Buying Time

  She had reached over the bowl of drugs to get the wine. “You shook it.”

  “I don’t take it anymore. You’re never truly cured until you die of something else. No matter what they say.” Her lips touched the wine, and she put it down.

  “I made my million as part of therapy. Acting normal. That was ’62. Then another Stileman in ’75. But that’s the last one. Two or three more years and that’s it.”

  I didn’t know what to say. I spilled some wine instead.

  “I’m over a hundred. I’ve always said that would be it.”

  “Nothing left you want to do?”

  “Tie up loose ends.” She stroked my arm. “Like you.”

  “I don’t know about being tied up. Guess I’ll try anything once.”

  “Silly. I’ve thought about getting in touch with you hundreds of times, since you came back as Dallas. I remembered that was your real name. And you don’t really look that much different from Fitzgerald.”

  “Twenty-two years I’ve been Dallas. You don’t make hasty decisions, do you?”

  “Rarely.” She kissed my cheek. “Maybe I was a little afraid it wouldn’t work. You wouldn’t remember, or you’d be mad. Then whom would I fantasize about?”

  “Ah, the lovebirds.” An acre of Hawaiian shirt appeared. “Glad you found each other.”

  “Lamont told me you’d be here, when we met last month in Stockholm.”

  I tapped a crimson butterfly somewhere over his heart. Play it dumb. “You told her I’d be here and then told me she’d be here?”

  He grinned. “Matchmaking on the margin.”

  “But that means you knew I was in the clinic. How the hell could you find that out?”

  “Well … we have sources.” He patted me on the shoulder. “I don’t mean to be mysterious. In fact, I’m not sure exactly where the information does come from.”

  “That’s reassuring.” Maybe I should ask Sir Charles. “When are we going to get down to business?”

  He checked his watch. “Food in ten minutes, Claudia said. Then all the ’phems go into town; they have tickets to the Bolshoi opening.”

  “Could we do that instead of the meeting?”

  “It’ll be fun.” Pat, pat again. “I have to go help.” His walk looked strange, too sprightly for a plump man. The implant probably weighed only a few ounces. Maybe I should get one the next time I go private.

  “He is a funny little man,” Maria said.

  “You met him at a party like this?”

  “No, Stockholm was much more serious. He had sent me a letter … let me see. He said there was an ‘informal discussion group’ of immortals that had decided to include me. I went because I’d never been to Stockholm except to change planes.”

  “But what they talked about was interesting enough for you to return for more.”

  “Not actually. I suppose that what they discussed could be of great interest to an immortal. I’m just a well-preserved lady of a hundred and ten. Not much longer to go.”

  Again, an ice water splash inside me. She touched the corners of my mouth. “Smile. I told Lamont I didn’t think I’d make the next one, and he asked whether he could bribe me with you being there. Funny that he should know.”

  “A lot of funny stuff going on. He told me I’d been blackballed for years.”

  She smiled quizzically. “Black balls?”

  “One person had objected to my joining the group. But he died.”

  “I heard, yes. That Russian.” Lips pursed. “That was sad, or grotesque.”

  “The way that he died?”

  “Well … that he should die there, in Stockholm. It’s ironic, isn’t it. Just because he went to a meeting of immortals, he—”

  “Wait. He died at the meeting?”

  “Just after. Some kind of car accident. I read about it the next day. He was still in the Stockholm traffic net; but his car’s brain went out, and I guess all the failsafes did, too.

  “There was a big smell, a big stink, I mean, because he had been some kind of important government man in America. Then he defected to Russia. You must have read about it.”

  “No, I was in the tank.”

  “Oh! Of course. There were a lot of accusations. The Russians claimed the CIA had done it.”

  “Let me guess. The CIA said the Russians did it to make them look bad.”

  “Maybe. All I recall was that everybody was investigating it, but there was no conclusion. He’d gone almost straight up and fallen several kilometers into the sea, that one by Stockholm—”

  “The Baltic.”

  “I suppose. The car seems to have exploded on the way down, and most of the pieces sank. So you had the Americans and the Russians and the UN and the Swedish traffic people, all making wild guesses and accusations. Dio boia! I didn’t like him very much, but that’s still an awful way to die.”

  I had the sudden paranoid certainty that he had been disposed of because he stood in the way of my joining the group. That was ridiculous, of course. “He was an unpleasant guy?”

  “Too pleasant. He was all over me, trying to be nice in this … oily Russian way. An Italian man would simply ask.”

  “And keep asking,” I said.

  She smiled, teasing. “Only to be gallant. You’re too American to understand that.”

  “Gallant and optimistic.”

  Claudia was standing by the pool, ringing a silver bell. A procession of white-suited men and women carried steaming trays.

  “You still eat like a bird?”

  “Yes.” She laughed brightly, also remembering a seventy-year-old joke. “Half my weight in bugs every day.”

  We lined up and filled plates, then tried to find places to sit. It probably amused Claudia to see a hundred expensively dressed people standing with a drink in one hand and a plate in the other, looking for a somewhat clean patch of ground to light on. I led Maria up to the telephone grotto.

  The food was elegantly prepared and reasonably exotic, to non-Australians. “You got your bugs, bird,” I said, holding up something that looked like a cross between a crawdad and a household pest. Moreton Bay bugs, a delicacy.

  “I know.” She pried one open and speared the morsel of flesh inside. “Chirp, chirp. You can’t disgust me with that. I’ll hold you down and feed you witchety grubs.”

  “You’ve been here before.”

  “I’ve been everywhere before.” On that cheerful note I went down to replenish our wine.

  The small chore gave me time to think some difficult thoughts. So when I returned, I wasn’t completely surprised when she said, “You think I’m pretty ghastly, don’t you?”

  “How so?” I said, not too honestly.

  “To be so matter-of-fact about dying.”

  “I wouldn’t say matter-of-fact. I’d say positively cheerful.”

  “Well, yes.” She intently opened her last bug, popped it into her mouth, and set down the plate. “No reason not to be cheerful. Instead of scraping together a fortune and hoarding it until it’s time to go to the hospital again, all I have to do with my money is spend it. There’s enough for me to live out the decade as a millionaire should.”

  “And then?”

  “And then I die, like everybody. But not like an ephemeral … instead of year after year of declining powers and growing discomfort, it’s over in a few days.”

  “Terrible days. I’ve seen—”

  “So have I. There are drugs.”

  There was no real answer to that. I took a sip of the cold wine and looked at her unchanged beauty, and saw dust.

  “Why don’t you try to change my mind?” she said. “We were going to spend a couple of weeks together after Singapore. Let’s do it now.”

  “Where would you like to go?”

  “I don’t know. You have a special place?”

  “Any place would be.”

  “Be serious, Casanova. Perhaps somewhere you’ve never gone?”

  I looked up into the darkening sky. “
Well, adastra would be different. Feel like throwing money away?”

  “That would be fun. You make the arrangements; I’ll fly us up.”

  “Good. Early next week.” Adastra was the ongoing starship project. Like most immortals, I’d invested some money in it, one incarnation or another, but I’d never been up to walk around in it, or float around. They’d only had life support inside for a year or so, and didn’t encourage casual visitors. It probably was the one place Maria hadn’t been.

  “You have your own ship, or rent?” I asked.

  “A nice Bugatti that I more or less own. Stileman got it nine years ago; I bought it back last year.” That was a familiar pattern.

  “White Sands?”

  She shook her head emphatically. “Too crowded. Maui.”

  “Money to burn?”

  “Be nice to me and I’ll leave you some.” A creepy thought. She would be allowed to.

  She had to raise her voice to be heard over the clatter of a couple of dozen cabs approaching the front of the house. “That would be Claudia getting rid of the ’phems. Shall we move on down to the meeting?”

  “Sure.” She took my arm and squeezed softly against it. “Sorry that I seem morbid. I’ll try not to bring it up.”

  As it turned out, she wouldn’t have to.

  Geoffrey Lorne-Smythe, London Physician, Dead at 136

  (Reuters, 19 Sept.) Geoffrey Lorne-Smythe, one of the founding members of the Stileman Foundation, died last night, apparently the victim of a cerebral hemorrhage. A housekeeper discovered the body early this morning, and, as stipulated in Dr. Lorne-Smythe’s will, he remanded the body to the custody of the London Stileman Clinic for analysis. (The Metropolitan Police Authority were invited to witness the autopsy, and confirmed that there was no evidence of foul play.)

  A clinic spokesman, warning that test results are as yet inconclusive, said that Dr. Lorne-Smythe evidently perished as a delayed result of a head injury suffered last year while playing polo.…

  Dallas and Maria stood at the entrance to the mansion’s great room and, along with everyone else, silently read the obituary that glowed down from the wall screen. Most of the furniture was occupied; they sat together on the floor by the glass wall that overlooked the harbor. The slight buzz of conversation stopped when Lamont Randolph stood up and escorted a frail-looking gentleman dressed in evening clothes to the front of the room.

  “My friends,” Randolph said, “allow me to introduce Mr. Ian Montville, who was the head of Dr. Lorne-Smythe’s household at the time of his death. Mr. Montville was in Australia representing the estate’s interests here, and kindly consented to speak to us confidentially.”

  “Yes.” The old man cleared his throat and continued in a clear voice evidently accustomed to giving orders. “Dr. Lorne-Smythe did request that I contact you in the event of his death. I believe that there are only two other foundation members among your … anonymous group. The Doctor was not sure that the foundation would be frank with you. He wanted to be assured that all of you were aware of the details of his … decline. As unpleasant as it may be to communicate them.

  “About four months ago, the Doctor told me he was forced to admit a sudden and apparently continuing advent of mental confusion. I had noticed, of course, having been in the family’s service for nearly fifty years. The Doctor had been forgetful and physically rather clumsy. I had put it off to the absence of his wife, though, who had been vacationing on the Moon for some weeks.

  “He confided, however, that the mental decline was far more profound than simple absentmindedness. He was unable to read either Japanese or Chinese, in both of which he had been fluent, and could speak only a few phrases. He still had French, which he had learned as a child, and German, from his university studies.

  “More seriously, he found it increasingly difficult to understand his own investment patterns. He had kept notes in a kind of shorthand that was rapidly becoming opaque. I sat with him for several days, attempting to decode his records page by page. A great deal was lost. If any of you know of direct dealings with the Doctor which have not yet been regularized by the estate, please be in touch with me.”

  Montville poured a glass of ice water from a tinkling pitcher and drank half of it.

  “He assumed it was brain death, entropic brain dysfunction, or so he said. If I may be permitted a personal observation … I could never have imagined Dr. Lorne Smythe giving in, not even to this certainty of death. But he did become quite meek in his last days, withdrawn and uncommunicative even with Mrs. Lorne-Smythe. To all appearances he did give up, though of course he wasn’t really the Doctor anymore.

  “From the time he first noticed symptoms of decline—which was eight days before he confided in me—until the morning of his death, was only a fortnight. It was not a terrible way to die, but of course was centuries premature. I never conceived of outliving him.”

  He picked up the glass and stared at the ice, swirling it. “Poor man. I honestly do wish it had been me instead.”

  Maria

  Dallas was of course upset by the news—or by the evidence, I should say, since Mr. Randolph had hinted to him the day before that there was bad news waiting at Claudia’s.

  He was older than the doctor.

  I held his hand while the aged servant was talking. Although his expression didn’t change one iota during the speech, his skin grew cold and damp. He is probably a formidable man to face over a card table, or a conference table. I suppose most of us have some talent in that direction.

  Mr. Randolph led a short discussion afterward, the essence of which was that we should all find out what we could and then meet again later. The Slovenian woman Alenka Zor offered the use of her Dubrovnik villa in two weeks. She is very beautiful, and I did not care for the looks she exchanged with Dallas. Is there something between them? It can wait, woman. Be patient. Less than a year and he’s all yours.

  Maybe I shouldn’t have lied to Dallas about the time. It just came out that way. I guess I said “two or three years” to give him some hope.

  The doctor last week said six months, maybe eight. It makes me feel free.

  People who lived near Sydney and London were going to push as hard as they could for inside information. The two surviving foundation members—one of whom was a doctor—who had come to other meetings of this group were this evening conspicuously absent. People grumbled about that; one woman used the lovely archaic term “stonewalling,” which Dallas had to explain to me. Nobody mentioned the possibility that one or both of the foundation members might be too ill to come, dying of advanced age. I didn’t bring it up.

  Dallas volunteered to pass the word to the immortals working in adastra and see whether any of them had news or ideas. That had the immediate result of getting us visas (the rest of the world may call it a half-built spaceship, but the people aboard call it a country), since the chairman of their Earthbound board was in the room. That probably saved us a day of red tape before our trip.

  The prospect of going aboard adastra gave me an unaccustomed feeling of anticipation. Space travel is no novelty to me—I’ve taken the Bugatti as far as Ganymede Station—but I’ve never seen adastra. On reflection, it did annoy me a little to realize that Dallas had chosen the starship as a sort of tacit argument that there might be things for which it could be worthwhile to greatly, abnormally, prolong life. But I had already covered that in my mind.

  I think Dallas may make the same mistake other immortals have made, thinking that I’m existentially (as well as experientially) naive because of having spent a large part of my life sequestered in some convent—either a solid one of stone and tradition or the no less real fence of secrecy, omertà, that has characterized my business dealings and social life, or nonexistence, since I left behind the skirts of the Church. It is a mistake I capitalize on. I know the world well, and, from decades of isolated contemplation, I know the map of my own mind as well, far better than most people know theirs. And I don’t fear death, God??
?s last gift, which gives me a kind of freedom that people like Dallas can never have. I feel sorry for him as much as he feels sorry for me.

  The Stileman Process makes life sweeter, but it isn’t immortality, and I think the Church was justified when it declared that using the term in that context was a venial sin. To find actual immortality, you have to die. If that’s false, and if everyone since Peter has been lying or fantasizing, when you die it’s just like turning off a switch—then when I die I will be losing nothing of value.

  At the end of the evening, Claudia brought out an “entertainment” that was designed to shock us, and succeeded. The sport of boxing is still legal up in Queensland, a state to the north; she imported a pair of athletes who proceeded to beat each other senseless, for our edification. They were not, as I remembered from childhood (and Dallas confirmed), protected by gloves and helmets. Claudia cheerfully pointed out that most of them suffer irreversible brain damage before they retire.

  Dallas and I collected our bodyguards and shared a cab back to the city. He was staying at the old Regent and, of course, made it clear that I was welcome to move in with him; plenty of room in the suite and so forth. I pleaded too many loose ends to be tied up before we left, though actually, as he must have known, most of it was electronic business that could be done from any safe phone. I suppose he thought I was being coy, and that must be partly true, though the image of a century-old coquette is ghastly. It’s mostly to indulge a lifelong habit of meditation before change. This would be a large change.

  Besides, our first time should be in zero gravity. They say it’s amusing. I have never even “done it” in the water.

  A QUIET DECLARATION OF TASTE.

  The Bugatti Galileo is not the marque for everyone. Yachts costing considerably less may draw the eye with modish styling: may impress the simply impressionable with exaggerated claims of sustained high acceleration and extended range. (The discerning customer, however, will of course ignore the claims of advertising and ask to see the ship’s individual bonded certification.*)