Nikka said, “You’re exaggerating. Ted hasn’t got time—”

“No, he’s right,” Carlotta said. “Ted’s probably ‘building a file,’ as the administrators say.”

Nikka said, “But health problems aren’t grounds for—”

“If a majority of our esteemed crewmates think it is, then it is, period.” Nigel said. His face sagged with an inward-looking fatigue.

Nikka said softly, “They might put you in the Slots, then?”

“Slotting might bring you back up to specs for a manual job,” Carlotta said thoughtfully.

Nigel sighed and shrugged.

“Look.” Carlotta leaned forward. “At a minimum, it’ll make you live longer.”

“And miss most of the voyage to Ross 128.”

“Small price,” Carlotta said. “I don’t think you have to do it, though. You’ve got lots of sentiment behind you. They may all not agree with your theories, but the crew remembers all this started ’way back with the Snark and Mare Marginis and—”

“I’ve told you before, I don’t want to win by pinning on my medals and parading round the ship.”

“You want to convince them, right?” Carlotta said sharply. “Only they see things different. Well—”

“Stop, you two,” Nikka said, lean and lithe and distant on the grass. “Nigel, if you go into the Slots, I’m going with you.”

“What!” Carlotta jumped up.

“I could use some repair myself.”

“That’s not it.” Carlotta’s voice rose. “You want to stay with him even if he’s asleep!”

“My medmon index isn’t very high, either,” Nikka said neutrally.

“You’d leave me behind just to—”

“Bloody hell, must you forever think in terms of yourself?” Nigel jerked his head irritably. “We wouldn’t be slotted for more than a few years at most.”

“A few—! But us, our—”

“I know,” Nikka said soothingly. “I’ve thought of that, and I’m sorry, but I must stay in good physical condition. It’s different when you’re old. Nigel, when he comes out, I won’t be very much use to him if I’m run down and—”

“You—both of you—leave me—”

Nigel nodded. “I have to. If Nikka follows—well, that’s her affair. We each still have some freedom, y’know.”

“But I’ll be alone.”

“It can’t he helped,” Nikka said firmly. “I’m going with him.”

That was all she would ever say about the matter.

Nigel spun slowly in the Sleepslot. It was not true sleep, but rather a drifting, aimless dreaming. He felt faint tugs and ripples as the fluids moved him—massaging leathery muscles, caring for soft wrinkled tissues, ensuring a regular flow of blood and oxygen. The fluids kept his metabolic level a fraction above the shutoff point that would bring on death.

It was like an achingly labored swimming, clutched in currents one could only dimly sense. He rested in the wetness, free of the labor of breath, lungs filled with a spongy stuff that fed healing fluids and sparkling oxygen directly into him. His skin shed a snow of flakes and grime, a torrent of impurity. Inside, cellular police searched for renegades.

Dying, it had turned out, was often merely an inept response to the universe.

The simplest way for the body to defend itself against invaders was by making antibodies. If that failed, evolution had forged a deeper response. It made killer lymphocytes, white cells that attached themselves to the invaders and made a template of them. They excreted specific, short-range toxins, varying the poison until it destroyed the invader. Long after the battle, the lymphocytes carried the template of this intruder, to recognize and kill on sight any returning enemy.

But this immune response can err. That was why eating meat was dangerous. Unless the meat was well cooked, some raw portion would inevitably get into the body cavity, through holes in membranes. The lymphocytes then developed a killing response to animal protein, since it was a nonhuman cell.

The problem was that animal protein is very similar to human protein. As the lymphocytes drifted through the rivers of blood, finding and killing invaders, they sometimes changed. Radiation or heat could damage them. If the random changes made the animal-protein template resemble human protein, the lymphocytes could become confused. They would attack the body’s own cells. Cellular suicide. Cancer.

With age the body developed more and more templates. The chances of a catastrophic error increased. To combat this, the body tried to develop so-called suppressor lymphocytes, which could control the killers and stop them from multiplying. Often this failed.

No matter how many technical fixes could be arranged for heart troubles or organ failures, this irreducible knot of a problem remained. It was rooted in the very nature of the body’s age-old defenses.

Evolution did not care if a preventive measure ran amok, once childbearing age passed. In fact, all the better. It was a simple way to clear the stage, once the actors had played their parts.

The medicine of the twenty-first century was preoccupied with runaway immune response, with bodies that had become strangers to themselves.

Nigel dimly felt fluids slosh within him, seeking lymphocytes gone awry. Outside, the grasshopper world clacked on, Lancer edged close to light speed, and he thought of the cold world an intelligent machine must know: brittle, arid, a labyrinth of logic and careful design, stale space and geometric rigidities. Quite unlike the milky world that nurtured him here, smoothing the skin now crinkled like old butcher paper.

This treatment would stretch his life-span, free oxygen to swarm through parts of his brain that now ebbed. But it meant years of nothingness, blunted by drugs, telescoped down to a mere self-perceived few days. Years subtracted from the pace of events.

It was deeper than sleep, that great eraser. Like any new technology, it eased you through life, insulated you for a time from a brutal fact, and left you with a disquieting vision: that nature engraved mortality on its children by making them attack themselves.

Carlotta led them into the huge cavern where nothing was real. “This is it,” she said excited. “Surprised?”

“Moderately,” Nigel said, though he wasn’t sure what moderation was any longer. Five days out of the Sleep-slots, and he still carried the wispy, dislocated air of not quite being fully present. An expected side effect, to be sure, but what he had seen around the ship had enhanced the effect. “Ted and the rest actually approved this?”

Carlotta shrugged: “We aren’t getting much advice from Earth. There were signs of real morale problems, and the psych types thought—Look, Earthside predicted some fast sociocultural rates shipboard, fax?”

“In five years?” Nikka asked quietly.

“Can you fashion things change just for, you know, change itself? But look, you’ll get the mix. Come on.”

They followed her. A couple took a tumble slide through purple ice crystals above. A hollow gong; the fine crystals dissolved into a rain of acrid fire. People passed by, rippling, and Nigel saw they had faces that shifted like holograms. Carlotta polarized herself into fundamentals and blended instantly with the dank, humid jungle that was forming around them. They sat at a table. A panther snarled. Nigel saw cat eyes gleaming beneath the folds of a wet elephant ear leaf.

“Shows what a pack of smart lads can do when they’ve nothing to distract ’em,” Nigel said. Carlotta reappeared, wearing a pair of enhanced gloves. She casually lifted the table and the gloves glowed amber. “I was scanning the Earthside briefs,” he began, “and they—”

“Amazing, isn’t it? That they can’t find out anything. Makes you wonder,” Carlotta said.