by Brian Aldiss
That phase had passed. Gradually, they penetrated the senility barrier. Their skin flattened again, smoothed curiously, became as patterned and strange as oak planking.
These were external signs only. Inside, the changes were infinitely greater.
‘What are you thinking about this morning, Palmer?’ Darkling asked of one reclining figure that lay wallowing at the pool’s edge. He squatted in his oilskins, putting his face down to Palmer’s, with its great brown and black whorls as if time had set a thumbprint over it.
It took a brief while for Palmer to begin to answer, rather as if the message had to travel to Mars and back before reaching his brain.
‘I am pursuing a line of thought that preoccupied me some sixty or so years ago. Not so much a line as a nexus of thought.’
Since he then fell silent, Darkling had to prompt. ‘And the thought is…?’
‘I couldn’t say in words. It is less a thought than … than a shade. Some of us here discussed the idea of a language of colour. If we had a language of colour, I could tell you precisely about what I was thinking.’
‘The idea of a colour language was aired and dismissed long before I took over here,’ Darkling said firmly. ‘The consensus of opinion was – and you immortals agreed – that colours were far more limiting than words: fewer in number, for that matter.’
Palmer thrust his face into a jet of water and let it play gently on his nose. Between gasps, he said, ‘Many more colours exist than you know of. It is simply a matter of registering them. And my idea is of a supplementary rather than a substitute language. If this other business the group was talking about, a way in which an eye could project as well as absorb light, comes to anything, the colour language may have a future.’
‘Well, let me know if you think of anything.’
‘OK, director.’
As they padded away through the rain, Stone said, ‘Does that sound like a fruitful idea to you?’
Darkling said, ‘There I must keep my own counsel, my boy. To the untrained mind, even their fuzziest ideas can be dangerous – like slow depth-charges, you know. It takes an expert to evaluate their real worth.’ He remembered what the Gods had said that very morning and added, with an effort, ‘Still, off the cuff, I’d say it sounded like an unfruitful idea.’
The two men walked among the wallowing bodies, exchanging a word here and there. One or two of the immortals had something fresh to offer, which Darkling noted on a waterproof slate for one of the trained interrogators to follow up later. Most of the ideas they gleaned here were not practicable in terms of man’s society; just a few had revolutionised it.
The immortality project was a failure in its origins: this protraction of life proved too eccentric for anyone to volunteer to become an immy. Nevertheless, by preserving these strange old failures, the project was skimming off a useful by-product: ideas, and rearrangements of old ideas. The immies now represented a great capital investment – as the governors were aware.
At last the morning round was finished and Darkling and Stone made their way to less humid quarters, where they removed their boots and oilskins.
‘Don’t seem to be earning their keep much, these days, do they?’ Stone commented. ‘We ought to ginger them up a bit, cut off their water supply or something.’
‘What an immoral idea! – Useless, too, because it was tried many, many years ago. No, we have to face it, Stone, they are different from us, very different.’
He towelled his face vigorously, and continued, ‘The immortals have been cut off from man’s root drives. For obvious reasons, the only drives we can inherit are those that manifest themselves before reproduction. It was argued in times past, quite dogmatically, that there were no other drives. Well, we see differently now. We see that once through the senility barrier, man is no longer a doing creature but a thinking creature. Vice versa, we see that we on the green side of the senility barrier are doing rather than thinking creatures – another idea that would have upset our ancestors. Our thinking is just embryo thinking. These immortals are our brains. Frankly, in this star-going age, we can’t afford to be without them.’
Stone had switched off several sentences ago. Hearing his boss’s voice die, he said, in a vague tone of agreement, ‘Yeah, well, we ought to ginger them up or something.’
He was thinking of his story. What he needed was new characters – young ones, who wouldn’t have to think at all.
‘We cannot ginger them up!’ In Darkling’s voice was a sudden rasp that shook Stone to full attention. His superior had swung on to him, his little moustache twitching, as if with a malevolent life of its own.
‘Your trouble is, Stone, you don’t listen to what’s being said. The immortals are merely given care here, you know – this isn’t a prison, it’s a refuge from the complex world outside.’
He had never liked Darkling; that went for his moustache too. Putting on a calm and insulting drawl, he said, ‘Oh come now, sir, let’s not pretend they aren’t prisoners. That’s a bit hypocritical, isn’t it?’
Perhaps it was the word ‘hypocritical.’ Darkling’s face went very red. ‘You watch your step, Stone! Don’t think I don’t know of your activities with Miss Roberts when you should be on duty. If one of the immortals wished to leave us – which never has happened and never could happen, because they live here in ideal conditions – they would be free to. And I’d back their decision against the governors.’
They looked at each other in helpless antagonism.
‘I still think it would be a miracle if one got away,’ Stone said.
As he left the room, Darkling reached for his pocket shrine. There was something about Zee Stone that put him in need of spiritual comfort.
When Otto Pommy arrived at the project, he was in a fine ecstatic mood of resignation. Resignation filled him, and he executed every gesture with pugnacious resignation.
While he completed the questionnaires it was vital he fill in before speaking to an immy, while he was undergoing a medical examination, while he was having his retinal pattern checked, he concentrated on a number of absorbing arrangements in space-time that served to keep his mood one of substantial mellowness. In particular, he dug a number of universals out of the toecap of his left boot or, more particularly, the hinge between the toecap and the rest of the boot. By the time he was allowed in to see his relation in the Wethouse, Otto had decided that for one skilled in the art, it would be possible to read from the creases in the hinge a complete history of all the journeys he had undertaken in this particular pair of boots. The right boot seemed somehow altogether more evasive about its history.
‘Hullo, Father Palmer! Old Acid Head come to see you again. Remember me? It’s been two years!’
The generations were a little mixed. Otto, in fact, was nothing less than great-great-great-great-grandson to Palmer Pommy’s long-dead brother, and the title ‘Father’ he used was therefore part honorary, part derisory. Despite his two hundred years and his zebra-striped senility effect, Palmer looked younger than the shaggy, whiskery Otto. Only in his voice was there a suggestion that he basked on considerably remoter shores than Otto would ever attain.
‘You are my closest living relation, descended by six generations from my brother. Your name is Otto Jack Pommy. You have shaved since I saw you last.’
Otto broke into affectionate laughter. ‘Only you’d be able to detect it!’ He stretched forth a hand and gripped Palmer’s; it had a blubbery feel and was cold, but Otto did not flinch. ‘I love you damned old immies – you’re so funny! – I wonder why the hell I don’t come to see you more often.’
‘You’re more faithful to the principle of inconsistency than to any individual, that’s why. Also, you don’t like the climate of the Wethouse.’
‘Yeah, that’s a consideration – though it’s not one I had considered.’ He stopped talking, absorbed in meditation on Palmer’s face. It was a cartographic face, he came to the conclusion. Once the marks of senility, the wrinkles and
pits and folds, had been as real as irregularities in hilly ground; now they were abstracts merely, like contours. ‘You got a cartographic face,’ he said.
‘It is not a map of me: I don’t wear my heart on my face.’
‘Of time, then? Marked out in isobars or secobars or something?’ His attention was wandering. He knew why everyone hated the immortals, why nobody wanted to become immortals, although their great contributions to life were so obvious. The immies were too different, strange to look at, strange to talk to – except that he did not find them so. He loved them: or he loved Palmer.
It was the Wethouse he could not bear, with its continual gouts of water. Otto was an anti-water man. He and Palmer were talking now – or staring at each other in a dream, as was their custom – in one of the guest rooms, where no water was in evidence. Palmer was garbed in a wraparound towelling robe from which his ancient tattooed head and striped legs protruded like afterthoughts. He was smiling; over the last hundred years, he had smiled as widely perhaps once every six years; he liked Otto because Otto amused him. It made him proud of his long-dead brother to look at his great-great-great-great-grandson.
‘Are you managing this session pretty painlessly without water?’ Otto asked.
‘It doesn’t hurt for a while. The hurt doesn’t hurt for a while.’
‘I’ve never understood your whole water-orientation – or for that matter whether you immies yourselves understood it.’
Palmer had momentarily lost contact. ‘Difference between hurt and harm. A term should be inserted between them meaning ‘benevolent pain stimulus.’’’
‘Water-orientation, Father.’
‘No, that doesn’t … oh, water-orientation.… Well, it depends what you mean by understanding, Otto. Life renews itself in wetness and slime. The central facts of existence – at least until my kind arrived – were bathed in moisture. The vagina, semen, womb – goodness me, I’ve almost forgotten the realities those terms represent.… Mankind comes from the sea, is conceived and born amid salty liquid, dissolves not into dust and ashes but slimes and salts. Except, that is, for us immortals. We’re up past our bedtimes and it seems to give us a terrible neurosis for water and the irreplaceable liquids that once belonged to our natural state.’
‘Up past bedtime? Never thought of the grave as satisfying any particular craving of mine.…’
‘Longevity is a nodal zone where thirsts partly metaphysical supplant most other desires.’ He closed his ancient eyes, the better to survey the desert of nondeath across which his kind journeyed.
‘You talk as if you were dried up inside. Your blood still circulates as surely as the oceans of the world, doesn’t it?’
‘The blood still circulates, Otto.… It’s below that level that the dryness starts. We need something we haven’t got. It may not be extinction but it reveals itself as ever-rushing waters.’
‘Water, that’s all you see! You need a change of scenery.’
‘I’ve forgotten your world, Otto, with its crowds and change and speed.’
Otto grew excited. He began to snap his fingers and a curious twitch developed in the region of his left cheek.
‘Palmer, Palmer, you idiot, that’s not my goddamned world any more than it’s yours. I’ve opted out from the machine culture just as thoroughly as you. I’m an acid head – I know that rush of dark waters you mention pretty well myself. I love you, Palmer, I want to get you out of here. This place is like a damned prison.’
Palmer screwed up his eyes and looked slowly around the room, beginning to shudder, as if an ancient engine had started within his frame.
‘I’m a captive,’ he whispered.
‘Only because you think there’s nowhere to go. I’ve got a place for you, Father! Perfect place, no more than twenty miles away. Some friends of mine – bangers, every one of them, hopped high but gentle, I swear – we got hold of an old swimming pool. Indoor. Works fine. We bunk in the cubicles. You could be in the shallow end. You’d be at home. Real home! People to talk to’d understand you. New faces, new ideas. Whole setup built for you. I’ll take you. Go right now!’
‘Otto, you’re mad! I’m a captive here!’
‘But would you? Would you like to?’
His eyes were sometimes all surface and meaningless, like a patterned carpet; now they looked out and lived. ‘Even if only for a little while. … To be away.…’
‘Let’s go then! You need nothing else!’
Palmer caught his hand pitifully. ‘I keep telling you, I’m a captive. They’d never let us go.’
‘The bosses? It’s in the constitution! You’re free to walk out whenever you want. The government pays. You don’t owe anyone a damned thing.’
‘In a century and a half, no immortal ever walked out of the project. It would be a miracle.’
‘We’ll pray for a miracle!’
Shaking his head to show he would listen to not one more word of protest, Otto unstrapped his old secondhand shrine from his back and set it up before him on the table. He opened it, struck it when the altar light refused to glow, shrugged and assumed what Palmer took for a gesture of reverence. He began to pray.
‘O Gods, sorry to bother you twice in one day! This is your old friend and troublemaker Otto Jack Pommy in a proper fit of reverence. You’ll recollect that when I was on to you first thing this morning, you were saying how arrogant I was. Remember?’
No answer came. Otto nodded in understanding. ‘They have no small talk in heaven. Very proper. Of course you remember. Well, I’m never going to be arrogant again, and in exchange I beg of you, Almighty Gods, just one small miracle.’
From the darkness behind the altar, a level voice said, ‘The Gods do not bargain.’
Otto cleared his throat and pointed an eyebrow at Palmer to indicate that this might be difficult. ‘Quite right. Understandable in your position, O Gods. O Gods, I therefore pray you do me one small miracle without strings attached – wait, let me tell you –’
‘There are no miracles, only favourable conjunctions of circumstances.’
‘Very well put, O great Gods, in which case I pray you for one small favourable conjunction of circumstances, to wit, letting me get my dear old Father here out of this lousy project. That’s all! That’s all! And in return, I swear I will remain humble all the days of my life. Hear my prayer, O Gods, for thine is the power and the glory and we are in a genuine fix, forever and ever. Amen.’
The Gods said, ‘If you wish to remove the immortal, then the time to go is now.’
‘Ah!’ Otto grabbed his shrine in both hands and fervently kissed the altar. ‘You’re lovely people to treat an old acid head so, and I swear I’ll declare the miracle abroad and walk in truth and righteousness all the days of my life and get a new battery for the altar light. Amen in the highest amen and out!’
Turning to Palmer with his eyes gleaming, he strapped the shrine back over his shoulder.
‘There! What do you think of that? When the Gods work in our favor, there’s nothing Twenty-Second Century civilisation can do to stop us! Come on, daddy-o, and I’ll look after you like a child.’
He pulled the immortal to his feet and led him from the room. In confused excitement, Palmer in turn protested that he could not go and longed to leave. One arguing, one encouraging, they made their way down the extensive corridors of the project. Nobody stopped them, although several officials stared and looked hard after their eccentric progress.
It was when they got to the main door that their way was blocked. Dean Cusak, imposing in his brown uniform, popped forward like a dummy and asked for their passes.
Otto showed his visitor’s pass and said, ‘As you’ll probably recognise, this is one of the immortals, Mr Palmer Pommy. He is leaving with me. He has no pass. He has lived here for the past one hundred and fifty years.’
This was Cusak’s big moment, and he painfully recognised it as such. Never having been face to face with an immortal before, he felt, as many another man had don
e, the stunning impact of that encounter, which was invariably followed by a shockwave of envy, fear, and other emotions: for here was a being already four times as old as himself, and due to go on living long after all the present generation was subsumed into ashes.
Cusak’s voice came reedily. ‘I can’t let nobody through here without a pass, sir. It’s the rules.’
‘For the Gods’ sake, man, what are you? Are you going to be someone else’s yes-man all your life? – A mere taker-of-orders? Look on this immortal and then ask yourself if you have any right to offend his wishes!’
Cusak’s eyes met Palmer’s, and then dropped. It could have been that he was not even thinking of this present moment at all, or of these persons, but of some other time when someone else held the stage and a shriller voice made the same demands of him.
When he looked up, he said, ‘You’re quite right, sir. I pleases myself who I lets through here. I don’t exist just to carry out Mr Darkling’s orders. I’m my own man, and one day I’m going to run my own little farm. Carry on, gentlemen!’
He saluted as they went by.
Directly the two men were gone, Cusak began to suffer qualms. He dialled his superior, Zee Stone, and told him that one of the immortals had left the project.
‘I’ll deal with it, Cusak,’ Stone said, snapping off the doorman’s flow of apology. He sat for a moment staring into vacancy, wondering what to do with this interesting piece of news. It was his only for a while; by evening, if he let the immy go, it would be all over the planet. The news value was colossal; no immortal had ever dared leave the project before. Certainly the news would bring the project under close investigation and no doubt a number of secrets would come to light.
In particular, it would bring Jaybert Darkling under investigation. He would probably get the sack. So, for that matter, might Zee Stone.