She shook her head violently. “There’s a gift economy in people’s feelings that precedes all the rules. Set one up and people give themselves to it. And we have to do something. If we don’t, they’ll shoot us down. They’ll kill us and eat us.”

Wahram sipped his coffee, trying to slow her down. She had gone too far, as always. He would like to hear what Pauline would say about all this, but there was no way he was going to be given access to Pauline at this moment. Swan had seized up the cup he had poured for her and slurped it down, then started lecturing him some more, emphasizing her points with the coffee cup so that he was going to be lucky not to have it poured on him.

And in fact, though she was going too far, as usual, she was also expressing things Wahram had been thinking himself. Really, it was just another articulation of a point that Alex had been making for years. So he seized a moment when she was catching her breath and said, “The problem is that what’s needed to be done has been clear for centuries now, but no one does it because it would take a very large number of people to enact it. Construction work, landscape restoration, decent farming, they all take huge numbers of people.”

“But there arehuge numbers of people! If the unemployed were mobilized, there’s your numbers. The revolution of full employment. The place is trashed, they’re cooked, they need to do it. In effect Earth needs terraforming as much as Venus or Titan! In fact it needs it more, and we’re not doing it.”

Wahram thought it over. “Could it be sold that way, do you think? As a restoration? Appeal to the conservatives as well as the revolutionaries—or at least confuse the issue as to what is really happening?”

“I don’t think we need to be confusing.”

“If you are clear about your intention, Swan, there will be opposition. Don’t be naïve. Any change will be opposed. And by serious opposition. I mean violence.”

“If they can find the way to apply it. But if there’s no one to arrest, no one to beat back, no one to scare…”

He shook his head, unconvinced.

Swan was pacing around him like a comet around the sun; Wahram rotated to face her. Twice she rushed him again and beat him on the chest with the hand not holding her coffee cup. Their voices crossed in an antiphony that anyone listening would have heard as a duet for croak and cheep.

Finally the dissonant duet came to an end. Swan was winding down at last. She had just arrived on Venus, it was clear, and was beginning to yawn despite the coffee. Wahram sighed with relief, shifted the timbre of his voice to something calmer, changed the subject. They stared out the window at the falling snow, blown by a hard gale into frolic architectures plastered over everything. This world, so new and raw, still emerging, told them with great whacks of wind: things were changing.

Wahram considered Alex’s two unfinished projects: to deal with Earth; to deal with the qubes. He felt a shiver, as suddenly it seemed to him that these projects were becoming parts of one thing. Very well, but it would take real craft to pull them together; it would take some cleverness in the execution. And Swan was going to keep getting mad at him until he helped to make it happen. But he thought perhaps he could.

Extracts (13)

certain metabolic actions accumulate lifetime damage, and each kind of damage has to be treated individually, and the treatments coordinated with each other as well as with the ordinary functioning of the organism

cell loss or atrophy is ameliorated by exercise, growth factors, and directed stem cells

cancerous mutations are identified by massively parallel DNA sequencing and transcriptome sequencing and dissolved by targeted gene therapies and telomerase manipulation; chemo and radiation therapies are now highly targeted, using monoclonal antibodies, avimers and designed proteins

death-resistant cells that are senescent in their function must not be allowed to transform into harmful forms, but must rather be targeted by suicide genes and immune response

undamaged mitochondria are introduced into cells suffering mitochondrial mutations

lipofuscin is one kind of accumulated junk inside our cells that can’t be carried away by the immune system. Amyloid plaques are another. Enzymes adapted from bacteria and molds that completely digest animal bodies will upon introduction flourish until their nutrient runs out, and this absence activates inserted suicide genes in the enzymes. Extracellular aggregates are removed by vaccinations that stimulate immune responses, including a state of enhanced phagocytosis. Complications include

random extracellular cross-linking of cells makes for stiffness, but the links have been successfully broken with enzymes designed to

the manipulation of telomerase has proved to be a very difficult balancing act in certain cell types: telomeres too long and you get a cancerous immortality, telomeres too short and you quickly hit the Hayflick limit and replication is no longer successful

while DNA repair involves a DNA polymerase with an exonuclease-proofreading capability, resulting in high-fidelity DNA repair, RNA polymerases do not have this and therefore make many more mistakes during gene transcription; this is a potent driver of evolution

pleiotropy is the phenomenon of a gene causing good effects in the young organism that turn into bad effects in the same organism when aged. It is very often the source of the problems that bisexual hormone treatments are designed to

hormesis (eagerness) is an eventually advantageous biological response to low exposures of toxins or stressors. This process, sometimes called eustress, and related to Mithridatism (after King Mithridates, who ate small amounts of poison so that a larger amount would not kill him), has been put forth as explaining in principle why the Earth sabbatical might help maximize longevity

strongest correlations to longevity include smaller body size and exposure to both androgens and estrogens; these two are also multipliers of each other, to the extent that no small androgyn or gynandromorph has yet been known to die of natural causes. The oldest are over 210 years old, and their potential life span cannot be calculated at this time. There are likely to be more such subjects to study as this finding becomes better known

actuarial escape velocity is defined as occurring when a year of medical research adds more than a year’s worth of longevity to the total population. Nothing even close to this has ever been achieved, and emerging signs of an asymptotic curve in progress suggest this velocity may never

premature declaration of huge longevity gains has been called kyriasis or Dorian Gray syndrome or simply the hope for immortality

lengthen the telomeres in certain cells by temporary increase of telomerase in these cells. As different cells lose telomeres at different rates, drug treatments have to be tagged to certain kinds of cells only, and inadvertent cancers

biogerontology, humbled time and again by unexpected

the famous calorie-restricted vitamin-enhanced diet acted to feminize gene expression in many ways that proved decisive for the longevity effect, so now gender hormone therapy is tailored to create this feminizing effect without the necessity of the caloric restriction, which never caught on