“You mean spending two nights in his room made him a demon from Hell?”
“Merely the effect of Hyperfunction on the human fight-or-flight reflex,” said Labienus dismissively. “It’s not his fault, poor creature. And, after all, Dr. Zeus found just the job for him! They made him a long-distance courier. As long as he’s traveling, as long as he’s constantly exposed to new sights he’s never seen before, the adverse RNA reaction can’t build up. He can even retrace old journeys, if enough years elapse between visits. Trouble only occurs if he’s obliged to stay in one place for more than twenty-four hours, but of course Dr. Zeus has always taken care to ensure that new orders are waiting for him at every destination.”
“What happened in this case?”
Labienus looked aside. “A minor clerical blunder. His orders were forwarded to the wrong terminal. The clerk responsible has been disciplined.”
“How comforting.”
“I’m sure it will never happen again. And we’ll fasten on his head and he’ll be off on his travels again, to New York or Mazatlan or Warsaw, good as new, with no memory of this unfortunate occurrence. He never remembers anything very long, actually, if it isn’t something hard-wired like a language. Except for the plots of films he’s seen. Those he retains, for some reason.”
“Poor thing,” I mused. Very good Theobromos, this.
“Do you think so? I rather envy him, myself. Imagine a life of endless new horizons! Nothing to bore him or dull his palate, no tedious sameness to his experiences. All his friends will be new friends.” Labienus smiled wistfully and put his silver case away. “Well. Principally what you need to know is that of course there’ll be no disciplinary hearing for you. We quite understand that under the circumstances you had no choice but to badly damage a fellow operative. We would like to know why you didn’t contact us sooner—his psychotic behavior must certainly have been increasingly obvious … ”
“Er, well—I did try—and then I didn’t have access to my credenza, you see.” I began to sweat a little. And did I feel just a trace of pain in my fingertips? “I loaned it to him—”
“Yes; we found it in the rafters. Well, no real harm done, it appears; though I’m afraid you’ll have some explaining to do to your mortal authorities. I’m certain you’ll follow standard operating procedures this time, though, and acquit yourself with flying colors. Shame I can’t give you anything to speed up your self-repair; but then, if you got up tomorrow without a scratch on you after that fight, you’d really have some explaining to do, wouldn’t you?” He chuckled and smacked my thigh in a companionable sort of way. It hurt. A short in my femoral wiring finally fixed itself and informed me that I had a massive hematoma there and several torn ligaments. As I was reflecting on this, another immortal appeared in my doorway.
“Sir? Recovery operation completed. All personnel are aboard and ready for departure.”
“Then I’m off.” Labienus rose, adjusting his coat and shooting his cuffs. “Well, Kalugin. I hope our next meeting takes place under more pleasant circumstances. You will transmit your full report within the next forty-eight hours, I trust? Good. Until next time.” He stepped out into the corridor.
“How old is he?” I blurted.
“Who? Courier?” Labienus looked in at me, arching his eyebrows. “Thirty thousand years, I believe.” He walked away and then stuck his head back through the doorway for a second. “Oh, by the way—Happy Halloween.” He flashed a smile and was gone.
So that was the end of it, at least as far as Dr. Zeus was concerned. I myself was in a tight spot for a while. As soon as he heard about the incident, Kostromitinov became convinced it was some sort of loathsome crime of homosexual passion, and had me arrested. Fedor Svinin got a few days’ holiday, because our jail was only big enough to accommodate one person. He used the time to go fishing and caught pneumonia.
At the inquest it was discovered that my pretty Creole girl had decided to tidy up my room whilst I was unconscious, and had cleaned the blood off the murder weapon and put it back in its sheath. Better still, the victim’s body had vanished from its grave and was nowhere to be found when an exhumation order was given. Best of all, I had a roomful of witnesses swearing on their immortal souls that the person I’d beheaded hadn’t been a human being at all. Iakov Babin was particularly vehement on my behalf, and his testimony counted for something: he was a man with a lot of experience at beating murder raps.
Thus the case never came to trial, and I was left under a sort of half-hearted house arrest that nobody bothered to enforce. And, you know, the rest of my time there was extraordinarily happy! I became accepted, respected, liked. Apparently a man who can deliver babies with one hand and kill dybbuks with the other was just what people wanted on the frontier. I stayed on at the Ross colony until it was sold to Mr. Sutter ten years later, though I didn’t go home with my fellow Russians right away: but that’s another story.
I can’t say it’s a comfort to think that Courier is still out there on the road somewhere, in endless transit like an orbiting moon. It’s likely enough that at some point in the next thirty thousand years our paths will cross again, so I’m grateful he won’t remember me.
But, think about it: you may well have seen him yourself. In some city, on some tourist boat or in some railway carriage, there is always a stupid young man in the happy morning of his life, chatting with perfect strangers and exclaiming over the scenery; and he is always alone.