"Is there anyone we should be going back and getting?"

"No."

Cam's Antarctic base is just becoming visible.

"Shuttle ride all the way to point B or do you want to test out the elevators?"

" - Elevators."

Manius'll stay in the shuttle; Fulgencio also wants to ride an elevator; Viator and Valentius confer and decide on the shuttle.

Elevator-riders can be dropped off and the shuttle can carry on. The elevators can go really fast, they have some of the same gravitics tricks the shuttle does to compensate for the acceleration, but the shuttle will still get there ahead of them by a bit.

The remaining solquinoxen go pretty quiet looking out at the view.

"The one of these who we're going to be resurrecting wants to know the limits on transhuman traits for new bodies."

"Uh, the weirder I get with it the likelier it is they'll have an awful time moving around, healing from injuries, not getting cancer, etcetera. The human brain expects a human body plan, and it's plastic enough to figure it out if you give it more limbs and consistent feedback associated with those, flying is just exhausting for humans, but if we start talking mermaid tails and tentacles that will tend to break down as an assumption. I especially don't know how any of this interacts with your weird genetics, I was taking your word for it on wings and arms being safe enough for you."

"I've been fine so far in that regard, yes.  How willing are you to reresurrect people in the event of improper healing or 'cancer'?"

"I mean, I'll do it, I'd just sooner not have to - do you not get cancer -"

"I hadn't heard of anything matching the little I read about it, but none of me were medical folk.  If we have something similar we call it something else."

"It's when a cell stops playing nicely with the internal coordination mechanisms to do with which cells should divide and which should not and which should die off, and starts dividing uncontrollably. It comes up with supernumerary parts because they're dissimilar from what the normal anti-cancer mechanisms expect to encounter."

"I'm a medical folk.  Never heard of that happening."  She doesn't stop looking out the window to speak.

"Point to the stars doing star magic, then, cancer's nasty. - what diagnoses do deaths from old age tend to involve?"

"Usually something to do with the heart, lungs, and/or bones becoming weaker and less effective."

"I was one of the star clouds working on keeping parasites from evolving, which is a really common thing for people to do with their afterlives.  I never heard of anyone working on preventing cancer.  Maybe it was solved a long time ago or just takes less maintenance, I suppose, but it might just be another difference between our humanities the same way lungs are."

"Yeah, I'd be sort of surprised if it was low-maintenance and less surprised if your cells just don't get jumped up in quite that way in the first place."

"Mm.  The star is trying to pitch me on having you load up the body with the highest potentially-reasonable number of extra limbs, since other people will presumably also want similar things and they expect it would be better for the limit to be known sooner rather than later."

"I guess I could do extra arms and wings and a big tail to balance all that."

"They're also wondering whether it would be possible to split each arm at the elbow, total of eight hands, but I think I'm making progress on convincing them that even with four I'm only as coordinated as I am because I don't have to divide my attention equally between my bodies and am generally not moving all of my selves at once.  Yes or no on digitigrade legs, being really tall, unique skin tones and eye colors, horns, fangs, pointed ears, that sort of thing?  Any sensory enhancement on offer?"

(The various remaining winters smile to themselves out the window and squirm and bite their lip and dig their fingernails into their arm, and say nothing.)

"I can do digitigrade and tall. Colors and horns and fangs and ears are all low risk and doable as long as I don't use a pigment that'll poison a local or something. If they wanna be furry I can do that too. I do not know there to be prior art on arm splits so I wouldn't be confident I could make that work to begin with. I can add weird cartilaginous superfluities no big deal. I can do claws but they might want that on only one set of arms. I can do hooves, on the digitigrade legs. Sensory enhancements I wouldn't want to build in organically knowing as little as I do about how you work but there's tech options."

" - Would we have to die to get at the tech options?  Or otherwise generate inconvenience?"

"No, I can do those on live people no big deal. Do you know how to use contacts?"

"The lenses that go on the surface of your eyes?"

"That's them."

"Given the context I expect I would be very motivated to learn!"