Analog Science Fiction & Fact 2014 09 by Sheila Williams

Author:Sheila Williams [Williams, Sheila]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Periodicals:Science Fiction
Publisher: Penny Publications
Published: 2014-09-01T05:00:00+00:00

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Vladimir Chong Chooses to Die

Lavie Tidhar | 4657 words

The clinic was cool and calm, a pine-scented oasis in the heart of Central Station. Cool calm white walls. Cool calm air conditioning humming, coolly and calmly. Vladimir Chong hated it immediately. He did not find it soothing. He did not find it calming. It was a white room; it resembled too much the inside of his own head.

"Mr. Chong?" The nurse was a woman he recalled with exactness. Benevolence Jones, cousin of Miriam Jones who was his boy Boris's childhood sweetheart. He remembered Benevolence as a child with thin woven dread-locks and a wicked smile, a few years younger than his own boy, trailing after her cousin Miriam in adoration. Now she was a matronly woman in starched white and dreadlocks thicker and fewer. She smelled of soap. "The mortality consultant will see you now," she said.

Vlad nodded. He got up. There was nothing wrong with his motor functions. He followed her to the consultant's office. Vlad could remember with perfect recall hundreds of such offices. They always looked the same. They could have easily been the same room, with the same person sitting behind them. He was not afraid of death. He could remember death. His father, Weiwei, had died at home. Vlad could remember it several ways. He could remember his father's own dying moment—broken sentences forming in the brain, the touch of the pillow hurting strangely, the look in his boy's eyes, a sense of wonder, filling him, momentarily, then blackness, a slow encroachment that swallowed whatever last sentence he had meant to say.

He could remember it from his mother's memories, though he seldom went into them, preferred to segment them separately, when he still could. She was sitting by the bed, not crying, then fetching tea, cookies, looking after the guests coming in and out, visiting the deathbed of Weiwei. She spared time for her boy, for little Vlady, too, and her memories were all intermingled of the moment her husband died, her hand on Vlady's short hair, her eyes on Weiwei who seemed to be struggling to say something then stopped, and was very still.

He could remember it his own way, though it was an early memory, and confused. Wetness. Lips moving like a fish's, without sound. The smell of floor cleaner. Accidentally brushing against the cool metal leg of R. Brother Patch-It, the robo-priest, who stood by the bed and spoke the words of the Way of Robot, though Weiwei was not a practitioner of that, nor any other, religion.

"Mr. Chong?"

The mortality consultant was a tall thin North Tel Aviv Jew. "I'm Dr. Graff," he said.

Vlad nodded politely. Dr. Graff gestured to a chair. "Please, sit down."

Vlad sat, remembering like an echo, like reflections multiplying between two mirrors. A universe of Chongs sitting down at doctor's offices throughout the years. His mother when she sat down and the doctor said, "I'm afraid the news is not good." His father after a work injury

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