Isle Of The Dead

Roger Zelazny

Isle Of The Dead

Author's DEDICATION:

To Banks Mebane.

I

Life is a thing--if you'll excuse a quick dab of philosophy before you know what kind of picture I'm painting--that reminds me quite a bit of the beaches around Tokyo Bay.

Now, it's been centuries since I've seen that Bay and those beaches, so I could be off a bit. But I'm told that it hasn't changed much, except for the condoms, from the way that I remember it.

I remember a terrible expanse of dirty water, brighter and perhaps cleaner way off in the distance, but smelling and slopping and chill close at hand, like Time when it wears away objects, delivers them, removes them. Tokyo Bay, on any given day, is likely to wash anything ashore. You name it, and it spits it up some time or other: a dead man, a shell that might be alabaster, rose and pumpkin bright, with a sinistral whorling, rising inevitably to the tip of a horn as i

I am a coward.

Now, there are a lot of things that scare me, and they are all of them things over which I have little or no control, like the Big Tree.

I propped myself up on my elbow, fetched the package from the bedside table and regarded its contents once more.

There could be no mistake, especially when a thing like that was addressed to me.

I had accepted the special delivery, stuffed it into my jacket pocket, opened it at my leisure.

Then I saw that it was the sixth, and I'd gotten sick and called things to a halt.

It was a tri-dee picture of Kathy, all in white, and it was dated as developed a month ago.

Kathy had been my first wife, maybe the only woman I'd ever loved, and she'd been dead for over five hundred years. I'll explain that last part by and by.

I studied the thing closely. The sixth such thing I'd received in as many months. Of different people, all of them dead. For ages.

Rocks and blue sky behind her, that's all.

It could have been taken anywhere where there were rocks and a blue sky. It could easily have been a fake, for there are people around who can fake almost anything these days.

But who was there around, now, who'd know enough to send it to me, and why? There was no note, just that picture, the same as with all the others--my friends, my enemies.

And the whole thing made me think of the beaches around Tokyo Bay, and maybe the Book of Revelations, too.

I drew a blanket over myself and lay there in the artificial twilight I had turned on at midday. I had been comfortable, so comfortable, all these years. Now something I had thought scabbed over, flaked away, scarred smoothly and forgotten had broken, and I bled.

If there was only the barest chance that I held a truth in my shaking hand ...

I put it aside. After a time, I dozed, and I forget what thing out of sleep's mad rooms came to make me sweat so. Better forgotten, I'm sure.

I showered when I awoke, put on fresh clothing, ate quickly and took a carafe of coffee with me into my study. I used to call it an office when I worked, but around thirty-five years ago the habit wore off. I went through the past month's pruned and pre-sorted correspondence and found the items I was looking for amid the requests for money from some oddball charities and some oddball individuals who hinted at bombs if I didn't come across, four invitations to lecture, one to undertake what once might have been an interesting job, a load of periodicals, a letter from a long-lost descendant of an obnoxious in-law from my third marriage suggesting a visit, by him, with me, here, three solicitations from artists wanting a patron, thirty-one notices that lawsuits had been commenced against me and letters from various of my attorneys stating that thirty-one actions against me had been quashed.

The first of the important ones was a letter from Marling of Megapei. It said, roughly:

"Earth-son, I greet you by the twenty-seven Names that still remain, praying the while that you have cast more jewels into the darkness and given them to glow with the colors of life.

"I fear that the time of the life for the most ancient and dark green body I am privileged to wear moves now toward an ending early next year. It has been long since these yellow and failing eyes have seen my stranger son. Let it be before the ending of the fifth season that he comes to me, for all my cares will be with me then and his hand upon my shoulder would lighten their burden. Respects."

The next missive was from the Deep Shaft Mining and Processing Company, which everyone knows to be a front organization for Earth's Central Intelligence Department, asking me if I might be interested in purchasing some used-but-in-good-condition off-world mining equipment located at sites from which the cost of transport would be prohibitive to the present owners.