DAVE SMEDS - A Marathon Runner In The Human Race

AUTUMN LEAVES FLOATED onto the patio. Neil Corbin counted them: three from the
maple, six from the ornamental plum. Another shifting of the seasons -- what did
he care?

He keened his ears for the familiar chorus of shuffling shoes or the clicking of
Joe and Al's daily game of dominoes. But not a person stirred, and none were
visible save crazy Anne over in the shade of the umbrella table. Were it not for
the birdsong in the trees, Neil would have sworn his deafness had never been
cured.

A car turned into the driveway -- another source of silence but for the low moan
of tires on concrete. The vehicle stopped mere yards from Neil's chair. A
muscular, casually dressed young man emerged.

"Sorry I'm late, Gramps. Are you ready?"

Nell accepted his grandson's help in rising. "You're looking good," the old man
said.

"You will, too, Gramps. Come on. The clinic's expecting you."

Nell removed his elbow from the young man's grip. "I only move at one speed,
Matthew. You know that." He padded toward the car, wobbling but making steady
progress.

Matthew rolled his eyes, piled the luggage in the trunk, and went to the
driver's side.

"You forgot the trophy," Neil said.

The item lay beside the chair where Neil had been sitting. Grumbling, Matthew
retrieved it, placing it in his grandfather's lap rather than waste time
reopening the trunk.

Neil's hands closed over the statuette above the bronze plate that bore his
name. His hands automatically stroked the contours of the running figure, but
his attention wandered elsewhere, soaking in one last view of the place that had
been his home for so long. His glance tracked to the empty, dusty windows of the
far wing. His room had been the third from the end, just over the sign reading
"Shadyhome Retirement Community."

The once-immaculate grounds bore the first small signs of neglect. The grape
vine he had planted when he came to live there hung lush with fruit in the arbor
by the fish pond, its trunk almost as fat as a tree. He'd never seen so many
grapes on it, ripe and ready. His fellow residents always ate them too quickly.

"You must be almost the last guy to move out," Matthew commented. "I think you'd
have stayed there if the place weren't shutting down."

"Could be," Neil said. He sighed. "Let's go."

Traffic seemed to part magically in front of them, quiet except for the wind of
passage and an occasional cranked up music system. Matthew, as if sensing NeWs
lack of interest in conversation, kept himself busy manually guiding the car,
though the navigation menu prompted him as to what speed to travel, and when to
change lanes, in order to maintain the symphony of cross-town transit.

Matthew really was looking good. He held the steering wheel with a teenage grace
and ease. Neil lifted his own palm, stared at the creases, and after a slight
pause, pulled down the visor to look in its tiny mirror.

Moles and liver spots disfigured his bald head. The translucent pallor of his
complexion was relieved only by the rosette stain of burst capillaries. Wrinkles
-- no, crevasses -- lined a face rendered gnomelike by passing decades.

He lifted up the visor, and turned back to the scenery. He blinked in surprise.
They were arriving at their destination. Miles had vanished, lost to the mirror.

"Dr. Rosen said to have him paged from the lobby," Matthew reminded him -- Neil
Hated it when young folks imagined he had no memory capacity.

"Do you want me to go in with you?"

"No. I can manage on my own."

Matthew chuckled. "I'll pick you up here tomorrow at 10:00 sharp."

"You'll be late," Neil said. He hobbled into the clinic as resolutely as his
one-hundred-twenty-year-old legs could carry him.

In the morning Matthew was on time, of course, tardiness cured by the deliberate
skepticism. The young man was leaning against the car as Neil stepped out the
door ahead of Dr. Rosen and strode briskly down the walkway.

Matthew's eyes telescoped outward like a cartoon character. "Gramps?" he asked.

"I'm not sure," Neil answered, voice firm and deep. "You tell me."

Matthew grinned and opened the car door. "Looks like they got every molecule in
the right place." He slapped his grandfather on the back, a firm tap that, only
a day earlier, would have caused a stagger. "Come on. You'll want to get home
and see your new room."

"I can't wait," Neil said, deadpan.

Neil slid gracefully into his seat, and had his door closed before Matthew could
assist. Through the open window poured the aromas of heavy dew and mulch from
the flower beds along the walkway. He sucked in a deep breath. When had his nose
ever been able to detect scents so well?

Matthew stepped away to speak to Dr. Rosen. They kept their voices so low that
Neil knew they were talking about him. Irritated, Neil deliberately turned away.

A woman was sitting on a bench about twenty yards in front of the car. The
morning sun haloed her reddish curls, giving her oval, smooth features an
angelic peace, like a Renaissance madonna, but with northern European coloring.

Neil made eye contact. She blushed, and turned her gaze to the avenue, as if
expecting someone.

Slowly, belatedly, Neil thought to smile, but it was too late. Matthew climbed
in and the vehicle pulled away.

"You really were a runner," Matthew said, gesturing at Neil's body. His jovial
tone seemed forced. No doubt his mind was still on whatever Dr. Rosen had told
him.

The sawdust scent of the track welled up in Neil's mind. Hurdles skimmed his
calves. Competitors hovered in the corner of his eyes, not quite keeping pace
with his long, sure leaps and strides. The ribbon parted as his chest struck it.

"I broke a track and field record or two." Neil waved his hand dismissively.
"Just school records, you know. I had one good season in sprints and hurdles."

"I thought your event was the marathon."

"That came later."

Neil was jiggling his right leg, and tightening his fists just to gauge their
strength. Matthew kept looking at him with a cat-with-a-canary grin.

"What's so funny?" Neil demanded.

"Those hormones are pumping now, Gramps. You're feeling what I felt, two months
ago."

Neil pursed his lips. "Maybe," he said, temporarily closing the subject.

Boxes of Neil's possessions, full of a century's worth of packrat accumulations,
lay stacked willy-nilly all over the guest bedroom of Matthew's apartment. Neil
clicked his tongue, estimated the capacity of the empty shelves, and tried to
imagine his collection of photographs and prints against the tobin's egg blue of
the walls. He'd forgotten the magnitude of moving into a new place.

Neil began by shifting aside boxes in order to unroll his treasured Afghan
carpet. As he did, his hand skimmed the edge of a flap, slicing his skin open.

Wincing, Neil rushed to the bathroom to wash and bandage the paper-cut. With his
injured hand over the sink and the other on the faucet handle, he paused. The
ribbon of blood along his wrist and forearm reversed its flow, defying gravity
to return to the vessels from which it had sprung. That done, the slice closed,
weaving together with an itchiness that made Neil feel as if ants were suturing
him up with minuscule needles and thread.

Not ants. They were called nanodocs. Within three minutes they had completed
their job. Neil ran his finger along unblemished, unscarred flesh. He shuddered.
Next thing he knew, the Feynman Institute would come up with a means to revive
the dead.

Perhaps they had. Lifting his glance to the mirror, he stared at a man from a
previous century. The athletic lines of his reflection matched those in the
track team photo from his senior year of college. The thick, brown hair was the
same glorious mop his June Cleaver mother hounded him to cut, all the while
editorializing about the corrupting influence of Those Beatles Fellows.

The last time he'd looked like this, he'd been twenty-three years old.

Even his perspiration evoked an earlier time, when exertion brought out a crisp,
pheromonal incense, not the reek of ancient glands. Neil tensed his neck. The
muscles bulged, taut and corded -- no more sagging jowls. He tugged off his
shirt, and tapped his firm, lightly rippled abdomen.

This was how he'd been before he'd developed that annoying tire around his
waist. Before he'd become a father. Before all those years at a desk job. Neil
Corbin -- lean, mean track star.

Except he was even better this time around. As requested, the nose he'd had
surgically straightened at age thirty-nine was still straight; the appendectomy
scar, from age seventeen, was gone as if it had never existed. The promise of
nanotechnology had blossomed. A year ago, nano-assemblers, despite all their
useful applications, could only augment other types of medical care. Now they
coursed, self-guided, through every cell of Neil's body, reining in free
radicals, disassembling invasive microbes, healing damage as it occurred.

And, of course, restoring youth. Permanently.

Neil turned this way and that in the mirror, unable to resist the visual feast,
the sensual kiss of fabric against hard muscle and supple skin. Was this him?

An unfamiliar sensation started low in his torso, grew stronger, and finally
demanded attention. He opened his fly and there it was, a physiological event as
effortless as breathing or blinking. His groin hummed like a violin string drawn
tight over the bridge, its music amplified by the sweet ache from his bladder.

"Incredible," Neil murmured.

He hadn't had erections for thirty years, yet this was already the fourth in
half a day. He made no attempt to produce them; they just happened, as they had
every day of his adolescence.

This wasn't like the inoculation with the Ponce de Leon Vaccine, which had
halted his aging sixteen years ago, but kept him looking and feeling no better
off than a healthy one-hundred-four-year-old. The mass media hoopla of the last
six months came back to him like some sort of electronic echo, but the dreamlike
impossibility of the reports was gone. He'd followed the lead already taken by
three-quarters of the world's population. He was young again.

Then why did it still feel as if his soul hung poised over the abyss of death?
He turned away from the mirror, no longer able to look.

His body seemed oblivious to any anxiety his mind could muster. He could have
used his penis as a towel rack.

He shook his head slowly. "What," he asked his erection, "am I supposed to do
with you?"

MILD INDIAN summer radiance stretched down the canyons of downtown buildings as
Neil and Matthew joined the flow of pedestrians. Young face after young face
ambled by, nearly all on attractive, physically fit bodies. A few children
played, a few middle-aged types promenaded, trying to look distinguished;
otherwise, everyone seemed to be in their late teens to early thirties.

A month after his visit to the clinic, Neil had almost grown used to the absence
of sagging flesh and rheumy eyes around him, despite all the decades spent in
retirement communities, hospitals, and other abodes of the elderly. It reminded
him of college -- another equally unreal part of his adult life.

"Do I really have to do this?" Neil asked.

"Humor me," Matthew said meaningfully. "You have to get out and about sooner or
later."

"I've been busy. Architecture's changed a bit since I last generated a set of
blueprints." Back then, such things were still duplicated on paper and were
still sometimes blue.

"Gramps. . ."

Neil sighed. He'd never shared a home with Matthew before these past few weeks.
He'd been surprised to learn that his grandson could be just as stubborn as he.

This time, Neil had conceded defeat, if only because the kid was right. Neil had
been a hermit, and despite his excuses, all too little of his time had been
spent at his interface studying to resume his career. For the most part he
simply sat in his room.

Matthew at least had the good grace not to lecture. Dr. Rosen had already done
enough of that. All that talk about how the very old -- and Neil was about as
old as anyone on the planet-- didn't always adapt to the installation of
nanodocs. They exhibited "a reluctance to engage in life," as if those who had
fought the war against age were now suffering a kind of post-traumatic stress
syndrome. Some had gone as far as suicide.

That was their prerogative, Neil thought. Who said that a person had to act
young just because he looked it? Who said a person had to embrace immortality?

"You'll enjoy it out here," Matthew said.

"You keep telling me that."

"Trust me. This part of town did wonders for me just after I had my nanodocs
installed."

They turned a corner, arriving at their destination.

"My god," Neil whispered.

The area was nothing like he remembered. The dingy gray concrete, blacked-out
windows, and peeling paint had become a panoply of clean, bright facades with an
abundance of glass, proudly displaying the interiors. Gone were the hawkers and
the girls lounging like slung beef on the curbsides, replaced by stylish
registration desks, openly displayed lists of services, and comfortable parlors
for interviews between clients and artists.

The paint on the remodelled apartment house across the street rolled its
molecules, shifting from an off-white to a deep beige that reflected the sun
less harshly. The last time Neil had seen that building, its bottom floor had
been festooned with handbills warning of AIDS. Those posters would be
collector's items now that nanodocs rendered any and all venereal diseases a
part of the past, along with unintentional pregnancy.

The crowds of prospective clientele, still mostly male, wandered past the
establishments like children at an amusement park. Joy soaked the air, a
carefree piquancy that slid in with each inhalation, caressing taste buds on its
way past the tongue like a fine, dry wine. Neil followed his grandson's lead
like a marionette, with his jaw slack and eyes numbed by some new sight almost
every instant. Matthew plunged ahead, clearly gripped by an aphrodisiacal
contact high.

Two female artists chatted on the steps of a coffeehouse, taking a break during
the lull between the morning rush of patrons and the traditional evening
barrage. One of the women noticed Matthew's attentiveness and turned slightly,
providing both men with a view of a cleavage in which a banker could lose small
change forever, if banks still used coins.

"Let's go in here," Matthew suggested.

Neil resisted the tug on his sleeve. "No. I'd like to look around a bit more."

Matthew raised an eyebrow and tilted his head toward the buxom artist. "You sure
about that, Gramps?"

"Yes. Maybe I'll drop in later. If not, meet you at seven by the fountain."
Matthew shrugged. "Okay. See you then."

Neil wandered. In its new incarnation, the redlight district stretched far past
its old confines. One place of business after another washed past him. None held
his interest more than a few seconds. He thought he understood why Matthew had
chosen to bring him here. Sex certainly was the epitome of "engaging in life."
And he could well believe all the therapeutic effect Matthew had personally
derived from visits here. Matthew was seventy-two, and thanks to the vaccine had
stopped aging at fifty-four. He'd never been old enough for sex to lose its
allure.

Neil drifted by a palatial bordello with a statue of Lily St. Cyr out front,
continuing on even though the receptionist, in her elegant woman's tuxedo,
flashed him a wonderful smile. He ignored a tidy hotel with its rooms where, so
the marquee claimed, the virtual whores were Custom Programmed by Maestro
Roberto Niezca Himself. He even skipped the old-fashioned video arcades,
something familiar from episodes of youthful curiosity or loneliness.

Finally he came to a three-story Victorian. "Gallery of Erotica" it read in
Romanesque letters above the door. Few people seemed to be entering, and in
their expressions passion rode serenely, absent the frantic urgency of most
passersby.

Neil pressed the handpad, letting the gallery debit his account. The sibilant
noises of the street vanished as the door swung shut behind him.

He meandered down an aisle filled with sculptures of bacchanalian orgies. In an
alcove, a female mannequin wore lingerie that mutated at nano- levels through
the fashions of many eras, from Colonial-era teddies to the brass inauguration
bra made famous by Erotic Artists Guild president Elaine Agoura. Finally he came
to a small section devoted to framed centerfolds from mid-20th century
cheesecake magazines.

His glance lit on one he thought he recognized. He and Toby Wyckoff had found a
cast-off Playboy once in a dumpster. The model had the same intensely black hair
as that issue's Playmate. Her breasts, naturally shapely -- as opposed to the
silicone balloons featured in later decades -- pointed outward at an angle
designed to knock teenage boys' eyeballs out of their sockets. A bedsheet denied
the viewer a glimpse of her pubic hair -- a forbidden zone for the camera in
that day and age.

Neil wiped his palms on his shirt. How easily the memory bubbled up. Had he
truly been that adolescent, crouched breathless in an alley behind a dumpster,
acknowledging for the first time the undeniable tropism of sexuality?

Yes. He had.

An hour later, emerging from the gallery, he drank in the ambience of the street
with senses newly tuned. The redolent musk of sweat and arousal that wafted from
open upper-story windows made him heady. A thousand nights' worth of gasps,
sighs, and moans seemed to pour out of the walls of every building on the
street.

Maybe Matthew had been right to bring him here. It had awakened something.
Perhaps it wasn't so unreasonable to explore the feeling.

But not in this rain of fire. Despite all the changes, one thing about this part
of town was the same: here, sex was a commodity. It was for jaded palates,
looking for something new, something quick, something uncomplicated.

Neil's palate was not jaded. He'd been out of the game so long he was like a
virgin. He couldn't start with a business transaction. He'd have to do things
his way.

He headed for the fountain to wait for his grandson, treading like a snow
leopard across the Himalayas, knowing a mate must be somewhere up there among
the alpenglow and mist.

The party scene was the same backwater it had always been, with the same fish
caught in its eddies, lacking the vitality to dare the rapids to the spawning
pools. Neil endured it until, at a housewarming for a neighbor of Matthew's, he
met Thea.

Thea was long and statuesque, with a deep ebony complexion that may or may not
have been her birth color -- did it matter these days? She came up to him as he
sat, alone, on the patio retaining wall.

"Hello, you must be Neil," she said.

Avoiding eye contact, he gestured indoors at the petite blonde Thea had arrived
with. "Your spouse seems to be the hit of the night in there." "Oh, she's not my
spouse. Just my roommate."

His cheeks reddened. "Whoops," he said. She laughed in a way that told him both
that she'd taken no offense, and that she thought it hilarious that anyone would
characterize her as homosexual.

"What do you. . .um, do?" Neil asked.

"I'm in household AI sales. Tell me, sir, do you want your door guard program to
growl at Jehovah's Witnesses or to politely tell them to fuck off and leave you
alone?"

Neil snorted into his beer.

Thea kept talking. She was easy to listen to. The stiffness leaked from his
shoulders and spine. He stopped compulsively running his hands up and down the
handle of his mug. Thea filled the dreaded long pauses when he couldn't think of
a thing to say. Yet she listened when he did manage to stutter out a phrase. She
laughed at his jokes.

Gradually the conversation became real, more than small talk. Neil managed to
get past his tendency at earlier parties to keep it light. Dr. Rosen said that
trait was a defense mechanism, a habit left over from his twilight decades when
any friend he made died. Old widowers risked much to try to forge deep
relationships. Neil didn't care about the analysis. He just did what felt right.
Heart pounding, he got the words out: "Can I see you again?"

Thea played with one of her tightly kinked curls, like a cat next to a mouse it
has trapped, letting the poor thing wonder if it will again set down its paw.
"Yes. I would like that," she said.

For their first date, they took the Slingshot up to low earth orbit, on a
ten-hour tourist package Thea had signed up for on a whim years back. She'd
never canceled the reservations for two, figuring that when the time finally
arrived, she'd find someone who wanted to accompany her.

Neil and Thea spent the bulk of the visit strolling along the view decks of the
Earthrise Mall, goggling at the starscape. Their favorite moments, though, took
place in what Thea labeled "the trampoline chamber," a sphere eighteen meters in
diameter, attached to the space station just so Grounders could fly back and
forth to their hearts' content. They giggled like children, hysterical at the
peculiar effect of weightlessness on their faces and figures. By the time they
took their berths in the descent vehicle, they were so pleasantly exhausted that
they napped for the last half of the glide to sea level.

As they strolled out of the station into a blustery night, Thea threw back her
head and hooted enthusiastically, "Oh, I love doing new things, don't you?"

Her arm drifted into the crook of his elbow. Neil's wits seemed to vanish into
the breeze, knocked out of his brain by the unexpected chill of natural
planetary atmosphere. He recognized the cue. The decision, said her body with a
theatrical shiver, was his.

She looked so perfect, black flesh framed against a black sky. The warmth of her
radiated all the way from his cradled elbow up his arm and down his torso to his
crotch. Yes, he told himself, trying to reestablish his ability to breathe. If
she was ready, so was he.

SHE TOOK Neil into her with velvet-glove softness. She squirmed on top of him,
rolling like an otter on the slick, firm surface of his torso. Her breasts
tickled the hairs of his chest, pasting them down with her own sweat. Casting
off his anxiety, he concentrated on pleasing her.

She was riding him again, much, much later, when his climax arrived. The
ejaculation seemed to originate from the tips of his toes and the surface of his
scalp, rushing to his penis and into her with flash-flood suddenness and force.
As his hips collapsed to the mattress, he thought he would faint.

"Well!" she said, arching back and purring, still straddled across him. "What'll
we do tomorrow?"

He opened his eyes, peering under heavy lids at her beaming, gratified smile.
His body still basked in post-orgasmic tremors, but his mind was working again.
He replayed her comment from earlier in the evening. "I love doing new things,
don't you?"

The night lost the transcendence that came from banishing thirty-five years of
abstinence. In its place rose the shame of having read the signs wrong. Neil
choked down his disappointment. He began to count the days until Thea would no
longer consider him to be "the new thing."

Felice pranced across the tennis court, playing aggressively, forcing Neil to
call upon old tricks to hold his own. Though small and fine-boned, she whacked
the ball over the net with blistering vigor. The sweat flew from NeWs hair as he
lunged to catch her serve. The upper quarter of his racquet got there just in
time, sending the ball arcing lazily to her side.

She caught it before the bounce, slamming it into a far corner of his court, far
out of his reach.

"C'mon, Neil," she yelled. "You can move those hunky thighs faster than that."

He stuck out his tongue, and on her next serve, fed her the ball straight back
to her face -- another old trick. Startled, her backhand counterstroke fell
apart.

"Barbarian!" she called cheerfully.

Neil grinned, enjoying the steady pounding of his heart, the burn in his legs.
But she'd gotten him with the comment about sluggishness. He was trying hard,
but whenever he flung himself full-tilt across the court, he recalled the time,
at age 74, when a knee had locked up without warning, sending him to the asphalt
so hard he broke his nose. He'd given up tennis at that point.

His body was good now. He should trust it.

He hated seeming less than ideal in front of Felice. She seemed like just the
person to ease the braises left by his three-week liaison with Thea. The winter
had been long and lonely.

In other areas of his life, he was adjusting. He'd resumed his architectural
career. He'd moved out of Matthew's apartment into a place of his own. Dr. Rosen
seemed satisfied with his progress. Yet this new world remained flat without a
companion to share it with.

Felice was a miniature tornado. She played with a determination that intimidated
blossoms right off the nearby trees. She was easy to admire, and it was likewise
easy for him to imagine building on that respect until it included an erotic
element.

He was thinking of that, not his stumbling, as their court time expired.

They collected their balls and ambled away, surrendering their spots to another
couple.

"Good game," he said. He'd been ahead, but she'd been coming up on him rapidly;
if they'd had time to play out the match, she'd probably have won. He told her
so.

"I did okay," she said, shrugging in such a genuinely modest way that he
couldn't help but feel even better about her. The woman had no pretensions; he
didn't have to strut for her. He didn't have to invent compliments.

"Want to shower together?" Neil asked.

Felice raised her eyebrows. He supposed she was wondering why go to the
trouble--their nanodocs could scrub out their pores, dissolve the grit, and
freshen them up. But showering together had a definite romance to it, like
roasting marshmallows over a campfire under the starlight. He knew he wasn't the
only traditionalist left, or the locker rooms wouldn't still be there, over at
the edge of the courts by the redwood grove.

"Sure," she replied, as if catching his mood. "Why not?"

The spray did wonderful things to Felice's body. The rivulets born on her upper
chest and shoulders twisted and forked as they negotiated her curves. The fine,
almost transparent hairs at the base of her neck caught droplets like dew on
strands of spider web in a morning garden. Her nipples rose. She arched her
breasts toward him, as if to say, "Here, these need the touch of warm, soapy
hands."

He hesitated. The way her wet hair clung to her skull, and the color of it,
reminded him of his own daughter -- may she rest in peace -- as a toddler.

"How old are you, Felice?" he murmured.

Old enough, her wink told him, but she answered, again without guile, "Thirty."

He'd been a widower longer than she'd been alive. Christ, she might not even
have reset her age yet; he might be seeing her natural youth. He stepped behind
her, and used his warm, soapy hands -- on her back. He didn't want to let his
body language commit him to a course he didn't intend.

She leaned into him, robbing her slick form against his. The spray couldn't wash
away, her fresh, feminine aroma. His penis stirred against the curve of her
buttocks.

He shifted his hips away abruptly, as he would have done had a child, wriggling
in his lap, prompted an inadvertent sexual response.

He needed time. An evening of candlelight and good food would reshape his mood,
make him forget the ninety year difference in their ages. Even a few minutes
might be enough, but not now, with the water rinsing away the delicacy of his
fantasies.

He didn't have time. The stiffening of her shoulders told him she'd taken
offense.

Ah, thought Neil, he'd buried himself now. She'd made an offer, and he had
slapped it down. She wouldn't leave herself open for rejection a second time. If
he wanted anything to happen later, he'd have to pursue her with diligence.
She'd make him ask, in words, and would give him no encouragement until her ego
had recovered.

But he didn't want to pursue her with that kind of fervor until he was more sure
of his feelings for her. Yet to delay would surely cause yet another insult. He
didn't have to be a genius to know that all too soon, Felice would be looking
for a new tennis partner.

Slowly, like a senior citizen, Neil rinsed the soap from his hands.

Daffodils bloomed along the walkways of the cemetery. The heat of late spring
had already shriveled natural daffs, but here the yellow King Alfreds and
orange-and-tan Saharan Lords stood tall and proud, maintained by their own
versions of nanodocs, programmed by the groundskeeper.

Neil followed a route his feet had traveled many times before, until the
headstones took on dates-of-birth that sent a burble of acid up his esophagus.
1950. 1955. 1960. 1965. The last generation to die of old age. He could find the
names of kindergarten classmates on those marble and granite markers. By the law
of averages, his mortal remains should be here, too. But that burst appendix
hadn't claimed him, the lymphoma had been treatable, that drunk driver had
swerved at the last moment. Here he was.

An ancient oak tree shaded the particular resting site that he had come to see.
Weather had muted the sharpness of the carved letters. He scanned across the
name to the impossible date-of-death. How had thirty-two years passed with so
little in them?

Kneeling he placed a lavender rose upon the grass, over the spot he imagined his
good wife's heart to be.

"You spoiled me, Stacey," he said to the earth. "You set my damn standards too
high."

Was that it? Was he carrying a torch? Was her ghost jealously guarding him,
perhaps? Convenient, to think it was only that.

The rose caught a sunbeam that slipped through the oak leaves. The petals
drooped in the increasing heat. The flower had not been programmed to last.

That was the way it had to be.

A family appeared through the cemetery gates, making a procession toward a large
crypt near the fountain. Every adult of the group walked on long, supple legs,
their unlined faces tilted away from the day's brilliance.

Two lanky men, so similar in appearance they could've been twins, brought up the
rear. From their body language, Neil doubted they were twins. More likely the
one on the left was the great-grandfather of the one on the right.

Neil worked his way back through the graves. At the entrance, a woman stepped
onto the lawn with a small bouquet in her hands. As the distance between them
closed, he automatically made eye contact.

Her fine reddish curls and her figure brought a concealed smile of appreciation
to his face, but when he saw recognition spark in her green eyes, he stopped
short. So did she.

"I know you, don't I?" she said.

"Yes," he replied. "I saw you at the clinic, the morning after my nanodocs were
implanted."

"My morning-after, too." She looked at her bouquet, and then at a set of
headstones, as if measuring the distance between the two. But she didn't walk
on. Instead, she smiled.

"My name's Neil." "Nadine."

Neil and Nadine -- it had a nice, alliterative ring. Suddenly his scheduled
plans for the rest of the morning dissipated.

"Are you a local girl?" he asked, waving at the cemetery. "Family here?"

"Just my husband. He died not long after we retired out here in '41. I didn't
see much point in moving him or me back to Texas. So ah jus' stuck him in th'
ground with his boots pointed up." A chuckle accompanied her last sentence,
adding to the color of the deliberately exaggerated twang. Neil recognized that
kind of mirth; it was the type people used to bandage a deep wound.

"You know," Neil said, half to himself, "when I saw you on that bench outside
the clinic, I just naturally assumed you were twenty-two. Old habits, I guess."

Abruptly she raised the bouquet to her nose, covering a bashful smile. She
glanced again toward the headstones. "Would you excuse me for a moment. .
.Neil?"

"Of course."

She nodded, grateful for his instant understanding, and traced her way across
the cemetery. Neil found a shady spot beneath an oak much like the one growing
near Stacey Corbin's resting spot. He sat on a retaining wall, watching the
patterns of the clouds in the sky. Nadine joined him there, sans bouquet.

A babble of thoughts seemed to dance across her brow. Neil tentatively broke the
silence by asking her occupation.

"I was in furniture sales," she answered. "But there's not much need to sell
things like new sofas when a homeowner can just command the old one to change
its color, or create a spare from garden dirt. So I've shifted into interior
design. You'd be amazed how picky everyone's become about their decor, now that
they can afford any style they want, and can change it every day."

"No, I wouldn't be amazed," he said, and told her of some of the home redesign
requests that had flooded his office.

Before Neil knew it, an hour had passed, and his mouth had become cottony from
all the conversation. Suddenly Nadine glanced at her watch. "Oh, my lord! I have
to go!" She winced, as if wishing she'd forgotten to put the timepiece on that
morning.

"Can I take you out to dinner some time?" he asked. The question tumbled out
without having to think about it.

The green of her eyes deepened, or was that just the widening of her pupils?
"Yes."

"How about tomorrow night?"

She pursed her lips. "How about Tuesday instead?"

She laughed at his tiny frown of disappointment. "You northern boys are so
impatient." She lifted her hand up. Recognizing the gesture, he kissed her
knuckles.

A trace of a shiver rolled along her arm.

"We have plenty of time," Nadine said. She gave him her Link access number and
turned to go.

Yes, Neil thought, watching the wiggle of her hips as she disappeared down the
street. Time. Deep inside himself, he turned from the trophies and record books
and team photos on his shelf, and looked toward the open track ahead. His feet
were in the starting block.

What did one hundred twenty years of the past matter, compared to a thousand
years of the future? Heading home, Neil repeated Nadine's number under his
breath until it became part of him.

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