The Mammoth Book of Best Short SF Novels

by Gardner R. Dozois

  In spite of all Rafiel’s assurances, Docilia insisted on getting dressed and escorting him back to his own place. She chattered all the way. “So this city you saved, si chiama Thebes,” she was explaining to him as they got into the elevator, “was in a hell of a mess before you got there. Before Oedipus did, I mean. This Sphinx creature was just making schrecklichkeit. It was doing all kinds of rotten things – I don’t know – like killing people, stealing their food, that sort of thing. I guess. Anyway, the whole city was just desperate for help, and then you came along to save them.”

  “And I killed the Sphinx, so they made me roi de Thebes out of gratitude?”

  “Certo! Well, almost. You see, you don’t have to kill it, exactly. It has this riddle that no one can figure out. You just have to solve its riddle, and then it I guess just goes kaput. So then you’re their hero, Oedipus, but they don’t exactly make you king. The way you get to be that is you marry the queen. That’s me, Jocasta. I’m just a pauvre petite widow lady from the old dead king, but as soon as you marry me that makes you the capo di tutti capi. I’m still the queen, and I’ve got a brother, Creon, who’s a kind of a king, too. But you’re the boss.” The elevator stopped, making her blink in slight surprise. “Oh, siamo qui,” she announced, and led the way out of the car.

  Rafiel halted her with a hand on her shoulder. “I can find my way home from here. You didn’t need to come with me at all, verstehen sie?”

  “I wanted to, piccina. I thought you might be a little, well, wobbly.”

  “I am wobbly, all right,” he said, grinning, “mais pas from being in the hospital.” He kissed her, and then turned her around to face the elevator. Before he released her he said, “Oh, listen. What’s this riddle of the Sphinx I’m supposed to solve?”

  She gave him an apologetic smile over her shoulder. “It’s kind of dopey. ‘What goes on four legs, two legs and three legs, and is strongest on two?’ Can you imagine?”

  He looked at her. “You mean you don’t know the answer to that one?”

  “Oh, but I do know the answer, Rafiel. Mosay told me what it was. It’s—”

  “Go on, Cele,” he said bitterly. “Auf wiedersehen. The answer to the riddle is a ‘man,’ but I can see why it would be hard for somebody like you to figure it out.”

  Because, of course, he thought as he entered the lobby of his condo, none of these eternally youthful ones would ever experience the tottery, “three-legged,” ancient-with-a-cane phase of life.

  “Welcome back, Rafiel,” someone called, and Rafiel saw for the first time that the lobby was full of paparazzi. They were buzzing at him in mild irritation, a little annoyed because they had missed him at the hospital, but nevertheless resigned to waiting on the forgivable whim of a superstar.

  It was one of the things that Rafiel had had to resign himself to, long ago. It was a considerable nuisance. On the other hand, to be truthful, it didn’t take much resignation. When the paps were lurking around for you, it proved your fame, and it was always nice to have renewed proof of that. He gave them a smile for the cameras, and a quick cut-and-point couple of steps of a jig – it was a number from his biggest success, the Here’s Hamlet! of two years earlier. “Yes,” he said, answering all their questions at once, “I’m out of the hospital, I’m back in shape, and I’m hot to trot on the new show that Mosay’s putting together for me, Oedipus Rex.” He started toward the door of his own flat. A woman put herself in his way.

  “Raysia,” she introduced herself, as though one name were enough for her, too. “I’m here for the interview.”

  He stopped dead. Then he recognized the face. Yes, one name was enough, for a top pap with her own syndicate. “Raysia, dear! Cosi bella to see you here, but – what interview are we talking about?”

  “Your dramaturge set the appointment up last week,” she explained. And, of course, that being so, there was nothing for Rafiel to do but to go through with it, making a mental note to get back to Mosay at the first opportunity to complain at not having been told.

  But giving an interview was not a hard thing to do, after all, not with all the practice Rafiel had had. He fixed the woman up with a drink and a comfortable chair and took his place at the exercise barre in his study – he always liked to be working when he was interviewed, to remind them he was a dancer. First, though, he had a question. It might not have occurred to him if Docilia hadn’t made him think of lost Alegretta, but now he had to ask it. He took a careful first position at the barre and swept one arm gracefully aloft as he asked, “Does your syndicate go to Mars?”

  “Of course. I’m into toutes les biospheres,” she said proudly, “not just Mars, but Mercury and the moons and nearly every orbiter. As well as, naturally, the whole planet Earth.”

  “That’s wonderful,” he said, intending to flatter her and doing his best to sound as though this sort of thing hadn’t ever happened to him before. Slowly, carefully, he did his barre work, hands always graceful, getting full extension on the legs, her camera following automatically as he answered her questions. Yes, he felt fine. Yes, they were going to get into production on the new Oedipus right away – yes, he’d heard the score, and yes, he thought it was wonderful. “And the playwright,” he explained, “is the greatest writer who ever lived. Wonderful old Sophocles, two thousand nearly seven hundred years old, and the play’s as fresh as anything today.”

  She looked at him with a touch of admiration for an actor who had done his homework. “Have you read it?”

  He hadn’t done that much homework, though he fully intended to. “Well, not in the original,” he admitted, since a non-truth was better than a lie.

  “I have,” she said absently, thinking about her next question – disconcertingly, too. Rafiel turned around at the barre to work on the right leg for a while. Hiding the sudden, familiar flash of resentment.

  “Vous êtes terrible,” he chuckled, allowing only rueful amusement to show. “All of you! You know so much.” For they all did, and how unfair. Imagine! This child – this ancient twenty-year-old – reading a Greek play in the original, and not even Greek, he thought savagely, but whatever rough dialect had been spoken nearly three thousand years ago.

  “Mais pourquoi non? We have time,” she said, and got to her question. “How do you feel about the end of the play?” she asked.

  “Where Oedipus blinds himself, you mean?” he tried, doing his best to sort out what he had been told of the story. “Yes, that’s pretty bloody, isn’t it? Stabbing out his own eyes, that’s a very powerful—”

  She was shaking her head. “No, pas du tout, I don’t mean the blinding scene. I mean at the very end, where the chorus says” – her voice changed as she quoted –

  See proud Oedipus!

  He proves that no mortal

  Can ever be known to be happy

  Until he is allowed to leave this life,

  Until he is dead,

  And cannot suffer any more.

  She paused, fixing him with her eye while the camera zeroed in to catch every fleeting shade of expression on his face. “I’m not a very good translator,” she apologized, “but do you feel that way, Rafiel? I mean, as a mortal?”

  Actors grow reflexes for situations like that – for the times when a fellow player forgets a line, or there’s a disturbance from the audience – when something goes wrong and everybody’s looking at you and you have to deal with it. He dealt with it. He gave her a sober smile and opened his mouth. “Hai, that’s so true, in a way,” he heard his mouth saying. “N’est-ce pas? I mean, not just for me but, credo, for all of us? It doesn’t matter however long we live, there’s always that big final question at the end that we call death, and all we have to confront it with is courage. And that’s the lesson of the story, I think: courage! To face all our pains and fears and go on anyway!”

  It wasn’t good, he thought, but it was enough. Raysia shut off her camera, thanked him, asked for an autograph and left; and as soon as the door was closed behind her Ra
fiel was grimly on the phone.

  But Mosay wasn’t answering, had shut himself off. Rafiel left him a scorching message and sat down, with a drink in his hand, to go through his mail. He was not happy. He scrolled quickly through the easy part – requests for autographs, requests for personal appearances, requests for interviews. He didn’t have to do anything about most of them; he rerouted them through Mosay’s office and they would be dealt with there.

  A note from a woman named Hillaree could not be handled in that way. She was a dramaturge herself – had he ever heard of her? He couldn’t be sure; there were thousands of them, though few as celebrated as Mosay. Still, she had a proposition for Rafiel. She wanted to talk to him about a “wonderful” (she said) new script. The story took place on one of the orbiting space habitats, a place called Hakluyt, and she was, she said, convinced that Rafiel would be determined to do it, if only he would read the script.

  Rafiel thought for a moment. He wasn’t convinced at all. Still, on consideration, he copied the script to file without looking at it. Perhaps he would read the script, perhaps he wouldn’t; but he could imagine that, in some future conversation with Mosay, it might be useful to be able to mention this other offer.

  He sent a curt message to this Hillaree to tell her to contact his agent and then, fretful, stopped the scroll. He wasn’t concentrating. Raysia’s interview had bothered him. “We have time” indeed! Of course they did. They had endless time, time to learn a dead language, just for the fun of it, as Rafiel himself might waste an afternoon trying to learn how to bowl or paraglide at some beach. They all had time – all but Rafiel himself and a handful of other unfortunates like him – and it wasn’t fair!

  It did not occur to Rafiel that he had already had, in the nine decades since his birth, more lifetime than almost anyone in the long history of the human race before him. That was irrelevant. However much he had, everyone around him had so much more.

  Still, in his ninety years of life Rafiel had learned a great deal – even actors could learn more than their lines, with enough time to do it in. He had learned to accept the fact that he was going to die, while everyone he knew lived on after him. He had even learned why this was so.

  It was all a matter of the failings of the Darwinian evolution process.

  In one sense, Darwinian evolution was one of the nicest things that had ever happened to life on Earth. In the selection of desirable traits to pass on to descendants – the famous “survival of the fittest” – virtue was rewarded. Traits that worked well for the organism were passed on, because the creatures that had them were more likely to reproduce than the ones lacking them.

  Over the billions of years the process had produced such neat things – out of the unpromising single-celled creatures that began it all – as eyes, and anuses, and resistance to the diseases that other organisms wanted to give you, and ultimately even intelligence. That was the best development, in the rather parochial collective opinion of the intelligent human race. Smarts had turned out to be an evolutionary plus; that was why there were ten trillion human beings around, and hardly any of such things as the blue whale, the mountain gorilla and the elephant.

  But there was one thing seriously wrong with the way the process works. From the point of view of the individual organism itself, evolution doesn’t do a thing. Its benefits may be wonderful for the next generation, but it doesn’t do diddly-squat for the organisms it is busily selecting, except to encourage the weaker ones to die before they get around to reproducing themselves.

  That means that some very desirable traits that every human being would have liked to have – say, resistance to osteoporosis, or a wrinkle-free face – didn’t get selected for in the Darwinian lottery. Longevity was not a survival feature. Once a person (or any other kind of animal) had its babies, the process switched itself off. Anything that benefited the organism after it was finished with its years of reproducing was a matter of pure chance. However desirable the new trait might have been, it wasn’t passed on. Once the individual had passed the age of bearing young, the Darwinian score-keepers lost interest.

  That didn’t stop such desirable traits from popping up. Mutations appeared a million times which, if passed on, would have kept the lucky inheritors of subsequent generations hale for indefinite periods – avoiding, let us say, such inconveniences of age as going deaf at sixty, incontinent at eighty and mindless at the age of a hundred. But such genes came and went and were lost. As they didn’t have anything to do with reproductive efficiency, they didn’t get preserved. There wasn’t any selective pass-through after the last babies were born.

  So longevity was a do-it-yourself industry. There was no help from Darwin. But . . .

  But once molecular biology got itself well organized, there were things that could be done. And were done. For most of the human population. But now and then, there were an unfortunate flawed few who missed out on the wonders of modern life-prolonging science because some undetectable and incurable quirks in their systems rejected the necessary treatment . . .

  Like Rafiel. Who scrolled through, without actually seeing, the scores of trivial messages – fan letters, requests for him to appear at some charitable function in some impossible place, bank statements, bills – that had arrived for him while he was away. And then, still fretful, turned off his communications and blanked his entertainment screen and even switched off the music as, out of habit and need, he practiced his leaps and entrechats in the solitude of his home, while he wondered bitterly what the point was in having a life at all, when you knew that it would sooner or later end.

  5

  People do still die now and then. It isn’t just the unfortunates like Rafiel who do it, either, though of course they are the ones for whom it is inevitable. Even normal people sometimes die as well. They die of accident, of suicide, of murder, sometimes just of some previously unknown sickness or even of a medical blunder that crashes the system. The normal people simply do not do that very often. Normal people expect to live normally extended lives. How long those lives can be expected to last is hard to say, because even the oldest persons around aren’t yet much more than bicentenarians (that’s the time since the procedures first became available), and they show no signs of old age yet. And, of course, since people do go on giving birth to other people, all that longevity has added up to quite an unprecedented population explosion. The total number of human beings living today is something over ten trillion – that’s a one followed by thirteen zeroes – which is far more than the total number of previous members of the genus Homo in every generation since the first Neanderthalers appeared. Now the living overwhelmingly outnumber the dead.

  When Rafiel woke the next morning he found his good nature had begun to return. Partly it was the lingering wisps of his last designer dream – Alegretta had starred in it, as ordered, and that lost and cherished love of his life had never been more desirable and more desiring, for that matter, because that was the kind of dream he had specified. So he woke up in a haze of tender reminiscence. Anyway, even the terminally mortal can’t dwell on their approaching demise all the time, and Rafiel was naturally a cheerful man.

  Getting out of bed in the morning was a cheerful occasion, too, for he was surrounded with the many, many things he had to be cheerful about. As he breakfasted on what the servers brought him he turned on the vid tank and watched half a dozen tapes of himself in some of the highlights of his career. He was, he realized, quite good. In the tank his miniature self sang love ballads and jiving patter numbers and even arias, and his dancing – well, yes, now and then a bit trembly, he conceded to himself, but with style – was a delight to watch. Even for the person who had done it, but who, looking in the tank, could only see that imaged person as a separate and, really, very talented entity.

  Cheerfully Rafiel moved to the barre to begin his morning warm-ups. He started gently, because he was still digesting his breakfast. There wasn’t any urgency about it. Rehearsal call was more than an hour awa
y, and he was contentedly aware that the person he had been looking at on the vid was a star.

  In a world where the living far outnumbered the dead, space was precious. On the other hand, so was Rafiel, and stars were meant to be coddled. Mosay had taken a rehearsal room the size of a tennis court for Rafiel’s own private use. The hall was high up in the arcology, and it wasn’t just a big room. It was a very well-equipped one. It had bare powder-blue walls that would turn into any color Rafiel wanted them to be at the touch of a switch, a polished floor of real hardwood that clacked precisely to his taps, and, of course, full sound and light projection. Mosay, fussing over his star’s accommodations, touched the keypad, and the obedient projectors transformed the bare walls into a glimmering throneroom.

  “I’m afraid that it’s the wrong period, of course,” Mosay apologized, looking without pleasure at the palace of Versailles, “no roi soleil in Thebes, is there, but I want you to get the feel of the kingship thing, sapete? We don’t have the programs for the Theban backdrops yet. Actually I don’t know if we will, because as far as my research people can tell, the Thebans really didn’t have any actual throne-rooms anyway.”