Longer

–NINE–

Cav had not been lax. If he knew anything, it was how to conduct an investigation. He’d done his homework.

At last count, there were, roughly, a million ways to die. Less, to take one’s life. Still less, to dispose of the body afterward.

You could burn it, bury it, eat it, or let it be eaten—by worms, microbes, molecules. You could put it outside, aboveground, preferably somewhere humid and hot, and let it be eaten there—by beetles, ants, vultures, jackals, and the like, and the weather. You could freeze it, then transport it to one of Earth’s remaining pockets of eternal ice and snow, and tuck it into bed there. You could embed it in plastic. Drop it into a lake of tar, or of toxic waste. Compress it to near nothingness. Blow it to smithereens with explosives.

On Earth there were options. On Gleem One, orders of magnitude fewer.

Cremation was impractical and risky. Burial was impossible. You could stow the body somewhere, but that would only leave the problem for someone to deal with later. There were no carnivores on board, save one, and that one couldn’t very well eat his own body if he were already dead. Not to mention that eating a dead human, regardless of the circumstances, was gross.

You could suit up and send yourself into space, point toward Earth, ignite the thrusters, and become a meteor in someone else’s sky. A reliable way to dispose of the body, and a quick way to die. Too quick—and too painful—for his purposes.

You could avoid this by aiming the thrusters in the opposite direction, fighting orbital decay, and become a new planetary body littering the sky, at least for a while. Cav hated litter, but felt backed into a corner. It didn’t hurt that he’d been leaning toward ending his life this way from the start: half-knowingly before his arrival on station, then through the long hours of gazing into space, into his heart and mind, awe in ascendance, terror in decline. The idea had been steadily growing.

He felt a shiver of fear and excitement thinking about it now.

Death was a journey, composed of little deaths, little steps along the way. Sometimes the steps were close together, tightly packed, and death came rapidly. Sometimes they were spaced far apart, and it approached at a crawl. Suicide offered a choice of speeds. It was the ultimate in self-determination.

Cav figured six to eight hours start to finish. Most people choose a quicker exit, but he didn’t want to rush. Didn’t want to drag things out, either. Figured time would do its own thing anyway. A minute could last a year; an hour, a second. Six to eight hours seemed about right.

He ran through the steps in his mind. Space suit, jetpack, airlock, outer hatch. Nothing fancy. A simple defenestration. Stand at the brink, take the leap, ignite the burners, and embrace the unknown.

It wasn’t complicated.

Nothing to clean up. No hole to dig. No ashes.

The only thing left to decide: premedicate or not?

He had pills, but didn’t want to take them. Preferred to be awake and alert, alive to every sensation, every thought. He wanted to be fully in possession of himself in order to fully appreciate the experience. His sole concern: he might panic, and screw everything up.

Panic was a killer of the here-and-now. It was death to contemplative observation. It twisted reality, made it frightening and hideous.

He wasn’t panic-prone, had only panicked once in his life, and that was after waking up from juving, a fairly common occurrence. He doubted it would be a problem, but also knew that panic didn’t care about intentions, that it had a life of its own, came when it came, suddenly, out of nowhere, without invitation. The smallest thing could set it off, and this was hardly small.

He was bringing pills, just in case. Not to sleep, but to calm the nerves, if necessary. Composure, not unconsciousness. That was the plan.

His came in the form of capsules. Each capsule contained hundreds of tiny granules that looked like poppy seeds, but pink and white, the color of cotton candy. Colors favored by Gleem, which manufactured the medicine, and had named it, imaginatively, NOCKOUT, or NOK, as it was commonly called. Not to be confused with the beer of the same name, which had the same effect, if you drank a truckload. The name was a nod to days long past, when it meant glamour, bedazzlement, wow wow wow. Just the kind of double entendre PR and marketing departments fell out of their chairs for.

The word was stamped, along with the helpful icon of a sleeping beauty, on a sleeping beauty bed, on the capsule’s protective, gelatinous shell. It was a mid-list drug—reliable, no-nonsense, and a steady seller. He’d brought enough to put down a horse.

He planned to carry four, attached to his helmet within reach of his tongue and mouth, but separated, so that he could take as many or as few as necessary. He unscrewed the top of the bottle and shook out a handful.

A bad idea. A mass of capsules spilled out and immediately dispersed, like a genie freed from captivity. He grabbed at them, but it was like grabbing at a school of fish, and he merely managed to drive them farther away. He focused on one. His hand-eye coordination was not a thing of beauty, but he finally managed to pinch it between thumb and forefinger, and pushed it back in the bottle. Then he got a second one. Thinking, this is ludicrous, like moving a sandbox grain by grain.

What if it happened outside? They came loose in his helmet, then floated around in front of his face, a total distraction and annoyance, not to mention out of reach of his mouth?

A setback.

The upside: better to know now.

What could be done?

Go without them. That was one possibility. But it felt like giving in, and also risky. Besides, he liked puzzles, even now, at this late stage of the game.

It wasn’t much of one, as it turned out. Capsules and pills were made to dissolve. Optimally, in a stomach. Less optimally, in plain water. But water worked, particularly if you heated it up.

He didn’t have to eat his medicine, he could drink it.

He tried pulling a capsule apart, with the idea of dumping the contents directly into a beaker, where they’d dissolve much quicker without their protective coating. But the halves were sticky and hard to separate, especially for old, trembling hands, and grains were no more willing to be poured than the pills themselves, and in fact much less manageable. They dispersed in a particle cloud, then hung there, like a swarm of midges. He cautioned himself not to inhale.

Subsequently, he didn’t try what he couldn’t do, and instead used the whole capsules, and a closed system. Keeping busy kept him from looking too far ahead, and second-guessing himself.

It took an hour under low heat to dissolve them, then another for the solution to cool. While he was waiting, the comm came to life.

It was Laura Gleem. He recognized her voice, which preceded her image, and the perfectly modulated cadence of her speech. He assumed that, like her image, there was software involved.

She looked the same as always. Pert, attractive, businesslike. Abruptly, the screen went blank. Moments later, someone else took her place.

At least it looked like someone.

The person was sitting up, if “sitting” was the right word, in bed. She, if it was a she, was the color of ash and nearly hairless. What hair she did have was stringy and valentine pink, as though dyed by a morbid beautician. Her body was gnomish and deformed; she looked like a gnarl of wood. She was hunched forward, as though she had no choice. No fat or muscle. Drooping, loose skin. Strikingly, there were grapefruit-size lumps on her arms, legs, and torso.

The figure was draped in a formless gown. Didn’t seem to care if it covered her or not. A network of tubes and wires were attached to her, and ran off-screen.

He kept his composure, even as his stomach churned. He wasn’t entirely sure who or what he was seeing.

Laura Gleem’s voice answered the who. “What do you think?”

His mind, uncharacteristically, was blank.

“That bad?”

“Is this you? For real?”

“In the flesh. Such as it is.”

“You juved a third time.”

“I survived,” she said defiantly. “Give me credit for that.”

“The lumps …”

“Tumors. As you’d expect.” Her mouth didn’t move when she spoke. “At present, under control.”

“How are you communicating with me?”

“With difficulty.”

“Deep brain?” He knew it had been tried. Still a few hurdles, last he’d heard.

“I wish.” With an effort—and considerable discomfort—she arched her entire back, too frozen in the neck to independently lift her head, revealing a thumb-sized appliance crabbed to her larynx.

“A plug-in,” he said.

“God bless ’em.”

“It works well.”

“Well enough. I’m due for an upgrade. And you, Doctor. How are you? You don’t mind my saying, you look like you could use an upgrade yourself. Did I interrupt your beauty sleep?”

“I’ve been working.”

“Glad to hear it. Work is better than sleep. Better than almost anything. You get old, you appreciate that.”

“It’s true.”

“I assume your work includes our new object. What can you tell me? Is it worth getting excited about?”

A moment of truth. He decided to lie. “The asteroid’s carbon. Nothing exciting in that. The object is metamorphic rock. A collision artifact.”

“It’s rock?”

“That’s right.”

“Is it valuable?”

“Possibly to a student of astrogeology. To you, no. It’s worthless.”

She didn’t reply. She could have been thinking about deep-space mining, about capital outlay, financial risk, unloading her assets, writing them off, and so on and so forth. Alternatively, she could have been thinking about calling his bluff. In her current ravaged state, she had the world’s most unreadable poker face.

He waited her out.

“I’m sorry to hear that,” she said at length.

“Yes. I’m sorry, too. I was hoping for something different.”

“Hope sustains us. It’s our daily bread. The only bread I can eat.” She half-grunted, half-groaned. “Have you ever seen anything like it?”

“Like what?”

“This,” she said. “Me.”

“You look …”

“Unusual?”

“Uncomfortable.”

She barked. “Don’t make me laugh. I look like crap. A crumpled-up bag of bones. Like I’ve been picked at by vultures, chewed up, spit out, then fed to a compacter.”

“You’re in pain.”

“I’m a disaster. Leading naturally to the question of what happens next. How to remedy the situation. Juving is no longer an option. Having used my allotment and then some.” She paused. “Thoughts?”

“You’re asking my advice?”

“Your thoughts. You don’t know me well enough to give advice.”

“Fair enough. A question first: are you on life support?”

“To a large degree. Yes.”

“Stop it. Get rid of all the wires and tubes. Including your feeding tube, assuming you have one.”

“Why would I do that?”

“Take sips of water if you like. Get someone to help, if you can’t do it yourself.”

“I can’t do anything myself. Except think. I’m a thinking machine. A rabble-rouser. A visionary. You want me to stop. You’re telling me to die. Commit suicide.”

“Die with dignity.”

“That’s the best you can come up with? And if I did? How long would it take?”

“Days. A week. Maybe two. Little by little, you’ll fade.”

“I’ll fade.”

“You’ll drift off.”

“I’ll drift.”

“Yes.”

“Slowly.”

“Yes.”

“And gently. You forgot to mention gently. And peacefully.”

“Yes. All that.”

“Like a little cloud, warmed by the sun. I’ll drift away, and slowly evaporate. I’ll become one with the universe.”

He didn’t reply.

“Do you think I’m a child?”

“I know you’re not a child.”

“It sounds awful.”

“You could take something. Go to sleep. Hurry things along.”

“Sleeping pills.”

“Your very own. You wouldn’t have to pay for them.”

“That’s cute.”

“You’re afraid, aren’t you?”

“Of taking pills?”

“Of dying.”

She could barely move her head. He’d been talking to the side of her face for most of the conversation. But something came over her, and she wrenched herself sideways, until she was looking him straight in the eye.

“I’m afraid of nothing, Doctor. Nothing. If I die, I die. But I don’t want to die. I want to live.”

“You’ve proven that,” he said. “Three lifetimes’ worth. Isn’t three enough?”

“Not nearly enough. Four would not be enough. Ten might be enough. Might be. You’d have to ask me then. How old is the universe?”

“You want to live as long as that?”

“Shoot for the moon, then negotiate. I’d settle for a millennium.”

“You’re not greedy.”

The barest hint of a smile on her dry, cracked lips. “A little greedy. Tell me about H82W8.”

“You have our reports. Everything’s there.”

“I don’t want everything. I want your summation. How does it look?”

“You should speak to Dr. Gharia. She’s responsible for the bulk of the work.”

“I plan to. But I’m speaking to you now. Is it promising?”

“Too early to say.”

“But worth pursuing?”

“Depends what you mean by worth.”

“You’re being cagey, Doctor.”

“I’m being honest.”

“I’ll take that as a yes. I’ve been told that Dr. Gharia has left the station. I won’t ask why.”

“It’s no secret. The work is done. The study is complete.”

“Did she take H82W8 with her?”

“Yes. Of course. It’s not ours to keep. It’s yours.”

“Just so. I intend to use it.”

“In what way?”

“On myself.”

“Inadvisable, Ms. Gleem.”

“Not here. There. Where you are. Gleem One. Where it works.”

“We don’t know that it works.”

“Where it isn’t lethal.”

“We don’t know that.”

“We’ll find out then, won’t we? I’ll need help. Obviously. I can’t do anything without help. I can’t eat. I can’t speak. I can barely move. I’m a fully dependent creature, Doctor. Do you know how that feels? Do you know what that means? There’s always someone nearby. A person. A robot. Some other kind of machine. Beeping, spewing, watching. I’m never alone. I’m surrounded. Fenced in. Encased.”

“You need privacy.”

“I need independence. Without it I feel …”

“Trapped?”

“Lost.”

“I understand.”

“Disrespected,” she added sharply.

“Respect comes from within, Ms. Gleem.”

“Oh please. Respect is earned, Doctor. On a daily basis. Speaking of which, I want you to do something with those things.”

“What things?”

“You know what things. The Raggedy Anns. The abominations. I want them.”

“You? Why? For what purpose?”

“They’re mine. I own them.”

“They’re no use to you.”

“I disagree. They’re historic. They should be preserved. Somewhere they can be seen. Viewed. Appreciated.”

“That’s a terrible idea.”

“A museum maybe.”

He stared at her. “How about a trophy case? Or a zoo?”

“Those could work, too.”

“They’re not animals. They’re not souvenirs. They don’t exist for people’s amusement. They’re also not yours. They’re nobody’s. Ownership doesn’t apply.”

“On the contrary.”

“They’re public property.”

“I’d say not. They’re kept in vaults. Private vaults. They’re traded on the dark web, and the black market. Highest bidder claims the rights of ownership.”

“In that case, they’re mine. I purchased them. Paid for them out of my own pocket. You can check your accounts.”

“You signed a contract, Doctor. Read the fine print. From the time you set foot on the shuttle to the time you touch down, with plenty of room on either side, everything that passes through your hands is mine. All property: real, intellectual, unreal, whatever. All of it. This can’t be a surprise. So just do whatever you have to in order to keep them alive. Further instructions to follow.”

The screen went dead. Seconds later, it blinked back to life. A new image appeared, the Laura Gleem known to millions: brassy, high octane, irrepressible.

“Tell me something, Doctor. How do you feel about pink?”

He felt dizzy. “Pink?”

“All my doctors wear pink. I insist on it. Pink for my doctors, pink for my nurses, pink for all my staff. Pink pink pink.”

“I’m not on your staff.”

“But you could be. Easily. In a second. You wouldn’t have to lift a finger. Wouldn’t have to move an inch. Just stay where you are. Stay there, Doctor, and I’ll come to you. I need someone I can trust. Someone who understands me. Meanwhile, enjoy your solitude. There’s nothing like it, is there? And what better place? Just you and Gleem One. No one else around. No one telling you what to do. No one hovering. Free as a bird. I envy you.”

The call left him deeply disturbed, for reasons both obvious and not. He sat for a long time after it, wrestling with himself. At length he came to a decision, and rummaged in the lab for the necessary equipment. Once he had it assembled, he poured the now fully dissolved and cooled sleeping potion into a boiling flask, lit the flame underneath it, set the timer, then left.

He had not intended to leave a message or a note, but the call changed his mind. He wanted to set the record straight.

He began by identifying himself. He absolved all parties of responsibility. His decision to end his life was purely personal, he explained. It was not meant as a statement. That said, his conscience demanded that he speak out.

Juving came at a price. It had political, social, and economic consequences. It put a strain on the world’s resources. It put a premium on long life at the expense of new life and new blood. It widened the gap between the haves and have-nots.

None of this was news. But it bore repeating. At some point people were going to have to find a way to pack more life into less time. Be satisfied with a shorter life span. A century and a half, say. Two, max. A radical idea, but progress rode on radical hooves. Civilization would be nowhere without them.

He paused at this point. He’d said what he had to say, but the message seemed incomplete. More a sermon than a farewell. But sometimes sermons worked.

And farewells … well, they were never less than awkward.

He saved the message, then returned to the lab, where the preparation was complete. A tincture-size amount of concentrated NOK remained in the flask. He decanted this into a bottle equipped with a spray head, then took it to the cargo bay.

The HUBIES seemed instantly alert to his presence. As he approached, their delicate nasal hoods retracted, their nostrils quivered, and their eyes swung like pendulums, then centered on him. The air felt charged. Even the Ooi, ever mute and mysterious, seemed to be holding its breath.

He administered his potion to the HUBIES. Sprayed each of their nostrils inside and out, until they were saturated. Repeated this, emptying the bottle, then moved a respectful distance away to wait.

It didn’t take long. Their bodies were pint-sized. The potion was concentrated. First their eyelids drifted shut, then their chests stopped moving, then their hearts stopped beating, then they were dead.

He said a prayer. Emotionally, he felt raw and nearly spent. He unfastened their harnesses, and one by one took them down. He cradled each in his arms, as he himself would not be, then tenderly tucked them into the bed they’d arrived in. Their womb was now their coffin. He closed and secured the lid, lifted the case, then headed to the door. Then paused.

He couldn’t leave without a parting word for their inscrutable visitor. He wished it had seen fit to be less opaque. He laid his palm on it a final time, thanking it for what it had been, what it was. Then he turned, and HUBIES in hand, left the bay.

The space suit was next. Getting into it was a workout; the boots, next to impossible. His back and fingers fought him every step of the way. He had to stop to catch his breath. At one point he thought he was going to faint.

If living was a chore, preparing to die was worse.

He considered going without the boots, going without anything, leaving life as he had entered it, naked and exposed. This was the last time he’d be dressing, the last time doing that most human of acts, clothing himself. Death was a journey of farewells. Internally, a shutting down; externally, a series of separations. He was no fashionista, hardly cared what he wore, but he did like a good pair of socks, and on occasion, a nice warm sweater, and it grieved him to part forever with those.

The space suit was bulky. He felt mildly claustrophobic. Worse once he got the helmet on and locked in place. Started breathing fast; heart started racing. Chest felt tight, like it was caught in a vise. He couldn’t seem to get any air, and began to panic.

He tore his helmet off, and immediately felt better. Waited out the attack, then tried again.

The second time was an improvement. Barely a whisper of distress. Instead, he felt a flutter of excitement as he entered the airlock. The call from Laura Gleem had sidetracked him, but now he was nearly there.

His plans had changed slightly. He wouldn’t be alone. The HUBIES would be with him. Attaching their carrying case to his jetpack took time and also ingenuity. It was large and bulky, but eventually he got it strapped on and secure. A minor adjustment for him, though likely a real head-scratcher to anyone who happened to come across them in the future. Not that anyone would: a speck of a speck of a speck in infinite space. But if. If. What would they think?

A signal of some kind? A fugitive? A messenger? A traveling salesman, haplessly—fatally—thrown off course?

It made him smile to think of himself as a puzzle for someone else to solve. Wished he could be there.

He closed and locked the inside hatch. The flutter of excitement persisted. So maybe not excitement, or not only. Ignoring it, he propelled himself to the outer door.

Through its porthole he could see a wedge of Earth, its far horizon limned with the sliver of approaching sunrise. The Milky Way was resplendent, not yet erased. He felt a fullness in his heart. Then, unexpectedly, a lurch, followed by a scary pause, then a pain unlike any he’d ever felt.

He grabbed his chest, broke into a drenching sweat. Couldn’t seem to get his breath. His arms and legs felt leaden.

An alarm went off somewhere.

Thank goodness, he thought. Thank goodness for alarms and reminders. He’d been remiss. He was grateful for the warning to set things right.

Everything was happening fast. Memories, faces, and sensations flew by and blurred. One moment he seemed to have all the time in the world, the next not an instant to spare. The alarm continued, loud and insistent.

A warning? Maybe not. In fact, it seemed to be more of an announcement.

His heart was giving out.

He was dying. Could that possibly be right?

Dying on the way to kill himself? Dying on the doorstep? Before he was ready? Before he could realize his plans? Caught with his pants down, fated to be frozen forever in the act, the purgatory, of almost there.

What a joke.

The universe was laughing at him. How trite. How perfect.

The universe was perfect. It was beautiful, beyond belief.

This life—and it wasn’t done, not yet, not quite—was beautiful. He couldn’t get enough. Loved it to death.

That was rich.

He loved life to death.

Love flew out of him in every direction. Love, attachment, desire, connection—the names meant nothing—flew out: to Earth, to the stars, to the emptiness between the stars, to the dark matter and the dust, the fourteen dimensions and the fifteen cosmos, to all that was living and all that was not. Love flew, faster than light. So fast that it came back around, and wasn’t done. He knew it wasn’t done, because the alarm didn’t stop. Like a wake-up call, a catchy jingle that gets stuck in your head, a song from the symphony of life, vinyl version, with a scratched track that keeps popping back, it kept repeating, repeating, as if to prolong the suspense.

He was ready to die, but also ready to live. There was a balance in all things, and death at the moment appeared to have the upper hand. He had made his peace with this, was prepared to embrace it, but he had a passing thought, quite possibly his last: was it too late to change his mind?

The thought, impossibly, gave way to action. Marshaling every bit of strength and will, he clawed his way back to the inside hatch, unlocked it, then collapsed into the bay. It was all he could manage. He had nothing left after that.

He hovered above the floor, more or less on a level with the Ooi, which was nestled on its rock. He stared at it. He, and he alone, had believed in it, and given it life. Who was he, he had to ask, to give life?

He wasn’t God. He didn’t believe in God. Or wishes on a star.

Yet there it was. An inert, unresponsive, implacable splotch now glowing like the rising sun, like a comet’s coma. Radiating heat and light.

A miracle. Like life itself.

He didn’t ask why or how. It was enough to be bathed by its healing energy. He felt it through his suit. It warmed his skin, but didn’t penetrate farther, unable to drive away the deeper chill. There was so much of that. Too much. And it was spreading.

But the Ooi wasn’t done. It ramped itself up, burning brighter, hotter. Red, orange, yellow. It fought the chill and the gathering darkness. Drove them back.

But not far, and not for long.

The alarm kept sounding. Louder now than ever.

Death was knocking at the door.

The Ooi seemed to shudder in response. Then it drew itself up, rose from the asteroid, and began to vibrate. Then hum. The hum was unrecognizable, unlike anything he’d ever heard. From its own symphony, or rather the expanded symphony, the infinite, universal one. Musica mysterium. Heavenly and euphoric. It drowned out the alarm.

Death retreated.

But not far, and not for long.

Eternal darkness was like a fog that might lift for a minute, an hour, a lifetime or two, but in the end would return to engulf all. A fog of oblivion. It sent its lacy tendrils toward him now. They carried the smell of death. An honest smell. Awful, but beguiling.

It filled his nostrils, then his mind.

Death was upon him.

The Ooi refused to yield. It hovered above the asteroid, and seemed to melt. Bubbles appeared on its surface, and as they burst, he smelled something new in the air. Sweet but not too sweet, rich but not too rich. Fresh and deeply satisfying. A smell to put iron in the blood and hair on the tongue. The smell of life, which overwhelmed the smell of death, and silenced the alarm.

But only for a little while.

Like a school bell, signaling the end of recess, it returned. Like a barking dog, it wouldn’t stop.

He was growing weary of the sound. Weary to the bone. He longed for peace and quiet.

He looked to the Ooi for help, but it had nothing more for him, nothing more to give. It had done what it could. He thanked it with all his heart, and wished it well.

The wish was his final thought.

After that, there were only sensations. A roaring in his ears. A pungent, earthy scent. A spreading chill, and something opposing it, the embers of a fire, pale red and ghostly pink, growing ever fainter. He saw a ray of light, felt a spark, then was swallowed by darkness.