Longevity

Longevity

By Vivian Doolittle

I used to be afraid of dying. Now? I want to die. It is my most fervent wish. It has been so for over a thousand years.

Long since, I killed my only companion, Bill. But that was not my first crime. Nor was my first crime the fact that it was I who had doomed poor Bill in the first place.

No, my first crime was my hubris. My second crime was killing the Seer. I know now why her warning was so dire, but I let my pride blind me to it. She counted on that, I’m sure.

What I wouldn’t give for death’s sweet release from this self-imposed prison. Alas, taking my own life is not possible now.

By the time I reached my second century of life, my body was failing rapidly. The pain was enough to prevent me getting out of bed most days, but even that agony was not enough to overcome the intensity of my fear of the alternative.

In better times, I had been a prospector on a lousy little planet in a forgotten corner of the galaxy. My claim was staked at a dry riverbed on that misbegotten world. No one was more surprised than I when I hit that rich vein of gold. I became wealthy beyond my wildest dreams. I bought a state-of-the-art orbiting house. I had machines to clean and care for me. I could afford all the medicines and painkillers known to science, but eventually they stopped working.

Bill, my terrier and constant companion, kept me company. But endless days of leisure, even when you are very old, become boring and monotonous. Though I no longer needed to prospect, I still flew down to the surface from time to time, if only to get Bill and me out of the house for a while.

My mine was up and running and still producing. It was fully automated, so I needed no employees to share my wealth. But I would take my little plastic pan and a few gallons of water and pan for gold like I did in days gone by. My bane and my curse began the last time I took such a simple excursion.

I crouched at the edge of the hole that I dug, swirling the pan in lazy counterclockwise circles.

I had been through quite a bit of the gravel already with no luck. There! A glimmer of metal. I moved some of the black sand aside and sure enough, there was a nugget. It was big enough to cover my pinkie-nail. That would fetch a great price, though I didn’t need the money.

Crouching for hours on course gravel is hard work for the young and fit, but for me it was excruciating. As I packed my equipment into the pod and called Bill to my side, I looked up to see a woman approaching. I can tell you without hesitation, seeing another person on my claim came as quite a shock to me. I do not believe I’ve ever been so startled. Suffice it to say that I nearly soiled myself at the sight of this person where no one should ever be.

She stopped and stared at me. She was young and quite lovely. She wore a plain hooded robe and sandals. Her arms were crossed and her hands were shoved into her sleeves, invisible. I wondered if she had a weapon. She almost blended into the brown and gray hues of the dead trees that lined the banks of the equally dead river. She spoke first. 

“Your pain is palpable to me,” she said. Her voice was soft and her dark eyes regarded me from under the generous hood.

“Yeah? Well it’s pretty palpable to me, too,” I said. “How are you here?”

“I can heal you,” she said.

“I sincerely doubt that young lady,” I said. “I’ve been there and back again and I can tell you with certainty that there is no medicine for what ails me.”

“Nonetheless,” she said. One of her hands came free of the robe’s deep sleeve and she pointed up a hill to my right. “My dwelling is nearby. I am a Seer. I possess a Livenstone. I can heal you,” she said again.

I had heard of Livenstones, who hadn’t? But they were about as real as ghosts and I had little patience and even less stamina to continue to listen to her foolishness.

 “Thanks for the offer, but I need to get this to the assay office before they close,” I said. It was a silly excuse. I would never bother to sell such a trinket.

“It will cost you only a few moments and you can be pain free again.”

“What’s in it for you?” I asked.

“I do it for you,” was all she said.

A fresh bolt of pain traced up my spine, an unnecessary reminder of my condition. So, I sighed, shrugged, and followed her. She was correct, it wasn’t far. I wondered how I could have come to the mine so many times and failed to see her shack. That ramshackle building didn’t look like it would hold up in a light breeze. It was so much humbler than my grand mansion, waiting just outside the atmosphere.

Once inside the dark, one-room shack, she sat at a small table near the center of the room. A black velvet bag about the size of my shoe, was on the floor at her feet. “Sit,” she said.

I pulled the only other piece of furniture, a low 3-legged stool, up to the table and sat. She leaned forward and brushed a lock of frizzy gray hair from my temple. The gesture made me feel more comfortable. I thought for a moment that her kindness could be genuine, for how could such a young and lovely creature as this, bear to touch a gray and shriveled crone such as myself?

“The Livenstone extracts a great price from the user,” she said.

Oh, here it comes, I thought.

“Once you have been exposed to its light, you will again be young and vibrant. Your pain will vanish and you will enjoy a lifespan many thousands of times that of a normal human,” she told me. “You will not age and you will not suffer infirmity.”

“And what is that great price?” I asked.

She paused and I saw her eyes drop to the bag at her feet.

“Once exposed to the light of the Livenstone, you will belong to it. The stone will trap you wherever it finds you. You cannot leave that place, ever. You cannot escape. It will not even permit suicide. You will be forced to remain at that location forever or until you can find another way to end your long life.” Her voice had taken on a strained tone.

“A person can’t be tied to a single location!” I cried. “I have my ship. In fact, I have a second ship at home that can go interstellar.”

“If you look at the stone, you will remain here for the rest of your days,” she said.

“I won’t! I’ll get in my pod down at the bottom of this hill and I’ll go home.” She just shook her head, regarding me with a sad look.

“Your ship will not start. Or a great wind will blow a tree onto it, crushing it. Or it will forever be out of fuel.”

“Then I will wait until someone comes along who can take me!” I cried.

“You will remain invisible to all who would remove you from your final resting place.”

“Is that why I’ve never seen you here until today?”

She nodded. “I’ve watched you for decades. For some reason I cannot explain, today I felt compelled to approach you. And you saw me, which tells me that it was the right thing to do.”

“So you looked upon the stone at this very spot? At some time in the past? And you built this hovel to house you?” As I asked these things, I became ever more suspicious of her tale.

“Why could I not just hike out through the forest?” I asked.

“If you try to escape through the Dead Forest, you will find obstacle after obstacle until you finally realize that you are a prisoner of this place.” She spoke with such finality that I found myself wanting to believe her in spite of my distrust of her motivations. I believed that she really could have a Livenstone, or at least think that she did.

“Give me the stone,” I said. “I’ll take it with me and use it elsewhere as it suits me!” I dug the collection bottle out of my pocket and offered it to her.

“Here. This will pay you for it and then some, I’m sure!” It occurred to me then that she might have nothing more in that bag than a rock to brain me with so she could steal my gold. The more I thought about that, the more convinced I became that it was her plan all along.

My pain was palpable, indeed. I was obviously very old and it didn’t take a physician to see my limp or hear my groan as I rose from the gravel by the river. The greedy girl had been planning to rob me. In my pain and surprise at the sight of her, I stupidly followed her home. However, my fear of death rose up, greater than the pain, and in that moment I decided I would have to kill her first. If I failed, she would surely overpower me, frail as I was.

She regarded me cautiously, but without concern. I found my digging axe suddenly in my hand and I hit her with it, again and again. I hit her many more times than I should have had the strength to. She did not resist and finally she fell to the floor, a bloody mess.

Afterward, I stood there panting. Her hood had fallen back and her once beautiful face was ruined. Her blood soaked rapidly into the floorboards and I knew I had to escape before I was somehow discovered.

When I climbed back down the hill, with the Livenstone tucked into my pack, I saw Bill sitting in the pod, wagging hello. It was coming dark and the adrenaline rush was wearing off. I began to shake, the exertion taking its toll. A sip of whiskey would set me right, I decided and flew my pod toward town instead of home. I found my favorite pub, and leaving Bill in the pod, I walked weakly into the welcoming dim interior. I stayed much longer than intended.

It occurred to me after more than an hour and more than one sip of whiskey, that Bill would be needing to get out of the pod and I had undoubtedly said much too much about the day’s events to all who would listen. Flying home might be difficult, groggy as I felt.

I returned to the pod and set Bill free for a few moments to relieve himself. He wagged his gratitude and upon hopping back into the pod, he licked me. Bill was such a good dog. I owed him so much more than just the pleasure of my company. He was what kept me going. He was what really when I think about it, kept me alive.

We flew back slowly, Bill and I. It took everything I had to avoid looking at the bag that held the stone. That inescapable and overwhelming dread of dying, though I was alone save for the dog and well into my second century, is what had me so ready to believe the girl. That stone had to be real. If it wasn’t, then I was just a murderer.

It was my whiskey-loosened tongue that did me in. Pursuit seemed impossible so hot on the heels of my crime. Yet not long after I returned home and stashed the Livenstone in my emergency duffel, exterior scan showed a ship flying straight toward my house. I could see three men in the forward port. There may have been more.

There would be no running from them. My failing joints were screaming with fresh agony. Bill ran ahead and then back. He was urging me on in his best old-dog way.

 They were coming and I had but one chance to escape. Sounds filtered up from the hangar deck below. Soon they would be inside. They would be after the Livenstone that I had stolen from my victim, not me. These were no law enforcement types.

You must understand, I did what I did because of pain. Not emotional pain, though I have plenty of that. No, I’m talking about physical pain. The kind of bone deep, chronic, unbearable pain that nothing can relieve except dying. But in my twisted recollections of centuries of loss, my family, my friends and lovers, all that I ever held dear, even those pains were not enough to make me wish for death. Now, with the Livenstone, I had the means to truly be free of all pain and escape death at the same time.

I shuffled across the living room, through the hall and into my bedroom. The overstuffed duffel waited there in the back of the closet. Bill was anxiously wagging his tail as he paced to and fro over the rug that lay on the floor next to my sleeping platform.

He knew where we were going because we had practiced emergency departures many times over the years.

I pulled back the rug and exposed a hatch, flush with the floor. My pursuit was coming up the stairs onto the main floor of my house. It wouldn’t be long now.

“Thirty-one, ninety-seven, forty-five, eighteen,” I said. The hatch clicked and I pulled it open, throwing the duffel down into the opening. Bill jumped in and landed on the bag, never ceasing his enthusiastic wagging. Unlike Bill, I was in no shape to jump, so I stepped onto the recessed ladder and stiffly climbed down until I could reach up and almost close the hatch.

Before closing it completely, I grasped the edge of the rug and pulled it back into place. I then let the hatch close and listened for the lock to reengage. As it did, I heard the men enter my bedroom. Their footsteps pounded urgently above, but I thought my clever carpet ruse and voice recognition lock would hold them just long enough.

I opened the cockpit of my tiny interstellar pod and Bill joyfully leapt in. I followed him, pulling the heavy duffel behind me and securing the hatch.

Bill made himself comfortable in his customary left-hand seat as I settled behind the controls with a groan. I took us out to what was surely less than a safe distance and hit the light drive. By the time the men figured out where I had gone, this old girl would be a hundred light years away.

As we fled, I wondered where I would go. I had enough money to buy my own small world. There, I could make my own laws and be forever out of reach. The murder would go unsolved.  

I slowed us down a little to prepare to do some research. The hasty departure had not left time to gather much food and drink. We would have to make landfall fairly soon.

I engaged the autopilot and turned around to open the duffel. Bill panted good-naturedly beside me. My goal in the duffel was a bottle of water, but my hand fell on the velvet pouch and I took it out. A corner of the pouch fell away and the light that came from it was blinding. It would have been impossible to stop myself had I tried. I took out the stone.

And now I wish, all those hundreds of years ago, that I had let the men who broke into my orbiting home kill me right then. I wonder if they would have killed Bill, too. Poor little guy was sitting right there when I foolishly took the stone out of the duffel and gazed upon its brilliance. No dog in the history of dogs lived so long as Bill. I killed him in his sleep about a decade back. I couldn’t bear for him to keep on living so long after he should have returned to dust. I know he relished the release. How I envy him.

We traveled from world to world over the centuries. The story was always the same. I could not land my pod. We could not disembark from it. We could not die. Bill and I were cursed to live for all eternity sitting in a small interstellar pod, trapped in place as I was warned.

Am I mad? I was. I was mad to kill the Seer. I was mad to take the Livenstone. I certainly have gone mad on and off over the centuries. Spacefarers keep their distance, unable to see me, as the Seer had cautioned. I can’t imagine what I look like now. A young and attractive woman, sitting in the cockpit of a little pod, forever sailing through space, never to land. A little white dog dead on the seat beside her.

Now I dream of finding someone to take my place as keeper of the Livenstone. I cannot kill myself, as predicted. God knows I’ve tried.

Once in a great while, a ship will hail me. This has been a recent development. Perhaps I am now visible so that I may end my miserable existence. I should send out a distress signal. I am assuredly in great distress. There must be a way to find someone who will end my life, just as the Seer tricked me into ending hers so very long ago.