“That’s right. And I never will.”
Okay, that stopped me dead.
Almost like it was orchestrated, the jukebox went silent. I looked back. The bartender had vanished. I swung back to Struldbrug. He smiled, waiting.
“You’re a reborn,” I said.
He shook his head.
I rotated the pool cue in my hands. Whatever this was, I didn’t want it. I really didn’t want it. “Then you’re taking the Retrozine.”
“C’mon, Mr. Donner,” he said.
I’d gotten good at knowing when I was about to get blindsided. It wasn’t exactly a premonition—more like when you’re a boxer on the canvas and you see your opponent’s shoulder drop and his weight shift, you know a right cross is coming.
I was about to get knocked out.
“The math’s simple,” he said. “You just won’t accept it.”
Connected, but not connected. An impossibly young father, an impossibly young daughter. Working on a fountain of youth drug, derived from mysterious DNA…
The jukebox lurched back into life, and Louie Armstrong started lying about what a wonderful world it was.
Connected, but not connected. Impossibly young, before there was Shift, before there was a drug to take. Before, and after.
Connected.
I watched the cue vibrate. An earthquake, out here?
But not connected.
It wasn’t an earthquake. It was my hands.
“Sure you don’t want something stronger?” he teased. “I’ve got some eighty-year old Scotch…”
“This place,” I croaked.
“Arg-é Bam? I was feeling homesick. Of course, Persopolis was nice, too. Back then, I went by Achaemenes. It means, ‘Friendly By Nature.’“
I sank onto the stool, my lungs shrink-wrapped in plastic.
“Do you know these revisionist historians are trying to say that Cyrus the Great, his son, made up Achaemenes? To legitimize his reign?”
I hitched in a breath. I sounded tubercular.
“Of course, I was Cyrus, too. Now I couldn’t very well make myself up, could I?”
I dropped my head, worked on getting oxygen.
“I know,” he said, “You’re hung up by the Struldbrug thing. Your research said the family that founded Surazal were German Jews from Dresden. How could I be a Jew if I’m an Arab?” He leaned in to me, like he was being confidential. “Let me tell you something. It gets boring being one thing. Along the way, I’ve been Muslim, Jewish, Christian… even a Hindu for a while. That was fun. Their deities are so colorful.”
“Immortal,” I said. “You’re immortal.”
His eyebrows went up another notch.
“God,” I said. “Jesus God.”
“Take it easy,” he said. “Have another Coke. Dottie!”
The bartender appeared, and he pointed at me. She cracked another can, poured, and then messily dropped in some ice cubes.
This was worse even than that first awful day when I saw my gold eyes and my white hair and they told me what had happened to the world. Where was Walter Winchell and his adenoidal rap to help me through? “Good evening, Mr. and Mrs. America and all you ships at sea—let’s go to press! So you’re sitting next to someone who’ll never die. This reporter says: don’t be a pantywaist!”
“Immortal,” I said again.
“I prefer the term ‘ageless.’” he said.
He took the stool next to me, still all casualness. Just two buddies talking. Dottie put a fresh Coke under a fresh napkin and went back to her holding position.
“Actually, there’s no such thing. Accident, murder, suicide, severe physical trauma—poof. I’ve been very lucky. And very careful.”
I couldn’t get my mind around it. It was like looking up at the walls of the Grand Canyon after mule-riding to the bottom. All you got was all that looming oppressive rock. No big picture, just your vision crowded by immensity.
I said it again. “Immortal.”
His brow darkened. “What are you, a parrot? Yes, immortal—eternal, unceasing, perpetual, everlasting, imperishable, ceaseless, incorruptible, amaranthine—”
“Stop.”
He went to the table and finished racking the balls. His break was like a thunderclap. He bowed his head for a couple seconds, marshalling himself.
“I apologize,” he said. “For some reason, this always irritates me. The going into shock routine, the denial. Somehow it gets me more than outright disbelief. It’s easier when they just think you’re crazy.”
Louie Armstrong finished “Wonderful World”. They say when he came back, he refused to ever sing it again.
“How?” I said, trying to find the words. “I mean, this happened, uh, naturally?” I asked.
“If by natural, you mean without the aid of any outside force, yes. But I am the furthest thing from natural, Mr. Donner. I am a one-in-a-zillion freak. A creature so beyond the laws of probability, there has never been another like me.”
“Gavin… Gavin told me about aging…”
“Ah, yes. All the different processes and events that combine to make immortality impossible. Programmed cell death, apoptosis. The Hayflick limit. Telomeres. Environmental damage. Each one of which would have to be accounted for, and corrected, in an ageless being.”
I looked at his skin, his face, his hair. “And you—”
He shrugged. “Like I said, a fluke. A cosmic joke. The perfect collection of mutations, all at the same time, working together in perfect synchronicity. Infinite, faultless cell reproduction. Massive production of telomerase, which replenishes my telomeres. A unique internal antioxidant process. Blah blah blah. The result is a perfectly self-repairing organism.” He smiled. “Although I do try to stay out of the sun.”
“This is impossible, isn’t it?”
“Nothing is impossible, Donner, only improbable. I am living proof of that statistical truth. In actuality, given enough time and enough couplings, enough re-shufflings of our genes, enough random mutations, an ageless human would have eventually happened a couple billion years down the pike. The weird thing is that it occurred so early in the history of our race. But here I stand, having arrived at the party far too early.”
I must’ve started looking stunned again, because he said, “Oh no. Am I going to need to provide evidence to support my wild claim? Let’s see, what can I pony up? Hmm. A Gutenberg Bible, signed by Gutenberg?” He mimed opening a book. “To Izzy; thanks for the printing press idea.’” He laughed.
“No,” I said. “I believe you.”
He seemed impressed. “And why is that, Mr. Donner?”
“It explains Nicole, all those years ago. She’s like you.”
“You haven’t been listening. Another anomaly like me is as about likely as all the stars in the Universe going nova at the same time.”
I ran a hand down my face, looked at the Coke. “I could use a cigarette.”
A suede sports coat was slung over some chairs. He pulled a pack out from a pocket. “Menthol okay?”
A laugh burst out of me, too hard, the semi-hysterical kind. “You smoke?” I said.
“Why not?”
Why not, indeed?
He shook out a pair, fired both from a match and handed me one. “Tobacco’s stale, sorry. I don’t get deliveries often enough.”
I blew a storm cloud over my head. “Nicole’s mother—?”
“Normal.”
“Then how—”
“Nicole inherited some of my traits, Mr. Donner. She’s what you would call a hybrid. She and her brother Adam are unusually long-lived. They age, but very slowly. They will die. Eventually.”
I flashed back to Crandall’s interrogation. “The tissue samples that Nicole gave Crandall’s team, back in the beginning—the ones with the strange DNA that they used to develop the Retrozine. Yours?”
“Hers.”
“But your DNA—passed down to her—it’s still the basis for Retrozine.”
“Yes.”
Something clicked in my head. The big question, finally answered. Now it seemed so obvious.
“Uh oh,” he said. “I just saw a light bulb go off.”
“We couldn’t figure out who would kill Nicole’s scientists to thwart her, yet would also kill Alvarez to protect her from me. Didn’t make sense.”
“But…”
“But a father would do something like that. Protecting her from others and herself at the same time.”
He went back to the table. He sunk two balls and perfectly positioned the next shot. “My daughter sees these drugs as a means to unlimited power. But doling out immortality to the highest bidder is a very bad idea.”
“Living forever’s not all it’s cracked up to be?”
He gave me a weary look. “Everyone thinks they know what it would be like,” he said.
Two of my balls were in the way of his shot. If he struck his ball into a pocket with one of mine, it would be a fault. Struldbrug elevated the end of his stick to a severe angle, scoping down its shaft. “The Flying Dutchman, doomed to sail around the Cape of Good Hope forever. Tolkien, Borges, Swift, Rice. An immortal would grow weary of life. After centuries of living, life would become a burden. Everyone you knew and loved has faded and died, blah blah blah.”
He struck the cue ball from this high angle. It reversed direction and swerved backwards around the obstruction to nudge his thirteen into the pocket. A trick shot, done perfunctorily and without fanfare.
“Mr. Donner, I’ve been alive for six thousand, four hundred and twenty-seven years. I’ve done pretty much everything a human being can do on this earth. I’ve been rich and I’ve been poor, a king and a slave. And I have never wanted to go on living more than I do right now, today. So let’s dispense with the crap about what a curse immortality would be.”
“Then why not share? Just don’t want the other kids playing in your sandbox?”
He sunk the eight ball. Game over. “You think I prefer the charade? I do this for you. One immortal, weaving his way through the ages, keeping his nature hidden, does not disrupt humanity. But a hundred, a thousand, ten thousand of our most powerful and wealthy rulers, suddenly ageless?” He shook his head. “Do you think the masses would ever stand for it? For having to grow old and die, when their neighbor doesn’t?” He went to the rack and put up his stick. “It would be anarchy, rioting in the streets. And if they did get what they wanted—if everyone received the gift, what then? Can this earth sustain nine billion immortals, with billions more on the way?”
“And that’s the scenario Nicole is creating?”
Struldbrug took a leatherette tarp from a bureau. He threw an end at me and we worked to cover the table with it.
“Not intentionally, Mr. Donner. She sees the Retrozine as a means of control, for seizing greater power. She intends to very carefully dole it out. But it is too powerful a thing for anyone to control for very long.”
“She’s done okay so far,” I said quietly. “I mean, creating and managing the Shift.”
He smoothed the spruce-colored vinyl where it had bunched. His fingers were tapered and well cared for. Almost delicate.
“Or did you do that,” I pressed, “before your ‘retirement?’”
He turned and walked to the jukebox. I followed him across the room, pretending not to notice the bartender pretending not to watch us.
“I’ve engendered hundreds of offspring. I didn’t tell a single one about my gift, always leaving before they noticed my agelessness. But Nicole and Adam were different. They were the first to inherit some of my longevity. I thought they would be stronger. Adam is a rock, but he is not very ambitious or imaginative, because he already has everything he could want. But Nicole… Nicole is uniquely… unquiet. The reservoir of hate that fuels her ambition is bottomless.”
“She’s nuts,” I said.
He looked at me, startled. “Why, yes, she is, in a sense.” He tapped the glass of the jukebox. “I made a mistake with Nicole. The children of famous people often crash and burn. How could they not, living in that kind of shadow? After all, it is the parent’s job to eventually fade to the preeminence of the child, the new generation. But how can you, when you’re a President or a Chairman or a billionaire or the discoverer of the cure for cancer? Some children, the strong ones, find their own identity and use the benefits of a powerful father to their advantage. But what if you’re not smart or beautiful or talented? What if you’re a movie star’s kid and you can’t act your way out of a wet paper bag? What if Dad won the Pulitzer for fiction and your prose sounds like the back of a cereal box? How could you not feel ‘less than’ and resent that?
“Nicole’s hatred of this world has little to do with my parenting skills. Although I admit to failings there. It is simply because I am immortal and she is not. It doesn’t matter to her that she has a gift shared by only one other person on the planet. It doesn’t matter that I handed her an empire and stepped aside into self-imposed exile so she could rise. All that matters to her is that she cannot supersede me, ever. She will die and I will remain. And there’s not a thing I can do about it.”
“You could die,” I offered.
“Kill myself?” He chuckled. “One thing about immortality, Mr. Donner—it makes you selfish. Why should I die just so my daughter can brush a chip off her shoulder?”
“So she hates Daddy. What has she got against the rest of us?”
“Every time she looks at you, she is reminded that she has more in common, in her eventual death, with you, than with me.”
“So creating the Shift—that was her revenge?”
“Is that what you think?”
Then I had him bent backwards over the jukebox, my Beretta in his mouth, my hand around his throat, before I even knew I was moving. He gagged around the metal. I pulled it from between his gums and pressed it against his right eye.
“I think an immortal might not like going through eternity blind.”
The eyes narrowed in defiance. I cocked the hammer. They flew wide again.
I caught a liquid motion out of the corner of my vision. I stepped back as fast as possible, hands up, the gun dangling from my forefinger.
“Stop!” choked Struldbrug.
Dottie made it all the way over the bar and across the space in the time it took me to step back. She shimmered in homicidal rage a foot away. If I hadn’t been ready for it, I’d be lying on the floor in smoking pieces. She lashed out, batting the pistol out from my hand. It was like slamming into dry ice, so cold it burned. My wrist was instantly on fire.
“I said, stop!”
Struldbrug righted himself, rubbing his throat, coughing.
Dottie/The Lifetaker just glared at me. “Smarter than you look,” it said in that unholy voice.
“Real bartenders fill the glass with ice first, then pour the drink,” I said. “So it doesn’t splash.”
“You’re the expert,” it sneered.
“That’s enough,” said Struldbrug. “Get him a bandage.”
It hated that idea, but obeyed and flowed out of the room.
I sat at the nearest deuce, my face covered in sweat. “You need a shorter leash for your dog.”
He took the other chair across from me. “He and I have a great deal in common. Both outcasts.”
He picked up the box of matches from the table. The cover said “The Blue Rose.” He rotated the box in his fingers.
“I was tired, Donner. Not ready to jump off a bridge tired, but I wanted a rest. I’d been Abel Struldbrug, then his son Abraham, then his son Isodor. When the twins came along, I welcomed the chance to turn over the company to them. I was sick of humanity. The endless repeating of the same mistakes. So I went back to my old haunts. Babylon. Mesopotamia.”
He suddenly looked all of his six thousand years. It was something haggard in his expression, some sheen of age on his olive skin.
“The Shift,” I insisted.
“Yes,” he sighed. “Nicole caused it.”
/> So there it was, at long last. Confirmation.
There was no feeling of pride at having the answer. No relief, no elation. Nothing but a knot of fear at the base of my spine.
“Containment protocols at the lab failed, she said. The retroviral agent escaped. When the Shift started, she seemed as horrified as we were. She promised us—Adam and me—that she would make it right.”
“Necropolis? That’s how she made it right?”
“She wasn’t running things, then. A lot of decisions were made by a lot of people.”
“She fucking caused it, Izzy! All this horror, it’s her fault, because she was trying to develop her fucking Retrozine and get even with Daddy! She killed me and my wife forty years ago so nothing would slow her down!”
“I didn’t know then, of course,” he said mildly. “I was in Iran. When the Shift happened, I took it as a sign and came here, to this manmade desert, and rebuilt my beloved citadel. To continue my retirement, but be a little closer to Nicole, just in case.”
“So you just watched from afar as she built her little magnetic gulag across the river.”
“I don’t expect you to understand being a parent,” he sighed. “If you step in every time they make a mistake, how will they ever learn?”
I gaped.
“Then I discovered it hadn’t been an accident after all.”
I gaped harder. He walked over to the bar and ran a long finger over the wood. “She… she did it on purpose. She deliberately seeded the Shift virus all over the world.”
I could feel myself not wanting to believe. It was too extreme, even for this world. I could buy Nicole exploiting an accident, creating a police state, murdering thousands… but deliberately unleashing it in the first place was beyond monstrous.
“Izzy…” I said, “That’s like… that’s like setting off a couple nukes in your backyard to see what the radiation would do.”
Struldbrug knew as well. He was as unburdened by conscience as men come, but even he looked at his hands in shame. “She believes in the illusion of her control. You see… she’s deliberately continuing its effects.”
“What do you mean?”
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