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A Country For Old Men
(© Biswapriya Purkayastha)

Page 2

"But you were one of the team which created the process!"

I shrugged, watching the water begin to come to a boil. "Perhaps that’s as good a reason as any other not to agree to it being done on me," I said. "Other people might have their reasons, of course, and I have mine."

"You’re being selfish," he said then. "Selfish and cruel to the kids...to us."

"Cruel?" I arched one eyebrow, a trick I learned as a teenager. Not everyone can do it. "How do you mean, cruel? And how is my choice selfish?"

"They’re..." He was fumbling for words. "You’re exposing them to – bereavement."

I snorted. "And how exactly is that being selfish? You’d say going on would be unselfish? Going on and on and on."

"But they’ll be scarred mentally for life!"

"You think so?" I nodded at the photo on the wall. I really just keep it around because it’s become a habit with me. It’s not as though I need it to remember what she looked like. "Were you scarred for life when your mother died? You were the same age as your kids are now."

"That’s different." He flushed with anger or something else, probably shame at having to repeat the arguments his wife had drilled into him. "That was before the transfer process was perfected."

"Right, so it was. And what difference does that make?" I poured out the coffee, black for me, with a dash of milk for him. "You got over it, didn’t you? And don’t people get over it these days, when something like it happens?"

"We’ve even got a body for you," he said, rising. "It’s all ready, Dad. Please have a look at least!"

"Oh, I’ll have a look," I said, handing him his coffee. "But I won’t change my mind."

"But why?" he asked again. "I don’t understand."

I sipped at the coffee and looked out of the window at a cloud drifting across the sky. "You’ll never understand."



In the evening I went to the club. I don’t go there much anymore, not since going there meant running into some muttering psychotic or other from one of the death cults. But after my son’s visit I felt the need for equivalent human company.

It seemed that tonight most of the other members had the same urge. The place was crowded. Everyone was old, of course, most of them even older than I am. I looked around for familiar faces in the crowd, and found surprisingly few.

"Looking for someone?" I turned at the voice. It was the old woman whose name I kept forgetting. Something beginning with S. Sofia? Sonja? She’s one of the oldest of the club’s members, her face a mass of wrinkles so intricate that her features seem submerged in them. "Haven’t seen you around for a while," she said.

"It’s been a while since I came here," I confessed. "There don’t seem so many of the regulars around any more."

"I suppose you haven’t heard then," she told me. "Rocky – you know Rocky, of course? Well, he agreed to the transfer. And so did five or six others."

"He did?" I remembered Rocky, dark and hollow-cheeked, waving his stick-thin arms around as he declaimed against the entire transfer process. "I’m, well, I’m amazed. How come?"

"Let’s sit down." Despite her age, S is still quite nimble, certainly more so than I am, but old muscles and bones give out. "He had throat cancer," she said when we were sitting in the uncomfortable wicker chairs.  "I suppose he just couldn’t face it when the time came. He didn’t announce it, of course. We didn’t find out till...after."

"I see. I suppose the others also couldn’t stand up to the pressure?"

"I hear," she replied, "that there’s a new law proposed, to make transfers compulsory. It seems we disturb the social balance and harmony, not to speak of the expense of caring for us in our old age."

"It won’t pass, of course," I replied. "The religious factions are still too strong."

[ Continue to page 3 ]

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Genre:Science Fiction
Type:Short story
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