by Damon Knight
In the wall mirror, her eyes sparkle; her lips are liquidly red, as tender and dark as the red wax that spills from the edge of a candle.
She feels a somber recklessness; she is running with the tide. Responsive to her mood, the silvered ceiling begins to run with swift bloody streaks, swirling and leaping, striking flares of light from the bronze dado and the carved crystal lacework of the furniture. With a sudden exultant laugh, Claire tumbles into the great yellow down bed: she rolls there, half smothered, the luxuriant silky fibers cool as cream to her skin; then the mood is gone, the ceiling dims to grayness; and she sits up with an impatient murmur.
What can be wrong with her? Sobered, already regretting the summery warmth of the Mediterranean, she walks to the table where Dio’s card lies. It is his reply to the formal message she sent en route: it says simply:
THE PLANNER DIO
WILL BE AT HOME.
There is a discreet chime from die delivery chute, and fabrics tumble in in billows of canary yellow, crimson, midnight blue. Claire chooses the blue, anything else would be out of key with the day; it is gauzy but long- sleeved. With it she wears no rings or necklaces, only a tiara of dark aquamarines twined in her hair.
SHE SCARCELY NOTICES the new exterior of the building; the ascensor shaft is dark and padded now, with an endless chain of cushioned seats that slowly rise, occupied or not, like a disjointed flight of stairs. The vestibule above slowly comes into view, and she feels a curious shock of recognition.
It is die same: the same blue- veined marble, the same mobile idly turning, the same arched doorway.
Claire hesitates, alarmed and displeased. She tries to believe that she is mistaken: no scheme of decoration is ever left unchanged for as much as a year. But here it is, untouched, as if time had queerly stopped here in this room when she left it: as if she had returned, not only to the same choice, but to the same instant.
She crosses the floor reluctantly. The dark door screen looks back at her like a baited trap.
Suppose she had never gone away—what then? Whatever Dio’s secret is, it has had ten years to grow, here behind this unchanged door. There it is, a darkness, waiting for her.
With a shudder of almost physical repulsion, she steps onto the annunciator plate.
The screen lights. After a moment a face comes into view. She sees without surprise that it is the thin man, the one who showed her the rat . . .
He is watching her keenly. She cannot rid herself of the vision of the rat, and of the dark struggling figure in the doorway. She says, “Is Dio—” She stops, not knowing what she meant to say.
“At home?” the thin man finishes. “Yes, of course. Come in.”
The doors slide open. About to step forward, she hesitates again, once more shocked to realize that the first room is also unchanged. The frieze of screens now displays a row of gray-lit streets; that is the only difference; it is as if she were looking into some far-distant world where time still had meaning, from this still, secret place where it has none.
The thin man appears in the doorway, black-robed. “My name is Benarra,” he says, smiling. “Please come in; don’t mind all this, you’ll get used to it.”
“Where is Dio?”
“Not far . . . But we make a rule,” the thin man says, “that only students are admitted to see Dio. Would you mind?”
She looks at him with indignation. “Is this a joke? Dio sent me a note . . .” She hesitates; the note was noncommittal enough, to be sure.
“You can become a student quite easily,” Benarra says. “At least, you can begin, and that would be enough for today.” He stands waiting, with a pleasant expression; he seems perfectly serious.
She is balanced between bewilderment and surrender. “I don’t—what do you want me to do?”
“Come and see.” He crosses the room, opens a narrow door. After a moment she follows.
He leads her down an inclined passage, narrow and dark. “I’m living on the floor below now,” he remarks over his shoulder, “to keep out of Dio’s way.” The passage ends in a bright central hall from which he leads her through a doorway into dimness.
“Here your education begins,” he says. On both sides, islands of light glow up slowly: in the nearest, and brightest, stands a curious group of beings, not ape, not man: black skins with a bluish sheen, tiny eyes peering upward under shelving brows, hair a dusty black. The limbs are knob-jointed like twigs; the ribs show; the bellies are soft and big. The head of the tallest comes to Claire’s waist. Behind them is a brilliant glimpse of tropical sunshine, a conical mass of what looks like dried vegetable matter, trees and horned animals in the background.
“Human beings,” says Benarra.
She turns a disbelieving, almost offended gaze on him. “Oh, no!”
“Yes, certainly. Extinct several thousand years. Here, another kind.”
In the next island the figures are also black-skinned, but taller—shoulder high. The woman’s breasts are limp leathery bags that hang to her waist. Claire grimaces. “Is something wrong with her?”
“A different standard of beauty. They did that to themselves, deliberately. Woman creating herself. See what you think of the next.”
She loses count. There are coppery-skinned ones, white ones, yellowish ones, some half naked, others elaborately trussed in metal and fabric. Moving among them, Claire feels herself suddenly grown titanic, like a mother animal among her brood: she has a flash of absurd, degrading tenderness. Yet, as she looks at these wrinkled gnomish faces, they seem to hold an ancient and stubborn wisdom that glares out at her, silently saying, Upstart!
“What happened to them all?”
“They died,” says Benarra. “Every one.”
Ignoring her troubled look, he leads her out of the hall. Behind them, the lights fall and dim.
The next room is small and cool, unobtrusively lit, unfurnished except for a desk and chair, and a visitor’s seat to which Benarra waves her. The domed ceiling is pierced just above their heads with round transparencies, each glowing in a different pattern of simple blue and red shapes against a colorless ground.
“They are hard to take in, I know,” says Benarra. “Possibly you think they’re fakes.”
“No.” No one could have imagined those fierce, wizened faces; somewhere, sometime, they must have existed.
A new thought strikes her. “What about o ancestors—what were they like?”
Benarra’s gaze is cool and thoughtful. “Claire, you’ll find this hard to believe. Those were our ancestors.”
She is incredulous again. “Those—absurdities in there?”
“Yes. All of them.”
She is stubbornly silent a moment. “But you said, they
“They did; they died. Claire—did you think our race was always immortal?”
“Why—” She falls silent, confused and angry.
“No, impossible. Because if we were, where are all the old ones? No one in the world is older than, perhaps, two thousand years. That’s not very long . . . What are you drinking?” She looks up, frowning with concentration. “You’re saying it happened. But how?”
“It didn’t happen. We did it, we created ourselves.” Leaning back, he gestures at the glowing transparencies overhead. “Do you know what those are?”
“No. I’ve never seen any designs quite like them. They’d make lovely fabric patterns.” He smiles. “Yes, they are pretty, I suppose, but that’s not what they’re for. These are enlarged photographs of very small living things—too small to see. They used to get into people’s bloodstreams and make them die. That’s bubonic plague—” blue and purple dots alternating with larger pink disks—“that’s tetanus—” blue rods and red dots—“that’s leprosy—” dark- spotted blue lozenges with a cross-hatching of red behind them. “That thing that looks something like a peacock’s tail is a parasitic fungus called streptothrix actinomyces. That one—” a particularly dainty design of pale blue with darker accents—“is from a malignant ede
ma with gas gangrene.”
The words are meaningless to her, but they call up vague images that are all the more horrible for having no definite outlines. She thinks again of the rat, and of a human face somehow assuming that stillness, that stiffness . . . frozen into a bright pattern, like the colored dots on the wall . . .
SHE IS RESOLVED not to show her revulsion. “What happened to them?” she asks in a voice that does not quite tremble.
“Nothing. The planners left them alone, but changed us. Most of the records have been lost in two thousand years, and of course we have no real science of biology as they knew it. I’m no biologist, only a historian and collector. He rises. “But one thing we know they did was to make our bodies chemically immune to infection. Those things—” he nods to the transparencies above—“are simply irrelevant now, they can’t harm us. They still exist—I’ve seen cultures taken from living animals. But they’re only a curiosity. Various other things were done, to make the body’s chemistry, to put it crudely, more stable. Things that would have killed our ancestors by toxic reactions—poisoned them—don’t harm us. Then there are the protective mechanisms, and the paraphysical powers that homo sapiens had only in potential. Levitation, regeneration of lost organs. Finally, in general we might say that the body was very much more homeostatized than formerly, that is, there’s a cycle of functions which always tends to return to the norm. The cumulative processes that used to impair function don’t happen—the ‘matrix’ doesn’t thicken, progressive dehydration never gets started, and so on. But you see all these are just delaying actions, things to prevent you and me from dying prematurely. The main thing—” he fingers an index stripe, and a linear design springs out on the wall—“was this. Have you ever read a chart, Claire?”
She shakes her head dumbly. The chart is merely an unaesthetic curve drawn on a reticulated background: it means nothing to her. “This is a schematic way of representing the growth of an organism,” says Benarra. “You see here, this up-and-down scale is numbered in one-hundredths of mature weight—from zero here at the bottom, to one hundred per cent here at the top. Understand?”
“Yes,” she says doubtfully. “But what good is that?”
“You’ll see. Now this other scale, along the bottom, is numbered according to the age of the organism. Now: this sharply rising curve here represents all other highly developed species except man. You see, the organism is born, grows very rapidly until it reaches almost its full size, then the curve rounds itself off, becomes almost level. Here it declines. And here it stops: the animal dies.”
He pauses to look at her. The word hangs in the air; she says nothing, but meets his gaze.
“Now this,” says Benarra, “this long shallow curve represents man as he was. You notice it starts far to the left of the animal curve. The planners had this much to work with: man was already unique, in that he had this very long juvenile period before sexual maturity. Here: see what they did.”
With a gesture, he superimposes another chart on the first.
“It looks almost the same,” says Claire.
“Yes. Almost. What they did was quite a simple thing, in principle. They lengthened that juvenile period still further, they made the curve rise still more slowly . . . and never quite reach the top. The curve now becomes asymptotic, that is, it approaches sexual maturity by. smaller and smaller amounts, and never gets there, no matter how long it goes on.”
Gravely, he returns her stare.
“Are you saying,” she asks, “that we’re not sexually mature? Not anybody?”
“Correct,” he says. “Maturity in every other complex organism is the first stage of death. We never mature, Claire, and that’s why we don’t die. We’re the eternal adolescents of the universe. That’s the price we paid.”
“The price . . .” she echoes. “But I still don’t see.” She laughs. “Not mature—” Unconsciously she holds herself straighter, shoulders back.
Benarra leans casually against the desk, looking down at her. “Have you ever thought to wonder why there are so few children? In the old days, loving without any precautions, a grown woman would have a child a year. Now it happens perhaps once in a hundred billion meetings. It’s an anomaly, a freak of nature, and even then the woman can’t carry the child to term herself. Oh, we look mature; that’s the joke—they gave us the shape of their own dreams of adult power.” He fingers his glossy beard, thumps his chest. “It isn’t real. We’re all pretending to be grown-up, but not one of us knows what it’s really like.”
A silence falls.
“Except Dio?” says Claire, looking down at her hands.
“He’s on the way to find out. Yes.”
“And you can’t stop it . . . you don’t know why.”
Benarra shrugs. “He was under strain, physical and mental. Some link of the chain broke, we may never know which one. He’s already gone a long way up that slope—I think he’s near the crest now. There isn’t a hope that we can pull him back again.”
Her fists clench impotently. “Then what good is it all?” Benarra’s eyes are hooded; he is playing with a memocube on the desk. “We learn,” he says. “We can do something now and then, to alleviate, to make things easier. We don’t give up.”
She hesitates. “How long?”
“Actually, we don’t know. We can guess what the maximum is; we know that from analogy with other mammals. But with Dio, too many other things might happen.” He glances up at the transparencies.
“Surely you don’t mean—” The bright ugly shapes glow down at her, motionless, inscrutable.
“Yes. Yes. He had one of them already, the last time you saw him—a virus infection. We were able to control it; it was what our ancestors used to call ‘the common cold’; they thought it was mild. But it nearly destroyed Dio—I mean, not the disease itself, but the moral effect. The symptoms were unpleasant. He wasn’t prepared for it.”
She is trembling. “Please.”
“You have to know all this,” says Benarra mercilessly, “or it’s no use your seeing Dio at all. If you’re going to be shocked, do it now. If you can’t stand it, then go away now, not later.” He pauses, and speaks more gently. “You can see him today, of course; I promised that. Don’t try to make up your mind now, if it’s hard. Talk to him, be with him this afternoon; see what it’s like.”
Claire does not understand herself. She has never been so foolish about a man before: love is all very well; love never lasts very long and you don’t expect that it should, but while it lasts, it’s pleasantness. Love is joy, not this wrenching pain.
Time flows like a strong, clean torrent, if only you let things go. She could give Dio up now and be unhappy, perhaps, a year or five years, or fifty, but then it would be over, and life would go on just the same.
She sees Dio’s face, vivid in memory—not the stranger, the dark shouting man, but Dio himself, framed against the silver sky: sunlight curved on the strong brow, the eyes gleaming in shadow.
“We’ve got him full of antibiotics,” says Benarra compassionately. “We don’t think he’ll get any of the bad ones . . . But aging itself is the worst of them all . . . What do you say?”
CHAPTER IV
UNDER THE CURTAIN of falling stone, Dio sits at his workbench. The room is the same as before, the only visible change is the statue which now looms overhead, in the corner above the stone curtain: it is the figure of a man reclining, weight on one elbow, calf crossed over thigh, head turned pensively down toward the shoulder. The figure is powerful, but there is a subtle feeling of decay about it: the bulging muscles seem about to sag; the face, even in shadow, has a deformed, damaged look. Forty feet long, sprawling immensely across the corner of the room, the statue has a raw, compulsive power: it is supremely ugly, but she can hardly look away.
A motion attracts her eye. Dio is standing beside the bench, waiting for her. She advances hesitantly: the statue’s face is in shadow, but Dio’s is not, and already she is afraid of what she may see
there.
He takes her hand between his two palms; his touch is warm and dry, but something like an electric shock seems to pass between them, making her start. “Claire—it’s good to see you.
Here, sit down, let me look.” His voice is resonant, confident, even a trifle assertive; his eyes are alert and preternaturally bright. He talks, moves, holds himself with an air of suppressed excitement. She is relieved and yet paradoxically alarmed: there is nothing really different in his face; the skin glows clear and healthy, his lips are firm. And yet every line, every feature, seems to be hiding some unpleasant surprise; it is like looking at a mask which will suddenly be whipped aside.
In her excitement, she laughs, murmurs a few words without in the least knowing what she is saying. He sits facing her across the corner of the desk, commandingly intent.
“I’ve just been sketching some plans for next year. I have some ideas . . . it won’t be like anything people expect.” He laughs, glancing down; the bench is covered with little gauzy boxes full of shadowy line and color. His tools lie in disorderly array, solidopens, squirts, calipers. “What do you think of this, by the way?” He points up, behind him, at the heroic statue.
“It’s very unusual . . . Yours?”
“A copy, from stereographs—the original was by Michelangelo, something called ‘Evening.’ But I did the copy myself.”
She raises her eyebrows, not understanding.
“I mean I didn’t do it by machine. I carved the stone myself—with mallet and chisel, in these hands, Claire.” He holds them out, strong, calloused. It was those flat pads of thickened skin, she realizes, that felt so warm and strange against her hand.
He laughs again. “It was an experience. I found out about texture, for one thing. You know, when a machine melts or molds a statue, there’s no texture, because to a machine granite is just like cheese. But when you carve, the stone fights back. Stone has character, Claire, it can be stubborn or evasive—it can throw chips in your face, or make your chisel slip aside. Stone fights.” His hand clenches, and again he laughs that strange, exultant laugh.