This Immortal

by Roger Joseph Zelazny

  Still his arms tightened, and I knew that it would not be long before he broke me unless I could break his hold.

  I doubled my hands into fists and got them against his belly and pushed. His grip tightened. I stepped backward and heaved forward with both arms. My hands went up higher between us and I got my right fist against the palm of my left hand and began to push them together and lift with my arms. My head swam as my arms came up higher, and my kidneys were on fire. Then I tightened all the muscles in my back and my shoulders and felt the strength flow down through my arms and come together in my hands, and I smashed them up toward the sky and his chin happened to be in the way, but it didn't stop them.

  My arms shot up over my head and he fell backward.

  It should have broken a man's neck, the force of that big snap that came when my hands struck his chin and he got a look at his heels from the backside.

  But he sprang up immediately, and I knew then that he was no mortal wrestler, but one of those creatures born not of woman; rather, I knew, he had been torn Antaeus-like from the womb of the Earth herself.

  I brought my hands down hard on his shoulders and he dropped to his knees. I caught him across the throat then and stepped to his right side and got my left knee under the lower part of his back. I leaned forward, bearing down on his thighs and shoulders, trying to break him.

  But I couldn't. He just kept bending until his head touched the ground and I couldn't push him any further.

  No one's back bends like that and doesn't snap, but his did.

  Then I heaved up with my knee and let go, and he was on me again-that fast.

  So I tried to strangle him. My arms were much longer than his. I caught him by the throat with both hands, my thumbs pressing hard against what should have been his windpipe. He got his arms across mine though, at the elbows and inside, and began to pull downward and out. I kept squeezing, waiting for his face to darken, his eyes to bug out. My elbows began to bend under his downward pressure.

  Then his arms came across and caught me by the throat.

  And we stood there and choked one another. Only he wouldn't be strangled.

  His thumbs were like two spikes pressing into the muscles in my neck. I felt my face flush. My temples began to throb. Off in the distance, I heard a scream: "Stop it, Hasan! It's not supposed to do that!" It sounded like Red Wig's voice. Anyhow, that's the name that came into my head: Red Wig. Which meant that Donald Dos Santos was somewhere nearby. And she had said "Hasan," a name written on another picture that came suddenly clear.

  Which meant that I was Conrad and that I was in Egypt, and that the expressionless face swimming before me was therefore that of the golem-wrestler, rolem, a creature which could be set for five times the strength of a human being and probably was so set, a creature which could be given the reflexes of an adrenalized cat, and doubtless had them in full operation.

  Only a rolem wasn't supposed to kill, except by accident, and golem was trying to kill me.

  Which meant that his governor wasn't functioning.

  I released my choke, seeing that it wasn't working, and I placed the palm of my left hand beneath his right elbow. Then I reached across the top of his arms and seized his right wrist with my other hand, and I crouched as low as I could and pushed up on his elbow and pulled up on his wrist.

  As he went off balance to his left and the grip was broken I kept hold of the wrist, twisting it so that the elbow was exposed upwards. I stiffened my left hand, snapped it up beside my ear, and brought it down across the elbow joint.

  Nothing. There was no snapping sound. The arm just gave way, bending backward at an unnatural angle.

  I released the wrist and he fell to one knee. Then he stood again, quickly, and as he did so the arm straightened itself and then bent forward again into a normal position.

  If I knew Hasan's mind, then rolem's timer had been set for maximum-two hours. Which was a pretty long time, all things considered.

  But this time around I knew who I was and what I was doing. Also, I knew what went into the structuring of a golem. This one was a wrestling golem. Therefore, it could not box.

  I cast a quick look back over my shoulder, to the place where I had been standing when the whole thing had started-over by the radio tent. It was about fifty feet away.

  He almost had me then. Just during that split second while I had turned my attention to the rear he had reached out and seized me behind the neck with one hand and caught me beneath the chin with the other.

  He might have broken my neck, had he been able to follow through, but there came another temblor at that moment-a severe one, which cast us both to the ground-and I broke this hold, also.

  I scrambled to my feet seconds later, and the earth was still shaking. Rolem was up too, though, and facing me again.

  We were like two drunken sailors fighting on a storm-tossed ship…

  He came at me and I gave ground.

  I hit him with a left jab, and while he snatched at my arm I punched him in the stomach. Then I backed off.

  He came on again and I kept throwing punches. Boxing was to him what the fourth dimension is to me-he just couldn't see it. He kept advancing, shaking off my punches, and I kept retreating in the direction of the radio tent, and the ground kept shaking, and somewhere a woman was screaming, and I heard a shouted "Ole!" as I landed a right below the belt, hoping to jar his brains a bit.

  Then we were there and I saw what I wanted-the big rock I'd intended to use on the radio. I feinted with my left, then seized him, shoulder-and-thigh, and raised him high up over my head.

  I bent backwards, tightened up my muscles, and hurled him down upon the rock.

  It caught him in the stomach.

  He began to rise again, but more slowly than he had before, and I kicked him in the stomach, three times, with my great reinforced right boot, and I watched him sink back down.

  A strange whirring sound had begun in his midsection.

  The ground shook again. Rolem crumpled, stretched out, and the only sign of motion was in the fingers of his left hand. They kept clenching and unclenching-reminding me, oddly, of Hasan's hands that night back at the hounfor.

  Then I turned slowly and they were all standing there: Myshtigo and Ellen, and Dos Santos with a puffed-up cheek,

  Red Wig, George, Rameses and Hasan, and the three plastaged Egyptians. I took a step toward them then and they began to fan out again, their faces filling with fear. But I shook my head.

  "No, I'm all right now," I said, "but leave me alone. I'm going down to the river to bathe." I took seven steps, and then someone must have pulled out the plug, because I gurgled, everything swirled, and the world ran away down the drain.

  The days that followed were ashes and the nights were iron. The spirit that had been torn from my soul was buried deeper than any mummy that lay mouldering beneath those sands. It is said that the dead forget the dead in the house of Hades, Cassandra, but I hoped it was not so. I went through the motions of conducting a tour, and Lorel suggested that I appoint someone else to finish it out and take a leave of absence myself.

  I couldn't.

  What would I do then? Sit and brood in some Old Place, cadging drinks from unwary travelers? No. Some kind of motion is always essential at such times; its forms eventually generate a content for their empty insides. So I went on with the tour and turned my attention to the small mysteries it contained.

  I took golem apart and studied his governor. It had been broken, of course-which meant that either I had done it during the early stages of our conflict, or Hasan had done it as he had souped him up to take the fight out of me. If Hasan had done it, then he did not just want me beaten, but dead. If such was the case, then the question was, Why? I wondered whether his employer knew that I had once been Karaghiosis. If he did, though, why should he want to kill the founder and first Secretary of his own Party?-the man who had sworn that he would not see the Earth sold out from under him and turned into a sporting house by a pa
ck of blue aliens-not see it without fighting, anyhow-and had organized about himself a cabal which systematically lowered the value of all Vegan-owned Terran property to zero, and even went so far as to raze the Talerites' lush realty office on Madagascar-the man whose ideals he allegedly espoused, though they were currently being channeled into more peaceful, legalistic modes of property-defense-why should he want that man dead?

  Therefore, he had either sold out the Party, or he didn't know who I was and had had some other end in mind when he'd instructed Hasan to kill me.

  Or else Hasan was acting under someone else's orders.

  But who else could there be? And again, why?

  I had no answer. I decided I wanted one.

  The first condolence had been George's.

  "I'm sorry, Conrad," he'd said, looking past my elbow, and then down at the sand, and then glancing up quickly into my face.

  Saying human things upset him, and made him want to go away. I could tell. It is doubtful that the parade consisting of Ellen and myself, which had passed that previous summer, had occupied much of his attention. His passions stopped outside the biological laboratory. I remember when he'd dissected the last dog on Earth. After four years of scratching his ears and combing the fleas from his tail and listening to him bark, George had called Rolf to him one day. Rolf had trotted in, bringing along the old dishrag they'd always played at tug-of-war with, and George had tugged him real close and given him a hypo and then opened him up. He'd wanted to get him while he was still in his prime. Still has the skeleton mounted in his lab. He'd also wanted to raise his kids-Mark and Dorothy and Jim-in Skinner Boxes, but Ellen had put her foot down each time (like bang! bang! bang!) in post-pregnancy seizures of motherhood which had lasted for at least a month-which had been just long enough to spoil the initial stimuli-balances George had wanted to establish. So I couldn't really see him as having much desire to take my measure for a wooden sleeping bag of the underground sort. If he'd wanted me dead, it would probably have been subtle, fast, and exotic-with something like Divban rabbit-venom. But no, he didn't care that much. I was sure.

  Ellen herself, while she is capable of intense feelings, is ever the faulty windup doll. Something always goes strong before she can take action on her feelings, and by the next day she feels as strongly about something else. She'd choked me to death back at the Port, and as far as she was concerned that affair was a dead issue. Her condolence went something like this:

  "Conrad, you just don't know how sorry I am! Really. Even though I never met her, I know how you must feel," and her voice went up and down the scale, and I knew she believed what she was saying, and I thanked her too.

  Hasan, though, came up beside me while I was standing there, staring out over the suddenly swollen and muddy Nile. We stood together for a time and then he said, "Your woman is gone and your heart is heavy. Words will not lighten the weight, and what is written is written. But let it also be put down that I grieve with you." Then we stood there awhile longer and he walked away.

  I didn't wonder about him. He was the one person who could be dismissed, even though his hand had set the machine in motion. He never held grudges; he never killed for free. He had no personal motive to kill me. That his condolences were genuine, I was certain. Killing me would have nothing to do with the sincerity of his feelings in a matter like this. A true professional must respect some sort of boundary between self and task.

  Myshtigo said no words of sympathy. It would have been alien to his nature. Among the Vegans, death is a time of rejoicing. On the spiritual level it means sagl-completion-the fragmentation of the psyche into little pleasure-sensing pinpricks, which are scattered all over the place to participate in the great universal orgasm; and on the material plane it is represented by ansakundabad't-the ceremonial auditing of most of the deceased's personal possessions, the reading of his distribution-desire and the division of his wealth, accompanied by much feasting, singing, and drinking.

  Dos Santos said to me: "It is a sad thing that has happened to you, my friend. It is to lose the blood of one's own veins to lose one's woman. Your sorrow is great and you cannot be comforted. It is like a smoldering fire that will not die out, and it is a sad and terrible thing.

  "Death is cruel and it is dark," he finished, and his eyes were moist-for be it Gypsy, Jew, Moor, or what have you, a victim is a victim to a Spaniard, a thing to be appreciated on one of those mystically obscure levels which I lack.

  Then Red Wig came up beside me and said, "Dreadful… Sorry. Nothing else to say, to do, but sorry."

  I nodded.

  "Thanks."

  "And there is something I must ask you. Not now, though. Later."

  "Sure," I said, and I returned to watching the river after they left, and I thought about those last two. They had sounded as sorry as everyone else, but it seemed they had to be mixed up in the rolem business, somehow. I was sure, though, that it had been Diane who had screamed while golem had been choking me, screamed for Hasan to stop him. That left Don, and I had by then come to entertain strong doubts that he ever did anything without first consulting her.

  Which left nobody.

  And there was no real motive apparent…

  And it could all have been an accident…

  But…

  But I had this feeling that someone wanted to kill me. I knew that Hasan was not above taking two jobs at the same time, and for different employers, if there was no conflict of interests.

  And this made me happy.

  It gave me a purpose, something to do.

  There's really nothing quite like someone's wanting you dead to make you want to go on living. I would find him, find out why, and stop him.

  Death's second pass was fast, and as much as I would have liked to have pinned it on human agent, I couldn't. It was just one of those diddles of dumb destiny which sometimes come like uninvited guests at dinnertime. Its finale, however, left me quite puzzled and gave me some new, confusing thoughts to think.

  It came like this…

  Down by the river, that great fertile flooder, that eraser of boundaries and father of plane geometry, sat the Vegan, making sketches of the opposite bank. I suppose had he been on that bank he would have been sketching the one he sat upon, but this is cynical conjecture. What bothered me was the fact that he had come off alone, down to this warm, marshy spot, had not told anyone where he was going, and had brought along nothing more lethal than a No. 2 pencil.

  It happened.

  An old, mottled log which had been drifting in near the shore suddenly ceased being an old, mottled log. A long, serpentine back end whipped skyward, a bushel full of teeth appeared at the other end, and lots of little legs found solid ground and started acting like wheels.

  I yelled and snatched at my belt.

  Myshtigo dropped his pad and bolted.

  It was on him, though, and I couldn't fire then.

  So I made a dash, but by the time I got there it had two coils around him and he was about two shades bluer, and those teeth were closing in on him.

  Now, there is one way to make any kind of constrictor loosen up, at least for a moment. I grabbed for its high head, which had slowed down just a bit as it contemplated its breakfast, and I managed to catch my fingers under the scaley ridges at the sides of that head.

  I dug my thumbs into its eyes as hard as I could.

  Then a spastic giant hit me with a graygreen whip.

  I picked myself up and I was about ten feet from where I had been standing. Myshtigo had been thrown further up the bank. He was recovering his feet just as it attacked again.

  Only it attacked me, not him.

  It reared up about eight feet off the ground and toppled toward me. I threw myself to the side and that big, flat head missed me by inches, its impact showering me with dirt and pebbles.

  I rolled further and started to rise, but the tail came around and knocked me down again. Then I scrambled backward, but was too late to avoid the coil it threw. It c
aught me low around the hips and I fell again.

  Then a pair of blue arms wrapped themselves around the body above the coil, but they couldn't hold on for more than a few seconds. Then we were both tied up in knots.

  I struggled, but how do you fight a thick, slippery armored cable with messes of little legs that keep tearing at you? My right arm was pinned to my side by then, and I couldn't reach far enough with my left hand to do any more gouging. The coils tightened. The head moved toward me and I tore at the body. I beat at it and I clawed it, and I finally managed to tear my right arm free, giving up some skin in the process.

  I blocked with my right hand as the head descended. My hand came up beneath the lower jaw, caught it, and held it there, keeping the head back. The big coil tightened around my waist, more powerful than even the grip of the golem had been. Then it shook its head sidewards, away from my hand, and the head came down and the jaws opened wide.

  Myshtigo's struggles must have irritated it and slowed it some, giving me time for my last defense.

  I thrust my hands up into its mouth and held its jaws apart.

  The roof of its mouth was slimy and my palm began to slip along it, slowly. I pressed down harder on the lower jaw, as hard as I could. The mouth opened another half foot and seemed locked there.

  It tried to draw back then, to make me let go, but its coils bound us too tightly to give it the necessary footage.

  So it unwound a little, straightening some, and pulling back its head. I gained a kneeling position. Myshtigo was in a sagging crouch about six feet away from me.

  My right hand slipped some more, almost to the point where I would lose all my leverage.

  Then I heard a great cry.

  The shudder came almost simultaneously. I snapped my arms free as I felt the thing's strength wane for a second. There was a dreadful clicking of teeth and a final constriction. I blacked out for a moment.

  Then I was fighting free, untangling myself. The smooth wooden shaft which had skewered the boadile was taking the life from it, and its movements suddenly became spasmodic rather than aggressive.