SIMON WAS INSIDE the VIP lounge at some club inside a Vegas casino when the past caught up with him.
He and a dozen other people were drinking and watching a young woman, perhaps nineteen, as she danced alone, very drunk. She’d been hired for some bachelor party, which Simon remembered was the reason he was here. Some other wealthy young idiot. Like he was supposed to be. The girl began removing what little clothing she wore, and everyone cheered. She smiled at him, caught his eye, and revealed a little more of her tanned and sculpted flesh. Suddenly, it hit him just how old he was, just how vast the gulf of years between them was.
When he was this girl’s age, no European had ever stepped this far into the interior of the American continent. This was empty desert. Perhaps a few thousand humans at most had passed over this ground in centuries, always on their way to someplace else. And a young woman who took off her clothes in public would be branded a whore or a witch. A death sentence, either way.
Now he stood inside a building taller than the biggest cathedral of his youth, next to a man-made lake, surrounded by five times as many people as had lived in Rome at the height of its empire. Within hours, he would step aboard a plane and travel a distance that once took years and cost lives. But first he would see this young woman naked, bathing in electric lights, unaware of how many disasters she had dodged just to get to this point. The vaccinations against the diseases that killed so many children. The clean water and plentiful food that gave her long legs and clear skin and just the right amount of body fat and muscle. The synthetic fabrics that no longer covered her. She danced to notes clearer than any human choir could produce, with a pill under her tongue that would have been considered a revelation direct from God Himself once upon a time. And all the while, she remained completely ignorant of the miracles that surrounded her.
Perhaps she was stripping her way through college.
He couldn’t see her anymore. Couldn’t see anything but the indisputable fact: everyone he knew as a boy was dead, had been dust for longer than this city had existed.
For a second, it was difficult for Simon to breathe. The weight of the years felt like it would crush him, drown him in time.
This kind of extreme dislocation had happened before. It was the opposite of what he supposed other people called déjà vu. They had the impression they were seeing something that had happened before. Simon, by contrast, had seen almost everything before. He breathed deeply and let it wash over him, and rode it out. He suspected it was one more symptom of his long use of the Water. Men were not meant to live as long as he had.
He took a breath. Then another. He breathed. He was still alive. Despite everything, the world had not been able to kill him yet. And it would not.
Simon stood and walked away from the naked dancer.
The host of the party, the bachelor himself, stepped in front of Simon and placed a hand on Simon’s chest. “Hey, man, where you going? Party’s just getting started.”
It took every bit of restraint Simon owned to keep from grabbing that hand, twisting it, snapping the bone, spinning the man to expose his chest for the sword—
No. That was a different time.
Men did not touch each other so casually then. This was not a challenge. This was what passed for sociability.
He remembered to smile. “Gotta get a little space.”
The other man looked disturbed. Simon did not manage to get the tone quite right. Sometimes it leaked out. The age. The difference. Especially at moments like this.
He finally got himself under control by the time he reached the back booths of the club. They were mostly deserted, everyone’s eyes on the hired girl now, clustering around. In another moment, more women from the crowd would begin to strip—spontaneously joining the party, just as they’d been instructed and paid to do.
He’d seen it before. He’d seen it all before.
This was worse than usual, Simon had to admit. He had weak moments. Usually after he heard about Shako.
How long since he’d last seen her? Really seen her, not just a blurry surveillance photo passed along by the CIA or some other top-secret government agency?
Centuries. More time than these people thought possible.
He flattered himself that she still thought of him, too. Of course she did. She intended to kill him.
There were moments—like this one—where he considered offering himself as a target. Let her get it over with. Max would say that he had this suicidal impulse all the time, but Max didn’t understand. He wasn’t there for the true beginning.
Simon put the drink down. It was not going to help.
Perhaps he was feeling nostalgic, as Max had said. He was so close to—well, there was no better word—to winning.
The others didn’t understand, because all they wanted was for their lives to continue. And he couldn’t blame them, not really. He’d made them comfortable and powerful and rich beyond the imagining of their mortal lives.
But in truth, they’d advanced only to the point of that stripper: happy and protected and safe in the knowledge that her youth was eternal. The difference was, for her that was the standard illusion of the young. For Simon and the other members of the Council, it was truth.
But Simon had always wanted it to mean more. The others didn’t always see the plan. They didn’t see how difficult it was to maintain all the spinning plates, to keep the wheels within wheels turning.
He thought of his plan, in his private moments, as a great wall, assembled stone by stone. The end result would be the world as he envisioned it: safer, better, stronger. Everything perfect and eternal.
But for every stone he moved into his wall, another rolled out of place. It was incredibly frustrating. He spent all his time putting the world back together, and it just kept falling apart.
Time had a way of changing everything.
Vegas, for example. What was once a Mormon outpost along a desert road became a modern-day El Dorado, exactly like the legend, because the Mob needed a place to launder money. They gave the mandate to build a casino to Bugsy Siegel, who took it as a license to create a dream. They killed him for it, but it was too late. The dream grew huge and became reality.
(Simon had met Ben several times back then. He’d liked him, even though the man was deeply unstable.)
You couldn’t control everything.
When he’d started, Simon believed it was possible to unite the world under a single crown, and the Water would give him the power to manipulate the crown. He and his men would control the resources of the New World, and they would force the old one to be better. He’d planned to lift all men up, one at a time, if necessary, to see the glory that was possible in this world. He would share the wealth he’d found, once they were ready. His original idea had been a happy and united population, all following his ideals. They seemed grandiose at the time: cleaner water; food for all; schools open to every child, not just those of position or wealth; and an end to slaughter and war by the simple method of having the biggest and most powerful army on the planet.
But first, to do that, he had to secure his position. Amass enough wealth and power to make his voice strong enough so he could not be ignored. Then he’d use the power of the Spanish monarchy to begin changing the world for the better.
The English were the first to destroy that illusion for him. They destroyed Spain’s armada and began their decades of influence over the world.
So Simon and the Council had to adapt, had to use their riches to adjust to the new reality of an English-dominated world. Simon made the moves he could. He financed alchemists, then scientists, and other thinkers. He tried to overthrow England’s monarchy by supporting a fringe group of religious extremists, and they even succeeded for a time.
Then they fell apart, and the monarchy was restored. Simon had adapted to that, as he did everything else.
His grandiose goals became the status quo, bit by bit. And yet, somehow, the better world always remained just out of reach. People still, stubbornly, refused to behave in their best interests. Children were still starving and men and women still dying of pointless diseases and slaughtering one another in pointless wars.
Simon no longer believed in God, but he believed in sin. One sin in particular. He knew pride. He saw how it corrupted everything. How it kept people from knowing their place. How much better the world would be, he often thought, if only it would behave, and listen to someone who truly knew how it should work.
And yet they all insisted on following their own whims, even when they led straight into Hell.
At moments like this, especially, Simon could easily fall into despair. He controlled vast fortunes. He held the fate of powerful men in his hands. He’d seen empires rise and fall, and buried more enemies than could fit in a hundred graveyards.
And the world wasn’t perfect yet. Despite everything he’d done.
But he would not surrender.
Above all, he survived. Almost everyone and everything else he’d ever known was dust and rot, but he remained.
The dream was still good. And he’d see it come to life. No matter how long it took.
Now, with the possibility of an unlimited supply of the Water—of a true cure for death—he was closer than he ever thought possible. No more games. No more hiding behind the scenes. A man who could offer a cure for death could have anything. There was no one on Earth who would fight him then. They would all finally have to do as they were told. And then he would have the world as he had always dreamed it, made perfect and eternal.
He heard a noise behind him. It served to wake him from his dreams of the past. His mask fully in place, a modern man once more, he turned and looked.
The girl stood there, wearing nothing but a thong.
“Hey,” she said. “Never had that reaction before. You really didn’t like my dancing?”
He smiled. She wouldn’t take rejection. It was as foreign as the past to her.
“Maybe I just wanted a private show,” he said.
She smiled, back in a familiar script, and moved closer to him. Simon put his arms around her as she settled onto his lap and began to writhe.
Men were not meant to live as long as he did, he reminded himself. But that didn’t mean he was going to give it up anytime soon.