In just this manner, twenty-eight bored people took a ship and a handful of ancient, incomplete records and, on a whim, searched out the lost colony of Denner's Wreck. Surprised and pleased by what they found, they settled down for an extended vacation there.

Bredon asked that the story stop again.

The Powers, then, came from Terra, just as his own people had; they were not from the world of the dead at all. Their power came from the magic called “technology."

“This ‘technology’ thing,” he asked. “Is it something that people are born with, or something that they learn?"

The spirits were silent for a moment, trying to devise an answer that would be correct, informative, and intelligible, but finally Gamesmaster settled for saying, “It's something they learn."

“Could I learn it?"

Gamesmaster hesitated. “Some of it,” it said. “Without treatment, you won't live long enough to learn all current technological knowledge. Sorry, kid."

Bredon accepted that.

He reviewed what he had been told, and balked at one detail.

“A vacation? A holiday? But the Powers have been here for centuries!"

“It's been a long vacation. Some of them have wanted to leave, at various times, but there's only one ship, and the rule is that unless there's an emergency of some kind they need a majority vote to go, and so far there have never been more than eleven out of twenty-eight voting for departure at any one time. If somebody wanted off urgently enough he or she could transmit a call for another ship, but so far nobody's bothered to do that. It's a nice planet."

“But hundreds of years?"

“Hey, these people live forever if they want to; they can spare a few hundred years."

Bredon had to chew on that idea for awhile before he was able to shove it into the back of his mind, still undigested.

“So that's who the Powers are, and how they got here? And who my people are, and how they got here?"

“You got it, kid. And you don't know how lucky you are to be here, either. Ordinarily, a shipwreck like the one your ancestors lived through doesn't leave a viable colony behind; either the planet isn't habitable, or it's full of hostile native life, or some other such problem. And when the colony does survive, they usually rebuild a higher technology in order to fight off the indigenous life. Your people hit the jackpot, though; this place had enough sea life to provide an oxygen atmosphere, and no land life at all. No moons to make tidal pools, not much volcanic activity, not much land, for that matter, nothing to help land life along, so the stuff they brought with them had no competition and just dug right in."

Bredon did not really follow that, since as far as he knew there had always been plenty of life on land. He decided that Gamesmaster was trying to explain something about why salt-water fish and other sea creatures weren't edible. It did not seem particularly important. “Is there any more to the story?” he asked.

“Not the mainline history lesson, no. That brings us about up to date on that. But whatever other area you're interested in, I can tell you more."

Bredon blinked, unsure where to begin; he thought for a moment, and then asked, “Why is Thaddeus the Black causing trouble? Why is Geste so worried about him?"

“That's hard to explain without telling you a lot of stuff about just who Thaddeus is."

“Tell me, then,” Bredon said. “I'm listening.” He settled back in his seat, started as it shifted shape to accommodate him, and then relaxed, his eyes and ears open.

"…there before him stood a menacing figure in black robes, fully three meters tall, with eyes of flame and with fangs showing between his lips.

"The apparition spoke, saying, ‘I am Thaddeus the Black, and like your brothers before you, you have dared to defy me. Know, then, the price of defiance!’ And he reached into his cloak and flung something down before Hillowan.

"He looked down, and saw that it was his brother Filowan's head, the eyes wide and staring, the mouth frozen in a scream of terror. He took a step back, and Thaddeus reached again into his cloak, and flung another head.

"This one was Gilloran's, and most horrible of all, the severed head was still alive! It rolled its eyes up at Hillowan, pleading with him, and tried to speak, but of course it had no lungs to give it breath so that no sound came out. Hillowan screamed, and stepped back again.

"And Thaddeus opened his cloak and drew forth a third object, but this time it was no severed head, but something that hung limply in his hand, like a rag; and he flung it down before Hillowan, who saw that it was skin, that it was human skin-that it was the skin of his third and youngest brother, Sherowan, somehow peeled from his body in a single piece…"

– from the tales of Atheron the Storyteller

The first known immortal human, Gamesmaster explained, was the man who now called himself Shadowdark. That was not his original name, merely the one he had adopted most recently; it had now lasted a few thousand years, longer than any other he had ever used, including the long-forgotten one his parents had given him.

Shadowdark's immortality was not the result of technology, but a freak of nature, something he was born with. For all anyone knew, the same freak might have happened dozens of times before or since, but only Shadowdark and a handful of his descendants survived the myriad diseases and omnipresent dangers to life and limb that presumably killed off all the other people born with the same peculiarity.

Shadowdark's great peculiarity was in the way he grew. Once he reached adolescence he grew very, very slowly, at a steadily decreasing rate-but never completely stopped. At the age of thirty he stood less than a meter and a half in height; at sixty he still looked thirty, but stood just over a hundred and sixty centimeters, as nearly as he could recall.

Since centimeters had not yet been invented at the time, and no records existed except Shadowdark's memory, the exact height might not be right, but the basic concept was. Shadowdark's body never finished growing, never made the transition from growth to maturity-and therefore to decay.

Bredon interrupted, “Like a tree, you mean?"

“Yes, pretty much like a tree,” Gamesmaster agreed.

“But trees eventually die anyway, when they get too big."

“I know that; I'm coming to that."

There were limits to Shadowdark's growth, of course, Gamesmaster continued; eventually, when he was slightly over two thousand years old, his heart gave out and had to be repaired, and later his skeleton collapsed under its own weight, and he had to have most of it replaced. Fortunately, by the time his natural longevity began to fail him, technology had reached the point where it could take over and keep him going indefinitely. Otherwise he would have died long ago. If any immortals had been born much before Shadowdark they would surely be dead by now in any case, since medical technology had not advanced quickly enough to have saved them.

“Are you sure?” Bredon asked.

“No,” Gamesmaster answered. “Who's telling this, you or me?"

“You are."

“Then shut up."

Bredon shut up, and Gamesmaster went on with his story.

In his early years, before he fully realized just how unique he was, Shadowdark had tried to lead a normal life. His peculiarity forced him to relocate every twenty or thirty years, establishing a new identity each time, but in between these moves he did his best to maintain a home and family and business.

Later on, he found the constant loss of wives, friends, and children to be too depressing, and experimented with a variety of lifestyles. By then, however, he had left behind a good many children, and a few of them had inherited his abnormal growth pattern.