"Or two thousand," said Roic, trying to imagine it.  Some few Betans and Cetagandans actually made it to almost two centuries, Roic had heard, but their healths had been genetically guaranteed before conception.  For random folks alive and afoot already, not a help.

"Not two thousand, probably," said m'lord.  "Some actuarially-minded wag once calculated that if all the medical causes of death were removed, the average person would still only make it to about eight hundred-standard before encountering some fatal accident.  I suppose that means that some would slab themselves at eighteen and some at eighteen hundred, but it would still be the same game in the end.  Just set to a new equilibrium."

"Makes you wonder about the Refusers."

"Indeed.  If the God they posit waited billions of years for them to be born, a few hundred extra years till they die should hardly make a difference to Him."  M'lord stared off into some sort of twisty m'lord mind-space.  "All the worry people expend over not existing after they die, yet nary a one ever seems to spare a moment to worry about not having existed before they were conceived.  Or at all.  After all, one sperm over and we would have been our sisters, and we'd never have been missed."

Since there didn't seem an answer to this that didn't make Roic's head hurt trying to think about, he kept silent.  They turned in past the sagging chain link gates of Madame Suze's facility at last.

#

It took many hours to bring Lisa Sato's core temperature up from deep-cryonic to just below freezing.  Miles sent Johannes back to the consulate, and, as the night wore on, took turnabout with Roic napping in a makeshift bunk in a room opposite Raven's cobbled-together revival lab, set up on the third floor of the old patron intake building.  Raven and Medtech Tanaka, too, took the night watch in shifts.  Dawn of the new day brought the start of the critical procedures: the flushing of the old cryo-fluid, the swift replacement with what to Miles seemed vats of new synthetic blood.  The skin of the supine figure on the procedure table went from clay gray to an encouraging warm ivory with the transfusion.  The cryo-fluid gurgled away down the drain.

If they'd had the time and equipment, not to mention a starter-sample from the patient, whole blood identical to the original's could have been grown.  The synthetic blood lacked the unique white cells the patient's own body produced, so the revived person would have to be in isolation for an indeterminate time following, till her own marrow began to refill the immunity gaps.  Miles had been kept asleep through that phase, Raven told him, but then, he'd had a lot more trauma, surgical and otherwise, to heal from.  Ako had spent all last evening cleaning and readying the isolation booth.