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apartment. Mickey had always insisted that they must keep informed. The coverage was of the panic at last night’s
Cholera!
performance. Suddenly the images focused in on an old interview: he marvelled at how young he looked. Since then he’d accumulated a number of scars he had chosen not to repair.
    The caption along the bottom read
Interview excerpt, The Bulletin
:
    Q: Do you feel pain when you take on the full symptomology of a disease?
    A: We now have extremely effective painkillers, of course, so theoretically I wouldn’t have to feel any pain at all. But the look of a disease depends as much on the physical constraints that pain imposes as it does on the smell, colour, and distortion of flesh. Pain also imposes certain attitudes which are necessary to a good performance. So part of the art comes from inviting pain into the performance, but regulating it so that the artist’s perceptions remain clear.
    Q: What about your audience? Are you causing them pain?
    A: People have been genetically engineered to resist disease and limit infection. That pretty much limits their pain repertoire. Disease is an expression of how we view our internal mortalities, and eventually of course, our impending deaths. What I choose to do to the outside of my body is only an expression of the audience’s internal fears concerning their own death and destruction. The closer the pageantry of my performance reflects some intangible unease the more powerful the performance is going to be.
    Q: But to what purpose? Shouldn’t society’s goal be to eradicate disease?
    A: I’ve never suggested that anyone but myself should be infecting themselves. But disease used to be as much a part of our lives as eating, drinking, sleeping. Of course it still is, but its effects have become so muted, so distanced from our consciousness that we usually aren’t even aware that we are ill. I believe that our appreciation of our frailties in a world that will travel on without us has been stolen from us.
    “The philosophers and religious toastmasters speak of a paradise which was, or will be, free of disease. Disease has been our punishment for disobedience, they tell us, for following the unapproved ways. It is as if these diseases were administered by demons—in the old days they often had the names of mythological creatures—and can be alleviated through prayer and obedience. So we pray to modern medicine and we do what the professionals tell us to do. I’m not sure that’s always a good thing.”
    “You shouldn’t grant so many interviews, you know. If you keep yourself a bit of a mystery we’ll make more money. And spouting off about the medical profession isn’t to our benefit—they’re still responsible for about a third of our income. Besides, in case you’ve forgotten,
I’m
a medical professional.”
    Mickey spoke to him from the shower. Mickey was always speaking to him from the shower. Most citizens who could afford it had a full communication system in the shower. A layered shower of sound, heat, water, and air was about the most relaxing thing a person could do in the modern world.
    “Answering questions isn’t what you do best,” Mickey said, sliding into bed next to him. He put his hand on Jerome’s chest, feeling the scar tissue there, pretending to be slightly repulsed, but his gentleness betrayed him. “Are you ever going to get your nipples back?”
    Jerome glanced down at the two little patches of scar where his nipples should have been, a left over symptom from his six months as a victim of Hutchinson-Gilford progeria, the rapid aging disease. In many ways it had been one of the most rewarding—as well as difficult and dangerous—of his transformations, involving surgeries, bone reduction, and genetic tampering. The result was not a perfect emulation of progeria by any means, but close enough for this world.
    Most rewarding of all had been when the three remaining victims of progeria came to visit him and share the