He gathered himself. “A mercy killing.”
“You could call it that,” she said.
“I believe in mercy.”
“We all believe in mercy,” said Dash, not to be left out.
“Then we’re agreed.”
Cav frowned. “But I don’t agree. I’m sorry, but I don’t. We don’t know what mercy is in this case. What it is to them. We’re ignorant. To them it might be the opposite of what we think. How can we put them to sleep? We can’t.”
“We made them,” Gunjita retorted.
The words seemed to reverberate with self-recrimination. Neither man spoke. Moments later, when she realized what had just come out of her mouth, she rushed to explain herself.
“What I meant . . . We’re responsible. Without knowing what they want, we have to guess. Put ourselves in their shoes. Ask ourselves what we would want.”
Cav felt that she was talking about him. He was filled with love for her, filled with pride to be her husband, filled with admiration. But he could only say what he would want, not what they would, and what he wanted was the freedom to choose.
“We could guess,” he said gently. “I wish I could say we should. But I don’t believe it. We have no right to dictate their fate. When and how they live and die is not our business. Our business is us.
“Which leads me to what I want to say. It might ease the sting. I’m giving up the fight. No more arguing about our Ooi. No more pushing down your throats a pill that obviously doesn’t agree with you. There’s a time for talk and a time for silence.”
“Hallelujah,” she said.
“You’re changing your opinion?”
“Give an inch, they ask for a mile.” Cav shook his head, and smiled. “I’m not objecting to yours. Say whatever you like. I won’t contest or contradict anything you report.”
“What’s the catch?” asked Gunjita.
“No catch.”
She didn’t believe it. “Hear that?” she told Dash. “That ringing in your ears? That hole in the air? That vacuum? That’s the sound of a shoe not dropping.” She locked eyes with her husband. “Stop being such a pussy.”
She was right. In addition to being his soul mate, she was his weather vane. In addition to that, his rock and his pillar. He needed her, now more than ever. He needed every bit of strength he could muster.
“I have a favor to ask.”
Here it comes, she thought.
“I want to be alone.”
Dash nodded. It seemed a reasonable request.
“Alone alone,” he added.
Another nod from Dash. “Sure. Why not?”
“You don’t get it,” said Gunjita. “He wants us out of here. Gone.”
“Is that right, Cav?”
“He’s had enough of us. He’s giving us the boot.”
“That’s not true,” said Cav.
“But it is.”
“Not of you. Of everything.”
“You’re tired,” said Dash. “You’re worn out. You’re old. That’s what juving is for.”
“I’m full, my friend. I couldn’t possibly be any fuller. Not if I lived another life, or another ten. I don’t need more than I have. I don’t want more. More would only push out what I already possess, and cherish.”
“I don’t believe that,” said Dash. “You don’t believe that. You never have before.”
“So what if it does?” said Gunjita. “So what? You’ll find something new to cherish.”
“I don’t want to. Do you really not understand?” It seemed so simple, so elementary. He was puzzled and upset that they didn’t get it.
Gunjita was pitiless. “No. I don’t understand. You think you’re being heroic. This isn’t heroism, Cav. It’s stubbornness. It’s idealism. It’s fluff. Romantic bluster. No one builds statues to romantics.”
“I don’t want a statue.”
“You want something. What?”
Freedom, he thought. An end to the work of living.
And time. Time to prepare. Time to get into the right frame of mind. Find the right zone, and take up residence.
True observation was fearless. It was egoless. You had to give everything, expect nothing in return. His hope and his prayer: to be present, fully, for the experience.
“Aren’t you even a little curious?”
“I’ll be curious when I have to be,” said Gunjita.
“Maybe I’ll meet the giant oyster.”
“You’re a child.”
“Don’t do this,” Dash pleaded.
“Honestly? That’s an option. I might not. I won’t know until I do it, will I? I could always back out.”
Cause for cheer, one might think. Gunjita felt differently.
“Take all the time you want. Do what you have to. I won’t be here. You’ve had enough of me? Well, guess what? The feeling’s mutual.”
She started to leave, then stopped, and came back. She took Dash by the arm. “You heard the man. He wants to be alone. Say good-bye. Let’s go.”
* * *
They departed the station the next day. Gunjita’s eyes were dry. Dash embraced his dearest friend and begged him to change his mind, at least keep it open. Cav hugged him hard, then faced the love of his life.
They stared at each other, like two old warriors, neither of them knowing what to say or do. Cav had tears in his eyes. Gunjita regarded him stoically, until she couldn’t stand it anymore. She reached out and took him in her arms. They held each other tight.
Then a miracle happened.
Time stopped, and the world disappeared. No past, no future, no uncertainty. Just that moment. Just them.
Invincible. Unassailable.
An island of bliss in a sea of amnesia.
* * *
Cav didn’t accompany them to the dock. One good-bye was enough. He was drained.
He did, however, have the strength to watch their takeoff. Every second of it. Eyes glued to the screen, as though his own life were at stake. As the shuttle ignited, then separated from the station, and all went well, he felt a wave of relief. Not long after that, he burst into tears.
He had a good, long, exhausting cry, then fell asleep. When he woke, every muscle hurt. He thought maybe he’d broken a rib. Apart from that, he felt better. Refreshed. Ready to move forward.
Mixed with this, a faint misgiving, a qualm, a question in his mind. Had he been wrong to throw Gunjita and Dash together? His wife and his best friend. If it was right, then why was he having second thoughts?
He was jealous. That was why. Not terribly, but a little went a long way.
Old men had no business being jealous.
But it gnawed at him, like a call to arms, a gauntlet that life had tossed in his path, and that needed to be dealt with before he could have any rest. As if it—life—would seize on anything, however petty, however small, to assert itself and not be extinguished.
He wondered how long jealousy would keep a man alive. Would depend on the jealousy. His was sharp, but fleeting. It lived only as long as his eye was turned resolutely inward. Once it turned outward, toward his loved ones and their well-being, their ongoing lives and unfolding futures, jealousy lost its grip on him. The cord was cut.
The HUBIES would come next.
He felt freer than he had in years.
1 From the manual: Choosing Long Life: What to Expect, chapter 11, “The Final Days.”
–NINE–
Elvis Presley died of coronary arrhythmia.
Is that what I am going to die of? I don’t think so. Of losing my temper perhaps.1
Cav had not been lax. If he knew anything, it was how to conduct an investigation. He’d done his homework.
At last count, there were, roughly, a million ways to die. Less, to take one’s life. Still less, to dispose of the body afterward.
You could burn it, bury it, eat it, or let it be eaten—by worms, microbes, molecules. You could put it outside, aboveground, preferably somewhere humid and hot, and let it be eaten
there—by beetles, ants, vultures, jackals, and the like, and the weather. You could freeze it, then transport it to one of Earth’s remaining pockets of eternal ice and snow, and tuck it into bed there. You could embed it in plastic. Drop it into a lake of tar, or of toxic waste. Compress it to near nothingness. Blow it to smithereens with explosives.
On Earth there were options. On Gleem One, orders of magnitude fewer.
Cremation was impractical and risky. Burial was impossible. You could stow the body somewhere, but that would only leave the problem for someone to deal with later. There were no carnivores on board, save one, and that one couldn’t very well eat his own body if he were already dead. Not to mention that eating a dead human, regardless of the circumstances, was gross.
You could suit up and send yourself into space, point toward Earth, ignite the thrusters, and become a meteor in someone else’s sky. A reliable way to dispose of the body, and a quick way to die. Too quick—and too painful—for his purposes.
You could avoid this by aiming the thrusters in the opposite direction, fighting orbital decay, and become a new planetary body littering the sky, at least for a while. Cav hated litter, but felt backed into a corner. It didn’t hurt that he’d been leaning toward ending his life this way from the start: half-knowingly before his arrival on station, then through the long hours of gazing into space, into his heart and mind, awe in ascendance, terror in decline. The idea had been steadily growing.
He felt a shiver of fear and excitement thinking about it now.
Death was a journey, composed of little deaths, little steps along the way. Sometimes the steps were close together, tightly packed, and death came rapidly. Sometimes they were spaced far apart, and it approached at a crawl. Suicide offered a choice of speeds. It was the ultimate in self-determination.
Cav figured six to eight hours start to finish. Most people choose a quicker exit, but he didn’t want to rush. Didn’t want to drag things out, either. Figured time would do its own thing anyway. A minute could last a year; an hour, a second. Six to eight hours seemed about right.
He ran through the steps in his mind. Space suit, jetpack, airlock, outer hatch. Nothing fancy. A simple defenestration. Stand at the brink, take the leap, ignite the burners, and embrace the unknown.
It wasn’t complicated.
Nothing to clean up. No hole to dig. No ashes.
The only thing left to decide: premedicate or not?
He had pills, but didn’t want to take them. Preferred to be awake and alert, alive to every sensation, every thought. He wanted to be fully in possession of himself in order to fully appreciate the experience. His sole concern: he might panic, and screw everything up.
Panic was a killer of the here-and-now. It was death to contemplative observation. It twisted reality, made it frightening and hideous.
He wasn’t panic-prone, had only panicked once in his life, and that was after waking up from juving, a fairly common occurrence. He doubted it would be a problem, but also knew that panic didn’t care about intentions, that it had a life of its own, came when it came, suddenly, out of nowhere, without invitation. The smallest thing could set it off, and this was hardly small.
He was bringing pills, just in case. Not to sleep, but to calm the nerves, if necessary. Composure, not unconsciousness. That was the plan.
His came in the form of capsules. Each capsule contained hundreds of tiny granules that looked like poppy seeds, but pink and white, the color of cotton candy. Colors favored by Gleem, which manufactured the medicine, and had named it, imaginatively, NOCKOUT, or NOK, as it was commonly called. Not to be confused with the beer of the same name, which had the same effect, if you drank a truckload. The name was a nod to days long past, when it meant glamour, bedazzlement, wow wow wow. Just the kind of double entendre PR and marketing departments fell out of their chairs for.
The word was stamped, along with the helpful icon of a sleeping beauty, on a sleeping beauty bed, on the capsule’s protective, gelatinous shell. It was a mid-list drug—reliable, no-nonsense, and a steady seller. He’d brought enough to put down a horse.
He planned to carry four, attached to his helmet within reach of his tongue and mouth, but separated, so that he could take as many or as few as necessary. He unscrewed the top of the bottle and shook out a handful.
A bad idea. A mass of capsules spilled out and immediately dispersed, like a genie freed from captivity. He grabbed at them, but it was like grabbing at a school of fish, and he merely managed to drive them farther away. He focused on one. His hand-eye coordination was not a thing of beauty, but he finally managed to pinch it between thumb and forefinger, and pushed it back in the bottle. Then he got a second one. Thinking, this is ludicrous, like moving a sandbox grain by grain.
What if it happened outside? They came loose in his helmet, then floated around in front of his face, a total distraction and annoyance, not to mention out of reach of his mouth?
A setback.
The upside: better to know now.
What could be done?
Go without them. That was one possibility. But it felt like giving in, and also risky. Besides, he liked puzzles, even now, at this late stage of the game.
It wasn’t much of one, as it turned out. Capsules and pills were made to dissolve. Optimally, in a stomach. Less optimally, in plain water. But water worked, particularly if you heated it up.
He didn’t have to eat his medicine, he could drink it.
He tried pulling a capsule apart, with the idea of dumping the contents directly into a beaker, where they’d dissolve much quicker without their protective coating. But the halves were sticky and hard to separate, especially for old, trembling hands, and grains were no more willing to be poured than the pills themselves, and in fact much less manageable. They dispersed in a particle cloud, then hung there, like a swarm of midges. He cautioned himself not to inhale.
Subsequently, he didn’t try what he couldn’t do, and instead used the whole capsules, and a closed system. Keeping busy kept him from looking too far ahead, and second-guessing himself.
It took an hour under low heat to dissolve them, then another for the solution to cool. While he was waiting, the comm came to life.
It was Laura Gleem. He recognized her voice, which preceded her image, and the perfectly modulated cadence of her speech. He assumed that, like her image, there was software involved.
She looked the same as always. Pert, attractive, businesslike. Abruptly, the screen went blank. Moments later, someone else took her place.
At least it looked like someone.
The person was sitting up, if “sitting” was the right word, in bed. She, if it was a she, was the color of ash and nearly hairless. What hair she did have was stringy and valentine pink, as though dyed by a morbid beautician. Her body was gnomish and deformed; she looked like a gnarl of wood. She was hunched forward, as though she had no choice. No fat or muscle. Drooping, loose skin. Strikingly, there were grapefruit-size lumps on her arms, legs, and torso.
The figure was draped in a formless gown. Didn’t seem to care if it covered her or not. A network of tubes and wires were attached to her, and ran off-screen.
He kept his composure, even as his stomach churned. He wasn’t entirely sure who or what he was seeing.
Laura Gleem’s voice answered the who. “What do you think?”
His mind, uncharacteristically, was blank.
“That bad?”
“Is this you? For real?”
“In the flesh. Such as it is.”
“You juved a third time.”
“I survived,” she said defiantly. “Give me credit for that.”
“The lumps . . .”
“Tumors. As you’d expect.” Her mouth didn’t move when she spoke. “At present, under control.”
“How are you communicating with me?”
“With difficulty.”
“Deep brain?” He knew it had been tried. Still a few hurdles, last he’d heard.
“I wish.” With an effort—and considerable discomfort—she arched her entire back, too frozen in the neck to independently lift her head, revealing a thumb-sized appliance crabbed to her larynx.
“A plug-in,” he said.
“God bless ’em.”
“It works well.”
“Well enough. I’m due for an upgrade. And you, Doctor. How are you? You don’t mind my saying, you look like you could use an upgrade yourself. Did I interrupt your beauty sleep?”
“I’ve been working.”
“Glad to hear it. Work is better than sleep. Better than almost anything. You get old, you appreciate that.”
“It’s true.”
“I assume your work includes our new object. What can you tell me? Is it worth getting excited about?”
A moment of truth. He decided to lie. “The asteroid’s carbon. Nothing exciting in that. The object is metamorphic rock. A collision artifact.”
“It’s rock?”
“That’s right.”
“Is it valuable?”
“Possibly to a student of astrogeology. To you, no. It’s worthless.”
She didn’t reply. She could have been thinking about deep-space mining, about capital outlay, financial risk, unloading her assets, writing them off, and so on and so forth. Alternatively, she could have been thinking about calling his bluff. In her current ravaged state, she had the world’s most unreadable poker face.
He waited her out.
“I’m sorry to hear that,” she said at length.
“Yes. I’m sorry, too. I was hoping for something different.”
“Hope sustains us. It’s our daily bread. The only bread I can eat.” She half-grunted, half-groaned. “Have you ever seen anything like it?”
“Like what?”
“This,” she said. “Me.”
“You look . . .”
“Unusual?”
“Uncomfortable.”
She barked. “Don’t make me laugh. I look like crap. A crumpled-up bag of bones. Like I’ve been picked at by vultures, chewed up, spit out, then fed to a compacter.”
“You’re in pain.”
“I’m a disaster. Leading naturally to the question of what happens next. How to remedy the situation. Juving is no longer an option. Having used my allotment and then some.” She paused. “Thoughts?”
Longer Page 12