Haldeman, Joe - Buying Time

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BUYING TIME - Joe Haldeman

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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

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BUYING TIME - Joe Haldeman

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,

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BUYING TIME - Joe Haldeman

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

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BUYING TIME - Joe Haldeman

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.

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BUYING TIME - Joe Haldeman

"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

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BUYINGTIME-JoeHaldemaneVersion1.0-clickforscannotesBUYINGTIMEJoeHaldemanThisbookisdedicatedtotheinterestingpeopledoingresearchinlifeextension,cryonics,andothersuchintimationsofimmortality.Mayyououtliveyourcritics.Afterthefirsthundredyears,somepeoplestoptakingchances.Withanewyoungbody—oratleastahea...

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