ROMSO Cyprus Knowledge Base

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The Fountain of Ages (original title : ) is a short novel by Nancy Kress published in 2007 and translated into French and published by Le Bélial' in 2021. He won the 2007 Nebula Award for Best Short Novel.

Executive summary
A few years before the beginning of the 19th century, Max Feder was an old man of eighty-six years. He has lived in a nursing home for ten years, receiving every Sunday the visit of his only son accompanied by his two young children. On one of his visits, he lost a ring with old memories, a ring he had worn since the age of forty-four. He remembers his youth...

Max Feder, then twenty-year-old military youth, met Daria, an 18-year-old prostitute, on leave in Cyprus. Immediately conquered by each other, they spent seven intense days together and then Max had to leave, with in memory of Daria a wick of her hair and a print of her lips on a piece of paper. After the war, he returned to Cyprus to try to find her, in vain. He then married Miriam, but love within their couple soon disappeared.

Ten years after he met Daria, he crossed his face on the front page of a magazine, as an illustration of an article about Daria Cleary, the wife of the billionaire British financier Peter Morton Cleary, who had just had surgery on a brain tumor and is currently in Manhattan, not far from where Max lives. After six weeks of searching for the right person to pay a bribe, and after giving him half of his savings, Max manages to enter the hospital and then into the room in which Daria is located. She seems surprisingly old since she was eighteen. Max then met her husband and furious with the submissive look he saw in Daria's eyes, slapping her and then running away, not without Daria having previously slipped into his ear an appointment for the evening. At this appointment, a teenager sneaks him into a pocket a credit chip wrapped in a piece of paper asking him to use that money to buy shares from the biotechnology company LifeLong. After making this purchase, sad and upset to have once again lost Daria, Max gets drunk and only returns home the next morning. Upon his arrival, after an umpteenth argument with his wife, he decided to announce his will to divorce him when the latter told him that she was pregnant, which made Max's desire to leave her void.

Two days after purchasing LifeLong's shares, the world discovers that Daria's brain tumor, as well as the one just detected on her spine, produce novel proteins that can generate stem cells. LifeLong had been purchased shortly before by Peter Morton Cleary to take commercial control of Daria tumours. This