TOMUS

Here is a story on a theme that has been treated

before in science fiction—in “The Story of the Late Mr.

Elvesham” by H. G. Wells, in “The Master Shall Not Die”

by R. DeWitt Miller, and in “The Indesinent Stykal” by

D. D. Sharp, among others—but never as poignantly as this.

Stephen Robinett

He is utterly humorless and determined. This morning he learned he will die. He has said nothing since. Brooding? Possibly. He had never brooded before. The sensation is annoying. I have my work to do. His silence is more unnerving than his usual chatter. This morning, idly, just after breakfast, he asked about death.

Tomus, what is death?

I answered frankly. I always try to answer frankly. We have come, over the years, to an uneasy, communicative peace. I don’t know.

You must know, Tomus. You know everything.

I noticed his voice. It came through the thin barrier between our personalities with a changed quality, retaining its usual impression of wide-eyed innocence, but somehow different. The quality escaped me.

Not everything. I don’t know everything, I answered, only half paying attention, my mind occupied with my own work. My mathematical model of our galaxy, the core of my interstellar navigator, had yet to crystallize in my mind. Reconciling the converging series of equations demanded by the curvature of space with the infinite series demanded by the expanding universe, is, as one might imagine, taxing. His questions, by comparison, are merely annoying, tedious, usually simpleminded, seldom humorous, always without wit. He is uncultivated.

You must know, he insisted.

Will you please shut up!

Tomus, this, I think, is important.

Not very.

You must tell me about death.

It is one of the few things I have never experienced.

But you know about it.

It is the maximum entropy of a biochemical system.

He chewed on that awhile, allowing me to work through several equations. Ultimately my galactic model will be used to program a navigational computer, the perfect map. I was deep into a conflicting pair of equations when he finished chewing.

Tomus.

What?

Somehow your answer is unsatisfying.

It is accurate.

What is entropy? What is a biochemical system? Tomus, what is death?

Do you remember the dog? The dog, a friend of our early years together, the years after I allowed him to remain, had died, as dogs do, after fifteen years. It grew old. Entropy increased. It died. Maximum entropy, its scampering quantum of energy spreading back to the universe.

I remember the dog.

That is death.

I got a great amount of work done after that. Occasionally he began to ask something, then fell silent. About noon he broke the silence.

Will I die?

Yes.

And you, Tomus? Will you die?

It’s possible.

But I will die. You are sure of that.

Yes.

He said nothing else. He says nothing else. He is brooding. I sense his determination. He wants to live. To think of himself gone, nonexistent, expired, kaput, upsets him. He broods. At least he is quiet.

I finish my day’s work and go out to eat. The sun, a dull fat orange on the horizon, autumn fruit, has nothing in it of summer. Winter approaches. It is still beautiful. My four hundred summers and winters merge in my mind, each beautiful, each different. Only my work is the same, unchanging, new problems but the same mental processes.

I walk across the broad lawn in front of the Center. I recognize few of the strollers. It is too much trouble to keep track of who is where. If I need them, I can find them. The faces change. Only the people remain the same.

I walk out the gates and glance back at the building. It is anonymous. Since the Life Riots three hundred years ago, there has been nothing but anonymity for us. Once a sign hung over the main entrance, Center for Anentropic Maintenance. I was one of the first. In those days I was a black man. It helped during the riots. The mobs, thinking on a primitive, stereotyped level, could never conceive of a black Longevitor. They left me alone. I worked out the basic principles of the modular city while they rampaged, destroying the old, permanent city. Now, new modules—neighborhoods, they were called— are installed at regular intervals. The old modules are reconditioned and used elsewhere. Times change. Places change. Only the Longevitors remain the same.

Over dinner, he continues to be troubled. It disturbs my digestion.

Tomus, he says during dessert, why do I have to die?

It is the nature of things.

But you—

I have my work to do.

I could do your work.

I doubt it.

Test me.

If the polynomial equation F times X equals zero—with rational coefficients—has a root of A plus the square root of B, where A and B are rational and B is greater than zero but not a square, is A minus the square root of B also a root of the equation F times X equals zero? I sense confusion.

I could learn.

I doubt that, too. The problem I gave you is simple, fundamental.

What was it again?

I tell him.

And if I do not know the answer, I will die?

There’s more to it than that.

That is enough for now. I will work on it.

I finish eating and go to Madline’s. She is the only Longevitor with whom I keep contact. This time she is tall and thin and bony. Last time she was short, dumpy and slightly repulsive. I avoided her. When she reembodied, tall and thin, I had already been with him forty years. He had ceased gibbering and begun to speak. The gibbering, romping around in the unused portions of the brain, throwing tantrums, crying out in the middle of the night like a wild man so that I was startled awake, passed into mumbling, then speech.

His first word surprised me. I was at home alone, trying to deal with several Naperian logarithms, a simple manipulation. Unable to concentrate, I sat back and heard it, a sound like a sparrow’s peep. I looked around the room, thinking it originated externally. Again I heard it, a single sound, Me. I should have killed him then.

* * * *

Madline, dressed in a low-cut, clinging garment—proud of her knobby frame—meets me at the door. Externally, we are a chronological mismatch. Father-daughter. Hers is in its twenties, mine in its sixties. I want to finish the navigator program before reembodiment.

She puts her long arms lightly on my shoulders, interlacing her fingers behind my neck. She smiles, satisfied she is still attractive to me, letting me see how attractive she is—this time, thin and bony— and kisses me.

Stop that.

It is something he dislikes. It makes him feel self conscious. I kiss Madline.

Stop it!

Mind your own business.

Madline leads me to the sofa, a contragravitational field she developed once (fifty? seventy-five years ago?), holding my hand. The sofa, its field decorated with a green pastel smoke, enfolds us.

“You look tired, Tomus.”

“I’ve been working hard. I want to finish the program before the next exchange.”

The comment reminds her of something. She goes to her desk, an ancient plastic rolltop she has kept through four embodiments. She holds up a letterdisk. I recognize the seal.

“Have you read this?”

“No.”

“They’ve found two more.”

“Where?”

“One in Peking. The other in Vermont. They’re the first two we’ve found on Earth this century.”

“It’s too stable here. Adversity breeds intelligence.” I indicate the viewer on the desk next to her. She drops in the disk and hands me the viewer. Two men, both well over the two hundred I.Q. threshold, both with substantial personal achievements, one a chemist, the other a poet. The poet interests me. I point at him.

Madline nods, understanding me. We have known each other too long for misunderstandings.

“We’ve never had one,” she says. “They’ve allowed him one probationary embodiment.” Part of Madline’s job is screening potential Longevitors. “He probably won’t last more than one exchange anyway. Poets burn out early.”

“And mathematicians?”

She smiles and returns to the sofa. “You’re approved. I saw the recommendation myself. There was no trouble.”

I had expected more resistance. My output, due primarily to him, has diminished. They might have interpreted it as a trend.

“We’ll always need mathematicians,” says Madline.

“They said that about engineers before Caster.”

Caster, the inventor of flexible computer engineering, permitting computer design of anything mathematically possible, had been too old to retrain. The device he thought would guarantee his reembodiment made it unnecessary. Society no longer needed engineers. When they cease needing mathematicians, will I be in a young phase, young enough to retrain? Intelligence always finds a place in society. Only when the skills trained into that intelligence become outmoded does it become expendable. If they are physically able, most men retrain, satisfy the Center of their usefulness. Intelligence does what it must to survive.

“Madline, have you ever thought about dying?”

“Once, the first time. Before I was chosen.”

“Lately?”

“No, why?”

“He brought it up. He realized today he’s going to die.”

Her expression takes on an air of disapproval. She frowns, grave and solemn. “Why did you let him live in the first place?”

“Is there a law against it?”

“No, but it’s cruel.”

“Everyone else dies. He has it better than most of them. He has no problems, no worries about making a living.”

“How old is he now, mentally?”

“Eleven or twelve. I’m surprised he’s developed that far.”

Madline shivers. “It’s so cruel. If you just overwhelm them, smother them as soon as you’re in control, it’s much more humane. Why did you let him live?”

I remember the embodiment, sixty years before. It is the best part of an exchange, the old carcass discarded, suddenly seeing through new eyes, feeling new muscles, weak but adequate, a feeling of vitality. I remember the laboratory table, the computer, flickering, dying, ending the program that transferred me. I looked at the overhead mirror. The transfer cap, its myriad wires blurred and out of focus, looked frothy on my new skull. I tried the arm. It jerked across the chest, unused to so strong a stimulus. I tried again, more gently. The arm moved and stopped. I sensed the presence. At that moment, when you gain control, you are supposed to kill. I hesitated. Why? I had done it before. Something, some latent ethic from my past, asserted itself. I let it live.

I look at Madline. “I don’t know.”

I’ve got it!

What?

The answer.

What answer?

To your equation.

I smile.

“What is it?” asks Madline.

“At dinner, I gave him a simple algebra problem. He thinks he has the answer.”

I do! I do have it!

“Does he?” She looks worried.

What is it?

True.

That’s all?

What else do you want?

A proof.

Oh. Just a minute.

“Does he?” repeats Madline.

“I framed it like a true-false question. He says the answer’s true.”

She relaxes, smiling. “Can he flip a coin?”

Tomus.

What?

Pay attention. He begins, haltingly, to give me a proof. The terminology is wrong. He recognizes only that A and B, X and F are symbols. He has observed roots and coefficients, watching me work. Still, I become interested in his explanation. It is good, simpleminded and unsophisticated, but good. It is also correct.

I nod. “He got it.”

An expression of utter horror comes over Madline’s face.

“What’s wrong?” I ask.

“Don’t you see?”

“No.”

“We have been afraid something like this—” She shakes her head. “Tomus, please go home. I have to think. The Center will have to know.”

“That he can do algebra?”

“That he is twelve and without training and can do algebra.”

I see that she is right. I nod and prepare to leave. She stops me at the door, her long fingers light on my forearm.

“I’ll have to tell them.”

“I know.”

“They’ll reevaluate your application for exchange.”

I nod. “Probably.”

She frowns again, uncertain how to read my expression. “Does it worry you?”

“My energy goes into my work, not worrying.”

Momentarily her fingers tighten on my arm. “I hope—”

“You hope what?”

She shakes her head. “Nothing. The decision isn’t ours.” She kisses me lightly. “Good night, Tomus.”

Outside, the sun has set. The sky, awash with stars: clear, crisp points of light, seemingly eternal. I look for the nova, a bright buckle on Orion’s belt. It became visible from Earth a decade ago. Even stars end, collapse and explode, their vitality reabsorbed by the whole. The stars change. Only the people remain the same.

A cold wind catches me off guard. I walk to the nearest gravity tunnel. I punch in the number of the stop nearest my apartment and take a capsule. It drops several stories, is routed, rerouted, starts upward and emerges at Newport Beach Station Three. The journey from Los Angeles has taken three minutes.

I walk toward my apartment building, remembering Madline’s face when she realized the implications of his algebra. For me it is only a fact. It has no emotional significance. Somehow I knew he would develop. His progress has been geometrical. He gibbered for decades, perpetually infantile, the child locked in the closet through middle age, never developing, without the normal means of asserting itself, bound and gagged in his closet, able only to think. He mumbled only a few years. He spoke, first one word, then several. I took an interest in him. I explained the world he saw through my eyes, the sounds he heard through my ears. Once the nucleus of a vocabulary developed, he learned quickly, putting two and two together. Now he puts F and X, A and B together.

Madline is anxious for me. She thinks they will disapprove my reembodiment. It is one thing for them to allow us to smother babes in their beds. It is something else for them to allow reembodiment, knowing the old husk must be discarded still containing life. The Representative Panel—all mortal—has qualms, scruples, ethics. They see death from the wrong end of the telescope. They see a tiny grim reaper, inexorably marching toward them. They feel it is wrong to collapse the telescope and speed his arrival.

I see only entropy. As long as my energy can be channeled effectively into my work, as long as they judge my work useful, irreplaceable, I am permanent. For them, death is inevitable, tragic, a dark room to frighten children. For me death is a matter of choice.

I reach my apartment and sit down to work. He has been suspiciously quiet. What is he up to? Escape?

Are you there?

I am here, Tomus.

What are you doing?

Thinking.

Does it hurt? I sense confusion. He is too serious to have a sense of humor.

No, he answers.

Good. What are you thinking about?

I want to live, Tomus.

You sound like you’ve already got one foot in the grave.

I begin work, listening to his idle chatter. It slows me down but amuses me. Is that why I let him live? For amusement? For company? I remember the dog.

I want—

You want what?

I want to be a nuclear physicist.

There are no more nuclear physicists, and where did you learn about them anyway?

In an old book you were reading.

Spying again, eh?

He is flustered. He hates being accused of anything. His ego, though strong, is unused to the abrasion of other egos. He feels, justifiably, that being unable to act should relieve him of responsibility.

Eventually he settles down.

I want—

What do you want?

I want to be a mathematician.

How about a fireman?

What’s a fireman?

A man who puts out fires, but they don’t exist anymore either.

Good. I do not want anything put out.

I am surprised and pleased, a metaphorical turn of phrase has, lamely, popped into his conversation.

How about an Indian chief? There are still some of those.

What’s an Indian chief?

You have to be an Indian first. Are you an Indian?

No.

How do you know?

You are not an Indian, I think, so I am not.

I’m not, despite appearances, your blood brother. Whatever I am is irrelevant.

True.

I laugh out loud.

Why are you laughing?

Your wit’s improving.

What wit?

Good question. Keep at it.

I want to be a mathematician.

I decide it is time to shut him up.

Okay, mathematician, try this. I give him one of the problems I am working on.

Pardon me?

That’s the type of problem mathematicians do.

Tell me again.

I tell him. He ponders, befuddled.

I will work on it.

Next day I find a letterdisk on my desk. The Center is reevaluating my exchange application. New evidence, requiring reconsideration, has come to light. I disregard it. There is work to do. Only the work is important. As long as it is done, little else matters. At noon I am in a state of intense concentration. He interrupts.

Tomus.

Buzz off.

Tomus.

Later, please.

I am a mathematician.

Good for you. So am I, a mathematician with work to do.

I have done your work.

He has my attention. Go on.

The answer is true like last time.

And the proof?

He begins the proof. Because of his success with the algebra, I pay close attention. Halfway through, I begin to laugh.

Tomus, what is wrong?

His proof is ludicrous, ridiculous. He has misunderstood the problem, committed blatant errors of manipulation, ignored what refused to fit, tried to chop the problem on a Procrustean bed. He is hopeless. A dunce.

When I finish laughing, he is still bewildered.

Tomus, the answer is true. I am certain it is true.

Get your pointed hat out of the cupboard and sit in the corner.

Pardon me?

Your proof is hopeless. I begin to explain his errors. The sense of wide-eyed astonishment grows. He has never seen anything so complex. It makes the questions of death and entropy shrink to minuscule proportions in his mind. He is awestruck. But he is still listening.

I spend the afternoon going over the problem, step by step, showing him, showing him again. Finally, when he understands, he is dumbfounded by its beauty.

He remains dumbfounded throughout the evening, allowing me, for once, a quiet dinner alone.

* * * *

Weeks pass. From time to time, I show him more. He masters things quickly. He is learning geometrically, omnivorously. I try to impose some system on his learning. Discipline, the grammar of thought, is his weakness. He is insatiable, a mental whale—maw open —taking in the plankton of thought. He wakes me in the middle of the night with questions, some foolish, some irrelevant, some probing. He is on fire with learning. I wish, instead of a mathematician, he had chosen to be a fireman, putting out infernos.

A year passes, two years. I give up complaining about his interruptions of my work. His unintentional interruptions are the worst, a peripheral sense of intensity, edging into my mind, a clamoring, a clanging, a one-man band.

Because of this distraction, my own work creeps. The Representative Panel, delaying judgment on my application—on my worthiness to survive, to serve them—is anxious. They want results. Madline tells me of the controversy over my application. Many of them are using my unproductiveness as an excuse to oppose another reembodiment. They prefer to avoid meeting the question directly. They prefer to avoid killing him. A canceled application kills no one. It permits a normal death, age, death, entropy.

I have thought of it. Even without the scholar in my closet, the furious engine of learning, rattling and clanking and puffing steam, even without him, my output would be small. One day, I realize why. I am bored. Bored stiff. Ho-hum. Though I still believe in my work, work that must be done, it bores me. I have experienced most things. Everything of interest, except—I remember a conversation I had with him. No, I have never experienced that.

I sit back in my chair, hands behind my head, thinking, reflecting, ruminating on too many years.

Have you ever thought— I begin.

Not now, Tomus.

I am stunned. He has never refused to talk. Not now?

I am busy.

Busy? What can he be doing? Digging out? Tunneling out? The rebuff angers me. What the hell do you have to do that’s so important?

Please, Tomus, I’m concentrating.

On what, my navel?

No, your program. I have it almost finished.

I sit up in the chair. What do you know about—

I have been watching, learning. You made a mistake in the equations that describe the Orion nova.

Mistake? The upstart! The ingrate! Mistake, my foot!

It had better be yours. I have none. He laughs.

A joke, his first, an incongruity observed. A joke. I laugh. I laugh and keep laughing and laugh until tears run down my cheeks. Tension and weariness and anger drain from me.

Finally, breathing deeply, I control myself. I reach across my desk and punch up the equations for the Orion nova. I scan them quickly, indexing through several sequences, before I find the error. I stare at it a moment, then punch in the correction.

Do you want the rest of it, Tomus?

The rest of what?

The navigational program. I have it.

All right. Cough it up.

He hesitates, wondering about the phrase, then talks. I punch it into the computer as he talks. I know, as he dictates, he is correct. The simplicity and beauty of the construction alone confirm it. Still, hours later, when he finishes, I get computer confirmation. The mistake, an oversight, a moment of bored inattention, has unsettled me. The computer confirms his program.

* * * *

Madline meets me at the door. He no longer objects to my kissing her. He is curious. He would like to kiss her himself. I imagine him trying it, a passionless kiss generated by intellectual curiosity, a pensive moment afterward, frowning, quizzical, analyzing the kiss into oblivion. I expect him at any moment to say, Tomus, step aside, let me try.

I have come to Madline’s to get word on the exchange application. We sit on the sofa, now smoked a rust red. I wait. Her information is supposed to be secret until official promulgation. Hear ye! Hear ye! The following named minds please step forward! You have been chosen to serve mankind, eternally!

She knows why I have come. I have seen her seldom since the reexamination of my application began. She knows by my infrequent visits and by the way I kissed her. Finally, to break the uncomfortable silence, I ask, “Have they decided?”

She nods.

“And?”

“They evaluated your program. It was superlative. The best work you’ve done, Tomus.” She smiles. “It startled them with its brilliance.”

“And?”

“They also examined the potential projects that would justify reembodiment. There were several.”

“But-”

Unable to appear solemn any longer, she grins, throwing her arms around my neck. “Even the dissenters gave up. A mind like yours, Tomus, it will live forever.”

She kisses me, slowly, seductively. Even this weary carcass begins to respond.

Tomus.

Go away.

Tomus, they have approved the program?

The doctor is busy. Call back later.

Tomus, will I die now?

* * * *

The next few weeks, those before reembodiment, I spend with him. The navigational program is finished. Technically, officially, I am retired until next time. I take him places and teach him things. Mathematics has beauty but it is not the whole of life. He must be exposed to as much of it as he can before we are separated. Separated, a euphemism. Before total entropy, before death. I owe him that.

He drinks in the world with the same intensity he drank in my world. It is a marvel to him. He wonders why we have never done this before. I tell him the truth. The work had to be done. It came first. I try to impress that on him. It is all that matters, the work. The rest is froth and foam, big bubbles on a short beer. To survive, I had to work. He understands the need to survive. The other things I have taught him are the tools of survival. But that one fact, the need to survive, is the reason. Without it the tools are useless.

* * * *

Madline, good friend, tall and bony friend, is there on the day of the exchange. She smiles and kisses me.

“The last for fifteen years,” she says. Some residual sense of propriety would never let her start earlier.

“You like younger men, I take it.”

“I like you, Tomus.”

“Madline, I want you to do something for me.”

“Name it.”

I take out the letterdisks, one addressed to her, an explanation, the other addressed to the technician in charge of exchange, a Longevitor, another old friend. His contribution, his reason for being inserted continually into the ranks of the able-bodied, is his integrity. If a mortal ran the equipment, his bitterness toward Longevitors—the same bitterness that keeps selection of Longevitors in the hands of mortals, who must be shown compelling reasons to grant another person perpetual life—would corrupt him or drive him insane. I hand Madline the disk addressed to her. “Read it after the exchange.”

She accompanies me into the exchange room. I pass the second disk to the technician, asking him to read it now. He completes the setup first. The table is hard beneath me. I feel the familiar cap fitted to my head. How many times before? Madline takes my hand.

“Are you comfortable?”

“Not very. They haven’t changed that.”

She smiles. “No. They haven’t. Perhaps next time we can do something about it.”

“Perhaps.”

Tomus. What?

I am afraid.

Don’t be silly. There’s no sensation. It just happens.

I am still afraid.

The technician comes back, asks Madline to leave, and nods curtly to me, acknowledging the letter. Has he had such requests before?

“Ciao, Tomus.”

“Good-bye.”

I wait. There will be no sensation. I know that. Still, I am anxious. And, I notice, interested.

* * * *

I feel strange. Something is in front of my eyes. An arm. It is pudgy, short, floppy. I try to move the arm. Unexpectedly, frighteningly, it flings away from me. I remember what Tomus said, carefully, slowly.

I will try it later, when I am calm. Now I am giddy. The sights, the sounds heap in upon me. Yet there is something I must do. Tomus has told me. I sense the presence. It is like me. It is fearful. Tomus, you told me what to do but it is so helpless. I cannot do it. Tomus, I cannot.

I am frightened. Tomus, I am frightened without you. Where are you, Tomus?

I remember. Now I know where you are. You are gone, dead, Tomus. You are like the dog. There is only me and it. I cannot do it. I will not do it. I will let it live as you let me live. I will call it after you. I will call it Tomus. I will name it after you, Father.