I thought about them, hundreds even thousands of years old, the memories, loves, skills, and torments piled up on them unwillingly like an odd assortment of bricks put up shabbily on some ramshackle house in the middle of nowhere. I had lived in that house for over three years, alone. The idea of living in it alone for one day longer seemed too much to bear. I looked over at her as she unwrapped the roast beef and it all began to make perfect sense. They had to stay together, for sanity's sake if nothing else.

"It sounds like they were already well rooted in Egypt, so why move to Zurich and reestablish there?"

"Well, this condition we share has always afforded us the one luxury of practical immortality, though I've always thought the term Immemorial more appropriate for us than Immortal, for we all die, we just remember having died. I say practical because we were able to bequeath wisdom and experience to ourselves in each successive life but we were never able to reap the benefit of any wealth or lands that we acquired because we could never pass it on to ourselves.

"When there were five, the odds were very high that there would always be at least one of them alive, alive in the sense that they were old enough to be aware of their nature and aware of the others. Since then, there has always been one designate who keeps the holdings of the ones who have died and returns them to the new incarnates upon their reemergence. The Ascension became the way of verifying identity. If the designate died, all of his assets and the assets of the others were passed on to an alternate or second designate that was alive. It still works that way today. The fact that we have to depend on and trust one another makes us a very close family in some ways. The home you've stayed in, the car you rode in, my other homes around the world, my twenty percent stake in one of the largest glass manufacturers in the world, were all left to me by my benefactor," she said, motioning to the plaques, "by me, the same person. Here, have a sandwich." She handed me a small sandwich of roast beef and cheese between two crackers.