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We hugged.

I was afraid for her as well as for myself. I didn’t believe, then, that she truly intended to die. I wanted to keep us both safe until help arrived.

My panic faded while I held Hadria Nuccoli in my arms, only to be replaced by some other emotion, equally intense, to which I could not put a name. I made every effort to remind and convince myself that it hadn’t ever mattered whether she infected me or not, given that medical help would soon arrive.

“This is the only real life,” she murmured, as the script she had somehow internalized wound down to its amen. “Emortality makes a sepulchre of the flesh. If we are to become more than human, we must live more fervently, burn more brightly, die more extravagantly.”

“It’s all right,” I assured her. “Help will be here soon. Everything will be fine.”

I was right about the help, but wrong about the everything.

My naive faith in medical science and internal nanotechnology left me completely unprepared for the kind of hell that I endured before the attending doctors got the bug under control. Nature had never designed diseases capable of fighting back against the ministrations of IT, but the makers of new plagues were cleverer by far.

As the infection ran its vicious course I wished, over and over again, that I were able to live the experience as Hadria Nuccoli presumably lived it, not as hell but as passion, but I couldn’t do it. I was an emortal through and through. I couldn’t abide that kind of fervor, that kind of extravagance. All I wanted was the restoration of peace of mind and metabolic calm. While my nanotech armies fought tooth and nail against enemies the likes of which they had never faced before for possession of the battleground of my flesh, all I was capable of wanting was to be still and self-controlled.

I could not help but wonder, afterward, whether I had already begun to aspire to the robot condition. I couldn’t help asking myself whether, as Hadria Nuccoli would presumably have argued, I was fleeing from true human potential because I was incapable of loving anything but the sepulchral death-in-life that was the emortal condition.

Was it conceivable, I wondered, that she might have been right about the nature of the authentic fountain of youth?

I concluded, on due reflection, that she was wrong in every respect. That may have been why, in the end, I lived and she died. On the other hand, the nanotech injected into her body by the doctors may simply have arrived too late to turn the tide.

I wept for her when they told me she’d died and wished with all my heart that she hadn’t, even though I knew that if there were tears on the far side of life, she would be lamenting my inability to join her.

Although it was entirely unlike my previous close encounters with death, my infection by Hadria Nuccoli was just as disturbing in its own way. I tried to regard it as a minor hiccup in the settled pattern of my life—something to be survived, put away and forgotten—but I couldn’t quite put the pattern back together again.

The last thing I’d expected when I set out to write a History of Death was that my explanatory study might actually assist the dread empire of death to regain a little of the ground it had lost in the world of human affairs. Even though the Thanaticists and their successors were willfully misunderstanding and perverting the meaning of my work, I felt that my objectivity had been fatally contaminated when the protective walls of my home had been breached, and that the stain would not be easily eradicated. I knew that I still owed it to the Thanaticists as well as to everyone else to make the true message of my work clear, but while my own mind was less than perfectly clear that task seemed impossible.

I felt that I could not stay on Cape Wolstenholme and that I could never live in such a frail dwelling again.

I had to move again—but where could I go? Where on Earth, and in what kind of home, could I recover the equilibrium I had