Brian Aldiss - Greybeard

“Here, how old was you reckoning I was?” Norsgrey asked, thrusting his colourful countenance into Martha’s face.

“I wasn’t really thinking,” Martha said sweetly.

“You was thinking about seventy, wasn’t you?”

“I really was not thinking. I prefer not to think about age; it is one of my least favourite subjects.”

“Well, think about mine, then. An early seventy you’d say, wouldn’t you?”

“Possibly.”

Norsgrey let out a shriek of triumph, and then looked apprehensively towards the blue curtain.

“Well, let me tell you that you’d be wrong, Mrs. Lady — ah, oh dear, yes, very wrong. Shall I tell you how old I am? Shall I? You won’t believe me?”

“Go on, how old are you?” Towin asked, growing interested. “Eighty-five, I’d say you were. I bet you’re older than me, and I was born in 1945, the year they dropped that first atomic bomb. I bet you were born before 1945, mate.”

“They don’t have years with numbers attached any more,” Norsgrey said with immense scorn, and turned back to Martha. “You won’t believe this, Mrs. Lady, but I’m close on two hundred years old, very close indeed. In fact you might say that it was my two hundredth birthday next week.”

Martha raised an ironical eyebrow. She said, “You look well for your age.”

“You’re never two hundred, no more than I am,” Towin said scornfully.

“That I am. I’m two hundred, and what’s more I shall still be be knocking around the old world when all you buggers are dead and buried.”

Towin leant forward and kicked the old man’s boot angrily. Norsgrey brought up a stick and whacked Towin smartly over the shin. Yelping, Towin heaved himself up on his knees and brought his cudgel down at the old man’s flaming cranium. Charley stopped the blow in mid-swing.

“Give over,” he said sternly. “Towin, leave the poor old chap his delusions.”

“’Tisn’t no delusion,” Norsgrey said irritably. “You can ask my wife when she wakes up.”

Throughout this conversation and during the meal, Pitt had said hardly a word, sitting withdrawn into himself as he so often did in the Sparcot days. Now he said, mildly enough, “We’d’a done better if you’d listened to what I said and stayed on the river rather than settle down in this madhouse for the night. All the world to choose from and you had to choose here!”

“You can get outside if you don’t like the company,” Norsgrey said. “Your trouble is you’re rude as well as stupid. Praise be, you’ll die! None of you lot know anything of the world — you’ve been stuck in that place wherever-it-was you told me about. There are strange new things in the world you’ve never heard of.”

“Such as?” Charley asked.

“See this red and green necklace I got round my neck? I got it from Mockweagles. I’m one of the few men who’ve actually been to Mockweagles. I paid two young cow reindeer for it, and it was cheap at half the price. Only you have to call back there once every hundred years to renew, like, or one morning as you open your eyelids on a new dawn — phutt! you crumble into dust, all but your eyeballs.”

“What happens to them?” Becky asked, peering at him through the thick lampglow.

Norsgrey laughed.

“Eyeballs never die. Didn’t you know that, Mrs. Taffy? They never die. I seen them watching out of thickets at night. They wink at you to remind you what will happen to you if you forget to go back to Mockweagles.”

“Where is this place Mockweagles?” Greybeard asked.

“I shouldn’t be telling you this. There aren’t any eyeballs looking, are there? Well, there’s this place Mockweagles, only it’s secret, see, and it lies right in the middle of a thicket. It’s a castle — well, more like a sort of skyscraper than a castle, really. Only they don’t live on the bottom twenty floors; those are empty. I mean, you’ve got to go right up to the top floor to find them.”

“Them, who are them?”

“Oh, men, just ordinary men, only one of them has got a sort of second head with a sealed up mouth coming out of his neck. They live for ever because they’re immortals, see. And I’m like them, because I won’t ever die, only you have to go back there once every hundred years. I’ve just been back there now, on my way south.”

“You mean this is your second call there?”

“My third. I went there first of all for the treatment, and you have to go to get your beads renewed.” He ran his fingers through the orange curtain of his beard and peered at them. They were silent.

Towin muttered, “You can’t be that old. It isn’t all that time since things fell apart and no more kids were born. Is it?”

“You don’t know what time is. Aren’t you a bit confused in your mind? Mind you, I’m saying nothing. All I’m saying is I just come from there. There’s too many vagabonds wandering round like you lot, moving about the country. It’ll be better next time I go there, in another hundred years. There won’t be any vagabonds then. They’ll all be underground, growing toadstools. I shall have the whole world to myself, just me and Lita and those things that twitter and fry in the hedges. How I wish they’d stop that bloody old twittering and frying all the time. It’s going to be hell with all them in a few thousand years or so.” Suddenly he put his paws over his eyes; big senile tears came spurting through his fingers, his shoulders shook. “It’s a lonely life, friends,” he said.

Greybeard laid a hand on his shoulder and offered to get him to bed. Norsgrey jumped up and cried that he could look after himself. Still snivelling, he turned into the gloom, scattering hens, and crawled behind the blue curtain. The others sat looking at each other.

“Daft old fool!” Becky said uncomfortably.

“He seems to know a lot of things,” Towin said to her. “In the morning, we’d better ask him about your baby.”

She rounded angrily on him.

“Towin, you useless clot you, letting our secrets out! Didn’t I tell you over and over you wasn’t to mention it till people saw the state I’m in? Your stupid old clacking tongue! You’re like an old woman—”

“Becky, is this true?” Greybeard asked. “Are you pregnant?”

“Ah, she’s gravid as a rabbit,” Towin admitted, hanging his head. “Twins, I’d say it is, by the feel.”

Martha looked at the plump little woman; phantom pregnancies were frequent in Sparcot, and she did not doubt this was another such. But people believed what they wanted to believe; Charley clasped his hands together and said earnestly, “If this be true, God’s name be praised! It’s a miracle, a sign from Heaven!”

“Don’t give us any of that old rubbish,” Towin said angrily. “This was my doing and no one else’s.”

“The Almighty works through the lowest among us, Towin Thomas,” Charley said. “If Becky is pregnant, then it is a token to us that He will after all come down in the eleventh hour and replenish the Earth with his people. Let us all join in prayer — Martha, Algy, Becky—”

“I don’t want any of that stuff,” Towin said. “Nobody’s praying for my offspring. We don’t owe your God a brass farthing, Charley boy. If he’s so blessed powerful, then he was the one that did all this damage in the first place. I reckon old Norsgrey was right — we don’t know how long ago it all happened. Don’t tell me it was only eleven years we was at Sparcot! It seemed like centuries to me. Perhaps we’re all a thousand years old, and—”

“Becky, may I put my hand on your stomach?” Martha asked.

“Let’s all have a feel, Beck,” Pitt said, grinning, his interest momentarily roused.

“You keep your hands to yourself,” Becky told him. But she allowed Martha to feel beneath her voluminous clothes, looking into space as the other woman gently kneaded the flesh of her stomach.