Dancing with Eternity

by John Patrick Lowrie

“Tamika’s here, too,” I said. She approached the bed.

  “Hello, Tamika! How are you?”

  “I’m ... I’m fine. It’s, it’s good to see you, Alice.”

  “And we have another friend from the old days.” I gestured to Ham. He came up to the bed and gently nuzzled her.

  “Ham! Ham, you big puppy! You look wonderful!” She looked at all of us. “It’s so good to see you all again! It’s so nice to get everybody together!”

  We talked for a little while, but she wore out pretty quickly. I was able to ask about Yuri. I wasn’t sure how to bring it up, but she was at peace with his passing. It had been over three decades for her.

  “Did ... did Yuri pass before Eden opened up to the outside world?”

  She smiled and patted my hand. “It was largely because of my husband that Eden did open up.”

  “How did, how did ... I mean they seemed so dead-set against it. The heresy thing, the ... the ... everything that happened with your father—”

  “Oh, I know. It wasn’t easy and it didn’t happen overnight.”

  “But I would have thought that, that as soon as you brought up getting in touch with the outside world—”

  “We didn’t.”

  “What?”

  “I’m afraid I gave the people here a bit of a conundrum.” She smiled. “You see, I was in contact with the outside world, and yet, I was a legitimate citizen of Eden.”

  “You told them who you were? Where you’d been?”

  “I didn’t exactly tell them; I just didn’t keep it a secret. When someone would ask, I’d tell the truth. Yuri and I never advocated communicating with the rest of humanity; we just did communicate with them. Well, I did directly and Yuri did through Jemal after you had that ingenious idea. Yuri was very proud of you. Very happy that you got the data out.”

  Too many things at once: I was trying to be humble in the face of Yuri’s praise while at the same time trying to process this. Yuri hadn’t been on the net. None of us had been. But Alice was talking like she was on the net. Which is what I had thought, only there wasn’t any way she could be. “Wait a minute. You ... you are on the net? How did you get back on?” She’d been on Eden. There was no way.

  “I’d never been out of contact with the net. Mom didn’t consider me a security risk, I guess.”

  Oh.

  “We had to walk a very fine line. But then, Yuri kept solving problems for people, designing things, making life better. You know he was a genius but he also had the advantage of a millennium of technological advances.”

  “Of course.”

  “But most importantly, people just liked him.”

  That made sense.

  “He’d talk about all the silly things that made human civilization so wonderful—old movies, TV shows, all kinds of crazy things. It made it less scary to the people here.”

  “Hmm.”

  “And then there was the fact that he came here. To be with me.”

  “Yes?”

  “You see? He could have stayed out there and re-booted and kept living, but he chose to come here. Just to be with me.”

  “I— I— I don’t see—”

  “He challenged their faith.”

  I must have looked confused. She smiled indulgently. “Don’t you see? He showed them that a person could choose what to sacrifice himself for. He made them feel, well, rather cowardly for not going out into the world, offering their ideas, and taking their chances that they might decide to leave their religion and become something else.”

  “Huh.”

  “I’m afraid I pushed him. I always wanted to get everyone back together. I think I might have been a little obsessive about it.” She smiled again. “He knew I wanted it. He knew I wanted the human family to be whole again. He offered them an extraordinary promise. And he kept his word.”

  “What?”

  “He said if we reached out, if we re-integrated with the rest of humanity, he would still not re-boot. He would allow his life to end here, on Eden. And that’s what he did. He did it for me.” Alice brushed at the tears that were rolling down my cheek. “Don’t be sad about Yuri. You know what a heavy burden he was carrying. It was time for him to lay it down, and he never would have chosen to forget.”

  “No, he wouldn’t.”

  “No.”

  “Your ... your ... your mom ... chose to forget.”

  “I know,” her expression darkened. “I know. We all have our own path to walk.”

  We sat there quietly for a moment. Then Tamika said, “I wonder what’s going to happen to their culture, to the culture here. Do you think it can survive?”

  Alice looked thoughtful. “That’s something they’re going to have to work out. As my beloved husband used to say, ‘Stasis is death. Change is the most sublime aspect of the universe.’ ”

  We spent the night in the house. When we woke in the morning Alice had declined quite a bit. I guess seeing us again and talking about everything had taken a lot out of her. But about mid-morning Cooper came into the sitting room to get me.

  “Mom would like to see you again, Mohandas.”

  “Oh, okay.” I got up off of the settee and followed her upstairs.

  Her eyes were closed, but she opened them when she heard us walk in. I sat in the chair next to the bed. Cooper stood by the door. Alice said, “Cooper, dear, could you give us a little privacy?”

  Cooper said, “Oh, sure. I’ll be right downstairs.” She went out.

  Alice regarded me for a moment, like I was a problem she wasn’t sure how to solve.

  “What is it, Alice?” I asked.

  She thought for a moment more. Then she said, “It occurred to me ... It occurred to me that I might be seeing your wife soon.”

  Well, that was it for me. It took about two seconds for me to fall completely apart. My chest heaved, tears ran down my face and snot dangled out of my nose. She brought my head to her bosom and stroked my hair. “Sh-h, sh-h. It’s all right, Mo. It’s all right.” She held me as I sobbed. Then she said, “I was just wondering if there was any message you’d like me to give her, just in case I see her.”

  I looked up into her elfin face, her eyes tired but still bright. I was lost, found, transformed, demolished. “I— I— I— I don’t ... know—”

  “Is there anything at all you’d like to say?”

  I thought about my wife as the tears streamed down my face. Her beautiful eyes, her beautiful mind. Her trust, her heart. “Tell her... tell her ... tell her I’m sorry. I’m— I’m sorry. I’m so, so sorry.”

  Alice lifted her head off the pillow. “You’re sorry? What kind of a message is that? You haven’t seen her in twelve centuries and you want to tell her you’re sorry?”

  “I— I— I—”

  “Tell you what. I’ll tell her you love her. How’s that? I know that’s the truth.”

  And I was reborn. I didn’t know whether to laugh, cry, shout to the universe or remain silent. I was new. Unsullied. Pristine. I couldn’t feel my hands. I couldn’t feel my ears. My head floated above the ground, unconnected to anything temporal. “Yeah,” I answered. “Yeah, that would probably be better.”

  Alice died that afternoon. Her tiny body quietly stopped. Her unique, irreplaceable perspective vanished from the world of our senses. We had given everything we could to try to save her and she had ended up saving all of us.

  The memorial service was attended by thousands of Edenites. Most of them had to stand outside the church. All of Nazareth filled with people who just wanted to be near her in this final moment. As I listened to the pastor speak about her life, I couldn’t help thinking about Steel, about all the decisions she had made—the awful, selfish, shortsighted, impudent, arrogant decisions. And yet, if she had made just one of those decisions differently I never would have met Alice. Alice never would have existed. I didn’t know what to do with that information. I guess women are just blessed that way.

  I decided to go back to my house on Scarpus.
It was summer there and the hardwood forests would be beautiful. But more than that, it was a big house, and I had new responsibilities.

  Before she died, Alice had asked me to help introduce her daughters to the galaxy. They weren’t going to die. They had already re-booted once. They explained it to me while I was in Nazareth. Their mother was only half Edenite; that is, their grandmother was from Earth. Evidently there was enough of the genetic puzzle left in Alice’s genome to prevent her from re-booting, but when Alice and Yuri had had Cooper and FA’izeh they were only one-quarter Edenite and the genetic puzzle broke down. It was helping researchers in Draco and The Pleiades figure out how it worked—how to develop a way around it and let everyone from Eden re-boot. They figured they’d have it licked in another couple of decades. I asked Cooper and FA’izeh what they thought that would do to their culture. FA’izeh had smiled:

  “People were worried about it. But Dad told them, I remember his words exactly, he said, ‘The only way to find out if you’re immortal is to make it to the end of time and look around to see if you’re still alive. Until you’ve done that, all you know is that you haven’t died yet.’ ”

  So they’ve sent applications to study at the MAD Labs on Circe, the newest facility at the Antigone Institute. It’s where all the hottest bleeding edge stuff is going on: the Marcus/Archie/Drake Exobiology and Leptonics Laboratories. It’s where they developed that orgasm stuff. Until we hear if they’ve been accepted, the four of us are staying here—me, Cooper, FA’izeh and Ham.

  I know what my job is now. It is as simple as it is sublime. My job is to love my wife till the end of time, or as long as I can keep from falling over. I accept this task with all of its ramifications and manifestations. I will echo and resonate with her love of the universe and everything and everyone in it. I will give her love to the cosmos as she gave it to me. I will give it to the young, to the powerless, to the people who need it. As she would have said, there’s plenty of work to be done.

  Speaking of work, I need to find a job. If I’m going to be re-booting Ham every fifty years I’m going to have to find a way to make more money.

  Thank you, Alice.

  Thank you, Steel.

  Thank you, my darling, darling wife.

  I love you.

  Forever.

  Seattle, December 25th, 2009

  John Patrick Lowrie was born in 1952 in Honolulu, Hawaii and raised in Boulder, Colorado. At 16 he left home to make his way as a singer/guitarist/flautist/trombonist in a rock ‘n’ roll band, sleeping in parks and communes and getting to know several hippies. After surviving the draft, he graduated with highest distinction from the Indiana University School of Music and for a few years managed to make a living as a composer and guitarist in his acoustic fusion duo, The Kiethe Lowrie Duet, garnering critical acclaim and opening for people who were much more famous than he was. He then decided to become an actor because the pay was better and the work was steadier. To this day he remains the only person he knows of who has done this. He met Ellen McLain, his wife of twenty-four years, in Arnhem, Holland on a European tour of a Broadway show and started his acting career in Palermo, Italy telling jokes to an opera house full of Sicilians who didn’t speak English. Success continues to dog his heels like an angry Pekinese. He and his wife now reside in Seattle where they divide their professional time between acting in live theater and voice-acting for computer games and radio dramas.

  You can find John on the web at:

  www.lowrie.camelpress.com