Fantasy & Science Fiction Mar-Apr 2013 (30 page)

"I thought you a man," Sophie raged at me, "but I see now that you are only a boy, faithless and full of himself."

I felt anger begin to build in me as I listened, but pride has many facets. I resolved not to let on that her words stung. I smiled contemptuously, to show that I couldn't possibly be hurt by the words of a mere woman—not even a white woman at that. I must have been so convincing that one of my comrades said, "Oh, give her a good beating and send her on her way!"

But that I could not do, would not have done in any case. I had only enough resolve to harden my heart against her, none at all to raise my hand.

"A boy you shall always be," she said. "I will ask the loas to give you time to regret your perfidy." The loas, I vaguely understood, were the local deities, whose assistance was biddable through dancing and animal sacrifice and all the attendant mumbo-jumbo. "You will drink from lovely women and yet always be thirsty. And long after I am dust, you will think of
me
always with yearning and regret." And I have. "I will be like knives in your heart, forever." But there she may have given me too much credit. I may not have had a heart then, though I know now that I have been trying to grow one almost ever since.

Soon after Sophie had left for parts unknown, yellow fever swept though the army, almost carrying me off and indeed carrying off LeClerc and thousands more. I next found myself, still shaky from the fever, among the relatively few defenders under Rochambeau at the climactic Battle of Vertières; the rebels, it turned out, did not really need Toussaint L'Ouverture's leadership as long as they still had their hatred of the French. Without at all intending to distinguish myself, I managed to wind up in the thick of the fight but escaped—miraculously?—without a scratch, though most of the men around me were killed. When Rochambeau admitted defeat and agreed to terms, I was more than slightly relieved. I decided I had had enough of army life and began making plans accordingly. We were given ten days to embark and depart from Saint-Domingue, leaving our wounded behind, under key, as the expression went, until they were able to follow.

France had paid a heavy price in treasure and soldiers' lives and gained nothing in Saint-Domingue. Just so, Saint-Domingue had paid a heavier price for its independence. If there is anything to the loas, and if, as some darkly hint, their help was enlisted in expelling the French, they exacted a terrible toll—after a dozen years of civil war, there were in 1803 only ten thousand of thirty thousand whites left alive, and probably one-hundred-fifty thousand of half a million blacks had died. And the loas continue to this day to exact their toll. I visited Haiti during the 1960s. The richest colony in the New World had long since become its poorest independent nation. Papa Doc Duvalier was a genius in the handling of the populace—one of those human monsters, it is true, who make Hell necessary, but a genius nonetheless. For me it was a glimpse of the future of the rest of the world, one I shall probably live to see. The environment was infinitely degraded. An educated, wealthy few lorded it over the illiterate, impoverished, superstitious many.

Sometimes the most important thing is simply to remember it all. It's as if my memory were a bookcase, and I must periodically straighten its contents, find the proper places for items carelessly tossed in at some earlier date.

Thus, I make lists.

I start with a list of the names of women I've loved, truly loved. I think about Sophie, of course. I think about Lise, whom I courted in Paris, and Suzette in New Orleans, and Maria in Mexico City, and the one and the one and the one, and have to ask myself, finally, were those courtships or merely seductions? After a time, surely it was more the one thing than the other, for once I knew what had happened to me, how could I have seriously offered to share my life with someone whose own existence was so brief, so fragile? Then I find myself writing the names of some to whom I falsely professed love, and then the names of some whose attention I only rented—if they had names—and a deep shame overtakes me.

Yet it has been only since around the end of the First World War that I could resist lovely women. It took me more than a hundred years to become bored with them, and at first that seemed even worse than what Sophie had promised, knives twisting eternally in my heart.

We survivors of the wretched expedition were scattered, some of us to return to France, others to go on to the French West Indies, where the British were making trouble. I succeeded at avoiding both destinations and found myself in New Orleans, a
sous
-lieutenant no longer, a deserter, in fact, but one with a few advantages. My looks were my passport.

And here I finally became truly cognizant of my immunity to harm: it stood me in some good stead in that cesspool of cutthroats and compulsive duelists. Even then I felt I enjoyed an unfair advantage, and thus I was never the challenger in affairs of honor. By such infinitesimal increments did my transition begin, but I had seen enough of killing. My other habits had not changed, however, and so I was the challenged often enough. There was no way for me to duck out—how could I have explained, and to an irate husband at that, "You cannot get so much as a pinprick's satisfaction from dueling with me—I am under the personal protection of some god or demon!" I invariably chose pistols, therefore, in most cases, an exchange of shots (two each, all deliberate misses on my part, inexcusable misses and inexplicable misfires on the challenger's) satisfied honor and was less messy and arduous than swordplay. An opponent armed with a sword generally felt himself obligated to try to skewer or at least pink me, and my invisible guardian would make sure that my blade was there to parry, or that the other fellow's foot slipped in the grass.

The disadvantages of always looking twenty-two years old became apparent after a time. I grew tired of being always on the move. I married well, settled down, fathered children. After twenty years, when my wife was visibly middle-aged and my children were being mistaken for my siblings, I knew I had overstayed, and I contrived to disappear, with enough money to set myself up in comfort someplace else. After a time, I stopped taking wives. After a bit more, I stopped even taking lovers. Boredom had settled in, and I wondered if this might not be the first sign of my despairing of life—that I would soon find myself longing for death, and up would pop the Devil to claim his due—or of growing a heart, the better to feel Sophie's knives. There are few things more tormenting than not knowing by whom you are being tormented.

I returned incognito to France in 1867, having seen some of the United States' civil war and too much of Maximilian in Mexico. I had become adept by this time at taking on and laying aside civilian identities and at providing their wherewithal. I got caught up in the tragicomic Franco-Prussian War and stayed in my homeland long enough to see something of its horrific sequel in 1914. That was the last major war I witnessed up close, and thank God for that, for it gave me some unhappily correct notions as to the shape future wars were to take. I removed myself from Europe one step ahead of World War II, and I have long since ceased to pay particular attention to the flags, sovereigns, and sovereign patches of dirt for which mortal human beings risk everything they have, everything they are.

Perhaps there is no moral in all this. There were many better persons than I in Saint-Domingue in the early 1800s, but many worse, too. I have mentioned atrocities; I took no part in them. I was only a self-centered, self-satisfied
sous
-lieutenant, cruel to women, perhaps, but not vicious toward them, pulling soft duty in the rear area; when it ceased to be a rear area and became the site of the last pitched battle of the campaign, I fought hard because I believed, rightly or wrongly, that my life depended on it. Sophie, the loas, the Devil, perhaps none of them had anything to do with my immortality. Perhaps Fate chose me. If so, it must have done so blindly. I don't know the answer. I don't know. I just don't.

"You're always here with us old fossils," Casanova observes. "Don't you ever hang around with young people your own age? Surely there's a young woman in your life."

Of course, I cannot tell him what a curse eternal youth is to one who can no longer stand young people, male or female. I let the question slide by and tell him it's time to prepare for bed. He is still able to do that for himself, so I slip out and swiftly reconnoiter the other rooms assigned to me. Everybody else is asleep, and even Casanova is slipping away when I return to look in on him. He is just conscious enough to extend a hand to me. I take it and hear him murmur, "You're good to us. You're always here for us."

"And I always shall be," I tell him. And I mean what I say. I can't be sure, of course, but it could be the only hope I have of redemption.

Van Aaron Hughes is a recent winner in the Writers of the Future Contest. His fiction has appeared in
Writers of the Future Vol. 27, Abyss & Apex,
the political protest anthology
Glorifying Terrorism,
and other publications. He does book reviews and author interviews for
www.FantasticReviews.com
and he judges the "Battle of the Books" at their blog. In real life, he is a lawyer practicing in Denver and has argued before the United States Supreme Court. His
F&SF
debut should be of interest to anyone who has ever been concerned about balancing work and family.

WHAT MAKES A PERSON decide to desert everyone she knows and leave the whole world behind?

My name is Emzara Ghali-Gordon, and the first time I did it was easy.

The first thirty civilian colonists arrived on the
Vanguard
together, with a cheer and more than a few tears. The captain had already spun up the main cylinder, leaving all our zero-g training useless. We raced each other down the central corridor, bounding in the low gravity, laughing as Coriolis toppled us like so many drunks at closing time.

Chuck was in that first group too. We didn't know each other yet, but in hindsight, his presence made the
Vanguard
my first real home from the moment we floated aboard and for the next 125 years.

At university in Alexandria, they called us the
jabaan
, the "cowards." We worked like donkeys to get the best grades, to win scholarships to graduate school overseas. To get away.

I was the best of the
jabaan
. I wanted nothing but to leave Egypt. Not because it was miserable, although it surely was, especially for the surviving Coptic Christians like my family, but because it was
old
. My country had passed its best days many centuries before, and I wanted a home in the future.

I remember little from university but a rush of coursework and late-night studying. I loved history, literature; I doubled up in biology and chemistry, because they wanted that in America and China. I pestered every professor until I mastered each item in the syllabus, but hardly spoke to the other students.

Nor did I ease up once I made it to America, for the bio-boom was just starting. The other students thought we were learning skills to make money, but I always take the long view of events, and I knew what we were really doing: rejuvenating the tottering global economy.

To most Americans, a weak economy means having to borrow from your uncle to get by. In Alexandria, it means death. To me, the bio-boom wasn't about money; we were saving the world.

The first weeks after everyone boarded the
Vanguard
were a whirlwind of activity, especially for me as chief geneticist and sonoporator. I kept telling myself that soon everything would slow down, by a factor of twenty.

Three hundred colonists, untold thousands of adjustments to get the stream of cavitation microbubbles just right—too weak and you don't create deep enough pores in the cell membranes for the DNA to pass through; too strong and you cause excess cell damage. Since nobody's cell walls are the same, the balance is different for each cell type in each person.

Some people can't undergo gene modification by sonoporation at all, usually those with relatively thick cell walls. But the colonists were tested in advance and all had cells within the tolerance range. All except one. My procedure made this whole trip possible; damned if I would be left behind.

The charm of saving the world wore out much faster than I had expected. All our amazing progress in biotechnology and what had we accomplished? Medical researchers still favored retroviruses, so my team didn't get to work much with diseases. The American government had strictly outlawed intelligence enhancements, and I didn't have the nerve to go underground or to China, where I would face further religious oppression. So we used the human macro-sonoporation I pioneered—deploying modified genes with ultrasonic sound—to give people puffy lips, subcutaneous skin art, and mood hair. I had left Egypt because it was in decline, but I soon came to believe that so was America, so was China, all of Earth.

I wanted my work to take us into the future, but people were interested in toys and games, not real advances. So I volunteered for
Vanguard
.

 
I ONLY EVER SAW Chuck cry twice. The first time was the day I realized we were in love.

He had told me he loved me before that, and I said it back so as not to hurt his feelings, but it surprised me he would say it so soon after we started dating—as a biologist, I did not believe in love at first sight, not until Boutros and James arrived.

Chuck and I had been spending nearly every minute together since I finished the sonoporation. It had worked for everyone, even me with my chubby cells, and we were all slowed. Now, we had over a century to pass, but it would only feel like a bit more than six years. That still sounded like a lot to me, but less daunting after I met Chuck.