Maya stiffened in her chair. In Sabishii it was Ls 246, very near perihelion — the fourth day of 2 November — the days short, the nights warmish for this M-year 44. Maya had had no idea what the Terran date was, and hadn’t for years. But back there it was her birthday. Her — she had to calculate … her 130th birthday.

Feeling sick, she scowled and threw her half-eaten bagel on her plate, stared at it. Thoughts burst in her head like birds scattering out of a tree; she couldn’t track them; it was like being blank. What did it mean, this horrible unnatural age? Why had they turned on the screen at just that moment?

She left the half-moon of bread, which had taken on an ominous look, and walked outside into’the autumn morning light. Down the lovely main boulevard of Sabishii’s old quarter, green with streetgrass, red with broad-topped fire maples — there was one maple blocking the low sun, and flaring scarlet. Across the plaza outside their dorm she saw Yeli Zudov, playing skittlebowl with a young child, perhaps Mary Dunkel’s great-great-granddaughter. There were a lot of the First Hundred in Sabishii now, it was working well as their demimonde, all of them tucked into the local economy and the old quarter, with false identities and Swiss passports — everything amazingly solid, enabling them to live surface lives. And all without the need for the kind of cosmetic surgery that had so altered Sax, because age had done that surgery for them: they were unrecognizable just as they were. She could walk the streets of Sabishii and people would see only one ancient crone among many others. If Transitional Authority officials stopped her they would identify one Ludmilla Novosibirskaya. But the truth was, they would not stop her.

She walked through the city, trying to get away from herself. From the north end of the tent she could see outside the town to the great mound of rock that had been brought up out of Sabishii mohole. It formed a long sinuous hill, running uphill to the horizon, across the high krummholz basins of Tyrrhena. They had designed the mound so that from above it formed the image of a dragon, clutching the egglike tents of the town in its talons. A shadowed cleft crossing the mound marked where a talon left the scaled flesh of the creature. The morning sun shone like the dragon’s silver eye, staring back over its shoulder at them.

Her wristpad beeped, and irritably she took the call. It was . Marina. “Saxifrage is here,” she said. “We’re going to meet out in the western stone garden in an hour.”

“I’ll be there,” Maya said, and cut the connection.  .

What a day it was turning out to be. She wandered west along the city perimeter, abstracted and depressed. One hundred thirty years old. There were Abkhasians down in Georgia, on the Black Sea, who were reputed to have lived to such ages without the treatment. Presumably they were still doing without — the gerontologi-cal treatments had been only partially distributed on Earth, following the isobars of money and power, and the Abkhasians had always been poor. Happy but poor. She tried to remember what it had been like in Georgia, in the region where the Caucasus met the Black Sea. Sukhumi, the town was called. She felt she had visited it in her youth, her father had been Georgian. But she could call no image to mind, not a scrap. In fact she could scarcely remember anything of any part of Earth — Moscow, Baikonur, the view from Noyy Mir — none of it. Her mother’s, face across the kitchen table, laughing blackly as she ironed or cooked. Maya knew that had happened because she rehearsed the words of the memory from time to time, when she was feeling sad. But the actual images … Her mother had died only ten years before the treatment became’ available, or she might be alive yet. She would be 150, not at all unreasonable; the current age record was around 170, and rising all the time, with no sign that it would ever stop. Nothing but accidents and rare diseases and the occasional medical mistake were killing the treated these days. Those and murder. And suicide.”

She came to the western rock gardens without having seen any of the neat narrow streets of Sabishii’s old quarter. That was how the old ended up not remembering recent events — by not seeing them in the first place. Memory lost before it ever came to be, because one was focusing so intently on the past.

Vlad and Ursula and Marina and Sax were seated on a park bench across from Sabishii’s original habitats, which were still in use, at least by geese and ducks. The pond and bridge, and banks of riprap and bamboo, were straight out of an old woodblock or silk painting: a cliche. Beyond the tent wall the great thermal cloud of the mohole billowed whitely, thicker than ever as the hole got deeper, and the atmosphere more humid.

She sat down on the bench across from her old companions, stared at them grimly. Mottled wrinkled codgers and crones. They looked almost like strangers, people she had never met. Ah, but there were Marina’s sultry hooded eyes, and Vlad’s little smile — not surprising on the face of a man who had lived with two women, apparently in harmony and certainly in a completely isolated intimacy, for eighty years. Although it was said that Marina and Ursula were a lesbian couple, and Vlad only a sort of companion or pet. But no one could say for sure. Ursula too looked content, as always. Everybody’s favorite aunt. Yes — with concentration, one could see them. Only Sax looked utterly different, a dapper man with a broken nose that he still had not had straightened. It stood in the middle of his newly handsome face like an accusation against her, as if she had done it to him and not Phyllis. He did not meet her eye, but only stared mildly at the ducks clacking around his feet, as if studying them. The scientist at work. Except he was a mad scientist now, wreaking havoc with all their plans, completely beyond rational discourse.

Maya pursed her lips and looked at Vlad.

“Subarashii and Amexx are increasing the number of Transitional Authority troops,” he said. “We got a message from Hiroko. They’ve bulked up the unit that attacked Zygote into a kind of expeditionary force, and it’s now moving south, between Argyre and Hellas. They don’t seem to know where most of the hidden sanctuaries are, but they’re checking hot spots one by one, and they entered Christianopolis, and took it over as a base of operations. There’s about five hundred of them, heavily armed and protected from orbit. Hiroko says she’s only just barely keeping Coyote and Kasei and Dao from leading the Marsfirst guerrillas in an attack on them. If they find many more sanctuaries the radicals are bound to call for an attack.”

Meaning the wild youngsters of Zygote, Maya thought bitterly. They had brought them up poorly, the ectogenes and that whole sansei generation — almost forty now, and itching for a fight. And Peter and Kasei and the rest of the nisei generation were nearing seventy, and in the ordinary course of things should have long since become the leaders of their world; and yet here they were always in the shadow of their undying parents, and how did that make them feel? How might they act on those feelings? Perhaps some of them were figuring that another revolution would be just the thing to give them their chance. Perhaps the only thing. Revolution was the empire of the young, after all.

The old ones sat around watching the ducks in silence. A somber, dispirited group. “What happened to the Christians?” Maya asked.

“Some went to Hiranyagarbha. The rest stayed.”

If the Transitional Authority forces took over the southern highlands, then the underground might have infiltrated the cities, but to what purpose? Scattered so thinly they couldn’t budge the two-world order, based as it was on Earth. Suddenly Maya had the ugly feeling that the whole independence project was no more than a dream, a compensatory fantasy for the decrepit survivors of a losing cause.