Jack Chalker: Priam's Lens

The spaceport, now called Hacalu Naval District, was under severe martial law. The joint and the few other remnants of bygone days were inside the district, although that didn’t make it more desirable. Just because it was frequented by dispirited military people and the always anarchic spacers didn’t make it any more “normal,” only physically secure.

Inside it was always crowded with the flotsam and jetsam of The Confederacy. Most were Terrans, but there were often representatives of the dozen or more non-human races that had once, willingly or unwillingly, been members of the old order. If they could exist in a Terran friendly environment and consume the usual stuff, well, they weren’t turned away.

The Terrans didn’t discriminate, either. Not the spacers and the old-line Navy folks, anyway. Space took its toll on the professionals, always had. The twists and turns of time standing nearly still during journeys left them with no family or friends that didn’t also move the same way, and the various forces, the radiation and warping and twisting of space-time, changed them all into different, often unique life-forms of their own.

They were a tough, violent, mutant breed, and they were the only ones left holding any part of civilization together in what seemed to be the last days of independence and freedom any would ever know.

The place was filled with noise, and body odors less than pleasant, and the remnants of puke and vile concoctions. It was staffed by real people only because the machines could no longer be trusted; still, here you could buy most anything, any pleasure, any vice, anything at all.

Nobody seemed to notice her when she walked through the entrance and into the hall. Anybody who could stand the smell had already passed the first test. Still, in a place like this, every newcomer was viewed with some curiosity and even some suspicion, particularly when they knew that no ships had come in recently that they didn’t know and when the figure was unlike anyone familiar.

She was a small, slightly hunched over individual, wearing a black robe, perhaps a black dress, with a bit of tassel and lace about it. It stretched to the floor, giving little indication of what lay beneath, and it rendered the body somewhat shapeless, although it clearly was, or had started out as, Terran. She also wore a hat, one with a fancy shape and brim, from which fell a thin gauzelike film that made it impossible to see her face or tell any more about the features there. Clearly, though, she could see out of it. She moved slowly, with the aid of an ornate carved cane of what might have actually been real wood, in the kind of short shuffling steps that only the very ancient were forced into.

One huge, silver-haired man with a bushy gray beard and pointed, blackened teeth leaned over to the bartender and gestured slightly at the newcomer. “Is it me or what I’ve been havin’, or is that one there the oldest creature in the known galaxy?”

The bartender, a rough-looking man with nasty growths on his face and arms, shook his head. “Beats me. There’s some money in those clothes and that walking stick, but anybody with money wouldn’t walk like that.”

“Not unless it was an act,” the customer agreed, suspicious. He slid off the stool and casually approached the figure, who was still heading for the bar and might make it in another five minutes at the speed she was going.

She was either shriveled beyond belief or she was incredibly short; the silver-haired man literally towered over her.

“Are you sure you’re in the right place, ma’am?” he asked, trying to be polite. He reflected, though, how even the small suggestion of money might mean she wouldn’t get ten steps when she left the place.

“Cockroaches of a hundred varieties on the floor, roaches on the sign—I think there can not be two of these places,” she responded in a high, tough, ancient voice suited to what had to lie beneath the clothes. “I need to find someone. He’s a frequenter of this place, and we had an appointment to meet here today this very hour.” She started creeping on toward the bar, and he followed.

“Yeah? Who? Maybe I know him.”

“You probably do, but that doesn’t mean much. He is called, I believe, simply the Dutchman. Is he about?”

“The Dutchman! I—yeah, I know him. Sort of. But he’s not here, and the Hollander’s not in port. I’m afraid somebody just tricked you into coming into a real dangerous place, ma’am.”

“I have been in worse. I know that is hard for you to believe, but you are not a woman and you weren’t out here in the old days. Do you even remember the old days, sonny?”

“Yes, ma’am. Most of us do. Remember, a lot of us were born centuries ago. We age slow, and with the docs in these ports, we can keep ourselves in fairly good condition even when age does get to us. I’ve lived seventy years, but I was born over three hundred years ago, on Cagista.”

She cackled, amused, as she finally made it to the bar itself and accepted her self-appointed reception committee’s aid in easing into one of the overworn full stools with back and one arm still intact. She let out a sigh of contentment when she settled in, as if great pain had suddenly been lifted from her.

“Sonny, you want to compare old age with me? I was born nine hundred and seventy-one years ago next month.”

His jaw dropped, and he wasn’t at all sure he believed her. “Ma’am? That’s before space flight! That’s back in ancient history! Why, that would mean you’d have been born on Earth!”

“Well, they’d gone to the Moon, but not much more,” she acknowledged. “Me, I was born in a small town in the west of England called Glastonbury. Nobody’s heard of it these days; like England, like Earth itself, it’s passed into dim legend. It was a legend then. Joseph of Arimathea brought the Holy Grail to Glastonbury. King Arthur built Camelot there and found the Grail and used it to fight evil.” She paused. “None of this means anything to you, though, does it?”

“I’m afraid not, ma’am. Earth was destroyed before my time. I never even knew anybody who’d even been there before you, let alone somebody actually born there. I told Atair, the bartender, there, that I thought you looked the oldest person I ever did see. Maybe I’m right?”

Sharing birth years was an old sport among spacers, although not between them and the groundhogs. Space travel did all sorts of things to you when you did it all the time, some positive, some negative, but in addition to the biological effects there was always the problem of time. Like anything else, time, too, was warped and distorted by going to and fro over impossible distances using artificially created wormholes and natural phenomena to attain speeds and distances otherwise impossible. When nothing else could give, time gave as well. Spacers were literally a breed apart, not just because of the physical toll but because they were forced to sever all links to family, home, and clan. Time was linear only to them, relative to all others. How many years had she physically lived to pass through that nine hundred plus? How many had he to reach even his temporal distance from his birth?

She seemed amused by his impudence at suggesting her age. “Perhaps. Too old, certainly. Old enough to hear parents speak of world war and be schooled in the greatness of the British Empire even if they had dissolved it before I got there. Old enough to see Communism fall and a hundred isms after that. Old enough to see Earth finally bring on its own doom, and old enough to not have been there at the time. And old enough, now, not only to have seen The Confederacy at its start and height, but at its death. Let me tell you, young man, if you live long enough to reflect back on those kinds of events in a stinkhole like this, you’ve lived far too long and it’s pretty damned depressing!”