Free Stewards of the Flame by Sylvia Engdahl Page B

where does it stop and start, if you believe in that? Where do you draw the line? Certainly not at mere inability to function well; plenty of disabled people stick it out and find life worthwhile. Not at pain—in my book, that’s simple cowardice. So where, then?”
    “You can’t say,” Ingrid agreed. “So what will you do when you are old and feel your time has come, if you don’t believe in cheating?”
    “Well,” said Jesse, “if you want frankness on this subject, I’ll do what people who don’t talk about it do. They refrain from doing anything. They don’t try to prolong the natural process. That’s how my great-granddad went, and nobody questioned it, and what he didn’t tell the doctors was left unsaid.” God, he thought, does it have to be spelled out for them? Are they all too young to have figured it out for themselves?
    But they had figured it out—they had, perhaps, acted on that basis. Were they looking to him for validation?
    “In other words,” said Carla, “you believe there are times not to seek treatment.”
    “Sure I do. I’d even go so far as to refuse advised treatment—” He broke off, aghast at the implications of what he was saying. He knew where they were leading him, now.
    “You’d refuse just as you refused treatment for alcoholism,” Peter agreed. “But that’s an option we don’t have here.”
    “Oh, God,” Jesse said. “You’re saying it wasn’t a matter of whether to call the ambulance. Your friend had to be hidden from one already after her.” It had become all too clear. The city’s ambulances, after all, had police powers.
    “She was due for a mandatory checkup,” Anne said, “and this time, she’d have been held permanently. Even if her condition had stabilized.”
    “You mean everyone—everyone on this world who’s not killed outright—dies slowly in that damned hospital, hooked to machines?” Jesse persisted. “You all know that’s what you’re facing? It’s not even a matter of odds?”
    “I wish that were what we meant,” Bernie said. There was an uneasy silence. Then, with irony, he went on, “But you see, we have the galaxy’s finest medical facility in this colony—”
    “So I’ve been told. That’s not quite how I’d describe it.”
    “And,” Kwame declared, “the galaxy’s finest medical facility can’t let people die.”
    “Till they’ve disintegrated from old age, you mean.” God. It might take years, with unlimited forced treatment. . . .
    “No, Jesse. It can’t let them die at all. At least not according to the Meds’ criteria.”
    He stared at Kwame. “I guess I don’t quite see.”
    “You wouldn’t,” Carla said gently, “and yet you have to, in order to live here even for a while. It’s better that you hear the facts from us than by chance, from strangers. You’re not going to like what you hear.”
    Jesse was silent.
    “Our medical facility,” Bernie told him, “really is an advanced one. From the technological standpoint it’s superb. It has developed sophisticated techniques not common elsewhere, and as you know, its funds are unlimited. The law says everyone must be treated for everything. So you see, bodies are just—maintained. Indefinitely.”
    “Even after they’re brain-dead?” Jesse asked in a low voice.
    “Yes—like bodies from which organs for transplant were taken, back in the days before cloned organs were perfected. Sometimes there’s minimal brain stem activity, but no possibility of subconscious mental functioning.”
    “Surely the goal must be to restore the mind, or perhaps someday transplant it.”
    “No. We’re not talking about coma. People in comas have an interior life, some form of consciousness, whether or not they show evidence of it. But even in principle, technology can’t restore or transplant a mind that no longer physically exists.”
    “The law holds that personhood resides in mere flesh,” Liz said. “The general public perceives maintenance as