing the new technique thoroughly would have taken hundreds of years, and people would not go on living and dying while potential immortals were being sustained in their midst.
    Everyone knew about the Transition—the upheavals, the
collapsing governments, the deaths, the demands. There were some facts not fully known, that were
still strangely absent from computer banks and information centers; exact figures on suicides,
records of how many were killed by the treatments themselves, who the first subjects had been and
what had happened to them. Josepha had searched and found only unpleasant hints; one small town with
a thirty percent mortality rate after treatment, prisoner-subjects who had mysteriously disappeared,
an increase in “accidental” deaths. She had lived through it, surviving a bullet wound as a
bystander at a demonstration of older citizens, hiding out in a small out-of-the-way village, and
yet any present-day historian knew more than she could remember. She suspected that the only people
who knew almost everything were a few old biologists and any political leaders who were still
alive.
    In her nineties, half-blinded by cataracts, hands distorted into claws by arthritis, Josepha had at last been treated and begun her extended life. She had survived Peter Beaulieu, her first husband, and Gene Kolodny, her second. She had outlived her brother and her parents and her few close friends. And until now, she often thought, she had done little to justify that survival.
    She could not accept that so many had died for the world as it was now. The vigor and liveliness had gone out of human life, or so it seemed. Perhaps those who would have provided it were gone and the meek had inherited the earth after all.
    But she could change. She was changing. Either the death cultists were right and their lives were meaningless or their extended lives were an opportunity which must be seized. She recalled her own near-death and the promise of another life; even that possibility did not change things. She had to earn that life, if there was such a thing, with a meaningful life here, and if there was no other life, then this one was all she had.
    More than three hundred years to discover that—it was absurd. There were no more excuses for failure, which explained the suicides and death cults at least in part. Merripen’s project would force the issue. She remembered how his enthusiasm for his dream had been conveyed to her during their first discussion, in spite of her doubts. She thought: Maybe most of us are slow learners, that’s all; well, we’ll learn or be supplanted.
    She refused to think of another possibility: that the world might not accept the children, that any future beyond the present was unthinkable.
     
     
    A month after her visit with Merripen, Josepha arrived at the village where the parents and children were to live. Three houses, resembling chalets, stood on