It did not occur to Rafiel that he had already had, in the nine decades since his birth, more lifetime than almost anyone in the long history of the human race before him. That was irrelevant. However much he had, everyone around him had so much more.
Still, in his ninety years of life Rafiel had learned a great deal - even actors could learn more than their lines, with enough time to do it in. He had learned to accept the fact that he was going to die, while everyone he knew lived on after him. He had even learned why this was so.
It was all a matter of the failings of the Darwinian evolution process.
In one sense, Darwinian evolution was one of the nicest things that had ever happened to life on Earth. In the selection of desirable traits to pass on to descendants - the famous 'survival of the fittest' - virtue was rewarded. Traits that worked well for the organism were passed on, because the creatures that had them were more likely to reproduce than the ones lacking them.
Over the billions of years the process had produced such neat things - out of the unpromising single-celled creatures that began it all - as eyes, and anuses, and resistance to the diseases that other organisms wanted to give you, and ultimately even intelligence. That was the best development, in the rather parochial collective opinion of the intelligent human race. Smarts had turned out to be an evolutionary plus; that was why there were ten trillion human beings around, and hardly any of such things as the blue whale, the mountain gorilla and the elephant.
But there was one thing seriously wrong with the way the process works. From the point of view of the individual organism itself, evolution doesn't do a thing. Its benefits may be wonderful for the next generation, but it doesn't do diddly-squat for the organisms it is busily selecting, except to encourage the weaker ones to die before they get around to reproducing themselves.
That means that some very desirable traits that every human being would have liked to have - say, resistance to osteoporosis, or a wrinkle-free face - didn't get selected for in the Darwinian lottery. Longevity was not a survival feature. Once a person (or any other kind of animal) had its babies, the process switched itself off. Anything that benefited the organism after it was finished with its years of reproducing was a matter of pure chance. However desirable the new trait might have been, it wasn't passed on. Once the individual had passed the age of bearing young, the Darwinian score-keepers lost interest.
That didn't stop such desirable traits from popping up. Mutations appeared a million times which, if passed on, would have kept the lucky inheritors of subsequent generations hale for indefinite periods - avoiding, let us say, such inconveniences of age as going deaf at sixty, incontinent at eighty and mindless by the age of a hundred. But such genes came and went and were lost. As they didn't have anything to do with reproductive efficiency, they didn't get preserved. There wasn't any selective pass-through after the last babies were born.
So longevity was a do-it-yourself industry. There was no help from Darwin. But....
But once molecular biology got itself well organized, there were things that could be done. And were done. For most of the human population. But now and then, there were an unfortunate flawed few who missed out on the wonders of modem life-prolonging science because some undetectable and incurable quirks in their systems rejected the necessary treatment....
Like Rafiel. Who scrolled through, without actually seeing, the scores of trivial messages - fan letters, requests for him to appear at some charitable function in some impossible place, bank statements, bills - that had arrived for him while he was away. And then, still fretful, turned off his communications and blanked his entertainment screen and even switched off the music as, out of habit and need, he practised his leaps and entrechats in the solitude of his home, while he wondered bitterly what the point was in having a life at all, when you knew that it would sooner or later end.
5
People do still die now and then. It isn't just the unfortunates like Rafiel who do it, either, though of course they are the ones for whom it is inevitable. Even normal people sometimes die as well. They die of accident, of suicide, of murder, sometimes just of some previously unknown sickness or even of a medical blunder that crashes the system. The normal people simply do not do that very often. Normal people expect to live normally extended lives. How long those lives can be expected to last is hard to say, because even the oldest persons around aren't yet much more than bicentenarians (that's the time since the procedures first became available), and they show no signs of old age yet. And, of course, since people do go on giving birth to other people, all that longevity has added up to quite an unprecedented population explosion. The total number of human beings living today is something over ten trillion - that's a one followed by thirteen zeroes - which is far more than the total number of previous members of the genus Homo in every generation since the first Neanderthalers appeared. Now the living overwhelmingly outnumber the dead.
When Rafiel woke the next morning he found his good nature had begun to return. Partly it was the lingering wisps of his last designer dream - Alegretta had starred in it, as ordered, and that lost and cherished love of his life had never been more desirable and more desiring, for that matter, because that was the kind of a dream he had specified. So he woke up in a haze of tender reminiscence. Anyway, even the terminally mortal can't dwell on their approaching demise all the time, and Rafiel was naturally a cheerful man.
Getting out of bed in the morning was a cheerful occasion, too, for he was surrounded with the many, many things he had to be cheerful about. As he breakfasted on what the servers brought him he turned on the vid tank and watched half a dozen tapes of himself in some of the highlights of his career. He was, he realized, quite good. In the tank his miniature self sang love ballads and jiving patter numbers and even arias, and his dancing - well, yes, now and then a bit trembly, he conceded to himself, but with style - was a delight to watch. Even for the person who had done it, but who, looking in the tank, could only see that imaged person as a separate and, really, very talented entity.
Cheerfully Rafiel moved to the barre to begin his morning warm-ups. He started gently, because he was still digesting his breakfast. There wasn't any urgency about it. Rehearsal call was more than an hour away, and he was contentedly aware that the person he had been looking at on the vid was a star.
In a world where the living far outnumbered the dead, space was precious. On the other hand, so was Rafiel, and stars were meant to be coddled. Mosay had taken a rehearsal room the size of a tennis court for Rafiel's own private use. The hall was high up in the arcology, and it wasn't just a big room. It was a very well-equipped one. It had bare powder-blue walls that would turn into any colour Rafiel wanted them to be at the touch of a switch, a polished floor of real hardwood that clacked precisely to his taps, and, of course, full sound and light projection. Mosay, fussing over his star's accommodations, touched the keypad, and the obedient projectors transformed the bare walls into a glittering throne room.
Tm afraid that it's the wrong period, of course,' Mosay apologized, looking without pleasure at the palace of Versailles, 'no roi soleil in Thebes, is there, but I want you to get the feel of the kingship thing, sapete? We don't have the programs for the Theban backdrops yet. Actually I don't know if we will, because as far as my research people can tell, the Thebans really didn't have any actual throne rooms anyway.'