by Brian Aldiss
'What do you want, Theo? It's some horrible thing about me, isn't it?'
That restored his humour and some of his confidence. 'No, Caterina, it's not! It's nothing at all to do with you. I lost all interest in you a long long time ago, long before you ran off with this fisherman!' He got up and crossed to the map of the world hanging, dry and fly-spotted, on the wall.
'Clement, you'd better come and look at this. Here's the Baltic, Here's the Med. You tracked the immortality virus all the way from the Baltic right down to the Antarctic. I thought you'd had the wit to grasp how the missing link between Baltic and Mediterranean was forged; I assumed you were suggesting that your silence could be bought on that score. I over-estimated you! You still haven't got it, have you?'
Yale frowned and stroked his face. 'Don't be so superior, Theo. That area was right beyond my bailiwick. I only started in the Tyrrhenian Sea. Of course, if you know what the link is, I'd be tremendously interested.... Presumably it's brought from one sea to the other by a pelagic species. A bird seems a likely agent, but as far as I know nobody has established that the Baltic virus - the immortality virus, you call it - can survive in the body of a bird ... except the Adelie penguin, of course, but there are none of those in the northern hemisphere.'
Taking his arm, Caterina said, 'Darling, he's laughing at you!'
'Ha, Clement, you are a true man of science! Never see what's under your nose because you're sunk up to your eyes in your own pet theories! You gangling fathead! The vital agent was human - me! I worked on that virus on a ship in the Baltic, I took it back with me to Naples to WWO HQ, I worked on it in my own private laboratory, I —'
'I don't see how I was supposed to know - Oh! ... Theo, you've found it - you've found a way to infect human beings with the virus!'
The expression on Devlin's face was enough to confirm the truth of that. Yale turned to Caterina. 'Darling, you're right and he's right, I really am a short-sighted idiot! I should have guessed. After all, Naples is situated on the Tyrrhenian Sea -it's just that one never thinks of the term and speaks of it always as the Med.'
'You got there at last!' Devlin said. 'That's how the virus leaked into your Devlin Current. There is a small colony of us in Naples with the virus in our veins. It passes out through the body in inert form, and survives the sewage-processing, so that it is carried out to sea still living - to be digested by the cope-pods, as you managed to discover.'
'The circulation of the blood!'
'What?'
'No matter. A metaphor.'
'Theo - Theo, so you are now ... you have it, do you?'
'Don't be afraid to say it, woman. Yes, I have immortality flowing in my veins.'
Tugging his beard, Yale went and sat down and took a long drink at his beer. He looked from one to the other of them for a long while. At last he said, 'You are something of the true man of science yourself, Theo, aren't you, as well as a career man? You couldn't resist telling us what you know! But leaving that aside, we of course realized that an inoculation of man with the virus was theoretically possible. Cat and I were discussing it until late last night. Do you know what we decided? We decided that even if it were possible to acquire immortality, or shall we say longevity, we should refuse it. We should refuse it because neither of us feels mature enough to bear the responsibility of our emotional and sexual lives for a span of maybe several hundred years.'
'That's pretty negative, isn't it?' Devlin strolled over to the far corner and retrieved the pistol. Before he could slip it into his pocket, Yale stretched out his hand. 'Until you leave, I'll keep it for you. What were you planning to do with it, anyway?'
'I ought to shoot you, Yale.'
'Give it to me! Then you won't be exposed to temptation. You want to keep your little secret, don't you? How long do you think it will be before it becomes public property anyhow? A thing like that can't be kept quiet indefinitely.'
He showed no sign of giving up the gun. He said, 'We've kept our secret for five years. There are fifty of us now, fifty-three, men with power - and some women. Before the secret comes into the open, we are going to be even more powerful: an Establishment. We only need a few years. Meanwhile, we make investments and alliances. Take a look at the way brilliant people have been attracted to Naples these last few years! It's not been just to the WWO or the European Common Government Centre. It's been to my clinic! In another five years, we'll be able to step in and rule Europe - and from there it's just a short step to America and Africa.'
'You see,' Caterina said, 'he is mad, Clem, that sort of sane madness I told you about. But he daren't shoot! He daren't shoot, in case they locked him up for life - and that's a long time for him!'
Recognizing the wild note in his wife's voice, Yale told her to sit down and drink another beer. 'I'm going to take Theo round to see the whales. Come on, Theo! I want to show you what you're up against, with all your fruitless ambitions.'
Theo gave him a sharp look, as if speculating whether he might yield useful information if humoured, evidently concluded that he would, and rose to follow Yale. As he went out, he looked back towards Caterina. She avoided his glance.
It was dazzling to be out in the bright sun again. The crowd was still hanging about the helicopter, chatting intermittently with the pilot, Thomas. Ignoring them, Yale led Devlin past the machine and round the lagoon, blinding in the glare of noon. Devlin gritted his teeth and said nothing. He seemed diminished as they exposed themselves to a landscape almost as bare as an old bone, walking the narrow line between endless blue ocean and the green socket of lagoon.
Without pausing, Yale led on to the north-west strip of beach. It sloped steeply, so that they could see nothing of the rest of the island except the old Portuguese fort, which terminated their view ahead. Grim, black, and ruinous, it might have been some meaningless tumescence erupted by marine forces. As the men tramped towards it, the fort was dwarfed by the intervening carcasses of whales.
Five whales had died here, two of them recently. The giant bodies of the two recently dead still supported rotting flesh, though the skulls gleamed white where the islanders had stripped them for meat and cut out their tongues. The other three had evidently been cast up here at an earlier date, for they were no more than arching skeletons with here and there a fragment of parched skin flapping between rib bones like a curtain in the breeze.
'What have you brought me here for?' Theo was panting, his solid chest heaving.
'To teach you humility and to make you sweat. Look on these works, ye mighty, and despair! These were blue whales, Theo, the largest mammal ever to inhabit this planet! Look at this skeleton! This chap weighed over a hundred tons for sure. He's about eighty feet long.' As he spoke, he stepped into the huge rib cage, which creaked like an old tree as he braced himself momentarily against it. 'A heart beat right here, Theo, that weighed about eight hundredweight.'
'You could have delivered Fifty Amazing Facts of Natural History, or whatever you call this lecture, in the shade.'
'Ah, but this isn't natural history, Theo. It's highly unnatural. These five beasts rotting here once swallowed krill far away in Antarctic waters. They must have gulped down a few mouthfuls of copepod at the same time - copepods that had picked up the Baltic virus. The virus infected the whales. By your admission, that can only have been five years ago, eh? Yet it is long enough to ensure that more blue whales - they were practically extinct from over-fishing, as you know - survived the hazards of immaturity and bred. It would mean too that the breeding period of older specimens was extended. Yet five years is not enough to produce a glut in whales as it is in herrings.' 'What are blue whales doing near the Laccadives in any case?'
'I never found a way to ask them. I only know that these creatures appeared off shore here at full moon, each in a different month. Caterina could tell you - she saw them and told me all about it in her letters. My son Philip was here with her when the last one arrived. Something drove the whales right across the
Equator into these seas. Something drove them to cast themselves up on to this beach, raking their stomachs open on the reefs as they did so, to die where you see them lying now. Hang around for ten days, Theo, till the next full moon. You may see another cetaceous suicide.'
There were crabs working in the sand among the barred shadows of the rib cage, burrowing and signalling to each other. When Devlin spoke, anger was back in his voice.
'Okay, you clever trawlerman, tell me the answer to the riddle. It's been revealed to you alone, I suppose, why they kill themselves?'
'They were suffering from side effects, Theo. The side effects of the immortality disease. You know the Baltic virus seems to bring long life - but you haven't had time to find out what else it brings. You've been in so much of a hurry you abandoned scientific method. You didn't want to get any older before you infected yourself. You didn't allow a proper trial period. You may be going to live a thousand years - but what else is going to happen to you? What happened to these poor creatures so awful that they could not bear their increase of years? Whatever it was, it was terrible, and soon it will be overtaking you, and all your conspirators sweating it out uneasily in Naples!'
The silencer was extremely effective. The pistol made only a slight hiss, rather like a man blowing a strawberry pip from between his teeth. The bullet made a louder noise as it richo-cheted off a bleached rib and sped over the ocean. Suddenly Yale was full of movement, moving faster than he had moved in years, lunging forward. He hit Devlin before he fired again. They fell into the sand, Yale on top. He got his foot over Devlin's arm, grasped him with both hands by the windpipe, and bashed his head repeatedly in the sand. When the gun slid loose, he stopped what he was doing, picked up the weapon, and climbed to his feet. Puffing a little, he brushed the sand from his old jeans.
'It wasn't graceful,' he said, glaring down at the purple-faced man rolling at his feet. 'You're a fool!' With a last indignant slap at his legs, he turned and headed back for the coral-built house.
Caterina ran out in terror at the sight of him. The natives surged towards him, thought better of it, and cleared a way for him to pass.
'Clem, Clem, what have you done? You've not shot him?'
'I want a glass of lemonade. It's all right, Cat, my love
He isn't really hurt.'
When he was sitting down at the table in the cool and drinking the lemonade she mixed him, he began to shake. She had the sense not to say anything until he was ready to speak. She stood beside him, stroking his neck. Presently they saw through the window Devlin coming staggering over the dunes. Without looking in their direction, he made his way over to the helicopter. With Thomas's aid, he climbed in, and in a few moments the engine started and the blades began to turn. The machine lifted, and they watched in silence as it whirled away over the water, eastwards towards the Indian sub-continent. The sound of it died and soon the sight of it was swallowed up in the gigantic sky.
'He was another whale. He came to wreck himself here.' 'You'll have to send a signal to London and tell them everything, won't you?'
'You're right. And tomorrow I must catch some jewfish. I suspect they may be picking up the infection.'
He looked askance at his wife. She had put on her dark glasses while he was gone. Now she took them off again and sat by him, regarding him anxiously.
'I'm not a saint, Cat. Never suggest that again. I'm a bloody liar. I had to tell Theo an awful lie about why the whales ran themselves up our beach.'
'Why?'
'I don't know! Whales have been beaching themselves for years and nobody knows why. Theo would have remembered that if he hadn't been so scared.'
'I meant, why lie to him! You should only lie to people you respect, my mother used to say.'
He laughed. 'Good for her! I lied to scare him. Everyone is going to know about the immortality virus in a few weeks, and I suspect they're all going to want to be infected. I want them all scared. Then perhaps they'll pause, and think what they're asking for - the length of many lifetimes living with their first lifetime's inadequacies.'
'Theo's taking your lie with him. You want that to circulate with the virus?'
He started to clean his spectacles on his handkerchief.
'I do. The world is about to undergo a drastic and radical change. The more slowly that change takes place, the more chance we - all living things, I mean, as well as you and I -have of living quiet and happy as well as lengthy lives. My lie may act as a sort of brake on change. People ought to think what a terrifying thing immortality is - it means sacrificing the mysteries of death. Now how about a bathe, just as if nothing revolutionary had happened?'
As they changed into their swim things, as she stood divested of her clothes, Caterina said, 'I've suddenly had a vision, Clem. Please, I've changed my mind - I want to, I want us both to live as long as we possibly can. I'll sacrifice death for life. You know what I did with Philip? It was only because I suddenly felt my youth slipping from me. Time was against me. I got desperate. With more time ... well, all our values would change, wouldn't they?'
He nodded and said simply, 'You're right, of course.'
They both began to laugh, out of pleasure and excitement. Laughing, they ran down to the lapping ocean, and for a moment it was as if Yale had left all his hesitations behind with his clothes.
As they sat on the edge of the water and snapped their flippers on, he said, 'Sometimes I understand things about people. Theo came here to silence me. But he is an effective man and he was so ineffectual today. It must mean that at bottom he really came to see you, just as you guessed at the time - I reckon he wanted company in all that limitless future he opened up for himself.'
As they sliced out side by side into the warm water, she said without surprise, "We need time together, Clem, time to understand each other.'
They dived together, down in a trail of bubbles below the sparkling surface, startling the fish. Flipping over on his sides Yale made for the channel that led out to the open sea. She followed, glad in her heart, as she was destined to do and be for the next score and a half of centuries.
... And the Stagnation of the Heart
Under the weight of sunlight, the low hills abased themselves. To the three people sitting behind the driver of the hover, it seemed that pools of liquid - something between oil and water -formed constantly on the pitted road ahead, to disappear miraculously as they reached the spot. In all the landscape, this optical illusion was the only hint that moisture existed.
The passengers had not spoken for some while. Now the Pakistani Health Official, Firoz Ayub Khan, turned to his guests and said, 'Within an hour, we shall be into Calcutta. Let us hope and pray that the air-conditioning of this miserable machine holds out so long!'
The woman by his side gave no sign that she heard him, continuing to stare forward through her dark glasses; she left it to her husband to make an appropriate response. She was a slender woman of dark complexion, her narrow face made notable by its generous mouth. Her black hair, gathered over one shoulder, was disordered from the four-hour drive down from the hill station.
Her husband was a tall spare man, apparently in his mid-forties, who wore old-fashioned steel-rimmed spectacles. His face in repose carried an eroded look, as if he had spent many years gazing at just such countries as the one outside. He said, 'It was good of you to consent to letting us use this slow mode of transport, Dr. Khan. I appreciate your impatience to get back to work.'
'Well, well, I am impatient, that is perfectly true. Calcutta needs me - and you too, now you are recovered from your illness. And Mrs. Yale also, naturally.' It was difficult to determine whether Khan's voice concealed sarcasm.
'It is well worth seeing the land at first hand, in order to appreciate the magnitude of the problems against which Pakistan and India are battling.'
Clement Yale had noted before that his speeches intended to mollify the health official seemed to produce the opposite effect. Khan said, 'Mr. Yale
, what problems do you refer to? There is no problem anywhere, only the old satanic problem of the human condition, that is all.'
'I was referring to the evacuation of Calcutta and its attendant difficulties. You would admit they constituted a problem, surely?'
This sort of verbal jostling had broken out during the last half-hour of the ride.
'Well, well, naturally where you have a city containing some twenty-five million people, there you expect to find a few problems, wouldn't you agree, Mrs. Yale? Rather satanic problems, maybe - but always stemming from and rooted in the human condition. That is why executives such as ourselves are always needed, isn't it?'
Yale gestured beyond the window, where broken carts lay by the roadside. 'This is the first occasion in modern times that a city has simply bogged itself down and had to be abandoned. I would call that a special problem.'
He hardly listened to Khan's long and complicated answer; the health official was always involving himself in contradictions from which verbiage could not rescue him. He stared instead out of the window as the irreparable world of heat slid past. The carts and cars had been fringing the road for some while - indeed, almost all the way from the hospital in the hills, where East Madras was still green. Here, nearer Calcutta, their skeletal remains lay thicker. Between the shafts of some of the carts lay bones, many of them no longer recognizable as those of bullocks; lesser skeletons toothed the wilderness beyond the road.
The hover-driver muttered constantly to himself. The dead formed no obstacle to their progress; the living and half-living had yet to be considered. Pouring out of the great ant-heap ahead were knots of human beings, solitary figures, family groups, men, women, children, the more fortunate with beasts of burden or handcarts or bicycles to support themselves or their scanty belongings. Blindly they moved forward, going they hardly knew whither, treading over those who had fallen, not raising their heads to avoid the oncoming hover-ambulance.