Immortals

by Jack Dann

  "Yes. Yes."

  She begins to tremble. She understands the true depths of his compassion now, and she is appalled. He has married her out of charity. No man her own age would have wanted her, because the developing signs of bodily deterioration in the years just ahead would surely horrify him; but Leo is beyond all that. He is willing to overlook her unfortunate little somatic defect and give her a few decades of happiness before she has to die. And then he will proceed with the rest of his life, the hundreds or thousands of years yet to come, serene in the knowledge of having allowed the tragically doomed Marilisa the happy illusion of having been a member of the ageless elite for a little while. It is stunning. It is horrifying. There is no way that she can bear it.

  "Marilisa—"

  He reaches for her, but she turns away. Runs. Flees.

  It was three years before he found her. She was living in London, then, a little flat in the Bayswater Road, and in just those three years her face had changed so much, the little erosions of the transition between youth and middle age, that it was impossible for him entirely to conceal his instant reaction. He, of course, had not changed in the slightest way. He stood in the doorway, practically filling it, trying to plaster some sort of facade over his all too visible dismay, trying to show her the familiar Leo smile, trying to make the old Leolike warmth glow in his eyes. Then after a moment he extended his arms toward her. She stayed where she was.

  "You shouldn't have tracked me down," she says.

  "I love you," he tells her. "Come home with me."

  "It wouldn't be right. It wouldn't be fair to you. My getting old, and you always so young."

  "To hell with that. I want you back, Marilisa. I love you and I always will."

  "You love me?" she says. "Even though—"

  "Even though. For better, for worse."

  She knows the rest of the passage—for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health—and where it goes from there. But there is nothing more she can say. She wants to smile gently and thank him for all his kindness and close the door, but instead she stands there, neither inviting him in nor shutting him out, with a roaring sound in her ears as all the millions years of mortal history rise up around her like mountains.

  THE WORM THAT FLIES

  Brian W. Aldiss

  One of the true giants of the field, Brian W. Aldiss has been publishing science fiction for more than a quarter of a century, and has more than two dozen books to his credit. His classic novel The Long Afternoon of Earth won a Hugo Award in 1962. "The Saliva Tree" won a Nebula Award in 1965, and his novel Starship won the Prix Jules Verne in 1977. He took another Hugo Award in 1987 for his critical study of science fiction, Trillion Year Spree, written with David Wingrove. His other books include the acclaimed Helliconia trilogy —Helliconia Spring, Helliconia Summer, Helliconia Winter—The Malacia Tapestry, An Island Called Moreau, Frankenstein Unbound, and Cryptozoic. His latest books include the collection Seasons In Flight, the novels Dracula Unbound and Remembrance Day, and a collection of poems, Home Life With Cats. He lives in Oxford, England.

  Few SF writers have ever had the imagination, poetic skills, and visionary scope to write convincingly about the really far future—once you have mentioned Olaf Stapledon, Clark Ashton Smith, Jack Vance, Gene Wolfe, Cordwainer Smith, Michael Moorcock, and M. John Harrison, you have almost exhausted the roster of authors who have handled the theme with any kind of evocativeness or complexity—but Aldiss has almost made a specialty of it. The Long Afternoon of Earth remains one of the classic visions of the distant future of Earth, and Aldiss has also handled the theme with grace and a wealth of poetic imagination in stories like "Old Hundredth" and "Full Sun." Never more vividly than here, though, as he takes us to a remote and terrible future to unravel the dread mystery of "The Worm That Flies."

  When the snow began to fall, the traveler was too absorbed in his reveries to notice. He walked slowly, his stiff and elaborate garments, fold over fold, ornament over ornament, standing out from his body like a wizard's tent.

  The road along which he walked had been falling into a great valley, and was increasingly hemmed in by walls of mountain. On several occasions it had seemed that a way out of these huge accumulations of earth matter could not be found, that the geological puzzle was insoluble, the chthonian arrangement of discord irresolvable: And then vale and drumlin created between them a new direction, a surprise, an escape, and the way took fresh heart and plunged recklessly still deeper into the encompassing upheaval.

  The traveler, whose name to his wife was Tapmar and to the rest of the world Argustal, followed this natural harmony in complete paraesthesia, so close was he in spirit to the atmosphere presiding here. So strong was this bond, that the freak snowfall merely heightened his rapport.

  Though the hour was only midday, the sky became the intense blue-gray of dusk. The Forces were nesting in the sun again, obscuring its light. Consequently, Argustal was scarcely able to detect when the layered and fractured bulwark of rock on his left side, the top of which stood unseen perhaps a mile above his head, became patched by artificial means, and he entered the domain of the Tree-men of Or.

  As the way made another turn, he saw a wayfarer before him, heading in his direction. It was a great pine, immobile until warmth entered the world again and sap stirred enough in its wooden sinews for it to progress slowly forward once more. He brushed by its green skirts, apologetic but not speaking.

  This encounter was sufficient to raise his consciousness above its trance level. His extended mind, which had reached out to embrace the splendid terrestrial discord hereabouts, now shrank to concentrate again on the particularities of his situation, and he saw that he had arrived at Or.

  The way bisected itself, unable to choose between two equally unpromising ravines; Argustal saw a group of humans standing statuesque in the left-hand fork. He went toward them, and stood there silent until they should recognize his presence. Behind him, the wet snow crept into his footprints.

  These humans were well advanced into the New Form, even as Argustal had been warned they would be. There were five of them standing here, their great brachial extensions bearing some tender brownish foliage, and one of them attenuated to a height of almost twenty feet. The snow lodged in their branches and in their hair.

  Argustal waited for a long span of time, until he judged the afternoon to be well advanced, before growing impatient. Putting his hands to his mouth, he shouted fiercely at them, "Ho then, Tree-men of Or, wake you from your arboreal sleep and converse with me. My name is Argustal to the world, and I travel to my home in far Talembil, where the seas run pink with the spring plankton. I need from you a component for my parapatterner, so rustle yourselves and speak, I beg!"

  Now the snow had gone; a scorching rain had driven away its traces. The sun shone again, but its disfigured eye never looked down into the bottom of this ravine. One of the humans shook a branch, scattering water drops all around, and made preparation for speech.

  This was a small human, no more than ten feet high, and the old primate form which it had begun to abandon, perhaps a couple of million years ago, was still in evidence. Among the gnarls and whorls of its naked flesh, its mouth was discernible; this is opened and said, "We speak to you, Argustal-to-the-world. You are the first ape-human to fare this way in a great time. Thus you are welcome, although you interrupt our search for new ideas."

  "Have you found any new ideas?" Argustal asked, with his customary boldness. "I heard there were none on all Yzazys."

  "Indeed. But it is better for our senior to tell you of them, if he so judges good."

  It was by no means clear to Argustal whether he wished to hear what the new ideas were, for the Tree-men were known for their deviations into incomprehensibility. But there was a minor furore among the five, as if private winds stirred in their branches, and he settled himself on a boulder, preparing to wait. His own quest was so important that all impediments to its fulfillment seemed negligible.

&n
bsp; Hunger overtook him before the senior spoke. He hunted about and caught slow-galloping grubs under logs, and snatched a brace of tiny fish from the stream, and a handful of nuts from a bush that grew by the stream.

  Night fell before the senior spoke. As he raspingly cleared his gnarled throat, one faded star lit in the sky. That was Hrt, the flaming stone. It and Yzazys' sun burned alone on the very brink of the cataract of fire that was the universe. All the rest of the night sky in this hemisphere was filled with the unlimited terror of vacancy, a towering nothingness that continued without end or beginning.

  Hrt had no worlds attending it. It was the last thing in the universe. And, by the way its light flickered, the denizens of Yzazys knew that it was already infested by the Forces which had swarmed outward from their eyries in the heart of the dying galaxy.

  The eye of Hrt winked many times in the empty skull of space before the senior of the Tree-men of Or wound himself up to address Argustal.

  Tall and knotty, his vocal chords were clamped within his gnarled body, and he spoke by curving his branches until his finest twigs, set against his mouth, could be blown through to give a slender and whispering version of language. The gesture made him seem curiously like a maiden who spoke with her finger cautiously to her lips.

  "Indeed we have a new idea, oh Argustal-to-the-world, though it may be beyond your grasping or our expression. We have perceived that there is a dimension called time, and from this we have drawn a deduction.

  "We will explain dimensional time simply to you like this. We know that all things have lived so long on Yzazys that their origins are forgotten. What we can remember carries from that lost-in-the-mist thing up to this present moment; it is the time we inhabit, and we are used to thinking of it as all the time there is. But we men of Or have reasoned that this is not so."

  "There must be other past times in the lost distances of time," said Argustal, "but they are nothing to us because we cannot touch them as we can our own pasts."

  As if this remark had never been, the silvery whisper continued, "As one mountain looks small when viewed from another, so the things that we remember in our past look small from the present. But suppose we moved back to that past to look at this present! We could not see it—yet we know it exists. And from this we reason that there is still more time in the future, although we cannot see it."

  For a long while, the night was allowed to exist in silence, and then Argustal said, "Well, I don't see that as being very wonderful reasoning. We know that, if the Forces permit, the sun will shine again tomorrow, don't we?"

  The small Tree-man who had first spoken said, "But 'tomorrow' is expressional time. We have discovered that tomorrow exists in dimensional time also. It is real already, as real as yesterday."

  Holy spirits! thought Argustal to himself, why did I get myself involved in philosophy? Aloud he said, "Tell me of the deduction you have drawn from this."

  Again the silence, until the senior drew his branches together and whispered from a bower of twiggy fingers, "We have proved that tomorrow is no surprise. It is as unaltered as today or yesterday, merely another yard of the path of time. But we comprehend that things change, don't we? You comprehend that, don't you?"

  "Of course. You yourselves are changing, are you not?"

  "It is as you say, although we no longer recall what we were before, for that thing is become too small back in time. So: if time is all of the same quality, then it has no change, and thus cannot force change. So: there is another unknown element in the world that forces change!"

  Thus in their fragmentary whispers they reintroduced sin into the world.

  Because of the darkness, a need for sleep was induced in Argustal. With the senior Tree-man's permission, he climbed up into his branches and remained fast asleep until dawn returned to the fragment of sky above the mountains and filtered down to their retreat. Argustal swung to the ground, removed his outer garments, and performed his customary exercises. Then he spoke to the five beings again, telling them of his parapatterner, and asked for certain stones.

  Although it was doubtful whether they understood what he was about, they gave him permission, and he moved round about the area, searching for a necessary stone; his senses blowing into nooks and crannies for it like a breeze.

  The ravine was blocked at its far end by a rock fall, but the stream managed to pour through the interstices of the detritus into a yet lower defile. Climbing painfully, Argustal scrambled over the mass of broken rock to find himself in a cold and moist passage, a mere cavity between two great thighs of mountain. Here the light was dim, and the sky could hardly be seen, so far did the rocks overhang on the many shelves of strata overhead. But Argustal scarcely looked up. He followed the stream where it flowed into the rock itself, to vanish forever from human view.

  He had been so long at his business, trained himself over so many millennia, that the stones almost spoke to him. And he became more certain than ever that he would find a stone to fit in with his grand design.

  It was there. It lay just above the water, the upper part of it polished. When he had prized it out from the surrounding pebbles and gravel, he lifted it and could see that underneath it was slightly jagged, as if a smooth gum grew black teeth. He was surprised, but as he squatted to examine it, he began to see that what was necessary to the design of his parapatterner was precisely some such roughness. At once, the next step of the design revealed itself, and he saw for the first time the whole thing as it would be in its entirety. The vision disturbed and excited him.

  He sat where he was, his blunt fingers around the rough-smooth stone, and for some reason he began to think about his wife Pamitar. Warm feelings of love ran through him, so that he smiled to himself and twitched his brows.

  By the time he stood up and climbed out of the defile, he knew much about the new stone. His nose-for-stones sniffed it back to times when it was a much larger affair, when it occupied a grand position on a mountain, when it was engulfed in the bowels of the mountain, when it had been cast up and shattered down, when it had been a component of a bed of rock, when that rock had been ooze, when it had been a gentle rain of volcanic sediment, showering through an unbreathable atmosphere and filtering down through warm seas in an early and unknown place.

  With tender respect, he tucked the stone away in a large pocket and scrambled back along the way he had come. He made no farewell to the five of Or. They stood mute together, branch-limbs interlocked, dreaming of the dark sin of change.

  Now he made haste for home, traveling first through the borderlands of Old Crotheria and then through the region of Tamia, where there was only mud. Legends had it that Tamia had once known fertility, and that speckled fish had swum in streams between forests; but now mud conquered everything, and the few villages were of baked mud, while the roads were dried mud, the sky was the color of mud, and the few mud-colored humans, who chose for their own mud-stained reasons to live here, had scarcely any antlers growing from their shoulders and seemed about to deliquesce into mud. There wasn't a decent stone anywhere about the place. Argustal met a tree called David-by-the-moat-that-dries that was moving into his own home region. Depressed by the everlasting brownness of Tamia he begged a ride from it, and climbed into its branches. It was old and gnarled, its branches and roots equally hunched, and it spoke in grating syllables of its few ambitions.

  As he listened, taking pains to recall each syllable while he waited long for the next, Argustal saw that David spoke by much the same means as the people of Or had done, stuffing whistling twigs to an orifice in its trunk; but whereas it seemed that the Tree-men were losing the use of their vocal chords, the man-tree was developing some from the stringy integuments of its fibers, so that it became a nice problem as to which was inspired by which, which copied which, or whether—for both sides seemed so self-absorbed that this also was a possibility—they had come on a mirror-image of perversity independently.

  "Motion is the prime beauty," said David-by-the-moat-that-
dries, and took many degrees of the sun across the muddy sky to say it. "Motion is in me. There is no motion in the ground. In the ground there is not motion. All that the ground contains is without motion. The ground lies in quiet and to lie in the ground is not to be. Beauty is not in the ground. Beyond the ground is the air. Air and ground make all there is and I would be of the ground and air. I was of the ground and of the air but I will be of the air alone. If there is ground, there is another ground. The leaves fly in the air and my longing goes with them but they are only part of me because I am of wood. Oh, Argustal, you know not the pains of wood!"

  Argustal did not indeed, for long before this gnarled speech was spent, the moon had risen and the silent muddy night had fallen with Hrt flickering overhead, and he was curled asleep in David's distorted branches, the stone in his deep pocket.

  Twice more he slept, twice more watched their painful progress along the unswept tracks, twice more joined converse with the melancholy tree—and when he woke again, all the heavens were stacked with fleecy clouds that showed blue between, and low hills lay ahead. He jumped down. Grass grew here. Pebbles littered the track. He howled and shouted with pleasure. The mud had gone.

  Crying his thanks, he set off across the heath.

  ". . . growth . . ." said David-by-the-moat-that-dries.

  The heath collapsed and gave way to sand, fringed by sharp grass that scythed at Argustal's skirts as he went by. He ploughed across the sand. This was his own country, and he rejoiced, taking his bearing from the occasional cairn that pointed a finger of shade across the sand. Once one of the Forces flew over, so that for a moment of terror the world was plunged in night, thunder growled, and a paltry hundred drops of rain spattered down; then it was already on the far confines of the sun's domain, plunging away—no matter where!

  Few animals, fewer birds, still survived. In the sweet deserts of Outer Talembil, they were especially rare. Yet Argustal passed a bird sitting on a cairn, its hooded eye bleared with a million years of danger. It clattered one wing at sight of him, in tribute to old reflexes, but he respected the hunger in his belly too much to try to dine on sinews and feathers, and the bird appeared to recognize the fact.