Read Online Now and Forever by Ray Bradbury - Free Book Online

were romances. For while we could not propagate, we could still enact passion. A perfect population, assembled from the four corners of creation, a jigsaw beautifully fitted with no rough edges. Everyone had a job, some wrote poems, others novels, all got published in far places, fantasies mainly of cities beyond belief, whose readers thought the tales mere figments of wild imagination, but we were living it. So there it is. Here it is. Perfect weather, perfect town, perfect lives. Long lives. Most of us shook hands with Lincoln, attended the obsequies at Grant’s tomb, and now …”
    â€œNow?” said Cardiff.
    â€œYou are a messenger of doom, come to destroy it all.”
    â€œI am not the message, Nef. I do deliver it, yes.”
    â€œI know,” said Nef, quietly. “But how I wish you could go off and come back with some better truth.”
    â€œIf I could, so help me God, Nef, I’d gladly bring it to you.”
    â€œGo,” she said. “Please. Find it and bring it here.”
    But he could only sit on the evergreen grass of eternal summer and let the tears run down his cheeks.

CHAPTER 27
    â€œAnd now,” said Nef.
    â€œNow?” said Cardiff.
    â€œI must prove that I do not wish to kill the bearer of bad news. Come.”
    And she led him across the lawn where the picnic blankets still lay as after a storm, tossed and half-furled, and some few dogs had arrived with the army ants while several cats waited for the beasts to leave, and Nef walked among them and opened the front door of the Egyptian View Arms and, ducking his head, blushing, Cardiff stepped in swiftly, but she was already at the stairs and halfway up before he touched the first riser, and then they were in her tower room and he looked and saw that her vast bed had been stripped and the windows thrown open wide with their wind-tossed curtains and the town clock was striking four in the afternoon as Nef lifted her arms and a great soft bloom of sheet rose in a summer cloud over the bed and he seized his half and with her gentled it down in a field of white over the bed to cover its face. And they stood back and watched the late afternoon exhale and fill the lace and blow the curtains inward toward the bed, like a fall of never-arriving snow, and there was a glass of lemonade on either bedside table, and his questioning look caused her to laugh and shake her head. Only lemonade, nothing more.
    â€œBecause,” she said, “ I will inebriate you.”
    It was a long fall to the bed. She arrived an eternity later. He sank under white sheets of snow and recalled his whole life, in a whiplash of memory.
    â€œSay it,” he heard her cry, a long way off.
    â€œOh, Nef, Nef,” he cried. “I love you!”
    Â 
    It was twilight. The lace curtains continued to move in a white snowfall above them. The Chinese wind crystals on the porch chimed. They lay hand in hand, dear chums most dearly met, eyes shut, drinking the silence, dressed only by the late sunlight and the weather, and at last she said: “How would you like to live a few hundred years? Or,” she added, “forever, whichever comes first.”
    â€œForever, I think,” he said.
    â€œGood.” Her hand tightened on his. “Trust me?”
    â€œYes. No. Yes.”
    â€œWhich?”
    â€œI’m confused,” he said. “I’m not one of your miraculous longtime historical ‘sports.’ Can you make me one?”
    â€œYou came to us, remember.”
    â€œBut for two reasons. To see your town before it was buried under cement. And I was carrying the news of your destruction, which you didn’t know, and I had to tell. Two reasons.”
    â€œThree,” she said. “There was a sense in you, as in most of us, like a homing pigeon, a thing printed in your blood or behind your face, a ghost in your head. And why not? A ghost of a need, just as our ghosts moved us, let us recognize each