Immortality

‘I will return, good sirs, in a quarter of an hour, with the fish course. Sadly, we do not keep as fine a table these days as once we did.’

‘Times change, Shardlow,’ said the Doctor, softly.

‘Do they, sir? Do they indeed?’

Slowly and sadly, the old man limped out and the sound of the key was heard in the door again.

‘This place is nuthin’ but a flamin’ asylum,’ insisted Kevin. ‘I’ve never heard such a load of complete cods-wallop in all me born days!’

‘What you’ve just heard is the plain, unvarnished truth, I should think,’ replied the Doctor sombrely.

‘Two-hundred-year-old geezers serving the grub?’

‘More than two hundred,’ the Doctor pointed out.

‘That’s just the time he’s been here – he was his natural age before that -- say, what – sixty?’

‘Oh, that makes a lot more sense that does,’ snorted Kevin, ‘him being two hundred and sixty instead of two hundred. That makes it a lot more credible!’

‘That poor old man,’ murmured the Doctor, turning to look after the way Shardlow had gone. ‘The gift of immortality didn’t seem to please him that much, did it?’

‘Immortality?’ asked Kevin, unused to such concepts as facts of life.

‘When you can start counting your age in centuries, you can call that immortality, can’t you? Of a sort?’ The mood of melancholy seemed to change abruptly, as reaction set in to what he had just witnessed. ‘Or like the rest of your race, are you going to quibble about definitions?’

Kevin was somewhat taken aback, sensing that the Doctor was not having a dig at the Anglo-Saxons, but rather the whole polyglot of Homo Sapiens in general.

‘Yes, that would be typical,’ continued the Doctor, working up a good head of steam now, ‘to spend the rest of eternity defining immortality – that would really satisfy the human race’s yearning for self-justification! That poor old man...’ He stopped and shook his head again, compassion almost overwhelming him. ‘Centuries of servitude, slavery for what? Losing at a board game! And the game would have been rigged as well! This time the Toymaker has gone too far.’

***

The Nightmare Fair, Chapter 6