Time Enough for Love (6 page)

“Not that I would drink. But the local brandy I think well of.”

“Good. Brandy and bubbles for me if that is the best we can do, a brandy Manhattan if anyone knows what I mean by that.”

“I do, and like them—I learned something about ancient drinks when I studied your life.”

“Fine. Then please order for us, drinks and dinner—and I’ll listen and see how many words I can pick up. I think my memory is coming back a bit.”

Weatheral spoke to one of the technicians; Lazarus interrupted. “That should be one-
third
sweet vermouth, not one-half.”

“So? You understood it?”

“Mostly. Indo-European roots, with a simplified syntax and grammar; I’m beginning to recall it. Damn it, when a man has had to learn as many languages as I have, it’s easy for one to slip away. But it’s coming back.”

Service was so fast as to cause one to suspect that a crew was standing by ready to produce anything that the Senior or the Chairman Pro Tem asked for.

Weatheral raised his glass. “Long life.”

“In a pig’s eye,” Lazarus growled and took a sip. He made a face. “Whew! Panther sweat. But it does have alcohol in it.” He took another. “Improves as your tongue gets numb. Okay, Ira, you’ve stalled long enough. What was your
real
reason for snatching me back from my well-earned rest?”

“Lazarus, we need your wisdom.”

PRELUDE

Lazarus stared in horror. “
What
did you say?”

“I said,” Ira Weatheral repeated, “that we need your wisdom, sir. We do.”

“I thought that I was off again in one of those before-dying dreams. Son, you’ve come to the wrong window. Try across the hall.”

Weatheral shook his head. “No, sir. Oh, it isn’t necessary to use the word ‘wisdom’ if it offends you. But we do need to learn what you know. You are more than twice as old as the next oldest member of the Families. You mentioned that you have practiced more than fifty professions. You’ve been everywhere, you’ve seen far more than anyone else. You’ve certainly learned more than any of the rest of us. We aren’t doing things much better now than we were two thousand years ago, when you were young. You must know why we are still making mistakes our ancestors made. It would be a great loss if you hurried your death without taking time to tell us what you have learned.”

Lazarus scowled and bit his lip. “Son, one of the few things I’ve learned is that humans hardly ever learn from the experience of others. They learn—when they do, which isn’t often—on their own, the hard way.”

“That one statement is worth recording for all time.”

“
Hmm!
No one would learn anything from it; that’s what it says. Ira, age does not bring wisdom. Often it merely changes simple stupidity into arrogant conceit. Its only advantage, so far as I have been able to see, is that it spans
change.
A young person sees the world as a still picture, immutable. An old person has had his nose rubbed in changes and more changes and still more changes so many times that he
knows
it is a moving picture, forever changing. He may not like it—probably doesn’t;
I
don’t—but he knows it’s so, and knowing it is the first step in coping with it.”

“May I place in open record what you have just said?”

“Huh? That’s not wisdom, that’s a cliché. An obvious truth. Any fool will admit that, even if he doesn’t live by it.”

“It would carry greater weight with your name on it, Senior.”

“Do as you like; it’s just horse sense. But if you think I have gazed upon the naked Face of God, think again. I haven’t even begun to find out how the Universe works, much less what it is for. To figure out the basic questions about this World it would be necessary to stand
outside
and look at it. Not inside. No, not in two thousand years, not in twenty thousand. When a man dies, he may shake loose his local perspective and see the thing as a whole.”

“Then you believe in an afterlife?”

“Slow up! I don’t
‘believe’
in anything. I
know
certain things—little things, not the Nine Billion Names of God—from experience. But I have
no
beliefs. Belief gets in the way of learning.”

“That’s what we want, Lazarus: what you have learned. Even though you say it’s nothing but ‘little things.’ May I suggest that anyone who has managed to stay alive as long as you have must necessarily have learned many things, or you could not have lived so long? Most humans die violent deaths. The very fact that we live so much longer than our ancestors did makes this inevitable. Traffic accident, murder, wild animals, sports, pilot error, a slippery bit of mud—eventually something catches up with us. You haven’t lived a safe, placid life—quite the contrary!—yet you have managed to outwit all hazards for twenty-three centuries.
How?
It can’t be luck.”

“Why can’t it be? The most unlikely things do happen, Ira—there is nothing so unlikely as a baby. But it’s true that I’ve always watched where I put my feet…and never fought when I could duck out…and when I did have to fight, I always fought dirty. If I had to fight, I wanted
him
to be dead instead of
me
. So I tried to arrange it that way. Not luck. Or not much, anyway.” Lazarus blinked thoughtfully. “I’ve never argued with the weather. Once a mob wanted to lynch me. I didn’t try to reason with them; I just put a lot of miles between me and them as fast as I could and never went back there.”

“That’s not in any of your memoirs.”

“Lots of things not in my memoirs. Here comes chow.”

The door dilated, a dining table for two glided in, positioned itself as the chairs separated for it, and started unfolding to serve. The technicians approached quietly and offered unnecessary personal service. Weatheral said, “Smells good. Do you have any eating rituals?”

“Eh? Praying or such? No.”

“Not that sort. Such as—Say one of my executives eats with me: I won’t let him discuss business at the table. But if you will permit, I would like to continue this conversation.”

“Certainly, why not? As long as we stick to subjects that don’t rile the stomach. Did you ever hear what the priest told the old maid?”

Lazarus glanced at the technician at his elbow. “Perhaps not now. I think this shorter one is female and she just might know some English. You were saying?”

“I was saying that your memoirs are incomplete. Even if you are determined to go through with dying, won’t you consider granting me and your other descendants the rest of your memoirs? Simply talk, tell us what you’ve seen and done. Careful analysis might teach us quite a lot. For example, what
did
happen at that Families Meeting of 2012? The minutes don’t tell much.”

“Who cares now, Ira? They’re all dead. It would be my version without giving them a chance to answer back. Let sleeping dogs bury their own dead. Besides, I told you my memory was playing tricks. I’ve used Andy Libby’s hypno-encyclopedic techniques—and they’re good—and also learned tier storage for memory I didn’t need every day, with keying words to let a tier cascade when I did need it, like a computer, and I have had my brain washed of useless memories several times in order to clear those file drawers for new data—and still it’s no good. Half the time I can’t remember where I put the book I was reading the night before, then waste a morning looking for it—before I remember that
that
book was one I was reading a century ago. Why won’t you leave an old man in peace?”

“All you have to do is to tell me to shut up, sir. But I hope you will not. Granted that memory is imperfect, nevertheless you were eyewitness to thousands of things the rest of us are too young to have seen. Oh, I’m not asking you to reel off a formal autobiography covering all your centuries. But you might reminisce about anything you care to talk about. For example, there is no record anywhere of your earliest years. I—and millions of others—would be extremely interested in whatever you remember of your boyhood.”

“What is there to remember? I spent my boyhood the way every boy does—trying to keep my elders from finding out what I was up to.”

Lazarus wiped his mouth and looked thoughtful. “On the whole I was successful. The few times I was caught and clobbered taught me to be more careful next time—keep my mouth shut more and not make my lies too complicated. Lying is one of the fine arts, Ira, and it seems to be dying out.”

“Really? I had not noticed any diminution.”

“I mean as a fine art. There are still plenty of clumsy liars, approximately as many as there are mouths. Do you know the two most artistic ways to lie?”

“Perhaps I don’t but I would like to learn. Just two?”

“So far as I know. It’s not enough to be able to lie with a straight face; anybody with enough gall to raise on a busted flush can do that. The first way to lie artistically is to tell the truth—but not all of it. The second way involves telling the truth, too, but is harder: Tell the exact truth and maybe all of it…but tell it so unconvincingly that your listener is sure you are lying.

“I must have been twelve, thirteen years old before I got that one down pat. Learned it from my maternal Grampaw; I take after him quite a lot. He was a mean old devil. Wouldn’t go inside a church or see a doctor—claimed that neither doctors nor preachers know what they pretend to know. At eighty-five he could crack nuts with his teeth and straight-arm a seventy-pound anvil by its horn. I left home about then and never saw him again. But the Families’ Records say that he was killed in the Battle of Britain during the bombing of London, which was some years after.”

“I know. He’s my ancestor, too, of course, and I’m named for him. Ira Johnson.”
³

“Why, sure enough, that was his name. I just called him ‘Gramp.’”

“Lazarus, this is exactly the sort of thing I want to get on record. Ira Johnson is not only your grandfather and my remote grandfather but also is ancestor to many million people here and elsewhere—yet save for the few words you have just told me about him, he has been only a name, a date of birth, and a date of death, nothing more. You’ve suddenly brought him alive again—a man, a unique human being. Colorful.”

Lazarus looked thoughtful. “I never thought of him as ‘colorful.’ Matter of fact, he was an unsavery old coot—not a ‘good influence’ for a growing boy by the standards of those times. Mmm, there was something about a young schoolmarm and him in the town my family had lived in, some scandal—‘scandal’ for those days, I mean—and I think that was why we moved. I never got the straight of it as the grownups wouldn’t talk about it in front of me.

“But I did learn a lot from him; he had more time to talk with me—or took more time—than my parents had. Some of it stuck. ‘Always cut the cards, Woodie,’ he would say. ‘You may lose anyhow—but not as often, nor as much. And when you do lose,
smile
.’ Things like that.”

“Can you remember any more of what he said?”

“Huh? After all these years? Of course not. Well, maybe. He had me out south of town teaching me to shoot. I was maybe ten and he was—oh, I don’t know; he always seemed ninety years older than God to me.
⁴
He pinned up a target, put one in the black to show me it could be done, then handed me the rifle—little .22 single-shot, not good for much but targets and tin cans—‘All right, it’s loaded; do just what I did; get steady on it, relax and squeeze.’ So I did, and all I heard was a
click
—it didn’t fire.

“I said so, and started to open the breech. He slapped my hand away, took the rifle from me with his other hand—then clouted me a good one. ‘What did I tell you about hangfires, Woodie? Are you aching to walk around with one eye the rest of your life? Or merely trying to kill yourself? If the latter, I can show you several better ways.’

“Then he said, ‘Now watch closely’—and
he
opened the breech. Empty. So I said, ‘But, Gramp, you
told
me it was loaded.’ Shucks, Ira, I
saw
him load it—I thought.

“‘So I did, Woodie,’ he agreed. ‘And I lied to you. I went through the motions and palmed the cartridge. Now what did I tell you about loaded guns? Think hard and get it right…or I’ll be forced to clout you again to shake up your brains and make ‘em work better.’

“I thought fast and got it right; Gramp had a heavy hand. ‘Never take anybody’s word about whether a gun is loaded.’

“‘Correct,’ he agreed, ‘Remember that all your life—and follow it!—or you won’t live long.’
⁵

“Ira. I
did
remember that all my life—plus its application to analogous situations after such firearms went out of style—and it has indeed kept me alive several times.

“Then he had me load it myself, then said, ‘Woodie, I’ll bet you half a dollar—do you
have
half a dollar?’ I had considerably more, but I had bet with him before, so I admitted to only a quarter. ‘Okay,’ he said, ‘Make it two-bits; I never let a man bet on credit. Two-bits says you can’t hit the target, much less stay in the black.’

“Then he pocketed my two-bits and showed me what was wrong with what I had done. By the time he was ready to knock off I had the basics of how to make a gun do what I wanted it to do, and wanted to bet him again. He laughed at me and told me to be thankful the lesson was so cheap. Pass the salt, please.”

Weatheral did so. “Lazarus, if I could find a way to entice you into reminiscing about your grandfather—or about anything—I’m certain we could extract from such record endless things you have learned, important things—whether you choose to call them wisdom or not. In the last ten minutes you have stated half a dozen basic truths, or rules for living—call them what you will—apparently without trying.”

“Such as?”

“Oh, for example, that most people learn only by experience—”

“Correction. Most people won’t learn even by experience, Ira. Never underestimate the power of human stupidity.”

“There’s another one. And you made a couple of comments on the fine art of lying—three, really, as you also mentioned that a lie should never be too complicated. You said also that belief gets in the way of learning, and something about knowing a situation was the essential first step in coping with it.”