Outnumbering the Dead

by Frederik Pohl

  3

  All the worlds know the name of Rafiel, but, actually, 'Rafiel isn't all of his name. That name, in full, is Rafiel GutmakerFensterbom, just as Docilia, in full, is Docilia Megareth-Morb, and Mosay is Mosay Koi Mosayus. But 'Rafiel' is all he needs. Basically, that is the way you can tell when you've finally become a major vid star. You no longer need all those names to be identified or even to get your mail delivered. Even among a race of ten trillion separate, living, named human beings, when you have their kind of stardom a single name is quite enough.

  Rafiel's difficulty at present was that he didn't happen to be in his own condo, where his mail was. Instead he was in Docilia's, located fifty-odd storeys above his own in the arcology. He really did want to know what messages were waiting for him.

  On the other hand, this particular delay was worthwhile. Although Rafiel had been sleeping for eleven days, his glands had not. He was well charged up for the exertions of Docilia's bed. He came to climax in record time - the first time - with Docilia helpfully speeding him along. The second time was companionably hers. Then they lay pleasantly spooned, with Rafiel drowsily remembering now and then to kiss the back of her neck under the fair hair. It wasn't Alegretta's hair, he thought, though without any real pain (you couldn't actually go on aching all your life for a lost love, though sometimes he thought he was coming close); but it was nice hair, and it was always nice to make love to this tiny, active little body. But after a bit she stretched, yawned and left him, fondly promising to be quickly back, while she went to return her calls. He rolled over to gaze at the pleasing sight of her naked and youthfully sweet departing back.

  It was a fact, Rafiel knew, that Docilia wasn't youthful in any chronological sense. In terms of life span she was certainly a good deal older than himself, however she looked. But you couldn't ignore the way she looked, either, because the way she looked was what the audiences were going to see. As the story of Oedipus Rex began to come back to him, he began to wonder: Would any audience believe for one moment that this girlish woman could be his mother?

  It was a silly thought. The audiences weren't going to worry about that sort of thing. If it registered with them at all it would be only another incongruity of the kind that they loved so well. Rafiel dismissed the worry, and then, as he lay there, pleasantly at ease, he at last became aware of the faint whisper of music from Docilia's sound system.

  So it had been an agendaed tryst after all, he thought tolerantly. But a sweet one. If she had not forgotten to have Victorium's score playing from the moment they entered her flat, at least she had been quite serious about the lovemaking he had come there for. So Rafiel did what she wanted him to do; he lay there, letting the music tell its story to his ears. It wasn't a bad score at all, he thought critically. He was beginning to catch the rhythms in his throat and feet when Docilia came back.

  She was glowing. 'Oh, Rafiel,' she cried, 'look at this!'

  She was waving a tomograph, and when she handed it to him he was astonished to see that it was an image of what looked like a three-month foetus. He blinked at her in surprise. 'Yours?'

  She nodded ecstatically. 'They just sent it from the creche,' she explained, nervous with pleasure. 'Isn't it tres belle?

  'Why, that's molto bene,' he said warmly. 'I didn't know you were enceinte at all. Who's the padre?'

  She shrugged prettily. 'Oh, his name is Charlus. I don't think you know him, but he's really good, isn't he? I mean, look at that gorgeous child.'

  In Rafiel's opinion no first-trimester foetus could be called anything like 'gorgeous', but he knew what was expected of him and was not willing to dampen her delight. 'It's certainly a good-looking embryo, sema dubito,' he told her with sincerity.

  'His always are! He's fathered some of the best children I've ever seen - good-looking, and with his dark blue eyes, and oh, so tall and strong!' She hesitated for a moment, prettily almost blushing. Then, 'We're going to share the bambino for a year,' she confided proudly. 'As a family, I mean. When the baby's born Charlus and I are going to start a home together. Don't you think that's a wonderful idea?'

  There was only one possible answer to that. 'Of course I do,' said Rafiel, regardless of whether he did or not.

  She gave him a fond pat. 'That's what you ought to do too, Rafiel. Have a child with some nice dama, bring the baby up together.'

  'And when would I find the time?' he asked. But that wasn't a true answer. The true answer was that, yes, he would have liked nothing better, provided the right woman was willing to donate the ovum... but the right woman had, long ago, firmly foreclosed that possibility.

  Docilia had said something that he missed. When he asked for a repeat, she said, 'I said, and it'll help my performance, won't it?'

  He was puzzled. 'Help how?'

  She said, impatient with his lack of understanding, 'Because Jocasta's a mutter, don't you see? That's the whole point of the story, isn't it? And now I can get right into the part, because I'm being a mutter, too.'

  Rafiel said sincerely, 'You'll be fine.' He meant it, too. He had assumed she would all along.

  'Yes, certo,' she said absently, thinking already of something else. 'I think I ought to give a copy to the dad. He'll be so excited.'

  'I would be,' Rafiel agreed. She blinked and returned her attention to him. She lifted the sheet and peered under it for a thoughtful moment.

  'I think,' she said judiciously, 'if you're not in a great hurry to leave, if we just give it a few more minutes....'

  'No hurry at all,' he said, pulling her down to him and stroking her back in a no-hurry-at-all way. 'Well,' he said. 'So what else have you been doing? Did they release your Inquisitor yet?'

  'Three days ago,' she said, rubbing her foot along his ankle. 'God, those clothes were so heavy, and then the last scene- You didn't see it, of course?'

  'How could I?'

  'No, of course not. Well, try to, si c'est possible, because I'm really fine in the auto-da-fe scene.'

  'What scene?' Rafiel knew that Docilia had finished shooting something about the Spanish Inquisition, with lots of torture - torture stories always went well in this world that had so little personal experience of any kind of suffering. But he hadn't actually seen any part of it.

  'Where they burn me at the stake. Quelle horreur! See, they spread the wood all around in a huge circle and light it at the edges, and I'm chained to the stake in the middle. Che cosa! I'm running from side to side, trying to get away from the fire as it bums toward me, and then I start burning myself, capisce? And then I just fall down on the burning coals.'

  'It sounds wonderful,' Rafiel said, faintly envious. Maybe it was time for him to start looking for dramatic parts instead of all the song and dance?

  'I was wonderful,' she said absently, reaching under the covers to see what was happening. Then she turned her face to his. 'And, guess what? You're getting to be kind of wonderful yourself, galubka, right now....'

  Three times was as far as Rafiel really thought he wanted to go. Anyway, Docilia was now in a hurry to send off the picture of her child. 'Let yourself out?' she asked, getting up. Then, naked at her bedroom door, she stopped to look back at him.

  'We'll all be fine in this Oedipus, Rafiel,' she assured him. 'You and me in the lead parts, and Mosay putting it all together, and that merveilleux score.' Which was still repeating itself from her sound system, he discovered.

  He blew her a kiss, laughing. 'I'm listening, I'm listening,' he assured her. And did in fact listen for a few moments.

  Yes, Rafiel told himself, it really was a good score. Oedipus would be a successful production, and when they had rehearsed it and revised it and performed it and recorded it, it would be flashed all over the solar system, over all Earth and the Moon and the capsule colonies on Mars and Triton and half a dozen other moons, and the orbiting habitats wherever they might be, and even to the distant voyagers well on their way to some other star - to all ten million, million human beings, or as many of them as cared to
watch it. And it would last. Recordings of it would survive for centuries, to be taken out and enjoyed by people not yet born, because anything that Rafiel appeared in became an instant classic.

  Rafiel got up off Docilia's warm, shuddery bed and stood before her mirror, examining himself. Everything the mirror displayed looked quite all right. The belly was flat, the skin clear, the eyes bright - he looked as good as any hale and well-kept man of middle years would have looked, in the historically remote days when middle age could be distinguished from any other age. That was what those periodical visits to the hospital did for him. Though they couldn't make him immortal, like everyone else, they could at least do that much for his appearance and his general comity.

  He sighed and rescued the red pantaloons from the floor. As he began to pull them on he thought: They can do all that, but they could not make him live for ever, like everyone else.

  That wasn't an immediate threat. Rafiel was quite confident that he would live a while yet - well, quite a long while, if you measured it in days and seconds, perhaps another thirty years or so. But then he wouldn't live after that. And Docilia and Mosay and Victorium - yes, and lost Alegretta, too, and everyone else he had ever known - would perhaps take out the record of this new Oedipus Rex now and then and look at it and say to each other, 'Oh, do you remember dear old Rafiel? How sweet he was. And what a pity.' But dear old Rafiel would be dead.

  4

  The arcology Rafiel lives and works in rises 235 storeys above central Indiana, and it has a population of 165,000 people. That's about average. From outside - apart from its size - the arcology looks more like something you'd find in a kitchen than a monolithic community. You might think of it as resembling the kind of utensil you would use to ream the juice out of an orange half (well, an orange half that had been stretched long and skinny), with its star-shaped cross section and its rounding taper to the top. Most of the dwelling units are in the outer ribs of the analogy's star. That gives a tenant a nice view, if he is the kind of person who really wants to look out on central Indiana. Rafiel isn 't. As soon as he could afford it he moved to the more expensive inside condos overlooking the lively central atrium of the arcology, with all its glorious light and its graceful loops of flowering lianas and its wall-to-wall people -people on the crosswalks, people on their own balconies, even tiny, distant people moving about the floor level nearly two hundred storeys below. To see all that is to see life. From the outer apartments, what can you see? Only farmlands, and the radiating troughs of the maglev trains, punctuated by the to-the-horizon stretch of all the other analogies that rose from the plain like the stubble of a monster beard.

  In spite of all Rafiel's assurances, Docilia insisted on getting dressed and escorting him back to his own place. She chattered all the way. 'So this city you saved, si chiama Thebes,' she was explaining to him as they got into the elevator, 'was in a hell of a mess before you got there. Before Oedipus did, I mean. This Sphinx creature was just making schrecklichkeit. It was doing all kinds of rotten things - I don't know - like killing people, stealing their food, that sort of thing. I guess. Anyway, the whole city was just desperate for help, and then you came along to save them.'

  'And I killed the Sphinx, so they made me roi de Thebes out of gratitude?'

  'Certo! Well, almost. You see, you don't have to kill it, exactly. It has this riddle that no one can figure out. You just have to solve its riddle, and then it I guess just goes kaput. So then you're their hero, Oedipus, but they don't exactly make you king. The way you get to be that is you marry the queen. That's me, Jocasta. I'm just a pauvre petite widow lady from the old dead king, but as soon as you marry me that makes you the capo di tutti capi. I'm still the queen, and I've got a brother, Cleon, who's a kind of a king, too. But you're the boss.' The elevator stopped, making her blink in slight surprise. 'Oh, siamo qui,' she announced, and led the way out of the car.

  Rafiel halted her with a hand on her shoulder. 'I can find my way home from here. You didn't need to come with me at all, verstehen sie?'

  'I wanted to, piccina. I thought you might be a little, well, wobbly.'

  'I am wobbly, all right,' he said, grinning, 'mais pas from being in the hospital.' He kissed her, and then turned her around to face the elevator. Before he released her he said, 'Oh, listen. What's this riddle of the Sphinx I'm supposed to solve?'

  She gave him an apologetic smile over her shoulder. 'It's kind of dopey. "What goes on four legs, two legs and three legs, and is strongest on two." Can you imagine?'

  He looked at her. 'You mean you don't know the answer to that one?'

  'Oh, but I do know the answer, Rafiel. Mosay told me what it was. It's-'

  'Go on, Cele,' he said bitterly. 'Auf wiedersehen. The answer to that riddle is "a man", but I can see why it would be hard for somebody like you to figure it out.'

  Because, of course, he thought as he entered the lobby of his condo, none of these eternally youthful ones would ever experience the tottery, 'three-legged', ancient-with-acane phase of life.

  *

  'Welcome back, Rafiel,' someone called, and Rafiel saw for the first time that the lobby was full of paparazzi. They were buzzing at him in mild irritation, a little annoyed because they had missed him at the hospital, but nevertheless resigned to waiting on the forgivable whim of a superstar.

  It was one of the things that Rafiel had had to resign himself to, long ago. It was a considerable nuisance. On the other hand, to be truthful, it didn't take much resignation. When the paps were lurking around for you, it proved your fame, and it was always nice to have renewed proof of that. He gave them a smile for the cameras, and a quick cut-and-point couple of steps of a jig - it was a number from his biggest success, the Here's Hamlet! of two years earlier. 'Yes,' he said, answering all their questions at once, 'I'm out of the hospital, I'm back in shape, and I'm hot to trot on the new show that Mosay's putting together for me, Oedipus Rex.' He started toward the door of his own flat. A woman put herself in his way.

  'Raysia,' she introduced herself, as though one name were enough for her, too. 'I'm here for the interview.'

  He stopped dead. Then he recognized the face. Yes, one name was enough, for a top pap with her own syndicate. 'Raysia, dear! Cosi bella to see you here, but - what interview are we talking about?'

  'Your dramaturge set the appointment up last week,' she explained. And, of course, that being so, there was nothing for Rafiel to do but to go through with it, making a mental note to get back to Mosay at the first opportunity to complain at not having been told.

  But giving an interview was not a hard thing to do, after all, not with all the practice Rafiel had had. He fixed the woman up with a drink and a comfortable chair and took his place at the exercise barre in his study - he always liked to be working when he was interviewed, to remind them he was a dancer. First, though, he had a question. It might not have occurred to him if Docilia hadn't made him think of lost Alegretta, but now he had to ask it. He took a careful first position at the barre and swept one arm gracefully aloft as he asked, 'Does your syndicate go to Mars?'

  'Of course. I'm into toutes les biospheres,' she said proudly, 'not just Mars, but Mercury and the moons and nearly every orbiter. As well as, naturally, the whole planet Earth.'

  'That's wonderful,' he said, intending to flatter her and doing his best to sound as though this sort of thing hadn't ever happened to him before. Slowly, carefully, he did his barre work, hands always graceful, getting full extension on the legs, her camera following automatically as he answered her questions. Yes, he felt fine. Yes, they were going to get into production on the new Oedipus right away - yes, he'd heard the score, and yes, he thought it was wonderful. 'And the playwright,' he explained, 'is the greatest writer who ever lived. Wonderful old Sophocles, two thousand nearly seven hundred years old, and the play's as fresh as anything today.'

  She looked at him with a touch of admiration for an actor who had done his homework. 'Have you read it?'

  He ha
dn't done that much homework, though he fully intended to. 'Well, not in the original,' he admitted, since a non-truth was better than a lie.

  'I have,' she said absently, thinking about her next question - disconcertingly, too. Rafiel turned around at the barre to work on the right leg for a while. Hiding the sudden, familiar flash of resentment.

  'Vous etes terrible,' he chuckled, allowing only rueful amusement to show. 'All of you! You know so much.' For they all did, and how unfair. Imagine! This child - this ancient twenty-year-old - reading a Greek play in the original, and not even Greek, he thought savagely, but whatever rough dialect had been spoken nearly three thousand years ago.

  'Mais pourquoi non? We have time,' she said, and got to her question. 'How do you feel about the end of the play?' she asked.

  'Where Oedipus blinds himself, you mean?' he tried, doing his best to sort out what he had been told of the story. 'Yes, that's pretty bloody, isn't it? Stabbing out his own eyes, that's a very powerful-'

  She was shaking her head. 'No, pas du tout, I don't mean the blinding scene. I mean at the very end, where the chorus says' - her voice changed as she quoted –

  See proud Oedipus!

  He proves that no mortal

  Can ever be known to be happy

  Until he is allowed to leave this life,

  Until he is dead,

  And cannot suffer any more.

  She paused, fixing him with her eye while the camera zeroed in to catch every fleeting shade of expression on his face. 'I'm not a very good translator,' she apologized, 'but do you feel that way, Rafiel? I mean, as a mortal?'

  Actors grow reflexes for situations like that - for the times when a fellow player forgets a line, or there's a disturbance from the audience - when something goes wrong and everybody's looking at you and you have to deal with it. He dealt with it. He gave her a sober smile and opened his mouth. 'Hai, that's so true, in a way,' he heard his mouth saying. 'N'est ce pas? I mean, not just for me but, credo, for all of us? It doesn't matter however long we live, there's always that big final question at the end that we call "death", and all we have to confront it with is courage. And that's the lesson of the story, I think: courage! To face all our pains and fears and go on anyway!'