The Fountain of Age by Nancy Kress

Author:Nancy Kress
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Science Fiction, Short Fiction
ISBN: 9781931520454
Publisher: Small Beer Press
Published: 2012-01-01T05:00:00+00:00

They found him two days later. It took that long for basic city services to begin to resume and for anyone to approach the Dumpster. Cixin was catatonic, dehydrated, bitten by rats. He was taken to the overburdened hospital. Ben was called when a nurse discovered Cixin’s name and phone number sewn into the waistband of his jeans—Renata’s idea. He found Cixin rigid on a gurney parked in a hallway jammed with more patients. He had an IV, a catheter, and multiple bandages. His eyes were empty.

Ben put the inhibitor on Cixin’s tongue. Slowly Cixin woke up, his dark eyes over sunken cheeks turning reproachful. Ben yelled for a doctor, but no one came.

“Cixin.”

“They . . . didn’t . . . know,” he croaked.

“It’s okay, buddy, I’m here now, it’s okay . . . Who didn’t know what?”

But painfully Cixin turned his face to the wall and would say no more.

The staff wanted to do a psych evaluation. Ben argued. They turned stubborn. Eventually he said they could get a court order if they wanted to but for right now he was taking his boy home as soon as the treatment for dehydration was completed. The harassed hospital official said several harsh things and promised legal action. A day later Ben signed out Cixin AMA, against medical advice, and drove him home through streets returning to normal much faster than anyone had thought possible.

There was a dreary familiarity to the scene: Cixin asleep in his room, Ben and Renata with drinks in the living room, talking about him. How many times in the last few months had they done this? How many more to come?

Renata had just come from the small bedroom. She’d asked to talk to Cixin alone. “He won’t tell you anything,” Ben had warned, but she’d gone in anyway. Now she sat, pale and purse-lipped, on Ben’s sofa, holding her drink as if it were an alien object.

“Did he tell you anything?” Ben said tiredly. He stood by the window, facing her.

“Yes. No. Just what he told you—‘They didn’t know’ and ‘Let me go back.’ Plus one other thing.”

“What?” Jealousy, perverse and ridiculous, prodded him: Cixin had talked more freely to her than to him.

“He said there was a big explosion, a long time ago.”

“A big explosion?”

“A long time ago.”

That hardly seemed useful. Ben said, “I don’t know what to do. I just don’t.”

Renata hesitated. “Ben . . . do you remember when we met? At Grogan’s?”

“Yes, of course—why wouldn’t I? Why bring that up now?”

“I was correcting papers, remember? My students were supposed to answer questions about Wheeler’s two-slit experiments.”

Ben stared at her. She was very pale and her expression was strange, both hesitant and wide-eyed, completely unlike Renata. “I remember,” he said. “So?”

“The original 1927 two-slit experiment showed that a photon could be seen as both a wave and a particle that—”

“Don’t insult my intelligence,” Ben snapped, and wondered at whom his nasty tone was aimed. He tried again. “Of course I know that. And

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