The Live-Forever Machine

by Kenneth Oppel

  “You don’t want to see all this burn, do you?” he said urgently. “You love the museum. You feel as I do. Outside these walls, the past is being demolished. You’ve seen it with your own eyes. We must protect it—all this, all that I’ve struggled for centuries to achieve.”

  They stared into each other’s eyes.

  Eric was afraid to move. He pictured the inside of his head as a tumultuous ocean suddenly gone mirror-smooth. It all made sense, as if he’d half-known all along.

  “You knew her,” was the first thing he could say.

  Alexander hesitated for only a moment, then: “Yes.”

  “It’s you she’s looking at,” Eric said. “You were standing there when it was painted.”

  “Yes.” The word came out as a weary sigh.

  Eric made the calculation quickly. He felt absurdly calm. Some part of him was vaguely aware that he should be incredulous, should be gasping in disbelief. He wasn’t. Dates his father had taught him surfaced silently in his mind: Methuselah, 969 years old; Noah, 950.

  Yet he was trembling as the next question itched the inside of his mouth.

  “How old?” he said. “How old are you?” Alexander touched his hands to his face. “ ‘Devouring Time, blunt thou the lion’s paws,’ “ he muttered to himself, and laughed. He looked back at Eric. “The invention of photography.”

  “1827,” Eric answered immediately. “Niepce’s photographs on a metal plate. But you must be older—”

  “The Battle of Waterloo.”

  “1815.” It was the familiar game.

  “The first French Republic.”

  “The 1790s; I don’t know exactly when.” “That will suffice. Oliver Cromwell’s rule in England.”

  “I don’t—”

  “1653 to 1658. Michelangelo’s paintings on the Sistine ceiling.” “Early 1500s?” “Yes. The Black Death.”

  “1330?” His mind was swirling now as Alexander plunged him deeper and deeper into history.

  “1346 to 1348. Marco Polo’s travels in China.”

  “Around 1280. Is that when you were—” “The Crusades,” Alexander cut him off. “Late eleventh and twelfth centuries.” Deeper and deeper.

  “The Battle of Hastings.”

  “1066.”

  “The coronation of Charlemagne.”

  Eric shook his head.

  “800. The fall of the Roman Empire.”

  “400 A.D.”

  “There—that’s it! 331 Anno Domini.”

  Eric whistled under his breath, performing the mental arithmetic.

  “Sometimes,” Alexander said softly, “I can scarcely believe it myself. Tempus fugit.”

  “Latin,” Eric said. “You speak Latin.” He found he was thinking very clearly and quickly, suddenly remembering things that had lain dormant at the back of his mind, snatches of conversation from the medieval armoury. “You’re Roman, then.”

  “I was born in Alexandria, the city from which I took my name,” the ancient man replied. “It was under Roman jurisdiction, in the weakening Empire. I’ve never forgotten Latin; my first tongue it was.”

  He fell silent for a moment, apparently inundated by memory. His eyes narrowed slightly, as if he were trying to make out something far in the distance.

  “I’ve seen so much,” he said slowly, almost absentmindedly. Then he turned to Eric and there was a spark dancing in each eye. “I saw the Great Library of Alexandria ablaze as its vast collections disintegrated in flame. I saw the Visigoths riding into Rome on horses like dark thunder. I wandered through the ruins of the Empire, through the new kingdoms of the barbarian tribes. I have passed through history like a nomad.”

  How? Eric wanted to ask; how did you do it? But Alexander had been silent about his past for so long that now the words poured out like a torrent through a breached dam.

  “In Northumbria, I worked at the monastery at Lindisfarne, copying holy texts, illustrating them. I indexed the great monastic libraries of Jarrow, Centula and St. Gall. I was summoned to serve under Charlemagne at his famous scriptorium in the Frankish Empire, where the libraries of Italy and Byzantium were joined in our great halls, and Alcuin of York sat day after day in his workroom, restoring the true text of the Bible.

  “At the end of the first millennium, after Charlemagne’s Empire had been partitioned and wasted by war, I went on to the Clunaic abbey near Macon. Art treasures from the known world and beyond were being hungrily collected and catalogued. Then it was not long before the rise of the universities, the glorious universities, and the world began to learn again. Paris, Oxford, Padua, Bologna. I taught mathematics, astronomy, philosophy: no one ever knew I spoke with the voice of the past.”

  Eric understood his strange accent now, a mixture of a hundred different dialects from around the world.

  “Later,” Alexander went on, “I was employed by the great Medici family in Florence—as an advisor on artistic matters for their burgeoning state. I commissioned Cellini, Giovanni Bologna, Michelangelo. Another age passed away.”

  He paused briefly. His exuberance seemed to be dying out, and there were traces of sadness in his face. He suddenly began coughing, one hand clenched over his mouth, the other against a pocket of his coveralls, gripping the locket.

  “Then I returned to Rome and assisted the Pope in transforming the city into one of the wonders of the modern world, the eternal city: Saint Peter’s, San Carlo, St. Ivo—all the great churches rose up under my supervision. On the cusp of the seventeenth century, wanderlust overtook me again and I travelled to new cities, to new museums and libraries in Vienna, Berlin, Madrid, Constantinople, but I returned to France, where revolution marched in the streets of Paris, and the Louvre opened its doors, promising to be one of the greatest museums in all time. I stayed there for almost a hundred years, leaving once when it seemed appropriate I should die, then returning some years later when I’d been forgotten.

  “By the turn of this century, it was no longer possible to slough off the skins of identity so easily. Records were becoming much more detailed, and the world was contracting with railroads, motorized carriages and trolleys, telegraphs. I could no longer stay at the Louvre without arousing suspicion, so I travelled across the great ocean. I work here doing repairs to escape notice. Had I applied for a higher position, my history would undoubtedly have been checked. But this way, I pass like a spectre through the museum, watching over it all. It must be protected.” Alexander’s eyes darted nervously around the room. “Like a fool, I thought I could escape him, but he’s found me again.”

  Eric stared at his sneakers, calmly piecing together the jigsaw pieces in his mind. He looked up at Alexander.

  “He was at the Louvre with you, wasn’t he? He said something about it in the armoury.”

  “Yes, he was there.”

  “He looks so young,” Eric murmured. An hour ago he would have sworn the man in black was no more than thirty.

  “He is almost as old as I,” Alexander said. “We worked together at the Library of Alexandria. His name was Macer, but he has changed it a hundred times through the ages. He calls himself Coyle now.”

  “But how?” Eric asked. “How have you both lived so long?”

  “That’s the greatest secret of all,” Alexander said. “The live-forever machine.”

  9

  The Live-Forever Machine

  The freight elevator plunged them into the depths of the museum. Eric watched the painted numbers on the shaft wall slide slowly by: 3, 4, 5 …

  What did a live-forever machine look like? He imagined a massive apparatus bristling with wires, throbbing with electricity, and his thoughts immediately turned to the machinery he and Chris had heard deep beneath Astrologer’s Walk, the jagged splinter of blue light, the billowing black smoke. No, that didn’t make any sense. There was no electricity back in 300 A.D., no wires, no steel. So what kind of machine was it?

  “I was chief librarian at the Library of Alexandria,” said Alexander at his side. “I
t was a storehouse for the knowledge of the known world, past and present. Under our high ceilings were writings from the Hittites, the Phoenicians, the Etamites. There were pictographs from the ancient Sumerians, writings in Akkadian on clay tablets from Babylon and Assyria, ivory boards covered with old Persian, Meriotic script from the African civilization of Kush.”

  Eric was beginning to feel slightly unreal, as if he were watching everything through water. He was there! He had to keep reciting those words to himself in his head.

  “I was translating some Babylonian writings on longevity,” Alexander went on. “They spoke of the possibility of living eternally. It is a subject to which every age has turned in fascination and longing. It intrigued me then—nothing more. But shortly afterwards I came across some Phoenician writings on the same subject. I delved into the library’s immense collection, looking for more. I translated writings from almost all the ancient civilizations, unable to sleep. It had obsessed me, you see, this idea of immortality.”

  The elevator cable groaned. The numbers slid by: 7, 8, 9. Eric watched Alexander as he spoke. What was it like to have lived that long? he wondered.

  “Coyle was my assistant then,” Alexander said. “He helped me find some of the material I needed. He had only a vague idea of my research, and I was careful to tell him as little as possible. He was an exceptional scholar, but we couldn’t have been more dissimilar. I was content to sift through the past; he was interested only in the latest learning, the latest achievements. He had visions, you know—wild visions of the future that he said came to him in dreams. He ranted about machinery and inventions that seemed impossible at the time. Who could have known they would prove to be true?”

  “The way of the future,” Eric mumbled to himself, remembering Coyle’s words in the medieval armoury.

  “After several years,” Alexander went on, “I had collected all the writings I had found on eternal life, collated them, fused them into one text, and painstakingly transcribed it onto one long scroll of parchment. I called it, this one document, the live-forever machine—though, of course, it wasn’t really a piece of machinery at all, certainly not by today’s definition. But that was the way I thought of it then: an incredible, impossible machine. I half-believed it might work.”

  So it was just paper. Eric felt a twinge of disappointment.

  “Coyle found my working papers one day. He read them, translated them into Latin. Then, one night, he tried what I don’t think I would ever have tried myself. He tried to make himself immortal. It worked.”

  “How, though?” Eric asked.

  “How is one made immortal?” Alexander hesitated. “It would seem like madness to you. At night, under the eye of the moon, there are certain rituals that must be observed, incantations read aloud. But that is the least of it. When that is done, the person must immerse himself in deep water and drown.”

  “Make yourself drown?” Eric cried out. “Can you even do that?”

  “It’s the hardest thing in the world, to breathe water willingly into your lungs, to feel them icily fill, to hear your own breath leave your body in choking gasps. But yes, it is possible, by force of will, if you believe strongly enough.”

  “What happens then?” Eric felt his chest tighten, as if his own lungs were being filled with water.

  “You die. For three days, your body settles heavily on the bottom. But then there is the second awakening. You feel yourself stir, as from a drugged sleep. You strain to reach the surface of the water, and you pull yourself out onto the shore. You’ve become immortal.”

  The elevator settled with a thud at the bottom of the shaft. The massive doors split apart and Alexander strode out into the harsh fluorescent light, down a long corridor lined with doors. Storage rooms.

  “How did you know Coyle had done it?” Eric asked. “How could you tell?”

  “It was his eyes,” explained Alexander. “They had changed colour. The next morning, when I saw his face, I knew he had done it. He told me, too, laughing, and then I smelled the fire. It spread so quickly that there was no time to stop it. Now that he was immortal, he wanted to destroy the very mechanism of his creation. He wanted to be the only one. What he didn’t know—not for hundreds of years—was that I had hidden the complete live-forever machine elsewhere for safekeeping.”

  Eric glanced through a tiny glass window in one of the storage-room doors. All he could make out were the hard lines and corners of sealed boxes and crates. He shivered. There was something eerie about it, like a room with all the furniture covered over with sheets, dead.

  “Looking at Coyle’s face that morning, I realized what an evil thing had been born. He laughed contemptuously as the library burned and toppled. It gave him tremendous pleasure. He told me that only by laying waste to the past could he attain his dreamed-of future. Then he fled, and that was the last I saw of him for nearly three centuries.

  “I felt as if the contents of Pandora’s box had been loosed on the world for a second time. Something had to be done. I feared that he would desecrate everything old that came within his reach. There had to be balance. So that night, I too turned myself immortal with the live-forever machine, and I left Alexandria forever.”

  At the end of the corridor was a small door, secured by deadbolts and a steel bar. From one of the pockets in his coveralls, Alexander produced a large ring bristling with keys. After opening the locks, he slid the rusting metal beam to one side.

  The door swung open into darkness. A warm, fetid wind hit Eric in the face, making his nostrils and throat contract in revulsion. Alexander reached around through the doorway and pulled out an oil lantern. He lit it.

  “Watch your footing,” Alexander warned him.

  Eric looked dubiously at the wooden staircase, rotted by dampness, some steps missing altogether.

  “ ‘Each day we take another step to hell,’ “ Alexander intoned. “ ‘Descending through the stench, unhorrified …’ “

  The stairs were built down against the four walls of a square shaft, slanting into darkness.

  “I wandered through the ruins of the Empire,” Alexander continued. “I collected things that would have been lost forever in the chaos and hid them in secret places in wait for a more stable time. I tried to compensate for what had been lost in the library fire. Moreover, every object I ferreted away was one thing less for Coyle to destroy, one thing more that would survive the ages.”

  “What did Coyle do after he left Alexandria?” Eric was trying to breathe through his mouth so he wouldn’t smell the stale stench of the cellars.

  “He became a marauder. I would hear rumours of monastery libraries mysteriously burned to the ground, or castle keeps plundered. What he didn’t destroy, he hoarded and sold years later for enormous profits. He’d become very wealthy by the time I met him again.

  “He didn’t recognize me at first. I had to call him by his birth name, speak of Alexandria and the library. Then he remembered. How he paled! He thought I was a ghost! But he slowly came to realize there must have been another copy of the live-forever machine.”

  They reached a landing with a door, but Alexander hurried Eric past it.

  “I told him that he had destroyed only my working papers in the fire. I told him as well that he had missed one very important piece of the machine—the mechanism that enables a person to unmake himself or others. I warned him that if he did not cease his wanton destruction, I would cast him into the abyss of time.”

  “Could you really do that?” Eric asked. His mind was beginning to cloud. It was too much all at once, too much to keep straight.

  “Yes. If you drown a second time, you are unmade.”

  “That’s it?”

  “No, it’s not that simple. It must be done beneath the same moon under which you made yourself immortal.”

  “What do you mean, the same moon?”

  “I mean within the same three-day period of the yearly lunar cycle.”

  “Did you try to unmake him then?�
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  Alexander was silent for a moment, casting his gaze down to the sodden wooden steps. “No,” he said awkwardly. “The time was not right, and he fled immediately.

  “Several centuries streamed by before I saw him again. He tracked me to Charlemagne’s scriptorium and tried to steal the live-forever machine. He wanted the secret of unmaking so he could do away with me. The scroll was well hidden, but in his anger he cut a swath of destruction through the library’s vaults. The three days when I could have unmade him had passed. From then on, he dogged my steps around the world, heedless of my warning. I suppose he thought my threat had been an idle one.

  “The most curious thing about Coyle was that he was vastly changed each time I saw him. He was so obsessed with his vision of the future that he would forget everything about the last age in which he had lived: the language, the customs, the knowledge. He was a perfect chameleon. Every year, it seemed, he would learn everything anew. Scarcely a fragment of the past clung to his consciousness except the memory of the live-forever machine, and his drive to unmake me.”

  They had reached a high door at the bottom of the rotting staircase. Alexander fumbled in his coveralls for his ring of keys.

  “The last time I saw him before now was at the Louvre. I trapped him in one of great galleries, and had him taken down to one of the dungeon vaults that hadn’t been used since the building’s days as a royal residence. I sealed him in, hoping never to see him again. He must have remained there for the better part of a century, smouldering with hatred in the dark. I have no idea how he finally got out. Perhaps an unwitting labourer released him. Now he has come back into the world.”

  Alexander turned the key in the lock and pushed the door wide open.

  “Go in—go,” he said.

  Eric gasped.

  Pirate’s treasure, toy shop, art gallery, museum, junkyard. The lantern’s light played across smooth marble busts and crude clay statuettes, the canvases of oil paintings, a stone sarcophagus inlaid with lapis lazuli and red limestone, teetering piles of books, a Bull’s head plated in gold, a bronze helmet. It was all stacked up against the walls of the cave-like chamber, covering antique tables and bureaus, sprawled out across the floor on Persian rugs. Trunks and strongboxes lay open, filled to the brink with fabulous baubles.