Connie Willis - Passage

As soon as she was gone, Maisie sat up. “Okay, tell me,” she said. “You think she went to see somebody and they told her something, don’t you? That’s why you came to see me, because you thought it was me, right? But it wasn’t. I bet it was one of her NDE people, so the first thing we’ve gotta do—”

“We?” Richard said. “You aren’t doing anything except resting.”

“But I could—” Maisie stopped short and slumped back against the pillows.

“Maisie?” he said, glancing anxiously at Kit, who had looked at the monitor and then back at Maisie. Maisie was watching the door.

Lucille came in with a small can with a straw in it. She set it on the tray across Maisie’s bed. “All of it,” she said.

“This is vanilla,” Maisie said. “Don’t you have any chocolate?”

“All of it,” Lucille said and walked out.

“I hate vanilla,” Maisie muttered, and pushed the can to one side. “I bet Mr. Mandrake knows who all the NDE people are. We could go ask—”

“You aren’t going anywhere, Maisie. I mean it,” Richard said, “you’re not going to do anything except rest and get strong so you’ll be ready for your new heart. Kit and I will find out who Joanna was talking to.”

“I wouldn’t be doing anything,” Maisie said, appealing to Kit. “Just asking people when they come to do stuff if they saw her talking to anybody, the guy who empties the wastebasket and stuff. I wouldn’t even get out of bed.” She looked at Richard. “Please. Joanna said I was really good at finding stuff out.”

And you fully intend to go ahead whether I give you permission or not, he thought. He wondered how Joanna would have handled her, and then realized he knew. She had put her to work looking up wireless messages and Pacific islands. “All right,” he said, looking at Kit, who nodded, “you can help, but you have to promise you’ll rest—”

“And do everything your nurses tell you,” Kit said.

“I will,” Maisie said meekly.

“We mean it,” Richard said. “You’re just to ask questions. You’re not to do anything or go anywhere.”

“They won’t let me anyway,” Maisie said disgustedly, and Richard wondered what the story behind that was. “I promise. I’ll just ask questions.”

“All right,” Richard said. “The time we’re looking for is after eleven and before twelve-fifteen.” Maisie started to reach over to the nightstand, and Kit leaped to get a pencil and tablet for her.

“Eleven and twelve-fifteen,” Maisie said, writing them down. “Do you want me to page you when I find out?”

Richard smiled. “You can just call me,” he said. He fished one of his cards out of the pocket of his lab coat.

“What if you’re not there?”

“You can leave a message on my answering machine,” he said, and, at her skeptical look, “I promise I’ll come the minute I get the message.” He looked at his watch.

“We’d better go,” Kit said, standing up. “It’s been two minutes.”

“You can’t go yet. I don’t have your number,” Maisie said. “In case Dr. Wright’s answering machine doesn’t work.”

The master staller at work. She wrote down Kit’s number and then Vielle’s. “But you’re not to call the ER,” Richard said sternly. “They’re very busy. You call me.”

“I will,” Maisie said meekly.

“Now, you drink your Ensure and rest,” Richard said, and they started for the door.

“You know what this is just like?” Maisie said.

“What?”

“It’s just like the Titanic. They had to figure out what happened to the people, only they were dead, so they had to talk to other people and find out what they did and who saw them and stuff.”

Piecing together the tragedy, bit by bit, conversations and glimpses and last words. “Joanna was crazy about you, you know,” Richard said, and Maisie nodded solemnly.

“I knew she wouldn’t just go off and leave me.”

“Are you going to be all right, Maisie?” Kit asked.

“Uh-huh,” Maisie said. “It’s almost time for the magazine lady to come. She goes all over the hospital giving people magazines. I bet she might have seen Joanna. Kit, can you fluff up my pillows before you go?”

It took them another five minutes and Lucille’s finally coming in to get away. “You’re right,” Kit said as they waited for the elevator. “She’s quite a kid.”

“How did you know I should tell her about Joanna?” Richard asked her.

“She looked just like my uncle Pat the day he got the diagnosis,” she said, staring at the closed elevator door. “There are worse things than death.”

“Like letting someone down.”

Kit looked up at him. “We’re not going to let Joanna down. We’re going to decipher her message.”

But how exactly? By piecing together bits and pieces and conversations. Kit brought him the list of garden references she’d found in among the transcripts and another one headed “Abrupt NDE Returns.”

“That’s from several weeks ago. I’ve already seen it,” he told Kit, but when he looked at it again, he noticed Amelia Tanaka’s name on the list, and when he checked her account against that session’s scans, he found she’d come out of the NDE-state on her own, and that theta-asparcine was present.

He went through all of her NDEs and then started on Mr. Sage’s. Testimony was of no use with Mr. Sage, but when Richard checked the scans, he found that he’d gone straight from the NDE-state to waking twice. Both times theta-asparcine had been present. But it wasn’t present in Mr. Pearsall’s NDEs, or Mr. O’Reirdon’s.

He worked on the scans until his eyes began to burn, and then walked over to the west wing and mapped the rest of the floors, asking assorted nurses and orderlies, “How can I get up to eight-east from here?” and, “What’s the quickest way down to the ER?,” jotting down the answers, and adding the routes to his map.

In between, he pored over Maisie’s list of wireless messages. They were almost unbearable to read, a litany of increasing disaster and desperation: “We are on the ice.” “We are putting the women off in boats.” “Require immediate assistance.” “Sinking fast.” “SOS. SOS. SOS.”

There was a clue here somewhere, a connection. Joanna had had a reason for asking Maisie to look them up, but he was as dense as the ships replying to the Titanic’s SOSs had been. “What is the matter with you?” the Olympic had asked, and then unbelievably, “Are you steering south to meet us?” The Frankfurt had been so clueless that the wireless operator had snapped at him, “You fool, stand by and keep out!” and even the Carpathia’s operator had asked, “Should I tell my captain?” Thick-headed fools, all of them, unable to figure out a perfectly simple message. Like me, he thought.

Vielle called. “I found somebody else who saw Joanna. Wanda Rosso. She’s a radiologist. She says she saw Joanna on four-west around eleven-thirty.”

“Where on four-west?” Richard asked, calling up the map of Mercy General.

“She was getting into an elevator.”

There were two banks of patient elevators and two service elevators on four-west. “Which elevator?” he asked.

“She didn’t say,” Vielle said. “I assume the one by the walkway.”

“Ask her,” Richard said. “Did this Wanda know in which direction Joanna was going?”

“She couldn’t remember,” Vielle said. “She thinks she remembers the ‘down’ arrow being lit, but she’s not sure. I asked her if Joanna looked excited or happy, and she said she didn’t notice anything except that she seemed to be in a hurry because she kept looking up at the floor numbers and tapping her foot.”