Collected Short Fiction, page 819
When a curious crowd had gathered, the schoolmaster hopped out of the black wagon, still nimble on his wooden leg. No longer the shabby little mouse I remembered, he was robed in gold and black velvet.
“My father?” The blacksmith’s son limped anxiously to meet him. “Is he coming home?”
The trumpets drowned anything the schoolmaster said.
“Is he—is he dead?”
“Alive.” The schoolmaster waved his hand. The music stopped, and he lifted his voice for the rest of us. “Alive forever, safe in Eternity.”
He strutted to the coach and climbed to stand on the driver’s seat. His voice pealed louder. Our village was a sacred place, he said, because here the Agent had died and risen again from death. He and the doctor had been blessed to witness that first miracle. As chosen Voices of Eternity, they had now returned to share the blessing of eternal life with all of their old friends who wished it.
My father had pushed to the front of the crowd.
“By what power, and by what name,” he demanded, “do you preach the resurrection of the dead?”
“The Agent has power enough of his own.” Glaring down at him, schoolmaster waved as if to knock him aside. “He needs no other name, and some of you here witnessed his own resurrection.”
“I call him by his true names,” my father shouted. “Satan! Lucifer! Beelzebub! The Prince of Darkness!” He dropped his voice. “I am sorry to hear you repeating his lies, because all of you were once true children of our true Lord. I beg you to repent and confess, that your mortal sins may be blotted out—”
The schoolmaster gestured, and a bray of trumpets drowned the words.
“You call yourselves Voices,” my father tried again. “I beg you to listen for the voice of God. Listen to Him in your hearts, speaking through the Holy Ghost.”
“I never met a holy ghost.”
My father flushed red at the mockery.
“Listen to the words of Eternity!” The schoolmaster raised his head to look beyond my father. “We bring you something better than myth and ignorant superstition. I pray you to heed the verities of scientific truth and save your own precious lives. Learn the new science of veronics. For you with open minds, let me lay out the actual facts.”
“Facts?” my father shouted. “Or Satanic lies?”
The blacksmith’s son caught his arm.
“The words of the Agent.” The schoolmaster frowned as if we were backward students. “He has taught the simple truth. The veron is an energy particle. Carrying neither mass nor dimension, it is mind without matter. The so-called human soul in fact the veronic being. The Agent has taught us how to liberate it into Eternity. Freed from slavery to the mortal flesh, with all its faults and ills, your immortal minds can live forever.”
He paused for a paean of rousing music, and asked for questions when it ceased.
What proof could he offer?
“Look inside yourselves.” He paused, with nods and smiles of recognition for my mother and my sister. “Haven’t every one of you hated the limits and pains of your bodies? Haven’t you all enjoyed moments of liberty from space and time, as you recalled the past, looked into the future, thought of far-off friends? Those were precious glimpses of your future freedoms in eternity!
“If you want to live forever, step forward now!”
The doctor came down from the coach to a table set up in front of the black tent. Robed like the schoolmaster in gold and black velvet, he had grown grayer and fatter than I recalled him. Silently, he spread his arms to urge us forward. The music rose again. The blacksmith’s deserted wife hobbled toward him. Arthritic and blind, she leaned on her limping son.
“Eat. Drink.” Intoning the words, the doctor gestured at a platter and a pitcher on the table. “One little wafer and one small sip of this veronic fluid will break the chains of flesh to set you free. But you must be warned.”
He dropped his voice and raised his hands.
“This final feast is only for those who trust the Agent and accept the miracle of his resurrection. Once you have felt the joy of eternity, there is no turning back. I must remind you also that you take nothing with you.”
Tears washing white channels down his dark-grimed face, the blacksmith’s son shouted the warning into his mother’s ear. She mumbled and opened her mouth. He dropped jingling coins into a basket on the table. The doctor laid a tiny white wafer on her tongue, put a little glass of a blood-red liquid to her drooling lips. She gulped it down. Two men in black took her arms to help her into the tent.
Next came the baker’s old and helpless father, moaning on a stretcher carried by the baker and his helper. A dozen others shuffled forward. Finally my sister. Tears on her face, she hugged our mother and our father, darted to startle the blacksmith’s son with a kiss and a quick embrace, and fell into the line. I caught her arm to pull her back.
“Let her go.” My father was hoarse with pain. “She has damned herself.”
The solemn music rose again. The line crept forward, my sister the last. My father knelt on the ground, murmuring a prayer. My mother stood silently sobbing. My sister dropped something into the basket, the gold necklace and gold earrings the blacksmith’s son had given her. I heard a stifled moan from him. Smiling, she swallowed the wafer and the liquid. My mother cried out, shrill with pain. My sister looked back and tried to speak, but her voice was already gone. Her features stiffened. She staggered. The black robes hustled her into the tent.
With a final flourish, the music ceased. The doctor intoned a solemn assurance that these beloved beings were happy now, forever free from grief and care. He and the schoolmaster climbed back into the coach. The musicians dismantled their instruments and knocked down the platform where they had stood. They rolled up the black tent, loaded everything on the wagon, and followed the coach back to the road down the river.
The bodies were left lying in a row on the ground. My mother knelt to close my sister’s eyes. My father stood above them to beg the Lord that all their sins and blunders might be forgiven and their souls received into God’s own paradise. Neighbor men toiled all night, nailing coffins together. Next day a pastor came from the village below to preach a farewell service before the boxes were lowered into the row of new graves.
One morning next spring, while my mother was making breakfast, we saw a bright silver skipship lying in the cornfield where the stranger’s craft had fallen. Another tall stranger was poking into the tangle of tall weeds and rusted metal where it had stopped. He came across the garden to our door.
When I answered his knock, he displayed a holo card that showed the bright round Earth spinning in starry black space. Silver print across it identified him as a field inspector for the Pan-Terran Police. Pointing back at the wreck, he asked for anything we knew about it. My mother asked him to share our grits and bacon while we told him what we could about the ship and the Agent and the Church of Eternity.
“We believed—” She broke into tears when she spoke of my sister’s death. “We had seen him risen from the dead. She trusted him.”
“Satan!” my father rasped. “He dragged my daughter down to Hell!”
“He was a criminal.” The inspector nodded in sober sympathy. “The tale he told you was largely a hoax. It’s true that he was a native Earthman, but no verons exist, no veronic bodies either. Though he did have microbots in his blood, he had no skills or know-how to share them with anybody else.”
Sobbing, my mother rose to leave the room.
“Listen to him!” My father was hoarse with his own emotion. “The Lord will help us bear the truth.”
“A vicious criminal.” Regretfully, the inspector shook his head. “But also the victim of tragedy. He was the offspring of a mortal woman’s illicit affair with an immortal. He inherited his father’s microbots. They should have been destroyed, but that would have crippled or probably killed him. It must have been a desperate choice, but his mother kept him as he was and kept his secret till he was grown. She was arrested when the truth came out, but he escaped in his father’s skipship. I regret the harm he did here, but at least his evil career is over.”
“Over?” My father stared at him. “If he is immortal—”
“His church officials will no doubt claim that he’s still alive in some veronic paradise.” The inspector grinned. “But microbots aren’t magic. They are only electronic devices. When we located him here, we were able to shut them down with a radio signal. His natural body functions had become dependent on the microbots. His heart stopped when they did.
“He will trouble you no longer.”
“Thank you, sir.” My father reached over the table to shake his hand. “You have served as a faithful agent of the Lord.”
“Or the Pan-Terran Police.”
After breakfast, the inspector asked me to clear the weeds around the wreckage to let him take holos of it. He walked with my father over our little farm and wanted to see the farm tools and the mules in the barn. He looked at my mother’s garden and asked about the plants she grew. He had me show him the windmill and the water wheel and the grist mill, and tell him how they worked.
He watched me slop the hogs and milk the cows that night, and went with my parents to the hymn service at the church while I stayed home to finish the chores. My mother let him sleep in the room that had been my sister’s. Next morning he watched my father kindle the fire in the old cast iron stove and watched my mother fix the breakfast. When we had eaten, he looked sharply at me and asked what I planned for the future.
“I never had a future,” I told him. “I always longed to get away, but never had a chance.”
“If he had a chance—” He turned to my parents. “Could you let him go?”
They stared at him and whispered together.
“If he could really get away—” My mother tried to smile at my father. “We have each other.”
My father nodded solemnly. “The Lord’s will be done.”
The inspector let his shrewd eyes measure me again.
“It would be forever,” he told me gravely. “As final as death.”
“Let him go,” my father said. “He has earned his own salvation.”
The inspector took me out to see his skipship. It was strange and wonderful, but I was too dazed and anxious to understand what he said about it. He had me sit, looked me in the eye, and asked for more about my life.
“I stay alive,” I told him. “I’m the janitor for my father’s church, though I’ve never caught his faith. I help him at the mill and help my mother in her garden.”
My heart thumping, I waited again until he asked, “Would you like to be immortal?”
Hardly breathing, I found no words to say.
“Perhaps you can be,” he said. “If you want the risk. The immortals have to guard their own future. They want no rivals here, but they have agreed to let us send an expedition to colonize the Andromeda galaxy. There’s a two-million-year skip each way, which leaves them safe from any harm from us.”
He frowned and shook his head.
“We ourselves can’t feel so confident. No skip so far has ever been attempted. It’s a jump into the dark, with no data to let us compute any sure destination. We may be lost forever from our own universe of space, with no way back. Even if we’re lucky, we’ll have new frontiers to face, with our industrial infrastructure still to build. We’re likely to need skills and the knowledge you have learned here. I can sign you on, if you want the chance.”
I said I did.
My mother dried her tears and kissed me. My father made us kneel and pray together. I hugged them both, and the inspector took me with him to board the departing mother ship.
ALL THAT WAS TWO million years ago and two million light-years behind us. That long jump dropped us into the gravity well of a giant black hole, but we were able to coast around it in free fall, with no harm at all. The third skip brought us into low orbit around our new planet, a kind world that had no native life and needed no terraforming. My low-tech skills did help us stay alive. The microbots have learned them, and we are well established now.
I have recalled this story for our children and their microbots to remember. I was at first uneasy about letting the microbots into my body. For a long time I hardly felt them, but they’re beginning now to give me a new zest for life, a new happiness with all my new friends, an endless delight in the wonders of our new world.
Our new sky blazes with more stars than I ever imagined, all in strange constellations, but on a clear night we can make out our home galaxy, a faint fleck of brightness low in the south. Remembering my parents, who lived so far away and long ago, I wish they could have known the true afterlife we’ve discovered here.
The Planet of Youth
Mr. Williamson’s latest story has a bit in common with “Afterlife” (from our February issue), but that’s mostly because both stories are set in the same universe and both consider questions of mortality. Here the tale’s focus is less on spirituality and more on action, but the results are no less thought-provoking.
THE PLANET WAS A LEGEND of the starways. As old spacemen told the story, it was the perfect world, totally terraformed, free of polar ice and tropic heat, densely forested, and richly productive. Its people were never ill, never aged, never died.
None of the tellers had been there, however, nor known anyone who had. When asked why it was missing from the charts, they said no traders ever called. It was far out toward the galactic rim, located at the edge of a great star cluster. Endowed with everything, its happy citizens made nothing to sell and had no need to buy.
I’d heard the tale in a hundred bars, never imagining a word of truth in it, until an aging space-breaker pilot named LeZarr came to the office and sat till I had time to see him. He gave me a package wrapped in bright gold foil. An old paper book when I opened it, gone brittle and yellow with age.
“The secret of life!” He was a hard-nosed veteran of the skyways by his looks, his mouth stained purple-red by the starkiss nuts he chewed.
They gave him a faint bitter scent, and I saw a glint of madness in his eyes. “Read it,” he said. “Show it to Mr. McDervik. A chance I think he’ll take.”
I’d seen so many scams I should have thrown him out, but he held me fixed with that crazy stare till I skimmed through the book. It was the life story of an All Souls missionary who claimed his church had sent him to the Planet of Youth to carry his own message of the life eternal.
“A Terra-type planet,” he wrote, “in orbit around a Sol-type sun. I found the people godless. They claim they live forever and swear they never sin. I preached to them, prayed with them, tried to warn them of the dire peril to their immortal souls. They laughed at salvation.”
I was about to laugh at him, till he opened the book and showed me a note on the flyleaf, written in faded red ink.
“Read this.” He pointed with a stubby finger. “Galactic coordinates that locate a star known to have planets. It’s off the trade routes, but I’ve plotted a five-skip route to take us there. Tell Mr. McDervik it’s a business opportunity.”
I hesitated. An interstellar tycoon, head of McDervik Pan-Galactic, he had no time for cranks.
“Tell him Fawn sent it.” He paused for a wistful smile. “A girl you’d love. She claims to be his granddaughter, but I don’t know. She works as a nurse for my wife’s doctor. She’s certainly not rich.”
She wouldn’t be, I thought.
“Vultures!” I’d heard him call his heirs. “All of you vultures! Swarming overhead and perched all around, hungry for the flesh on my bones.”
He was my great-uncle and I knew his ways. He paid me peanuts, called me a stupid jerk, and worked me like a slave.
“You’ll get it when I die,” he used to say when I hinted for a raise. “I’m leaving you the planet Grand Bonanza. It’s just opened for settlement and rich in everything. As proprietor, you can tax it for trillions.”
Nobody loved him, but that promise had always tempted me to endure his ugly ways and hang on as his general factotum and favorite punching bag.
“Please sir,” LeZarr begged me now. “If you knew my wife—” Pain twisted his purple lips. “A martyr and a saint! She stayed here on Earth and raised three kids while I was off risking my life over half the galaxy. Now I’m okay and she’s sick and dying of a rare mutation the medics can’t reverse. If that planet has something that could save her—”
He looked so woeful that I took him up to McDervik’s top-floor office.
Physically, McDervik was zero. Twisted and totally hairless from a nameless malady his space-going father had picked up out toward the rim, he wore a sleek black wig. His back was bent with age, his left arm shriveled. He hobbled about on a silver cane. Yet he owned half a thousand planets.
He’d hunted for sport as long as he was able. His huge desk, at the center of a high spire room in the Pan-Galactic tower, was surrounded with his off-Earth trophies, monsters apt to startle unwarned visitors. Wide windows all around the room looked down upon the city roofs. At McDervik Starport, out in the distance, a sleek silver space-breaker was just lifting to skip a hundred light-years in no time at all.
We found him hunched at the desk, yelling at an unlucky flunky. He left us standing until the quivering victim had scuttled off to the elevator, then turned at last to stab LeZarr with a dagger stare.
“Who the hell are you?”
“Space-breaker pilot Jean LeZarr, sir. License Number Q7B, Polaris Sector Nine. Rating First Class, Range Unlimited.” He laid his license and the missionary’s book on the desk. “Sir, here is a gift from your granddaughter Fawn—”
“What the hell does she want?”
“Nothing, sir. But a note on the flyleaf tells the way to the fabulous Planet of Youth.”
“A fabulous con!” McDervik gave him a yellow-fanged snarl. “Invented to milk the fools who believe it.”
“Look at the book.” LeZarr held his ground. “It contains plausible evidence that it actually exists.”
