Connie Willis - Passage

“There isn’t,” she said, grabbing a bottle of wine off the bar.

He snatched at the wrist of her hand holding the bottle. “I work out at the health club three times a week!”

“It doesn’t matter. The Titanic had sixteen watertight compartments, she had the latest safety features, and it didn’t matter. An iceberg gashed her side and—” she said, and remembered her blouse and the little ooze of blood.

“It doesn’t look like a very bad cut,” Maisie had said, scrutinizing the diagram of the Titanic. And it wasn’t, but belowdecks, inside, water was pouring into the watertight compartments, spilling over into the engine room and the chest cavity and the lungs. “How bad is it?” Captain Smith asked, and the architect shook his head. “It’s nicked the aorta.”

“What is it?” Greg asked, letting go of her wrist. “What’s the matter?”

“Nothing,” she said, thinking, You have to get the message to Richard. “I need something to open the wine bottle with.”

“There isn’t time. We have to get up to the Boat Deck,” he said, and his face was furious, frantic, like the face of the boy in the Avalanche jacket, whirling toward her…

“I have to do this first,” Joanna said, and began opening drawers, digging through silverware.

“I found this,” Greg said, and held out a knife to her. A knife. He had had a knife. But when she looked down, she hadn’t been able to see it. Because it had already gone in. “We’ve got a stab wound here,” the resident had said. “Get a cross match.” But it was too late. Belowdecks it was roaring out, into the staterooms and staircases, putting out the boiler fires, flooding the passages. Flooding everything.

“Give it to me,” Greg said and wrenched the wine bottle out of her hand. He pried the cork out with the point of the knife, clumsily. The wine spilled on the flowered carpet, dark red, soaking into the carpet and her cardigan and Vielle’s scrubs.

“We’ve got a stab wound here,” the resident had said to Vielle, but it wasn’t Vielle’s blood, it was hers. She sank against the bar, holding her side.

Greg was bending over her, holding the open bottle out. “Now can we go up to the Boat Deck?” he said.

The boats are all gone, she thought, staring dully at the bottle. There’s no way off the ship. “I’m going,” Greg said, and put the bottle in her helpless hand. “There have to be boats on the other side. They can’t all be gone.”

But they are, Joanna thought, watching him run out. Because I’m the ship that’s going down. I’m dying, she thought wonderingly, he killed me before I could tell Richard, and remembered why she had wanted the bottle.

She had wanted to send a message, but it was impossible. The dead couldn’t send messages from the Other Side, in spite of what Mr. Mandrake said, in spite of Mrs. Davenport’s psychic telegrams. It was too far. But Joanna stood up and poured the wine out onto the carpet, looking steadily at the dark, spreading stain. She folded the sheet of White Star stationery into narrow pleats and put it in the bottle, tamping the cork down and then prying it out again and putting in the note to Mr. Rogers’s sister, too.

She climbed back up the aft staircase to the Boat Deck, holding on to the railing with her free hand because the stairs had begun to slant, and walked over to the railing and threw the bottle in, flinging it far out so it wouldn’t catch on one of the lower decks, straining to hear the splash. But none came, and though she stood on tiptoe and leaned far out over the rail, peering into the black void, she could not see the water below, or the light from the Californian, only darkness. “SOS,” Joanna murmured. “SOS.”

Richard called up the neurotransmitter analysis for Joanna’s first session and scanned through the list. No theta-asparcine, and there hadn’t been any in any of Mr. Sage’s NDEs either.

He called up her second session. None there either. Theta-asparcine wasn’t an endorphin inhibitor, but it might affect the L+R or the temporal-lobe stimulation. Dr. Jamison had said she had a paper on recent theta-asparcine research findings. He wondered if she was back from her errand, whatever it was.

He glanced at his watch. Nearly two. Unless Dr. Jamison called in the next fifteen minutes, he wouldn’t be able to meet with her until after Mrs. Troudtheim’s session, and he’d wanted to find out if there was a possibility that it was the theta-asparcine and not the dithetamine dosage that was interrupting Mrs. Troudtheim’s NDEs.

He called up the third session and stared at the screen, frustrated. There it was, big as life, theta-asparcine, and Joanna had been in the NDE-state for—he checked the exact time—three minutes and eleven seconds.

Which puts me right back at square one, he thought, and there was no point in going through Joanna’s other sessions. He called up her and Mrs. Troudtheim’s analyses again, looking for some other difference he might have missed, but every other neurotransmitter was present in other scans, including the cortisol.

Could the cortisol alone be aborting the NDE-state? It was present in other sessions, but only Amelia Tanaka’s had shown similar high levels, and if Mrs. Troudtheim’s NDE-state threshold was lower, less cortisol might be needed to interfere with the endorphins. He’d ask Dr. Jamison.

And where was she? And where was Joanna? Tish would be here any minute to set up, and he had hoped Joanna would come before Tish did, so he could ask her about her most recent account. She’d said she’d experienced a feeling that Mr. Briarley was dead, which was obviously another manifestation of the sense of significance, but there had only been midlevel temporal-lobe activation in the area of the Sylvian fissures.

He looked at his watch again. Maybe he should call Dr. Jamison. She had said she’d page him when she got back to her office.

He thought, You turned your pager off so Mandrake couldn’t page you, and no wonder you haven’t heard from Dr. Jamison. He pulled the pager out of his lab coat pocket and switched it on. It immediately began to beep. He went over to the phone to call the switchboard.

“Dr. Wright!” a voice said from the door, and a young Hispanic woman in pink scrubs burst into the room. “Are you Dr. Wright?” she said, breathing hard and holding her side. There was blood on her scrubs.

“Yes,” he said, slamming down the phone and hurrying over to her. “What is it? Are you hurt?”

She shook her head. “I ran—” she said, panting. “I’m Nina. Nurse Howard—there’s an emergency. You’ve got to come down to the ER.”

Vielle’s been hurt, he thought. “Did Dr. Lander send you?”

She shook her head, still trying to catch her breath. “Dr. Lander, she—Nurse Howard sent me. You need to come right away!”

Maisie, he thought. She’s coded again. “Is this about Maisie Nellis?”

“No!” she said, frustrated. “It’s Dr. Lander! Nurse Howard said to tell you it’s an emergency.”

He gripped her shoulders. “What about Dr. Lander? Is she hurt?” Nina gave a kind of whimper. “You said the ER?” Richard said and was out the door and over to the elevator, punching and repunching the “down” button.

“This guy came into the ER,” Nina said, following him, “and he must have been on rogue because all of a sudden, he pulled a knife—”

Richard punched the elevator button again, again. He glanced up at the floor lights above the door. It was on first. He took off running for the stairs with Nina on his heels, clutching her side. “—and I don’t know what happened then,” she said, “it was all so fast.”