“I would–try to–keep it,” it said, red lights blinking about its dome, before it turned and lumbered off, across the Great Graveyard.
“Yes,” said John Auden aloud, “but this thing cannot be done.”
Sythia did not understand him, and on that thirty-first day they returned to that place where he had lived for a month and he felt the fear of death, strong, so strong, come upon him.
She was more exquisite that ever before, but he feared this final encounter.
“I love you,” he said finally, for it was a thing he had never said before, and she stroked his brow and kissed it.
“I know,” she told him, “and your time is almost at hand, to love me completely. Before the final act of love, my John Auden, tell me a thing: What is it that sets you apart? Why is it that you know so much more of things-that-are-not-life than mortal man should know? How was it that you approached me on that first night without my knowing it?”
“It is because I am already dead,” he told her. “Can’t you see it when you look into my eyes? Do you not feel it, as a certain special chill, whenever I touch you? I came here rather than sleep the cold sleep, which would have me to be in a thing like death anyhow, an oblivion wherein I would not even know I was waiting, waiting for the cure which might never happen, the cure for one of the very last fatal diseases remaining in the universe, the disease which now leaves me only small time of life.”
“I do not understand,” she said.
“Kiss me and forget it,” he told her. “It is better this way. There will doubtless never be a cure, for some things remain always dark, and I have surely been forgotten. You must have sensed the death upon me, when I restored my humanity, for such is the nature of your kind. I did it to enjoy you, knowing you to be of the Faioli. So have your pleasure of me now, and know that I share it. I welcome thee. I have courted thee all the days of my life, unknowing.”
But she was curious and asked him (using the familiar for the first time), “How then dost thou achieve this balance between life and that-which-is-not-life, this thing which keeps thee unconscious yet unalive?”
“There are controls set within this body I happen, unfortunately, to occupy. To touch this place beneath my left armpit will cause my lungs to cease their breathing and my heart to stop its beating. It will set into effect an installed electrochemical system, like those my robots (invisible to you, I know) possess. This is my life within death. I asked for it because I feared oblivion. I volunteered to be gravekeeper to the universe, because in this place there are none to look upon me and be repelled by my deathlike appearance. This is why I am what I am. Kiss me and end it.”
But having taken the form of woman, or perhaps being woman all along, the Faioli who was called Sythia was curious, and she said, “This place?” and she touched the spot beneath his left armpit.
With this he vanished from her sight, and with this also, he knew once again the icy logic that stood apart from emotion. Because of this, he did not touch upon the critical spot once again.
Instead, he watched her as she sought for him about the place where he had once lived.
She checked into every closet and adytum, and when she could not discover a living man, she sobbed once, horribly, as she had on that night when first he had seen her. Then the wings flickered, flickered, weakly flickered, back into existence upon her back, and her face dissolved and her body slowly melted. The tower of sparks that stood before him then vanished, and later on that crazy night during which he could distinguish distances and grasp perspectives once again he began looking for her.
And that is the story of John Auden, the only man who ever loved a Faioli and lived (if you could call it that) to tell of it. No one knows it better than I.