Part 40 (1/2)

”The time has come, Daniel. Everything is now too late. Do you want to join us for the end?”

”No, I want face it alone.”

”You continue to surprise us with your choices.”

”Well, that's what life is all about, isn't it? With only one sentient being in the universe, where are the surprises?”

”There are no more surprises. We've both failed.”

”I'm going to keep reporting what I see.”

”Of course.”

”Will anyone hear?”

”That's beyond even our abilities to know. Theoretically quantum synapses on your neural link may make it possible. You have been very astute, but the time distortions cannot be mapped by any algorithm.”

”Not astute enough to come up with a way to stop the universe from ending.”

”I believe it's happening now.”

”What, so soon?”

”You persist in your time perceptions.”

Helen, I can feel the wild stellar winds buffet me as a bright s.h.i.+mmer appears in my vision. The white ma.s.s of the last living star in the universe is beginning to shed its outer layers. It's so beautiful. I wish you could see it with me. Inside I can see a crystalline lattice of carbon and oxygen atoms, a diamond-like core glowing with intense light.

Now it's all starting to darken.

Helen, if you can still hear me, I want to say good-bye. I know I didn't always treat you as well as I should have. I'm ... I'm going to say something I thought I would take to my grave. I'm so gutless I can only say it now because possibility theory suggests it's highly unlikely that you'll ever hear it. Helen, I've always loved you. I know you couldn't ever love such a twisted cripple as me, so I chose never to say anything. I recorded all our conversations not to trip you up about things you had said in the past, but because I never wanted your voice to leave me. That's the real truth. Good-bye, my truth.

The loner in physics-Eleanora Schmidt Daniel Rostrom's recordings, therefore, are either delusional flights of fancy which will keep the world's psychiatrists busy for decades to come or they present the scientific community with unsurpa.s.sed information and reasoning about the end of the universe. Who knows, perhaps by giving one sentient race such depth of understanding so early in the life of the universe, perhaps we have the head start we need, and in the billions of years until the end, the sentient beings of the universe will learn enough to stop the death of the last star.

”Daniel, I guess I'm hoping you're so brilliant that you've somehow engineered it so that you can still hear me. If not, well, I guess I'm just talking to myself here. I have been listening to every word. People think you're making it all up, but I believe you. I believe everything you've said. I do love you too. And I could have loved you more if you'd let me. Believing you, of course, means you'll never come back. You won the bet. Well done. Good-bye, Daniel.”

RECOLLECTION.

Nancy Fulda

Despite all the gains science has made, we are still held hostage to the inevitability of death. We can extend our life spans further and further, but eventually, inescapably, death overtakes us.

Memory loss is much like death. The body remains, but the person inhabiting that body has lost most of what makes us alive.

Nancy Fulda's ”Recollection” shows us that science alone is not enough to heal us. There has to be love. We are mammals, after all, and without the warmth and care of other mammals we may be able to exist, but we cannot live.

The dream is always the same. You are a tangled ma.s.s of neurons, tumbling through meteors. Flaming impacts pierce your fragile surface, leaving ragged gouges. You writhe, deforming under bombardment, until nothing is left except a translucent tatter, crumbling as it descends. Comets pelt the desiccated fibers. You fall, and keep falling, and cannot escape the feeling that, despite your lack of hands, you are scrabbling desperately at the rim of a shrouded tunnel, unable to halt your descent. Glimmers crawl along the faint remaining strands, blurring as you tumble ...

You awaken to warmth and stillness. Gone are the soulless tiled floors of the seniors' home. Sterile window drapes have been replaced by sandalwood blinds. Fresh air blows through the vents, overlaying faint sounds from the bathroom and from morning traffic on nearby canyon roads. You clutch the quilted blankets, stomach plummeting. This cozy bedroom, with its st.u.r.dy hardwood furnis.h.i.+ngs, should be familiar to you, but it isn't. Two days, and still nothing makes sense. You feel as though you're suffocating. Tumbling ...

Your wife has heard you gasping for air. She comes running, nightgown flapping behind her. Her face is creased in overlapping furrows. Your mirror tells you that the two of you are a match: the same fading hair, the same shrunken hollows along the eyes. Laugh lines, she calls them, but you cannot manage to see them as anything except deformities, in your face and hers both.

”Elliott?” She grabs your hand and kneels at the bedside to look in your eyes. ”It's me, Elliott. Everything's fine. Everything's going to be OK.”

Her name, you recall, is Grace. She told it to you two days ago, and is irrationally elated that you are able to repeat it to her upon demand, anytime she asks. You feel like a trained puppy, yapping for treats, except there aren't any treats.

There's just Grace, and this room. And before that, the seniors' home. And before that...? You're not sure. You flail at the bedside for your notebook, thinking it might offer continuity. But there are only a few shaky scribbles, beginning the day before yesterday.

Grace pulls you upright, propping pillows against your spine. She fusses over you, adjusting your hair, prattling off questions. She seems to think you're in pain, but you're not. Not any more than you'd expect of a man with joints and bones as old as yours. She tries to kiss your forehead, and you recoil.

It's a cruel gesture, pulling away like that, but you can't help it. She's a stranger, and despite the anguish in her eyes, it feels wrong to pretend otherwise. You can't feign love. You won't. Not to please her, not to please anyone.

Grace hesitates only slightly before continuing her efforts. You watch her, trying to recall more about this woman you've shared your life with, but your grasping thoughts turn up only emptiness. You haven't recognized her-haven't recognized anyone in your family-for years. That's what Alzheimer's means. Or what it used to mean.

You're not sure what anything means, anymore.

Grace, arranging blankets along the side of your bed, pauses to stroke your arm. ”Someone had to be first,” she says sadly, almost like a litany. ”The next batch of patients will have it easier. They'll begin treatments almost as soon as they're diagnosed, long before the neural tissue breaks down...” She gazes into empty air, and adds with forced enthusiasm: ”But we'll get through this, you know we will. You were always tough as ironwood. Remember how we used to sit at Squaw Peak and look over the valley? You told me you felt cheated as a boy, because all the frontiers had been taken, and it was too late to be a pioneer.”

She keeps talking, wave after wave of trivialities burdening the air. It is clear that she loves you. It is equally clear that she does not realize how few of her words find purchase on the slippery crags of your recollection. Names and anecdotes sweep past you, unconnected to anything familiar, and therefore quickly forgotten. Your blank stare must be disheartening, but she doesn't stop. She was always stubborn that way; ruthlessly optimistic in the absence of all evidence. Why you can remember that, when everything else is gone, you can't say.

An image rips across your thoughts. A spiderweb, torn by a stick, so that the tattered remaining strands are left to dangle in the wind. The hand gripping the stick is yours-you are certain of it, although you must be remembering something wrong, because it looks like the hand of a child-and you recall staring, fascinated by how quickly the pattern disintegrates once the central supports have been torn away ...

You feel suddenly dizzy. Your gaze sweeps the room, searching for some sort of anchor, but all you find is a photo next to the bed. It shows a stronger, less withered version of yourself and Grace, shouldering backpacks on a dusty mountain trail. The man is laughing. The woman's balled fist is thrust against his side, her lips pressed in mock indignation. You wonder what he said to elicit such affectionate ire.

The neurologists said this would happen. Before you left the rest home, they showed you brightly colored images of your brain tissue. They outlined areas where beta-amyloid plaques had been cleared, pointed to the scattered remaining tau deposits, and explained that your brain is once again capable of parsing and recording information. You are no longer a dementia patient, but the memories you've lost will never return. The best you and Grace can hope for is to rebuild across the tattered rifts in your consciousness.

That won't be too hard. Grace had laughed, hands clamped around your limp fingers, still ecstatic that you remembered her name. Elliott loves building things.

Grace isn't laughing now, though. To be honest, she doesn't look like a woman who laughs much at all. Hollow eyes, unkempt hair, slender to the point of spindliness ... Her haggard face can no longer be described as beautiful. Also, she annoys you. The words keep coming, pointless babble on a dozen inconsequential topics, like a slew of s.h.i.+ny b.u.t.tons which you have not hands enough to catch.

You must have loved her, once. Yes, you almost certainly loved her, and the endless prattle now spilling off her lips must be weighted with decades' worth of meaning-shared jokes, shared secrets, shared opinions ... Each fleeting phrase a lifeline to a h.o.a.rded wealth of common history. It should mean something to you, but it doesn't.

You close your eyes and grimace against the pillows, shutting out Grace, shutting out everything. It's not right. You never asked for this. Why would anyone choose this?

Why didn't they let you keep tumbling?