I say, "I know."

  Then with a different tone, I ask, "What did Grandfather think about my father?"

  The question seems to puzzle her.

  "Compared to your other husbands, I mean -- "

  "Oh," she exclaims. And with a deep, thoughtful sigh, she admits, "He liked them all equally well. I'm sure of that."

  Ten dead men, I think.

  But I just smile, saying nothing at all.

  * * *

  Before my mother is put to bed, I manage to corral Jacob, allowing the two of them to meet. The boy is on his best behavior, while Mother seems unsure as to whose hand is being offered. But the moment has a sweetness, and at least one of us is able to walk away happy.

  Smiling, I lead Jacob downstairs, joining the rest of the family in the dining hall. Supper is enormous and simple. Eggs and milk, cornmeal and blood, have been swirled together with an array of vegetables, baked to gold, then covered in honey and served with pitchers of weak beer and whole milk. Two chairs have been reserved at the main table. Conventions born long before me demand a strict formality. Conversations are determined and self-conscious. Adults discuss the day-by-day business of the farm -- the needs of various machines and livestock, and who is responsible for what -- while the little half-cousins near Jacob whisper about school and various friends that he will never meet. Ethan invests his time staring at the hall's enormous window, nothing to see outside but darkness, eating little bites and otherwise holding his tongue still. Finally, Grandfather finishes his meal, and setting down his fork says, "Hannah," with a voice that carries. With a word, I am made into a real person. And now everyone is free to look at me, and if they wish, smile.

  "One of our far flung family members has come home," the ancient man continues. "For too short of a visit, I'm afraid. So while she is here, perhaps somebody has a question for Hannah."

  A young man lifts a nervous hand.

  I don't have my father's talent for faces and names, but he looks new. Judging by where he sits, he must be Ethan's newest son-in-law.

  "I love your movies," he claims.

  "Thank you," I reply, with what I hope sounds like genuine pleasure. Then I have to ask, "Which movies?"

  The question puzzles him. But one of my aunts leaps into the silence, explaining, "You've taken two stabs at acting. Isn't that right, dear?"

  The tone isn't exactly approving, but she is correct.

  "I've had two careers," I admit. Then to my admirer, I say, "You probably mean my second career. The one where I played the rathe."

  "Yes." With a happy expertise, he names titles. "_The Blood of Life_ and _The Milk of Life_. Those are my favorites."

  "So what happens in them?"

  Of all people, Ethan asks the simple question, displaying what for him is an unusual curiosity.

  "Haven't you seen them?" his young son-in-law asks.

  "If I have," my uncle replies, "I don't remember it."

  "Hannah plays the old mythic creature," the young man explains. "She's a rathe. Which means that she has some weird genetic disorder. If she doesn't eat human flesh, her body starts to fall apart. Her skin sags and her teeth stop coming. And eventually, she grows ugly and weak and dies."

  For some, the concept brings discomfort. But most people actually smile, revealing the same grim intrigue that helped make my second bout as an actress become such an enormous financial success.

  "She lives in an old fortress," my admirer continues. "She lives with men and women who have the same affliction, and they use their beauty to lure in passersby." Shivering with delight, he says, "Very spooky. Very fun."

  Again, I say, "Thank you."

  Grandfather sits at the far end of the table, one hand unseen. With that hand, he calmly scratches Lady's head, and with his free hand he gestures, bringing the room's attention back to him.

  Everyone waits for him to speak.

  Hours might pass, and nobody would dare move. That is his power and authority, and perhaps on a different day, he might force everybody to sit, demanding that show of obedience. But not tonight. He is satisfied to shrug his massive shoulders, and with an almost casual voice, he admits, "I should probably watch one of those little films. Just to get a feel for them."

  With a few words, my unimportance is plain to see.

  Again, nobody looks at me. I am a temporary guest, inconsequential and soon to be forgotten. If only Jacob could sense the mood, then maybe we would escape without further embarrassment. But with his own infectious enthusiasm, my boy shouts out, "You know how to kill my mom? When she's a rathe, I mean."

  Too slowly, I say, "Don't -- "

  "With a golden sword," he explains, one arm whirring above his head. "You have to chop off her head with this big gold sword."

  "Really?" Grandfather says.

  Then with a low laugh, he exclaims, "What an intriguing image!"

  * * *

  The hotel was perched on top of a tall bank building, the best rooms looking toward the Great Pyramid. History and the modern world stood shoulder to shoulder. Three hundred million souls filled the narrow Nile Valley, from the delta to the reservoir at Aswan. Extensive irrigation projects and draconian building codes left just enough arable farmland to feed most of the people, the shortfalls made up by imports. My grandfather's grain might have helped feed these millions. Certainly each of those hungry mouths could only make the value of his crops increase.

  "Are you going to stare out the window all night?"

  I said, "Perhaps," and put on a smile, looking back over my shoulder.

  My lover sat in the middle of our bed, wearing a fond expression and worried eyes.

  "You know," I said, "you could stand here with me."

  "Maybe I will. Maybe I won't."

  But he couldn't help himself. In another moment, with the padding of bare feet, he slipped in behind me, warm arms wrapped around my waist and his spent prick pressed against my bottom.

  Time had reversed our circumstances. I was the famous actress enjoying her reborn career, while he was just another geneticist hoping for a fifty-year tenure with any mid-tier university. He had a wife now, and a child, and a world bursting with responsibilities. Yet luring him to this place wasn't difficult. Despite all of our wishing, we can never quite rid ourselves of the affections of our youth.

  "You know," I whispered. "You helped me quite a bit, years ago."

  "I did?"

  He thought of the money he gave me. But I admitted, "No, it was your career advice. It only took me another four decades, but eventually I realized that you were right. I should play the villain."

  "Well, then, you're welcome."

  "So what have you learned? Since then, I mean."

  "Learned?"

  "About my grandfather." I pushed back against him, causing the prick to stir. "The big genome project went on for years. I've read some of the results. At least as far as I can follow them. But nothing published actually mentions him -- "

  "We can't name your grandfather," he interrupted. "The genetic privacy laws strictly forbid that."

  "What have you learned?" I asked again.

  My lover took a breath, gathering himself. Then with a sorry tone, he admitted, "Very little, really. Since I saw you last ... well, the man's definitely old, and durable. But how old, and what makes him so durable -- "

  "Would you like to know?" I interrupted.

  He hesitated, his arms lifting off me now.

  "Would you like to study his blood?" I asked. "Would that help with your career?"

  "Yes, I would like a sample. But I doubt if it would help." He was such an innocent soul. It had finally occurred to him that I was using him, and it would take another few minutes before he grew comfortable with that hard fact. "Hannah," he said, and he breathed again. "Genetics don't mean nearly as much as we'd hoped," he explained. "A person's DNA can be robust, but only to a point. After that, nothing matters but luck and lifestyle. Which is why we dropped our studies with the very long-lived people. We collected enough samples from their descendants -- from people like you -- that we don't have to directly involve them. And it's been twenty years since the data has given us anything new."

  "What about his mitochondria?"

  Warm hands settled on my hips, as if to hold me to the ground. "What about his mitochondria?"

  "He inherited them from his mother. Whoever she was. But his children inherited their mitochondria from their mothers. Maybe his are unique. Maybe that's the reason he can be thousands of years old."

  "You've been reading," he muttered.

  Then with the steady voice of a practiced lecturer, he told me, "Mitochondria are simple, genetically speaking. Maybe there's something unique in your grandfather's organelles. But even if there is, or was, there's always a steady mutation rate. In the course of a long life, a person's mitochondria will have to change in some significant ways."

  "What about memes?"

  That brought silence, and curiosity.

  "You mentioned lifestyle and luck," I said. "But have you ever wondered? Maybe the old man survived all this time because he has certain beliefs, or tricks, or useful ways of thinking. Memes, I mean. Maybe if you could study him, and I mean carefully ... maybe everybody would learn how to remain young and vital for ten thousand years...."

  The hands dropped, but he remained intrigued by the idea.

  "Would the man be worth anything to you?" I asked. "Assuming I could actually deliver him, of course."

  "Deliver him? Like a package, you mean?"

  I didn't explain what I meant.

  "That isn't going to happen," he assured me. Or himself. "And really, that kind of psychological work isn't even in my field."

  I hadn't thought that any of these schemes would fly. They were just foundations to an assault more basic, more proven. With one hand, I reached behind my back, firmly gripping his testicles and the cool prick. Then with a frankness that couldn't help but work, I said, "I intend to enslave you. Starting now. You're going to be mine to do with as I please."

  He laughed, and gulped. "I'm already half-enslaved, darling -- "

  "But it's not time yet," I continued. "Not this year, or the next decade, probably. But soon. And until then, I'm going to hold you like this. Understand? Like this!"

  He winced, saying, "Please."

  "All right then."

  My corporeal hand let him go, but in every other fashion, I still had a grip on him. Then standing together, we stared out of the window, watching the sun rise over the Nile Valley, those first red-stained rays reaching high. Like each of the Great Pharaohs, Cheops had drunk nothing but water boiled in priestly ceremonies, and he ate a balanced, moderate diet, and only people who passed through a ritual quarantine could share the same room with him. The greatest of all the pharaohs, Cheops had lived for one thousand and fifteen years, and in that span his tomb became a mountain -- a giant massif of quarried granite -- its slopes kept at a moderate grade to avoid catastrophic collapses, but the pyramid still high enough that the air thinned noticeably on the upper slopes, and when there was moisture in the air, as if on that particular morning, a cluster of sun-reddened clouds gathered around the tiny, sharply pointed summit.

  * * *

  I won't sleep. I don't think that sleep is even possible. With Jacob snoring peacefully in the bed beside mine, I lie on my back, perfectly alert, counting the minutes and the long hours while marveling at how horribly slow time moves when you stand behind it, shoving hard.

  Suddenly my eyes close and remain shut.

  What wakes me is a dog barking in the cold night air. Foolishly, I sit upright, the mattress creaking beneath me. But I manage to regain my self-control. I force myself not to look out the window. Quietly, smoothly, I settle back onto the bed, and after another couple of low woofs, the old dog falls silent.

  * * *

  My father's body was cremated, and because he hadn't been married to my mother for the customary twenty years, he wasn't regarded as really belonging to us. That was why his remains were shipped home to certain obscure relatives. That was why I never got a clear answer when I asked for the whereabouts of his urn and ashes.

  "There's no grave," my mother used to claim, her nose wrinkling with disgust. "They probably stuck the urn into the back of a closet somewhere. It's sad, I know. Criminal, even. But you see, darling, these people aren't like us. They don't honor their ancestors. And since they breed like weeds, they barely care about their own children."

  "What family was his?" I asked.

  She willingly gave me a name. Indeed, she believed in that name. But her certainty was too easy, her manner too incurious. When I made my own inquiries, I discovered that my father's family was barely that. A family. There was a genuine name and a wide array of people attached to that arrangement of letters, but who was related to who was a much more complicated and interesting business.

  I didn't find my father's earthly remains until my last visit home. Jacob was two years old, safe with friends inside the orbiting habitat. I had already spent the requisite time with my mother, and I'd boasted about my son as much as I dared, and after signing the necessary forms to remain a stockholder in good standing with the family farm, I saw no reason to linger. Claiming a nebulous problem back home, I left three days early. The hired multirotor flew to the city, dropping me at the front gate of the district's main airport. There I hired a driver and two bodyguards, and armed with clues harvested from a multitude of sources, I took a little ride into the heart of the city.

  There are larger metropolises, most of them more crowded and poor. But my father's city has its own oppressive touches. Its name was stolen from a native tribe that was eradicated with rifles and smallpox. Little more than two centuries old, it possesses a drab, determined newness that makes it indistinguishable from a thousand other immigrant towns. The immigrants came here to build the railroads. They came to work in the early grain mills and blood mills. From Europe and North Africa, as free citizens and freed slaves, they came and settled, built their homes and raised the first of their families. Four million souls are pressed together on the bluffs above a wide brown river, most of them living in the twenty-story apartment buildings that were built from brick for the first century, and then the forty-story towers built with steel and white concrete. And as you walk the narrow streets, people will gaze at you from the high windows -- a certain portion of those faces belonging to the very same immigrants who settled this land, who still speak with rich accents, and in their sleep, still dream in the languages of their vanquished youth.

  My father's neighborhood was half a dozen apartment buildings overlooking a cluster of old mills and little factories. His urn and the accompanying nameplate were set in a public mausoleum. Despite the general poverty, death remained an unusual turn of events, and the murder of a young man would always be a horrible, memorable crime. What could have been a thousand years of life had been erased with two bullets. Today, a murderer was still going unpunished. And every day, without fail, somebody in those buildings -- someone who had actually known my father -- would think of him, recalling his smile and laugh, and his happy manner, and his preposterous hopes for the future.

  I spent a few moments examining the urn, and then I told my bodyguards what I wished to do next.

  They refused. Pointblank, they told me they were hired to bring me here and out again. Nobody had whispered a word about actually going inside one of these slum towers. I offered to triple their salaries, and their response was to threaten my driver. Then the three of them piled back into the low sedan, driving away with an unashamed cowardice.

  Courage is a nearly impossible trick when you can see Forever.

  I entered the building across the street, taking the elevator as high as possible. After that, I had to climb the narrow stairs, passing between armed men who kept asking about my business, and did I know I looked like an old movie star? Finally, on the topmost floor, my way was blocked. Two women -- sisters, apparently -- took me into a lavatory and made me strip and relieve myself and then dress again. I was asked and asked again, "What's your business here?" But I offered only hints and vague mutterings. I forced them to summon up the curiosity to invite me into what looked like a small and rather ugly penthouse apartment. Every window was bulletproof. Elaborate sensors watched me as I crossed the main room. But the man sitting at his desk was nothing if not relaxed. With a smile, he said, "I've always liked your movies. The old ones best, I suppose." He had a thick, chewy accent, Germanic and French in equal measures. "Sit, if you want. A drink, maybe?"

  "Nothing. Thank you."

  In his smile, I saw my father. But then again, I had been seeing portions of my father in every face inside that little neighborhood.

  "If I may ask: What can I do for you, Miss Cross?"

  I opened my notebook, unencrypted a certain file, and began to explain. A friend of mine had passed through these streets some years ago. With blood samples and algorithms, he had easily established what I'd always suspected. "I don't have a sample from you," I told him, "but it seems obvious enough. I have to be your granddaughter."

  "You certainly are," he purred.

  "And you're also my uncle," I said.

  Which brought a little nod and a knowing grin.

  "From what I can decipher, my father and I share the same grandfather."

  Of course none of that was a surprise. He knew perfectly well who his father was, and who he was, and whatever reason in the deep past caused him to be disinherited. Ignoring my elaborate diagrams, my grandfather/uncle preferred to study my face and manners. Then with a cold little voice, he asked, "How is my dear father?"

  "Alive and well," I reported.

  And with a sad sigh, he asked, "Isn't that awful to hear?"

  * * *

  The alarms are inaudible to me. But I hear a sudden flurry of activity, dozens of feet stumbling in the darkness, voices calling out, "Lady, Lady!" Then the search widens, and quiets, and someone checks with the farm's security system, discovering what seems like a critical clue.

  Uncle Ethan comes to wake me. But then he hesitates, looking down at Jacob before moving to my bed, and then staring at me until I quietly ask, "What is it? What's wrong?"

 

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