Maya saw they were shocked, though she did not know why. Nadia had tears in her eyes, not a common sight. Michel looked stricken. Maya, sensing something seriously wrong, fled the apartment. No one stopped her.
The others picked up the place. Nadia went to Michel.
“More and more like that,” Michel muttered, looking haunted. “More and more. I feel it myself. But for Maya…” He shook his head, looking deeply discouraged. Even Michel could make nothing good of this, Michel who had worked his alchemy of optimism on all their previous reversals, making them part of his great story, the myth of Mars that he had somehow wrenched out of the daily morass. But this was the death of story. Thus hard to mythol-ogize. No — living on after the memory died was mere farce, pointless and awful. Something was going to have to be done.
Sax was still thinking about this, sitting in a corner absorbed in his wristpad, reading a collection of abstracts from recent experimental work on the memory, when there came a thump from the kitchen and a cry from Nadia. Sax rushed in to find Nadia and Art crouched over Michel, who lay white-faced on the floor. Sax called the concierge, and faster than he would have imagined possible an emergency crew had barged in with their equipment and shouldered Art aside, big young natives who brusquely encased Michel into their compact web of machinery, leaving the old ones as spectators only of their friend’s — struggle.
Sax sat down among the medics, in their way, and put a hand to Michel’s neck and shoulder. Michel’s breathing had stopped, his pulse as well. White-faced. The resuscitation attempts were violent, the electrical shocks tried at a variety of strengths, the subsequent shift to heart-lung machine accomplished with a minimum of fuss; and the young medics worked in near silence, talking among themselves only when necessary, seemingly unaware of the old ones sitting against the wall. They did all they could; but Michel remained stubbornly, mysteriously dead.
Of course he had been upset by Maya’s memory failure. But this did not seem an adequate explanation. He had already been aware of Maya’s problem, none more so, and he had-been worried; so any single display of her problem shouldn’t have mattered. A coincidence. A bad one. And of course eventually — quite late that evening, actually, after the doctors had finally given up, and taken Michel downstairs, and were clearing out their equipment — Maya returned, and they had to tell her what had happened.
She was distraught, naturally. Her shock and anguish were too much for one of the young medics, who tried to comfort her (that won’t work, Sax wanted to say, I’ve tried that myself) and got himself struck in the face for his pains, which made him angry; he went out in the hall, sat down heavily.
Sax went out and sat beside him. He was weeping.
“I can’t do this anymore,” the man said after a while. He shook his head, seemingly apologetic. “It’s pointless. We come and do all we can and it makes no difference. Nothing stops the quick decline.”
“Which is?” Sax said.
The young man shrugged his massive shoulders, sniffed. “That’s the problem. No one knows.”
“Surely there must be theories? Autopsies?”
“Heart arrhythmia,” said one of the other medics curtly as he passed by with some equipment.
“That’s just the symptom,” the sitting man snarled, and sniffed again. “Why does it go arrhythmic? And why doesn’t CPR restart it?”
No one answered.
Another mystery to be solved. Through the door Sax could see Maya crying on the couch, Nadia beside her like a statue of Nadia. Suddenly Sax realized that even if he found an explanation, Michel would still be dead.
Art was dealing with the medics, making arrangements. Sax tapped at his wrist and looked at a list of titles for articles on quick decline; 8,361 titles in this index. There were literature reviews, and tables assembled by AIs, but nothing that looked like a definitive paradigm statement. Still at the stage of observation and initial hypothesis… flailing. In many ways it resembled the work on memory Sax had been reading. Death and the mind; how long they had studied these problems, how long the problems had resisted! Michel himself had commented on that, implying some deeper narrative that explained their unexplainables — Michel who had brought Sax back from aphasia, who had taught him to understand parts of himself he hadn’t even known existed. Michel was gone. He wouldn’t be back. They had carried the last version .of his body out of the apartment. He had been around Sax’s age, about 220 years old. It was an advanced age by any previous standard; why then this pain in Sax’s chest, this hot blur of tears? It didn’t make sense.
But Michel would have understood. Better this than the death of the mind, he would have said. But Sax wasn’t so sure; his memory problems seemed less important now, Maya’s as well. She remembered enough to be devastated, after all. Him too. He remembered what was important.
Strange to recalclass="underline" he had been in her company immediately in the wake of the death of all three of her consorts. John, Frank, now Michel. Each time it got worse for her. And the same for him.
Michel’s ashes, up in a balloon over the Hellas Sea. They saved a pinch for return to Provence.
The literature on longevity, and senescence was so vast and specialized that Sax found it difficult at first to organize his usual assault on the material. Recent work on the quick decline was the obvious starting point, but understanding articles on the subject meant going back to their predecessors and coming to some fuller understanding of the longevity treatments themselves. This was an area Sax had never understood more than superficially, shying away from it instinctively because of its messy biological inexplicable semimiraculous nature. A subject very near the heart of the great unexplainable, really. He had left it happily to Hiroko and to the supremely gifted Vladimir Taneev, who along with Ursula and Marina had designed and overseen the first treatments, and many major modifications since then.
Now, however, Vlad was dead. And Sax was interested. It was time to dive into viriditas, into the realm of the complex.
There was orderly behavior, there was chaotic behavior; and on their border, in their interplay, so to speak, lay a very large and convoluted zone, the realm of the complex. This was the zone in which viriditas made its appearance, the place where life could exist. Keeping life in the middle of the zone of complexity was, in the most general philosophical sense, what the longevity treatments had been about — keeping various incursions of chaos (like arrhythmia) or of order (like malignant cell growth) from fatally disrupting the organism.
But now something was causing the gerontologically treated individual to go from negligible senescence to extremely rapid senescence — or, even more disturbingly, straight from health to death, without senescence at all. Some heretofore unseen irruption of chaos or order, into the border zone of the complex. This was how it seemed to him, in any case, at the end of one very long session of reading the most general descriptions of the phenomenon he could find. And it suggested certain avenues of investigation as well, in the mathematical descriptions of the complexity-chaotic border, likewise the order-complexity border. But he lost this holistic vision of the problem in one of his blankouts, the train of thought concerning the substance of the math gone forever. And it had probably (he tried to console himself afterward) been too philosophical a vision to do him any good anyway. The explanation after all was not going to be obvious, or else the massive concerted effort of medical science would have searched it out by now. On the contrary; it was likely to be something very subtle in the biochemistry of the brain, an arena that had resisted five hundred years of effort to investigate it scientifically, resisted like the hydra, every new discovery only suggesting another headful of mysteries…