Now she—of all people—was about to have a private audience with him, and furthermore was planning to give a flat refusal to any request he might make of her. The knowledge of what she had to do made Gretana both queasy and restless. She roamed about the large apartment inspecting its sparse furniture and ornaments while she strove to prepare herself for what was to come. In retrospect, the morning’s tour of the inner wards seemed a relatively minor incident and she longed to be back among the familiar surroundings and circumstances of the hostel.
She was returning to her chair for perhaps the tenth time when a courtesy bell chimed to announce that Warden Vekrynn was about to enter the room. Gretana whirled to face the door, standing as tall as possible while at the same time drawing in her upper lip, widening her eyes and turning her head a little to one side. Observing the little ritual, so essential to her self-esteem, added to the tensions that were racking her body and as the door opened she felt the blood tingle painfully away from her face.
Gretana’s first impression of Vekrynn as he entered the reception chamber was that he resembled a magnificent statue cast in various shades of gold. The darkest metal of all was represented by the tanned skin of his face and hands, a yellow gold had been used for the thick cap of closely waved hair, and something close to platinum for his embroidered tunic and trousers. His eyes, which were deep-set and alert, were cabochons of brown quartz radially needled with gold. Gretana knew him to be of great age—he had held the Wardenship of Earth for some thousands of years—but nothing in his appearance or manner revealed the fact. There had been no vertical compression of the body due to the millennial action of gravity, nor did his expression betray any of the morbid languor which sometimes troubled the faces of very old actives. Indeed it was his expression which had the most profound effect on Gretana, for his eyes regarded her with warmth and interest, and in doing so held perfectly steady. There had been no flicker to one side followed by that forced gleam of geniality which was meant to disguise pity or repugnance. She felt a positive and vital response to his presence, a reaction which was enhanced through being completely unexpected. I’ll never go to Earth, she reminded herself.
“Fair seasons, Gretana ty Iltha,” Vekrynn said in a resonant baritone, surprising her by using the commonplace form of greeting.
“Fair seasons, Warden.” She cleared her throat, resisting the temptation to try repeating the words more clearly.
“It was good of you to come to see me. Under normal circumstances I would have preferred to call at your home, but I am very short of time.”
“I understand.” Gretana had never heard anybody but the most pretentious of her acquaintances claim to be pressed for time, but in this case she accepted it as a statement of fact.
“If you would care to sit down we can talk in comfort,” Vekrynn said. “I’d like you to relax because I can see that Doctor Kallid has already told you why you are here.”
“I’m sure he was only…”
“It’s perfectly all right.” He silenced her by raising one hand. “He has done that sort of thing before, and in a way I’m quite glad because the very fact that you came here at all tells me a lot about your character. You could have gone into hiding.” Vekrynn’s smile was perfect, with a hint of ruefulness which suggested he was pleased to have met an intelligent person who could understand his problems.
Gretana was flattered and simultaneously made wary. “I couldn’t go to Earth,” she said, more forcefully than she had intended and immediately felt embarrassed. “I’m sorry, but I…”
“Your feelings are perfectly natural, perfectly understandable, and I appreciate your honesty.” Vekrynn again gestured towards a chair and this time waited until Gretana had sat down. “Now you’re asking yourself why, as you have made your position so clear, I want to prolong the discussion—especially as I have pretentions of being a very busy man with all the problems of the universe on his shoulders.”
Gretana eyed the Warden in silence and then, realising she had made the mistake of facing him directly, turned her head a little. The move did nothing to lessen the sheer impact of his physical presence.
“All right, Gretana! I’m going to be totally honest and admit that I intend to persuade you, before you leave this room, to join my personal staff and work for me on Earth for a short period of, say, five or six decades. Do you think I’ll succeed?”
“No.” She was persuaded to smile. “I don’t see how you could.”
“In that case you can be generous. You can afford to relax and hear what I have to say.” Vekrynn walked to one of the high windows and stood looking out, the intensified light glowing like a nimbus around his hair. “How old are you, Gretana?”
“I’m in my sixth decade.”
“Your life has hardly started, and if I’m not mistaken that ring on your left hand is a life recorder. Why do you wear it?”
Gretana was taken aback. “I…It’s the way.”
“Oh, I know all actives use them. They are part of the activist philosophy, a means of preserving a coherent memory and a single identity throughout a greatly extended lifespan—but how many entries have you made in your recorder in the past year?”
“I don’t know,” Gretana replied, trying to anticipate the point. “Several.”
“Several! And no doubt you’ll make several more next year, and in the following year, and in the year after that.”
“I expect so.”
“Why?” Vekrynn turned to look at her, his face hidden in a corona of reflected sunlight, and his voice was both sad and compassionate. “Why will you do that, Gretana?”
“I don’t understand.”
“It’s so that you won’t forget, so that you won’t lose those years from your memory, from your life. Don’t you see what that means? What you are saying is that you are not really alive.” Vekrynn took one step away from the window, changing the light patterns on the nacreous walls of the room. “This is only your sixth decade—what’s it going to be like in your sixth century? Will you be like all the others? Growing coral sculptures and tree sculptures for excitement, and filling your recorder with notes of their progress?”
Echoes of her own early thoughts brought a return of the smothering sensation Gretana had experienced.
“I’m offering you the gift of your own life,” Vekrynn said. “Go to Earth for me and you’ll have material for a thousand entries a year in your recorder, but you won’t need to make them, because you can remember what happens to you when you’re really alive.”
Gretana drew a quavering breath. “I couldn’t go to Earth.”
“Are you afraid?”
“Yes.”
“Good! I’d have no use for you if you didn’t have sense enough to be afraid.” Vekrynn moved closer to her. “Is it the people, or the presence of the—?”
“It’s the people.” Gretana pressed the back of a hand to her lips. “I couldn’t face them.”
“Doctor Kallid says you could.”
Gretana strove to marshal her thoughts, to present an ordered and logical case which would bring the interview to a speedy conclusion. “It isn’t the physical aspect of the people,” she said quietly. “I know I could become reconciled to the presence of disease and deformity, perhaps even death. It isn’t even the fact that they only live for eleven or twelve decades…”
“Seven,” Vekrynn cut in.
“Seven?”
“The life expectancy of an individual living in one of the developed regions is a little over seven Earth decades. As the Earth year is slightly shorter than ours, that works out at almost exactly seven Mollanian decades.”
They begin to die from the moment they’re born, Gretana thought, chilled and distracted. “What I couldn’t ever cope with is…I mean, supposing I actually saw someone being…”