Arrows of Time - Kim Falconer [164]
He took off his glasses, pinching the furrow between his eyes. Now it made sense, but it didn’t lessen his disorientation. It didn’t make it any easier to do what must be done. He polished the lenses with the edge of his scrub shirt and replaced them, the room coming back into focus. No one would understand a death, but they had to learn. It was time for them all to face it.
It’s keeping them trapped. Can’t you see that now? Her voice rang in his head, though he knew it was only a memory. She said she wouldn’t hang around after. After death? He didn’t blame her. With the images of life in other worlds, vibrant worlds where he’d made other choices, filling his mind like a multi-digital display, who would? She’d shown them to him to offer encouragement and to help him understand. He did, now. He also understood the austerity and poverty of this world. Not a poverty of nutrition, but of the soul. Who would stay in a place so devoid of spirit, a place where the inhabitants were all but robotic replicas of human expression? That’s what she’d called him, and the label made him weep.
A replica of human expression. He shook his head. No one had predicted that their ‘fountain of youth’ would turn into a prison, a place where souls, over time, would fade, losing their lustre for life, love and happiness. Worse still, it happened so slowly, so insidiously, that no one noticed. No one cared. They were going to live forever in a confinement of their own making, never acknowledging they were architect as well as inmate.
She had told him, though. She had made him see. Without words or narrative she had delivered the images. She’d put them straight into his mind—pictures of trees and flowers and forests, of four-legged creatures like Canie, and some not like him at all, of fish and frogs and fleas. She’d shown him glorious weather patterns, sunsets and mountain peaks. And he had heard their sounds. Angelic music, voices, wind blowing spray from the crest of waves, birds, whales, whispers and wolves—everything missing from his world, this choice, for so long it was forgotten. His Earth had become a cadaver, a ghost town with windows shuttered and streets abandoned, nothing but dust and debris tumbling past—and he was the dust and debris. They all were. This was no way to live a life, let alone an eternity.
She’d shown him yet another world, full of contrast, gloriously bright fields of grain and flowers, dark forests and darker swamps, rumbling mountains and rippling streams, oceans, cities and prairies. This other world was also suffering. Because of his fountain of youth, no children were born in that other place and their cycle of life-death-life failed. He laughed at the irony.
His people, who fervently wanted to preserve existence, were preventing it, trapping the life force until the energy dried up and turned to ash. Suspended animation was not a lifegiver after all. They’d got it wrong, and he was the one who had to set it right.
He had wanted to say, why me? He’d screamed it out to her, but what she’d shown him next made his mouth snap shut. Instead of a protest, he’d squared his shoulders and dipped his head. This was his chance to turn it around. He said, ‘Why, me!’
The stainless steel table reflected the halogen lights, hitting his eyes like a sunbeam. He focused on the hard edge, unable to look elsewhere, unable to turn away. He pulled off his gloves, letting them fall to the floor. In his peripheral vision he saw his team moving as if in slow motion, turning off monitors, clamping drip sets, folding up instrument packs, collecting rubbish. No one walked away, though. No one left her side. He understood why. This was their first death.