I heaved one upright and opened the top drawer. The paper files were yellowed and brittle, lightly toasted along the edges, but still legible. I pulled open the second drawer and saw that it contained what appeared to be birth certificates and medical records. I called Kirdre over. Gesturing at them, I said, “These might help Luther determine…” My voice trailed off as my eye caught something. Curtis Andersson, a fellow I had interviewed late the previous week, born… when?
Must have been his father.
Then I realized there was no date of death. Frowning, I flipped to the one behind it. I didn’t recognize the name. The dates indicated that she had died at age seven. The one behind that was another name I didn’t recognize, but if the dates were to be believed… let’s see, eight minus three, carry one to subtract four from one… no way. I adopted a different tactic, flipping through until I found Luther Kellerman.
I stood stock still, staring at that page for three seconds less than forever. Luther Kellerman was 171 years old.
I looked at Kirdre, confused. She was standing very close to me. “What’s your last name?” I asked.
“Pye,” she said in a small voice.
My gloved fingers were clumsy at migrating through the files, but I found it. I closed my eyes and took a deep breath before turning to face her. “Kirdre—”
Her eyes refused to meet mine. “It was too soon to talk about it.”
“Too soon to talk about what?”
“I…” she turned her head away sharply, as though she didn’t want me to see her face. “It wasn’t supposed to come up this way. We need you here. I had it in mind to… oh, hell.”
I gently took her chin and pulled her face around towards mine. “Talk to me. What’s going on around here?”
“It’s the trees.”
“It’s the trees?” I repeated, blinking.
“Something about the trees. We think it’s the fumes from the wood, but we don’t know. We don’t have a research laboratory. We can’t afford one. We can’t ask for a research team from Earth without telling them why. We can’t have people storming in here in search of the fountain of youth because…” she paused, searching my face, “one way or another, it kills most of them.”
“It—”
She gestured at the open drawer at my elbow “Susaen Andreeth was my best friend’s daughter. We think it’s genetic—a recessive trait—she didn’t have it. If you don’t have it, it drives you the other way. You get old fast. Days are weeks. Months are years. Years are entire decades. She died of old age at seven, wanting to play hopscotch one last time. She couldn’t. Her body was sagging… old.” Kirdre looked away from me again, but the words came in a rush. “Lane Daltry caught her when she was about three—looked like she was in her twenties—fortunately there weren’t any children. She never really understood what was happening, only that it felt good.”
Too much, too much. I couldn’t assimilate the things she was telling me. And to make matters worse, I suddenly remembered what I had been thinking just before I went to sleep in Sat’s house. Something about Greta. He had started to say that he had found her almost two hundred, and in my mind I filled in the blank… years ago.
She continued, “Of those who survive the physical aspects, some can’t handle the mental strain. There’s not a lot to do on Messagie, and some people get, well, bored. We have a statistically high percentage of suicides.”
A high price to pay. It was easy to see why they wanted to keep it quiet. “So once you find out that you’re going to live, then—”
“Why do you think we have silly little make-work jobs like Ruby’s? So she can breathe the tree. Why don’t the cutters wear masks to keep out the fumes? They need it, too. If you leave, then you live and die just like anyone else.”
“Too much and you end up like Sat. Too little and you live a normal life span.”
She nodded. “Something like that.”
“So how long do you live?”
A wry smile. “Well, whatever’s in that stuff, it clearly works pretty well for the trees. We’ve not yet really had anyone die of old age. They just get stranger and stranger, like Norm. Sooner or later, he would have had an accident with his saw, I guess.”
I shook my head slowly. No one part of it was all that strange, and in retrospect, they hadn’t even been hiding it all that carefully. The hints were everywhere. “So you’re asking me to stay, is that it? Add some diversity to the gene pool. I’ve survived several weeks without aging, so I must have this gene.”
“I know that the way I’ve told you these things makes it sound terrible. But we’re here, and you saw the files, and I couldn’t think of a way to just toss it off.”
Gently, I brushed the snowflakes from her hair. “Helluva way to spend the morning.”
“Ruby said that your, um, personal life isn’t all that wonderful right now.”
Involuntarily, my mouth tightened. Well, it wasn’t as though I had asked Ruby to keep it a secret. “No, it isn’t,” I admitted.
She smiled shyly and held out her hand. “Let’s start over. Hi, my name’s Kirdre.”
I reached out and took her hand. “I’m Michael, and this is all going way too fast, but it seems that I’ve got a decision to make. Maybe you could help.”
Hand in hand, we stepped over the remains of the foundation of the building that had been Town Hall and walked into the forest. And talked. I talked to her as I have rarely talked to anyone, man or woman, in my entire life. I talked to her the way I’d been trying to talk to Stephanie for the last two years. But whereas Stephanie had given sullen silences in return, Kirdre weighed the things I said, turned them over, and showed me different perspectives. Insight, she had, and wisdom. Perhaps it was her age. On the other hand, maybe she was just that kind of woman.
One thing she was not, was jaded. Everything was interesting to her. She would stop, lightly touch the bark of one of the trees we passed, tell me some small bit of wood lore, then resume exactly where she had left off.
During that walk with Kirdre, I discovered something… mostly about myself.
Stephanie’s beauty was a cultural product, bought in bottles, applied staring into mirrors. With it, she was an astonishingly desirable creature. Without it, she was plain, a blank canvas. Her personality was another null. She had certain artifices, but, like her makeup, they were only superficial appliques. I realized that perhaps the reason she didn’t talk to me was that she couldn’t. There wasn’t anything to say, because there was no person underneath the bright smiles and sparkling eyes.
Kirdre, by comparison, was substantial and whole. While not overtly beautiful, although she did have lovely eyes, there was a person inside, and that lit her up from within. No makeup, no mirrors. All natural. Genuine.
Hours passed. We walked. We talked. It was a seduction of sorts, pure and simple. Kirdre wanted to show me the good side of Messagie. I’d seen some of the bad parts. She showed me the snow-dappled forest, with its cathedral-like velvety quiet that made a perfect background for thinking. In contrast with the background noise level in the city I had left, the silence was nearly deafening. She showed me the beauty of the trees. I had taken for granted the wood itself. Kirdre introduced me to the trees themselves, the snowflakes that drifted into crevices in the bark, the wholesome smell of the air that sighed between the gargantuan trunks.
Always, I had felt an amused contempt for musicians and other assorted lost souls who went into the Himalayas to find a guru and meditate. What could they find there that they could not find at home? Belatedly, I began to see that there might possibly be something to their pilgrimages.