Collected fiction, p.564
Collected Fiction, page 564
After a moment, moved by no impulse she could name, the woman let her lips tuck in at the corners in an acknowledged smile, disdainful, condescending. She moved one shoulder to shrug her robe aside and stretched out a slender arm and a very slender, small-boned hand with plain, thick gold bands pushed down well at the base of every finger. Very delicately she laid the hand on Sam Reed’s arm and stepped down beside him. On that thick forearm, hazed with red hair, the muscles interlacing in a hard column toward the wrist, her hand looked waxen and unreal. She felt the muscles tighten beneath her touch, and her smile grew even more condescending.
Sam said, “Your hair wasn’t black the last time I saw you at Carnival.”
She gave him an aloof glance down her delicate thin nose. She did not yet trouble herself to speak. Sam looked at her unsmilingly, inspecting her feature by feature as if this were some portrait and not a breathing, disdainful woman who was here beside him only by a precarious whim.
“It was yellow,” he said finally, with decision. The memory was clear now, wrenched out of the past in almost complete detail, so that he realized now vividly it must have impressed him at the time. “That was—thirty years ago. You wore blue on that day, too. I remember it very well.”
The woman said disinterestedly, her head turned aside so that she seemed to be addressing someone at her other shoulder, “That would have been my daughter’s daughter, I expect.”
It jolted Sam. He was well aware of the long-lived aristocracy, of course. But he had never spoken directly to one before. To a man who counts in decades his own life and those of all his friends, the sudden impact of a life that spans centuries unimpaired must strike a disconcerting blow.
He laughed, a short bark of sound. The woman turned her head and looked at him with faint interest, because she had never before heard one of these lower classes make quite such a sound as that, self-assured, indifferent, the laugh of a confident man who doesn’t trouble himself with manners.
Many people before Kedre Walton had found Sam rather mysteriously fascinating. Few had Kedre’s perception. She knew before very long exactly why. It was the same quality that she and the world of fashion groped for when they hung barbaric ornaments through the pierced flesh of their ears and sang the wailing, forthright ballads of bloodshed and slaughter which were only words to them—yet. A quality of vitality and virility which the world of man had lost, and hungered for obscurely, and would not accept when it was next offered them, if they could avoid the gift.
She looked at him scornfully, turned her head a little to let the black cascading curls caress her shoulders, and said coldly, “Your name?”
His red brows met above his nose.
“You don’t need to know,” he told her with deliberate rudeness.
For an instant she froze. Then, slowly, an almost imperceptible warming seemed to flow down her limbs, relaxing everything about her, muscles, nerves, even the chill of her aloofness. She drew a deep, silent breath and the ringed fingers which had only touched his arm until now moved deliberately, opened out so that her palm lay against his forearm. She let the palm slide gently forward toward the thickly tapered wrist, her rings cold and catching a little in the heavy red hair that thatched his arm.
She said without looking at him, “You may tell me about yourself—until you bore me.”
“Are you easily bored?”
“Very easily.”
He looked her up and down, liking what he saw, and he thought he understood it. In forty years Sam Reed had gained an immense store of casual knowledge about the Keeps—not only the ordinary life that anyone could see, but the devious, secret methods a race uses to whip its lagging interest in living when life has gone on longer than humans can easily adjust to. He thought he could hold her interest.
“Come along,” he said.
That was the first day of Carnival. On the third and last day, Sam got his first intimation from her that this casual liaison might not come to an end with the festival. It rather surprised him, and he was not pleased. For one thing, there was Rosathe. And for another—well, Sam Reed was locked in the confines of one prison he could never escape, but he would not submit to gives within the confines of his cell.
Hanging without gravity in empty darkness, they were watching a three-dimensional image. This particular pleasure was expensive. It required skilled operators and at least one robot plane, equipped with special long-view lenses and televisor. Somewhere far above a continent on Venus the plane was hanging, focused on the scene it had tracked down.
A beast fought with a plant.
It was enormous, that beast, and magnificently equipped for fighting. But its great wet body was wetter now with the blood that ran from gashes opened all over it by the saber-thorned vines. They lashed out with calculating accuracy, flirting drops of venom that flashed in the wet gray air. Music, deftly improvised to fit the pulse of the battle, crashed around them.
Kedre touched a stud. The music softened to a whisper. Somewhere far above the plane hovered on ignored above the battle, the improviser fingered his keys unheard. Kedre, in the darkness, turned her head with a faint silken rustling of unseen hair, and said. “I made a mistake.”
Sam was impatient. He had wanted to see the finish of the fight.
“What?” he demanded brusquely.
“You.” Out of the darkness a finger brushed his cheek lightly, with casual possessiveness. “I underestimated you, Sam. Or overestimated. Or both.”
He shook his head to evade the finger. He reached out in the dark, feeling his hand slip across a smooth, curved cheek and into the back-drawn hair. He found the ring through which the showering curls were drawn and seized a handful of ringlets, shaking her head roughly from side to side. The hair moved softly over his forearm.
“That’s enough of that,” he said. “I’m not your pet dog. What do you mean?”
She laughed. “If you weren’t so young,” she said insultingly.
He released her with such abruptness he unsteadied her on the divan beside him, and she laid a hand on his. shoulder to catch herself. He was silent. Then in a remote voice he asked, “Just how old are you?”
“Two hundred and twenty years.”
“And I bore you. I’m a child.”
Her laughter was flattering. “Not a child, Sam—not a child! But our viewpoints are so different. No, you don’t bore me. That’s the trouble, or part of it. I wish you did. Then I could leave you tonight and forget all this had ever happened. But there’s something about you, Sam—I don’t know:” Her voice grew reflective. Behind it in the darkness the music swelled to a screaming crescendo, but very softly, a muted death-note as one adversary or the other triumphed far up in the swamplands overhead.
“It you were the man you look,” Kedre Walton was saying. “If you only were! You have a fine mind, Sam—it’s a pity you must die too soon to use it. I wish you weren’t one of the commons. I’d marry you—for awhile.”
“How does it feel,” Sam asked her savagely, “to be a god?”
“I’m sorry. That was patronizing, wasn’t it? And you deserve better. How does it feel? Well, we are immortals, of a sort. We can’t help that. It feels—good, and frightening. It’s a responsibility. We do much more than just play, you know. I spent my first hundred years maturing and studying, traveling, learning people and things. Then for a hundred years it was intrigue I liked. Learning how to pull strings to make the Council see things my way, for instance. A sort of jujitsu of the mind—touch a man’s vanity and make his ego react in just the way I mean it to. I think you know those tricks well enough yourself—only you’ll never live long enough to master the art as I know it. It’s a pity. There’s something about you that I . . . I . . . never mind.”
“Don’t say again you’d marry me. I wouldn’t have you.”
“Oh yes you would. And I might try it, at that, even if you are a common. I might—”
Sam leaned forward across her knees and groped for the light switch. The small; cushioned room sprang into illumination as the switch clicked, and Kedre blinked her beautiful ageless eyes and laughed half in protest and half in surprise.
“Sam! I’m blind. Don’t do that.” She reached to extinguish the light. Sam caught her hand, folding the fingers together over their heavy golden rings.
“No. Listen. I’m leaving you right now and I never want to see you again. Understand? You’ve got nothing I want.” He rose abruptly.
There was something almost serpentine in the way she moved to her feet in one smooth, swift flow, light glinting on the overlapping golden sequins that sheathed her.
“Wait. No, wait! Forget about all this, Sam. I want to show you something. That was just talk, before. I needed to sound you out. Sam, I want you to come with me to Haven. I have a problem for you.”
He looked at her coldly, his eyes steel splinters between the ruddy lashes, under the rough, ruddy brows. He named the sum his listening would cost her. She curled her lip at him and said she would pay it, the subtle Egyptian smile denting in the corners of her mouth.
He followed her out of the room.
Haven approximated man’s half-forgotten birthplace. It was Earth, but an Earth glamourized and inaccurately remembered. It was a gigantic half-dome honeycombed with cells that made a shell arched over a great public room below.
Each cell could be blocked off, or a rearrangement of penetrating rays could give you the illusion of being in the midst of an immense, crowded room. Or you could use the architect’s original plan and enjoy the illusion of a terrestrial background.
True, palms and pines seemed to grow out of the same surrogate soil, grapes and roses and blossoming fruit trees shouldered one another; but since these were merely clever images they did not matter except to the purist. And only scholars really knew the difference. Seasons had become an exotic piece of history.
It was a strange and glamorous thought—the rhythmic equinoxes, earth’s face changing from green and brown to glittering blue-white, and then the magic of pale green blades pushing up and green buds breaking from the trees, and all this naturally, inevitably, unlike the controlled growth of hydroponics.
Kedre Walton and Sam Reed came to Haven. From the stage where they entered they could look up at that immense, shining hemisphere, crowded with glittering cells like fragments of a bright, exploded dream, shifting and floating, rising and falling in the intricate light-currents. Down below, very far away, was the bar, a serpentine black shape where men and women made centipede-legs for its twisting body.
Kedre spoke into a microphone. One of the circling cells moved in its orbit and bumped gently against the landing stage. They stepped inside, and the swaying underfoot told Sam that they were afloat again.
Leaning among cushions by the low table were a man and a woman. Sam knew the man by sight. He was Zachariah Harker, oldest of one of the great Immortal families. He was a big man, long-boned, fine of line, his face a curious mixture of—not age—but experience, maturity, contrasting with the ageless youth that kept his features fresh and unlined. He had a smoothness that came from within, smooth assurance, smooth courtesy, smooth and quiet wisdom.
The woman—
“Sari, my dear,” Kedre said. “I’ve brought you a guest. Sari is my granddaughter. Zachariah, this is . . . I don’t know his name. He wouldn’t tell me.”
Sari Walton had the delicate, disdainful face that was apparently a family characteristic. Her hair was an improbable green-gold, falling with careful disorder loose over her bare shoulders. She wore a tight garment of the very fine fur of a landside beast, plucked down to the undercoat which was as short and thick as velvet and patterned with shadowy stripes like a tiger. Thin and flexible as cloth, it sheathed her tightly to the knees and lay in broad folds about her ankles.
The two Immortals looked up, surprise showing briefly on their faces. Sam was aware of a quick surge of resentment that they should be surprised. He felt suddenly clumsy, conscious of his thick body and his utter unlikeness to these aristocrats. And he felt, too, his immaturity. As a child resents his elders, Sam resented the superior knowledge implicit upon these handsome, quiet features.
“Sit down.” Kedre waved to the cushions. Stiffly Sam lowered himself, accepted a drink, sat watching the averted faces of his hosts with a hot resentment he did not try to hide. Why should he?
Kedre said, “I was thinking of the Free Companion when I brought him here. He . . . what is your name? Or shall I give you one?”
Sullenly Sam told her. She lay back among the cushions, the gold rings gleaming softly on her hand as she raised her drink. She looked at ease, gracefully comfortable, but there was a subtle tension in her that Sam could sense. He wondered if the others could.
“I’d better explain to you first, Sam Reed,” she said, “that for twenty years now I’ve been in contemplation.”
He knew what that meant—a sort of intellectual nunnery, a high religion of the mind, wherein the acolyte retires from the world in an attempt to find—well, what is indescribable when found. Nirvana? No—stasis, perhaps, peace, balance.
He knew somewhat more of the Immortals than they probably suspected. He realized, as well as a short-lived mortal could, how complete the life that will span up to a thousand years must be. The character must be very finely integrated, so that their lives become a sort of close and delicate mosaic, an enormous one, but made up of tiles the same size as those composing an ordinary life. You may live a thousand years, but one second is still _ exactly one second long at a time. And periods of contemplation were sometimes necessary to preserve balance.
“What about the Free Companion?” Sam demanded harshly. He knew. Robin Hale, last of the warriors, was very much in public interest just now. The deep discontent which was urging popular favor toward the primitive had caught up the Companion, draped him in synthetic glamour, and was eager to follow his project toward colonization of the landside.
Or they thought they were eager. So far most of the idea was still on paper. When it came to an actual struggle with the ravening fury that was continental Venus—well, realists suspected how different a matter that might turn put to be. But just now Robin Hale’s crusade for colonization was enjoying a glowing, irrational boom.
“What about him?” Zachariah Harker asked. “It won’t work. Do you think it could, Sam Reed?”
Sam gave him a red-browed scowl. He snorted and shook his head, deliberately not troubling to answer aloud. He was conscious of a rising desire to provoke discord among these smoothly civilized Immortals.
“When I came out of contemplation,” Kedre said, “I found this Free Companion’s project the most interesting thing .that was happening. And one of the most dangerous. For many reasons, we feel that to attempt colonization now would be disastrous.”
Sam grunted. “Why?”
Zachariah Harker leaned across the table to set down his drink. “We aren’t ready yet,” he said smoothly. “It will take careful planning, psychologically and technologically. And we’re a declining race, Sam Reed. We can’t afford to fail. This Free Companion project will fail. It must not be given the chance.” He lifted his brows and regarded Sam thoughtfully.
Sam squirmed. He had an uncomfortable feeling that the deep, quiet gaze could read more upon his face than he wanted anyone to read. You couldn’t tell about these people. They had lived too long. Perhaps they knew too much.
He said bluntly, “You want me to kill him?”
There was silence in the little room for a moment. Sam had an instant’s impression that until he spoke they had not thought the thing through quite so far. He felt a swift rearrangement of ideas going on all about him, as if the Immortals were communicating with one another silently. People who have known each other for so many centuries would surely develop a mild ability at thought-reading, if only through the nuances of facial expression. Silently, then, the three Immortals seemed to exchange confidences above Sam’s head.
Then Kedre said, “Yes. Yes, kill him if you can.”
“It would be the best solution,” Zachariah added slowly. “To do it now—today. Not later than forty-eight hours from now. The thing’s growing too fast to wait. If we can stop him now, there’s no one ready to step into his place as figurehead. Tomorrow? someone, might. Can you handle it, Sam Reed?”
Sam scowled at them. “Are you all fools?” he demanded. “Or do you know more about me than I think?”
Kedre laughed. “We know. It’s been three days, my dear. Do you think I let myself get this involved without knowing the man I was with? I had your name before evening of the first day. I knew your record by the next morning. It’s-quite safe to intrust a job like this to you. You can handle it and for a price you’ll keep quiet.”
Sam flushed. He hated her consciously for the first time then. No man cares to be told he has been made a fool of.
“That,” he said, “will cost you twice what it would cost anyone else in the Keep.” He named a very high price.
Zachariah said, “No. We can get—”
“Please, Zachariah.” Kedre lifted her hand. “I’ll pay it. I have a reason.”
He looked at her carefully. The reason was plain on her face, and for an instant Zachariah winced. He had hoped the free-marriage she had stepped out of when she went into contemplation might be resumed very soon now. Seeing her eyes upon Sam, he recognized that it would not be soon.
Sari leaned forward and put her pale, narrow hand on his arm.
“Zachariah,” she said, warning and possessiveness in her voice. “Let her have her way, my dear. There’s time enough for everything.”
Grandmother and granddaughter, almost mirror-images, exchanged a look in which Sam, who had missed nothing, thought he saw both rivalry and understanding.
Zachariah said, “Look over there.” He moved his hand and the cell wall glowed into transparence. Floating a little distance off among the crowding cells was an inclosure in which a man sat alone. . “He’s been here for two hours now,” Zachariah went on.
