The Ministry for the Future

by Kim Stanley Robinson

  He was asleep, or at least had his eyes closed, and she sat down on one of the chairs and decided not to wake him up, to wait for that.

  He looked ill. The instrumentation hummed, his pulse bumped the scrolling graph over his head. Faint smell of starch and sweat and soap. Ah yes: she knew this world.

  She sighed and sat back. Hospice, in effect. Even if they were still making efforts to save him or give him time, this was still hospice. She knew this place. The halfway house between this world and no world.

  It was a quiet place, much attenuated. Much had already gone away. Remaining was water, some food, food as fuel, which she had seen be refused, to speed the process along; also painkillers, also removal of wastes. Catheter tube running out from under sheet to a plastic bag hanging from the bed frame. She had sometimes brought music into these places, as the one thing that need not fall away, that some part of the failing mind might recognize and enjoy, or at least be distracted by. The boredom inherent in the situation was as bad for the dying person as for those visiting; or worse. Left with time to think, as in a night of insomnia that never relented. Except sleep did come. The drugs helped that, and simple exhaustion. Failing functions in the brain. Sleep came in to fill the emptied spaces, and as so often in life it was a blessing, for even if one woke uneasy and unrefreshed, some time had been passed out of awareness, out of pain. Sleep that knits the ravelled sleeve of care; not exactly, in her painfully unravelled insomniac experience, but it was a beautiful phrase nonetheless. The rocking of the vowel sounds was like the cradle itself. Shakespeare’s gift for phrasing. A true poet. The great poet, erratic though the plays always seemed to her. Hit or miss, shots in the dark. Garbled messes with perfect knots of tense confrontation. She recalled once in the Abbey Theatre, Falstaff and Hal confronting each other in a scene that must have lasted an hour, the two fencing with each other, enjoying the contest of wits, but with something dangerous at stake too, something deep. Their friendship, unstable on the great disparity of their situations. Maybe she and Frank had been a bit like that. That hour would never leave her.

  Nor this. Well, this was hospice. There was too much time to think. Let the mind roam. She could pull out her phone and read or check her mail, sure. She could listen to music on earbuds, or bring in a little speaker box if he wanted to listen too. But also, she could just sit there. Rest. Think. Run over in her mind the conference that had ended, and everything else: their last hike in the Alps; those wild creatures up there living their lives. Those creatures too must die in pain, with some of their kin huddled round them seeing them out, presumably. Or just alone out there. Tatiana. Martin, the hospice he had died in. There was a tendency to range widely in these situations, she had found, as if sitting on the edge of a cliff, with a view out to the edge of the world, like at the Cliffs of Moher but even higher. The sidewalk over the abyss, as Virginia Woolf had put it: sitting on the edge of that sidewalk with one’s feet kicking in the empty air, staring down into the abyss or out at the horizon, or back at the sidewalk that had seemed so important as they walked it, now revealed as a gossamer strip through careless air. No, life— what was it? So deep and important and full of feeling, so crucial, then suddenly just a blink, a mayfly moment and gone. Nothing really, in the grander scheme; and no grander scheme either. No. A vertiginous perch, the bedside chair in a hospice.

  Certainly it was impossible to avoid the realization that this was going to happen to her too, someday. Usually one could dodge that thought; it was a distant thing, one could avoid thinking of it. Take it on, get used to it in small theoretical doses, forget about it again. Live on as if that would always be the case. But in a room like this one the real situation obtruded as if out of another dimension. Thus the vertigo, the sense of scale. A great reckoning in a little room, indeed. This phrase was supposed to be Shakespeare’s reference to Marlowe’s death, which was generally understood to have resulted from a drunken fight over a pub bill. Sudden and stupid eruption of hospice reality into mundane reality.

  That first visit right after the conference, he never woke. She left with a little guilty sensation of relief. She knew very well it would be hard to talk with him in any comfortable way. He had not ever been one for mincing words or papering over a situation with some kind of comforting nostrum. He had not ever been comfortable with her visiting him. It had been like punishing him and she had done it anyway.

  The next time she visited, she found his ex-partner and her child in the room. The girl was now a young woman and looked miserable. Youth was no protection from the exposure of a room like this, indeed for youth it might even have more of an impact, being perhaps new, or at least unusual; the calluses had not yet formed, the reality of death was more shocking, less buffered.

  His ex looked unhappy as well. They sat on the chairs upright, twisting their hands together, looking anywhere but at him. He regarded them with what Mary thought was a kindly look, full of regret and love. Seeing it was like a needle stuck in her heart; she had thought he was beyond feeling, that he had dismissed them somehow. But of course not. A mammal never forgets a hurt; and they all were mammals. And here these two were. They were afraid of him, she saw. Not just afraid of death, but of him. She wasn’t sure he saw that. Maybe he did and loved them for coming anyway. The young woman would remember this for the rest of her life. All her anger would have to include this too. The one who lives longest wins. But then has to carry the burden of that victory, that horrid feeling of triumph. It would never be good to feel that.

  I’ll come back later, Mary said.

  We were just leaving, the mother said. The daughter nodded gratefully. We were just leaving. He may be tired.

  Frank’s little smile belied that, Mary thought. Thanks for coming, he said. I appreciate it. I’m sorry you had to come. Sorry for everything— you know.

  No no, the woman said, tears spilling down her cheeks all of a sudden. We’ll come back again. It’s not far.

  Thank you, Frank said. He reached out a hand and she took it and squeezed it. Then his daughter lunged forward and put her hand on the back of her mother’s. For a moment they held hands like that. Then the young woman rushed out of the room, and, weeping, the mother followed.

  Sorry about that, Mary said to Frank. I didn’t mean to intrude.

  That’s all right. They wanted to leave.

  No.

  It’s all right. They were here a while.

  I can come back later.

  Not necessary. Sit for a while if you want. Maybe you could hit the nurse button. I’d like to get them to bring some juice.

  Sure.

  They sat there in silence. After a while a nurse came by with apple juice in a small cup with a sealed cap and a straw protruding from it. Hospital equipment, disabled people accommodated as well as could be; he drained it in a single suck.

  I can probably find a water fountain and refill that, Mary offered.

  Please.

  She wandered the hall, found a water fountain near the restrooms. Sealed cap hard to get off, but she could do it. Cup too small. Trying to keep patients from choking, from overhydrating? She didn’t get it.

  She dragged her heels getting back to the room, but there was no avoiding it.

  Back on the chair. He avoided meeting her eye, she thought. She would have to exert herself to make this work.

  We had a good meeting, she said.

  Yeah? Tell me about it.

  So she did. It was interesting to try to summarize the whole event in a way he would appreciate. The day of accomplishments, the day of outstanding problems. The difficulty in reconciling the two. The difficulty in giving up any sense of influence on the process, much less control. When you ride a tiger it’s hard to get off. The Chinese had known this feeling for a long time.

  How were the Chinese? he asked, curious. Are they on board with all this?

  Yes, I think so. I get the impression that they feel confident they’re at the center of the story, or one of the main players. Fo
r them, it’s not just the United States anymore. They have rivalries with Russia and India that are also collaborations. They have contacts everywhere. I think they know they’re crucial. I don’t see the Party beating the drum about the century of humiliation anymore, or not as much. It doesn’t make sense to the Chinese alive now. Including the leadership. So they seem to be relaxing into a feeling of confidence, of being taken seriously. No one can bully them anymore, not even the US. It would be stupid to try. And they can see that everyone’s beginning to do things more like them. I mean state-owned enterprises. Everyone’s taking over money and energy and even land, they’re all seen as public trusts now, and that’s how the Chinese have always treated them. So the containment of the market, of finance— they must feel they led the way on that, or gave everyone an example of how to do it.

  So it’s really America that is the main problem, Frank said.

  Mary sighed. I suppose. It’s so easy to blame you for everything, you lead with your chin, but I’m never comfortable with that. There’s so much good along with the bad. The country of countries, that kind of thing.

  I wonder if people said that about Britain when it was the world power.

  I don’t know.

  Not in Ireland.

  Well that’s true! She laughed. Although it has to be said, there was some good in the Brits and their empire, even in Ireland.

  I bet you don’t say that when you’re there.

  No, I don’t.

  Suddenly he winced. His forehead popped sweat.

  Are you all right? she asked.

  He didn’t reply. He buzzed the nurse, which was a reply of sorts. When one showed up, he asked her for pain relief. Mary felt her stomach clench. Of course. Pain. Enough to cause sweat to pop out of you, to cause your face to go gray. Break-out pain, they called it. She had seen this before, but it had been a long time.

  Maybe I’ll come back later, she said.

  Okay, he said.

  95

  I am a thing. I am alive and I am dead. I am conscious and unconscious. Sentient but not. A multiplicity and a whole. A polity of some sextillions of citizens.

  I spiral a god that is not a god, and I am not a god. I am not a mother, though I am many mothers. I keep you alive. I will kill you someday, or I won’t and something else will, and then, either way, I will take you in. Someday soon.

  You know what I am. Now find me out.

  96

  In the weeks that followed she began to take her pad with her to the clinic where Frank was being cared for. A period of surgeries and interventions had given way to a routine of palliative care. He could get out of bed, and with help shuffle out into the clinic courtyard, a pleasant walled space dominated by a big shade tree, a linden. He would sit there looking up into the leaves and the sky. There were flowerbeds, well-tended, but he never seemed to look at these. As far as Mary could tell, his ex and her daughter never came back to visit again. Once she asked him about it and he frowned and said he thought they had come by once or twice, but he couldn’t be sure when it had been. She even asked one of the nurses about it, and was told it was not information they could share, that she would have to ask him.

  It didn’t matter. Acquaintances from the apartment co-op he had so briefly occupied came by, and friends from jail. So he said. Whenever she came by he was alone and seemed like he had been that way for the whole of that day, no matter when she came. It could have just been his manner, which was getting more and more withdrawn, but she began to think her impression was right; he was seldom visited. As his condition worsened, and he was more and more confined to his room and even his bed, on an IV drip of pain meds and who knew what else, she began to spend more and more time there. She realized that she believed, as much as she believed anything, that when someone was dying, it wasn’t right that they be left alone, stuck in a bed, attended only sporadically by nurses and doctors. That wasn’t proper; it wasn’t human; it should never happen.

  And so she began to make his room her office. She brought in a music box; found a small chair she could borrow from the clinic to use as a footstool; added a pillow to the chair she sat in, to give her back more support.

  After that she began every day with a quick breakfast in her safe house, filled a thermos with coffee, then went to the office to check in, then continued on to Frank’s room. There she settled into her chair with her pad, started Miles Davis’s Kind of Blue on the music box to announce her arrival, and got to work on her pad. If she had to make a call she stepped out into the hall and spoke as briefly and quietly as she could. Her bodyguard detail, almost always Thomas and Sibilla, got comfortable in their own ways out in the clinic reception area. Their job had to be boring, she judged, but they did not complain. When she mentioned it they just shrugged. We like it that way, they said. Better that way. Hope it stays that way.

  These days, Frank spent most of his time asleep. This was a relief to both of them. When he woke, he would stir, groan, blink and rub his eyes, look around red-eyed and confused. His face was swollen. He would see Mary and say “Ah.” Sometimes that was all, for minutes at a time. Other times he would ask how she was doing, or what was happening, and she would reply with a quick description of the latest news, especially if it pertained to the refugee situation. If it was about Switzerland in particular, she read to him off her pad, so he could get as much information as there was. Otherwise she gave him her impressions.

  Most of the time he slept, uneasily, fitfully. Drugged. Sometimes he lay still, but often he shifted restlessly, trying to find a more comfortable position.

  Sometimes he would come to suddenly and seem fully awake, although eyeing her from a great distance. Once when he was like this, he said out of the blue, “Now you’ve got me kidnapped.”

  She growled at that, a little nonplussed. “A captive audience is never very satisfying,” she replied at last, trying to keep it light.

  “You could help me escape.”

  “That’s what I’m doing.”

  “You’re not very good at it.”

  “Well, you’re in maximum security here.”

  “Still visiting me in jail then.”

  “ ’Fraid so.”

  Another time he woke and stared at her, then knew her, and where he was. He said quietly, “I’ll be sorry not to see what happens next. It sounds like things are getting interesting.”

  “I think so. But, you know. No one will live long enough to see an end to it.”

  “More trouble coming?”

  “For sure.” She looked at her in-box; she would have to scroll down for a couple of minutes to get to the bottom of it. “Something this big is going to go on for years and years.”

  “Centuries.”

  “Exactly.”

  He thought it over. “Even so. The crux, you called it once. The crux is a crux. You might see an end to that anyway.”

  She nodded, watching him. Instinctively she always shied away when he talked about his death. She recognized that fear in her— that some barrier would crack and they would fall together into an unbearable space. But she had learned to stay quiet and let him go where he would. There was no point in keeping someone company if you wouldn’t follow them where they wanted to go.

  This time, he fell asleep while still formulating his next thought. Another time when she walked in he was already awake, sitting up and agitated. He saw her and reached out for her so convulsively she thought he might fall off the bed.

  “I just jumped through the ceiling,” he exclaimed, wild-eyed. “I woke up and I was standing on this bed, and then I jumped up through the ceiling, right up there!” Pointing up. “But then I still couldn’t get away. I tried to but I couldn’t. I fell back down and then I found myself here again. But I jumped right through the ceiling!”

  “Wow,” Mary said.

  “What does it mean?” he cried, transfixing her with his look, his face vivid with dismay and astonishment. “What does it mean.”

  “I don’t know
,” she said immediately. She reached out and touched his hand, both twining her fingers with his and shifting him back toward the middle of the bed. “Sounds like you had a vision. You were trying to get out of here.”

  “I was trying to get out of here,” he agreed.

  She let go of him and sat in her chair. “It’s not time yet,” she ventured.

  “Damn,” he said.

  “You’re a very strong person.”

  “So I should be able to do it,” he objected.

  She hesitated. “Well,” she said. “It cuts both ways, I guess. It wasn’t your time yet.”

  He stared at her, still completely rattled. Of course, to have a real vision— to hallucinate— to try to fly out of this world— it was bound to be upsetting.

  She didn’t know what to say. Now he was weeping, looking right at her still, tears rolling down his cheeks. Seeing it she felt her eyes go hot and tears well up. Something leaping the gap from face to face, some kind of telepathy, some primate language older than language. It was like seeing someone yawn and then yawning yourself. What could you say?

  She tapped on the music box and got Kind of Blue going. Their theme music now, this album, flowing along in its intelligent conversation. She sat back in her chair, let the familiar riffs flow over them together. She reached out and they held hands for a while. He clutched her hand from time to time. After a while he relaxed, fell asleep, and was deeply out the rest of the day.

  Another day, struggling unconscious on his bed, writhing even, he suddenly came up from under, as if to breathe, and saw her there and turned his head aside, pained somehow. He was drugged, confused, only semi-conscious if that. Out of that condition she heard him mutter, “It’s only fate. It’s only fate.”

  She stared at him. His face was sweaty, both bloated and drawn at the same time. His breathing was labored; he pulled in air with desperate heaves, as if he could never get as much as he needed. When she was sure he was fully out, she said, “My friend, there is no such thing as fate.”