She was cradling my head in her lap. Though she was talking past me to Albert, and mostly in Russian, I heard my name often enough to know she was talking about me. I tried to reach up to pat her cheek. “I’m dying,” I said-or tried to say.
She understood me. She leaned over me, her long hair drifting across my face. “Very dear Robin,” she crooned, “is true, yes, you are dying. Or your body is. But that does not mean an end to you.”
Now, we had discussed religion from time to time over the decades we’d been together. I knew her beliefs. I even knew my own. Essie, I wanted to say, you’ve never lied to me before, you don’t have to do it now to try to ease dying for me. It’s all right. But all that came out was something like:
“Does so!”
Tears dripped over my face as she rocked me, crooning, “No. Truly no, dearest Robin. Is a chance, a very good chance-“
I made a tremendous effort. “There … is … no … hereafter,”
I said, strongly, spacing the words out with the best articulation I could manage. It may not have been clear, but she understood me. She bent and kissed my forehead. I felt her lips move against my skin as she whispered:
“Yes. Is a hereafter now.”
Or maybe she said “a Here After.”
22 Is There Life after Death?
And the stars sailed on. They didn’t care what was happening to one biped m~mm~i1ian intelligent-well, semi-intelligent-living thing, simply because it happened to be me. I have always subscribed to the egocentric view of cosmology. I’m in the middle and everything ranges itself on one side of me or another; “normal” is what I am; “important” is what is near to me; “significant” is what I perceive as important. That was the view I subscribed to, but the universe didn’t. It went right on as though I didn’t matter at all.
The truth is that I didn’t matter just then even to me, because I was out of it. A good many thousand light-years behind us on Earth, General Manzbergen was chasing another batch of terrorists who had hijacked a launch shuttle and the commissaris had caught the man who had taken a shot at me; I didn’t know and, if! had known, wouldn’t have cared. A lot closer, but still as far from us as Antares is from Earth, Gelle-Klara Moynlin was trying to make sense of what the Heechee were telling her; I didn’t know that either. Very close to hand indeed, my wife, Essie, was trying to do something she had never done before, though she had invented the process, with the help of Albert, who had the entire process in his datastores but had not hands to do it with. About that I would have cared a great deal if I had known what they were doing.
But I couldn’t know, of course, since I was dead. I did not, however, stay that way.
When I was little my mother used to read me stories. There was one about a man whose senses were somehow scrambled after a brain operation. I don’t remember who wrote it, Verne, Wells, one of those biggies from the Golden Age-somebody. What I remember is the punch line. The man comes out of the operation so that he sees sound, and hears touch, and the end of the story is him asking, “What smells purple?”
That was a story told me when I was little. Now I was big. It was not a story anymore.
It was a nightmare.
Sensory impressions were battering at me, and I couldn’t tell what they were! I can’t describe them now, for that matter, any more than I can describe… smerglitch. Do you know what smerglitch is? No. Neither do I, because I just made the word up. It’s only a word. It has no meaning until it is invested with one, and neither did any of the colors, sounds, pressures, chills, pulls, twitches, itches, squirmings, burnings, yearnings-the billion quantum units of impression that were assaulting naked, tender me. I didn’t know what they meant. Or were. Or threatened. I don’t know what to compare it to, even. Maybe being born is like that. I doubt it. I don’t think any of us would survive it if it were.
But I survived.
I survived because of only one reason. It was impossible for me not to.
It’s the oldest rule in the book: You can’t knock up a pregnant woman, and you can’t kill someone who is dead already. I “survived” because all that part of me that could be killed had been.
Do you have the picture?
Try to see it. Flayed. Assaulted. And most of all, aware I was dead.
Among the other stories my mother read me was Dante’s Inferno, and what I sometimes wonder was whether Dante had some prevision of what it would be like for me. For if not, where did he get his description of Hell?
How long this lasted I did not know, but it seemed forever.
Then everything dwindled. The piercing lights moved farther away, and paler. The terrifying sounds were quieter, the itches and squeezes and turbulences diminished.
For a long time there was nothing at all, like Carlsbad Caverns in that scary moment when they turn off all the lights to teach you what dark is. There was no light. There was nothing but a distant confused mumbling that might have been the circulation of blood around the stirrups and anvil in my ears.
If I had had ears.
And then the mumbling began to hint of a voice, and words; and, from a long way off, the voice of Albert Einstein:
“Robin?”
I tried to remember how to speak.
“Robin? Robin, my friend, do you hear me?”
“Yes,” I shouted, and do not know how. “I’m here!” as though I knew where “here” was.
A long pause. Then Albert’s voice again, still faint but sounding closer. “Robin,” he said, each word spaced as though for a tiny child. “Robin. Listen. You are safe.”
“Safe?”
“You are safe,” he repeated. “I am blocking for you.” I did not answer. Had nothing to say.
“I will teach you now, Robin,” he said, “a little at a time. Be patient, Robin. Soon you will be able to see and hear and understand.”
Patient? I could be nothing but patient. I had no other options but to patiently endure while he taught me. I trusted old Albert, even then. I accepted his word that he could teach the deaf to hear and the blind to see.
But was there any way to teach the dead to live?
I do not particularly want to relive that next little eternity. By Albert’s time and the time of the cesium clocks that concerted the human parts of the Galaxy it took-he says-eighty-four hours and a bit. By his time. Not by mine. By mine it was endless.
Although I remember very well, I remember some things only distantly. Not from incapacity. From desire, and also from the fact of velocity. Let me explain that. The quick exchange of bits and bytes within the core of a datastore goes much faster than the organic life I had left behind. It blurs the past with layers of new data. And, you know, that’s just as well, because the more remote that terrible transition is from my “now,” the better I like it.
If I am unwilling to retrieve some of the early parts of that data, at least the first part that I am willing to look at is a big one. How big? Big.
Albert says I anthropomorphize. Probably I do. Where’s the harm? I spent most of my life in the morph of an anthropos, after all, and old habits die hard. So when Albert had stabilized me and I was-I guess the only word is vastened-it was as a human anthropomorphic being that I visualized myself. Assuming, of course, that the human being were huger than galaxies, older than stars, and as wise as all the billions of us have learned to be. I beheld the Local Group-our Galaxy and its next-door neighbors-as one little clot in a curdling sea of energy and mass. I could see all of it. But what I looked at was home, the mother Galaxy and M-31 beside it, with the Magellanic Clouds nestling nearby and all the other little clouds and globules and tufts and fluffs of streaky gas and starshine. And-the anthropomorphic part is-I reached out to touch them and cup them and run my fingers through them, as though I were God.
I was not really God, or even sufficiently godlike to be able really to touch any galaxies. I couldn’t touch anything at all, not having anything to touch them with. It was all illusion and optics, like Albert lighting his pipe. There was nothing there. No Albert and no pipe.