When First We Were Gods

RICK YANCEY

Many lifetimes later, as he boarded the last ferry to Titan, Beneficent Page recalled the first and only time he fell in love.

Beneficent was married at the time to a woman named Courteous Spool, of the New New York Spools, a very prominent and powerful family whose patriarch, Omniscient Spool, served as chairman of the Conduct Review Committee, the most powerful position in the Republic of North America, more powerful than the president herself, since this committee was responsible for reviewing lifetime accomplishments, transgressions, and applications for Transfer. To get on Omniscient’s bad side could literally cost you your life.

So the marriage was, at least from the Page family’s perspective, an excellent match. Courteous was, by virtue of being the youngest, the favorite of Omniscient’s seventy-six daughters.

Though it was Beneficent’s sixteenth marriage, it was Courteous’s first. She had been in love before, countless times, and had actually planned several weddings, always to call them off days—or sometimes minutes—before the ceremony. It became somewhat of a joke among the First and Foremost Families (the 3Fs): “So who is Courteous going to marry this year?” the 3Fs would snarkily ask each other. If Courteous had been the daughter of anyone else, this latest invitation would have been deleted with a roll of the eye and a cynical snicker. “Courteous actually saying ‘I do’? Riiiiiiiiight.”

But Courteous Spool wasn’t the daughter of just anybody else. She was the daughter—the favorite daughter—of the chairman of the Conduct Review Committee. So when the invitation dropped into their cogboxes, trips and parties were canceled, schedules rearranged, Transfers postponed—or moved up, if possible—and even some labors induced or pregnancies terminated, because, though the odds were slim it would actually happen, you weren’t going to miss the wedding of three centuries over something as commonplace as giving birth.

It would be a lavish affair, even by Spool standards. Omniscient’s goal was to make the celebration so over-the-top outrageous that his daughter would be too mortified to call it off: seven hundred guests; more than a hundred performers, including the world-famous Amarillo Gladiators from Waco, who staged fights to the death with a variety of archaic and unusual weapons, including, in one memorable performance, a handbag full of bricks and a bullwhip festooned with sewing needles (the handbag won); exotic dishes prepared by the finest chefs in the world; door prizes that included a free Transfer regardless of your Conduct Review (jokingly called “Omniscient’s Get Out of Jail Free card”); and all to take place at the most exclusive venue of all—the Gingrich Memorial Gardens on Moon Base Alpha. The lunar colony was only a few decades old in those days and most of the 3Fs looked at it as wildly exotic, the ultimate vacation spot, a nice place to visit but not somewhere you’d want to live.

Three days before the Big Day, Courteous went shopping with her mother and her oldest sister, Genuine. It was her third visit to her favorite Transfer boutique in a week and a bad sign, in her mother’s opinion. Perfectionism in the age of immortality is a recipe for disaster, and Courteous was a perfectionist. Her look for the ceremony had to be just right, as the ceremony itself had to be just right, as every potential mate had had to be just right. Of course, nothing is ever just right, even when death is discarded.

“What do you think about this one?” she asked her mother and sister, pausing before the display case.

“Five nine and a half,” Genuine said, consulting the monitor beside the nude body suspended in the tank. “And ten pounds heavier. Your dress won’t fit.”

“I’ll get a new dress,” Courteous said. “I’m not crazy about it anyway.”

“Courteous,” her mother said. “You love that dress. It’s a Tiffanplouf original!”

“It’s too old-fashioned. No one does translucent gowns anymore.”

“I did last year,” Genuine pointed out.

“Exactly,” Courteous said.

“The wedding is in three days,” her mother put in. “It’s too late to design a new dress.”

“Then we put it off for another week,” Courteous said with a casual shrug.

Her mother and Genuine exchanged knowing looks. They had witnessed this nearly a dozen times before: the piling up of excuses as the Big Day approached until the Big Day simply never came.

They continued down the row of display cases. “What about this one?” Genuine said, stopping before a fetching seventeen-year-old inanimate. “Look how delicate her features are! And that little nose is to die for.”

“She’s the right height, too,” Mother Spool noted. “And weight. The Tiffanplouf would fit perfectly.”

“Unless it doesn’t,” said Courteous. “And if it doesn’t, then we will have to postpone it.”

“Well, there’s only one way to make certain it fits,” Genuine snapped. “Don’t Transfer before the wedding! Who does that?” She turned to Courteous’s mother for support. “I mean, who Transfers three days before their wedding?”

“I never did. Not in twenty-six marriages.”

“She has a good point, Courteous,” her sister said. “Maybe you’re stuck in perpetual engagements because you’re thinking your first will be the only wedding you’ll ever have.”

“Maybe it will be,” Courteous shot back defiantly. “Maybe if I get this one just right, I’ll never have to go through it again!”

“Well, I hope you don’t, because after going through this seventeen times with you, I can’t take any more.”

After viewing another six rows of options and debating the merits of dozens of different looks (this one’s face was “too long. I want to go with something heart-shaped and pixyish,” that one’s proportions were off, waist too long, legs too short, or vice versa), Courteous returned to her first choice, the tall one with the striking green eyes. Green, she explained, was Beneficent’s favorite color.

“That’s a good point,” her flustered mother said, thinking what the designer at Tiffanplouf’s was going to say when they informed him the dress would have to be totally redesigned in less than twenty-four hours. “Beneficent is expecting this,” pointing at Courteous’s present body, “not that,” pointing at the tall, green-eyed inanimate floating behind the glass. “What if he doesn’t like it?”

“It’s my wedding,” Courteous replied testily. “I suppose I can wear whatever look I want. If Beneficent doesn’t like it, I can always change into something more to his fancy afterward, but I will never pick a look simply to please a man!”

Her mother sighed. Her strategy had completely backfired. Courteous’s mind was made up: she was switching from a five-foot-six-inch body into one four inches taller and ten pounds heavier. Her mother linked up with the designer while Courteous completed her order and the Transfer agent prepped her new look. She was still televersing when Courteous was taken into the private room for the final upload to her master file. The designer’s curses and threats of quitting thundered inside Mrs. Spool’s head—thank goodness only she could hear them!—as Courteous handed the agent her psyche-card. Mrs. Spool would have missed the switchover entirely if Genuine hadn’t found her at the last second, huddled in a corner of the boutique, pressing her hands over her ears in a futile attempt to muffle the outraged roars of the couturier.

“I have to go,” she whispered. “She’s about to switch.”

She will not switch! the designer screeched inside her head. And then, remembering whose wife he was televersing with: All right, but I make no promises. No promises! She may have to settle for something off-the-rack !

“We’re going to miss it,” Genuine worried as they hurried to the Transfer room.

“Oh, they know we’re here. They’ll wait for us.”

She was right, of course. Rarely was even the most routine Transfer done without some family member present—there was always the chance, no matter how remote, that something might go wrong in the switchover—and rarer still was any member of the Spool clan switched without a loved one there to murmur the obligatory, conditional good-bye.

Which Courteous’s mother did, ending with the quote spoken at all proper Transfers:

“May you wake safely upon that far shore

When night is through

May you find no everlasting sleep

When breaks the Eternal Dawn!”

A final kiss. A final upload from Courteous’s psyche-card to the master file. And then the first shot to put her to sleep. Her latest purchase rolled into the room, dressed now, hair carefully arranged, beautiful green eyes blank and staring sightlessly at the ceiling, the mind empty, a cup waiting to be filled with the trillion bits of data that was Courteous Spool. The download into her new look lasted a little over a minute. The pupils dilated, the body spasmed as circuits came alive, and the tall girl was whisked out of the room for full cognitive testing, but not before she looked up into her mother’s face—a face not much older than her own—and smiled.

For a few minutes, there were two Courteous Spools in the world, the shorter, brown-eyed one and the taller, green-eyed one. Then, after the neurological and physical tests were completed to confirm the Transfer was a success, a second shot was administered to the first Courteous, or the redundancy, as it was called. This second shot stopped her heart.

She was dead.

And alive. In a body picked out just for her wedding. A body whose eyes were Beneficent’s favorite color. A copy of a copy of a copy of a copy of a copy of a copy of a copy of the original, the one her mother had given birth to several lifetimes ago, but still Courteous.

“I don’t know,” she mused the next morning, examining her newest self in the mirror. “The faces always look a little different inside the display case. This nose didn’t look so narrow and the cheekbones are a little too prominent, I think. Should I try to find another?”

She was leaving for the moon in less than an hour. There was no time to find another look and, at any rate, you were allowed only one Transfer every five years—it’s time-consuming and expensive to grow inanimate human beings. But that particular rule just happened to be enforced by the Conduct Review Committee, which just happened to be chaired by one Omniscient Spool, who just happened to be the father of the green-eyed beauty standing in front of the mirror, who just happened to be his favorite daughter. If she wanted another look, she would get one.

Courteous turned to her personal assistant—her persist, in the parlance of the 3Fs—a pretty young girl named Georgiana, whose family had faithfully served Courteous for ten generations, and asked her opinion.

“I think it’s beautiful,” Georgiana said. “Much better than the last look.”

“I’m not comparing it to the last look,” Courteous said impatiently. She paused as a message from her mother dropped into her cogbox. The shrill voice rang annoyingly inside her head: Forty-five minutes to takeoff, dear! Tick-tock, tick-tock! “What would be the point of that? Tell me the truth; you won’t hurt my feelings.”

“No new look is perfect,” Georgiana said carefully. “Those eyes are the perfect shade of green, though. They’ll go wonderfully with your gown.”

“Oh, Georgiana,” Courteous sighed, pinching her new nose and then pushing on the tip to flare the nostrils. “I envy you finitissium sometimes, I really do. You get just one body, and you never have to go through this agony.”

“One body … and one lifetime,” Georgiana murmured. Only 3Fs could spit on death’s grave. The vast majority of people still lived finite lives—hence the slightly condescending and contemptuous name for them: finitissium, the finite ones. The day would come when Georgiana would be too old and feeble to properly care for Courteous. She would be sent off to live out the remainder of her days at the Retired Persists’ Home and replaced with someone younger—hopefully someone from her own family, a granddaughter, perhaps, if she was lucky enough to have one. Being a persist was a choice job, if you could get it. Private quarters in the high-security family compound, not some shack in the sprawling slums that ringed the city, surrounded by open sewers and reeking garbage, preyed upon by the vicious gangs that ruled the ghetto. The job came with free health care, including vision and dental. And an education, if you wanted one. Georgiana was very proud of the fact that she was the first in her family to read and write. She also spoke a bit of Courtesian, much to her mistress’s delight and the only reason she spoke it—to delight her: As long as she kept Courteous happy, her job was safe.

“Why am I going through it, Georgiana?” Courteous asked. “To please my father? To shut up those idiots who laugh at me? To save my family the embarrassment of yet another aborted wedding? I’m only four hundred and ninety-eight years old.” Staring at her eighteen-year-old face in the mirror. “Maybe I’m too young to get married.”

“Do you love him?” Georgiana asked quietly.

“Love who? Oh, Beneficent. Well, of course I do. As much as I loved the others I thought I was going to marry.”

“Then that’s why you’re going through it.”

“It all just seems so pointless. Do you know how many times my father has been married? Forty-four. Forty-four times, Georgiana! People change spouses more often than they clean out their closets. And every time they say, ‘This is the one. This is the person I’m going to spend eternity with.’ Then forty or fifty years go by and you’re just sick of each other, utterly sick, and it’s on to the next ‘true love.’ My question is what good is eternity if you are eternally falling in and out of love? Joy. Despair. Desire. Revulsion. Excitement. Boredom. They should do away with marriage altogether, in my opinion. It makes you only more dissatisfied and lonely.”

“But there’s always a chance, isn’t there?” Georgiana asked.

“A chance for what?”

“That someday you will find the one to spend eternity with.”

Courteous thought about that for a long moment.

“Oh, what do you know?” she said finally. “You’re mortal, and only a mortal can afford to be romantic. When we conquered death, we murdered love.”

Even as those harsh words came out, there was a part of her that rebelled at the thought. Endless life increased the probability of everything, including the most improbable thing of all: a love that lasts longer than the stars. Perhaps Beneficent was the one of whom she would never tire, whose life she would share until the sun had burned all its fuel and died. How long would their love endure? A billion years? Ten billion? Until the universe was black and cold, until the final flaring out of the last star?

Georgiana sat down beside her, stroked her silky auburn hair, and said simply, “I believe in love.”

Blinking back tears, Courteous whispered, “In spite of life eternal?”

“In spite of life eternal,” her persist answered. “And because of it.”

Two days later, Courteous married Beneficent Page.

Looking back three billion years later, Beneficent could not say how he happened to fall in love for the first and only time, the why of it always eluded him, but he could remember to the hour when it happened.

It was a little after seven o’clock on an early morning in May, four years into his marriage. He had risen at dawn, as was his habit, leaving Courteous to sleep in while he enjoyed a few moments of solitude on the balcony, where he could drink his coffee and stream the morning news into his cogbox with no distractions except the spectacular sunrise over the river. The golden light sparkled on the dark water and shimmered in the smoke rising lazily from the cooking fires of the tenements that spread out for miles below him.

It was his favorite part of the day. Just his coffee, the pleasant banter of the announcers echoing inside his head, the glorious sunrise, and himself: Beneficent enjoyed being alone. His own company he found perfectly agreeable. If the world had been a slightly different place and he slightly less ambitious, he might have never married, not Courteous and not the fifteen who came before her. He didn’t love Courteous, any more than he had loved his former wives. He found her to be, like nearly every one of the 3Fs, shallow, vain, petty, and almost unbearably boring. But the world was what it was and his ambition was what it was, and now he had arrived, if not at the pinnacle, then at least within striking distance of it: He was the husband of the favorite daughter of the most powerful man on the planet. All that remained was a child. A child would seal his place in Omniscient’s unofficial court, no matter what came of the marriage.

Sitting with his back to the door, he did not see her approach. Her fragrance announced her presence, a delicate floral scent popular among the finitissium, one that would, over the coming millennia, remind him of that moment when he realized he was in love.

“I thought you might like some muffins. Fresh from the oven,” Georgiana said. She placed the platter beside his coffee.

The air smelled of smoke and perfume. The golden morning light caressed her lovely young face, unmarred, as one day it surely would be, by the ravages of time.

“Hmmm, blueberry, my favorite. Thank you, Georgiana,” he murmured. He reached for a hot muffin, and the little finger of her right hand brushed against his left. With that accidental contact, that meaningless touch, something long dormant stirred inside him. Something larger than he, something even older than he, something that had been since the foundations of the earth. Something that he had never experienced before and never would again, not in three billion years. He tried to push it down, brush it aside, but it was far more powerful than he. He tried to ignore it as he bit into the warm muffin, a strange and thrilling sense of vertigo, which he blamed on the strong coffee, but it had already gripped him and not even the passage of three billion years could loosen its hold.

“Would you like to join me?” he asked, casually waving toward the empty chair beside him. He shut down his cogbox to silence the morning program in his head. Suddenly, he found the announcers’ voices extremely irritating.

“Thank you, Mr. Page, but Mrs. Page will be rising soon and … ”

“She won’t be up for hours, we both know that. I can’t remember a day when Courteous rose before noon. Please, Georgiana. I have no one to enjoy the sunrise with.”

The persist had little choice but to join him. She sat with her knees pressed together, not looking at him, but across the water at the smoky glow of the tenement fires. She had extended family down there, though she had not seen them in several years. She was afraid to visit. She was young and pretty and well fed. She might be targeted by a gang for her nice clothes, robbed, beaten, perhaps raped.

“Have a muffin,” Beneficent said.

“I had one already,” she confessed.

“I know. I see a bit of crumb on your lip. May I?”

He reached toward her—she was very careful not to pull back or flinch—and gently brushed the crumb away with his thumb. The first touch was accidental; this second touch was not.

“Tell me something, Georgiana. How long has your family been with Courteous?”

“Almost two hundred years,” Georgiana answered.

“And what do you think of her?”

“I care for Mrs. Page very much.”

“No doubt, but I wonder if there might be some, for lack of a better word, resentment, too?”

“Oh no. Why would I resent her?”

“I would think resentment would be quite common for your people.”

“To tell you the truth, Mr. Page, sometimes I … ” She took a deep breath. It was a very dangerous thing to say. “Sometimes I actually feel sorry for her.”

“Really? And why should someone like you feel pity for someone like her?”

She did not answer right away. Watching the smoke and the light that lit up the smoke, knees pressed together, refusing to look at him, she finally said, “When I was very small my mother told me a very old story, about a covetous man who wanted everything he saw, so when he died he was cursed with eternal hunger and thirst and imprisoned in a pool of water with a handful of delicious fruit hanging above him. Every time he bent to drink, the water receded, and every time he reached for the fruit, the fruit was pulled away.”

“And that story reminds you of Courteous?”

“It reminds me of … many people.”

“But we all drink to our fill,” he argued. “We all eat till we can eat no more. Well, actually, ours is the feast that never ends.” He popped the remainder of the warm muffin into his mouth, delighting in its rich, moist texture. “For example, tomorrow I am off to hunt great whites off the coast of Australia, armed with nothing but a bowie knife. The odds are extremely likely that I will be eaten alive. Yet I will wake the next day as whole and healthy as I am right now.”

“In a different body,” she pointed out. “And with no memory of what happened.”

“Well,” he said with a laugh. “I don’t think being eaten alive is something I’d want to remember.”

“I don’t see the thrill in doing something dangerous if there is nothing to lose.”

“Funny you should say that. I’ve often thought the same about love.”

There was an awkward silence. Now why did I bring up love? he wondered. It was an odd transition, from being eaten alive by sharks to love. As the millennia passed, however, it seemed less odd and more prescient.

“Love or sharks, does it matter?” she asked. “Isn’t all of it pointless if … ”

“Yes, Georgiana? If … what?”

She lowered her eyes. “If you cannot fail.”

He might have told her that he had failed. That he was a dismal failure when it came to love, if never having loved meant failure. For a shocking instant, he felt as if he might cry. He had not cried in … what? Five hundred years or more? When was the last time he had cried? He had no memory of it, but that did not mean much. The memory could belong to a lost day, like the one that would be sacrificed if he lost his duel with the sharks, for example. Your memory was only as complete as the latest download to your psyche-card.

“Have you ever been in love, Georgiana?” he asked.

She shook her head. Refusing to look at him. It was that refusal, he realized after many centuries of introspection, that had done him in. If she had looked at him in that pivotal moment, the spell her touch had cast might have been broken. It might have satisfied his curiosity, convinced him that she was nothing more than an ordinary girl, a finitissium unworthy of his notice.

But she did refuse to look at him, and, even more than that first touch, it was the look withheld that doomed him.

“What a pity,” he sighed. “I was hoping you could tell me what it feels like.”

“But you love Mrs. Page,” the girl protested, looking at him finally, but he did not see it; he had turned away.

He left for Australia the following morning, without Courteous—she was absurdly, when you think about it, afraid of the ocean—and bagged four sharks on the first day, but on the next his luck ran out. A twenty-foot monster rocketed up from the deep, taking him by surprise, ripping his body to shreds before dragging the mangled corpse into the lightless depths. His persist returned home with his psyche-card, backed up the night before his last ill-fated dive, and within an hour of touching down, Beneficent had been downloaded into the new body he had reserved on the morning of his departure. He remembered nothing of his demise, of course. That distasteful memory had perished with the body that was slowly digesting in the guts of a dozen sea creatures, from the shark that had shredded him to the tiny bottom-feeders that scuttle across the floors of silent seas.

On the morning following his return, he was sitting on the balcony with his coffee, his cogbox on silent because just the thought of the announcers’ voices was enough to set his teeth on edge, when he heard the door slide open behind him. He turned, smiling expectantly, certain that it was Georgiana with another plateful of muffins. It seemed more than just a few days since he had seen her.

“What?” Courteous asked. “Why do you look so surprised to see me?”

“I thought you were asleep,” he answered easily.

His wife slid into the seat beside him. She was naked. The newborn light of day caressed her luminous flesh, her flawless skin. Beneficent sipped his coffee and looked away.

“You were smiling and now you’re not,” Courteous pointed out. “Do you find me hideous?”

“What an absurd thing to say.”

“Tell me what kind of body you’d like and I’ll switch.”

“No, no. There is no need to switch, dear. I would love you no matter what look you wore.”

“I don’t like your teeth,” she said.

“My teeth?”

“They’re too long. Big as a horse’s. Why did you choose something with such big teeth?”

He forced himself to laugh. “The better to eat you with, my dear!”

She wrinkled her nose. “It smells out here.”

“It’s the fires. I rather like it.”

“I don’t know how those people stand it.”

“I suppose they have no choice.”

“No, but we do.” She stretched her bare arms over her head. “Let’s go inside, and you can make love to me with those big teeth.”

“Of course. Do you mind if I finish my coffee first?”

“We haven’t made love since you came back from Australia. Is there something wrong?”

His coffee had gone ice cold. He sipped it anyway. A tiny sip.

“No.”

“I’m curious to see if your teeth are the only things overly large.”

She rose from the chair. She was glorious, perfect, and he did not look at her. The door slid shut behind her. Beneficent turned up the volume of his cogbox to drown out his own thoughts. Several minutes later, the door opened again, and he closed his eyes. When he opened them, there was Georgiana, dressed in the drab gray uniform of a persist. He broke into a smile, though a small one. He was self-conscious now about the size of his new teeth.

“Georgiana! But where are my muffins?”

“Mrs. Page sent me to find you, sir.”

“Why would she do that?” he wondered. “She knows where I am.”

“She said you’ve either fallen off the balcony or got lost on your way to the bedroom.”

Looking at her, he was struck by the contrast between her face and his wife’s. Courteous was stunningly beautiful, possessing features only the daughter of a Spool could afford, a face that put Helen’s to shame, and Georgiana’s, though pretty, was so ordinary as to be homely next to hers. Why, then, did something bright and wonderful bloom inside him at the sight of that ordinary face?

“What shall I tell her, Mr. Page?”

“Georgiana, we’ve known one another nearly five years now. Please, call me Beneficent.”

“Yes, sir,” she replied with a slight stammer, lowering her eyes. He could see the fires down below reflecting in them. “Beneficent.”

“Only when we’re alone,” he cautioned. “Never in Courteous’s presence.”

He handed her his empty cup. Trailed the tip of his finger along the back of her hand. She kept herself very still, eyes downcast, holding his empty cup.

“I’ve been thinking of you,” he said softly.

“Of me?” She seemed shocked.

“Since the morning you brought me those delicious muffins. In all my lifetimes, Georgiana, I swear to you I have never tasted anything more sumptuous, more … decadent than your muffins. Will you make them again for me? Tomorrow?”

“Yes, sir, Mr. … ”

“Ah, ah.”

“Beneficent.”

“That’s a good girl.” He sighed. “Well, I suppose I must go see my wife now. Tell me something, Georgiana: What do you think of my new teeth?”

“Your teeth?”

“Do you think they’re too large?”

She shrugged. “You can always switch if you don’t like them.”

“Of course, but I was asking if you liked them.”

“Everyone’s taste is different.”

“You have no opinion, then?”

“It isn’t my opinion that matters.”

“It matters to me.”

“Why?” Something like anger flashed in her eyes. “Why should my opinion matter to you or to anyone?”

“Dear Georgiana,” he answered. “I may be immortal, but I am still human.”

“I suppose that depends on the definition.”

“Of immortality?”

“Of what is human.” She moved at last toward the door, away from him. “And what is not.”

Beneficent went inside and, finding Courteous waiting for him in their private quarters in all her unblemished perfection, made love to her, his cogbox blaring at full volume, not so much to drown out his own thoughts but to drown out Georgiana’s parting words, Of what is human … and what is not.

Afterward, a quick shower and then a short tram ride to his job at the Research Center, the vast complex deep beneath the streets of New New York. Courteous’s father had arranged an appointment for him to the prestigious Relocation Committee, which was charged with the enormous task of finding an Earth-like planet in the vastness of space to which the 3Fs could flee when the sun expired in a few billion years. The work was not terribly demanding, since finitissium technicians performed the bulk of it. Committee members, like Beneficent, mostly reviewed reports they couldn’t understand, wrote—or had written for them—memoranda that few ever bothered to read, or, more often than not, played holographic games downloaded into their cogboxes. It was stultifyingly boring work, but serving on the Relocation Committee was considered a high honor and a stepping stone to the most powerful committee in the Republic, the Conduct Review Committee, Omniscient’s committee, the committee that held in its hand the power of life itself and the one upon which Beneficent desperately wanted to sit.

Where he would be sitting, if not for one condition he had yet to meet. An unspoken but well-understood condition:

Four years into it, and the marriage had yet to produce offspring.

The bonds of holy matrimony were not terribly strong among the 3Fs. A marriage that lasted beyond four or five Transfers was uncommon; Beneficent was on his sixteenth marriage and Omniscient himself had been married more than forty times. Marriage doesn’t last, the saying went, but children go on and on. Courteous’s child—his child—would be a legitimate addition to the clan, and as its father Beneficent would be forever a link in the Spool dynastic chain. His marriage might—probably would—end, but never the children from it. It was the only reason he had pursued Courteous. And, as long as they remained childless, he remained vulnerable.

He had broached the topic many times with her. It was the thing he talked about most. And it seemed the more he talked about it, the less she listened.

“I’m not ready,” she would say. Or “In another decade or two. I’m still young. What’s the rush?”

He dared not press too hard. She wasn’t very bright, but she had siblings and aunts and uncles and cousins who were and who might, if they already hadn’t, become suspicious that he had married her with less than honorable intentions.

He had lunch that day with an old chum from his boarding school days, Candid Sheet, who was in his two hundred and seventeenth year of service on the Research and Development Committee. He hadn’t seen Candid in a while, so he had to reintroduce himself when they met in the restaurant.

“Well, I was going to ask how the shark hunting went, but now I don’t need to,” Candid remarked drily. “You’re taller. I thought you never liked going over six-two.”

“Courteous is five-nine and she wanted something at least six inches taller.”

“I always stay within a half inch of my First Me,” Candid said.

“Why?”

“Because I’m cheap. I don’t want to change out my entire wardrobe with every switch.”

Lunch was a light affair: lobsters, porterhouses, creamed asparagus and fries, baked Alaska, and, ordered on a whim, a plate of blueberry muffins, which arrived during their postlunch cigars.

“Muffins?” Candid asked.

“I positively crave them.” Beneficent took a big bite and was vaguely disappointed. They were not Georgiana’s muffins, not by a long shot. “Tell me what you think about the teeth.”

“What teeth?”

“These teeth.”

“They’re blue.”

“That’s from the muffin. I was talking about the size. Do you think they’re too large?”

“Obviously someone thinks they are.”

“Well, I just switched. I doubt Omniscient will grant a waiver based on the size of my teeth.”

“He would if Courteous asked for one.”

“I have a feeling she might.”

“If she’s interested, I have just the thing for oversize teeth. The prototype has just been approved for testing.”

“What is it?”

“Simply marvelous is what it is! We developed it in conjunction with the Marriage Integrity Committee in an effort to strengthen and prolong fidelity. Basically the program accesses your visual cortex and overlays a holographic screen image over the face of your lover—or anyone’s face, for that matter … ”

“A holographic image of what?”

“Anyone you please! Say you’ve developed a little crush on a coworker or a friend or even some starlet in the televerse. It could be anyone. No need to risk divorce over a little crush. Simply execute the program and, voilà, the virtual face replaces your spouse’s. Or, in your case, Courteous could overlay your current look with your prior appearance, and gone will be the offensive teeth.”

“That does sound marvelous,” Beneficent allowed.

“And the most marvelous part is only you can see it. Your partner need never know.”

“She might like that,” Beneficent said. “I do want her to be happy. We made love this morning, and I could tell the teeth bothered her, even though I was very careful to keep my mouth closed.”

“I’ll send her a copy of the prototype.”

“No,” Beneficent said, popping the last muffin into his mouth. “She’ll think it’s a virus and just delete it. Forward it to my cogbox, and I’ll pass it along.”

“This is just the beginning, Beneficent,” his friend said, his eyes glowing at the prospect. “The second stage of human evolution is coming to an end. In another thousand years, we will be loosed from all corporal confinements. The third and final stage: pure conscious, pure being. The work of your committee will be scrapped—there will be no need to find a new Earth, and we will flee the dying solar system in a vessel the size of a tin cup.”

Beneficent’s heart quickened with something very much like fear.

“What do you mean?”

“Our entire existence will be virtual, a holographic construct of our own design, in which everything we desire will be ours to live and relive for all eternity. The end of pain, loss, heartbreak … and big teeth! The universe will expire, but we will not. We will lie forever in a paradise of our own making. We will be like true gods, then.”

“My! That sounds … ” Beneficent searched for the word. “Wonderful.”

He tried out Candid’s fidelity program that night. The experience was disconcerting, bordering on the bizarre. The image kept slipping every time Courteous moved her head and there was a slight delay in reaction time. For example, Courteous’s mouth would come open and, a millisecond later, the overlaid hologram of Georgiana’s would follow suit. It was as if he were making love to both women—and neither of them. He found himself whispering to his wife, “Hold still, hold still.” For when she held still, the image of Georgiana’s face sprang to life in his visual cortex, the reproduction of it from his memory nearly perfect. His heart would leap exactly as if the woman in his arms actually were the woman of his dreams. Hold still. Hold still.

“Well, how did it go?” Candid asked him when they met again for lunch a few days later.

“She noticed a few glitches.”

“For instance?”

Beneficent explained the shifting, the delay between the real expression and the hologram’s. Candid suggested the problem might not lie in the program, but in whatever image Courteous was accessing. There might not be enough data.

“She might not remember your old self well enough. The hologram is only as good as the recollection.”

“What does that mean?”

“It means the better she can remember a face, the better it will be holographically reproduced. Our studies have shown very poor results if one simply looks at a photograph or even a three-dimensional image. It’s the living face that we best remember, smiling, laughing, frowning, talking, eating, what have you.”

Beneficent said, “That might prove difficult.”

“Because that face was eaten by a shark?”

“Perhaps she knows someone who has smaller, more attractive teeth. I’ll ask her.”

He did not, of course. Instead, he gave his persist a tiny holocorder and instructed him to follow Georgiana anywhere she went outside the company of her mistress. On errands, at night in her quarters (if he could manage it without getting caught), on her off-day. He demanded daily uploads into his cogbox of the footage. At night, after Courteous had fallen asleep, he would creep out of bed and sit on the balcony, playing the footage over and over, trying to memorize every line, every detail of the girl’s face, freezing on the close-ups and lingering over them for hours on end. He pinpointed every freckle, every blemish, calculated the precise angle of her smile. One night he even counted her eyelashes.

Hold still, hold still.

His results improved, but still were not perfect. He decided, if there was any hope of success, he must study Georgiana himself. It was very risky. He didn’t dare stalk the girl, but made excuses to be around her more. He took a week off from work and whisked her and Courteous off to Paris for a four-day shopping spree. Then three weeks skiing in the Alps. And, of course, every morning he insisted Georgiana join him on the balcony for muffins and coffee.

Hold still, hold still! And the image would briefly fall perfectly into line and he could imagine it was Georgiana in his arms, her body beneath his, her sweet breath on his face and his upon hers, which was utterly perfect, down to the last eyelash, until Courteous moved or spoke, shattering the illusion.

“What is it?” she would demand. “Why do you seem so angry when we make love?”

“Not angry,” he answered. “Self-conscious. The teeth thing.”

“Really?” Courteous was becoming suspicious—who wouldn’t? The urgent whispering, over and over, hold still, hold still, and the intense, disconcerting way he stared at her. She began turning off the light before their lovemaking, which ruined it for him; the program did not work in the dark.

And, because it didn’t, something else didn’t work either.

“I am so sorry I ever mentioned it,” Courteous snapped after one particularly embarrassing session, when nothing they tried worked. “Those damned teeth. Tomorrow I’m speaking to Daddy about a waiver.”

“I don’t think it’s the teeth,” he confessed.

“Then what is it? What look do you want for me, Beneficent? I’ll Transfer into it tomorrow.”

“No, no. It isn’t the look, darling. It’s … well, it’s been nearly five years now and there’s still no … Well, it starts to feel a little, how do I say it? Pointless.”

“What feels pointless?”

He laid his hand upon her bare stomach. “Just yesterday your father asked again. Just yesterday.”

“And? Did you tell him he was asking the wrong person? Whichever one I may be in, it’s my body. I will decide when to burden it with child.”

“Perhaps that’s the problem,” he gently suggested. “It is not usually the kind of burden one takes on alone.”

“You have children already, Beneficent,” she reminded him. There were sixty-two of them from his prior marriages.

“But none with you, my love.”

“And without a child, our union is pointless?”

“No, merely … imperfect.”

He woke the next morning from a terrible nightmare. It began well enough. He and Georgiana were making love and in the middle of it she reached up and pulled off her entire face, revealing Courteous’s face beneath the mask. I know, Courteous said to him in the dream. I know.

He felt he had no choice. He must confess his love to Georgiana, for he had come at last to the conclusion that there was no substitute for her, virtual or otherwise. Rising carefully so as not to disturb his wife, he tiptoed onto the balcony and waited for the dawn. He rehearsed what he would say when she arrived with the muffins. He would promise to be careful. He understood that, if they were caught, Georgiana could lose everything. Banishment to the ghetto, perhaps torture or worse. There was a law, rarely enforced but a law nevertheless, that stated carnal relations between 3Fs and the finitissium were punishable by death—for the finitissium, of course. He wouldn’t put it past Courteous to push for the ultimate punishment.

“I can protect you,” he planned to say. “If she discovers us, I’ll find a place for you to hide, and I will visit you as often as I can. I cannot bear it any longer, Georgiana. I cannot bear the thought of being without you.”

The sun rose. The golden light spread over the sprawling slum, kissed the dark surface of the river, crawled up the gleaming edifice atop which he waited.

He waited, and Georgiana never came.

At midmorning, he sprang up and staggered to the door in a panic. Something was wrong; he felt it to the bottom of his immortal being. The sum of four hundred lifetimes told him something was terribly wrong.

And he was right.

The door to her quarters was locked. He knocked softly, though did not dare call out her name. He hurried to the kitchen, but only the cook was there.

“Have you seen Georgiana this morning?” he asked.

No, the cook told him, he had not.

Back to his own quarters, where he found his marital bed empty. He looked up and saw Courteous sitting in the chair he had vacated, wrapped in a robe of flawless white, her long, bare legs, equally flawless, stretched out in front of her. He steadied himself with a few deep breaths before joining her.

“Good morning, my darling.” With a kiss upon her perfect cheek.

“Beneficent. I thought you had gone to work.”

“I’m not feeling very well today.”

“Did you have a bad dream?”

“Why … no. Not that I can remember, why?”

“I thought I heard you cry out in your sleep. It’s been happening quite a bit lately.”

“Has it?”

She was sitting in the sun, he in the shade. She leaned her head toward him.

“Be a dear and rub my head, will you? I have a terrible headache.”

He scooted his chair behind hers and gently rubbed her temples.

“Hmmmm. That feels delicious.”

“Neither one of us has been feeling well lately,” he said. “It’s the doldrums. We can’t afford to get into a rut, darling.”

He was referring to the last terminal human malady: boredom. Extreme cases could be deadly, permanently deadly, since they might lead to suicide, the ultimate taboo in the age of immortality. Sibyls, they were called, after the myth. Sometimes the word was used as a verb, as in, “Did you hear about Gracious? She sibylled yesterday.”

“Let’s get away,” he continued. “Have you ever been to Antarctica? It’s the perfect time of year to visit.”

“We just came back from the Alps,” she reminded him.

“Antarctica is nothing like the Alps.” He traced his fingers down her neck and began to massage her shoulders.

“I meant we just took a trip.”

“I know it’s rather primitive by your standards, but we’ll spare no expense. We’ll bring along the entire staff, your stylist included, that insufferable Carl or Kenneth or whatever his name is … ”

“Kent, darling.”

“Yes, Kent, even him, and Georgiana, of course … ” He took a deep breath and asked, as if he’d just noticed, “but where is Georgiana this morning? I don’t believe I’ve seen her.”

“Georgiana? Oh, I dismissed her.”

His fingers froze, but for an instant, and he said casually, “Oh, really? Dismissed her?” His mind was racing; his fingers were not. They slowly and lovingly caressed her perfect neck. “That’s a surprise. I thought her family had been with you for two hundred years or more.”

Courteous shrugged. Shrugged! A spasm went through his hands. He closed his eyes. Hold still!

“What … when precisely did you dismiss her?”

“Yesterday afternoon. I thought I told you.”

“No. Or if you did, I’ve forgotten it. What was the cause?”

“I caught her stealing.”

“Stealing?” His throat was tightening up. Breathe. Breathe!

“Or conspiring to steal. I confronted her, and she confessed. So I dismissed her.”

“I see. Well. I didn’t know her very well—hardly at all, actually—but thievery didn’t strike me as part of her character.”

“Oh, at your age you should know that the smallest sins are the hardest to hide.”

“But now you’re left without a persist. You should have told me before you sacked her. I could have procured another for you.”

“Why do I need a persist, darling, when I have you?” she purred, rubbing her palms over the backs of his hands. “You will be my persist from now on, and wait on me hand and foot!”

“Nothing would bring me greater joy, my love,” he said, and kissed her forehead. “Nothing at all.”

He waited until the afternoon to escape, telling her he had a meeting down at the Research Center. On board the tram, he dropped a message tagged urgent into his persist’s cogbox.

Meet me at my office. B. P.

“Georgiana is gone,” Beneficent informed him the moment his personal assistant arrived. “I want her found.”

“Have you dropped a message into her cogbox?” his persist asked.

“I don’t have her address. And I can’t ask Courteous for it, and do not ask me why I cannot ask. She is missing.”

“Courteous?”

“Georgiana! Courteous dismissed her. Now, I know she has family in the East Quarter … ”

“The East Quarter?” The persist’s face bled of all color. The East Quarter was a notoriously dangerous section of the ghetto. Even Omniscient’s private police, the dreaded CRC, the Captains of the Review Committee, refused to venture into the East Quarter after sunset.

“She shouldn’t be too hard to find,” Beneficent said. “A persist from the house of Spool hasn’t been dismissed in any of their memories. It will be the talk of the ghetto. Follow the whispers to her front door.”

“And once I find it? What would you have me do?”

“Bring her back to me, of course!”

“Bring her … ?”

“Well, not literally to me. That wouldn’t do. Bring her back here. Yes. Find her and bring her here and once she’s here drop me a message. I’ll find some excuse to come down. If not, stay here with her till morning. Don’t let her out of your sight.”

“And if she refuses?”

“What do you mean? What if she prefers squalor and disease and starvation to the lap of luxury? If she even bothers to ask, tell her you were sent by Candid Sheet, who is looking for a new persist for his wife.”

“And what if I can’t find her?”

“You are not to return until you do.”

The persist was aghast. “I can’t stay in the East Quarter past sunset! It would be suicide!”

“Here.” Beneficent handed him a device slightly smaller than the palm of his hand. “If you find yourself in a tight spot, press the button.”

“What happens when I press the button?”

“Anyone within a hundred feet will be neutralized.”

“What will keep me from being neutralized?”

“The device itself. It insulates whoever’s holding it. Make certain you don’t use it anywhere near Georgiana!”

He pushed the man toward the door. The day was waning. “Hurry! And you better put on some sort of disguise. You’re easy prey with that uniform on. Report to me immediately when you find her. Go!”

Beneficent had lived many lifetimes, but none seemed longer than the rest of that day. Or that night. For the sun drew low in the sky and the shadow of the tower stretched across the river and fell over the East Quarter, and the trash fires glowed a hellish red in the darkening day. Dinner with Courteous was a particular agony. To be forced to sit through seven courses, and afterward to join her for her favorite programs inside the televerse, insipid melodramas about the insipid lives of the insipid 3Fs in which nothing really mattered because there was no real risk, even the risk of a broken heart. And then, the worst of all, lying with her in the utter dark, a blind man groping in a lightless void, where her lightest caress was scorchingly painful. After midnight now, and still no word. What has happened? Where could his persist be? Where could she be? Dropping an urgent message into his missing persist’s cogbox: Where are you? Reply at once! And hearing nothing, nothing at all. Tuning into the breaking-news stream, because surely, if his persist had used the device, word of it would leak out, even from the no-man’s-land of the East Quarter. But there was nothing, nothing. And then, with less than an hour till dawn, actually considering going into the ghetto himself. Not to find his missing persist, damn him, but to find her.

He slept not at all that night—missing the auto-backup to his psyche-card, but that hardly mattered to him—and he rose with the sun. His eyes were red and swollen, as if he had cried his way through the night. He ordered up some coffee and waited for it on the balcony, watching the sunrise. Another message to his persist, and more silence in reply.

The door slid open behind him. He smelled coffee.

And muffins.

“Georgiana … ?” He wondered if he might be hallucinating. How could she be standing there in that same drab uniform, holding a plate of muffins, as if nothing had happened? How was it possible?

She placed the tray on the table, set down his cup. When she leaned over, he could smell her perfume, and his head swam.

“Beneficent?” she asked. “Is something the matter?”

“I thought … Courteous said … Georgiana, where have you been?”

“In the kitchen, making muffins. Oh, you mean yesterday? Mrs. Page gave me the day off. I was visiting my grandmother at the Retired Persists’ Home.”

“You were visiting … ?”

“Didn’t Mrs. Page tell you?”

“Of course. I must have forgotten.” He made an attempt to pick up a muffin. His hand was shaking violently.

“Is everything all right, Beneficent?”

“Well, yes. Everything is fine, Georgiana. Everything is … ”

He could not go on. With any of it. He hurled the crushed pastry over the railing and cried out, “I thought I had lost you! Never do that to me again, do you understand? I cannot bear it, Georgiana. I cannot bear it!”

Before she could escape, he threw his arms around her and pressed his face against the rough material of her uniform. Startled, she pushed against his shoulders, trying to free herself, but he had locked his hands behind her back.

“Mr. Page! Beneficent! What are you doing?”

“I love you. I have loved you for a very long time, and I don’t know what to do about it. I’ve never loved anyone, not in six hundred years, Georgiana, and never will again, not in six billion or six trillion. If I lost you, I would destroy my psyche-card and throw myself off this balcony—I would pull a sibyl, I swear I would! It would be better to die than live a single day without you.”

Pressing his face against her uniform, staining it with his tears.

“You cannot love me, Mr. Page.”

“Exactly the problem!”

“No. I mean, you cannot. I am a finitissium.”

“I don’t care if you’re a turtle! It doesn’t matter to me.”

“It matters to me.”

He gasped. Her words weakened his grip and she broke free. Holding up her hands, as if to say Stop! No farther!

“You’re in love with someone else,” he said. It was not a question.

“There is no one else.”

“Then why does it … ?”

She shook her head. “There is no one else,” she said. “Only you.”

She fell into his arms, her face shining in the first light of the finite sun, and he told her he knew her down to the last eyelash and she smiled as if she understood.

What had Courteous said? The smallest of sins are the hardest to hide. No wonder he had missed it.

The body of his persist was recovered in a steaming trench of raw sewage three days later. His throat had been slashed from ear to ear. The loss raised several uncomfortable questions in the minds of the CRC investigators, questions they shared with Beneficent. Why was his persist in the East Quarter after dark? How had he come into the possession of a neural neutralizer? Beneficent confessed ignorance on both matters, except to say his neutralizer was missing and he had long suspected his persist was addicted to metacoke, a deadly habit that Beneficent nevertheless tolerated because it greatly increased the man’s energy and efficiency. He supposed the poor fellow had gone to the Quarter to fuel his habit. Beyond that, he knew as much as they did. The file was closed that day. Beneficent was, after all, the husband of Omniscient Spool’s favorite daughter.

Beneficent met Georgiana that afternoon in a little cottage at the western edge of the Spool compound. Years ago, the cottage had been a guesthouse, then converted into a gardener’s shed, then finally abandoned. They made love on a pile of old blankets in an atmosphere of moist earth and old fertilizer.

“Is it safe?” he had asked her.

“You know it isn’t,” she answered as they tore off each other’s clothes.

Afterward, he held her in his arms, her head resting on his chest, and he watched the dust motes spin in the afternoon sunlight streaming through the cracks between the rotting boards. He thought of the CRC pulling his persist’s bloated corpse from the trench reeking of human waste. The image had been mass broadcast, and he had inadvertently opened the message in his cogbox. He deleted it immediately, but it was too late, he had seen it.

Rot. Decay. He saw it everywhere lately, though it had surrounded him for generations. Even the beautiful flowers of the Spool gardens growing in abundance reminded him of the finiteness of all life—except his own. One day a strong wind would come and the walls of the old cottage would collapse. The wood would break down to its unrecognizable essence. Winter would come and the flowers would die. And the girl in his arms? She, too. She, too.

But he would go on and on. Young, ancient, blessed, cursed. The time was coming, as sure as the sun would one day swallow the Earth in its fiery maw, when every atom of her body, all seven billion billion billion of them, would be scattered and diffused. Nothing would remain but his memory of her, to torment him for eternity.

“What are you thinking about?” she asked. “Your heart is beating very fast.”

“I’m wondering if she suspects.”

“Of course she suspects. That’s why she played that trick on you, told you I was sacked.”

“She cannot find out, Georgiana. Where does she think you are?”

“I told her my brother was sick.”

“I didn’t know you had a brother.”

“You don’t know many things about me.”

“I want to know everything. Your favorite color, what sort of music you like, what you dream about, the secret things you’ve never told anyone … ”

“I don’t have secrets. Well, just one, and that one you already know.”

They could run away. Flee the city. It would be absurdly easy. There were still remote places in the world where they could hide. He could fake a suicide—the master files of all sibyls were erased, their psyche-cards destroyed. They could grow old together and, when they died, his atoms would scatter and mix with hers, like a flock of fourteen billion billion billion birds twirling in the sky.

“Well, there might be one more,” she said.

“And that is? Come, you must tell me, Georgiana!”

“You won’t like it.”

“I don’t care. Tell me.”

“She will never give you a child.”

He was shocked. “How do you know?”

“Because then you could divorce her. She knows the reason you married her. She’s known since the beginning. ‘He thinks I’m stupid. He thinks I don’t know what he really wants.’ ”

The imitation was so dead-on, Beneficent laughed. “That was perfect. You sound just like her, emphasis, inflection, even your expression. Perfect!”

“I have spent my entire life in her company,” Georgiana reminded him. “Nearly everyone has known her longer, but there is no one who knows her better. Because I am her persist: What does it matter what I know? And I will tell you one last thing I know, my love—she does not love you.”

“Then why doesn’t she leave me?”

“You really don’t know? The answer is obvious. For the same reason she left so many before you at the altar. She is terrified of failure. Making a mistake, admitting she made a mistake—unthinkable! Now that she’s taken the plunge, she will never admit defeat, and she will never allow you to force defeat upon her. As long as there is no child, you will stay, for it is the only thing you desire!”

“The only thing I used to desire.”

He urged her onto her back and stared deeply into her eyes.

“Now tell me what you desire.”

She looked away. “Don’t make me say it. Please.”

“I will hold you here until you say it, my darling, even if it takes a lifetime.”

“A lifetime,” she whispered. “Yes.”

“A thousand lifetimes.”

And she replied, breaking his heart, “A thousand? No.”

The hours with her lasted no longer than a blink of her mortal eye. Those apart from her were longer than the age of the universe. He had never worked hard; now he hardly worked at all. He spent his days scheming, scouring the globe for a remote place in which they could hide, researching the law regarding the penalties in case they were caught, inventing plausible scenarios for a fake suicide. It struck him as exceedingly ironic that he served on a committee tasked with finding a new Eden before the sun blew up in their faces.

He managed to keep his plans from Georgiana for some time. He feared she might refuse. Not because she didn’t love him, but because she also loved her family. If the truth came out, it would mean certain banishment to the ghetto, a sentence worse than death, their lives cut short by violence and disease and the slow suicide of despair. At some point, of course, he would have to tell her. He just didn’t know when. Or how.

And then one day it slipped out.

Courteous was off on a weeklong shopping trip in Buenos Aires with her mother and twelve of her closest sisters. Beneficent gave the staff the week off, and they had the quarters entirely to themselves. For the first time, they had complete privacy. No schedule to keep. No facade to maintain. He had never known such feelings of freedom and release, and he was a man who enjoyed the ultimate freedom. He feasted upon her, day and night. He explored every inch of her lovely terrain. Drunk with love, he let down his guard and confessed his plans.

“You can’t be serious,” she said.

“I couldn’t be more serious, my darling.”

“Oh, Beneficent! My wonderful, mad, naïve, immortal lover. You know it could never work.”

“But why? We’ve but to commit to it with all our hearts. The rest is mere logistics.”

“It will never happen. You’re too afraid of death.”

He was stunned. He had expected her to bring up her family. She would refuse to sacrifice them upon the altar of their love.

“You’re forgetting who you’re talking to,” he said.

“All of you are,” she went on, speaking of the 3Fs. “It is the fruit you hunger for, the drink you thirst for.”

“What you describe isn’t fear but its opposite,” he said.

“What does death bring, Beneficent?” she asked him.

He found himself shaking. Why was he shaking?

“Annihilation.”

“No. It brings beauty.”

“That’s absurd.”

“What is life without death, Beneficent? You of all people can answer that question. A never-ending orgy of emptiness that you stuff with meaningless activity. Everything is disposable, including your relationships—especially your relationships. Courteous understands that much at least. She wants to pretend it matters, that by killing death you have not killed all hope of love.”

“But she doesn’t love me. You said so yourself.”

“Not you, Beneficent. Not love for any particular person. Love. There is no meaning, no beauty, no love without death. Don’t you understand? That’s why you’re afraid. You hunger for something that only death can give you.”

“No,” he said, thinking it over. “I can’t put into words why you’re wrong, but I can say this: I love you. I know I love you. I will always love you, though I live ten billion years.”

Her eyes welled with tears of pity. She touched his face. “That is the effect, not the cause, my love. We both know why you fell in love with a persist, a servant girl, a finitissium. I will pass like a spring rain, Beneficent. And you will go on.”

He puzzled over her argument for many days. One rainy afternoon he walked alone in Omniscient’s gardens, amid the wildflowers and roses, and wondered how much of their beauty came from the fact that they would fade. Death was the horrible blemish they had managed to wipe clean from the human face. Now perfected, was that face hideous? By making it perfect, had they defiled it past all recognition? Was that what lay behind their obsession with “looks,” disposable bodies with which they quickly grew dissatisfied, casting them aside as casually as an old coat? In another thousand years, we will be loosed from all corporal confinements, Candid had predicted. There would be nothing outside themselves but a “tin cup” floating in a lightless void. The pleasures of the flesh would exist only inside their own holographic constructs, in every way “real” but in no way actual. The ultimate freedom of life unending. The ultimate prison of unending life.

“Georgiana is right,” he said to himself, to the roses and wildflowers, to the rain. “It is about death. Not my own, though. No, not mine!”

He turned on his heel and hurried back to his office. He had been looking at the problem from the wrong angle. He’d been selfish. It was not what he was willing to give up, but what was in his power to give. In less than an hour, he had settled upon the basics, the broad outline of a very narrow path that led the way out of his impossible dilemma.

As he told Georgiana: once the heart commits, the rest is logistics.

“I have something for you,” he told her a week later. They were cuddling beneath a blanket in the old cottage. The year had grown old, the days cold, gray, and cheerless. Naked, she shivered against him.

He pressed an envelope tied with red ribbon into her hand.

“What is it?” she asked. He had never given her a present before.

“Open it and see.”

She pulled out the small blue card and said, “Oh, no, Beneficent.”

“Only in case something happens. I’m leaving for my anniversary trip in three days.”

It had been his idea to celebrate the five-year mark of his marriage on the moon, the place where his vow to love Courteous for all eternity had been sealed.

“It’s a very touching gesture, my love,” Georgiana said. “But if something should happen, they will ask why your wife’s persist has your psyche-card.”

“It isn’t my psyche-card.”

Her eyes widened in the gloom. “Courteous’s?”

“Yours.”

She was speechless. What he said made no sense.

“Or it will be,” he added nervously. Her silence unnerved him. “Once you’ve been downloaded onto it.”

“You offer a gift that isn’t yours to give,” she said finally.

“Only if I’m caught.”

“No,” she said, pressing the card against his fist. “Take it back, Beneficent. I don’t want it.”

“It doesn’t hurt, you know,” he murmured, gently stroking her bare arm.

“I won’t be downloaded onto a piece of plastic. Besides, what would be the point?”

“I have a friend who works on the Research and Development Committee. There’s a program he’s working on that can merge two psyches. Well, not a true merger. The donor psyche loses consciousness forever. The receiver retains his personality and memories, but incorporates those of the donor into himself.”

“You would … take me into yourself?”

“In a manner of speaking. I don’t mean now. I mean … I mean, just in case. When … when the time comes.”

“You would make me immortal.” Her eyes shone with wonder and love. “Hiding forever inside you.”

“I told you once I wanted to know everything.”

She threw her arms around his neck and kissed him, again and again, pressing her deliciously warm flesh against the length of his body and, oddly, he swore he could smell muffins.

That evening he and Courteous dined at the Olympus, which no one called the Olympus, but the Top, as in, “Let’s meet at the Top.” The restaurant sailed a thousand feet above the city, held aloft by a quantum envelope of antigravity, offering spectacular sunset views of the metropolis, where the 3Fs might dine like the gods, far removed from the petty mortal strife of the ghetto. The only thing missing was ambrosia, though the Top made up for it with twelve courses, a wine list unrivaled in the Western Hemisphere, and an after-dinner massage.

“To five wonderful years,” Beneficent said, raising his glass.

“No, to persistence,” Courteous said.

Persistence? Was that a play on words? He said, “That implies I had a choice whether to pursue you. But the truth is I couldn’t give up even if I wanted to.”

She set down her glass without drinking. “Then why did you?”

“I didn’t. I haven’t. What do you mean?”

“What is five years to us, Beneficent?” she demanded. “What is five hundred? Five thousand? A day. An hour. A blink of an eye. Look around you. Everything you see in this room, everything you see outside this room for as far as you can see it, all of it will be gone one day, but you and I will endure.”

“Yes,” he said. “We will endure.”

“Why do we celebrate anniversaries and birthdays anyway? Why do we celebrate any benchmark when time no longer matters?”

“It isn’t about time. It’s about—”

“It’s all about time,” she snapped. “Time so abundant it has no value anymore. Once the most precious thing on earth, now the most worthless. It is as if we took a diamond and ground it into a lump of coal.”

“My darling, you know where that kind of thinking leads. Remember what they teach us in school: Value the moment. Don’t think too much about the future. Don’t try to imagine yourself a thousand or ten thousand years from now. Imagine now.”

“And what do you imagine when you imagine now, Beneficent?”

“I imagine you being happy.”

“And I imagine you being honest.”

Their first course arrived, gliding to their table upon a silver tray. Grilled flounder in a light cream sauce. The fish’s eye stared back at Beneficent, blank, unblinking, dead.

“Are you enjoying her, Beneficent?” Casually, as if asking how he liked the fish. “Enjoying the now of her? Because, you know, the then will not be so pretty or exciting. Will you still be enjoying her in two hundred years, when you can hold the entirety of her being in the palm of your hand? She is a diamond now. What will you do when time has ground her to dust?”

He set down his fork and said quietly, “Do you want a divorce?”

She laughed. “Over Georgiana? That thing? Really, Beneficent, you’re forgetting who you’re talking to. You should be punished, I agree, but it would be an odd punishment that gave you exactly what you wanted!”

“You will dismiss her—for real this time.”

“That would be a fitting punishment for her, but not for you. You were willing to sacrifice your own persist to rescue her, which makes me wonder what you would not risk. You might leave me, in any case, and I will not let you leave me, Beneficent. Do you understand? I will not allow you to leave.”

“And how will you stop me?”

“You know how I will stop you. What masochistic pleasure does it give you to hear me say it?”

“You’ll report her to the CRC. She’ll be tried for consorting and put to death.”

“You really should thank me, Beneficent,” Courteous said with a brilliant, beautiful smile. Her face was flawless, the face of Venus herself, and the most hideous thing Beneficent had ever seen. His stomach turned in revulsion.

“Thank you?” he choked, tasting the oily bile bubbling up the back of his throat.

“For keeping her as my persist. That way you may enjoy her until time is finished with her.”

“Hmmm.” He tried to appear calm, but his blood roared in his ears, his heart threatened to explode from his chest. “That seems a punishment even odder than divorce.”

“Do you think so? She will fade bit by bit before your very eyes, hour by hour, day by day, year by year, the slow torture of time, her malicious lord, Beneficent, though not yours, not yours. Your torture will be to watch it—to watch and be powerless to stop it.”

“Your punishment presumes that I love her,” he pointed out coldly, or at least he hoped he sounded cold. Hold still, hold still!

“Your words confirm that you do.”

She dismissed the subject then with a wave of her hand. His love for Georgiana held no more significance for her than the sun setting over the smoky horizon. Pretty in its way, spectacular even, but commonplace, an everyday occurrence.

“Now you said on the way to dinner that you had a surprise for me,” she said. “Something to do with our anniversary. Tell me, Beneficent. I’m dying to know.”

The second course arrived: a tomato bisque and rolls dripping in butter. Courteous tore off a piece of bread and dunked it into the rich soup, and the flesh of the bread turned scarlet.

“It’s not something I can tell you,” he said. “I must show you.”

“I’d prefer that you just tell me.”

“And I would prefer that I just show you.”

Through the next ten courses, as all light bled from the sky, during the after-dinner massage, lying naked beside her on the white divans, the twinkling lights of the city shining through the glass floor, like, his mind insisted, a million diamonds, and then the shower afterward, lathering her perfect flesh, her quintessential form, he maintained his composure. They chatted about their pending celebration upon the moon. Gossiped about the latest scandal among the First and Foremost Families. Discussed the recent news, fresh from their cogboxes, of the fighting in Africa and the proposed union of the Republic of North America with the United States of Europe into one mega-state, the United Atlantic Republic. They boarded the private shuttle a little after midnight, sated in body and spirit.

“Where are we going?” Courteous asked, for it was clear they were not heading in the right direction. “Beneficent? Where are you taking me?”

“To show you the surprise.”

He took her hand. Smiled reassuringly. Kissed her gently. The shuttle dropped into the unloading bay and then it was just a few steps to the tram, and then just a couple of stops to their destination.

“My Transfer boutique?” she asked. “Beneficent, what do you have up your sleeve?”

“Come and see,” he said.

The Transfer agent was waiting for them behind the frosted-glass door, smiling, obsequious, giddy with excitement, a coconspirator in Courteous’s anniversary surprise. Giggling, the agent led Courteous to the prep room, asked in a very dramatic voice, “Are you ready, darling?” and threw open the door. Courteous gasped.

Lying upon the padded table was the wedding look she had chosen over her mother’s objections five years before. Tall with flashing green eyes, because green was Beneficent’s favorite color.

“Well, what do you think?” Beneficent asked, beaming. “They’ve discontinued this look, but I managed to pull a few strings … ”

“I found it,” the agent said proudly. “Pulled it out of deep, deep storage. The last one!”

Courteous pursed her lips and said, “I don’t want it.”

“Oh, darling, please say that you will,” Beneficent said. “It’s perfect, don’t you see? A new beginning—or rather, another chance at the same beginning.” He turned to the agent. “A moment, please.”

When they were alone, he took her hands in his and gazed imploringly into her eyes.

“My old look is waiting in the next room, my love,” he whispered. “I’ll switch, too, and it will be as if the last five years didn’t happen.”

“It’s too soon,” she whispered.

“Your father signed the waivers yesterday. Here.” He dropped the documents into her cogbox.

“Father approved?”

“Courteous, you are right. Of course it was stupid—is stupid—of me to consort with that girl. It’s not the thing I desire, but denied that desire I turned to her … ”

“The thing you desire … ” she echoed. “What do you desire, Beneficent?”

“You know what I desire. What sadistic pleasure does it give you to hear me say it?”

“You would have me believe you seduced Georgiana because I refused to bear you a child? It is my fault?”

“It is the fault of our curse, Courteous. The blemish upon our perfect face.”

“Don’t talk to me in riddles. I don’t care about the waiver; I was never fond of that look.”

“But I was,” he said. “Courteous, you know there is no choice between her and you. How can there be? You said it yourself. She will pass; you will endure. I pledged to care for you for all eternity, and that I will. No mortal thing can ever come between us—how could it? No matter how much I think it can’t or hope it won’t, the flower fades, the rain passes, the sun winks out.”

He fell to his knees before her, still clinging to her hands.

“Put on the look,” he pleaded. “You may switch when we return, but for this, for me, for us, put it back on.”

“Are you a wise man, Beneficent?” she asked, her eyes filling with tears. “Or are you a fool?”

But she allowed him to lift her onto the empty table. Beneficent summoned the Transfer agent. Handed him Courteous’s blue psyche-card for the upload to her master file. Her eyelids fluttered; she was “saved.” A final kiss and then, whispered so only he could hear, “I will do it, Beneficent. I will bear your child.”

“I know, I know,” he whispered back, stroking her perfect cheek. He spoke the obligatory words, May you wake safely upon that far shore … He stepped away from the table. The agent took his place. Unobserved, Beneficent removed her card from the slot and inserted an identical card.

She will pass; you will endure.

The agent administered the first shot, the one that stole away her consciousness. As she drifted into oblivion, she kissed Beneficent’s hand, and said in a desperate voice, “Tell me it isn’t pointless. Tell me that it’s beautiful.”

“It is not, and it is,” he told her, but she had already fallen asleep.

“That was the most romantic thing I’ve ever seen in my life,” the agent said, tears streaming down his cheeks. A moment later, his joy turned to confusion: the system was not responding to the Transfer command. His fingers danced over the touch screen, trying to track down the error.

“Is there a problem?” Beneficent asked.

“Incompatible data streams,” the agent muttered. “The psyche-card isn’t matching the master file … ”

“But it matched on the upload,” Beneficent said.

“I know! I’ve seen mismatches before on uploads—a damaged psyche-card or an input error—but never afterward.”

He pulled the psyche-card from the slot to examine it for defects. Beneficent left his wife’s unconscious body and stood behind the agent, peering over his shoulder.

“It can’t be the card,” Beneficent pointed out. “As you said, if the card was damaged it wouldn’t have uploaded.”

He pulled the blue card from the agent’s grasp and slid it back into the slot.

“Download her.”

“I’m not allowed,” the agent protested. “The protocol is quite clear, Mr. Page. In the event of incompatibility with the master file … ”

“Overwrite it.”

The poor agent was taken aback. “Excuse me?”

“Overwrite the master file.”

“Mr. Page, if I overwrite the master file with corrupted or incompatible data, the damage could be irreversible.”

“I will take full responsibility.”

The agent didn’t quite know what to say. The proper procedure was to abort the Transfer, wake Courteous, and run a full system check to track down the error. With any other client, he might refuse, but this was not just any other client. This was a member of the first and foremost family of all the First and Foremost Families. Refusal could cost him his livelihood. Or worse, his life. But if he didn’t refuse, if he overwrote the file and something terrible happened, he still would be held responsible for ignoring the protocol! He was in an impossible situation. His only prayer was Beneficent’s same prayer: that the Transfer took without a hitch.

May you wake safely upon that far shore …

The eyelids of Courteous’s new look—or her old one, since she had worn it before, on her wedding day—fluttered as the data flooded into its brain, igniting synapses, wiring the irreversible connections that made up the human map, mixing memory and desire, breeding lilacs, as the poet said, out of the dead land. Both men held their breaths until it was done, and the green eyes came open, the pupils contracting in the sudden onslaught of light. Beneficent leaned over, so his face filled the entirety of her vision, so that all she could see was his reassuring smile.

“Hello, my love.”

Her body convulsed upon the table, and Beneficent seized her flailing hands and held them tightly between his own, whispering urgently, “No, no, no. Don’t be afraid. It’s fine now, perfectly fine, it’s done, you’re here with me forever now, my precious one, my darling, my true love.”

And he covered her new face with kisses, Georgiana’s perfect, flawless face.

“Beneficent,” Georgiana whispered hoarsely. “What have you done?”

“It is not about what I am willing to give up for you,” he told her. “But what I can give to you.”

Beneficent dropped a message into Georgiana’s cogbox: You are Courteous now! If he suspects anything, we’re both doomed!

“And how are we feeling?” the agent asked Georgiana, patting her bare arm.

“A little light-headed,” she murmured, clutching her lover’s hand.

“Hmmm-mmmm.” The agent was studying her vitals on the monitors. Blood pressure and heart rate slightly elevated, but that was to be expected, brain activity normal. He ran quickly through the obligatory questions. What year was it? Who was the president of the Republic? What was her mother’s maiden name? What was her earliest memory? She answered all fifty questions correctly—there was no one who knew her mistress better—hesitating on only one: What is the name of your persist?

The agent had her wiggle her toes, flex her fingers. He tested her reflexes, then helped her down from the table and ran the usual tests on balance, coordination, and basic neurological function. All the while, messages from Beneficent dropped into her cogbox. You’re doing marvelously! It’s almost over. Be strong, my love.

The agent was a bit baffled, but relieved. The Transfer was a complete success. He excused himself and wheeled Courteous into the adjoining room for the second shot, the one which would stop her heart. It could be disconcerting, to say the least, to watch the body you had just a moment before occupied die right before your eyes. In any other age, it would be called murder. In this age, it was called termination of the redundancy.

In this particular case, however, it was murder.

“You must stop him,” Georgiana demanded.

“It’s too late,” he said.

She shoved him aside and started toward the door, but collapsed before she had taken two steps. A Transfer could be overwhelming, a disorienting existential disconnect, particularly the first and especially if you’ve had no warning, no chance to prepare yourself mentally. Beneficent lifted her into his arms and carried her back to the table.

“Why?” she asked weakly.

“Because I could not suffer you to die.”

The Transfer agent returned to their room. Georgiana burst into inconsolable tears, but it was too late: Courteous was already on her way to the incinerator.

At Beneficent’s request, the agent gave Georgiana a mild sedative. It was not an uncommon reaction, to grieve the passing of your former look. The little death, it was called.

He brought her back to their quarters in the white tower and laid her in his marital bed, drawing the covers over her shivering form, promising her she would feel better in the morning. Dawn was near. He went onto the balcony and waited.

He closed his eyes when the door behind him slid open. The smell of warm muffins. Her delicate scent. What had he said to Courteous? The flower fades, the rain passes, the sun winks out. Her cool hands pressed against his closed eyes and her soft voice murmured in his ear.

“Good morning, my love.”

He grasped her wrists and stood up. She saw at once something in his expression. Love gives us eyes that see down to the marrow of our lover’s bones.

“What is it, Beneficent?” she whispered.

“Nothing,” he answered, gazing into the face of Georgiana’s redundancy. He realized he was seeing this face for the last time, and his heart ached with a sudden rush of grief. You’re smashing the empty vase, he told himself sternly, the flower within endures! Keeping a firm grip upon her wrists, he swung her toward the railing. She giggled nervously, a little unnerved and confused.

“A trifle,” he said. “Not to be considered.” And he kissed her one last time before hurling her over the railing.

Two days later, they departed for the moon to celebrate the anniversary of his marriage to his dead wife. It was understandably hard for Georgiana. Not only did she have to adjust to her new body, which can be hard enough, but she had to adjust while pretending to be her former mistress, mourning the untimely and tragic suicide of her persist, who also happened to be herself! Beneficent had justifiable concern for her mental health. The trip could not have come at the more perfect time. Just the two of them, away from all family and familiar surroundings, the ideal opportunity for her to recover and get used to her new body—and the mind-boggling reality of life eternal.

Their room had a glass dome for a ceiling, so when they made love they could see the Earth suspended like a glittering blue diamond in the star-encrusted sky. Their bodies, unfettered from Earth’s heavier gravity, strangely insubstantial, as if their bones were hollow. She cried afterward and here even her tears were lighter and rolled as if in slow motion down her perfect cheeks.

“You lied to me,” she accused him. “You said you would take me into yourself, not imprison me.”

“Imprison you?” He was confused. “But I have freed you, Georgiana.”

“You are a murderer, and I am the accessory to the crime.”

“More like the motive, I would say.”

She struck him across the cheek. The blow fell lightly, though, like her tears.

“What I have done, I have done,” he said simply. “It was the only way.”

He kissed away her tears. They did not taste the same as her old tears. He pushed that disconcerting thought away. Not the vase, but the flower! He looked deeply into her luminous green eyes, the color of the wet grass of Omniscient’s garden, and, despite himself, saw a stranger there.

“If you don’t like it, you can always choose another,” he said.

“Another what?”

“Another look. I don’t mind. It isn’t the look I love, it’s you, Georgiana. Why, you can even switch back if you like.”

“Switch back? Switch back into what?”

“All they need is a sample from your former self. A strand of hair from your comb, for example. They can grow a replacement.” His voice rose with his spirits. Of course! Why hadn’t he thought of it before? “A replacement you can replace when it reaches a certain age so you will always be the Georgiana you always were!”

“And how will we explain that?” she demanded. “A 3F switching to a replica of her dead persist?”

“An expression of your love for her,” he offered rather weakly. “A tribute to her lifelong devotion. A way to bring her back from the grave, as it were … ”

“They will think I’ve lost my mind—or that Courteous has lost her mind, I should say. I don’t think you understand the magnitude of your crimes, Beneficent. Not only did you murder her, but you have imprisoned me inside her body, inside her life, for now, for all eternity, I must live inside the fiction that I am her … Oh God, what have you done? Beneficent, what have you done?”

He decided it was a terrible mistake, putting Georgiana into a look Courteous had worn, particularly a look she had worn on her wedding day. It was too much for both of them; it raised his dead wife bodily so she stood between them, casting a blemish over the perfection of their love. Upon their return to New New York, he approached Omniscient and tactfully asked for another waiver, explaining that his favorite daughter had not liked her anniversary present as much as they both thought she would. He brought Georgiana back to the boutique to pick out a new look, something that would remind neither of them of Courteous. But that proved more difficult in practice than in theory, for some part of every sample reminded Georgiana of her dead mistress. The nose. The shape of the ears. The curve of the mouth. He grew frustrated, at one point blurting out, “Well, good God, there’s going to be some resemblance. We’re human after all—we can’t transfer you into a dog!” They left without making a choice.

That night, he was unable to perform in bed, and he fled onto the balcony, his heart burdened with a sense of profound and utter despair. She followed him without even pausing to throw a robe over her faultless body and, when he saw her naked, he snarled at her to conceal herself. Her nakedness reminded him too much of Courteous, who had lacked all modesty.

“What shall I put on?” she shot back. “My old uniform? Would you like that, Beneficent? I’ll put it back on, though it’s much too small for me now, and I’ll go down to the kitchen and make you some fresh muffins—is that what would please you?”

That was it, he thought. That must be it. He brought a few strands of her original hair to the Incubation Facility. While he waited for the new Georgiana to be grown, he spoke to her family and friends, or rather Courteous’s family and friends, explaining that the reason she had not chosen a new persist was that she could not move past the loss of her old one. She had loved Georgiana like a sister. Well, just a little bit more than her actual sisters and half sisters, to be honest. Her psych-profile indicated it might help her through the mourning process if she switched into a replica of the poor girl for a few years. To his astonishment, everyone thought it was a marvelous idea, terribly touching and therapeutic at the same time. Somehow the news leaked, and stories about the plan began to appear in cogboxes and in the televerse. It became a national sensation. Never had the two worlds of 3Fs and finitissium collided in such a way. He managed to keep Georgiana out of the public eye, refusing all requests with the excuse that she was too overcome with grief to grant any interviews.

When the time came and she saw her new—that is, her old—body lying lifelessly upon the table in the Transfer room, Georgiana was overcome. The prospect did not feel like a return to her. To her it was the pool. It was the delicious fruit. And when she awoke and looked at Beneficent with the same eyes that had adored him in the old cottage, he did not appear the same, as if he had switched into a new body and this face before her was the face of a stranger. That night she dissolved into tears when he tried to make love to her. To her, it did not feel like lovemaking.

It felt like rape.

Beneficent assured her these feelings would pass. They had an eternity to grow used to each other again. Privately, he was not so sanguine. He, too, was deeply troubled. She was not, though he tried with every ounce of his ancient being to pretend otherwise, the same sweet persist he had fallen in love with twenty years before. He grew a little desperate, and one night while they made love activated the old program Candid had given him, generating a holographic image in his visual cortex of her former face, identical in every regard to her current one, overlaying the present with the past, and the past jerked and shifted and refused to hold still, and afterward he had a horrible dream of standing in a pool of crystal clear water, dying of thirst but unable to drink.

Her body grew old. She switched into a new one—that is, the old one—but the problem, for lack of a better word, persisted. She agreed, for both their sakes, to wear her old uniform when they were alone in their quarters. She even cooked his muffins and brought them to him on the balcony at sunrise. It was on one of these mornings, while she sat across from him silently watching the smoke from the cooking fires curl lazily into the temporal blue, that he looked over at her profile and recoiled in disgust. He set down his half-eaten muffin. It tasted like cardboard.

One day several thousand thereafter, he returned home from work to find her missing. No note. No message from her in his cogbox. He dropped a message into hers; they had reservations that evening at the Top, and he wondered where she might have gone. The message went unanswered. He dropped several more into the family’s boxes: Have you seen Courteous? We have a seven thirty at the Top. No one had seen her all day. For a brief moment, he was filled with terror. Somehow they’d been found out. The CRC had taken her into custody. Any moment they would appear at his door. Arrest. Conviction. Oblivion. He tore apart their quarters, looking for any clue that might tell him where she had gone. He even dug through the trash, and that’s where he found her psyche-card, shredded into a dozen pieces. While he stared with dumb horror at the shards of plastic in his hands, as if it had been waiting for the perfect time to drop, a message appeared in his cogbox:

My love. By the time you receive this …

He silenced her voice, flung the useless remains of her memory onto the floor, and raced from the room, into the elevator, onto the launch platform, into the hovercraft, across the darkening landscape, high above the petty mortal strife, his thought a single refrain, Hold still, hold still! He did not know where she was, but he knew where he must go.

He leapt out of the craft onto the wet grass of Omniscient’s garden and tore down the path, between the undulated heads of a thousand flowers, toward the old cottage, where a crowd had already gathered, including members of the press and agents of the CRC. Courteous’s mother and Genuine, her favorite sister, were there too, and when they saw him they pushed the crowd aside, making a path for him to the front door that hung precariously upon a single hinge. He stepped inside, knowing what he would find.

There is no meaning, no beauty, no love …

He fell to his knees before her lifeless body and, forgetting himself in that moment, cried out, “Georgiana! Georgiana, do not leave me!”

A hush fell over the onlookers, the witnesses she had arranged for her suicide to prove she was a Sibyl, to ensure her master file would be destroyed. Someone whispered, “He calls her Georgiana!” And another: “He’s mad with grief, poor thing.”

“Like her,” a third said. “Didn’t you hear? Courteous left a note: she simply could not go on without her darling Georgiana!”

“I saved you,” Beneficent wailed. “I gave you eternal life! Don’t go, Georgiana, don’t go!”

But it was too late. She was gone. In truth, she had left him long ago. The moment he stole her mortality from her, his true love was gone.

Courteous had told him that time had no power or meaning anymore, and he prayed she was wrong, that with the passage of enough of it, the pain might fade, the memory of Georgiana would recede after a few thousand years into a sepia-toned, bittersweet, infinitesimally small point in his endless life, a life that expanded like the universe until objects dropped over the cosmic horizon, forever too far away to see. A few thousand years did pass, during which he remarried—several times—fathered hundreds of more children, even rose into the Conduct Review Committee, where he sat at the right hand of Courteous’s father. Georgiana’s death had bound him to the family as no offspring ever could.

Then a million years. And another. And another. Then a billion and a billion more on top of that. The sun ballooned in the sky, turned an angry red. Temperatures soared. The oceans began to evaporate. Their probes located another planet in a distant galaxy, nearly identical to Earth and much younger, a new home that would last a good six or seven billion years. The basecamp on one of Saturn’s moons was completed, their last refuge before the final launch into deep space.

As he settled into his seat for the ferry ride to Titan, next to his new wife—they had been married only six hundred years—Beneficent looked out the window for his last view of Earth, a hellish landscape, lifeless, infused in crimson light, not a leaf or flower or stubborn weed left anywhere (the weeds were the last to die). He took his wife’s perfect hand and closed his perfect eyes and sorted through his cogbox until he found the message he had been saving since, it seemed to him, the dawn of time. A time when the world was green and wildflowers bloomed in summer gardens and eternal life had yet to mar the perfect mortal face of his beloved. My love. By the time you receive this …

He had started to delete it innumerable times over the millennia. It wasn’t the words so much that he dreaded to hear—he was sure he knew the gist of them—but the sound of her voice. He wasn’t sure he could bear hearing it again. He had kept the message, though, because nothing else of her remained. Those seven billion billion billion atoms had diffused long ago across the vast surface of a dying world.

It seemed fitting to hear her voice now, before that world was gone. So he played the message as the seat beneath him shuddered and he began to rise above the shattered Earth, her voice filling the darkness inside his head, the lightless abyss between his immortal ears:

My love. By the time you receive this I will be gone. I will have taken back the precious thing that was taken from me. Do not grieve for me, beloved. And do not torture yourself with blame and guilt. Death is the yoke that frees me. From boredom and regret and envy, though the worst of these is envy. I am filled with it. I envy every living thing. I envy the trees. I envy the grass. I envy everything that grows or walks or crawls upon the face of the Earth. You would make me perfect by giving me eternal life, but, beloved, don’t you understand it was your love that made me immortal? Your love that perfected me? And that it was the very fact that I would one day die that made me precious to you? Now that I am gone, your love will come back to you. It will, I pray, sustain you until the end of time, until the never-ending ends and the last star dies.

Beneficent dropped his reply into the void, where it fell for an eternity, unheard:

Tell me it isn’t pointless. Tell me that it’s beautiful.