This Is How You Die

by Matthew Bennardo

  In general, I think we felt sorry for the aliens more than anything. We’d all wondered at some point how the poor benighted people of previous eras managed to live with the level of uncertainty that was the norm then. Obviously they didn’t know anything different, but still—

  I found myself thinking a lot about my own death management classes, back when I was a kid. At my school they started in Grade Four, as part of our Health and Morals class, though I think I must have been told the same things earlier. I remember being split up into groups: chronic illnesses, suicides, sudden deaths, inexplicable. My best friend had “Christmas.” I was in with the sudden deaths: fire, car crash, one tornado, four drownings. Two stabbings, but one was just “knife” and the kid who had it insisted he ought to be over with the suicides.

  Most of what we were told was simple. It’s likely to be quick. You won’t see it coming. It’s probably going to hurt, but not for long. “In some ways, we’re lucky,” our teacher (Mr. Rosenthal, motorcycle) told us. “We aren’t facing months or years of lingering illness. We aren’t going to have to take the responsibility for deciding when it’s a good time to die.” (The kid with “knife” mumbled something inaudible.) “We aren’t going to spend our whole lives scratching our heads over an unclear result. We have a lot to be thankful for.”

  My best friend told me afterward that everybody got a pep talk of some kind. Still, the same things were repeated often enough that they tended to stick. After a century and a half, schools pretty much knew how to teach death.

  Days passed. The work went on. Even with listening to them talk all day, I had no idea whether the scientists were making progress. If someone had asked me to paraphrase what they were saying, I would have come up with something something quantum something anomalous superposition blah. It was frustrating. I couldn’t figure out why the Nelat, who spoke English just fine, hadn’t come up with translations for their technical terms before they arrived. Isperander told me they wanted to make sure humans understood the technology, rather than just treating it as magical. It seemed like a flimsy reason; most humans use phones and wiremind and video every day without even slightly understanding how they work. Hell, nobody knows how the Death Machine works, and we’ve been using that for a hundred and fifty years. Nobody’s ever been able to duplicate the original work, and the guy who invented it burned all his notes and took poison; if the prototype hadn’t been stolen, we wouldn’t have the thing at all. So what harm does it do to use black boxes? But the Nelat were firm; this was the way first contact was always done.

  My own projects—mainly trying to write up a grammar of the primary Nelat language, Elusur, from my recordings and the materials they’d given me—proceeded apace. Then, a week or so after the visit to the hospital, Brianna announced that the ship was getting ready to leave for Iceland for a day, and she and one of the biologists were going to be aboard.

  “You’re sure this is a good idea?” I asked, for the dozenth time.

  She smiled. “It’s a wonderful idea, Em,” she assured me. “I need to see their drive working. They told me we’d all be entangled—you know, eshfendant” (“grown-together,” I translated) “with the ship as it runs, and that I should be able to perceive the—um—”

  “Tanshfestemen tfesperan,” I finished, using a phrase we’d been hearing a lot. “The-forest-that-is-all-one-tree” was the best literal translation I could make. I’d suggested “multiverse,” which seemed to me to be what they were getting at, but Isperander was hesitant.

  Brianna nodded. “That one. Whatever it is. I’m hoping to have a better idea after the flight. The outbranch, I mean.”

  I decided I didn’t wish I were going, after all. Granted, a magical disappearing ship wasn’t likely to lead to the death I was slated for, but there were plenty of awful things short of death that could happen to a person, and somehow the more I learned of the Nelat language, the less I felt I liked it. All their constant metaphors of trees and growing seemed somehow threatening. It was completely illogical, but it had somehow sunken roots into my mind. I’d been having nightmares about dark endless forests, full of paths that never went anywhere.

  The ship left. The ship came back.

  I was waiting for her at the landing site—the inbranching site, Brianna’s team were calling it now. I found myself sweating. I didn’t know what I expected. I’d had a horrible dream the night before, of them carrying her out on a stretcher, a mindless, drooling husk. Stupidly melodramatic, but it had stayed with me through the morning, as though I couldn’t fully wake up.

  Lost in my thoughts, I missed the door opening. “Hey!” Brianna called. My whole body jerked as though with an electric shock. “Hey, sleepyhead!”

  I stared at her. She ran toward me and caught me up in a jubilant hug. “You wouldn’t believe it,” she was telling me. “It was amazing. I think I see how it all works. I’m not sure yet—I’ve got to go over it with Hasfenoon, make sure I’m not missing anything—but I think I understand it.”

  “Do you need me for that?” I asked.

  She rolled her eyes. “I can’t get started yet! The doctors want at me first. I told them I’m fine, but they’re insisting they need to test me for everything from brain tumors to extraterrestrial athlete’s foot. I’ll probably be in the hospital the rest of the day.”

  She was, and overnight, and the next day as well. The other scientists on her team went from puzzlement to irritation to worry. I was worrying from the beginning.

  On the third day I went over to the hospital and made a nuisance of myself until the staff reluctantly acknowledged that she was there. Eventually I got them to admit that she wasn’t believed to have anything dangerous or catching (and what would they have done if she had, given that she’d been out hugging people for at least half an hour before reporting to the hospital?) and a harassed-looking nurse led me to her room.

  I almost didn’t recognize her. She sat on the edge of the bed, shoulders slumped, feet dangling. She was wearing a hospital gown and with her hair loose she looked about fourteen. “What happened to you, Bree?” I demanded.

  She didn’t seem to hear me. I repeated myself. After a few moments she looked up at me. “Em. I’m sorry. I am so sorry.”

  “It’s okay,” I told her. “Whatever it is, it’s okay.”

  “It’s not. I’ll show you.” She stood up and took my arm. “We have to be quick. They want me to stay in here.”

  She led me to the elevator and up to the maternity ward, where we’d been the week before. Once again we were standing in front of the Death Machine, now reassembled and ready to test the new babies. Brianna put her hand into the recess. The needle clicked down.

  The slip popped out, and I read it. “Chalk.” I did a double take. “I thought you told me—”

  The printer hummed.

  “Cancer,” Brianna said, taking the second slip. “Keys. Drowning. Cancer again. Nightshade. Fibrodysplasia ossificans progressiva. Boots. Suicide—I always get it sooner or later.”

  “This doesn’t happen,” I said. It was a stupid thing to say, but I couldn’t help it.

  “I know,” Brianna said. She turned off the machine. Little slips of paper cascaded to the floor. “They can’t figure it out. But I know why.”

  “The ship?” I guessed. “Something to do with the ship.”

  She nodded. “Right. I know how it works. I can’t explain it in words—not English words anyway. We’re going to have to learn Elusur to do their kind of science, I think. But it involves—alternate versions of ourselves, like we thought, only they aren’t really. I mean, they aren’t selves with different pasts, or anything like that. They’re patterns of—not patterns, I mean—” She bit her lip. I’d never seen her do that. “I’m sorry. I can’t explain it properly.”

  “Tanshfestemen tfesperan,” I offered.

  “Right. The forest that’s all one tree. The ship, the quantum drive, it sort of—strips away the topsoil so you can see the roots all connected to each
other. Then it multiplies the—the uncertainty, the probability that you’ll be in a given place at a given time, or not, by the number of alternate self-patterns you’re accessing, and somehow that lets you move—anywhere.”

  I thought about it. “That makes no sense at all,” I decided finally. “And anyway, it doesn’t explain this.” I picked up one of the slips of paper from the floor. It was the suicide one, as it happened. “The machine’s supposed to be foolproof. It’s supposed to always work.”

  “It does always work,” Brianna said. She, too, looked stunned, even having had days to get used to the prospect. “It’s just—now it gives you everything. All the alternate versions of yourself that the quantum drive tangles you up with—the machine can’t tell which one you are anymore; it can’t separate them.” She gave a humorless laugh. “This might actually help us figure out how the Death Machine works. Wouldn’t that be something; we work it out right when it becomes useless.”

  “It’s not useless,” I said wildly. “We’ll just—we won’t use the quantum drive. Ever again.”

  “Of course we will,” Brianna said. “You know that.” I knew that. “And even if we don’t—if you don’t—it doesn’t matter. Causality links us all together, and if one person’s future becomes uncertain, then everyone’s does.” She was speaking hollowly, sounding as though she wanted to stop but couldn’t. “It’s probably already too late. You might as well have yourself tested and see.”

  “Blunt force trauma,” I said obstinately. “I don’t need to be tested again. It doesn’t change.”

  “Maybe not right away,” Brianna said. “We don’t know how the second-order effects will work. Will all your possible futures appear at once? Or will you have two or three at first, and then more and more and—”

  “Stop it!” I shouted.

  For a few seconds we just stared at each other.

  “It doesn’t matter anymore,” Brianna said at last. “The certainty’s gone. We’re savages again.”

  They found her three days later with her wrists slit, a snowdrift of Death Machine results around her. She’d written a note on the back of one of them: “This is not a world I want to live in.”

  I’ve thought sometimes of following her. Some days I can’t stand the uncertainty either. I haven’t gotten tested again; I don’t know for sure that my future’s actually changed. I don’t want to know.

  Earth has joined the Union. Every day more ships come, and more people leave on them when they go. There are marvels out there, they say. Beyond description, beyond imagination. I’ve seen pictures and videos of incredible things. I’ve read the papers of my colleagues, of the linguists who’ve gone out to Trespin and Emdullah and Isveritur to study the languages of the stars. I do not feel the slightest urge to join them. This is not my world.

  I understand how Brianna felt. I understand it exactly. There’s only one thing that keeps me from following her.

  My death is not suicide.

  * * *

  Story by Grace Seybold

  Illustration by Carla Speed McNeil

  CONFLAGRATION

  ELIOT TAPPED SUGAR OUT OF a spoon onto the glistening surface of half a grapefruit. It took a few moments before the crystals softened their edges and melted to syrup. He knew, when he sealed it in a Ziploc bag and stowed it in the crisper, that Lydia would want the other half. He knew she wanted the other half of the fruit, and he knew how the rest of the morning would unfold.

  In a few minutes, Lydia will appear at the foot of the stairs in slippers and a white terry-cloth bathrobe cinched below her breasts. She’ll see him hacking with a too-big spoon at the wedges of his fruit, squinting against the spray of juice. She’ll glance over the Formica counter, which she scrubbed yesterday or the day before, but she won’t bring it up. She’ll yawn in the doorway and step in the kitchen and say, “Did you save me half?”

  Eliot will freeze, his spoon poised, and say, “Oh. Did you want that? I’m sorry, I put it back in the fridge.”

  Lydia will stare at him, expressionless, for about two beats longer than necessary to make her disappointment clear. As she glides across the kitchen, ankles just visible in the gap between her slippers and the hem of her robe, his mind will drift to mornings a decade ago. In those days, her legs would scissor out of her robe when she walked. In those days, when she bent low to scratch at her shin or adjust a slipper, one of her breasts might sneak out from behind a loose knot at her waist.

  At some point—probably after she’s coaxed three or four wedges of fruit from the rind with a lazy, juiceless ease—she’ll ask him about their vacation plans. Has he been cleared to take that week off work? Though his request had been approved days ago, he’ll evade the question.

  Eventually, they’ll dress. He in a rumpled blazer intended to make his patients see him as competent yet cool. She in a crisp, cheap pantsuit intended to make her colleagues see her as professional but unambitious.

  In the driveway, cars crouching side by side, he’ll give her a kiss on the cheek. He’ll climb into his car while she fidgets in front of the garage, waiting for her coworker, the pudgy and pasty-faced Gary, to cross the street from his house, stuffing his shirttails into his pants.

  That, Eliot knew, is how the morning would unfold.

  He stood over the freshly scrubbed counter. The sugar had dissolved in the juice of the grapefruit, and he jabbed at it with his too-big spoon.

  He hadn’t yet finished unpacking his briefcase when Rosemary’s number appeared on his desktop phone.

  Eliot pressed a button and winced at the torrent of noise it uncorked. “Rosemary!” he said. “Turn it down.”

  The noise calmed and a beat emerged from the distortion. Bossa nova? “Eliot, hey,” Rosemary said. “I’m stuck in gridlock and have an appointment in ten minutes. Could you babysit him until I get there?”

  “I can do better, if you want. I scheduled an hour of prep it turns out I don’t need. Should I take him for you?”

  “That would rock,” she said. “You rock.”

  Eliot grinned and raised his eyebrows at no one in particular. “What’s the guy’s story?” Eliot said to Rosemary.

  “My guess is he’s a standard-issue scared guy.”

  “Not another suicide looking for an excuse?”

  “Definitely not. He’s midthirties, owns his own business—a little three-person graphic design shop. I’ve got him pegged as feeling ground down by uncertainty, looking for bedrock in the first place that occurred to him.”

  “Your basic type-one talkdown.”

  “That’s my guess. His name’s Mike Cohen and his file’s on my desk. Thank you so much, El. I’ll see you in—God—maybe an hour?”

  “Sorry to pull a switch on you like this, but Dr. Martin is stuck in traffic. Do you mind?”

  “No.” Mike Cohen was tall and a little thin, pale behind a few days of dark stubble. “One is as good as another.”

  Eliot nodded. “You understand why you’re here?”

  “You’re asking me for proximate or ultimate causes?”

  “I’m not sure we’d agree on the ultimate reason. Too deep.”

  Mike shifted in his chair. Slouched, then sat up straight. “I want to know how I will die, and before the government will release the information to me, they send me to you, so you can convince me that I don’t want what I do want.”

  “That’s pretty much it,” Eliot said. This was a likable kid. Smart but willing to engage. “Why do you want to know how you’ll die?”

  “Variables,” Mike said. He cleared his throat. “How am I supposed to make informed decisions—how am I to choose one path over another when the future is a mess of unknowns? If I can eliminate some uncertainty—nail down the value of one big fat variable—I’m hoping that it’ll be easier to make some choices.”

  “And you’re faced with some particularly difficult choices now? That’s why you’re filing the Death Machine request now, instead of five or ten years ago?”

&nbs
p; “Yeah,” Mike said. “I’ve got a business, a fiancée, health issues, parents. None of it is going like I expected. Do you want details about this stuff, or what?”

  “If you want to tell me.”

  “Not really.”

  “The complications are worse now than they’ve been?”

  “They’re more paralyzing than they’ve been. I swear, it’s like a sickness. Or poison. Hemlock, right? Numbness creeping in, limbs to heart.”

  “How will your Death Machine slip help? How will this little bit of knowledge eliminate complications or cure your indecision?”

  “It’s a pretty big bit of knowledge, isn’t it? A huge bit. And I don’t expect it will cure it, exactly. But it will sweep away one whole range of unknowns. Or at least it could. Depending on the answer, I might be able to guess whether I’m planning for the short or long term. That’s huge. If I’m planning short term, everything gets easy. But even if it’s long term—even if the answer comes back ‘senile dementia’ or something, just knowing that will help shake things loose.”

  “Here’s what I think,” Eliot said, looking at his fingers, at the deepening creases over his knuckles, the thickening nails, the coarsening skin on the backs of his hands. “I think this particular cure is worse than the disease.”

  Mike snorted and shook his head. “I have to tell you, GI Shrink, that I’m shocked to hear you say that. But go ahead. Let’s hear the spiel.”

  Eliot thought about fire, water, car accidents, and cancer. Infectious disease and cross fire. The slow agony of cirrhosis and the shock of aneurysm. He looked at Mike and supposed that any one of these avenues would work. “Imagine you file this request and the response comes back that you’ll die by drowning. What would you do?”