11th day of Spring
11th day of the Moon
48th year of the Space Age
30 March 2004

not apo strophe remember

More Faust writing fantasy science fiction...

Faust 1.2

The old wooden bridge from 1916 was torn down in the late 1930s and rebuilt in California cement.  By then I was already in my sixties and would have been thinking about retiring but I saw the war coming and I knew there would be more work than ever in my specialty.  Aerial cinematography.

Cinematograph - that's what we called it long before people began worshipping the movie camera.  Yeah, I was in the business - and still am - but only for the money.  I haven't produced anything since 1959 but the doctors tell me I should begin working like a fifty year old again and when I was fifty, in 1925, Tijuana was just beginning its ten most beautiful years, the "golden age" that would end with a bang and then a whimper, as the casino was shut down but the new race track ran on... ah, those, those were the days, my friend, yes.

I'm sorry.  It's just that even back then, I was already too old.  I've always been too old, it seems, and even now I worry I can't do it again, can't... but then I woke up this morning, and I could feel it.  I could feel the changes taking hold in my body.  I could feel the muscles restructuring, sense their fresher pull against my bones, and the skeleton answered that it, too, has grown stronger in my sleep.  So maybe I will make that call, will go back in a week or two not just as a consultant but a full producer when I leave here for another fifty years.  They tell me that this time it will be all right, that no one will remember me.

The next time I come back, for my third treatment, it will already be halfway nearer the end of the 21st century.  We will have seen the first nuclear hostage crises, and how it was stopped, once.  The ugly statement of capital and terror will feed sideways into ancient hatred and crusade.  I sometimes wonder if I truly deserve to inflict my living presence on that world, on this world, if I cannot do at least one good service to make our universe better, stronger, cleaner, or healthier....

But then I read about dead oxygen zones in the high seas and all our fertilizing goes to kill nothing.  Nothing lives.  Nothing dies.  And something seems very selfish of me to take this rejuvenation, but the interstellar court has decided we can have 200 years if we agree to be quiet about it.  The gift is given in return for silence... except for our quietly recruiting other patients, of course.  (They tell me that is why I should write this - that other potential patients may read my history.)

I imagine that the space people, out there, who are sharing this medicine with us (few), believe that human history will continue for centuries more.  It stands to reason: they would not invest so much time or effort only to see us become extinct, now, would they?

They can never go home again.  Or if they do, everyone will have died generations and generations before.  Out here in the galactic arms, far from their birthplace in the core, they must make their own culture traveling between the systems and constellations, watching over young worlds like our Earth, helping us when they can, but jealous, always jealous not to upset the balance of our independence.  Except lately.  They've been a little more open, somehow, it seems to me.  Actually encouraged me to write this story, and get back into film producing, once I leave....

Or, well, Doctor Espinadie did, at any rate.  He has encouraged me.  But I believe he speaks for his suppliers, Interstellar Pharmaceuticals.

He looks great.  His second treatment has made him look younger than his son....

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