She scarcely notices the new exterior of the building; the ascensor shaft is dark and padded now, with an endless chain of cushioned seats that slowly rise, occupied or not, like a disjointed flight of stairs. The vestibule above slowly comes into view, and she feels a curious shock of recognition.
It is the same: the same blue-veined marble, the same mobile idly turning, the same arched doorway.
Claire hesitates, alarmed and displeased. She tries to believe that she is mistaken: no scheme of decoration is ever left unchanged for as much as a year. But here it is, untouched, as if time had queerly stopped here in this room when she left it: as if she had returned, not only to the same choice, but to the same instant.
She crosses the floor reluctantly. The dark door screen looks back at her like a baited trap.
Suppose she had never gone away—what then? Whatever Dio's secret is, it has had ten years to grow, here behind this unchanged door. There it is, a darkness, waiting for her.
With a shudder of almost physical repulsion, she steps onto the annunciator plate.
The screen lights. After a moment a face comes into view. She sees without surprise that it is the thin man, the one who showed her the rat. . . .
He is watching her keenly. She cannot rid herself of the vision of the rat, and of the dark struggling figure in the doorway. She says, "Is Dio—" She stops, not knowing what she meant to say.
"At home?" the thin man finishes. "Yes, of course. Come in."
The doors slide open. About to step forward, she hesitates again, once more shocked to realize that the first room is also unchanged. The frieze of screens now displays a row of gray-lit streets; that is the only difference; it is as if she were looking into some far-distant world where time still had meaning, from this still, secret place where it has none.
The thin man appears in the doorway, black-robed. "My name is Benarra," he says, smiling. "Please come in; don't mind all this, you'll get used to it."
"Where is Dio?"
"Not far . . . But we make a rule," the thin man says, "that only students are admitted to see Dio. Would you mind?"
She looks at him with indignation. "Is this a joke? Dio sent me a note . . ." She hesitates; the note was noncommittal enough, to be sure.
"You can become a student quite easily," Benarra says. "At least you can begin, and that would be enough for today." He stands waiting, with a pleasant expression; he seems perfectly serious.
She is balanced between bewilderment and surrender. "I don't—what do you want me to do?"
"Come and see." He crosses the room, opens a narrow door. After a moment she follows.
He leads her down an inclined passage, narrow and dark. "I'm living on the floor below now," he remarks over his shoulder, "to keep out of Dio's way." The passage ends in a bright central hall from which he leads her through a doorway into dimness.
"Here your education begins," he says. On both sides, islands of light glow up slowly: in the nearest, and brightest, stands a curious group of beings, not ape, not man: black skins with a bluish sheen, tiny eyes peering upward under shelving brows, hair a dusty black. The limbs are knot-jointed like twigs; the ribs show; the bellies are soft and big. The head of the tallest comes to Claire's waist. Behind them is a brilliant glimpse of tropical sunshine, a conical mass of what looks like dried vegetable matter, trees and horned animals in the background.
"Human beings," says Benarra.
She turns a disbelieving, almost offended gaze on him. "Oh, no!"
"Yes, certainly. Extinct several thousand years. Here, another kind."
In the next island the figures are also black-skinned, but taller—shoulder high. The woman's breasts are limp leathery bags that hang to her waist. Claire grimaces. "Is something wrong with her?"
"A different standard of beauty. They did that to themselves, deliberately. Woman creating herself. See what you think of the next."
She loses count. There are coppery-skinned ones, white ones, yellowish ones, some half naked, others elaborately trussed in metal and fabric. Moving among them, Claire feels herself suddenly grown titanic, like a mother animal among her brood: she has a flash of absurd, degrading tenderness. Yet, as she looks at those wrinkled gnomish faces, they seem to hold an ancient and stubborn wisdom that glares out at her, silently saying, Upstart!
"What happened to them all?"
"They died," says Benarra. "Every one."
Ignoring her troubled look, he leads her out of the hall. Behind them, the lights fall and dim.
The next room is small and cool, unobtrusively lit, unfurnished except for a desk and chair, and a visitor's seat to which Benarra waves her. The domed ceiling is pierced just above their heads with round transparencies, each glowing in a different pattern of simple blue and red shapes against a colorless ground.
"They are hard to take in, I know," says Benarra. "Possibly you think they're fakes."
"No." No one could have imagined those fierce, wizened faces; somewhere, sometime, they must have existed.
A new thought strikes her. "What about our ancestors—what were they like?"
Benarra's gaze is cool and thoughtful. "Claire, you'll find this hard to believe. Those were our ancestors."
She is incredulous again. "Those—absurdities in there?"
"Yes. All of them."
She is stubbornly silent a moment. "But you said, they died."
"They did; they died. Claire—did you think our race was always immortal?"
"Why—" She falls silent, confused and angry.
"No, impossible. Because if we were, where are all the old ones? No one in the world is older than, perhaps, two thousand years. That's not very long. . . . What are you thinking?"
She looks up, frowning with concentration. "You're saying it happened. But how?"
"It didn't happen. We did it, we created ourselves." Leaning back, he gestures at the glowing transparencies overhead. "Do you know what those are?"
"No. I've never seen any designs quite like them. They'd make lovely fabric patterns."
He smiles. "Yes, they are pretty, I suppose, but that's not what they're for. These are enlarged photographs of very small living things—too small to see. They used to get into people's bloodstreams and make them die. That's bubonic plague"—blue and purple dots alternating with larger pink disks—"that's tetanus"—blue rods and red dots—"that's leprosy"—dark-spotted blue lozenges with a crosshatching of red behind them. 'That thing that looks something like a peacock's tail is a parasitic fungus called streptothrix actinomyces. That one"—a particularly dainty design of pale blue with darker accents—"is from a malignant oedema with gas gangrene."
The words are meaningless to her, but they call up vague images that are all the more horrible for having no definite outlines. She thinks again of the rat, and of a human face somehow assuming that stillness, that stiffness . . . frozen into a bright pattern, like the colored dots on the wall. . . .
She is resolved not to show her disgust and revulsion. "What happened to them?" she asks in a voice that does not quite tremble.
"Nothing. The planners left them alone, but changed us. Most of the records have been lost in two thousand years, and of course we have no real science of biology as they knew it. I'm no biologist, only a historian and collector." He rises. "But one thing we know they did was to make our bodies chemically immune to infection. Those things"—he nods to the transparencies above—"are simply irrelevant now, they can't harm us. They still exist—I've seen cultures taken from living animals. But they're only a curiosity. Various other things were done, to make the body's chemistry, to put it crudely, more stable. Things that would have killed our ancestors by toxic reactions—poisoned them—don't harm us. Then there are the protective mechanisms, and the paraphysical powers that homo sapiens had only in potential. Levitation, regeneration of lost organs. Finally, in general we might say that the body was very much more homeostatized than formerly, that is, there's a cycle of functions which always tends to return to the norm. The cumulative processes that used to impair function don't happen—the 'matrix' doesn't thicken, progressive dehydration never gets started, and so on. But you see all these are just delaying actions, things to prevent you and me from dying prematurely. The main thing—" he fingers an index stripe, and a linear design springs out on the wall—"was this. Have you ever read a chart, Claire?"