Robert Silverberg - Sailing to Byzantium

“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 shining 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 harbor 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 toward 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 age 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 then 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 appetites, 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 gray-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 forever? 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 forever, 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 look 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 simpleminded 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 aging, 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 aging people in a world where nobody grows old. What I can’t understand is why you aren’t even willing to consider the possibility that—”