“Well, you look as if you might. When people have to die, they look upon death differently. They dress it up and dance with it and put it in black robes and fear it. I have many disagreements with the Hexamon, but I do not regret their giving us the choice. Those graves—most are from the years just after the Death. Most of my constituents have chosen to live longer. Some hope to live forever. Perhaps they will. Death is not failure, it may even be completion, but only so long as it is not master.”

“Right,” Karen said.

“Have you chosen to live forever?” Lanier asked.

“No,” Kanazawa said.

“Why?”

“That is personal.”

“Sorry,” Karen said. “This is not a pleasant subject…”

“No. It is important,” Kanazawa said. “Not too personal to talk about. Rum talk, even. I cannot forget certain things. Unpleasant memories. I cannot use Talsit or pseudo-Talsit, even if we could get them, wonderful as those treatments are; these memories are a fixed part of me, and have made me what I am now. I fight with them always. In the morning I wake to them. Sometimes they hang over my whole day. You know what I’m talking talk about, don’t you, Garry?”

“Amen,” Lanier said.

“When I die, those memories will be gone. I will be gone, and perhaps someone better will come in my place. He may have knowledge of the history I’ve lived through, but he will be able to lift above them. There will be no waste. What I cannot assimilate, he or she will.”

“Amen,” Lanier repeated in a whisper.

“We will agree to disagree,” Ram Kikura said. “You are a wonderful man, Senator. Your death would be a loss.”

Kanazawa tilted his head to acknowledge her compliment.

“We cannot cry, you know,” Ram Kikura said. “We feel many of the same emotions, but we have…not risen above them. Transcended them. We assimilate and remain ourselves, but…” She shook her head vigorously. “I can’t think straight! Rum thought, rum talk.”

“We are too close to a lot of death to look at individual death objectively,” Kanazawa said. “Karen, do you approve of your husband’s age?”

“No,” she said after a long pause.

“I can’t keep up with her,” Lanier said, trying for a pleasantry.

She looked down from the stars at the dark grass. “It’s not that. I don’t want to lose you. I don’t want to sacrifice myself to stay in step with you, either.”

“Lance that boil, doctor,” Lanier said.

“Shut up.” She pushed away from him again and stood up. “We’re talking stupid talk now.”

“Rum talk,” Kanazawa said, swinging the beam across the sky again. “In vino, veritas.”

“This is noble,” Ram Kikura said. “This is human.”