Poul Anderson

“ And he would be on Tanith....
And there would be his friends. He thought of the utter loneliness that waited for him in the Galaxy. Two hundred years was a sizeable draft of eternity; he had acquired enough of the immortal's viewpoint and personality to find the short-lived completely alien. He could never know more than the most superficial comradeship with even the oldest of those who were younger than he. He could never be close to his wife; she would occupy only the smallest part of the emptiness within him. Because before she had grown enough to match him, they would both be dead. ”

“ The Chinese had been in his fifties when he came, one of the first load of colonists, and Tanith could not restore lost youth. But a healthy middle age had its own advantages, it conferred a peace and depth of mind more rapidly than an endlessly young body would permit. In the Solar System, Chang had been a synthesist, taking all knowledge and its correlation as his field of work, and he had come to Tanith in some of Langdon's mood of abandonment—futile to attempt the knowing and understanding of all things, when life had flickered out in a hundred years. ”

“ And as a man grew older, without loss of physical and mental faculties, he found more and more within himself, an unfolding inward richness which none of the short-lived would ever appreciate or even comprehend. He had less need of other men to prop him up. Or perhaps it was simply that the wisdom, the fullness which came with immortality, made a little of the other colonists' company go a long ways.
There was no denying it, Eileen's twenty-three years of life could not compare with Langdon's two hundred or more. ”

“ For a man on Tanith did not grow old.
Suddenly he stiffened, and a psyche-feeder swooped low to absorb his furiously radiated nervous energy. The reaction of it eddied in his mind as a chilling fear. Angrily, without having to think about it, he drove the creature off with a jaggedly pulsed mental vibration and remained standing and listening. ”

“ Grass may look just as well when it's red or blue or yellow—but it shouldn't be all of them at different times. The sky is wrong, the trees are wrong. Those hideous lakes of life and the things in them, obscene—those voices singing out in the mists, nobody knows what they are—those images of things a hundred million years dead—and the faces, and the whisperings, and there's always something watching and waiting and moving just a little outside the corner of your eye.... ”

“ I hated the thought, but Eileen—well—you saw her. And you remember those first colonists."
"I do. She is exhibiting all their symptoms. She can't stand the unpredictability of her environment, and she can't adjust her scale of values enough to see the beauty in what to her is wrong and horrible." In the vague golden light, Langdon thought he glimpsed a grim smile on the other man's face. "Perhaps she is right, Joseph. Perhaps it takes someone not quite sane by the rest of the Galaxy's standards to adjust to Tanith." ”

“ It isn't good."
"No," she whispered.
"Can't you learn that there's nothing to fear on Tanith?" he asked. "Death itself, the greatest dread of all, is gone. We've eliminated all actually dangerous life in the neighborhood of our settlements. There are things that can be annoying—the sword-plants, the psyche-feeders, the static discharges—but it's no trick to learn how to avoid them. Nothing here can hurt you, Eileen."
"I know," she said hopelessly. "But I'm still afraid. Day and night, I'm afraid. There are worse things than death. Joe." ”

“ After all, it was ten or twenty years before we even suspected the truth. A world as alien as this was settled only because planets habitable to man and without aborigines are hard to find. Since then, many more such worlds—normal ones—have been discovered, and few people care to risk madness by coming here. Tanith is an obscure dominion of the Galactic Union, having a certain scientific interest because of its unique natural laws—but not too great even there, when science has so many other things to investigate just now. ”

“ Men came to Tanith and stayed if they could endure it. But if they couldn't, and tried to stay anyway, they soon fled from the unendurable madness of its reality to a safer and more orderly madness of their own.
From what he had heard, few of them were cured again, even back on Terra.
"I've got to see Chang," he said.
The colonists on Tanith tended to live well apart from each other, and unless they owned the new televisors designed especially for the planet their only contact was physical. ”

“ The planet couldn't hold a fraction of them. Even as it is, we have to space births very carefully lest in a few centuries we crowd ourselves off the world. Furthermore, the unstable social environment produced by such an influx of colonists, most of whom couldn't stand the place anyway, would delay, perhaps ruin, the research by which we hope to find out why life does not grow old here. When we have that answer, and can apply it outside this region of space, all the Galaxy will have immortality. ”

“ Langdon looked up to the swarming stars. A sheet of blue auroral flame covered them for a moment.
He asked presently: "How much further have our scientists gotten in explaining the phenomenon?"
"We've come quite a ways, but progress has been mostly in highly technical fields of mathematical physics. You'll have to take a decade or two off soon, Joseph, and learn that subject. Briefly, we do know that this is a region of warped space, similar to those in the neighborhood of massive bodies but of a different character. ”

“ Tanith seems like a chaos, governed by living spirits and most of them malignant, only because you don't see the regularity. Its pattern is too different from what you're used to. Terra herself must have seemed that way to primitive man, before he discovered order in nature.
"Our scientists here are slowly finding out the answers. Talk to old Chang sometime, he can tell you more about it than I. But I can see the order now, a little of it, and it's a richer and deeper thing than the rest of the universe. ”

“ In our own bodies, there is none of that tendency toward chemical and colloidal degradation which I think lies at the root of aging and death.
"But that's just my guess, you know, and biological phenomena are so extraordinarily complex that it will probably take us centuries to work it out. ”

“ Takes a crazy man to stand that world in the first place."
He pointed to a tall man who was half leading, half supporting a young woman along the deck. She would have been beautiful had she not been badly underweight. She smiled at the man, but her eyes were haunted, and his answering smile was far-away. It went no deeper than his lips.
"That fellow Langdon is the only long-time colonist I ever heard of who left Tanith for good," said the captain. "He must have been there for years. Maybe he was born there, but he's coming back to Sol now. ”

“ Intellectual understanding of a problem never solves it, though it may help. Eileen takes your word for these being purely natural phenomena. She's not superstitious. It might help if she were! Because explaining the horror doesn't lessen it to her. ”

“ Many of them, of course, are simply illusions produced by complex refractions of light and sound waves: others are very real. The time axis itself is subject to certain transformations which produce the temporal mirages. ”