Divided by Infinity

3.

They want me to keep on with my memoirs.

They take the pages away from me, exchange them for greater rations of food.

The food is pale, chalky, with the claylike texture of goat cheese. They excrete it from a sort of spinerette, white obscene lumps of it, like turds.

I prefer to think of them as advanced machines rather than biological entities—vending machines, say, not the eight-foot-long centipedes they appear to be.

They’ve mastered the English language. (I don’t know how.) They say “please” and “thank you.” Their voices are thin and reedy, a sound like tree branches creaking on a windy winter night.

They tell me I’ve been dead for ten thousand years.

Today they let me out of my bubble, let me walk outside, with a sort of mirrored umbrella to protect me from the undiluted sunlight.

The sunlight is intense, the air cold and thin. They have explained, in patient but barely intelligible whispers, that the gamma ray burst and subsequent bath of cosmic radiation stripped the earth of its ozone layer as well as much of the upper atmosphere. The oxygen that remains, they say, is “fossil” oxygen, no longer replenished. The soil is alive with radioactive nuclei: samarium 146, iodine 129, isotopes of lead, of plutonium.

There is no macroscopic life on Earth. Present company excepted.

Everything died. People, plants, plankton, everything but the bacteria inhabiting the rocks of the deep mantle or the scalding water around undersea volcanic vents. The surface of the planet—here, at least—has been scoured by wind and radiation into a rocky desert.

All this happened ten thousand years ago. The sun shines placidly on the lifeless soil, the distant blue-black mountains.

Everything I loved is dead.

I can’t imagine the technology they used to resurrect me, to re-create me, as they insist, from desiccated fragments of biological tissue tweezed from rocks. It’s not just my DNA they have recovered but (apparently, somehow) my memories, my self, my consciousness.

I suppose Carl Soziere wouldn’t be surprised.

I ask about others, other survivors reclaimed from the waterless desert. My captors (or saviors) only spindle their sickeningly mobile bodies: a gesture of negation, I’ve come to understand, the equivalent of a shake of the head. There are no other survivors.

And yet I can’t help wondering whether Lorraine waits to be salvaged from her grave—some holographic scrap of her, at least; information scattered by time, like the dust of an ancient book.

There is nothing in my transparent cell but bowls of water and food, a floor soft enough to serve as a mattress, and the blunted writing instruments and clothlike paper. (Are they afraid I might commit suicide?)

The memoirs run out. I want the extra food, and I enjoy the diversion of writing, but what remains to be said? And to whom?

Lately I’ve learned to distinguish between my captors.

The “leader” (that is, the individual most likely to address me directly and see that others attend to my needs) is a duller shade of silver-white, his cartilaginous shell dusted with fine powder. He (or she) possesses many orifices, all visible when he sways back to speak. I have identified his speaking orifice and his food-excreting orifice, but there are three others I haven’t seen in use, including a tooth-lined maw that must be a kind of mouth.

“We are the ones who warned you,” he tells me. “For half of a million years we warned you. If you had known, you might have protected yourself.” His grammar is impeccable, to my ears anyway, although consonants in close proximity make him stumble and hiss. “You might have deconstructed your moon, created a shield, as we did. Numerous strategies might have succeeded in preserving your world.”

The tocsin had sounded, in other words, for centuries. We had simply been too dull to interpret it, until the very end, when nothing could be done to counter the threat.

I try not to interpret this as a rebuke.

“Now we have learned to transsect distance,” the insectile creature explains. “Then, we could only signal.”

I ask whether he could re-create the Earth, revive the dead.

“No,” he says. Perhaps the angle of his body signifies regret. “One of you is puzzle enough.”

They live apart from me, in an immense silver half-sphere embedded in the alkaline soil. Their spaceship?

For a day they haven’t come. I sit alone in my own much smaller shelter, its bubble walls polarized to filter the light but transparent enough to show the horizon with vicious clarity. I feel abandoned, a fly on a vast pane of dusty glass. And hungry. And thirsty.

They return—apologetically—with water, with paper and writing implements, and with a generous supply of food, thoughtfully pre-excreted.

They are compiling, they tell me, a sort of interstellar database, combining the functions of library, archeological museum, and telephone exchange. They are most grateful for my writings, which have been enthusiastically received. “Your cosmology,” by which they must mean Soziere’s cosmology, “is quite distinctive.”

I thank them but explain that there is nothing more to write—and no audience I can even begin to imagine.

The news perplexes them. The leader asks, “Do you need a human audience?”

Yes. Yes, that’s what I need. A human audience. Lorraine, warning me away from despair, or even Deirdre, trying vainly to shield me from black magic.

They confer for another day.

I walk outside my bubble at sunset, alone, with my silver umbrella tilted toward the western horizon. When the stars appear, they are astonishingly bright and crisp. I can see the frosted breath of the Milky Way.

“We cannot create a human audience for you,” the leader says, swaying in a chill noon breeze like a stately elm. “But there is perhaps a way.”

I wait. I am infinitely patient.

“We have experimented with time,” the creature announces. Or I think the word is “experimented.” It might as easily have been the clacking buzz of a cricket or a cicada.

“Send me back,” I demand at once.

“No, not you, not physical objects. It cannot be done. Thoughts, perhaps. Dreams. Speaking to minds long dead. Of course, it changes nothing.”

I rather like the idea, when they explain it, of my memoirs circulating through the Terrestrial past, appearing fragmented and unintelligible among the night terrors of Neanderthals, Cro-Magnons, Roman slaves, Chinese peasants, science fiction writers, drunken poets. And Deirdre Frank, and Oscar Ziegler. And Lorraine.

Even the faintest touch—belated, impossible—is better than none at all.

But still. I find it difficult to write.

“In that case,” the leader says, “we would like to salvage you.”

“Salvage me?”

They consult in their own woody, windy language, punctuated by long silences or sounds I cannot hear.

“Preserve you,” they conclude. “Yourself. Your soul.”

And how would they do that?

“I would take you into my body,” the leader says.

Eat me, in other words. They have explained this more than once. Devour my body, hoc est corpus, and spit out my soul like a cherry pit into the great galactic telephone exchange.

“But this is how we must do it,” the leader says apologetically.

I don’t fear them.

I take a long last walk, at night, bundled against the cold in layers of flexible foil. The stars have not changed visibly in the ten thousand years of my absence, but there is nothing else familiar, no recognizable landmarks, I gather, anywhere on the surface of the planet. This might be an empty lake bed, this desert of mine, saline and ancient and, save for the distant mountains, flat as a chessboard.

I don’t fear them. They might be lying, I know, although I doubt it; surely not even the most alien of creatures would travel hundreds of light years to a dead planet in search of a single exotic snack.

I do fear their teeth, however, sharp as shark’s teeth, even if (as they claim) their bodies secrete an anesthetic and euphoriant venom.

And death?

I don’t fear death.

I dread the absence of it.

Maybe Soziere was wrong. Maybe there’s a teleological escape clause, maybe all the frayed threads of time will be woven back together at the end of the world, assembled in the ultimate library, where all the books and all the dreams are preserved and ordered in their multiple infinities.

Or not.

I think, at last, of Lorraine: really think of her, I mean; imagine her next to me, whispering that I ought to have taken her advice, not lodged this grief so close to my heart; whispering that death is not a door through which I can follow her, no matter how hard or how often I try…

“Will you accept me?” the leader asks, rearing up to show his needled mouth, his venom sacs oozing a pleasant narcotic.

“I’ve accepted worse,” I tell him.