Zelazny, Roger - Novel 05 (2 page)

 
          
 
But I was pushing forty. My character had long
ago hardened. Though the circumstances that shaped me had long since passed, my
pleasures in a, to me, almost pressureless society, were infiltrated by notes
scored to a different measure, resulting at first in a vague uneasiness, to be
followed by a growing dissatisfaction. life is seldom so pivotally
crisis-conditioned a thing as novelists would have us believe. While it is true
that we sometimes recover from shocks with a sense of the freshness of reality
and the wonder of existence, this state of mind does pass away—and fairly
rapidly, at that—leaving both reality and ourselves untransfigured once more.
Consciousness of this fact came to me as I sat sentimentalizing past crudities
for my descendant, and grew into a major discontent during the weeks that
followed. I had not changed much, though everything else had. It was not
completely a sense of being superfluous, though there was something of that,
nor could it be nostalgia, as my memories were sufficiently recent and
substantial to preclude any glossing over of what, to Paul, was the distant
past. Perhaps it was a growing sensitivity to the fact that people seemed a
trifle gentler, more pacific, that aroused some feelings of inferiority, as
though I had just missed out on some necessary step in the process of
civilization. I was not ordinarily given to such introspection, but when
feelings become sufficiently strong and persistent they force their own
exploration.

 
          
 
Still, how does one picture his mental life to
anyone, let alone one who seems a distorted image of himself? What I wanted to
say was manifold and not the sort of thing that could really be communicated by
words.

 
          
 
Paul may have done better than I thought in
understanding it, in understanding me, though. For he made two suggestions, one
of which I followed immediately, while thinking about the other.

 
          
 
There. For example.

 
          
 
I went back to
Sicily
. An almost predictable thing, I would say,
for a man in my circumstances and state of mind. Aside from the obvious
associations it held, reaching back to my childhood, I had learned that it was
one of the remaining places in the world which had not yet suffered from
overdevelopment. It was then, in a very real way, a means of traveling back
through time for me.

 
          
 
I did not stay long in
Palermo
, but headed almost immediately into the
hinterland. I rented an isolated place that had a familiar feeling to it, and
spent several hours every day riding one of the two horses that had come with
it. Mornings, I would ride down to the rocky shore and watch the surf come
creaming and booming toward me, picking my way along the wet shingles it slid
from, listening to the squawks of the birds as they arced and dipped above it,
breathing the acrid sea-wind, watching the play of dazzle and shade across the
gray, white, bleak prospect. Afternoons or evenings, as the mood moved me, I
would often ride in the hills, where scraggly grass and twisted trees clung
desperately to the thin soil and the damp breath of the
Mediterranean
drifted sultry or cool, as the mood moved
it, about me. If I did not stare too long at the several stationary stars, if I
did not raise my eyes when a transport vehicle flashed high and fast over head,
if I refrained from using the communications unit for anything but music and rode
to the nearest small town but once every week or so for perishable supplies, it
was almost as though no time at all had passed for me. Not just the intervening
century, but my entire adult life seemed to recede and fade into the timeless
landscape of my youth. So what happened then was not wholly inexplicable.

 
          
 
Her name was Julia, and I encountered her for
the first time in a rocky cul-de-sac that grew lush by comparison with the
bruise-colored hills through which I had been riding all that afternoon. She
was seated on the ground beneath a tree which resembled a frozen fountain of
marmalade to which some pale confetti had adhered, her dark hair drawn back and
fastened with a coral clip, sketchpad in her lap, eyes darting and hand
shifting, precise, deliberate, as she sketched a small flock of sheep. For a
time, I just sat there and watched her, but then a cloud moved on and the
emerging sun cast my long shadow down past her.

 
          
 
She turned then, and shaded her eyes. I
dismounted, twisted the reins about a nearby shrub's handiest branch and headed
down.

 
          
 
"Hello," I said, as I approached

 
          
 
It was ten or fifteen seconds before I reached
her, and it took her that long to decide to nod and smile slightly.

 
          
 
"Hello," she said.

 
          
 
"My name's Angelo. I was riding by and
saw you, saw this place—thought it might be pleasant to stop and smoke a
cigarette, to watch you draw. If that's all right?"

 
          
 
She nodded, bit into the lower half of a new
smile, accepted a cigarette,

 
          
 
"I'm Julia," she said. "I work
here."

 
          
 
"Artist in residence?"

 
          
 
"Bio-tech. This is just a hobby,"
she said, tapping the pad and letting her hand remain to cover her work.

 
          
 
"Oh? What are you bioteching?"

 
          
 
She nodded toward the woolly crowd.

 
          
 
"Her," she said.

 
          
 
"Which one is she?"

 
          
 
"All of them."

 
          
 
"I'm afraid I don't follow …”

 
          
 
"They are clones," she said,
"each one grown from the tissue of a single donor."

 
          
 
"Neat trick, that," I said. 'Tell me
about clones," and I seated myself on the grass and watched it being
eaten.

 
          
 
She seemed to welcome the opportunity to close
the pad without letting me see her work. She launched into the story of her
flock, and it required only a few questions here and there for me to learn
somewhat of herself also.

 
          
 
She was originally from
Catania
, but she had been to school in
France
and was presently in the employ of an
institute in
Switzerland
which was doing research in animal
husbandry and was employing cloning techniques to field-test promising
specimens in various environments simultaneously. She was twenty-six and had
just ended a marriage on a very sour note and gotten herself transferred to the
field with a test flock. She had been back in
Sicily
for a little over two months. She told me a
lot about clones, really warming to the subject in the face of my obvious
ignorance, describing in overabundant detail the processes whereby her sheep
had been grown from cellular specimens of a hybrid in
Switzerland
to replicate her in all details. She even
told me of the peculiar and still not understood resonance effect, which
involved the fact that all of them would exhibit temporary symptoms of the same
illness should one of them be stricken—in eluding the original in Switzerland
and others in other parts of the world. No, to the best of her knowledge,
cloning had not yet been attempted at the level of human beings—myriad legal,
scientific and religious objections existed—although there were rumors
concerning experimentation on one of the outpost worlds. While she apparently
knew her business quite well, it struck me after a time that her words were put
forth more with a pleasure at having someone to talk to than from any desire
too inform. And we had this, too, in common.

 
          
 
But I did not tell her my own story that day.
I listened, we sat a time in silence, watching the sheep, watching the
lengthening shadows, talked again, in a desultory fashion, of small, neutral
matters. As we talked, a mutual assumption gradually became manifest in our
speech, that this was but a part of a continuing conversation, that I would be
back, the next day or the day after, that we would be seeing one another again,
and again. Nor was this assumption incorrect

 
          
 
Before very long, she became interested in
horseback riding. Soon we were riding together every day, mornings or evenings,
sometimes both. I told her where I was from, and how, omitting only what I had
done there and the exact nature of my passing. I did not realize that I was
falling in love until long after we had become lovers. I did not discover the
fact until the day I determined to reach a decision on Paul's second suggestion
and I realized how much of a factor she had become in my thinking.

 
          
 
I rose, crossed the room to the window, drew
back the curtain, stared up through the night The embers in the grate still
glowed cherry and orange. The outer cold had passed through the walls and was
pressing now like a spiritual glacier toward our corner of the room.

 
          
 
"I must be leaving soon," I said.

 
          
 
"Where will you go?"

 
          
 
"I may not say.*

 
          
 
Silence. Then, "Will you be coming
back?"

 
          
 
I had no answer, though I wished I did.

 
          
 
"Would you like me to?"

 
          
 
Silence again. Then, "Yes."

 
          
 
"I will try to," I said.

 
          
 
Why was I going to take the Styler contract? I
had wanted to from the moment Paul had described the situation to me. A
high-level sinecure with the company and a big block of expensive stock were
but the surface returns on the thing. I had no illusion that my thawing, my
treatment, my recovery had been the result of an unsullied desire for my company
on the part of my descendants. The necessary techniques had been available for
several decades. It is not unpleasant to feel needed, however, no matter what
the reasons. My pleasure at their attentiveness was in no way vitiated by the
knowledge that I had something they wanted. If anything, it was enhanced. What
other hold had I on the day? I was more than just a curiosity. I had a value
that went beyond the emotions of the moment, and its realization could restore
to me some measure of mastery, could earn me another sort of appreciation. I
had been thinking about this, or something like it, earlier when I had drawn
rein above the nearest village at a place where the olive terraces rose to
scrub and bleakness, and stared down at the light and movement. Shortly, Julia
came up beside me. "What is it?" she had asked.

 
          
 
I was wondering at that moment what it would
have been like if I had awakened with no memories of my earlier existence.
Would it have made it easier or more difficult to find me some slot in life, to
be satisfied with it? Might I then be like the inhabitants of the village
below, bringing interest and something of pleasure to simple actions at their
ten thousandth repetition?

 
          
 
Standing beside a shallow, sheltered inlet on
a warm, bright afternoon, watching the reflected ripple of the water trace
trembling lines across her naked breasts as she stopped splashing and the smile
went out of her face and she said, "What is it?" I was thinking of
the seventeen men I had killed back when they had begun calling me "Angie
the Angel," as I had risen through the ranks to secure that earlier
existence. Paul had not known about all of the killings, of course. I was
surprised that he had known of as many as he did—eight, to be exact, the names
spoken with a measure of confidence I did not feel he could have faked. For my
part, I found it virtually inconceivable that the legal niceties and
organization-chart formalities had become something more than a facade, that in
fact there were few reliable professional killers to be had any more. So it
seemed that I had indeed brought something of value across the years with me. I
had for the most part personally eschewed such activities, however, once I had
secured my position at a higher level within the organization. Now, to be
offered a contract, in a sedate time of almost total cultural availability,
smoothly meshing gears, life prolongation and interstellar travel ... It seemed
more than a little strange, no matter how delicately Paul put it.