I said, “Did he have a hard-on?”

“No, he never does unless you suck on him a while.”

I thought of our meeting on the bridge.

Clara looked hard at me for a moment and then said, “I had an uneasy feeling when we started to make love, John. Or I should say when I started to make love. You had changed, too. It wasn’t just the softon.

Do you know, you’re evil, too!”

This was a peculiar thing for her to say. I wanted to ask her more about her feelings but she left quickly.

The silence had to be filled with my thoughts. They buzzed like flies in a dead mouth.

It seemed to me that anybody who accepted the gift of the Nine, and so accepted their terms, was, in some measure, evil. It was true that the Nine had never required me to do anything which I thought of as evil. As yet. They had the power, by the terms, to ask me to do anything they wished.

I thought of the inevitable parallel, the story of Faust and the devil. Faust, however, made a sorry bargain, a short-termed one, and regretted it. We, however, if we were lucky, would live for at least

30,000 years, and, once dead, that was the end of it. Also, some of us would probably become members of the Nine, because even they died now and then. The last one had died 2000 years ago, and one of the servants of the Nine had taken his place. The next vacancy might not be for another 2000 years or it might be today.

I would say that to be offered a multimilleniaed youth is to be tempted irresistibly. I can picture a mentally sick person, a depressed person, or a very old person, rejecting the offer. But not anyone who loves life.

Why should the Nine share this prolonged life with others? I suppose because the elixir is far more binding than money. And also because the Nine believe in tradition, in the continuity of their secret body of people, the oldest by far of any bodies.

The intercom buzzed nine times, and the Speaker’s voice began to call our names. Mine was fifth.

Caliban’s was eighth. By this alone, I knew something unusual was happening. In the 48 years I had been attending, no more than one pilgrim at a time went into the ceremony cave.

25

The entrance was carved out of rock, delta-shaped, and only large enough to admit one at a time. It was a tight squeeze for me.

The cave was well-lit only in the center. Elsewhere, it was dim dusk for the space of a few yards and then blackness. The rough granite floor sloped downwards from all sides to the center. At the bottom was a tiny lake of black water, and in its center was a truncated cone of large rough-hewn oaken blocks and beams. On top of the island, which was about twelve feet high, was a circular oaken table, a ring. Inside the ring were nine high-backed intricately carved oak and ash chairs. The Nine entered through a trapdoor in the middle of the wooden cone.

The ceiling was covered with darkness except in the center, where nine massive crystaline stalactites hung down, like glowing hanged men, from the night of the ceiling. The light came from nine giant torches of wood and pitch projecting from moveable stone pillars set around the edges of the platform top.

We lesser beings stood on the slope—there were no chairs for us—throughout the ceremony. There was silence except for the inevitable coughing, occasioned by nervousness, not colds, since those who drink the elixir have no physical diseases. We were not allowed to speak except in reply to the Nine.

After a long time, the Speaker came up through the hole in the island and stood to one side of the chairs, leaning his staff with its ankh and hannunvaakuna outwards from him.

Slowly, one by one, the Nine appeared from the hole and took their assigned chairs. The last to appear was the most important, the old woman Anana.

Only eight of the Nine were here. The chair just to the right of Anana’s was empty. It belonged to the giant white-bearded old man who wore a double-headed raven headpiece and a black patch over a good eye. We knew him only as XauXaz.

The eight were dressed in their monkish robes, but the hoods were hanging behind their necks, and they wore their headpieces. Anana’s was the head of a wild sow, and the others wore the heads of a bear, a wolf, a hyena, a ram, a jaguar, a badger, and an elk.

The woman Anana looked us over for a long time. I have been close to her many times, so I knew that she looked as if she were 125 and kept Death away only by scaring him. I had reason to believe that she was 30,000 years.

Finally, she gestured at the Speaker. He walked to the empty chair beside her and lifted from its seat what the shadows had hidden. It was the two-headed raven headpiece of XauXaz. He placed it on the table before the chair and stamped the end of his staff against the oaken floor so that it boomed nine times.

He cried out in English in a loud voice that echoed back from the murkiness, “XauXaz has gone to his ancestors, as all must, even the Nine!”

The others picked up small stone cups and drank from them and set them down. There was another silence. Apparently, this was to be all that would be said about XauXaz, who had sat in that chair, or one like it elsewhere, for at least 5000 years and perhaps for three times that long. The Nine may have had a previous ceremony during which they genuinely mourned him. I do not know. But when with us, they acted as if they believed in ceremony, but in a short one, only.

Anana seemed to shrink within herself, physically, though the force of her personality did not diminish. I was not joking when I said she was holding Death off by scaring him. I do not frighten easily, but I am very uneasy when in her presence.

After another painfully long pause, she stirred. She looked to her right at Ing, the old man who wore a bear’s head, and to her left at Iwaldi, the gnomish old man who wore a badger’s head. These two, with

XauXaz, were, I believe, the oldest after Anana. I do not know what their age is, but I have been close enough more than once to hear the language which the three men spoke only among themselves. And I know enough of Indo-European linguistics to recognize several of the words. I have read them, in their hypothetical and reconstructed forms, though I had not, of course, heard them spoken by a native speaker.

Until then, that is.

One word was “weraz,” and the other was “taknwaz.” I believe that these meant, respectively, “man”

and “precious object.” Ing, Iwaldi, and XauXaz were speaking a dialect of Primitive Germanic. This is the tongue from which is descended the modern Norse, English, High and Low German languages, and, earlier,

Old English, Old Norse, Prankish, Gothic, Old Saxon, and so on.

The others ranged from seeming octogenarians to those who looked no more than 50. I knew something of each, since I had had contact daily for several weeks when I had been Speaker. One was a

Hebrew born shortly before 1 A.D. Two were Mongolian but spoke a language between themselves I could not identify. One was a very old, very huge Negro, and he sometimes talked to himself in a language that I am sure is the ancestor of all the Bantu tongues of modern Africa. The seventh looked as if he were a North American Indian. He also looked so Mongolian, however, that he could be an Olmec of ancient

Mexico. Ing looked Nordic. Iwaldi was a dark-skinned dwarf with very broad shoulders, a huge head, slight epicanthic folds, long thick gnarled arms, great hands like the roots of an oak tree, and very short thick bowed legs. His white hair fell to his buttocks, and his white beard to his knees. He looked as if he belonged to a very different stock of Caucasian. Yet he spoke Primitive Germanic with Ing and XauXaz and seemed very close to them, as if they had known each other for a long time and had unusually common interests.