She said, “I wish I’d been born earlier. I could have been with you—”
“No,” he said quickly. “At least—not too far back.”
“Was it so bad?”
He shrugged.
“I don’t know how true my memories are any more. I’m glad I don’t remember more than I do. But I remember enough. The legends are right.” His face shadowed with sorrow. “The big wars ... hell was loosed. Hell was omnipotent! The Antichrist walked in the noonday sun, and men feared that which is high. . . .“ His gaze lifted to the pale low ceiling of the room, seeing beyond it “Men had turned into beasts. Into devils. I spoke of peace to them, and they tried to kill me. I bore it. I was immortal, by God’s grace. Yet they could have killed me. I am vulnerable to weapons.” He drew a deep, long breath. “Immortality was not enough. God’s will preserved me, so that I could go on preaching peace until, little by little, the maimed beasts remembered their souls and reached up out of hell.. . .“
She had never heard him talk like this.
Gently she touched his hand.
He came back to her.
“It’s over,” he said. “The past is dead. We have today.”
From the distance the priests chanted a paean of joy and gratitude.
The next afternoon she saw him at the end of a corridor leaning over something huddled and dark. She ran forward. He was bent down beside the body of a priest, and when Nerina called out, he shivered and stood up, his face white and appalled.
She looked down and her face, too, went white.
The priest was dead. There were blue marks on his throat, and his neck was broken, his head twisted monstrously.
Tyrell moved to shield the body from her gaze.
“G-get Mons,” he said, unsure as though he had reached the end of the hundred years. “Quick. This … get him.”
Morn came, looked at the body, and stood aghast. He met Tyrell’s blue gaze.
“How many centuries, Messiah?” he asked, in a shaken voice.
Tyrell said, “Since there was violence? Eight centuries or more. Mons, no one—no one is capable of this.”
Mons said, “Yes. There is no more violence. It has been bred out of the race.” He dropped suddenly to his knees. “Messiah, bring peace again! The dragon has risen from the past!”
Tyrell straightened, a figure of strong humility in his white robe.
He lifted his eyes and prayed.
Nerina knelt, her horror slowly washed away in the burning power of Tyrell’s prayer.
The whisper breathed through the monastery and shuddered back from the blue, clear air beyond. None knew who had closed deadly hands about the priest’s throat. No one, no human, was capable any longer of killing; as Mons had said, the ability to hate, to destroy, had been bred out of the race.
The whisper did not go beyond the monastery. Here the battle must be fought in secret, no hint of it escaping to trouble the long peace of the worlds.
No human.
But another whisper grew: The Antichrist is born again.
They turned to Tyrell, to the Messiah, for comfort.
Peace, he said, peace—meet evil with humility, bow your heads in prayer, remember the love that saved man when hell was loosed on the worlds two thousand years ago.
At night, beside Nerina, he moaned in his sleep and struck out at an invisible enemy.
“Devil!” he cried—and woke, shuddering.
She held him, with proud humility, till he slept again.
She came with Mons one day to Tyrell’s room, to tell him of the new horror. A priest had been found dead, savagely hacked by a sharp knife. They pushed open the door and saw Tyrell sitting facing them at a low table. He was praying while he watched, in sick fascination, the bloody knife that lay on the table before him.
“Tyrell—” she said, and suddenly Mons drew in a quick, shuddering breath and swung around sharply. He pushed her back across the threshold.
“Wait!” he said, with violent urgency. “Wait for me here!” Before she could speak he was beyond the closing door, and she heard it lock.
She stood there, not thinking, for a long time.
Then Mons came out and closed the door softly behind him. He looked at her.
“It’s all right,” he said. “But ... you must listen to me now.” Then he was silent.
He tried again.
“Blessed of God—” Again he drew that difficult breath. “Nerina. I—” He laughed oddly. “That’s strange. I can’t talk unless I call you Nerina.”
“What is it? Let me go to Tyrell!”
“No—no. He’ll be all right. Nerina, he’s—sick.”
She shut her eyes, trying to concentrate. She heard his voice, unsure but growing stronger.
“Those killings. Tyrell did them.”
“Now you lie,” she said. “That is a lie!”
Mons said almost sharply, “Open your eyes. Listen to me. Tyrell is—a man. A very great man, a very good man, but no god. He is immortal. Unless he is struck down, he will live forever—as you will. He has already lived more than twenty centuries.”
“Why tell me this? I know it!” -
Mons said, “You must help, you must understand. Immortality is an accident of the genes. A mutation. Once in a thousand years, perhaps, or ten thousand, a human is born immortal. His body renews itself; he does not age. Neither does his brain. But his mind ages—”
She said desperately, “Tyrell swam the pool of rebirth only three days ago. Not for another century will his mind age again. Is he—he’s not dying?”
“No-no. Nerina, the pool of rebirth is only a symbol. You know that.”
“Yes. The real rebirth comes afterward, when you put us in that machine. I remember.”
Mons said, “The machine. If it were not used each century, you and Tyrell would have become senile and helpless a long time ago. The mind is not immortal, Nerina. After a while it cannot carry the weight of knowledge, learning, habits. It loses flexibility, it clouds with stiff old age. The machine clears the mind, Nerina, as we can clear a computer of its units of memory. Then we replace some memories, not all, we put the necessary memories in a fresh, clear mind, so it can grow and learn for another hundred years.”
“But I know all that—”
“Those new memories form a new personality, Nerina.”
“A new—? But Tyrell is still the same.”
“Not quite. Each century he changes a little, as life grows better, as the worlds grow happier. Each century the new mind, the fresh personality of Tyrell is different—more in tune with the new century than the one just past. You have been reborn in mind three times, Nerina. You are not the same as you were the first time. But you cannot remember that. You do not have all the old memories you once had.”
“But—but what—”
Mons said, “I do not know. I have talked to Tyrell. I think this is what has happened. Each century when the mind of Tyrell was cleansed—erased—it left a blank mind, and we built a new Tyrell on that. Not much changed. Only a little, each time. But more than twenty times? His mind must have been very different twenty centuries ago. And—”
“How different?”
“I don’t know. We’ve assumed that when the mind was erased, the pattern of personality—vanished. I think now that it didn’t vanish. It was buried. Suppressed, driven so deeply into the mind that it could not emerge. It became unconscious. Century after century this has happened. And now more than twenty personalities of Tyrell are buried in his mind, a multiple personality that can no longer stay in balance. From the graves in his mind, there has been a resurrection.”