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.