Timequake - Kurt Vonnegut [67]
I called back to him from the rear of the crowd: “You’ve been sick, Mr. Trout, but now you’re well again, and there’s work to do.”
My lecture agent, Janet Cosby, was there.
At ten o’clock the old, long-out-of-print science fiction writer announced it was his bedtime. There was one last thing he wanted to say to us, to his family. Like a magician seeking a volunteer from the audience, he asked someone to stand beside him and do what he said. I held up my hand. “Me, please, me,” I said.
The crowd fell quiet as I took my place to his right.
“The Universe has expanded so enormously,” he said, “with the exception of the minor glitch it put us through, that light is no longer fast enough to make any trips worth taking in even the most unreasonable lengths of time. Once the fastest thing possible, they say, light now belongs in the graveyard of history, like the Pony Express.
“I now ask this human being brave enough to stand next to me to pick two twinkling points of obsolete light in the sky above us. It doesn’t matter what they are, except that they must twinkle. If they don’t twinkle, they are either planets or satellites. Tonight we are not interested in planets or satellites.”
I picked two points of light maybe ten feet apart. One was Polaris. I have no idea what the other one was. For all I knew, it was Puke, Trout’s star the size of a BB.
“Do they twinkle?” he said.
“Yes they do,” I said.
“Promise?” he said.
“Cross my heart,” I said.
“Excellent! Ting-a-ling!” he said. “Now then: Whatever heavenly bodies those two glints represent, it is certain that the Universe has become so rarefied that for light to go from one to the other would take thousands or millions of years. Ting-a-ling? But I now ask you to look precisely at one, and then precisely at the other.”
“OK,” I said, “I did it.”
“It took a second, do you think?” he said.
“No more,” I said.
“Even if you’d taken an hour,” he said, “something would have passed between where those two heavenly bodies used to be, at, conservatively speaking, a million times the speed of light.”
“What was it?” I said.
“Your awareness,” he said. “That is a new quality in the Universe, which exists only because there are human beings. Physicists must from now on, when pondering the secrets of the Cosmos, factor in not only energy and matter and time, but something very new and beautiful, which is human awareness.”
Trout paused, ensuring with the ball of his left thumb that his upper dental plate would not slip when he said his last words to us that enchanted evening.
All was well with his teeth. This was his finale: “I have thought of a better word than awareness,” he said. “Let us call it soul.” He paused.
“Ting-a-ling?” he said.
EPILOGUE
My big and only brother Bernard, a widower for twenty-five years, died after prolonged bouts with cancers, without excruciating pain, on the morning of April 25th, 1997, at the age of eighty-two, now four days ago. He was a Senior Research Scientist Emeritus, in the Atmospheric Sciences Research Center of the State University of New York at Albany, and the father of five fine sons.
I was seventy-four. Our sister Alice would have been seventy-nine. At the time of her humbling death at the age of forty-one, I said, “What a wonderful old lady Allie would have been.” No such luck.
We were luckier with Bernard. He died the beloved, sweet, funny, highly intelligent old geezer he deserved to become. He was enraptured at the very end by a collection of sayings of Albert Einstein. Example: “The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and science.” Another: “Physical concepts are free creations of the human mind, and are not, however it may seem, uniquely determined by the external world.”
Most famously, Einstein is reputed to have said, “I shall never believe that God plays dice with the world.” Bernard was himself so open-minded about how the universe might be dealt with that he thought praying would help, possibly, in drastic situations.