25 Short Stories and Novellas Part 46

The newer-model senior-rehab equipment had just a single readout, which

gave you a go or a no go, and if you got the no go you could

immediately request data on specific organic or pseudo-organic

malfunctions. But Uncle James was one of the early models, and there

was no money in the rehab budget for updating citizens left over from

the previous century.

"You think I'll live?" he asked her, suddenly feisty.

"For another five hundred years, minimum."

Quickly, deftly, she finished the job of making him ready to go out. She

disconnected the long intravenous line from the wall and put him on

portable. She disabled his chair control override so that she alone

could guide the movements of his vehicle via the remote implant in her

palm. She locked the restraining bars in place across his chest to

keep him from attempting some sudden berserk excursion on foot out

there. More than ever now, the old man was the prisoner of his own

life-support system.

Just as she finished the job Carlotta felt a strange inner twisting and

jolting as though an earthquake had struck: the unexpected, sickening

sensation ot seeing herself in his place, old and withered and shrunken

and mostly artificial, feeble and helpless in the grip of a life-support.

Her long slender legs had turned into pretzels, her golden hair was thin

colorless straw, her smooth oval face was a ma.s.s of dry valleys and

creva.s.ses. Her eyebrows were gone, her chin jutted like some old

witch's. The only recognizable aspect of her was her clear blue eyes,

and those, still bright, still quick and sharp, glared out of her ruined

face carrying such a charge of hatred and fury that they burned

through the air in front of her like twin lasers, leaving trails of white

smoke.

Not me, she thought. Not ever, not like that.

She pressed down hard on her palm implant and sent the old man's chair

rolling toward the door, which opened at his approach. And out they

went into the hallway.

Carlotta had been working as a nurse at the center for a year and a half,

ever since she'd left high school. It wasn't the kind of work she had