Eric Brown: Penumbra

He had always assumed she would get better. To be told that Ella would soon die had filled Bennett with a sense of disbelief and, later, anger.

Two days later Ella had died, with Bennett and his parents at her bedside, and with her impossible death something within Bennett seemed to vacate him, leaving in its place a vast and terrible emptiness.

A week after the funeral, his father had interrupted his com-screen lessons. He had done his best to avoid his parents since Ella’s death; he felt a residual resentment at being kept in the dark for so long, and had no desire to see his grief mirrored in theirs. Now his father said: “We’ve decided to establish a memorial to Ella, Joshua, in the garden where you played together.” And he had told his son what it was.

He had avoided going into the garden for a long time after Ella’s death. He did not want to be reminded of his loss. The memorial seemed to him a crass memento of someone once so vital and alive. Later he wondered why people with the Christian beliefs of his parents had erected such a tawdry icon, and came to understand that it was merely their way of coping with a grief just as real and painful as his own.

Perhaps a year after her death, Josh realised that he could no longer hear Ella’s voice in his head. He had forgotten the sound of her confiding words, her excited chatter, and that terrified him. One afternoon, after ensuring that his parents were away from the dome, he had stepped with trepidation and curiosity into the enclosed garden.

Now Bennett pushed open the rusty iron gate to the memorial garden. A riot of untended blooms, frangipani and rude bougainvillaea, crowded the paved enclosure like unwelcome guests at a party. He quickly crossed the garden, his throat tight and sore, swept away fallen leaves from the mock-timber bench and sat down. A high voice asked, “Hi, Josh, how’s things in space these days?”

The dark-haired little girl in a blue dress crouched before Bennett, tanned arms wrapped about tanned legs. Her blue eyes, so treacherously alive, stared at him with delight.

He came almost every leave to the memorial garden, and every time the sight of Ella struck him a painful blow in the solar plexus.

“Oh, fine… you know, it’s a job.”

“Anything exciting happened?”

She stood and moved to an overhanging branch, reached up, grasped it and swung back and forth. She was perhaps a metre from him, as visually substantial as the bench on which he sat. He stared at the brown straining muscles of her arms, her impishly pretty face and long black hair. He wanted suddenly to reach out, take her in his arms and crush her to him, and the desire brought tears to his eyes.

“I was in a close shave yesterday, Ella,” he said. He told her about the accident, enjoying her open-mouthed, wide-eyed reaction, her little girl exclamations.

As they chatted, the pain abated. He enjoyed the company of this ersatz sister, this companion ghost of many years. She might only have been a fabulously intricate simulated identity hologram, a genie conjured by state-of-the-art logic circuits, and no more real or sentient than the com-screen back at his dome, but the illusion satisfied some deep need within him. She salved his pain, briefly; she fuelled his memories.

“Ella, you know I told you that Daddy was ill last time?”

She nodded, suddenly serious. “How is he?”

He shrugged. “I don’t know. I mean, not good. He’s just so old—over a hundred now.”

Ninety years older than you were when you died, Ella. There was no justice in the world.

“Does he still tell you off?”

Bennett smiled. What a little girl thing to say! It was what he loved about his hologram sister. It was just what Ella would have said.

“No, not any more, Ella. He’s still... I don’t know, censorious—I mean critical. Still finding fault in everything l do. I’d like to win his respect,” he said, and hated himself for the admission. He shrugged. “He’s very old and frail now, but inside he’s still the same person he always was.”

“Why do you mention him, Josh?”

There were times when the program was just too advanced, Bennett thought. Would Ella have asked him that?

“His doctor contacted me yesterday. Dad wants to exercise his right to undergo euthanasia.”

Ella frowned. She was seated cross-legged on the ground now, her hands placed primly on her bare knees. “What’s eutha— whatever?”

“It means he wants to die. He wants to take a drug that’ll end his life. I’ve got to go and see him today. Talk it over.” He stared into her big, unblinking eyes. “You don’t understand, do you?”

She pursed her lips, then nodded. “I think I do, Josh. You feel guilty.”

The program running the simulated identity hologram had a learning facility. Over the years it had integrated everything Bennett had said to Ella, analysed and interpreted his pronouncements for meaning.

“It’s just…” He shook his head. “I don’t want to do this, Ella. I can’t face him about this. I don’t want him to see that I understand his life’s been a terrible failure.” After so long being so distant from his father, he realised, the time was coming when they would have to share an unaccustomed emotional proximity. Perhaps it was just that he didn’t want his father to see that he really cared.

Ella was smiling at him. “You’ll do okay, Josh,” she said. “You know what you always tell me?”

“What?”

She pulled her pretty, thinking-cap face. “What is it—something like, reality is never as bad as you expect it to be.”

He laughed. “I’ll remember that, Ella. Thanks.”

They stared at each other for a long time.

At last she said, “Josh,” and slowly, watching him, she reached out a slim brown arm, fingers outstretched towards him.

He reached too, staying his hand so that his finger-tips were millimetres from her own, so as not to spoil the illusion. Like this, he told himself, in the long silence there was some kind of contact happening that could not be quantified by logic.

He dropped his hand. “I must be going, Ella.”

Still seated, she gave a quick wave in the air. “Come back soon, okay, Josh?”

“I’ll be back.” He stood, and the image of his sister disappeared before his eyes.

It was almost ten when Bennett reached Mojave Town.

Automobiles were not allowed within the city limits, so he parked in the small lot on the perimeter. Rather than take an electric bus, he walked the two kilometres to the town centre.

He shared the wide streets with citizens out jogging or strolling, cleaning-drones that seemed to have very little to clean, and children on scooters. The habitats on either side of the streets occupied spacious, abundant gardens, an eclectic collection of the latest domes, mock-timber A-frames and more conventional carbon-fibre houses. The high foliage of a thousand evergreens shaded the town, and power was provided by tall masts which pierced the canopy and opened petal-like energy panels to the burning desert sun.

The Oasis Medical Centre occupied extensive grounds in the centre of town, over two dozen polycarbon units linked by a warren of diaphanous passages set in rolling landscaped gardens. Bennett strolled across the avenue and into the hospital. He found reception and was directed down long corridors to the consultancy rooms of Dr Samuels.

The door opened automatically at his approach, forestalling his attempt to knock. He stepped inside.

“Mr Bennett, I’m glad you could make it. If you’d care to take a seat.”

Samuels, as informal in person as he had appeared on the vis-link that morning, moved from his desk and sat on the window-seat overlooking the rolling greenery. Bennett took the offered swivel seat and turned to face the doctor.