Karen had not demurred. If it had been her under the rock slide, rather than Larry, she would not be dead now; stored in her implant, she would await her due resurrection, in a body newly grown for her on one of the precincts, and brought to Earth. She would soon be as young or younger than she was now. And as the years passed, she would not grow any older than she wished, nor would her body change in any but accepted ways. That set her apart from these people. It set her apart from her husband.

Like Karen, their daughter Andia had carried an implant, and Lanier had not protested, something that had shamed him a little at the time; but watching her grow and change had been an extraordinary enough experience, and he realized he was far readier to accept his death than this beautiful child’s. He had not overruled Karen’s plans, and the Hexamon had come down to bless the child of one of their faithful servants, to give his own daughter a gift he did not himself accept because it was not (could not be) made available to all the Old Natives of Earth.

Then, irony had stepped in and left a permanent mark on their lives. Twenty years ago, Andia’s airplane had crashed in the eastern Pacific and she had never been found. Their daughter’s chances for a return to life lay in the silt at the bottom of some vast deep, a tiny marble, untraceable even with Hexamon technology.

The tears in his eyes were not for Larry. He wiped them and drew his face into stiff formality to greet the priest, a pious young hypocrite Lanier had never liked. “Good wine comes in strange glass,” Larry had once said.

He came into a wisdom I envy.

In the first flush of wonder, working with the Hexamon, all had been dazzled; Heineman had after all accepted his second body gladly enough, and Lenore had accepted youth treatments to keep up with her husband. She had later dropped the treatments, but now she seemed no more than a well-preserved seventy…

Most Old Natives did not have access to implants; even the Terrestrial Hexamon could not supply everybody on Earth with the necessary devices; and if they could have, Earth cultures were not ready for even proximate immortality.

Lanier had resisted implants, yet accepted Hexamon medicine; he did not know to this day whether or not that had been hypocrisy. Such medicine had been made available to most but not all Old Natives, scattered around a ruined Earth; the Hexamon had stretched its resources to accomplish that much.

He had rationalized that to do the work he was doing, he needed to be healthy and fit, and to be healthy and fit while doing that work—going into the deadlands, living amidst death and disease and radiation—he needed the privilege of the Hexamon’s medicine.