Surely if the islanders knew anything about “the secret of ETERNAL LIFE,” there’d be a bit more about them, and it, in the library?
It was mere stubbornness, or reluctance to go back to the sullen travel agent and admit my mistake, that impelled me to the docks the next morning.
I cheered up no end when I saw my ship, a charming mini-liner with about thirty pleasant staterooms. Its fortnightly round took it to several islands farther west than Aya. Its sister ship, stopping by on the homeward leg, would bring me back to the mainland at the end of my week. Or perhaps I would simply stay aboard and have a two-week cruise? That was fine with the ship’s staff. They were informal, even lackadaisical, about arrangements. I had the impression that low energy and a short attention span were quite common among Yendians. But my companions on the ship were undemanding, and the cold fish salads were excellent. I spent two days on the top deck watching seabirds swoop, great red fish leap, and translucent vanewings hover over the sea.
We sighted Aya very early in the morning of the third day. At the mouth of the bay the smell of the marshes was truly discouraging; but a conversation with the ship’s captain had decided me to visit Aya after all, and I disembarked.
The captain, a man of sixty or so, had assured me that there were indeed immortals on the island. They were not born immortal but contracted immortality from the bite of the island flies. It was, he thought, a virus. “You’ll want to take precautions,” he said. “It’s rare. I don’t think there’s been a new case in the last hundred years—longer, maybe. But you don’t want to take chances.”
After pondering a while I inquired, as delicately as possible, though delicacy is hard to achieve on the translatomat, whether there weren’t people who wanted to escape death—people who came to the island hoping to be bitten by one of these lively flies. Was there a drawback I did not know about, some price too high to pay even for immortality?
The captain considered my question. He was slow-spoken, unexcitable, verging on the lugubrious. “I think so,” he said. He looked at me. “You can judge,” he said. “After you’ve been there.”
He would say no more. A ship’s captain is a person who has that privilege.
The ship did not put into the bay, but was met out beyond the bar by a boat that took passengers ashore. The other passengers were still in their cabins. Nobody but the captain and a couple of sailors watched me (all rigged out head to foot in a suit of strong but gauzy mesh which I had rented from the ship) clamber down into the boat and wave good-bye. The captain nodded. One of the sailors waved. I was frightened. It was no help at all that I didn’t know what I was frightened of.
Putting the captain and Postwand together, it sounded as if the price of immortality was the horrible disease udreba. But I really had very little evidence, and my curiosity was intense. If a virus that made you immortal turned up in my country, vast sums of money would be poured into studying it, and if it had bad effects, scientists would alter it genetically to get rid of them, and the talk shows would yatter on about it, and news anchors would pontificate about it, and the Pope would do some pontificating too, and so would all the other holy men, and meanwhile the very rich would be cornering not only the market but the supplies. And then the very rich would be even more different from you and me.
I was curious why none of this had happened. The Yendians were apparently so uninterested in their chance to be immortal that there was scarcely anything about it in the library.
But I could see, as the boat drew close to the town, that the travel agent had been a bit disingenuous. There had been hotels here—a couple of big ones, four stories. They were all visibly derelict, signs askew, windows boarded or blank.
The boatman, a shy young man, rather nice-looking as well as I could tell through his gauze envelope, said, “Hunters’ lodge, ma’am?” into my translatomat. I nodded and he sailed us neatly to a small jetty at the north end of the docks. The waterfront too had seen better days. It was now sagging and forlorn, no ships, only a couple of trawlers or crabbers. I stepped up onto the dock, looking about nervously for flies; but there were none at the moment. I tipped the boatman a couple of radio, and he was so grateful he took me up the street, a sad little street, to the diamond hunters’ lodge. It consisted of eight or nine decrepit cabins managed by a dispirited woman who, speaking slowly but without any commas or periods, said to take number 4 because the screens were the best ones breakfast at eight dinner at seven eighteen radio and did I want a lunch packed a radio fifty extra.
All the other cabins were unoccupied. The toilet had a little, internal, eternal leak, link… tink, which I could not find the source of. Dinner and breakfast arrived on trays, and were edible. The flies arrived with the heat of the day, plenty of them, but not the thick fearsome swarms I had expected. The screens kept them out, and the gauze suit kept them from biting. They were small, weak-looking, brownish flies.
That day and the next morning, walking about the town, the name of which I could not find written anywhere, I felt that the Yendian tendency to depression had bottomed out here, attained nadir. The islanders were a sad people. They were listless. They were lifeless. My mind turned up that word and stared at it.
I realised I’d waste my whole week just getting depressed if I didn’t rouse up my courage and ask some questions. I saw my young boatman fishing off the jetty and went to talk to him.
“Will you tell me about the immortals?” I asked him, after some halting amenities.
“Well, most people just walk around and look for them. In the woods,” he said.
“No, not the diamonds,” I said, checking the translatomat. “I’m not really very interested in diamonds.”
“Nobody much is any more,” he said. “There used to be a lot of tourists and diamond hunters. I guess they do something else now.”
“But I read in a book that there are people here who live very, very long lives—who actually don’t die.”
“Yes,” he said, placidly.
“Are there any immortal people in town? Do you know any of them?”
He checked his fishing line. “Well, no,” he said. “There was a new one, way back in my grandpa’s time, but it went to the mainland. It was a woman. I guess there’s an old one in the village.” He nodded towards the inland. “Mother saw it once.”