25 Short Stories and Novellas Part 46
The newer-model senior-rehab equipment had just a single readout, which
gave you a go or a no go, and if you got the no go you could
immediately request data on specific organic or pseudo-organic
malfunctions. But Uncle James was one of the early models, and there
was no money in the rehab budget for updating citizens left over from
the previous century.
"You think I'll live?" he asked her, suddenly feisty.
"For another five hundred years, minimum."
Quickly, deftly, she finished the job of making him ready to go out. She
disconnected the long intravenous line from the wall and put him on
portable. She disabled his chair control override so that she alone
could guide the movements of his vehicle via the remote implant in her
palm. She locked the restraining bars in place across his chest to
keep him from attempting some sudden berserk excursion on foot out
there. More than ever now, the old man was the prisoner of his own
life-support system.
Just as she finished the job Carlotta felt a strange inner twisting and
jolting as though an earthquake had struck: the unexpected, sickening
sensation ot seeing herself in his place, old and withered and shrunken
and mostly artificial, feeble and helpless in the grip of a life-support.
Her long slender legs had turned into pretzels, her golden hair was thin
colorless straw, her smooth oval face was a ma.s.s of dry valleys and
creva.s.ses. Her eyebrows were gone, her chin jutted like some old
witch's. The only recognizable aspect of her was her clear blue eyes,
and those, still bright, still quick and sharp, glared out of her ruined
face carrying such a charge of hatred and fury that they burned
through the air in front of her like twin lasers, leaving trails of white
smoke.
Not me, she thought. Not ever, not like that.
She pressed down hard on her palm implant and sent the old man's chair
rolling toward the door, which opened at his approach. And out they
went into the hallway.
Carlotta had been working as a nurse at the center for a year and a half,
ever since she'd left high school. It wasn't the kind of work she had