Chapter Twelve
We wear our mortal skins like cloaks, protecting us until the fabric rots away. Then at last we are left naked, exposed to the entropy of the universe.
—A saying of Lost Earth
Princess Meghina of Siriki had led an interesting life.
One of the most beautiful women in the galaxy, she had married the Doge Lorenzo del Velli twenty-two years ago, when she was only fourteen. As her loveliness became renowned throughout the realm, she had—with her husband’s concurrence—become a courtesan to other powerful noblemen in the Merchant Prince Alliance. An independent woman, she had lived separately in a marvelous palace on the planet Siriki, and ostensibly bore seven daughters for Lorenzo. Afterward, having escaped the destruction of her homeworld by Mutati military forces, she had moved to the orbital gambling facility over Canopa, to live with her husband.
There, her darkest secrets had been revealed. Through intrigues by Francella Watanabe, she had been exposed as a Mutati, but one who had always wanted to be Human, and whose shapeshifting cellular structure had locked into Human form. Her daughters, it turned out, had all been fake pregnancies. She had never given birth to any of them. The MPA public, and Lorenzo himself, had ultimately been sympathetic to her, despite the deceit.
Living with her husband on the orbital gambling facility for some time now, she had become a mysterious, glamorous figure, occasionally seen out on the gaming floor, but more often she frequented the back corridors and glittering chambers of the facility, where she spent time with a most unusual group of friends.
One evening, Lorenzo invited Meghina and these friends to dinner in his elegant dining hall. Months earlier, he had been forced to abdicate as doge, in part because of the revelations about Meghina, which his political enemies used to their advantage. Now the nobleman was essentially an outcast on the orbiter, living in a velvet-lined cocoon.
At the appointed hour, Princess Meghina sat on one end of the gleaming wooden banquet table, opposite Lorenzo on the other. With her golden hair secured by a jeweled headband, she wore a long black velveen dress, trimmed in precious gemstones. She smiled down the long table at her husband, and sipped from a large silver goblet of red wine, a fine Canopan vintage.
Along the sides sat her five extraordinary companions—three men on one side and two women on the other. They formed an exclusive little club, often getting together socially in Meghina’s royal apartments on the Pleasure Palace orbiter. All the while, the six of them were under continuing medical supervision.
This was because they had apparently become immortal.
Under a research program established by the medical division of CorpOne, a remarkable elixir had been developed from the DNA of the purportedly indestructible Noah Watanabe. The new solution (dubbed the Elixir of Life) had been injected into two hundred thousand persons from all of the galactic races, and had resulted in immortality for a scant six of them, including Meghina. It had been like winning a lottery, and initially they had all considered themselves lucky.
Then they had heard that Noah’s insane sister had injected herself with the elixir, and had suffered a rapid cellular decline—an artificial form of progeria that caused the rapid aging of her cells, and her premature death. There had even been rumors that Francella, shortly before dying, had injected her own tainted blood back into her brother, trying to harm him. The attempt had apparently been unsuccessful, because he didn’t seem to have experienced any associated medical problems.
So far, neither had Princess Meghina or the other Elixir of Life “winners.”
O O O
In a chair on Meghina’s immediate left sat a small black-and-tan pet that she had recently taken a liking to, a rare Bernjack dagg from her private animal collection. Once it had been owned by a very old woman, but she had gone into a rest home and had been unable to care for the dagg any longer. The shaggy animal was very special to Meghina now, and she called it Orga, because the old lady had been Mrs. Orga. Using the solitary bulbous eye above its snout, it peered around the shaggy fur overhanging its face.
At the other end of the table, on Lorenzo’s right, sat what looked like another pet but really wasn’t. Rather, it was her husband’s furry little attaché, the feisty Hibbil, Pimyt. Meghina had never liked the graying, black-and-white alien, but had gracefully concealed her feelings from him.
Raising his own goblet, Lorenzo said, “A toast to the good life.”
He and his guests quaffed their drinks, then set the goblets down with thumps that were almost in synchronization.
Just then, the dagg leaned its long snout over the table, and gripped its water bowl in its mouth. Lifting the bowl high, the animal leaned back and slurped from it, before losing its grip. The bowl crashed to the floor, shattering and spilling the water.
Several guests tittered, but Lorenzo scowled at the animal, as he often did. He only tolerated the dagg. A servant hurried over to clean up the mess.
“Perhaps we should put wine in Orga’s bowl!” suggested one of the guests, a ruddy, aging man named Dougal Netzer. Once an impoverished portrait painter, he now earned large sums for his work. More than any of his cellular peers, he had been able to capitalize financially on his overnight fame as an immortal.
Servants brought in platters heaped with steaming game hens, cooked in a dark, aromatic sauce. At Meghina’s order, they even had a plate of boned meat for the dagg. The moment it was placed in front of him, Orga tried to grab a piece of meat. But Meghina waggled a finger near the plate, causing the animal to let go of the food and pull his head back—awaiting permission to eat.
“As my lovely wife has probably told you,” Lorenzo said, “I am in de facto exile on this orbital facility, with little opportunity to get away from it.” He paused. “Tell me about events on the surface of Canopa—news, gossip, bits of information. Pimyt doesn’t have the connections he enjoyed while working for me on-planet. I’ve been feeling isolated.”
Pimyt shot him a hard stare, but for only a moment. Two of the female guests and one of the men provided the former doge with details, how Doge Anton, Noah Watanabe, and others had formed a military expedition and departed in a big hurry.
When Lorenzo had heard enough, he permitted the table to fall into witty, light-hearted conversation, much of it about the immortality of Meghina and her friends.
At first, Pimyt said very little. Finally, he asked the woman seated next to him, “What do you intend to do with your own extended life?”
“I have so much time now to consider such matters,” she said. A robust, big-chested woman in a blue tunic, she smiled. Since gaining immortality she had abandoned her original name, and for unexplained reasons now called herself Paltrow.
“And the answer is, after all the time you’ve taken to consider it?” the Hibbil asked.
“I have put off such matters, such worries, really. I’ve hardly thought about them at all.”
“A nice luxury to have.” The little Hibbil tugged at the salt-and-pepper fur on his chin. It was a nervous mannerism that Meghina had noticed previously.
“I’m sorry,” Paltrow said. “I don’t mean to be rude, but I honestly haven’t given it much thought.”
Most of those at the table had paused to listen to the exchange.
“Perhaps our additional time is not so important as you might think,” Meghina suggested. “What, exactly, does living forever mean? Living forever in relation to what?”
“Intriguing observation,” Dougal Netzer said.
The guests began to pitch in. Finally Paltrow asked, “Is a million years in our galaxy only a moment, or a mere fraction of a moment?”
Theories and more questions went around the table in rapid succession, and it developed into a game in which several people tried to ask the most clever question, some of them rhetorical.
The repartee intensified, and Lorenzo seemed to enjoy it. Meghina couldn’t help noticing, however, that Pimyt appeared to be somewhere else in his mind, perhaps far across the galaxy on his alien homeworld.
***