"Life sucks!" I remarked to my best friend Jenna, as I dumped Granddad's anti-ageing tablets down the toilet, and threw the plastic container onto the fire. "Well, long life sucks, anyway!"

"It looks like you're trying to get rid of the old bugger," she giggled.

I flicked the switch on my new memory panel and Granddad's grizzled face with his flyaway hair sprung up in hologram form in front of us. I automatically went to stroke his cheek, but my hand went straight through him. I thought I'd never get used to this new fangled contraption, as Granddad called it.

"Oh come on, you know I love him, and that I want him to live a nice long life, but I don't want to see him spend the rest of it on a transport ship to God knows what planet," I protested.

"He's still a randy old bugger," she said, "He caught me in the garden last week, and I was very lucky to get out with my virtue intact. Doesn't he realise I'm still only 22?"

"Virtue?" I snorted. "Your only knowledge of virtue is that it comes between versatile and vitality in the dictionary!"

"Come on, we'd better get out before he comes home and rumbles what's been happening to his tablets."

I shoved the memory panel back into my pocket and we ran out of the front door just as the giant sun Betelgeuse was setting. Novo Terra, the fifth planet out from the sun, was an Earth type planet, and we had lived here for as long as I could remember, after the Kandaskans had invaded Earth, and all humans ordered to leave.

According to Granddad, Earth was a paradise, a lovely blue-green planet with rolling oceans, scudding white clouds and majestic snow capped mountains. I'd read history books, and decided that the reality was something that Granddad conveniently forgot when reminiscing. Earth seemed to me to be a place of wars between religious factions, industrial pollution, chronically short of vital resources, and in danger of becoming unfit for human habitation. Privately I decided that the Kandaskans had probably done us a big favour by taking Earth over. As far as I was concerned, they were welcome to it, though I would never had admitted such a thing to Granddad.

I had never seen mankind's home planet for myself, as I had been born in space on the long journey to this new world, a staging post to the further distant planets now colonised by humans, and named for its striking resemblance to Earth. Many refugees of the first wave of the Diaspora had opted to settle here, rather than journey on to unknown planets, possibly hostile to life as we knew it. Granddad told me that he had come out with a lifetime's supply of Eterna tablets, an anti-ageing drug taken by people when they reached middle age. It slowed ageing down to a mere crawl, enabling people not only to live for over 200 years, but also to remain fit and active for most of them.

He also told me how the police had done a purge a few years later, and rounded up all the Eterna they could find, and ruthlessly destroyed it. All of it!

We had heard of a tremendous variety of new societies that had developed, but none that we knew of, apart from Novo Terra, had banned the drug Eterna. Its import and manufacture was strictly prohibited, similar to the drug tobacco, a couple of centuries ago on Earth, so of course there was a thriving black market for it. Its simplicity enabled it to be made cheaply, and so easily that the authorities had little chance of stamping it out.

Granddad summed up the resistance to its ban. "We had to give up our homes, and our planet. I'm buggered if I'm going to give up Eterna as well." So were many of the other first generation settlers.

"Granddad, what's buggered mean, and why did they ban your Eterna?"

"Bugger's a rude word, and don't you let your mother catching you saying it. As for what it means, who knows? And Eterna was banned because Novo Terra got to be so overcrowded that it can't support a lot of people who live for more than 200 years. Many of us got here and said, so far and no further, while the adventurous lot went on to places like Tertius, Imagine and Taliban, and set up shop there. Now go and play, Shaani, and leave me in peace for a couple of hours."

I told Hayley, Jenna and Caitlin the new word, and we liked the sound of it and used it on every possible occasion, sometimes forgetting where we were, and earning many a hiding from our mothers, until we grew too big for such discipline. Of course, we eventually grew out of our childish fascination with forbidden words, though Jenna never relinquished her nickname for my Granddad, "Old Bugger".

Abuse of the regulations governing the use of Eterna reached such proportions that heavy penalties for its manufacture, supply and use were introduced.

Makers were sentenced to automatic exile from Novo Terra, and pushers received long jail terms. Users were punished by large fines for a first offence, then jail terms for second offenders. Users deemed incorrigible were banished. I asked Granddad about it once.

"But surely, if you're banished to Haven, or somewhere like that, it would be good wouldn't it? You could take Eterna without having to worry."

"That would be too easy," he grumbled. "They put them on ships going to planets so far away that they'd be dead of old age before they ever saw an Eterna tablet."

"But if you go in cold sleep, then you'd be OK, wouldn't you?"

"Hah!" he snorted. "They need somebody to do the shit work on the ships, so they don't allow deportees the luxury of cold sleep. It's just another example of bloody-minded bureaucracy at work. They have to have their pound of flesh."

"Pound of flesh?" I queried. That led to a discussion of some old writer from the dark ages on Earth, and the subject of Eterna was dropped.

Granddad was one of the old incorrigibles, and was now on his final warning. My mother worked in law enforcement, and would let me know when a snap Eterna purge was coming, so that I could break into Granddad's house and destroy the evidence.

Granddad would complain bitterly about low lifes who'd break in and steal an old man's Eterna, but we'd never let on that it was me who was doing it for his own good. If he'd known, I wouldn't have lived long enough to need my first Eterna tablet.

I decided that before I was old enough to need to start taking it, usually around the age of 50 or 60, I was going to migrate off world. If I went voluntarily and not as a deportee, I'd be entitled to cold sleep passage, so would arrive at my destination still young enough to benefit from a legal supply of Eterna.

If Granddad was still alive by then, I hoped I'd have a daughter who could continue to cover up his transgressions, though as he'd be around 250 years old by then, Authority would be asking some pretty pointed questions. I could only pray that he'd have some equally pointed answers!

© Sandy Parkinson, July 2006. Word count 1240