Asimov's SF, September 2006

by Dell Magazine Authors

  “I won't,” she said tartly. But she couldn't look him in the eye. Sometimes she had stayed online until three or four in the morning, her eyes so bleary she could hardly read. She promised herself she would do better.

  So in the following days, she limited her computer time to a couple of hours in the evening, and tried to keep to her usual schedule—volunteering at the local library, teaching adults to read, finishing a quilt for her granddaughter Jasmine. But the tests and appointments loomed over everything: lymph node dissections, liver tests, a chest x-ray, and finally a scan of her brain.

  She knew from her research that her prognosis worsened with each new test. But she also felt increasingly dissociated from the test results and images the doctors showed her as they explained what was wrong with her body. She felt fine, except for her sore scalp. Those pictures must belong to someone else. Surely.

  Then the day came when no more tests were scheduled and she sat in the overstuffed chair again with Dr. Anderson beside her and dark pictures of her brain lying on his desk.

  She gulped. Dr. Anderson took a breath, but she could not bear him to speak first.

  “How long do I have?” she asked.

  He paused, and she wanted to shake him. “The melanoma has spread to the brain,” he said in his careful doctor's voice.

  A chill washed over her, froze her to her chair. Spread to the brain. It was not a surprise—she had imagined this moment, even expected it. But she felt shocked and unprepared, as if she had awakened without warning in a different time, or on a different planet.

  Her brain—the melanoma was in her brain.

  Goddamn it.

  She felt his hand on her arm, and jerked away. He leaned back. “It's inoperable, unfortunately,” he continued. “There's not much chance of a cure. I'm—"

  “I know that,” Pearl snapped. She felt lightheaded, dizzy. “How long?” she repeated.

  Dr. Anderson reached toward her again, then let his hand drop to his knee. She wished he would be rude, brusque, insensitive, so she could be angry instead of afraid. But his voice remained gentle. “A year at the outside, if radiation treatments are effective. More likely six months.” He looked at her, his eyes steady and compassionate. “I'm sorry,” he said.

  But Pearl hardly heard him. She was having trouble breathing. She remembered something Philip had said when he was three. All the air is out of my tummy. Now her tummy was that empty.

  “There are treatments that may give you more time,” Dr. Anderson added.

  She closed her eyes to shut out his face. Treatments—but for what? A few more weeks of misery? She had seen some of her friends go through that. No, damn it, she wouldn't. She sat up straight and looked at him.

  He waited.

  “I don't want any treatments,” she said. “Just for pain, that's all. I've lived longer than most people on this planet hope to. If I'm going to die anyway, I don't want to stretch it out just to make somebody else feel better."

  “It's certainly your choice,” he said. “But take some time to think about it. We can do more than we used to. Maybe even a clinical trial—"

  “No.” She stood up, trembling right down to her fingertips. “No treatments. And no machines. Read my living will."

  “I'm glad you have one,” Dr. Anderson said quietly.

  “I'm not stupid!” Pearl shook with fury. She needed to leave, to get out, before she burst into tears in front of this man who knew her brain better than he knew her. She clutched her purse to her side and reached for the door. “I have to go now."

  “Are you sure? You can stay for a few minutes. No hurry."

  She closed her eyes, took a couple of breaths. She had to stay calm long enough to get out of the office. “No,” she said steadily. “I have to go."

  Dr. Anderson put his hand on her shoulder. This time she endured his touch, but she barely held back the tears. “All right,” he said. “But call me if you have more symptoms, or if you change your mind about treatments. Or if you have any questions, any at all."

  “I'm not going to call you. I'm going on a trip.” Only as she spoke did she realize what she would do. “I'm going to Greece. And Botswana."

  She left him standing in his office doorway, looking ten years older than when she had come in.

  The moment she closed her car door, her composure shattered. She clung to the steering wheel and wept. So this was how it would end, seventy-four years of life, good life, struck down by a renegade mole on her scalp. How utterly trivial.

  How was she going to tell Philip?

  She knew immediately—she wouldn't. Not Philip, not anyone, not until she had to. Philip would insist on coming home, staying with her through every last minute, giving up the work he loved on the wildlife reserve in Botswana. No, she would not let him. She was his mother, and it was her privilege to protect him. He would be angry when he found out, but as long as she allowed him a good-bye, his anger would mend.

  Not until that night when she lay in bed, staring into the darkness, did it occur to her that by telling no one she protected herself, too. If people knew she had a fatal disease, they would pity her, whisper about her, put on overly cheerful or kind faces.

  How she would hate that.

  She left for Greece the following week. She wore hats and scarves to cover the evidence of surgery, feeling quite stylish, and she told everyone in her tour group about the Spanish word, jubilado, that sounded so much nicer than “retired.” They all laughed—only two were under sixty—and dubbed themselves “the jubilant retirees.” E-mail and snail mail addresses were exchanged, and everyone promised to stay in touch.

  But the last thing Pearl wanted was more people waiting for news about her illness. So she said good-bye warmly and discarded her address list before boarding the plane to Botswana, where she toured the wildlife reserve with Philip and his wife, and danced the hokey-pokey with Jasmine. She could almost pretend she was well.

  But she knew the melanoma was growing, and would catch up to her in the end. Almost as soon as she returned home, she started having dizzy spells. She reviewed her will, sorted her belongings, and put off calling Philip as long as she could. If she could not die in her own time, she could at least die as much as possible on her own terms.

  * * * *

  "So what about you?” Señor Rueda asked. “How did you get to be here?"

  "Melanoma. After a bad sunburn at Teotihuacan."

  "Ah.” His dark eyes bored into her. “And?"

  Suddenly Pearl knew what she had done. “I touched the Sun Stone. Because of you. You said you had touched it, and it was a special thing."

  Señor Rueda laughed grimly. “Even I didn't know how special. I suppose that means you're my sacrificial captive. To us Mexica, that's like family."

  The surrounding soldiers surged forward, carrying Pearl and Señor Rueda with them. She fought to stay near the professor. They ended up pinned back to back as the crowd cheered the waxing light.

  "Is it like this every day?” she shouted.

  "Every day,” he replied.

  "Don't we turn into butterflies or hummingbirds after four years?"

  "So they say. I think I have two years left. One loses count."

  Pearl didn't wonder at that. She was finding it hard to think in the din.

  A passing soldier shouted, “Hail One-vulture!"

  "Nine-serpent!” Señor Rueda shouted back. “A terrible sign,” he explained to Pearl. “Nines are the worst."

  "What about fours?” she asked. “I think my sign is four-movement. I tried to figure it out once. But I don't know if the calendar I was using was accurate."

  He grabbed her by the shoulders. “Four-movement? Do you know what day that is?"

  Pearl shook her head.

  "It's the day-sign of the sun. The fifth sun.” He paused. “Those born on that day are destined either to take captives or to be sacrificed."

  Pearl grunted. “I guess we know what happened to me, don't we?” A loud cheer soun
ded. “So what happens now?” she asked.

  "We carry the sun."

  A blinding light burst upon them. Pearl raised her shield. A hole the size of an arrow's shaft let a few rays pass through. She drew the shield close and squinted through the hole. In the middle of the reddened sun-disk she made out a flickering face, traced in solar flares. The mouth gaped.

  "Come!” shouted Señor Rueda. “It's time!” He broke into a run. Pearl followed him toward the dawn.

  * * * *

  Ice melted slowly on Pearl's tongue. With great effort she swallowed the water that dribbled into her throat. How long would she be entangled with this failing, aching body? She struggled to pull her thoughts in from where they wandered, and found herself concentrating on her name. Pearl. But this flesh, this thing lying in a hospital bed was not her, not Pearl. Pearl roamed the Acropolis. Pearl raised a son, alone. Pearl traveled to Mexico and explored the Great Temple.

  That Pearl would not have endured the way people whispered around her now. Her son, home with his family from Botswana, her daughter-in-law, her sister, and assorted in-laws of her sister whom she could no longer keep straight. Why couldn't they be quiet? She had enough trouble trying to think without having to filter out their babble. Especially now that the pain medication dulled her.

  But not Jasmine. She silently exempted her granddaughter from the list of unwelcomes. Jasmine read books to her daily, for which Pearl blessed her, even when she fell asleep or could not follow the story. The others acted as if her brain were already gone, which it wasn't, not quite. Not yet.

  Ten months. She had beaten the melanoma for ten months, and she was proud of that. But she wouldn't want another ten months in this bed, even if she could have them.

  Not that she expected much of death. She didn't expect to meet God, and she certainly didn't believe in heaven or hell.

  But she did entertain a fantasy—something that sounded so silly out loud that she had never mentioned it except to Burney, who had smiled but hadn't laughed—that when she died, if she did not cease to be, she would at last learn everything she had always wondered about in life. Whether God existed was among the least interesting of questions. What she really wanted to know was whether conscious life existed elsewhere in the universe. What was written in the books that burned in Alexandria. How the Incas built Sacsahuaman. Who Tutankhamun's parents were.

  What the sacrifices had really meant to the Aztecs.

  Whether death would satisfy her curiosity, she would learn soon enough. She thought she was ready. But something still nagged at her, something she needed to do. Something she needed to tell Philip. What was it? Something—yes, something to do with the Aztecs, with her trip to Mexico.

  She heard the door creak and let her eyelids open half way. Just a nurse. Good. Quick hands pushed back her hair, smoothed the sheet.

  “Would you like more ice, Mrs. Richards?"

  Pearl nodded. The nurse spooned crushed ice from the pitcher. Pearl closed her mouth over it and shut her eyes. Then she opened them again. She had remembered. She struggled to lift her hand.

  “Nurse? Please?” The ice in her mouth made her garble the words.

  The nurse leaned over her. “Do you need something, Mrs. Richards?"

  She swallowed some of the ice. “Tell—Philip,” she whispered. God, she hated this feeble voice. “Tell Philip. Don't touch it. The Sun Stone. In Mexico. The Sun Stone,” she repeated.

  “Tell Philip not to touch the Sun Stone,” said the nurse. “Is that right?"

  Pearl nodded. “They say it's special. A special thing. But don't touch it."

  “I saw it myself once,” the nurse said. “It is a special thing. But I didn't touch it."

  Pearl lifted her hand and pointed. “Don't forget.” Suddenly it seemed terribly important. The nurse said, “I'll remember,” and gently pressed Pearl's hand back to the sheet. She left quietly in her soft white shoes.

  Pearl let her head fall to the side, but the oxygen tube irritated her nose, so she turned back the other way. Her limbs felt heavy, and the sheets scratched like straw. She had never imagined that a time would come when she would not want to live. But she was so tired of dying, of the endless good-byes.

  The slow click of the doorknob reminded her that others waited, too. Quick, she told herself, now, before the sorrowing hordes return. She let go of the bedsheets, let her chest sink and be still.

  Zan achica ye nican. Just for a moment here.

  She slid into darkness.

  * * * *

  Pearl ran until the thick mass of bodies slowed and then stopped, like people in a theater converging on an exit. But this was no exit. She raised her shield and squinted at the sun. Its hungry face crept into the sky, supported by a writhing pillar that grew higher and higher as soldiers scaled their fellows to push the glowing disk toward its zenith.

  Señor Rueda stepped onto a man's back and offered his hand. “Come with me. I'll show you how we lift the sun into the sky."

  She hesitated. The mass of soldiers reminded her of insects crawling over one another. She shuddered.

  "Hurry!” Señor Rueda reached for her.

  She could not force her hand up to meet his. The image of the sun flared in her mind. Huitzilopochtli had killed her, and now he expected her to carry the sun? What about all the others who had died for the Aztec universe? The thousands of warriors? The slaves? The children with double cowlicks?

  Señor Rueda grabbed her wrist. “Come! Now!"

  From beyond the crowd, beyond the sun, beyond even the sky, a deep voice, vibrant like a string on a bass viol: “Four-movement! Help us."

  The world stopped, held its breath, as it had when she'd touched the Sun Stone. Pain and hunger flooded her. She felt the Sun's weakness, its need for her. But she remembered the slaughtered warriors, the weeping children, the flayed and dismembered ones, and she mustered her courage. “No,” she shouted. “I won't.” She shook herself free of Señor Rueda's grip, then stripped her shield from her arm and threw it into the sand.

  "What are you doing?” Señor Rueda, One-vulture, leapt down beside her. “Without us the sun will fail to rise, and the world will end. You must join us."

  Pearl sat down in the gray sand. “I tried to understand, truly I did. But I will not serve these gods. Besides, the sun doesn't really rise. The earth turns. You know that."

  Señor Rueda shook his head. “Not here, Four-movement. Not here."

  The shouts gave way to mutterings, all the way up the column to the sun and back, and then every soldier fell silent. Pearl squinted at the sun, shieldless. Was it her imagination, or did the sun rock a little back and forth?

  The deep voice spoke again, pleading. “Four-movement, without you and the other soldiers we are nothing. The sun is nothing. The world is nothing. Help us."

  Pearl jumped to her feet. “I will not spend my eternity with you, Huitzilopochtli,” she shouted. She turned her back on the sun and the soldiers. The dry plain stretched toward a distant horizon of darkness. Scraggly trees and thorny maguey plants grew in the unending sand.

  Behind her the soldiers groaned. The bass-viol voice thrummed. “Four-movement!"

  Then she heard Señor Rueda shout. “Look to the sun!"

  She turned. The golden disk rolled to the left, then to the right. The soldiers that had stopped climbing to plead with her scrambled up the column, hurrying to steady the life-giving fifth sun.

  Pearl wiped her hands on her hips and headed briskly into the desert. As she walked she studied the bleak landscape. For a moment she wondered what she would do for water and food, and whether there were rattlesnakes. Then she laughed. Silly woman! She was dead. Snakebites and sustenance were no longer concerns.

  Perhaps Burney was somewhere out there.

  Perhaps she would walk through nothingness forever.

  But anything was better than staying here. Death had not turned out the way she had expected. Of course, neither had life, and she had managed that just fine. She
would manage this, too.

  * * * *

  A maid in a cheap Mexico City hotel grabbed a bed as the floor rocked. Across the room a mirror crashed. People screamed in the street below.

  Sofía crossed herself and held her breath. At last the floor steadied. That was the third terremoto this month, and the strongest. She hoped her children were not too frightened—either by the earthquake or by what their great-grandmother would tell them. The old woman thought the world was coming to an end. When Sofía went home tonight, the abuelita would shake her finger, again. “Earthquakes,” she would croak, clutching her dark-beaded rosary. “This world ends in earthquakes. That is what my grandmother taught me, and I teach you. The last one is coming. Ya viene. Soon."

  Sofía did not dare to contradict her grandmother, but she knew that Mexico had endured earthquakes for centuries past and would probably suffer them for centuries to come. People studied the quakes now, and understood them, and maybe one day would predict them. That was what her husband said.

  Besides, he had argued, if the old stories were true, the world would have ended centuries ago, when the Spaniards arrived, and sacrifice to the old gods ceased.

  She shrugged. Who could know the future? Some things were best left to God.

  Distant sirens wailed. Car horns added to the din.

  Sofía went into the bathroom and splashed her face, as her grandmother had taught her. Then she pushed aside the curtain at the tiny bathroom window and peered out.

  The pale, fuzzy sun—the fifth sun—hung just over the roof of the next building.

  She blinked. Was it her imagination, or did the sun tremble?

  She closed her eyes, shook her head, looked once more. The sun hung as it always had, steady and still. She tried to laugh and could not.

  From nowhere a hummingbird zoomed to the window and hovered in the lower lefthand corner. Its wings flashed green as it stared through the dirty pane. The maid stared back.

  The tiny bird dipped to the right, then again to the left, swinging in wider and wider arcs. Finally it darted once more to the glass, hung briefly in the air, then tilted and sped away over the city rooftops, flying toward the sun.