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Robin. Is a chance, a very good chance-"
I made a tremendous effort. "There . . . is . . . no . . . hereafter,"
I said, strongly, spacing the words out with the best articulation I could
manage. It may not have been clear, but she understood me. She bent and kissed
my forehead. I felt her lips move against my skin as she whispered:
"Yes. Is a hereafter now."
Or maybe she said "a Here After."
22
Is There Life after Death?
And the stars sailed on. They didn't care what was happening to one biped
m~mm~i1ian intelligent-well, semiintelligent-living thing, simply because it
happened to be me. I have always subscribed to the egocentric view of
cosmology. I'm in the middle and everything ranges itself on one side of me or
another; "normal" is what I am; "important" is what is near to me;
"significant" is what I perceive as important. That was the view I subscribed
to, but the universe didn't. It went right on as though I didn't matter at
all.
The truth is that I didn't matter just then even to me, because I was out of
it. A good many thousand light-years behind us on Earth, General
Manzbergen was chasing another batch of terrorists who had hijacked a launch
shuttle and the commissaris had caught the man who had taken a shot at me; I
didn't know and, if! had known, wouldn't have cared. A lot closer, but still
as far from us as Antares is from Earth, Gelle-Klara Moynlin was trying to
make sense of what the Heechee were telling her; I didn't know
that either. Very close to hand indeed, my wife, Essie, was trying to do
something she had never done before, though she had invented the process, with
the help of Albert, who had the entire process in his datastores but had not
hands to do it with. About that I would have cared a great deal if I had known
what they were doing.
But I couldn't know, of course, since I was dead. I did not, however, stay
that way.
When I was little my mother used to read me stories. There was one about a man
whose senses were somehow scrambled after a brain operation. I don't remember
who wrote it, Verne, Wells, one of those biggies from the Golden Age-somebody.
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What I remember is the punch line. The man comes out of the operation so that
he sees sound, and hears touch, and the end of the story is him asking, "What
smells purple?"
That was a story told me when I was little. Now I was big. It was not a story
anymore.
It was a nightmare.
Sensory impressions were battering at me, and I couldn't tell what they were!
I can't describe them now, for that matter, any more than I can describe. . .
smerglitch. Do you know what smerglitch is? No. Neither do I, because I just
made the word up. It's only a word. It has no meaning until it is invested
with one, and neither did any of the colors, sounds, pressures, chills, pulls,
twitches, itches, squirmings, burnings, yearnings-the billion quantum units of
impression that were assaulting naked, tender me. I didn't know what they
meant. Or were. Or threatened. I don't know what to compare it to, even. Maybe
being born is like that. I doubt it. I don't think any of us would survive it
if it were.
But I survived.
I survived because of only one reason. It was impossible for me not to.
It's the oldest rule in the book: You can't knock up a pregnant woman, and you
can't kill someone who is dead already. I "survived" because all that part of
me that could be killed had been.
Do you have the picture?
Try to see it. Flayed. Assaulted. And most of all, aware I was deciL
Among the other stories my mother read me was Dante's Inferno, and what I
sometimes wonder was whether Dante had some prevision of what it would be like
for me. For if not, where did he get his description of Hell?
How long this lasted I did not know, but it seemed forever.
Then everything dwindled. The piercing lights moved farther away, and paler.
The terrifying sounds were quieter, the itches and squeezes and turbulences
diminished.
Fbr a long time there was nothing at all, like Carlsbad Caverns in that scary
moment when they turn off all the lights to teach you what dark is. There was
no light. There was nothing but a distant confused mumbling that might have
been the circulation of blood around the stirrups and anvil in my ears.
If I had had ears.
And then the mumbling began to hint of a voice, and words; and, from a long
way off, the voice of Albert Einstein:
"Robin?"
I tried to remember how to speak.
"Robin? Robin, my friend, do you hear me?"
"Yes," I shouted, and do not know how. "I'm here!" as though I knew where
"here" was.
A long pause. Then Albert's voice again, still faint but sounding closer.
"Robin," he said, each word spaced as though for a tiny child. "Robin. Listen.
You are safe."
"Safe?"
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