Chapter 36 #4
We floated there for a little while, watching the Sun.
I tried to understand it. I couldn’t make it fit.
The Earth was gone. I could say it, think it, but some stubborn, animal part of me refused to believe it—the same part that still refused to accept that any of this was really happening, the same part that kept expecting me to wake up or to come back to reality, blinking against a cocktail of antipsychotic medications.
It was far more frightening to think I wasn’t crazy. That all this was happening.
“How much longer?”
“Dad?”
“How much farther are we going to go?”
“I don’t know.”
“How much farther can we go? Can you even keep us alive?”
“For a time. Eventually … no. The suit’s resources will run out, as with all things.”
I nodded, not really hearing.
“Dad? Where should we go?”
I tried to shrug. Being in space made the motion more complicated. “Mars again, I guess.”
We found it, out in space. With Lyle’s help it wasn’t so hard. I had him land us on the boiling-hot surface for the next transit. On the forty-second day, Mars went from a superheated, sunbaked landscape of clay to a dark, frozen, and heavily cratered dead world.
The Sun was a tiny white spot in the sky.
“White dwarf,” Lyle said. “The Sun’s final stage.”
“What’s the haze around it?”
“The nebula of its cast-off mass following its collapse from the red giant phase. The Sun lacked the mass to generate a supernova or collapse into either a neutron star or black hole. It’s about the size of the Earth now, or the size the Earth was.
It’s essentially a very hot diamond, a gravitationally dense, highly compressed lump of carbon that will gradually cool over the coming billions of years. ”
“So, it’s dead, too.”
“Such as it was ever alive, it is now dead, yes. All the heat it has left is residual.”
“I outlived the Sun.”
“Shall I call Guinness?”
“Please do. I want a whole page dedicated to me.”
“At the very least.”
On day forty-three, I read the Word again by the light of the dead Sun and a thousand stars, sitting on the airless and raw landscape of what was left of Mars as the formerly red planet made its wide arc around what remained of the star that had given humanity life.
Lyle mentioned in passing that Mars had been lucky not to have been pulled into Jupiter as the Sun died.
This time, as I read, no passage jumped out at me.
I read Lyle’s words and let his thoughts wash over me.
I still didn’t talk about it with Lyle. I couldn’t say why, but it didn’t seem right.
Like discussing the New Testament with Saint Paul.
The value was what I took out of the words, not what Lyle meant to say.
On the forty-fourth day, there were fewer stars in the sky. The Sun was a tiny, dim dot Lyle had to highlight for me.
Lyle and I discussed our options.
“There aren’t really any,” I said. “We sit here and wait to die as the universe dies all around us.”
“Unless something changes, I’m afraid that’s all we can do. I will keep you alive for as long as I can.”
On the forty-fifth day, we left Mars. It had become unstable.
“Atomic decay is heating the center of the planet,” Lyle said.
“What’s left of our solar system is careening toward the galactic core of what used to be the Milky Way or Andromeda, which collided some time ago; or, rather, they spiraled into one another and pulled one another apart, re-forming on the other side.
We are, in effect, in another galaxy now.
Eventually, the tidal forces from the super black hole in the center of the galaxy will tear the planet apart. ”
“How long are we talking?”
“A very long time, for anyone except you.”
“And you.”
“Yes. And me.”
We flew, warping space-time before us, away from Mars, away from the hulking mass of the galactic core, away from anything I’d ever known or called home.
I talked to Lyle to keep from hallucinating again.
I told him everything I could think of. He listened and interjected a comment or asked a clarifying question as I rambled on, disjointed and unfocused.
I was passionate, as if my existence depended on communicating my life to Lyle.
Things I’d never had time to tell him, things I’d been waiting to talk to him about—and things I had already told him but reiterated now, as much for him as for me. Putting the pieces together.
I told him of my childhood, starting from the beginning as though my life was a great epic worth telling.
Growing up in the suburbs of Chicago. Grandma Miriam.
My father’s blistering, constant disappointment, and my mother’s tepid silence.
It felt important that he understand them, even though I didn’t really understand them myself.
I tried to convey the physical and social agonies of junior high school, and the lesser agonies of high school. I told him again about Severine and Sophie, my rocks in the river. He commiserated.
I walked him through the painful story of my first prom, and the girl who’d only agreed to go with me as friends because no one else asked her and our parents knew each other.
Of the platonic kiss she’d given me on the cheek before getting out of my rusting sedan to go home at the end of the night, and how I sat there, wishing I’d asked Severine instead, wondering how she and Sophie were doing with their own dates.
In turn, Lyle told me about his prom, how Amy had been the one to pin the boutonniere on his chest because the girl he’d gone with had been afraid of stabbing him.
I told him about his mother, what she’d been like when we met in college.
Her contradictions, how she kept me at arm’s length at first, early in our relationship.
How I persevered, like some deep part of me knew we were right for one another.
Destined to come together and create Lyle, perhaps.
But I felt it was beyond that, beyond some kind of predetermined biological necessity.
Amy and I were right for each other. Never perfect.
We had our fights, our moments when Amy put her walls back up, and I’d have to wait for her to pull them back down.
But for the most part I’d been inside those walls.
She’d let me in. More than anyone else, she’d let me in.
I told him what he’d been like as a baby, as a toddler, as a child. Every detail I could remember. I painted his face with my words, drew my impression of him on the darkness of the void that surrounded us as we blurred down the tunnel of blue and red.
He asked, and I told him, about Miri, Lily, and Case. Our descendants. About all the wonderful and terrible things I’d seen since that April morning in Madison when I’d been driving to work and sleepwalking through my life. Since I left him behind.
Eventually I ran out of things to say, and he did, too.
And we continued.
On the forty-sixth day, there were fewer stars in the darkness around us.
On the forty-seventh, there were even fewer, and they were dim, even with Lyle enhancing my vision.
I panicked when I drifted to sleep and woke in the middle of nothingness.
Lyle had to administer stronger drugs to keep me from screaming and trying to claw my way through the black curtain hanging all around me.
We continued.
On the forty-eighth day, I couldn’t see anything with my naked eyes.
Open or closed, it didn’t matter. All was endless blackness.
Lyle switched wavelengths and magnifications for me, and we were able to pick out a few feeble hits on stretched wavelengths, photons from stars and galaxies whose light had reached across time and space to find us.
“Star formation has ended,” Lyle said, his voice a whisper. “You’ve traveled seven hundred and seventy-one billion years.”
On the forty-ninth day, we couldn’t see anything in any wavelength. The vacuum around us was a few hundredths of a degree Kelvin above absolute zero. I was one and a half trillion years from my time, from Amy and my job, my life. My seven-year-old genius of a son.
I was on a nearly continual drip feed of calming medication. I still felt, at various times, like screaming or running. Escaping. I wanted to die. I was finally sure. I didn’t want to freeze to death at the end of the universe as the suit’s energy resources dwindled away to nothing.
But I was most terrified of Lyle dying and leaving me alone.
It was irrational, of course: if the suit stopped working, I would die instantly as the various protections failed, freezing in a fraction of a second even with the enhancements the Consciousness had given me.
But still, the fear was there, a black shadow above me. Without Lyle, I would be utterly alone.
So, I kept talking to him—mostly nonsense, rambling and barely coherent, if at all. But Lyle kept responding, kept nudging me on, and so I survived, comforted by the drugs and his calm voice in my ear.
We flew on.
And, at some point, the dark, silent, dying universe slipped around us once again.