Текст книги "2312"

Автор книги: Kim Stanley Robinson

Соавторы: Kim Stanley Robinson
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Текущая страница: 11 (всего у книги 36 страниц)

“No!” Swan said, annoyed. “I told you, I’m a sunwalker myself.”

He did not want her annoyed. “Tell me, do you have anything else interesting added to your brain?”

“I do.” She still sounded sour. “There’s an earlier AI, from when I was a child, put in my corpus callosum to help deal with some convulsions I was having. And a bit of one lover—we thought we’d share some of our sexual responses and see where that led us. Which was nowhere, as it turned out, but I presume that bit is still in there. And there’s other stuff too, but I don’t want to talk about it.”

“Oh dear. Is it confusing?”

“Not at all.” Grimmer and grimmer she sounded. “What, don’t you have anything in you?”

“In a way. I suppose everyone does,” he said reassuringly, though in fact he had seldom heard of a brain with as many interventions as hers. “I take some vasopressin and some oxytocin, as recommended.”

“Those both come from vasotocin,” she said authoritatively. “There’s just one amino acid of difference between the three. So I take the vasotocin. It’s very old, so old it controls sex behavior in frogs.”

“My.”

“No, it’s just what you need.”

“I don’t know. I feel fine with the oxytocin and vasopressin.”

“Oxytocin is social memory,” she said. “You don’t notice other people without it. I need more of it. Vasopressin too, I suppose.”

“The monogamy hormone,” Wahram said.

“Monogamy in males. But only three percent of mammals are monogamous. Even birds do better than that, I think.”

“Swans,” Wahram suggested.

“Yes. And I am Swan Second Swan. But I’m not monogamous.”

“No?”

“No. Except I’m faithful to endorphins.”

He frowned, but assumed she was joking and tried to go along. “Isn’t that just like having a dog or something?”

“I like dogs. Dogs are wolves.”

“But wolves are not monogamous.”

“No. But endorphins are.”

He sighed, feeling he had lost her point, or that she had. “It’s the touch of the beloved that stimulates endorphins,” he said, and left it at that. You couldn’t whistle the end of the “Moonlight Sonata.”

That night, as they slept in the tunnel on their little aerogel mattresses under their thin blankets, he awoke to find that Swan had moved, and was sleeping against him back to back. The resulting flood of oxytocin relieved his sore hips a little; this was how one could read it. Of course the urge to sleep with someone, the pleasure in sleeping with someone, was not exactly synonymous with sex. Which was reassuring. Across the floor indeed the three ferals were curled together like kittens. The tunnels were warm, often too warm, but right on the floor it got cold. Very faintly he heard her purring. Feline genes for same—yes, he had heard of it—people said it felt good, very like humming. Feel pleasure, purr, feel better: a positive feedback into more pleasure, loop, loop, loop, all at the pace of breathing, it sounded like when he listened to her. A different kind of music. Although he knew very well that sick cats sometimes purred at a momentary relief, or even as if hoping to feel better, trying to jump-start the loop. He had lived with a cat who had done that near its end. A fifty-year-old cat is an impressive creature. The loss of this ancient eunuch had been one of Wahram’s first losses, so he remembered its purr near the end as particularly pitiful, the sound of some emotion too crowded to name. A good friend of his had died purring. So now this purr from Swan gave him a little shiver of worry.

Down the tunnel after a sleep, groggy and dim. The morning hour. Whistle the slow movement from the Eroica, Beethoven’s funeral music for his sense of hearing, written as it was dying inside him. “ ‘We live an hour and it is always the same,’ ” he recited. Then the slow movement of the first of the late quartets, opus 127, variations on a theme, so rich; as majestic as the funeral march, but more hopeful, more in love with beauty. And then the third movement that followed was so strong and cheerful it could have been a fourth movement.

Swan gave him a black look. “Damn you,” she said, “you’re enjoying this.”

His bass croak of laughter felt good in his chest, a little hadrosauric. “ ‘Danger to him was like wine,’ ” he growled.

“What’s that?”

“The Oxford English Dictionary. Or that’s where I saw it.”

“You like quotations.”

“ ‘We have come a long way, we have a long way to go. In between we are somewhere.’ ”

“Come on, what’s that? A fortune cookie?”

“Reinhold Messner, I believe.”

He really was kind of enjoying it, he had to admit. Only twenty-five more days, more or less; it wasn’t such a big number. He could endure. It was the most iterative pseudoiterative he would ever live, thus interesting, as a kind of limit case of what he supposedly wanted. A reductio ad absurdum. And the tunnel was not so much a matter of sensory deprivation as it was sensory overload, but in very few elements: the walls of the tunnel, the lights running along its ceiling fore and aft for as far as they could see.

But Swan was not enjoying it. This particular day seemed worse than any before, in fact. She even slowed down, something he had never seen before, to the point where he had to slow down a bit to keep from getting well ahead of her.

“Are you all right?” he asked after waiting for her to catch up.

“No. I feel like crap. I guess it’s happening. Do you feel anything?”

In fact Wahram was sore in his hips, knees, and feet. His ankles were all right. His back was all right once he got walking. “I’m sore,” he admitted.

“I’m worried about that last solar flare we saw. By the time you see one of those, there’s faster radiation that’s come off the snap. I’m afraid we might have gotten cooked. I feel shitty.”

“I’m just sore. But then, you covered me at the elevator.”

“It probably hit us differently. I hope so. Let’s ask the ferals how they feel.”

They did at the next stop, where, by the looks on their faces, the sunwalkers had waited long enough to be concerned. Tron said, “How goes it?”

“I’m feeling sick,” Swan said. “How are you three feeling?”

They looked at each other. “All right,” Tron said.

“No nausea or diarrhea? No headaches or muscle soreness? No hair coming out?”

The three sunwalkers looked at each other, shrugged. They had gone down the elevator earlier.

“I’m not very hungry,” Tron said, “but the food isn’t very good.”

“My arm is still sore,” Nar offered.

Swan looked resentfully at them. They were sunwalkers, young and strong; they were doing what they did all the time, except underground and widdershins. She looked at Wahram. “What about you?”

Wahram said, “I’m sore. I can’t go much faster than I already am, or longer, or something will break.”

Swan nodded. “Same for me. I may even have to slow down. I feel bad. So I wonder if the three of you should hurry on ahead, and when you get to the sunset, or run into people, you can tell them about us.”

The sunwalkers nodded. “How will we know when we’re there?” Tron asked.

“In a couple of weeks, when you come to stations, you can go up in the elevator and have a look.”

“All right.” Tron looked at Tor and Nar, and they all nodded. “We’ll go get help.”

“That’s right. Don’t go out so fast you hurt yourselves.”

After that Wahram and Swan walked on their own. An hour walking, a half hour sitting, over and over for nine times; then a long meal and a sleep. An hour was a long time; nine of them, with their rests, felt like a couple of weeks. They whistled from time to time, but Swan was not feeling well, and Wahram did not want to do it on his own, unless she asked him to. She stopped and fell back in the tunnel from time to time to relieve herself; “I’ve got the runs,” she said at one point, “I’ve got to empty my suit.” After that she only would say, “Wait a minute,” and then, after five or ten minutes, catch up to him again, and on they would go. She looked desiccated. She became irritable and often spoke viciously to Pauline, and sometimes to Wahram too. Querulous, disagreeable, unpleasant. Wahram would get annoyed with how unfair she was, how pointless the unpleasantness she created out of nothing, and he would hike along speechlessly, whistling dark little fragments under his breath. In these moments he struggled to remember a lesson from his crèche, which was that with moody people you had to discount the low points in their cycle, or it would not work at all. His crèche had numbered six, and one had been moody to the point of bipolarity, and in the end this had been what caused the group to semi-disband, Wahram believed; he himself had been one of those least able to see that person in their whole amplitude. Six people had thirty relationships in it, and hex wisdom had it that all but one or two of these had to be good for a crèche to endure. They hadn’t even come close to that, but later Wahram had realized that the moody one in the upper half of his cycle was one of the people he most missed out of the group. Had to recall that and learn from it.

Then a time came when ten minutes passed with Swan back down the hall, and she didn’t return; and then he thought he heard a groan.

So he went back and found her sprawled on the floor, semiconscious at best, with her spacesuit down her to ankles and her excretion obviously interrupted midcourse. And she was indeed groaning.

“Oh no!” he said, and crouched by her side. She had her long-sleeved shirt still on, but under it her flesh was blue with cold on the side that had been on the ground. “Swan, can you hear me? Are you hurt?”

He held up her head; her eyes were swimming a little. “Damn,” he said. He didn’t want to pull her spacesuit up over the mess between her legs. “Here,” he said, “I’m going to clean you up.” Like anyone he had done his share of diaper changes, on both babies and elders, and knew the drill. And one pocket of his suit had his toilet tissues; he himself had had to deploy them in a hurry a few times recently, which now worried him more than it had. And he had water, and even some moist pads in foil packets, courtesy of his suit. So he got them out and shifted her legs around and cleaned her up. Even with his eyes averted he could not help seeing in the tangle of her pubic hair a small penis and testicles, about where her clitoris might have been, or just above. A gynandromorph; it did not surprise him. He finished cleaning her up, trying to be meticulous but fast, and then he pulled her arms over his shoulders and lifted her—she was heavier than he would have thought—and pulled up her spacesuit, and got the top part around her waist and sat her back down on the ground. Got the arms of the suit onto her. Happily a suit’s AI worked Jeeveslike to help the occupant into it. He considered her little backpack, there on the ground; it had to be taken. He decided to put it back on her. With all that arranged, he lifted her up and carried her before him in his arms. Her head lolled back too far for his liking and he stopped.

“Swan, can you hear me?”

She groaned, blinked. He got his arm behind her neck and head and hefted her up again. “What?” she said.

“You passed out,” he said. “While you were having the runs.”

“Oh,” she said. She pulled her head upright, put her arms around his neck. He started walking again. She was not that heavy, now that he had her help in holding her. “I could feel a vasovagal coming on,” she said. “Am I getting my period again?”

“No, I don’t think so.”

“It feels like it, I’m cramping. But I don’t think I have enough body fat to do it.”

“Maybe not.”

Suddenly she jerked in his arms, pulled away to look at him face to face. “Oh my. Hey look—some people don’t like to touch me. I have to tell you. You know those people who ingest some of the aliens from Enceladus?”

“Ingest?”

“Yes. An infusion of that bacterial suite. They eat some of the Enceladans; it’s supposed to be good for you. I did that. A long time ago. So, well, some people don’t like the idea. Don’t even like to be in contact with a person who’s done it.”

Wahram gulped uneasily, felt a jolt of queasiness. Was that the alien bug, or just the thought of the bug? No way to tell. What was done was done, he could not change it. “As I recall,” he said, “the Enceladan life suite is not regarded as being particularly infectious?”

“No, that’s right. But it is conveyed in bodily fluids. I mean, it has to get into your blood, I think. Although I drank mine. Maybe it only has to get into the gut; that’s right. That’s why people worry. So…”

“I’ll be all right,” Wahram said. He carried her for a while, aware that she was inspecting his face. Judging by what he saw in the mirror when he shaved, he did not think there would be much to see.

Without intending to, he said, “You’ve done some strange things to yourself.”

She made a face and looked away. “Moral condemnation of other people is always rather rude, don’t you think?”

“Yes, I do. Of course. Though I notice we do it all the time. But I was speaking of strangeness only. No condemnation implied.”

“Oh sure. Strangeness is so good.”

“Well, isn’t it? We’re all strange.”

She turned her head to look at him again. “I am, I know that. In lots of ways. You saw another way, I suppose.” Glancing at her lap.

“Yes,” Wahram said. “Although that’s not what makes you strange.”

She laughed weakly.

“You’ve fathered children?” he asked.

“Yes. I suppose you think that’s strange too.”

“Yes,” he said seriously. “Though I am an androgyn, myself, and once gave birth to a child. So, you know—it strikes me as a very strange experience, no matter which way it happens.”

She pulled her head back to inspect him, clearly surprised. “I didn’t know that.”

“It wasn’t really relevant to one’s actions in the present,” Wahram said. “Part of one’s past, you know. And anyway, it seems to me most spacers of a certain age have tried almost everything, don’t you think?”

“I guess so. How old are you?”

“I’m a hundred and eleven, thank you. What about you?”

“A hundred and thirty-five.”

“Very nice.”

She shifted in his arms, lifting a fist in a mime of threatening him. By way of a riposte he said, “Do you think you can walk now?”

“Maybe. Let me try.”

He put her feet down, pulled her upright. She leaned against him. She hobbled along for a bit holding his arm, then stood straight and proceeded on her own, slowly.

“We don’t have to walk, you know,” he said. “I mean, we can get to the next station and wait there.”

“Let’s see how I feel. We can decide when we get there.”

Wahram said, “Do you think it was the sun that made you sick? Because I must say, for being in M g, I’m feeling very sore in my joints.”

She shrugged. “We took a shot big enough to kill our comms. Pauline says I took ten sieverts.”

“Wow.” The LD 50 was about thirty, he thought. “My wristpad would have flagged it if I’d taken that much. I checked and it was only up three. But you covered me while we were waiting for the elevator.”

“Well, there was no reason both of us should take a full hit.”

“I suppose. But we could have taken turns.”

“You didn’t know about the flare. What’s your lifetime total?”

“I’m at around two hundred,” he said. They all relied on the DNA repair component of the longevity treatment to stay in space as much as they did.

“Not bad,” she said. “I’m at five.” She sighed. “This could be it. Or maybe it just killed the bacteria in my gut. I think that’s what’s happened. I hope. Although my hair is falling out too.”

“My joints are probably just sore from all the walking,” Wahram said.

“Could be. What do you do for aerobics?”

“I walk.”

“That’s not much of a test of your aerobic system.”

“I huff and I puff as I walk and I talk.” Trying to distract her.

“Another quote?”

“I think I made that up. One of my mantras for the daily routine.”

“Daily routine.”

“I like routine.”

“No wonder you’re happy in here.”

“It’s true that there is a routine here.”

They trudged down the tunnel in silence for a long time. When they got to the next station, they declared it a day and settled in to rest a few extra hours, as well as sleep through their night. Once Swan walked back down the tunnel to do something, then returned, and she fell asleep and seemed to sleep well, without purring. The next morning she wanted to carry on walking, declaring she would go slow and be careful. So off they went.

The lights kept appearing ahead out of the distant floor, then up and over them in their long arc. The effect was as if they were always about to walk downhill. Wahram tried to keep sight of one particular light, but could not be sure he had kept track of it from its first appearance to overhead. It could be some kind of unit: the view to horizon; multiplied how many times, he was not quite sure. “Can you ask Pauline to calculate our view distance to the horizon?” he asked at one point.

“I know it,” Swan said shortly. “It’s three kilometers.”

“I see.”

Suddenly it didn’t seem to make much difference.

Shall we whistle?” Wahram asked after they had walked in silence for half an hour.

“No,” she said. “I’m all whistled out. Tell me a story. Tell me your story, I want to hear more things that I don’t know about you.”

“Easy enough, to be sure.” Although suddenly he could not think exactly how to start. “Well, I was born a hundred and eleven years ago, on Titan. My mother was a wombman who came originally from Callisto, a third-generation Jovian, and my father was an androgyn from Mars, exiled in one of their political conflicts. I grew up mostly on Titan, but it was very constrained in those days, a matter of stations and just a few small domes. So I also lived in Herschel for some years as I went to school, then also on Phoebe, and one of the polar orbiters, and then, recently, Iapetus. Almost everyone in the Saturn system moves around to get a sense of the whole, especially if you’re involved with the civil service.”

“Do many people do that?”

“Everyone has to do the basic training, and give a certain amount of time to Saturn, as they say, and they may also get drafted in the lottery for some position in the government. Some get drafted and grow to like it and then do more. That’s what I did. One of my last mandatories was on Hyperion, and it was very small, but I really grew fond of that place, it was so strange.”

“There’s that word again.”

“Well, life is strange, or so it seems to me.” He sang, “People are strange, when you’re a stranger,” and then cut it short. “Hyperion is truly strange. It’s apparently the remnant of a collision between two moons of about equal size. What’s left looks like the side of a honeycomb, and the ridges bracketing the holes are white, while the powder filling every hole about halfway is black. So when you walk the ridges, or float over that side of the moon, it is very like some supremely bold work of art.”

“A big old goldsworthy,” she said.

“Sort of. And it’s an easy place to disturb by one’s presence. So it’s been a question how to set up a station, even whether to set one up, and how it should be run if one is put there permanently. Having helped with that, I have the sense of being a curator or something.”

“Interesting.”

“I thought so. So, I went back to Iapetus, which is also a superb place to live; it’s kind of a pulling back, and at an angle, to give you a better view of the whole system, and of why it should evoke such feeling. There I studied terraforming governance, and the diplomatic arts, such as they are—”

“The honest man sent by his country to lie for it?”

“Oh, I would hope that is not an accurate description of a diplomat. It’s not mine, and I hope not yours.”

“I don’t think we get to choose what words mean.”

“No? I think we do.”

“Only within very tight limits,” she said. “But go on.”

“Well, after that I went back to Titan and worked on the terraforming there. In those years I had my children.”

“With partners?”

“Yes, my crèche had six parents and eight children. I see them all from time to time. It’s almost always a pleasure. I try not to worry about them. I love the kids; I remember parts of their lives they don’t remember themselves. I think that’s of more interest to me than to them. That’s all right. Memory is a haunting. You remember times you liked, and you want something like them. But you can only get new things. So I try to want what I get. It isn’t obvious how to do it. You get into your second century and it gets hard, I think.”

“It was never not hard,” she said.

“True. This world is very mysterious to me. I mean, I hear what people say about the universe, but I don’t know how to put it to use. To me it sounds meaningless. So I agree with those who say we have to make our own meaning. The concept of the project I find useful. Something you do in the present, and can remember doing in the past, and expect to do in the future, in order to create something. A work of art which need not be in the arts per se, but something human worth doing.”

“That’s existentialism, yes?”

“Yes, I think that’s right. I don’t see how you can avoid it.”

“Hmm.” She thought about it. The light gleamed off her black hair in white streaks. “Tell me about your crèche. How did that work?”

“On Titan there would be groups of people around the same age, who were educated together and worked together. Smaller cohorts would band together out of these to raise children. Usually it was in groups of half a dozen or so. There were different ways to structure them. It depended on compatibilities. There was a feeling at the time that pair-bonds didn’t have enough people in them to endure over the long haul—that they succeeded less than half the time, and children needed more. So there would be some larger number. Almost everyone thought of it as a child-raising method and not a lifelong arrangement. Thus the name crèche. Eventually there were a lot of hurt feelings involved. But if you’re lucky, it can be good for a while, and you just have to take that and move on when the time comes. I still stay in touch with them; we’re even still a crèche. But the kids are grown, and we very rarely see each other.”

“I see.”

A long time of silent walking passed, and Wahram was feeling rather companionable, and not too sore.

Then Swan said vehemently, “I can’t standit in here. There’s nochance of changing. It’s like a prison, or a school.”

“Our submercurial life,” he said, just a little offended, as he had been enjoying himself. On the other hand, she was ill. “It will soon enough come to an end.”

“ Notsoon enough.” She shook her head gloomily.

They walked on, hour after hour. Everything stayed the same. Swan walked better than she had right after her collapse, but she was still slower than she had been before it. It didn’t matter to Wahram; he liked the slower pace, in fact. He was still quite sore in the mornings, but did not seem to be getting any worse; nor did he feel weak or nauseous, though he was on the lookout for the symptoms in an uncomfortable way. He felt queasy a lot. Swan had pulled off all the hair on her head, leaving a fair number of scabby patches.

“What about you?” he said at one point. “Tell me more about you. Did you really lie naked on blocks of ice for hours at a time? Did you cut orreries into your skin and make patterns of blood on you?”

She was walking ahead of him, and now she hesitated, then stopped and let him take the lead. “I don’t want to shout back at you,” she said as he passed her.

“And yes,” she said as they carried on, “I did do those things, and other kinds of abramovics. The body is very good material for art, I think. But that was mostly when I was in my fifties.”

“What about before?”

“I was born in Terminator, as I said. It was just being constructed, and I was a kid in the farm when they were still putting in the irrigation systems. It was a big deal when the soil arrived. It came out of big tubes, like wet cement, only black. I played in there with my mother while they were getting the first crops and the park plants started. It was a great place to be a kid. It’s hard to believe that it’ll all be dead when we come up. I’ll have to see it to believe it. Anyway that’s where I grew up.”

“The past is always gone,” Wahram said. “Whether the place is still there or not.”

“Maybe for you, oh sage one,” she said. “I never felt that way. Anyway, after that I lived on Venus for a while, working for Shukra. Then I designed terraria. Then I moved into making artworks, working with landscapes or bodies. Goldsworthies and abramovics, still very interesting to me, and how I make my living. So I’m out and about, following commissions. But I keep a room in Terminator. My parents both died, so my grandparents Alex and Mqaret were kind of like my parents. You couldn’t have made any critique of pair-bonding by looking at those two. Poor Mqaret.”

“No, I know,” he said. “It was child rearing I was talking about, that seems to take more than two people. You must have learned that too?”

She shot him a glance. “One of them is out there somewhere. The child I had with Zasha died.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Yes, well, she was old. I don’t want to talk about that right now.”

In fact she was slowing down, and seemed to him hunched over. He said, “Are you all right?”

“Feeling weaker.”

“Do you want to stop and rest?”

“No.”

On they struggled, in silence.

He helped her through one hour, supporting her as she walked with one of his arms around her back and under her far arm, pulling up. After the rests she struggled up and continued walking, and would brook no argument against it. When they got to the next station, he looked around in every cabinet and closet in the place, and in the last closet he checked (but it was always the last one, when you found something) there was a little four-wheeled pushcart with a bar on one end that rose to chest height; otherwise it was a flatbed set just above wheel height, the bed one meter by two, and the two swiveling wheels opposite the bar.

“Let’s put our backpacks on here and I’ll push them,” he suggested.

She gave him a look. “You think you can push me around.”

“It would be easier than carrying you, if it came to that.”

She dumped her backpack on the cart, and the next morning took off ahead of him. At first he had to hurry; then he caught up with her; then he slowed down as she did.

Hour after hour. Without discussing it, she would sometimes sit on the cart. Up on the surface over them passed the craters and scarps named after the great artists of Earth; they went under Ts’ao Chan, Philoxenus, R m , Ives. He whistled “Columbia, the Gem of the Ocean,” which Ives had incorporated so memorably into one of his wild compositions. He thought of R m ’s “I Died as Mineral” and wished he had it memorized better. “I died as mineral and rose as a plant, I died as plant and was born an animal; when did I ever lose by dying?”

“Who is that?”

“R m .”

More silence. Down the big curve of the tunnel. The walls here were cracked, and it looked like they had been heat-treated more than usual to fuse them to impermeability. Crazed glazes of black on black. Craquelure to infinity.

She groaned and stood up from the cart and walked back to the west. “One moment, I have to go again.”

“Oh dear. Good luck.”

After a long while he heard a distant groan, maybe even a forlorn “Help.” He went back down the tunnel, pulling the cart with him.

She had collapsed again with her suit down. Again he had to clean her up. She was a little more conscious this time, and looked away; even at one point batted weakly at him. In the middle of his work she looked at him blearily, resentfully. “This isn’t really me,” she said. “I’m not really here.”

“Well,” he said, a little offended. “I’m not either.”

She slumped back. After a while she said, “So nobody’s here.”

When he was done and she was dressed again, he got her on the cart and pushed her forward. She lay there without a word.

In the next break he got her to drink some water dosed with nutrients and electrolytes. The cart, as she said at one point, was beginning to resemble a hospital bed. From time to time Wahram whistled a little, usually choosing Brahms. There was a stoic resolution at the heart of Brahms’s melancholy that was very appropriate now. They still had twenty-two days to go.

That evening they sat there in silence. The scene devolved into the desultory animal behaviors that often followed such little crises—the turned heads, the preparations for sleep pursued abstractedly; dull aching drop into sleep, that unseen refuge. Here the pseudoiterative needed to be held to as a comfort. Lick one’s wounds. All these things had happened before and would happen again.

One morning she got up and tried to walk, and after twenty minutes she sat back on the cart again. “This is worrisome,” she said in a small voice. “If enough cells were busted…”

Wahram didn’t say anything. He pushed her along. Suddenly it occurred to him that she could die in this tunnel and there was nothing he could do about it, and a wave of nausea passed through him, making him weak in the legs. A stay in a hospital could have done so much.

After another long silence, she said in a low voice, “I suppose I used to enjoy risking death. The jolt of the fear. The thrill when you survive. It was a kind of decadence.”

“That’s what my mom used to say,” Wahram said.

“Like horror stories, where you try to shock yourself awake or something. But all that stuff is wrong. Say you attend the death of a person and help them out. All the images you see are out of horror stories. You see that those images came from where you are. But you stay anyway. And after a time you see that’s just the way it is. Everyone goes there. You help but really you can’t help, you just sit there. And eventually you’re holding the hand of a dead person. Supposedly a nightmare. Bones thrust up out of the ground to clutch you and so on. And yet in the actual act, perfectly natural. All of it natural.”

“Yes?” Wahram said, after she had stopped for a while.

She heard him and went on. “The body tries to stay alive. It’s not so… It’s natural. Maybe you’ll see it now. First the human brain dies, then the animal brain, then the lizard brain. Like your R m , only backward. The lizard brain tries to its very last bit of energy to keep things going. I’ve seen it. Some kind of desire. It’s a real force. Life wants to live. But eventually a link breaks. The energy stops getting to where it needs to be. The last ATP gets used. Then we die. Our bodies return to earth, go back to being soil. A natural cycle. So…” She looked up at him. “So what? Why the horror? What are we?”