This Immortal

by Roger Zelazny

  It. Down below.

  Death, heat, mud-streaked tides, new shorelines. . . .

  Vulcanism on Chios, Samos, Ikaria, Naxos. . . .

  Halicarnassos bitten away. . . .

  The western end of Kos visible again, but so what?

  . . . Death, heat, mud-streaked tides.

  New shorelines. . . .

  I had brought my whole convoy out of its way in order to check the scene. Myshtigo took notes, also photos.

  Lorel had said, “Continue on with the tour. Damage to property has not been too severe, because the Mediterranean was mostly full of junkstuff. Personal injuries were either fatal or are already being taken care of. —So continue on.”

  I skimmed in low over what remained of Kos—the westward tail of the island. It was a wild, volcanic country, and there were fresh craters, fuming ones, amidst the new, bright sea-laces that crisscrossed over the land. The ancient capital of Astypalaia had once stood there. Thucydides tells us it had been destroyed by a powerful earthquake. He should have seen this one. My northern city of Kos had then been inhabited from 366 B.C. Now all was gone but the wet and the hot. There were no survivors—and the plane tree of Hippocrates and the mosque of the Loggia and the castle of the Knights of Rhodes, and the fountains, and my cottage, and my wife—swept by what tides or caught in what sea-pits, I do not know—had gone the ways of dead Theocritus—he who had done his best to immortalize the place so many years before. Gone. Away. Far. . . . Immortal and dead to me. Further east, a few peaks of that high mountain range which had interrupted the northern coastal plain were still poking themselves up out of the waters. There was the mighty peak of Dhikaios, or Christ the Just, which had overlooked the villages of the northern slopes. Now it was a tiny islet, and no one had made it up to the top in time.

  It must have been like this, that time so many years ago, when the sea near my homeland, bounded by the Chalcidic peninsula, had risen up and assaulted the land; in that time when the waters of the inland sea had forced them an outlet through the gorge of Tempe, the mighty convulsions of the thing scoring even the mountain walls of the home of the gods itself, Olympus; and those it spared were only Mr. and Mrs. Deukalion, kept afloat by the gods for purposes of making a myth and some people to tell it to.

  “You lived there,” said Myshtigo.

  I nodded.

  “You were born in the village of Makrynitsa, though, in the hills of Thessaly?”

  “Yes.”

  “But you made your home there?”

  “For a little while.”

  “‘Home’ is a universal concept,” said he. “I appreciate it.”

  “Thanks.”

  I continued to stare downward, feeling sad, bad, mad, and then nothing.

  Athens after absence returns to me with a sudden familiarity which always refreshes, often renews, sometimes incites. Phil once read me some lines by one of the last great Greek poets, George Seferis, maintaining that he had referred to my Greece when he said, “. . . A country that is no longer our own country, nor yours either”—because of the Vegans. When I pointed out that there were no Vegans available during Seferis’ lifetime, Phil retorted that poetry exists independent of time and space and that it means whatever it means to the reader. While I have never believed that a literary license is also good for time-travel, I had other reasons for disagreeing, for not reading it as a general statement.

  It is our country. The Goths, the Huns, the Bulgars, the Serbs, the Franks, the Turks, and lately the Vegans have never made it go away from us. People, I have outlived. Athens and I have changed together, somewhat. Mainland Greece, though, is mainland Greece, and it does not change for me. Try taking it away, whatever you are, and my klephtes will stalk the hills, like the chthonic avengers of old. You will pass, but the hills of Greece will remain, will be unchanged, with the smell of goat thigh-bones burning, with a mingling of blood and wine, a taste of sweetened almonds, a cold wind by night, and sides as bluebright as the eyes of a god by day. Touch them, if you dare.

  That is why I am refreshed whenever I return, because now that I am a man with many years behind me, I feel this way about the entire Earth. That is why I fought, and why I killed and bombed, and why I tried every legal trick in the book, too, to stop the Vegans from buying up the Earth, plot by plot, from the absentia government, there on Taler. That is why I pushed my way, under another new name, into the big civil service machine that runs this planet—and why Arts, Monuments and Archives, in particular. There, I could fight to preserve what still remained, while I waited for the next development

  The Radpol vendetta had frightened the expatriates as well as the Vegans. They did not realize that the descendants of those who had lived through the Three Days would not willingly relinquish their best areas of coastline for Vegan resorts, nor yield up their sons and daughters to work in those resorts; nor would they guide the Vegans through the ruins of their cities, indicating points of interest for their amusement. That is why the Office is mainly a foreign service post for most of its staff.

  We had sent out the call of return to those descendants of the Martian and Titanian colonies, and there had been no return. They had grown soft out there, soft from leeching on a culture which had had a headstart on ours. They lost their identity. They abandoned us.

  Yet, they were the Earthgov, de jure, legally elected by the absent majority—and maybe de facto too, if it ever came to that. Probably so. I hoped it wouldn’t come to that.

  For over half a century there had been a stalemate. No new Veggy resorts, no new Radpol violence. No Return, either. Soon there would be a new development. It was in the air—if Myshtigo was really surveying.

  So I came back to Athens on a bleak day, during a cold, drizzling rainfall, an Athens rocked and rearranged by the recent upheavals of Earth, and there was a question in my head and bruises on my body, but I was refreshed. The National Museum still stood there between Tossitsa and Vasileos Irakliou, the Acropolis was even more ruined that I remembered, and the Garden Altar Inn—formerly the old Royal Palace—there at the northwest corner of the National Gardens, across from Syndagma Square, had been shaken but was standing and open for business, despite.

  We entered, and checked in.

  As Commissioner of Arts, Monuments and Archives, I received special considerations. I got The Suite: Number 19.

  It wasn’t exactly the way I’d left it. It was clean and neat.

  The little metal plate on the door said:

  This suite was the headquarters of Konstantin Karaghiosis during the founding of the Radpol and muck of the Returnist Rebellion.

  Inside, there was a plaque on the bedstead which read:

  Konstantin Karaghiosis slept in this bed.

  In the long, narrow front room I spotted one on the far wall. It said:

  The stain on this wall was caused by a bottle of beverage, hurled across the room by Konstantin Karaghiosis, in celebration of the bombing of Madagascar.

  Believe that, if you want to.

  Konstantin Karaghiosis sat in this chair, insisted another.

  I was really afraid to go into the bathroom.

  Later that night, as I walked the wet and rubble-strewn pavements of my almost deserted city, my old memories and my current thoughts were like the coming together of two rivers. I’d left the others snoring inside, descended the wide stairway from the Altar, paused to read one of the inscriptions from Perikles’ funeral oration—“The entire Earth is the tomb of great men”—there on the side of the Memorial to the Unknown Soldier, and I studied for a moment those great-thewed limbs of that archaic warrior, laid out with all his weapons on his funeral bed, all marble and bas-relief, yet somehow almost warm, because night becomes Athens —and then I walked on by, passing up Leoforos Amalias.

  It had been a fine dinner: ouzo, giuvetsi, Kokkineli, yaourti, Metaxa, lots of dark coffee, and Phil arguing with George about evolution.

  “Do you not see a convergence of life and myth, here, during t
he last days of life on this planet?”

  “What do you mean?” asked George, polishing off a mess of narantzi and adjusting his glasses for peering.

  “I mean that as humanity rose out of darkness it brought with it legends and myths and memories of fabulous creatures. Now we are descending again into that same darkness. The Life Force grows weak and unstable, and there is a reversion to those primal forms which for so long existed only as dim racial memories—”

  “Nonsense, Phil. Life Force? In what century do you make your home? You speak as though all of life were One single, sentient entity.”

  “It is.”

  “Demonstrate, please.”

  “You have the skeletons of three satyrs in your museum, and photographs of live ones. They live in the hills of this country.

  “Centaurs, too, have been seen here—and there are vampire flowers, and horses with vestigial wings. There are sea serpents in every sea. Imported spiderbats plow our skies. There are even sworn statements by persons who have seen the Black Beast of Thessaly, an eater of men, bones and all—and all sorts of other legends are coming alive.”

  George sighed.

  “What you have said so far proves nothing other than that in all of infinity there is a possibility for any sort of life form to put in an appearance, given the proper precipitating factors and a continuous congenial environment. The things you have mentioned which are native to Earth are mutations, creatures originating near various Hot Spots about the world. There is one such place up in the hills of Thessaly. If the Black Beast were to crash through that door at this moment, with a satyr mounted on its back, it would not alter my opinion, nor prove yours.”

  I’d looked at the door at that moment, hoping not for the Black Beast, but for some inconspicuous-looking old man who might sidle by, stumble, and pass on, or for a waiter bringing Diane an unordered drink with a note folded inside the napkin.

  But none of these things happened. As I passed up Leo-foros Amalias, by Hadrians Gate, and past the Olympieion, I still did not know what the word was to be. Diane had contacted the Radpol, but there had been no response as yet Within another thirty-six hours we would be skimming from Athens to Lamia, then onward by foot through areas of strange new trees with long, pale, red-veined leaves, hanging vines, and things that brachiate up above, and all the budding places of the strige-fleur down among their roots; and then on, across sun-washed plains, up twisty goat trails, through high, rocky places, and down deep ravines, past ruined monasteries. It was a crazy notion, but Myshtigo, again, had wanted it that way. Just because I’d been born there, he thought he’d be safe. I’d tried to tell him of the wild beasts, of the cannibal Kouretes—the tribesmen who wandered there. But he wanted to be like Pausanius and see it all on foot. Okay then, I decided, if the Radpol didn’t get him, then the fauna would.

  But, just to be safe, I had gone to the nearest Earthgov Post Office, obtained a dueling permit, and paid my death-tax. I might as well be on the up-and-up about these things, I decided, me being a Commissioner and all.

  If Hasan needed killing, I’d kill him legally.

  I heard the sound of a bouzouki coming from a small cafe on the other side of the street. Partly because I wanted to, and partly because I had a feeling that I was being followed, I crossed over and entered the place. I moved to a small table where I could keep my back to the wall and my eyes on the door, ordered Turkish coffee, ordered a package of cigarettes, listened to the songs of death, exile, disaster, and the eternal faithlessness of women and men.

  It was even smaller inside than it had seemed from the street—low ceiling, dirt floor, real dark. The singer was a squat woman, wearing a yellow dress and much mascara. There was a rattling of glasses; a steady fall of dust descended through the dim air; the sawdust was damp underfoot. My table was set at the near end of the bar. There were maybe a dozen other people spotted about the place: three sleepy-eyed girls sat drinking at the bar, and a man wearing a dirty fez, and a man resting his head on an outstretched arm, and snoring; four men were laughing at a table diagonally across from me; a few others, solitary, were drinking coffee, listening, watching nothing in particular, waiting, or maybe not waiting, for something or someone to happen.

  Nothing did, though. So after my third cup of coffee, I paid the fat, moustached owner his tab, and left the place.

  Outside, the temperature seemed to have dropped several degrees. The street was deserted, and quite dark. I turned right into Leoforos Dionysiou Areopagitou and moved on until I reached the battered fence that runs along the southern slope of the Acropolis.

  I heard a footfall, way back behind me, at the corner. I stood there for half a minute, but there was only silence and very black night. Shrugging, I entered the gate and moved to the tenemos of Dionysius Eleutherios. Nothing remains of the temple itself but the foundation. I passed on, heading toward the Theater.

  Phil, then, had suggested that history moved in great cycles, like big clock hands passing the same numbers day after day.

  “Historical biology proves you wrong,” said George.

  “I didn’t mean literally,” replied Phil.

  “Then we ought to agree on the language we are speaking before we talk any further.”

  Myshtigo had laughed.

  Ellen touched Dos Santos’ arm and asked him about the poor horses the picadores rode. He had shrugged, poured her more Kokkineli, drank his own.

  “It is a part of the thing,” he’d said.

  And no message, no message. . . .

  I walked on through the mess time makes of greatness. A frightened bird leapt up on my right, uttered a frightened cry, was gone. I kept walking, wandered into the old Theater at last, moved downward through it. . . .

  Diane was not so amused as I had thought she would be by the stupid plaques that decorated my suite.

  “But they belong here. Of course. They do.”

  “Ha!”

  “At one time it would have been the heads of animals you had slain. Or the shields of your vanquished enemies. Were civilized now. This is the new way.”

  “Ha! again.” I changed the subject. “Any word on the Vegan?”

  “No”

  “You want his head.”

  “I’m not civilized. —Tell me, was Phil always such a fool, back in the old days?”

  “No, he wasn’t. Isn’t now, either. His was the curse of a half-talent. Now he is considered the last of the Romantic poets, and he’s gone to seed. He pushes his mysticism into nonsense because, like Wordsworth, he has outlived his day. He lives now in distortions of a pretty good past.

  “Like Byron, he once swam the Hellespont, but now, rather like Yeats, the only thing he really enjoys is the company of young ladies whom he can bore with his philosophy, or occasionally charm with a well-told reminiscence. He is old. His writing occasionally shows flashes of its former power, but it was not just his writing that was his whole style.”

  “How so?”

  “Well, I remember one cloudy day when he stood in the Theater of Dionysius and read a hymn to Pan which he had written. There was an audience of two or three hundred—and only the gods know why they showed up—but he began to read.

  “His Greek wasn’t very good yet, but his voice was quite impressive, his whole manner rather charismatic. After a time, it began to rain, lightly, but no one left. Near the end there was a peal of thunder, sounding awfully like laughter, and a sudden shudder ran through the crowd. I’m not saying that it was like that in the days of Thespis, but a lot of those people were looking over their shoulders as they left.

  “I was very impressed also. Then, several days later, read the poem—and it was nothing, it was doggerel, it was trite. It was the way he did it that was important. He lost that part of his power along with his youth, and what remained of what might be called art was not strong enough to make him great, to keep alive his personal legend. He resents this, and he consoles himself with obscure philosophy but in answer to your question—no,
he was not always such a fool.”

  “Perhaps even some of his philosophy is correct.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “The Big Cycles. The age of strange beasts is come upon us again. Also, the age of heroes, demigods.”

  “I’ve only met the strange beasts.”

  “‘Karaghiosis slept in this bed,’ it says here. Looks comfortable.”

  “It is. —See?”

  “Yes. Do I get to keep the plaque?”

  “If you want. . . .”

  I moved to the proskenion. The relief sculpture-world started at the steps, telling tales from the life of Dionysius Every tour guide and every member of a tour must, under a regulation promulgated by me, “. . . carry no fewer than three magnesium flares on his person, while traveling.” pulled the pin from one and cast it to the ground. The dazzle would not be visible below, because of the angle on the hillside and the blocking masonry.

  I did not stare into the bright flame, but above, at the silver-limned figures. There was Hermes, presenting the in fant god to Zeus, while the Corybantes tripped the Pyrrhi fantastic on either side of the throne; then there was Ikaros whom Dionysius had taught to cultivate the vine—he was preparing to sacrifice a goat, while his daughter was offering cakes to the god (who stood aside, discussing her with satyr); and there was drunken Silenus, attempting to hole up the sky like Atlas, only not doing so well; and there were all the other gods of the cities, paying a call to this Theater —and I spotted Hestia, Theseus, and Eirene with a horn of plenty. . . .

  “You burn an offering to the gods,” came a statement from nearby.

  I did not turn. It had come from behind my right shoulder, but I did not turn because I knew the voice.

  “Perhaps I do,” I said.

  “It has been a long time since you walked this land, this Greece.”

  “That is true.”

  “Is it because there has never been an immortal Penelope —patient as the mountains, trusting in the return of her kallikanzaros—weaving, patient as the hills?”

  “Are you the village story-teller these days?”