ABOUT TWENTY YEARS AGO—AROUND THE TIME OF HIS HUNDREDTH birthday—Dr. Hu Noah (like all Ivyns, he put his family name first, because it was somehow supposed to be more logical) had made a conscious decision to give up on trying to explain to younger people just how little he had actually changed with age. It didn’t really matter that these people were making all sorts of wrong assumptions about how his mind and his body were changing. What mattered to them, he had finally come to realize, was that they believed such things to be true. It was more important to them to believe it than it was for him to explain the facts of the situation, and so he had decided to let them think what they thought and to try to find constructive ways to use it. Sometimes this meant sitting so quietly that they forgot he was there and began speaking of him in the third person, using Remembrance as a sort of interpreter. Sometimes he could astonish by speaking up, making it clear that he had been following the conversation all along. Or he would stand up—an action that was always described later, by witnesses, as “springing to his feet” even though it was nothing of the sort—and begin to move about under his own power, which many who didn’t know him well seemed to consider miraculous. Because Remembrance was always by his side, and his grabb was always scuttling along beside him, giving him a sort of universal banister and grab-rail, people assumed he was more unsteady than was really the case. In fact, this support system was nothing more than a simple way of playing the odds. A fall could cripple or kill him; why not have the grabb handy? And Remembrance, though she was assumed by most to be a health care worker, was really more of a general-purpose aide de camp and, to put it crudely, a cowcatcher for turning human obstacles out of his path.
He had had many conversations during his long life. Some were fascinating and stayed with him more than a century later. Others were less so. As a younger man he had tolerated those as part of the cost of doing business—a sort of tax that all people must pay in order to take part in civilized society. When he had turned one hundred, he had decided to stop paying that tax. Henceforth he would engage only in conversations that really interested him—which, with a few exceptions for close friends and family members, meant conversations with a purpose. Remembrance carried in her head a list of all the people whom Doc might actually care to have a conversation with, and knew how to turn the others aside, typically by playing the age card. The list changed slowly over time, and certain people, some of whom were quite important, were occasionally discomfited to find that they were no longer on it. The list had been written down only once, twenty years ago, when Doc and Remembrance had established their relationship. She had committed it to memory and destroyed it. It now existed only in her—not Doc’s—head. Perhaps 10 percent of the original names remained. Many of them had died. The others had been crossed off, almost always without any volition from Doc. Remembrance stayed off to one side during his conversations, on the pretext that she might be needed to intervene medically. But what she was really doing was following the dialogue and monitoring Doc for signs, not that his heart was failing or his medication wearing off, but that he was bored. Sometimes, during their first decade together, he had gone so far as to glance in her direction and catch her eye for a moment while his interlocutor wasn’t looking, and this had been enough to eliminate that person from the list, but since then it had no longer been necessary. In many cases Remembrance had made what Doc had, at the time, considered to be mistakes in her performance of this duty, but on further consideration he had seen what she had seen quicker, and come to agree with her.