The dry veldt was a guilty patch on the planet, and no one went there much. Small plots of forest broke it up here and there, making cooler places of shade and water. Beasts went there to avoid the blinding sun.
We lay on our stomachs, looking over the top of a sandy, shallow rise. "From here," I told O'Connor, my team recruit, "we're sure to see the main group."
"Why 'sure'?" he asked, peering through the shimmering heat, face shadowed by the wide brim of his hat.
"Because they've been in their plot of forest a long time now, living off the wildlife. They have to move."
"Quite right," he said, then was quiet for a while, reluctant to say whatever he wanted to say to me, as if the heat were trying to squeeze an unwelcome thought out of him. I felt his rivalry with me, but he seemed only distantly aware of his feelings.
"Why bother," he said finally. "They don't want our help. Never did."
There were such pockets left all over the world, of people who still didn't want to live on beyond the old human lifespans, as we did, making up our lives as we went along as we tried to mold the indefinite futures. It was hard for the majority to which I now belonged to see why these backwards hid from us, why they didn't greet us with open arms.
"They don't want us," O'Connor said again, this time with a hint of reproach in his voice.
"Then why are you here?" I asked, thinking of the strange missionary I had become, bringing the gospel of longlife back to the nature dwellers.
"No ... why are you here?" he mumbled, hiding under his hat. "You've been at this longer than I have."
I knew why. I had always known why. "It may trouble you to understand," I said, "but their existence still tells us who we are. It makes us think about who they are, and why they are here, and why we have left them behind."
He squinted at me from under his brim. "And that's your reason?"
"One of them. There is strength in these people that we should not lose."
"Pretty abstract. I thought that somehow ... you cared, emotionally, I mean."
"I do."
"I don't see the care in your face," he said.
"They're like us, as most of us were not so long ago. Still more like us than not."
I looked out across the veldt to the forest that sat halfway to the horizon as if it had been driven to clump there by the arid emptiness of the plain. Behind his show of detachment, O'Connor probably cared too much, or too little. I couldn't tell which. Like most of us, he had too much life ahead of him to be disturbed by anything near-term.
And then we saw them, the largest group of old humanity that I had ever spotted, moving out of the trees and across the blazing Sunday afternoon like a single beast with a hundred heads. Their weakest were in the middle of the body, where they could be helped along by the stronger.
"It's not like they don't know about us," O'Connor said. "They know and don't want us."
"They don't really know any better," I said, remembering. "They don't really see us."
"Think so?" he asked with a laugh. "If they did, they wouldn't want to live out here like this, would they?"
I was thinking that hunting down these people was useless, that we had gotten hot and dusty all for nothing, in the season when it got hot and dry and the sun hammered the land and made you sure to keep your hat on your head.
"Don't worry," he said. "I'll do my job, if only to see how it goes."
)
In a forgotten corner of a world a century hence, two men steal up on a tribe like fervent missionaries. What they bring isn't the promise of salvation, but salvation itself. New genetic therapies have made possible eternal life, absolute freedom from the "prison of nature." Should be an easy sell--after all, who doesn't want to live forever? Lots of people, actually. Immortality isn't for everyone.
