Roger Zelazny - This Immortal

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THIS IMMORTAL by Roger Zelazny

"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 ###omikos."

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, et cetera.) 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, calling 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 windowsill 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 galactojournalist,

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 Prankish 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, del-

icately 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

4 ROGER ZELAZNY

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 disin-

terring 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 desper-

ation, married her against my will. (The last part

was her idea). I wasn't really thinking about it, my-

self-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 Hip-

pocrates, and decided that~I wanted her- Kalli-

kanzaroi 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-be-

cause 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, point-

ing.

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

nice."

., THIS IMMORTAL 5

; "Let's enjoy it."

,. "Yeah Sorry."

^ We finished our coffee, sat smoking.

"I feet 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 your-

?*elf. Then you'll be back."

-, "Hope so," I said. "If it takes any longer, though,

HI send for you. Dunno where alt 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."

"/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 mean-

time. 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."

6 ROGER ZELAZNY

I sank further. I waited. I rose again.

"Uh-there's something I, well, in my own reti-

cent way, sort of never quite got around to mention-

ing to you. . . . How old are you anyway, Cassan-

dra?"

"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 shag-

giness, 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 usual-

ly 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.

THIS IMMORTAL 7

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 re-

member 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,

8 ROGER ZELAZNY

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 mountaintop,

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 stngeflcur, as Em-

met 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.

THIS IMMORTAL 9

"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 fire-

arms I knew of were aboard the Vamtze, 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 kill-

ing one without any weapons. It snatched him up

from the dock he was standing on-at Piraeus-

10 ROGER ZELAZNY

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," 1 remembered,

"back before the Office started its campaign to ex-

terminate the things. They 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 re-

ally quite simple. -My air taxi is coming now."

"I don't hear anything."

"You will.'*

After a moment it came sliding down the sky to-

ward 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; Hat-

bottomed, blunt-nosed.

THIS IMMORTAL 11

"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 head-

ing 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 tl?e

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 Fd 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 actiondoll with a faulty mechanism

-cold grace, and a propensity to kick people in the

shins when they least expected it; and she had lots

12 ROGER ZELAZNY

and lots of orangebrown hair, woven into a Gordian

knot of a coiff that frustrated me as I worked at un-

tying 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 pen-

tameter 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 Isher-

wood, the writing of fearfully long metaphysical

epics, talking a lot about Enlightenment, and per-

forming 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."

THIS IMMORTAL 13

"I did. He said I'm going to be a guide. What I

want to know, though, is why? -The real reason.

Pve 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\ 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."

"But I'm not happy here at the Port."

"You are less unhappy here at the Port than

you'd be anywhere else on this planet."

"We could have tried," she said, and she turned

her back on me to look down the slope toward the

lights of the harbor section.

"You know," she said after a time, "You're so

damned ugly you're attractive. That must be it."

I stopped in mid-reach, a couple inches from her

shoulder.

"You know," she continued, her voice flat, emp-

tied of emotion, "you're a nightmare that walks like

a man.*'

I dropped my hand, chuckled inside a tight chest.

"I know," I said. "Pleasant dreams,"

14 ROGER ZELAZNY

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THISIMMORTALbyRogerZelazny"YOUAREAKALLIKANZAROS,"SHEANNOUNCEDSUDDENLY.Iturnedontomyleftsideandsmiledthroughthedarkness."IleftmyhoovesandmyhornsattheOffice.""You'veheardthestory!""Thenameis###omikos."Ireachedforher,foundher."Areyougoingtodestroytheworldthistimearound?"Ilaughedanddrewhertome."I'llthin...

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Roger Zelazny - This Immortal

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