“Weren’t you listening to them at all? Because the Stochaster procedure couldn’t be repeated—but people kept trying it and going bonkers. First they made it illegal to do repeats, and then they changed the laws so that a crazy senior couldn’t tie up a family’s assets forever.”
“Yes, but now it’s not illegal. The new procedures—”
“Can now be legally repeated, yes. And we have laws about how competency affects inheritance, but no laws dealing with indefinitely extended lives. Think, Ronnie. Suppose your father, or mine, lives . . . well, hundreds of years, if not forever. Those of our class who’ve been expecting to inherit a tidy living will wait . . . having our own rejuvenations . . . until they finally die.”
“But nobody’s going to live that long,” Ronnie said, frowning.
“Are you sure? I’m not. The oldest serial Rejuvenants are now in their nineties—the oldest people now alive used the Stochaster, which they can’t repeat. In the next decade or so, the balance will shift, until all the Rejuvenants are repeats. Maybe the first generation of them will be content with only a few rejuvenations . . . but someone’s going to want to live a lot longer. Will your father give up his position in the family business just because he hits eighty, or a hundred, or a hundred and twenty? I doubt it. And the law is set up to test competency, not age.”
“But—but no one is . . .” Raffa’s voice trailed off.
“And if the Morrelines think they have a corner on the process, they’re not going to want a nosy old aunt—whom they cannot control, because she can’t rejuv anyway—poking around in their business backyard.”
“Even if they’re manufacturing the drugs illegally,” Raffa said, “does this mean they’re adulterating them? I don’t see that it follows. . . .”
“Perhaps not,” said George. “But if you wanted to control a good bit more than one end of the pharmaceutical industry, wouldn’t you be tempted to slip a few attitude adjustments into the mix? Lorenza certainly did.”
“We are going to be very careful on Patchcock,” Raffa said slowly. “Very, very careful.”
Patchcock would never qualify as one of the beauties of empire, Raffa thought as she watched the dull gray-green brush slide past the windows of the commuter train from the shuttle port. Vagaries of geology and terraforming had resulted in low-relief landmasses and a monotonous climate. Irrigation freshened the vast fields of staple grains and root crops that fed the planet’s work force, but beyond the fields—whose bright greens and yellows seemed almost garish—the vegetation consisted of many varieties of thorny scrub between three and six meters high. When the wind blew, which it usually did, the sky hazed with grit; when it rained, erosion scoured the thin, loose soil into twisting arroyos. The train racketed across a bridge over one of these, and Raffa noticed a pile of construction waste that looked as if someone had thought of damming the dry watercourse. It hadn’t worked; a deeper channel cut around one end of the pile.
Twoville, almost as dull as its name, was a low-built compact city on the coast itself. Raffa had arranged rooms at the one real hotel. Ronnie and George would share a room in a hostel for transient workers. They were in the car behind her, carefully separate.
When she reached the hotel address, she was startled to find herself facing a small one-story cube with a single solid door. Had someone made a mistake?
Inside, she realized she was at the top of a well, looking down into the hotel. Across the gap, a waterfall poured over a tiled edge to fall . . . she felt dizzy when she looked over the edge.
“It takes most newcomers that way,” said a voice behind her. She looked around to see a respectable-looking older man in business clothes. “Especially if they didn’t know anything about how Patchcock was built. Bet you thought this was a mighty small hotel.”
“Yes.” Raffa tried to get her breath back.
“Patchcock’s mostly underground,” the man said. “There’s not much scenery topside, or a climate to brag about, and fierce storms off the ocean. Everything’s dug in, just shafts and warehouses on the surface.”
“But aren’t you too close to the ocean? Doesn’t it seep in?”
“Flood would be more like it, except that there’s a Tiegman field generator holding a barrier on it.”
This meant little to Raffa, who had no idea what a Tiegman field generator was. She did have a clear memory of the perpetually damp sublevels in a seaside resort, resulting from percolation of seawater through porous soil. Patchcock soil certainly looked porous. She wished the building had windows to the outside—she wanted to know exactly how far below the water they would be.
Her nervousness must have shown, for the man went on. “It’s quite safe, I assure you. The Tiegman field is absolutely impermeable, and the field shape has been designed to enclose all the sublevels—”
“It must take a lot of energy,” Raffa said.
“Not once it’s on. Starting it up, now . . . that took half a Patchcock year, and every bit of power they could find. But it’s stable once it’s on and locked.”
“Excuse me, madam.” That was the doorman, with her luggage on a trolley. “Would you prefer to glide down, or take the lift?”
“The lift,” Raffa said. It would have comforting walls and doors. The hotel registration desk also seemed ordinary, as long as she could pretend it was on ground level, and the great open shaft with the waterfall went that far up in the air.
Her rooms opened onto a private terrace lush with flowering plants. Between the thick vines and bushes, she caught glimpses of what looked like distant green meadows under a twilight sky. Concealed lights produced the illusion of sunlight, shifting with the hours, on her terrace. If not for the evacuation procedures display on the reverse of the door, with the critical data highlighted in red, she’d never have suspected that she was twenty-seven meters below mean sea level, far out of sight of Patchcock’s real sky and sun.
It was perfectly dry, with no smell of the sea. She felt the carpet surreptitiously; no hint of dampness. It didn’t really make her feel safe. That it was dry now didn’t mean it would stay dry. She looked around at her small domain. A bedroom and sitting room, both opening onto the terrace, and a large bathroom with every variety of plumbing she’d encountered before. Handsome furniture, fresh flowers, a cooler stocked with a dozen or so bottles and cans . . . she recognized only a few of the brands. Amazing what money could do . . . she would not have guessed that Patchcock had such amenities. Then she noticed the table lamp.
Puce and turquoise, with an uneven streak of mustard yellow down one side, as ugly as any of Venezia’s pots. Raffa eyed it suspiciously. It might have been a pot once. So might the bedside lamp, garish pink splotched with a funguslike pattern of blue-gray. Above the cooler hung a decorative object that reminded her of the mask on Ottala’s wall at school. When she looked at the terrace plantings more carefully, the graceful ferns and brilliant flowers were rooted in odd-shaped pots of astounding ugliness.
So—was this what happened to Venezia’s output? Were the ceramics her family claimed to prize stuck away in the obscurity of Patchcock? She wondered how many other places in Twoville had been given the dubious honor of showing off Ottala’s aunt’s presumed talent.
She flicked on the comconsole. Again the emergency procedures, this time requiring her to thumb-sign an affidavit that she had read and understood them. She glanced over to the open closet, making sure that a p-suit hung there, as advertised. Then a string of advertisements for local tour guides and recreational facilities. None looked inviting. (“See the unique sea life on Patchcock’s nearest barrier reef,” one offered, but the unique sea life in the display was all small and dull-colored. She had not come all this way to see odd-shaped beige and gray blobs no bigger than her hand.)