About forty years ago, I wrote a short story exploring the idea of immortality. The main character (a kind of everyman — or everywoman in this case) does a favour to a supernatural being who, in gratitude, offers to make her immortal.
As she’s a bit unsure what to make of this, he takes her to meet two men he gave the same gift to thousands of years before. One turns out to be sunk in misery and boredom, mourning for lost people and longing for his ordeal to end. The other is full of enthusiasm, remembering the people who’ve gone but welcoming new people and new ideas.
The point I was trying to make, of course, was that it was really nothing to do with immortality. The two characters reacted as they did because of the kind of people they were, and that would have been true however long or short their lives had been.
The story was never published, and rightly so, as the plot and characters were too formulaic, just excuses to make a point. But I’ve written plenty in the intervening years about immortal characters, and the basic philosophical issues I raised forty years ago have had plenty of airing.
But what exactly is immortality? It’s not as straightforward a question as it might seem, and in my stories set in the Traveller’s world, I have three quite distinct types of immortal characters.
The Undying Mortal
Most of my immortal characters, notably the Traveller, fit into the “undying mortal” category. These are people who have started out as ordinary humans but, one way or another, have stopped aging or decaying.
There are various magical or supernatural methods by which this happens, but really I’m not especially interested in that aspect. Although the various incidents may be vivid or exciting, they’re really just excuses to explore immortality.
Although in general the people involved have no idea what’s happened to them, I have established for myself how it works — and this model is actually discussed in an as-yet-unpublished story from the “modern” era, where human physiology is understood. It’s not that I’ve worked out how to make it happen, of course (I’d be rich if I had), but I do have a reasonable model of what happens on a physiological level to someone undergoing the process.
It’s actually quite simple. The physiology is altered so that each cell is constantly “resetting to default” — that is, to the exact state it was in when the change occurred. This has various results, most obviously that the Traveller (and others) don’t deteriorate at a cellular level. This includes, for instance, that there’s none of the shortening of telomeres that’s associated with aging. On all levels from outward appearance to each individual cell, you would remain the same as when the change first occurred.
There are other implications. It makes the body more resistant to disease and hastens healing of wounds — although neither of these is infallible. If the Traveller were stabbed through the heart, he’d still die. Perhaps crucially, though, the process prevents cancers from developing. In practice, anyone living for centuries, let alone millennia, would eventually develop cancer, but the first hint of a cancerous cell would get zapped back to its default.
There are holes in this process, though. I can’t really explain why the same process wouldn’t apply to the neural network — and, come to that, the capacity of an immortal’s brain seems to be infinitely expandable. Of course, I have the get-out-of-jail card that we don’t really know how a young, healthy brain would react to living for thousands of years. And, since this isn’t science fiction, that excuse will do.
The Immortal Gods
I haven’t really introduced the gods much in any published works, though this is intended to change. They’re a completely different type of being from mortals, although they actually know very little about their own nature. For the most part, they believe their own mythologies, even though many of them are mutually exclusive, and there’s a suggestion they may have been created by their worshippers’ faith.
All the same, their nature is very consistent. Their physical form is entirely different, and I’ve played with the idea of it being based on a triple helix, instead of a double one. Whatever exactly that might mean. The most characteristic difference is that they’re visible by self-generated light, rather than reflected light — which means, most significantly, that they can be seen in the dark.
They’re also immortal in the sense of not being fully tied to their bodies. Even if the body is totally destroyed (as happened in one unpublished story) they can simply grow a new one. Though, for it to be viable, it has to “look like” the particular god.
Unlike the “immortal mortals”, the gods are immortal because death has nothing to do with them. That doesn’t necessarily mean they last forever, though. The gods are intimately linked to their worshippers’ belief and faith, and if no-one believes in a god any longer, they go mad and eventually disappear. No-one knows what happens to an ex-god.
The Maverick
There’s always one who doesn’t fit in, isn’t there? My maverick immortal is called Renon, who appears in At An Uncertain Hour and in a number of not-yet-published novels and short stories.
Renon is a strange figure, who wanders in and out of various times and places, nudging events in the direction he insists they need to go. Although his appearances cover at least ten thousand years, that doesn’t necessarily mean he’s lived that long. He talks about “walking to tomorrow and yesterday” and appears to be more of a time traveller than an immortal.
Or perhaps he’s simply the author, who can visit any part of the story and adjust it to go in the right direction.
Living With Immortality
That forty-year-old story was written partly as a reaction to the common assumption that immortality would be a curse: that immortals would be either miserable, or else detached and amoral. Those are certainly possible reactions, and perhaps more true of the gods in my stories, but there are other alternatives.
Of the “undying mortals” in my stories, some certainly take those paths, or worse. They abuse and kill people, either because they don’t feel accountable or because beings that are here and gone aren’t worth worrying about. Certainly, the gods, even when not cruel, tend not to understand the real value of the mortals who worship them.
The Traveller, on the other hand, never loses sight of the value of other people. The past is important to him, but it doesn’t tie him, and he’s constantly eager to find something new. And there are new things to find, even after thousands of years, because the world is big, it’s changing all the time, and there are always new people, not quite like anyone else.
In the end, this isn’t really a question of lifespan, but about how you approach life. In that respect (though by no means in all others) I’m quite like the Traveller. I’ve lost many people during my life, either to death or just to change, and of course I miss many of them, but throughout my life I’ve always found other people to care about. And that’s precisely how the Traveller approaches his immortality.
It’s really about living in the moment, because the moment is the same, whether your life is twenty years or two thousand. The Traveller knows more than most that everything is transient:
“The only events we can call beginning or end are the moments of our birth and death, and even those are only absolute for us. Perhaps that is why death is so important, because what we do at the instant of death is forever.”
And knowing that he could, ultimately, die is what defines his life as much as ours — and what sets us all apart from the gods, who know nothing of death.
“The only events we can call beginning or end are the moments of our birth and death, and even those are only absolute for us. Perhaps that is why death is so important, because what we do at the instant of death is forever.”
And knowing that he could, ultimately, die is what defines his life as much as ours — and what sets us all apart from the gods, who know nothing of death.
The Fantasy Worlds of Nyki Blatchley 