Immortals

by Jack Dann

  "Claire," says Katha, approaching her, "it was so peculiar about your friend. Did you notice? When he left, his finger was still bleeding."

  The white plume leaps, higher, provoking a gust of nervous laughter. Piet dances up after it, waving his legs in a burlesque entrechat. "What?" says Claire. "You must be wrong. It couldn't have been."

  "Now, come on, everybody. Hang close!"

  "All the same," says Katha, "it was bleeding." No one hears her; she is used to that.

  Far out, the comber lifts its head menacingly high; it comes onward, white-crowned, hard as bottle glass below, rising, faster, and as it roars with a shuddering of earth into the cavern, the Immortals are dashed high on the white torrent, screaming their joy.

  Dio is in his empty rooms alone, pacing the resilient floor, smothered in silence. He pauses, sweeps a mirror into being on the bare wall; leans forward as if to peer at his own gray face, then wipes the mirror out again. All around him the universe presses down, enormous, inexorable.

  The time stripe on the wall has turned almost black: the day is over. He has been here alone all afternoon. His door and phone circuits are set to reject callers, even Claire—his only instinct has been to hide.

  A scrap of yellow cloth is tied around the hurt finger. Blood has saturated the cloth and dried, and now it is stuck tight. The blood has stopped, but the hurt nail has still not reattached itself. There is something wrong with him; how could there be anything wrong with him?

  He has felt it coming for days, drawing closer, invisibly. Now it is here.

  It has been eight hours . . . his finger has not healed itself.

  He remembers that moment in the air, when the support dropped away under him. Could that happen again? He plants his feet firmly now, thinks, Up, and feels the familiar straining of his back and chest. But nothing happens. Incredulously, he tries again. Nothing!

  His heart is thundering in his chest; he feels dizzy and cold. He sways, almost falls. It isn't possible that this should be happening to him. . . . Help; he must have help. Under his trembling fingers the phone index lights; he finds Claire's name, presses the selector. She may have gone out by now, but sector registry will find her. The screen pulses grayly. He waits. The darkness is a little farther away. Claire will help him, will think of something.

  The screen lights, but it is only the neutral gray face of an autosec. "One moment please."

  The screen flickers; at last, Claire's face!

  "—is a recording, Dio. When you didn't call, and I couldn't reach you, I was very hurt. I know you're busy, but—Well, Piet has asked me to go over to Toria to play skeet polo, and I'm going. I may stay a few weeks for the flower festival, or go on to Rome. I'm sorry, Dio, we started out so nicely. Maybe the classes really don't mix. Goodbye."

  The screen darkens. Dio is down on his knees before it. "Don't go," he says breathlessly. "Don't go." His last t outage is broken; the hot, salt, shameful tears drop from his eyes.

  The room is bright and bare, but in the corners the darkness is gathering, curling high, black as obsidian, waiting to rush.

  II

  The crowds on the lower level are a river of color, deep electric blue, scarlet, opaque yellow, all clean, crisp and bright. Flower scents puff from the folds of loose garments; the air is filled with good-natured voices and laughter. Back from five months' wandering in Africa, Pacifica and Europe, Claire is delightfully lost among the moving ways of Sector Twenty. Where the main concourse used to be, there is a maze of narrow adventure streets, full of gay banners and musky with perfume. The excursion cars are elegant little baskets of silver filigree, hung with airy grace. She gets into one and soars up the canyon of windows on a long, sweeping curve, past terraces and balconies, glimpse after intimate glimpse of people she need never see again: here a woman feeding a big blue macaw, there a couple of children staring at her from a garden, solemn-eyed, both with ragged yellow hair like dandelions. How long it has been since she last saw a child! . . . She tires to imagine what it must be like, to be a child now in this huge strange world full of grown people, but she can't. Her memories of her own childhood are so far away, quaint and small, like figures in the wrong side of an opera glass. Now here is a man with a bushy black beard, balancing a bottle on his nose for a group of laughing people . . . off it goes! Here are two couples obliviously kissing . . . Her heart beats a little faster; she feels the color coming into her cheeks. Piet was so tiresome, after a while; she wants to forget him now. She has already forgotten him; she hums in her sweet, clear contralto, "Dio, Dio, Dio . . ."

  On the next level she dismounts and takes a robocab. She punches Dio's name; the little green-eyed driver "hunts" for a moment, flickering; then the cab swings around purposefully and gathers speed.

  The building is unrecognizable; the whole street has been done over in baroque facades of vermilion and frost green. The shape of the lobby is familiar, though, and here is Dio's name on the directory.

  She hesitates, looking up the uninformative blank shaft of the elevator well. Is he there, behind that silent bulk of marble? After a moment she turns with a shrug and takes the nearest of a row of fragile silver chairs. She presses "3"; the chair whisks her up, decants her.

  She is in the vestibule of Dio's apartment. The walls are faced with cool blue-veined marble. On one side, the spacious oval of the shaft opening; on the other, the wide, arched doorway, closed. A mobile turns slowly under the lofty ceiling. She steps on the annunciator plate.

  "Yes?" A pleasant male voice, but not a familiar one. The screen does not light.

  She gives her name. "I want to see Dio—is he in?"

  A curious pause. "Yes, he's in. . . . Who sent you?"

  "No one sent me." She has the frustrating sense that they are at cross purposes, talking about different things. "Who are you?"

  "That doesn't matter. Well, you can come in, though I don't know when you'll get time today." The doors slide open.

  Bewildered and more than half angry, Claire crosses the threshold. The first room is a cool gray cavern: overhead are fixed-circuit screens showing views of the sector streets. They make a bright frieze around the walls, but shed little light. The room is empty; she crosses it to the next.

  The next room is a huge disorderly space full of machinery carelessly set down; Claire wrinkles her nose in distaste. Down at the far end, a few men are bending over one of the machines, their backs turned. She moves on.

  The third room is a cool green space, terrazzo-floored, with a fountain playing in the middle. Her sandals click pleasantly on the hard surface. Fifteen or twenty people are sitting on the low curving benches around the walls, using the service machines, readers and so on: it's for all the world like the waiting room of a fashionable healer. Has Dio taken up mind-fixing?

  Suddenly unsure of herself, she takes an isolated seat and looks around her. No, her first impression was wrong, these are not clients waiting to see a healer, because, in the first place, they are all students—every one.

  She looks them over more carefully. Two are playing chess in an alcove; two more are strolling up and down separately; five or six are grouped around a little table on which some papers are spread; one of these is talking rapidly while the rest listen. The distance is too great; Claire cannot catch any words.

  Farther down on the other side of the room, two men and a woman are sitting at a hooded screen, watching it intently, although at this distance it appears dark.

  Water tinkles steadily in the fountain. After a long time the inner doors open and a man emerges; he leans over and speaks to another man sitting nearby. The second man gets up and goes through the inner doors; the first moves out of sight in the opposite direction. Neither reappears. Claire waits, but nothing more happens.

  No one has taken her name, or put her on a list; no one seems to be paying her any attention. She rises and walks slowly down the room, past the group at the table. Two of the men are talking vehemently, interrupting each other. She listens as
she passes, but it is all student gibberish: "the delta curve clearly shows . . . a stochastic assumption . . ." She moves on to the three who sit at the hooded screen.

  The screen still seems dark to Claire, but faint glints of color move on its glossy surface, and there is a whisper of sound.

  There are two vacant seats. She hesitates, then takes one of them and leans forward under the hood.

  Now the screen is alight, and there is a murmur of talk in her ears. She is looking into a room dominated by a huge oblong slab of gray marble, three times the height of a man. Though solid, it appears to be descending with a steady and hypnotic motion, like a waterfall.

  Under this falling curtain of stone sit two men. One of them is a stranger. The other—

  She leans forward, peering. The other is in shadow; she cannot see his features. Still, there is something familiar about the outlines of his head and body. . . .

  She is almost sure it is Dio, but when he speaks she hesitates again. It is a strange, low, hoarse voice, unlike anything else she has ever heard before: the sound is so strange that she forgets to listen for the words.

  Now the other man is speaking: ". . . these notions. It's just an ordinary procedure—one more injection."

  "No," says the dark man with repressed fury, and abruptly stands up. The lights in that pictured room flicker as he moves and the shadow swerves to follow him.

  "Pardon me," says an unexpected voice at her ear. The man next to her is leaning over, looking inquisitive. "I don't think you're authorized to watch this session, are you?"

  Claire makes an impatient gesture at him, turning back fascinated to the screen. In the pictured room, both men are standing now; the dark man is saying something hoarsely while the other moves as if to take his arm.

  "Please," says the voice at her ear, "are you authorized to watch this session?"

  The dark man's voice has risen to a hysterical shout—hoarse and thin, like no human voice in the world. In the screen, he whirls and makes as if to run back into the room.

  "Catch him!" says the other, lunging after.

  The dark man doubles back suddenly, past the other who reaches for him. Then two other men run past the screen; then the room is vacant; only the moving slab drops steadily, smoothly, into the floor.

  The three beside Claire are standing. Across the room, heads turn. "What is it?" someone calls.

  One of the men calls back, "He's having some kind of fit!" In a lower voice, to the woman, he adds, "It's the discomfort, I suppose . . ."

  Claire is watching uncomprehendingly, when a sudden yell from the far side of the room makes her turn.

  The doors have swung back, and in the opening a shouting man is wrestling helplessly with two others. They have his arms pinned and he cannot move any farther, but that horrible, hoarse voices goes on shouting, and shouting . . .

  There are no more shadows: she can see his face.

  "Dio!" she calls, getting to her feet.

  Through his own din, he hears her and his head turns. His face gapes blindly at her, swollen and red, the eyes glaring. Then with a violent motion he turns away. One arm comes free, and jerks up to shield his head. He is hurrying away; the others follow. The doors close. The room is full of standing figures, and a murmur of voices.

  Claire stands where she is, stunned, until a slender figure separates itself from the crowd. That other face seems to hang in the air, obscuring his—red and distorted, mouth agape.

  The man takes her by the elbow, urges her toward the outer door. "What are you to Dio? Did you know him before?"

  "Before what?" she asks faintly. They are crossing the room of machines, empty and echoing.

  "Hm. I remember you now—I let you in, didn't I? Sorry you came?" His tone is light and negligent; she has the feeling that his attention is not really on what he is saying. A faint irritation at this is the first thing she feels through her numbness. She stirs as they walk, disengaging her arm from his grasp. She says, "What was wrong with him?"

  "A very rare complaint," answers the other, without pausing. They are in the outer room now, in the gloom under the bright frieze, moving toward the doors. "Didn't you know?" he asks in the same careless tone.

  "I've been away." She stops, turns to face him. "Can't you tell me? What is wrong with Dio?"

  She sees now that he has a thin face, nose and lips keen, eyes bright and narrow. "Nothing you want to know about," he says curtly. He waves at the door control, and the doors slide noiselessly apart. "Goodbye."

  She does not move, and after a moment the doors close again. "What's wrong with him?" she says.

  He sighs, looking down at her modish robe with its delicate clasps of gold. "How can I tell you? Does the verb 'to die' mean anything to you?"

  She is puzzled and apprehensive. "I don't know . . . isn't it something that happens to the lower animals?"

  He gives her a quick mock bow. "Very good."

  "But I don't know what it is. Is it—a kind of fit, like—" She nods toward the inner rooms.

  He is staring at her with an expression half compassionate, half wildly exasperated. "Do you really want to know?" He turns abruptly and runs his finger down a suddenly glowing index stripe on the wall. "Let's see . . . don't know what there is in this damned reservoir. Hm. Animals, terminus." At his finger's touch, a cabinet opens and tips out a shallow oblong box into his palm. He offers it.

  In her hands, the box lights up; she is looking into a cage in which a small animal crouches—a white rat. Its fur is dull and rough-looking; something is caked around its muzzle. It moves unsteadily, noses a cup of water, then turns away. Its legs seem to fail; it drops and lies motionless except for the slow rise and fall of its tiny chest.

  Watching, Claire tries to control her nausea. Students' cabinets are full of nastinesses like this; they expect you not to show any distaste. "Something's the matter with it," is all she can find to say.

  "Yes. It's dying. That means to cease living: to stop. Not to be any more. Understand?"

  "No," she breathes. In the box, the small body has stopped moving. The mouth is stiffly open, the lip drawn back from the yellow teeth. The eye does not move, but glares up sightless.

  "That's all," says her companion, taking the box back. "No more rat. Finished. After a while it begins to decompose and make a bad smell, and a while after that, there's nothing left but bones. And that has happened to every rat that was ever born."

  "I don't believe you," she says. "It isn't like that; I never heard of such a thing."

  "Didn't you ever have a pet?" he demands. "A parakeet, a cat, a tank of fish?"

  "Yes," she says defensively. "I've had cats, and birds. What of it?"

  "What happened to them?"

  "Well—I don't know, I suppose I lost them. You know how you lose things."

  "One day they're there, the next, not," says the thin man. "Correct?"

  "Yes, that's right. But why?"

  "We have such a tidy world," he says wearily. "Dead bodies would clutter it up; that's why the house circuits are programmed to remove them when nobody is in the room. Every one: it's part of the basic design. Of course, if you stayed in the room, and didn't turn your back, the machine would have to embarrass you by cleaning up the corpse in front of your eyes. But that never happens. Whenever you saw there was something wrong with any pet of yours, you turned around and went away, isn't that right?"

  "Well, I really can't remember—"

  "And when you came back, how odd, the beast was gone. It wasn't 'lost,' it was dead. They die. They all die."

  She looks at him, shivering. "But that doesn't happen to people."

  "No?" His lips are tight. After a moment he adds, "Why do you think he looked that way? You see he knows; he's known for five months."

  She catches her breath suddenly. "That day at the beach!"

  "Oh, were you there?" He nods several times, and opens the door again. "Very interesting for you. You can tell people you saw it happen." He pushes her
gently out into the vestibule.

  "But I want—" she says desperately.

  "What? To love him again, as if he were normal? Or do you want to help him? Is that what you mean?" His thin face is drawn tight, arrow-shaped between the brows. "Do you think you could stand it? If so—" He stands aside, as if to let her enter again.

  "Remember the rat," he says sharply.

  She hesitates.

  "It's up to you. Do you really want to help him? He could use some help, if it wouldn't make you sick. Or else—Where were you all this time?"

  "Various places," she says stiffly. "Littlam, Paris, New Hoi."

  He nods. "Or you can go back and see them all again. Which?"

  She does not move. Behind her eyes, now, the two images are intermingled: she sees Dio's gorged face staring through the stiff jaw of the rat.

  The thin man nods briskly. He steps back, holding her gaze. There is a long suspended moment; then the doors close.

  III

  The years fall away like pages from an old notebook. Claire is in Stambul, Winthur, Kumoto, BahiBlanc . . . other places, too many to remember. There are the intercontinental games, held every century on the baroque wheel-shaped ground in Campan: Claire is one of the spectators who hover in clouds, following their favorites. There is a love affair, brief but intense; it lasts four or five years; the man's name is Nord, he has gone off now with another woman to Deya, and for nearly a month Claire has been inconsolable. But now comes the opera season in Milan, and in Tusca, afterwards, she meets some charming people who are going to spend a year in Papeete. . . .

  Life is good. Each morning she awakes refreshed; her lungs fill with the clean air; the blood tingles in her fingertips.

  On a spring morning, she is basking in a bubble of green glass, three-quarters submerged in an emerald-green ocean. The water sways and breaks, frothily, around the bright disk of sunlight at the top. Down below where she lies, the cool green depths are like mint to the fire-white bite of the sun. Tiny flat golden fishes swarm up to the bubble, turn, glinting like tarnished coins, and flow away again. The memory unit near the floor of the bubble is muttering out a muted tempest of Wagner: half listening, she hears the familiar music mixed with a gabble of foreign syllables. Her companion, with his massive bronze head almost touching the speakers, is listening attentively. Claire feels a little annoyed; she prods him with a bare foot: "Ross, turn that horrible thing off, won't you please?"