“I salute you,” cries the architect, sitting upright and raising his hand in a smart military salute. “Tell me why.” “For personal reasons that have nothing to do with the therapy. This will allow you, at least, many more centuries of good work. I am a Swedish Socialist who sees as clearly as you the evils of a self-perpetuating propertied class. I hope that a self-perpetuating academy of mankind’s intelligent servants will counteract it, as the Christian church sometimes counteracted feudal warlords. That will be a long, weary struggle of which I am already tired.”
The architect presses a switch that lowers his leg-rest, saying, “I must now furiously think in silence for a while. Excuse me.”
He springs up and paces round the big room with bowed head and hands clasped behind back.
The scientist strolls to the drinks cabinet, lifts a sherry bottle, silently offers to fill the lawyer’s half-empty glass. She refuses with a shake of the head. He fills a tumbler from a can of Pilsner lager and carries it to the longest window. This allows a larger view of the landscape he watched earlier, with tops of pines and cypresses visible through walls to left and right. The wall with the entrance door is a huge mirror reflecting the three window walls, so the room seems a magic carpet floating above the Italian Riviera. The architect halts before this mirror and examines his reflection like a zoologist studying a fascinating but repulsive beast. He asks, “Would this bloated belly of mine also be immortalized?”
Without turning the scientist says, “Eat less, exercise properly and you could be rid of it in a few months.”
“Oho! So your therapy involves no grafting? No healthy young man of my blood group will be kidnapped and murdered and have his good organs replace my decrepit ones?”
“Of course not!” cries the lawyer, standing and refilling her sherry glass. The scientist says, “The results of such therapy are too patchy to last. My therapy keeps restoring cells inherited at birth.”
“Good! I have never believed that our intelligence and memory exist mainly in the brain. Lucretius knew our spirits are distributed through every part of our body. An architect’s talent is gained by striding through lands and rooms while his eyes notice every kind of spatial limit, the nerves and muscles of arms and fingers learn skill in draughtsmanship. Like Leonardo I am ambidextrous, a fact I hid from my closest assistants, though not from my dearly beloved wives. I give you this secret in return for the dangerous secret you are offering me. If I understand rightly, I need not be rejuvenated? Need not forget the carefully, painfully learned experiences of a lifetime?”
“Not at once,” says the scientist, “but in an eternal future you will only make room for new discoveries by forgetting more and more of the past. I predict that after several millennia immortals will have forgotten their childhoods, first marriages and children and probably the planet where they were born. I want no such future, but am not an artist, far less one who builds good homes for people who are not rich and privileged. Perhaps Goethe was right. He said artists have recurring puberties that keep returning them to a younger state before they advance to a new one.”
“You compliment me,” says the architect, now standing beside the scientist and watching the island that might be Monte Cristo, “but Goethe was an old bore long before his death, when he had just managed to finish writing the end of Faust. Remember what Schiller said on reading the start of that play thirty years earlier — it would be wonderful to see if Faust would be corrupted or win free of the Devil he employed. Goethe went on to make Faust a heartless seducer, murderer, warlord, an evictor of peasants and piratical millionaire who thinks he is liberating mankind when his grave is being dug. So Goethe sends his soul up to a heaven ruled by a female from Dante’s Paradiso.”
Behind them a harsh voice cries, “I must interrupt this comradely swapping of cultural references. I reject the cynical reasons given by the maestro for our Foundation’s offer, but the offer exists. Does he accept it? Maestro, please sign this contract.”
She takes a sheaf of pages from her briefcase, goes to a map chest and spreads them on top saying, “Endon expects no payment for the therapy, which will be provided painlessly once a month by a doctor from the Foundation. All Endon requires in return is your complete silence about the matter.”
“Nor will it change your character at first,” says the scientist dryly, “though I think it will inevitably induce insane smugness toward all who have died or will die.”
The architect goes to the chest, takes a fountain pen from the pocket of his gown saying, “I do not want to know the exact terms of this shameless document, but I will obviously be safer if I sign it.”
“Sign each page separately and we will witness them,” says the lawyer.
The architect asks the scientist, “You have signed such a contract?”
“Yes, years ago. It commits the signatory to keeping the therapy secret, but allows freedom to refuse or discontinue it, as I am doing.”
“You have chosen rightly,” says the architect. “I will stay as I am.”
He carefully signs every page to which his guests add their signatures, then he asks, “Am I to have a copy?”
“No.” says the lawyer, putting the sheaf into her briefcase. From a drawer in the chest the architect takes two cream-coloured papers with a small picture on each saying, “Thank you for this visit. Please accept a little gift as a souvenir. My latest hobby is the obsolete art of mezzotinting.”
He carries the prints to a desk, lifts a pencil, sees that the point is needle-sharp, then carefully writes small words after his signature in the lower margins. He slips each print into a black plastic envelope, lifts a drumstick and strokes a copper gong with the padded end, making a noise like the roar of a melodious lion. He hands each visitor an envelope and shakes their hand as the little girl enters.
“Minnie,” he says, “lead the fine lady and gentleman down to their car where a poor bored chauffeur has been languishing for nearly two hours. Goodbye my friends. This has been a pleasant meeting, productive of much thought. Tell your Foundation that I will keep their secret and stay as I am.”
The child leads the visitors to a lift with glass walls. It takes them down a glass-walled shaft to a yard where they enter an old-fashioned Rolls-Royce with a screen dividing passengers from driver. As it speeds to the nearest airport the scientist asks, “Are we still being recorded?”
“What do you mean?”
“Yesterday Endon invited me to have a discreet chip embedded in my neck so that all the maestro said, and (of course) all we said, would be recorded. I refused. You will have received the same invitation. I assume you accepted?”
She turns her head and looks at passing scenery. He sniggers and says, “That question may be taken as proof that I am a loose wheel. You might say you are sorry for my imminent demise, if that would not compromise you.”
She says sharply, “Your pessimism is absurd. Endon knows how trustworthy you are.”
He murmurs, “A safely ambiguous remark.”