Connie Willis - Passage

He went back to the lab and marked it on the map, grateful he could eliminate something. And at least they had narrowed the place she’d been going to the west wing. Unless she’d been going down to second to the walkway to Main.

He gave up and went back to the scans. He did a series of superimposes of the scans in which theta-asparcine was present, looking for pattern similarities. There weren’t any, which meant the theta-asparcine was just a side effect. Or the product of a randomly fired synapse.

And Kit had said, “It definitely has something to do with the Titanic.” The answer was somewhere in the pile of books. He sat down, pulled The Tragic End of the Titanic out of the pile, and began to read, his head propped on his hand.

“Accounts of those left on board after the last boats were gone are, of course, sketchy,” he read, “though all agree there was no panic. Men leaned against the railing or sat on deck chairs, smoking and talking quietly. Father Thomas Byles moved among the steerage passengers, praying and offering absolution. The deck began to list heavily, and the lights dimmed to a reddish—”

Richard slapped the book shut and went back over to the mind-numbing monotony of mapping the scans. He graphed the levels of cortisol and acetylcholine, and then got on the Net and did a search on theta-asparcine. There were only two articles. The first was a study of its presence in heart patients, which—

Someone knocked on the door. He turned around, hoping it was Kit, or Vielle, but it wasn’t. It was a woman in a dressy pink suit and high heels. Could this be Mrs. Haighton, he wondered, finally here, several eons too late, for her first session?

“Dr. Wright?” the woman said. “I’m Mrs. Nellis, Maisie’s mother.”

Oh, this is all I need, he thought tiredly. Here it comes. I had no business telling Maisie Joanna died, it’s terribly important for her to have only upbeat, cheerful experiences. Positive thinking is so important.

“Maisie’s told me so much about you,” Mrs. Nellis said. “I appreciate your taking the time to visit her. It’s hard to keep her spirits up, here in the hospital, and your visit cheered her up no end.”

“I like Maisie,” he said warily. “She’s a great kid.”

Mrs. Nellis nodded. She was still smiling, but the smile was a little strained. “She’s all right, isn’t she?” Richard said. “Nothing’s happened to her?”

“No, oh, no,” Mrs. Nellis said. “She’s doing extremely well. This new ACE-blocker she’s on is working wonders. She tells me you’re a research neurologist.”

He was surprised. He had had no idea Maisie knew anything about him except that he was a friend of Joanna’s. And what was all this about? If she was going to lecture him over having told Maisie about Joanna, he wished she’d stop smiling and get it over with. “Yes, that’s right,” he said, and, to give her the opening she was apparently looking for, “I’m researching near-death experiences.”

“So I was told,” she said. “I understand you believe near-death experiences may actually be some sort of survival mechanism. I also understand that you hope to use your research to develop a technique for reviving patients who’ve coded, a treatment for bringing them back.”

Who had she been talking to? Joanna would never have told her anything like that, especially knowing her tendency to unbridled optimism, and neither would Maisie. Mandrake? Hardly. Who then? Tish? One of the subjects? It didn’t matter. He had to stop this before it went any further. “Mrs. Nellis, my research is only in the very preliminary stages,” he said. “It’s not even clear yet what the near-death experience is or what causes it, let alone how it works.”

“But when you do find out how it works,” she persisted, “and when you do develop a treatment, it could help patients who’ve coded. Like Maisie.”

“No—Mrs. Nellis—” he said, feeling like someone trying to stop a runaway train, “At some point in the far-distant future, the information that we’re gathering might possibly be put to some practical use, but what that use might be, or whether, in fact, it will even turn out that—”

“I understand,” she said. “I know how uncertain and time-consuming medical research is, but I also know that scientific breakthroughs happen all the time. Look at penicillin. And cloning. Amazing new treatments are being developed every day.”

Not a runaway train, a pyroclastic flow, he thought, seeing Maisie’s photo of Mount St. Helens in his mind’s eye, the black cloud roaring unstoppably down the mountain, flattening everything in its path, and wondered if that was where Maisie had gotten her original interest in disasters. “Even if there were a breakthrough in understanding near-death experiences,” he said, knowing it was useless, “it wouldn’t necessarily result in a medical application, and even if it did, there would have to be experiments, tests, clinical trials—”

“I understand,” she said.

No, you don’t, he thought. You don’t understand a thing I’ve said. “Even if there were a treatment, which there’s not, there has to be hospital approval and clearance by the research institute’s board—”

“I know there will be obstacles,” she said. “When amiodipril was approved for clinical trials, it took months to even get Maisie on the waiting list, but my lawyer’s very good at overcoming obstacles.”

I can imagine, Richard thought.

“That’s why it’s critical to have Maisie in your project now, so all the problems can be worked out in advance. Of course, it’s all just precautionary. Maisie’s doing extremely well on the ACE-blocker. She’s completely stabilized, and she may not even need the treatment. But if she does, I want everything to be in place. That’s why I came to see you as soon as Maisie told me about your coding cure. If she’s in your project, she’ll already be approved and the paperwork all completed when the treatment becomes available, and there won’t be any unnecessary delays in administering it,” she said, but he had stopped listening at “as soon as Maisie told me.”

Maisie had told her mother? That he could bring people back from the dead? Where would she have gotten an idea like that? The only person she would ever have talked to about the project was Joanna, and Joanna had always been completely honest with her. She would never have given her false hopes. And even if she had told Maisie there was a miracle cure (which Richard refused to believe), Maisie wouldn’t have believed it. Not hardheaded Maisie, who wore dog tags around her neck so they would know who she was if she died while she was down having tests. If the Hindenburg and the Hartford circus fire and the Lusitania had taught Maisie anything, it was that there weren’t any last-minute rescues. Her mother might believe in miracle cures, but Maisie didn’t. And even if she did, she wouldn’t have told her mother, of all people.

Joanna had said Maisie never told her mother anything. She hid her books from her, her interest in disasters, even the fact that he’d told her about Joanna’s death, and her mother only allowed upbeat discussions. She would never even have let Maisie bring up the subject of coding. Something else must have happened. Maisie must have accidentally mentioned his name, and, to cover, so her mother wouldn’t find out he’d been there telling her about Joanna, she’d said something about the project, and her mother had confabulated it, through her powers of positive thinking, into a miracle cure.

“You’ll need a copy of her medical history,” Mrs. Nellis said, busily planning. “I’ll pick up the project application from Records. Maisie will be so pleased. She was so excited when she was telling me about your project. The possibility of coding again’s really worried her, I know. I told her her doctors won’t let anything happen to her, but she’s been fretting about it.”