Damon Knight - Orbit 21

“You play chess?”

“Yeah. And I’m five hundred and fifteen years old.”

“Wow, that’s old. You’re not Knorrson?”

“No, just old.”

“I’ll say.”

“Yes, I’ve seen six of these new-century eves—though I can’t say I remember twenty ninety-nine very much. . . .”

“You must have seen a lot of changes.”

“Oh yeah. Not as many, though, these last couple of centuries. It appears to me things don’t change as fast as they used to—not as fast as in the nineteenth, twentieth, twenty-first. Inertia, I guess.”

“Slower turnover in the population, you mean.”

“Yeah. I suppose it’s a commonly observed phenomenon.”

“Is it?”

“I don’t know. But damn it, why doesn’t the wise old man beat the young turk? Why don’t you just keep getting better? Where does your creativity go?”

“Same place as memory,” I said.

“I guess. Well, what the hell. Winning ain’t essential. I’m doing fine without it. I wouldn’t have it over.” He shook his head. “Wouldn’t do like those Phoenixes. You heard of them? Folks banded together, ‘way back when, in a secret organization, and now they’re knocking themselves off on their five-hundredth birthdays?”

I nodded. “The Phoenix Club.”

“Phoenixes. I wouldn’t do that, not me. Never will understand those folks. Never understand those daredevils, either. Seems like the more you have to lose, the bigger thrill you get from risking your life for no reason. Those damn fools dueling with knives, trying to stand on Jupiter, having picnics on some iceberg in the rings—get themselves killed!”

“You really think people have more to lose by dying now than they did when they lived their three-score-and-ten?”

“Sure.”

“I don’t.”

“Well, what the hell, you’re just a kid. You don’t know how strange it’s going to get. As far as I can tell there are only a couple hundred people in the whole system older than me. And they’re going fast. One of these days, if I’m like the rest of them, and I don’t doubt that I am, my body is gonna toss off all this medical manipulation and go —” he snapped his fingers—”just like that. They still don’t know why. And I tell you, closing in on it, I wouldn’t mind having another six hundred years. I try talking my body into the idea all the time. And I’m damn glad I didn’t go at seventy or a hundred. What kind of a life is that? I’ve been careful, and lived long enough to do so many things. . . .” He paused, and his eyes, aimed at the concrete we were sitting on, were focused for infinite distance.

“You done everything you wanted to?”

“‘Course not, didn’t you hear me?”

“Me neither.”

He laughed. “I should hope not.”

“I’d like to see the Vasyutin megalith.”

He looked up at me. “The what?”

“The Vasyutin megalith, you know, that thing on Pluto.”

“Yeah, I know, but Vasyutin?”

“He headed the expedition that put it there.”

“He did not.”

“What?” Now I was surprised.

“Where did you learn that?”

“Um, a historian named Nederland tracked the story down on Mars. . . .”

“Well, he was wrong.”

I was taken aback. “I don’t think so, I mean, he has it all well documented—”

“Idiot! He does not! What’s he say, some asteroid miners put together a half-baked starship and take off—what’s that got to do with Pluto?”

“They were the only ones out there, process of elimination—”

“Naaah. Listen, kid, I’m not going to sit here and argue with you about it. I’ll tell you why Vasyutin didn’t put up that thing—” He leaned toward me, leered. “Because I know who did,”

He leaned back and stared at me calmly, and looking back at him I felt an uncanny certainty—something in his expression told me that he knew. He was telling the truth. “I know, “ he repeated.

Just then Saturn broke over the horizon, and everyone started to cheer. All over Ed’s Town voices and sirens and whistles and bells marked the dawn of the New Year with their ragged chorus. My companion stood and whooped several times, then lifted a hand to me and moved through the crowd, back toward the streets. After a moment’s indecision I struggled after him. It took me a long time to reach him. I grabbed his sleeve and pulled at it, like a kid. He turned around.

“How do you know? How?”

He said nothing, looked thoughtful. Finally he grinned, a big toothy grin that stretched all across his thin face. He pursed his lips, bugged his eyes out, and tapped a forefinger against his mouth. Then he poked me in the chest with the other forefinger.

“You find that out,” he said, and turned and left me standing there.

Later on I figured he helped put the monument up, or maybe he helped plant the hoax on Mars. That was why he was so sure. But at the time, I didn’t have the slightest idea. I just knew that I believed him—and that my life had been changed. Changed for good.

My food had run out, and my memory was exhausted, so I decided to take the day off and hang around in the commons. Perhaps I would visit Jones in the afternoon. Several people aboard, I had heard, had been surprised or affronted to hear that I had invited Jones along; for Theophilus Jones was an outcast, he was one of those strange scientists who defied the basic tenets of his field. But I found the huge red-haired man to be one of the most intelligent and diverting people on the Snowflake , and more inclined than the others to talk about something other than Icehenge. Before I left for the commons I went to my library console to print up one of Jones’s books. Should I read from Prehistoric Technology? I typed out the code for it.

In the kitchen I got a large bowl of ice cream, and went to a table to eat and read. The commons was empty—perhaps this was the sleeping time? I wasn’t sure.

I opened my crisp new book, pages still stiff around the ring binding, and began to read:

We must suspect alien presence in the unsolved problem of human origins, for science has significantly failed to discover the beginnings of human evolution, the point at which human beings and a terrestrial species might meet; and the recent finds in the Urals and in southern India, in which fossilized human skeletons one hundred million years old have been found, show that the scientific description of human evolution held up to this time was wrong. Alien interference, in the form of genetic engineering, crossbreeding, or most likely, colonization, is almost a certainty.

So it is not impossible that a human civilization of high technology existed in prehistoric times—an earlier wave of history, now lost to us. That such a civilization would be lost to us is inevitable. Continents and seas have come and gone since it existed, and humanity itself must have come close to extinction more than once. If there had been a great and ageless city on the wide triangle of India, when it was a splinter of Gondwanaland inching north, what would we know of it now, crushed as it must have been in the collision between Asia and India, thrust deep beneath the Himalayas by the earth itself? Perhaps this is why Tibet is a place where humans have always possessed an ancient and intricate wisdom, and what we now know to be the oldest of written languages, Sanskrit. Perhaps some few of that ancient race survived the millennial thrust skyward; or perhaps there are caves the Tibetans have found, with deep fissures winding down through the mountain’s basalt to chambers in that crushed city.

My ice cream bowl was empty, so I got up and went to the kitchen to refill it, shaking my head over the passage in Jones’s book. When I returned, Jones himself was in the room, deep in conversation with Arthur Grosjean. They were at the long blackboard, and Grosjean was picking up a writing stick. He had been the chief physicist on the Persephone in 2541, and had coauthored the only detailed description of the monument. He was an old man, nearly five hundred, short and frail. Now he was tying a piece of string around the stick, listening to Jones’s excited voice. I sat down and watched them as I ate.