"We left you your digestive system, because part of the pleasure you craved comes through that. But you could completely deny yourself the food that you thought sustained you and feel no ill effects--at least no physical ones. It's the pills that feed you, Emrys." "Well," Emrys said slowly, "they're food, then." "Of a sort. But not the kind you mean. You cannot exist without us and our skills, Emrys. Each vial of pills consists of the mitogenetic force of ten tons of life." "What kind of life?" Emrys asked. "Does it really matter?" "You said I cannot exist without you," Emrys pointed out shrewdly, "that I need the pills. So I could stop taking them, couldn't I, and starve myself to death?" * * * * * Uvrei smiled. "Yes, you could do that. Only it would take, say, about fifteen hundred terrestrial years--perhaps, since we have given you a strong, young body, as much as two thousand. Do you think you are strong enough to starve yourself to death over a period of two thousand years?" Emrys knew he was not. In that first anguish, all he could think of to do was to humble himself before the Morethan. "I have served your purpose. Why not be merciful to me now?" he pleaded. "At least let me die." "I could not, even if I would. So little of our old powers remain. We have kept the secret of perpetual life, but we have lost the secret of perpetual death." "But that's the greater secret!" "Of course it is!" For the first time, Emrys saw the Morethan high priest lose control. "Do you think I don't know what it is to crave death?" After a silence, the voice, once more chillingly warm, said, "Come, my son, being one of us, you have nothing to fear from our arrival. You no longer have anything in common with these animals. You cannot even--what is your word?--love them. When you tried, you fixed upon a machine with the face of a memory." "Would a human being have known she was a machine?" "A human being would have known." "Then ... I am a machine, too? A machine created by mental, rather than physical processes, but a machine nonetheless?" "In a sense," the alien said thoughtfully, "you could be called that--though to compare you, as an artistic creation, with that trumpery piece of gimcrack...." "Don't call her that!" Emrys shouted. "She's dead!" Uvrei began to laugh quietly. After a little, Emrys began to laugh, too. "I'm being foolish," he said. "Extremely foolish," Uvrei agreed. "Resign yourself, my son, and accept your fate. That is what we immortals have all had to do, one by one." Of course he could do that, Emrys thought. After all, he wouldn't be as badly off as the other Earth people when the Morethans came; whatever else happened, he, at least, could not be turned into a component part of a little golden pill. Immortality was a dull future, but perhaps, after the Morethans arrived, it would become more interesting.