The Best of the Best, Volume 2 by Gardner Dozois

Author:Gardner Dozois
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3, mobi
Publisher: St. Martin's Press
Published: 2007-09-05T04:00:00+00:00

Three times was as far as Rafiel really thought he wanted to go. Anyway, Docilia was now in a hurry to send off the picture of her child. “Let yourself out?” she asked, getting up. Then, naked at her bedroom door, she stopped to look back at him.

“We’ll all be fine in this Oedipus, Rafiel,” she assured him. “You and me in the lead parts, and Mosay putting it all together, and that merveilleux score.” Which was still repeating itself from her sound system, he discovered.

He blew her a kiss, laughing. “I’m listening, I’m listening,” he assured her. And he did in fact listen for a few moments.

Yes, Rafiel told himself, it really was a good score. Oedipus would be a successful production, and when they had rehearsed it and revised it and performed it and recorded it, it would be flashed all over the solar system, over all Earth and the Moon and the capsule colonies on Mars and Triton and half a dozen other moons, and the orbiting habitats wherever they might be, and even to the distant voyagers well on their way to some other star—to all ten million million human beings, or as many of them as cared to watch it. And it would last. Recordings of it would survive for centuries, to be taken out and enjoyed by people not yet born, because anything that Rafiel appeared in became an instant classic.

Rafiel got up off Docilia’s warm, shuddery bed and stood before her mirror, examining himself. Everything the mirror displayed looked quite all right. The belly was flat, the skin clear, the eyes bright—he looked as good as any hale and well-kept man of middle years would have looked, in the historically remote days when middle age could be distinguished from any other age. That was what those periodical visit to the hospital did for him. Though they couldn’t make him immortal, like everyone else, they could at least do that much for his appearance and his general comity.

He sighed and rescued the red pantaloons from the floor. As he began to pull them on he thought: They can do all that, but they could not make him live for ever, like everyone else.

That wasn’t an immediate threat. Rafiel was quite confident that he would live a while yet—well, quite a long while, if you measured it in days and seconds, perhaps another thirty years or so. But then he wouldn’t live after that. And Docilia and Mosay and Victorium—yes, and lost Alegretta, too, and everyone else he had ever known—would perhaps take out the record of this new Oedipus Rex now and then and look at it and say to each other, “Oh, do you remember dear old Rafiel? How sweet he was. And what a pity.” But dear old Rafiel would be dead.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.