When we of Earth get to this point in biological science, let us hope that we come thru it as cleanly and easily as we see in this story. There is no doubt that the treatments will be only for the privileged and secret for quite some time. We will probably never know when they become available to the elites of Earth but already many parts of this have been kept from us. A cure for grey hair exists today, but Clairol has bought the American rights and does not allow it to be imported to this country. Telomere treatments have been researched, but news of them has already been suppressed. Even as this is released the republican party is using a pandemic to reduce the medicare and medicade rolls, and to try and delay the demographic transition in this country because minorities are more exposed and receive less medical care.
In this story we see how the transition from ephemeral to eternal was made in one of the most backward areas of Kassidor, and one of only two where there was a long delay in bringing the benefits to nearly all of society. We follow the lives of six people thru the forty years when that transition occured. Two of them have made the transition long ago, three are affluent enough that they knew they would live on even when they were young and one of them longed to stay young but was too poor to ever suspect he would make it.