25 Short Stories and Novellas Part 40

'Aye, like Prester John!' Willoughby cried. 'Like Tamburlaine himself! Aye, am I not majestic?' He slapped Phillips gaily on the shoulder, a rough playful poke that spun him halfway about, coughing and wheezing. 'We flew in the air, as the eagles do, as the demons do, as the angels do! Soared like angels! Like angels!' He came close, looming over Phillips. 'I would have gone to England, but the wench Belilala said there was an enchantment on me that would keep me from England just now; and so we voyaged to Cathay. Tell me this, fellow, will you go witness for me when we see England again? Swear that all that has befallen us did in truth befall? For I fear they will say I am as mad as Marco Polo, when I tell them of flying to Cathay.'

'One madman backing another?' Phillips asked. 'What can I tell you? You still think you'll reach England, do you?' Rage rose to the surface in him, bubbling hot. 'Ah, Francis, Francis, do you know your Shakespeare? Did you go to the plays? We aren't real. _We aren't real._ We are such stuff as dreams are made on, the two of us. That's all we are. O brave new world! What England? Where? There's no England. There's no Francis Willoughby. There's no Charles Phillips. What we are is -- '

'Let him be, Charles,' a cool voice cut in.

He turned. Belilala, in the robes of an empress, coming down the steps of the Silver Terrace.

'I know the truth,' he said bitterly. 'Y'ang-Yeovil told me. The visitor from the twenty-fifth century. I saw him in New Chicago.'

'Did you see Gioia there too?' Belilala asked.

'Briefly. She looks much older.'

'Yes. I know. She was here recently.'

'And has gone on, I suppose?'

'To Mohenjo again, yes. Go after her, Charles. Leave poor Francis alone. I told her to wait for you. I told her that she needs you, and you need her.'

'Very kind of you. But what good is it, Belilala? I don't even exist. And she's going to die.'

'You exist. How can you doubt that you exist? You feel, don't you? You suffer. You love. You love Gioia: is that not so? And you are loved by Gioia. Would Gioia love what is not real?'

'You think she loves me?'

'I know she does. Go to her, Charles. Go. I told her to wait for you in Mohenjo.'

Phillips nodded numbly. What was there to lose?

'Go to her,' said Belilala again. 'Now.'

'Yes,' Phillips said. 'I'll go now.' He turned to Willoughby. 'If ever we meet in London, friend, I'll testify for you. Fear nothing. All will be well, Francis.'

He left them and set his course for Mohenjo-daro, half expecting to find the robots already tearing it down. Mohenjo-daro was still there, no lovelier than before. He went to the baths, thinking he might find Gioia there. She was not; but he came upon Nissandra, Stengard, Fenimon. 'She has gone to Alexandria,' Fenimon told him. 'She wants to see it one last time, before they close it.'

'They're almost ready to open Constantinople,' Stengard explained. 'The capital of Byzantium, you know, the great city by the Golden Horn. They'll take Alexandria away, you understand, when Byzantium opens. They say it's going to be marvellous. We'll see you there for the opening, naturally?'

'Naturally,' Phillips said.

He flew to Alexandria. He felt lost and weary. All this is hopeless folly, he told himself. I am nothing but a puppet jerking about on its strings. But somewhere above the s.h.i.+ning breast of the Arabian Sea the deeper implications of something that Belilala had said to him started to sink in, and he felt his bitterness, his rage, his despair, all suddenly beginning to leave him. _You exist. How can you doubt that you exist? Would Gioia love what is not real?_ Of course. Of course. Y'ang-Yeovil had been wrong: visitors were something more than mere illusions. Indeed Y'ang-Yeovil had voiced the truth of their condition without understanding what he was really saying: _We think, we talk, we fall in love._ Yes. That was the heart of the situation. The visitors might be artificial, but they were not unreal. Belilala had been trying to tell him that just the other night. _You suffer. You love. You love Gioia. Would Gioia love what is not real?_ Surely he was real, or at any rate real enough. What he was was something strange, something that would probably have been all but incomprehensible to the twentieth-century people whom he had been designed to simulate. But that did not mean that he was unreal. Did one have to be of woman born to be real? No. No. No. His kind of reality was a sufficient reality. He had no need to be ashamed of it. And, understanding that, he understood that Gioia did not need to grow old and die. There was a way by which she could be saved, if only she would embrace it. If only she would.

When he landed in Alexandria he went immediately to the hotel on the slopes of the Paneium where they had stayed on their first visit, so very long ago; and there she was, sitting quietly on a patio with a view of the harbour and the Lighthouse. There was something calm and resigned about the way she sat. She had given up. She did not even have the strength to flee from him any longer.

'Gioia,' he said gently.

She looked older than she had in New Chicago. Her face was drawn and sallow and her eyes seemed sunken; and she was not even bothering these days to deal with the white strands that stood out in stark contrast against the darkness of her hair. He sat down beside her and put his hand over hers, and looked out towards the obelisks, the palaces, the temples, the Lighthouse. At length he said, 'I know what I really am, now.'

'Do you, Charles?' She sounded very far away.

'In my era we called it software. All I am is a set of commands, responses, cross-references, operating some sort of artificial body. It's infinitely better software than we could have imagined. But we were only just beginning to learn how, after all. They pumped me full of twentieth-century reflexes. The right moods, the right appet.i.tes, the right irrationalities, the right sort of combativeness. Somebody knows a lot about what it was like to be a twentieth-century man. They did a good job with Willoughby, too, all that Elizabethan rhetoric and swagger. And I suppose they got Y'ang-Yeovil right. He seems to think so: who better to judge? The twenty-fifth century, the Republic of Upper Han, people with grey-green skin, half Chinese and half Martian for all I know. _Somebody_ knows. Somebody here is very good at programming, Gioia.'

She was not looking at him.

'I feel frightened, Charles,' she said in that same distant way.

'Of me? Of the things I'm saying?'

'No, not of you. Don't you see what has happened to me?'

'I see you. There are changes.'

'I lived a long time wondering when the changes would begin. I thought maybe they wouldn't, not really. Who wants to believe they'll get old? But it started when we were in Alexandria that first time. In Chang-an it got much worse. And now -- now -- '

He said abruptly, 'Stengard tells me they'll be opening Constantinople very soon.'

'So?'

'Don't you want to be there when it opens?'

'I'm becoming old and ugly, Charles.'

'We'll go to Constantinople together. We'll leave tomorrow, eh? What do you say? We'll charter a boat. It's a quick little hop, right across the Mediterranean. Sailing to Byzantium! There was a poem, you know, in my time. Not forgotten, I guess, because they've programmed it into me. All these thousands of years, and someone still remembers old Yeats. _The young in one another's arms, birds in the trees_. Come with me to Byzantium, Gioia.'

She shrugged. 'Looking like this? Getting more hideous every hour? While _they_ stay young for ever? While _you_ -- She faltered; her voice cracked; she fell silent.

'Finish the sentence, Gioia.'

'Please. Let me alone.'

'You were going to say, "While _you_ stay young for ever too, Charles," isn't that it? You knew all along that I was never going to change. I didn't know that, but you did.'

'Yes. I knew. I pretended that it wasn't true -- that as I aged, you'd age too. It was very foolish of me. In Chang-an, when I first began to see the real signs of it -- that was when I realized I couldn't stay with you any longer. Because I'd look at you, always young, always remaining the same age, and I'd took at myself, and -- ' She gestured, palms upward. 'So I gave you to Belilala and ran away.'

'All so unnecessary, Gioia.'

'I didn't think it was.'

'But you don't have to grow old. Not if you don't want to!'

'Don't be cruel, Charles,' she said tonelessly. 'There's no way of escaping what I have.'

'But there is,' he said.

'You know nothing about these things.'

'Not very much, no,' he said. 'But I see how it can be done. Maybe it's a primitive simple-minded twentieth-century sort of solution, but I think it ought to work. I've been playing with the idea ever since I left Mohenjo. Tell me this, Gioia: why can't you go to them, to the programmers, to the artificers, the planners, whoever they are, the ones who create the cities and the temporaries and the visitors. And have yourself made into something like me!'

She looked up, startled. 'What are you saying?'

'They can cobble up a twentieth-century man out of nothing more than fragmentary records and make him plausible, can't they? Or an Elizabethan, or anyone else of any era at all, and he's authentic, he's convincing. So why couldn't they do an even better job with you? Produce a Gioia so real that even Gioia can't tell the difference? But a Gioia that will never age -- a Gioia-construct, a Gioia-program, a visitor-Gioia! Why not? Tell me why not, Gioia.'

She was trembling. 'I've never heard of doing any such thing!'

'But don't you think it's possible?'

'How would I know?'

'Of course it's possible. If they can create visitors, they can take a citizen and duplicate her in such a way that -- '

'It's never been done. I'm sure of it. I can't imagine any citizen agreeing to any such thing. To give up the body -- to let yourself be turned into -- into -- '

She shook her head, but it seemed to be a gesture of astonishment as much as of negation.

He said. 'Sure. To give up the body. Your natural body, your ageing, shrinking, deteriorating short-timer body. What's so awful about that?'

She was very pale. 'This is craziness, Charles. I don't want to talk about it any more.'

'It doesn't sound crazy to me.'

'You can't possibly understand.'

'Can't I? I can certainly understand being afraid to die. I don't have a lot of trouble understanding what it's like to be one of the few ageing people in a world where n.o.body grows old. What I can't understand is why you aren't even willing to consider the possibility that -- '

'No,' she said. 'I tell you, it's crazy. They'd laugh at me.'

'Who?'

'All of my friends. Hawk, Stengard, Aramayne -- ' Once again she would not look at him. 'They can be very cruel, without even realizing it. They despise anything that seems ungraceful to them, anything sweaty and desperate and cowardly. Citizens don't do sweaty things, Charles. And that's how this will seem. a.s.suming it can be done at all. They'll be terribly patronizing. Oh, they'll be sweet to me, yes, dear Gioia, how wonderful for you, Gioia, but when I turn my back they'll laugh. They'll say the most wicked things about me. I couldn't bear that.'

'They can afford to laugh,' Phillips said. 'It's easy to be brave and coot about dying when you know you're going to live for ever. How very fine for them: but why should you be the only one to grow old and die? And they won't laugh, anyway. They're not as cruel as you think. Shallow, maybe, but not cruel. They'll be glad that you've found a way to save yourself. At the very least, they won't have to feel guilty about you any longer, and that's bound to please them. You can -- '

'Stop it,' she said.

She rose, walked to the railing of the patio, stared out towards the sea. He came up behind her. Red sails in the harbour, sunlight glittering along the sides of the Lighthouse, the palaces of the Ptolemies stark white against the sky. Lightly he rested his hand on her shoulder. She twitched as if to pull away from him, but remained where she was.

'Then I have another idea,' he said quietly. 'if you won't go to the planners, _I_ will. Reprogram me, I'll say. Fix things so that I start to age at the same rate you do. It'll be more authentic, anyway, if I'm supposed to be playing the part of a twentieth-century man. Over the years I'll very gradually get some lines in my face, my hair will turn grey, I'll walk a little more slowly -- we'll grow old together, Gioia. To h.e.l.l with your lovely immortal friends. We'll have each other. We won't need them.'

She swung around. Her eyes were wide with horror.

'Are you serious, Charles?'

'Of course.'

'No,' she murmured. 'No. Everything you've said to me today is monstrous nonsense. Don't you realize that?'

He reached for her hand and enclosed her fingertips in his. 'All I'm trying to do is find some way for you and me to -- '

'Don't say any more,' she said. 'Please.' Quickly, as though drawing back from a suddenly flaring flame, she tugged her fingers free of his and put her hand behind her. Though his face was just inches from hers he felt an immense chasm opening between them. They stared at one another for a moment; then she moved deftly to his left, darted around him, and ran from the patio.

Stunned, he watched her go, down the long marble corridor and out of sight. It was folly to give pursuit, he thought. She was lost to him: that was clear, that was beyond any question. She was terrified of him. Why cause her even more anguish? But somehow he found himself running through the halls of the hotel, along the winding garden path, into the cool green groves of the Paneium. He thought he saw her on the portico of Hadrian's palace, but when he got there the echoing stone halls were empty. To a temporary that was sweeping the steps he said, 'Did you see a woman come this way?' A blank sullen stare was his only answer.

Phillips cursed and turned away.

'Gioia?' he called. 'Wait! Come back!'

Was that her, going into the Library? He rushed past the startled mumbling librarians and sped through the stacks, peering beyond the mounds of double-handled scrolls into the shadowy corridor. 'Gioia? _Gioia!_' It was a desecration, bellowing like that in this quiet place. He scarcely cared.

Emerging by a side door, he loped down to the harbour. The Lighthouse! Terror enfolded him. She might already be a hundred steps up that ramp, heading for the parapet from which she meant to fling herself into the sea. Scattering citizens and temporaries as if they were straws, he ran within. Up he went, never pausing for breath, though his synthetic lungs were screaming for respite, his ingeniously designed heart was desperately pounding. On the first balcony he imagined he caught a glimpse of her, but he circled it without finding her. Onwards, upwards. He went to the top, to the beacon chamber itself: no Gioia. Had she jumped? Had she gone down one ramp while he was ascending the other? He clung to the rim and looked out, down, searching the base of the Lighthouse, the rocks offsh.o.r.e, the causeway. No Gioia. I will find her somewhere, he thought. I will keep going until I find her. He went running down the ramp, calling her name. He reached ground level and sprinted back towards the centre of town. Where next? The temple of Poseidon? The tomb of Cleopatra?

He paused in the middle of Canopus Street, groggy and dazed.

'Charles?' she said.

'Where are you?'

'Right here. Beside you.' She seemed to materialize from the air. Her face was unflushed, her robe bore no trace of perspiration. Had he been chasing a phantom through the city? She came to him and took his hand, and said, softly, tenderly, 'Were you really serious, about having them make you age?'

'If there's no other way, yes.'

'The other way is so frightening, Charles.'

'Is it?'

'You can't understand how much.'

'More frightening than growing old? Than dying?'

'I don't know,' she said. 'I suppose not. The only thing I'm sure of is that I don't want you to get old, Charles.'

'But I won't have to. Will I?'

He stared at her.

'No,' she said. 'You won't have to. Neither of us will.'

Phillips smiled. 'We should get away from here,' he said after a while. 'Let's go across to Byzantium, yes, Gioia? We'll show up in Constantinople for the opening. Your friends will be there. We'll tell them what you've decided to do. They'll know how to arrange it. Someone will.'

'It sounds so strange,' said Gioia. 'To turn myself into -- into a visitor? A visitor in my own world?'

'That's what you've always been, though.'

'I suppose. In a way. But at least I've been _real_ up to now.'

'Whereas I'm not?'

'Are you, Charles?'