Robert Silverberg - Death Do Us Part

Leo says gravely, “What kind of nonsense?” and she tells him in a quick unpunctuated burst and watches his smooth taut face collapse into weary jowls, watches him seem to age a thousand years in the course of half a minute. He stands there looking at her, aghast; and then she understands that it has to be true, every terrible word of what Fyodor has said. She is one of those , the miserable statistical few of whom everybody has heard, but only at second or third hand. The treatments will not work on her. She will grow old and then she will die. They have tested her and they know the truth, but the whole bunch of them have conspired to keep it from her, the doctors at the clinic, Leo’s sons and daughters and wives, her own family, everyone. All of it Leo’s doing. Using his influence all over the place, his enormous accrued power, to shelter her in her ignorance.

“You knew from the start?” she asks, finally. “All along?”

“Almost. I knew very early. The clinic called me and told me, not long after we got engaged.”

“My God. Why did you marry me, then?”

“Because I loved you.”

“Because you loved me.”

“Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes.”

“I wish I knew what that meant,” she says. “If you loved me, how could you hide a thing like this from me? How could you let me build my life around a lie?”

Leo says, after a moment, “I wanted you to have the good years, untainted by what would come later. There was time for you to discover the truth later. But for now—while you were still young—the clothes, the jewelry, the traveling, all the joy of being beautiful and young—why ruin it for you? Why darken it with the knowledge of what would be coming?”

“So you made everybody go along with the lie? The people at the clinic. Even my own family, for God’s sake!”

“Yes.”

“And all the Prep treatments I’ve been taking—just a stupid pointless charade, right? Accomplishing nothing. Leading nowhere.”

“Yes. Yes.”

She begins to tremble. She understands the true depths of his compassion now, and she is appalled. He has married her out of charity. No man her own age would have wanted her, because the developing signs of bodily deterioration in the years just ahead would surely horrify him; but Leo is beyond all that, he is willing to overlook her unfortunate little somatic defect and give her a few decades of happiness before she has to die. And then he will proceed with the rest of his life, the hundreds or thousands of years yet to come, serene in the knowledge of having allowed the tragically doomed Marilisa the happy illusion of having been a member of the ageless elite for a little while. It is stunning. It is horrifying. There is no way that she can bear it.

“Marilisa—”

He reaches for her, but she turns away. Runs. Flees.

It was three years before he found her. She was living in London, then, a little flat in the Bayswater Road, and in just those three years her face had changed so much, the little erosions of the transition between youth and middle age, that it was impossible for him entirely to conceal his instant reaction. He, of course, had not changed in the slightest way. He stood in the doorway, practically filling it, trying to plaster some sort of facade over his all too visible dismay, trying to show her the familiar Leo smile, trying to make the old Leo-like warmth glow in his eyes. Then after a moment he extended his arms toward her. She stayed where she was.

“You shouldn’t have tracked me down,” she says.

“I love you,” he tells her. “Come home with me.”

“It wouldn’t be right. It wouldn’t be fair to you. My getting old, and you always so young.”

“To hell with that. I want you back, Marilisa. I love you and I always will.”

“You love me?” she says. “Even though—?”

“Even though. For better, for worse.”

She knows the rest of the passage— for richer for poorer, in sickness and in health —and where it goes from there. But there is nothing more she can say. She wants to smile gently and thank him for all his kindness and close the door, but instead she stands there and stands there and stands there, neither inviting him in nor shutting him out, with a roaring sound in her ears as all the million years of mortal history rise up around her like mountains.