James Halperin - The First Immortal

“Of course. That any act of kindness, or spite, is like a stone pitched into an endless sea.” Toby explained: “Both throw off ever widening waves.”

“You said that, Dad?” Gary asked.

“Yep. Although I managed to let myself forget it for about thirty-five years.”

“Well, thirty-five years isn’t such a long time anymore. Kimber taught me that. I’ve been thinking a lot about human kindness, and I agree with you.” Gary looked first toward Father Steve, then at Epstein. “Which is why Christ was such an important philosopher. Whether or not you believe he was really the son of God, his teachings might well have saved the human race. I suspect forgiveness may be our most life-preserving characteristic.”

Alica wrapped an arm around the shoulder of her grandfather, Noah Banks. Noah smiled, then nodded at Ben, whose chance at life he’d once tried to eliminate; who, despite that, had revived him twenty-six years ago. Yet Ben’s decision to do so was actually rational. For in today’s world, such unsustainable and impotent defects of character as Noah had once displayed now seemed utterly harmless. Ben returned the nod.

Father Steve grinned. Yes , he transmitted to the entire room, whether or not Jesus was the son of God is irrelevant. His philosophy is what mattered .

“Probably true at that,” Epstein agreed aloud. “Without Christ’s doctrine of forgiveness, we might’ve self-destructed a century ago. Philosophy’s a powerful preserver of our species.”

Ben’s mouth flew open in amazement. Sure, you’ve mellowed over the years, Carl. Yet who would have ever expected you to endorse the value of religion? I must be dreaming.

Many laughed.

Epstein nodded. “Like your widening waves, Ben. That which leaves you is that which finds you.”

“Yes,” Ben said. “Everything influences everything else, given enough time. Everything’s intertwined, from human history to the trajectories of celestial objects.”

Ben detected a few titters from the group, but assumed that they came more from habit than anxiety. Hardly anyone worried about Nemesis anymore; confidence in science and human ingenuity seemed to have permeated world culture, at least for now.

“I know that’s true,” Kimber said. “I’m proof of it myself.”

“You? How?”

“Ever since I was a little girl, growing up in the very early twenty-first century, I knew I wanted to live in America. You know why, Ben?”

“Tell me.”

“It started with my grandfather, my father’s father, who was just a child himself when the Nazis occupied France. He was seven when the war ended, and nine when the Marshall Plan was adopted. Half a century later he still remembered the packages of food that tasted a hundred times better because everyone who got them had been so hungry. He told me how he felt about the Americans who sent those packages, kind people who’d liberated France at great sacrifice, then after returning home from that victory, in the midst of their own daily troubles and concerns, made sure the children of their allies were sustained until their economy could recover. What loyalty! he’d thought.

“But years later he was amazed to learn that Americans had also fed and helped rebuild the economies of Germany and Italy; the same countries whose armies had sent so many of your sons home in coffins.”

“And that’s why you decided to move here?” Ben said. “I can thank George Marshall for the daughter-in-law who sent my son back to me?”

“There’s more,” Kimber said. “When I moved to Japan after my first divorce, I heard other stories. We Japanese compartmentalize well. Sure, we remember the Americans firebombed Tokyo, and dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki—our own comets from the blue. But we also know these allied occupiers, especially the Americans, were fair with us once the war actually ended. My great-grandmother described how American soldiers would receive care packages from the Red Cross. Yet she’d rarely seen Americans themselves consuming anything from those packages. They’d give it all away to the street children and starving women, the loved ones of their enemies. In the face of crisis, these men acted so that all might survive.”

“Yes,” Ben said, remembering the words of Colonel Rand, his commanding officer at Purgatory, on the day they had learned of Japan’s surrender: Grudges just ain’t part of the American way. So remember that, and do us proud.

“But the most impressive story of all,” Kimber continued, “was about my great-grandfather, a man I never knew. He died of an aneurysm in 1987, ten years before I was born. When the war ended, most men of his rank committed suicide. He was the commandant of a prisoner-of-war camp, and had brutally interrogated an American sailor to get information about their ship movements.”

Ben froze.

“Following the orders of his general,” Kimber went on, “he’d tortured and permanently maimed many of that sailor’s friends and shipmates. Yet that same American convinced my great-grandfather that any human life was too precious to destroy, even his own. An American’s forgiveness is responsible for the fact that I exist at all. That’s why I decided to live here, and why forgiveness is a concept I value so highly.”

“Oh? Tell me, where did your great-grandfather serve? What camp?” Ben asked, his voice flat, the best acting job of his life. “He was taisa Hiro Yamatsuo, stationed at Futtsu. Why? Did you know him?”

Ben recalled their short telephone conversation in 1985 and wondered why, like so many of that time, Yamatsuo, a man who’d seemed so open to a second chance at life, had ultimately succumbed to his innate fears, inertia, and the superstitions of Deathism.

“Know him? Not really,” he said. The Truth Machines all stayed green. “But I know his great-granddaughter, and that’s enough to know he was worthy of life.”

Ben also wondered if there was any more he could have said back then to convince the man. He hoped not.

Kimber smiled. So did Ben. He then looked at Epstein, who wore an expression proclaiming that maybe he’d just seen God.

Ben winked, then glanced toward Toby.

Dear Toby, he transmitted, you fought off all those superstitions you were raised to believe; fought them off through sheer force of will. But when I asked you to gamble on what must have struck you as quack science, you never thought twice about it. You accepted a sketchy premise that helping me die was the only way to save my life.

Toby smiled, giving his head a single nod.

Then Ben considered the fates of Sam and Mack, and the original Marge and Alice, each of whom had also given him gifts of life yet did not survive their own incarceration in decaying bodies.

But at least he had the new Alice and Marge: children of a new era, yet familiar, too, each a bewitching composite of two identities, almost like another kind of being.

He looked across the table toward his granddaughter Katie, noble and wise, once imprisoned by the same disease that had destroyed Marge; but Katie had survived by assuming rational influence over her life while she still could.

He contrasted Katie’s fate with that of her brother, his grandson George, my father, whom history now regarded as a warrior for humanism and logic, incinerated as a collateral casualty in a lesser war he’d neither waged nor understood.

Now Ben gazed toward me, transmitting his thoughts: Even in Final Death, George granted an incalculable gift to our family and to the world: a son, wounded, but also inspired to achievement, by his parents’ murders. A legacy far beyond mere DNA.

As he mourned lost loved ones, Ben also relished the celebration, here among so many of his offspring and their loving partners in marriage. He found a special joy and justice in welcoming Brandon Butters into his family, and in reconciling with Noah Banks, father of Sarah, David, and Michael, grandfather of Alica, great-grandfather of Lysa and Devon.