by White, Gwynn
And every time she could finish a complete thought and enunciate it, it would be this: “Please let me die.”
* * *
Medically assisted dying had been legal in Canada since early in the twenty-first century, for cases that showed serious and incurable illness, disease or disability; an advanced state of irreversible decline; enduring physical or psychological suffering; and where natural death was reasonably foreseeable.
In that sense, my mother and I were lucky. In other jurisdictions, that option wouldn’t even have been possible.
Here, the laws were strict, but they allowed us to take action.
So, one day, I made the call and talked to her doctor.
That night I held my mother’s hands and told her that Dr. Bishara and someone else on staff could provide the independent medical opinions she needed, and a reference to a physician who would take her through the medical process.
I accompanied her to all the appointments, cupping my ear to her mouth and translating her slurring when necessary.
And when, finally, my mother had the assent she needed, and an agreement with the physician on that date, the most peaceful smile that I have ever seen spread on her face.
* * *
My mother was born in the Year of the Dragon, as was I. She chose to die, as well, in a Dragon year.
On the day of her death I took her back around the world, to the Zoo that she had come to love as much as I did.
Our last stop, Mom and I, was at the zebra habitat. Mom’s eyes were failing, but I pointed out Leia, grazing peacefully among a group of other Grevy’s zebras in the sunlight.
When we were done, I took her home.
By now she was using a feeding tube, so I connected her and read her poetry. In the middle of something by Pablo Neruda, she seemed to be trying to say something, and when I listened more closely, I thought I knew what she was saying.
“You want your phone?”
She nodded yes.
I took it out, turned it on, and showed it to her. On the screen, as she knew, there was a message from Paul.
I LOVE YOU MOM.
I asked her if she wanted to reply.
She shook her head, raised two fingers to gesture toward me, and with great difficulty, she said, “You answer.”
I made myself smile, and nodded.
An hour later, in my pocket, her phone vibrated, but at that moment the physician was at the door.
I laid my mother on her bed, and pulled the covers up. The physician asked her, slowly and clearly, if she still wanted to continue to do this. She nodded and I took her hand.
The physician opened his case, where he had a set of pre-filled syringes—midazolam, xylocaine, propofol, rocuronium. Bezoar stones, goat’s blood, bone of a stag’s heart, unicorn’s horn.
The first was an anesthetic drug, which puts a patient to sleep. The second numbs the veins. The third put the patient into a deep coma. The fourth paralyzes the body’s muscles, including those of the respiratory system.
The physician took the syringe with midazolam and injected my mother. Her breathing slowed and her eyes closed.
Then the physician applied another injection of xylocaine and propofol. I continued to hold her hand.
A final injection, this time the rocuronium.
I watched my mother the whole time I held her hand, mouthed a prayer at the final injection. I couldn’t tell where she had stopped breathing, and from the beginning there wasn’t even the flutter of her eyes.
In all the features of her face, there was just the simplest expression of peace. I touched my fingers to her eyelids, and bent down to whisper in her ear:
“Goodnight, Mom.”
16
Firefly
My mother’s phone was still in my pocket the next day, a morning alarm she must have set buzzing like an insect, waking me from my dream.
The words of Paul’s message last night, each letter luminous as a firefly, were still on the screen:
You too Zara.
* * *
Pablo Neruda once wrote, “If nothing saves us from death, may love at least save us from life.”
But what saves us from love?
Oblivion.
17
Deer in the Manger
We brought her to St. Dominic’s Church, in Lakeview, to the parish she grew up in before she and my dad moved to Milton.
She’d been a member of the Catholic Women’s League there and had made many fast friends. She’d contributed marshmallow brownies and banana bread loaves to various bake sales. She’d helped organize pilgrimages to the Basilica of Our Lady of Fatima across the border in Lewiston. She’d joined the CWL in calling parishioners in the drive to raise funds for the recent renovation of the church’s roof.
I’d been at St. Dominic’s before when I was six. One of her cousins was getting married, and I’d been tapped to be one of the flower girls. I remember moving down the aisle in my white dress and shoes, hands pressed together and, as I approached the altar, mouthing an Our Father.
I went back another time when I was older. At the rear of the church, there was a small, enclosed booth with a central chamber, where—in place of God—the priest sat, with two smaller booths on either side. You sat kneeling in the dark until the priest opened up a small, latticed window to your small booth, which was a sign to start fumbling through your sins.
I believed in God back then.
You remember everything at six as being bigger. God. The backyard of my great grandfather’s stone house in San Andres, which I remember as having a lake and shoals of fish, turned out to have a small carp pond, though no less beautiful. Returning to Meadow Green Academy, my elementary school, I found the halls as welcoming, but narrower, and I wondered how I could fit everything in the cubby-holes they had to store books and bags.
St. Dominic’s was as immense as I remembered it.
From the outside, its face was glass, framed by the steep, inverted V of a peaked roof. The main structure of the church, the nave, was oriented from east to west, and the transepts at the top of the nave combined to form the arms of a crucifix as seen from the sky.
Inside, after stepping through a small vestibule, the architecture was just as breathtaking.
From the entryway, the roof was a line of A-frames, constructed of solid timber, imposing in its steepness, a sharp arrow to the heavens all the way to the sanctuary area at the back. All along the length of the church, cylindrical lamps hung over the pews where the congregation sat, converging on the altar where the priest celebrated Holy Mass, on a platform elevated from the main floor by four steps.
Above the altar itself, suspended from the rafters, hung a wooden sculpture of the crucified Christ, head bowed and crowned with thorns, arms outstretched on a cross made almost entirely of glass.
This was my God now, an enigma impaled on a faith that could, at any moment, shatter.
* * *
In the middle of the service, we had a visitor.
We were on the final verse of Ave Maria, and continued singing as it entered the church.
It was a stag, majestic, which paused at the south entrance on the left, which faced the woodlot. It stood for a moment, silhouetted in the grand arch of the doorway, its antlers perched on its head like two candelabra.
As we finished the song there was silence.
For some reason, around me there was the scent of almonds.
The stag crossed the threshold of the altar and went up on two steps, crossing towards the choir on the right. As we watched, the stag turned, and took one more step up towards the altar.
For a moment, it looked at the gilded proscenium, where the Communion hosts were ensconced, then turned to the casket where my mother lay. It took two small steps, looked inside, and breathed.
The stag continued on, moving towards the doorway on the right, towards the outside light.
Then it was gone.
* * *
A murmur filled the church as the stag disappeared,
but there was silence again as I stood up.
I was the last of us, the only real family here, with Paul on a starship in the heavens somewhere.
“My mother loved poetry,” I said, “She used to read them to me when I was a child. This is something that I read for her the night she died, a sonnet from an old poet. I don’t think she could hear it any longer when I read it, not with the ears that she was born with. I hope that she can hear it somewhere, and know what’s in my heart.”
The Way the World Ends
The world will come to an end tonight.
Not with comets slanting through the rafters,
Or tidal waves surging across the coast,
Or the braze of volcanoes, unsubmerged.
Not with the earth’s decimated orbit
Spiralling it into a strangled sun,
Not with the rush of spurious armies
Turning fallow the scope of mankind’s dreams.
But with the last of your kiss, fading
From the sepulchre of these lips: it ends.
And the night sky may as well be shattered,
And the sun never rise again, or set,
And the stars may as well burn to cinders,
For all the worth they are, when you are gone.
Part V
Panther
For Immediate Broadcast M6 40 96
Exodus Transport Ship Arrives at Valles Marineris
The first ship from Project Amethyst, the official United Earth Force (UEF) mission to covey the Earth’s population to a safe haven, arrived successfully at the Mars Aerospace Administration (MAA) landing facility serving the Valles Marineris metropolis, after a successful launch from the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida.
Project Amethyst began with a phase that saw the conversion of the UEF’s Arcturus-class troop transport ships into civilian vessels that would be able to accommodate over 15% more individuals than it is usually rated for. With the completion of that phase, the mission moved to implementation. A total of five Arcturus-class transport ships have already completed the evacuation stage of their missions. They are expected to complete their missions over the next period, with arrivals at the MAA aerospace facilities serving Valles Marineris, MetropolisX, Medusae Fossae, and Origin City.
MAA Director Christopher Swardstrom noted: “This day we celebrate a significant milestone for this remarkable mission, and for this mission team. We’re proud of what our engineers and our troops have accomplished in order to support this unprecedented effort in the service of Earth.”
Project Amethyst was accelerated to complement the comet deflection initiative for planetary defense, the Comet Redirection Project (CRP), which was not able to show a successful transition from concept development, numerical simulation, and preliminary design phase, to implementation.
The next phase of Project Amethyst is the accommodation of incoming civilians by the cities. As the first to welcome the newcomers, Valles Marineris has established several Amethyst Transition Camps (ATCs) at the outskirts of the city, which will ensure that adequate provision is made for the needs of the travelers.
“The hospitality of Marinerians is a reputation that has been well-earned, and we’re proud of that reputation,” said Stefan Wells, Governor General of Valles Marineris at the University of Arizona, Tucson. “We are sympathetic to the needs of our brothers and sisters, and have enabled a fast-track for the transition process so that lives can go back to normal.”
Project Amethyst was the UEF response to the expected impact of Comet C/21B9 M2 DEMOS with the Earth, and is the first large-scale mission to evacuate large numbers of civilians from a threatened zone, outside of the normal missions associated with the Colonial War.
18
Baboon
Whoever the hell decided to broadcast live video of the Comet as it speeds toward us on Earth should die. First.
It was one thing for NASA and the UN and everyone else to be updating the impact estimates every day. One thing for still photos coming from UEF satellites and ships. One thing for simulated videos with cartoons of a blue planet and a comet.
Now some baboon has a goddamn live stream with stats and a bloody countdown timer superimposed.
19
A Kangaroo Named Carrie
The Zoo was fortunate. Out in the middle of a conservation area, we were left relatively in peace from the chaos engulfing the world. Religious cults sprung up to worship the Comet. Hoarders and militants mobilized. I was watching the descent of much of civilization into human baseness.
There was still kindness and compassion, I reminded myself. Neighbors sharing rationed gasoline with neighbors who needed it more, the United Way still running charity campaigns and breaking records, farming cooperatives and grocery chains still providing the Zoo with meat and produce.
Our keepers and volunteers continued their jobs, and from all over the world others still sent us FedEx packets of samples to add to our collection.
Right after the funeral, before my leave was officially over, I went back to work, salve for the heart and head.
Chloe was gone. We had been losing keepers very slowly, but hadn’t lost a single member of CIRCE’s core staff. Her desk and office chair were neatly in place. Her desktop and bookcases still had most her things—books and papers, a Galileo thermometer, a dancing mini-Groot flowerpot, a Swansea FC cup filled with an assortment of pens.
But there was something missing—a small plastic kangaroo she’d named Carrie, after one of the roos she’d raised from birth.
Judith looked up from her computer, surprised, as I barged into her office. “Zara? You’re back?”
“Chloe—Did she tell you she was leaving?”
She blinked, then saved what she was working on the file, and motioned for me to follow her.
“Chloe’s out on fieldwork,” Judith said, as we went down the corridor.
I followed her low tone back with a whisper. “Fieldwork? She’s not on any of the collection rosters for the week. I checked.”
We entered the exterior room to the Ark and as the door slid shut behind us, she started putting on her gear and said, “No, she’s not on collection detail.”
The Ark room seemed to be as it always was, massive, silent, imposing. Steel and cold. There were no cameras here, except a single solid-state device, trained on the three freezers, that fed directly into Judith’s office. It was a place not just to keep secrets, but to tell them.
“Chloe wasn’t on any roster for this week,” Judith said. “You were.”
* * *
Earlier in the year, the last of the military transports had left the Earth, but the despair that followed was balanced out by another announcement. Finally, the first of the newly-commissioned colony ships was ready for launch.
There had been delays in the massive construction project, but with perseverance, intense public pressure—and a massive influx of Nether and Marscoin funding from the inner colonies, because off-planet firms no longer accepted Earth currencies—work on the Artemis series proceeded.
It was a lottery with the selection from the general population, and it was a massive screw-up.
The selection computers went down from denial of service and other hacking attacks. There was rioting in the streets. Names and addresses of people selected were published on open social media, and they were attacked, or their homes destroyed.
The highways to the facility were clogged for a week before the scheduled launch. Crowds gathered around the perimeter wall, twenty feet high and studded with active sensors and deterrents, and they pounded at it with battering rams.
On an appointed day, selected families were brought in by military air transport, flying over the heads of the crowds who were not selected.
The Artemis 1 was massive, but the number of individuals transported—150,000—was still minuscule compared to the billions without a golden ticket. The ship symbolized hope, but it also fed the fires of a world seething with anger, jealousy, and
despair.
As the smoke of ignition billowed from the thrusters, billions of people onsite or watching on their viewers wished that they were the ones on the ship, wished they were the ones tapped for salvation.
And then the Artemis 1 exploded on the launch pad.
20
Panther at the Gate
Judith pulled out a remote, and the green light on the camera flicked off.
“You were on the roster, but then you took a leave of absence. And then the Artemis 1 launch failed.”
I frowned at her, not understanding.
“San Diego was on that launch,” she said.
“Oh my God.”
There was only one thing she could mean. San Diego Zoo’s Institute for Conservation Research, the one institution in the world that held a frozen collection as comprehensive as our own, our twinned cryo-preservation facility, had sent up its Frozen Zoo.
“They only had the one chance, so they sent their entire collection. All of it.”
And now it was gone. I felt faint, and leaned against one of the insulated tanks.
“San Diego didn’t tell me their plans until about a week before launch. I had reservations, and I’m sure they did too, but it made sense.”
“They must have a back-up plan.”
“Their back-up is to pray we succeed.”
She went to one of the freezers and opened it. It was empty.
I must have gasped audibly, because she said, “It’s all right. Chloe has everything. Well, in truth, all the specimens from Freezer A, and some of the samples from B.”