25 Short Stories and Novellas Part 45

The wrinkled eyelids made three or four quick traversals of the hazel-colored

fibergla.s.s bundles that were his optical inputs.

"When did all that happen?"

"The war's been over for a hundred years, Uncle James. A hundred years today."

"No s.h.i.t!" Muscle stalks moved slowly around in the crepey convolutions of his

cheeks. "Imagine that. A hundred years. That's one G.o.dd.a.m.n long time." Then he

said, after a moment, "Who won?"

"We did, Uncle."

"We did? You sure?"

"We're still a free country, aren't we? n.o.body tells the Empire of San Francisco

what to do, do they? We're the most powerful country in Northern California,

isn't that so?"

e digested that. "Yeah. Yeah, of course we won. I knew that. Really I did." He

sounded a little doubtful. He generally did. Well, he had a right. He was one

hundred forty-three years old, give or take a few months, and most of him was

machinery now, practically everything except the soggy old grey brain behind his

optical inputs. His wrists were silicon elastomer, his femurs were polyurethane

and cobalt-chromium, his eardrums were Teflon and platinum, his metacarpal

joints were silicone with t.i.tanium grommets. His elbows had plastic bushings;

his abdominal walls were Dacron. And so on, on and on. Why anyone wanted to keep

seniors alive that long was more than Carlotta could figure out. Or why the

seniors wanted to be kept. But she was only nineteen. She allowed for the

possibility that she might take a different view of things when she got to be as

old as he was.

"We're just about ready to go, now. Let's do the checkout, all right?"

Obediently he held out his arm. She opened his instrument panel and began keying

in the life-support readouts that ran like a row of bright metal tacks from his

wrist to his elbow. "Respiratory--circulatory-- metabolic--catabolic--there,

that's a good reading--audio appercept--optical appercept--biochip

automaintain-- aminos-- hemoglobin--enzyme release--glucose level..."

There were two dozen of them, some of them pretty trivial. But Carlotta

diligently ran down the whole list, tapping in a query and getting a

green from each little readout plate. It took close to ten minutes.