Outnumbering the Dead

by Frederik Pohl

  Mosay and Docilia were looking in, the dramaturge with a benign smile, Docilia with a quick kiss for Rafiel and another for Charlus. Although their appearance was a distraction, the kiss turned it into the kind of distraction that starts a new and pleasing line of thought; Docilia was in white again, but a minimum of white: a short white wraparound skirt, a short wraparound bolero on top, with bare flesh between and evidently nothing at all underneath. 'Everything going all right?' the dramaturge asked, and answered himself: 'Of course it is; it's going to be a merveille du monde. Dear ones, I just stopped by to tell you that I'm leaving you for a few days; I'm off to scout out some locations for shooting.'

  Rafiel took his eyes off Docilia and blinked at him. 'We're going to make Oedipus on location?'

  'I insist,' said Mosay firmly. 'No faux backgrounds; I want the real thing for Oedipus! We're going to have a Thebes that even the Thebans would admire, if there were any of them left.'

  Charlus cleared his throat. 'Is Docilia going with you?' he asked.

  That question had not occurred to Rafiel to ask, but once it was asked he wanted to know the answer, too. Mosay was looking thoughtfully at the choreographer. 'Well,' he said, 'I thought she might have some ideas. ... Why do you want to know that?'

  Charlus had an answer ready. 'Because we've started to work out some of the pas de deux routines, and Docilia ought to have a chance to try them out.' Rafiel did not think it was a truthful one.

  Evidently Mosay didn't, either. He pursed his lips, considering, but Docilia answered for him. 'Of course I should,' she said. 'You go on without me, Mosay. Have a nice trip; I'll see you when you get back. Only please, dear, try to find a place that isn't too hot. I sweat so when I'm dancing, you know.'

  Whatever plans Charlus had for Docilia, they were postponed. When at last they were through rehearsing, Docilia kissed the choreographer absently and pulled Rafiel along with her out of the room before Charlus could speak. '}'ai molto faim, dear,' she said - but only to Rafiel, 'and I've booked a table for us.'

  In the elevator, Rafiel looked at her thoughtfully. 'Didn't Charlus want to see you?'

  She smiled up at him, shrugging. 'But he acted as though he didn't want you to go off with Mosay,' Rafiel persisted. 'Or with me either, for that matter. Is he, well, jealous?'

  'Oh, Rafiel! What a terrible word that is, "jealous". Are you thinking of, what, the Othello thing?'

  'He's the father of your child,' Rafiel pointed out uncomfortably.

  'Mais oui, but why should he be jealous if I'm shtupping you or Mosay, liebling! I shtup him too, whenever he likes - when I don't have another date, of course. Come and eat a nice dinner, and stop worrying.'

  They walked together to their table - not on a balcony this time, but on a kind of elevated dais at the side of the room, so they could be well seen. It was the kind of place where theatre people gathered, at the bottom of the atrium. Tables in the open surrounded the fiftieth-floor rooftop lake. There was a net overhead to catch any carelessly dropped objects, and from time to time they could hear the whine of the magnets pulling some bit of trash away. But nothing ever struck the diners. The place was full of children, and Docilia smiled at every one of them, practising her upcoming motherhood. And swans floated in the lake, and stars were woven into the net overhead.

  When the servers were bringing their monkey-orange juice Rafiel remembered. 'Speaking of Charlus. He had an idea for your scene at the end. You know? Just before you go to hang yourself? As you're going out....'

  He looked around to see who was looking at them, then decided to give the fans a treat. He stood up and, in the little cleared space between their table and the railing, did the step Charlus had called 'gedruk’, mincing and swaying his hips. It was not unnoticed. Soft chuckles sounded from around the dining room. 'Oh, maybe yes,' Docilia said, nodding, pleased. 'It gets a laugh, doesn't it?'

  'Yes,' said Rafiel, 'but that's the thing. Do we want comedy here? I mean, you're just about to die....'

  'Exactly, dear,' she said, not understanding. 'That's why it will be twice as funny in the performance.'

  'Aber a morceau incongruous, don't you think? Comedy and death?'

  She was more puzzled than ever. 'Hai, that's what's funny, isn't it? I mean, dying. That's such a bizarre thing, it always makes the audience laugh.' And then, when she saw his face, she bit her lip. 'Pas all that funny for everybody, is it?' she said remorsefully. 'You're so normal, dear Rafiel. Sometimes I just forget.'

  He shrugged and forgave her. 'You know more about that than I do,' he admitted, knowing that he sounded still grumpy - glad when a famous news comic came over to chat. Being the kind of place it was, table-hopping was, of course, compulsory. As pleased as Rafiel at the interruption, Docilia showed her tomographs of the baby to the comic and got the required words of praise.

  Then it was Rafiel's turn to blunder. 'What sort of surrogate are you using?' he asked, to make conversation, and she gave him a sharp look.

  'Did somebody tell you? No? Well, it's cow,' she said, and waited to see what his response would be. She seemed aggrieved. When all he did was nod non-committally, she said, 'Charlus wanted to use something fancier. Do you think I did the right thing, Rafiel? Insisting on an ordinary cow surrogate, I mean? So many people are using water buffalo now....'

  He laughed at her. 'I wouldn't know, would I? I've never been a parent.'

  'Well, I have and, believe me, Rafiel, it isn't easy. What difference does it make, really, what kind of animal incubates your child for you? But Charlus says it's important and, oh, Rafiel, we had such a battle over it!'

  She shook her head, mourning the obstinacy and foolishness of men. Then she decided to forgive. 'It isn't altogether his fault, I suppose. He's worried. Especially now. Especially because it's almost fin the second trimester and that means it's time-'

  She came to a quick halt, once more biting her lip. Rafiel knew why: it was more suddenly remembered tact. The end of the second trimester was when they had to do the procedure to make the child immortal, because at that point the foetal immune system wasn't developed yet and they could manipulate it in the ways that would make it live essentially for ever.

  'That's a scary time, I know,' said Rafiel, to be comforting, but of course he did know. Everyone knew he knew, and why he knew. The operation was serious for a little foetus. A lot of them died, when the procedure didn't work - or managed to survive, but with their natural immune systems mortally intact. Like Rafiel.

  'Oh, mon cher,' she said, 'you know I didn't mean anything personal by that!'

  'Of course you didn't,' he said reassuringly; but all the same, the happy buzz of the day's good rehearsing was lost, the evening's edge was gone, and long before they had finished their leisurely supper, he had abandoned any plan of inviting her back to his condo for the night.

  It did spoil the evening for him. Too early for sleep, too late to make any other arrangements, he wandered alone through his condo. He tried reading, but it seemed like a lot of effort. He glanced toward the bar, but his muscles were sore enough already from the day's work-out. He switched on the vid, roaming the channels to see if there was anything new and good, but there wasn't. A football series coming to its end in Katmandu, an election in Uruguay - who cared about such things? He paused over a story about a habitat now being fitted out with engines to leave the solar system: it was the one named Hakluyt and it held his interest for a moment because of that silly woman, Hillaree, with her script. It would be interesting, he thought, to take that final outward leap to another star ... Of course, not for him, who would be long dead before the expedition could hope to arrive. He switched to the obituaries - his favourite kind of news - but the sparse list held no names that interested him. He switched again to the entertainment channels. There was a new situation comedy that he had heard about. The name was Dachau, and he remembered that one of the parts was played by a woman he had slept with a few times, years ago. Now she was playing a - a what? - a concentration-camp
guard in Germany in World War II, it seemed. It was a comic part; she was a figure of fun as the Jews and Gypsies and political enemies who were inmates constantly mocked and outwitted her. It did have its funny bits. Rafiel laughed as one of the inmates, having escaped to perform some heroic espionage feat for the Allies, was sneaked back into the camp under the very eyes of the commandant. Still, he wondered if things had really ever been that jolly in the real concentration camps of the time, where the real death ovens burned all day and all night.

  It all depended on whether you were personally involved, he thought.

  And then he switched it off, thinking of Docilia. He shouldn't have been so curt with her. She couldn't help being what she was. If death seemed comical to the deathless, was that her fault? Hadn't most of the world, for centuries on end, found fun in the antics of the dwarves and the deformed, even making them jesters at their courts? Perhaps the hunchbacks themselves hadn't found anything to laugh at - but that was their point of view.

  As his attitude toward dying was his own.

  He thought for a moment of calling Docilia to apologize - perhaps the evening might be salvaged yet. Then he remembered what Mosay had said about personal messages and scrolled them up.

  The first one was personal, all right, and a surprise. It was a talking message, and as soon as the picture cleared he recognized the face of the man who happened to have been his biological father.

  The man hadn't changed a bit. (Well, why would he, in a mere ninety-some years?) He was as youthful and as handsome as he had been when, on a rare visit, he had somewhat awkwardly taken young Rafiel on his knee. 'I saw you were in the krankhaus again,' the man in the screen said, with the look of someone who was paying a duty call on an ailing friend - not a close one, though. 'It reminded me we haven't heard from each other in a long time. I'm glad everything fait bon, Rafiel - son - and, really, you and I ought to have lunch together some prossimo giomo.'

  That was it. Rafiel froze the picture before it disappeared, to study the dark, well-formed face of the man whose genes he had carried. But the person behind the face eluded him. He sighed, shrugged and turned to the other message....

  And that one made him stiffen in his chair, with astonishment too sharp to be joy.

  It wasn't an imaged message, or even a spoken one; it was a faxed note, in a crabbed, nearly illegible handwriting that he knew very well:

  Dearest Rafiel, I was so glad to hear you got through another siege with the damned doctors. Mazeltov. I'm sending you a little gift to celebrate your recovery - and to remind you of me, because I think of you so very often.

  What the gift was he could not guess, because it hadn't arrived yet, but the note was signed, most wonderfully signed:

  For always, your Alegretta.

  6

  Naturally, all kinds of connections and antipathies appear among the Oedipus troupe as they come together. Charlus is the sire of Docilia 's unborn child. Andrev, who is to play the Creon, is the son of the composer of the score, Victorium. Ormeld, the Priest, and Andrev haven't acted together for thirty-five years, because of a nasty little firefight over billing in what happened to be the first production in which either got an acting credit. (They hug each other with effusive but wary joy when they come together in the rehearsal hall.) Sander, the Tiresias, studied acting under Mosay when Mosay had just abandoned his own dramatic career (having just discovered how satisfying the god-behind-the-scenes role of a dramaturge was). Sander is still just a little awed by his former teacher. All these interconnections are quite separate from the ordinary who-had-been-sleeping-with-whom sort of thing. They had to be kept that way. If people dragged up that sort of ancient history they'd never get everything straight. Actually, nobody is dragging anything up - at least, not as far as the surface where it can be seen. On the contrary. Everybody is being overtly amiable to everybody else and conspicuously consecrated to the show, so far. True, they haven't yet had much chance to be anything else, since it's only the first day of full-cast rehearsal.

  Although Mosay was still off scouting for locations - somewhere in Turkey, somebody said, though why anybody would want to go to Turkey no one could imagine - he had taken time to talk to them all by grid on the first day. 'Line up, everybody,' he ordered, watching them through the monitor over his camera. 'What I want you to do is just a quick runthrough of the lines. Don't sing. Don't dance, don't even act - we just want to say the words and see each other. Docilia, please leave Charlus alone for a minute and pay attention. Victorium will proctor for me, while I' - a small but conspicuous sigh; Mosay had not forgotten his acting skills - 'keep trying to find the right location for our production.'

  Actually it was Rafiel who was paying least attention, because his mind was full of lost Alegretta. Now, perhaps, found again? For you never forgot your first love.

  Well, yes, you did, sometimes, but Rafiel never had. Never could have, in spite of the sixty or seventy - could it have been eighty? a hundred? - other women he had loved, or at least made love to, in the years since then. Alegretta had been something very special in his life.

  He was twenty years old then, a bright young certain-to-be-a-star song and dance man. Audiences didn't know that yet, because he was still doing the kind of thing you had to start out with, cheap simulations and interactives, where you never got to make your own dramatic statement. The trade was beginning to know him, though, and Rafiel was quite content to be working his way up in the positive knowledge that the big break was sure to come. (And it had come, no more than a year later.)

  But just then he had, of all things, become sick. (No one got sick!) When the racking cough began to spoil his lines, he had to do something. He complained to his doctors about it. Somewhat startled (people didn't have coughs), the doctors put him in a clinic for observation, because they were as discomfited by it as Rafiel himself. And when all the tests were over, the head resident herself came to his hospital room to break the bad news.

  Even all these decades later, Rafiel remembered exactly what she had looked like that morning. Striking. Sexy, too; he had noticed that right away, in spite of the circumstances' A tall woman, taller in fact than Rafiel himself; with reddish-brown hair, a nose with a bit of a bend in it that kept it from being perfect in any orthodox way, but a smile that made up for it all. He had looked at her, made suspicious by the smile, a little hostile because a little scared. She sat down next to him, no longer smiling. 'Rafiel,' she said directly, 'I have some bad news for you.'

  'Che c'e? Can't you fix this damn cold?' he said, irritated.

  She hesitated before she answered. 'Oh, yes, we can cure that. We'll have it all cleared up by morning. But you see, you shouldn't have a cough at all now. It means....' She paused, obviously in some pain. 'It means the procedure didn't work for you,' she said at last, and that was how Alegretta told Rafiel that he was doomed to die in no more than another hundred years, at most.

  When he understood what she was saying, he listened quietly and patiently to all the explanations that went with it. Queerly, he felt sorrier for her than for himself - just then he did, anyway; later on, when it had all sunk in, it was different. But as she was telling him that such failures were very rare, but still they came up now and then, and at least he had survived the attempt, which many unborn babies did not, he interrupted her. 'I don't think you should be a doctor,' he told her, searching her lovely face.

  'Why not?' she asked.

  'You take it too hard. You can't stand giving bad news.'

  She said soberly, 'I haven't had much practice at it, have I?'

  He laughed at her. She looked at him in surprise; but then, he was still in his twenties, and a promise of another hundred years seemed close enough to forever. 'Practise on me,' he urged. 'When I'm released, let's have dinner.'

  They did. They had a dozen dinners, those first weeks, and breakfasts too, because that same night he moved into her flat above the hospital wing. They stayed together nearly two weeks; and there had never been
another woman like her. 'I'll never tell,' she promised when they parted. 'It's a medical confidence, you know. A secret.' She never had told, either.

  And his career did blossom. In those days Rafiel didn't need to be an oddity to be a star, he became a star because he was so damn good.

  It was only later on that he became an oddity as well because, though Alegretta had never told, there were a lot of other checkups, and ultimately somebody else had.

  It had not mattered to Rafiel, then, that Alegretta was nearly a hundred to his twenty. Why should it? Such things made no difference in a world of eternal youth. Alegretta did not look one minute older than himself... And it was only later, when she had left him, and he was miserably trying to figure out why, that he realized the meaning of the fact that she never would.

  First run-throughs didn't matter much. All they were really for was to get the whole cast together, to get some idea of their lines and what the relationship of each character was to the others, who was what to whom. They didn't act, much less sing; they read their lines at half-voice, eyes on the prompter scroll on the wall more than each other. It didn't matter that Rafiel's mind was elsewhere. When others were onstage he took out the fax from Alegretta and read it again. And again. But he wasn't, he thought, any more inattentive than any of the others. The pretty young Anti- gone - what was her real name? Bruta? Something like that - was a real amateur, and amateurishly she kept trying to move toward stage front each time she spoke. Which was not often; and didn't matter, really, because when Mosay came back he would take charge of that sort of thing in his gentle, irresistible way. And Andrev, the Creon, had obviously never even looked at the script, while Sander, who was to play the blind prophet, Tiresias, complained that there wasn't any point in doing all this without the actual dramaturge being present. Victorium had his hands full.