The Fountain of Age (27 page)

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 your students were writing about Wheeler’s demonstration that observation determines the outcome of which one a photon registers as.”

“The presence or absence of observation also determines the results of a whole slew of other physics experiments,” she said. “All right, you know all that. But why?”

“Feynman’s probability wave equations—”

“Explain exactly nothing! They describe the phenomenon, they quantify it, but they don’t explain why
observation
, which essentially means human consciousness, should be so woven into the very fabric of the universe at its most basic level. Until humans observe anything fundamental, in a very real sense it doesn’t exist. It’s only a smear of unresolved probability. So why does consciousness give form to the entire universe?”

“I don’t know. Why?”

“I don’t know either. But I think Cixin does.”

Ben stared at her.

Renata looked down at the drink in her hand. Her shoulders trembled. “The explosion Cixin said he saw in his mind—he said, ‘It made everything.’ I think he was talking about the Big Bang. I think he feels a presence of some kind when he’s in his catatonic state. That whatever genemods he has, they’ve somehow opened up parts of his mind that in the rest of us are closed.”

Ben put his glass down carefully on the coffee table and sat beside her on the sofa. “Renata, he does feel a presence. He’s experiencing decreased blood flow in the posterior superior parietal lobes, which define body borders. He loses those borders when he goes into his trance. And very rapid firing in the tempoparietal region can lead to the sense of an ‘other’ or presence in the brain. Cixin’s consciousness gets caught in neural feedback loops in both those areas—which are, incidentally, the same areas of the brain that SPECT images highlight in Buddhist monks who are meditating. What Cixin feels is real to him—but that doesn’t make it real in the cosmos. Doesn’t make it a . . . a . . .”

“Overmind,” she said. “Cosmic consciousness. I don’t know what to call it. But I think it’s there, and I think it’s woven into the universe at some deeply fundamental level, and I think Cixin was accidentally given a heightened ability to be in contact with it.”

Ben said, “I don’t know what to say.”

“Don’t say anything. Just think about it. I’m going home now, Ben. I can’t take anymore tonight.”

Neither could he. He was flabbergasted, dismayed, even horrified by what she’d said. How could she believe such mystical bullshit? He didn’t know who she was anymore.

It wasn’t until hours later that, unable to sleep, he realized that Renata also thought her “cosmic consciousness” had diverted the solar flare radiation away from Earth in order to protect Cixin.

Thirteen: Cixin

Cixin sat in his bedroom, cross-legged on the bed. His iPod lay beside him, but he wasn’t listening to it, hadn’t listened to it for the past week. Nor had he gone to school, played video games, or sent email to Xiao. He was just waiting.

Xiao—he would miss her. Ben had been very good to him, and so had Renata, but he knew he wouldn’t miss them. That was bad, maybe, but it was true.

Maybe Xiao would come one day, too. After all, if the voices were everything, and they were him, then they should be Xiao, too, right? But Xiao couldn’t hear them. Ben couldn’t hear them. Renata couldn’t hear them. Only Cixin could, and probably not until tomorrow. And this time . . .

The nurse hired to watch him while he was “sick” looked up from her magazine, smiled, and turned another page. Cixin didn’t hate her. He was surprised he didn’t hate her, but she couldn’t help being stupid. Anymore than Ben could help it, or Renata, or Xiao. They didn’t know.

Cixin knew.

And when he felt the calm steal over him, felt himself expand outward, he knew the voices would be early and that was so good!

Cixin
.

Yes
, he said, but only inside his mind, where the nurse couldn’t hear.

Come
.

Yes
, he thought, because that was right, that was where he belonged. With the voices. But there was something to do first.

He made a picture in his mind, the same picture he’d seen once before, the whole Earth wrapped in a gray fog. He made the sun shining brightly, and a ray gun shooting from the sun to the Earth, the way Renata had described it to him. The picture said POW!! Like a video game. Then he made the ray gun go away.

Yes
, formed in his mind.
We’ll watch over them
.

Cixin sighed happily. Then he became everything and went home, to where he knew, beyond any need to race around or yell at people or be
fen noon nan hi
, who he really was.

He never heard the nurse cry out.

Fourteen: Ben

She came to him through the bright sunshine, hurrying down the cement path, her dirty blond curls hidden by a black hat. The black dress made her look out of place. This was Southern California; people wore black only for gala parties, not for funerals. But Renata, his numb and weary mind irrelevantly remembered, came originally from Ohio.

Ben turned his back on her.

She wasn’t fooled. Somehow she knew that he hadn’t turned away from not wanting her there, but from wanting her there too much. No one else stood beside the grave. Ben hadn’t told his family about Cixin’s death, and he’d discouraged his few friends from attending. And they, bewildered to learn only after the death that anti-social Ben had been adopting a child, nodded and murmured empty consolations. And then, of course, there were the sunspots. A second coronal mass ejection had occurred just yesterday, and everyone was jumpy.

“Ben, I just heard and I’m so sorry,” Renata said. From her, the words didn’t sound so empty. Her eyes held tears, and the hand she put on his arm held a tenderness he badly needed but wouldn’t allow himself to take.

“Thank you,” he said stiffly. If she even alluded to all that other nonsense. . . . And of course, being Renata, she did. “I know you loved him. And you did the best you could for him—I know that, too. But maybe he’s where he wanted to be.”

“Can it, Renata.”

“All right. Will you come have coffee with me now?”

He looked down. So small a coffin. Two cemetery employees waited, trying not to look impatient, to lower the coffin into its hole, cover it up, and get back inside. To their eyes, this was a non-funeral: no mourners, no minister or priest or rabbi, only this one dour man reading from a book that wasn’t even holy.

“Please,” Renata said. “You shouldn’t stay here, love.”

He let himself be led away. Behind him the men began to work with feverish speed.

“They’re afraid,” he said. “Idiots.”

“Not everybody can understand science, Ben.” Then, shockingly, she laughed. He knew why, but she clapped one hand over her mouth. “I’m so sorry!”

“Forget it.”

Not everybody could understand science, no. In Ben’s experience, almost nobody even tried. Half the population still equated evolution with the devil. But the president had made a speech on TV last night and another one this morning:
The new solar flare presents no danger. There will be no repeat of last week’s crisis. The radiation is not reaching Earth.
Wisely, she had not tried to say why the radiation was not reaching Earth. Nor why the astronauts on
Hope of Heaven
, the Chinese space shuttle, had not been fried in orbit.
No danger
was as far as the president could go. It was already like crossing into Wonderland.

Ben and Renata walked to his Saab. If she’d parked her own car somewhere in the cemetery, as she must have, she seemed willing to leave it. Gently she took the book from his hands and studied the cover.

“I’m not giving in,” he said, too harshly.

“I know.”

“If there really were . . . ‘more,’ were really something that could be reached, contacted, by more or different brain connections—then what evolutionary gain could have made humanity lose it? Was it too distracting, interfering with survival? Too calming? Too
what
?”

“I don’t know.”

“It doesn’t make sense,” Ben said. “And if it really were genetic, really were that the rest of us aren’t making enough of some chemicals or connective tissues or . . . I just can’t believe it, Renata.”

“I know.”

He wished she would stop saying that. She handed back to him James Behren’s
Quantum Physics and Consciousness
, but he knew she’d already seen the page he’d dog-eared and underlined. She already knew that over the grave of Cixin, who could barely decipher any language, Ben had read aloud about two-slit and delayed-choice and particle-detector experiments. Renata knew, always, everything.

“Maybe,” she said after a long silence, “if they know now that the rest of us possess consciousness, however rudimentary, not just Cixin . . . if they know that, then maybe someday . . .”

She could never just leave anything alone. That’s who she was. Ben shifted the book to his other hand and put an arm around her.

“No,” he said. “Not possible.”

This time she didn’t answer. But she leaned against him and they walked out of the cemetery together, under the bright blue empty sky.