The Kings of Eternity (26 page)

Jasper laughed. “How could I not bequeath you that which I have already enjoyed? Now do as I did, and administer the serum. Goodbye, my friends.”

His voice faded and a second later, before we had time to respond, the blue egg lost its lustre.

I moved like a man in a daze and sat upon the chesterfield before the fire. I was undergoing hot and cold sweats, and my hand gripping the pistol was shaking as if with palsy.

I stared at my friends where they sat, immobile, around the table.

Vaughan said, “Wait, Jonathon! Don’t use it yet... It would be foolhardy to rush into this. There are implications which we would be wise to discuss.”

“I agree,” Charles said. “We need to consider the ramifications of this before we go ahead, or not.”

They joined me before the fire, the brandy forgotten, and we sat for a time in a profound silence - like, paradoxically, men handed down a death sentence, and not precisely the opposite.

“Elena...” Vaughan said at last.

I looked up. “Excuse me?”

Vaughan smiled sadly. “My wife, Elena. She died three years ago. If only I had possessed the serum then.”

I stared at him. “My father...” I said to myself.

If Jasper had sent the serum a few days earlier, then my father would have lived; or if he could have hung on a little longer... I felt my throat tighten at the thought.

“My God,” Charles said, more to himself. “Think of it, just think of it. If we do administer the serum, then everything changes. Our relationships with those with whom we fall in love... Consider: we cannot just administer the remaining serum to our next lover. What is the likelihood that that love will last the test of time?” He smiled bitterly to himself. “And then we will meet others, whom we will love perhaps even more, with the knowledge that that love will be doomed when they age and grow old and we remain forever young.”

“Also,” Vaughan said, “we will by necessity be forced to live a life of deceit and duplicity. How long will we be able to remain in one community before people begin to notice that we are not ageing? We’ll be forced to move every so often, forever wandering the globe, leaving loved ones and friends and all we’ve come to hold dear...”

“But consider the alternative,” I said. “Death, in thirty or forty or however many years. And an eternity of oblivion after that.”

“Of which we will know nothing,” Vaughan said, as if that were any consolation.

“I would rather experience an eternity of existence,” I said, “even if it does entail ceaseless wandering, and doomed love. Imagine the possibilities, the experiences one would have, freed from the spectre of death. Vaughan, haven’t you wanted to live to see whether your novelistic prophecies might come to pass, or other maybe even stranger futures that might arise instead?”

“There are benefits and drawbacks,” Vaughan said, his gaze distant. “But to be granted eternal life while all around you millions are doomed to brief existences... Wouldn’t the psychological pressure become too much?”

“Perhaps one would adapt,” I said. “And if one did find a true love, with whom to share eternity...”

“Spoken like a true romantic,” Charles said, “or a naïve dreamer.”

I raised the serum pistol before me. I recalled the many times when I had awoken in the empty early hours of the night, beset with visions of oblivion. To be freed from the inevitability of death would, surely, compensate for all the drawbacks enumerated by Vaughan.

I looked at my friends. “We would not be tied to Earth, either. In time, when humankind is granted the status of a star-faring race, we too could go among the stars.”

“Even before that,” Charles mused, “if Jasper opens another shanath to Earth.”

I shook my head. The possibilities offered by the serum were overwhelming, and I felt compelled to waste no time and press the pistol to my flesh at that very second.

“I have thought long enough,” I said. “I appreciate all you’ve said, but to live without fear of death is worth all manner of hardship.”

I found my jugular and placed the nozzle of the pistol against it. I located the studs, gazing across at my friends as they watched me with wide eyes. Vaughan opened his mouth to remonstrate, but too late.

One by one I depressed the studs.

A burning pain stung the flesh of my neck, and then I was taken in a dizzy rush as the serum entered my bloodstream and careered to my brain, bestowing an instant heady euphoria. I slumped back into the chesterfield and laughed aloud.

“Langham,” Charles said. “How do you feel?”

“Light-headed best describes it,” I reported. “A little drunk, and ecstatic!”

I watched Vaughan as he raised the pistol to his neck and, after a second’s hesitation, pressed the studs. He slumped back into his chair, his eyes closed.

I looked across at Charles. “Well?” I said.

He was staring at the pistol in his hand, as if weighing the consequences of any action he might take.

I was overcome, then, with the nausea that Jasper had described. I felt dizzy and a little sick, as if at any second I might lose the contents of my stomach. I stretched out on the chesterfield and stared at the ceiling, sweating profusely. I did not see whether Charles had decided to administer the serum to himself, and cared little.

The nausea lasted about one hour and then I passed into a state of profound and languorous lethargy. My limbs seemed to weigh a ton, and yet at the same time it was as if I were floating above the chesterfield. I closed my eyes and drifted as if under the influence of a powerful anaesthetic.

I came awake later - how much later I was unsure, until I looked up at the carriage clock on the mantelshelf. It was seven in the morning. I had been unconscious for approximately nine hours.

I sat up, realising that I was still gripping the pistol that contained the one remaining dose of serum. I slipped it into my pocket and stood. Only then did it come to me that I felt not only invigorated but possessed by a sensation of fitness and well-being such as I had never known before. I felt as though every toxin had been flushed from my system, that every ache and pain had been eased; I felt, then, as I paced the room, possessed of energy and purpose.

Vaughan was slumped in his armchair, the pistol having fallen to his lap. An angry red weal stood out on his neck, where he had administered the serum. I crossed to Charles: he too was unconscious, stretched out upon the settee; he, too, had succumbed to the lure of eternal life and applied the pistol to his neck.

I paced the room, then, taken by the need to flee the confines of the library, fetched my overcoat and hurried through the French windows and up the hillside. Dawn was breaking, and it seemed to me the most beautiful sunrise I had ever witnessed: a myriad streamers of cerise and argent laminated the sky to the east. The air was still, and rent with birdsong; I heard the lowing of a distant dairy cow, the barking of a farm dog. The world was waking, and I was awaking with it.

I strode up the hillside and through the wood until I came to the clearing, and continued through it on a path I had never taken before. I was less interested in my destination than in the desire to exercise, to be part of the lightening world around me. At times I even ran, full of boundless energy and a feeling of unrestrained joy. It was a sensation I dimly recalled from youth: an open acceptance of the wonder of existence, of the million possibilities that lay ahead, untramelled by such obstacles as adult concerns and conventions. It was as if my mind were open, for the first time in years, to the wonder of reality that we all once felt but which, over time, the blinkers of routine and conformity work to hide from us. I was mentally liberated and physically, too: I walked for miles as the sun rose and the hours passed by in a rush. I had never felt healthier; my body was a perfect machine and my mind was open and alert.

At last I came to the lane above Cranley Grange, where just a few weeks ago Vaughan had stopped his car in order to take in the snow-bound view. I paused now on the crest of the rise, and stared down at the Grange before continuing on my way. I wanted to greet Vaughan and Charles on the first morning of our immortality, and share with them the joy of our renewed existence.

When I burst into the library, my friends appeared to have just awoken from their slumber; they were smiling, and stretching their invigorated limbs. I could tell by their expressions that they felt as reborn as I.

I hurried over to the table, snatched up the brandy and glasses and splashed out three generous measures.

We took a glass each and stood before the dying embers of the fire.

I raised my drink. “A toast,” I said. “To the Kings of Eternity!”

My friends responded. “To the Kings of Eternity!” they cried.

PART TWO

A Trove of Stars

Chapter Eleven

Fairweather Cranley and London, 1936-1945

I am writing this some ten years after the momentous day in 1935 when Jasper granted Charles Carnegie, Edward Vaughan and myself the gift of immortality. Much has happened since that day, and I will endeavour here to set down some record of the intervening years.

In 1936, soon after completing my account of events in Hopton Wood and the subsequent happenings, I decided that I had had enough of London life, and looked around for a quiet place in the country. My decision was prompted by two main factors: surrounded by so many people in the city, accosted by crowds whenever I ventured out, I was forever reminded that I was set apart from those around me by an accidental and arbitrary stroke of circumstance. Surrounded by people, I was in the paradoxical situation of being made to feel isolated and lonely. The sight of couples arm in arm on the street, dining together in restaurants, filled me with despair. I had two brief affairs in the years before the war, but neither of these were true meetings of minds, still less communions of the soul: the easy physical aspect of both liaisons served to point up the emotional lacunae that existed between me and both these women. I went out of my way to find in these people qualities that I might in time come to love, but failed: they seemed to me too caught up in the easy materialism of the time, interested in the shallow vogues of a contemporary culture I was coming to feel less and less a part of, and which in time I came to despise. For their part, they found me ‘distant and remote’ I was ‘unable to commit emotionally’, one woman said, and another found me, ‘pathologically reserved’. They were probably right. How could I commit myself to people with whom I shared little understanding and who, in time, while I remained a constant thirty-five, would age and go the way of all flesh? I told myself that perhaps in time I might find someone with whom I would have something in common, and whom I might come to love... In time, and I had all the time in the world, after all.

The second reason I wanted to be away from London was that in the city I was forever haunted by reminders of Carla; the years seemed to do nothing to assuage the pain I experienced at our separation - pain not only at being without someone with whom I had shared a lot, but at the shallowness and cruelty of the person I had been back then in ‘35. So many venues in London filled me with a feeling of bitterness and guilt, and I had to get away.

During those pre-war years I spent most weekends with Charles Carnegie and Edward Vaughan at Cranley Grange. Our meetings began soon after Jasper transmitted the serum from the stars; once a week we would convene on Saturday evening and dine in the library with the blue egg taking pride of place on the table, in the hope that we might hear from the star traveller once again. Later, when we realised that in all likelihood we might never again speak to Jasper, the weekends became a meeting of friends who shared, aside from friendship, a unique secret. I came to rely on these gatherings, as I think did Vaughan and Charles. They were the only people in whose company I could completely relax; we shared, beside the bond of common experience, an even stronger bond of trust. Only with these men could I talk of my experiences and be sure that they understood; like me, they knew what it was to be set apart from the mass of humanity; like me, they knew what it was to crave emotional affection from people with whom, out of necessity, we could not share the whole truth.

It became our custom to embark upon long walks on Saturday or Sunday mornings, taking in Hopton Wood and the clearing and the village of Fairweather Cranley. On these rambles we would discuss the effects, both physical and psychological, of our condition. We each shared an improved fitness and well-being: we were never ill; the common cold, or worse, held no fear for us. Charles had even experimented upon himself to scientifically test the fact of our resistance to disease. He had introduced himself to a whole range of viruses and bacteria, to no ill effect. On one occasion he told us that he had injected himself with cancer cells, but other than a period during which he felt slightly under the weather, he suffered not in the slightest.

The psychological effect of being rendered immortal was more problematic, and much harder to define or detect. Vaughan and Charles seemed less effected than I, and admitted as much themselves. Vaughan continued his life as a respected and popular novelist, writing a book a year from his cottage in Kent; after the loss of his wife, he had no pressing desire for intimacy or even companionship, he told me. Friends in his village and in London, and our weekly company, satisfied his social needs. For his part, Charles too seemed satisfied with his lot: he worked as a family doctor in Aylesbury, had one or two friends in the town, and was engaged in an occasional liaison - his description - with a widowed woman ten years his senior.

“But don’t you ever feel... I don’t know...
excluded?”
I once asked as we strolled along the lane towards the public house in Fairweather Cranley. “The human race has its own agenda, and I have mine, and never the twain...”

Vaughan looked at me shrewdly. “I think your problem, Jonathon, is that you feel guilty.”

I considered his words for a time. “You might be right,” I said. “Why me? Everyone around me is slowly dying. That’s always been the terrible tragedy of the human race, the single fact that touches all endeavour with poignancy: the ultimate futility of existence. Whatever we do, whatever great things we create, we die.” I shook my head. “Now I’m freed from the fear of death, the fact of death... and I suppose you’re right, I do feel guilty.”