Immortals

by Jack Dann

  He looks up, his blunt face aggrieved. "It's the Rhinegold."

  "Yes, I know, but I can't understand a word. It sounds as if they're clearing their throats. . . . Thank you."

  He has waved a dismissing hand at the speakers, and the guttural chorus subsides. "Billions of people spoke that language once," he says portentously. Ross is an artist, which makes him almost a player, really, but he has the student's compulsive habit of bringing out these little kernels of information to lay in your lap.

  "And I can't even stand four of them," she says lazily. "I only listen to opera for the music, anyhow, the stories are always so foolish; why is that, I wonder?"

  She can almost see the learned reply rising to his lips; but he represses it politely—he knows she doesn't really want an answer—and busies himself with the visor. It lights under his fingers to show a green chasm, slowly flickering with the last dim ripples of the sunlight.

  "Going down now?" she asks.

  "Yes, I want to get those corals." Ross is a sculptor, not a very good one, fortunately, nor a very devoted one, or he would be impossible company. He has a studio on the bottom of the Mediterranean, in ten fathoms, and spends part of his time concocting gigantic menacing tangles of stylized undersea creatures. Finished with the visor, he touches the controls and the bubble drifts downward. The waters meet overhead with a white splash of spray; then the circle of light dims to yellow, to lime color, to deep green.

  Beneath them now is the coral reef—acre upon acre of bare skeletal fingers. A few small fish move brilliantly among the pale branches. Ross touches the controls again; the bubble drifts to a stop. He stares down through the glass for a moment, then gets up to open the inner lock door. Breathing deeply, with a distant expression, he steps in and closes the transparent door behind him. Claire sees the water spurt around his ankles. It surges up quickly to fill the airlock; when it is chest high, Ross opens the outer door and plunges out in a cloud of air bubbles.

  He is a yellow kicking shape in the green water; after a few moments he is half obscured by clouds of sediment. Claire watches, vaguely troubled; the largest corals are like bleached bone.

  She fingers the memory unit for the Sea Picces from Peter Grimes, without knowing why; it's cold, northern ocean music, not appropriate. The cold, far calling of the gulls makes her shiver with sadness, but she goes on listening.

  Ross grows dimmer and more distant in the clouding water. At length he is only a flash, a flicker of movement down in the dusty green valley. After a long time she sees him coming back, with two or three pink corals in his hand.

  Absorbed in the music, she has allowed the bubble to drift until the entrance is almost blocked by corals. Ross forces himself between them, levering himself against a tall outcropping of stone, but in a moment he seems to be in difficulty. Claire turns to the controls and backs the bubble off a few feet. The way is clear now, but Ross does not follow.

  Through the glass she sees him bend over, dropping his specimens. He places both hands firmly and strains, all the great muscles of his limbs and back bulging. After a moment he straightens again, shaking his head. He is caught, she realizes; one foot is jammed into a crevice of the stone. He grins at her painfully and puts one hand to his throat. He has been out a long time.

  Perhaps she can help, in the few seconds that are left. She darts into the airlock, closes and floods it. But just before the water rises over her head, she sees the man's body stiffen.

  Now, with her eyes open under water, in that curious blurred light, she sees his gorged face break into lines of pain. Instantly, his face becomes another's—Dio's—vividly seen through the ghost of a dead rat's grin. The vision comes without warning, and passes.

  Outside the bubble, Ross's stiff jaw wrenches open, then hangs slack. She sees the pale jelly come bulging slowly up out of his mouth; now he floats easily, eyes turned up, limbs relaxed.

  Shaken, she empties the lock again, goes back inside and calls Antibe Control for a rescue cutter. She sits down and waits, careful not to look at the still body outside.

  She is astonished and appalled at her own emotion. It has nothing to do with Ross, she knows: he is perfectly safe. When he breathed water, his body reacted automatically: his lungs exuded the protective jelly, consciousness ended, his heartbeat stopped. Antibe Control will be here in twenty minutes or less, but Ross could stay like that for years, if he had to. As soon as he gets out of the water, his lungs will begin to resorb the jelly; when they are clear, heartbeat and breathing will start again.

  It's as if Ross were only acting out a part, every movement stylized and meaningful. In the moment of his pain, a barrier in her mind has gone down, and now a doorway stands open.

  She makes an impatient gesture, she is not used to being tyrannized in this way. But her arm drops in defeat; the perverse attraction of that doorway is too strong. Dio, her mind silently calls. Dio.

  The designer of Sector Twenty, in the time she has been away, has changed the plan of the streets "to bring the surface down." The roof of every level is a screen faithfully repeating the view from the surface, and with lighting and other ingenious tricks the weather up there is parodied down below. Just now it is a gray cold November day, a day of slanting gray rain: looking up, one sees it endlessly falling out of the leaden sky: and down here, although the air is as always pleasantly warm, the great bare slabs of the building fronts have turned bluish gray to match, and silvery insubstantial streamers are twisting endlessly down, to melt and disappear before they strike the pavement.

  Claire does not like it; it does not feel like Dio's work. The crowds have a nervous air, curious, half-protesting; they look up and laugh, but uneasily, and the refreshment bays are full of people crammed together under bright yellow light. Claire pulls her metallic cloak closer around her throat; she is thinking with melancholy of the turn of the year, the earth growing cold and hard as iron, the trees brittle and black against the unfriendly sky. This is a time for blue skies underground, for flushed skins and honest laughter, not for this echoed grayness.

  In her rooms, at least, there is cheerful warmth. She is tired and perspiring from the trip; she does not want to see anyone just yet. Some American gowns have been ordered; while she waits for them, she turns on the fire-bath in the bedroom alcove. The yellow spiky flames jet up with a black-capped whoom, then settle to a high murmuring curtain of yellow-white. Claire binds her head in an insulating scarf, and without bothering to undress, steps into the fire.

  The flame blooms up around her body, cool and caressing; the fragile gown flares and is gone in a whisper of sparks. She turns, arms outspread against the flow. Depilated, refreshed, she steps out again. Her body tingles, invigorated by the flame. Delicately, she brushes away some clinging wisps of burnt skin; the new flesh is glossy pink, slowly paling to rose-and-ivory.

  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 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 the 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 aquamarine
s 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 the 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 knot-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 those 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 our 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 died."

  "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 thinking?"

  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 crosshatching 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 oedema 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 disgust and 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 percent 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."