The Fountain of Age

The Fountain of Age Read Online Free PDF

Book: The Fountain of Age Read Online Free PDF
Author: Nancy Kress
Tags: Science-Fiction, Short Fiction
her eyes. “Yes.”
    “Did your reason for seeing him have to do with any sort of . . . of mental experience? A small seizure, or an episode of memory aberration, perhaps?”
    Erin’s ringed hand tightened on her book. He noted, numbly, that today it seemed to be a novel. She said, “Let’s talk.”

    “I don’t believe it,” he said. “I’m sorry, Mrs. Bass, but it sounds like rubbish to me.”
    She shrugged, a slow movement of thin shoulders under her peasant blouse. Her long printed skirt, yellow flowers on black, swirled on the floor. Her apartment looked like her: bits of cloth hanging on the walls, a curtain of beads instead of a door to the bedroom, Hindu statues and crystal pyramids and Navaho blankets. Henry disliked the clutter, the childishness of the décor, even as he felt flooded by gratitude toward Erin Bass. She had released him. Her ideas about the “incidents” were so dumb that he could easily dismiss them, along with anything he might have been thinking which resembled them.
    “There’s an energy in the universe as a whole,” she’d said. “When you stop resisting the flow of life and give up the grasping of trishna, you awaken to that energy. In popular terms, you have an ‘out-of-body experience,’ activating stored karma from past lives and fusing it into one moment of transcendent insight.”
    Henry had had no transcendental insight. He knew about energy in the universe—it was called electromagnetic radiation, gravity, the strong and weak nuclear forces—and none of it had karma. He didn’t believe in reincarnation, and he hadn’t been out of his body. Throughout all three “incidents,” he’d felt his body firmly encasing him. He hadn’t left; other minds had somehow seemed to come in. But it was all nonsense, an aberration of a brain whose synapses and axons, dendrites and vesicles, were simply growing old.
    He grasped his walker and rose. “Thanks anyway, Mrs. Bass. Good-bye.”
    “Again, call me ‘Erin.’ Are you sure you wouldn’t like some green tea before you go?”
    “Quite sure. Take care.”
    He was at the door when she said, almost casually, “Oh, Henry? When I had my own out-of-body Tuesday evening, there were others with me in the awakened state . . . Were you ever closely connected with—I know this sounds odd—a light that somehow shone more brightly than many suns?”
    He turned and stared at her.

    “This will take about twenty minutes,” DiBella said as Henry slid into the MRI machine. He’d had the procedure before and disliked it just as much then, the feeling of being enclosed in a tube not much larger than a coffin. Some people, he knew, couldn’t tolerate it at all. But Henry’d be damned if he let a piece of machinery defeat him, and anyway the tube didn’t enclose him completely; it was open at the bottom. So he pressed his lips together and closed his eyes and let the machine swallow his strapped-down body.
    “You okay in there, Dr. Erdmann?”
    “I’m fine.”
    “Good. Excellent. Just relax.”
    To his own surprise, he did. In the tube, everything seemed very remote. He actually dozed, waking twenty minutes later when the tube slid him out again.
    “Everything look normal?” he asked DiBella, and held his breath.
    “Completely,” DiBella said. “Thank you, that’s a good baseline for my study. Your next one, you know, will come immediately after you view a ten-minute video. I’ve scheduled that for a week from today.”
    “Fine.” Normal . Then his brain was okay, and this weirdness was over. Relief turned him jaunty. “I’m glad to assist your project, doctor. What is its focus, again?”
    “Cerebral activation patterns in senior citizens. Did you realize, Dr. Erdmann, that the over-sixty-five demographic is the fastest growing one in the world? And that globally there are now one hundred and forty million people over the age of eighty?”
    Henry hadn’t realized, nor did he care. The St. Sebastian aide came forward
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