This Immortal Read online

  This Immortal

  Roger Joseph Zelazny

  Roger Zelazny

  This Immortal

  AUTHOR'S DEDICATION:

  To Ben Jason

  "YOU ARE A KALLIKANZAROS," SHE ANNOUNCED SUDDENLY.

  I turned onto my left side and smiled through the darkness.

  "I left my hooves and my horns at the Office."

  "You've heard the story!"

  "The name is 'Nomikos.'"

  I reached for her, found her.

  "Are you going to destroy the world this time around?"

  I laughed and drew her to me.

  "I'll think about it. If that's the way the Earth crumbles-"

  "You know that children born here on Christmas are of the kallikanzaroi blood," she said, "and you once told me that your birthday-"

  "All right!"

  It had struck me that she was only half-joking. Knowing some of the things one occasionally meets in the Old Places, the Hot Places, you can almost believe in myths without extra effort-such as the story of those Pan-like sprites who gather together every spring to spend ten days sawing at the Tree of the World, only to be dispersed at the last moment by the ringing of the Easter bells. (Ring-a-ding, the bells, gnash, gnash, the teeth, clackety-clack, the hooves, etcetera.) Cassandra and I were not in the habit of discussing religion, politics, or Aegean folklore in bed-but, me having been born in these parts, the memories are still somehow alive.

  "I am hurt," I said, only half-joking.

  "You're hurting me, too…"

  "Sorry."

  I relaxed again.

  After a time I explained, "Back when I was a brat, the other brats used to push me around, called me 'Konstantin Kallikanzaros.' When I got bigger and uglier they stopped doing it. At least, they didn't say it to my face-"

  "'Konstantin? That was your name? I've wondered…"

  "It's 'Conrad' now, so forget it."

  "But I like it. I'd rather call you 'Konstantin' than 'Conrad.'"

  "If it makes you happy…"

  The moon pushed her ravaged face up over the window-sill to mock me. I couldn't reach the moon, or even the window, so I looked away. The night was cold, was damp, was misty as it always is here.

  "The Commissioner of Arts, Monuments and Archives for the planet Earth is hardly out to chop down the Tree of the World," I rasped.

  "My kallikanzaros," she said too quickly, "I did not say that. But there are fewer bells every year, and it is not always desire that matters. I have this feeling that you will change things, somehow. Perhaps-"

  "You are wrong, Cassandra."

  "And I am afraid, and cold-"

  And she was lovely in the darkness, so I held her in my arms to sort of keep her from the foggy foggy dew.

  In attempting to reconstruct the affairs of these past six months, I realize now that as we willed walls of passion around our October and the isle of Kos, the Earth had already fallen into the hands of those powers which smash all Octobers. Marshaled from within and without, the forces of final disruption were even then goose-stepping amidst the ruins-faceless, ineluctable, arms upraised. Cort Myshtigo had landed at Port-au-Prince in the antique Sol-Bus Nine, which had borne him in from Titan along with a load of shirts and shoes, underwear, socks, assorted wines, medical supplies, and the latest tapes from civilization. A wealthy and influential galacto-journalist, he. Just how wealthy, we were not to learn for many weeks; just how influential, I found out only five days ago.

  As we wandered among the olive groves gone wild, picked our way through the ruins of the Frankish castle, or mixed our tracks with the hieroglyph-prints of the herring-gulls, there on the wet sands of the beaches of Kos, we were burning time while waiting for a ransom which could not come, which should never, really, have been expected.

  Cassandra's hair is the color of Katamara olives, and shiny. Her hands are soft, the fingers short, delicately webbed. Her eyes are very dark. She is only about four inches shorter than me, which makes her gracefulness something of an achievement, me being well over six feet. Of course, any woman looks graceful, precise and handsome when walking at my side, because I am none of these things: my left cheek was then a map of Africa done up in varying purples, because of that mutant fungus I'd picked up from a moldy canvas back when I'd been disinterring the Guggenheim for the New York Tour; my hairline peaks to within a fingerbreadth of my brow; my eyes are mismatched. (I glare at people through the cold blue one on the right side when I want to intimidate them; the brown one is for Glances Sincere and Honest.) I wear a reinforced boot because of my short right leg.

  Cassandra doesn't require contrasting, though. She's beautiful.

  I met her by accident, pursued her with desperation, married her against my will. (The last part was her idea.) I wasn't really thinking about it, myself-even on that day when I brought my caique into the harbor and saw her there, sunning herself like a mermaid beside the plane tree of Hippocrates, and decided that I wanted her. Kallikanzaroi have never been much the family sort. I just sort of slipped up, again.

  It was a clean morning. It was starting our third month together. It was my last day on Kos -because of a call I'd received the evening before. Everything was still moist from the night's rain, and we sat out on the patio drinking Turkish coffee and eating oranges. Day was starting to lever its way into the world. The breeze was intermittent, was damp, goosepimpled us beneath the black hulk of our sweaters, skimmed the steam off the top of the coffee.

  "'Rodos dactylos Aurora…'" she said, pointing.

  "Yeah," I said, nodding, "real rosy-fingered and nice."

  "Let's enjoy it."

  "Yeah. Sorry."

  We finished our coffee, sat smoking.

  "I feel crummy," I said.

  "I know," she said. "Don't."

  "Can't help it. Got to go away and leave you, and that's crummy."

  "It may only be a few weeks. You said so yourself. Then you'll be back."

  "Hope so," I said. "If it takes any longer, though, I'll send for you. Dunno where all I'll be, yet."

  "Who is Cort Myshtigo?"

  "Vegan actor, journalist. Important one. Wants to write about what's left of Earth. So I've got to show it to him. Me. Personally. Damn!"

  "Anybody who takes ten-month vacations to go sailing can't complain about being overworked."

  "I can complain-and I will. My job is supposed to be a sinecure."

  "Why?"

  "Mainly because I made it that way. I worked hard for twenty years to make Arts, Monuments and Archives what it is, and ten years ago I got it to the point where my staff could handle just about everything. So I got me turned out to pasture, I got me told to come back occasionally to sign papers and to do whatever I damn pleased in the meantime. Now this-this bootlicking gesture!-having a Commissioner take a Vegan scribbler on a tour any staff guide could conduct! Vegans aren't gods!"

  "Wait a minute, please," she said. "Twenty years? Ten years?"

  Sinking feeling.

  "You're not even thirty years old."

  I sank further. I waited. I rose again.

  "Uh-there's something I, well, in my own reticent way, sort of never quite got around to mentioning to you… How old are you anyway, Cassandra?"

  "Twenty."

  "Uh-huh. Well… I'm around four times your age."

  "I don't understand."

  "Neither do I. Or the doctors. I just sort of stopped, somewhere between twenty and thirty, and I stayed that way. I guess that's a sort of, well-a part of my particular mutation, I guess. Does it make any difference?"

  "I don't know… Yes."

  "You don't mind my limp, or my excessive shagginess, or even my face. Why should my age bother you? I am young, for all necessary purposes
."

  "It's just that it's not the same," she said with an unarguable finality. "What if you never grow old?"

  I bit my lip. "I'm bound to, sooner or later."

  "And if it's later? I love you. I don't want to out-age you."

  "You'll live to be a hundred and fifty. There are the S-S treatments. You'll have them."

  "But they won't keep me young-like you."

  "I'm not really young. I was born old."

  That one didn't work either. She started to cry.

  "That's years and years away," I told her. "Who knows what will happen in the meantime?"

  That only made her cry more.

  I've always been impulsive. My thinking is usually pretty good, but I always seem to do it after I do my talking-by which time I've generally destroyed all basis for further conversation.

  Which is one of the reasons I have a competent staff, a good radio, and am out to pasture most of the time.

  There are some things you just can't delegate, though.

  So I said, "Look, you have a touch of the Hot Stuff in you, too. It took me forty years to realize I wasn't forty years old. Maybe you're the same way. I'm just a neighborhood kid…"

  "Do you know of any other cases like your own?"

  "Well…"

  "No, you don't."

  "No. I don't."

  I remember wishing then that I was back aboard my ship. Not the big blazeboat. Just my old hulk, the Golden Vanitie, out there in the harbor. I remember wishing that I was putting it into port all over again, and seeing her there for the first shiny time, and being able to start everything all over again from the beginning-and either telling her all about it right there, or else working my way back up to the going-away time and keeping my mouth shut about my age.

  It was a nice dream, but hell, the honeymoon was over.

  I waited until she had stopped crying and I could feel her eyes on me again. Then I waited some more.

  "Well?" I asked, finally.

  "Pretty well, thanks."

  I found and held her passive hand, raised it to my lips. "Rodos dactylos," I breathed, and she said, "Maybe it's a good idea-your going away-for awhile anyhow…" and the breeze that skimmed the steam came again, was damp, goosepimpled us, and made either her hand or my hand shake-I'm not sure which. It shook the leaves too, and they emptied over our heads.

  "Did you exaggerate your age to me?" she asked. "Even a little bit?"

  Her tone of voice suggested that agreement would be the wisest reply.

  So, "Yes," I said, truthfully.

  She smiled back then, somewhat reassured of my humanity.

  Ha!

  So we sat there, holding hands and watching the morning. After awhile she began humming. It was a sad song, centuries old. A ballad. It told the story of a young wrestler named Themocles, a wrestler who had never been beaten. He eventually came to consider himself the greatest wrestler alive. Finally he called out his challenge from a mountain-top, and, that being too near home, the gods acted fast: the following day a crippled boy rode into the town, on the plated back of a huge wild dog. They wrestled for three days and three nights, Themocles and the boy, and on the fourth day the boy broke his back and left him there in the field. Wherever his blood fell, there sprang up the strige-fleur, as Emmet calls it, the blood-drinking flower that creeps rootless at night, seeking the lost spirit of the fallen champion in the blood of its victims. But Themocles' spirit is gone from the Earth, so they must creep, seeking, forever. Simpler than Aeschylus, but then we're a simpler people than we once were, especially the Mainlanders. Besides, that's not the way it really happened.

  "Why are you weeping?" she asked me suddenly.

  "I am thinking of the picture on Achilleus' shield," I said, "and of what a terrible thing it is to be an educated beast-and I am not weeping. The leaves are dripping on me."

  "I'll make some more coffee."

  I washed out the cups while she was doing that, and I told her to take care of the Vanitie while I was gone, and to have it hauled up into drydock if I sent for her. She said that she would.

  The sun wandered up higher into the sky, and after a time there came a sound of hammering from the yard of old Aldones, the coffin-maker. The cyclamen had come awake, and the breezes carried their fragrance to us from across the fields. High overhead, like a dark omen, a spiderbat glided across the sky toward the mainland. I ached to wrap my fingers around the stock of a thirty-oh-six, make loud noises, and watch it fall. The only firearms I knew of were aboard the Vanitie, though, so I just watched it vanish from sight.

  "They say that they're not really native to Earth," she told me, watching it go, "and that they were brought here from Titan, for zoos and things like that."

  "That's right."

  "… And that they got loose during the Three Days and went wild, and that they grow bigger here than they ever did on their own world."

  "One time I saw one with a thirty-two foot wingspread."

  "My great-uncle once told me a story he had heard in Athens," she recalled, "about a man killing one without any weapons. It snatched him up from off the dock he was standing on-at Piraeus -and the man broke its neck with his hands. They fell about a hundred feet into the bay. The man lived."

  "That was a long time ago," I remembered, "back before the Office started its campaign to exterminate the things. There were a lot more around, and they were bolder in those days. They shy away from cities now."

  "The man's name was Konstantin, as I recall the story. Could it have been you?"

  "His last name was Karaghiosis."

  "Are you Karaghiosis?"

  "If you want me to be. Why?"

  "Because he later helped to found the Returnist Radpol in Athens, and you have very strong hands."

  "Are you a Returnist?"

  "Yes. Are you?"

  "I work for the Office. I don't have any political opinions."

  "Karaghiosis bombed resorts."

  "So he did."

  "Are you sorry he bombed them?"

  "No."

  "I don't really know much about you, do I?"

  "You know anything about me. Just ask. I'm really quite simple.-My air taxi is coming now."

  "I don't hear anything."

  "You will."

  After a moment it came sliding down the sky toward Kos, homing in on the beacon I had set up at the end of the patio. I stood and drew her to her feet as it buzzed in low-a Radson Skimmer: a twenty-foot cockleshell of reflection and transparency; flat-bottomed, blunt-nosed.

  "Anything you want to take with you?" she asked.

  "You know it, but I can't."

  The Skimmer settled and its side slid open. The goggled pilot turned his head.

  "I have a feeling," she said, "that you are heading into some sort of danger."

  "I doubt it, Cassandra."

  Nor pressure, nor osmosis will restore Adam's lost rib, thank God.

  "Goodbye, Cassandra."

  "Goodbye, my kallikanzaros."

  And I got into the Skimmer and jumped into the sky, breathing a prayer to Aphrodite. Below me, Cassandra waved. Behind me, the sun tightened its net of light. We sped westward, and this is the place for a smooth transition, but there isn't any. From Kos to Port-au-Prince was four hours, gray water, pale stars, and me mad. Watch the colored lights…

  The hall was lousy with people, a big tropical moon was shining fit to bust, and the reason I could see both was that I'd finally managed to lure Ellen Emmet out onto the balcony and the doors were mag-pegged open.

  "Back from the dead again," she had greeted me, smiling slightly. "Gone almost a year, and not so much as a Get Well card from Ceylon."

  "Were you ill?"

  "I could have been."

  She was small and, like all day-haters, creamy somewhere under her simicolor. She reminded me of an elaborate action-doll with a faulty mechanism-cold grace, and a propensity to kick people in the shins when they least expected it; and she had lots and lots of oran
gebrown hair, woven into a Gordian knot of a coiff that frustrated me as I worked at untying it, mentally; her eyes were of whatever color it pleased the god of her choice on that particular day-I forget now, but they're always blue somewhere deep deep down inside. Whatever she was wearing was browngreen, and there was enough of it to go around a couple of times and make her look like a shapeless weed, which was a dressmaker's lie if there ever was one, unless she was pregnant again, which I doubted.

  "Well, get well," I said, "if you need to. I didn't make Ceylon. I was in the Mediterranean most of the time."

  There was applause within. I was glad I was without. The players had just finished Graber's Masque of Demeter, which he had written in pentameter and honor of our Vegan guest; and the thing had been two hours long, and bad. Phil was all educated and sparsehaired, and he looked the part all right, but we had been pretty hard up for a laureate on the day we'd picked him. He was given to fits of Rabindranath Tagore and Chris Isherwood, the writing of fearfully long metaphysical epics, talking a lot about Enlightenment, and performing his daily breathing exercises on the beach. Otherwise, he was a fairly decent human being.

  The applause died down, and I heard the glassy tinkle of thelinstra music and the sound of resuming voices.

  Ellen leaned back on the railing.

  "I hear you're somewhat married these days."

  "True," I agreed; "also somewhat harried. Why did they call me back?"

  "Ask your boss."

  "I did. He said I'm going to be a guide. What I want to know, though, is why?-The real reason. I've been thinking about it and it's grown more puzzling."

  "So how should I know?"

  "You know everything."

  "You overestimate me, dear. What's she like?"

  I shrugged.

  "A mermaid, maybe. Why?"

  She shrugged.

  "Just curious. What do you tell people I'm like?"

  "I don't tell people you're like anything."

  "I'm insulted. I must be like something, unless I'm unique."

  "That's it, you're unique."

  "Then why didn't you take me away with you last year?"

  "Because you're a People person and you require a city around you. You could only be happy here at the Port."