An old man
sitting at sickbed. Hospital rooms are all the same. Clean, white,
cool, humming, fluorescent. On the sickbed lies a man, tall,
dark-skinned, thick black eyebrows. Sleeping fitfully. The old man
is hunched at his head. One finger touches the skull behind the
ear. Under his breath the old man is muttering. “If it’s an
allergic response, then your own immune system has to be convinced
that the allergen isn’t really a problem. They haven’t identified
an allergen. Pulmonary edema is usually high-altitude sickness, but
maybe the mix of gases caused it, or maybe it was low-altitude
sickness. You need to get water out of your lungs. They’ve done
pretty well with that. The fever and chills might be amenable to
biofeedback. A really high fever is dangerous, you must remember
that. I remember the time you came into the baths after falling
into the lake. You were blue. Jackie jumped right in— no, maybe she
stopped to watch. You held Hiroko and me by the arms, and we all
saw you warm up. Nonshivering thermogenesis, everyone does it, but
you did it voluntarily, and very powerfully as well. I’ve never
seen anything like it. I still don’t know how you did it. You were
a wonderful boy. People can shiver at will if they want, so maybe
it’s like that, only inside. It doesn’t really matter, you don’t
need to know how, you just need to do it. If you can do it in the
other direction. Bring your temperature down. Give it a try. Give
it a try. You were such a wonderful boy.”
The old man reaches out
and grabs the young man by the wrist. He holds it and
squeezes.
“You used to ask
questions. You were very curious, very good-natured. You would say
Why, Sax, why? Why, Sax, why? It was fun to try to keep answering.
The world is like a tree, from every leaf you can work back to the
roots. I’m sure Hiroko felt that way, she probably was the one who
first told me that. Listen, it wasn’t a bad thing to go looking for
Hiroko. I’ve done the same thing myself. And I will again. Because
I saw her once, on Daedalia. She helped me when I got caught out in
a storm. She held my wrist. Just like this. She’s alive, Nirgal.
Hiroko is alive. She’s out there. You’ll find her someday. Put that
internal thermostat to work, get that temperature down, and someday
you’ll find her. . . .”
The old man lets go of
the wrist. He slumps over, half-asleep, muttering still. “You would
say Why, Sax, why?”
