if you recall the old comparison of the human body to a Havana Chevolet, with all moving parts replaced when they broke, then the problem could be compared to metal fatigue in the chassis and axles. In other words, the “seven deadly sins” of senescence are not the only sins. Unrepaired DNA damage, noncancerous mutation, the drift of chromatin states—all these eventually create “aging damage” hard to detect or counteract. None are currently amenable to repair. This probably explains the

take skin cells from people, turn them into pluripotent stem cells, put these in a protein bath of the right kind and they form a neural tube, which is the start of the nervous system that will grow the spinal cord from one end and the brain from the other. Take slices of neural tube and direct them with other protein stimulants to become cells of different parts of the brain, like cortex cells. Test for firing.

arrhythmia, stroke, sudden collapse, quick decline, immune loophole, brain wave irregularity, superinfection, heart attack, apparently causeless instantaneous death (ACID), etc.

KIRAN IN VINMARA

Kiran’s new work unit began regularly driving a rover back and forth from one of Lakshmi’s locked compounds in Cleopatra to the new town Vinmara, always passing Stupid Harbor on the way. Vinmara was still growing like a mussel bed around its shallow empty bay, and off to the south through the drifting snowfall they could see the silver glitter of the dry ice sea.

After one of these runs, when they were back in Cleopatra, Kiran ran into Kexue in a game bar they both frequented, and the voluble small said, “Come meet a friend of mine. You’ll like him.”

It turned out to be Shukra, beard and hair long and gray; he looked like a wandering mendicant. Kexue grinned as Kiran recognized the man. “I told you you’d like him.”

Kiran mumbled something awkward.

“It’s all right,” Shukra said, staring hard at him. “You were bait, I told you that. And you got taken. So now I’m here to tell you what to do next. Lakshmi’s got you on the route between her compound here and that coastal town, right?”

“That’s right,” Kiran said. He could see how he probably still owed his first Venusian contact his services, but it was becoming all too clear to him how dangerous it was to play both sides. He didn’t want to cross Lakshmi in any way; on the other hand, this man did not seem like someone to be trifled with either. Indeed at the moment there was no way to deny him. “There’s shipments going both directions, but we don’t see what gets loaded.”

“I want you to find out what it is. Insinuate yourself further into the situation, and then let me know what you find.”

“How will I contact you?”

“You won’t. I’ll contact you.”

So after that, feeling deeply uneasy, Kiran kept his eye out when they were making the Vinmara run. It became clearer than ever to him that the transport crew was not intended to know the contents of their rovers; there were guards on every run, and the office in central Vinmara was as closed to outsiders as the various facilities in Cleopatra. The rovers backed up to a loading dock and interfaced with the building, and after a while drove away, and that was it. Once, when an exceptionally deep snowfall delayed them mid-route, Kiran listened without watching as the guard in their cab had a phone conversation that seemed to be with people in the storage compartment of the rover; they spoke Chinese, and later Kiran had his translation spectacles translate the recording it had made:

“Are you okay back there?”

“We’re fine. They’re fine.”

They? Anyway, it was something to tell Shukra, if he reappeared.

As it happened, they were down in Vinmara when the big blizzard finally stopped. The skies cleared; the stars in all their glory punctured the black dome of the sky. Naturally they joined the whole town in suiting up and going out the city gates onto the bare hills above the town. The continuous deluge of snow and sleet and hail and rain had gone on for three years and three months. Now everyone wanted to see what things looked like under the stars.

Almost all the landscape they could see was covered by snow, gleaming in the starlight. Many spiky points of black rock broke through this gleaming white—the land surrounding the town must have been a devil’s golf course of aaor something like it—and the result was that over their heads the black sky spangled with brilliant stars, while under their feet the white hills were spattered by spiky black outcroppings, so that the two together looked like photographic negatives of each other.

And now they could breathe the open air. It was screamingly cold, of course, so as people pulled off their helmets they did scream, casting brief plumes of frost from their open mouths. Breathable air—a nitrogen-argon-oxygen mix, at seven hundred millibars, and ten degrees below. It was like breathing vodka.

The snow underfoot was too hard to dig out snowballs, and people were falling as they skidded this way and that. Out on the hilltop above the town they could see for huge distances in all directions.

It was around noon, and among the stars overhead hung the black circle of the eclipsed sun. A black cutout in the sky—the sunshield, letting through no sunlight—except for today, when there was a scheduled uneclipse. These uneclipses had been happening once a month for a while now, to help heat things back up to a more human-friendly level, but no one on the planet had been able to see them because the rain and snow had blocked the view. Now there would be one they would be able to see.

Many people were putting their helmets back on; the reality of the cold was setting in. Kiran’s nose was numb, while his ears were still burning as they froze. People said you could break frozen ears right off, and now he believed it. Music was playing from loudspeakers down in the town, something clangorous with cymbals and bells, very Slavic, very violent and loud.

Then directly overhead the sunshield was suddenly marked by a perfectly circular thread of diamond light, blazing near the edge of the black disk. Though this annular ring was a mere wire of brilliant yellow, a delicate hoop of fire, it still lit up the white hills and the scalloped town, and the silver sea to the south, and the plumes of frost pouring from their cheering throats, all glowing now with a bronze light that brought back memories of all the sunniness they had ever known or dreamed of. The burnished tinge was like the light of life itself, a light they had almost forgot, all brought back now by the yellow air.

After a frigid hour the ring of fire grew thinner and thinner, eclipsing from its inside out, until the disk of the sun became completely black again. The circular venetian blind had closed its opened slat. The snowy land darkened to its usual pale luminosity; the stars grew big again. Full night was back, in all its grim familiarity. Just above the black disk of the sun a bright white planet gleamed, small but steady: Mercury, Kiran was told. They were seeing Mercury from Venus, and it gleamed like a pearl made of diamond. And there over the western horizon hung Earth and Luna too, a double star with a blue tinge. “Wow,” Kiran said; something in him seemed to be blowing up like a balloon. Had to breathe deep or he might pop.

But his teammates were tugging at his arm. “Earth boy! Earth boy! Bye-bye miss America pie! We must get back in town fast, there’s a rover broken down, Lakshmi want us right now!”

“Lead on!” Kiran cried, and followed them back down the hillside to the open gates of Vinmara.