Sailing to Byzantium by Robert Silverberg

as I aged, you’d age, too. It was very foolish of me. In Chang-an, when I first began to see the real signs of it—that was when I realized I couldn’t stay with you any longer. Because I’d look at you, always young, always remaining the same age, and I’d look at myself, and—” She gestured, palms upward. “So I gave you to Belilala and ran away.”
    “All so unnecessary, Gioia.”
    “I didn’t think it was.”
    “But you don’t have to grow old. Not if you don’t want to!”
    “Don’t be cruel, Charles,” she said tonelessly. “There’s no way of escaping what I have.”
    “But there is,” he said.
    “You know nothing about these things.”
    “Not very much, no,” he said. “But I see how it can be done. Maybe it’s a primitive simpleminded twentieth-century sort of solution, but I think it ought to work. I’ve been playing with the idea ever since I left Mohenjo. Tell me this, Gioia: Why can’t you go to them, to the programmers, to the artificers, the planners, whoever they are, the ones who create the cities and the temporaries and the visitors. And have yourself made into something like me!”
    She looked up, startled. “What are you saying?”
    “They can cobble up a twentieth-century man out of nothing more than fragmentary records and make him plausible, can’t they? Or an Elizabethan, or anyone else of any era at all, and he’s authentic, he’s convincing. So why couldn’t they do an even better job with you? Produce a Gioia so real that even Gioia can’t tell the difference? But a Gioia that will never age—a Gioia-construct, a Gioia-program, a visitor-Gioia! Why not? Tell me why not, Gioia.”
    She was trembling. “I’ve never heard of doing any such thing!”
    “But don’t you think it’s possible?”
    “How would I know?”
    “Of course it’s possible. If they can create visitors, they can take a citizen and duplicate her in such a way that—”
    “It’s never been done. I’m sure of it. I can’t imagine any citizen agreeing to any such thing. To give up the body—to let yourself be turned into—into—”
    She shook her head, but it seemed to be a gesture of astonishment as much as of negation.
    He said, “Sure. To give up the body. Your natural body, your aging, shrinking, deteriorating short-timer body. What’s so awful about that?”
    She was very pale. “This is craziness, Charles. I don’t want to talk about it any more.”
    “It doesn’t sound crazy to me.”
    “You can’t possibly understand.”
    “Can’t I? I can certainly understand being afraid to die. I don’t have a lot of trouble understanding what it’s like to be one of the few aging people in a world where nobody grows old. What I can’t understand is why you aren’t even willing to consider the possibility that—”
    “No,” she said. “I tell you, it’s crazy. They’d laugh at me.”
    “Who?”
    “All of my friends. Hawk, Stengard, Aramayne—” Once again she would not look at him. “They can be very cruel, without even realizing it. They despise anything that seems ungraceful to them, anything sweaty and desperate and cowardly. Citizens don’t do sweaty things, Charles. And that’s how this will seem. Assuming it can be done at all. They’ll be terribly patronizing. Oh, they’ll be sweet to me, yes, dear Gioia, how wonderful for you, Gioia, but when I turn my back they’ll laugh. They’ll say the most wicked things about me. I couldn’t bear that.”
    “They can afford to laugh,” Phillips said. “It’s easy to be brave and cool about dying when you know you’re going to live forever. How very fine for them: but why should you be the only one to grow old and die? And they won’t laugh, anyway. They’re not as cruel as you think. Shallow, maybe, but not cruel. They’ll be glad that you’ve found a way to save yourself. At the very least, they won’t have to feel guilty about you any longer, and that’s bound to please them. You can—”
    “Stop