Short Story

TRYPHO

by

John Farrell
 

"Alex gave it up last week, did you know that?"

Trypho nodded, not taking his gaze from the October surf. He pulled his knees into his chest and hugged himself. Justin, less at ease with the windy, exposed environment, shivered as he toyed with a quartz stone.

"I thought he was younger than that."

"Nope. We're all the same age at Annals, Justin. Poor excuse for conversation."

Justin snapped, "You're just angry, because I won't touch you."

Trypho shook his head, his eyes locked on the sea. "Not angry with anyone. I don't want to be, on my last day."

Justin glared at the side of Trypho's head, ready to challenge, but when his friend showed no signs of returning his gaze, he threw the quartz stone into the choppy waves. "I do. I think I'd like to kill someone, if you want to know the truth."

Trypho smiled. "Well consider this, dear: there are two companions on the island with us."

Justin looked about at the other beach walkers, most of them distant. "I thought they were goners too."

"Companions. At least two of them." Trypho laughed. "They have to be watchful, even with a pair of old goats like us."

"How hateful. To the very last they'd watch us." He dug his hands into the sand. "I'd like to kill someone."

"I wouldn't," said Trypho. "I'd like to go back to work."

"What on earth for?"

"Research."

Justin tossed his head back and crowed. "They'd never let you near Research, you simpleton. You're lucky they even kept you for filing and formatting--"

"I can't help it. Whether I glimpse the stuff they're scanning, or dare to read it, it's impossible to forget."

Justin leaned toward him, a sudden look of pinched defenselessness on his haggard face. "I don't want to talk about it. I want you closer to me. There's a smelly woman over there, and she's touching herself. She'll badger us soon, and I don't want to deal with her." He moved closer, so that Trypho could feel a familiar breath on his chin.

Trypho shuddered. "No. It's wrong. I don't want to spend my last day touching anybody."

Justin stiffened as if he'd been struck. His eyes narrowed like slits. "You snake. You read that somewhere, too, didn't you? There's nothing wrong with it. What else are we supposed to do?" He stood up, stifling tears and kicked sand over Trypho's feet. "Why don't you do it with that filthy woman." He stomped off.

Still Trypho did not respond. He spotted a companion sitting on the far side of the sand dunes, its large head watching the incident, apparently with some amusement, for its jaw distended in what seemed to be silent laughter.

Trypho returned his gaze to the ocean, recalling his thoughts before Justin's tantrum.

"The Great Year," he said to himself, his eyes looking through the waves as he tried to remember the electronic text, scrolling through his mind. "Aristotle's mistake was to apply the standards of biology to everything--including physics, with disastrous results for the progress of science. See J. Needham and C. Dawson."

Trypho clamped his eyes shut, as though the thoughts were painful. "The sun returns, the seasons return--even time the eternal, returns; was Aristotle wrong about that, too?"

A faint voice said, "Wrong about what?"

Trypho looked up, surprised to see the woman, the bald "smelly" woman Justin had found so revolting. She seemed puzzled, though a smile played on her lips, an expression that made Trypho wish they'd allow females to grow hair. He'd always been suspicious of laws about female physiognomy, and looking at this woman now with her bright blue eyes, made him see why they might be considered a threat.

"May I sit down with you?" she said. "I'm not a companion."

"I know."

She giggled. "How do you know?"

The question was naive, but Trypho wasn't surprised. "You're much too small, for one thing. And I spotted them on the way out here. They came in a separate vehicle. Bothers me, they don't even try to maintain the illusion of privacy anymore. They just wait for us, like policemen."

"Policemen? I've never heard that expression before." As he pondered how to respond to this, the woman smiled and plunked herself down beside him. "Did you have a fight with your friend?"

Trypho looked down the beach where Justin continued to march, apparently wishing to get as far away from him as possible. The companion on the dunes rose from its sitting position, like an ancient statue spilling sand from its limbs, as it uprooted itself and started to follow.

"No, not a fight. He always gets like that when I shrink from him. I guess I've been doing it a lot lately. I don't mean to, but..."

"You're tired of males?" she said hopefully.

"No, dear. I'm tired of flesh."

His terseness subdued her for a moment. "I see," she said softly.

"I was thinking about my work."

"On your last day?" She looked startled. "I should think you'd want to join with someone and be damned to everything else."

He smiled cynically. "At your age, yes. I must admit there are times when I wish they weren't quite so generous with the male population. Forty is far too long a time to live, let alone work."

She laughed outright. "Sorry, we've nothing in common there. I was evacuated when I was fourteen years old."

Trypho feigned interest. "A year early?"

"Yes. I was expected to breed. But...I lost the final lottery...and they evacuated me."

"Ah." He didn't know what else to say. Women made Trypho uncomfortable, and reproduction more so.

"Still, I should be grateful. Once you've fulfilled your reproductive donations they hate to allow you more than five years. I got six, so I made the twenty mark after all." She grinned at him.

Trypho looked at her directly. Females were seldom so talkative, and she piqued his curiosity.

"How are you going tomorrow? Injection?"

She shook her head. "I don't want to see it. I insist on being put to sleep first. Don't care how they finish me, long as I don't feel it."

"Ah."

"What about you?"

"Injection," he said. "Don't mind."

"No? Quite brave, are you?"

"I'll miss work."

"No."

"No, really. I work--excuse me, I had worked for years in Annals, for the Index. Started to like it towards the end."

"Really?"

"Yes. I was just pondering a sentence I remembered from Victorian history before you--before you sat down here. Whole thing was off-loaded for archiving. But I'll never forget it."

"And was it exciting?" she asked, a smile playing on her lips again. He got the faint impression she might be teasing him.

"Oh, very," he said, returning a serious look.

She giggled at his expression. "Go on."

"Just listen to this: 'True science is inconsistent with theories of cyclical history.'"

She nodded wisely, obviously grasping not the slightest bit of what he said.

"Can you imagine such a thing?"

"I don't have to." She moved closer.

"No, of course not, and neither do I. But it's...so attractive."

"Is it?"

"I think so. Just to read somebody suggest cyclical history is anything other than brute dogma is encouraging. Makes my life seem more worthwhile...in the end."

"The end? What do you mean? Don't you want to be reincarnated?" she rubbed her lips with her finger tips.

He shook his head.

"You just want to end? Just like that?"

Trypho folded his hands beneath his legs where she couldn't pick and reach at them. "Not end. But sleep. Rest."

"There's no time to rest," she said grimly. "It's on to the next turn. And hope they let me breed instead of removing my reproductive organs."

Trypho looked at her distastefully. Reproduction always disgusted him. His home was abstraction, and he never wanted to leave it. "Not me. One life's enough. Death will set me free."

She pouted suddenly. "Oh, I don't believe you."

"You don't have to, dear. It's your last day, you can do what you want."

She looked at her hands. "Will you join with me?"

Trypho didn't even look at her when he said it. "No."

"It feels so good, even if it doesn't mean anything. Your friend won't mind."

"Yes he will. But I said I don't want to touch anyone."

She didn't get up and leave as Justin had. She merely played with the sand in silence as Trypho stared across the sea.

"It's just twenty kilometers to the edge of that horizon. Then it drops out of sight. If I traveled straight ahead, eventually I'd end up right where I started from. A perfect circle. It seems natural."

She perked up at his ruminations, and nodded. "It is."

Trypho turned on her. "Then who told Isaac Newton and those other wigs that objects continue in a straight path unless acted on by other forces?"

She shrank from him. "What?"

He leaned toward her face. "It's not natural. That's why they're freezing it, sweeping it out of all the libraries. It doesn't make sense. It doesn't fit. And they don't want anyone to get curious."

She frowned. "I don't understand you. I told you I don't have to know that stuff. Neither do you. Are you trying to get us in trouble?"

He laughed. "What trouble can we cause at this point?"

"Why are you thinking about these things?"

"Because it's not natural. And I've been doing so-called natural things and thinking so-called natural things for so long I've got bored with it all. The unnatural seems more interesting."

"You're being defiant."

"I know. Exciting, don't you think?"

She shook her bald head emphatically. "You've hurt your friend and he's sure to tell one of the companions about it."

Trypho lay back with his hands behind his head. "Let him." A few clouds passed above, and the mesmerizing blue of the sky drew his attention to the dust motes that slid across the film of his eyes. The woman said nothing, but only watched him stare, and he could feel her patience, like that of a cat, never taking her eyes off him, waiting for his resistance to erode. "What were you in your past life?" he said.

She snapped out of her heavy-lidded fixation on him. "Sorry?"

"Your past life. Everybody gets a past life--or lives. What did they tell you about yours?"

"Oh, I was a revolutionary."

He grinned. "Who wasn't. Now what do you really think you were?"

She shied away from him. "I don't understand you."

Trypho sat up. "Because you don't know. You didn't have a past life, and neither did I. They made one up for you. Your life started twenty years ago in a dish. Mine forty, and tomorrow they both end forever."

"Please don't say that," she whispered.

"Why not? Why are you crying?"

"Because I want to live again," she hissed, "and you've promised I won't."

"Exactly."

"Liar!"

"I don't lie," he said, still gently. "But you shouldn't worry. You'll die. But you may not end."

She shuddered with sobbing, but narrowed her eyes at him. "What do you mean?"

"Something else I remembered, even more interesting than Newton. You see, I think there's a difference between living and existing, just as there's a difference between dying and being destroyed. Tomorrow we'll die. But will we be destroyed?" He shrugged. "Perhaps not."

She looked at the ocean, and then turned to Trypho again, her voice full of suspicion and curiosity. "I don't understand. How do you remember all these things?"

"Complete recall. They tried to do something about it at first, but they needed clericals, good clericals. So, I was tolerated. Until now. Now I've served my purpose."

"So have I," she said sadly. "But I'll never know which children are really mine."

She froze, as if by instinct. Trypho noticed the companion striding towards them. It was tall, almost seven feet; out of its synthetic head waterless eyes stared only at Trypho, ignoring the woman who submissively bowed her head and looked at the sand.

"Your partner is consummated," it said. "Do you also request an adjusted schedule?"

Trypho looked at the monster and felt cold.

"No. I'm sure Justin provoked you. I won't. I'll wait till tomorrow, as scheduled. Thank you."

"You're quite welcome." The companion flexed it's mouth slightly and retreated.

The woman continued to stare at the sand beneath her feet, trembling. Then she said, "Sometimes I dream my children are made into companions: sent off to those terrible buildings and given those needles. Then I rejoice I will die so soon, for I wish never to meet them."

He reached out to touch her arm, suddenly ashamed of his intellectual boasting, and gasped to fight back his tears.

"Sometimes I dream I am a companion," he whispered. "And I'm forced to follow people all about...follow them, and finish them off."

She wept. "I want you. I want somebody in my life...before I die."

He said nothing for a long while. When he apologized, he couldn't look at her; he stared at the ocean. "It's a bad habit of mine...ever since I knew I was smarter than others. I've enjoyed shocking your sensibilities and crushing your illusions. I'm sorry. I don't want you to go tomorrow hating me for that, hating me as much we hate them."

He was still holding her arm, and she put a pale hairless hand over his. "I don't hate you," she said. "I hope you're right. I hope everything you told me is true. I hope all that knowledge they made you freeze is unfrozen someday. I hope I'm never reincarnated. I hope I sleep forever, with time at last to dream and never be...destroyed."

Her hand felt dry over his. Trypho could not remember the last time a partner, lover or friend had not touched him with moist and clammy hands. Her hand was warm, and encouraged him. He knew the companion lingered, perhaps within hearing. He leaned closer as she stared at the sand, her head still bowed and her eyes still wet, and whispered to her.

"Then take heart, for I remember something else, more important than all the other things I spoke about just now."

His voice changed for a moment and she was surprised by what he said, for she had never heard a foreign language in her life.

"It's not a foreign language," he smiled. "It's our language, from a time so long ago they knew nothing of companions. It's what an old soldier said at the end of a terrible battle, tiredly, sadly--defiantly."

She nodded. "Just like us. What then?"

He chanted, "Will the greater, heart the keener, soul the stronger...as our strength wanes."

She closed her eyes in the breeze, and repeated the words in silence. Once again Trypho could only wonder at her small face, the only hair visible her long lashes closing over her tears. Finally she turned her head, listening for the companion as it loitered. Then she opened her eyes and smiled at Trypho once more.

"I'm ready now. Let's call him back."


§ § §

John Farrell is a writer working in Boston. He has written science articles and book reviews for publications as varied as Salon and National Review Online. His fiction has appeared in Aboriginal Science Fiction.

His offbeat digital feature of Shakespeare's Richard the Second screened in New York last year and was hailed by Filmthreat.com as one of the best modern Shakespeare adaptations. John can be contacted at jfarrell@caregroup.harvard.edu. .

Send the URL for this work to a friend!

GO TO NEXT PAGE