Throughout history, immortals avoided detection by moving around and changing their identities. Our sources for the history of immortals include
The Boat Of A Million Years by Poul Anderson and
The Sandman by Neil Gaiman. In Robert Heinlein's Future History, the long-lived Howard Families avoid detection by practicing the Masquerade. There are also future periods in which longevity or immortality need no longer be concealed. Poul Anderson's Hanno and Hugh Valland and James Blish's John Amalfi use their immortality to roam the universe. Astutely, Neil Gaiman makes us aware of the predicament of immortals in periods before interstellar travel:
"And Robert Gadling contemplates building yet another identity.
"Ever since Audrey was killed, he's felt a deep wanderlust: the desire to leave, to get away, to start anew.
"The trouble with six centuries of travel, he ponders, is that there are too few places he hasn't been. He wants to go somewhere, not to return somewhere."
-Neil Gaiman, The Sandman: The Wake (New York, 1997), p. 32, panel 5, captions 1-3.
9 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
And I think we see signs of Hanno the Phoenician feeling like that in the 20th century portions of THE BOAT OF A MILLION YEARS. Of not feeling able to find truly new places he could explore and settle down with for half a century or more. That might explain why Hanno kept one false identity so long that it was starting to attract some suspicions from the Internal Revenue Service. He was getting bored with the minutia of liquidating assets, falsifying his death, and establishing a new identity.
And of course we see Sen. Edmund Moriarty (D MA) sensing something odd about the pro-libertarian Hanno/"Tamberly" and setting sleuths after him! I did think the way the Moriarty sub-plot petered out so inconclusively in BOAT it's one real flaw. We don't see how Hanno outwitted or escaped exposure by Moriarty.
Ad astra! Sean
Of course, if you stay away from a place long enough, it's not the same place when you "return". Hence the saying "you can't go home again".
You change and your former home changes too.
As for immortals, things would get more and more difficult as things like identity papers and fingerprints become more and more common. There would be some compensating factors -- cities are easier to hide in than villages -- but the balance would be unfavorable.
To give an example of "you can't go home again", my mother's mother described the town she grew up in, in Lancashire, very vividly.
But they were memories of the place prior to 1914. She left in 1915 to be a VAD (Voluntary Auxiliary Department) nurse, went to London, was in a Zeppelin bombing raid, worked in a convalescent hospital for wounded officers, met my grandfather and then eloped with him, sailing from Liverpool to Halifax and then Lima in 1919. She never saw the town she grew up in again.
The details, the mill and its steam whistle, the wooden clogs of the factory girls on the cobbles, the women holding their skirts to avoid the horse-dung in the streets, the men with waxed mustaches and watches and chains on their waistcoats, the smell of coal-smoke, the old men sitting outside the pubs -- all these are gone, and they were mostly gone before she died in 1970.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
I agree with what you said about change and "You can't go home again." But, it's somewhat different for people like me, who lived all their lives in the same city. Changes that would seem striking and disturbing if I had been gone forty years occurred gradually in front of my eyes. Which means I took them for granted, was used to them.
And we do see Hanno fretting about police reports, fingerprints, and photographs! Comparing fingerprints and photos of allegedly different persons who lived at different times and finding out they were the same would let the cat out of the bag!
Ad astra! Sean
Sean: also, computer comparisons make that data much easier to use. Even now, you can have computers collate and compare millions of fingerprints and facial images, and it's getting easier to do so all the time.
This process is going on all the time and it has long roots.
Eg., I have Luz think in DAGGERS IN DARKNESS that it's now necessary to have someone ready to answer calls to her ostensible "business' in Mexico City, because transcontinental long-distance telephone calls, though expensive, are now reasonably commonplace.
Yet the first NYC-San Francisco call (a demonstration at the Panama-Pacific Exposition) had only occurred in 1915, and Ciara had been there to see it.
The long-distance communications make it much faster and easier to check on someone's cover story, and harder to sustain the cover. Before that telephone link, you'd have to try and do the same through correspondence by mail (slow, cumbersome, less accurate) or go and see for yourself (involving a long journey and weeks of time).
This has only gotten more so since.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
MORE problems for people like Hanno or spies like Luz! And even without computers I recall Luz thinking in one of the Black Chamber books that the Germans were world beaters when it came to patient, methodical detail work. Such as collating fingerprints and photographs.
Ad astra! Sean
Sean: right, computers give you a cheap and reliable alternative to legions of fiendishly conscientious bureaucrats.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
Absolutely! Altho you will still need SOME conscientious bureaucrats, just not so many.
Ad astra! Sean
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