Projections by Stephen Robinett

Author:Stephen Robinett [Robinett, Stephen]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Ace
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

Tomus

HE IS UTTERLY HUMORLESS AND DETERMINED. This morning he learned he will die. He has said nothing since. Brooding? Possibly. He has never brooded before. The sensation is annoying. I have my work to do. His silence is more unnerving than his usual chatter. This morning, idly, just after breakfast, he asked about death.

Tomus, what is death?

I answered frankly. I always try to answer frankly. We have come, over the years, to an uneasy, communicative peace. I don’t know.

You must know, Tomus. You know everything.

I noticed his voice. It came through the thin barrier between our personalities with a changed quality, retaining its usual impression of wide-eyed innocence, but somehow different. The quality escaped me.

Not everything. I don’t know everything, I answered, only half paying attention, my mind occupied with my own work. My mathematical model of our galaxy, the core of my interstellar navigator, had yet to crystallize in my mind. Reconciling the converging series of equations demanded by the curvature of space with the infinite series demanded by the expanding universe, is, as one might imagine, taxing. His questions, by comparison, are merely annoying, tedious, usually simpleminded, seldom humorous, always without wit. He is uncultivated.

You must know, he insisted.

Will you please shut up!

Tomus, this, I think, is important.

Not very.

You must tell me about death.

It is one of the few things I have never experienced.

But you know about it.

It is the maximum entropy of a biochemical system.

He chewed on that awhile, allowing me to work through several equations. Ultimately my galactic model will be used to program a navigational computer, the perfect map. I was deep into a conflicting pair of equations when he finished chewing.

Tomus.

What?

Somehow your answer is unsatisfying.

It is accurate.

What is entropy? What is a biochemical system? Tomus, what is death?

Do you remember the dog? The dog, a friend of our early years together, the years after I allowed him to remain, had died, as dogs do, after fifteen years. It grew old. Entropy increased. It died. Maximum entropy, its scampering quantum of energy spreading back to the universe.

I remember the dog.

That is death.

I got a great amount of work done after that. Occasionally he began to ask something, then fell silent. About noon he broke the silence.

Will I die?

Yes.

And you, Tomus? Will you die?

It’s possible.

But I will die. You are sure of that.

Yes.

He said nothing else. He says nothing else. He is brooding. I sense his determination. He wants to live. To think of himself gone, nonexistent, expired, kaput, upsets him. He broods. At least he is quiet.

I finish my day’s work and go out to eat. The sun, a dull fat orange on the horizon, autumn fruit, has nothing in it of summer. Winter approaches. It is still beautiful. My four hundred summers and winters merge in my mind, each beautiful, each different. Only my work is the same, unchanging, new problems but the same mental processes.

I walk across the broad lawn in front of the Center. I recognize few of the strollers. It is too much trouble to keep track of who is where.

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