“If we give in to this temptation, we’ll land as a bunch of four-hundred-year-olds who were afraid to die and whose ideas were ossified from old Earth. How can we teach our children the value of sacrifice, the meaning of heroism, of beginning afresh? We’ll barely be human.”
“We stopped being human the moment we agreed to this mission!” Maggie paused to get her voice under control. “Face it, the birth allocation algorithms don’t care about us, or our children. We’re nothing more than vessels for the delivery of a planned, optimal mix of genes to our destination. Do you really want generations to grow and die in here, knowing nothing but this narrow metal tube? I worry about their mental health.”
“Death is essential to the growth of our species.” His voice was filled with faith, and she heard in it his hope that it was enough for both of them.
“It’s a myth that we must die to retain our humanity.” Maggie looked at her husband, her heart in pain. There was a divide between them, as inexorable as the dilation of time.
She spoke to him now inside his head. She imagined her thoughts, now transformed into photons, pushing against his brain, trying to illuminate the gap. We stop being human at the moment we give in to death.
Jo?o looked back at her. He said nothing, either in her mind or aloud, which was his way of saying all that he needed to say.
They stayed like that for a long time.
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God first created mankind to be immortal, much like the angels.
Before Adam and Eve chose to eat from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, they did not grow old and they never became sick. During the day, they cultivated the Garden, and at night, they enjoyed each other’s company.
Yes, I suppose the Garden was a bit like the hydroponics deck.
Sometimes the angels visited them, and—according to Milton, who was born too late to get into the regular Bible—they conversed and speculated about everything: Did Earth revolve around the Sun or was it the other way around? Was there life on other planets? Did angels also have sex?
Oh no, I’m not joking. You can look it up in the computer.
So Adam and Eve were forever young and perpetually curious. They did not need death to give their life purpose, to be motivated to learn, to work, to love, to give existence meaning.
If that story is true, then we were never meant to die. And the knowledge of good and evil was really the knowledge of regret.
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“You know some very strange stories, Gran-Gran,” six-year-old Sara said.
“They’re old stories,” Maggie said. “When I was a little girl, my grandmother told me many stories, and I did a lot of reading.”
“Do you want me to live forever like you, and not grow old and die someday like my mother?”
“I can’t tell you what to do, sweetheart. You’ll have to figure that out when you’re older.”
“Like the knowledge of good and evil?”
“Something like that.”
She leaned down and kissed her great-great-great-great—she had long lost count—granddaughter as gently as she could. Like all children born in the low gravity of the Sea Foam, her bones were thin and delicate, like a bird’s. Maggie turned off the night-light and left.
Though she would pass her four hundredth birthday in another month, Maggie didn’t look a day older than thirty-five. The recipe for the fountain of youth, Earth’s last gift to the colonists before they lost all communications, worked well.
She stopped and gasped. A small boy, about ten years in age, waited in front of the door to her room.
Bobby, she said. Except for the very young, who did not yet have the implants, all the colonists now conversed through thoughts rather than speech. It was faster and more private.
The boy looked at her, saying nothing and thinking nothing at her. She was struck by how like his father he was. He had the same expressions, the same mannerisms, even the same ways to speak by not speaking.
She sighed, opened the door, and walked in after him.
One more month, he said, sitting on the edge of the couch so that his feet didn’t dangle.
Everybody on the ship was counting down the days. In one more month they’d be in orbit around the fourth planet of 61 Virginis, their destination, a new Earth.
After we land, will you change your mind about—she hesitated, but went on after a moment—your appearance?
Bobby shook his head, and a hint of boyish petulance crossed his face. Mom, I’ve made my decision a long time ago. Let it go. I like the way I am.
? ? ?
In the end, the men and women of the Sea Foam had decided to leave the choice of eternal youth to each individual.
The cold mathematics of the ship’s enclosed ecosystem meant that when someone chose immortality, a child would have to remain a child until someone else on the ship decided to grow old and die, opening up a new slot for an adult.
Jo?o chose to age and die. Maggie chose to stay young. They sat together as a family, and it felt a bit like a divorce.
“One of you will get to grow up,” Jo?o said.
“Which one?” Lydia asked.
“We think you should decide,” Jo?o said, glancing at Maggie, who nodded reluctantly.
Maggie had thought it was unfair and cruel of her husband to put such a choice before their children. How could children decide if they wanted to grow up when they had no real idea what that meant?
“It’s no more unfair than you and I deciding whether we want to be immortal,” Jo?o had said. “We have no real idea what that means either. It is terrible to put such a choice before them, but to decide for them would be even more cruel.” Maggie had to agree that he had a point.
It seemed like they were asking the children to take sides. But maybe that was the point.
Lydia and Bobby looked at each other, and they seemed to reach a silent understanding. Lydia got up, walked to Jo?o, and hugged him. At the same time, Bobby came and hugged Maggie.
“Dad,” Lydia said, “when my time comes, I will choose the same as you.” Jo?o tightened his arms around her and nodded.
Then Lydia and Bobby switched places and hugged their parents again, pretending that everything was fine.
For those who refused the treatment, life went on as planned. As Jo?o grew old, Lydia grew up: first an awkward teenager, then a beautiful young woman. She went into engineering, as predicted by her aptitude tests, and decided that she did like Catherine, the shy young doctor that the computers suggested would be a good mate for her.
“Will you grow old and die with me?” Lydia asked the blushing Catherine one day.
They married and had two daughters of their own—to replace them, when their time came.
“Do you ever regret choosing this path?” Jo?o asked her one time. He was very old and ill by then, and in another two weeks the computers would administer the drugs to allow him to fall asleep and not wake up.
“No,” Lydia said, holding his hand with both of hers. “I’m not afraid to step out of the way when something new comes to take my place.”
But who’s to say that we aren’t the “something new”? Maggie thought.
In a way, her side was winning the argument. Over the years, more and more colonists had decided to join the ranks of the immortals. But Lydia’s descendants had always stubbornly refused. Sara was the last untreated child on the ship. Maggie knew Sara would miss the nightly story times when she grew up.
Bobby was frozen at the physical age of ten. He and the other perpetual children integrated only uneasily into the life of the colonists. They had decades—sometimes centuries—of experience, but retained juvenile bodies and brains. They possessed adult knowledge, but kept the emotional range and mental flexibility of children. They could be both old and young in the same moment.
There was a great deal of tension and conflict about what roles they should play on the ship, and occasionally, parents who once thought they wanted to live forever would give up their spots when their children demanded it of them.
But Bobby never asked to grow up.
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