That day and the next morning, walking about the town, the name of which I could not find written anywhere, I felt that the Yendian tendency to depression had
bottomed out here, attained nadir. The islanders were a sad people. They were listless. They were lifeless. My mind turned up that word and stared at it.
I realized I’d waste my whole week just getting depressed if I didn’t rouse up my courage and ask some questions. I saw my young boatman fishing off the jetty and went to talk to him.
“Will you tell me about the immortals?” I asked him, after some halting amenities.
“Well, most people just walk around and look for them. In the woods,” he
said.
“No, not the diamonds,” I said, checking the translatomat. “I’m not really very interested in diamonds.”
“Nobody much is any more,” he said. “There used to be a lot of tourists and diamond hunters. I guess they do something else now.”
“But I read in a book that there are people here who live very, very long lives—who actually don’t die.”
“Yes,” he said, placidly.
“Are there any immortal people in town? Do you know any of them?”
He checked his fishing line. “Well, no,” he said. “There was a new one, way back in my grandpa’s time, but it went to the mainland. It was a woman. I guess there’s an old one in the village.” He nodded toward the island. “Mother saw it once.”
“If you could, would you like to live a long time?”
“Sure!” he said, with as much enthusiasm as a Yendian is capable of. “You know.”
“But you don’t want to be immortal. You wear the fly-gauze.”
He nodded. He saw nothing to discuss in all this. He was fishing with gauze gloves, seeing the world through a mesh veil. That was life.
The storekeeper told me that you could walk to the village in a day and showed me the path. My dispirited landlady packed me a lunch. I set out next morning, attended at first by thin, persistent swarms of flies. It was a dull walk across a low, damp landscape, but the sun was mild and pleasant, and the flies finally gave up. To my surprise, I got to the village before I was even hungry for lunch. The Islanders must walk slowly and seldom. It had to be the right village, though, because they spoke of only one, “the village,” again no name.
It was small and poor and sad: six or seven wooden huts, rather like Russian izbas, stilted up a bit to keep them from the mud. Poultry, something like guinea fowl but mud-brown, scuttled about everywhere, making soft, raucous noises. A couple of children ran away and hid as I approached.
And there, propped up next to the village well, was the figure Postwand had described, just as he had described it—legless, sexless, the face almost featureless, blind, with skin like badly burned bread, and thick, matted, filthy white hair.
I stopped, appalled.
A woman came out of the hut to which the children had run. She came down the rickety steps and walked up to me. She gestured at my translatomat, and I automatically held it out to her so she could speak into it.
“You came to see the Immortal,” she said.
I nodded.
“Two radio fifty,” she said.
I got out the money and handed it to her.
“Come this way,” she said. She was poorly dressed and not clean, but was a fine-looking woman, thirty-five or so, with unusual decisiveness and vigor in her voice and movements.
She led me straight to the well and stopped in front of the being propped up in a legless canvas fisherman’s chair next to it. I could not look at the face, nor the horribly maimed hand. The other arm ended in a black crust above the elbow. I looked away from that.
“You are looking at the Immortal of our village,” the woman said in the prac-ticed singsong of the tour guide. “It has been with us for many many centuries. For over one thousand years it has belonged to the Roya family. In this family it is our duty and pride to look after the Immortal. Feeding hours are six in the morning and six in the evening. It lives on milk and barley broth. It has a good appetite and enjoys good health with no sicknesses. It does not have udreba. Its legs were lost when there was an earthquake one thousand years ago. It was also damaged by fire and other accidents before it came into the care of the Roya family. The legend of my family says that the Immortal was once a handsome young man who made his living for many lifetimes of normal people by hunting in the marshes. This was two or three thousand years ago, it is believed. The Immortal cannot hear what you say or see you, but is glad to accept your prayers for its wellbeing and any offerings for its support, as it is entirely dependent on the Roya family for food and shelter.
Thank you very much. I will answer ques-tions.”
After a while I said, “It can’t die.”
She shook her head. Her face was impassive; not unfeeling, but closed.
“You aren’t wearing gauze,” I said, suddenly realizing this. “The children weren’t. Aren’t you—“
She shook her head again. “Too much trouble,” she said, in a quiet, unofficial voice. “The children always tear the gauze. Anyhow, we don’t have many flies. And there’s only one.”
It was true that the flies seemed to have stayed behind, in the town and the heavily manicured fields near it.
“You mean there’s only one immortal at a time?”
“Oh, no,” she said. “There are others all around. In the ground. Sometimes people find them. Souvenirs. The really old ones. Ours is young, you know.” She looked at the Immortal with a weary but proprietary eye, the way a mother looks at an unpromising infant.
“The diamonds?” I said. “The diamonds are immortals?”
She nodded. “After a really long time,” she said. She looked away, across the marshy plain that surrounded the village, and then back at me. “A man came from the mainland, last year, a scientist. He said we ought to bury our Immortal. So it could turn to diamond, you know. But then he said it takes thousands of years to turn. All that time it would be starving and thirsty in the ground and nobody would look after it. It is wrong to bury a person alive. It is our family duty to look after it. And no tourists would come.”
It was my turn to nod. The ethics of this situation were beyond me. I accepted her choice.
“Would you like to feed it?” she asked, apparently liking something about me, for she smiled at me.
“No,” I said, and I have to admit that I burst into tears.
She came closer and patted my shoulder.
“It is very, very sad,” she said. She smiled again. “But the children like to feed it,” she said. “And the money helps.”
“Thank you for being so kind,” I said, wiping my eyes, and I gave her another five radio, which she took gratefully. I turned around and walked back across the marshy plains to the town, where I waited four more days until the sister ship came by from the west, and the nice young man took me out in the boat, and I left the Island of the Immortals, and soon after that I left the Yendian Plane.
We are a carbon-based life form, as the scientists say, but how a human body could turn to diamond I do not know, unless through some spiritual factor, perhaps the result of genuinely endless suffering.
Perhaps “diamond” is only a name the Yendians give these lumps of ruin, a kind of euphemism.
I am still not certain what the woman in the village meant when she said, “There’s only one.” She was not referring to the immortals. She was explaining why she didn’t protect herself or her children from the flies, why she found the risk not worth the bother. It is possible that she meant that among the swarms of flies in the island marshes there is only one fly, one immortal fly, whose bite infects its victim with eternal life.