The Declaration

was indeed late, if only for sleep. She needed to get out of the bath, to calm herself so she could fall into a deep slumber. Otherwise, tomorrow would be torture. She was safe now that the journal was hidden, and there was no point thinking about the new Surplus. No reason for her to still be feeling jumpy.
    Quickly getting out of the tub, she had taken a small towel from the rail in front of her and dried herself mechanically, the rough, dry cotton welcome after the cold, soapy water. And right then, she’d heard him arrive. The sounds were muffled and at one point she’d thought she could hear the anguished yelps of an injured dog, but then she’d realised it was probably a gag. They used gags sometimes, if Surpluses were particularly noisy. The driving unions had insisted on it, Mrs Pincent said – their members were getting upset. It was bad enough Surpluses existing, she said, without also causing mayhem and hurting Legal people.
    Then Anna had heard something break and, a few seconds after that, a crack and a noise that had sounded like something heavy but soft hitting the floor. Then some more muffled voices, and a minute or so later, silence.
    She’d crept out of the bathroom and held her breath for a few minutes, listening for something else – perhaps the sound of the Surplus being taken up the stairs to the Pending boys’ dormitory, but eventually she’d given up. He must have gone to Mrs Pincent’s office, she decided. She’d find out tomorrow, anyway. Right now it was time to go to bed.
    But in the morning, when she’d taken a detour to breakfast in order to have a look at the new incumbent and perhaps to introduce herself, she’d found that the new Surplus’s bed hadn’t been slept in after all. The other Pending boys had simply shrugged when she’d asked them about him; Mrs Pincent hadn’t even told them someone new was coming and they certainly weren’t going to trouble themselves over an empty bed. An empty bed meant an extra blanket and no one was going to complain about that.
    When there was no sign of him the next day, nor the day after that, Anna had begun to think that they must have taken him to a different Surplus Hall, or maybe to a detention centre; perhaps they’d decided that Pending was too late to arrive at Grange Hall.
    But then, a week later, he’d turned up again.
    He arrived, dressed in regulation navy overalls, the same overalls that every other Surplus wore – shapeless, sturdy and practical – just when Mr Sargent was telling the story of Longevity for about the fiftieth time. Mr Sargent was their Science and Nature teacher and he never got sick of that story, never tired of telling them about the natural scientists who found a way to cure old age. Before they did that, people used to die. All the time. From horrible diseases. And they looked awful too.
    Anna knew the story of Longevity very well and, like Mr Sargent, she never got sick of it either. Longevity was how humans fulfilled the ambitions of Nature. Longevity proved that humans were superior in every way. But with superiority came responsibility, Mr Sargent said. You couldn’t abuse the trust and bounty of Mother Nature.
    Before Longevity, people died from things called cancer, heart disease and Aids. They also got something called disability, sometimes, which meant that something went wrong and couldn’t be fixed. Like if someone lost a leg in an accident or something, they had to spend the rest of their life in a chair with wheels on it because they couldn’t make new legs back then. Renewal didn’t exist and brain exercises weren’t invented yet, and everyone died by the time they were seventy, apart from a few lucky people, but they weren’t really that lucky; they were tired all the time and couldn’t hear properly so they might as well have been dead, really.
    Then the natural scientists discovered Renewal, where you could get new, fresh, cells to replace old ones and they mended the rest of your cells too. First they cured cancer. Then they cured heart disease. It took them quite a bit longer to cure Aids, but eventually they cured that too, although it needed more cells.
    And then a natural scientist called Dr Fern discovered something else. He found out that Renewal worked against old age too. He took some of the drugs himself to see what happened, and he stopped getting older, just like that. Only he didn’t tell anyone about it for a while. And when he did, the Authorities (which