She agreed. And not just because she was curious. Or rather, her curiosity wasn’t limited to Orrin Mather and the HPD. She was increasingly curious about Jefferson Bose himself.

*   *   *

Clearly he wasn’t a wine person. He produced a dusty bottle of some off-brand Shiraz, probably a gift, long neglected in a kitchen cupboard. Sandra told him beer would do fine. His refrigerator was amply stocked with Corona.

Bose’s single-bedroom apartment was conventionally furnished and relatively neat, as if it had been cleaned recently if not enthusiastically. It was only three stories up but it was situated with a partial view of the Houston skyline, all the gaudy towers that had shot up in the aftermath of the Spin like gigantic pixelboards of randomly lit windows.

“It’s the money that drives the corruption,” Bose said, putting a chilled bottle into her hand and sitting opposite her in a recliner that had seen better days. “Money, and the one thing more valuable than money.”

“What’s that?”

“Life. Longevity.”

He was talking about the trade in Martian pharmaceuticals.

Back in med school, Sandra had roomed with a biochemistry major who had been obsessively curious about the Martian longevity treatment brought to Earth by Wun Ngo Wen—she had suspected that its life-prolonging effects could be teased away from the neurological modifications the Martians had engineered into it, if only the government would free up samples for analysis. That hadn’t happened. The drug was deemed too dangerous for general release, and Sandra’s roommate had gone on to a perfectly conventional career, but her intuition about the Martian drug had been correct. Samples had leaked out of the NIH labs onto the black market.

The Martians had believed longevity should confer both wisdom and certain moral obligations, and they had designed their pharmaceuticals that way. The famous “fourth stage of life,” the adulthood after adulthood, had entailed changes to the brain that modified aggressiveness and promoted sympathy for others. Not a bad idea, Sandra thought, but hardly commercial. The black-marketers had hacked the biochemical combination lock and evolved a better product. Nowadays—assuming you had serious money and the right contacts—you could buy yourself an extra twenty or thirty years of life while avoiding that awkward surge of human sympathy.

All illegal, of course, and massively profitable. Just last week the FBI had shut down a distribution ring in Boca Raton that was processing more cash on an annual basis than most top-fifty corporations, and that was only a fraction of the market. Bose was right: in the end, for some people, life was worth anything you had to pay for it.

“The longevity drug isn’t easy to cultivate,” Bose was saying. “It’s as much an organism as a molecule. You need genetic seed stock, you need a decent-sized bioreactor, and you need a lot of closely watched chemicals and catalysts. Which means you have to buy a lot of look-the-other-way.”

“Including some in HPD?”