“I have plenty hoarded, and I can make more,” Hanno assured her. “The termination must be done as plausibly as is consistent with speed. Tomek will die and be cremated abroad, in accordance with his wishes. Robert Cauldwell— m-m, something similar had better happen to him, because unfortunately, he’s left a potential trail. Joe Levine will get a job offer from an out-of-state firm... Oh, I’ll be busy for the rest of this year, but I do have standing preparations for a variety of emergencies, and I expect I can make things fade out in natural-looking ways. There’ll be loose ends, inevitably; but then, there generally are in ordinary life, and the investigators will leave them dangling once it seems dear they wouldn’t lead to anything much. Policemen don’t lack for work, you know. Their lot is not a happy one.”
“But you could do so much with the money,” she begged. “Yes, and with the power you, we, would have, the influence of our fame, in spite of any drawbacks. So much that cries out for doing.”
“Do you feel we are being selfish in wanting to stay hidden?” Svoboda queried.
“Well— Do you, then, want to?”
“Yes. And not for myself, or ourselves. I am afraid for the world.”
Wanderer nodded. Svoboda smiled at him, warmly though without mirth. “You don’t quite understand,” she said in his direction. “You think of nature destroyed, the environment. But I think of humankind. I have seen revolutions, wars, breakdowns, ruin, for a thousand years. We Russians have learned to fear anarchy above all else. We would rather have tyranny than it. Hanno, you do wrong to look on people’s republics, strong governments of every kind, as always evil. Freedom is perhaps better, but chaos is worse. If we let go our secret today, we let loose unforeseeable forces. Religion, politics, economics—yes, how shall a world of immortals order its economy? —a million contending dreams and dreads, for which men will war around the world. Can civilization itself endure that? Can the planet?”
“Muhammad came out of nowhere,” Aliyat whispered.
“And many another prophet, revolutionary, conqueror,” Svoboda said. “The intentions can be noble. But who foresaw that the idea of democracy hi France would bring the Reign of Terror, Napoleon, and a generation of war? Who foresaw that after Marx and Lenin would come Stalin and, yes, Hitler? The world volcano already smokes and shivers. Put this new thing in it that nobody ever thought of before, and I would hope for a tyranny that can prevent the final explosion; but I wonder if any such rule will be possible.”
“It won’t be for lack of trying,” Hanno said. He had turned entirely grim. “At the bare least, every corrupt politician and fat cat in the West, every totalitarian dictatorship abroad, every dirty little warlord who battens on backwardness, all will jump to screw down then- power forever. Yes, death robs us of our loves and finally of ourselves. But death is also good riddance to bad rubbish. Do we dare change that? My friends, being ageless does not make us gods, and most certainly does not make us God.”
16
Nearly full, the moon frosted earth with light and dappled it with shadow. Air had gone still, but hour by hour a breath of autumn flowed down from the mountains. Somewhere an owl hooted, hunting. Windows glowed yellow in houses strewn across miles. They seemed almost as remote as the stars.
Hanno and Svoboda had driven from town, out onto the range, to walk alone. The wish was hers. “Tomorrow evening what was ours begins coming to an end,” she had said. “Can we steal a last few hours of peace? This country is very like the homeland I once had, wide and lonely.”
Their footfalls crunched on a dirt road. He broke a lengthy silence. “You spoke of peace,” he said. Voices were, small in the vastness. “We’ll have it again, dear. Yes, we’ve got a frantic time to go through first, and it’ll hurt, but afterward— I believe the whole seven of us will be glad of the place we’re going to.”
“I am sure it is lovely,” she replied, “and we will be safely away from the world for as long as we need to be.”
“Not forever, remember. In fact, that wouldn’t work. We’re only gaining another mortal lifetime, the same as so often before. Then we’ll have to start fresh under new masks.”
“I know. Until someday, perhaps soon, the scientists find immortality by themselves, and we may as well come forth.”
“Someday,” he said, more skeptically than enthusiastically.
“That is not what I think about, though,” Svoboda went on. “Now we must think about us. We seven. It will not be easy. We are so different. And ... three men, four women.”
“We’ll work out our arrangements.”
“For the rest of time? Nothing to change, ever?”
“Well—“ She could hear the reluctance. “Of course none of us can bind the rest. We’ll each be free to leave, whenever we like. I do hope we’ll stay in touch and ready to give help. Isn’t freedom the whole of what we’re trying to keep?”
“No, I do not feel that is enough,” she told him gravely. “There must be more. I do not know what it is, not yet. But we must have something beyond survival to live for, or we shall not survive. The future will be too strange.”
“The future always was,” he answered from his three thousand years.
“What is coming, more strange than ever before.” She raised her eyes. Stars gleamed through the moon- glow, golden-red Arcturus, blue-white Altair, Polaris of the sailors, Vega where lately men had found spoor of planets. “In Odysseus, Hamlet, Anna Karenina, we still see ourselves. But tomorrow, will they know those people, or us? Can we understand them, our children?”
She caught his left arm. He laid his right hand across hers, for whatever comfort that might give in the night.
They had talked of this already, a little. Once, while they rested for a day on their long journey from the east, she had guided him in trying to imagine what might happen...
XIX. Thule
1
As rr rose out of the darknesses that had severed it from Hanno, his machine self came back to him. Abruptly he was again down in the world that filled his human vision.
Clouds towered mountain-high. Their nether caverns were full of night and lightning. Then- flanks billowed and streamed, streaked with strange tawnies and ochers, where winds beyond all hurricanes roared. Their thunderhead peaks caught sunlight, to blaze white against imperial blue.
Moment by moment the robot lifted, air thinned, linkage strengthened toward fullness: Hanno felt its haste in his bones, the jet thrust like blood and muscle. It burned, brawled, shouted into the storms that grabbed at it, spurned the monstrous gravity underneath. Heaven deepened to purple, to black and stars. Now he saw with eyes open to, every color of light from radio to gamma. He tasted and smelled the changing chemistries until they thinned away and radiation sharpened. Sound likewise died; when the ion drive kindled, that was barely a thrum, less in his awareness than the flows of mathematics by which the robot guided itself to rendezvous with his ship.
Throughout, he was also a man looking forth, afloat in silence. At synchronous-orbit distance, he must turn his head a little if he would look from edge to edge of Jupiter. The king planet was at present half daylit. Intricacies wove along the frontiers of belts and zones. The effect was of pallid serenity. Deceptive—how well he knew. He had been there.
After a fashion. No worthwhile transmission could be made from the lower atmosphere. He would never
