Read Time Enough for Love for Free Online Page B

as many languages as I have, it’s easy for one to slip away. But it’s coming back.”
    Service was so fast as to cause one to suspect that a crew was standing by ready to produce anything that the Senior or the Chairman Pro Tem asked for.
    Weatheral raised his glass. “Long life.”
    “In a pig’s eye,” Lazarus growled and took a sip. He made a face. “Whew! Panther sweat. But it does have alcohol in it.” He took another. “Improves as your tongue gets numb. Okay, Ira, you’ve stalled long enough. What was your real reason for snatching me back from my well-earned rest?”
    “Lazarus, we need your wisdom.”
     
    PRELUDE
II
    Lazarus stared in horror. “ What did you say?”
    “I said,” Ira Weatheral repeated, “that we need your wisdom, sir. We do.”
    “I thought that I was off again in one of those before-dying dreams. Son, you’ve come to the wrong window. Try across the hall.”
    Weatheral shook his head. “No, sir. Oh, it isn’t necessary to use the word ‘wisdom’ if it offends you. But we do need to learn what you know. You are more than twice as old as the next oldest member of the Families. You mentioned that you have practiced more than fifty professions. You’ve been everywhere, you’ve seen far more than anyone else. You’ve certainly learned more than any of the rest of us. We aren’t doing things much better now than we were two thousand years ago, when you were young. You must know why we are still making mistakes our ancestors made. It would be a great loss if you hurried your death without taking time to tell us what you have learned.”
    Lazarus scowled and bit his lip. “Son, one of the few things I’ve learned is that humans hardly ever learn from the experience of others. They learn—when they do, which isn’t often—on their own, the hard way.”
    “That one statement is worth recording for all time.”
    “ Hmm! No one would learn anything from it; that’s what it says. Ira, age does not bring wisdom. Often it merely changes simple stupidity into arrogant conceit. Its only advantage, so far as I have been able to see, is that it spans change. A young person sees the world as a still picture, immutable. An old person has had his nose rubbed in changes and more changes and still more changes so many times that he knows it is a moving picture, forever changing. He may not like it—probably doesn’t; I don’t—but he knows it’s so, and knowing it is the first step in coping with it.”
    “May I place in open record what you have just said?”
    “Huh? That’s not wisdom, that’s a cliché. An obvious truth. Any fool will admit that, even if he doesn’t live by it.”
    “It would carry greater weight with your name on it, Senior.”
    “Do as you like; it’s just horse sense. But if you think I have gazed upon the naked Face of God, think again. I haven’t even begun to find out how the Universe works, much less what it is for. To figure out the basic questions about this World it would be necessary to stand outside and look at it. Not inside. No, not in two thousand years, not in twenty thousand. When a man dies, he may shake loose his local perspective and see the thing as a whole.”
    “Then you believe in an afterlife?”
    “Slow up! I don’t ‘believe’ in anything. I know certain things—little things, not the Nine Billion Names of God—from experience. But I have no beliefs. Belief gets in the way of learning.”
    “That’s what we want, Lazarus: what you have learned. Even though you say it’s nothing but ‘little things.’ May I suggest that anyone who has managed to stay alive as long as you have must necessarily have learned many things, or you could not have lived so long? Most humans die violent deaths. The very fact that we live so much longer than our ancestors did makes this inevitable. Traffic accident, murder, wild animals, sports, pilot error, a slippery bit of mud—eventually something catches up with us. You haven’t lived a