Shadowdark's immortality was not the result of technology, but a freak of nature, something he was born with. For all anyone knew, the same freak might have happened dozens of times before or since, but only Shadowdark and a handful of his descendants survived the myriad diseases and omnipresent dangers to life and limb that presumably killed off all the other people born with the same peculiarity.
Shadowdark's great peculiarity was in the way he grew. Once he reached adolescence he grew very, very slowly, at a steadily decreasing rate-but never completely stopped. At the age of thirty he stood less than a meter and a half in height; at sixty he still looked thirty, but stood just over a hundred and sixty centimeters, as nearly as he could recall.
Since centimeters had not yet been invented at the time, and no records existed except Shadowdark's memory, the exact height might not be right, but the basic concept was. Shadowdark's body never finished growing, never made the transition from growth to maturity-and therefore to decay.
Bredon interrupted, “Like a tree, you mean?"
“Yes, pretty much like a tree,” Gamesmaster agreed.
“But trees eventually die anyway, when they get too big."
“I know that; I'm coming to that."
There were limits to Shadowdark's growth, of course, Gamesmaster continued; eventually, when he was slightly over two thousand years old, his heart gave out and had to be repaired, and later his skeleton collapsed under its own weight, and he had to have most of it replaced. Fortunately, by the time his natural longevity began to fail him, technology had reached the point where it could take over and keep him going indefinitely. Otherwise he would have died long ago. If any immortals had been born much before Shadowdark they would surely be dead by now in any case, since medical technology had not advanced quickly enough to have saved them.
“Are you sure?” Bredon asked.
“No,” Gamesmaster answered. “Who's telling this, you or me?"
“You are."
“Then shut up."
Bredon shut up, and Gamesmaster went on with his story.
In his early years, before he fully realized just how unique he was, Shadowdark had tried to lead a normal life. His peculiarity forced him to relocate every twenty or thirty years, establishing a new identity each time, but in between these moves he did his best to maintain a home and family and business.
Later on, he found the constant loss of wives, friends, and children to be too depressing, and experimented with a variety of lifestyles. By then, however, he had left behind a good many children, and a few of them had inherited his abnormal growth pattern.
Most of these died eventually, by violence or from disease, but a few managed to survive. Daughters did very poorly; bearing children in those primitive times significantly increased their risks.
His son Peter was the oldest survivor. He was born when Shadowdark was less than a century old and still living in his native land.
The second was Thaddeus. He was born in a land that had been conquered and abused by Shadowdark's people; Gamesmaster provided the name and date, but neither meant anything to Bredon. He ignored all the names and dates on Terra as essentially meaningless; the only important fact was that this land was being mistreated by Shadowdark's countrymen.
Shadowdark had fled to this place at the age of a century or so, no longer welcome in his own country, and had taken a local woman as his wife. The marriage had not been happy, and Thaddeus was not a happy child-particularly not after his father abandoned him and his sisters.
Gamesmaster displayed an image of Thaddeus, and Bredon asked, “Why is he called Thaddeus the Black? He isn't much darker than I am."
“I don't know,” Gamesmaster said. “I suppose it has something to do with his temper, or his record."
“Oh.” Bredon shut up, and Gamesmaster continued.
Shadowdark and Thaddeus found each other again decades later, and were, in time, apparently reconciled with one another, their disagreements not so much forgotten as temporarily set aside. They saw one another off and on over the centuries, sometimes travelling together or even living together for a time, but the relationship always had its unpleasant side. The only thing that really held them together, far more important than their blood relationship, was their shared memories. They were the only people still alive who remembered the land of Thaddeus's birth and the people they had known and loved there. Peter, the only other person of approximately the same age, did not visit that land until centuries later, when everything had been altered beyond recognition.
When he was nearing two thousand years of age, Shadowdark went through a bad period. Gamesmaster could provide no details, but apparently the enforced isolation and duplicity of being an immortal in a world of mortals had driven him temporarily insane. When he recovered, he decided that he needed a goal, something worthy of an immortal, something that would distract him and that might somehow put an end to his loneliness.
What he hit upon was the accumulation of wealth and power. He had pursued both before, but had never bothered to hold onto them for long. Neither greatly interested him in and of itself.
Now, however, what he intended to do was to buy himself into a position where he could reveal his immortality without fearing that jealous mortals would kill or imprison him.
At first he had planned on an island, where he could establish himself as a god-king, but before he could achieve this modest goal humans began to make their first steps toward travelling to other worlds, and the idea of having an entire world to himself appealed to him. He set his sights on ruling his own planet.
When he had his planet, finally, he needed something to do with it, and therefore set out to conquer others, as well. It gave him something to do to pass the time, something that he had not done before.
The end result was the Imperium, which at its peak united twenty-four worlds under Shadowdark's absolute rule. This, Gamesmaster noted, was long after Denner's Wreck had been found and then lost again. In fact, even the first planet, Alpha Imperium, had not been found until after Denner's Wreck had been lost.
“Why didn't he go to another world sooner, then?” Bredon asked. “Why didn't he come here?"
“Because he wanted a world of his own, not just to be a member of a colony."
“But if he'd lived so long, had so much experience, couldn't he have conquered a planet like this one?"
“Well, yeah, he probably could have, but he didn't."
“Why not?"
“How the hell should I know? I'm just a dumb machine; all I know is what's in the records or what people have told me, all right?"
“All right,” Bredon said, somewhat cowed by this outburst.
“May I go on?"
“Please, go on."
“Thank you.” Gamesmaster paused, in imitation of a human gathering his wits, and then continued its tale.
Like everything else, it explained, even absolute power will eventually bore an immortal. Furthermore, during Shadowdark's reign on Alpha Imperium artificial immortality, using tailored symbiotes and genetic reprogramming, had been developed and become widespread, so that he no longer needed to disguise his agelessness. In time, he lost interest in the Imperium and left.
Before leaving, however, he located his son Peter, and appointed him as the new ruler in his stead. To leave the empire without a monarch would have been unnecessary cruelty; he had set the entire system up so that it revolved around himself, and with his departure the whole structure would have collapsed into anarchy and civil war had he not appointed a replacement.
Peter, however, found he had little taste for power, and furthermore was not very good at wielding it. After less than a century he grew tired of the whole thing and turned it over to Thaddeus.