The Elders (Mind Dimensions #4)(37)
He doesn’t say anything back, but I catch him rolling his eyes in annoyance. Good. We walk in an uncomfortable silence for a couple of minutes.
“Is the Celebration taking place outside the Castle?” I ask, noticing that we’re walking toward the intricately designed entrance doors.
“It takes place all over, but most of the merriment is happening at the fair.”
As we walk farther, he tells me more about this tradition. As he alluded to earlier, this gathering is a way to motivate the Island residents to go about their day. It’s also a nice start to the century, which the Elders plan to spend by themselves. I strongly suspect the latter is more of a reason than the former. During the Celebration, the Island’s citizens are told the highlights of what the Elders achieved during the prior day’s Session—what he calls the hundred or so years spent in the Quiet. Apparently, the Elders don’t really talk to anyone after they do this Session. They have this whole set of rules of how they live outside the Quiet, some of which George hinted at. One of the biggest rules, it seems, is to not stress their physical bodies with unpleasant conversations. This rule, he assured me, is to make sure their bodies age as slowly as possible.
“Seems antisocial,” I comment as Gustav and I walk into town.
“But don’t you see how wasteful it would be to expend our mental resources outside the Mind Dimension?” Gustav retorts. “It’s far more rational to conserve our body’s energy and conduct our business when real-world time is at a standstill.”
“But don’t you end up with the most boring lives imaginable while outside the Mind Dimension?”
“Simple lives, yes, but I wouldn’t go as far as to call them boring. Even if those lives are perhaps uneventful, we more than make up for it when we Split the next day.”
He proceeds to describe what their day outside the Quiet is actually like. It all revolves around a bunch of research they’ve been doing on the subject of longevity. He explains that when the Elders maximize their lifespans, they don’t just add a year here or a few days there as normal people do. It’s multitudes of centuries and millenniums of time in the Quiet that they gain. So they try to mingle with close friends and family, with no stressful topics allowed, in order to satisfy their basic needs for human companionship. For nourishment (his term), they eat mostly unprocessed, plant-based foods, emphasizing greens, beans, onions, mushrooms, and berries, with the very occasional wild fish mixed in. They do numerous relaxation techniques, drink a glass of red wine, work out in a special gym, nurture physical relationships with their loved ones (Gustav speak for daily hookups), walk barefoot through nature during most of the day, and make sure to get adequate amounts of sleep.
“So, in other words, when you’re not doing your Sessions, you’re living in a health nut’s paradise,” I conclude, casting a suspicious glance at one of my attacker’s lookalikes as we pass him by.
Gustav laughs. “You sound just like Victoria. She resents that lifestyle. If we didn’t enforce it for all the Elders, she’d probably smoke, curse, and—”
“Why did she join you then?” I ask. “She strikes me as someone who likes her freedom.”
“Because she enjoys her Sessions. We all do.”
“Arts and crafts for a hundred years? Sign me up.”
“That’s just one aspect of it,” Gustav says. “We do the things that make human beings unique. We do them all, and we take great pleasure in them. Victoria is very much one of us in that.”
I nod absentmindedly as I look around.
The houses in this town are more decorated than a suburban neighborhood at Christmas, only the actual motif of this celebration is more reminiscent of Thanksgiving, what with the harvest-oriented decorations. A dirigible so big and colorful it would give the floats of Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade a run for their money drifts across the sky.
“I heard you pass judgment when it comes to certain Guide-on-Guide crimes,” I say when I’ve heard enough about their lifestyle. “Does that happen during the Celebration?”
“Not exactly,” Gustav says. “It’s something we only discuss with the Ambassadors. They give us new cases to review during the Session, and when it’s done, we hand over our decisions on the prior day’s cases.”
“Are they all murder cases?” I ask, recalling how Thomas and Liz mentioned something along those lines.
“They concern a variety of complex issues, things that require wisdom to judge.”
It’s clear he’s not comfortable discussing this, and I don’t push the issue, since it’s not really that important to me.
Throughout our conversation, I noticed more and more masked, cheerful people pulling their friends into the Quiet. My mental tally of near-duplicates of my attacker has reached double digits.
“Can we stop to listen?” I ask as we near a group of masked musicians, one of whom also looks like my attacker. The music they’re performing is incredible.
“Sure,” Gustav says, lowering his voice.
“What’s that song they’re playing?” I ask in a reverent whisper after a couple of minutes. “I think it’s the most hauntingly beautiful melody I’ve ever heard.”
“Thank you,” he whispers back. “I wrote that score myself.”