Connie Willis - Passage

“Which means they haven’t experienced those things. As I expected. Have they experienced the Life Review and the Revelation of the Mysteries of the Cosmos?”

“No.”

“And the Bestowing of Powers?”

“Bestowing of Powers?” Joanna said. That was a new one.

“Yes, many of my subjects display enhanced paranormal abilities after their return: clairvoyance, telepathy, communications from the dead. I don’t suppose any of your subjects have evidenced such abilities?”

No, Joanna thought, because if I had, I’d be using them to send a telepathic message to Richard to come and save me.

“I take it your silence means they haven’t, which is not surprising. No laboratory stimulation of the brain could do any more than create physical sensations and the NDE is not physical, it is spiritual. It shows us the world that lies beyond death, the Reality beyond reality, and a number of my subjects have been in touch with that reality. Mrs. Davenport…”

Maybe I do have telepathic powers, Joanna thought. I knew we’d get around to Mrs. Davenport sooner or later.

“…received a message from her great-grandmother last night, a message she knew to be authentic. Do you know what that message was?”

“ ‘Rosabelle, believe?’ ” Joanna said.

Mr. Mandrake glared at her.

“She said, ‘There is no fear here,’ ” Mr. Mandrake intoned, “ ‘and no regret.’ Have any of your subjects spoken to the dead? Of course not, because these so-called simulations of the NDE are just that, mere physical imitations. Mrs. Davenport has also received messages from a number of…”

Joanna looked longingly at the door, and Richard, impossibly, emerged with an armful of scan printouts and file folders. “Oh, Dr. Lander, there you are,” he said, bending to lock the lab door. “I was afraid you’d forgotten.”

“Forgotten?” Joanna said.

“Our meeting.”

“Oh, our meeting,” Joanna said, clapping her hand over her mouth, “with Dr. Tabb. I did forget. You’re lucky you caught me. I was just on my way home. I’m sorry, Mr. Mandrake. Dr. Wright and I have a meeting—”

“Ten minutes ago,” Richard said, looking pointedly at his watch. “And you know how Dr. Tabb is about punctuality.” He took Joanna’s arm.

Mr. Mandrake pursed his lips. “This is extremely—”

“We’re late. If you’ll excuse us,” Richard said to Mandrake. He led Joanna rapidly toward the stairs and through the door.

“Thank you,” Joanna said, racketing down the stairs beside him. “In another minute he’d have had me going down to see Mrs. Davenport, who is now receiving messages from the dead. How did you know we were out there?”

“Telepathy,” he said, grinning. “And Mandrake’s piercing voice. Who’s Dr. Tabb?”

“Mr. Tabb is a patient I interviewed two years ago. I didn’t want to name a real doctor for fear he’d go try to get information out of him.”

“Well, hopefully he’ll spend the next few days searching for Dr. Tabb instead of paging us.” They’d reached the bottom of the stairs. “Which way are we least likely to run into him?”

“This way,” Joanna said, leading him through the oncology ward to a service elevator. “I can get out to the parking lot from here,” she said, “oh, but you can’t go back to the lab, can you? Not if we’re supposed to be in a meeting.”

“That’s okay. I wanted to talk to you anyway. Shall we go get something to eat?”

“That’d be great,” Joanna said, feeling inordinately pleased, “but I’d imagine the cafeteria’s closed.”

It was. “Is it ever open?” Richard asked as they stared through the locked glass doors.

“No,” Joanna said. “What now? You don’t have any food in your lab coat, do you?”

He made a search and came up with a Mountain Dew and half a Hostess cupcake. “I need to restock,” he said. “How does Taco Pierre’s sound? Oh, wait,” he rummaged through his pockets again, “I don’t have my keys.”

“I’ve got mine,” Joanna said, “but you don’t have a coat.”

“Taco Pierre’s has hot sauce, and your car does have a heater, doesn’t it?”

“It does,” Joanna said.

She cranked it all the way up to high as soon as they got in and handed him her mittens, but he was shivering by the time they got to Taco Pierre’s, and he ordered two coffees with his tacos. “One for each hand,” he explained, and picked up six packets of extra hot sauce on the way to the table.

The dining area was littered with taco wrappings and straw papers. Joanna had to wipe off their table with a napkin before they sat down. “Somebody has got to open a restaurant closer to the hospital,” Richard said.

“A nice restaurant,” Joanna whispered, smiling at him. The place was a mess, the blond, tattooed kid behind the counter looked like the mug shot of the nail gunnee, and it wasn’t exactly a romantic setting, but it was warm, and deserted. And it’s a date of sorts, Joanna thought, Vielle will be so pleased, and felt pleased herself, taking a bite of a Tater Torro that had been fried at least a week ago. “At least it’s warm in here,” she said.

“And the coffee’s cold. So what did Mandrake have to say? I missed the first part.”

She told him while they ate. “And now Mrs. Davenport’s receiving messages from the dead.” She sipped thoughtfully at her Coke. “I wonder if they’re in code.”

“In code?” Richard asked, drinking his cold coffee. “Yes, like the message Houdini promised to try and send his wife after he died,” Joanna said, taking a bite of taco.

“ ‘Rosabelle, believe,’ he told her, but the message was really ‘Rosabelle answer, tell, pray-answer, look, tell, answer-answer, tell.’ The words stood for the letters in ‘believe.’ It was the code they’d used in their old mind-reading act.”

“Did he succeed?”

“No, and if anybody could have gotten a message through, it was Houdini,” Joanna said, taking a drink of her Coke, “though doubtless in a couple of days Mrs. Davenport will announce that she’s spoken to him personally and he’s told her,” she affected a sepulchral voice, “ ‘There is no fear here, and no regret.’ ”

“ ‘And no daring underwater escapes,’ ” Richard said in the same ghostly tone. “Why does the afterlife always sound like the most boring place imaginable?”

“Boring might be good,” Joanna said, thinking of the empty darkness beyond the bridge, of the officer saying, “There’s water on D Deck.”

“You mean as opposed to the Titanic,” Richard said, as if he were telepathic. He crumpled up the papers his burrito had been wrapped in. He took the tray over to the trash. “Actually, that’s what I wanted to talk to you about.” He rummaged through the file folders on the seat next to him and pulled out the transcript of her NDE. “You keep saying it’s the Titanic,” he said. “How do you know it is?”

So much for this being a date, Joanna thought. “I’m not claiming it’s the actual Titanic,” she said patiently. “I explained that before. It isn’t the historical ship that went down in 1912. It’s—I don’t know—some sort of Titanic of the mind.”

“I know,” Richard said. “That’s not what I’m asking. How do you know what you’re seeing is the Titanic?”

“How do I know it is?” she said. “I heard the engines stop and saw the passengers out on deck. I saw them signaling the Californian.”

“Correction,” Richard said, looking through her stapled account, “you saw them signaling something. No mention was made of the Californian. You assumed that.” He took a sip of coffee. “There’s no mention by any of these people you saw of an iceberg or a collision. In fact, the steward says he thinks it was a mechanical problem.”